Given the impact of this global pathogen called COVID-19 and the resulting levels of anxiety and uncertainty, I am thinking of the late John O’Donohue, an Irish poet, author and priest, who wrote “our trust in the future has lost its innocence… We now know that anything can happen from one minute to the next….. Politics, religion and economics and the institutions of family and community all have become abruptly unsure.”
As each week unfolds, I believe we are still learning how to sit with the discomfort of a global pandemic, and to be present to ambiguity it is creating. We know that there are going to be more “surprises” and more uncertainty in the weeks and months ahead.
I also think we have been so consumed by 2020 that we have forgotten that before COVID arrived, we were tired and worried from the events of 2018 and 2019. While those two years feel like a lifetime ago on one level, we need to remember that we entered into this global pandemic worn and exhausted from working so hard. Then, as COVID exploded into our lives at work and at home in March, we entered into an emergency response period followed in the late spring by this on-going adaptive period. Now, we look forward to the post pandemic period in 2021 or 2022, but we must be honest with ourselves and recognize that we will exit this period more exhausted and more overwhelmed by the continued pace and emerging new problems in a post-pandemic period.
And when I sit quietly with all that was before COVID and all that is happening now during COVID, I arrived today with a singular question: What is the story we as leaders are trying to tell?
Many years ago, Marcus Buckingham in his book, The One Thing You Need to Know ... About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success (Free Press, 2005), wrote: “To excel as a leader …. You must become adept at calling upon those needs we all share. Our common needs include the need for security, for community, for authority, and for respect, but for you, the leader, the most powerful universal need is our need for clarity. To transform our fear of the unknown into confidence in the future, you must discipline yourself to describe our joint future vividly and precisely. As your skill at this grows, so will our confidence in you.”
The line, “To transform our fear of the unknown into confidence in the future, you must discipline yourself to describe our joint future vividly and precisely”, really speaks to me this morning. We are afraid of the unknowns. We do not have much confidence in the future. And yet, as leaders, we must rise to the challenge before us and discipline ourselves to describe the future, vividly and precisely. The only was to do this is to pause and remember our history.
I believe we are so consumed by COVID that we have forgotten our history. We have forgotten our roots. We have forgotten our story up until this moment. We have forgotten our past strategic choices. The dangerous and potential outcome of this organizational and personal amnesia is that we might learn to live with limited long term perspective. This “land of forgetfulness” creates relationships which do not have the capacity to trust, deal with risks, or generate creative responses to the extraordinary and complex challenges before us all.
As leaders, we need to understand that there are four kinds of history. The first is remembered history, namely the stories we learned from others. The second is lived history, namely the experiences we personally lived through. The third is shared history, namely the experiences we personally lived through with others. The fourth form of history is the current experiences that are happening right now which will become history - remembered, lived, and shared.
All four of the above create the narrative we tell ourselves and others about what is happening now and the why it is happening in a particular manner. Still, we must be careful about the stories we tell ourselves and others. As Brene Brown in her very important and helpful book, Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution. (Spiegel Grau, 2015) wrote, “The most dangerous stories we make up are the narratives that diminish our inherent worthiness. We must reclaim the truth about our lovability, divinity, and creativity.”
Margaret Atwood, Canadian poet and novelist in her book, Alias Grace, reminds us “When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”
With the whirlwind of a global pandemic swirling around us, we need to set aside time to regularly pause, reflect and think deeply. Thomas Merton, one of the most influential monks, poet and spiritual writers of the 20th century wrote, “When I speak of the contemplative life I do not mean the institutional cloistered life, the organized life of prayer. I am talking about a special dimension of inner discipline and experience, a certain integrity and fullness of personal development, which are not compatible with a purely external, alienated, busy-busy existence. This does not mean that they are incompatible with action, with creative work, with dedicated love. On the contrary, these all go together. A certain depth of disciplined experience is a necessary ground for fruitful action. Without a more profound human understanding derived from exploration of the inner ground of human existence, love will tend to be superficial and deceptive. Traditionally, the ideas of prayer, meditation and contemplation have been associated with this deepening of one’s personal life and this expansion of the capacity to understand and serve others.”
We are living a “busy-busy existence.” Therefore we need to set aside time on a regular basis, and give ourselves permission to explore and understand the inner ground of our experiences in order that we can “describe our joint future vividly and precisely” and “transform our fear of the unknown into confidence in the future”. When we do this from a place of an “inner disciple and experience, a certain integrity and fullness of personal development”, it will result in speaking with authenticity, clarity and “inherent worthiness” of ourself and of others.
So, my challenge to you this week and throughout this month is to engage in a disciplined and regular process of reflection and contemplation. Then, you will be able to answer the question, What is the story we are trying to tell?, and share it well with others as we all prepare for 2021.
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