One of the most captivating and disturbing storylines to me is the backslide from some height of achievement. Remember the young adult book Flowers for Algernon, where Charly is a kid with a mental disability who takes some drug and becomes brilliant only to realize that the drug will unavoidably fail and leave him potentially worse off than before?
I fear my life is going to play out that story. I felt like an old soul as a kid. My family drama asked me to step up and take care of myself and my mother's emotions way too soon, and I felt valued and competent when I could do that. I spent the first 20 years of my life feeling confident and superior, together and driven and never second-guessing. Everything was black and white, and I was passionate about denouncing what I saw as wrong, unflinching in judgment about myself and everyone around me. In short, young. And terribly unwise and unkind, but feeling like I knew everything.
And so the last 20 years have been about learning to question myself and the easy first-reaction judgments. I've been reading Thinking Fast and Slow for the last 6 months. I can only read a few pages at a time, because it's an indictment of my youth and my continued first instincts. Our intuition is our System 1 brain in Daniel Kahneman's explanation of how our brains work, our feeling and judging brain that reasons with stories in which there is a hero and a villain (guess which one we all think we are?). That brain has built in shortcuts necessary for us to function minute by minute in a world of overwhelming stimuli that surrounds us. But those shortcuts have built-in errors, and if we don't slow down to question, to breathe, to zoom out of the myopia of our own first-person stories, then we literally don't see things correctly. Our System 2 brain can reason, considering multiple competing factors, but that brain is lazy and defers to System 1 unless pressed into service.
Which is all to say that I am facing a tough conversation with a member of my team on Monday, and I'm scared about how it will go. I have been picturing myself staying calm, centered, and curious. I've been re-reading Brene Brown's Dare to Lead. Clear is kind; unclear is unkind. The cave you fear hides the treasure you seek. So this conversation is a key to growth for me as a manager, as a leader, as an introvert tasked with connecting with a team every day.
And perhaps scariest of all, this is about what I can control and what I can't. I can't make someone like me, or improve performance, for that matter. I can't change the triangle dynamic of a dysfunctional reporting system for this unfortunate woman. I can't not be hurt and angry and feel powerless and disrespected when she cultivates the relationship with my boss's boss, who continually undermines and overlooks me. I can't control how this woman feels about me and my part in this mess. I can't control her interpretation of my actions or the assumptions she's making about me and my motives. I'm less nervous about that part. I can feel myself slowing down, breathing, staying grounded.
It's scarier to think about having this hard conversation and nothing changing. Either having to have it again or never getting to have it again and things going from bad to worse.
But I can only do what I can do. She is doing her best, and so am I. Perhaps we are not a good fit for each other. Maybe I haven't been brave. Maybe she feels ashamed that she can't do more and do better right now. Maybe all of that and more is true.
I'm guessing it comes down to me not valuing what she's contributing and her not feeling that her contribution is valued. There's a whole conversation about assumptions and goals that needs to happen and sounds really hard, and long, when what I am feeling is panic at how much there is to do in so little time.
And then there's the personal questioning of why I don't know more, feel more confident, when I used to live in that certainty and self-righteousness. And while I simultaneously understand that recognizing how much I don't know is wiser and kinder, I hate not trusting myself, not relying on my first instincts to be unerringly right and true and just.
And so middle age is arrived at.
I must remember: more love. My only job is to figure out how to best use people's strengths in the service of the bigger picture, how to support them in bringing their best. Brene Brown asks: "What does support look like?"
I hope I'm about to find out. Together.
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