Dream, Not Dread

“Fearless,” is how his collaborators described Neil Patrick Harris for being willing to deliver an exuberant, on-the-fly rap to end the 2011 Tony Awards broadcast. A quick scan of recent news stories finds the word fearless applied—with notably different shades of meaning—to other performers, film directors, journalists, athletes, explorers, soldiers, activists, and even politicians.

Whether we’re talking about life-or-death situations or simply the possibility of embarrassment, we admire people who are willing to take a risk when the stakes are high.

But, are these people really fearless? Surely not. Some measure of fear is essential to our survival and to escape it completely would be folly. On the other hand, to let fear dominate our awareness is equally dangerous because it erodes our capacity to create and produce—in fact, to live.

What we can learn from the risk-takers around us is that it’s possible to make fear the footnote instead of the headline. Grounded in clarity about their values and purpose, risk-takers choose to pay more attention to what they want than what they fear. And that makes for a richer, more meaningful life.

Watch and share this one-minute animation to remind yourself to tune in to the channels that energize you rather than the ones that frighten you.

Bleeding Hearts

When someone names “Nature” among their core values, we tend to picture Nature in its most endearing manifestations: Tranquil pools, sunny meadows, enduring mountains—environments that lend themselves to reflection or adventure.

Less likely to leap to mind are ferocious tsunamis, tornadoes, and floods of the sort that have caused so much destruction and loss across the globe over the past few months. Those storms, though, are no less Nature than the flowers and breezes we associate with its more docile expressions.

Similarly, we—being of Nature, and not something apart from it—are as capable of tempestuousness as we are of tenderness. That’s not necessarily a bad thing if we can, as Aristotle counseled, “…be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way….”

But, too often, we resort to storminess when gentler behavior might be the better course. At those times, aren’t we are lucky to have Nature’s most exquisite handiwork to turn to for instruction? How can I look at the bleeding hearts that I planted in memory of my father a few years ago and not be called to honor my better angels?

When do you choose to persuade by violence, and when by love?

Honor the Brick

Is it permissible to treat people poorly in the name of artistic vision? Most of us would offer a resounding “No,” because we hold human relationship as our preeminent value. For the late architect Louis I. Kahn, as for many artists, musicians, and performers, the question was more complicated.

In the graceful and provocative 2003 documentary, My Architect, produced by Kahn’s son, Nathaniel Kahn, we discover an aesthetic innovator destined to live with the human collateral damage that results when the vision comes first.

Historians call Kahn one of the most influential architects of the mid-20^th century, noting that he inspired successive generations of designers with his “uncompromising pursuit of formal perfection and emotional expression.” In the film, we get a taste of that singular focus: “To express is a drive. When you want to give something presence, you have to consult nature. And that is where design comes in. If you think of Brick, for instance, and you say to Brick, ‘What do you want, Brick?’ And Brick says, ‘I like an arch.’ And you say to Brick, ‘Look, arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel over you; what do you think of that, Brick?’ Brick says, ‘I like an arch.’ It’s important that you honor the material you use. You don’t say…‘We have a lot of material around; we can do it one way, we can do it another.’ That’s not true. You can only do it if you honor the brick and glorify the brick instead of just shortchanging it.”

Honoring the brick of his own nature could be seen as the central theme of Kahn’s life. Small and physically awkward with an odd voice and extensive facial burn scars sustained as a toddler, Kahn was as true to surface imperfection as he was to purity of form.

And though his enduring masterworks reflect an evolved artistic—or even spiritual—consciousness, his behavioral imperfections also left their mark. He fathered children with three women while maintaining relationships with all of them, he drove employees to the brink of collapse with his excessive demands, and he alienated potential clients with his rigidity.

Yet, some of those lovers, employees, and clients still weep with affection and admiration as they recall their time with Kahn. Shamsul Wares, who worked with the architect on his signature Bangladeshi capital building, suggests that far from being a misanthrope, Kahn’s aesthetic was deeply humanist. “He loved everybody,” says Wares. “To love everybody he sometimes did not see the very closest ones. And that is inevitable for men of his stature.”

I’m not sure I agree with that as a general rule. But I do see the wisdom of reserving judgment and giving each individual the space to know and live his or her own purpose. The most touching thing about this film is the courage with which Nathaniel Kahn approaches his father’s life story. Neither grinding an ax as victim, nor polishing his credentials as celebrity son, he creates an unflinching portrait that comes from a place of genuine curiosity about this architect of his. In the process, he teaches us something about being human and about the importance of recognizing the values that drive our choices.

Mid-Life Crocus

Is there any vision more hopeful than a crocus triumphantly pushing forth from the icy soil of a New England garden in March?

This year, as I witness the magic of new life advancing out of the retreat of winter, I am thinking of the many people in my life who are surprising themselves with their capacity for fresh starts and new learning—regardless of how many birthdays they’ve clocked.

In her book The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk and Adventure in the 25 Years After 50, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot shares the uplifting stories of forty men and women between the ages of 50 and 75 who, far from regarding this phase of their lives as a time of deceleration, have discovered new channels for learning and growth (see her talking about it with Bill Moyers).

Noting the hushed and “confessional tone” that her interviewees often adopt when talking about their blossoming passions, Lawrence-Lightfoot wonders whether “somehow, we feel that people our age should be consolidating our experiences, integrating all that we’ve learned and accomplished, and resting on our laurels—not engaging in risk-taking projects, embarking on unmapped adventures, and enduring the awkwardness and vulnerabilities of new mastery. Maybe we even feel it is somehow undignified to be so childish in our enthusiasms and eagerness to explore new domains of knowledge, recover ancient passions, and try on new roles and costumes.”

There is something of the crocus in these Third Chapter adventurers as they start new careers, adopt new personal development processes and uncover the writer or potter or chef or storyteller that has lain dormant within them all this time.

With delicate yet assertive gestures, they are finding ways to give expression to the surging life force still constantly renewing itself in their hearts.

What’s blooming in you?

Looking At, Looking Through

I’ve always loved this photo, taken by my friend Nancy Daugherty in Bermuda, because it reminds me to be respectful of multiple realities.

Can’t you just imagine a team leader confidently describing what she’s looking at—say, for example, some trees and a house on a bluff—while the rest of the group have puzzled looks on their faces. They’re wondering how in the world she sees trees and houses in these beautiful abstractions they’re looking at. It’s only after they realize that they are all looking through different windows that the team can have an intelligent conversation about what they are seeing together.

The first step in moving toward a shared vision, whether at work or with family and friends, is to recognize that we each experience reality through our own window, and that there are as many windows as there are people in the world.

In The Dance of Change, Peter Senge and his co-authors recount how Harley-Davidson CEO, Jeff Bleustein could tell that the change initiative the company had undertaken was beginning to make a difference: “The most tangible change I observed in the first few years after the organizational learning work began at Harley was at meetings,” Bleustein observed. “People stopped saying, ‘This is the way it is,’ and started saying, ‘This is the way I see it.’”

An important breakthrough. But of course, the work of building a shared vision doesn’t end with acknowledging the existence of multiple viewpoints. The harder work lies in developing the capacity—even the courage—to try out different windows, and commit to the one(s) best-suited to moving the vision forward together.

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, the authors of Immunity to Change, describe the capacity to relinquish our attachment to our own window in terms of mental complexity. “If one is not to be forever captive of one’s own theory, system, script, framework, or ideology, one needs to develop an even more complex way of knowing that permits one to look at, rather than choicelessly through, one’s own framework.”

So, the challenge for the team leader is to encourage everyone else to let go of their frameworks and come over to her window, right? No! Why should her window be sacrosanct? If she’s really after team success, her job is to facilitate a conversation in which the whole team can step back, agree on what they want to create, and take a bold look at how each of their windows obscure, distort, or magnify the view.

What do you know about the window that you’re most comfortable looking through?

Shape Change

In working on various writing and editing assignments over the years, I’ve made extensive use of the “Track Changes” feature in Microsoft Word. And I occasionally find myself smiling with amusement when selecting the menu option “Accept Change.” If only it were that easy!

From big changes, like sending a child off to college, to little ones, like adapting to a new mobile phone, all of us experience resistance to change at one point or another. Most challenging are the changes that we perceive as coming from outside ourselves—changes done to us, rather than initiated by us.

At work and in our personal lives it’s so easy to surrender to the idea that we don’t have a choice in change. But, I tend to agree with Maya Angelou, who suggests that we always have the power to choose something when she says, “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.”

In a recent conversation, a client and I made an entertaining discovery about the word “reactive” that inspired me to develop this little animation about my orientation to change. It’s less than a minute long. I hope it gives you a smile.

Goodbye, Old House

Thank you for sheltering us from snow and rain and wind for almost 50 years.

How many times did we find retreat and sanctuary in your embrace?

You stood silently behind us in countless photos; a member of the family. You knew our routines and bent yourself to our needs.

Within your sturdy walls we expanded and contracted, celebrated and grieved, whistled, worked, and prayed.

Now it’s time to go. We have outgrown you, in a way. Our new house is ready. And you have a new family to learn.

***

What is it time for you to say goodbye to, with gratitude and clarity?

The View from Here

When you go around with eerie music and spooky sound effects in your head, everything you see looks like a horror flick.

Remember the classic recut trailers that turned Mary Poppins into a predator and The Shining into a lighthearted family film?

Beyond spotlighting the editing skills of their creators, these little pieces beautifully illuminate the power of perspective. Filmmakers are always making choices designed to shift our perspective. They take us to a viewpoint. And it’s our viewpoint that determines what we actually see.

So, as the director of your own life story, you have some choices to make. Are you starring in a thriller? A romantic comedy? An action adventure? What soundtrack have you chosen? What happens when you change the audio?

Just Enough

“If I won the lottery all my problems would be solved!” Right?

Well, not necessarily; not according to Lynne Twist the anti-hunger activist who in her brilliant book, The Soul of Money, took me through a bracing re-examination of my relationship with money.

As a successful fundraiser, Twist has worked intimately with people at every level of financial advantage and disadvantage. From her first-hand observation that excessive wealth could be as damaging to the soul as poverty, she developed a philosophy of sufficiency grounded in the notion that “what you appreciate appreciates.”

Twist reminds us that money is our own invention with a 3,500-year history of facilitating the exchange of goods and services. But, she points out, “somewhere along the way, the power we gave money outstripped its original utilitarian role.” To refocus on the value we are creating in relationship with one another is to disarm three toxic myths of scarcity that Twist contends now dominate our cultural assumptions about money and influence our behavior:

• Myth #1: “There’s Not Enough…generates a fear that drives us to make sure that we’re not the person, or our loved ones aren’t the people, who get crushed, marginalized, or left out.”
• Myth #2: “More is Better…drives a competitive culture of accumulation, acquisition, and greed that only heightens fears and quickens the pace of the race.”
• Myth #3: “That’s Just the Way it is…makes us feel hopeless, helpless, and cynical” about addressing the inequities that we’ve learned to tolerate and perpetuate.

In the years since The Soul of Money was published, Twist has done much to move the world from this “economy of fear, consumption, and scarcity, to an economy of sufficiency, sustainability, and generosity.” She founded the Soul of Money Institute and more recently helped establish the Global Sufficiency Network, both organizations that promote a radical shift in our definition of prosperity.

So, do I feel like a dope for wanting to buy a lottery ticket? Not necessarily; it’s a transaction that prompts me to stop and think seriously about my relationship with money—this commodity that has so much power to create anxiety in my life—and ask myself the question: When would I know that I had enough?

Hey, No Fair!

Not everybody was happy when the web-based registration system for the 2011 Boston Marathon took just eight hours to fill all 20,000 slots deemed by race organizers to be the maximum number the course could hold. With applications outpacing capacity, thousands of qualified runners failed to get a number for the race.

In a recent article for the Boston Globe, columnist Doug Most offered a gentle admonition to those runners who cried foul about being left out in the cold.

“To all those runners bemoaning how it wasn’t fair that they didn’t get in: Would it have been more fair if you had gotten in and another runner had not instead?”

It doesn’t take much to trigger our fairness meter. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has posited compellingly that fairness is one of five foundations of morality that all human beings share. It is certainly a value that many of us would name as important.

We watch for fairness in the media, where we hope to see equal weight afforded to opposing sides of a story. We watch for it in the development of public policy, where we expect to have conflicts of interest made visible. We watch for it in sports, where we slap fines, jail time, or at the very least a record book asterisk on players who have taken unfair steps to outperform the competition.

Fairness lies at the heart of that golden rule of behavior that tells us to treat others as we would have them treat us.

But there’s a difference between luck and fairness, isn’t there? Fairness implies intention. Our best chance for receiving fair treatment is to follow the golden rule as often as we’re able.

But, when a random or capricious circumstance thwarts our wishes, we can fuss about it, or we can make another choice. We can chalk it up to luck, or—as I prefer—to the invisible hand of fate steering us closer to our purpose.

The next time you get boxed out of the Boston Marathon, what other race will you choose to run?