The life-changing magic of teachers

Jerry Colonna and Elizabeth Gilbert changed my life.  I’ve never met them.

Before I decided to experiment with this idea of first retirements, like so many people, it was clear something was happening in my life.  Stress, anxiety and everyday pressures built up, and each time I put them aside, I knew they’d be back – stronger, louder, and more insistent.

Eventually, I could no longer tough it out and had to seek help.  Sometime after I’d started being treated seriously for depression, I was trying to fall asleep on one particularly insomniac night.  Podcasts had become my go-to white noise, especially when I could find calming voices with at least mildly interesting things to say.  Think Bob Ross giving a TED talk.  On this night, I turned to On Being – a podcast at the intersection of inner and outer life.  It’s often very interesting and often (sorry, On Being) easy to sleep to.  The episode that caught my eye was an interview with Jerry Colonna: “Can you really bring your whole self to work?”  And it didn’t put me to sleep – it woke me up.

Because I certainly thought the answer to that particular question was not only “No” but “Hell no.”  This is a long-held belief from my earliest days in an office environment.  The way I explained it was as follows:

When you hit a breaking point (and we all do), there’s no safe option for women in the workplace.  If you cry, you’re fragile and overly sensitive; if you yell, you’re a bitch.  You can’t win.  So I thought – fine, I’ll be a man.  By which I meant, I’ll simply cut off any emotional response to work and be driven completely by logic and rationality and the needs of the business.

As you might expect, this was wildly unsuccessful.  Of course I didn’t succeed in cutting off emotion (i.e. caring deeply about the work I was doing).  Anyone who’s ever worked with me would hardly call me “unemotional.”  In fact, the most consistent piece of feedback I’ve received in two decades in the workforce has been “Don’t take things so seriously” which is supposed to mean “Lighten up, we’re not curing cancer here,” but really translated to me as “Don’t care so much, and definitely don’t feel so much.”  I’d achieved the exact opposite of what I’d tried to do.

On the other hand, for a long time this strategy worked.  Translating my feelings into male-acceptable sarcasm, argumentativeness and superiority may not have won me raving fans, but I survived.  Once I moved to a retail company in the Northeast, the competitive, slightly toxic environment meant I thrived.

Then, as I climbed the ranks into leadership, I started to be coached to be more “authentic.”  Which I hated – on the one hand, you’re telling me not to care so much, and on the other, to make sure I’m showing people how I really feel.  Uh, trap?

I saw it as one more mask I needed to put on – now, in addition to showing people “rational, strong business person” I also needed to show them “authentic, approachable person.”  Because obviously the real, authentic me wasn’t welcome at work – no one’s is.

So, no, I didn’t think you could bring your whole self to work.

As I say, I didn’t fall asleep to On Being that night.  And I began to seek out interviews with Jerry anywhere and everywhere.  Which is how I found his company, Reboot, his book, Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up and The Reboot Podcast.  Reboot is a leadership coaching company dedicated to the idea that better humans make better leaders and “work can be the way we achieve our fullest selves.”

I can draw a direct line from hearing that first interview to the decision to leave my job and go on this journey.

It was such a breath of fresh air to hear a voice saying “Yes” to integrating our messy, human, emotional selves into the high-pressure environment of success-driven corporate life.  And it’s not about turning work into a therapy session, either – Jerry was a startup VC and now coaches founders and CEOs.  This is not work in the casual or woo-woo lane.

I couldn’t ever remember hearing someone so traditionally successful speak so honestly about pain, shame, anxiety, anger – in short, feelings – and at the same time, the sense of purpose that work can bring.  In other words, taking work pretty fucking seriously.  And not just once, in a stirring speech about struggle and hardships experienced and overcome, but continuously and faithfully putting this dialogue at the absolute center of his professional presence.  I was in love.

To misquote an overused phrase: “When the student is ready, appear Yoda will.”  Discovering Jerry coincided with a time in my life where I was awakening to new understandings and curiosities.  I was also engaged in the work of my own inner exploration, through coaching, therapy, medication, meditation and journaling.  He was the teacher I needed in that moment.  And The Reboot Podcast gave me a resource to bring in new ideas and start to recognize that it was okay to not be okay with a compartmentalized,  politically savvy office life.  Which let me consider what the alternatives might be.

At the root of all this is a desire for wholeness.  The request for “authenticity” felt like just a buzzword to me; a performance to put on for the benefit of others or greater accolades for oneself.  “She’s so authentic.”  Wholeness, by contrast, is messy, strange, uncomfortable – and unending.  It’s certainly not a destination to which you can arrive and then stay forever.

Jerry talks about this with Parker Palmer, one of his most valued teachers.  In a podcast episode titled, “Shadow and Leadership”, Palmer says:

“Wholeness means the whole kielbasa. … What we have to understand is that we will never achieve wholeness if we cannot ultimately say, ‘I am not only my light, my strengths, my gifts, my virtues, my ability.  I am also my shadow: I am my failures, I am my fears, I am those potholes that I keep falling into; I am all of the above.’“

This thought reminds me of another of my teachers, Elizabeth Gilbert, and her breakout bestseller Eat, Pray, Love.

I can’t remember now how I heard about the book or why I picked it up.  But it moved me.  There were places that I felt seen – like where Liz talks about crying uncontrollably on the bathroom floor.  There were places I wanted to see myself – connecting to love, taking time to travel and meditate and pray and experience and live.  And then, towards the end of the book, there is a passage so powerful that even now, reading it a decade later, tears immediately start rolling down my face and my whole body feels the weight and truth of it.

Liz, in the middle of some pretty awful personal experiences, decides to take a self-imposed solo and silent retreat.  She writes:

“I remember thinking, ‘This is it, Liz.’  I said to my mind, ‘This is your chance.  Show me everything that is causing you sorrow.  Let me see all of it.  Don’t hold anything back.’  One by one, the thoughts and memories of sadness raised their hands, stood up to identify themselves.  I looked at each thought, at each unit of sorrow, and I acknowledged its existence and felt (without trying to protect myself from it) its horrible pain.  And then I would tell that sorrow, ‘It’s OK.  I love you.  I accept you.  Come into my heart now.  It’s over.’  I would actually feel the sorrow (as if it were a living thing) enter my heart (as if it were an actual room).  Then I would say, ‘Next?’ and the next bit of grief would surface.  I would regard it, experience it, bless it, and invite it into my heart, too.  I did this with every sorrowful thought I’d ever had – reaching back into years of memory – until nothing was left.

Then I said to my mind, ‘Show me your anger now.’   One by one, my life’s every incident of anger rose and made itself known.  Every injustice, every betrayal, every loss, every rage.  I saw them all, one by one, and I acknowledged their existence.  I felt each piece of anger completely, as if it were happening for the first time, and then I would say, ‘Come into my heart now.  You can rest there.  It’s safe now.  It’s over.  I love you.’  This went on for hours, and I swung between these mighty poles of opposite feelings – experiencing the anger thoroughly for one bone-rattling moment, and then experiencing a total coolness, as the anger entered my heart as if through a door, laid itself down, curled up against its brothers and gave up fighting.

Then came the most difficult part.  ‘Show me your shame,’ I asked my mind.  Dear God, the horrors that I saw then.  A pitiful parade of all my failings, my lies, my selfishness, jealousy, arrogance.  I didn’t blink from any of it, though.  ‘Show me your worst,’ I said.  When I tried to invite these units of shame into my heart, they each hesitated at the door, saying, ‘No – you don’t want me in there…don’t you know what I did?” and I would say, ‘I do want you.  Even you.  I do.  Even you are welcome here.  It’s OK.  You are forgiven.  You are part of me.  You can rest now.  It’s over.’”

…

The grace in these words has stayed with me.  What really punched me in the gut – then and now – is how she invites each feeling into her heart to rest, honoring and blessing them in the process.  The divine understanding she conveys that the love and the rest and the help that we so desperately need come only fully from ourselves.

Wow.  How devastating.  How liberating.  How scary and humbling and beautiful.

Because in the depths of my own sorrows or rages, or disappointments, or depression, or exhaustion, what I really want is for someone to come along, pick me up and carry me through the situation.  To let me rest.  To give me a free pass and wake me up when whatever’s happening is all over.  Whether it be a parent, a friend, a therapist or doctor, a higher power – I’m crying out because I want to sit down and say, “I can’t do it anymore.  Someone help.  Take over.”  But I knew immediately the truth in what Liz had written: yes, someone can take over.  Someone can love you, rescue you, let you rest.  That someone is you.

(By the way, I’m terrified of this exercise.)

Like Gilbert, both Jerry Colonna and Parker Palmer have deep experience with depression, which they speak about openly and often.  I sometimes wonder if the reason they talk about it so often is because, as humans, we are hungry for these stories that are still seen as taboo and rare.  Even today, someone who talks about their relationship with mental health is seen as courageous – which of course they are – instead of just human, striving to be whole.

In the same episode, Palmer tells a story about sitting with a group of successful teachers as they each talked about the failures in their lives, and how they led them to the place they are today.  He asks if any of them have shared these stories with their students.  None had.  “You’ve got [people] sitting in your classes right now who are dying inside thinking about a failure that they think is a dead end rather than an opening to a new path.”

Being honest and responsible about seeking wholeness seems like it could be the next step forward in leadership development originally pioneered by Donald O. Clifton and Marcus Buckingham in the early 2000s.  Their Strengths Psychology approach, based on large-scale Gallup research, suggested that, rather than focusing on our “areas for improvement,” i.e. weaknesses, we’d be happier and more successful developing our strengths.

Logically, what comes next is the understanding that we have to accept both our strengths and weaknesses, and learn to work with it all.  Because the alternative – to compartmentalize, downplay or deny the messy parts of ourselves – means we’ll just end up acting them out on everyone else around us.  Just like I couldn’t cut off the parts of myself I didn’t want to bring to work without having stress, anger or anxiety spill out onto my friends and colleagues.  Jerry often quotes this line from C.G. Jung:

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

It’s not lost on me that so many of the people engaged in this work towards wholeness have struggled with depression, anxiety and other wounds of the inner landscape.  It’s not lost on me that I recognize the path because I’m on it.  And I’m profoundlly grateful for the teachers who are leaving breadcrumbs on the trail.

Jerry has something to say about these teachers who change our life, even (and especially) the ones we don’t know.  “You [Parker Palmer] have been a personification of the core spiritual notion that we are all connected.  You – unbeknownst to you, because we didn’t know each other at the time – you helped me. It’s a profound expression of the interconnectedness of us.”  And he acknowledges that the road goes on: “Me, doing my work, allows the other to do their work.”

Jerry, Liz, Parker, and so many others – thank you.