365 Days of Peace

Leaders spend enormous amounts of money and time to prepare themselves for the knowledge of leadership.  But, do we recognize or plan for the demand on our emotional selves?  True leadership moves beyond accuracy, content expertise, and effectiveness and assumes responsibility for the heart and soul of our organization and our staff.  After ten years of school leadership, I have to take a time-out, reflect on multiple years of emotional highs and lows that have been assigned to the role of principal, and ask myself:  Have I ever spent any intentional time developing my own emotional being?

The first step in developing your emotional health is accepting the inextricable relationship between your professional and personal experiences.  Successful leaders have generally shown high proficiency in separating their professional life from their personal life.  They leave their children's soccer schedules, lunches, and lastest homework project; put on their suits, pull out their smartphones, grab their cappuchinos; and head to be people who operate from their compartmentalized work identities.

Our work identities are like avatars.  They have  a specific look, interaction style, and history that are filled with their own emotional storylines.  We feel at work, relate, communicate, and respond.  We cross into this domain effortlessly, like stepping through a transparent wall that separates our home and work worlds.  It wouldn't be a far stretch to accept that there are some of us who may find our home identity to be our avatar.  We feel that we are our truest selves in our professional world.  Either way, we fool ourselves if we think that our emotional being is actually divisible by two.  Try preventing personal emotional trauma from affecting your professional self.  Or, the other way around. 

We have only one emotional self.  How healthy is it? Your effectiveness in leading the heart, soul, and humanity of your organization is only as strong as the strength of your emotional being.

For the next 365 days, after an extremely difficult personal experience and a cataclysmic professional tragedy, I am devoting time and energy to my emotional self.  You will find this path on http://daysofpeace.wordpress.com/.

I recently realized something startling.  I wanted to take a good picture of my son with my point-and-shoot camera with an unbelievable delay between pressing the button to take the picture and the actual take.  As I was watching through the view, trying to predict what was about to happen in time to actually take the picture, I started noticing things about my son that I had never seen before.  I realized then how little I observe the moment.  I am so good at overthinking things before and after they happen and so bad at reading and responding in the moment. 

I chose photography to frame my emotional journey through the next year.  I bought a higher quality camera and plan to use this medium to document my path.  I don't care about being a great photographer.  Though, as I come upon more sophisticated thoughts, I'll want more sophisticated ways to express them.  I imagine that my improved skill at photography will provide that opportunity.

The Powerful Woman's Fatal Flaw

Powerful Women have a major life-altering flaw. 
They get what they want. 
Always.

Everyone's dream?  Maybe.  Anyone's path to self-fulfillment?  Never.  A terrible albatross, it breathes life into the expression power corrupts.

Desires are healthy.  They move us through life, a meandering journey of experiences that shape us.  Healthy desires give us the guidance that allows us to recognize when opportunities present themselves.  But beware the power to make them happen at will.  We think we know what will make us happy and when.  When we use our will to control timing, we fail miserably.

Let's take, for example, the Powerful Woman who chooses a man.  Simple choice.  After all, she makes things happen at will on a daily basis, surely finding the right one is as simple as intentional power.  She chooses and the quest begins.  She changes herself to make the fit.  She makes huge compromises on the very principles that were once critically important to her.  She leaves friends in the wake who watch her small tornado of effort skeptically, wondering where the girl they loved went.

The changes bring temporary gratification. But the small gains of the moment, a series of getting what she wants for that day, week, or month prolong an inevitable discovery, a simple basic truth:  when you have to work that hard at making something happen, it isn't meant to be.  But, of course, a power addict refuses to accept that something isn't meant to be.  Isn't everything simply one act of will away?

The irony of desire is that the more it's fed, the greater it grows.  Just like love, which grows by fulfilled obligation, commitment, and faithful attention, desire grows with each committed and intentional act to get what you want. What a curse to be just successful enough to keep the perception of control alive.  When the crash happens, it happens hard.  For by that time, the object of desire is bigger than life, given far more credit and merit than deserved, and leaves a proportionately large, gaping hole when the floor falls out from beneath. Is it the loss of the object that sends her to the sanitarium? No.  That kind of craving rarely brings any happiness to miss. It is the birth and death, euphoria and despair, of a desire that captured measureless energy and obsession.  The sad truth: she really just took on a battle against herself...and lost.  

Now, all that is left is a simple submissive admission.

The Powerful Woman doesn't always get what she wants in the end.  Nor should she.

Step back and relinquish control sometimes. The best things in life are a gift, not a quest.

Choosing to Show My Face

Choosing to show your face, back your beliefs, and accept accountability for your actions all point to comfort with transparency.

Leading at a young age is a challenge.  At every turn, you find yourself hiding the developmental features of your age and asking those around to accept an alternate version: an overdeveloped façade of maturity.  You fell into a position of leadership because you understood what leaders do, you understood how to make decisions, you could identify a quality decision, and you knew how to follow through.  Similarly, your analytical processes allowed you to assess and replicate how leaders act.  But you were left continually apologizing for the obvious lack of years behind the intuition and expertise.

With school leaders representing a fairly consistent middle-age range, accepting leadership at the age of 26, I found myself trying to emulate a middle-aged educator.  I accepted an unassuming, middle-aged style and kept deadly quiet about my not-so-middle-aged hobbies.  Over time, I found myself developing two distinct paths of maturity, working to maintain aged credibility at work while living out my youthful preferences during my free time. Not surprisingly, I was terrified of transparency.  I preferred to withdraw socially from my staff, community, or parents in fear that someone would discover that I really wasn’t a middle-aged educator.

The tragic consequences of accepting an alternate version of myself has been a collection of less than impressive personal judgments and decisions.  So many of these choices have left scars of remorse and regret. 

Ultimately, we all make the most bizarre choices when we are uncomfortable with who we are.  When we feel ashamed, we hide.  And it is when we hide that we are most vulnerable to the egregious decisions, lapses of judgment, of which we are most embarrassed.

So, I have determined to back my beliefs and be held accountable for all I do and say around them.  What do I believe?  I believe that every human is innately beautiful and it is the manifestation of our highest social being to draw out this beauty in all that we meet.  I believe that love is to be given freely, even when we are broken by it.  In the end, we grow from having loved, not by receiving it.  I believe in making the tough choices that lead to the greater good for the people I serve.  I believe that it is done with kindness, affirmation, and support.  I believe that life is to be lived to its fullest with as little judgment as possible on what brings individual happiness. 

The most liberating step I took was to align my beliefs and my actions to accept full transparency.  It is in the spirit of this transparency that I show my face next to the words and beliefs that I espouse. 

Choosing Femininity Sometimes

Power. Powerful. 

Word choice has shifting value.  A word reserved for worthy ideas preserves its strength.  A word used indiscriminately loses its potency.  Some words empower us to aspire to greater versions of ourselves.  Some tear us down.  If we want to change the lens through which we see our world, we must wrestle with the influence of our language.

I am a woman.  I am strong. I am powerful. 

It may surprise you find out that these words, recited before an exam, an interview, or within a context of pressure may actually serve to negatively impact performance.  For example, studies have shown a correlation with diminished math performance when girls consider their femininity prior to an exam.  In a moment of pressure, accessing language fraught with complicated underlying messages suggesting that women aren’t good at math or competition may serve to subconsciously reinforce gender-based insecurities and diminish performance.

There is a time to apply gender-neutral language.

Ultimately, powerful women want an androgynous career field.  We aspire to neutrality in handling the daily demands of our job.  It shouldn’t matter if we are male or female if we are together to complete a task.  We achieve together because we are talented. We do not want achievement because we are women or in spite of being a woman.  So, in handling our work, our self-talk avoids the topic of gender.  We rely on mastery language, aggressively speaking and acting knowingly on our topic of expertise. 

There is a time to celebrate gender-specific language accentuating our femininity.

The femininity of power must be widely displayed for the next generation.  Millions of young girls are subconsciously developing impressions and perspectives of how the world works.  They are internalizing social rules, not by hearing them, but by watching them role-played.  Girls who see only men in specific roles of power, fail to imagine a female alternative.  Of course, thankfully, there have always been renegades, adventurers who pioneered early fields like law, medicine, architecture, philosophy, government, and business.  But, to explode myths of the male monopoly of specific career skills, we want power accessible to the population of women at large. Women must reach out to their society’s budding successors to debunk the very complicated underlying messages that interfere with the use of gender language as an asset to performance.

Parade the femininity of our power to our girls.  Convince them that the world is theirs.  Refrain from focusing on femininity to complete our acts of power.

Choosing Faith: Wrestling with Religion

Politically, the natural enemy of a Powerful Woman is organized religion.

Not God. Not faith. Not monotheism.

Every 70 years, fundamentalism raises its sleepy head, notices how progressive the church has become, and swings a sword to decapitate the new growth.  As sure as the sun will rise, any new attitude of the church toward women will be stifled and suppressed as soon as there is a trumpet call to return to the days when the church was dominant, powerful, and patriarchal.

So, naturally, a Powerful Woman's first face-lift is removing the baggage of religion.  But, in doing so, too many aggressive women miss out on the salve of faith.

Faith: the sister of intuition, the parent of hope, the child of submission. 

Submitting to the idea of a higher power is much like the idea of submitting to another.  Full power is retained by the purposeful and voluntary relinquishment of the exclusive control of our own being.  We recognize that there are forces we cannot manipulate, ideas that we cannot reconcile, and a standard of perfection that forever remains out of our reach.  Faith is the gentle ointment that fills in the raw wounds, connects our consciousness to a higher sense of order, and calms the nagging voice that reminds us of how far we must go to meet our own expectations.  Faith is within us, a mental process that parallels logic, as prolific as our daily self-talk and present in all of our decision-making.  And yet, for so many, it is unrecognized, underutilized, or mismanaged. 

Every day you are either intentionally or unintentionally relying on faith.  Whether you believe in the higher order of capitalism, the consistency of science, the beauty of the human spirit, the complexity of the human mind, or monotheistic divinity, you are acting in reliance on a set of underlying, foundational principles that govern your life--principles that you can't prove exist but have provided you with enough discrete examples that give you the confidence to predict future transactions.  No matter how much you would like to believe otherwise, you are submitting to something.

The greatest gift that organized religion has given us is the structure to develop our spiritual dimension, to introduce us to the powerful capacity of the mind to believe, hope, and find pleasure and the joy within ourselves that relies on no external stimulus, no ideal set of circumstances, or degree of perfection. Much like years of school that trained us to develop our rational selves, religion presented us with the discipline to develop our capacity for faith.

Unfortunately, this structure also has a crippling effect.  Over time, if an individual relies on this structure, in the absence of independent thought, it has no more developed the capacity for faith than its absence has for those who have never encountered it. 

So, were we right?  Should we just abandon it altogether?  No, we are social creatures and collective beings.  However, we must be aware of the conflicting forces that grant and take our greatest asset and source of power - our independent thought.  Find your source of faith, invest in learning to intentionally apply it to develop your whole being, use external sources like the church to refresh and reenergize your faith, and align your core to these set of beliefs. 

Organized religion is a love-hate relationship.  I will be forever annoyed by its abuse of faith to achieve political means or to perpetuate a collective morality.  However, I am eternally grateful for its lessons in intraspection, discipline, and submission. 

My guiding principle is faith.  Not religion.

The Fear of Gender Disparity in Leadership

What if all the issues that females write about in their experiences as emerging leaders turn out to be the same issues that emerging male leaders have?

Great.  My book is already knocked of the best-seller list and it's not even written.    I already had titles picked out:  I Am Woman. Hear Me Whine., Last Woman Standing, Stop Picking On Me, I'm a Woman!

Are we really afraid of a difference that may not actually exist?  Another example of the fear of fear? Remove all the deeply rooted resentments of how difficult it was to get to positions of power.  Respect, but move past, the last generation's fight against the glass ceiling. Recognize the fact that we still have a ways to go to see equitable representation in female leadership.

But...once we're there, how different is it? Comparing notes with male leaders; leadership struggles, pitfalls, and successes arrive and abate neutral to gender.  So is it just the visual of female leadership that tickles our imagination and aspirations to step into the ring? 

Once you're there, both men and women will guide the way.

I Choose You: A Post-Feminist Perspective on Submission

I choose you.

Considering that powerful women barter for choice in most areas of their lives, the idea that such a woman would set out to choose a man isn't a far stretch.  Why allow fate to determine our relationships?  If we can choose the best candidate to grow our organization, what prevents us from finding the best man? 

Beware. This is a trap. Like the man who took the genie's three wishes and made himself a genie found: greediness for power will enslave you in turn. Choosing a man is an exercise in submission to self.

If you were lucky enough to brilliantly negotiate Erickson's developmental stage of intimacy v. isolation in your twenties and find a mate early on, growing together or mutually constructing interdependence was a natural progression. You grew into adulthood with ideas of self that were inevitably shared with the ideas of self of another. Subjugating your own will to that of another occurred seamlessly, likely without notice.

However, if you didn't, and you spent your early adulthood developing independent ideas of self, it is a surprising revelation to find that choosing interdependence requires a rather conscious act of submission to make room for the other. The irony comes when an extra-powerful woman decides to be extra-intentional about the man she chooses. If a woman decides to embrace the challenge of pursuit, activating her feminist ideas of equality, does she actually violate those same ideas of female power?

Trap 1: The greater the challenge of the task, the greater the subjugation to make the match happen.

We must first assume that such a woman is choosing the man wisely.  An overzealous approach to doing whatever it takes tends to hide the more obvious red flag that this may simply not be the right one for you. On the other hand, choosing a man later in life infers the tolerance and acceptance of the inherent baggage that all of us carry at this point: widowhood, divorce, or hyper-independence.

Intimacy was so much easier when we were in adolescence. We were all at the same starting point, baggage-free, with ubiquitous availability of options. But we are mid-stride now, and the second, and perhaps the more significant, challenge is finding congruence in timing.

Trap 2: The woman decides to hunt; exercise her skill in making things happen; and finds the right man, wrong time. If anyone has encountered "wrong time" politics, it comes with frequent sacrifices of self, significant periods of waiting, and a skewed distribution of feelings; choreographed as a push-pull dance. It is an enormous exercise in the delay of gratification. I'm sure that most women accustomed to the immediate results of power find this last experience especially excrutiating.

Through the test of timing, how purposeful will her choice continue to be? How submissive to her choice will she become? Is exercising her full right to choose, and thereby keep power, an appropriate application of feminism? If so, how do you categorize her subsequent choice to subjugate herself to this choice? Is this a legitimate exercise of feminism or is it moving beyond?

I propose that the intentional exercise of choice, regardless of the nature of the choice, is the full manifestation of the intent of feminism. That the choice involves the submission to a male is truly irrelevant, moving beyond traditional feminisim. The premise of feminists as perpetual opponents of men mistakenly establishes men as the central tenet of female power. If men do not grant a woman her power, men cannot inherently take it. The critical question is whether or not women maintain their right to choose. Thus, though choosing a man may lead to the intentional submission of self, choosing a man does not violate the tenets of modern feminists and may be considered a post-feminist perspective on the relationship of men and women.

So, what separates this idea from pre-feminist powerless submission? Feminism.  Its era, contribution, and the equalizing right to female choice created to permit a newly liberating platform of power.