There’s only one thing I know for sure when I look at my calendar at the beginning of the week: It’s going to change.

That’s even more true in pandemic.

Between tech failures, bandwidth limitations, family crises, double-booking, the crush of events, the press of proposals, surgery, last-minute recollections of car pool duty, and let’s not forget chronic exhaustion, I need to be ready to roll with what happens in other people’s lives.

I go back to the idea that the Universe is a lot smarter than I am.

It knows, in a way that I don’t, when I’ve tried to jam too much stuff into a week. 

That’s when clients call in sick and have to reschedule, or stayed a week longer on the road and have to move their sessions.

I often struggle to respond generously — especially when I have created goals for myself, and decided that I need to be firm in how I manage the finite resources of my time. One school of thought dictates, “I must set boundaries with other people: define those boundaries firmly for myself, declare them clearly to others, and defend them — tell someone when they break that boundary and that it’s not okay to do that.”

I put a clause in my clients’ contracts: they can reschedule one session at no charge, and then they’ll pay me a rescheduling fee of $500 for every schedule change after that.

I have a hard time telling a client that, yes, they can move their session, and then reminding them that they’ve agreed to pay that rescheduling fee. 

When is it better for me to be generous, and when do I truly need to hold the boundary? Generosity and Boundaries are both on the list of seven elements that Brene Brown presents (in her works Rising Strong, and Dare To Lead, among others) as fundamental to developing and sustaining trust in relationships. Until right now, I hadn’t considered how often they push up against each other for me. 

When I decide to make an exception to a boundary, am I letting myself down? Am I weakening the foundation of trust with that client by showing them that I don’t really mean it when I declare a boundary?

Or is it both practical and compassionate to agree to reschedule a meeting (particularly when it’s one of a set of multiple meetings that all need to move) at no charge because someone feels sick? If they’re sick, they can’t concentrate on doing the work we had planned together, and my commitment to them is not just to deliver my services but also to help them get the result that they can only achieve when they do the work.

That’s different from, “Hey, we decided to take the kids on vacation at the last minute, so we have to move the session.” 

The former is a time for compassion and understanding. How would I want to be treated if I were sick? The latter situation, I am making a note for another day, is one where I will charge the cancellation fee.

The client who stayed out on a road trip a week longer? Two considerations: first, he’s out MEETING FEDERAL BUYERS. He’s getting an extra week of live practice in all the skills I’ve been teaching him, using all the techniques of relationship development and lead generation detective work, that will help him be even more successful. He can’t do a session with me if he’s out concentrating on meeting buyers. His buyer will only be in that place or at that event that week. It was in our mutual interest to reschedule the session, and his results are likely to be even stronger as a result.

And…this is the same client who took extra time to have a testimonial conversation with one of my prospects who’s thinking of working with me. Did I close more business as a result? No, not yet, but the prospect got a firsthand realistic idea of my client’s experience in working with me, and what it takes to be successful. So not only is that prospect more likely to become a client when the time is right, but they are more likely to be set up for success when they do. And this is the client who’s thinking of extending their engagement with me once the basic program is done. 

I invested in building the relationship.

But here’s the funny thing that happens when my appointments shift: it always works out better, because suddenly I get two things that are precious: first, an opening of time that was otherwise booked. I never have any trouble filling that time. I usually have a ten item list jostling for dibs on which one is the right size to fit into that slot with high hopes of getting finished.

And, second, when someone reschedules a sales call, I make the effort and activate my generosity circuits. Yes, it’s an effort to not get my socks in a twist and think, “ohhh, they’re putting me off. They just don’t want to say no.” I’m almost as glad to talk to someone for five minutes and find a better time on their calendar, for when they’ve got their new sales team in place, or have finished the big proposal and can clear the time to work with me, as I am when someone tells me, “No, this program isn’t right for me,” or  “We don’t have the resources to work with you right now,” or “the Federal market isn’t a high enough priority for us.” 

I’m happy to get a clear “no” because it means they have clarity about their own way forward.

I’d far rather reschedule, or even get a “no, thanks,” than to have someone just fail to show up for a call and not tell me why. 

I take issue with the school of thought that one closes the sale by pressing someone to define their objections clearly, and then addressing and removing each obstacle.

People do business with people they trust. 

I truly believe that people say yes when they have confidence that by engaging me, they will be on track to get the result, and the experience, that they want. If the conversations we had didn’t give them that positive sense, then no amount of argument is going to change that. I would rather receive a straight-up no, early, with grace than hear, “Don’t call me; I’ll call you.” I’m not going to claim the title of Queen of Follow up, but I do take a lot of notes during thousands of conversations. Sometimes, someone will come back to me TEN YEARS after we meet, and be ready to engage. And my notes tell me a lot about the journey they’ve been on between then and now.

Somebody else might say, “Hey, if they’re not ready, let ‘em go. There are more people to talk to.”  That’s true, too.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from a counselor. We were talking about how anxious I was feeling about…probably this same issue, sales and prospecting and my business. 

“I get that you need to stay focused,” she said. “But what if you could just hang on loosely?”

Hanging on loosely is not only less stressful. It makes it easier to let go of the things that aren’t really worth the effort to hang onto, the things and people and experiences that belong to someone else.

The Universe is a generous place, and it’s a lot smarter than I am.

It communicates through intuition.

I have a stubborn streak. It serves me well when I direct its attention to the abundance of positive and amazing, wonderful and worthwhile, experiences and people in my life. However, if I’m not paying attention, that stubborn streak gets hijacked by ancient voices and lights me up with fear and negativity in service of one of my biggest bêtes noires: scarcity.

To be generous takes courage and faith in “enough”: that I have enough, that there is enough, especially money and time. And that I am enough: wise enough, smart enough, savvy enough, thoughtful enough, kind enough.

The stubborn streak, on its dark days, tramples generosity with a thunderous stampede that can almost drown out the seemingly delicate, ethereal, voice of intuition.

Almost.

I had an interesting conversation today. 

Sometimes people who “meet” me online, who hear or see me speak at one of the dozens of broadcasts I give all year long, write and ask to set up a phone call. They have questions, and those conversations are the start of relationships that can turn into a professional engagement (or, in sales terms, a lead that converts to a sale; a person who decides to engage me and become a client).

Once upon a time, I talked to people answering their questions about Federal contracts all day long. When I worked at the Embassy, I did just that. I took every call, and answered all the questions, and the days I loved most were the ones where someone would say, “Wow, I never expected to get such great service from my government!”

It was WONDERFUL.

And I got paid for that.

That was one of the very best parts of public service: the SERVICE part. The fact that I got paid as well as appreciated to be someone’s superhero surprise of the day was even better.

It was an endless delight: to be useful, and valued, and financially compensated for that without having to sell anything.

Running my own business…not so much.

One of the things I learned (over and over and over, and so I share this with anyone who is thinking how great it would be to run a consulting business) is that, as a solo consultant, the amount of time one spends doing non-revenue-generating stuff is absolutely staggering. Sure, maybe you get paid a couple hundred bucks an hour, but most weeks nowhere near the forty or fifty or sixty hours a week you’re working involve getting paid for that time.

Remember I talked about stubborn? I’m sure there were a lot of ways I could have figured out some alternative ways to actually run a business — to break out of what Michael Gerber describes as “The E-Myth” a lot sooner that I have. Such is life.

When one’s business is small (as mine is), time is the most scarce resource. As one of my favorite business profs used to say, “There’s only 24 hours in the day, and you’ve gotta eat and you’ve gotta sleep.” (I’ll save for another day my musing on comparison as the thief of joy as I muse at what creates the wildly varying differences among what each of billions of individual humans accomplish with those same 24 hours.)

So when I’m speaking for free (and I do a lot of that), I’m doing lead generation. There are easily a dozen ways that someone who hears me speak can get in touch with me and ask to have a conversation. I spend some of my time having those conversations. But there are only so many hours in the day. Who’s worth having a conversation with?

I’ve got gaps in what marketers call my “product ladder”. In one kind of business model, one has a set of related offerings for people at different stages of need, and different price points. That way, someone who likes you and needs your expertise but can’t afford your big program, can solve some of their problems, get a little bit of help, with a smaller offering that will help them along their way, and keep them engaged and connected with you perhaps until they CAN afford a bigger program.

Thing is, it can take almost as much of a sales person’s time to sell an inexpensive program as it does to sell an expensive one. There is calculus somewhere about the economics of sales calls, but in a world where time is finite, it’s easy for the roaring chorus in my head to remind me, “You can’t talk to just everybody. Not everybody is a prospect. Qualified prospects are worthy of your time. Other people should get the politely-drafted reply that goes something like, “Based on your application, it appears that your company is not in a position to invest in my program right now. However, you might to look into my book, Amazon #1 Bestseller “Government Contracts Made Easier…(or whatever other more self-serve offer or download I have that they can click and buy)”. 

I almost turned down someone’s request for a meeting because the meeting application email he’d sent me suggested that his company seemed too small and at too early a stage to become a client.

But…really, how important is fifteen minutes of my life, if I might make a difference for somebody, get them on the right track… who am I to be so important? (I put down a footnote that that voice sounds a whole lot like Brene Brown’s “Who do you think you are?” voice, and that’s a problem I’ll have to tackle another day).

I am often reminded that I got to find my way to where I am today because so many people have been kind to me, and given me 15 minutes or an hour or more of their time at critical points in my life. Famous people, former ambassadors, international public servants, just because I wrote and asked. When I was considering a career in the foreign service, I will always remember being bowled over by the response I got when I wrote to Stephen Lewis, at the time Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations. I wrote to him and he replied, “You ask so many questions that I could not possibly do them justice in a letter. Please call me at my home in New York so we can speak.”

And I did, and we did.

I’m neither rich nor famous, but I have the same capacity to be generous to others, to people I barely know, as those people did who had never heard of me..

To spend 15 minutes of my life just being kind to someone is its own gift — given and received. Even (as happens usually) when someone isn’t a prospect, it feels almost as good as writing a thank you note to just give someone a little lift and encouragement, especially when it’s my last call at the end of the day.

So I decided to take the call. In fact, I was kind of embarrassed about how I got started, because I had been cleaning up my sales and prospect backlog and forgot about the time and then had a call that went long so I was actually late for the call I had promised to this fellow. That was unintentionally rude on my part — not the experience I want anyone to have with me. I was grateful for his graciousness at my tardiness. 

I made the mistake of heading into the call by telling him that I was glad to talk to him and answer his questions, but I was really sorry that I really didn’t have anything to offer him besides my book and maybe some webinars he could pick up from a partner who re-sells recordings of some of my classes, www.Govology.com. 

 I asked him what was on his mind. He said he’d learned a lot from last week’s session I had given about Simplified Acquisition, and wanted to know if I could tell him how to build relationships that could turn into simplified acquisitions.

 The downside is that that’s not a question you can answer in 10 minutes. In fact, it’s something I spent 25 years avoiding, and then everything about the last six years on the path to mastering, and it’s now at the very core of the things I teach my clients. I just haven’t figured out how to teach it fast or in a quick download.

Nobody has.

The end of the day can also be a time when I can feel tired and depleted. I had just gotten the email from my bookkeeper about bills coming due next week, and was confused about where the money was coming from to pay them (it was there somewhere but my scarcity circuits had gotten triggered).

That left me wrestling with feelings of despair that I tried to keep out of my voice as I explained to him that I was embarrassed to have only have one offer — an eight-week private consulting program that I had already started to make the assumption would represent a major or even untenable investment for a company his size. I almost plunged into just making an introduction to my training partner who has a different program and lower price point but covers the same principles of Federal sales for her clients as well as when she teaches for mine. 

But I slowed down and started asking a few more questions. And discovered that even though the company is small, he and two other people are handling sales and business development for the Federal market. That’s often a more important criterion to qualify a client than how big the company is. 

I noticed I was rushing, and the tug of intuition slowed me down for long enough to be generous again, to stop making assumptions about the person I was just getting to know.

In the end, he did ask for a proposal. The person he wanted to connect with was… me. I will see what happens next week. 

A story for another day: how I spent 25 years avoiding everything to do with sales, only to find myself slammed face-first into my fears so hard that I shattered them forever.

I will tell you this: the day you truly understand what sales is (and what it’s not), you have a lifetime enrollment in Generosity University. 

It’s a credential that’s recognized everywhere. 

Japanese ceramic artists have a form known as kintsugi. That’s what the top image is.

Beautiful, broken, or a bit of both?

I think it’s stunning.

Kintsugi (金継ぎ, “golden joinery”), also known as kintsukuroi (金繕い, “golden repair”),^[1] is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique.^[2][3][4] As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.^[5]

~ Wikipedia

Today has been a long day, and I knew it would end past my general day-end-plan when I began. Sometimes that’s what it takes to reach people, and it’s different to plan it than to let my day dribble off into nothingness.

Many artists and actors experiment with improvisational techniques or experiences as a way to loosen up and discover things, expand their range of performance.

I scheduled two back-to-back broadcasts (because if I have to do makeup, I might as well get the most of it): I did one with Justin Muscolino of up-and-coming TweezzleTV, an innovative format for trainers to share expertise.

That was the opportunity that these two shows provided me: I was willing to trade off my end-of-day limit in order to have the chance to stretch my performance envelope, my comfort and control zone, and show up as more vulnerable, as more deeply authentic…and less scripted, with the possibility of making mistakes live as well as talking about the hard and painful experiences of making mistakes at different points on my journey of discovery, personal and professional.

Brene Brown writes about how hard it is for us to connect with each other when we show up all “armored up.” As humans, our deepest needs include the need to connect with each other. And that’s only possible when we have the courage to wade into the wide murky zone of vulnerability. I’ve come to realize I can expect to struggle pretty much every time as I try to figure out how to show up professionally but open; willing to share my life and my mistakes and my lessons learned. I hope against hope to not over-share in a way that causes people to back away rather than feel closer to me, or leads people to question my judgement or credibility, but to seem courageous enough to show people that we have struggles in common. 

It used to be that I’d give lots of cheerful, tactic-packed how-to presentations, and people never really followed up, really wanted to get to know me, or, despite all my technical expertise, felt they could relate to me. I didn’t open up enough to them to show that I had been where they are, that I had had a hard time learning these things, that they ever really wanted to begin to trust me…which is fundamental to not only sales, but also to everything to do with any relationship.

That’s why the opportunity for more “authenticity practice” is strongly aligned with my focus and priorities right now. To be in integrity, I need to walk my talk. I can’t extol the virtues of being vulnerable if I don’t do it myself and show people what it looks like and sounds like, and what it feels like to be in the presence of someone who’s practicing that.

Because our broken parts are where the light gets in. Our imperfections leave open the places for people to connect with us — not to fill in the gap to repair us, but to open a space for someone to peek in, to see what we’re made of, to notice what we have in common, to feel not-alone. And every so often to offer a place where new pieces fit together that never would have found each other, to create new things and experiences of extraordinary beauty that were only possible because first something opened, came apart, or even broke.

Justin just wanted me to talk about me, and my story. His team will be editing the 90 minutes we recorded, and breaking that into about six small episodes. I’m not sure how it will turn out, but it’ll be a mix of some of my technical expertise and some of my lessons-learned moments along the way. The challenge here was to go relatively unscripted, pay attention to where intuition took the conversation, and not just talk without letting my generous host ask questions. 

I have been struggling for many years with a gap in my service offerings, and it just might be that collaborating with Jason, in breaking both myself and my expertise into more vulnerable, digestible, pieces, just might offer the chance to fill that gap. We’ll see.

Breaking down to try something different just might be where the light gets in.

Justin told me there was nothing I needed to teach, no presentation I needed to make. He said that his community would just like to get to know me. It was a lovely reminder of the value each of us has as human beings, that we are worthy simply for who we are, completely apart from our expertise, from what we DO. 

The second show was the second of a six-episode live 90-minute session series I’m doing with Eric Coffie, host of the GovCon Giants podcast and YouTube Live Mastermind.

With Eric, our conversations are similarly unscripted, though we agreed on a theme for each week (and I admit that I caved in the last seven minutes of the session because I really really wanted some visuals to drive home the easy model of how to use checklists to prepare for a meeting that’s so good that your prospect wants to invite you back). 

I love responding to the live chat, to the questions from the YouTube chat and engaging those who show up in active discussion, challenging them to take action, explore, be brave, admit their struggles and discover solutions. But this show also stretched me in another way. I wanted to offer a different perspective, a shift in the theme or emphasis, that the audience was absorbing from the host’s strong social media message. His show attracts many business owners who are at an early stage of Federal contracting and often have very small businesses. Owners of very small businesses can, and do, have big dreams. I had noticed that his language about “big contracts”, and “big wins for small business,” attracted hundreds of followers. 

Language about big contracts can get people pretty excited about working with an energetic speaker or expert they can relate to.

I don’t have an offering right now, other than my book and workbook (Amazon #1 Bestseller Government Contracts Made Easier (Second Edition))  for the large numbers of very small businesses who might love to get my expertise. I have an insatiable desire to be of service, even if I can’t be paid for it, to people who just might make better decisions if they have a “light bulb moment” listening to a talk I give. My business lets me make that difference in the world. 

I also wanted to inspire and encourage them, even though they might not be ready to be my clients, even if they did business with my host instead of me, by sharing some of my failures and struggles that I know so many of the listeners also have: fear of selling, fear of rejection, fear of sales, mistakes in conversations that mean didn’t get the business, failure to recognize small signs of progress that would have encouraged me if only I’d seen them. At the very least, I wanted them to not only have hope, but discover some small practical steps that would help them a little.  

While I live to make a difference in the world, I don’t always expect to be paid for that. It’s nice when it works out that way, but I believe that the Universe is a fundamentally generous place, and pays attention when we do the right things for the right reasons.

One of my achievements tonight was to encourage one of my hosts to share not jut the stories of his big multi-million-dollar wins, but to reach back and remember all the small steps, the small wins, even the winning moments that had no monetary value at all, that led to the multimillion dollar wins. I wanted his audience to get the message, from his stories and mine, that the road to success is long and takes staying power and commitment. 

It was sneaky, I admit. But I hope that people who showed up with stars in their eyes left feeling that their feet were more firmly grounded in reality rather than being at risk for their hopes being dashed.

Another one of my achievements was to show up in the full beauty of being an imperfect human.

I think that was the best of all.

This imperfect human really needs a hot bath and a good night’s sleep. I hope you get one, too.

Anyone who’s traveled by air has heard this pre-flight announcement: 

“In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, an oxygen mask will automatically appear in front of you. To start the flow of oxygen, pull the mask towards you. Place it firmly over your nose and mouth, secure the elastic band behind your head, and breathe normally. Although the bag does not inflate, oxygen is flowing to the mask. If you are travelling with a child or someone who requires assistance, secure your mask on first, and then assist the other person. 

When it comes to oxygen, flight attendants don’t get a lot of arguments.

So why is it so hard to treat self care the same way?

In my conversations this weekend with friends and family, pandemic was a big topic. “Is everybody healthy? How are you doing? What are things like where you are?”

Once we had the basic check-ins covered, two themes came up over and over: first, how pandemic has cast into stark relief all places our social safety net needs repair. Who is vulnerable? How easily people can fall through the cracks and get left behind, become homeless, and — especially our elderly — even die of loneliness. How differently governments around the world are providing leadership and financial support, and how much (or how little) difference that support is making for our friends and loved ones. 

We’ve seen incredible examples of human creativity in adapting and responding to life-changing circumstances in just about every aspect of the basic systems in our societies that support life and living: health care, communications, work, exercise, travel, supply chain, groceries, education.  

On the other hand, I can’t imagine what the phrase “doing the best we can” means for anyone whose profession is in food service, restaurants, entertainment or the arts. Sure, I’ve read news stories of artists forming creative performance bubbles, and dancers improvising ways to keep their strength and artistic edge. Olympic athletes must be going through an incredibly anxious time right now, trying to guess at whether or how the postponed 2020 games will happen in Tokyo this summer.

I’ve struggled to adapt many routine aspects of my life, with mixed success. What people see most of is my visual “game” on zoom and social: I’ve got a ring light kit and a great LIVE multicoloured backdrop (none of those wonky pseudo green screens for me!) that accessorizes with anything I wear. I’ve upped my lipstick game, patted down the shine, and found earrings that don’t dangle when I get animated while I talk. I went through three iterations of mics and earphones and audio mixer boxes to get as close as I could to professional “FM” quality sound for any broadcast I do. 

The online experiences I create for my audiences and clients are high-engagement. You’re not going to get death-by-powerpoint from me, nosiree bob! If you’ve asked me to speak for your group or lead a lesson, or work with your team, you’d better be ready to show up fully present, ready to work, think, speak up, be challenged, and take action.  

And I was “on” about six hours a day, four or five days a week, between internal team meetings across three times zones as well as client service and a heavy schedule of, in essence, promotional free teaching gigs for lead generation.

Slowly but surely, my lights were dimmer every day. Even before pandemic, when I’d finish giving a 90-minute webinar, I was wiped. I felt like I’d fallen off a cliff, and the event producers rarely called up afterward to say, “atta girl.” More often, I also took 15 or 20 minutes as soon as I got “offstage” to thank and give “soft landing” time to my guest and co-hosts, and let them feel appreciated so they didn’t have the crash.

Ever see a professional speaker, entertainer, or performer when they’re offstage after the gig is done? Like, after they’re out of the official backstage gladhanding bubble? They mostly don’t have a lot left. You wouldn’t expect them to. If you paid for the ticket, you expect them to give you all they’ve got, and then you both go home.

Ever thought about how it must feel to be a Broadway performer, with eight shows a week including matinees and evening performances? Ever thought about how carefully they have to manage their bodies and their personal energy and emotional resilience to be able to put it all out there for the audience in three hour chunks? And how much time they spend rehearsing, fine tuning, training, fixing the little stuff that breaks? And how much support they have from the crew and the house, all the people we as the audience rarely see, to put on that top quality performance night after night, day after day? And then there’s Monday: many Broadway shows go “dark” on Monday nights so that performers and crew can have a day of rest.

And yet here we are in pandemic, coming up on our one year anniversary next month of A Year At The Improv. Most of us started out as solo acts or cobbled together the best cast and crew and equipment we could. There was no script. We made it up as we went along; kept the bits that worked, threw out the stuff that didn’t. Nobody gave us “dark” days off if we weren’t savvy enough to take them ourselves.

Especially health care professionals, teachers, parents, and care-givers. They had virtually none of the preparation or training or supporting cast or massage or rehearsal or makeup or coaching that even the understudy feline in the Iowa production of CATS was getting  (up until March 9th of 2020). The utter urgency of absolutely every day is as oppressive as we let it be. 

The grind has been relentless, and many of us are only now acknowledging how depleted we are, and regrouping for whatever lies ahead.

Which takes me to the second topic that comes up if the conversation goes on long enough: “How are you really doing?” 

My answers are very much like my friends’: learning, later rather than sooner, the vital importance of treating work as something that needs limits rather than a perfect anesthetic to numb emotions that otherwise overwhelm. Not sleeping well, with no rational explanation other than the lurking presence of an invisible virus that’s killed nearly half a million people in the country where I live and is waiting for me if I don’t watch out. Whole body, whole spirit, fatigue. 

In late March of 2020, the place my husband and I usually visit for a week in the summer notified us that they were closing for the rest of the season, and our vacation would need to be rescheduled. We look forward to that trip for a full four months every year. In the early days of pandemic, that was the loss that hit me especially hard: the reality of losing a week of deep downtime and reconnection with my partner.  

I wrote to my friend Robert about feeling ashamed at grieving a lost vacation when thousand of other people were losing the livelihoods and incomes and  lives of family and friends.

“Why shame?” he wrote back. A pleasure is a good, and loss of a good is a proper cause for grief.” He comforted me with the encouragement to think of others’ losses not so much as “more worthy” of grief, but harder to deal with and needing more support.

It’s been easier to push aside and ignore the effects of grief compounded for the loss of a thousand small normal pleasures with a constant refrain of, “gosh, my situation is easy compared with so-and-so who’s lost family and friends and their job, and their marriage, and their graduation, and couldn’t be there for the birth of their grandchild or the funeral of their aunt…”

No. 

This has to stop.

I need to remember, every day, to put on the mask that’s going to feed me the vital emotional oxygen of self care and self compassion. I need to have faith that, just like that aircraft’s oxygen mask, even if the bag doesn’t seem to inflate, the oxygen is flowing. 

What’s in my mix of self care is almost certainly very different from yours. And it might change from one day or week to the next.  

Today, my mix included journaling, a sweaty, high-intensity TRX workout, conversations with friends and family, creative projects in editing and graphic production, and the pleasure of sorting through a couple thousand images I’d taken since 2019 of places including a Pacific ocean beach, Icelandic landscapes, underseas in the Cayman islands, Athens and the cliffs of Kalymnos, a ton of architecture and art and urban oases and parks and rivers and creeks… and, strangely enough, about 150 memes related to compassion and resilience! It was as if a little subroutine in my mind was storing these up so I’d have them for… well, now, actually.

The mix also includes self-compassion and a dollop of gentleness for the stuff on list that I didn’t get done this weekend: tai chi practice. Meditation. A batch of thank you notes. A shipment of mugs. 

It includes taking a moment to remember the best advice my dad ever gave me: “Be very kind to yourself.”

I hope you’re making sure to breathe deeply every day from your supply of self-care and self-compassion. Whether or not you believe it’s doing much good, that’s why it’s called a practice. Keep on breathing, and so will I, so we can both thrive and be there for the others in our lives who need us.

I have a hard time deciding when to end my day. Why? Why does it matter, is it a problem, and is it a problem worth solving?

I began my self-imposed challenge wondering how it is that we lose the courage to show up real, to be who we are. What are the forces that erode the natural energy and naive invincibility that we come into the world with?

Where do the voices come from? I’m fortunate to have worked with counselors and coaches over the years and had great experiences with them. One of my counselors recommended Richard Carson’s book, “Taming Your Gremlin: A Surprisingly Simple Method For Getting Out Of Your Own Way.” So “gremlins” are my nickname for the horde of cunning, devious, vicious, voices that murmur and mumble, chatter and chant, and whisper their way through my day. Which might be manageable if they didn’t also slink their way into my sleep, and lie in wait for the witching hour: four in the morning (about which more another day).

The messages that hammer away relentlessly, telling us we are less, we are not enough? I know it’s not just me, but does everybody hear them? My husband is very familiar with these voices but I think only by reputation, because he’s the one who dispenses the hugs at four in the morning when I wake up too anxious to fall back to sleep on my own.

He’s utterly unequivocal about the voices.

“They lie,” he says flatly.

I just realized he might be one of those people who doesn’t actually hear such voices himself. I wonder whether some people have such a strong sense of self, or a vision of the purpose for their lives, or internal guiding light, that the internal critical voice that sows self-doubt year after year in many minds including mine finds no place to be nurtured in theirs.

I mentioned a chorus of voices. They have specialties. One of the oldest voices is “not good enough.” And I’m tired of it. Literally exhausted.

Where did that one come from?

In pretty much every part of my life, my interests range widely. I like to adventure, to explore. While I like to be good at everything I do, I love learning enough that I am willing to try something new and be terrible at it when I start because that’s where learning begins.

One of the biggest apprehensions I had about starting a business was that I struggle to know what “enough” looked like. My parents wanted the best for me and all their kids. Being raised by parents who had struggled through the Depression of the 1920’s, my sense was they were driven to encourage their kids do better than they and their parents had done, to strive to achieve. Whether that push was overt, or something I just absorbed by osmosis, somewhere pretty early in life I inherited one of my oldest gremlins: the one that says, “Not good enough.”

For most of my life, I’ve placed a high value on productivity — particularly my own. A good day is a day when I get a lot done.

That’s where the slippery slope begins.

If a good day is one where I get a lot done, then surely a great day is one when I get more done, right? Workity workity workity workity work! More work got me promotion and recognition and opportunities and credibility and the chance to explore and lead fun projects! The possibilities were endless. The harder I worked, the more I opportunity I found to… well, really, work harder. I hit the salary cap. I wasn’t really working for the money. I told myself I was giving my all to serve my country, as a Trade Commissioner for the Canadian Embassy, helping thousands of Canadian companies who wanted to win U.S. Federal contracts.

And, yeah, I was doing that. But, looking back, I was also deeply hooked on trying to satisfy the voice that kept whispering, “not good enough.” There wasn’t any line that I could draw that I believed would be the point where I could say I’d given enough to serve my country. What I thought of as my sense of duty was endless.

Then came the time, in 2003, when I started my own business. Then, I didn’t have the motivation of patriotic duty. There was the lure of working hard enough (or maybe smart enough) to make endless amounts of money.

Ah, the lure of the American dream of entrepreneurship.

So, fast forward nearly twenty years. It’s 4:30. The time I told myself I was going to stop doing tasks, and organize my lists for tomorrow.

Pandemic has been kicking the stuffing out of all of us for almost a year. I know intellectually that I just can’t expect to try to get as much done in any given day, but apparently that’s a hard habit to break…until it’s really started breaking me.

I. Am. Tired.

Today was the end of Wednesday. There were three proposals I had promised to people in the conversations I’d had today, and one proposal that I hadn’t gotten around to sending out that I’d promised last Friday.

It wasn’t like I got paid for that time. The work I was doing was all directed toward winning business. I spent my afternoon in a flurried cycle of conversations and follow up proposals. That’s a pretty good way to spend time: if I talk to enough people, some of them say yes, and then I do have the chance to get paid for my efforts.

No proposals, no responses; no responses, no yeses; no yesses, no contracts; no contracts, no income, no business.

Oh my. Just look at that narrative: the downward spiral. “For want of a nail, the horse was lost,” begins the story. Clearly, four proposals were the only thing standing between me and the abyss. And they all take longer at the end of the day when I’m tired. But surely it’s a better day if I get more finished AND push myself back from the abyss, right.

Wait: who put the abyss there?

Who promised those proposals? Who set that deadline?

Uh, me.

Ah, but what is that “more” costing me? Or, put another way, what am I getting for the 90 minutes I decided (for it is my choice) to work past the time I promised myself would be the end of the day?

Mostly what I got was just breaking my promise to me. And gave another win to the “not good enough” voice.

So starting tomorrow (less than two hours from now), I can make a more realistic — more humane — promise of when I will get things to people. So that I’m taking better care of me so I can take better care of the other people in my life, including my loved ones and friends as well as my team and clients and prospects.

What do I get when I make a different choice than workityworkitywork?

I get more time to be in places like the image up top.

You know what else?

I’m grateful for all the I learned today, including in reflecting as I write this.

And grateful to have another day tomorrow to try again.

True north, strong and free. It tugs at me every time I leave. Boundaries are funny things. This is a ragged segue into exploring the edges of authenticity.

I remember being about eight or nine, maybe, standing in church beside my mom and singing the last song at the end of mass. I liked to sing, and I particularly liked to improvise a harmony line while everyone around me was singing the melody. When the song finished and we were getting ready to leave, my mom asked me, “Are you prepared to be an individual?”

I was mystified by the question. Why on earth wouldn’t I be? How could that even be a question?

What could possibly be so difficult to stay standing, speaking or even singing my truth, being who I am in the world, with the courage of a full heart and without apology?

What teaches us shame or fear to be who we are? Why does it take so long to recognize that fear, and why does it take so many years (and hours of therapy) to release those learned fears, and reclaim our fearless four-year old?

This blog post, and the ones I’ll be writing in this month, is part of my quest to explore that a bit.

When I decided to dig a little deeper into what authenticity is, the first article I saw was this one from Harvard Business Review. It hit on a lot of the risks we run as we try to find the zone of authentic connection. It didn’t go nearly so deeply into why authenticity is essential for leadership and for human connection.

But reading it, I was reminded that one can only find or deepens authenticity through — wait for it— embracing imperfection! Only by being willing to try different approaches, and getting feedback and mentorship from others about whether what they see is what we intended to show, can we find our way. And so comes my declaration. As part of my quest to explore authenticity, my goal is, every day in February, to publish a new post on my personal blog

For many years, particularly since the rise of social media, I have struggled with what it means for me to show up as my authentic self in the world. Social media is a place where I build relationships for business as well as stay connected with friends and even make new ones. On one hand, I feel like I have a lot to say. Many of the ideas are interconnected. I find it hard to decide where to end one complete idea without laying out all the backstory with footnotes and references.

I was taking a marketing course recently. We were given an assignment to write the “origin story” of the product or service we were marketing: what was the riveting personal experience that led us to create our offer for our clients? I think I missed the part of the instructions where we were told that the story would be something we could share in about six minutes. I just looked it up: six minutes of spoken narrative is a little under a thousand words.

I kept writing and writing and writing.

By the time I got to twelve thousand words, I realized this wasn’t an origin story. It was therapy.

Being in connection with others is one of my core values. I’ve learned (thank you Brene Brown) that authenticity demands vulnerability. I’ve learned that sharing my ooey gooey messy side is not only okay, but that if I don’t do that — if I just wander through the world all shiny, all “shields up,” then I don’t leave anyone room to come in.

Maybe you’ve heard the phrase, “the cracks are where the light gets in.” Our imperfections are the places where we connect. When I see someone I love, or someone I respect, or someone I admire, struggling with something that I also find hard, I feel closer to them.

It’s not just me, I think. I am not alone.

When I am vulnerable, when I’m willing to share the things I find hard, the things I struggle with, I give someone else the chance to feel that they’re not alone either. Struggling alone, unwilling or unable to ask for help (especially if, like me, you place a high value on achievement, on pleasing others, on getting it perfect…) devolves into isolation, into disconnection.

When in struggle and I find the courage to say to someone, “Hey, I’m having a hard time with something…” I’m able to give another human being that feeling of being in this life together.

Here’s the thing: There’s no hard, clear, universal, easy line defining where “too much information” is.

Recently, I remember telling my mom, “Life and relationships are one long line of ‘fall-down-go-boom’ — like a little kid — and picking ourselves up again.” Relationships are built on an endless experiment wading around in a messy zone of vulnerability. For many years, I’ve generally shown up on the cautious side, all shiny and best face forward. And then I’m surprised and disappointed when I discover people can’t relate to me if they impression they have of me is that I’m some constant shiny pinwheel of sparky, slightly scary, frenetic, energy.

The frenzy comes from years of trying too hard because I’m constantly afraid of not being good enough.

The shiny frenzy is isolating and exhausting. But vulnerability takes practice and is a messy imprecise business fraught with imperfection. Plenty of times, when I’ve unbuckled my armor, and showing my broken bits and struggles, so dearly wanting to have a closer relationship with someone I cared about, I’ve accidentally overshared. The intimacy and trust I had hoped to build got painfully damaged and sometimes the relationship disappeared, perhaps forever (though never say never).

Better to have loved and lost.

I would rather keep trying, in the full knowlege that the only thing I know for sure is that I’m going to end up falling face first again. It’s not a matter of if, but just how soon. The falling down teaches me a bit more every time.

My nephew Ven recently told me, “I learn more about watching something blow up than I do seeing something work perfectly.”

While I really don’t want any relationship to blow up, I’m always grateful when people are willing to be generous with me, to give me the benefit of the doubt when I screw up.

I try to do the same for you, too.

One day at a time.

What will I write about? I don’t know yet! But if you want to find out, read the posts, follow me, comment, or cheer me on.

Let’s travel the road into authenticity together and see where we go.

33 years ago today, I started my job at the Canadian Embassy in Washington DC. It’s been quite a ride.