A Profound Opportunity

At my current school we have chapel once each week. The entire high school gathers for music, prayer, meditation, readings, and a sermon.

During today’s sermon, it struck me what a profound opportunity it is to have an audience, people giving the gift of their attention, their thoughtfulness, and their listening. It’s a profound opportunity to expect people to open themselves up with curiosity to be moved or touched by our words and being.

Teachers engage with several audiences each day in the classroom. Most people, in fact, engage with audiences throughout the day - even one-on-one conversations are an audience of one.

Whether we have an audience of a school with 400 people, a classroom of 15-30 people, or a conversation with just one person, engaging with others will forever be a profound opportunity.

And we often squander that opportunity. We’re intent on sounding knowledgeable, looking good, or being cool. We’re working to get someone to agree with our perspective, to validate our view, to meet our expectations. We’re proving something to others, proving something to ourselves, or trying to make someone else proud. Maybe we’re just trying to “make it” through the moment, the hour, the day, or the week.

All the while, we’re distracting ourselves from the profound opportunity at hand.

The opportunity to connect, to love, and to appreciate. The opportunity to open, to grow, and to be touched. The opportunity to awaken, to express ourselves authentically, and to be fulfilled.

When all else is put aside, what a profound opportunity it is to engage soul to soul with anyone else.

I listened to a recording this evening of a coach I look up to, and he said something along the lines of this: “My wife and I don’t argue. We realized that it’s something we don’t want to do, so we stopped doing it.”

To turn that statement around just a little bit: What’s something you want for your communication with others? What's something you'd like to be in your communication? What’s an intention worthy of someone else’s time, attention, and curiosity?

Perhaps it’s to be open and curious. Maybe it’s to enjoy the interaction and grow from it. Maybe it’s honest communication, self-expression, and creativity. Maybe it’s to bring appreciation and honor.

Whatever it is that calls to you, I recommend that you intentionally bring something into your interactions with others. The opportunity to engage with another is profound, so wouldn’t it be pretty great to experience it that way?

I am deeply grateful for your time, attention, and curiosity. Thank you for being my audience, and thank you for allowing the spirit of my message to move you in whatever way it moves you. Have a beautiful day. ❤️

The only reason to give a speech is to change the world. - JFK

The Beauty (and Strength) in Our Flaws

A client shared that a warrior awakens within her when her spouse is threatened. She feels a fierceness rise like a sword being unsheathed, and adrenaline fires up each cell in her body.

She saw the warrior as a limitation that gets in the way of being present. Her warrior shuts her listening down, fires up her anger, and she can’t be present even with her spouse in these moments. In fact, she often turns the warrior on herself, and she’s left disempowered and helpless.

An inner warrior - what an amazing display of the genius of human beings! So many biological, intellectual, and psychological responses we have to people and situations - and they all serve to maintain our well-being. Whether it’s the warrior that awakens to fight or the adrenaline to hightail it to safety - we seek to minimize threats. Whether it’s the desire to mate or the desire to eat sugar - we like to satisfy our needs. We’ve inherited these automatic responses to keep us alive and help us thrive.

But my client wasn’t present to that wonder. Most of us aren’t present to the wonder of who we are, especially in those times where self-judgment, frustration, and shame darken our self-perception.

I was speaking with a different client recently, and he’s working to overcome his selfishness in his marriage and in his family. He was really down on himself - disappointed, frustrated, and desperate to break through. Like the warrior, he sees his selfishness as a flaw in his character, something he’s either got to overcome or continue succumbing to.

Every aspect of our being, even the crappy ones, serves some positive purpose. Fear, insecurity, trauma, anger, resentment, selfishness, hopelessness - whatever it is, there’s a good reason for it. What occur as weaknesses may not seem to serve us positively in the moment, but they exist because they serve us somehow. When we get in touch with the value of these emotions, we’re better able to transform them.

You see, as long as we persecute ourselves, we're in a vicious cycle of repeated self-blame and self-shame. That’s exhausting and doesn’t help. We’re then stuck either persecuting ourselves or feeling like we’re the victim of our circumstances, our upbringing, or the people around us. Either way, we’re stuck.

Staying caught in the vicious circle of self-judgment - persecutor and victim - leaves us no wiggle room to experience choice. Finding beauty, appreciation, love, warmth, or acknowledgment for these parts of us gives us that wiggle room to see new opportunities in old ways of being. When we foster appreciation and love for those parts of us that seem unlovable, we give ourselves enough inner quiet to hear the wise whispering from within.

It’s okay that our connection to our innate wholeness and well-being is sometimes obscured by our perceived demons. However, aim to see the beauty inherent in yourself, your mechanisms, and this fascinating and transcendent creature called “human” that we get the privilege to experience.

By the way, there's not just beauty in our weaknesses. There's also strength. I promise - seeing the positive side of our weaknesses is an access to transforming them.

And the better we’re able to give ourselves a little grace even in our worst moments, the better we're able to give others a little grace in theirs.

Thanks so much for reading. ❤️

P.S. If you’re interested in seeing what coaching with me would be like for you, schedule a call and let’s talk!

They're Not Responding to You

I still get angry sometimes as a dad. I’ll yell or get frustrated, and then come back around and have a conversation with my kids about it. What used to become a guilt-induced and blame-tinged apology has become an opportunity to love and grow. Here’s the magical phrase (or something like it) that’s begun to fall out of my mouth:

“Regardless of what you’ve done, my anger is not on you, it’s on me. Of all the ways I could’ve responded, I responded with anger. That says a lot about me and nothing about you.”

I’m so grateful to have learned this nugget of truth, because it’s one of the most important lessons I can teach my kids: They’re not responding to you.

Their anger or frustration - they’re not responding to you.

Their opinions and judgments - they’re not responding to you.

Their laughter and insults - they’re not responding to you.

Their gossip and drama - they’re not responding to you.

No matter what you do - they’re not responding to you.

They’re responding to their own stuff - their own thinking, their own illusions and delusions about you and themselves. They’re responding to their own fears, their own insecurities, and their own grappling with how to be in a world that feels so daunting at times. They’re responding to their own past and to their own fears about themselves and their future.

Can you imagine going through adolescence and young adulthood with less care and worry about what others thought of you? Can you imagine living free from needing to figure out what significance or meaning was behind how someone acted toward you or what someone said to you? Can you imagine living that way now?

Regardless of everything else: they're not responding to you. They're responding to their own interpretation of the way things are supposed to be. They're responding to their own desire to connect with others, and they sadly don’t know the better ways of doing it.

A colleague was telling me today about a student who came to her upset because of how the student perceived his peers judging him. She coached him to deflect their words and laughter, and when we really get that they’re not responding to us, there’s not even a need for deflection anymore.

When we get that they’re not responding to us, we get free. We get free to be. We get free to express ourselves honestly and passionately. We get free to enjoy ourselves. And perhaps most strangely, we get free to love even those whom we once thought were hurting us.

It’s sad for them that their thoughts distract them from the love and beauty of who you are. Imagine the internal suffering and at least delusion that must justify how they’re treating you. You’re worthy of so much more, and it’s sad that they can’t see it.

This perception - that they’re not responding to us - gives us access to response-ability. No matter the circumstances of how others occur in our lives, once we get that they’re not responding to us, we are no longer harmed and we are no longer trapped in needing to respond in specific ways. This is freedom.

We’ve had the keys to these shackles the whole time!

That they’re not responding to you, however, is only one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is just as profound and still not yet obvious:

You're not responding to them.

That's actually how I started this post off. When I'm angry or dismissive or mean to my kids, I'm not responding to them at all - I'm responding to my own perceptions, insecurities, fears, and expectations about how things are supposed to be.

Once we get that they’re not responding to us, we get free. When we then get that we're not responding to them, we stay free. And with this understanding we gain access to 100% response-ability, what I like to call radical responsibility.

Thanks so much for reading. ❤️