The Hero Comes Home, doing hard things part 2

It was around 2012 and I was working as a program analyst, I was a guy in a cubicle. I had a 12-mile commute to a neighboring city where I spent most days sitting at my desk, doing data processing and building PowerPoint presentations someone else would give, it was mostly boring work. During that same time my son was spending summers and holidays at home between college semesters hoping to make extra money and had gotten a job as a Jr analyst with a large consulting firm in the same town. For two summers and a couple Christmas and Easter breaks we commuted together, and he got to experience what my daily life had been like for five years. My son didn’t offer much in the way of his feelings about his job during that time but my instincts told me he didn’t like it very much but “soldiered” through each day making the best of what he most likely thought was a miserable existence. Most mornings he slept as I drove and, in the afternoons, impatiently texted me with “are you here yet?” It wasn’t until years later he confessed to me there was little he liked about those days. Early wake ups, excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and word documents, arbitrary deadlines, meetings, more meetings, neckties and suits, it felt like a repetitive, stressful, and constraining grind. But when he made that confession to me, he also made another confession of a different kind, a revelation. It was also the best professional work training he’d ever received he said and he drew from it daily in his current job and during difficult times as the manager of a software company, that professional tempering was one of the secret to his success. 

 Last month in Doing hard things , living the hero’s story we talked about embracing the suck, learning to tolerate discomfort, and how to live our own heroes’ story.  This month we continue the conversation and instead of focusing on the absurdities and peculiarities of our time , we are going to continue drilling down into the commonalities of mankind, those things which have been with us for an eternity and will continue to challenge us until we figure them out. If we can find common patterns along these oddly familiar yet different paths, and if we can agree upon paths all of us follow, then perhaps we can not only plan a hero’s journey for a lifetime but also map a way back to our beginning at the end of it. If I’m implanting a “foot stomp” in this article perhaps, it’s that often we consciously work too hard in attempts to affect and predict the future, to find our purpose and discover “it”, ultimately forcing an unnatural and unfavorable imbalance out of the universe. What’s this balance I’m suggesting? I describe it like riding a wave.  It’s a balance between what you want and what the universe wants of you. Maybe it’s a balance between what our conscious mind thinks it wants and what our subconscious mind hides inside. Maybe it’s even a “duality/tri-ality” balance; the conscious and subconscious mind, and the universe we bump into. We have no control of the trajectory of the universe’s wave, only that we can catch it and ride it. As we consciously decide which wave to ride and how to do it, it’s the sub-conscious mind that masters the energy of the wave. If this were an exercise of the conscious rational mind we would wipe out every time.

Adjusting to “hard”

The reality of “hard” is a subjective thing, and that’s not due to the physical reality of the hardness of things but instead because of the internal reality of our mind’s perception. One could convincingly argue that scaling a mountain peak or earning a college degree is harder than traversing a parking lot or completing kindergarten, but you’d be wrong in assuming this, and doing those around you a disservice.  Part of adjusting to hard is to admit hard things originate in the mind. When you do this, “hard” disappears and with it the thoughts and memories which have bounded its description. Physicist David Bohm says memory clutters the mind and our thought is never equal to the whole of something. It is a representation, an incomplete “re-presentation” of what was seen, or felt. Yet we are ready to accept our thoughts as complete descriptions of what is, when they’re more like limited facsimiles.

 Power vs Force; change your behavior for an easier life

And one which is more enjoyable and fulfilling.  A colleague recently reacquainted me with David Hawkins, MD and PHD, and his chart (above). It can best be described as a consciousness maturity model that is calibrated to attributes.  Hawkins attends that many people calibrate around 250, or lower, with fewer and fewer the higher you go up the scale. Hawkins chart is a way to see where people are in terms of how they think about things, with self-interest being the lowest and enlightenment and spiritual pursuits being the higher levels. This maturity model forces one to admit where they are on the scale and where they need to go to improve. Below 200 represents life draining energy, and above, life supporting energy. Along the left column, power and force represent that people on lower levels are more apt to use force to get their way, i.e. bully and push people around to get results.  Power on the other hand is about inspiring, enlightening, and connecting so people go along willingly, they are not coerced. This scale also speaks to emotional intelligence.  Hawkins says society in general hovers around 250 plus or minus 100 points. At 175 and below there is no courage to stand up and do the right thing and too much pride to admit they have done something wrong, there is also anger, insecurity, and fear of those who are different.  People at lower levels also tend to default to basic human desires and blame others for problems, never accepting responsibility. To consider the people who achieve the higher rankings think of people like Jesus, Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Confucius, or the Pope. Those who meditate regularly have higher rankings as they have calmed their minds and connect with a larger world. As we evolve, we will naturally increase the numbers of people who occupy the upper levels and start to see more harmony with all things.  Today we currently don’t do much to raise our levels of consciousness but there are some that dedicate their lives to it, and they see the world differently. Jesus saw the world very differently than just about everyone else 2000 years ago, I wonder how we might see the world in another 2000 years?

Looking for leaders

Before looking for leaders to help you through “hard”, find, and refine, the leader in yourself. After that, any subsequent leaders you find will be your equals and collaborators and not some icon or deity to hold at a distance. Leadership is an endless hot topic and often looked upon as a magic bullet. If we could just get it right the tumblers would turn to the correct combination of behaviors and actions and everything would go brilliantly from then on. However, one of the reasons why we can’t catch illusive leadership is because we are looking in all the wrong places for something which is frequently right in front of us. We blindly overlook everyday acts of leadership with expectations of grandeur and spectacle. If leadership doesn’t “wow” us it’s not leadership, we expect that someone will ceremoniously “herald in” leader’s and their behavior, we’ve been programmed to expect it. A book written several years ago said there were currently 1500 definitions of leadership and 30 concepts, with so many definitions around it suggests two things. First that something is working because leadership happens and work gets done, one of these definitions must be right. Secondly, it suggests that perhaps we constantly miss it because were thinking of it in the wrong sorts of ways, looking for it in the wrong places, and waiting for formal structures to announce it. Perhaps leadership has less to do with force and control and more to do with strength and support. Maybe it’s not meant to be characterized as a bounded, tangible, or even a physical thing. Perhaps it’s simply an ongoing byproduct of effort and support done well. Ideas like these might shake traditional paradigms because they suggest a leaderless management model that is more transitory and shared than many could understand and be comfortable with. Besides that, if such an idea were to catch on, it might also threaten a multi-million-dollar industry in leadership books and training. It may never have occurred to you, maybe you were waiting for approval or you always think of others as the adult supervision in the room, but sometimes the leadership moment belongs to you.

Losing your way

Some heroes don’t make it home, perhaps this single thought troubles me most above all others. They get lost and cannot find their way back to the beginning; I think this may have happened to my grandmother and fear it may also be happening to my sister. A friend recently asked me a popular question of our time, “what happens to those who don't pursue their passions”? do they lose their way? Conversely, I would also ask, what happens to someone who did nothing but pursue theirs? could they also get lost? My answer to both those questions is yes. Last month I wrote: “Many people today, think freedom shouldn’t require things like repetition, routine, structure, effort, or even hard work. but the truth is there’s no quicker way to get yourself enslaved to someone or something, and miserable, than to do nothing and give your power and control away, freedom is achieved from the inside.”  So, what then causes us to become lost?  I think it’s caused in part by an imbalanced life. Ignoring and not pursuing one’s passion is a common theme often cited as cause of an unfulfilled unrealized life, and legitimate, but so is doing nothing but following one’s passion.  Part of life is divergence and part convergence, part exploration and part exploitation, part is pushing the gas pedal to the floor and part is letting off the gas and coasting, and part is maverick independence and autonomy and part is service to others and dues paying. If we are doing life right, we reap and we sow, and we ebb and we flow. Some never stop, and shift, exercising all of life’s patterns, and they spend a lifetime out of balance. And what do I mean when I talk about finding our way back home? In an earlier article I discuss a “meta-reality” , it’s a reality beyond our everyday world. A truer reality above the one in which we live with all that has defined us and all we have accumulated stripped away. Layers collected over decades of experiences; opinions, circumstances and actions define, bound, and border who we have become. Our true meta-reality is the original clear spring we originated from vs the muddy delta we have become after years of living. If we could strip away the vegetation, wash away the dirt, filter out the sediment and remove the distractions, we would see more clearly what we are at our core from that original stream. Finding our way back home is a journey back to our original selves.

 A humanity thing

Last month’s article generated great conversation from readers, and a few thoughtful critiques from people who came out in defense of the young. In it, I wrote that I was worried some young people were avoiding hard things, dismissing them as unnecessary or unhelpful. 

One comment was from my son Anthony, I began this article with a story about him. Anthony and his wife Beth are entrepreneurs, lifetime learners, and have their own outdoor adventure company and coaching business. After buying their first home and settling down in Pittsburgh PA they did something unconventional. They sold their house, converted a retired paramedic ambulance into a tiny home and began traveling the country, spending half of their time on the East coast and half on the West. In the article I wrote: “There are many young people who have never been blessed with the teaching experience of long-term drudgery, servitude, or apprenticeship, and for this reason are at a disadvantage…. they don’t yet know what it’s like to endure and conquer something with will, mental strength, and fortitude, their mettle has yet to be tested and they don’t know what their capable of…” Additionally, I wrote I worried for them, and that a lack of such experiences might be what separates them from greater fulfillment later in life. To these comments my son said that I “missed the mark” regarding the young. The struggle for the young, he said, was not in avoiding the difficult but instead in deciding which difficulties to invest in while defining and determining the value of achievement. “Achievement for achievements sake is an exercise in distraction” Anthony said. While on one level he’s right, we mustn’t waste precious time engaged in trivial or unproductive pursuits, on another I would argue that it’s all “grist for the mill”, un-useful experience, that which currently seems wasteful actually may not be later. Potentially, everything and anything which happens or presents itself to us has the potential to help us grow, to support us, and better us. It all depends on our processing and perspective of each experience we have. If one were to consciously, exclusively “pick and choose” what experiences to accept in life , this would be an exercise of the conscious mind, it wouldn’t allow the conscious, or subconscious to be confronted by unexpected experience, steering us towards a one-sided life perspective. What I’m saying is that there’s a part of nature which cannot be harnessed, controlled, predicted, planned, or deferred, though it’s our nature to try and do these things. I would also argue that such an apprehension is not a new fear. This reluctance to launch, or commit, has plagued mankind for ages. Whats the solution? My thoughtful son and daughter in law already have some of the answers. Anthony says he and Beth are pursuing a thorough understanding of what success means to them, and that will guide their next move. That’s a great outlook, if everyone took such a methodical and researched approach to life the world would be a very different, and less chaotic place. Seeking to better understand Anthony I looked up the definition of achievement. It means accomplishment, by ability, effort, courage, or deed.  The practice and betterment of life using such nouns in the pursuit of achievement (for achievements sake) seems worthwhile to me and only useless distraction if nothing is gleaned from it.

 This is not a “you or me”, or “us and them” thing, rather it’s a humanity thing.  Understand that your experiences, while unique to you, are also a variation on shared human themes. In a literal sense “blazing your own trail” is an impossibility, its highly likely your next move has been done before in some fashion by someone else, what were their experiences? So if you fear commitment or are reluctant to make your next move from presented choices because they’re not on the schedule, don’t, take the first step and say yes, and see what happens. I’m reminded of a wonderfully ridiculous Jim Carey movie in which he went to a motivational seminar and began to say “YES” to everything, life should be more like this, only maybe not to Careys extreme.  Famous Biologist Robert Sapolsky in a popular Stanford University lecture of human behavioral biology , complexity and emergence on the subject of fractals, cellular automata, and living emergent systems and rules says something relevant to our discussion. Sapolsky says, when considering things like cellular starting states, mature end states, and cell patterns which mature into living organisms that “you cannot look at the mature state and tell what the starting state pattern was.” Conversely, considering starting states gives you no indication of what the mature state will look like. So what’s the answer? Mix it up, plan some things, and trip into and discover others. Commit to all of it, even if its initially only in your thoughts and leave room for and pay attention to what might emerge. As for Anthony and Beth’s tiny home adventure, in 1993 my wife and I bought a late model motorhome and spent 2 months driving it from Alaska to Florida, it was a great experience.   

 The hero discovers their own journey

Another thoughtful commentary came from Carmel Finnan, a storytelling strategist and marketing mentor based in Berlin. Carmel reminded me with her story that the challenges faced by the young are not just an American thing, they’re a humanity thing. Carmel says, “the hero comes home when they discover their unique Journey in their own way.” She says that a great deal of our lives are wasted trying to fit into a mold made for someone else, and by someone else.  Carmel said she has a son who has always challenged her 'conventional' views. One thing she attests to regarding young people is that they have their own journey to finding what matters to them and then pursuing it.  It's not like our journey, while some themes persist in life, other things have changed. Carmel says today’s youth are children of an age of technology, a digital economy age some have dubbed the fourth industrial revolution which includes artificial intelligence (AI) , machine learning, robotics, and nanotechnology.  This new age is challenging our lives in unprecedented ways and challenging our young to reimagine fundamental things in life such as the workplace, free time, relationships, and health.  Carmel says she doesn’t think we realize what is happening in the world today. Our young will face their challenges in a different way, or they won't face them and that will have consequences, as it did with us. They, (young people) will live their Hero's Journey by walking through it as we had to do.  Our hero's task as elders is to allow them the space to do it, the encouragement, and the understanding.  After reading last month’s article Carmel said this is a big topic and deserving of a part 2. Particularly, Carmel asks: “What happens to those who don't pursue their passions, why didn’t they pursue them, why did they let those chances slip away, and do they have regrets? What are the signals we ignore about following our dreams?  Carmel said as a former educator in Germany she saw a number of children who were failed by the system, a system that suited 70 or 80 percent of the population but lost 20 to 30 percent.  The others ended up lost unless they had the luck or tenacity to find their true talents and pursue them. For this group, the hero’s journey was NOT a conventional one. Carmel reminds us of those who failed in traditional settings to later become the inventors and creatives who shaped our era. In a great video by Sir Ken Robinson he outlines what Carmel also felt, and knew when teaching. That our educational paradigms (globally) need to change and be revised for the 21st century. Personally, Carmel said she didn't know she wasn't living her purpose for a long time. She fitted the mold of her family though it was never a life that suited her.  It took her a long time to understand conventional pathways were not the ones she wanted to walk. Carmel says we must learn to listen to our voice, then as parents, teachers, and mentors, learn to listen to the voice of those who haven't yet found their way.

 Beyond hard

In his book Can’t Hurt Me, master your mind and defy the odds author David Goggins says what matters most in life is work ethic. David says our society has become addicted to “quick fixes”, but that only hard work leads to success. David should know, growing up in an abusive household he suffered traumatic stress to such a degree it caused him to have a severe learning disability and gain a dangerous amount of weight. By early adulthood he was functionally illiterate and approaching 300 pounds. What kinds of things did David do to move past his potentially crippling childhood and make the best of each moment? One thing is to get up early. In addition to working hard David advises people to “win the morning.” David starts every day at 4 am with a 10-mile run before putting in 8-9 hours in the office. And what does Goggins say about hard things? “Do one hard thing each day.”  As an adult, David’s professional life included him becoming one of the United States Navy’s few African American Navy Seals and in 2006, completed the Badwater 9000, an ultramarathon considered to be the “world’s toughest foot race.” A 135-mile endurance race covering nine thousand feet in elevation changes, it starts in Death Valley CA in July and ends at 8-thousand-feet at the base of Mt Whitney. If David can endure such hardship, make such positive changes, and achieve such goals, what can you do?

Clear-headed

The universe is order, humanity is chaos, and in the middle, there is us.  What does it mean to have a clear head? It means a great deal more than you might think and is harder to achieve than you’d imagine, perhaps even impossible.  If we could clear our minds, and control them, we could see our heroes’ path and our way back to the beginning at the end of it clearly. There’s a saying that “on a clear day, you can see forever”, unfortunately, humanity has few if any truly clear days, it’s just the way were wired.  So why is humanity so chaotic and what’s it doing to us?  There are many reasons, to include dualistic thinking, thinking of ourselves and others as both subject and object; an ego identity that identifies itself in terms of thoughts and things; and then there are self-deceptive thoughts and trying to keep our busy minds clear.

Self-deception and the cluttered mind 

Part of our problems have to do with our thoughts that are a jumbled mess of emotions, fear, bias, and self-deception, restricting clear thinking. Human thought is the chief reason for our disorder, and so it goes that the universe is order and human thought, disorder.  But why is human thought so disorderly? According to spiritualist J. Krishnamurti and physicist David Bohm, it’s due to self-deceptive thinking which comprises most of man’s thinking, and were not even aware of it.  Chief antagonist of our mental limitations is desire which leads to self-deception. Bohm attests that most of man’s thoughts are self-deceptive and are tailored to rationalize why we do, and want, “things.” In life, we naturally have desires, and Bohm says we create self-deceptions to justify the objects we crave (the objects of our desire). Eventually, this thoughtless pursuit of things, this self-deception, leads to incoherence and irrationality. Bohm says what we are really searching for in the pursuit of desire is a state of perfection, comfort, and safety. What we are really looking for with desire and self-deception is a connection with our authentic selves. We have also allowed thought to become our ruler but thought with all its limitations and fallacies should participate in our life, not rule it. Thought is an abstraction of reality, a limited representation and not a complete picture. The minute the mind attaches itself to something, a thought, an action, a deed, an idea, a kind of corruption begins, a bias toward that thought. Your mind becomes connected to the thing it has attached itself to and this inhibits original thought, new ideas, and creativity. No matter how independently you may believe your acting or thinking, it is founded on and linked to a preceding thought.  And why do we desire things? I’ll explain this next.

 A second reason we can’t think clearly is because we can’t get thoughts out of our heads and clear our minds, our minds are always full. Bohm and Krishnamurti say that in order for us to truly think clearly would require “unrestricted attentiveness” and, in order for us to do that we would have to clear our minds of everything and embrace nothing, a truly terrifying notion. Even during leisure time our minds are filled with distraction. The original Greek meaning of the word leisure meant “empty space”, but now, every space is filled with structure, activity, distraction, and things. Every minute of our day, every aspect of society, and every facet of our minds is occupied with something, whether we are at rest or at work. Perhaps the most terrifying of all of man’s fears, the idea of emptiness, or nothing, doesn’t sit right with humanity and strikes fear because it represents loss, the loss of our very existence. To “have nothing”, or to “be nothing” is a condition we avoid for a lifetime. In our language, and in society “nothing” literally suggests to us that we may not exist, here’s why. The Latin root for the word “real” means “thing” and “to think.” So real means “all things”, or things which the mind can think about. Nothing can mean empty space (a void), or worthlessness, or it can mean “no-thing” as in nothing physical, and therefore nothing real.  There’s a terror in removing the (physical) things in our lives on which our existence depends, they bound our reality and validate our existence. Physical “things” create a psychological security that is tangible. Non-physical thought alone cannot provide this comfort for humanity, at least not yet. With 180 known cognitive biases, pre-recorded tapes in the mind written long ago, prejudices, and social conditioning, it’s a wonder any of us are truly aware of anything around us and that new thoughts even get into our psyche.  How can this knowledge help you in writing your unique hero’s story and find your way home?  By simply reading this, and knowing some of these pitfalls, you have already been helped. When you begin to see the disorder in thought, it will begin to drop away. What intelligence is beyond thought? Beyond thought, there is awareness and observation.  When you start to move past a preoccupation with everyday thoughts and into these higher levels of intelligence, you will feel yourself beginning to change.  

The arc of life, the path from beginning, to end, and back to beginning

I would love to find for you the formula, the magical combination, so that every aspect of your life would suddenly “click” into place. However, I can’t do that, besides what fun would that be?  Conflict gives meaning to life, right? Could we live in a world without conflict, could we live with ourselves without it?  That’s a conversation for another time. Maybe, if I can’t provide a magic pill I can at the least set you on the right path. Perhaps one secret is that life is like an arc, or a bell curve characterizing attributes and abilities. We start low, to high, and back to low again in one of the curves (shown above) and move opposite (high-low-high) in the other. I’ve depicted two arcs as dichotomies in the diagram to represent life’s journey, when one is high, the other is low.  Study the diagram, I have a question: which attributes and abilities are better for the whole of life at the end, what should you possess “a little”, or “a lot of” in order to say you have lived a successful fulfilled life?  If the diagram has merit, then our challenge might be to find a “middle path” balancing between the two and riding that wave. I encourage your thoughts on the diagram I have created, what do you think?  

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way”

There are lots of good reasons to get your hard out of the way first. You have more mental and physical stamina when you’re young, it builds confidence and introduces familiarity, and when you get these processes into your muscle memory they will serve you well later when you need them. The late spiritualist J. Krishnamurti says, “Life is relationships and actions.” Focus your attention and efforts on these things and everything else will figure itself out. While reading an annual birthday message from the Commandant of the United States Marine Corps to his troops, General Berger shared a quote from an American novelist that seems appropriate to our discussion about living your unique heroes story: “In times of change and danger when there is quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present”- John Dos Passos.   

Thank you

With each article I write, I learn. The research, the dialogue, the reflection, the feedback, and the opportunities they bring are helpful and appreciated. I feel as if I know more with each one. But this continually evolving experience is a complicated dance and often feels like an exercise in “one step forward and two steps back”, I also feel as though I know less after each and that’s equally exciting. It tells me I have opened a new door, am looking down a new path, and considering a different view. Thank you for reading, thank you for sharing, and thank you for the connections, until next time- Eric      

 Dr. Zabiegalski is available to talk to your organization or venue about ambidexterity research or speak informatively and eloquently about organizational culture, leadership, strategy, learning, complexity, business neuroscience, creativity, mindfulness, talent management, personal success, emotional intelligence, Action Learning, and storytelling. Contact Eric about a talk, keynote presentation, or workshop today!