Sylvia's Journal

I subscribe to a most stimulating yearlong weekly webinar series done for and by coaches. I don’t listen to all of the offerings because the topics isn’t of interest to me, work interferes or I am turned off by the speaker. The latter has happened a few times when a talk is given by older white males who, after a disclaimer that they don’t like to brag, then proceed to tell us about all of their awesome accomplishments. Those I hang up on pretty quickly.

A recent talk on ‘Women Thrive’ was given by Sally Helgesen who coaches women either just below the glass ceiling or on their way, and probably some that smashed through and are now bleeding all over.

Together with a younger colleague we are planning a session at work and take a closer look at the behaviors Helgesen identified over a long career, those that appear to hold women back. We will explore them together and see if there are any that we can de-adopt.

The list contains 12 behaviors that are probably quite familiar to many of us women and probably some men as well – my husband recognizes them too. [Marshall Goldsmith in his book ‘What got you here won’t get there,’ list behaviors that many women I know could not relate to at all.]

One of the behaviors Helgesen has noticed is reluctance to claim one’s achievements. We call it bragging – didn’t I just use that word above? Many men and some women, of the Type A variety, call it ‘listing my achievements.’

We usually expect others to notice what we have done. I learned early on that  ‘good wine (as the wonderful table wine one gets in small French country eateries) does not need a label.’  And when we apply for a job and haven’t exactly done all the things the job is asking for and if we haven’t exactly that experience we may not even apply.

We are good at relationships but don’t leverage them into new work or a promotion because it feels like we are using the relationship for a purpose other than what we thought it was all about.

We are so focused on doing our current job well, being liked by our team that we neglect what we should do to advance (if that is what we want).

We feel everything we do has to be perfect and in so doing fall into the trap of never being good enough. We are too apologetic, sometimes circle too much around a point that our listeners, especially those senior to us, get impatient, and then our radar picks up the slightest facial expressions and body movements and we are thrown off. And then, later, when we feel we messed up, we ruminate. Ruminating comes from what cows do – endlessly chewing over what happened in futile pursuit of trying the change the course of events.

I know all about ruminating. I can still remember events I ruminated over that happened 60, 50 and 40 years ago. I remember the exact feeling I had during those ruminations, the memory tracks very firmly laid down deep in my brain. Quite frequently the rumination was mixed in with jealousy, producing a toxic cud that I kept chewing on. Now that I am studying the brain I am learning the networks in our brain that produce this ruminating – which, not surprisingly, is also related to depression.

I remember (this happened more than 25 years ago) having lost my airline frequent flyer card, the one that allows entry into the short (now red-carpeted) line – when such information wasn’t printed on our tickets quite yet. I had dropped the card while helping a Kenyan woman who was struggling with a toddler and a baby and lots of bags onto the plane by taking over the baby. When preparing my return trip I looked for the card and found it gone. I could not remember the smile on the face of the tired and overwrought mother, the sigh of relief. I could only chew on the lost card – as if I had lost a relative, not being able to stop myself. I finally wrote a poem about it.

Helgesen has given me a new frame and a new vocabulary to put the rumination phenomenon in perspective and detach myself – ahh, that’s what my brain was doing! Now what’s the survival value of that?

Two Losses – poem by a ruminator

There are two kinds of losses/One happens without me/To grieve and sadly mull/But nothing else to contemplate/Until the pain of loss is dull.

And then there is the other kind/Where I am causal link/Something I did or did not do/Which starts off a nearly/endless searching for a clue.

It’s like a film, run in a loop/Replayed a thousand times/The audience is only me/In a frustrating vain attempt/To re-create reality.

Undo my steps this time around/And treasure what is lost/To love and hold it, eyes alert/Erase my mistake just in time/And thereby do the loss avert.

Gets added to the loss and pain/The heavy sighs of guilt/Of that which I cannot erase/The longing sharpened by a knife/The cut I cannot face.

Two losses one of which/A threshold I can’t pass/A voice keeps whispering in my mind/That I brought loss upon myself/I do prefer the other kind.

Our daughter started a reading group online. Every Thursday I receive an automated notice, asking me what thoughts were triggered by people, situations, descriptions in the books I am reading. And since I am a parallel reader, have about 30 of 40 books going more or less actively at any time, I have plenty to choose from. And each time I find connections between books that no one would have guessed. I suppose as you get older, the cacophony of voices and chaos of happenings is no longer as deafening or overwhelming as this used to be because the essential elements are starting to come to the foreground. The background clutter is slowly absorbed into the foreground themes, or simply discarded.

I don’t always respond to the prompt because I am too busy. This is one of those themes, clutter and busy-ness. But I still have a long way to go before the themes merge into one big one, as I see in the books I read – authors have distilled everything into one big theme.  I have a fantasy of writing a book about my experiences in working in public health over the last 40 years but the one theme I need is still elusive.  I keep reading and listening to webinars from people who have figured things out. I sometimes feel sorry for them since they now have to apply their grand theory of everything to everything. I, on the other hand, can cherry pick all the elements that I like – I borrow from this man and that woman and weave these nuggets of wisdom and insights into my practice. And so my journey zigzags along those this one grand theme, or maybe not.

The zigzagging is intellectually satisfying but difficult to match with our organizational practices at headquarters, which aren’t as fluid and look for standardization. I try out new ideas with colleagues and find much resonance, more so with younger folks and with women. The metaphor of atherosclerosis sometimes comes to mind. Or, as I learned during my neuroscience journey this year,  the brain-derived-neurotropic factor (BNDF) gene that provides instructions for making a protein (found in the brain and spinal cord) that promotes the survival of nerve cells by playing a role in the growth, maturation (differentiation), and maintenance of these cells.

So this would be one of the ways I might respond to the weekly prompt – a mishmash of partially developed ideas, surprising metaphors and stimulating conversations.

Emboldened by our entry into serious exercise classes Axel signed up for something called TRX which, if I understand it well, is exercising various muscle groups using elastic bands and your own body as weight.  It is, I told him, a good incentive to lose weight. He was quite crippled the next day but then the painful memory faded. I think he is going to do it again, much like I will spin again tomorrow morning at 6AM.  Saffi and Faro should be quite impressed with their opa and oma.

We celebrated Jim’s not quite 40 birthday in Easthampton on Friday. We drove west while the Nor’Easter pummeled the eastern seaboard.  This morning we came back to survey the damage on our peninsula. It was bad. There were flooded areas everywhere. Many trees and several piers had not been able to withstand the force of the wind and water. They were broken like match sticks or carted off into the sea.

Our neighbors now have an enormous tree trunk in their yard which we used to sit on by the fire last summer. The January 2018 storm moved it to the other side of the cove and this storm brought it back again but not quite. It got deposited in the middle of their yard. It is not the kind of tree trunk that you can pick up with a few strong arms. It will require machinery. Our neighbor’s entire lawn has been inundated, water lapped at their foundation; the incoming water smashed onto their lawn, taking large rocks the size of frozen chickens and dropping them left and right. It also ripped up most of the beach roses (rosae rugosae) that were so neatly planted along the sea wall. Then, when receding as the tide went out, it took as much sand as it could find, leaving the seawall rocks without its natural cement and scouring the beach down to its gravel base.

Our seaside has also been scoured and hollowed out, but the large pine trees held, their roots doing their job at least on the land side. But we can no longer walk as close to the edge as we used to, dropping our yard waste off the edge. It could collapse any moment, reducing our land by yet another yard or so.