Sylvia's Journal

The journey is finally coming to an end. And as the saying goes, it is not the destination but the journey that counts. Actually, there is no destination. I have not arrived, just turned a corner.

When I started working at MSH it was Thanksgiving week in 1986. My new boss had just left for a month and had written down some instructions on what I should be working on. I was hired as a research associate. I don’t think I had a job description. I was joining a team that had started a 5 year project just a year earlier. It was like a startup.  We were building a road towards better management of family planning projects, laying the bricks in front of us. There was lots of energy in the old mansion of Brandegee – a mini Versailles, built by a wealthy merchant with aspirations. We were surrounded, at least downstairs, by curtains from the Imperial palace in Japan, a life-size John Singer Sargent painting of the merchant’s wife, Flamish tapestries and a vast collection of leather bound books that were very, very old.  Upstairs our deputy project director sat in an office that was originally a bathroom, marble-clad. The toilet and bathtub covered with planks.

MSH was already a teenager by the time I joined. I had an informational interview at the mansion two years earlier with one of its many experts – a gentleman who asked me what my expertise was. If I wasn’t intimidated by the setting, I surely was intimidated by him. I am sure I stuttered, turned red in the face and said I could do anything and I was a quick learner. But he dismissed me by saying that MSH needed experts, not generalists. When MSH won the large global FPMT project that changed. Women started to invade what was essentially a male club. After FPMT MSH was never the same again. MSH partnered with Pathfinder in the FPMT project. I had been working as a consultant for Pathfinder and had led the writing of one of the first books that considered the user’s perspective in family planning service delivery. The quality of care movement had just been born, with Judith Bruce who had written the first authoritative book on the subject. Pathfinder proposed me for a position that was sufficiently vague and open that narrow expertise was not required and probably not desirable. My attitude of being a quick learner, speaking French, and having lived in West Africa clinched the deal.

It was a heady time. Of all the people who were there then Ken Heise is the only one left now at MSH. He was the Zaire man, as the DRC was called then, and ex Peace Corps volunteer who had a vast network of friends from that time. All our sister organizations at that time had ex PC volunteers from Zaire – he was known in this new world I entered. I was not. I also was not sure what I wanted to do and what I was good at. I was a psychologist who had lived in Lebanon and Senegal, spoke French, had an American husband and two young children, lived about an hour’s ride north of Brandegee and was looking for a purpose.

That purpose I found when I learned about MSH’s MT (management training) program that was run in collaboration with the Experiment in International Living. We delivered multiple programs for various management disciplines which were essentially the WHO’s health systems pillars: financial management, pharmaceutical management, information management, human resources management and the management of service delivery programs for Child Survival and Maternal and Child Health. With some twenty participants who had come from all corners of the world, each course lasted 6 weeks full of intense learning about management in a highly experiential way. Relationships were forged then that lasted. More than a decade later I was embraced and taken to someone’s home for a meal in Guinea – he had participated in a course and it had changed his life. I was awed by this part of MSH and wanted more of it.

We also had a formidable team, consisting of worker bees like Ken, Ann Buxbaum, and myself, supported by an impressive cast of advisors, faculty members from INCAE in Costa Rica, from AIM in Manila, from one of the management institutes in India and of course from our own backyard, Harvard.

We had organized the task based on levels: we would develop experiential curricula, lots of case studies (influenced by Harvard and the Harvard wannabees) that would target senior level people, mid level managers and young leaders. Since I did not have a job description and my boss was travelling most of the time, I started to read, a habit I developed then and never abandoned. There was not much written about managing family planning programs – the research and literature was either about managing in the (US) private sector, or about the clinical/technical aspects of family planning. We developed case studies and made a deal with Kumarian Press. We published a lot. And then we started teaching what we were learning. And that is when I truly found my purpose. My first trip was to Nigeria, a place few people wanted to travel to. I joined a team of people who became my mentors, already highly accomplished thinkers and doers. One of them introduced me to the reading list for students in Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management.  Suffice to say I read them all. I now know many of those books are still considered the classics.

Although I started my traveling as the person who hands out the per diem, the gopher, I was able to sit in the sessions and even do a session, on delegation. We used the book of case studies written by David Korten – the only existing grounded book on the management of family planning programs. I prepared about 8 hours for a 2 hour session, practicing in front of the mirror in my hotel room, and then in front of my mentors.

I soon became a Nigeria expert; that was easy in those days: make a few trips to a country most people didn’t want to travel to and you are an expert. So easy, and so arrogant!

Over the years I realized that it was not so much the teaching that I liked but working with the stories of the people in the room and engage with them, dissect their experiences and help them find things that they could do differently, with less agony or pain and more effect. The dormant psychologist in me finally awoke.

In those heady first few years we were one of just a few doing management training focused specifically on the delivery of programs (FP, child survival, etc). There were of course the universities but their teaching wasn’t practical – a label MSH had already earned and which kept differentiating us from the pack. The other actors in the Global Health space then were CEDPA, which also delivered such programs (and was a partner with us on FPMT), but geared specifically to women. CEDPA had carefully managed and nurtured its alumnae network, something I believe was a tactical omission on our side. We neglected the power of relationships – women of whom many would rise to the top, over the years and who could open doors where others could not. Our own Fatimata Kane in Mali was among them. Fast forward and we know that CEDPA was gobbled up by AED which was then was gobbled up by FHI, becoming FHI360. But CEDPA, in my view, left a giant fingerprint in every country where family planning is now normal.

Back to the late 80s and early 90s: the world, it seemed, was awash with money for family planning. Population pressures, especially in Asia, had already surfaced as major drags to development over the last decades, though in many African countries family planning was eyed with suspicion, as a plot by their former colonial rulers to keep populations down. Family planning program managers had to tread lightly. Especially in Francophone Africa where family planning programs were delivered through state structures advocating for family planning was political suicide. As a result progress was slow and the activists often lonely.  The FPMT project created a network when networks weren’t as much in vogue as they are now, but our instincts were good: we had to connect them to each other and create processes and structures so they could learn from each other rather than teach them. The Francophone Regional Advisory Committee (FRAC) was created in 1986 at MSH in Boston. For the following 12 years we managed to bring people together in nearly each of the countries of the members with a fairly stable membership. Over the last 6 months I have met three women who were part of this network; we hadn’t seen each other in 25 years. Fatimata Kane of MSH/FCI/Mali was one of them. In Niger our FRAC founding member became minister and is now retired. In Mali, just a few weeks ago, I sat with another, also retired now. We talked about how the landscape has changed – family planning is no longer a dirty word and, although not at the levels where it should be, contraceptive prevalence has moved everywhere into the double digits.

And then there was AIDS, as it was referred to at first. The HI virus and resulting ‘slimming’ disease took the world by surprise. Early on we decided that family planning service providers should talk about AIDS and provide information and counseling (there wasn’t much else possible then). But the family planning program directors balked, as were the older nurses. Family planning was respectable, AIDS was not. They didn’t want any association.  But when years later PEPFAR started, with all its extra money, top up payments or attractive salaries, the family planning providers left in droves to work in the PEPFAR funded programs. I imagine one can pinpoint drops in performance of FP programs at that time.

And now the world is a different place in countless ways. Recruitment was easy way back, no need to check terrorist lists, no need to go through security checks at airports, Libya and Iraq still run by dictators (only Mugabe is still there). There was no internet – we had a telex machine that brought us messages from the field, long strips of punched paper curled up on the ground when one walked into the office in the morning. Our cable address was ‘MANSHEALTH.’ We had business cards that looked like lawyers’ business cards, Times New Roman type, no logo, no color. Voicemail was still in the future. We had phones that had small pieces of paper stuck to them with the names of our colleagues and the name of their significant other in brackets. We were amazed when we got our first COMPAQ computers, not individual ones, mind you. You had to go to the third floor library where one was installed. We used IBM selectric type writers. The new computers were not portable but, if needed, luggable, with amber letters dancing on a tiny screen, and floppies. To get anything done in the field took patience and perseverance and lots of time. I remember organizing a FRAC meeting in Guinea and getting a Peace Corps volunteer to travel 100 km to the nearest telephone so we could communicate about logistics.

I have worked an entire generation at MSH. Some of my young colleagues were born the year I started, or even later. They believe in MSH’s purpose. MSH’s creation story remains powerful, as some of us experienced when Ron came over this spring to address the JWLI fellows. He saw a need and he saw a problem that he ascribed not to lack of technical know-how but to the lack of management structures and, more importantly, leadership thinking. Over the years we have expanded management to include leadership and now governance, but the essence remains the same: if people responsible for services start to think and behave as managers who lead then the intended results will flow from there. How to operationalize this in a manner that differentiates us from our competition is the big challenge now.

And so I end this reflection on my journey at MSH with a sense of deep gratitude for what this journey has allowed me to do and become: I am clear on my purpose and will pursue it wherever I can: helping people to have productive conversations. I have been able to raise and educate our kids (one and 5 when I started, and now 32 and 37) – and yes, to all the new moms, it is possible to be a professional and a mother, but not without the agony of thinking you are not enough for anyone tugging at you, the sacrifices, the sleepless nights and tearful farewells.  They will appreciate later what it is you were trying to do, and admire you for it. There’s nothing like a good role model nearby.

I have a network of people I know and respect all over the world. I have gained innumerable deep life-long friendships with people near and far. I have been introduced to a young startup in Zambia that closes the loop for me: there are new versions of MSH in the making. There are young Rons out there. The opportunities for doing good abound, and so does the talent, like Ron’s all these years back, to do something about it. MSH can play the role of a wise elder, nurturing this talent and helping these young idealists to expand the work we are so deeply engaged in.

I want to end with something our erstwhile colleague Morsy (Mansour) wrote in the foreword to Managers Who Lead. Before we even developed the LDP, and in the experiments Jana Ntumba and I did in Guinea, we learned that leading is not about technical expertise – in fact expertise can get in the way and serve as a shield. It is also not about the numbers as the numbers can be fudged and require more controls which starts an endless cycle of more controls and more clever ways around them – people have an amazing capacity to spend their creative creative energy on the wrong things.

What we learned and now know to be true, is that what we are trying to bring about is a change of heart, as hearts cannot be fudged like results; hearts are sustainable as long as they keep beating.  Morsy expressed this so well: “what was missing was something inside [people’s] hearts, something that ignites the fire inside all who want to truly contribute or make a difference. What was missing was commitment. The question became: “How can we inspire this commitment in every health service team and team member?” This is the question that health managers around the world are asking. How can we take our limited resources and give the best of ourselves to ensure the quality we want our people to have? How can we not be stopped in the face of inadequate systems and limited resources? How can we motivate our staff to be creative in overcoming obstacles, when there are so many? I believe that when people are committed they can produce incredible results. Even if the systems are poor, with commitment they will find ways to continuously improve them.”

Morsy and Kahlil Gibran come from the same region and so it is not surprising to find that one echoes the other. Gibran reminds us that “Work is love made visible. The goal is not to live forever; the goal is to create something that will.” There you go, that’s the work. I hope these two quotes take you by the hand and lead you wherever you need to go.

The upgrade did not materialize but, at the arrival hall of Logan airport my husband did, as did the wonderful weather and greenery of New England that makes late spring such a wonderful time here, and not such a good time to spend in the Sahel.

During my last week of employ I took care of my looks:  a haircut and teeth cleaning, making myself presentable for my goodbye party on Thursday.

Tessa had been on my case for some weeks now to make reservations for a restaurant to mark the end of my career at MSH – a career that marked pretty much her entire life, most of Sita’s and three quarters of my life with Axel. I invited all three to the party – after all, my salary paid for their education and allowed other things that would not have been possible without MSH. We all are what and where we are for a great deal because of MSH.

I had not taken her exhortations to make up my mind of where to eat very seriously. I am used to make last minute reservations – for two in the area we live in it usually works just fine. But Tessa knows better about Boston and wanting a table for 5.  Tessa is the ultimate millennial when it comes to places to eat – she checks out the websites, triangulates and then makes a triage – she did this so well in New Orleans that she is now my go to person for restaurants outside Cape Ann. When I finally made up my mind, a week before the date of the desired reservation, none of her selections had room for us. In one case no reservations would be taken till July. I was chided for my carelessness with the familiar eyerolling sigh of “mohommm!”  She came up with a new batch of restaurants and this time I was decisive. She got us a table online instantaneously – it will be a celebratory dinner with no regard for cost – making a first dent into my severance package.

Today it was teeth cleaning day. It is not usually a topic I describe in my blog because it is not interesting, but today it was. My dental hygienist greeted me with great enthusiasm – her sister’s name was Sylvia, though written like this Szilvia. I guessed, based on how her name was embroidered on her smock (Krysztina) that she was Tsech or Hungarian. Yes, the latter. She spoke with a strong accent and before I knew it, encouraged by my questions, I learned about her journey as a high school grad from Hungary to being a dental hygienist in Beverly MA, with a first stopover in England in the early 90s, when such a thing was not as common as it is now thanks to the Euro zone.

When she learned about my travels she wanted to know if I had learned to travel light (I do and she doesn’t). She interrogated me like a detective to get my secrets (how many outfits, shoes? And what about layers?).

It’s hard to respond to such a barrage of questions when you are in a dentist chair. For one, there is stuff in your mouth, but I also didn’t hear her questions very well. There are all the different noises a dentist office produces, my hearing is no longer what it used to be and then there was her accent. At one point she asked me (I thought) how often I fly. I said about 9 times a year. But what she had really asked me how often I flossed and was rather nonplussed at my answer. “Huhh, 9 times a year? I have never heard anyone say that before.” We soon cleared up the confusion and had a good laugh. I think she will probably remember that I floss 9 times a year. I used to do it only twice a year, just before and just after my dentist visit; nine times would have been pretty good, about once every 6 weeks.

On Saturday I got up again at 3AM and retraced my steps to DC for the second time this week, this time to connect to an 11AM light from Dulles to Addis, the hub from which I would transit to my final destination. The Dulles-Addis flight took 13 hours, on Ethiopian Airlines, member of the Star Alliance for which I don’t have special status – the kind of status (gold or higher) that gets you in the short line or possibly into a lounge.

I sat in the back of the plane, surrounded by some people who were going home, others on their return trip probably people from the diaspora, on the outbound, to visit the relatives or try their luck. Diaspora Ethiopians were lured back some years ago with very appealing resettling arrangements. There were many Americans on the plane.. I assume some of them live and work in Ethiopia and some who go farther afield for their work, like me. Addis is a major African hub.

There are always (always) missionaries on the planes to Africa. They go there on short stints to fulfil their Christian duties – ministering to those less well off. On my plane there were quite a few. They were a peppy talkative bunch, waking me up and keeping me awake with their incessant chatter. The talk, the heat, the noise, the uncomfortably worn and sagging old seats, spaced so close together that my knees touched the seat in front, made this one of my more memorable unpleasant trips.

Among the travelers to Addis was a gaggle of young women wearing black T-shirts that gave them away: Christian nurses on a mission. Their T-shirts said ‘You see a leader.’ I could have gone up to them to ask what makes them leaders but I didn’t have the nerve. I suppose if you think you are a leader, then maybe you are. I only hope that they are leaders of the listener kind, not the telling kind.

I tried to watch some movies to kill time. I watched Blade Runner for a few minutes until the first violent act occurred. The audio was so bad I couldn’t understand the dialogue which might have compensated for the violence; then I tried the superhero movie, without sounds, which was amusing for a while before putting me to sleep. And finally I watched the story of Deep Throat, the ultimate whistleblower who brought Nixon down. It did make me think of Comey and the White house interfering with the FBI– there are more than a few parallels. Someone on my row was reading Comey’s book. It was displayed for impulse buys at the Dulles airport, for people looking for some light reading en route. Everything (nurses, movies, books) seems to be about leadership.

Leaving an organization after 30+ years automatically makes you old, and departures lead to reminiscing. The former was evident when, back at the DC airport, I found an empty seat across from two men engaged in a conversation that, although in English, might as well have been in Sanskrit. I knew they were tech people but that’s all – they strung together words into sentences that made no sense, sometimes I didn’t even know which words constituted the verbs and which the nouns. The one already young looking man complained about young people he was mentoring. So if he was now old, what did that make me?

As for the reminiscences, I have been thinking a lot about the world of work I entered in, my first overseas jobs in Lebanon (1977) and then Senegal (1979) and the pace of life at that time.  I would not be saying on Thursday that I didn’t know whether I would be travelling on Saturday. Now, the only reason I still don’t know for sure, late this Thursday, is that I haven’t seen my Entry Authorization letter because it couldn’t be scanned all these thousands of miles east of us because the scanner broke down and the IT guy had gone home, otherwise I would have known and finalized my ticket. A glitch.

In the olden days I would have to have my handwritten ticket in hand – the one with the multiple red carbon copies. If it wasn’t given to me some days before a trip I couldn’t leave. No internet, no faxes, no nothing instant. I made about 3 trips a year – more would have been a stretch on what was humanly and technologically possible.

That was also the time when business class tickets were just a few hundred dollars more than regular economy seats, and the difference was not as stark as it is now. No flatbeds. There was a time when a trip of more than 14 hours door to door entitled us to travel in business class.

Sometimes it really feels like the ‘olden days’ were better. At least they were slower. I try to remember whether we were all more patient then. Now I see impatience everywhere. “Why didn’t you reply to the email, the text, the call I made a few minutes ago?” I remember setting up a phone call with a Peace Corps volunteer who lived 100 kilometers away from the closest phone that could be used for intercontinental calls, about 6 weeks ahead of time, using a cable to communicate via the nearest post office, most likely in the local capital and then dispatched on a motor cycle or a bush taxi.

My new reality will be that nothing is certain until it is certain – in the past when that happened, when trips got canceled, I was still paid, but after June this will no longer be the case. I will have to sign contracts that will be to the contractor’s advantage – there will be clauses about Intellectual Property (IP) and cancellations without cause. This has already happened with the World Bank assignment in Saudi Arabia – it was canceled, at least for this fiscal year I was told, so there is the possibility of a be chance in the next fiscal year, whenever that starts in Saudi Arabia. It’s quite disappointing and also a cause of worry that if it comes around again, I will already have promised my time to another project. “Welcome to the world of consulting,” say my free agent friends.

In the meantime I am enjoying the last of the paychecks that will continue to come in with great regularity until late June, while also enjoying the prospects of being free from the early morning commute and the dependence on weekends to do the extracurricular things I like to do.

I am busy filling in all the paperwork for a brief teaching stint this summer in a Simmons College MBA program, covering the organizational behavior (OB) part of business administration. It’s a well-designed curriculum that covers all the things I am passionate about. I don’t have to design anything, just read tons of articles and books, though some of them I already know, and some have been written by my OB friends. I am excited about having access to all these articles and reading up on some OB topics I have neglected.

Axel had a pacemaker installed – it is to correct a very slow resting heartbeat. He has always had it and thought it a badge of honor when his heartbeat would not go up during a stress test, no matter how fast the speed or incline. Over the last months this turned out not to be such a good thing and the cardiologist suggested a pacemaker would help the heart beat faster and get more oxygen to wherever it was needed.

We did spent time reading up on pacemakers. His father had one implanted decades ago when the device was just a couple of decades old and there was still much learning and improving.  I remember seeing the big bulge under his skin, it was the size of a bicycle bell, but it kept his heart going and extended his life. We also learned that the device was invented, originally as a transistorized metronome, by a Scandinavian/Dutch doctor/engineer duo who became the founders of what is now a multi-billion dollar company that is keeping countless baby boomers’ hearts ticking at the right rate.

Last Monday he went into the hospital and had the pacemaker installed while under local anesthesia. He would have preferred to be put out for the procedure because he was very hungry (Tessa taught me the word “hangry” which describes people who become very unpleasant to be around when hungry – fasting is of course a requirement for any medical procedure). It also meant he could feel the electrical shocks his body sent out, whether in protest or acceptance of the alien wires we don’t know and don’t understand. He spent the night with a very impatient room mate who escaped to get a real coffee in the morning but was caught.

The timing of Axel’s procedure was very unfortunate as I ran a two day workshop with 6 Japanese women who had come for the month to Boston to learn from big and small NGOs about architecting social change programs. Since I was bringing in younger staff to learn from me and eventually take over the program, I could not cancel at this late stage and the dates were set in stone. Luckily we have two daughters who are very dedicated to their dad. Tessa was the most flexible and came for the day to pick him up from the hospital and look after him until I came home. She saw to it that he was not doing anything the doctors told him not to do, such as lifting things with his left arm, showering and being busy, telling him to quiet down and do nothing.

Now, a week later the stitches are out, the wound is healing well, the wires inside his heart are implanting themselves nicely into the heart muscle and he can drive and shower again. He happily tells everyone who wants to hear that he has gained about 15 extra heartbeats a minute. Imagine what one can do with those!

My new reality will be that nothing is certain until it is certain – in the past when that happened, when trips got canceled, I was still paid, but after June this will no longer be the case. I will have to sign contracts that will be to the contractor’s advantage – there will be clauses about Intellectual Property (IP) and cancellations without cause. This has already happened with the World Bank assignment in Saudi Arabia – it was canceled, at least for this fiscal year I was told, so there is the possibility of a be chance in the next fiscal year, whenever that starts in Saudi Arabia. It’s quite disappointing and also a cause of worry that if it comes around again, I will already have promised my time to another project. “Welcome to the world of consulting,” say my free agent friends.

In the meantime I am enjoying the last of the paychecks that will continue to come in with great regularity until late June, while also enjoying the prospects of being free from the early morning commute and the dependence on weekends to do the extracurricular things I like to do.

I am busy filling in all the paperwork for a brief teaching stint this summer in a Simmons College MBA program, covering the organizational behavior (OB) part of business administration. It’s a well-designed curriculum that covers all the things I am passionate about. I don’t have to design anything, just read tons of articles and books, though some of them I already know, and some have been written by my OB friends. I am excited about having access to all these articles and reading up on some OB topics I have neglected.

Although this new phase of my life, untethered from MSH, has not started yet, the transition is here. I learned much about transitions from Bill Bridges – the notion that new beginnings have to start – always – with endings and then the transition sets in before the new beginning can happen.

The ending process has already started – not a clean surgical strike like when previous layoffs happened – abrupt, unexpected. Mine is gentler – having two months to untether.

In the olden days, when long time staff left, they walked away with much accumulated knowledge that was in their heads and essentials captured in folders and files, left at the office. All that is different now. Now we walk away with terabyte thumb drives that, even if a copy was left and password protection removed, would be all but inaccessible – no one has time to sort through it all.

I have started to sort files and transfer those I may want to keep. It means going over decades of accumulated stuff, like the clean up of an old house after mom and dad have passed; what to do with all those photos, documents, folders that contain stuff I  may not need anymore but I know contain the answers to questions people ask me – when and where did we do this, or that? I am the embodied institutional memory of MSH’s leadership work – but it is organized in ways that are only meaningful to me.

I was asked to write five to six lines for a communication that will go our to all MSH employees just before my departure. To capture 31 years in five or six lines turned out to be impossible. I ended up writing just about one line for every year, 31 lines, to be edited down as the powers that be see fit.

Although I am at peace with the unthethering, and I have quoted all the things I don’t have to do anymore, there are of course some losses, as there are in any ending. Each thing I refer to as good (not having to commute anymore) contains something I will miss such as the company of colleagues who have become friends, the conversations over our cubicle walls, the walks we take, the stories we share. But then there is Facebook and Linkedin and WhatsApp and we’ll stay in touch.

After a very long run, nearly 32 years, it finally happened: my position at my longtime employer was terminated. After the phone call I was a little dazed, as if I was in the middle of a heavy fog, like the ones I remember from my childhood in wet Holland. And then I started to think about what it all meant. There was a bit of, why me (and then why us when I learned a colleague who does similar work was also let go) but it didn’t last long. It is true, when a door closes, all you need to do is turn around and all sorts of doors appear, some already slightly ajar, and some with the key in the lock, requiring only a simple turn. And then some wide open.

The more I thought about what my new life would be, the more excited I got. I called up people, I posted on facebook and LinkedIn and the requests for my CV and personal email address came flooding in. Best of all, some of those are for assignments I would have loved to take on but couldn’t in the past because I was full-time employed.

And as the days went by more and more doors opened. I can now babysit in the middle of the week, go skiing next winter when the rates are low, mid week. I don’t have to get up at 4:30 anymore; I don’t need to count remaining vacation days and I don’t need to deal with performance reviews and such, corporate requirements that are no longer relevant to me. Freedom and liberation are the operative words. I feel like a kidding a candy store – I can do whatever I want.

After my last day in the office, sometime mid June, I will have just a few days before my first consulting assignment, that was thrown in my lap by a longtime friend from Holland who retired after a career at the WorldBank. We will be together in Saudi Arabia to help the Crown  Prince with the reform and reorganization of the health sector and I get to teach about leadership, change management, emotional intelligence or I know not what. It is very exciting.

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.