Sylvia's Journal

I have embarked on a team coaching journey and completed the first part of a 15-month team coaching training program. This first part was mostly about theory, models, and frameworks, with a few assessments thrown in. The next part will be practice with a real team. I am a little nervous about this. Who wants to be a guinea pig? 

I work with two young organizations that I think would benefit from team coaching. The question is will they trust me to refine my skills with them? I’m planting some seeds for that right now. In both cases I see so much potential if the people could pull together and head in the same direction knowing that everyone’s perspective has been heard and considered, and the best ideas acted upon.

One is not a team, but rather a group of individuals who are bound by some contractual deliverables that has placed them in two separate boats rowing towards two different finish lines. One finish line is in sight, the other a few years out. I believe that if they were a team, given the talent that is on board, they could achieve amazing things, far beyond their immediate deliverables. The other needs cash to pay their bills and this creates another dynamic that may get in the way of realizing their potential.

Although I have worked with many teams over the years, doing team building, facilitating planning workshops and celebrating achievements, team coaching is a different animal. From everything I’m learning it is not an easy transition from individual coach team coach. But it feels like a right transition for me. When I first embarked on my individual coaching career, I wasn’t sure I would like it because I’ve always liked working with groups more so than with individuals.

Team coaching is done by two coaches, something I have never done. That feels like a double challenge: coaching the team and dancing with a partner all at the same time. I remember when I was learning to dance the salsa, I was so preoccupied with the mechanics of the dance that I paid no attention to my partner. When I was a rookie facilitator, I was so preoccupied with the process of facilitation that I paid little attention to the people I was facilitating. The same happened with individual coaching: you learn the mechanics, the steps, the process first until you have made them your own before you can truly and authentically engage with the people you are helping (or dancing with). I trust this will happen again in my new career as a team coach.

Yesterday a report was due for one of my clients. Axel heard me struggling with the voice control app. When I acted out my frustration verbally my voice control app typed everything neatly in the client report. I then needed to go back and remove all this language that has no place in a report to a client.

Although I cannot complain about my current handicap as it is quite mild compared to challenges other people are dealing with, I am counting the days for the cast to be removed. It’s funny how, when everything is going well, the days seem to go by so fast. But now, in my encumbered state, I’m waiting for the next two weeks to pass quickly, the days pass in slow motion. On January 27 another x-ray will be made to see if the bones have healed. If they have, I will be liberated me from the cast. If the bones have not healed enough, I’ll simply have to be patient. 

I’m getting used to work out on my spinning bike [a gift for my 70^th] with cast and all. It is a bit tedious and uncomfortable but doable. I am trying to keep up the routine of 30 minutes of spinning three times a week. I must drop Pilates and yoga for a while because there’s too much hand and wrist work. Luckily, I can continue our weekly tai chi classes. So, this will be my exercise regime probably for the next month or so.

I am sitting here in the presence of a large carboy that is busy with yeast chemistry, making loud blub-blub sounds, for days now. It is the yeast in the proto beer that is doing its work. Axel has been resuming his beer making, after a dormant period of several months. One batch is laagering in the cellar while the new batch is transforming the yeast. He makes very good beer. It would’ve made my father proud.

My right (and writing) hand is now in a cast. Only two of my five fingers are encased. My thumb index finger and middle finger are free. It makes for awkward writing. The cast around my two fingers, which sticks out beyond my index finger, inserts all sorts of letters and spaces that I don’t want. I started researching voice typing. It takes a little bit of practice to make a comma not sound as call Ma. But it’s easier on my hand than typing.

We had a winter storm last Friday, which explains the crowded hallway, the boots, jackets, and gloves, plus a sheet to dry off the dogs, the setting of my fall. We had nearly half a meter of snow, but now most of it is gone, and the temperature went from -0 back to spring weather in a couple of days. I don’t recall seeing such extreme variation in temperatures from one day to another. I told my typing assistant to write ‘climate change!’ Instead, it wrote: Time to change! That’s true too. What shall we change this year in our energy consumption and waste production, aside from changing out some of the climate change deniers this fall in our Congress and Senate?

Now that I am not so busy anymore, picking up my writing seems doable again, a routine I must pick up like a (knitting) stitch that has fallen so far that is has created a ladder. This is the ladder I plan to climb up to the top again, to resume my knitting in the round.

I did get some nice yarn for Christmas from Sita, a Christmas that we celebrated on the 8^th of January due to various omicron complications in overlapping pods.  I looked through my knitting books as if I was a cook looking for a great dish to cook – challenging but doable. I picked something that is doable when all is quiet, and you can count stitches without being distracted. But not doable if you have two dogs, two grandkids and 5 adults around you who are talking with each other, conversations I am interested in, or worse, asking me questions. I started about 10 times, each time unraveling the complex pattern and starting over again. 

And then, on the day everyone was leaving, I tripped over accumulated stuff in our small entrance hall, I fell and broke several small bones in my right (good) hand, where my 4^th and 5^th digits are connected to my hand. It’s called a ‘boxer’s fracture’ and is apparently a quite common hand injury – people either lash out to someone like a boxer would, or non-boxer’s trying to break a forward fall. 

So here I am, not being able to knit and with a right hand that cannot do everything it/I want(s) to do. Luckily it could have been worse, and I can use my right thumb, index and middle fingers, so typing is possible as well as picking up light things.

Last time I wrote was in May, after a very wet Memorial Day weekend when the mask mandate had been lifted and the people believed the pandemic was behind us. Visions of going back to normal were dangled before our eyes, like Biden’s promise of 4th of July cookouts with friends and families. But the 4th was rained out also, as was the rest of that month here in Massachusetts, while the other side of the country was going up in flames. The backyard barbecues and summer events where people had massed together helped the Delta variant along. If in July its presence was spotty, here in the US, by the end of August it had overrun us.

Now, in October, much has changed, again. Masks are back, some people are angrier, some sicker and some died because they didn’t take COVID seriously or they were infected by people who didn’t. We received our third dose of Pfizer while in most of the developing world most people are still waiting for their first dose. South Africa has gone in and out of lockdowns and in the US everything, including COVID and Trump, are tearing us further apart.

The Taliban overran Afghanistan and lots of people are scrambling, some to get out of Afghanistan and others to help those who did get out to find safety and housing in the US and other nations. Housing, specifically affordable housing, is the big stumbling block here in the US. We live in a neighborhood, town, district, and state where affordable housing is a big issue. People talk about it a lot, in planning board meetings. Affordable housing discussions bring up class thinking, us-them thinking, not-in-my-back-yard (NIMBY) thinking.

The Afghan evacuees are sent to the poorer towns because the housing prices are not as obscene as where we live. They won’t come here unless we invite them. We hope to have at least one person come to our town, as a new member of our family if we can get the paperwork and right procedures followed. A timeline of months stretching out ahead of us, which seems interminable for the bored, lonely and depressed young Afghan woman we are trying to bring here. In attempt to provide small comfort I tell her, via WhatsApp or BOTIM, “you won’t be stuck in this Humanitarian Centre (in Abu Dhabi) forever, use the idle time to learn.

I also have idle time, but it constantly shrinks because I am learning as if my life depended on it (it does not). During the summer I told myself to stop signing up for everything that looks interesting – it worked for a while, but now I am once again signed up, and deeply committed, to (a) become a team coach, (b) immerse myself in Quaker practice, (c) complete my Ubuntu coaching course that I started last spring, and (d) up my coaching skills. One of these (becoming a team coach) will stretch out into 2023, the others will end before the year is over.

All this still leaves plenty of time to read, bake bread, network, exercise and take care of things around the house, the latter now focused on preparing for winter. I do some pro bono work, some locally with one of our town’s volunteer boards and some through EthicalCoach, meeting every other week with two remarkable young people in Tanzania and Malawi. In between I continue to be engaged in a little paid work with a for profit start up that works in global health and two HIV programs in Southern Africa. The balance is just about right.

What has also changed since May is that Sita and family moved out of our rental apartment next door in July when the school year ended. After that we were no longer needed to monitor our sometimes-reluctant granddaughter during her online Kindergarten classes and keep her occupied in between these snippets of time. It was nice to have them close but not in our house. 

In July our first renters moved in for two weeks, followed by a young couple with small kids for another 3 weeks and then an older couple for one week. These rentals took care of the real estate taxes for the rental apartment.  There is no ROI quite yet on the considerable investment made by us and Sita to upgrade the place from a pigsty to a lovely and well appointed ‘cottage.’ Now, for the remainder of the year, we have a couple more renters who are essentially paying for all the things that went wrong lately: minor but expensive glitches in the septic and heating systems. With some luck we come out even, deferring our ROI to the years to come. Having renters next door has been gratifying to all.

I am not sure why after May 15 each year I turn to a new leaf in my diary and create a new word document in my blog collection that now spans 14 years. It is like the division of earnings into fiscal years that start at arbitrary days. So, this is a new page and the start of a new year in writing. The harvest last year was thinner than I had wanted, only 32 pages of writing. I have been busy because it was the year on Zoom and I could said ‘yes’ to everything that seemed even remotely interesting. Everything was within reach and I got busy.

Today is the 1^st day of a Memorial Day weekend that is the saddest I can remember. The heavens started crying yesterday, before I could bring my washed winter woolies in. Everything is soaked and will continue to be soaked until the long weekend is over. It is sad because this is the official start of our northamerican summer. The first summer since our 14 month isolation in which we are finally allowed to congregate and remove our masks. Whether one agrees with this policy decision or not, it lifted people’s spirits. Restaurants have opened their sidewalks for the faint of heart and more indoor spaces for those who believe the pandemic is over.

It is also sad because today we hold a memorial service for one of the members of our Quaker Meeting who succumbed to multiple cancers. I am holding all this sadness in my chest which feels heavy as if a rock is placed on my lungs. 

One of the best antidotes to my sadness is music, a remedy I discovered only recently.  Last August I joined a small group of women in a Saturday ritual where we use a technique from music therapy that is called Music & Imagery. The group is led by our (near) neighbor and dear friend Christine, a music therapist. The women are in Montreal and Massachusetts and for a while Maty from Senegal joined us. We have only met on Zoom and couldn’t meet any other way given the distances between our homes. 

We chitchat for a bit about what’s going on in our lives and then we center and draw whatever we find inside. We reflect on what we need more or less of to turn the corner we want to turn, and then draw that too. We give our two drawings a title and then share our artwork, with commentary. Then the music kicks in. Christine selects 3 pieces of music (‘friends’ she calls them) and we listen to these, draw and title the drawings. The last piece of music we each select for ourselves. They can be old friends, favorite pieces or sometimes I search for ‘random’ on Spotify and be surprised. 

Through this group I have discovered so much amazing music from around the world. The playlist for our group is like a treasure chest full of jewels. Ever since the rain started yesterday afternoon I have listened to this playlist. It can rain the whole weekend because the playlist is long (8-10 pieces of music for each weekly session since April 2020), adding up to at least two full days of songs and instrumentals.

If there is a wolf (or dog or other animal) with two heads that shows up in your life, which head are you feeding? The good one or the bad (evil) one? The image of such a two headed creature pops up in many old stories, legends, fairytales, of whih I have been reading a lot lately. I have become quite aware of when others are feeding the wrong head but maybe not so much when I do it (to) myself. I pull away from conversations that spoon the broth into the wrong head, an allergic mental reaction. 

I just finished a young adult book (Darius the great is not okay by Adib Khorram) that a friend passed on to me. The book is about a high school boy of mixed Iranian/American parentage who is depressed and take medication for his depression. The book took me into his head where I found him feeding the head of the two headed wolf that produced ever greater feelings of victimization, sadness, not fitting in at school and not being loved, especially not by his father. A trip to his mother’s family and ailing grandfather in Iran leads to a friendship with a neighborhood boy of his own age. The trip puts things in perspective when he is forced to see beyond himself and witnesses the pain and sadness of others.  I didn’t like the book. I felt I was the wrong audience (not a young boy, not of mixed parentage and not depressed) until I read the author’s note of why he wrote the book, reminding me that the book is about depression and how the world reacts to depressed people – exactly as I did while reading the book (wanting to sit the boy down and give him a good shake). So maybe the book was for me, after all.

I have joined the yearly peppy and upbeat monthlong series of webinars about energy leadership, a program I took nearly a decade ago, which launched me into my coaching career. The program was transformative in that it gave me a framework and language around the energetic pull of people and circumstances (even weather). Catabolic energy pulls one down into a spiral of anger at others and feeling victimized by circumstances. Anabolic energy pulls one’s energy up into ever higher reaches of energy until one reaches the ‘One with the Universe’ realm. The webinar series is run by the peppiest of peppiest young (highly anabolic) women. I watched her with great admiration as she interviewed three other peppy women, also in their 30s) who have created businesses and good incomes that help people channel their energies in the right direction. I am in awe, thinking of how and who I was at that age. Not anabolic like that, more catabolic like the boy in the book (I have journals to prove this).

Last night we spoke with our daughter and her husband who have just returned from a one month Airstream trip down south. They left to take a break from the sadness of having to put their first and dearly loved 14 year old dog to sleep and being in a house with too many memories. She is not clear about whether the trip helped her to cope with the loss. Our facetime conversation made me wonder. There was much of that catabolic energy. I had a strong reaction, maybe it is a kind of self-preservation, trying to withstand the pull that such energy has on me. I saw which head was being fed. The best medicine for me was to remove myself from that downward pull (all this against the background of an entire day of grey skies and incessant rain). I went to bed and lost myself in a 1024 piece electronic puzzle of a picture full of flowers and loveliness. 

I am listening to Angeles Arrien’s book ‘The Second Half of Life.’  In the olden days that would have been around 25 or 30 when the life expectancy was 50 or so. Nowadays the second half seems past middle age, giving us more time to screw up and having less time to use the stories’ medicine. But the second half doesn’t begin at a particular age. Some very mature people may be entering their second half at age 25 while others may never get there. I know of a guy with orange hair who is not even close. I wish I had discovered this book (and the stories) when I was 25.

The book is full of stories and myths that contain lessons (medicine) that we have to learn while on our earthly walk, and in particular during the last part of that walk. The stories are drenched in symbolism; symbols that only people with considerable life experience can decipher (or with help form interpreters like Joseph Campbell and Clarissa Pinkola-Estes) but these stories can also be read to young children. In the US they tend to get the expunged versions.  

One of Arrien’s stories has a remarkable resemblance to a story I recently read to my 5 year old granddaughter Saffi out of an old book of fairytales I carried with me from Holland (Sprookjes van de Lage Landen). The version I read to Saffi is about a wife, found cheating by her husband, who slays the lover and incarcerates the woman (in one version cutting her eyes out) and then letting the wife out of her cellar to eat once a day. In Arrien’s version she get to drink soup out of the skull of her lover (in that version she also has to sleep on top of the dead bodies of preceding lovers) or, in my Dutch book’s version, eat the meat of the lover’s body that is slowly roasting in back of the fire. 

A gruesome story with a lesson that isn’t as gruesome and has little to do with ‘thou shall not covet another person’s wife (or husband).’ Arrien’s retelling is about letting the skeleton’s out of the closet (or cellar) and face all the wrongdoings in one’s life, get beyond fear and pride and set things right (the latter lesson a boon for philanthrophy).

I do wonder what Saffi gets out of all these centuries-old stories. Her retelling of them to her parents or grandfather is fascinating because of what she leaves in and what she leaves out. And I noticed she doesn’t shudder much when someone’s head is cut off (because he was looking for death) and then sewn on backwards and eventually turned the right way out of compassion, or when the alleged adulterous wife gets to eat part of her lovers thigh (‘what is adulterous?”).