Sylvia's Journal

We finished part one of the coaching course on a high note with an exercise that turned everyone into a poet – quite wonderful. This group of 13 people who didn’t know each other 30 hours earlier had started to gel…we will be going through the 8 months coaching program together. I am a lot less hesitant than I was on Friday morning.

We left in a gentle snow storm, Axel hurrying home to see the game while I couldn’t care less.  Back home I fell asleep on the couch until Axel nudged me to bed.

Today I said goodbye to the hand doctor who says I don’t need him anymore, but with every doctor scratched off the list a new one comes around. There is the doctor to check out the nerves in my right foot to figure out the cause of the abnormal sensation that has been with me since the accident.  I also scheduled surgery for the left ankle (March 5).

I had my fourth acupuncture session in a row which confirmed that something happened this weekend that was visible in my body according to the acupuncturist. The way it showed up for me is that I quickly went into deep relaxation, needles and all.

One of my resolutions after the weekend was to re-start my yoga practice at home, using the DVD that kept me in shape in Afghanistan and which I haven’t touched since I got back, now a year and a half ago. With my hand healed enough for a down dog or plank, I was all set up when none of my computers would play the DVD. Hours later, downloading programs that didn’t fulfill their promises, the yoga mat, spread out in my office, sat there, unused and I was none the wiser.

One of my new mottos is, tomorrow start over again. So that is the new resolution.

Axel and I completed day one of the coaching course. It is exceeding my expectations. The biggest insight from yesterday was about people pushing one’s buttons – my reflecting about this has always been about the people who are doing the button pushing, but I came to realize it is not about them. First of all, I can’t change them, but secondly, and more importantly, it is me that is providing the button to push. Visualizing this made me laugh – me, with all these buttons spread over my body that are blinking and are waiting to be pushed. Ha!

We have an interesting mix in the group – it is the cohort that we will be working with until we complete our classroom work sometime in September. I am sorry that the guest invitation, extended to Axel, ends on Sunday night, but at least he knows what this is all about.  Experiencing these three days of reflection reminds me of our Cape Cod Institute days – learning in the morning and digesting everything (alongside with some great meals) in the afternoon and evening. Then, at night, we further digest the material in our own in our dreams.

Yesterday was all about ‘down energy’ – the kind of energy that drains, saps and pulls self and others’ down. We could all think of lots of examples. We are promised that today is about ‘up energy’ and I already feel that way when it is only 8 AM in the morning.

Against the strict orders from our daughters, who had Axel promise not to let me put on a pair of cross-country skis, I disobeyed all and loved getting back on skis. I was careful not to fall because I wasn’t wearing my hand splint – it wouldn’t allow me to wear gloves in 0 degrees Fahrenheit weather. We took it easy and skied like old people for about 45 minutes on flat terrain in a freezing cold wind. We had our skies waxed by a professional. He taught us some tricks and showed us how to wax one ski, after which we were on our own for the other three. We learned things we had forgotten. We had also forgotten where we had stored out supply of ski wax at home and so we had to buy from scratch, a costly affair. Only after we came home did we find our old stash. I am ready for more.

Since then another week has gone by and we are getting ready for a second weekend away from home, this time for the first of three training weekends that are to transform me into an executive coach. MSH has decided this would be a good investment. I was allowed to bring a guest and bringing Axel along. This will be a completely different adventure.

I sequestered myself all day in a cold room, looking out over the even colder looking Charles River, with a wheelchair expert.  It was a meeting of a subject matter expert with a process/adult learning expert during which I learned about this extraordinary effort that has been put forth on all continents and by many agencies (including the American government) and individuals to make sure that people who cannot move around on their own, get a wheel chair.

In reality it is much more complicated than that – because many people don’t have wheelchairs, or have wheelchairs that are no good, kludged together with plastic chairs, bicycle wheels and wire, or who have developed terrible sores and postures that will be hard to correct. I know of one such case from close up.

People with wheelchairs, old or new, need service, which is more often than not unavailable.  WHO put together a team of experts that pulled together an impressive looking training curriculum that looks finished and complete but it isn’t: one missing piece is helping future trainers to master the resource materials and learn how to teach. That has become my task.

And so, today, I learned from a wheelchair master trainer how I can complement what is already there. I have my marching orders and introductions for more conversations. It is funny how the terms of my engagement are no different than they were yesterday, and yet, they are now full of meaning.

I am immersing myself in complexity, that is, the science of complexity. Reading Quinn Patton’s book on developmental evaluation made me understand why we are having such a difficult time measuring the impact of our work – teaching people to act more like leaders, in the context they work in, is not about ‘do this and then that will happen. I am learning about Mt Fuji solution and getting at the right size for a shovel, rugged landscapes and why diversity is important to find the best solutions, and dancing landscape which is about arriving at a conclusion after much data gathering and analysis to find out that everything has changed in the meantime.  To explain all this is complicated (not complex). I have to do a lot more reading and watching before I can do this better.

I spent several hours of our long weekend watching a lecture series, starring the professor of my Model Thinking course. If only a very small percentage of the 40,000 Coursera participants (in Model Thinking) bought the video set, at 50 dollars apiece, then the business model of these free courses becomes obvious. I liked my professor and I am more likely to buy his publications than those of hundreds of others.

The video course goes over some territory that is already familiar but there was plenty of new stuff: the explore-exploit distinction that gave me some ideas for our Learning Organization task team at work, or the notion of complexity as created by a series of dials: by increasing diversity, connectedness, interdependence and adaptability you get complexity, but if you increase these too much you get chaos. And why would we want complexity? Because it allows for emergence – for us emergence is about innovations, new stuff, new connections, new ideas; and I learned that for slime molds emergence means survival.

I am doing all this exploring and thinking in preparation of my new role at work of leading a team to articulate a view point and curating knowledge about leadership. So many people have already done that elsewhere, where to start?

I impulsively booked a weekend, next week, at an immense old and creaky hotel in the White Mountains – it is ski weekend time, even though I have one leg in an orthopedic boot and a recovering hand fracture on the other side. I also haven’t skied for 6 years. Whether I will actually put on (cross country) skis or remains to be seen. I would have to ski with my hand splinted which makes it hard to put on a glove, but un-splinted is a little too risky, since falling is rather likely.  Maybe I will simply sit by the fire inside, with my embroidery, knitting, and a stack of books, learning more about complexity.

We watched Obama channel MLK and share his vision for American – something he has been trying to work towards for the last 4 years, as countless others claimed to have worked for. The reason none of them can realize the vision is, indeed, because of the complexity of our world – if the slime molds are complex, imagine the United States of America.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to find (or make?) the time to write. I have slid from every day writing to every other day to letting several days pass. It is not because there was nothing to write about, and more because of the energy that goes into other things. The weekend invasion, the early commute, the long days, the clunky orthopedic boot, the recovering hand – they all seem to conspire against writing, somehow. I hope it is a temporary dip because I do find something in writing that I can’t find elsewhere.

The trip to Washington was followed by a whirlwind weekend with a house full of guests. Sita’s old babysitter from Staten Island trained into South Station about the same time I landed at Logan. I was picked up by a limo while Goldie was picked up by Axel. We drove, unknowingly, in convoy and arrived home at the same time. Sita, Jim and baby Faro arrived a few hours later. Goldie was of course beside herself to see her baby’s baby. Faro was constantly in someone’s arms, smothered in kisses and not the least bothered by all the fuss. He just kept smiling. The next day we had a procession of grandparents and Faro had private time with each of his opa’s and oma’s and grampies and grannies, all 6 of them.

Saturday was also a food fest, as we entertained one set of grandparents at lunch and another during dinner. Except those looking after Faro, everyone got into the kitchen, responsible for dishes, cocktails and what not. The evening meal was an enormous spread of things to put in or on tacos: fish, meat, TVP, pork, vegetables, beans, sauces. One of the gramps had never eaten a taco in his life. He will be disappointed with lesser endowed tables.

Friday night, triggered by the new Ayurveda cookbook we got for Christmas, we tried to determine our doshas, using the checklist from the Ayurveda Institute. It created some hilarity around body or other characteristics that we could only imagine were literal translations from Sanskrit

Sunday everyone left, one by one, and then we left to joining old friends who had come up from Virginia for a funeral. Faro made a cameo appearance and then calm returned.

Monday started a fast and furious workweek that has continued until now, with only night time and a visit to the acupuncturist for total relaxation. Acupuncture is intense, I believe, when you have a treatment only once every few years. The last time was during a Kabul break, also intense.  I can’t convince Axel to go back, exactly because of the intensity he so well remembers; why torture yourself?

It is a good question but I have many good experiences with acupuncture and the discomforts come with the territory and are worth the effort. The focus of attention was of course my troubled extremities. I also learned some things that are quite in line what we learned from our Ayurveda book, such as avoiding ginger for a while and eat more cooling foods. I signed up for 5 sessions and paid for them up front.