Sylvia's Journal

Some weeks ago, I decided to offer complimentary services to teams that are now working in a high stress new normal. I made the offer to ex-colleagues who have moved on to other places of work and now are members of teams that don’t have a lot of practice talking about their feelings. I have done five sessions since then with four different teams working in the private for-profit sector, the private non-profit sector and the public sector.

As with any move we make towards others, they may not be entirely altruistic. In my offer were also some more self-serving motives.

For one, knowing that team coaching is on the rise, I figured that these experiences would give me something to experience and learn from, and I did. I am a member of a team coaching network that gets together periodically. The experiences gave me something to bring into the conversations.  With that, the selfish turned back into altruistic.

I also reasoned that, if the teams appreciated these sessions, maybe they would hire me in the future. In fact, one did offer to pay me but I declined, at least for now. Still, there is this hope.

I know in my reasoned brain that real thankfulness and gratitude do not require a response, but the brain cells in my heart keep jumping up and down waiting for that gushing response, oh, that was wonderful what you did, we want more of that (so I can be more generous again). 

But the reactions didn’t come, not positive, not negative, just none. And in that nothingness I find myself wanting. Any feedback, even if the session was a waste of time, is better than my guessing, which leaves nothing to learn or improve.  The vacuum leaves too much room for making up stories.

I am coaching someone who is missing feedback from her peers and boss about her performance and they way she works in the team, her style, but there is none. I can so empathize with her now. Some of my teachers would say, well, there you go, this experience needed to be experienced by you to be a better coach. I hope so.

I just deleted from my calendar the last vestige of our planned vacation in Holland, the return trip from Tessa from London which would have been done using my Delta miles. Now all signs of this event happening are gone. Hopefully we can do this a year from now.

We broke our isolation seal by having Sita and her family over for the weekend. Saffi, our 4 year old granddaughter gave us the longest real hugs ever. The one we had all been longing for. 

The weather was on our side. We spent much time on our beach, which had been cordoned off by the police, but we had our own access and ignored it. From time to time the police car would drive by and, using a bull horn to tell people to get off the beach.

There was a wide assortment of people on the beach: some family pods, some teenage pods (without masks) and some lonely adults. I think what we had all had in common, was the need to break away and inhale the fresh clean lobster cove air. It was too cold to swim, although some people did don bathing suits, ran in quickly, dipped below the surface and ran out. We stood by the side and applauded them. I don’t think I have ever swum in our cove before late June.

It was so nice to be together for a short while, as if nothing had changed. But of course, everything has changed and so we enjoy the time we have together doubly. Pure joy!

Here’s some perspective taking – a useful technique I learned in my coach training, that was triggered by the comparison of the number of deaths (in the US) due to COVID-19 and deaths during the entire Vietnam war. At this first week of May 2020 it is about the same, 58,000 or so. It made me think about other parts of that comparison that may be true as well (recognizing that 60 years ago we were in a man-made catastrophe, a little different from this force of nature that has hit us now): 

At a societal level:

• people were anxious and angry
• when your number came up, you could lose your life
• a generational divide about how to act, what to do or not to do, accompanied by estrangement within families based on one’s views
• an economic recession
• a deep polarization in society.

At a (geo)political level there were then, and still are now, some things that are eerily similar:

• a president considered incompetent by many
• officials at the highest levels lying through their teeth
• fierce battles between the White House and the so-called liberal media
• a cry to battle competitors to the ‘America First’ position (USSR then, China now)
• reluctance if not outright obstruction to the strategy of ‘tax and spend’ to help citizens traverse the turbulence
• election strategies focused on disenfranchising those who don’t support the president’s agenda 
• open warfare between the White House and Capitol Hill. 

And finally, there are the historical wounds that do not want to go away and that are still releasing pus:

• state rights versus federal rights
• vengefulness due to forced desegregation and all the other judgments about the denizens of ‘the (elitist) north’ and ‘the common (white) men of the south.’.

And then there is the long hair – this time not a statement about one’s political philosophy but rather a result of the closing of barbers and hair salons.

Here is a little tidbit culled from the archives of the House of Representative. With some minor changes in words and names, it was easy for me to see that we are not entirely on unfamiliar grounds. 

The 91st Congress (1969–1971) faced several daunting challenges: an unpopular war in Vietnam, race riots in the cities, a rising crime rate, and an economic recession. College campuses erupted in protest when President Richard Nixon ordered U.S. troops into Cambodia and escalated the Vietnam War. Congress defeated the President’s attempt to change welfare policy, and rejected two of Nixon’s nominees to the Supreme Court. As animosity mounted between the White House and Capitol Hill, Congress reorganized itself in 1970 to foster transparency with new voting rules, a new budget process, and a more professional staff. (source)

We have made it through that time half a century ago. We will make it again through this one. And maybe, 60 years from now, people will look back at this time as a period that created the most amazing music, and the teenagers then wished they hadn’t missed it.

History, and life, consist of cycles, with suffering and wonderment traipsing rigth alongside each other.

This was a good week, especially for our emerging bulbs, the bleeding hearts plants and the garden seedlings, what with all the rains and dampness. For us humans it was a little less good, weather-wise: it’s still mostly winter (upper 30s at night, 40s during the day), reminding me of something I know all too well – spring really doesn’t start here until the second half of May. The sun remained hidden most days.  One night, after a lovely sunny day, we had difficulty accepting that the (relatively) warm weather of the day was gone. We sat stubbornly outside, around our firepit. Shivering, despite wearing a coat and hat, it wasn’t as great as I had fantasized, a distant memory of a warm summer’s night. 

But it was a good week in terms of learning and human connections. With all that time on my hands I am making time to listen in on conversations around the world, and learn as much as I can. Although one could say that these conversations are all taking place in bubbles – like-minded people talking with each other about the importance of connection, care, compassion and communication, while we connect, express our care and compassion and communicate what we are all doing about these things, or could be doing. 

The conversations are uplifting. They leave me with a sense of hope. All these people who appear on my screen are embedded in others networks and each of those has members who are part of other networks – an exponential affair, all those bubbles. And in all those bubbles are helpers. Like me, they believe that the current crisis is not just a disaster but also an opportunity to re-arrange the desk chairs on this ship that, by the way, is NOT sinking if we continue act wisely to keep the ship seaworthy.

What’s also uplifting is the promise of this weekend: a promise of sun and warm weather, and best of all, a visit from our grandkids with their mom and dad. We have all been isolated and careful for so long that we are pretty sure we are clean. We will be a clean and careful family pod.  

My self-selected messengers delivered two related messages this morning that, like Velcro, hooked onto words already floating in my mind: boredom and change. They seem opposite at first glance. One a state of mind, the other a force of nature.

I have a steady morning routine which consists of  a 10-minute meditation, a 8 to 9 mile stationary bike ride, followed by a shower and then breakfast. I recently answered someone’s question (how are you feeling?) with the word ‘bored!’ It’s the same thing every morning, day after day after day. At night I have a different routine: I listen to whatever audio book I am engrossed in while doing my electronic jigsaw puzzle. It’s not that these routines are unpleasant or forced, it’s the sameness that sometimes gets to me.

My meditation teacher talked about boredom this morning. He reminded me that the sight of a sleeping baby may seem boring to all but the parents of that child. Not much going on. Yet nothing is further from the truth. Inside that sleeping infant changes are taking place at a crazy pace. 

In our physical distance world of today many people have expressed this sense of ‘boring sameness’ to me. A joke that is circulating on FB tells it all: Until further notice the days of the week are now called 
thisday, thatday, otherday, someday, yesterday, today and nextday!

Yet around us, and possibly inside us, change is taking place at a crazy pace. All the things we took for granted (such as how we get medical care, how we meet, how we work, how we earn our living) have been thrown out of the window. Telemedicine, something some people have been pushing for decades, has now become a common form of consultation with health professionals. Flexible work hours, tele-commuting, working in remote teams became a near instantaneous reality, as if a switch was flipped.

So I am telling myself that underneath all that sameness and boredom, some awesome, and in many cases badly needed changes are actually taking place. I can only hope that these changes are so firmly embedded by the time we leave our isolated spaces that flipping the switch off again will be nearly impossible. 

I studied psychology because I was interested in human behavior. After a long and circuitous route, I have come back to my roots. Not that I ever lost interest in human behavior, but I pushed off from the Developmental Psychology shores many decades ago. Now I am back.

I graduated about 5 years before Robert Keegan published his book ‘The Evolving Self.’ I paid little attention to him then as he was not in the pantheon of great psychology theorists at the time of my studies. Besides I had moved to the Middle East (Yemen, then Lebanon) and later to Senegal. I had gotten married and had a child while working full time. Although I watched the development process unfold in my own child, I had kind of forgotten about the discipline of developmental psychology in which I was credentialed, at least academically. It was in 2001, when I read Keegan and Lisa Lahey’s book ‘the way we talk’ that I reconnected with my initial interest in developmental psychology and started to follow Keegan. 

Yesterday I was reminded of his theory of human development during my breakfast reading of Heather Cox Richardson’s daily missive. She displays, for all to see, the behavior of people at the highest levels of our government. It took me back to Keegan’s view on how the mindsets of some people evolve more than those of others. 

Here’s a summary of his stage theory – more depth be found on the internet and YouTube.

In Keegan’s theory the earliest stage, Stage 1, is the stage of the Impulsive Mind. The world revolves around the small child and everything is there to serve his or her needs. At stage 2 the child (now an adolescent) has expanded his or her horizon, although satisfying one’s own needs is still at center stage in all interactions. This is the stage of the Imperial Mind. Interestingly, in his research he found that about 6% of the US’s adult population is stuck in that mindset. 

At stage 3 we have learned that we are no longer the center of the universe and our minds are socialized by the culture, values and philosophies of our extended family and community (tribe, religion, etc.) in which we are embedded. Keegan’s research suggests that about 58% of the adult population is at this stage of the Socialized Mind. In stage 4, the stage of the Self-Authoring Mind, we have come to realize that there are other perspectives on reality that are different from the one we were socialized in – hence the importance of travel and living in cultures other than the one you grew up in. About one third of the adult population has reached this stage. 

The highest stage is number 5 – the Self-Transformative Mind. At this stage we have come to realize there are no firm answers to anything as everything happens in a context.  Jennifer Garvey Berger, who has worked with Keegan and who is a genius in her own right (especially when it comes to leading in chaotic situations, like right now) explains: “People with this form of mind are less likely to see the world in terms of dichotomies or polarities, […] they are more likely to believe that what we often think of as black and white are just various shades of gray whose differences are made more visible by the lighter or darker colors around them.” An estimated 1% of the population has reached this stage.

The stages are somewhat comparable to the levels of energy that I learned about in my (IPEC) coach training. People with catabolic (depleting, destructive) levels of energy either are victims or get very angry. At levels three to seven people show up with the kind of energy that is anabolic, uplifting, constructive. The highest levels are congruent with Keegan’s stage 5.

Back to our government officials. I think many of them operate out of level 2 or 3, and the one at the top seems to be stuck in level 1. I would think this level to be an immediate disqualifier for the top position.

I am reading more and more about the millions of viruses out there that have not been catalogued and for which we are wholly unprepared, like this one. Of course, we can never be totally prepared as these viruses are known to shape-shift in response to our own shape-shifting context. The new normal will also be shape-shifting. And thus, I am extending the tunnel that we are currently in, further and further.

The light at the end of the tunnel that I saw early March, is slowly receding. The prediction that we are still far from normalizing life again is now closer to being fact rather than fiction (or opinion). The whole summer? Next fall? Next year? There are moments when I can only see darkness rather than light at the end of the tunnel.  

The light that used to be at the end of the tunnel will have to come from within. Not from outside to inside, as our president suggests, but from inside to outside.

How we show up in our lives has always been important, but now I think it is even more so. People have recently evoked many times the oxygen mask routine in planes (put it on yourself before you put it on your child). It is an apt comparison. If we can’t be grounded and lit up ourselves, how can we ground and light up others?

I am also benefitting from the light that others emit, both close by and faraway. I have joined two networks that were outside my geographic sphere, a vertical slice of the world that extends from the tip of Africa to the north of Europe, with some outliers in South America and Australia. They are all team coaches, some aspiring team coaches like me, and they are all full of light.

Last week I also joined an Indian network of people who consider themselves talent developers. I am signing up left and right to such networks as they keep me connected to the rest of the world, and I find inside these networks individuals who are not only like-minded but also light-minded.

It helps that, at least in the northern hemisphere, that we are also heading into more light of day and less and less darkness.

We have a new vocabulary now. During the day we ask ourselves whether we are zoomed in, or up, or out. When we facetime with our daughter, after her work day is over, we see her glazed over eyes and conclude that she is zoomed-out. There were zoom-bombings before the Zoom company shored up its security. There are Zoom(cock)tails and Zoom weddings and Zoom Quaker meetings for worship, with everyone on mute, unless a message from the universe requires an unmute.

There is the concept of social distancing, words rarely used together outside sociology departments, surely with a different meaning now. It’s not social but physical that causes us so much grief. With all the things we are not able to do, there is now the joy about the things we can do (internet stability permitting): being socially close to people that are not nearby. I feel socially quite close to people, knowing we could not possibly infect each other. I am participating in workshops and learning webinars with Indians, South Africans, European. Our Zoom 40th anniversary wedding was attended by people from two continents, 4 countries, and several states in the US.

Last night we watched a documentary about Mr. Rogers, a TV personality Americans would know about. Maybe he was known outside the US. I learned about him via our kids. It was Mr. Rogers who reminded kids that there were always more helpers than bad people. Look for the helpers he would recommend parents to tell their kids when bad things happened. And I see, around the world, that we are all heeding his words. The people who make us angry are always in the minority. It’s good to remember that.  

The things I have learned about the brain come in handy now. I understand better than before why centering practices, meditation, meditative yoga and other ‘stilling’ practices are important. As I prepare my sessions for working with teams that are coping rather than thriving in this new pandemicked world, I am going through the many centering exercises I have collected over the years to pick one for today’s session. 

In the past I felt a little self-conscious, awkward even, when I introduced a centering exercise at the start of a meeting.  Once, at a time of great anxiety and stress at my previous employer, I asked the people sitting around the table with me and those on a video screen in another location, to close their eyes and take a few deep breaths. I noticed how some people (mostly younger) embraced this opportunity, others (mostly older) rolled their eyes and seemed impatient to get on with the task at hand. 

It was risky telling people that being present, centered, and taking a few deep breaths before continuing with the meeting agenda, should be part of the task at hand. But now I am no longer the only one who believes that. There is now abundant research to suggest that centering and being present is a critical part of any work. After all, any, internal or external, change we want to make starts in the here and now. If your mind is elsewhere, either in the past or in the future, the change cannot start.

I made up the word pandemicked because it has the word panicked inside it. We know that panic is created by our old reptilian brain that is solely concerned with surviving. Our very existence now attests to how the effectiveness of this part of the brain to do what it was designed to do.  

The pandemic has brought to the fore the original meaning of surviving, which is about continuing to live and defy death, this in addition to psychological survival, which is the usual cause of our stresses and anxieties. Now there is a real existential threat because the corona virus could kill us, as it already has killed so many people. The new closing messages on emails are now ‘stay safe,’ because if we don’t, we, or others, might die.

Our reptilian brain is not very good at coherent thought. This capacity resides in the most evolved part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex. Our reptilian brain leads us to take sensory short cuts; it leads us to believe things to be true that are not, it leads us to jump to conclusions based on very little evidence. When this part of our brain is in the driver’s seat we do stupid things because we can’t think clearly about anything other than escaping danger in the here and now. We’ll deal about the consequences later, once the prefrontal cortex is back in the driver’s seat. 

When we are on such high alert, it’s our sympathetic nervous system that is activated and floods us with neurochemicals preparing our bodies to run away from the threat. But the corona virus is invisible and all around us, increaSing our sense of danger. Taking even a few minutes to breathe deeply and slowly, and still our mind, activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Gratitude practices, going into our happy place, imagining being with or holding someone or something we love or care deeply about, produces neurochemicals that enhance our well-being, our well-feeling and our immune system, in ways that brain scientists can explain so much better than I.