Tag: relationships

The Confidence to Be Wrong

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“There is no better test of man’s integrity than his behavior when he is wrong.” – Marvin Williams

My dad was a very good apologizer. He had a favorite quip, “If you have to eat crow, eat it early when it’s tender.” When we sat down to talk in-depth when he was in his late 70’s, in what turned out to be his last couple of years before he died suddenly in a bike accident, he readily admitted his mistakes without defensiveness or blame.

For instance, in the 1980’s, the Presbyterian church adopted the rule not to ordain gay ministers and my dad went along with that policy in the churches he led. When I talked with him about it in 2012, he said, “I was wrong.” He didn’t try to hide behind the policy of the church overall or explain it away because the fear about AIDS at the time.  He told me, “You learn in ministry that you move to the problem, not away from the problem. When a problem arises, that’s the same issue you mentioned with procrastination. When an issue arises, you jump in and if you are going to get beat up, get beat up right away. Don’t wait til later. If you have to apologize and ask for forgiveness, do it quick.”

But I hadn’t put together his willingness to admit he was wrong with confidence until Dr. Gerald Stein put it together for me in a comment he made on the Airing the Wounds Out post. He said, “Confidence and acceptance play into the surrendering of the desire to rebut every criticism.”

The confidence to be wrong. The ability to lean in to what we haven’t done well and try to do better without contorting ourselves in all sorts of unnecessary shapes in order to try to avoid the blame. It seems to work on two levels.

The first is to lean in and keep us open to life. Our spiritual traditions speak to this idea. The Roman Catholics have confession. The Buddhists talk about egolessness as explained by Pema Chödrön,

“In the teachings of Buddhism, we hear about egolessness. It sounds difficult to grasp: what are they talking about, anyway? When the teachings are about neurosis, however, we feel right at home. That’s something we really understand. But egolessness? When we reach our limit, if we aspire to know that place fully – which is to say that we aspire to neither indulge nor repress – a hardness in us will dissolve. We will be softened by the sheer force of whatever energy arises – the energy of anger, the energy of disappointment, the energy of fear. When it’s not solidified in one direction or another, that very energy pierces us to the heart, and it opens us. This is the discovery of egolessness. It’s when all of our schemes fall apart. Reaching our limit is like finding a doorway to sanity and the unconditional goodness of humanity, rather than meeting an obstacle or punishment.”

When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron

I was in my mid-20’s when I cheated on the guy I was dating. When I eventually broke up with him, I didn’t tell him the truth when he asked if there was someone else. It wasn’t until 4 years later when he sent me an email that I finally told him. It didn’t make us fast friends, but it finally made us honest friends. I didn’t have the confidence to be truthful right away because I wanted so much to be liked and I did a lot of damage to us both in the meantime.

Which is a segue to the second part, to do it quickly. That’s advice that is also common in the high-tech world as a business strategy called failing fast. It refers to the strategy to identify ideas that don’t work quickly before you get too invested in them. It works because one of the things that undercuts our confidence is rumination and overthinking. When we get caught up in the cycle of second-guessing and reviewing where we went wrong, we move out of action and into our heads. Authors Katty Kay and Claire Shipman explain:

“Failing fast allows for constant adjustment, testing and then quick movement toward what will actually work. The beauty is that when you fail fasts, or early, you have a lot less to lose. Usually you are failing small, rather than spectacularly. And you have a lot to gain from learning as you fail.”

The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman

As I discovered from watching my dad, it takes a lot of courage to be wrong. But when you can do it well, it actually builds confidence because we do it quickly, stay open and can move on.

This is my 7th post on confidence. The others are:

I Can

Fear and Confidence

Growth Mind-set

Bossy Pants – Confidence and Leadership

No Name Calling

Speaking Up

(featured photo from Pexels)

Where Does The Spark Come From?

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“At the center of the being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.” – Lao Tzu

Cognitive and Computational Neurosience Professor Anil Seth related an experiment from about 50 years ago on a Ten Percent Happier podcast that caught my attention. In the study, participants, who were all male, had to either walk over a low, sturdy bridge or a high, rickety bridge over a raging torrent. On the other side of the bridge was a female researcher who asked them some questions and then gave them her phone number in case they had any follow-on questions. The outcome was that many more of the male participants who had walked over the rickety, precarious bridge phoned the researcher to ask for a date or talk to her after the fact.

Anil Seth summed it up as “The interpretation of this ethically very, very dubious experiment is that the creepy walk across the rickety bridge misinterpreted their physiological arousal caused by the scariness of the bridge as some kind of sexual chemistry with the female researcher.”

The point that Anil Seth was making is that our emotions, whether it is fear of a snake or chemistry with another person, often start in our body and then are interpreted by our brain instead of the other way around even though it appears that our brains are running the show. This matches the metaphor presented by psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his book The Happiness Hypothesis of the elephant and the rider. The rider is our conscious mind and the elephant is everything else – our sensations, subconscious motives, internal presuppositions. We think the rider is in charge but that’s only the case if the elephant agrees.

This reminds me of a recent conversation I had with a couple of friends about online dating. I tried online dating about 10 years ago after my divorce and before I decided to start a family on my own. I dutifully filled out the surveys that catalogued interests and personality preferences, wrote the essay and subsequently met a number of nice men. In fact, my friend Eric was someone who I met online and we became great friends after deciding that dating wasn’t right for us.

It seems to me that online dating asks us to essentially name what we want – and that we don’t know what we want. We can’t quantify the mystery or adrenaline or whatever else it is that causes us to feel attraction. Of course from there, a committed relationship is a decision as much or more than a feeling but for that initial emotion, it seems might come from the body as it did in the experiment that Anil Seth described.

Unfortunately, codes being what they are these days in Seattle, I can’t think of any rickety bridges either to cross or to stand on the other side of. 😊

What do you think of online dating? What about the idea that emotion starts in the body and is interpreted by the mind?

(featured photo was taken by me in Nepal on the trek to Everest base camp in 2001)

Both And

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“Well, you can’t make old friends.” – Zadie Smith

The other day, my mom asked my daughter how her best friend, the little girl that lives next door, was feeling about having to move 1200 miles away in a month. My daughter replied that her friend was excited. And then she added, “And that makes me feel sad.”

The conversation moved on so thankfully I didn’t have to follow-up on that one right away because I find that subject to be tricky. How to be happy for others even when it means a loss for ourselves.

Years ago when I had a corporate job, I hired a former colleague to come work for me. He worked for me for about a year and I had given him some great opportunities and he had done a fantastic job. Then he announced that he’d gotten a job at Microsoft and was quitting and I felt hurt and betrayed. I don’t think I could talk to him at length for a week. Down deep I was happy for him and eventually I got there so I was happier for him up top as well, but I definitely felt the challenge of summoning my best self.

Listening to a Ten Percent Happier podcast with cognitive scientist Maya Shankar gave me some insight on why it’s so hard. She said “We don’t like change because it almost definitionally involves a loss of identity and that’s very destabilizing. I think as humans we often attach ourselves to specific identities as we move through the world because it gives us a sense of security.”

When I use that lens to apply to my work situation with my colleague, I can spot the identity I was inhabiting easily. The man that I hired was also someone I had championed previously when he was switching into the field of technology from his career in the military. I had spent a lot of time and energy helping him adjust to the change of culture and expectations and hopefully imparted some technical knowledge as well. When he quit, it challenged my sense of being a mentor.

In return, he had done the job beautifully and when I got over myself, I could appreciate that. It required me to disconnect from that specific identity to a more general sense which is that I draw a lot of satisfaction from helping other people.

In a quiet moment at the end of the day my daughter made that comment about her friend, I asked her some more questions and we talked about how she could be both/and. That is to say both sad that her friend was leaving and hopeful that her friend has an exciting new adventure when she moves. And that neither takes away from the friendship they have today.

(featured photo from Pexels)

On Our High Horse

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“Life is like dreaming with your feet.” – unknown

My kids and I went to a wedding out of town this weekend. Staying in a room with side-by-side queen beds, we didn’t get much sleep and I caught a stomach bug but it was an adventure. In a post this spring, I wrote about lantern awareness, the idea from professor Alison Gopnik that kids’ brains have an awareness that is like a light held up high in the dark and illuminates everything around whereas adult brains tend to have spotlight awareness that focuses in on what we need to get done.

I found that traveling with my kids to someplace completely new to them is like being completely immersed in a treasure trove provided by their lantern awareness.

So we found a lot of treasures and I wrote about one for the Pointless Overthinking blog in a post called Cookie Cutter Faith.

Freedom and Responsibility

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“Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.” – Gandhi

A couple of days ago I converted Mr. D’s crib to a big boy bed by taking off one of the sides. I kept the crib thing going as long as I could because it’s so comforting to have a child stay where you put them but he’s been exercising his ability to push boundaries by climbing out so it was time.

The first night he got out of bed after I said “good-night” a couple of times, fell out of bed, and the next morning he got up 30 minutes early and woke his sister.

Of course I went through this with Miss O a few years ago but I’m reminded again of the lessons that freedom brings.

When we have freedom – to go anywhere we like or to use our time the way we wish or because we are the boss and no one tells us what to do – it is so exciting. Then we have to decide how to use it.

After the newness wears off, we have to learn to have self-control. We get to choose – within the limits of what is responsible and respectful of other people. We have to make decisions that don’t negatively impact our loved ones or people around us.

And when there’s more freedom, then everyone has to enforce their boundaries. In this case, Mr. D’s ability to pop out of bed is infringing on my ability to have morning kid-free sacred time and Miss O’s ability to sleep.

While kids who are almost 3-years-old are not the most reasonable people to talk and negotiate with, I find that having a strong relationship and consistent conversations about what does and does not work for everyone eventually gets through.

In the days that Miss O was learning how to manage her big bed freedom, I would turn on the Tibetan meditation chant music and say that if she got up early, the only option was to meditate with me. It didn’t take long for her to decide to stay in bed. I did the same with Mr D. except I notice that having another child there as a co-conspirator makes the conversation harder.

Yes, this is perhaps a strained analogy to the state of freedom in the US. But on this July 4th, may we remember that freedom comes with the responsibility to exercise self-control, be respectful of the others around us, the requirement to keep talking with each other and enforce our boundaries. Sometimes freedom works for us and sometimes the freedoms of others make us feel a little crazy and grumpy.  We have to keep working for the middle ground where freedom and respect are in balance. We made this bed and now we need to lie in it. 🙂

Happy 4th everyone!

It’s in the Comments

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“To listen with an open heart and ask questions to better help us understand the other person is a spiritual exercise, in the truest sense of the word.” – Harriet Lerner

Yesterday I re-blogged a post about sliding glass door moments, the moments where you see the life you could have on the other side and choose whether to open the door and cross that threshold. Deb commented on it and mentioned that solid door moments, those times when we have no real sense of what’s ahead yet we know we need something in our life to change, might take even more courage to pass through.

Wow, did that make me think. It is just one example of the very many where a comment has expanded the envelope of my thinking. Which is the wonderful effect of comments. They often drive me to a deeper understanding of myself or the topic, sometimes both.

But when I first started blogging, I found commenting hard. Did I know the author well enough that a typed comment would be relevant? Was I interpreting the material correctly and would I be on point?

Maybe first time comments are like tiny solid doors – we often have no real idea who’s on the other side and whether our typed message which is often a bid for friendship will be accepted or even acknowledged. But you have to open it to find out whether or not the person on the other side wants to sit around your coffee table, to use my analogy of blogging from last week, or just speak from the podium.

What do you think about comments? How about the experience of commenting?

Holding Space

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“True friends are those who lift you up when no one else has noticed you’ve fallen.” – unknown

The other night I was reading books with my two-year-old and he whispered in my ear, “You are the best girl.” It was such a sweet and tender moment that gave me the shiver of recognition of what happens when we hold space for one another.

In the Disney Cars movie, Lightning McQueen starts out as the hot shot rookie that only cares about himself until he discovers the feeling of community and values in Radiator Springs and then finally emerges as the worthwhile competitor that knows that there is more to life than winning.

It’s actually in the third installment, Cars 3, that they use the line that Doc Hudson, Lightning’s gruff mentor (voiced by Paul Newman), “Saw something in you that you couldn’t see in yourself.” It’s a wonderful statement about hope and potential.

When we hold space for others, we store the image of their highest, purest selves so that when they are in the messy middle of anything, we can reflect it back to them. This reminds me of friend who became disoriented and demoralized while trying to reach a goal and we sat on a bench overlooking Puget Sound and unraveled why it was she started.

When we hold space for others, we capture the essence of who they are they are in the squishy, vulnerable core underneath any job or external validation so that if they get lost in work or a relationship, we can huddle with them and tell them we still see them.

This brings to me the moment when my friend Doug called to ask if I would climb Mt. Adams with him and his son this summer. He knows I am knee deep in raising these two kids, have been distracted by all that entails and I’ve not been a very present friend, but his offer stirred me deep within and I was so grateful he remembered me.

When we hold space for others as they age, we become the safety line back to the boat of their life, even when they don’t remember themselves. When my great-aunt Wilma was suffering from Alzheimers and nearing the end of her life, her son arrived on his weekly visit to talk with her and bring her favorite treats. She sweetly said to him, “You are so nice. You remind me so much of my beloved son Gary.”

When my son uttered, “You are the best girl.” he was just parroting back what he’s heard said. But he also reminded me that there’s a purity in the simple way he sees me that has everything to do with our relationship and nothing to do with what I accomplish. It made me think that relationships, parenting and families, when they are functional, can be repositories for our essential selves. We hold space for each other for the moments we need to come “home” and recharge.

What does the phrase holding space mean to you? Do you have a good holding space story?

Ying and Yang

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“We spend the first year of a child’s life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There’s something wrong here.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson

The other day I was driving in the car with my kids when my 2-year-old son, who’s favorite show these days is the British cartoon Peppa Pig, started doing a great imitation of Daddy Pig snoring.

My 6-year-old daughter laughed and then asked, “When we get a daddy will he always be falling asleep, snoring and messing up the map reading like Daddy Pig?”

Which made me want to snort with laughter like Mommy Pig does.

It seems like toxic masculinity is a term we bandy about these days. It reminds me of when I was a kid in the 70’s and Bobby Riggs and Billie-Jean King played their Battle of the Sexes and male chauvinism was such a hot topic.

But years ago I read something from University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson that made me think that this topic is deeply seeded in humans. In his book 12 Rules for Life, he talked about selection of male partners.

Woman are choosy maters (unlike female chimps, their closest animal counterparts). Most men do not meet female human standards. It is for this reason that women on dating sites rate 85 percent of men as below average in attractiveness. It is for this reason that we all have twice as many female ancestors as male (imagine that all the women who have ever lived have averaged one child. Now imagine that half the men who ever lived have fathered two children, if they had any, while the other half fathered none).

I thought that was a stunning statistic of the big picture view that only 50% of men, averaged over all time, have fathered children. But then it’s the next part of the passage that gave a hint about toxic masculinity:

It is Woman as Nature who looks at half of all men and says, “No!” For the men, that’s a direct encounter with chaos, and it occurs every time they are turned down for a date. Human female choosiness is also why we are very different from the common ancestor we shared with our chimpanzee cousins, while the latter are very much the same. Women’s proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are.

I know Dr. Peterson is a controversial character. But taking this argument at face value, but it doesn’t seem like too much of a leap to believe that women have sought out men who are certain, successful, strong and seemingly invulnerable. And so perhaps women can help to change that nature too, or at least I’d like to think we can help:

By raising sons who are free to grapple with their emotions.

By being a safe place for our brothers and friends to talk about the pressures they feel.

By helping out with map reading.

By letting our daughters know that it’s great to choose men who let their non-aggressive flags fly.

By listening and supporting everyone who says this is hard.

Maybe when I have a partner in life again, he’ll fall asleep and snore. But like Daddy Pig, he’ll be able to laugh about it because he knows we don’t expect him to be perfect, just true.

What do you think? Can women help with toxic masculinity? Is it too much of a buzz word to have much meaning? Is it okay to quote someone like Dr. Peterson even if I don’t agree with how he’s been politicized?

(featured photo from Pexels)

We Carry Them With Us

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“At some point, you have to realize that some people can stay in your heart but not in your life.” – Sandi Lynn

When I woke my daughter up last Friday for the last day of school, she had a frown. I thought perhaps it was just the fog of sleepiness still lifting but she told me otherwise.

“I was happy that it was the last week of school but I’m not happy that it is the last day. It’s not like you can ever go back.”

She didn’t want to leave her beloved 1st grade teacher. I thought the buildup and anticipation of summer would carry the day so I was caught off-guard, something fairly common for me as a parent.

The grief of the school year ending reminded me of a Ten Percent Happier podcast about the science of loss and grieving with Mary-Frances O’Connor, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Arizona. She talked about what happens when we bond with someone – it actually changes the brain so that we encode that person is special. In the brain imaging studies O’Connor recounted, yearning for someone lit up the part of the brain that is the reward center of the brain, the nucleus accumbens.

Her conclusion was that even when our memories tell us that something has changed – someone is gone, an experience has ended – even when we know all that, the part of our brain that was transformed when we bonded still lights up. In O’Connor’s example, when she goes to pick an Easter dress, she’s still impacted by her mother. She may pick the dress her mother would like or the one that her mother would hate, but either way her mother is still present.

This explanation resonated with me. It explains that warmth I get when I think of my dad putting his arm around me and saying “It’s going to be great, Kid!” Or the little skip in my step I experience when I hike a trail my beloved dog Biscuit liked and I think of how he’d run back and forth.

I’ve often said that the longer my dad is gone, the more that I feel him inside me as if I have to act out the parts that I used to rely on him playing. O’Connor’s research says that in a way, that is true because he lives on inside my brain. I’d say that same about my dog which is true but also I’ve always had a personality much like a golden retriever.

Knowing that I’ll always exist in my kid’s heads gives me a little perspective on what that voice should say. Is the soundtrack that wants them to pick up after themselves or the one that says that they are lovable, kind and capable of anything? I’m aiming for a little bit of the former but mostly the latter.

As we moved through this past weekend, my daughter kept asking, “what would I be doing at school now?” She was processing the experience of being done by remembering all her school activities and quoting her teacher to me. Knowing a little about the science of how we record things didn’t help me know what to say, but it did give me a lot of patience for her yearning.  

By the end of the weekend, my daughter said, “I’m so happy for the Kindergartners that will have my teacher next year.” To get to our new experience, we have to cross the threshold of leaving the old. But the bonds we formed in the old experience go with us.

Sorry Your Head Hurts, Do You Want Something to Eat?

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“I am becoming water; I let everything rinse its grief in me and reflect as much light as I can.” – Mark Nepo

Last night we were having dinner on my brother’s World War II era tugboat. He has lovingly renovated it over more than 20 years so that it’s very comfortable for him and my sister-in-law to live on, but it still has a lot of steel edges to bump into. Which is what happened – my 2-year-old son was looking out a port hole, stood up quickly and bonked his head. My sister-in-law was standing there with me, saw him do it and as I picked him up, showered him with sympathy.

But 30 seconds later (maybe longer but not much), my sister-in-law said to my son, “What’s the matter, Buddy? Are you hungry?”

It struck me as a common thing we do as humans. It’s hard to witness someone else’s pain. So we express sympathy and then we are ready to move on. Three things strike me about this.

First, we often move to trying to solve the problem. I find this impulse, especially as a parent, to be so alluring.

Second, if things last longer than we expect, we try to conflate the pain with something else as my sister-in-law did. Is it not surprising that we grow up confused about what our feelings are if the grown-ups around us think that what is wrong is that we are hungry when really our head hurts?

Third, we compound the original pain with our discomfort at sitting with someone in pain. So that they often are moved to pretend the pain has stopped so that they don’t have to contend with both their own pain and the pain of the people who are witnessing it.

It’s hard but sometimes the best thing to do when someone is in pain, is just sit with them. As a mom, I want to reach for the ice pack, the bandage or the song but I’m working on just letting the tears fall onto my arms as I hold them. We have to clean our wounds before we bandage them and, in a way, letting the injured party cry for as long as necessary is the best first step.