Black History Month is over, and we’re now into Women’s History month. Forgotten history, unrecorded stories, marginalized peoples, all need their own month to remind us and encourage us about our past and future. If that’s the rationale, then we also need a Personal History Month to remind us of our own hidden histories and how they still live in our every mood and moment. When it comes to personal development, psychology is guilty of eclipsing the impact of history, except for our childhood and family of origin stories. We don’t consider enough that who we are is a habit of history. We carry with us the vestiges of our ancestors, and much of our personality, behavior, beliefs and habits, for both good and bad, are the legacy of those who came before. Continue Reading…

It’s been insanely busy around her. The Process Work Institute is applying for accreditation with the Distance Education and Training Council. We’re preparing to enroll a new cohort in the MA program in June; two cohorts are graduating in the spring. And other projects I’m working on are also heating up. Busy!

Periods like this really test your work-life balance, your routines, processes and organizational systems. My systems are pretty good, but I am always tinkering, looking for something more effective or streamlined. I use a lot of web apps to help me stay organized. I find them to be a fantastic resource for small businesses like mine. Continue Reading…

I recently heard an interview on my local public radio with a young woman on her struggle to learn the violin. She wrote a blog piece about it called The Virtue of Being Bad and concludes that being bad at something and persevering nonetheless is a virtue.

But here’s another reason why being bad is good. In looking at the corrupting influence of power, the culprit appears to the self-reinforcing nature of power. Power gives us the means to surround ourselves with people and places that reflect our rank back to us. And, as I write in The Expert Syndrome and the Problem of Transfer, it’s easy to transfer our sense of mastery in one domain to all domains, thinking we are truly invincible:

The sense of power we have gained is comfortable and fortifying; the energy we have invested in getting to this place of expertise is too much to just walk away from. This rank and expertise is reinforced daily, by every person who relates to us in that role. Every encounter adds to the identity. And it becomes a self-reinforcing mechanism; the more comfortable we are in that role, the more we surround ourselves with people who relate to us in that role.

Our rank allows us to surround ourselves with people, places, contexts, roles, that reinforce our rank. The more we stay within the context in which our rank is ratified, the greater the danger of identifying only with our rank, beginning to believe in our infallibility.

Is there a solution? No. But there are things we can do in leadership positions to mitigate this tendency. One of them: be a beginner at something. Be bad at something. Put yourself in positions of uncertainty. Remember your beginner’s mind. Above all, leave the “office,” literally step outside that context in which your rank is reinforced. For some people, having children is that humbling experience. For others, it might just be learning the violin. Every position of power is upheld by its context. And while it won’t solve all the problems of abuse of power, learning who we are outside that reinforcing context should be a requirement of ourselves and others in leadership.

Recently my father sent me a package filled with letters, newspaper clippings and memorabilia about my aunt, Leila Diamond. Leila was a scientist, a cancer researcher, at a time when most cancer researchers were men. The few women scientists that were out there were supposed to do “gentle research,” as one of her colleagues said. Electron microscopy and tissue culture (neither of which sound to me, a non-scientist, very gentle) were some of the ‘acceptable’ research areas for women. Leila, in her quiet and dignified way, paved the way for women in science. She was a mentor to many young female scientists, and was a founder of WICR, Women in Cancer Research. Reading through the letters and emails that poured in following her death, I was greatly moved to hear how she inspired and supported younger colleagues.

This tribute from one of her colleagues stands out above the rest:

When I read the obituary from the Philadelphia newspaper, I was disturbed by the line that said: “there are no other immediate survivors.” On the contrary, there are hundreds, probably thousands, of her immediate survivors to be found among the many women scientists she inspired and mentored during her career. We are among her intellectual and professional family. Each of our future achievements will be a testament to her faith in us and her contribution to our scientific progress.

And by the way, January is National Mentoring Month. None of us got here without the help of someone else. We stand on the shoulders of others whether they mentored us directly, or spent their lives, as Leila did, paving the way for others. Time to say thank you.

Martin Luther King, Jr., on the eve of his assassination, eerily voiced a premonition of his death:

I’ve been to the mountain top!… He’s allowed me to go up the mountain! and I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land! I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight… that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!  And I’m happy tonight, I’m not worried about anything…. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

King, like Moses, never gets a chance to see the promised land. It’s both a truth and a metaphor. It’s a metaphor for leadership: There really is no leader beyond our own yearnings and dreams. While we  hope to rest in the illusion that there exists someone wiser, greater, or more powerful who can lead us, our fate is to become the wise woman or man we crave.

Is it even possible to  elect a leader, or a government that lives up to our ideals? Or, are our ideals ours to become? John Dewey predicted this when he said that, contrary to popular thought, the work of democracy was not to achieve common good and harmony, but was the work of individual self-realization. This is, as James Baldwin said, the real work of achieving our country.

Bob Sutton, in his blog post 12 Things Good Bosses Believe, emphasizes how the power of a role inevitably creates blind spots. Number 1 on his list:

I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it’s like to work for me

And he concludes with Number 12:

Because I wield power over others, I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk — and not realizing it.

I like how he says it and shows it so bluntly: power corrupts.

But it is not the power of the role alone. It is the fit between the power of the person and the power of the role. Think of it like clothing. The role or position is a piece of clothing, but the body who wears it has a lot to do with how it fits, to stretch an analogy just a bit. Continue Reading…

I have always thought of death as a sort of dénouement. The mysteries of existence will be revealed to us at the moment we die. And one of the biggest mysteries I’m anticipating that death will dispel is: why do we resist ourselves?

Why do we need resolutions, New Year’s or otherwise? Why do we need so much high-powered resolve to do things that are meaningful, important, good for us, or desirable? Why do we need so much encouragement to accomplish our goals and dreams, some of them quite mundane: getting up earlier, writing two blog posts a week, eating better, or exercising?

Those tasks in and of themselves are not that onerous. Some may even be pleasant. What is the internal obstacle that resolutions are meant to undo? Why is the human condition so fraught with inner resistance? Continue Reading…

I came across these two stories on the same day, and though these two women are worlds apart in who they are, and what they are about, they struck me as similar in their courage

Patti Smith belongs to my youth. Because the Night was an electrifying anthem to something I felt but couldn’t name. She was to me a punk Janis Joplin for my generation, raw and honest but unlike Joplin, showed a comfort and confidence in herself. Smith just published Just Kids about her relationship with Robert Maplethorpe, their friendship and devotion, to each other and to their art. In Maureen Dowd’s piece on it, Because The Night Belongs to Her, she quotes Smith, who wrote to Maplethorpe when he was dying of AIDS. Smith reminded him that he once said to her art “was like ‘holding hands with God.’ Urging him to grip that hand hard, she concluded: ‘Of all your work, you are still your most beautiful.’”

Flash forward a few decades. Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, whose credentials include serving as Chief of Staff to then U.S. Secretary of Treasury Larry Summers in the Clinton Administration, gave this TED talk below on the disheartening statistics of women at the top. Statistics show that progress for women (and Blacks, and other minorities) is not just lagging, but in some cases, moving backwards. Something is clearly not working. I like what Sandberg says. It’s time to look at hidden factors, at things we might be missing, including ourselves. Sandberg focuses on how women think about themselves. It’s not punk rock, but it’s bold and controversial because her critics could say she’s putting the blame on women. Like Smith, this is honest and real, and shows real devotion to her ‘art.’ When things are clearly not improving, it’s not time to play it politically correct, but to leave no stone unturned in finding solutions.

I can’t help but be influenced by the end of year recaps at this time of year –the best of this, the worst of that. It’s definitely a time to reflect, review, and plan. I love spending a few days, usually somewhere between Christmas and New Years, reflecting on  the past year, what I’ve accomplished,  learned, did, things I didn’t do, and then meditating on my sense of the coming year. It’s not just about goals – but also about what I sense is on the horizon. I try to feel my way into what the coming year will bring. What tendencies are stirring? Fantasies? What have I been daydreaming about? What projects are coming my way? Things that feel really important, I’ll work into more practical goals – I’ll set small benchmarks, assign them a time and place. I’ll look into my schedule and prioritize.

Looking backwards is fun, too. One of the things I like doing is reading through my agenda, journal and writing, seeing what I have done over the past year. Sometimes I read back several years, and two things always jump out at me. First, I’m always pleasantly surprised to see that I really have accomplished some things. I know, it sound a bit crazy, But I am one of those people who suffer from feeling there is way more to do than what I have time for. So seeing the things that have actually happened is always refreshing.

The other thing I notice is that even as I change, I stay the same. I think we all d0. We really do have theme songs, and no matter where we end up, we have something very recognizable about us. I saw this recently, since I just launched my newly revised website, thanks to the collective genius of Team Diamond (Suzie Schofield, Jim Parker and Bryan Capitano). I was looking for documents related to my web server and it gave me an opportunity to look at websites past. Like Scrooge in his vision, I dropped in on earlier iterations of myself. So what is it that didn’t change? Well, looking back at my earlier web presence, before blogs, before Web 2.0, before social media, I was playing around with different ways to create community with my website. Are there any readers out there who remember:

The Village Well? An email string on research and creativity?

Hi-5 – top 5 favorites submitted by different contributors?

The Process Work Wiki, or pwiki, which later was Processworkinternational?

OK, enough of the past for now, soon I’ll be drunkenly singing Auld Lang Syne and making promises I won’t want to keep ….

Wishing you all happy holidays, and thanks for reading. It’s a pleasure to not change along with you all!

I’m doing my end of year planning for 2011, and as I do every year, I struggle to carve out time for creative work, while trying to satisfy the demands of my work life. Writing, for instance, requires a lot of time for cooking and cogitating. It just can’t be done between 2 and 3 on Thursday afternoon. It needs long stretches of uninterrupted time.

There are some wonderful sites out there that offer tips on productivity, not just how to get things done, but how to carve out time for creative work, work that requires time to think, ponder, stew and meditate. The site http://the99percent.com/ is full of articles on creative productivity, or how to make creative ideas happen. Another great source of inspiration is the work of Jason Fried, co-founder of 37Signals (I’m a huge fan of their web-based applications Basecamp for project management and Backpack, their tricked-out to-do list application). Fried is also something of a social activist intent on changing the landscape of the work place, and challenging the status quo on how work gets done, and how it can be restructured to allow for more creativity and productivity. He wrote Rework, and recently gave this Ted Talk on “Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work.”

What are your secrets for being more creatively productive?