I’m having a day of uncomfortable (although necessary) realisations about some of the ways I behave badly and the amount of work I still have to do. It’s a day in which I look at my blog posts making suggestions about how other people can lead more fulfilling lives, and think ‘wow, you smug deluded hypocrite’.
Actually most of the time I do not think I am a smug hypocrite, although by definition I’m not the best judge of deluded. This is because everything I write is actually based on stuff I have learned, and almost everything I have learned comes from screwing up. (For example, I am in the middle of drafting a post on how to apologise, which I now more or less know how to do, but I only know how to do it now through making some appalling and actively harmful apologies in the past.) That’s true of pretty much everything on this blog, and also pretty much everything in my consulting and coaching practices. (Research is a bit different in the way it works, but I still screw everything up first before I get it right.)
The thing is, I tend not to write about the screw-ups. I just write the lessons.
The ostensible reason is that I mostly have no idea who the readers of this blog are, but at least some of them are past or future co-researchers or colleagues or employers or clients, and I want them to think I’m competent.
The reason underneath that is that I am still afraid of showing my imperfection to other people, because I feel shame. That link is Brene Brown’s TED talk on shame resilience and vulnerability, which I link to often. I think it’s one of the best personal development resources I’ve ever seen.
I’m doing a lot of coaching right now where I’m hearing myself saying ‘the important thing is not your relationship with [insert other person]. It’s your relationship with yourself.’ Again and again, I see them doing the work and getting the results. As their relationship with themselves is changing, they are finding the peace of mind and fulfilment they seek, even when their relations with the world around them remain difficult.
I tend to think that if I find myself saying the same thing again and again, I am saying what I myself need to hear.
It turns out that my relationship with myself is quite messed up at the moment, and that is having consequences for my relationships with others.
I am not going to write about this in detail right now. There are some good reasons for this and some bad reasons. The good reasons are that this is meant to be a work blog and I really don’t want to turn it into self-indulgent maunderings about my personal journey through life. If I want to write about how difficult to find it to live with my imperfections, there are other media for that.
The bad reasons are that I still want other people to think I’m perfect, and I still appear to subscribe to the delusion that if I only present information that reflects the good bits of me, other people will fall for it.
The thing is, my work is about helping people – and organisational systems – to find well-being, and that involves working with the fabric of who they really are. There is no project plan that gets change from a starting point of ‘who you’d like to be’ or ‘who you are pretending to be’ or ‘who you hope other people think you are’. There is only the truth.
I wouldn’t hire anyone to coach me if I thought they were perfect. I wouldn’t hire a consultant who was perfect. I wouldn’t even hire a researcher who was perfect. Because how would they understand me? How could they empathise with me? How would we connect? How could they interpret the environment around me in a way that took account of the way in which we trip up on our humanity all the time, if they themselves did not trip up on their own? I admire strength, but I connect to imperfection…
… and there I go trying to make myself look right again. I’m not a better consultant because I’m imperfect. Well, I might be. But I’m imperfect whether or not I’m a better consultant. I’m imperfect because I just get things wrong, all the time.
The truth is that in some ways I am an adult and highly functional person and in some ways I am very messed up and I do not function so well. Just like everyone else.
I am thinking about sharing more of my own journey on this blog. I’m very unsure about it. I fear others’ judgment. I fear being found out. I fear criticism and attack. Perhaps most of all, I fear what comes from admitting to myself how much work I still have to do in some areas. Right now I am feeling paralysed and overwhelmed by it, and I am therefore not doing anything at all.
On the other hand, I know that I do my best coaching when I become willing to tell the story of what I have learned, mostly through doing appalling and harmful things. I know that when Lloyd stops pretending that everything is okay, his writing starts to break through the page and comes alive with the magic of the real out-there in-your-face difficult uncomfortable non-standard painful truth that he is telling. And I know that for him, that’s when the magic starts to happen in his life and around him, as well. I’ve seen it again and again.
(In looking for those posts, I also found this one, which seems to make my point better than I’m doing.)
I know I can’t short-cut the process. There are some aspects of my research that I do very well now, having screwed it up first and then learned. Other aspects I do less well and am currently screwing up. After a while I will learn how to do it well. I look back on the last year and a half and think, ‘I should have done it so differently.’ But the truth is that I couldn’t have. I have to make the mistakes to learn how to get it right. The same is true for my coaching practice and my consulting practice and my personal relationships and my spiritual life.
I still feel lousy about all the mistakes I make and the harm I cause.
I still feel convinced that if I let any evidence of my imperfections escape, the people that I’ve somehow conned into giving me a studentship or working with me or letting me support them – or being in a close intimate loving relationship with me – will realise what a terrible mistake they are making, and the whole edifice will crumble.
I talk with people who share this experience with me – literally almost every day – and I always find myself saying the same thing. You will only be free of this by showing up and being truly yourself, no matter how scary it feels.”
Physician, heal thyself.
November 22, 2011 at 5:32 pm |
I can totally relate to this too. I used to think I had to be perfect at all times to be equal to those around me. Expectations of myself were way beyond what I expected from friends, family and colleagues.
I’m much easier on myself these days and the expectation gap is narrowing, constant work in progress with relapses happening from time to time. Has made life much less tiring and more relaxing though.
November 22, 2011 at 6:02 pm |
We as humans are inherently imperfect…therefore by acting or being imperfect we are perfectly human. Just sayin.
November 22, 2011 at 9:07 pm |
“I wouldn’t even hire a researcher who was perfect. Because how would they understand me? How could they empathise with me?”
This applies to everything in my life. When I was looking for my current relationship I was deliberately looking for someone who had been depressed, who had been a goth (or whatever) and come out the other side of it. Like you, I wondered what I would have in common with someone who had never been as down as me, who had never struggled with things the way I had?
November 28, 2011 at 9:59 pm |
My own experience tells me that you need time to be sure that the imperfections are not only common ground but are understood and acknowledged with empathy, be that for partners/friends and strangers alike.
December 3, 2011 at 8:39 am |
How do you go about doing that? I’m thinking specifically of public writing, I suppose, although I take Andrew’s point that it applies in many spheres.
December 8, 2011 at 10:09 pm |
Is it more about making a decision about your online identity, and about this space in particular? If this blog is a professional tool would it be unwise to delve too deeply into personal matters?
As to life experiences and what they allow us to be and to contribute, it might be useful to consider this quote that I gleaned from another blog,
‘Along with a genuine happiness from introspection, insight and emotional/spiritual growth, comes a humility based upon having had experiences that can be used as tools to help others seeking direction on their own paths to self-discovery.’