Difficult Conversations

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What is the most important conversation you need to be having, with yourself, your partner, your colleagues, your friends?

More often than not, in personal life and business the most important conversation gets pushed into the shadows. We avoid it perhaps because we fear change, discomfort or simply don’t feel worthy of having it.

The most important conversations will always ask something of us: more courage, vulnerability, good communication skills, trust in the unknown, but having these conversations is what makes us more human, better leaders, and more empowered.

Morning Rituals

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Morning rituals are important. They set the tone for your day, give you confidence that you have already accomplished valuable things, and in my opinion you should be able to do them anywhere.

A good morning ritual should be transferable to almost any life situation: a prison cell, the forest, a hotel room, the city and any weather condition.

This ritual I do I can do almost anywhere:

– 30 minutes meditation
– 10 minutes of gratitude
– 10 minutes of stretching
– 100 burpees
– Cold shower

The Benefits of Humility

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I recently gave a public talk at Open Door in Montreal which is a weekly event for inmates, ex-inmates and community members, hosted by Communitas, an organization that supports the successful reintegration of those who have spent time in prison.
I spoke about humility and the importance of cultivating humility personally, in relationships and in business.
I shared about my own challenges with humility, practices I use to cultivate humility and some of the practical benefits of humility for relationships, organizational culture and mental health.
Here are some highlights:
– Humility typically increases trust and improves communication and relationships. It is an invitation for more open, mature dialogue.
– In romantic relationships where both partners demonstrate humility there are better psychological and physiological outcomes such as less stress and lower blood pressure. This makes sense because reactivity, misunderstandings, conflict all can lead to stress.
– When leaders demonstrate and act as role models in demonstrating humility followers tend to trust them more and are more loyal.
– Humility is supportive of learning and leadership development. To learn we need to be a student which is essential to develop new skills and knowledge including being a more effective leader or communicator or parent.
– Humility contributes to better mental health and physical outcomes. Research suggests that people who have practices for developing humility have higher tendencies for forgivingness and patience and lower tendencies of negativity. It has also been demonstrated that humility can reduce stress and antisocial behaviour.

The Value of Being Lost

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Once walking on the street in Montreal I came across a homeless man who I met a few times before and I asked him how he was doing. He said, “I’m lost”, and he said it with tears welling up in his eyes and a confidence and vulnerability in his state of being that I’ll never forget.

The confidence and sincerity in his answer moved me. It inspired me to face myself and be more honest with my own lostness at times.

As a man I’ve found it hard to admit when I’m lost to myself and to others. But I have learned that there is much value in being lost. I’ve learned that being lost is simply a part of life, business, creativity, and becoming a better version of myself.

If we never got lost, we would stay the same. If we never got lost, we wouldn’t come up with any new ideas. If we never got lost we might not question ourselves. If we never got lost we would become too arrogant.

It takes courage to be lost in Western culture. We value knowing, having a plan, and confidently directing our lives according to our perfect philosophies. Sometimes lostness arrives as a loving messenger inviting new possibilities for ourselves and our projects and we may come up with even better plans if we listen. In my own experience, it has been periods of lostness that have preceded some of the most meaningful and inspiring changes in my life and career.

Suffering and Pain

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I was recently on The Ridge Journal Podcast with guest host Zackary Paben co-founder of More Heart Than Scars and we discussed leadership, initiation, men’s health, among other things. More Heart Than Scars is a charity that helps those with physical, mental or emotional scars realize they can live beyond them through participating in adventures such as the Spartan Race.

This is a short excerpt about denial of suffering and pain from a longer form podcast that will be released in the near future.

Metaverse Escapism

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I was recently on The Ridge Journal Podcast with guest host Zackary Paben co-founder of More Heart Than Scars and we discussed leadership, initiation, men’s health, among other things. More Heart Than Scars is a charity that helps those with physical, mental or emotional scars realize they can live beyond them through participating in adventures such as the Spartan Race.

In this short clip from our interview we talk about the potential dangers of overindulging the metaverse and the importance of preserving authentic community and human connection.

Privilege

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I was recently on The Ridge Journal Podcast with guest host Zackary Paben co-founder of More Heart Than Scars and we discussed leadership, initiation, men’s health, among other things. More Heart Than Scars is a charity that helps those with physical, mental or emotional scars realize they can live beyond them through participating in adventures such as the Spartan Race.

This is a short excerpt about making best use of privilege versus criticizing ourselves and others for having it. 

Toxic Positivity

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In life and in leadership ‘there will be suffering, joy and intimacy’…

I was recently on The Ridge Journal Podcast with guest host Zackary Paben co-founder of More Heart Than Scars and we discussed leadership, initiation, men’s health, among other things. More Heart Than Scars is a charity that helps those with physical, mental or emotional scars realize they can live beyond them through participating in adventures such as the Spartan Race.

This is a short excerpt about exaggerated positivity from a longer form podcast that will be released in the near future. I talk about intimacy with pain.

 

Suffering and Vitality at Work

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To what degree can you include your suffering in your work?

If you can’t include it you are likely far less impactful than you could be.

In Buddhism, there is a deep understanding that suffering exists, period. There is no way around suffering there is only more skillful means of how to be with suffering and to serve others who suffer. Suffering has to do with the fact of being human and all that that brings.

In our work lives there is also suffering. And there is suffering in other areas of our lives that influences our work. When we fixate on overly positivistic paradigms of work and professional life we cut ourselves off, not only from our legitimate and inevitable suffering, but from the wealth of vitality and power that when appropriately shared and harnessed can have an immense impact on our work and those we work with.

One of the truths of suffering is that it’s not possible to maintain images and overly perfected or controlled projections of culture. Dissociation in any form naturally leads to suffering. I believe this is one of the biggest issues we have to deal with in our present day work culture which emphasizes personal brands, abstract concepts of impact, and hyper-individuality as a result of the expansive creative freedom technology has brought us.

Several months ago one of my best friends died. He held a significant place in my personal, communal and work life and I had to begin facing, metabolizing and integrating the loss of his presence in my life. Facing his death naturally lead me to listen on a deeper level to the fact of my own inevitable death and what this meant for living now and all that I am invested in. This loss also pushed me to include the perspective of death more in my day to day life and moment to moment interactions, especially at work.

When you are grieving professional contexts can feel like they are the last place you want to be with your grief and they often lack capacity to know what to do with someone’s grief. Grief is for the forest, the counselor’s office, or for the confines of your privacy at home.

At some point this year during my own grieving I began, when it felt appropriate, to talk more about my own grief. I included it in conversations, in presentations, and in my coaching work. What this did was actually energize aspects of my work more and it gave permission to colleagues to embody more emotional freedom as well. The grief itself became a creative engine that could impact relevant contexts and conversations when I simply refused to suffer alone and come out of the dark.

When we forget or deny that suffering exists we decide usually unconsciously and with a lot of collective support to not include quite alive aspects of our existence. Suffering is alive, very alive, and it’s usually what deepens us into our human path and purpose. So we go on pretending we are on the path especially in work contexts when we’re not even close.

Whether you are a coach, facilitator, or leader please don’t forget to include reality in your conversations, your cultures, and your missions. People are suffering around you and there are ways to include and harness this fact. Have check-ins at meetings, include your own vulnerability when timely and appropriate, and check-in with people that seem to have checked out. Invite the creative power of suffering to create change, to create more safety, to burn through unconscious individual and cultural habits, and to create new norms and possibilities.

Work is not always nice. It is not always glowing. But it is certainly purposeful. And purpose can only really be found having, sharing and creating from the aliveness of our human experience.

Right Action: Marrying Integrity & Success

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One of the biggest challenges for most executives is locating, discerning, and actualizing right action amidst the complexity of their role, agreements, culture, and evolving context. Right action refers to coherent, clear, committed action. We all know when we are taking a right action and we all struggle to do it as well.

We struggle because in highly complex environments there are many power struggles, competing agendas, influences, unconscious agreements, and ultimately our livelihood security is on the line as well as our social currency. Our actions determine us and so regardless of what actions we take and who they please or don’t please, our so called brand is being made–for better or for worse.

But as executives we must challenge ourselves with the question: who and ultimately what do we serve? If we do not ask this question, we will be far more likely to be overwhelmed and compromised by the context we are in. We need a rudder, one stronger than even the potential temporal existence of our role and even organization. This purposefulness has the power to discern right action amidst complexity and even chaos.

In my decade of experience working with executives everyone struggles with this issue of right action and there is likely no end to it. Why? Because clearly our contexts are constantly evolving as are we.

If our path of action, and success, does not align to our deepest integrity we know on some level we have not actually “won”. Someone or something did, but not the thing we serve. To marry integrity and success is to embark on a never ending journey of actualization amidst complexity. And right action requires commitment, focus and attention. It requires practice.