“All Seasons Leaders” - Fall 2019 Leadership Team
By: Emily Unwin
Molly and Lucy had big fall semesters. For those new to what leadership team (LT) is, Ruby and Maggie offer space for two team members to deepen their yoga practice, inquiry, and meditation work within the structure of weekly meetings. Plus, the LT members get their own team of Shakti teachers and front desk staff to guide and connect with.
And, like I said, Molly and Lucy have been moving through a lot of work in their personal lives.
To paint you a picture, this interview took place at Bishop Park on the one sunny day we’d had all week. Molly came straight from taking the GRE for the second time. The first go-round, Molly hadn’t gotten the score she wanted, so she went back for another try. She didn’t get better results, and she showed up to the interview and shared how it felt.
“It’s fresh. I hate how something like this controls everything else. It didn’t go as planned, whatever, but I have something else on the schedule.” I said, It’s frustrating, right? When something like this happens. Because, as a leader, you can’t really slow down. Like today, you can’t really stop to feel the disappointment. I asked Molly, does it feel like everything’s out of control?
She responded, “I haven’t labeled how I feel about it yet, but it feels like I’m nothing but a percentile. And not a good one.”
I’ve felt that. Like I’m nothing more than a number, a face, a number on the scale, a letter grade. Feeling like I’m not seen as a real person. Or I’m seen, but only as the labels I’ve given myself: You’re not enough, not smart enough, not capable enough. It’s a shitty way to feel.
“I know [the GRE] doesn’t mean all or nothing, but it feels like I’m limited now.” (Molly blows her nose). “Sorry, that’s gross.”
I asked Molly if she wanted to reconvene at another time for the interview, and she said no. “We need to do it.”
Pretty much, that sums up the whole post. An All Seasons Leader = “We need to do it,” so we will. Let’s lean in, even though I feel like shit right now. Being a leader means showing up when we feel vastly unprepared, when there isn’t enough time or space to be present to who or what you’re leading. Molly showing up, in tears, but ready to commit to presence, is a very poignant example. She didn’t have to show up today. But she did.
Going into the interview, I thought about the past year about how much transition Molly and Lucy are still going through. All they’ve learned about themselves through transitions, like graduating, moving homes, shifting coping skills, dealing with relationship trials. How have Lucy and Molly continued to show up for the team even when they’re still human beings? What’s going on, and how is that making it harder to show up?
Molly says, “Balancing personal life with leading a team... It’s hard when you don’t feel like you’re showing up with 110%. In September, I felt like I wasn’t showing up how I wanted, like taking classes for feedback or participating on Slack. Because of the way I like to do things, be as a person, that felt very inauthentic. Like I wasn’t doing enough. Or putting in enough effort. But I felt like I was doing everything I could. I had a conversation with Ruby about it, and she said, ‘You can’t just quit. That’s the whole point of being in this role. Even if you’re not showing up 110%. This is still the role you play. Really, no one is checking off a list of you not meeting these standards. It’s all internal.’”
September for Molly: What was going on that made her feel like she couldn’t be here?
“Relationship stuff. Health stuff. The GRE, applying for schools. Feeling overwhelmed with all aspects of my own life, and that I had overcommitted professionally.”
So what had to change? In order to not quit, in order to keep showing up?
“I had to keep moving. Keep getting up and doing what’s on the schedule every day. Even if I didn’t feel like I could give 110%, 85% was okay. Being more compassionate with myself.” (Versus an all or nothing.) “Expressing it and saying it aloud helped a lot,” Molly adds. “Expressing how I was feeling.”
Instead of letting shame fester, Molly decided to talk about it. Just like she did for the interview, showing up, ready to talk about how she felt about her GRE scores. “When times come up and I feel like I’m inadequate, it makes me want to disappear and not be engaged with anything,” Molly says. “It makes me want to hide. But I know that’s not who I am; it’s shame. I can’t do that. I have to keep moving.”
Keep talking, instead of closing up and shutting away. I know for me, when I vocalize my fears, they lose all their power. Molly coming here and sharing with us that she fears not doing well on the GRE is going to derail her future: That’s a fear, not her reality. Her vocalizing her fear takes the shame out of it, which is bold and brave, courageous. And she knows, has always known, that numbers have nothing to do with worth.
Lucy’s challenges this semester looked more like a shifting philosophy, one that changed the way she reviewed recovery. And herself. Lucy and I had talked in previous meetings about how challenging it can be integrating who we were in the past and choices we made with who we are now. In a staff meeting, Lucy discussed how she’d been feeling like the skills and tools she’d used for processing in the past had stopped working. In order to get the full picture of the challenges she has faced, and how she’s been an all-seasons leader, it’s important to talk about where she’s transitioning from. And what sort of tools she’s learning about and growing out of.
“I was thinking about this last night while reading through 19 voices,” Lucy shared. “My journey... I don’t want it to take away from someone else's. Just because NA and AA (Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous) don’t mesh with me... I don’t want to discredit it just in case it worked for someone else. Because my whole first year of my sobriety synced in with NA/AA perfectly.”
Lucy and I had never sat down to talk explicitly about rehab and recovery, and she spent the next hour outlining her past, her drive to start rehab, and how yoga created a whole new door into how she could experience her life. There’s so much power behind her story, but for the purposes of this post, on what it means to be a leader during challenge, during transition, I’ll focus on what philosophical changes Lucy has gone through in the past few months.
Which starts with where she came from: NA and AA. “Both use 12 step programs,” Lucy explained. “The steps are used to maintain sobriety and cleanliness for really anything, but specifically alcohol and drugs. The 12 steps are really good, logical. But that’s not what felt sticky to me. It was more of the underlying principles. So, when I would go to meetings after my first year, I would feel this disconnect. Because I wanted to stay clean and sober, but I didn’t want to have to do the same things every single day just to feel like a normal person. For example, anytime I’m feeling like I need to make a decision, I don’t want to feel the need to call my sponsor before I’m allowed to make a decision about my life. I got hung up on the language they would use, too, like, ‘If I’m left to my own devices, I’ll mess it up.’ It’s a disempowering way to look at things.”
For Lucy, that meant pulling away from the groups. It meant deciding that she needed something different. She says, “When I started disconnecting, when I would reach out to people, the kind of advice I would get would be, ‘This is the time you need to be in a meeting. You must be close to a relapse, or, Are you still spiritually connected?’ It wasn’t the kind of response I wanted. But, and, those responses serve a purpose, in the bigger picture, because that is typically how it starts. I’ve seen it happen. You get disconnected from the work of it, and things start slipping. It’s not so much the program but me and my mentality. I knew I wasn’t in trouble feeling like that.”
For Lucy, a big part of her shift was teacher training. “Teacher training was a huge part of it. Going into a room of 45 people, none of them identifying as an addict or alcoholic, and being able to identify with all of them. It’s not because I’m an addict, it’s because I’m a human. It really did something. I felt normal again. That separateness was smaller.”
I asked Lucy, Do you identify as an addict?
“No. But I feel like the idea of attaching an ‘I am’ statement like that is so disempowering. The body reacts to what you’re saying about it. There’s no pride in saying that in my body. To say that stirs up shame. I identified that way at first because that’s what I was told to do. I don’t anymore.
Now, I go to a meeting, and I say, ‘I’m Lucy, and I’m grateful to be sober.’ I replace it with something true, factual, and that I’m proud of.”
Like I mentioned, this feels like a small section, a glimpse into what Lucy has learned about herself in these past few months. How much shift has happened behind the scenes and about the work she’s put in to create a life that she’s proud of and in line with what she believes, while still engaging with AA meetings and creating her own path to recovery.
Molly, too, adjusting to transition and deciding that her future might have some unexpected twists and turns. That the people in her life might shift, too. That things she didn’t feel ready for are now knocking at her door. (Like teacher training!) :)
Leading, while still being human, means not being afraid to change our minds, to show up anyway, to stand up for what we believe in. It means not quitting, even when our foundation crumbles.
