Fuel: Leadership, Crash, Burn, and Keep Going
In leadership, you do everything to elevate your team. Sometimes that looks like a work emergency when you're having a happy hour meeting with a colleague and you think you're going to have to bail. Most of the time it's celebrating their wins and helping them grow through their losses. I'm not a perfect leader, but I've been fortunate to learn from some great ones and some shitty ones. Yes, I have names in my head when I say both ends of that.
I do the task in front of me. If it's a meeting to strategize about the latest thing, if it's a maintenance issue to tend to in any sense, if it's a belligerent, entitled person, making mountains where there aren't any, I deal with it. People don't talk about this enough I think. My trauma history makes me bend with the chaos. My disability makes me adapt to whatever is happening. That combination allows me to pivot quickly. But, it comes with a cost.
Here I am on a Friday night, writing a forward of sorts to Monday's talk (no guarantees that this is a true forward to the talk). I'm doing that because sharing my story in a meaningful way almost always gets done after the work is done, after the parenting is done, after the looming questions and self doubt quiet just enough.
I deal with all of the things any leader does, what's the challenge in front of us today and long-term? How are my people doing and how can I support them? Is this decision in the best interest of the organization? And many other things like that. I also do that while navigating a physical disability and a body that's increasingly feeling the wear and tear of that life. I also do that while navigating around my trauma triggers (one of which is the cost of even admitting that I have trauma triggers).
I'm not alone in those things. Some of that is the price of leadership. You're working with people to achieve a mission or a goal of sorts. Some of that is what it is to manage life in the lens of trauma and disability. Doing those things congruently when no one (even myself) ever expected me to do all that I've done is the difference maker.
Many years ago, I spent the winter skiing, as a means of physical therapy. It was a dedicated skiing program for kids with disabilities, primarily cerebral palsy. I did this every winter for many years until I wanted to do something else on the weekends. The part that I'm going to share today is about guidance, and leadership.
I didn't learn to ski on my own. I had ski instructors for every one of those seasons. I'd spend the whole day with them, learning the best ways to do things on the mountain. They would guide, instruct, show, and coach. It was an early example in my life of what it means to have somebody lead you and guide you in training.
The thing that sticks out to me now, is that I can still articulate the lessons that they taught me even though I haven't been on a pair of skis in decades. That's how good coaching and leadership works. The stuff sticks with you. I use this example because those ski instructors were some of the earliest people to see my potential and in this case it was my physical potential on the skis. That is so unusual for me because my physical potential has always been a question mark with limitations. On the mountain, we weren't in the business of can't, we were in the business of how. For many years, I had this ski tip attachment that would help me make the pie angle for stopping and keep my skis from crisscrossing. That small innovation and adaptation that at the time required drilling holes in the ski tips and attaching an apparatus allowed me to excel at something that was seemingly beyond my reach. Years later, you could just buy a ski tip attachment that didn't require physical modification to the skis themselves.
At that time, whatever the task was on the mountain, I kept going until I got it. In some respect, that mindset has never changed. If you put something in front of me, no matter how big it seems, I will keep going sometimes to a fault. Here's why I think there should be more leaders with disabilities, not because it's going to benefit me further, although it would be nice to finally get the recognition that I've toiled for, but because having a disability requires you to adapt to a lot of things. Some might say it requires you to adapt to everything. When the design of the things around you and the environment you live in isn't suited to you and your abilities, you pretty much have no choice but to adapt. And being able to adapt is something that has to happen in leadership because things don't always go according to plan. In fact, they don't go according to plan a lot.
I adapted on the ski slopes and kept going and kept going until in my later years, I could ski the whole mountain without falling, now I can barely walk through some rooms and stay on steady feet. All these years later when I don't have the same level of balance and coordination that I did in my youth, that accomplishment is not lost on me. Today, I adapt differently.
There are drawbacks to my persistent style and burnout potential is high. It's really hard to rewire the idea of “have to” in the human psyche. For me, I have to keep going, I have to adapt, and I have to rise to the occasion, whatever that may be. I don't necessarily want to do any of that. What I want is to live a simple life where my basic needs are met. And I have to do anything but live simply in order to do that. That is a vicious irony that I'm not sure I'll ever escape.
I was having a conversation with someone recently and they were talking about not doing something before you were ready to do it, in the sense of being prepared for whatever the thing was, and my internal response was well, if I waited until I was ready to do things, I never would have done them. If I waited until I was ready to ski down the mountain, I never would have tried. If I waited until I was ready to climb mountains or repel off of them, I never would have tried. If I waited until I was ready to have a career, I'd still be living on assistance programs. If I waited until I was ready to change careers, it probably never would have happened. If I waited until I was ready to become a library director, I wouldn't have been one twice over and a third time as an interim. I take chances and I step up whenever and wherever I have to, to do the thing that is in front of me.
I have exceeded expectations that were set for me at a young age. I have obliterated them. I'm more successful than either of my parents ever were. That's not a knock on their professional accomplishments, it's an illustration of the fact that it wasn't expected for me to get even close to that. In my career, I have managed over 60 people. That's 60 people, many of whom are smarter than me, more talented than me, more creative than me, and have incredibly bright futures. I did that and I do that every day, navigating the challenges of my disability and my trauma triggers.
My disability and my trauma triggers actually provide me a tool for managing other people. That tool is compassion and empathy. I don't have a lot of compassion or empathy for myself, but I certainly do for the teams of people that I've led over the years. One of the things my ministry career gave me, even though it didn't work out, was a greater sense of meaning for human existence. I utilize that today in leadership, because I want to care more about the people who have to follow my leadership than I do about the outcomes that they provide. I have very specific expectations about customer service and the way people work. On the other hand, I leave a lot of space for their humanity. My goal is to always put the human before the task. Now, for my own peace of mind, I have to distance myself from attachments to the people I work with. That's largely due to my experience in ministry because I was so close with people that it hurt too much when it was over. I can't get that close to my team members anymore. And it's one of those things that I'm very aware of and want to be mindful of, knowing that it's connected to my wounds.
Everyone has leaders that guide them in some way shape or form. For me, it was my dad at one point, it was Jesus at another point, there were several mentors in ministry at some point, it was supervisors, colleagues, friends, therapists, gurus, and any other source of wisdom that I could glean. Today, I'm a leader, and I continue to learn how I can do that better because I do not believe that I will ever have all the answers about how to lead. I also believe that I will always have to work on managing the trauma triggers so that I can lead in a healthy way. I also believe that I will probably always have to overcome the self-doubt about being a leader with a disability. Over the years, I've gained a tremendous amount of confidence for what I bring to the table. My willingness to step up to the task in front of me regardless of what it is, lets me know that I'm doing something not everybody does. It's a whole lot easier to pass on responsibility than it is to take it.
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