Ever on & on

There are things you expect to tire you out, to wear you down, as you work through the days and the years.

The hours when they run long.

The push to meet deadlines.

The intensity of deliverables with high pressure outcomes, like the grant that keeps you and a few or dozens others employed.

Then there are the things no one seems to mention. Not until you’re in it. And even then, only in sacred spaces—the brief confessional of connection. Where maybe you let the mask slip. Where maybe the mentor, the confidante shows a crack so you can too.

The social drain of “stage” presence.

The fatigue following facilitation.

The emotional labor of the empathetic. Of being present for others in their fears and anxieties—even as you hold your own closely.

The tension of holding authenticity, awareness, and reassurance in uncertain times.

But there is something else. There has to be for you to persist. To keep coming back, despite the tax.

The satisfaction of success, or even just a heartfelt “well done.”

The privilege of trust.

The courage of connection.

The knowledge—or at the very least hope—that you showed up in a way that let someone release a little bit of their load.

Think of the a blade. The tool that’s most effective when sharp. The process to create that state requires shaving layers from an edge. Sometimes the friction that seems like it’s wearing you down is actually making you ready for what’s ahead.

This month I wrapped up 5 books and finished my first audiobook listen! Here’s the rundown.

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

Harari is a master at telling compelling stories over the long arc of history. I mean, who’d have thought a chapter entitled “Documents” would be so fascinating? Harari positions information flow and control as a central thread of human history, from establishing the possibility of far flung kingdoms to democracy to dictatorships. He pushes back again the techno-optimistic view that more information accessibility should be an unfettered benefit, and it’s hard to argue against him as we’ve seen things play out in recent years. I admit, I was not prepared for the turn to Democracy & Dictatorships—especially as it read so presciently of things we’re experiencing now. Harari paints many possible futures for humanity with the rise of AI, and it should create some urgency for policymakers and the public to create some guardrails.

Superbloom by Nicholas Carr

This was a fascinating and poignant read, and an incredible pairing to read while listening to Nexus. Carr uses a desert Superbloom event that yielded an influencer overrun as a snapshot to illustrate how communication technologies can drive us apart. But he goes back further—and deeper—tackling how each communications breakthrough brought optimism, fear & challenges. He highlights how media change the very ways we communicate, not just technologically but linguistically & socially too. He also shows how slowly & poorly our regulatory bodies adapt to new modes of communication. Carr tells how every leap forward was heralded by some as the invention that would lead to utopia, yet the increased speed and reduced friction often has the opposite effects. (Fun fact: Margaret Mead proposed a network for communication that sounded an awful lot like the internet. The tech just hadn’t arrived yet.)

Tools of Systems Thinkers by Albert Rutherford

This one fell a bit flat for me. It offers some useful concepts/tools, but the format and writing didn’t quite land.

If you want an intro to systems thinking, go for Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems — one of my favorite books of all time, period.

Leading Below the Surface: How to Build Real (and Psychologically Safe) Relationships with People Who Are Different from You by LaTonya Wilkins

Wilkins positions authentic, supportive, deep relationships as the key to transformative leadership. And I don’t think she’s wrong. She sets up a framework for REAL leadership—relatable, equitable, aware, loyal. She also makes a case that this type of leadership is foundational to improving equity and belonging in the workplace.

Everybody Needs an Editor: The Essential Guide to Clear & Effective Writing by Melissa Harris and Jenn Bane

A quick guide to improving your writing and avoiding common pitfalls. Though it mostly focuses on professional communications, it also touches on the personal as well. It will be a nice little reference book for my team and me.

Powered by Me: From Burned Out to Fully Charged at Work and in Life by Neha Sangwan

This is almost a how-to guide to being human, when you’ve eliminated so many boundaries that you are skidding towards exhaustion and burnout. It covers a lot of ground, from sleep and movement to core values and purpose. There are lots of assessments and worksheets to help along the way, and some powerful stories too. I was familiar with many of the key ideas, but often authors focus on one aspect, not the full spectrum of how we gain or drain energy. Sangwan trained as a physician and also brings in concepts from functional and Ayurvedic medicine. The latter admittedly sets off my skeptic senses, but I’m trying to keep an open mind.

This Is Strategy by Seth Godin

I somehow got plugged into Godin’s work several years ago, and I’ve admired how he can mold key insights into pithy, powerful posts. This Is Strategy is brilliant & timely. It’s about systems & time & projects & people. It offers repeated reminders of simple questions that are so often lost as we’re plowing ahead: Who’s it for? What’s it for? A great read regardless of whether you’re new to or experienced in strategy work.

Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

Burkeman structured this book as a deliberately paced journey. Divided into 4 sections, each 7 chapters just a few pages in length, the idea is to read a single chapter each day and build towards confronting, even embracing, the finitude of life. (If you grew up in a religious household as I did, you might feel some similarity with the daily devotional.)

I chose to move through this at the recommended pace. I also elected to write a brief reflection/reaction after each reading. Having just read Four Thousand Weeks at the end of the year, the concepts felt familiar, with some new insights & anecdotes, but slowing down the pace lended deeper personal engagement with them. Highly recommend!

Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes by Sunita Shah

IMO, this should be on everyone’s reading list, now more than ever. Shah trained as a physician and is now a researcher in organizational psychology investigating influence & what drives us to comply. She lays out a definition of defiance, not as a lack of obedience but of rejecting demands & actions that don’t align to our core values. Shah presents a framework for defiance (a true no) paralleling that of consent (a true yes) which she clearly distinguishes from compliance (going along with something without, e.g., the knowledge or autonomy to make an informed decision). She also highlights how defiance is an action, not a trait, that exists along a spectrum. Not all defiance looks like rebellion (and indeed rebellion isn’t always defiance). I learned a lot of science, and this book is changing my thinking in decision making and showing up in the world.

Resilience That Works: Eight Practices for Leadership and Life by Marian Ruderman, Cathleen Clerkin & Katya Fernandez

This comes from the Center for Creative Leadership and is a quick, practical read. It tackles the topic of resilience and what we can do as part of our everyday to help us better respond to the chronic and acute stresses of work and the rest of life. There’s a lot here that I already practice, but there were good nudges and reminders of areas I could tap into more. It ends with an exercise to help you get very tactical in growing resilience practices. Definitely valuable if you find yourself saying you don’t have time for such practices.

Subtract by Leidy Klotz

Loved this book! Klotz has a fascinating background—former pro soccer player, trained in architecture & engineering, collaborating with psychologists & other distant fields. He’s an exemplar of the interdisciplinary researcher, and he’s a fantastic writer to boot. The central premise is that, in attempts to fix or improve things, humans overwhelmingly try adding & are incredibly prone to ignoring opportunities to remove something, even when it would deliver objectively better results. Klotz lays out the driving factors—biological, psychological, societal—and ways to nudge us towards considering subtraction. This isn’t about minimalism. It’s about learning to recognize different ways to change systems.

This Ordinary Stardust by Alan Townsend

Wow. This was devastatingly beautiful. Townsend is an ecosystem ecologist, and the book is a remarkable blend of science communication & memoir. He draws on several scientific fields to tell a story of a changing world, which becomes a doorway to his personal story of moving through the world with trauma and grief. The writing is polished, but Townsend doesn’t sand down the edges of his experience or emotion. It’s a brilliant read that cuts deeply.

“The work isn’t up to the standard.”

But what precisely is the “standard”? For most professional outputs, there are layers.

Requirements

Requirements are the base and the easiest layer to understand—even when they don’t make sense.

These are the parameters you need to follow to keep from getting your work kicked back immediately. Think page limits and format constraints for a grant application or manuscript submission. Requirements will (or at least should) be clearly documented—written down and posted somewhere the relevant parties can find them.

Requirements are sometimes tedious and seemingly pointless, but you follow them anyway because they’re required. Occasionally I’ll see an academic (typically a senior man) say he pays no mind to journal requirements and submits the document formatted to his liking. Maybe that’s true, and he gets away with it. Ultimately my opinion is: Ignore requirements at your own peril.

Implicit Rules

Me nem nesa. It is known.

Implicit “rules” are the guidelines that nearly everyone seems to follow even though there’s probably no or little documentation. Some will feel like intuition or common sense to many, like using a formal tone in reports. They’re in part embedded in education and training. Other elements you learn on the job. And sometimes you can just google it.

These standards and norms are the widely(?) accepted/acknowledged expectations for how things look and feel. Some of this varies with the product. You’re not going to expect the same level of refinement from meeting minutes or a quick email to a peer as you do from a grant proposal or a report to executive leadership. Expectations will also vary by field, sector, and even organization.

The problem with implicit rules, of course, is that they’re implicit. They’re not written down, and any one person’s knowledge and understanding of them are going to depend on their own path, experience, and past and present. Yet many people don’t realize the difference between “this is how it’s done” and “this is how it’s done here.” Failure to adhere to such norms can secure one labels such as “sloppy” or “unprofessional”. Unknown hidden norms can also hold people back in their careers, for example, apparently taking too much or too little credit for their contribution to a project

Norms are part of professional culture. They can be useful, by establishing typical approaches to communication or interaction that can help us get to the same place faster. But I think often we underestimate how universal the implicit rules are and sometimes overindex on adherence to them for no good reason.

Preference

Is it wrong, or is it just not “mine”?

This is, for me at least, the most challenging. We each have our own way of doing things. And when you’ve been at it for a while, you can begin to internalize your way as “the” way. Your preference can become the standard that you expect from others, and every other way is “wrong.” Or if not wrong, less good.

Of course your way is what you’re used to. You might have reasonable justifications for some elements—this is how we make clear that we’re meeting requirements, that expedites review by the project lead. But sometimes your way is simply what you like, and it might not even be the best way for your audience, colleagues, or clients. But if you view your way as the standard, then you may miss out on other ways of approaching and potentially improving the work.

Managing the layers of “the standard”

The problem with “the standard” mirrors other issues in the workplace (and the world). The standard is rarely enforced equally, and it’s disproportionately used against those in groups that have been historically marginalized in the workplace. What we can do about “the standard” depends on how much power we have and the risks we’re able/willing to take.

Here’s my general strategy:

Requirements: Follow them.

There may be occasions to advocate for an exception or change, usually through very specific channels or mechanisms. Federal funders, for example, solicit feedback on proposed changes and policy implementation. If you have a group (e.g., a professional society or center) to work with, all the better.

Implicit rules: Learn them. Understand them.

If you’re a manager or established contributor, communicate them. Take the guesswork out as you can. Offer the rationale. Ask yourself, “How important is it?” In digging into the what and why, you might find that there’s a better way to do it and that you have the authority or influence to change it.

Preference: Examine your inclination to change it.

Maybe you have a preference that makes it easier for you to pull information. Maybe you need to make many voices sound as one, and you’re the one who gets to decide what that sound will be.

But if the work is clear, complete, and accurate, if it’s appropriately suited to its audience, maybe it’s time to let go of how you would do it and leave space for others to develop their voice and style.

I felt the unease and heaviness in my body from the start of the day. I just wasn’t quite sure what it was. Anxiety about work? Or the world? Irritation about a situation? Or with myself?

I did something unusual for me. I didn’t try to push it away. I just let it be. I felt waves of frustration that it had intruded on my day, but it carried the weight of something important. So I waited.

Eventually it moved from shadow to light. This was grief. Unbidden, unexpected. You see, I lost my father last April. I moved through the experience, feeling my reactions were somewhat muted for such a life changing loss. But this was the second time I’d lost a parent. I knew that grief moves in its own way and time.

And now here it is. No special anniversary, no precipitating event, that one might want to share with a parent. Just everyday life. A few days ago, on a run, I saw someone from a distance who looked like my dad. Not the image that comes to mind when I think of him, but as he was in the last couple of years. I don’t recall having that experience after my mom’s death. My breath caught. I had to pause, to look out across the water, back turned until this stranger passed.

Was it that single moment that triggered this wave of grief? Or was it grief in the shadows that made me attuned to the similarities of this passerby?

Often I hear us (myself included) speak of grief as a force—hitting us, crashing into us, overwhelming us. In this frame, it’s water, an ocean—uncontrollable, untamable. Threatening to pull us under, drown us, if we can’t escape to the shallows or the shore.

But what if grief is something else entirely? What if it’s that still, small voice trying to bring something important into view?

Yesterday afternoon, as I had pieced together the identity and source of my emotion, I had a preplanned meeting with a peer mentor. My wont is to compartmentalize the personal and the professional, despite knowing how much each can affect the other. But I chose, at my mentor’s invitation, to share more about what was going on. He reminded me that feelings arise from somewhere. They’re calling our attention, maybe for a reason, and maybe we should take a moment (or a few) to be with the emotion and see where it’s pointing.

Early this morning, a part of me wanted to just retreat back into sleep. But another part called me forward to my movement practice. A bit out of character, I felt the need for something that specific for this moment and quickly found that session: yoga for grief. It was a gentle practice, staying close to the ground, bringing focus to breath and the heart space. Today I felt the connection of this practice to my inner stay profoundly. The session progressed then settled into child’s pose. Oh the beautiful resonance that an insight about grief for my father should come at this point. As my forehead rested on the earth, a concrete thought emerged from the abstract emotion: The people who always held unconditional for you are gone. Can you ever be enough for those who remain?

This surprised me. I’d never felt or thought this, at least not so clearly, before. But I knew instantly this wasn’t extracted from overthinking. It had come to mind effortlessly. This had been sitting somewhere deep inside my psyche, unrecognized.

But then an inner voice asked: Is that true?

I understand immediately that it was not. I brought to mind my partner, my brother, dear friends. I know I am enough, as I am. Perhaps this fear comes from the worry and stress of proving myself in different arenas of my life. But I am not alone, and I am enough.

As I completed my practice and put things away, I thought of how we talk of sitting with grief. I am one who needs to move—I thought, at first, through grief, but then saw it’s moving with grief.

I return to this idea that we so often view grief as something to stand against, to endure, to wait out. But maybe there’s another way. What if grief isn’t an enemy, a foe to reckon with? What if grief is a companion, a guide? Not one we invite in, but one that is there at the necessary time, even when we’re not consciously aware of the need. After all, it is within us, a part of us, and to fight against it, to disdain it, is to turn against ourselves. That’s not to say we ought to keep grief close, cling to it. Grief can be heavy and uncomfortable and painful. But maybe we don’t need to shun it when it comes. Because it helps us cope with the hard certainty that someone or something is gone. And it can shine a light on lies and truths we need to see.