This is a hard week. We’ve seen so much pain coming out of Minnesota and across our country.
In the midst of it I’m doing a two-part series for a law firm on Leading with Empathy, a keynote on Trauma-Informed Leadership for top administrators at a major university, and a bar association panel on community trauma and individual healing.
I’m trying to find the right combination of words and silences, of inspiration and holding space, to help these leaders wend their way through the impossible decisions they’re facing, the upheaval they’re confronting, and the pain they’re seeing and experiencing themselves, so that we can all find a way forward in this time.
Because one thing I know is that it won’t help if we stop talking. If we shut down. If we harden our hearts.
I have a coaching client who cries sometimes in session, and then apologizes for it.
“I don’t mind the tears,” I say. “I get a lot more worried about people who don’t cry at all.” It’s when we lose our empathy, our humanity–that hardening of our hearts–that’s what really frightens me.
We often think of leadership as emotional control: staying calm, keeping things contained. But quiet and calm don’t always equal peace.
Sometimes, noise and outrage and pain are what is needed to get us to a new stage. If you’ve attended a birth, you know this is true. Yelling can be necessary, sometimes. Quiet is scary, sometimes.
Which makes me wonder whether what we need right now is more courage to face each other in our pain. More willingness to hear the anger and the outrage, the grief and the fear. In each other, in ourselves.
More willingness to stay with each other. To say, I don’t know the answer, but I am here and I will listen as hard as I can. I will keep trying to be honest with you, too.
This world is not getting easier. It’s getting more complex, tumultuous, and dangerous every day. And one thing I know is that we need both our minds and our hearts to make our way through it.
I don’t know yet if I’ll find the right words this week, but I will keep talking. Keep listening. Keep trying to connect. I hope you do, too.
2 Responses
“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear” Franklin D. Roosevelt
I have learned to Love the things most that I wish had not happen.
What punishments of God are not gifts?
It’s a gift to exist and with existence comes pain and suffering and there’s no escaping that. If you are grateful for your life which is a positive thing to do, not everyone is, I’m not always, we can’t pick and chose what we are grateful for. We have to be grateful for the good and the bad. With pain and suffering comes awareness of other people’s pain and suffering which allows us to bond with that other person. Allows us to have Empathy and Compassion for people, not just a situation.
Really beautiful, Kevin. Thanks for sharing that.