Home and Hearth Reflections 2021

Midwinter is a time of quiet activity and contemplation. The new year may be noticeably brightening, but there is much time that must pass before the promise of Spring made by the longer days is fulfilled. To pass the time, crafters focus on their crafts, writers write, planners plan, and dreamers dream. 

We rest in the in-breath, the waiting period before the rush of preparations begin. It is a time for inward reflection on where we have been, what we want to bring with us from those places in our past, and where we want to go moving forward.

This seasonal festival is celebrated in a similar way. Those who celebrate Imbolg or Imbolc honor the Goddess Brighid whose many epithets include healing, creation, and transformation. Some celebrate Candlemas, which is a festival of lights commemorating purification and the growing of the bright half of the year. All of them center on the fire at the center of our lives—our hearth fire. 

During this time of pandemic, social distancing, working from home, and general isolation, it has been easy to take our hearths for granted. A single flame holding vigil through this liminal time between when we used to gather and when we will finally be able to gather again. 

We’ve been in this liminal between space for a full year now. A whole year has passed since we held open in person ritual here at The Prairie Home. We’ve watched from a distance (sometimes not a very far distance) as wildfires burned, as police brutally murdered yet more people of color, as the people protested such violence, as agents of hate used the chaos to pillage and destroy, as alt-right counterprotests culminated in a full coup attempt and storming of the capital, and as the acrimonious politics of our nation threatened the voting process that is the only voice we have left as We The People (flawed as access to the system may be).

And through it all, our hearth fires burned: our single lights representing each of our single lives, sitting alone in seeming darkness. Looking closely at one flame can blind us to what else is around us. If we take a step backwards and widen our perspective, we see that not only are we not alone, for there are many other flames, but we are all connected, held aloft on the arms of a strong and intricate candelabrum. Our hearths alone may feel small and lonely, like a single flame struggling to light up a room, but if we can focus on the connections we have to the other hearths around us, we can truly see the light we cast capable of lighting up the world. 

To add to your own celebration, please find Melissa Hill's beautiful prayer for the season on her blog at Patheos.com: Imbolc Prayer to the Heart of Fire.

Job Satisfaction & The Chemicals of Trust

Job satisfaction is rooted in the environment that the leader establishes. The leader can be the CEO, an executive, the manager, or a team leader--and this doesn't apply to only your money-earning job. Volunteer roles and nonprofit workspaces are just as sensitive to the workspace environment. 

A good leader isn’t concerned with title and importance, rather is focused on making a workplace environment in which the employees and volunteers feel safe and feel they belong. It’s a Circle of Safety in which we grow, learn, and become real assets to our teams. We feel secure in this circle and protected by our leader. We learn to trust and cooperate and to speak up without fear of repercussions. The building of trust within the group is essential. We learn to trust the leader because they are consistent, tell the truth, do not have their own secret agenda, and is always there to support and counsel us. In turn, we learn to trust each other and work together as a team. We emulate the qualities of the leader. However, if a member of the group, leader or peer, is caught in a lie or is exposed for self-centered actions, the trust begins to die on the vine.

Survival is not just an intellectual matter. There is a direct and involuntary physiological release of these chemicals brought on by internal as well as external stimulants. A leader with integrity and a focus on the experience of those they lead will facilitate the release of helpful chemicals:

• Endorphins. Endorphins mask physical pain and are the “high” we feel after exercise. 
• Dopamine. Dopamine causes the feeling of satisfaction we get with accomplishment. 
• Serotonin. Our bodies release serotonin when we receive recognition creating feelings of pride and success. 
• Oxytocin. Oxytocin leads to the best feeling of all: the feeling of human connection. Oxytocin creates intense feelings of safety and comfort. 

Leaders actually create safety and comfort in our workspaces through generosity and integrity. When a leader sacrifices for others, everyone—including the leader, the receiver, and the witnesses—receives a boost in oxytocin. The more oxytocin we have in our bodies, the more generous we want to be. The more generous we are, the more oxytocin we release, and the safer and more comfortable we feel. Oxytocin even increases our ability to solve problems.

When things get hard, our body also responds by releasing a stress chemical: cortisol. Cortisol is the fight or flight chemical in our body and serves to viscerally alert us to signs of danger. When we work or volunteer in a stressful environment, we end up with high levels of cortisol. When we have high levels of cortisol, we become too busy protecting ourselves to help others feel safe and secure. Worse, our bodies will continuously release cortisol even after the stress has abated, creating a long recovery and healing period for a team suffering from a lack of trust. 

Leaders can make the choice to start the cycle of healing by example and putting others’ needs before their own. Selfless leaders with integrity are paramount to job satisfaction and feelings of workspace security. Leaders who focus on their own personal safety and security (or personal gain alone) will be the downfall of a team, because the trust that is essential for success evaporates in the face of selfishness.  Leadership is not a rank or position. It is a decision. It is a choice. As leaders, all we need to do is look to the people around us and decide to place their well-being over our own. Let them go ahead of us at the potluck of life and, as a leader, decide to eat last to make sure everyone else has what they need before serving ourselves.

Focus

Turning to the dictionary for understanding “focus” leaves room for improvement to say the least. Focus as a noun is the center of interest or activity, the main focus of attention (i.e. focal point). Focus as a verb means to adapt to the prevailing level of light and become able to see clearly. We’ve read about mindfulness practices that teach us to focus on what’s in front of us, to “be here now” with what we are doing, but what more does focus have to teach us as a skill?

Imagine you have awakened in the middle of the night with an urgent need to use the restroom. When you open your eyes, the dark is comfortable. It is not difficult to navigate your way. In the restroom, you turn on the light, and for a moment, everything is blurry and not easy to see. You have to wait for your eyes to adjust in order to begin moving forward again. After you’ve washed your hands, you turn out the light, and once more, your ability to see is hindered until your eyes adjust. Then, you can return to your comfy bed and sleep the rest of the night away.

Taking the time to focus is an important part of seeing the right path to take. Unless we pause for a moment and allow the details to resolve into discernable shapes—the root cause, the immediate effects, the long-term effects, the stakeholders, etc., we won’t know how best to move forward. Focus is what gives us the ability to observe a situation from a new perspective and adjust accordingly. 

Here are some behaviors that can help you hone your ability to focus, to see clearly that which is in front of you, and to make good, informed decisions:

1. Get enough sleep and wake up early enough to plan your day. Every day is a new opportunity, and if you have armed yourself with the big picture, any last-minute adjustments you need to make to your schedule will not be emotionally draining.
2. Schedule “focus time” into your daily routine. Focus time is a time with no email or Teams or phones or text messages, so you can manage tasks that take more of your mental capacity. The average attention span for a single task is about 14 minutes. If you want to hone this skill, you must practice it! Start with 15-minute intervals and work up from there. 
3. Keep a list of your most important tasks (i.e. big rocks) and accomplish those first. This way, if you run short on time, you are not doing a less-than-stellar job on the important stuff.
4. Limit your information intake. Information fatigue is real. Take quiet time, just like focus time, to allow your brain to rest and restore your focus energy.
5. Reflect, remember, and regroup. At the end of the day, go back over your performance. Did you follow your schedule? Did you accomplish the goals you set for the day? Were you able to put forth your best efforts?

The first part of focus is clarity about how you feel, what you want to do, the pulse of those around you, and the potential obstacles in your path. The second part is letting go of other things you also want to do, whether that means putting them off until later or removing them from your to-do list altogether. As Steve Jobs said, “Deciding what NOT to do is as important as deciding what TO do.”

Focus on your inner self. Expand your focus to include those around you. Expand your focus even further to include the systems and environment around you. And let everything else fade away. From here, you will be your most successful and effective self.

Holding Space for Curiosity

Ever heard someone say, “Curiosity killed the cat?” The original form of this saying was actually, “Care killed the cat,” attributed to William Shakespeare in the 1500s (Much Ado About Nothing circa 1958). It was meant as a warning against excessive worry and sorrow for others. Since its original use, it has come to be understood as a warning against “unnecessary investigation” or trying something new. 

This change in social understanding of the well-known aphorism is unfortunate. The inquisitive minds are often the ones that make great discoveries and find innovative ways to make the world around us better. Sadly, we tend to foster a negative mindset regarding experimentation and seek efficiency at the expense of exploration and innovation.

Here are some tips to help create a more hospitable environment for curiosity in our lives:

1. Model Inquisitiveness. Encourage others to curiosity by asking questions—and not just the simple or obvious ones. Ask questions like: What was your favorite part of that [movie/book/meeting]? Why? What part wasn’t what you expected?  What ideas do you have to make it better?
2. Practice Brainstorming. Especially in a group, create space for everyone’s ideas to be heard without judgment. It takes a lot of trust to think out loud, and the main barrier to doing it is fear of ridicule. 
3. Emphasize Learning Goals. It is an unfortunate fact that humans learn best through failure. As such, we tend to favor the safe and known ways of doing things with a focus on the results. As the old saying goes, “The journey is more important than the destination.” Help others set goals without a clear journey, even if the destination is outlined well. We need space to try new things and a soft place to land.
4. Normalize Expanding Interests. Here’s one: Subject Matter Expert. We like having go-to people for specific skillsets, and we tend to ask the same people for the same types of help, because we know they do it. But, what else are our SME’s interested in? Typecasting those around us leads to under-stimulation and can actually fuel burnout. 
5. Be Attentive to the World Around You. Sometimes, it helps to stand back and look at the big picture and just take it in. Wonder at the ways things move, the chain reactions of causes and their effects, the simple things you may have missed before. Let all those pieces flow in mists of billowing chaos in your mind until something new takes shape. 

Curiosity is important not only because of its ties to innovation but because it is the foundation of competence. A penchant for seeking new experiences, trying new things, and being open to change increases the depth and breadth of what we learn from what we do. 

We are good at being curious on vacation. We stroll through the unfamiliar halls of museums. We browse through little shops off the beaten path. We play dinner roulette on road trips and eat at whatever fun place we are near when we get hungry. But what about in our everyday lives? When was the last time you took a different route to work? How many times a week do you have the same thing for lunch? Above all else, seek out novelty and new challenges to extend and exercise your capacity to explore, to learn, and to live a fuller life. 

The Good Follower

Personal development programs tend to focus much of their efforts on leadership principles, an important aspect to developing the individual self. Developing a good team, however, relies on fostering the skill of “followership.” It’s straightforward: followership is the ability to take direction and be part of a team to deliver what is expected of the group, department, or area. 

Being labeled an “excellent follower” has been a backhanded compliment signaling an individual’s ineptitude when it comes to leadership potential. Because of this, many modern leaders fear being labeled as a good follower and seek opportunities to assert their dominance. In order to destigmatize the notion of following, this is a skill we need to showcase as leaders. When we practice following others, we are leading by example and showing those around us how to work together for the good of the team instead of the glory of the individuals.

Here are eight qualities of a Good Follower:

1. Judgment—Followers must learn to take directions, but they have an underlying obligation only to do so when the direction is ethical. We must gain a level of discernment that helps us distinguish between directions we don’t agree with and directions that are wrong.
2. Work Ethic—Good followers are good workers, diligent and motivated, committed and with good attention to detail. Being a follower means you were trusted to complete a task. Failing to do so, for whatever reason, will hurt your reputation as a leader and break trust with your peers and leaders.
3. Competence—Followers must know their limits and only agree to complete tasks for which they are competent to perform. Asking for help is a strength, not a weakness.
4. Honesty—Respect and politeness are important, but it is more important still that the follower also provide open and honest feedback to their leaders. Good leaders are grateful for constructive feedback, and good followers are not afraid to speak the truth as they see it.
5. Courage—Honesty takes courage. Following someone else takes courage. A good follower faces their fears to fully engage in the work.
6. Discretion—“Loose lips sink ships” is a favorite saying from WWII. Talking about work inappropriately or to an inappropriate audience undermines the teamwork and reputation of the entire enterprise.
7. Loyalty—Obligation to the enterprise is essential in a follower, not obligation to an individual leader. It is paramount to the success of the group that each member has their loyalty aligned properly. When our loyalty lies with the enterprise (or the member), it is easier for us to set aside petty differences and focus on what is truly important as the work evolves.
8. Ego Management—Followers are team players who embrace the fullness of the concept. They have good interpersonal skills. Their performance positively impacts the goal achievement, and their teammates know they are not doing the work for personal recognition or promotion.
9. Being a Good Follower might feel like placing yourself in the shadow of leadership, but strong followers are essential to success. Without them, our workplace suffers from poor work ethic, bad morale, organizational confusion, and overall poor performance. The most important step to revamping workplace culture is for our leaders to model strong followership as well as strong leadership qualities. 

Vozza, S. (2018). How to be a good follower (and why it’s a skill you need). Career Evolution. 

The Great Conjunction: December 21, 2020

Science: Conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn

Astrology: The Waves of Change

We’ve been living in a Capricorn world, one that is defined by top-down hierarchies, for a decade now, and this year, on December 21, Saturn and Jupiter will be in alignment at exactly 0 degrees Aquarius. (That probably sounds like a lot of new-agey babel, for those of you who don’t follow astrology, but hear me out.) 

You see, there is a limit to how far a top-down hierarchy can go. At some point, it hits the bottom and then has nowhere else to go. they eventually outlive their purpose. Where we are right now is the place where the Saturn-Capricorn Hierarchy has peaked--at the very bottom of our social structures--and from here, it feels like everything is falling apart. 

Imagine the planets as magnets hurling through the cosmos. The current state of things has us oriented with the positive at the bottom, where the most friction and pressure is, and the negative at the top. As the current model approaches the new model with the negative on the bottom, the forces are pushing against one another, refusing to adhere, repelled apart by their charge. With this alignment, auspiciously occurring on Yule this year, we will flip the Capricorn “magnet,” placing the negative force at the bottom, and everything will snap into place. By the time Winter Solstice has arrived, we will feel the chaos begin to abate. The perspective from the top down becomes more and more narrow as it approaches the bottom. The perspective from the bottom grows wider as it reaches for the stars. Jupiter brings vision, and Saturn brings implementation. And with the power at the bottom, there are no limits to where this may take us. 

As we begin our final preparations for the coming of the Solstice and the true new beginning promised to us this year, let us find within ourselves the ability to flip the magnet. What does restructuring look like for you? For me? I hope it looks like a further breakdown of privilege. I hope it looks like those on the top will create space for those who are coming up behind them. I hope it looks like reparations and accountability for the narrow points-of-view that have caused harm, globally and personally. But most of all, I hope it looks like solidarity, equity, and progress toward a just society. Who knows? From where we are, the only direction we can go is up! 

Warding off the Brain Weasels

Yes, you read that correctly: Brain Weasels. Brain. Weasels. Brain Weasels are those little voices in our heads that whisper mean things to us when we make a mistake. They tell us that everything we fear is going to happen. That our self-doubt is simply being reasonable. That whatever we imagine will go wrong is currently going wrong and it’s all. Our. Fault. 

The use of the term, “brain weasel,” comes to us from the mental health world where they use narrative therapy and externalization to help folks with anxiety and depression isolate and combat this harmful internal dialogue. Rather than referring to the negative self-talk as one more thing we are doing wrong, decentering the behavior to our “brain weasels” and using therapeutic humor helps to break the cycle and allows us to explore our self-critical dialogue. 

Our brain weasels are our fears, and like all emotions, they are trying to tell us something. An important part of our personal development as leaders is to learn to look at our fears objectively, so we can find the foundation of our concerns. From there, we can take back our brains from those weasels who want to keep us down.

In matters of leadership, one of the biggest brain weasels has a name. He’s big, he’s loud, and he loves to show up when you’ve done something well. He’s the worst of them all, because he takes the joy and the feelings of pride out of our accomplishments. His name is Imposter Syndrome. 

Imposter Syndrome is a common issue among high achievers. He tells us we are inadequate and incompetent. He tells us our successes are based on luck and not skill, and eventually everyone around us will know that we are frauds. When we break it down and get to the foundation, we find the brain weasel is a fear of failure. 

Here are the most common types of Imposter Syndrome behaviors as outlined here. If you see any of these in yourself, it might be time to confront your brain weasel!

1. The Perfectionist. These folks set excessively high goals for themselves and are harsh with themselves for any deviation from their desired outcome. They tend to be control freaks/micromanagers who have a motto: “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” This type can lead to burnout and negative interpersonal relationships, particularly with those who report to them.
2. The Superhuman. These folks are convinced they are phonies and try to make up for it by overachieving. If their coworkers are at work for nine hours, they will be there for ten. They gave up all of their hobbies to hyper-focus on their work and their only happiness comes from external validation. Constructive criticism is like a blow to the chest. This type often ends up a workaholic.
3. The Natural Genius. These folks are often young or have risen to a high place of power very quickly. They base their own competence on their ease of adjusting and the speed at which they achieve their goals. They have to “just be good” at everything. This is common amongst people who were high achievers in high school, typically seen in graduates with high IQs who never really learned how to study or work on something hard for them. This type tends to quit as soon as they realize they can’t just do it. 
4. The Soloist. These folks are independent to a fault. “I’ll do it myself,” and “I don’t need help” are their mantras. This type often experiences failure when they need to ask for help, because they feel asking for help reveals their incompetence. Fear of asking for help can lead this type to drown and need rescuing.
5. The Expert. These folks measure their competence by how much and how many things they know or can do. They will never be enough and fear they will be outed as unintelligent or inexperienced. They don’t apply for jobs unless they already meet every requirement, they constantly seek out trainings and certificates in case they will need them later, and shy away from being called a SME no matter how long they’ve been in their role. This type has a tendency to procrastinate AND over-prepare all at the same time. They hoard knowledge, but because they never feel like they have enough, they miss opportunities by putting off taking advantage of them until they are “ready.”

Studies suggest that ~70% of adults experience imposter syndrome at some point in their career. Our brain weasels tell us we will never be enough, that we don’t deserve our accolades, and that our successes are based on luck. Ward off your brain weasels by learning to accept and embrace your capabilities and your accomplishments. We will never be done learning. We will never know everything or be perfect, and we need to learn to make peace with that. Otherwise, the brain weasels win.