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Real Talk Day

I’m proposing a new holiday – Real Talk Day – where no one works and everyone talks about what’s important to them.

And you can’t just cop out and say “family.” You have to go deeper than that. And if you’re not answering the question, you have to listen, even if it’s the bus driver or your boss or the people you live with who you think you already know backwards and forwards (in other words, your family).

On Real Talk Day, people skip the small talk and drop down a level or two to that place we go when there’s a crisis, or when the power goes out, or when your time together is nearly up and you’re standing at the door with your hand on the doorknob and what you really want to say bubbles up effortlessly and comes out awkwardly: thanks I love you I’m sorry what I really want is…

Imagine if we started in that place, first thing in the morning, and everybody knew we were in that place. How different we would look at each other! How far we could go!

Conversations would start with a shy smile or an awkward joke – hey you’re not following the rules – and laughter and more laughter and then two people from opposite ends of the world would go somewhere together they’re afraid to go, even with those that are closest to them. And they’d go there and come out with their hearts lighter and tears in the corners of their eyes, surprised by how anxious they are to get home, and how difficult it is to pull apart from each other.

And at the end of Real Talk Day, each of us would lay down amazed by how much we accomplished in one day, how we’re no longer stuck, free from our patterns, more in love with the people around us, perhaps a little bit scared and a little uncomfortable, maybe even feeling that sharp tinge of loneliness that comes after we’ve been up all night and we notice the sun is about to rise.

Full and empty at the same time. Tired and awake. Wide open to what comes next.

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Common Ground Giving Way

The idea of objective facts is slipping away.

We all used to work from the same set of finite encyclopedias, the very same elementary school principles. Good or bad, they were the same.

Now, there are so many sources, so many talking heads and talking articles coming at us through the same tiny pinhole, we can easily find the facts we need for the situation we’re in, to come out feeling on top.

Each of us has our favorite collection of fact interpreters. We may start with the same numbers, but by the time we finish listening to those talking heads and talking articles, we’re thinking in opposite directions from at least half the world.

From there, we see no other option than to keep going with the same interpreters and the same interpreter-seekers who we call brilliant, and who call the others not so brilliant. Or something worse.

I’m no different.

I think my facts are right and yours are either wrong or the same as mine. But I’ve also found it’s impossible to stand on common ground when I perceive the other person to be foolish.

Really, it doesn’t matter what we think. The fact is we are all, indeed, standing on the same ground that’s breaking apart beneath our feet, and when we begin to fall, irreversibly, and we reach for anyone’s hands around us – not just the hands we’re comfortable holding, we will realize that there were facts after all, and we were wrong.

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Doing Good In The World

I think we all want to make the world a better place – through our job, through our personal pursuits, but it’s easy to get wrapped up in the responsibilities of day to day living, to get tired, and to be overwhelmed. Where do I start? How can I make a difference?

Well, when your limbs get heavy and the weight of the future is too much to bear, remember this:

People seek validation. Yes, you. And them.

If you want to make the world a better place, don’t fixate on building a spacecraft or inventing the cure for cancer. Instead, find someone who is doing something in earnest – anything – stitching a pillow, loving their girlfriend, collecting little die-cast figurines of army soldiers, rearranging their junk drawer – and give them the validation they seek. It doesn’t even take words. Just be there with them in the effort.

This is something you can do, wherever you are, that is as revolutionary as a parade, as noble as a peasant prophet, and as powerful as an armor-piercing bullet. Your generous boost will lift that person up and, who knows, maybe this is the boost they need to push themselves toward something greater, to launch up into the air and cannonball into the center of the ocean, making ripples that dwarf the waves.

You control our destiny as much as the astronauts and the biochemists.

With your small, untrained hands, working in the presence of genuineness, you can lift up the soul of the world.

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The Resume’s Soul

A common bit of resume advice you’ll hear is that you need to sell yourself, that your focus should be, first and foremost, on the employer. You’re supposed to think about their needs, what they want to see in a candidate, who you should be. And then be that.

This same advice often gets applied to presentations, personal statements, keynotes, executive bios, and the like. The idea is that you must think of your audience first to come up with content they’ll appreciate.

I disagree.

I think the reason we get so overwhelmed, annoyed, and frustrated when writing down our stories is because we slip into selling mode and lose sight of the real focus – ourselves. Ironically, that’s exactly what audience wants to read on the page and see up on the screen. They want to see us, not them.

So start there.

If you’re overwhelmed with what to write, go back to the basics: remember your greatness, what you’re good at, and what you want to do more of. Write it down without concern for what anyone else needs. This is your homebase, your lantern. As you walk back through your life, look for traces of these things and pull them out of the shadows.

Like a forced presentation or a plagiarized bio, when a resume starts from any other place other than you, it has no center; it’s merely a hollow pitch that no one will believe, not even you.

Give your resume a chance. Give it a soul.

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The Miracle Question

I’ve been asking the same question of people for 10 years to learn what’s important to them, beyond work. Psychologists call it the miracle question; it’s about removing confines and setting people just past the finish line so they can see what’s waiting for them on the other side, the thing that they’re pursuing.

I’ve asked this question to a lot of people.

Let’s do a little back-of-the-envelope tallying… Say, I work with 10 people per week times 50 weeks in a year times 10 years… conservatively, we’ll say that’s 5,000 people.

You know what’s crazy? Almost all of these people, regardless of age, job seniority, race, political leanings, earnings, and all of the other demarcations that divide us – regardless of all of these things, people answer in almost the exact same way, and even in the exact same order.

Here’s the question: What would you do if you had $100,000,000?

And here’s the way we all answer:

I’d pay off all of my family’s debt, then I’d invest some of it, then I’d have a party and buy myself a ________, then I’d travel, and, oh, at some point I’d probably create a nonprofit of some sort to do some good in the world.

Sound like you?

To be honest, people have answered so rotely the same that I’ve stopped asking the question. But it certainly says a lot about us and our need for Family, Stability, Fun, Connection, and Contribution (in that order). Doesn’t it?

If you’re ever struggling to find common ground to stand on with someone, look in one of these buckets. It’s what we all want.

We’re not all that different.

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Bottle That Sh*t Up

I saw a great episode of Queer Eye the other day where the Fab 5 convinced these 2 charming restauranteur-sisters to bottle up their barbecue sauce and sell it. Like everyone who is touched by the Fab 5, they cried. Over a bottle of barbecue sauce.

They’d been in business for years, people loved their flavor, so why hadn’t they done it sooner, especially if it meant so much to them? It seems a silly choice to keep a beloved recipe from the rest of the world, yet we all do this: refuse to bottle up our sauce.

Like the barbecue sisters, we have several (good) reasons:

We don’t want to give away our recipe.
We don’t want to ruin the mystery by deconstructing the recipe.
We don’t want to know that our recipe can, in fact, be broken down.
We don’t want to degrade our recipe by making it easily repeatable.
We don’t want to learn that someone else has already made our recipe.
We don’t want to find out our recipe isn’t special.

These are all good reasons that will surely succeed in convincing you to avoid understanding and sharing your gifts. Your magic will be yours and yours alone, like a superhero that can only fly when no one is watching, a dragon banished to a cave, or those cartoon yard trolls that do amazing things in the grass as long as the humans aren’t around.

One of the great things about time is how it applies pressure on you to carry out your story.

You can feel it in the morning and the evenings, in the spaces between your other obligations: an impatient and reliable shoving, an incessant faraway beeping to let you know you dozed off at the light.

If you’re lucky, that nudge will get more annoying than the fear of getting answers to all of your questions. You’ll stop protecting and start sharing.

And we’ll all finally get a taste.


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Stories of Stone

If you find yourself stuck in a loop, running an unwanted pattern, prisoner to a story that isn’t working anymore, it’s time for a review…

Clients come to me with well-rehearsed stories. Job searches require them to do so. The client tells me their story, as they’ve been telling it for months, years, decades. It seems like FACT at this point, as true and irrefutable as the ten commandments, etched into stone tablets.

But it’s not.

My job is to hand the client a mallet and a chisel and to inspire them to break their story into little pieces. I can’t break the story personally. They have to do it. But I can point to the areas of the story that hold it together.

These are the transition points, the important places where decisions were made.

You have transition points just like everyone else. Think about your decision to start something – a degree, a job, a relationship, a novel, a project – and then think about your decision to leave it. It’s the coming and the going that hold all the secrets.

Remember that the reasons you do things are not just owned by you, rather the entire world is involved and everyone in it. Ask for a friend’s opinion, read the headlines, simply look around when you’re in that memory, and look in a different direction than you’ve been looking.

That’s when your story will begin to break apart and you’ll realize the pieces can be rearranged, discarded, and filed down. You’ll see new pieces you missed and old ones you can’t find a place for anymore.

And, just like doing a jigsaw puzzle or watching the clouds pass overhead, a new image will emerge and off you go.

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Lucky Fool

To be a fool is a wonderful thing.

It means you’re naive, innocent, and trusting enough to be wooed into something out of the ordinary.

Having oatmeal fall on your head, stepping into a pair of shoes filled with shaving cream, showing up to an important meeting only to find a roomful of people laughing at you…. these are not things to be ashamed of. To me, they signify that you’re on the right track, that you take people at face value even after having been led into the mud so many times before.

I’ve always felt like the joke’s on the joker, the one who thought up the elaborate prank to fool another, the one who gets a kick out of turning earnestness into comedy.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a good gag; I’ll wear the fool’s crown for the benefit of the room.

But I’ll never be embarrassed for believing you.

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The Birth & Death of Hate

HATE cannot survive in the light.

It requires enclosed spaces . It forces us to see only the shadows of real things, but never the real things themselves.

HATE is clever. It is born where no one will look: in the echoing rooms of joyous friends holding hands and singing songs, offering safe reflections and easy conversation about common threads and talk of a new dawn.

You see, we forget that hate begins with us, not them.

And so we continue on our path of righteousness, listening for the applause and, of course, finding it. Soon we’re surrounded by those we deem to be the truth-tellers and that feels good but staying inside keeps us out of the light and our dance takes a turn. As the high fives and handshakes multiply, we start having more and more trouble denying the rigidity in our steps.

We seek a reason for our uniform dance. HATE is happy to provide that for us.

It always points to the same place: the soft-edged shadows on the floors and walls, reaching in through the windows and doorways like claws. They change shape and manifest in different ways but always seem to be coming for us.

The sun senses the change in our steps and knows its own unique power over HATE, which is why it changes the shape of the shadows.

The sun is calling us to the horizon, trying to remind us that HATE, in its cowardice and ghostliness, is easy to destroy, that the shadows are not claws and never were, and their source, divinely different than anything we know, is waiting to be found outside.

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The Boogeyman, Revealed

I listened to my daughter and her friend talk about the boogeyman yesterday, in the car ride home from picking up pizza.

You’re safe as long as you stay under the covers. He won’t come and get you if you’re asleep. Yeah, only if you’re awake. And he knows the difference between sleep walking and real walking. Totally! And when you’re in bed you have to be still. Well, you can move a little. Like how you move when you’re asleep. Yeah. Yeah, that’s definitely allowed.

They were laughing as they said these things so I thought it okay to ask some questions.

Can you have your head above the covers? Yes.

Why does the boogeyman get mad if you’re awake? I don’t know he just does.

When do you have to be asleep by, according to the Boogeyman? Within 15 minutes.

What happens when he actually comes? How should we know!?

Still laughing…

They know how ludicrous this all sounded. I think that’s what the laughter was about.

I didn’t realize my daughter was still thinking about the boogeyman, the monster in the closet. It makes me sad to think of her laying in her bed scared every night after I kiss her on the forehead. (If the boogeyman ever shows his face, there’s going to be a mob of parents that want to kick his ass, that’s for sure.)

Anyway, I marvel at how these somewhat grown kids can talk about their fears in laughter. They deconstruct the boogeyman in such a detached, matter-of-fact way, as if describing the opposing team’s strategy, standing there at the chalkboard pointing at the X’s and O’s.

Freud suggested that naming the boogeyman makes the boogeyman disappear. (I believe this is how you kill Freddie Kruger as well, as we learn in “Nightmare on Elm Street,” the first one.)

But this didn’t work for my daughter and her friend. They’ve named the boogeyman, described what he looks like, what his preferences are, what he cares about. They know their boogeyman backward and forwards, yet he keeps coming back.

Sometimes the brain and the heart aren’t connected. You know this is happening when the tone of your voice and the topic at hand don’t line up, like laughing when you’re talking about a mythical dude who comes in your room to kill you.

This is survival, just to get through. Sometimes we don’t want the heart around because of what it holds, so we stay in the brain. But when we get stuck in this pattern, where the brain speaks for the heart, the boogeyman keeps coming back.

We try to talk our way out, which only really works in high school debates and courtrooms. When it comes to the boogeyman, Freddie Kruger, and the monsters in our closets, our secret weapon is usually locked up in our heart, a tornado of fury and pain and the darker things that, once released, swarm Evil like locusts until nothing remains.

And as our brain tries to comprehend the math and science of it all, our heart rejoices in its emptiness, open to everything and ready to fill up once more.