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My Daughter Is A Disco Yeti

It’s Celebrity Day at school and, when so many kids look to pop stars for inspiration, my oldest daughter decided to wrap herself up in a white faux fur poncho and call herself a yeti, technically the Disco Yeti from Disney’s Expedition Everest roller coaster attraction.

Crazy girl.

It reminds me of the time I wore my grandma’s clip-on earrings to school in fifth grade. It wasn’t premeditated. I just saw them there laying on the back of the sink and clipped them on my ears. They were green and blue costume jewelry in the design of a flower. I sneaked out the door before my mom could see.

I don’t remember anyone’s reaction except for my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Lausten, notoriously the meanest teacher in the school who seemed to actually enjoy humiliating students. He called me to front of the class, his room was the only one with carpet, which made it hard to pull out your chair. When I reached him, his face scrunched up like he had just eaten something that made his stomach turn.

“Flamer,” he bellowed. “What the heck are you doing?”

He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t mightily clever like he usually was when destroying a student for entertainment. He seemed genuinely confused and scared, as if I had worn a completely different face to school, as if I’d grown 10 inches. I’d never seen that expression on him. I was kind of proud to put it there, like pushing him off balance with a new set of tools I didn’t know I had.

“Off. Now.” he said, with his palm turned up.

I’m not sure why clip-on earrings would prevent me from being able to learn Geography.

He gave them back to me after class and I wore them for the rest of the day. At least I imagine I did. I didn’t wear them to school again but not because of Mr. Lausten, because they gave me a headache (much like the large gold Queen Nefertiti hoop earrings I would wear 5 years later in high school).

So the yeti outfit doesn’t bother me. Looks like my daughter has a little bit of the ol‘ “Fresh Flame” in her.

I wonder what the faces will say to her. I wonder what she’ll discover in her toolkit.

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Nearly Robbed

A few years ago we were nearly robbed. I say nearly because we stopped them at the perimeter. My wife heard a banging, looked out the second-story window, and saw two young men standing in our front garden about to crawl through a hole in the fence. She yelled some expletives and they ran off.

It spooked us all, particularly my daughter, who had a lot of questions, which forced me to confront my own demons about the whole thing.

As a parent, I try to avoid the good-guys-vs-bad-guys thing, something that’s pretty rampant in cartoons. Instead, I point out cause and effect: there’s a reason Evil Dr. Doofenshmirtz lives alone in his lair obsessively plotting to destroy the Tri-State Area. Once you figure out that reason, Dr. Doofenshmirtz becomes a lot less scary.

It’s an easy enough philosophy to apply to cartoons, but it had me in a bind trying to gently explain why someone would rob us.

“Sometimes people see things we have that they themselves don’t have and that they want, and since they don’t have them and don’t think they can get them in other ways, they try to take them from us.”

Man, it’d be a lot easier just to peg these people as bad guys.

But I kept working at it, fielding the barrage of WHY questions my daughter hurled at me like gobs of clay, slowly sculpting our answer. It took some time, but together we got there.

I knew we had arrived because, as my mind rifled through my own list of enemies, from shitty roommates to Facebook foes to parking space thieves to childhood bullies, my daughter stared out the window down into the garden where muddy workboots had trampled our flowers.

And then she looked up at me with no fear left in her face, just like she does after I explain away her bad dreams. She looked at me for a few seconds longer, searching my face like a crime scene, and then she went back to playing.

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Happiness

Why is HAPPINESS so hard to obtain when it’s the thing we all want in life?

There’s no shortage of it and we have the gift of free will to track it down and put it in our pocket, yet most of us don’t get the experience of emptying it out onto our nightstand at the end of the day.

It’s possible we’re looking too hard.

We dedicate our lives to finding it, spend years charting a path and looking under stones, seeking out experts in robes and ivory towers. We ask other people. Marry other people. We get sidetracked by quests for stability, for family, for notoriety, for wisdom. We trip over piles of coins and follow its shimmering path back to the source, where it spits out of a well like confetti. And as the coins drop from the sky like rain through our outstretched fingers and into our pockets, we’re disappointed that the well of HAPPINESS isn’t anywhere nearby.

I see people looking all the time. It’s my job, as a career counselor, to look with them. They never say it out loud: “Cliff, I’m looking for happiness,” but that’s what all of them are telling me.

They tell me about the stones they’ve turned over and we turn over some more and at the end of our session, they feel good but often don’t notice. I see that they’re laughing or breathing more easily than they were an hour ago, so I tell them this. I point to the thing that’s happening within them but often they’re still focusing on the notes they took and the plan they’re developing.

And it’s a good plan, but really just another distraction.

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Better at Rejection

I’ve gotten better at rejection.

I realized this last night when I poured my cocktail down the sink. I’d spent a while making it but it didn’t taste right and, over the course of stirring and sipping, I guess I realized I didn’t want to be hungover the next day.

There was a time I would have just drank it.

I’ve been rejecting other things too: my warm bed in the morning, opportunities to take on too much work, second helpings of bread and dessert, lone latenight movie viewing…

Rejection is empowering. It works well against habits, to challenge the misunderstanding that it is necessary to stick with something just because we started it.

Rejection beckons change and opens us up to the possibility of contentment. Our first choice may not end up being the path we want to be on, but we often stay on it anyway, if for no other reason than the justify the time we’ve already invested. But that math doesn’t work out. I know. I’ve tried.

Forget about the hours behind you and focus on the minutes in front of you. Throw your cocktail down the drain and walk boldly into tomorrow, without the hangover.

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The Cliff Laugh

I laugh loud and am amused easily, which makes me the ideal member of any audience. It’s a full-body laugh that makes me hit my head on the back of the chair, even slide off onto the ground. Kids either love my laugh or are afraid of it, as it foghorns its way into the room. I’ve actually been nicknamed “The Laughing Cliff” by at least one toddler.

My laugh has a job.

Performers, speakers, and creators feed off of recognition, not because they’re desperate or co-dependent, but because they’re hoping their work reaches us as deeply as it reaches them. They want to know that they’re not just up there wiggling around, that their movement, their unique voice is traveling through the air and finding its way in, gaining some level of immortality.

It’s the laugh, really, that does this for them. Clapping is intentional, even smiles can be forced. With laughter, you can’t fake it. It either comes out or it doesn’t. And when it does, it’s like holding up a perfect 10 with both hands. It’s like waving back to the people on land from the deck of a ship.

We should all work to have our laughs at the top of our throat, behind our eyes, filling up our cheeks, ready to go, so it can do its job when the time comes. With practice, you can store your laugh just under the surface. That way, it won’t take much for it to spill out whenever somebody needs it.

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Good Leadership

My client mentioned she is good at having difficult conversations, and that this is something that makes her a good leader. A lot of people I work with say this.

It’s not so hard to be part of a difficult conversation if you’re the person in power – the boss, the landlord, the parent. You just start talking and it happens. What’s hard is coming at these things as an equal, what’s hard is putting aside your title and status to purposefully stand on common ground, ground that’s shaking and about to give way. What’s hard is coming out the other side better than you were before.

If someone is doing a bad job (again), or if payment is past due (again), or if rules are ignored (again), or if they put their foot in their mouth (again), a difficult conversation is indeed necessary. Here, you’re always at a crossroads.

You can drop the hammer and lay down the law; in other words, drive steadily toward the end-result you desire: the absence of that person.

Or, you can do the hard thing and tell that person what everyone else knows but what no one will say, with the lightness, respect, and reticence as if you were talking to your own supervisor. You can amplify the whispers for a moment. Underline the refrain. Offer up the code.

Few people try to fuck up in life, so chances are if the person is failing, it’s a theme in their life (or it’s about to be) – trying too hard, taking on more than they can handle, neglecting relationships, forgetting important dates…

That theme can be underscored or it can be interrupted. It will be underscored if you keep your hat on, wear your stripes, and wag your finger. It can be interrupted if you take a deep breath and leave yourself out of it.

It’s certainly not your job to fix people, particularly people who are messing up your own situation, costing you money, pissing you off, etc.

But how do you want to walk away from this? Like you just ran over a squirrel? – Not my fault! Why did it run out in the road like that!

Or, as if you came upon a hummingbird landing and taking off from a branch?

The most respected leaders seize the opportunity to lead in all situations, even the difficult ones, careful to leave everyone better off than they were before they came. They lead up until the very last moment, and they lead selflessly, so they can celebrate in good conscience when all that’s left is the branch, waving ever so slightly.

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When the Machine Breaks Down

Ever notice that the audience laughs louder or claps harder when the machine breaks down?

Take Saturday Night Live, for instance. The best parts are when the comedians can’t stop laughing at their own jokes. You can hear the studio audience cracking up the whole time. Or, at the circus, if the highwire acrobat stumbles on a jump, on their next attempt you can bet they’ll get bigger applause than anyone else the whole night. Or, when a keynote speaker forgets her next line and admits she lost her place; that’s when we stop Tweeting and sit up in our chair.

When running their routines smoothly, experts can be almost too perfect, so flawless, they stop being human. We appreciate the content, but we can’t relate, and so our interest falls to the background.

Without flaws, entertainers and lecturers become like digitized recordings, like robots – efficient and predictable, on some predetermined path and we, the audience, are merely onlookers without the power to influence.

We have no skin in the game, no hand in the outcome, and we almost feel like that person in front of us, so perfect and polished, isn’t even in the room with us, like they’re behind a screen, manipulated by levers that reach far off the stage.

Yes, we can benefit from their knowledge, we may indeed ooh and ahh, but they’ll never really reach us from there. The act remains an act.

Until something sputters or smokes, we’re both just playing our parts.

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Bare Minimum

When I’m sick I have what I call “Bare Minimum Days.” This means I set out to do just the bare minimum to get through the day: eat, sleep, poop, email, and 1 or 2 phone calls – the bare minimum amount of work possible to keep my life from running off the rails and waking up to a train wreck in a few days.

Sometimes that’s all I can do.

But sometimes I do more than that, find myself just a few hop-scotch squares farther along. Sometimes, I even forget for a moment that I’m sick.

Setting small goals makes it possible to achieve big ones, even moreso than if you just set out to win big from the beginning.

Cleaning the kitchen begins with organizing a drawer.

The secret is to do less. We can build kingdoms if we concentrate on laying down a single stone.

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Stones Become Fishes

I have this cycle I go through whenever I have an appointment with a client.

About an hour ahead of the appointment, I start to get anxious. Well, not exactly anxious. If I am to be honest, I would say it’s more like resentment that I have this appointment at all. It’s going to interrupt my flow, pull me out of the beautiful trance of writing resumes and working on business development stuff.

In other words… I’m in the zone, baby. And I don’t want to get out!

But this new thing is pulling me in a different direction and the current is getting stronger, so, I pop open the client’s intake form and begin reading their life story.

It always draws me in.

As I learn about crucial events, goals, insecurities, and sources of real pride, the client materializes before me. These anecdotes and insights, like fishes in an aquarium, begin to come together, catch the light, and reflect a pattern back to me. What was once just a few dark shadows, minute by minute, turns into something more. The first and last name in my calendar become a person, with something to offer and obstacles to overcome.

By the time I get on the phone, I’m in. All the way in.

There is potential for this cycle to play out in other aspects of my day as well: the woman at the traffic light, the Facebook friend of a friend, the store clerk, the wrong number… all shadows waiting to shimmer.

And since I don’t have an intake form to hand them… I have to initiate in other ways if I want to begin to see the patterns.

It’s my choice: These folks can stay shadowy stones in the current, or they can become brightly colored fishes that light up the water.

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Old Friends

Oh, what great fortune to have old friends!

Old friends who make you laugh with a word, who tell you like it is, who call you on your shit, who wave to you from your memories…

Old friends have watched you drop your breadcrumbs; they know where you’ve been and how far you’ve come, the tragedies that have made you, the false starts, the unexpected wins. They know all your nicknames, your ghosts, your hairstyles.

To be known and to be loved is often enough to wake up to.

How many times do we think of old friends in our busy lives and smile, consider a call, and then get wrapped up in something else?

That’s okay, they probably do it too, with you, and how wonderful to consider that, occasionally, when the smile is big enough, you’re both doing it at the same time.

Perhaps right now.

Hello, old friends.