My Focus for the New Year

Raise a glass half full to 2010!” said the headline.

Whenever I thumb through one of those women’s magazines, the kind with a photograph of a triple-layer chocolate mousse cake on the cover with a caption promising twelve effortless ways of slimming down, I usually forget what I’ve read as soon as I’ve read it, but the idea of toasting the new year with a glass half full resonated with me because it is both realistic and hopeful. Realistic because it acknowledges what isn’t there as well as what is. Hopeful because it offers the choice of where to put your energy with a more complete understanding of what’s missing.

Negativity being inherent in the human condition, most of us don’t have any trouble seeing what’s wrong or missing in our lives. But how do we, particularly in times like these, learn to “accentuate the positive,” as the Johnny Mercer song says?

If I ask myself, what were the high points of the last year, the moments when I felt the most effective and engaged, I recall the times that I was able to energize groups of unemployed or tenuously employed people to look for work in ways which empower rather than deplete them.

By far the best way I know of is a tool called Appreciative Inquiry (see sidebar). This is the practice of looking at what is working in a situation and making the decision to do more of it.

If I ask myself, what were the high points of the last year, the moments when I felt the most effective and engaged, I recall the times that I was able to energize groups of unemployed or tenuously employed people to look for work in ways which empower rather than deplete them.

This will be my focus for 2010—to be of service to people caught in this seismic upheaval in the fundamental nature of work, a transition which both causes tremendous loss, pain and confusion (the half-empty part) and holds out the possibility of a richer, fuller, more balanced professional life (the half-full part) for those who can stay the course through the dark space of uncertainty long enough to reach it.

Like many of us in the profession of helping others, I am watching people struggling with the consequences of the economic downturn as the reality sinks in that there is no quick fix, and I have been looking for an overarching message to support them in keeping their heads and hearts going as this situation drags on.

I found the theme I wanted to build upon recently when Cape & Plymouth Business magazine decided to use a short column I wrote last summer in the “Last Word” section of their January 2010 issue. I am reprinting the column below (you can see it as it appears on the last page of the the magazine, with an astonishingly large photograph of me, here.)

It is the first of a series of columns on helping people to hang in there for the long haul.

PERSEVERANCE
(from Cape & Plymouth Business, January, 2010)

By now you’ve probably already heard that the Chinese character for crisis is a combination of characters meaning danger and opportunity. You may even have heard it so often you’re sick of it.

The first time I encountered this idea, it brought a new perspective like a fresh breeze, and I used it as a way of reframing feeling fearful in business or personal situations.

But I’ve found that it hasn’t held up well over time, and in the world of work as it exists today, it’s not something I would think of offering as comfort to the clients I serve as a career counselor and business consultant.

I’m not sure if this is because the economic “crisis” we’re knee deep in feels too big for so cut-and-dried a response, or because the phrase has simply been dulled by overuse.

In either case, because of the short shelf-life this “crisis = danger + opportunity” meme has had for me, I’ve tended to tune out any time I’ve heard someone say, “The Chinese symbol for … is ….”

This changed last summer, however, when I participated in a seminar, led by organizational development thought-leader Margaret Wheatley, entitled, “Renewable Leadership: How to Respond Well to Crisis after Crisis,” at the Cape Cod Institute.

We spent the week looking at slides of flooded streets, destroyed homes, and piles of debris, learning about the inadequacy of government and NGO responses, and hearing from the leaders of Biloxi and Houston, whose crises came with the hurricane force winds of Katrina and Rita.

Their stories made me receptive to a new Chinese character, the one for perseverance. The word touches me because it reflects what I am hearing from the people who come to me for help and because it is an appropriate response to ongoing economic uncertainty.

Like the storm victims who are still rebuilding the Gulf Coast, people who are struggling to keep a business alive or have lost their job need to be able hang in for the long haul. This kind of endurance requires feeling the pain of loss that comes with the understanding that some of what has been carried off isn’t coming back.

The Chinese character for perseverance is a knife suspended over a heart, Oddly enough, our word “perseverance” also contains the word, “sever.” Only by accepting the “sever” part of perseverance and the feelings that come with loss (the “heart” part) can we get on with the business of recreating ourselves instead of futilely trying to recover what is gone forever.