Author Archives: meredithnelson1@bellsouth.net

Facing our Fears

Putting Myself Out There

I recently stood for an election. For what is not important. Anyone who knows me knows how completely against my nature this was. Why I agreed I am still not quite sure. Yet, during the process and its aftermath, I was reminded that things often have a funny way of working out.

Before going further I need to come clean and admit that I lost. I have no idea by how much or for that matter how close I came to winning. Yet, it was in losing that I was forced to face my fears about the process and reflect about why it was a good idea to put myself forward despite knowing this loss was a real possibility.

An Inverted Perspective

By some quirky fate of the calendar, the same day I learned that I had lost I attended an intense yoga inversion workshop. At the time I was simply looking forward to losing myself in my practice; I had no idea how cathartic the workshop would prove to be.

Let me be frank. I am pretty good at yoga but I am terrified of headstands. Staying inverted without the support of the wall has been a personal challenge for me for a long time. I have the strength, I have the form but I lack the confidence.

Spending a concentrated period of time working on staying up in a headstand helped me understand the competing pressures at work. On the one hand, there is a lot of ego involved. Why is it so important to me that I master the pose? On the other, is vulnerability. Am I really capable of staying up?

Competing Pressures

During the workshop I was struck by the realization that these same competing pressures (ego and vulnerability) were also at the heart of my losing the election. By agreeing to stand, my ego wanted a win; knowing it was a long shot made me vulnerable. I wonder if part of what pushed me to stand was a realization that I needed to face my fear of losing. I needed to stare down my vulnerability and move past it. Funny how a bruised ego can make one feel less, not more, vulnerable….

Contemplating my personal struggle between ego and vulnerability led me to watch Brene Brown’s TED talk on vulnerability. I had been “meaning” to watch this for ages. I just never got around to it. Listening to Ms. Brown talk about her own vulnerability issues struck a chord with me. It seems that by leaning into our vulnerability and putting ego aside we become more at peace and centered.

Into the Boardroom

This is a struggle that most leadership teams wrestle with. Leaders have egos. Big egos. Undertaking an organizational assessment of any kind involves putting your ego aside and opening yourself up to vulnerability.

Anytime an individual or team engages a consultant to investigate a problem there is inevitably a degree of fear involved. What will the process uncover? Do I really want to know? Do I need to know? Agreeing to learn what is actually going on forces a leader to become vulnerable while laying some ego aside.

The beauty of this process, however, is that despite being hard and uncomfortable, it can also yield surprisingly beneficial results. If knowledge is power, then being willing to open yourself up to what is actually going on may be one of the most effective ways to move forward. It may not yield the results you want or expect, but it just may lead you down a different, ultimately better, path.

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Synergy All Around

Spreadsheet Nerd

spreadsheet tower

I am a spreadsheet kind of girl! I have yet to meet a spreadsheet I didn’t want to figure out or tweak. You might even call me a spreadsheet nerd.

Those of us who like to live in the tidy world of numbers, however, can sometimes lose sight of the bigger picture. Keeping our pages “pretty” and our formulas “pure” can seem more important than factoring in shades of grey.

Let’s not Stack the Deck

While I like to think you need at least one person like me on every project, the benefits of not always stacking the team in our favor became clear to me (once again) while working on the groupings for my neighborhood’s progressive dinner.

Let me explain: after we thought we had finished putting the groups together we realized that we had forgotten to place one couple. As a somewhat hyper number-type my inclination was to fix our problem right away. How would I sleep knowing there were loose ends lying about?

Saner minds prevailed. The most laid-back members of our little team said not to worry, there would be movement among participants and things would surely work themselves out. YIKES.

Sure enough there was some movement within groups: a few late-comers and a few who dropped out. However, about a week before going live we did feel the need for one last push. Eventually those loose ends started to niggle at others…..And I am the first to admit that waiting to pull things together was a wise decision.

The synergies within our committee mirror what we were trying to accomplish within dinner groupings. We strove to mix young and old, new and long-time residents and, perhaps most importantly introduce people to each other. After all, if you want to have dinner with your friends have a dinner party.

Synergy at Work

These synergies pop up daily in all aspects of life. I was recently speaking with a very accomplished older lady about some of her volunteer work. Having worked with me, she knows that I often deal in spreadsheets. She shared a story about joining a board full of “number people”. At first she was terribly intimidated. However, she soon realized that she brought a depth of understanding of the population the board was meant to serve that the best spreadsheet could never capture.

Ultimately this comes back to the conventional wisdom that most of the time a group makes a better decision than do the individuals that comprise the group. I would hazard a guess that the more diverse the skill sets and perspectives of the members of the group the better their ultimate outcome.

As uncomfortable as it may be surround yourself with people who think and operate differently than you do, the reality is that how we play off and leverage our differences is what helps us achieve the most synergistic results. So next time one of us spreadsheet nerds is driving you crazy: listen, push back and work together.

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Kids and Guns

Lucky Shot

Airsoft gun is a dirty word in our house. Over the new year a seventh grader in our neighborhood was shot in the eye by one of these pellet guns. He had taken his mask off for a minute and thought he was out of the game. Not so thought another child.

Fortunately, the injured child is going to be fine. His parents threw out all the newly acquired airsoft equipment immediately and are telling everyone to be wary: just because rules are in place (e.g., facemasks) does not mean these guns are safe toys.

It is worth noting that the twelve year old in question is a very cautious, responsible kid. As his mother puts it “he is the child who never needed to be reminded to look both ways.” Furthermore, his mother is one of the most sensible people I know. She is smart, level-headed and is usually a “NO” parent.

Not so Lucky Shot

This incident has made my boys very interested in the Tamir Rice shooting. “Why would the police shoot a twelve year old?” my eleven year old wants to know. “It was pretty clear the gun was fake” piped in the eight year old after sneakily watching youtube clips of the incident.

It is interesting to me that neither one of them sees race as central to this shooting. That is not discounting the very real racial tension at the heart of the matter, but it is encouraging to see a child’s perspective. One of them looked at me squarely and said “I just don’t get why people would think that” when asked whether Tamir being black might have influenced the police.

From their perspective the safety of airsoft guns issue is much more thought provoking.

The heart of the matter

So in my world, we are now wrestling with a somewhat uncomfortable question about whether or not these realistic toys guns are appropriate toys. My very black and white daughter wants to know “why people are even calling them toys when they are actually guns?”

My sensible friend maintains the incident has reminded her why children need boundaries. No matter how mature they seem they are still children and do not always understand the consequences associated with a given action. How many fifteen year olds do you know who think they are ready to drive?

I hope people share stories like this one, helping to institute appropriate boundaries within families and across communities. At the end of the day, however, I think my kids got it right: Race should not matter. The police should NOT have shot a twelve year old. Guns should not be toys.

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