CHAPTER 1
Meaning Owning Relationships Emotions
Blog Post: Remember When
Do you remember your first best friend? The one you played with for hours on end, the one you told secrets to and trusted with your fears, the one who was your partner in all your childhood explorations?
My best friend was Karen. Her family moved in down the street when we were both four years old. We were inseparable through most of our school years. Growing up before the need for playdates and physical boundaries, Karen and I explored the reaches of our neighborhood and the country roads that began at the end of our block. The older we got, the braver we became and the further we explored. We were Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer; we were runaways and adventurers. We packed lunches, hopped on our little coaster bikes, and explored for hours. Our backyards became tented escapes, penny carnivals, and a wide array of locations for escapades and characters. We rode the city buses to swimming lessons, art classes, and Saturday afternoon matinees. Our sleepovers involved little sleep and a lot of talking. We laughed, we learned, and we cried together. We believed anything was possible. The Disney movie Peter Pan inspired us to become scientists as we endeavored to create pixie dust. Perhaps we just didn't get the right combination of the white, sprinkly substances — flour, sugar, and salt? Undaunted, we continued to believe that, just like our Barbies, we could do anything.
Our lives have taken us in very different directions and led us down very different paths, but always, we will be part of each other — the part that believes we can be MORE.
From Passive to Active MORE
As a child, I had no idea how hard my parents worked to make ends meet and give my two sisters and me all that we had. We never seemed to lack anything. I had friends who had more things and friends who had less, but we all appeared to have enough. We lived the epitome of 1950s and '60s middle-class Canada. The economy grew, wages rose, and everyone began to need, buy, and collect more of everything.
I grew up a shopper. In Edmonton, Alberta, everyone knew the location of every high school by its adjacent mall. As a young adult, I purchased as I wished, never stopping to pay attention to the motivation behind my purchases. Buying made me feel good; it was such a rewarding experience that I ignored my ever-increasing credit card debt. Consumerism fed my ego and gave me an artificial, passive, outside-in sense of worth.
It was not until I chose to move to the British Virgin Islands (BVI) that I forced myself to deal with my debt. I arrived in the Caribbean debt free. I soon learned that my meager savings in Canadian dollars turned into next to nothing in the US-dollar-based currency used in the BVI. That, combined with the minimum salary I received teaching at a small private school, threw me into a new understanding and appreciation of what I needed. I began to examine how I could essentially have MORE by living with less. It forced — or should I say allowed? — me to actively explore my worth from the inside out, not the outside in.
CHAPTER 2
Meaning belonging passion purpose loss
Blog Post: The Jump Rope Syndrome
"Not last night, but the night before ..." we seven-year-olds sing as I jump in rhythm to the skipping rope. "Twenty-four robbers came knocking at my door." I mime knocking as I continue to jump. "I went out ... " Breathless, I jump away from the rope, race around my best friend's back, and prepare to jump back into the skipping rope's rhythm as we continue, "While they went ... in!" I jump back into the rhythm just as the recess bell pierces the din of our childhood freedom.
There was always a tension between the anticipation of the jump into the swinging rope and actually jumping. When it came to double Dutch (jumping into two alternating skipping ropes) the tension could easily be paralyzing. Once you successfully jumped in, the longer you were able to navigate the rhythm of the rope, the more excited you felt and the more satisfying the experience. But what if you had to jump the rope, had to stay in, and had to keep singing the same song over and over?
Many of us live our lives in the rhythm of our own jump-rope games. We know the song, the players, the actions — going to work, taking care of family, controlling finances, and managing home, health, and day-to-day necessities. Initially, each of those jump-rope games excited us, inspired us, and challenged us to explore and expand who we were and who we could become. So at what point did we transition from excited into complacent? When did we become numb to the endless repetition of our lives, paralyzed in our repetition? How did we decide that this is all that there is and good enough? Why do we allow ourselves to live without passion or purpose and settle for less than our dreams?
It doesn't have to be this way. We can move beyond complacency and repetition. We can reconnect with and actualize passion and purpose in our lives. We can create meaning in our lives.
Meaning
MORE's core element of meaning acknowledges our need to belong, contribute, and play a part in creating a greater purpose. Meaning and purpose are not given to us but are what we create from all that is given. They are found in living our lives passionately, accepting the wisdom that comes from our challenges, and spreading kindness in the darkest of corners.
Many of us live overwhelmed in today's always-on culture. The yin and yang of technology allow us the freedom to work from anywhere and yet restrict our ability to let go, reflect, process, and revive. Taxed to the maximum, we have lost our sense of human beings, exceeded our lives as human doings, and now multitask like human viruses, causing much of the imbalance, dis-ease, and disease in our lives. In our viral state of multitasking and simultaneously attempting to control all the multiple aspects of our lives, we lose sight of our bigger pictures, our purposes, and what truly gives meaning and value to our lives.
We live in numbness; a state of being overwhelmed clouds our ability to seek and create meaning. Asking for help may feel pointless — just a continuation of the same cycle. Always tethered to technology, we can feel isolated and disconnected from others and ourselves. We stay in relationships and jobs that do not serve us, creating toxic environments that breed the dis-ease to disease cycle in our lives, the cycle that feeds a nagging cough, another cold, an unexplained rash, stiff joints, the sleepless nights — you know your list. Many of us carry on blindly or blatantly ignoring the dysfunction in which we exist. Prolonged high stress keeps our brains functioning in a threat state, which limits our abilities to problem-solve our way through daily dilemmas, blocks our creativity and insight, and starves our ability to communicate clearly. We live in sleep deprivation, manage our lives with medications (prescription and nonprescription), and create toxic cellular conditions that lead to heart attack, stroke, and other stress-related diseases. This clouded, caustic way of being builds barriers between you, your loved ones, and your meaning. When your life lacks meaning, you feel trapped, depressed, and worthless.
Even a rewarding career can become caustic when you find yourself living in a prolonged high-stress state. For instance, Thomas's work environment trapped him between fulfillment and frustration. While he found great professional satisfaction in working directly with his customers, the office environment was toxic. Struggling to survive, Thomas disappeared within his headset, immersed in the sanctuary of his music, which shielded him from his colleagues' negativity. Striving to continually meet his clients' needs, he found solace after hours in the quiet of the empty office. Exhausted and sleep deprived, Thomas found that the sense of meaning he gained with his clients was overshadowed and diminished by the realities of his work environment.
The dysfunction in Thomas's workplace robbed him of a sense of belonging and meaning and created toxic stress in his life. Long-term stress is insidious; it slowly strangles your connection to others and barricades you behind walls of exhaustion and apathy, hijacking your connection to your meaning.
Long-term and extreme stress can partner with other major life situations, such as poor health, aging parents, divorce, job loss, and negative relationships, each of which can send you spiraling into a pit of meaninglessness. Striving to balance the stresses with the day-to-day demands of living can be all-consuming, obscuring our sense of meaning and purpose.
You may be one of the people sandwiched between aging parents, a growing family, and your career, just like my client Sofia. She felt stressed and torn between the demands of her career, the health and daily needs of her aging parents, quality time with her children, and supportive time with her spouse. She lived in a continual state of feeling overwhelmed. Spread thin among the multitude of competing demands, she felt hollow, completely disconnected from her meaning. Near breakdown, Sofia finally realized she needed help. She chose to ask her siblings to step up and assist with their parents. Working through her siblings' excuses and resistance took effort. They were able to create a plan that lifted the sole burden of her parents' needs off her shoulders. She has room to breathe, enjoy her children, connect with her spouse, succeed professionally, and appreciate the time she spends with her parents.
The ever-changing career landscape can stretch our sense of purpose and potential to the breaking point. You may be one of the millions who were laid off, struggling to be recognized and hired for your talents and experience as you attempt to navigate the increasingly impersonal hiring practices of online applications.
Julian is an amazingly talented marketing and communications professional who has had to take on a variety of secondary jobs to pay his bills and live day-to-day. Even once hired, he has found, as newest hire, he is the first to be let go. As his longing to belong, to contribute, to be part of a greater good was ignored, his spirit deadened along with his desire for meaning. Julian came to coaching desperate for a new way forward. As he moved past his roadblocks and barriers, he opened his thoughts to new possibilities and alternative avenues to explore. He registered for adult continuing education courses to update and enhance his degree and expertise. Julian's new learning led to new professional connections and a wider range of career opportunities. New purpose and passions reignited meaning in his life.
Even a company's new direction or new upper management hire can derail our lives and sense of meaning. I thought I held my personal and professional life together through my husband's cancer, bone marrow transplant, and recovery. A new organizational direction and the increasing demands of my professional role created an incredibly stressful environment that continually stretched my abilities, depleting the meaning I had gained from my work. I felt micromanaged, manipulated, overwhelmed, and publicly ridiculed. Sleep was fleeting and rarely sustaining. I ate for comfort, gained weight, and self-medicated with many glasses of wine each evening. It was not until I was driving home from work after a performance review fearful and concerned about how I was going to tell my husband, who was still recovery from a bone marrow transplant, that I no longer had a job, that it hit me: I'm free! I am free to pursue and do just what I am meant to do. Just what that was didn't strike me immediately, but the elation of the freedom was immense and helped carry me through the beginning of my transition to reconnect me with meaning in my life.
All my coaching clients have spent decades feeling as though their stress buttons are permanently switched on, as their jobs and life events require them to respond to and be ready for crisis and disaster at any moment. Meaning and purpose are lost, as survival seems all-consuming. It is at these moments of overwhelm and frustration that we can find our greatest opportunities for creating and living with meaning.
When you seek to embrace MORE in your life, you will begin to find meaning in all that you do. Living with meaning allows you to create harmony between your work life and your personal life, integrating the two with purpose and intent. You will begin to intentionally seek out opportunities that will expand meaning in your personal and professional life. Meaning will evolve naturally as you actively foster belonging, embrace your passions, and live your purpose. Meaning making is a transformational experience and expands for us as we seek to create meaning through loss, hardship, and even death.
Meaning through Belonging
For many of us, meaning in our lives is born through our connections with others. How we perceive our roles within our families, amongst our friends, and in relation to our colleagues creates meaning in our lives. Changing jobs, moving to a new location, a death of a family member, loss of friendship, or isolation from our peers can easily cause us to collapse, sending us down a negative spiral of defeat and worthlessness.
I never understood the importance belonging played in my life until I moved away from home, away from my family, my friends, and the country of my birth. Transitioning from Canada to the British Virgin Islands required more than an adjustment to climate and culture. I was no longer a visitor, a welcomed tourist; I was a Non-Belonger (the legal term used for expatriates at the time). I had to seek out new connections and create friendships within a small and closed culture. I learned that belonging was an active process that required me to move out of my cultural comfort zone, open up to others, and create new avenues for connecting. Risking isolation and rejection was the only way forward.
I was an unknown entity on the island, a teacher with no status. My move was just before the global commonality of broadband connectivity. There was no e-mail, Facebook, or Skype to instantly connect me back home. I could not afford a landline telephone in my home, so if I wanted to call home, I headed out for the pay phone. With no public transport on the island, I stood on the side of the road each morning to hitch to school. I initially felt undervalued and invisible. I had to find ways to prove my worth to others. I made mistakes, made assumptions, and created power struggles. I had to learn to let go, to listen honestly, and to genuinely show respect. Every day and every relationship provided opportunities to practice belonging. It was a voyage in making meaning.
Dewain did not have to leave his country or even his home to experience feeling as isolated and undervalued as I had. He felt it every day he went to work. Ironically, his isolation came from the open office cubicle environment in which he worked. Dewain felt closed off from his coworkers by barriers of negativity and distrust that might just as well have been concrete walls.
Through the coaching process, Dewain explored ideas for reconnecting and consciously attempting to shift the closed, negative energy in the office to a more open and inclusive community of colleagues. He deliberately thanked and complimented his colleagues, showed interest in their families and activities, and suggested ways they could create a more fun and engaged environment in the office. His attempts to raise the positive energy of the office environment were rejected or dismissed. People were too busy to chat, and no one wanted anything to do with having fun at work. His closest colleague told him, "Look, Dewain, I just want to do my projects and get out of here." With every affirmative action Dewain employed, he became more and more frustrated. As he reflected and shared his frustration, an insight occurred. The invisible walls served as protection against the negativity of their toxic leader. Self-survival trumped all. His colleagues found comfort and safety within their negative cocoons. The positive change he desired was impossible, out of his control.
As Dewain processed his insights, he came to the realization that staying in the toxic work environment was detrimental to his mental and physical health. The only thing in his control was his ability to let go and move on. The risk of leaving the job became less than staying within the job. Dewain began to plan, network, and seek other employment opportunities. Even before he landed his new job, Dewain began to experience a sense of freedom and optimism for creating a new place for belonging. Through the freedom to move forward, Dewain began to rebuild meaning in his life.
