Author: Ricardo

One of the things I love most about iTunes is “The Song of the Week” freebie. I try not to be one of those people who troll the interwebs for free stuff. The iTunes weekly freebie, though, is one of my guilty pleasures. The thing I love most about it is the fact that I get to sample music I would never have otherwise listened to. I mean, NEVER. But I listen, and most of the time I enjoy.

Today…well, let’s just say today’s download struck a nerve. I’ll leave it at that.

If you use iTunes, go grab this week’s gem by Greg Laswell entitled “Come Back Down” featuring Sara Bareilles. It’s worth a listen.

Lyrics follow:

Come on now
you’re good friends are here waiting this one out
you’ve gotta come back down
you’ve gotta come back down
look around you
you’re the only one dragging this out
you’ve gotta come back down
you’ve gotta come back down
all of your wallowing is unbecoming
all of your wallowing is unbecoming
you’ve gotta take it on your own from here
it’s getting pathetic and i’m almost done here
you’ve gotta take it on your own from here
it’s getting pathetic and i’m almost done here
what you set out to kill off has been gone some time now
you’ve gotta come back down
you’ve gotta come back down
head out any further and you might just forget how
you’ve gotta come back down
you’ve gotta come back down
all of your wallowing is unbecoming
all of your wallowing is unbecoming
you gotta take it on your own from here
it’s getting pathetic and i’m almost done here
you’ve gotta take it on your own from here
it’s getting pathetic and i’m almost done here
all of your wallowing is unbecoming
all of your wallowing is unbecoming
you’ve gotta take it on your own from here
it’s getting pathetic and i’m almost done here
you’ve gotta take it on your own from here
it’s getting pathetic and i’m almost done here
you’ve gotta take it on your own from here
come back down
you’ve gotta come back down
you’ve gotta come back
you’ve gotta come back down
you’ve gotta come back down
you’ve gotta come back down
you’ve gotta come back down

I’ve become increasingly convinced that a leader’s voice is one of the most crucial characteristics to leverage when building an organization.  Leaders build organizations in many ways and in many circumstances.  However, regardless of whether a leader is building a new organization within a company, taking the reigns of an existing organization, or growing an organization that they’ve been leading for years, the shape that things take depends mostly on the leader’s voice. 

Few things are more important to the workforce than hearing the leader’s voice.  We use the term “organizational culture” to describe the set of beliefs and rules, both written and unwritten, that determine the way in which employees interact with one another and carry out the business of the organization.  Culture, though, is created primarily by the constituency, the individuals who make up the whole.  Culture is a collective construct, and the collective organically guide the evolution of the culture.  Leader’s play a role in that evolution, but the collective can and will correct for aberrant, dysfunctional behavior.  History is filled with examples of leaders who took the proverbial left turn and watched as the collective corrected the course.  Some corrections take generations and some take weeks.  The thing to remember is that leader’s are left to decay while culture marches on.

In contrast, an organization’s culture is heavily dependent on the leader.  From a corporate perspective, the leader shapes the organizational set of beliefs, and the collective follows.  The collective can influence, for sure, but the leader can perpetuate behaviors and situations that are aberrant and dysfunctional.  The collective follows, regardless.  There are, of course, examples of corporate rebellions and revolutions, but history is filled with examples of leaders who took the proverbial left turn and drove their organization into the ground.  On the flip side, history is also filled with organizations that have collapsed once the charismatic, visionary leader has left the picture.  The thing to remember is that leader’s in most organizations can move on, leaving the organization to decay in their wake.

Human cultures exist over time, evolving and transforming, merging and diverging, separating from and subliming into other cultures.  Organizational cultures are tightly tied to their leaders.  This is why the constituency must hear the voice of the leader.  A leader influences through action and inaction.  As Lao Tzu taught, inaction is, itself, action.  A leader’s sphere of influence spreads in one of two ways: through direct interaction between the leader and those they lead or through myth and legend passed on from the eyewitness to the audience once and twice removed.  In the absence of voice, the leader puts the perception of their intent into the realm of myths and legends.  They put their story into the hands of others.  Only through exercising their voice, by ensuring that they are heard as much as they can be, does a leader pull perception of their intent out of that nebulous realm of hearsay and into the brilliant light of truth.

I wrote something about leadership over at Woo Woo Leadership.  Read it here.

Here’s a weird paradox that I’ve noticed in life: the smaller you make your world, the larger the emptiness becomes…conversely, the more of the Universe that you let into your world, the smaller the Universe itself becomes.  This is the paradox of emptiness.

How can this be?  I believe that everything in this Universe is connected.  When we deny the connections, we deny a fundamental piece of our very existence.  This causes a schism in our psyche, a disconnect between what our Higher Self knows and what our ego-bound self thinks.  Intuitively, we understand that, at minimum, people are connected.  We are gregarious animals, if you will, and we find joy in the presence of others.  This should be our first clue of the important role that connection plays in our lives!  We desire connection to different extents, of course, depending on our life experiences, but if you are honest with yourself, you will appreciate that a balance between solitude and interaction with others brings a certain peace to life.  Thus, connection is an important part of the human experience, and resisting it is bound to cause disharmony.  When we shutdown and limit the connections, we amplify this disharmony and feed the negative emotional and psychological drivers that cause us to want to isolate ourselves.  It becomes a self-fueling cycle, and the end result can be nothing other than sadness.  Eventually, it can become tragic.

This is how making our world smaller makes the emptiness loom larger.

When we embrace the connections and feed them, they will grow.  Strong and healthy connections lead to balance, to harmony.  Embracing the need for connection and nurturing the ones we already have is a method of affirming the innate human need to be a party of the collective.  There is value in retreat, in meditation and internal reflection, but I do not believe that the average human being is meant to sustain a solo journey over the long haul.  Connections are safe harbors during life’s storms, and life is no less temperamental than the weather on an open sea during times of climactic change.  Our journeys are different, of course; each human being has a path to follow.  The Universe nudges us towards one another, into each other’s paths.  We weave into and out of each other’s lives.  If we could visualize them, the sum of our paths would look very much like a giant, cosmic net.  In the net, all paths lead to all others.  The weave is tighter than we think.  We understand that only when we allow ourselves to perceive the net.  We perceive the net only when we allow ourselves to flow into and out of the connections.

Universe.  Connection.  Flow.  This is how letting in more of the Universe makes the Universe itself smaller.

A paradox can be weird, but it does not have to be beyond our ability to comprehend and leverage it.

Apparently, Dr. Mercola says that you shouldn’t look at screens before bed. The intense light stimulates chemical production in the brain that gets you all confused about what it is exactly that you should be doing. What am I up to? Where am I going? What time of day is it?

How many other things do we do to ourselves that we shouldn’t be doing? Answer: probably a crapload. Things like checking in with your bitizens in Tiny Tower before putting your head down on your pillow. I recently read an article in which the author indicated his preference for the Kindle Fire over the iPad as an e-reader because he can hold the Fire more easily while on his side in bed. The things we do to ourselves…

But now you know. What will you do with that knowledge? Will you do something differently? Maybe I will. Maybe not. Regardless, it comes down to choices, choices like whether or not to stare at bright screens before bed.

You see, the emperor didn’t know he’d been swindled. He didn’t know that he wasn’t wearing any clothes. I know there are specific lessons that we are “supposed” to get from the story, but in ever understood why it was such a bad thing that he’d been fooled. After all, it didn’t matter until someone ELSE pointed the fact out to him. Then, suddenly, the fact that he was fooled mattered.

I’m not saying that I’d rather live life ignorant of my shortcomings, but I do think that those other opinions aren’t always necessary. There are matters of the spirit, of the soul, that require only reflection and little additional input.

My youngest child is doing amazing things at school. He’s doing things that are exciting his teacher. She’s so excited, she’s sharing what he’s doing with other teachers. His former teacher came and took a picture of what he’d done. She uses it to show parents what sorts of things kids who move on to the next level do with the materials in the classroom. The only problem with her approach is that she assumed that he was doing something he was taught by his new teacher. He isn’t. What he did, he did on his own. He invented it. He came up with a new way of working with the materials that his new teacher never learned in her training. She didn’t instruct him; he’s instructing her. And it’s exciting.

My son received no grade for his work. He received the satisfaction of being given the time, space, and permission to explore his world, manipulate it, and go down his own path. By contrast, he got bored doing Rocket Math in his old school. Single-digit addition, as fast as you can, as many as you can, while being timed? You can watch the progression of mastery in his Rocket Math scores. Better, faster, more: upward curve. Then, slower, fewer: downward curve. Did my child forget how to add single digits? Nope. He simply mastered it. He got bored. He lost interest. He moved on. The only problem was that he didn’t have the time, space, and permission to move on. So, up went the flags… His teacher got excited, but it wasn’t the kind of excitement that encourages growth. It was the kind that kills self esteem and encourages unquestioning compliance.

I stop to look at myself in the mirror every day, and I see a person who, at 40, still struggles to overcome the effects of my indoctrination. I want something different for my children, and they are getting it. Both my boys are. I see the same exploratory mechanisms, the same builders of confidence, at work in both their classrooms. I want my children to be better at being themselves than I am at being myself. Trust me, I’m not delusional; I know they will struggle to find their place in the world and in human society. But I hope they will struggle to find meaning in life or a purpose to drive them or a place where they will fit in, not struggle to embrace and celebrate who they are inside.

“Adversity is the trial of principle. Without it, a man hardly knows whether he is an honest man.” — Henry Fielding

Well, I’m feeling pretty honest these days.

It is your right to claim your voice.

Don’t whisper for the duration of your life. Someone may have stolen your voice, but what they took did not belong to them. So, it was never really taken. You chose to let it go silent. Choose something different now.

Choose to claim your voice.