Last week was a special one for little Benjamin.  His Grammie arrived from Nova Scotia for a week long visit.  I am the local grandma, and I am lucky to have lots of visits with this little precious grandson of ours.  I was thrilled that his other Grammie got to share in the joy last week.   I was invited to have dinner with Benjamin’s family and his Grammie on Sunday evening.  Before supper, she and I sat on the back deck and watched little Ben as he maneuvered in and out of his pint-sized lawn chair, moved his precious stones out of the empty planter, on to the deck and then back to the planter.  Once he tired of that he struck off across the lawn to a small tree.  He went to the far side of it and discovered that if he stood directly behind it, then moved his head to the side, we would disappear from his sight for a second as his eyes passed by the tree trunk.  When he ‘came into view’ again, we would say, ‘Peek – a – boo!’.  He thought this was utterly wonderful!

Ben had no idea we could see him the whole time, and of course it did not matter.  He was thrilled at being able to go out of sight, but he was even more thrilled at being seen again. 

It isn’t only one-year-olds who appreciate being seen.

The day before the grandmother reunion, I stopped into a local bike shop where I had had some work done on my bike.  I had the chain and rear cassette replaced in the late winter as I had been cautioned that it was at 100% use.  After it was replaced, the bike mechanic told me it was possible it would need some fine tuning, and that I’d need to take it out for a couple of rides to see if it was grinding or slipping when changing gears. 

After taking it on the road a couple of times, there was clearly a clunking sound, so I took it back in for a quick adjustment.  Again, the same advice was given to me; it might need another adjustment once I had ridden it a few times.  Sure enough, after two fairly respectable rides of 50 and 60km, most of the grinding was gone, except for some rubbing when I went into my bottom three or four gears on the rear cassette.  So back I went.

When I went to pick up the bike, I met a new mechanic.  He had not made any adjustment yet and asked what I had heard when I was biking.  I told him.  He invited me back to see my bike, and mentioned he wanted to show me something.  I’m not an expert on fixing bikes so I was pleased to think I would learn something new. 

Not so fast.

He began by slowly and carefully explaining how the front derailleur works (I have to admit, I did not know how to spell derailleur, but I sure did know how it worked.)  Then he continued to use his slow and careful tone in asking me what I thought it meant to shift into low gear.  I’m sure my face was not as neutral as I was trying to make it.   In truth, I was insulted, frustrated and plain old mad.  I have ridden this bike for thousands of kilometres.  It’s true, I have never been in the Tour de France, but I think I’m a decent cyclist.  And, I do know what it means to shift into a low gear.  Imagine. I’ve found my low gears really helpful when I’m climbing mountains.  And yes, I’m a middle-aged woman.  Clearly, one who he thought needed things explained very slowly and clearly.  

It isn’t only one-year-olds who appreciate being seen.

The day after the day after the bike incident, I was talking on the phone with Ruth, the photographer who has agreed to do a professional photo shoot for me.   I’d like to update my website and I’ve never had professional photos done for my business.  I was worried about the shoot.  I was feeling reluctant, afraid, self-conscious, and a bit shy.  Ruth had asked me to think about some words or qualities I would like most see portrayed in my images.  Ruth explained that she had been taught that if you don’t ‘know it’, you won’t ‘see it’.  I had been mulling over what I might say to Ruth when we chatted.  I told her that often when I see a picture of myself, I don’t think it accurately portrays what I thought I was portraying.  I said that my smile often looks like I’m holding a little something back.  Ruth said she had noticed this, and she had noticed that sometimes it looks like there is almost a hint of a question in my smile.  As soon as she said this, I felt a huge relief.

It isn’t only one-year-olds who appreciate being seen.

Ruth had been able to see me.  She understood what I have on the inside of me that I want to have seen on the outside.  I am at a place in my life where I don’t want to hold back, or feel that I need to.  I don’t want to have to question my abilities or my worth.  Ruth saw this.

Seeing someone is one of the most wonderful gifts we can give them.  Each of us wants to be seen, really seen, for what we believe we are.  It is such a feeling of home when someone ‘gets’ us.  When they see qualities in us that are important to us.  When they see past the generalizations and stereotypes that are also clearly available for easy viewing.  It may not be overstating it to say that until we believe we are seen, we can never truly step into our most confident, authentic selves.

On Saturday, when I was sitting with little Ben’s Grammie, we were both able to easily see Ben.  He, of course, is not yet at an age when he has learned to hold any pieces of himself back.  I hope we will always be two people in his life who see him.  Not just see that he is a toddler or a teenager, but really see the qualities inside him that let him know we know him, we believe in him and we are there to support him.

When April (Grammie) and I hugged goodbye, she whispered in my ear, “They’re doing such a great job, aren’t they?”  “They sure are”, I replied, both of us with tears in our eyes.   She clearly knows how to see.
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My inquiry for you this week is, “What needs to be seen?”

Elizabeth is a certified, professional Life and Leadership Coach, and the owner of Critchley Coaching.  She is the founder and president of the Canadian charity, RDL Building Hope Society.   She works with corporations, non-profits and the public sector, providing leadership and personal coaching for individuals and teams.  She creates and facilitates custom workshops for all sizes of groups. Contact Elizabeth to learn how to sharpen your tool of seeing others.
 

Jim and I were as enthralled as the rest of Canada with the winning game seven of the Toronto Raptors last weekend.  The final shot was breath-stealing!  Later that evening, the CBC National news showed an interview conducted by Rosemary Barton with the President of the NBA, Adam Silver.  In it, she broached the topic of politics and sport, specifically noting that the NBA, as an organization, has avoided prescribing what its athletes can say and what political topics the players can voice opinions about.  This is in stark contrast to other organizations, the NFL for instance, which has taken a fairly firm stance on players like Colin Kaepernick who chose to bring the Black Lives Matter movement into the spotlight when he ‘took a knee’ during the playing of the American National Anthem.

The entire interview was interesting, partly because Adam Silver very rarely gives public interviews, but mostly because he seems like such a very smart person; one who is grounded in common sense.   The thing that stood out for me was his description of the philosophy of the NBA around these issues.  He explained that the NBA organization has a set of clear values they operate by.  They include things like tolerance, inclusion and respect.

Only three months into his term, he banned the LA Clippers owner, Donald Stirling, from the league for life because of racist comments he made.  This swift, clear, firm action by Silver set the tone.  Clearly, the values the league ascribed to, were in fact going to be the values the league lived by.

This spoke to me.  It aligns perfectly with one of the most basic teachings in coaching; that being that organizations and individuals, both create the best opportunity for a rich, successful and satisfying life when we identify our values, and align our actions with them.

A value is something of worth.   It is something we cherish.  It is something we would fight to keep in our lives.  It is something we are willing to make sacrifices for.  A value, what we value, tells the world what we believe is important in life.

Often when I work with an organization, a group or an individual, I ask them to identify their values.  Using the case of individuals (although the process is the same for organizations), I have them list as many of their values as they can.  Given a few prompting questions, most people can easily come up with 25 – 50 values.

Once the list is established, I have them identify their top three values.  Any number can be used but three gives enough of the experience that most people are able to generalize it to the other important values they may have.  With the three values, I ask them the following, ‘How fully are you honouring these values in your life right now?’

This is usually the silence-maker.

All of us have values we can identify.  All of us like to believe we model our values every day.  All of us believe our values are worth fighting for.  What I love to think about is this:  If other people saw each of our values as a coin, when they picked up each coin, would they find it to be pure gold or gold-plated?

I, of course, love to imagine that my values are pure gold.  And if this is truly the case, I know that sometimes I do not give them the treatment they deserve.

So often, we claim to value a particular thing.  We insist this is our top value. We would fight for this value.  And yet, many, many times, we push our values aside on our road to something else.  I have listened to the silence of hundreds of people as they think about their top value and realize that although they claim it to be their value, at times it is as if it is a gold-plated coin.  You wouldn’t have to scratch very deeply to find it wasn’t pure gold.

On the surface, we can do a pretty good job of shining up the gold-plating.  At a quick glance, no one would notice.  People could be tricked into believing we really do deeply live our values.  But when day after day, week after week and eventually year after year, we give more talk than action about our values, the coins quickly lose their gold-plating.  If our time and attention are evidence of what we truly value, when the coating comes off the coin, the truth is what remains.

It is very hard to consistently honour our values.  It’s easy to be distracted, to think we have lots of time, to put them to the side, just for now, to show them off when it is convenient but to turn our backs on them when they cause us some discomfort.  How often do we turn on a device instead of having a conversation, pretend to listen instead of giving our full attention, and settle for good-enough instead of for our best?

It’s far too easy to be gold-plated instead of pure gold, and yet the pure gold moments are the ones we will cherish. 

My inquiry for you this week is, ‘Are these real gold?’

Elizabeth is a certified, professional Life and Leadership Coach, and the owner of Critchley Coaching.  She is the founder and president of the Canadian charity, RDL Building Hope Society.   She works with corporations, non-profits and the public sector, providing leadership and personal coaching for individuals and teams.  She creates and facilitates custom workshops for all sizes of groups. Contact Elizabeth to learn how to identify your gold values.

Sunday evening, I had agreed to partake in my first dance performance since being sidelined last September.  We were performing in a one-hour, Cinco de Mayo celebration at one of the more modern senior complexes in our city.

To provide some context, our group is made up of approximately 125 dancers.  Each week of the year, Reba J, our instructor, organizes smaller groups from this large group to perform at seniors’ facilities around the city and surrounding area.  It is colourful, lively entertainment for the seniors.  For the dancers, Reba J has cleverly created these performing events so we will be comfortable for our big performances during the Calgary Stampede, and at other key events in the city.  Each small performance, while low stakes in terms of crowd critics, is actually made much more challenging for the dancers in two ways; we dress in new, different themed outfits each time and, as if that wasn’t enough of a distraction for us, Reba J replaces our familiar tunes with music to match the theme.  The steps are the same, but the music is completely different.  It’s enough to force even a seasoned dancer to have to concentrate.

For a sideliner like me, I thought it might be career ending.

In fairness to myself, I handled some of the songs like an old pro, smiling and engaging with the audience.  But at other times, long, slow, painful, slow-motion times, it seemed as though when I was toe-heeling right, everyone else was heel-toeing left.  Many times, I proudly twirled around only to find myself face to face with the rest of the girls who clearly were not following me in my self-assigned solo.

I recovered from most of my mis-steps and while I eventually found my feet, it was often only a few seconds before the song ended.  Luckily, the music and the other dancers were entertaining enough to lessen the spectacle I was creating.  When we finished our set, as per our usual routine, everyone kindly and enthusiastically complimented each other, including letting me know I had done fine.  But I, and my Inner Critic, knew better.

I, who know all about Inner Critics, had opened the door for mine, and she had waltzed right through it like a long-lost friend.  She had no trouble keeping up with me and my mis-steps.  As I would find myself face to face with the other dancers she would whisper, ‘I knew you weren’t ready.’

On the drive home she rode shotgun and continued her commentary, ‘You have less than eight weeks until it’s really show time.  You cannot possibly learn all the new dances.’  By the time I drove into our garage she dealt her final blow:

‘You need to quit.  Just for this year.  You are not quite ready…. yet.’

My Inner Critic, like that of everyone else’s on this planet is a clever one.  If she had said, ‘You’re a loser.  You can’t dance.’, I would never have believed her. I have good solid proof to the contrary.

But she didn’t say that.  Instead she used the clever little phrase that has stopped many a strong woman from taking brave steps. ‘You’re not quite ready… yet’. 

You see, this we can believe.  The ‘yet’ word causes us to think she is really on our side, cheering us on, and gosh, darn, she would never, ever want to see us fail so she just suggests we wait… a bit.  It sounds so logical.  It sounds truthful, even kind.  She didn’t say I couldn’t perform.  Just not yet.  The trouble is, she will always think ‘You’re not quite ready…. yet’.  She detests it when we get out of our comfort zone.

The more I listened to her, the more she tried to convince me I should talk to Reba J about the upcoming performing season.  Luckily, hers is not the only voice in my head.  I recalled a phrase told to me by Tara Mohr, founder, coach and author of Playing Big:

‘That is too big a solution for your problem.’

In Tara’s story, a little boy was worried about an upcoming swim meet, knowing he had to swim a full length of the pool without stopping.  He came up with every possible reason to not go the meet, believing skipping the entire swim meet was the only solution.  When he finally revealed his true reason for not wanting to go, his mom wisely responded with, ‘Sweetie, that is too big a solution for your problem.’  This wonderful little story has stuck with me.

The sorrow I had been feeling about thinking I might not be able to perform this season began to lift.  This solution of ‘I’m not ready to dance…  yet… not this year’, was too big for my problem.  My problem is, in fact, that I have only been back to dance class for a few weeks and there is a lot to learn.  This happens to be a manageable problem for which there are reasonable solutions.  There are extra classes I can attend, I have classmates who will help me and there are PDF instructions I can use at home.

All of us face challenges and setbacks.  Each of us can think of a time when we created a solution that was far too big for our problem.  When we do this, we take ourselves right out of the game.  We do this when we speak up at a meeting, get criticized, and decide never to offer our opinion again.  We do this when we are driving and have a mishap, or get lost, and decide we can’t drive on busy roads any more.  We do this when we plan a special event that doesn’t go according to plan so we determine never to put ourselves out there again.  We do this when we are told we aren’t good at something when we are in grade one and we never try to do it again.  These are all solutions far too big for their problems.

I plan to perform this season.  I plan to know the steps.  I plan to add to the positive image of the group.  I’ll likely make a mistake or two.  Or three.  So will the other dancers.  Even the really good ones.  But the performing mistakes I make will be far, far less damaging than the mistake I would make if I let myself believe I cannot dance. 

My inquiry for you this week is, ‘What is a right size solution for this problem?’

Elizabeth is a certified, professional Life and Leadership Coach, and the owner of Critchley Coaching.  She is also the founder and president of the Canadian charity, RDL Building Hope Society.   She works with corporations, non-profits and the public sector, providing leadership and personal coaching for individuals and teams.  She creates and facilitates custom workshops for all sizes of groups. She dances with the Chinook Country Dancers.  Contact Elizabeth and allow her to help you right-size your solutions.
 
  

This week, we celebrated two birthdays in our family; our daughter, Kaitlyn’s, and our son-in-law, Matt’s.  Each year when the beginning of May gets close, I think back to the year Kaitlyn was born.  I suppose it feels even more poignant these days, now that she is the Mom of a little one, just like I was all those years ago. One of the traditions I chose when Kaitlyn was born, was to write her a letter on her birthday each year.  When Greg was added to our family, I did the same for him.

In the letters I told them about the milestones they had reached in the previous year, I wrote about the things they liked to do, about their dreams and worries, about my dreams and worries and most importantly of all, I told them how much I loved them and that I was proud of them.

They of course, had no idea I had this tradition. I can see myself sitting at our kitchen table after they had gone to bed, sometimes on the very day of their birthday, when their friends had gone home, and the candles on the cake had been blown out, hand-writing my letter to them.  When I finished the letter, I would ask Jim to add his thoughts at the end, put it in an envelope, put their name and the date on it and add it to the little shoe box in my closet.  I hadn’t decided when I should give the letters to the kids, but I always assumed I would know when it was the right time.

These of course were love letters.

I have a long tradition of letter writing.  When I was a little girl, living in Ontario, both sets of our grandparents lived on the East Coast, in New Brunswick, and we wrote letters to them.  I kept up this tradition long after I was married and had moved to Alberta.  By then I added my own parents, Jim’s parents, my godparents and often one or more of my siblings to the roster too.  This is how we kept in touch, long before we could text and before we could afford to call long-distance. 

When Jim and I were engaged, he spent four months on the remote north shore of Quebec, near Sept-Iles, performing research at a salmon-spawning station.  There was no electricity in the cabin where he stayed and there certainly was no phone.  Each week, we wrote letters to each other.

These too, were love letters.

As Kaitlyn’s birthday came and went this week, I found myself thinking about love letters.  While most of us no longer write letters of any kind, I’ve been thinking about how more modern love letters look. 

I read a little news story this week, out of Comox, B.C.  The story was about an 86-year-old woman, Tinney Davidson, who, for the past eleven years has sat in her living room, by her window, each morning and waved to the students as they headed off to Highland Secondary School.  Each morning the students walking past would glance to their left, see Tinney waving, and wave back.  The students began to count on this, as one would count on noticing the seasons change; it was spectacularly beautiful, and completely ordinary.  Tinney’s small wave, and genuine smile, became something the students counted on.

This was her love letter to them.

This week, when the students heard that Tinney was moving, one of the teachers helped them organize themselves to go to say goodbye.  They walked together to her home, 400 strong, homemade signs and heart shaped placards in hand.  They gathered quietly, stuck the signs on her lawn and in the gardens on the edges, and when the teacher brought her out on to her porch, together they all blew her a kiss and wished her well.

This was their love letter to her.

Modern love letters may not be hand-written on paper much anymore, but I notice people still finding ways to send them.  My friend Sandy, says she now has a schedule of her friends who are wanting to help her by driving her to her daily radiation and periodic chemotherapy treatments.

These are love letters.

In my house, I always baked chocolate chip cookies to put in the kid’s lunches when they were in school.  I later began to make them for my students on the days when they wrote their Math exam, and I brought them to my colleagues when we had a late meeting.  Now, I make sure to have them on hand when the kids come for a visit. I noticed Greg made them when we went to visit him.  And Kaitlyn bakes them for her staff.

These too, are love letters.

My dance instructor Reba J, sends us two love letters each week. One is delivered in person, when we show up in class and her face lights up with joy as she greets each of us.  The other is the email she sends to all the Chinook Country Dancers the next day to tell us how well we are doing and how proud she is of us.

These too, are love letters.

We may not write many of the old-fashioned love letters anymore but there are thousands of ways we can send the newer version.  I finally gave each of our kids their letters one Christmas when they came home from University.  It was the perfect timing and I know I’ve never purchased a gift more precious. 

This past year, I wrote my first letter to Benjamin and I’ve put it in a binder.  As he gets older, I think I’ll incorporate the twist to this tradition my friend Sheryl spun.  She loved the idea of my birthday letters, and when her grandchildren came along she decided to write letters for each of them.  She interviews them before the big day, and then writes the letter.  They keep them in a binder in their rooms and can be found reading them over and over.  What a gift. 

My inquiry for you this week is, ‘What love letter can I send?’
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Elizabeth is a certified, professional Life and Leadership Coach, and the owner of Critchley Coaching.  She is the founder and president of the Canadian charity, RDL Building Hope Society.   She works with corporations, non-profits and the public sector, providing leadership and personal coaching for individuals and teams.  She creates and facilitates custom workshops for all sizes of groups. Contact Elizabeth to learn how to customize your own brand of love letter.