New Week | June 14th
The Power of Continuous Self-Renewal or Part II of Crushing Authenticity Ceilings
Last week I talked about authenticity ceilings; “the personal inability to bring your fully activated and engaged whole human self to the table.” We reach authenticity ceilings when we journey for too long without pausing for self-examination and voluntary evolution. When we let layers of emotion, bias, and experience pile up and calcify our identity into something rigid and brittle instead of something fluid, adaptable, and antifragile. Authenticity ceilings manifest themselves as performance-inhibiting traits such as indecisiveness, insecurity, and difficulty forming loyal team bonds. In their worst form, authenticity ceilings ignored for too long can bring someone to a state of “mid-life crisis” or burnout.
The way to proactively prevent your potential from being capped by an authenticity ceiling is by pursuing what the great leadership thinker John Gardner calls “self-renewal.” Put simply, it’s the act of taking stock of how your life is going, evaluating which thoughts, habits, behaviors are serving you and which aren’t, pondering who and how you want to be in the world, then committing (or recommitting) to the way you’ll need to live to match your aspirations.
This idea of renewal may seem foreign to some but for some high-performers it’s not so outlandish. Indeed, doesn’t this all just sound like the kind of work one would do at an annual leadership retreat, or a mastermind weekend with trusted peers? Setting goals, retro-ing key decisions, reflecting on lessons learned, recalibrating priorities? Well, I’m here to say that this familiar and accepted idea of “occasional check-ins” with oneself might still not be enough, and that we might not be built to lead such compartmentalized inner lives. Certainly there’s merit to the approach of putting your head down for a few months of hard work, seeing what results, then coming up for air and seeing where you are on the map. But might there be an even better alternative that helps you maximize your energy and output even more during the limited time you have to make an impact during your lifetime?
What if we need to move past the idea of occasional self-renewal and embrace “continuous self-renewal”? The cells of our bodies are in a state of continuous self-renewal but often we ourselves are not. Thinking about self-renewal as something that we only need to do every now and then gives us an easy escape, allowing us to shut out important truth signals in the meantime, and relieving us of the work any great leader knows is necessary: to be present and conscious and engaged and genuine every day. If you’re unable to live in this way every day, to bring your full self to the table, then you need to ask yourself: what are you afraid to admit? What are you in denial of? What are you protecting yourself from?
Now here’s where things get interesting: the decision we make to go long periods of our lives knowing we could be living more freely, consciously, presently, lovingly, energetically, playfully, powerfully...is not just a mental decision but a physical decision. Our bodies literally store our fears and other emotions, and make a strong effort to protect us from change by refusing to open up the places where those emotions are stored. To ask our bodies to release those fears and let us live our full potential is a physically uncomfortable request. But until that request is made, our bodies are happy to carry on, protecting what’s inside.
Unfortunately, it’s often a traumatic life event that wakes us up. A near-death experience, the loss of a loved one, a debilitating injury, a shocking change in life trajectory. For me, it was the death of my father that woke me up to the importance of deep personal renewal. I was at a high in my life…personally an professionally: I was traveling the world with a backpack, conducting my own field research in Vietnam, and was building a business while finishing my masters. I was deeply committed to personal growth and had all the productivity and health hacks you can imagine. Eventually I learned that growth sometimes means to take a U-turn and look back at what the productivity and health hacks helped me to hide from. When the news came I moved back home, graduated a year later, wrote my research in tears, and left the company. Together with my sister we took care of him for 12 months and then moved into the hospice right before he passed. Nothing has ever felt so empty. My father lived an unhealthy lifestyle, held onto a lot of unresolved trauma, and held onto his company that should have been long gone. He was loyal to his dreams, but never loyal to the ingredients that would make his dreams come true - his body, his food, his mind, his work ethic, his entire lifestyle. In short? His everyday choices. The truth is he could be alive today. But he stood in his own way far too often to make a U-turn and say: “ It ain’t my business that’s not working, it’s me.” He didn’t become an extension of the success he was seeking, despite being a good father. I know he knew, I kept seeing it in his eyes during chemo; but the little boy inside of him was scared. For too long. In the spirit of my love for him, I committed to breaking this inter-generational habit of self-sabotage and started this journey.
I built businesses based on deep values, and opened my arms to success and failure, I committed to a physical practice that was and still sometimes is deeply uncomfortable, I gave birth to three children, each a couple of years apart. And with each of those experiences I experienced my own self being reborn. Each of these life events challenged me further and further to live in a way that keeps me fully aligned with my values. And now if I reflect on an average week: I laugh, play, and love freely with my husband and childrenI spend a lot of time in nature, I work out 5 days a week, I manage the household for my children, I face new fears as they come up, I initiate crucial conversations and set clear boundaries with colleagues and loved ones, I serve clients and partners whom I believe in, I incubate and design programs and products I believe in, and I’m building a community with a massive vision that I believe in. It’s MEANINGful. It carries my name.
I don’t know how to characterize my life habits prior to my father’s death other than by saying that despite how hardworking, meaning-seeking, or thoughtful I thought I was, I was also living with a lot of baggage, a lot of subconscious fears, and a lot of stored feelings, most of which I had no idea was even there. I look back and hug and love the past versions of myself, but I’m also much happier where I am now, having done the work of continuous self-renewal for the past 6 years and holding the intention to continue this way of life until the end. It’s so much more fun, and fulfilling.
I invite you to join me:
I am looking at all of you reading this to soak this up and feel an uncomfortable feeling rising in your bodies. I am calling on all of you to use it to keep going, keep learning, keep renewing.
The reason why conscious, good-hearted, well-intentioned leaders are such an amplifier of success is because you are impacting people on a daily basis. It doesn’t matter how many, it just matters that in your visionary, ambitious mind you find the strength to ask yourself what it is that needs your renewed energy, perspective, and vision so you keep us all pushing forward. We need your renewal so you can inspire the next generation to do it too. So your children are humbled by your authentic failures and wins and build their lives on the right moral backbone of always finding a new perspective to be a little better neighbor, colleague, partner, boss, leader.
Come to understand the impact you have on others as you step into yourself and the arts of mutual symbiosis. We all feed off of each other’s energies, our love for each other, and how we get back up when we fail or also to just be doing a better job at whatever we’re doing right now. Be committed to who you are and who you can be, don’t get the idea in your head that as you grow older that you are allowed to think about yourself a certain way, that you earned a certain view of the world. Be more optimistic than that.
I conclude with a paragraph I recently read by John Gardner: Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account."
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Journaling Challenge:
Sharing another journaling prompt from our bravespace journaling challenge with all of you. Enjoy the motions as you’re thinking and feeling through it:
A personal moment this week:
Time in nature is the greatest reset. This environment embodies self-renewal always and reminds us of what we are capable of. We come from the same source. We just have to remind ourselves.