Becoming Better

My good friend and colleague, David Berry is the V.P. of People & Culture at Municipal. David hosts the podcast, Becoming Better Men, which is about exactly what the name suggests.

Recently my husband and I listened in on David’s conversation with another good friend and colleague of mine, educator and spiritual director, Dane Anthony. Their conversation, There’s Another Way to Be Myself, was rich, insightful, and one of my favorites to date.

At the end of every conversation David asks his guest the same five questions. One in particular grabbed my attention.

What is a quality you wish you had less of?

We decided to answer that same question for ourselves.

My answer was clear and immediate.

Zero doubt about it, the quality I would like less of is defensiveness. For the record, other people in my life probably wish I had less of it too.

It’s been with me for as long as I can remember. Perhaps it grew out of being raised by a patriarchal father who wasn’t a fan of strong women, which is tough when that is what you are. It might have been a necessary coping mechanism back in the day, but not any more. It is a protective reaction, based on fear, and it isn’t pretty. Especially when you are married to a guy who absolutely is a fan of strong women, and which is in fact, one of the reasons he wanted to share life with you.

Like any longtime habit, my defensive pattern runs deep, and it doesn’t take much to set it off. However, I am discovering that there is a sliver of time in which to make a different choice. A tiny wafer of moments that creates enough room to take a breath, which creates enough space to take another one, and then another one. Those breaths allow me enough time to step away from that old reactive quality, and begin to step into a new one. One that is based on curiosity, not fear, and favors connection over protection. Sometimes my better angels don’t win, and I blast right past that tiny sliver of time. But now I know it is there, and as Dane Anthony reminds me in our monthly conversations, we can’t ever un-know what we’ve learned along our way.

I hope you will listen in on David’s conversation with Dane on Becoming Better Men. And when it’s over, maybe you will want to answer that same question for yourself.

What is a quality you wish you had less of?

If you are like me, your answer will come fairly quickly, and lead to plenty of opportunities to practice a new way of being yourself. And while practice may never make perfect, it will always make better.

(Be sure to check out Municipal for some great sports utility gear.)

Showing Up

Tonight there is a community conversation centered around my book BLUSH: Women & Wine. In that book, I suggest that we all have our coping mechanisms of choice. Those ways in which we hide from our own lives, and distance ourselves from the things we’d rather not face, the feelings we’d rather not experience, and the parts of ourselves that we try to keep under lock and key. As I say in BLUSH,Wine has been my “thing”. For others, it may stake no claim, and I raise my glass to them. But. Something does. Whether addiction to our smart phones or binge watching the latest hit series, smoking pot or online shopping, perfectionism or endless productivity, serving others so that we can ignore ourselves, nightly cocktails or an overflowing social calendar, excessive exercise or a fist full of peanut butter cups, a common thread in the fabric of the human soul is the temptation to avoid pain and discomfort. But hiding from our life today only means running back into it again tomorrow, and the truth of the matter is, it takes so much more energy to run away from our life than to show up for it.

Rather than what is so often cast as a “book talk” byShowing the author, this one is a place to be in conversation with one another. A safe space in which to wonder together, what does it mean to show up fully for the life that is ours, and what prevents us from doing that? Our questions are our own to live. But there is something good that happens when we choose to live them together. There is safety in numbers. Going it together reminds us that we are not alone in our efforts to make sense of things.

So, tonight we will gather together, over glasses of wine (yep…still love the stuff) and share our stories. We are story tellers at heart, and we see ourselves in one another’s stories. My plan is to go first because someone has to. And I’ve learned that if I am willing to tell my story, it can give others the courage to do the same.

Let’s show up for life and tell our stories!

Cheers.