Nimble Journeys

A young gal who once worked in a Charlottesville coffee shop I frequent often dispensed bushels of self-help advice to her favored customers (not me). Some time later I found her working in the Whole Foods vitamin department, a much better venue for dispensing help, I thought, but still not a place for the self-help kind. Afterwards she went on to grad school and a degree in business consulting. Now, I felt, she’d gotten in touch with her elephant and found her true career.

Her elephant? Some people say we act like the rider atop the elephant, with our rider aware and seeming to be in control but with our elephant unaware and largely propelling us forwards. True happiness, it is suggested, can only come when we get our rider and elephant to work together.

Today, however, we tend to kill our elephant rather than honor it. Much of that killing comes from living in a culture where things like family, school, religion, politics, advertising and career imprint us with values of the other. So we’re not ourselves.

A few years ago I worked with a rider-driven woman named Diana. She’d easily graduated from the University of Virgina law school, greatly pleasing her hard working parents, and then she’d worked in several legal jobs, doing well but hating them all. With a thick streak of heroism in her, she contemplated taking her legal skills to the military. But her rider could push her no further, and finally she gave in to her elephant and began to work with her hands, first with jewelry and then with glass. She’s now a successful glass artist, and her parents recently chipped in for a studio and a bigger kiln. Evidently both Diana and her parents are now on board with their elephants and their riders have decided to help things along .

So I guess we should ask: Are we ignoring the elephant?

Ever wonder why an all day meeting makes us so tired? Maybe it’s because we’re protecting ourselves! Since linear step by step presentations hold off giving us the whole picture, our unease at not having a gestalt makes us extremely uncomfortable. What better way to handle this, then, than to shut down, to fall asleep! School children have been doing it for centuries.

The alternative involves “spiral learning,” a process of learning in small steps where we first seek something that interests us. We next experience that interest through a challenging and engaging activity where we’re rewarded for doing well. We then repeat the process, only at a slightly higher, more challenging level.

In this way we get a little but whole picture, and then from that we construct, using the same circular process, a bigger and bigger whole picture. This allows us to continually feel in control, always having a sense of where we are. While this is good for us, the learner, it’s tough for the teacher (or manager or leader or parent) who must develop an understanding of each individual in the group. That’s why we tend to get “canned” presentations such as the one I had in a psychology class where a professor, simply reading from notes he’d developed many years ago, talked in the present tense about his first grade son whom we later realized was now in fact eighteen.

We’re uneasy when we’re talked to this way. And what better response than to simply turn off! Because in situations where success means learning more – school, work, play — we expect to be treated as individuals, and we revolt when we are not. So we might ask: As we learn now, are we thought of as individuals? Or are we in revolt?

I once offered career advice to a young man named Allen. Having lived all his life in Charlottesville, Virginia, he was apprehensive about his new job with a pharmaceutical firm in New Jersey. To give him confidence with new situations, I asked him to make a list of clothes he might buy his girlfriend and then go to 3 or 4 stores where he could practice buying those clothes. I also asked him to be sure to talk with a clerk in each store.

Afterwards he was elated because he managed to comfortably talk with all the clerks and even begin to understand the arcane world of women’s sizes, styles and colors. He also realized that he could apply these new found skills to his new job situation in New Jersey.

I explored this phenomena by looking at students who were taking an introductory kayaking class at the University of Virginia. One student reported that she bicycled long distances to get in shape for the river trip, and afterwards she reported that gave her the confidence to make a successful run. Her husband, a PhD chemist, instead took a scientific approach, talking about risks and safety features and likely outcomes. While he also successfully completed the run, afterwards he reported that his little league baseball experience back in Ohio had really gotten him down the river.

I think this brings up an important concern: How do we make sure we can act before we act? And does it matter if our thinking is correct?

Twenty years ago when I made the transition from married to single life, I did a lot of, well, strange things. Not knowing how to act as single person, I began to experiment. One experiment involved clothes. I’d moved to Chicago and like my mother before me and my sisters now, I began to frequent high end used clothing stores. At any time, then, I might show up with a different outfit — one day black gabardine Armani pants, another day collarless minister frocks over Brooks Brothers shirts. So I guess I was feeling perfectly normal when in my attempt to look as urbane as this guy I stepped off the plane in Philadelphia with a red kerchief tied around my neck. Even today my sister Liz recalls with much laughter how I appeared as we met in the airport.

So maybe not all attempts at change go smoothly. And maybe in times of change we have to test out various new and real experiences, ones we have a stake in, and then we have to learn from the experiences so we can plot a new direction. We must then keep going when things make sense and we must redirect when things appear, well, silly. Obviously my kerchief days became a redirect.

But to test and learn we have to adopt a kind of “provisional self” that allows us to pretend that we really like what’s happening. As I dated many new women in Chicago, for instance, a provisional part of me was introduced to the various ethnic restaurants these women preferred. Thus my Chicago years become a kind of gastronomical odyssey — Chinese, Indian, Thai, Mexican, Korean. While most proved delightful, there were the occasional upset stomach nights that had to be endured.

Maybe in times of transition, then, some people can tolerate and even welcome new experiences while others cannot. So we ask: Which person are we? Our answer to that question tells us whether or not we’re ready to make big changes.