Given that I have invited you to join me in the journey of personal transformation to become a more conscious leader, I wanted to share with you the story of how my own journey began. What follows is something I wrote in 2007. It is the opening chapter of an unpublished piece entitled: Working as Though People Matter: An Experiment in Living Nonviolent Communication in the Workplace …
When I started writing this down, I thought it was a story about a business, about how we resuscitated a business back to life. But I now realize it’s a lot more personal than that. It’s about me, and how I was resuscitated back to life. The business is a major supporting character to this story, though, as are the people within that business, but the story only really makes sense in the context of my own life—my struggles, my choices, my pain & my joy.
It’s a story about how I lost passion for my business, for my work. How it lost its meaning & its relevance to my life, except to bring home a paycheck. For the first eight years, it was vibrantly exciting for me: full of learning, challenge, growth. I was a co-creator of the business in 1985, and I was excited to be in the field of teaching software technology to businesses. The IBM PC had come out only a few years before and the field seemed wide open with possibility—it begged for creativity with few rules of limitation. And it embodied my love for teaching.
But after about 8 years, I began to feel listless at work, distracted by other things that seemed to hold more energy for me. I felt a tug on me, a call to do other things.
I often dreaded being there, and yet it was terribly difficult to separate myself from it. First because of greed and hope—I wanted to squeeze more money out of it before I sold it so that my family would have more financial resources for whatever was next. Later, I stayed because of fear—I couldn’t imagine how to make the income I was making doing anything else. It was what I knew.
So rather than listen to the call to do other things, I chose to stay in the business for three or four more years, but that turned into 6 years, and then 8 years, and then 10. I have regret over making that choice (or series of choices) to keep going with the business. But at the time, it seemed to make sense. “Success” always seemed to be just another year or two away.
A series of wake-ups calls
Amidst all this, a couple of significant events happened that seemed to wake up that passion again, that began to call me back to life.
In December of 1993 my brother Frank died of cancer at the age of 49. His death, unlike any I had experienced before, caused me to grieve deeply and shattered several of my worldviews. I became much more acutely aware of my own mortality. I wondered, if it had been me who died, would I have celebrated that I lived my life fully? I knew the answer was ‘no.’
I empathized deeply for my widowed sister-in-law, imagining what I would want to happen if it had been my wife widowed instead. Grieving with her and her family, and giving support to her was an important part of my own healing. My business, to which I had dedicated so much of my personal energies and emotions, suddenly became less important, less significant.
A couple of years later, another event, small but poignant, shook me. My wife, Lisa, had come by my office briefly to talk, and as she was leaving she paused at the door and turned back to look at me. I remember vividly the words she spoke at that moment:
“I don’t like to visit you at work. The person I see here is not the person I know. I don’t like what I see.”
And then she left.
The words connected me to my own disappointment that when I went to work only a piece of “me” was present. What I valued so much in my life—authenticity, connection, mutuality, compassion, exploring—were not part of my work life. I left them at the door when I entered and put on a costume to fit my role of “President & CEO.” Worst of all, I lived in the costume so much that I began to lose connection with who I was.
These two events stand out as my wake-up call—a poignant awareness that I wasn’t living my values at work. In fact, I wasn’t enjoying work and wasn’t sure what I really did enjoy.
I began to take time away from work to explore what I did think was meaningful, what I was passionate about. And I began to explore how I could live my values at work. The path was ultimately a spiritual path, but there were huge pieces that related to how I wanted to work.
I was distraught with the paternalistic approach that was so common among the business managers/owners that I knew, and from whom I had learned my own management skills. I was never comfortable with the “command and control” approach to manipulating people to get what I wanted using punishments & rewards. I wanted to work with people who were engaged in their work & with each other; I wanted a partnership relationship with those I worked with, not domination over them. Since I had essentially no role models for such an approach, I was continually seeking sources of inspiration and advice. Among those that I turned to were Roger Fisher & William Ury (Getting to Yes), Jon Katzenbach & Douglas K. Smith (The Wisdom of Teams), Robert Greenleaf (Servant Leadership), Peter Block (Stewardship), Sharon Drew (Selling with Integrity), and Thomas Gordon (Leader Effectiveness Training).
An experience that changes everything
It was in December