Mindset

by Toku on Mindset, Skillset

Be With Complaints Like Rain

If you have a baby, it’s going to cry, and if you lead people, they are going to complain. This isn’t a diss on people.

It’s not that people are whiny, but quite the opposite. Our capacity to deal with tremendous challenges and adversity is incredible, but we also complain.

We complain because we’re not happy.
Because we don’t know what to do.
Because we feel like we don’t have power.
Because we want to be seen and loved and listened to.

The challenge for you as a leader is how to respond to these complaints.

“Yeah yeah I hear you”, without really listening
“OMG I HAVE TO FIX THIS”
“This complaining is SO annoying”

But none of these will get you anywhere.

So instead, be with complaints like rain: let them tell you the weather and show you where new leadership is ready to grow, while also letting it roll off of you.

Rain isn’t personal. And even when it seems that way, complaints aren’t either.

 
by Toku on Mindset, Poetry, Skillset

How To Discover Your Life Purpose In 3 Easy Steps

Each year at the monastery we did a retreat all about discovering your life’s purpose. It was a whole week of sitting in deep meditation, completing exercises about what our lives meant to us and asking ourselves why we were here on this earth.

My last year at the monastery I decided I was really going to go for it during this retreat. I was determined to discover my life’s purpose so deep, true, and powerful that I would have no doubt what my life was really about.

So I sat like my hair was on fire, I dug deep with each of the questionnaires I filled out, and I searched each part of myself to discover what my true life purpose was.

But nothing happened. All I found was fog. A deep and unrelenting fog that covered over every answer that I sought. It seemed like the more I dug, the more I probed, the more I searched for answers, the further that answer moved away from me.

This fog lasted for months and my meditation became like a dry desert devoid of life and insight. I felt hopeless, angry, lost, confused, and desperate for anything else to arise. But nothing did. The field of my purpose was vast and empty.

Then one day during meditation I gave up and something shifted, my purpose arose in me from a place I didn’t even know existed.

It’s so simple and yet each time I say it I go back to those hours on the cushion, that moment of clarity, and the expansion of my heart.

And I’d like to give you a little taste of that as well. Which is why I want to share with you a simple process to discover your life’s purpose.

STEP 1 – Study Purpose

To start, you need to study purpose and what it means to have one. A great place to start is the first chapter of Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Start with the End In Mind.

In this chapter, he invites you to do a simple exercise where you imagine yourself at your own funeral and you consider what people might say about you. It’s a confronting exercise but a deeply powerful one.

But don’t stop there. Consider other ways to discover your purpose. Write your own obituary. Sit in meditation with the question ‘Who am I?’ on every inhale allowing space for any answer to arise as you exhale.

  • Read Voice of Vocation by Parker Palmer
  • Read Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
  • Read the War of Art and Do the Work by Steven Pressfield
  • Read Siddhartha by Herman Hess
  • Read Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron
  • Read Ruling Your World by Sakyong Mipham

Find other books and read them. I’ve read all of these and more. Become a student of purpose. Do ALL the exercises and the writing, reading isn’t enough you have to dive into purpose.

You may find that you have a clear purpose or mission statement, you might stumble on something deeply profound. If you do, write it down, sit with it, enjoy it, play with it, and be with it. Don’t worry about if it’s the right or final answer. Just be with it and see what happens.

STEP 2 – Thrash

If you’ve got a purpose statement or a purpose nugget now, great. If not, that’s ok too. Pick one. It’s ok if it’s a bad one, but pick something you’re going to practice with. Choose it powerfully.

Then put your whole life behind it.

If your purpose is to save the whales, then join organizations about saving whales, read books, do fundraising, talk about it with your friends, do letter writing campaigns, protest, and take trips to see whales in the wild.

If your purpose is to become a great writer, write every day, read every book on writing you can get your hands on, hire a writing coach, study other writers, take a writing class, analyze your own writing, and fight the demons of resistance. Write, write, and write some more.

Whatever you choose, put your whole life behind that choice. Really go for it.

Thrash like a maniac.

At some point, your purpose may lose its juice, if it does, stick with it a bit longer. If it doesn’t get stronger after the dip, it may be time to let it go. See if there’s something deeper there, if not, just choose another purpose and throw yourself into it.

At some point, you’ll see something. I can’t describe what it will be. It’s different for every person. It may not be a moment of total clarity, but something will happen and when it does, notice.

Write down your purpose. You’ve got a nugget now. A nugget defined by thrash and life, not just some theory of purpose.

A note of caution: phase 2 can take years. It doesn’t always, but be patient and diligent through this phase.

STEP 3 – Turn your purpose into a question

To be honest, a purpose is sort of meaningless. Your purpose may be to give a voice to children who don’t have one or to bring more magic into the lives of everyone you meet. My purpose is to serve those walking the path of awakening in a deep and fundamental way.

These are great purposes, but they are just bars. Bars which you measure yourself against. A good purpose is often a high bar and at times can feel intimidating, so turn your purpose into a question.

  • How can I give a voice to children who don’t have one?
  • How can I bring more magic into the lives of everyone I meet?
  • How can I serve those walking the path of awakening in a deep and fundamental way?

Then begin to answer that question with your life. Don’t worry about it being a BIG answer.

Sometimes the answer will be small. I can serve awakening by being kind to my server at a restaurant. By offering an acknowledgment to someone who upset me. By writing an article and posting it to my blog.

Sometimes the answer will be big. I can serve awakening by writing a best selling book, having a life changing conversation with a powerful leader, or founding a spiritual center.

Don’t be afraid of the big answers. Don’t overlook the small one.

Turn your whole life into an answer to that question. Become the answer.

Get to work

That’s it, that’s the magic formula. I get that it might feel daunting. Life is daunting. It’s this vast span of decades with no clear instructions. It’s this blink of an eye experience that vanishes before we expect it to. Life is a paradox and a question. What will you do with me?

But it’s a worthy question to ask and answer.

Without my purpose, my life wouldn’t mean much, not because my life wouldn’t offer value or have an impact on those I care about, but because I have to decide what it means.

My purpose is my choice. My life is about awakening, for myself and for others. This is my task.

Doing the work is worth it, even (and most often) when you don’t think it is. So get to work.

 
by Toku on Mindset, Uncategorized

4 Things to Remember When You Have to Adapt

A couple months ago I got a call from my assistant. She wanted to quit. I sat there heart beating on the phone unsure of what to do. Within two weeks my entire team was gone, and in the end it was for the best.

At the time I was scared, sad, and frustrated to have things change on me so fast. But in the end it taught me a lot and I ended up feeling grounded and complete.

The nature of the world is change and there’s little we can do to shift that.

And so we must learn to adapt.

Here’s what I’ve found to be the most valuable when things change suddenly:

Acceptance-

Denial is the first enemy of adaptation. It’s so easy to pretend that things haven’t changed, to keep seeing what you hope was happening instead of what is happening. I’m not suggesting that you be pessimistic, optimism is fine, but you must see reality for what it is.

For me, when I get that sinking feeling in my belly that something is changing, I do my best to look at it straight on and accept what I’m seeing. When someone tells me what they want or shows me who they are and it seems in alignment, I do my best to accept it.

When my assistant told me she was miserable it was hard to hear but I accepted it. I could have dismissed it or tried to talk her out of it, but it felt true, she was being honest to me, so I looked at it head on.

By accepting what is, you can then choose where to go next.

Feeling –

Our habitual response to pain is to move away from it. When change brings pain or fear with it, we tend to avoid thinking about it or we numb our pain in the face of it.

You notice yourself reaching for the ice cream, the bottle of whiskey, another episode of 90 day fiance, whatever it is that will take your mind and heart off of the change.

And some of these things can actually be helpful in moderation, but we tend to numb more than we need, and stifle our ability to adapt as a result.

I won’t lie, the evening that my assistant quit I spent the whole night working (work is often where I go to numb) I ate more ice cream than normal, and I had a whiskey before bed.

But by the next day, I let myself really feel what was going on underneath. I let myself feel the anger, the sadness, the disappointment, and the fear. I was mad that she was leaving. I had asked her so many times how she was doing, if we could shift her work at all. I was sad because she had been the person I leaned on as I was going through my transition with my ex. I was disappointed in myself for not seeing the signs sooner. And I was afraid that it would all fall apart, that I was a horrible leader, and that I’d just sink into failure and oblivion.

By letting myself feel my feelings I was able to process my emotions and come to a more stable place. Instead of resisting change I became willing to look at what was next and to make the best choices for her as well as for myself.

Forgive / Get Complete –

Often when we think of forgiveness we think about the apologies we gave as children. You said you were sorry but you didn’t mean it.

And it’s easy to think of forgiveness like an obligation, but forgiveness is actually an act of liberation. It liberates you from the weight of other’s mistakes and it frees them from the toxic judgment most of us hold onto when someone hurts us. Whether they hurt us on purpose or simply by accident.

In my practice I teach a kind of forgiveness called completion, which means you don’t just ‘say’, you forgive, you really move through everything you need to get back to a place of responsibility for your life.

You express your feelings, you look at how you’ve contributed to what happened, and finally, you appreciate the person for who they are.

These three simple steps, which I do by writing letters (a process I got from my coach Hans Phillips) helps me move forward. They help me forgive. When I do this process I get back to a place where I can own what happened and be responsible for how I’m going to respond and decide what to do next.

Get Clear and Act –

Finally, you get clear on what’s next and begin to move into action.

Of course most likely you tend to get into action before getting clear. You just want to react, to do something, to respond and the result is that you respond from fear, anger, or anxiety.

Which is why slowing down and getting clear happens first.

For me, part of getting clarity is getting clear about what I’m committed to. For example, I have a commitment that every person who works for me will benefit from being part of my team. They will grow, deepen, and expand who they are. And I know if I’m living up to that commitment it means that people will leave me from time to time. My job is to accept that they want to leave and support them to move onto a job that’s better for them.

After you get clear, then you can get into action.

Sometimes that action is literally doing things that need to be done, like reviewing all the tasks your assistant does. And sometimes it means adjusting your beliefs and the way you think about the change itself.

What’s important to remember is that action that comes from acceptance, clarity, and forgiveness is the action of a true leader.

For me and my time the whole thing was a big wake up call that I needed to start from scratch. I needed to let my assistant go and I actually needed to let my whole team go.

I had built my team with my ex and it was great for our business, but it wasn’t right for the business I wanted to build.

So I let them go, they all went on to better jobs and better things, which is exactly what I want for everyone who works for me.

Adapting isn’t easy and of course, change is hard to predict, but if you follow these steps and slow down enough so you can move with purpose and clarity, you may find that on the other side of change you didn’t ask for, is growth you didn’t expect.

 
by Toku on Mindset, Uncategorized

Waiting For Yourself

I’m almost 40, and by almost I mean I’ve passed my 39th half birthday by at least a little bit. Recently I’ve been wondering if I’m in the grips of a mid-life crisis. A theory, by the way, that I discovered doesn’t have much basis in science.

But still. . . I’ve been wondering a lot about what my purpose is, about whether or not I’ll fall in love again, and about what is next for my life and business. The kind of questions we all ask from time to time.

And the more I’ve thought about them, the more I’ve come to realize that I’m waiting.

I’m waiting for something. Not a love, not a new career, not a million dollars, not my big fancy life.

Instead, I’m waiting for myself. And I thought that I would tell you how to do it. So that maybe I can learn as well.

How to wait for yourself:

1) Be still – You are a wild, clever, animal. And you, unlike most people, know most of your own tricks.

So any move you make will likely cause you to become caught in some way. Which is why . . . if you’re going to wait for yourself, you must be still.

You can meditate, or spend time in nature, do tai chi, or learn to cook slowly with no music on, smelling the food as it blossoms.

However you do it, it starts with being still.

2) Let go – Not with drama or flair, but simply. The way you might let a remote fall from your hand as you drift off to sleep. You become so focused on the waiting that everything else simply falls away.

Some things will naturally fade, some interest in a hobby, maybe a goal you had at work, or even some long-held dream.

As it fades, let it go. Gently.

3) Forget – Forget who you think you are. You have practiced this story of you over and over again. And that story has the same ending. The story is about your life not working out, or working out in a particular way.

So just forget it. It may turn out that way again, it may not, a forgotten story never knows. You will try to remember who you are. You will grab onto threads of the past. See if you can forget.

4) Remember – Remember something about yourself that you can’t put into words. Wait from this place as much as possible. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about. focus on being still and you will remember.

5) Love – Love yourself, the trees, people around you, your fucked up life, your great life, your desire to doom scroll, your judgments about social media, you anger about the people in charge. Wrap your heart around it all.

6) Wait – Whenever you notice yourself not waiting, trying to decide, figure out, or fix, don’t. Just wait. Something is coming. You don’t know what it is, or who it is, but it is coming. Can you feel it?

The most important thing about waiting for yourself is to just wait.

7) Do something fun – As you wait, do something fun: read a book, paint a rock, learn a song, grow a plant. You don’t have to do nothing, just do something that aligns with waiting. As soon as you get distracted by something, remind yourself of your waiting.

8) Go outside – Look at the plants. Put your feet in a lake. Take a deep breath. You don’t have to wait inside.

9) Talk to people – One of the best things about waiting is meeting other people. Most of them are waiting too, and they’re just there with nothing to do but wait, so enjoy them.

10) Calm down – Whatever happens try not to get riled up. You will sometimes and that’s ok. You’ll get impatient, you’ll wonder what’s taking so long. But you’ve been waiting for yourself your whole life.

How long have you really been waiting for yourself?

Most people don’t even wait a day. So calm down. There’s plenty of time. And when you arrive, you’ll be there. And once you’re there you’re there.

It’ll be what you’ve always been waiting for. Quite literally.

There’s not much else to say other than, thanks for waiting with me. I hope you’ll stick around and wait some more.

Love, Toku

 
by Toku on Mindset

Being with Uncertainty

You are adrift in a sea of uncertainty. But most of the time you don’t notice it. Like a fish in water, you don’t really understand the nature of it.

But sometimes (more recently) you wake up to this uncertainty. You see how unclear the future is, how it’s hard to know what’s going to happen, how you’re not sure what you can truly rely on.

You read a lot about navigating uncertainty, or planning for it, but really that stuff doesn’t matter as much as how you be with is. So here’s a way to BE with uncertainty, so that you don’t drown in the water you’re swimming in.

1) Notice your fear –

The first thing uncertainty causes is fear. Because staring into a vast abyss of the unknown is scary. Maslow made this cool pyramid of needs but it could just as easily be called a pyramid of certainty.

I know where I’m getting my food from, I know where I’ll sleep, I know that the tigers won’t be attacking me tonight.

Take these things away and all of a sudden it’s hard to focus on being patient and kind, it’s hard to focus on company culture and managing your team.

So begin with noticing that you’re scared. Nothing wrong with it. It’s a normal natural human response to uncertainty. If you see you’re afraid you can calm the wild, scared animal inside of you, if you hide it, this same animal will stalk you silently.

Notice you’re afraid and then take a deep breath. Notice the thoughts your scared mind is whispering to you and then take a deep breath. Remind yourself that fear is normal, but not especially helpful.

Notice your fear and decide to choose from someplace else.

2) Remind yourself why you’re doing it –

Leading a team, running a business, being married, doing parenting.

Whatever it is, you have a reason for doing it. If you know that reason return to it. If you don’t then slow down and figure out what that is.

Write out what you’re doing all of this for. What are you committed to creating? What are you dedicating this to? Why do this instead of something else?

Then when uncertainty shows up, read what you wrote, or write it out again. Remind yourself WHY you are doing what you’re doing.

When you remember why you’re willing to face uncertainty, when you remember why you’re willing to risk something to lead, to create, to love, or whatever it is that you are seeking to do, something begins to shift inside of you.

3) Choose to come from what you’re creating –

Now that you’re clear about what you’re creating and what you’re scared of, you have a choice.

You can choose to come from fear, or you can choose to come from love.

This isn’t about what you do. It’s about who you’re being.

Are you being fear or love in the face of uncertainty?

In some ways, this matters way more than what you do.

Getting into a lifeboat from love, feels different than getting in one because of fear. Cutting your expense from love feels different than cutting them from fear. Laying off your team from love, feels different then doing it from fear.

One easy way to think of this running. All of us have had a time in our lives where we’ve run out of love. Full of exhilaration and joy we run, or roll, or drive fast. The wind moving through your hair is exciting, your body feels alive.

Running from fear isn’t the same, you feel alive, but scared and tense. You might even run a bit faster when you run from fear, but who you’re being is very different.

Choose to be I hope that as you face the uncertainty of this moment, you’ll continue to distinguish fear from love and choose to come from love.

Not only will it feel better, but it will work better, for your team, for your family, for your work.

Those who can choose from love, even in the face of great uncertainty, are the kinds of leaders we never forget. I hope you’ll be as unforgettable as you can.

Toku

unexecutive.com

 
by Toku on Meditations, Mindset

I Don’t Feel Like It

Some mornings you won’t feel like it.

You won’t feel like writing, or exercising, or doing your meditation, or reaching out to clients.

You won’t feel like loving your wife or husband or partner or kids.

Some mornings it will all feel heavy and hard and you’ll wonder if you can just get by without doing it.

Flow people will tell you you’re trying too hard.
Habit people will tell you, you need to try harder.

Both have a point.

The other choice is to remember and empower.

  • Remember why you committed to exercises,
  • Remember why you are committed to coming from love,
  • Remember why you want to be who you said you wanted to be.

Don’t push, don’t relax. Empower instead.

Remember why.
Let it open your heart.
Let it move you, even when you don’t feel like moving.

The tenderness required to choose your life, is the most breathtaking of all.

And it can also be the most incredibly annoying thing to have to do before you have your coffee.

Do it anyway.

Love,

Toku

 
by Toku on Meditations, Mindset

Performance vs Morality

Performance is a function of performance.

We offer certain inputs, inside a certain environment, and we see what kind of outputs we get.

The more we can control for the environment the more we can predict and modulate our inputs to get a certain output. The more chaotic or seemingly random the environment the more performance becomes part art and part science.

It’s easy to get lost in the dance that we ‘should’ know the correct inputs.
We should have the right knowledge, experience, data, and courage to make the ‘right’ choices.

Only a future you really knows what the results of your choices are.

From here, the future is a void. When we measure performance, observe the process, and are attentive to results we can generally perform better over time given the right resources.

Morality is how good you are or a judgment about whether you are a good person.

Because we value performance we often think that people who perform better are better people. It isn’t actually true, and very often we’re disappointed when star athletes, giants of industry, or our leaders reveal their human frailty to us.
But because we value performance it’s easy to think that performance is the most important factor of morality. Even though it’s not.

While thinking that performing better will make us better people might inspire us to work and pay attention, the utility of this mix up pretty much stops there. And for every person who seeks to perform better to be better, there are three people who feel awful about who they are because of some real or imagined lack of performance.

In truth, these two things are just different. Not that they don’t interact and play with each other. But performance is performance. It’s a measure of outputs based on certain inputs in a certain environment. And morality is morality. It’s about who you choose to be in life, it’s about kindness and generosity, it’s about love.

And anyone who’s ever tried to measure of tweak the utility of love through performance can probably tell you the futility of trying to bar graph the heart.

If you can allow them to be separate. If you can survive poor performance while maintaining a good self-image, so much is possible for you. It takes work, but it’s a worthwhile path to follow if you wish to do meaningful work in the world.

 
by Toku on Meditations, Mindset

YOUR LIFE IS AN ECHO OF WHO YOU ARE

Whoever you’re currently being, this is the life that is the result of that way of being. Rich, poor, happy, sad, in love, alone, on purpose, on accident.

The best predictor of tomorrow is not today but yesterday or last week.

To change, to become someone else, to live a different life you have to be willing to become someone you are not. And in doing so your life will likely stop working.

Because your life is designed to work for who you’re currently being.

YOUR LIFE ALWAYS WORKS

You may not like your life, you may not think it works at all, but it likely does work for who you’re currently being.

  • IF YOU FEEL CONSTANT PRESSURE . . . to achieve your goals and never seem to achieve enough.
  • THAT LIFE WORKS . . . for the person who is being constant pursuit and dissatisfaction.

    • —

  • IF YOU FEEL . . . lost and confused and can’t get anything started.
  • THAT LIFE WORKS . . . for the person who is being self-doubt and underachievement.

Change who you are, your life will go into dissonance.

It might be good dissonance or bad dissonance.
Easier or harder, but it will stop singing in the same key.

YOUR LIFE IS AN ECHO OF WHO YOU ARE

This is the reason people don’t change. Because when the song changes they get scared.

Ultimate change requires you stepping out of the key of your life. Often with very little understanding of what the new song will sound like.

Which is also called having faith.

Love,
Toku

 
by Toku on Meditations, Mindset

YOU DON’T BELIEVE WHAT YOU CAN’T SEE

The first thing many people do when they hear a tornado warning is they go outside.

Even though they know it’s a bad idea, they just don’t fully understand the threat.

They want to see it. Because seeing is believing.

The coronavirus is no different. We can’t see it. We may not know anyone personally who’s gotten it or we might know someone but they were fine. We don’t see dead bodies in the street. We may not have even heard the ambulances.

So we don’t believe it. The charts are just charts.

Racism is no different. If you’re white especially you don’t’ see it. Police officers are generally polite to you. No one follows you around a store. You don’t say overtly racist things and you have never burned a cross on someone’s lawn.

So you don’t believe you’re racist.

If you don’t’ see it you don’t believe it.

Except what the world needs is your ability to see beyond what you see.

And learn that what you can’t see can still be possible.

 
by Toku on Mindset

White Guilt vs White Responsibility

When I was in college a woman of color told me that white guilt helps no one. That feeling SUPER guilty about being racist or living in a racist society meant little.

And I got it.

Guilt sort of offers me a hall pass to racism.

I can feel really guilty and then go on with my life. I can draw attention away from people of color and their struggle by making a big fuss about my guilt.

That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t feel guilty and when I think and reflect on race and privilege I do feel guilty, but often that’s as far as it goes.

  • I feel bad, I wish I could do something,
  • I think ‘I don’t know where to start.’
  • I think ‘I’m worried I’ll do it wrong.’
  • I think who am I to try and stop racism?’

Then in a mix of fear and avoidance and doubt I just stop thinking about it.
Or I try to.

And I can. Pretty easily actually, because I’m a white man and I live in a world designed to shield me from any impact or responsibility for racism.

  • All I have to do is NOT wear white sheet or burn a cross and I can believe I’m not racist.
  • All I have to do is NOT laugh out loud at racist jokes and complain about Trump and I can believe I’m not a racist.
  • All I have to do is FEEL GUILTY about racism, wish I could do something, try to use inclusive language like people of color, African American, and first nations people, and I can believe I’m not racist.

It’s not true, but I can believe it.

Such is my privilege as a white person.
(PS I can also do this is about gender, class, and sexual orientation as well)

GUILT DOES NOT EQUAL RESPONSIBLE
But feeling guilty doesn’t create responsibility. In fact, it tends to hide and obfuscate responsibility.

To be responsible means to acknowledge that I have created a racist society.
Not by myself, not with intention, and actually not through very many of my own actions.

I have created a racist society by my inaction, complicity, and willingness to allow myself to stop at guilt, cynicism, and resignation.

Race is simply another place where I get to play the blame game if I want to.

I can blame my ancestors, the establishment, the police, and other ‘bad’ white people who didn’t realize that racism is ‘bad’. This helps because the problem ends up being ‘out there’ it’s someone else’s problem and all I have to do is NOT be them.

OR

I can blame myself. I should be doing more to end racism, I’m so blind to my privilege, I should have more friends of color, hire more people of color, march in more rallies. Man, I suck so bad because I’m white. The problem is all me and I’m hopeless. Maybe I try really hard for a bit but then I burn out, or I simply give up from the start. Thinking feeling really bad about myself is enough or ALL I can do.

Pushing blame on others or pulling blame into myself isn’t being responsible. It doesn’t create much space for action. It doesn’t create any sense that I can do anything at all.

This isn’t just true of racism. But it is especially true for racism when it comes to being white.

Being responsible means I accept my part, my complicity, my ignorance, my blindness, my fear, my doubt, and my uncertainty at what to do. I accept that I have played a role to create a racist society.

I look at the part I’ve done, thing words I’ve said (or haven’t), the ways I’ve contributed to (or failed to interrupt) racist thinking and doing, the way I’ve voted (or haven’t), the causes I’ve donated to (or not), and the people I’ve chosen to spend time with (or not).

I really look and choose it. I say I did this. I am responsible. I have created this.

Then I’m clear on what’s happened. Or at least what I’ve seen of what’s happened.

Once I’m there I can see what’s missing.
* My willingness to be with racial discomfort.
* My ability to notice where my privilege shows up.
* My ability to see my whiteness and how it touches everything I say and do.
* An understanding of racist vs anti-racist policies.
* Authentic relationships with people of color.
* A willingness to be with the heartbreak racism causes.
* Gratitude at being shown where I’m racist vs defensiveness at having my blindspots revealed
* And more

And from there. I get to choose what’s next.

I get to create who I am going to be. Or at least I get to declare it.

  • I can declare that I will become anti-racist more often than I’m not.
  • I can declare that I will be informed and attentive to the impact of race.
  • I can declare to talk and teach about the context of race when I work with my clients or train other coaches.

This is possible because I choose to be responsible.
It’s the same tool I use around money, leadership, and integrity.

But it works. Because my guilt is nothing.
I can certainly feel the heartbreak, the pain, the frustration that we live in a racist society.

Yet it’s not enough.
I have to get responsible.
Well, I don’t have to, I GET to.
And when I do I become empowered, to work towards what it is I say I care about.

So when I write about being racist I want to be clear.
I’m not expressing guilt. I’m intending to express responsibility.

The guilt might be there, but it’s not at the center.
At the center is the animating force of responsibility.
The thing that helps me live the life I say I want to live and begin to create the world we truly all deserve.