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Today’s newsletter was supposed to be about impostor syndrome. I’ve developed what I consider to be a effective approach for dealing with it.
But we have bigger issues to deal with.
So instead I’m writing with something I’ve been working on since the U.S. election in November. It was on my list for “sometime in 2021” but the events of this week have accelerated my plans.
When I look at what happened in my nation’s capitol this week, when I reflect on the cruelty of the past four years, when I study our history and consider the deep divisions and delusions we suffer from, I know I need to do whatever I can to build a better world.
I know it begins with me, within me. And I think I can help others begin within themselves.
I’ve spent the past two months speaking with people who are trying to learn and grow while navigating fractured relationships with their colleagues, family and friends. Each of these conversations—some of them formal interviews—hit the same themes: profound opposition with little common ground, high emotional reactivity, a toxic cocktail of judgment and defensiveness, continual stress, discomfort and outright pain.
And everyone I spoke with agreed that facts don’t work, arguments are fruitless and everything is subject to powerful programming that is embedded, in different ways, within all of us.
The truth is we all carry fear-based programming, a neural autopilot that guides our actions, reactions and interactions. Yet each of us has the capacity, the potential, to break free of that programming and choose differently.
To choose kindness. To foster peace. To live in reality.
This has been my personal practice for the past 12 years. I have been teaching it for the past seven. It has transformed my leadership. It has enriched my relationships. It equipped me to face and fight stage III breast cancer. It has saved my life figuratively and perhaps otherwise. I am humbled to share it, and hopeful it will do more good.
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Meditations on an insurrection