I deliver a workshop entitled, “High Impact Conversations ~ Peace & Productivity in the Workplace” with a gifted communications coach, Fran Liautaud.

In it, during an early exercise, we ask participants to answer this question:

What is the most important conversation you are NOT having?

We ask participants to post their responses in this format, avoiding confidential information:

With ______ About _______.

I am not at all surprised to learn that many people when responding are avoiding a conversation with themselves.

Having the often-avoided and oh, so important conversation with ourselves is the primary focus of today’s blog.

A Good Talking To

The poet and speaker David Whyte suggests that as adults, we need to give ourselves a “good talking to” from time to time. Perhaps it is because no one else has the guts to do it now that we’re all grown up. I do not know whether he insists the “conversation” goes on out loud. I do know from my own experience, that verbalizing those bald truths makes it impossible for me to ignore them.

It has been dawning on me these last two years, that somewhere, somehow along my journey, Discipline lost its way. I recall in earlier years a mentor telling me that he wished he had my discipline, so “I had it, I know I did!” I hear myself say encouragingly.

Last January I took stock of my difficult truths:

1) I had allowed the excuse of a slow healing knee to keep me from exercising – something I had always done – you guessed it – in a disciplined way. As a consequence, I had gained a dozen pounds and was in the worst shape of my life.

2) I had allowed red meat and fried foods to slowly infiltrate my eating habits. I went from eating red meat once or twice a year to once or twice a week. I went from “No fried foods” to filching my husband’s fries – or even ordering fried clams from The Ramp (the absolute BEST place for “healthy” fried food – or any gourmet comfort food for that matter!)

3) Increasingly, my love affair with wine was becoming a concern. Two or three glasses each time were a thoughtless necessity rather than a once-in-a-while choice.

Perhaps those things don’t sound too bad to you. Perhaps they sound horrifying. Each of us has our own struggles that feel smaller or greater by comparison. To me, it was evidence that I needed to reacquaint myself with Discipline.

This slippage in behavior happened so slowly that it was hard to detect rationally. It was as if all of the sudden I woke up to a new series of consequences in my life and wondered where I had gotten off track. Beware the moment by moment choices that, as Annie Dillard once wrote become, “how we spend our lives.”

Reacquainting with Discipline

It would be nice to describe the intentional way I made specific and planned changes in my life. I imagine the story: How I created a Ceremony of Commitment for myself, involved friends and family and chronicled the whole process. Not so! It was and is much more organic than that. Funny thing though, as I look back at my journaling, I signaled a readiness to change in my entry on Tuesday January 20, 2009, Inauguration Day for President Obama, our 45^th President of the United States. I wrote:

“To inaugurate means to begin. Today I am witness to what I hope will be a new chapter in America — and in my life.”

I set in motion some things, intentional or not.

I have Daryl Conant, owner of the Fitness Nuthouse to thank for providing the inspiration, information and personal challenge to me in physical fitness (he calls it FAT LOSS) as well as in nutrition. The results? In many of the metrics that count, I now range from ideal to average: Resting Heart Rate, % Body Fat, Blood Pressure, Cholesteral, Triglycerides, and Body Mass Index.

And I always have my thoughtful, generous and warm-hearted husband to thank for EVERYTHING that brings me joy.

It’s not easy, this vigilance of responsibility. There is an appeal to the looseness of living more carefree – or perhaps I should say less intentionally, more thoughtlessly. However, today I am laughing more. I am not plagued with guilt. I feel as though an omnipresent heaviness had lifted. I feel ready for a new challenge.

So I ask you:

What is the most important conversation you want to have with yourself?

Is it about wellness? Or about work? It is about your relationship with yourself? Or with others?

What part of your best self do you wish to be re-acquainted with?

Set your intention and watch what appears!

Are your avant guard friends coming to dinner and you’re looking for something different and meaningful? Does the weekend call for a rainy day? I’d like to share with you a fun activity that may also give you an opportunity for dialogue and discovery about what has meaning in your life.

I created this activity as part of a Human Resources Conference workshop I gave in May. The workshop centered on the theme of individual contribution within the broader organizational – and global – whole.

The premise is that in these past two decades of stress, where decision making is speeding up, work hours are lengthening, and there has been a breakdown of commitment between employer and employee – we are losing sight of the perspective of the whole. We’ve tended to hunker down in an attempt to slow things down, and yet, there is a deeper, persistent intra-planetary drumbeat that cannot be ignored.

You may be thinking: Why should I care about global issues? I can barely manage my own work hassles and family life? For some, the best coping mechanism is to disengage with the larger world. Although our industrial era culture may have taught us differently, we are all a part of the delicate web of interrelationships called the planet earth. While perhaps not always seen or even recognized, the global landscape is having and will continue to have an impact on each of us. It remains only a matter of when this reality becomes figural for us.

Have you disengaged from the larger conversation around you? What is the box you have built around yourself? To create an opportunity to see differently, try the following activity.

Steps:

1) Download and print (2-sided) the Global Landscape Cards. (Don’t look at the back side if you can help it. That has the “answers”.) Note: you will notice several blank cards. Add some of your own data to the deck.

global_landscape_cards_front

global_landscape_cards_back

2) You won’t want to play this alone. It’s not as fun. Find family members or friends, or work colleagues to “play”. This won’t take more than 30 minutes. (Caution! It could catalyze long, pleasant or unnerving conversations.)

3) Divide your group into teams. Each team gets a deck of Global Landscape Cards.

4) Play “true/false” with each of the statements on the Landscape Cards. Keep score of which ones and how many you or your group get correct.

5) Set up some competition – hey, that’s the Western culture way. Perhaps the first team who finishes with the most correct answers wins. Offer fabulous prizes to the winner. Or not.

Note: In spite of the rational, linear set of steps I’ve outlined above, I would suggest that you and those involved abandon all expectations of what should happen in the space you create together. There is no right or wrong way to use these cards. Be present to your individual and joint sense of what wants to happen in the moment.

Post activity thought starters:

What card was a surprise to you?

What did you notice about the cards?

What did you notice about your reaction to the activity?

What part was most difficult or easy?

Now reflect upon the following:

Who am I uniquely in relation to this global conversation?

What role will I choose to play in creating a higher vision of human purpose in the 21^st century?

I’m curious to know how the activity works for you. Keep me posted.