Two weeks ago, I posted a video on Instagram of me ranting about being stood up by a trainer I was trying to work with. I got a little bit vulnerable and a lot a bit animated in my commitment to keep working to make myself better physically the way I had over the past year mentally by going to therapy. That video was seen by some as a cry for help and by others as a way to help. And thankfully, within a few hours, I had a training session booked for the next morning with a new trainer that came very highly recommended and that I never would have found on my own.

I needed help and very thankfully, my community jumped at the chance and showed up big time.

But when I really thought about it, and even riffed on that moment with my executive coach later in the week, I realized that I have never really let me guard down like that to let people know how they can be helpful. That I continue to, despite all of what I thought were my attempts to be open and vulnerable, put up a pretty buttoned-up, life is good, don’t worry about me, persona on social and to anyone who doesn’t make it to the inner circle.

It’s what I have always done, but I am wondering now if that continues to serve me?

Things are weird and wild everywhere we look and keeping it all together is not something that any of us should have to do. We all should feel free to be a little crazier and authentically weirded out by everything that is happening in the world. I have so many questions and concerns right now about the world at large, but also around what is my world going forward and how do I want to show up for the challenges ahead.

This isn’t the post where I lay it all out, but it is the post where I say there are things to layout and things that I hope to have the chance to riff with you, the anonymous reader of this blog, and maybe have some of the things that I am finding tough in my life reflect some of the things you’re finding tough in your life and we sort them out together.

Being open and vulnerable in the world we live in today is scary, but standing for what is right when so many things are wrong is always the right thing to do. Maybe now more than ever.

There is that crazy thing you’ve always wanted to do. You know exactly what I am talking about. It is the first thing that just came to mind reading that sentence. It has been a “some day” thing for a long time. Guess what? Today is that some day if you decide that it is. Today is so much better than 100 days ago. The world is in absolute upheaval and you’ve never had a better chance to do the thing that you’ve wanted to do than right now. Everyone is so focused on putting their own world back together they aren’t paying attention to anyone else but themselves and the things that are unquestionably the top priority for themselves right now.

If you’ve ever had a hunch to go crazy - do it now before everyone starts paying attention again.

People are seeing crazy things every day and in every sphere of their life. If by chance they see you doing something crazy, it will look normal to them compared to everything else that is happening right now. But that window to go nuts and chase the purple banana is closing.

Don’t let the elevator bring you down!

This is one of my favorite examples of what I am talking about. Watch this trick play that a middle school team did with their quarterback:

Everything looks like it set up as normal but then the quarterback draws attention to himself and the defense reacts in kind, getting out of position themselves. He then boldly makes a move that starts the play, but no one else on his side reacts and the ploy is off to a good start. Then comes the wild moment where without hesitation he starts walking past defensive players whose only job in the game is to not let him move forward at all, but they are so confused, he gets away with it. Then comes the moment that we are all working towards, the breakthrough. He gets just far enough to know he can make a run for the end zone and takes off, letting everyone know that things aren’t how they are supposed to be, but he’s far enough through, that he gets away with it.

That is where we are right now. We’ve all settled into a new pattern and a new set of habits over the past 100 days. We are seeing others less frequently and we hopefully have created patterns with our time and interactions that have created efficiencies that we can lean into. That is the space where you can move the ball down the field and even though people might notice your making a move, they won’t know how bold of a move it is until you’re already past where they can stop your momentum and you can break free!

“Dearly beloved, we have gathered here today to get through this thing called life ”

— Prince

One of my favorite games to play as a kid was Chutes and Ladders. The thrill of spinning the number that landed you on the Ladder, the agony of seeing the number that sent you backwards down the Chutes, the complexity that happened further up the board as there were a more and more ways to be sent back down… a fantastic game and different every time we played.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the feeling of hitting that monster Chute that sent you from 87, only 13 away from winning, back down to 24. Being sent back meant you were amongst a lot more ladders than you were up there in the 80s, but it also means that you’re a lot further away from winning than you were before.

But when thinking about this game these past few weeks, it has been in the context that for the first time in my lifetime, we all collectively rolled the numbers that sent us all back down Chutes and are all much further away from what we thought were the wins just ahead of us. The combination of a global health pandemic, with unprecedented unemployment, and the racial injustice in our country being brought to the forefront of our society, everything we thought we knew about the game board and our place on it has changed.

In thinking through this collective Chute that has disrupted so much of what we thought and how we planned, it has struck me that it looks and feels a lot like the S-Curve used to show someone learning stages, going from Unfamiliar all the way up to Mastery first shared by Whitney Johnson in the Harvard Business Review in 2012. Starting at the base of the S-Curve is tough for everyone, but then you hit a moment of Hypergrowth on your way to Mastery.

This is a phase that a lot of us have gone through in the past. This is a phase that a lot of us are glad to have behind us. This is a phase that, like it or not, you are about to go through again.

As we all collectively rolled a massive Chute for what we thought we knew about what lay ahead for us in 2020 and beyond, we’ve all been sent back to a place without that level of confidence in our understanding of what is happening or when and how it will change. Long term planning used to include decades, now it includes months. Short term planning used to include quarters, now it includes daily updates. Whatever we thought we knew, whatever map we’ve had of the world, we need to update it, and quickly.

This has emerged for me as a choice that I am in control of. What kind of S-Curve experience do I want to undergo in the near future? I don’t have a choice about going through it, but I do get to choose what I make of it and where I end up on the other side.

Play It Again

This S-Curve will be the easiest, and therefore the most common choice that people make. It is an S-Curve to reestablish what you already knew, to play the same level of the game over again, and take what you understood about yourself, your work, your network, and your plans for the future, but update it with the new variables that you can see. It will be annoying to have to do things over again, to rebuild and reclaim things that you have already done, but it will be tweaks, not overhauls. The results will be getting back to what you already had and hoping you can hold on to it this time.

Press Reset

While the disruption has been tough and the uncertainty in the world wasn’t in your plans for 2020, this moment in time is the excuse you’ve been looking for to press reset on more than one area of your life and make a change you’ve been wanting to make for a long time. You hated what you were doing before and this global and collective change has given you the space to make the change that was going to happen someday… today. You didn’t like the S-Curve that you’d climbed or the game that you’d been playing and now you are free to jump wholeheartedly into a brand new challenge and pursue it without having to let go of what you were holding onto as it is no longer there anyway!

Level Up

Whatever had given you Mastery in before this moment is no longer enough to continue to claim Mastery going forward. How your Mastery showed up in the world is now in an unfamiliar place, a place that is brand new to you and everyone else who had thought they’d made it through the tough climb. But instead of just reestablishing your previous role with new features or pressing reset completely, this is your chance to level up to a whole new sphere of Mastery and begin to learn what can be built on top of your past work and with that discipline in the new world that we’re discovering. This will be the most challenging S-Curve, but also the most rewarding. The ability to approach this climb with the humility of a beginner will be matched with the joy of discovering something new for and the freedom to move without the constraints and responsibilities of your previous Mastery.

“This is not a moment, it’s the movement!
Where all the hungriest brothers with something to prove went...”

— Lin-Manuel Miranda

The question is not IF you will experience a surge of growth in the coming weeks and months, it is what kind of growth and Mastery will you choose to pursue. It is who will make the harder choices and pursue the more challenging growth opportunities and who will look for ways to “go back.” You will lose touch with people who choose a different path forward than you, and that is okay. Pursue relationships with people aligned toward your growth, seek out new teachers and ways to understand what could be ahead for you and your story. Become very comfortable with discomfort and change, it is likely to be one of the only constants in the months and years ahead.

Last week, I was out of sorts. I was just a bit off on a lot of things that I do normally, things that come naturally and are routine were harder than they should have been. But, it was week seven in quarantine, so I didn’t dig too deep on it. Everything is weird, it was just another thing that was weird. 

But then I did want to dig deep on it and needed to work through a couple of other things that were happening. And that’s when I realized there was a backlog of issues to be expressed and ideas to be processed. I was full of thoughts but they weren’t arranged in any particular order or with a sense of priority or urgency, they just were all mashed together.

This moment was when I got really mad at Amazon for not having delivered my new notebook. I had seen I was coming to the end of my current one and had ordered my soft-back lined Moleskine a full week before I thought I would need it. It showed it was delivered, but it wasn’t. So I ordered another one, but this time, the wait was going to be 10 days. (How fragile our supply change - a blog post for another time.) I started writing on some scratch paper and in another notebook, but that was very much a stop gap. 

I went for a walk to clear my heard, a secondary tactic that used to be a little more helpful than it is now as a walk outside reminds me in stark detail the dystopian I Am Legend feel of my surroundings. But walk I did and to my great delight, a small bodega near NYU was still open and in the very back, had a couple of my Moleskins for sale. I came home like a proud child having discovered a great treasure in the back yard and showed off my discovery. 

What I learned about myself quite a while ago (I have notebooks and journals going back to 1997) is that for me a thought isn’t real or something that I have to address until I externalize it. If I play with the thought in my head, it bumps into too many other thoughts and doesn’t stand on its own. But when I get that thought out of my head, either through speaking it out loud to someone or through writing it down, it becomes something I can deal with, process, and build on. In my pursuit to be a life time learner, this has been one of the most important discoveries for me. 

My notebook is a mishmash of journal entries and notes from meetings, personal and professional. It is with me in just about every meeting and is always in my bag. I’ll frequently just carry my notebook with me into a bar or restaurant when I have a hunch of an idea and see if it comes to me over a coffee, lunch, or a beer. In meetings, most people at the table have their laptops out, I have my notebook. 

I have had a lot of folks ask me about my journaling and expressed a desire to have their own practice. I’ve never thought too much about it, but I wanted to share a couple of the things that I do that have made it such a sticky and valuable habit for me in hopes that they might give you some jumping off points for your next journal entry and creating the routine that works best for you. 

STARTING

There is nothing as intimidating as the first blank page of a book full of blank pages. I have created a bit of a ceremony around my first page. I write the most important quote or lyric or Bible verse in my life right now on the inside of the cover of the notebook. In looking back over my past 15 notebooks, it is interesting to simply see what that quote was in my mind as I began. Then on the first page, I don’t write much of anything concrete, it is mostly just setting my intentions for this notebook and what I think will be the theme or the story arch over the next few months that are captured there (I average about seven months per Moleskine - but this last one was just over three months) These opening page intentions are really fun to reread also. The one I wrote on January 15th of this year at the beginning of my last notebook was almost comical given how much changed in the ensuing 100+ days. 

The second scariest page is the next page. Always. But this is where the relationship begins. What you write on these next pages will never be seen by anyone else. These pages just became your least judgmental friend and can show the most truest reflection of you. This is your new home for what you actually really think. These can be for your full range of emotions and can be the first place you share hopeful moments and rage fueled expletive rants. It’s just for you to really say what you mean and write down what you feel, or at least what you think you feel. I often find that when I make that feeling concrete, ink to paper, it is often more extreme or not extreme enough. “Is that really what I think? No, I’m even angrier than those words convey!” Or “Is that what I really think? No, I’m whining, it is not that bad. But at least I got it out.” 

HABITS

First things first, you don’t have to journal. Ever. But if you have a thought, if you have a memory, if you have an internal struggle, having a journal available to capture it is a beautiful thing. There is nothing too small to be memorialized in a journal. There is nothing to extreme that you can’t share. It is just for you. But, like most relationships, there is a comfort in the familiarity. If you haven’t written in a long time and you come back with a doozie of a intention or moment to share, you may find the first few pen strokes to feel foreign or like an intrusion on a friend who doesn’t have the rest of the context. But if you are frequently using your notebook for a whole range of different topics, to have a sounding board sitting next to you on your desk or as your treasure chest of ideas and themes and even notes from meetings and classes and online content, you’ll see more and patterns appear of what you choose to write down and what is important. 

It may feel strange at first to write anything and everything down, but like most things, it is better to start broad and then work your way through the process to narrow it down to your own scope and your own niche of journaling. My journals have everything, profession, personal, spiritual, educational, financial, and artist (so many doodles next to notes.) But that is just because I know what it does for me and I have built up an appreciation for each of those aspects. It is my written train of thought some days. And it is exactly what I needed it to be, unedited and raw. I don’t ever go back and cross anything out or tear out a page, I write the next page and add more context, often even draw arrows back to the sentence in question. 

FUNCTIONALITY

Because my notebook contains journal entries in between meeting notes in between quotes and doodles, I have created a functional way to make sure I call out the things that need to be addressed or remembered. Every Sunday night or first thing Monday morning, I go back through the past week or entries and pages. I look for the symbols and short hand notes that I have created to pull forward everything that I need to remember or to do for the week ahead. 

Box: When in meetings, if there is a to do list item that I am responsible for or that I am responsible for helping someone get done, I make a check box next to it. As soon as I complete that task, I check the box. If the box is still unchecked at the beginning of the next week, it goes on the to-do list for the week.

Dash: If there is something that is more memorable than others in a conversation, in a meeting, or in my journaling, I will put a big dash mark out to the side of the page in the margin. When rereading my journals, I sometimes just read the dash marks as they usually are the lessons learned or the ideas that I want to come back to. 

Stars: A lot of times, when I am writing, I realized I really would love to hear what other people think about the thought or entry I am contemplating and that I need to find a way to share it out with a larger audience. As a result, some of my best blogs, quotes, or social media quips started off in my notebook and then I found a way to sanitize the thought for public consumption or to summarize the essence of what my question is and offer it up to a my network for their input and feedback.

Cheat Sheet: If I am an in person meeting (back when that was a thing), I draw the table and then as people go around and say their names for introductions, I write them down (including people dial-in.) This helps me during meetings to always refer to people by name and then after meetings remember who said what and make sure in all follow up communications I am including everyone that was in that meeting .

MINDSET

Journaling should never feel like a chore or a have to, but it will take some time to find your practice and the value that you derive from it.  John D. Rockefeller kept incredible journals until his death. When the biography TITAN came out, it set the record straight on all other books and historical entries about him because the Rockefeller family gave the biographer unlimited access to his journals for the first time ever. That is the way that I think about these notebooks, I am doing my future biographer a favor and letting them know exactly what I was thinking and what were the circumstances that shaped me and how I thought about the world. 

The past few years have been absolutely wild for me, personally, professionally, and spiritually. There has been a lot of loss and a lot of growth. There has been very little comfort and very little consistency. And all of it has been captured, the good and the bad, in my notebooks. These stories, these lessons, these roller coasters of experience are just for me right now, but they are captured and codified in a way that one day, when the time is right, I hope to be able to reread them and glean even more wisdom and insight from - for me and perhaps in the future for others. 

On this morning’s walk through my garden, I was overwhelmed with how many of my plants have peeked their first shoots and buds through the cold spring ground just this week. Plants that I planted years ago are making their return to the Not So Secret Garden and bringing joy amidst all of the turmoil and insanity happening blocks away from this little refuge of stillness. The shrubs and bushes are regreening my morning coffee view and my imagination is racing with what new planting I will do this year.

But as I looked up this morning, smiling with the promise of new growth, I noticed something that didn’t register at first. On the massive tree that shades the garden from the morning summer sun, there was one last leaf. One dead leaf still hanging on at the end of a branch, a brown and crinkly leaf still sticking around. On branches just a little bit away, the buds of the spring bloom are forming. Every other plant or bush or tree is fully into new growth, but this one last leaf is holding on.

This morning, my reflection on the promise of new creation, the truth that what is old is gone and what is new is here was interrupted by this last leaf., this last reminder of the old in the middle of so much new. And after sitting down and spending some time focused on that last leaf, I noticed it actually wasn’t the last leaf I could see. It was just the last leaf still holding on to the branch where it was formed.

The other leaves I saw were less crisp. The other leaves I saw, were not whole. They were scattered and decaying into the mulch and ground cover of the garden, becoming nutrients for the new growth that had first caught my eye this morning. These leaves were completing their journey and the cycle of new growth. They were no longer the identity of that tree, but they are now the sustenance of what comes next.

I am in a time of newness. So many of the things that have been my identity and what people saw when they looked at me have fallen away in this most recent personal and professional winter. But those dead leaves, those past descriptors, while not the story of what comes next, they are the fuel of brainstorms and supporting lessons of what is emerging as a new moment of growth and a renewing of the spirit.

Thankful this Good Friday for that last leaf and the promise that it brings.