Happy Friday Everyone!
I hope you are well, wherever you are, and that you have a safe and empowering weekend that fills you with hope and joy.
In today’s coffee chat, I expanded a bit more on the themes I drew out from Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 film Princess Mononoke. The main points I drew out revolved around the importance of exercising personal agency and true self-care.
As leaders we use our personal agency in order to empower others while leading them, but out of fear and ego … unwillingness to be uncomfortable or uncertain … what we think of as self-care may be self-preservation or self-sabotage.
Proper nourishment takes many forms. An example I discussed on the live was the relationship I have with my lawnmower. Don’t get me wrong, I love it.
It was a gift from my father-in-law who gave it to me after retiring from commercial landscaping, and despite being 20 years old, usually runs great.
Unfortunately, I am not a small-engine mechanic, so without fail every summer of the past 5 years something has broken on it that needed fixing that required me to ask for help.
More often than not though, I try to use YouTube to fix it, out of personal pride. This year, that led to me not mowing my grass for over a month due also getting sick, and out-of-season levels of rain.
I chose to not ask for help out of fear of being judged for not being able to troubleshoot and fix a $10,000 piece of machinery that I was never trained on properly.
Because the grass has been so tall, I haven’t gone outside as much, something which brings me energy and inspiration, because if I went outside, I had to confront the fact the lawn still needing cutting, the mower still needed fixing.
All the excuses of work, sickness, rain, etc… I could wield them to great effect as long as I ignored the problem. I preserved my vanity for a short time, but my ego cracked eventually regardless.
So now, despite trying to exercise control and save my ego, this past week I found myself right where I had been. Thankfully, I have a kind neighbor who I’m paying to use his tractor to bushhog the grass, and has helped me figure out what was wrong with my mower in the first place.
It was the fuel pump. No matter how many times I crank the key, if there is no fuel going to the motor, even with a full tank, it won’t run.
I bet you can see where this is going.
If you put fuel in the mower, but it doesn’t travel through the line, no matter how many “correct” things you are doing or have in place, you won’t go anywhere.
Agency, action, it’s all a deliberate choice. And your choices will determine whether or not your fuel pump is working.
We might think we have everything hooked up right and in place, but we have to examine the relationship of what makes us feel good to what actually fuels us.
It felt good to ignore the problem because I didn’t have to risk being judged, but it didn’t solve anything.
Inaction is still an exercising of agency, but instead of moving forward you just spin your tires, spraying mud on everything around you.
If you remember from the other day in Contour Lines 058: Rise to Meet Your Fate, I said that:
“Engaging rather than withdrawing, building rather than consuming, the vision of a better future stops being accessible only to a few.”
“Start with yourself and the impact you can have in the smallest way. If you want to shape your future, enable others to shape theirs.”
Those points are things I have to constantly relearn and remind myself every time I am in new circumstances, and that includes the same patterns don’t work when you are building a business versus being an employee.
I withdrew from the issue instead of engaging with it, the result of which was a decrease in my mental energy and capacity to be consistent in other areas.
On the call I stated something to the effect of there being different types of self-care, and that it’s perfectly fine to just veg out, watch a television show, play video games, or something else “mindless” if you have certainty in what will come tomorrow.
If you need to adjust to changing circumstances, stresses, think creatively or strategically, you need a different type of nourishment. You have to introduce new voices and perspectives, do an active hobby such as working out, woodcarving, sewing, drawing, or something else.
Brain activation will help prevent stagnation - if you just ignore whatever was troubling you before, it will be there when you get back.
You will still have to address it, and it will likely be a bigger problem than before.
Often these issues will remain in our head as background processes, we just tune them out.
An brain-activating activity done as self-care, however, gets the fuel to the motor. You’ll often find that the new information will recontextualize your issue, give you a reality check, or perhaps an answer of what you need to do will become clear.
Taking care of myself is an obligation I have to not just to myself, but my family, friends, and clients. Leadership guide or leader in a corporation, the same principles apply. So if you are wondering why there have been less newsletters or notes from me the past few weeks, it’s because I’ve been prioritizing depth versus performance.
What I’m discussing with you now, and what I will be able bring you in the future will be that much better because I’ll be exercising agency with, as the village elder in Princess Mononoke says, “eyes unclouded.”
Tying into all of this, I’m very excited to let you know that next week, in addition to the usual Friday coffee chat, I’ll be going live on Thursday, October 23rd, at 12pm EST with
, where we will be chatting about how leaders cultivate agency through self awareness. I hope you’ll join us!Until then, let me know if the thoughts from this week have recontextualized self-care and agency for yourself, if so how you are going to show up differently for others.
Talk soon,
- Chris
Seed Catalog
If you remember, last week I mentioned that I ordered some books through my local store. They just came in, and in reading the first chapters of a few of them I’m already excited to continue reading. Here’s a few quotes that stood out.
From “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.” by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
“Sweetgrass is best planted not by seed, but by putting roots directly in the ground. Thus the plant is passed from hand to earth to hand across generations. It’s favored habitat is sunny, well-watered meadows. It thrives in disturbed edges.”
“Perhaps the Skywoman story endures because we too are always falling. Our lives, both personal and collective, share her trajectory. Wther we jump or are pushed, or the edges of the known world just crumbles at our feet, spinning into someplace new and unexpected. Despite our fears of falling, the gifts of the world stand by to catch us.”
From “Right Story, Wrong Story: How to Have Fearless Conversations In Hell” by Tyson Yunkaporta.
“They don’t get it. The canoe is not a belonging. The belonging is in the relationships that were strengthened in the canoe’s making, and the knowledge processes of a thousand activities that were demonstrated and passed on to the next generation at the same time. As long as the relationships last, the maps and blueprints of the canoe will remain as living knowledge that will outlast all the books and servers that might to capture this story. Relationships are the only way to store data safely in the long term.”
“In this death by a thousand cuts, every chip of wood is confetti in a celebration of the global marketplace in which we all compete to survive - the rugged individualism, the sheer audacity and self-annihilating work ethic that it takes to win this economical game of musical chairs. It’s really hard. Myself, me, my own, I-only, disconnected in this particular activity because my spouse is looking after the kdis while I take off for half a day to show the world how special and worthy I am instead of fulfulling my obligations to family.”
Contour Lines is my anecdotal newsletter segment that weaves whats going on in my life with my thoughts on leadership as well as personal and organizational development.
If something resonates, leave a comment, or reach out to chat - I always love hearing people’s stories.
Want to chat about personal growth or walking a path of authentic leadership but aren’t sure were to start?
You are always welcome to book a free call to either get fresh perspective or see if we’d work well together in cultivating your capacity to lead.
I offer a variety of services, 1:1 coaching, group programs, and leadership development program consultation. When you are ready, lets talk.
