« The Gift of Pain | Main | Starting Over »

July 4, 2007

Do I like myself as much as I used to?

I recently had a delightful lunch with a colleague from my past. My colleague and I worked closely together nearly 20 years ago when we shared the passionate idealism of youth for innovation within our chosen calling of education. As it happened, during the time we worked together my friend witnessed my transition from idealism to a disillusionment which led me to leave education to pursue a career in private business.

In the meantime, my colleague has risen to a senior management position.

During the course of our lunch she surprised me with the question "Do you like yourself as much as you used to?" When I look back on my decision to leave education, I am left wondering if it was the right decision or was it just based on chasing personal financial gain. I miss teaching. But as soon as I think about it long enough, I know I don't miss schools and neither do I miss the bureaucracy that surrounds them. Regardless of how my decision will weigh in the balance of my future, it has given me the opportunity to do things I never would have if I had stayed in teaching.

Surprising as it may seem, running my own business has given me the opportunity to know myself more fully. To be truthful, given my personality, I think I would have learnt more about myself whatever I did. Indeed, as I will come to shortly, I think my colleague's question was prompted by her reflection on her own actions in the positions she has held and the personal dilemmas that go hand in hand with increased responsibility.

Staying in the moment however, my immediate response was I thought I liked myself even more than I used to. As I have pursued my business interests I have had to reflect on the decisions I've made. On occasion I have trusted people I ought not to have trusted. There are times when I have invested time and money in ventures that were unlikely to, and in fact did not, succeed. As I reflect on those actions I have looked deep into myself to understand what attracts me to trust untrustworthy people and what attracts me to invest in unsound investments. In this deep reflection I have discovered a lot about myself. I have a tendency to avoid the difficult decisions – so it is easier to trust someone than probe their integrity. I believe in myself but I am afraid to really present myself because you may not share that belief – so it is easier to hope that the unsound investment might come off rather than confront what I am not putting into it.

Regardless of all this and more, I have had the opportunity to look into and have a glimpse of my deepest self. When I speak of this to some people their reaction is to regard me as self obsessed, that I think I'm better than other people. One associate in a potential business venture, with undisguised disdain once said to me "You think you're so special." That hit me hard and forced me to think. After a moment or two's thought I told him I did think I was special, but equally I thought he was special and indeed every single one of us is special. No one of us is more special than an other but we, each of us, are very special.

This all led to me to reflect on my colleague's question and pose it back to her. "You wouldn't like some of the things I do." She replied, emphasising the "you" meaning, I thought, me in particular. I took this to mean that after the idealism we had previously shared, I would think she had sold out on some of the principles we once shared.

It made me think of two young revolutionaries who met many years later. If I enter this analogy, my colleague's original question seems on the surface to be the wrong way around. In this scenario, I am the one who sold out. I left the revolutionary army to join the bourgeoisie, while she remained true to the revolution and, in this play, is indeed now a senior member of the new government.

However she went on to speak of the decisions she now makes. I thought she was going to fall into the jargon of saying "decisions she has to make" but either she corrected herself before the words came out and said instead, or always intended to say, "the decisions I choose to make."

Oh, the dilemmas of leadership. As young revolutionaries we could criticise our incumbent self serving and incompetent masters. When we find ourselves in their position however, things become so much more complicated. There is never, as it once seemed, one single obvious solution to a problem. No matter what we do, someone will be hurt, we will under-resource, or cut a program that should not be cut, we will never have a complete command of the whole picture and, being human, from time to time we will simply make bad decisions.

So do I like myself as much as I used to. Once I find it within me to forgive myself for my mistakes I truly can say I like myself more than I used to. A teacher in one of my postgraduate programs once made the comment "We miss out on so much in our organisations because we can't bring ourselves to forgive." In my personal journey, I have found it necessary to learn, and to continue to learn, to forgive myself as well as to forgive others. Indeed to forgive myself before I can forgive others. I am human. I make mistakes. I often don't care as much for those close to me as I want to. I get bound up in my own selfishness when others around me offer me so much. Yes, all of that is true. If, however, I can accept that as my human frailty find forgiveness I can move on to generosity.

Posted by chriscurnow at July 4, 2007 9:29 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.chriscurnow.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/389

Comments

Post a comment