how will we show up...
...when we're not sure we want to show up?
The missing post last week occupied more space in my head than I’d like to admit. It’s my first missed (weekly) deadline in over a year.
However, I’m pretty sure most of you didn’t notice. The thing is, I did, and it’s been eating at me all weekend.
The thing is, I had something close to ready to go. Something I’ll probably put out at a later date. It just wasn’t quite ready for primetime.
The missing post got me thinking about some other things, which I suppose is the purpose of all of this.
The main thought or question boils down to who do I want to be? How will I choose to show up?
Reliable, responsible, accountable, consistent, trustworthy, all of those mean something to me. They’re words and values that shape how I want to show up in spaces. They’ve been drilled into my head that this is what a good person is, what a good person does.
The thing is I don’t always embody these values. No one embodies their values all the time. I’d be out of a job if we did.
Maybe I get there 50-60% of the time, at least by my accounting (which has shown to be faulty). I often wonder if others would be as optimistic.
However, those aren’t the only things important to me.
On the flip side, I also experience myself as creative, open, responsive, relational, and empathic. These things require adaptivity and an openness to change. They require me to recognize when my consistency is harmful rather than helpful, my reliability a liability.
Last week, I could have published something incomplete, but still on time. It would fit that value of reliability and consistency, but it wouldn’t have been open, empathic, or creative. It just would’ve been… preachy.
Publishing something just to satisfy an itch doesn’t always mean it’s the right value to listen to. My writing suffers sometimes when I’m trying to hard to meet a deadline rather than meet a value.
So, it will sit there on my laptop for another day. It wasn’t a bad post, it just wasn’t me quite yet.
And, here’s the key take away from all of this for me. How am I [are we] discerning the steps we take through life? How am I [are we] becoming more resilient through adaptation rather than rigidity? How am I [are we] welcoming creativity and novelty into what we thought were settled processes?
Consistency builds trust. That doesn’t mean we trust the right things or the right people or the right mindsets.
So much of this comes down to how we prioritize the values we hold about ourselves and others. Can I be consistently open, reliably empathic, responsibly creative?
I don’t know, which is scary, but I guess we’ll find out together. I feel like this was a first good step.