The Assault on Christmas

The week before Halloween, I walked into Home Depot and almost walked out in protest. I was assaulted by Christmas decorations. When talking with an employee about my disgust, I was quickly told, “People are buying a lot already.”

It’s Christmas for goodness sakes – time to save the economy! On Thanksgiving Day, let’s give thanks for the opportunity to go shopping at midnight. The “holiday season” now starts with acclaims for “Black Friday” and the race to revive retail.

Apologies to my non-Christian friends who have to endure the endless clang of Christmas carols everywhere they go. Actually, it amazes me that anyone would want to sing anything on Christmas Eve after being bombarded with carols every waking moment for nearly two months. How has it come to this? This hijacking of Christmas.

The way I survive it is reading Watch for the Light, Readings for Advent and Christmas.

With a different writer every day, November 24 to January 7, the daily reminder of what this season is all about calms me and unsettles me all at the same time. Some are easier to read like “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” by Sylvia Path. Others, unnerving: “The Shaking Reality of Advent” written by Father Alfred Delp, a Jesuit priest, condemned as a traitor and writing from his prison cell before he was hanged.

Yesterday, from Loretta Ross-Gotta, “The intensity and strain that many of us bring to Christmas must suggest to some onlookers that, on the whole, Christians do not seem to have gotten the point.”

And from Henri Nouwen, he writes about the cultural reality that binds us: “Waiting is not a very popular attitude… For many people, waiting is an awful desert between where they are and where they want to go. And people do not like such a place.”

Peter Kingsley in an interview in Parabola recognizes this same malady Nouwen writes about when he says, “We are obsessed with keeping everything going: with asking what do we do next? But what if that’ s not the right question? What if we actually have to do nothing: just go deeper and wait?

Jump off the Wheel

When I left "an inside job" in the fall of 2009, I knew that my excitement and drive to reinvigorate the consulting business I had run for seven years would keep me busy. Soon my best friend was saying, "Whoah.. slow down." Her advice: "Jump off the wheel. Give yourself a break. You’ll be back on the wheel soon enough. Try a sabbatical. " She was so right. Just about this time last year, I jumped off.

It’s not surprising that my last post here was Aprjl 25, 2010. On April 15, I started a new job, after taking that sabbatical, and I've been pretty much head down ever since.

Now, as I take a deep breath the day after Thanksgiving, I give thanks for jumping off the wheel for several months in the winter of 2009/2010. It was the best gift I’ve ever given myself. And I know that without it, I probably would not have been ready to take the plunge I did in April (another "inside job" much to my surprise).

Taking sabbaticals is a lost art, except perhaps in academia, although usually a “to do” list goes along with the deal. A rarity in the corporate world. Only 19 companies on this list.

Taking that deep dive into a place of nonattachment to work was full of wonder and creativity. I loved it. I wrote poetry. And more poetry. I sat in silence. I spent time with my extended family. I enjoyed the highest snow fall on record. I stayed alone, for days at a time in a small cabin in the woods in the heart of winter. No sense of time. No agenda to meet. I rested and healed wounds I had found a way to hide. Mediation and Merton ("we cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time in the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony) were my guides. I listened hard to what I had long ago denied.

Sabbaticals are not for the cautious. It takes a degree of boldness to let go. To let go of the fear that your “place” won’t be there when you get back. To be willing to let go and find, maybe, a new place to be. It takes courage.

I think about my fellow comrades in the environmental community – now might be the time to consider jumping off the wheel. No chance of climate change legislation passing (That’s for another post). More gridlock to come for sure. So why not? Why not jump off the wheel. You just might be surprised about what you’ll learn about yourself, your job, what you may have hidden along the way.

For now, I’ll let Henri J.M.M. Nouwen close it out:

Without solitude there can be no real people. The more you discover what a person is, and experience what a human relationship requires in order to remain profound, fruitful, and a source of growth and development, the more you discover that you are alone – and that the measure of your solitude is the measure of your capacity for communion.

Irony of Reid's Move: Latinos Want Climate Action

Seems like Senator Reid can’t manage more than one issue at a time. He’s decided to push the bipartisan effort on climate and energy legislation to the back burner and instead focus on immigration reform. If you smell a rough re-election campaign, you’re on the right track. Ironically, Senator Reid is missing a big opportunity to address something that Latinos care a lot about – and that’s climate change.

On the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, the National Latino Coalition on Climate Change (NLCCC) released a study on the attitudes of Latino voters on climate change in three key states –Colorado, Florida AND Nevada. The findings? Latino voters want global warming action.

What’s more – the overwhelming majorities of Latino voters in Florida (80%), Nevada (67%) and Colorado (58%) say they are more likely to vote for a U.S. Senate candidate that supports proposals for fighting global warming. And 8 out of 10 voters reject the idea that fighting global warming will hurt the economy. In Nevada, 72% of those polled said that focusing on clean energy will create jobs.

NLCCC’s Vice-Chair Lillian Rodriguez-Lobez tells us why: “Latino Americans are on the front lines of climate change. We live where we feel the biggest impacts of droughts and hurricanes. We suffer disproportionately from asthma and air pollution, which will get worse under global warming. And, in huge numbers, we work in agriculture – of all industries the one likely to be hardest hit by climate change. The fact is that Latino Americans have every reason to call for an Earth Day revolution.”

Looks like Senator Reid is now saying, you can’t have it all. You can’t live freely in America and at the same time, be safe from the impacts of global warming.

Of course, let’s not just point the finger at Senator Reid. If there were more than one Republican Senator willing to do the work of protecting all of us from the impacts of global warming, then we wouldn’t be in the middle of this mess. In the absence of leadership, we all lose.

Leadership: What Matters Most

I doubt if there will ever be enough written (and certainly learned) about what makes a successful leader. In the category of leadership, we have all experienced the good, the bad and the ugly.

An inspiring article about the first woman president of Chile tells us that Michele Bachelet while mocked for her “overt emotion and talk of intuition,” ended her historic presidency with a 87% approval rating. Now, according to the article, “those who criticized her supposed sentimentalism are taking classes in emotional intelligence, while Chile's politicians must all pass the "Bachelet test" -- that is, having "heart" and being close to the people.”

A timely article to read after recently devouring Leadership and Self Deception. The book’s message: successful leaders treat people like people, not objects. Yes, in 2010 there’s plenty of “leaders” that still need to learn this lesson. The book also does a brilliant job of calling out the habits of self deception and self betrayal as the root of most conflict.

Truly great leaders, Ben Horowitz notes in his recent post on leadership, “create an environment where the employees feel that the CEO cares much more about the employees than she cares about herself.”

Horowitz also lays out three key traits a leader needs to have:

· The ability to articulate the vision

· The right kind of ambition

· The ability to achieve the vision

Horowitz understands that these are traits that every real leader needs to continually work on. Being committed to life-time learning, enhancing your emotional intelligence, and I would add, seeking out feedback from those you lead separates the true leaders from the wannabes.

Back in 2001, Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzi and Annie McKee wrote about “Primal Leadership” and the impact a leader’s “emotional maturity” has on the organization. Their research demonstrated that when leaders exhibit emotional intelligence, they ”create environments where information sharing, trust, healthy risk-taking, and learning flourish. “ They note in Primal Leadership, The Hidden Driver of Great Performance, that “tense or terrified employees can be very productive in the short term, their organizations may post good results, but they never last.”

There’s still far too many organizations filed with “tense or terrified employees.” Employees who are terrified to tell the truth about what they see, how they are treated and where leadership is failing. Far too many leaders continue to fly under the radar screen, lacking any measure of evaluation and feedback – from the people they lead. This lack of evaluation is now at epidemic levels – in financial markets, in Congress, in organizations and board rooms all over the country. To Horowitz’s list above I’d add a fourth trait of leadership: “The willingness to seek out and listen to feedback. “