Fail Often, with Great Joy

This is important. No one has perfect judgment. No one can, should, must, ought, or needs to be responsible all the time. No one can avoid mistakes. No one can live up to their own expectations or the expectations of others. In fact, assuming too much responsibility is more linked to trauma than it is too sainthood. I wish I had learned this earlier in life and I will spend the rest of my life giving other people permission to do what I could not allow myself to do for most of my life - fail often with great joy.

Fail at being 100% available.

Fail at avoiding pitfalls and mistakes.

Fail at trying so darn hard.

And notice, in the midst of all this failing to achieve, that everyone else is also failing.

Normalize failing and practice non-shaming responses. If we can pair those two principles together, then we can create an environment that is less traumatizing. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Armed with what we know - failing is not bad but it is inevitable - share failings aggressively. This serves several important purposes. It de-stigmatizes our shame and it encourages others. When Pete fails, I do not think he is a failure; I sigh with relief that maybe I do not have to be perfect either. It provides me a chance to remind him that we all fall short, so what? It helps to share with safe people, and that may require some additional failing along the way. I'm amazed at how differently humans respond to my own confessions of shortcoming. Sometimes I share and then feel that I made another mistake in sharing; I want to lie and hide from my limitations. But others get curious, ask questions, help me turn my failure into an experience, and remind me that I am not a mistake - I made a mistake.

2. Be the person other people can fail around. This doesn't mean that we never give feedback, we can and do (with permission). We just figure out how to be a safe person in the midst of recovering fromfailure.

3. Notice that the only way to avoid failure is to stop learning, growing, and leaning out over our skies a bit. It leaves one with a very, very small life.

How is fear of failure holding you back?

Setting Aside Judgement

One of the first passages of scripture that held me captive for a long, long time was Matthew 7:1-2. It goes like this:

"Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."

(NIV Translation)

In those days, my early 20's, I lived in a world filled with judgment. I could not imagine that it would be possible, even if I wanted to, to NOT judge and be judged in turn. Judgment was everywhere. I felt judged by Matthew 7, the very scripture that encourages NO JUDGING.

My own beloved grandmother, who I adored and was adored by, once told me in the middle of my own bout with anorexia, "Stay sweet and do not get stout." Wowzer, that was a bit off message. I was busy starving myself and she reminded me, in her own subtle way, that there was no such thing as a woman who was too thin.

Judgment judgment everywhere.

In the decades since, I continue to circle back to Matthew 7. I am so much older and much of the judgment of my youth has diminished. I have lost my will to judge, having seen how destructive it is especially in the hands of the ones we love the most. I have also lost my willingness to feel obligated to endure the judgment of others. Of course, there are days of relapse. I try not to judge myself when I fall back into the habits of childhood.

Here is what I am learning about Matthew 7. It is a pathway to freedom, not a judgment in and of itself. As a young woman, I heard it as a command too impossible to obey. Today I hear it as a voice of reason, inviting me, and all of us, into a different kind of life. A life, on the days I can live it, that is quite joyful.

Once we set aside judgment, or it is taken from us as a gift from our divine Healer, we can listen and marvel at all the manifold ways humanity expresses itself. Like Norah, who absorbs the new sights and sounds of Folly Beach without an ounce of judgment, we have the privilege of experiencing people in all their multitude. Matthew 7 is not asking us to get our act together so much as it is showing us what an abundant life looks like - in case, like me, others have never personally experienced a judgment free zone.

Do not judge - we are free not to! We can quit our comparing and competing. Yay for us!

You Have to Validate to Cooperate

For a month’s worth of posts, I (Scott) am critiquing my own past blog posts. I’m viewing this as an experiment in being willing to admit when I’m wrong, change my mind, and to do so publicly.

From yesterday:   How do we draw accurate conclusions about what has taken place during a fight?

If both parties are at least a bit wrong in every confrontation, then that means the truth of the situation does not exist on the side of either person but, instead, somewhere in the middle.  

In order to draw accurate conclusions about a fight both parties must be committed to an ongoing dialogue and both parties must remain legitimately open to what the other party has to say.  The only way to find truth is to cooperatively navigate through the filth of what transpired.  

If one side or the other is not committed to the process, both will be abandoned to guesswork and confusion.  Neither of these serves a relationship well.  

Looking back from the future:

One thing I would say with some additional time and perspective is that it just isn’t that important to get at the exact facts of an argument. It is critical that each person’s concern is heard, that each person’s feelings are validated, and that there is a spirit of cooperation in seeking a solution.

Remember, validation is not about agreement- it’s acknowledging what’s there without judgment. I don’t always agree with Brittany’s reasons for being upset with me- but it’s absolutely crucial that I get to a place where I can say, “I hear you’re upset, and it’s okay to be upset.” It’s only once both people have been heard that you can really cooperate on a solution.

Dial It Back: Developing Non-Judgement and Resisting Group Think

Every Saturday night a group of folks gather (via Zoom these days) to hone their spiritual, social and emotional intelligence. It’s challenging curriculum because it asks the participant to...participate. Lately we have spent time focusing on restraint. We’ve asked folks to up their active listening skills, learn how to validate better and more often, consider their internal boundaries, love each other harder and stronger.

Seems like faithful people can do all of this - right? Aren’t these great expressions of the principle of love one another? We think so. But what we have observed about ourselves and others over the years is that principles do not automatically translate into practices. This is why we are spending time focusing on developing skill sets to support our principles of lavish loving.

One of the many tools we use at NSC is the enneagram. If you do not know what that is - no worries, for the sake of this blog that does not matter. What does matter is some of the theory found and taught in that material. In the article on restraint, the author says that “we lie to ourselves a lot.”; the enneagram doesn’t call it lying - but it does kind of agree with this notion that we have these stories we tell ourselves that we unfortunately come to believe.

This causes us to develop a bit of blindness to aspects of ourselves that do not fit the story we have gotten used to telling about ourselves. This also occurs based on groups you belong to. We get accustomed to adopting the same views as the groups we associate with - and this is a problem. Think politics. Think religious affiliations. Think team sports.

Our work in developing the superpower of restraint is to resist group think and unconditional loyalty. We need to have contradictory philosophies that we wrestle with because the world is full of paradox and legitimate contradictions. How do we do this? Well, we need to practice nonjudgmental observation. Try to search out and find common ground with folks who are not naturally in your tribe; be willing to acknowledge the faults of your favorites.

Here’s an example. A political rival (who we do not know at all personally) is accused of sexual improprieties and we say, “Makes sense. What a slimeball. I always believe the woman.” A political ally (who we do not know at all personally) is accused of sexual improprieties and we say, “Fake news. Who paid her off? I heard she was a slut. There is just no way this happened. This person is too decent for that!” This is groupthink. We need to stay out of the herd! We need to do better than this; sit out of the arguments that are driven by our opinions and bias and second-hand knowledge. And...the best thing each of us can do is to wrestle with becoming the kind of people who in no way participate in sexism, sexual impropriety, sexual aggression or assault. This is where our energy is best spent. This is showing restraint and gaining wisdom.