"I’m not faking. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.” --actress Elaine Stritch as she struggled with the teleprompter at last night’s Emmy awards.
How many millions of us could relate to THAT sentiment! What this 80-plus actress has to teach us is that she was still doing it, still showing up, still giving it her best shot. Such is the challenge we face every day. “I just don’t know what to do...” rolls through our head as the young person in front of us, perhaps lost in their own internal self-talk, waits for us to do something. So we do. We take our best shot, fumble over the words, wish we could try it again, kick oursaelves for talking too much or lapse into trying to fix what is wrong instead of growing what is right.
And our audience laughs and applauds us wildly just for showing up.
OK, so they don’t. But they do inside. They are patient and they keep coming back for more, for they don’t need us to always “know what the hell we are doing.” They need us to keep trying, fake it till we make it, get it right sometimes, and give them credit for having the resources to take those moments when we do and make the most of them. They are applauding us alright, for their lives are filled with scared adults who stay backstage ahnd hope they’ll eventually give up and go home.
Elaine Stritch has been showing up for more decades than most of us have been alive, whether she felt graceful and wise or like she didn’t know what the hell she was doing. We could learn from her persistence.
Talk about on the mark! On the Today show last week, I listened to Kris Carr, author of Crazy, Sexy Cancer Tips talk about her battle/dance with cancer. In her book (which I highly recommend to anyone who wants to wake up and live as if they don’t have forever), she models a way of living on purpose that just knocked me out: clear, simple and gettin’ to it. I could go on and on about the strengths-focused principles evident in her wisdom, but you can read the real thing for that. It is what she said in the Today show interview that stopped me short.
Does it tire me or inspire me? This is the question she began to use to measure the value of her activities, relationships and thoughts. Does it tire me or inspire me? Could there be any better (and simpler) measure of what makes us strong? Using our strengths inspires us, gives us energy, delights us. Living in our weaknesses drains us. The goal is simple: to spend as much time as possible doing the “inspire” stuff and as little time as possible doing the “tire” stuff - and to teach and support others to do the same.
We can make excuses about not having control of some parts of our lives, needing to push through the hard stuff to get to the good stuff, and so on, but its a little hard to pass the straight face test with these excuses when you are talking to someone who has an “incurable” cancer. Instead, we can get about the work of finding the joy and maximizing our strengths within the circumstances we can’t control, changing the circumstances we can control, and having the line between the two begin to blur until we spend more time inspired than tired. Thank you Kris!
You tell me…
Today I invite you to tell me, “What are the qualitites that make someone transformative?” Bookstores are filled with inspirational stories of transformative people, but few answer the critical questions that interest us most: How do they do it? Is it what they say? How they say it? What they do? How they live their lives? Or is it something intangible, their very presence. Moreover, is it deliberate or a happy accident?
Further, can these common qualities the reduced to a single idea: The “one thing” that makes people transformative in the lives of young people? And by studying and emulating this one thing, can we be transformative—on purpose and by design? In the coming months, I will be interviewing dozens of transformative people, as well as those who have been impacted by them, to try to answer these questions. I will share these findings in a new book already in development.
If you would simply like to share your thoughts, click on “comments on this entry” at the bottom of this blog. (Please be sure to replace South Portland, Maine with your location. We’re working to repair this little quirk in the system.) If you’re willing to be interviewed, please contact me and share which role you’ve played (and it may be both) and a few words about your story. Be sure to include both an e-mail address and phone number. I will contact you as soon as I am able. Please be assured that I will protect your identity and privacy to whatever degree you wish.
Thank you in advance for your participation. This is an idea worth exploring!
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