I was confident I knew what I was talking about six weeks ago when I started a blog series, Leader UP, sharing advice for how leaders can navigate during times of uncertainty. My intentions were good; I was full of energy and leftover grit and stored up momentum. I hoped the force of my productivity would muscle me and my family—and you—back to a normal I could understand. A normal I could predict.
I was wrong.
There are times to power up, and there are times to power down. I find it hard to know which to do these days, and, as a result, I am largely “up and down.” Most of my phone communications sound awkward to my own ear. The rhythm of my days, even the “quarantine rhythm” that I’ve sidled up to rather nicely, can feel off some days. I say the wrong things (more than usual) and struggle to find the right words to say those wrong things. I feel out of my own skin. I want to help more, and I am not sure how. I extend my privilege where and how I can; I know these are problems of the healthy and well-resourced.
At nearly 54 laps around the fireball of which I currently feel so deeply deprived, I am finally learning to … relax. To not take everything to heart—because my heart is full and with little room to spare. I’m learning to be easy on myself, to not live my life in between meetings. Cooking is less of a chore, and it shows on the faces of the people I’m feeding. Mistakes are common, and more easily forgiven because of “these times.”
My house is messier than usual. My hair is crazy, and I’ve degenerated into a look shared by my favorite muppet (#twinningwithFrazzle). I exercise every day, but there are so many brownies. And cookies. So many. To be clear, they aren’t just dropping from the Betty Crocker heavens; I am baking with my over-washed dry and cracked hands, and with alarming regularity. Where I once innocently called one child by the name of another, I am now thoroughly incapable of getting anyone in my house’s name right—pets, people, whatevs.
Countless well-intentioned friends and neighbors are sharing lovely recipe, poem, book, yoga challenges. My apologies, friends, I can’t take in one more thing. How can I send a recipe to the first person on a list I can’t even see because I sat on my good glasses two weeks ago? And Words with Friends? Not. Fun. Too. Hard. So many Ys, and Qs with nary a U in sight. I can’t.
Friends, take this as permission, if you need it—or as an invitation if you want it—to power down. To slow down, to be imperfect and unprepared, to do the best with what you have in the moment. And if you accept this invitation, you won’t be alone. I’ll be right beside you, skipping happily past “under-promise and over-deliver,” in order to show up as today’s real me—the exhausted, thoroughly blessed and loving co-leader of this family and of our business, serving people inside of organizations that I care so deeply about. Unencumbered by a filter I barely had before, full of good intentions and willingness to do the hard work of connecting and supporting and helping myself and others, it will have to be enough.
Leaders, breathe. You do not have to be perfect. Just be you—imperfect and genuine, caring and honest, strategic and transactional, holder of multiple truths and perspectives, doing the best you can—Leader Up … and down.
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