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Kathy Stoddard Torrey

~ Leadership Coach and Trainer

Kathy Stoddard Torrey

Tag Archives: LifeLessons

60th Birthday Reflections

31 Tuesday Mar 2020

Posted by Kathy Stoddard Torrey in Emotional Intelligence, Leadership, Uncategorized

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Tags

#60thbirthday, #LeadershipRules #LeadYourselfFirst #KathySays, LifeLessons

60 bday 1K

Today is my 60th birthday. Birthdays that end in “0” make us want to reflect on our lives and our accomplishments. I am no exception – and I have more time than usual for some introspection. Here is my list of life lessons learned:

1. Let kindness and honesty be your guides. These two considerations must be taken together. Brutal honesty all the time is not kind, and not necessary. On the flipside, we can believe that leaving someone in the dark is kind, but honesty is usually much better. There is a balance to consider.

I keep way more things to myself than I did in my younger years. No one wants or needs to hear my opinions on every little thing. However, sometimes I feel a need to speak up. The questions I ask myself are: “Will knowing this help the other person in the long run?” and “Am I saying it for them or for my own ego?”

Everyone has to make their own decisions on how much honesty is kind. I tend to lean toward truth and appreciate it when others do the same with me. In my experience, people figure stuff out eventually. When they discover that you’ve known all along, there is a breach of trust that can never be fully repaired. Trust is the commodity of relationships.

2. Exercise self-control. Exercise is the appropriate word here because the more we use our self-control, the stronger it gets. Without self-control, we can’t honor #1 on the list because we are always blurting and giving in to our ego’s needs.

The big regrets that I have in life are when I lost my temper and lashed out at someone. It doesn’t happen often anymore, but I still feel bad about a few times when I lost control and yelled at my children when they were young.

3. Self-care is crucial. We cannot exercise self-control and make intentional choices around kindness and honesty if we don’t take care of ourselves. My biggest losses of self-control happened when several things in life were not going well. Stress puts us on edge and robs us of our ability to see the big picture and choose our words and actions wisely.

The antidote for stress is self-care, which will look different for each of us. For some people, self-care includes running or walking. For others, it means writing or drawing. We all need to have more than one self-care technique in our lives that allows us to center and regroup. Meditation is one great self-care technique that has tons of research proving its benefits.

4. Spend your emotional pennies wisely. I try not to spend emotional pennies on things that I cannot influence or control. If I can control it, I can change it. If I can influence it, I must decide if changing the thing is worth the emotional pennies that it will cost.

The most helpful phrase for me when conserving emotional pennies is “the chair is a chair.” You can read my blog on the quote from Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith. Basically, it means that certain people and situations are not going to change, and it’s best for me if I accept that.

5. Connect with others. I learned this one late in life. We humans crave connection with each other. I have always accepted the value of rugged individualism and was determined in my youth to make it on my own. Sixty years have shown me that it is impossible to make it on your own. Success happens with the support of a community.

Happiness also happens with the support of a community. The micro-moments of positivity we share with others are one type of building block we need to build a positive outlook on life.

6. Prepare for the worst, but expect the best. I am a firm believer in being prepared if everything goes to hell in a handbasket. However, I don’t believe in dwelling on the possibility. It’s important to assess, prepare, and then focus on a positive outcome that we want.

I ordered gloves and masks well before there was a shortage and then went on not thinking about it. I bought an extra six-pack of toilet paper at the grocery store while plenty was on the shelf but didn’t stress about it.

On a grander scale, when I was a stay-at-home mom, I put the utilities in my name to build credit. I went back to school and got my MBA. My goal was to be able to jump to self-sufficiency if anything happened to my then-husband. He would get irritated with me and insist I expected the worst of him. I pointed out that he could be hit by a bus on any given day. The fact that he was in the Army made his demise more likely than many others.

However, I never dwelt on the possibilities of my ex’s death or infidelity. I just prepared for the worst and went on living life and expecting everything to go well. The worst did eventually happen. I am grateful for a life of not expecting it – and for being prepared so I could move to self-sufficiency with relative ease.

7. Work to be vulnerable and loving despite the cruel blows that you will suffer. First, everyone suffers cruel blows in life. Cruel blows are a part of life. I’ve learned that it’s best to expect them and to not take them as personal affronts. Suffering disappointment, humiliation, and failure makes us human and more empathetic to the plight of others. Suffering is also an opportunity for growth.

And if you just scoffed or huffed at me, I totally get it. It sounds like a superficial platitude to me, as well, but that doesn’t make it any less true. I chose the word “work” for a reason. As far as I am concerned, putting my heart out on the line, knowing it will be crushed again, is work. It’s not easy at all and it’s a constant challenge.

Brenė Brown’s research on vulnerability helps me. She talks about the courage required to put yourself out there as a possible target for ridicule and deception. Maintaining that courage is work, but it’s worthwhile work. We cannot live a life full of joy and accomplishment if we live safely protecting our hearts. She talks a lot about this quote from Theodore Roosevelt:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

As I look back over the last 60 years, I haven’t been timid very often, but I have become bitter at times. Since I’m reviewing things that greatly influenced how I live, I feel I must include these charts from Richard Rohr, a Franciscan friar ordained to the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church.

Men's Journey (Rohr)

Women's Journey (Rohr)

Side note: These graphs depict different paths for men and women. I believe that this is because of how we are socialized, not because of major, inherent differences. I also hope that younger women find that their path is not so different as the one Rohr describes for men. I can’t speak to their experiences, but the graph resonates with me and my experience in many ways.

I discovered these graphs in my oldest son’s coat pocket when I was in my late 40s. (I was about to wash his coat per his request – not snooping!) They changed the trajectory of my life. I could see clearly that if I did not change, I was headed for the Embittering Journey, and I didn’t want to end my life bitter and resentful. I worked to embrace joy and acceptance.

Now at 60, I find myself in danger of becoming the “Witch on Her Broom” who is filled with rage. The last bit – “going nowhere – except to blame others and protect herself” – is a particular danger for me right now. That’s why Brown’s writings about vulnerability resonate with me.

My life lessons list, which is as much a list of goals for living my life as anything else, is a result of wanting to become a Holy Fool. I want to “live with paradox and mystery, with compassion and forgiveness.”

I know all of those things are mine if I make some intentional choices. I love the Magic Wand of Destiny!


For a little bit of fun leadership development, join 53 Leadership Challenges at KathyStoddardTorrey.com.

Want to go further with your professional development? Check out the courses offered at PositiveEffectLeadership.com.

If you are interested in taking your career to the next level quickly, contact me for a sample coaching session at KSTorrey@tapferconsulting.com.

 

 

 

Lesson 1: Chunking Down the Vision

04 Tuesday Oct 2016

Posted by Kathy Stoddard Torrey in Lessons From The Lawn

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Tags

#achievement, #goals, leadership, LessonsFromTheLawn, LifeLessons, PositiveEffectLeadership, vision

front-yard-pic

Lessons for Life and Leadership from the Lawn

I wanted to name this series “Lessons from the Garden” because it sounds nice and gardens are beautiful. However, I kill plants inside and out on a regular basis so that seemed misleading. In truth, I spent much of the summer of 2016 weeding my front yard. It wasn’t glamorous, and it didn’t result in any splendid color around the lawn. I toyed with the idea of “Lessons from the Yard,” but I thought that title made it sound like I was in prison. I decided on “lawn,” and whatever you call it, I learned a lot from sitting in the grass for a summer.

Lesson 1: Chunking Down the Vision

First, you need a vision, also known as a goal. It needs to be something you want to create or achieve. If the end state of your vision feels exciting and invigorating, then you are on the right track. The best visions also feel a little overwhelming. They look like they might be too big to accomplish!

My vision was to weed the front yard by hand. I could see the finished product of a beautiful expanse of chemical-free grass. I wanted to create it. I looked forward to spending time outside, and I was committed to using as few poisons as possible. However, you can see from the picture that it was a big yard, and there were a lot of weeds. I couldn’t face it all in the beginning. It seemed like too much for one person to accomplish. So, I chunked it down into smaller pieces.

I decided to start with just the grass on one side of the sidewalk that led to the front door. From that area of grass, I picked a smaller piece that was directly in front of the house. It would give me a beautiful weed-free view out of my front windows.

I created a grid on that first piece. I started at the house and worked my way down the sidewalk. When I got to the sidewalk that runs by the street, I turned around and did the next strip back to the house. I went out at dawn when it was cool, and I would work for an hour or so. It took me about a week to get that small section done, but it looked great! I could see the possibility for the rest of the yard. Anything I did was an improvement.

Then, I took on other pieces of the yard. I set time limits and concentrated on the process. I celebrated each accomplishment. Each section that I completed gave me more confidence and motivation. I began to believe that I could get the entire yard done.

I used the same method of Chunking Down the Vision when I created my first online course. I had “Create online classes” on my to do list for years! It was a big vision, a huge goal that was completely overwhelming. Finally, I chunked it down into smaller steps and got started. The first item on my list was “Find a web designer.” Finding a web designer that could see my vision and wasn’t intimidated by it took about six weeks of interviews. Then, I started working on down my list of small tasks.

The big difference between weeding the yard and creating an online class was the predictability. The weeding process didn’t present many surprises. Maybe there were a few more weeds than I expected sometimes. I did learn that only a few cute clover leaves can mean a gridlocked mess of roots. However, I just took it section by section and everything went according to plan.

The creation of the online class took me places I never planned to go. When I started recording the first video, I had to do it over so many times that I couldn’t stand to do it again. So many things about it were not good.

I took my first detour off of the planned path by creating YouTube videos to practice. YouTube videos weren’t in the original plan, but I needed to master recording video and audio before I could move on. It took lots of tries and in the end I owned a camcorder, an external audio recorder, and I knew how to edit videos in Adobe Premiere.

Once I figured out how to create acceptable quality videos, I was ready to begin recording the class again. Learning about video and audio wasn’t one of the original steps, but it came up. So, I broke that new goal down into small steps and got it done.

You can use the same system for your big vision. First, is it a vision or goal that you really want? I get such a feeling of peace and satisfaction when I look out over my weed-free, chemical-free lawn. Does the vision of your finished product or outcome make you feel motivated?

Second, is the vision big enough? The best goals are big ones that feel a little overwhelming.

Third, chunk it down! Write out the small steps you must take to get started. Chunking down also works for things like “Do the taxes.” Ack! Break it down. For example, the list might look like this:

1) Download IRS forms.

2) Collect/find W-2s.

3) Find receipts.

Doing just one thing a day will move you toward the finish. Once you get started, it’s easier to keep going.

Fourth, celebrate the chunks. When you finish one step of a process, bask in the glory for a few minutes. Revel in the feeling of accomplishment. When I finish writing this article, I am rewarding myself with 15 minutes outside in the grass.

Finally, don’t be afraid of the unplanned detours. Sometimes you get a shortcut. Sometimes you get a longer scenic route. Stay on the path toward your vision and you will get there.



For a little bit of fun leadership development, join 53 Leadership Challenges at http://bit.ly/29RYzx0.

Want to go further with your professional development? Check out the courses offered at http://bit.ly/29PcAQD.

If you are interested in taking your career to the next level quickly, contact me for a sample coaching session at KSTorrey@tapferconsulting.com.

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