Category Archives: Quotes

Leadership Styles to Enhance Creativity

Traditionally, the best and brightest specialists were promoted to positions of leadership, on the strength of the rationale that their creative success would permeate the team they headed. The legacy of this strategy, however, is knowledge organisations that are often financially and intellectually weakened by these brilliant specialists who were actually incompetent, autocratic leaders. Even today, few technical specialists are schooled in general management and, as a consequence, most learn from experience or need to receive management and leadership training after their appointment.

Recent research is showing that classic directive leadership or traditional autocratic management strategies are not effective in knowledge organisations or teams, and that knowledge workers respond to inspiration rather than supervision. Henry Mintzberg rightly notes that, in knowledge teams, the members are there because they are highly proficient at what they do so they need little coaching at a technical level. What they do need, according to Mintzberg, is inspiration, protection and support, all of which agree with the creativity-enhancing supervisory encouragement and organisational support of Amabile. Mintzberg described the type of leadership required to effectively lead a knowledge team as “covert leadership” because it is leadership that is delivered subtly through everything the leader does.

Leadership is generally accepted to occur at three different levels: the individual level where leaders mentor, coach and motivate; the group level, where leaders build teams and resolve conflicts; and at the organisational level, where leaders build culture. On the individual and team levels, leaders can covertly inspire and energise just by treating team members as “respected members of a cohesive social system”. Mintzberg stipulates that covert leadership establishes the team culture because the leader sets the culture standard through behaviour. Hardy and Schwartz also noted that a leader is only effective if her behaviour matches her directives. Therefore, the behaviour of a leader establishes the culture of the team or organisation, regardless of whether directives accompany the behaviour or not.

–Heather L. Bruce, Leading Creativity: Effective Leadership of Knowledge Teams

Exactly Where She Wants To Be

I’m a mental health professional, but I am also human. Therefore I experience the slings and arrows of life, which sometimes land solidly under a chink in my armor, and as I cannot be objective about myself, I suffer as others do.

Recently I wrote to my friend, Marta:

IÂ’m treading water of my own depression.

I could be happy, content — I ought to be. I am healthy (mostly), employed, loved, housed, fed, clothed. People like me, they really like me! BUT. Instead I feel numb, or emotionally flat, and my body aches a great deal. I carry out my daily duties and smile and laugh, but I also feel resistant, unsettled, and clenched. Meeting new people and making friends is trying. I miss you. I miss my other peeps. I avoid the phone because I want in-person connection. Ah, fuck it.

And I haven’t made art. Though I did color this weekend — a mandala. Does that count?

What is WRONG with me? I ask this in light of my recent encounter with death. Why the hell am I not embracing my life, cherishing it? Living it with joy?

And bless her wise, enormous heart, she wrote words of comfort and meaning.

That is a cliché. Encounters with death do not make us cherish life more. I think people say that because it is expected. It is what you’re supposed to say. Maybe they do sometimes, in moments of sunshine and cool breezes on the skin and what-not, but I think they often make us more fearful, more stressed, more tired. When my mother died I felt that there was nothing except a great, horrible void all around me. There was no floor under my feet and no roof over my head, just space and the knowledge that for the rest of time as I knew it, my mother would not be there. Perhaps because her death was unexpected, it made me feel that death waited around every minute of every day. It takes a while after that to feel that any of the small things that normally bring joy had any point at all. There is nothing wrong with you. You’re grieving. It isn’t easy and it isn’t tidied up with pithy sayings and clichés. But a moment will come when you’ll realize that you have been cherishing life, and you won’t be sure when the change came. At least, that’s how it was for me.

I have grieved deeply before. The last time I was also experiencing a moderate depression, and the loss which evoked grief deepened that episode. I have much more insight now, and a vastly better support system than I had then. Pharmacology helps too. Of late, I just find life draining and irritating. I become annoyed with the unexpected, when I would rather meet it with equanimity. Cognitive behaviorists would prescribe that I need to change my thinking. Buddhists would suggest I meditate and notice my ego. Athletes would recommend more exercise. Psychoanalysts would infer that this was connected to a long-buried childhood pattern or experience. All may be true, but this doesn’t change a thing.

I long for (and perhaps this is part of the problem) the following experience, and wish it to be the general tone of my life:

I arrived for one of my last sojourns at The Farm on a chill sunny day quite early in June 1979, just after Aunt Jane and Uncle Kip had moved up for the summer, while the lemon lilies and iris were still in bloom, before all the asparagus had gone to fern. After settling my considerable baggage in the downstairs front bedroom, which would be mine now that I could no longer climb the stairs to the one above it, I wandered back into the kitchen. It was new to me, the ample wooden cabinets and yellow Formica counters and stainless-steel sinks and especially the wide bay window above the table. I stood staring through the newly ample panes at the sweep of garden, lavendar flags and yellow trumpets against a tangle of green, the whole blurred in the long spreading shafts of late light.

     “What are you looking at?” Jane asked behind me.
     “Just the garden,” I answered. “I was feeling the pleasure of being exactly where I want to be.”
     “I’m glad,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Everyone should have one place where, when she’s in it, she’s exactly where she wants to be. And if she can no longer return to it, well, at least she’ll have been there. That’s something.

–Nancy Mairs, Remembering the Bone House: an Erotics of Space & Place

I have experienced this before, numerous times, in my original home state and then during my Texas years. But not since I moved to California.

I write about my personal struggles here both to cope with my life (the expression is curative), and with the hope that others reading it might find a kindred spirit and thus feel less alone in their journey.

A Mother and Not-Mother

Every girl should have a mother, I think, not the sort of predatory monster sketched out and whined about in pop-psych books designed to cop a chunk of the bestseller trade, but an ordinary mother like mine, flawed but serviceable, who will hang your kindergarten plaque in her kitchen and teach you to sew an invisible hem in your skirts and stay up watching a late movie with you both because she likes you and because she likes the movie. She may, like mine, take some of her responsibilities too seriously, especially in matters (not entirely unrelated) of politeness and sex, and in this way cause you a good bit of unnecessary teeth gnashing and sleeplessness. But unless, unlike mine, she’s some kind of nut, you’ll learn to interpret the clamp of emotional hands on your spirit as one of love’s shape-shifting signs and to pry her fingers free without breaking them or the heart they clutch.

At the same time, every girl should have a not-mother, a woman who has, in every sense, no stake in you. If you’re a bad child, no one will blame her. And she has a much narrower interpretation of badness than your mother, anyway. Almost nothing you do seems to strike her as bad. A lot more of what you do strikes her as funny. Like when you build a “cat house,” you solemnly tell her, for sleek, striped Minnie. Or when you lather yourself lavishly with the expensive soap from S.S. Pierce shaped exactly like a lemon, with a lemon’s maddening pungency. She’s under no obligation to warn you that certain words “aren’t nice” or to exhort you to thrift. She’s under no obligation at all. That’s what a girl needs: a woman who’s free to love her without fretting whether she’s going to grow up to be all right.

–Nancy Mairs, Remembering the Bone House: an Erotics of Space & Place

Penetrate the Veiled Consciousness

All I know is that people never penetrate the veiled consciousness that earns me the label “dreamy” (though it isn’t dreaminess unless life itself is, after all, a dream). Places do. I can establish a direct relationship with the slant of sun across a rug, the smell of blueberry bushes or mud flats, the scratch of sand inside a wet bathing suit, pale creamy oatmeal in a blue-and-white bowl, hot and sweet. These things speak to me as people do not.

–Nancy Mairs, Remembering the Bone House: an Erotics of Place & Space

This Life

My mother-in-law is in the hospital. A sudden illness from an infection. She’ll be just fine, and for this I’m grateful. But such news is distressing!

One of my cats, Sophie, probably has mammary cancer. She may also have heartworm. One of these will kill her, maybe sooner, maybe later. She has a heart murmur that she wasn’t born with, and her breathing problems may be symptoms of worm infestation in her heart. There’s no really effective treatment to cure heartworm in cats. Because she’s an indoor cat I didn’t think she was vulnerable to heartworm. None of my vets (until the one I saw today) ever suggested prevention. However, it takes only one mosquito bite to infect a cat. There’s almost no treatment for it, but prevention is easy. Do it!

Diagnosing and treating the tumors would require major surgery and possibly chemotherapy (if they are cancerous). Because her first vet spayed her incorrectly at age six months, leaving an ovary in her, the subsequent heat cycles may have contributed to this. She had a second spay surgery when she was three. Two major surgeries is enough, especially given her size. Chemotherapy practically kills human patients. I’m unable to embrace this as a reasonable protocol to put her in the position of enduring.

Sophie weighs barely eight pounds and currently has an excellent life. She’s content, lively. The only distress I observe is a slight panting or wheezing, an occasional cough. I can give her prednisone to ease those symptoms. She is otherwise full of zing. Given that my father-in-law died only six weeks ago, I had an alarm raised regarding my own health, and now these two events, the following quote hit home.

To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your life depends on it; and when the time comes, to let it go.

–Mary Oliver

And I’m thinkin’… The weather here is gorgeous. I’m working with kids Saturday night, having dinner with friends Sunday. Still haven’t made any art. Perhaps, just perhaps, I will shut down my computer and take a few days to experience this life of mine.

Beyond A Mere Escape

It’s that the benefits of reading extend beyond a mere escape from oneself. They linger. Reading affords one a certain detachment from life. Reading allows me, at least, to approach the events of my own life with the same mild curiosity I have toward a good novel: it’s easier not to get so invested. One could argue that film and television must do the same, but in truth, there is something different between the mediums. Books – texts – are private, personal, unique. They’re fueled and informed by whatever you’ve already experienced. Movies are public. They give everything to you. Also, television and film are almost always (and necessarily) presented from a limited third-person point of view: the nature of the stated objectivity of the camera makes anything else difficult. Books can be written from the inside, or from all sides – you get a taste of what it’s like to experience the world through the eyes and skin and past of another.

–Siona, Nomen Est Numen

Family Time

The family dinner has long been an example of family togetherness. But recently, scientists have been coming up with compelling reasons — including a lowered risk of smoking, drinking and doing illicit drugs among teenagers — for families to pull up a chair around the table.

The interest in the ritual may have been spurred by concerns that the number of families who do not dine together is increasing. According to several surveys, 30 to 40 percent of families do not eat dinner together five to seven nights a week, though most families eat dinner together some days a week.

–Laurie Tarkan, Benefits of the Dinner Table, New York Times

A Secret Cry

There is a secret cry inside every heart, sometimes so deeply hidden that it may not even be audible to the person who hides it. Whether they are complete strangers or someone you think you have known all your life, if you can hear a person’s secret cry then all your defenses and criticisms crumble. You become one with them and you cannot do anything other than love them as yourself.

–Natalie d’Arbeloff, Blaugustine

A New Perspective on Frustration With Inconsistency

However, for me, my frustration regarding my inconsistency or impermanence is an expression of how I suffer when I am unable to control both my situations and my self. I struggle to lock myself down in a fixed state. I imagine what qualities I would possess were I who I want to be and then I try hold that all in place in the hopes that I wonÂ’t have to wonder who I am. If I begin to doubt who I am and what makes me me, I can look to these labels that I attach to myself and feel reassured. I am a Buddhist. I am a vegetarian. I am a vegan. I am sensitive. I am someone who does yoga. I am someone with radical politics. And so on.

Is it any wonder that I am then inconsistent? After all, none of these things make me who I am. I donÂ’t even make me who I am.

—Auspicious Coincidence

The Antidote

Despair, said Thomas Merton, is the absolute extreme of self-love.

If we believe in the self, and cling to the self, how can we not despair ? The self faces certain obliteration. It arises from and returns to nothing.

But if we see the conscious self as a construction — a local epiphenomenon in the vast, interconnected web of being — we might attain what he describes as “humility,” the antidote to self-love.

How do we accomplish this ? Meditation lays us bare to ourselves — sensation, thought, intention, all arise in the mind, as does the watcher, just a thought among thoughts.

Once we’ve seen this, how can we return to all those heady boasts and claims ? I am this. I am that. Oh, really ? Tell me more.

And, thus deflated, how can we keep hankering after stuff ? Or hating ?

If you want to call part of this process “God,” I have no quibble with you.

–Paula, author of Affiction

Too Good Not to Post

Jack, a blogger whom I’ve read on and off for the past year, wrote something I felt compelled (again) to post at this site.

We keep ourselves stuck with how and why questions. How am I to live? How am I to get people to love me the way I want them to? How am I do get where I want to go in my career? Why am I where I am? Why do people in my world act and think the way they do?

Joseph Campbell’s spin: I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive. Looking for the meaning of life is looking for the how and why. Being alive is about saying yes to what makes us feel most alive. The answer to how and why is yes.

What makes you feel alive?

–Jack, from Jack/Zen

Off the top of my head…

  • Walking and pausing to smell all the glorious roses that bloom in just about every front yard here.
  • Giving Stella a body massage and burying my face in her tummy while she purrs.
  • Drinking cold water when I’m thirsty.
  • Reading aloud to interested listeners.
  • Cooking a delicious meal, lighting candles, serving it with a glass of good wine.
  • Writing
  • Making collages, doing needlepoint.
  • Helping out at organizations that benefit others.
  • Listening to music.
  • Lying in the hammock, enjoying the breeze.
  • Clean, fresh bedsheets.
  • A bouquet of flowers on the living room table.
  • Slathering lavendar-lemon, or vanilla, or rose-scented oil on my skin.
  • Riding my bike.
  • Blowing bubbles in a park.

I’m certain I could think of more… but why waste time thinking? I do that so much already. I’d rather take a walk in the evening air.

Have a restful weekend, good readers. Or an active one, if that’s your preference! I’ll return Monday with more “good stuff.”

Hope and Cynicism

Hope brings stress, because it creates desires and expectations. Some expectations and desires make me happy, but mainly they make me tense. I start to strive for something and meanwhile, I forget to live. Just feel what happens in your body when you start a sentence with “I hope thatÂ…”

If you hang on to hope, you’ll always have to wait: for the money that will make you happy, for the compliment that will make your day, for the hereafter that will bring you peace. Waiting makes you passive and keeps you from creating joy in your life.

Hoping for a better future means rejecting what is here, and this means you also reject a part of yourself. You resist something and thus push it away. You suppress yourself and keep yourself small.

–Tijn Touber, “Abandon all hope,” Ode Magazine, May 2005

Cynicism is an adjustment of expectations down. We expect the bad to continue or get worse.

When we understand cynicism from an ecological view, we realize that cynicism is an effective way to excuse ourselves from responsibility. The deeper our cynicism, the more we project responsibility for our world on other people. It works for anyone who wants to enjoy tangible and immediate relief from responsibility. So, the question is: What’s the opposite of cynicism and what kind of people seek its opposite?

My initial reaction is that the opposite isn’t a kind of hope that plays the same role of projecting responsibility on other people and conditions.

–Jack, JackZen

Oh Yes

I need to remember that life is precious and short and lovely. Funny how remembering that can sometimes lift me up and sometimes make me hopelessly sad.

–Kat, Kat’s Paws

How well I can relate to that this morning. Yesterday I got a phone call from the radiologist who did my mammogram. She’d like me to come in for another mammogram on my right breast as well as an ultrasound. They also want copies of the previous exams done, which are in Austin, so they can compare. Because I didn’t think to get copies when I moved, there will be a lapse of time between the exam and the comparison. I won’t know for awhile if anything is amiss.

In January 2003, just as my mother was beginning treatment for breast cancer, I had my own little scare. The exam I’d had in January resulted in an ultrasound, which revealed cysts “of note.” They had me back in May and one had enlarged, so a biopsy was done. It was benign. The whole experience was nerve-wracking. That was the year I turned 40, and I was suddenly brought up short by the realization that I’d entered that life stage where mortal concerns move from the abstract to the real. I struggled with a sense of tenuousness in my body, a feeling that it was betraying me. In 2004, my exam didn’t bring an alert, so I relaxed.

I’ve been telling myself since yesterday, “It’s fine, it’s nothing, these are new doctors who are being cautious, and they aren’t familiar with my history.” Yet this morning I had a minor meltdown as I prepared for the day. My thoughts ran amok and carried me into pessimism. Here’s the train of thought: “Oh my god I will have cancer and then I can’t get pregnant while I’m in treatment and I will die and then my husband will someday remarry someone younger and have children, which may all be for the best because I might be too old to conceive and certainly not energetic enough to raise a child.” Of course this was bound to put a gloomy tint to my day.

Mixed up in all this is also mourning for my father-in-law. I feel profoundly sad that, if we do end up having children, they won’t get to have relationship with him, and he won’t be around for us to enjoy his enjoyment. Then I realized that it’s only been three weeks since he died, but it really feels as though a lifetime has happened.

Meanwhile I need to summon my sanity, pull together my professional happy face, and go to work. I need to deal with insolent fifth graders. I need to conduct a staff meeting and attend to administrative details. And this evening I will be volunteering as a conversation facilitator with adults who are learning English as a second language. So I will tuck my moment of panic into a mental pocket and move forward. I’m trying to remember the wisdom from Eckhart Tolle’s book, The Power of Now. I don’t have all the information yet, and there is nothing I can do at this moment to change my life situation because it’s not yet clear that this is a problem. Thus it is not real, it is not part of now.

Ah, the emotional permutations a person can experience, all before noon on a given day!

All Will Be Well

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

–Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

Today this quote resonates, yet two days ago it would not have. Contrary to my general demeanor on this site (of being a rather “put-together” person), it was a difficult ten days, especially at work. I returned to my job last week, feeling enervated and disconnected from my it, my staff, the company. There had been a reorganization a few weeks ago resulting in a change of managers for me. Then I was out of touch for a couple of weeks with family concerns. Yesterday I realized that I was not only sad about my father-in-law, but about the loss of a supervisor whom I like and admire greatly (she was promoted). I also struggled with grief over my loss of motivation. In the face of death, the value of everything changed. To expend great effort for anything felt tinged with folly.

However, yesterday I met with my new manager and we talked about all this. I told her I needed support and motivation, and we decided on some ways to achieve this. I’ve been taking it easier with my students this week, and they are responding well.

I’m always amazed how my attitude shapes my life. The only thing that changed yesterday was that I experienced the relief of talking about my feelings and situation and received the empathy and connection I needed. Today I did the same tasks as always but felt much cheerier.

Spring is in full form here in California. The air is laced with the scent of roses, citrus blooms, and other flowering plants. I’ve been tending my garden and battling the snails. My flowers are blooming. I put air in my bike tires and took a ride today (which my legs are complaining about now). The past two nights I’ve cooked some complex and yummy dinners, and I’ve savored the activity. This has all helped restore balance.

I had a mammogram today — the usual annual experience of being prodded and squeezed between glass plates. The woman who did the exam was vivacious, bright, and friendly. She put me at ease as we talked about husbands, boyfriends, and so on. It was the most fun I’ve ever had getting a mammogram. The words “most fun” and “mammogram” have likely never been used in this way before! The technician was joyful and had a beautiful spirit, which put my morning on the right track.

I think about my father-in-law as well. It’s not a constant sorrow, but one that surfaces and submerges. So there you have it. Joy, sorrow. Life, death. In breath, out breath.

All is well.

It Cannot Be Explained

By being attentive, by learning to listen (or recovering the natural capacity to listen which cannot be learned any more than breathing), we can find ourself engulfed in such happiness that it cannot be explained; the happiness of being at one with everything in that hidden ground of Love for which there can be no explanations.

–Thomas Merton

Best Things

The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life’s plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.

–Robert Louis Stevenson

Some of the best things in my life right now:

  • flowers all over the house.
  • sunshine and a light breeze flowing in.
  • cats playing with each other and their toys.
  • a bird singing heartily in the tree.
  • a clean kitchen, with the dishwasher doing its job.
  • a garden to weed this afternoon.
  • steaks thawing for dinner.
  • a grocery list waiting to be fulfilled.
  • several good books in the process of being read.
  • a loving husband sleeping (still!) upstairs.
  • good health and energy.
  • a cozy, peaceful home.

How about you?