Living your Story and Surviving the “Downs” – in business and in life
All of us are living our stories -
all of us, you , me , we, journeying through life.
And all of us, you, me, we will journey through ups and downs - in business as much as in life. Wouldn't it be lovely if life were a straight line, rising, always rising until we reached nirvana? Wouldn't it be lovely if our business lives were the same - always improving, growing the business, making sales, improving the lives of our customers simply, pleasantly and easily?
Unfortunately it's not, not always simple, pleasant and easy. And yet, that's how the learning, the rising, happens. It seems we can't gain wisdom in some things without going through the ups and downs - the challenges, the learning, and sometimes that learning can be painful.
In Story Framework terms it's progressing through the story arc - going along a horizontal road, and then challenged, and falling down, down, down, through challenge after challenge, into the pits, maybe despair, maybe overwhelm, maybe confusion, maybe lost. We slide into those pits and I don't know about you, but I don't like being there. It's painful and confusing and not at all how I wanted life to be. It takes resilience to sit it out, to sort it out, to find the way out and up, up to the learning and growth.
I like that we can know that we are all living stories, though, and that we can recognise that this is normal, this diving down before we rise. It's reassuring. So we have acceptance that this is what life is like - full of ups and downs, or visits to the pits before we can see the sunlight again, following that story arc over and over as we face new challenges, new learnings, and that everyone does it at times, and that people have been going through the process for centuries - the stories tell us so!
That acceptance is vital, I think, to maintaining some sort of hope and sanity and faith through the rough times, through the bottom points of the story arcs.
But sometimes the resilience is hard to come by.
How do you achieve it? ...........
In the stories there are all sorts of ways to survive the "downs". Fairy tales and fiction are full of them, and I have been compiling some of the best for an upcoming workshop, but the one I want to use today is particularly special, and it belongs, I think, to some of the best stories - an unexpected twist.
I was reminded of it as I was out walking yesterday afternoon among the trees and rocks, and remembering where in my own story it suddenly rose up at a particularly difficult time.
It began about 25 years ago, when my husband and I had two little boys and we brought my mother down to live closer to us after my father died. It became increasingly obvious that something was wrong, and it wasn't just grief and shock. She was diagnosed with dementia and the years that followed were difficult ones indeed as we supported her through the stages of aged care for dementia patients. It is heart-breaking to watch a parent become a child, in effect. Eventually, she lost speech and became bedridden, this beautiful woman who had held me in the comfort and warmth of love and joy and gentle challenge, humour, intelligence and unconditional love for so many years ... though somehow the love never diminished.
It is a horrendous thing to face, and yet to visit any of these facilities is to be denied the sorrow and misery and taken into a place of uplift. The staff create an environment of constant positivity, well certainly while I visited, so there was a strange dichotomy of horrifically challenging change and loss superimposed with the atmosphere of positivity, calm and care.
My mother reached the end of her life. I arrived at the building and was allowed time to spend with her.
Again it was disconcerting that though I knew logically that she was dead, it seemed that she was just asleep. I could not comprehend that she had gone. There were the hands that had stroked my hair, peeled vegetables for dinner, held mine with such love and care, just the same and yet ...not. It was a surreal experience, and so incredibly sad, compounded by the whole place with its seemingly senseless loss and heartbreak.
I had to leave the room. There was no way to say any momentous goodbye, so I just said it as though I would see her next time she woke. With a realisation that there was nothing left to do, I walked out and waited for the staff to come and move me to the next phase. I was bewildered, hurt, confused, feeling surreal, looking out of the door at the garden, neglected, obviously in the throes of being rejuvenated, just bare dirt and sticks and dead leaves.
Yet in the middle of this desolation there was a red geranium - the flower my mother was so happy to grow in the dry country she had gone to to make her home when she married. Beautiful, glowing, yet ordinary and just there, suddenly, in the middle of the ugly, dead disorder.
And my heart lifted. Not high, but it lifted, focused, found hope and love and an acceptance of what was and what would be.
The memory stayed, and rises every so often as those memories do - signposts that something was learned there, though it may not have been obvious at the time.
So resilience comes, survival in the pits comes - from many processes and this is just one. I suppose it could be called Stop - Look - Truly See. Sometimes we have to stop - stop the control, stop the expectation of how things will be, stop the train we had put ourselves on. Looking means being open, through the senses, in this case the eyes, to something - not knowing, not controlling, not following any particular path to knowledge or understanding. And something that might have just been something ordinary and not important in everyday life, somehow takes on significance, beauty, as a signpost for change.
When I am despairing, or bored, or overwhelmed with the technology at my desk, I go outside. When a presentation will not coalesce, a marketing message will not distill, I drop it all and go outside. We have ordinary gum trees along our back fence - nothing special, but if I take the time to just look up - at the trees, the leaves towering up there and the blue sky in between, my shoulders drop, my despair and overwhelm drop away and I can settle and return to the challenges, rejuvenated, with a new approach, a new way of communicating the message.
Of course that is just one little mundane challenge in life. Sometimes they are huge, the pits, the bottoms of the story arcs, and they stay. And that's when we have to keep returning, keep going to those solutions, keep being open to creative ways that we learn the lessons the story wants us to learn so we can return to the surface, rise out of the despair/challenge/discomfort and change and grow into the speakers/humans we need to become.
What is it that you Look and See already, or that you might use next time you are journeying through the downs of life (and business!)?
