Three Marriages

I was speaking with my mentor last week and she asked me, "Where are the stresses in your life right now?" The answer was simple: work-life balance. She told me that when I phrase it that way, it means I am never fully immersed in one or the other, but always pulling back in an effort to maintain balance--which is an act of trying to off-set the movement of something by adding an opposite force. She said, "No wonder you are tired. Balancing on a knife point takes constant adjusting to the other side." Instead, she encouraged me to read David Whyte's new book called "Three Marriages" because it helps the reader understand that work, family, and self are not a balancing act, but relationships that all feed each other. I haven't read the book yet, but I plan to because I know that balancing these aspects of my life is not working and the first one of the three I "cheat on" is myself. By cheating myself, the other two relationships don't have a chance to thrive because, after all, didn't they choose me and what good is the "me" they chose if I can't even be present in the marriages?

One might ask what this has to do with adaptive leadership and you'd be right in questionning that. I will tell you that, for me, it has everything to do with it. Adaptive Leadership is about letting go of silos and integrating stakeholders. I am the biggest stakeholder of my life and I can't pretend that these three "marriages" of self, family, and work don't affect each other. I can't live a siloed life anymore. I don't believe that anyone is actually capable of separating these aspects of life, even though we think we do on a daily basis. All I have to do is look around at my students to know this is true. For example, today alone in class, a student is recovering from the loss of her cousin by suicide a week ago, another from the death of his dad just a month ago and a bicycling accident on Saturday that has temporarily disfigured his face, another who is so depressed he struggles to get out of bed each day, another who is single-parenting an 18 month old. They are 19 years old, they show up to class each day and they want to silo their lives, but I will not allow a class culture that supports such a thing. So, they bring their lives to the class and that becomes part of the fabric of the class. And, they take the class back to their lives and they change their friends, their careers, and their habits. And the carrier of all of this? The medium of change that makes this all possible? The Self. The marriage to the self (with a small s) that eventually becomes the marriage to the Self (with a big S, the non-egoic part that is actually unselfish by nature) after much attention has been paid to it. The rest just springs forth from that one fearless committment to be fully who we were born to be, an integrated and whole person acting from a place of integrated wisdom instead of siloed fears.