The MacGyver Approach

Know what? I really don’t like stress. It makes me sick. Literally. So, I am doing my best to eliminate every ounce of stress from my life.

A great definition of stress is feeling like you lack the tools required to do that which is asked of you. Think about that. I lack the tool of time, so I’m stressed on the commute to work. I lack the tool of money, so I’m stressed about sending my kid to college. I lack the tool of expert knowledge on a specific subject, so I’m stressed about being seen as a dope.

So, if it’s stressful for me to think that I lack the right tools, then the opposite, unstressful thought is: I have everything, or can get anything, I need to get this job done. I am always doing my best.

Yes, I am freakin’ MacGyver.

MacGyver was the resourceful secret agent on the 80s TV show of the same name who could solve any problem with spit, a toilet paper roll, three paper clips and a shoelace. Great stuff. And he never lost his cool. Maybe he knew he could always pull out some kind of solution and foil the bad guys. Loved that.

Over time, I’ve realized that, like MacGyver, I always have some kind of tool I can use in some way in any given situation. Even if that tool is simply asking a question, like, “Can you help?” Yeah, I can do that.

After years of self-flagellation where I told myself how often I fell short, I’ve changed. Now I know that I am always doing my best with the tools I’ve got on hand, even if the outcome is less than, or different from, what I anticipated at the outset.

Mindbender, huh? Contrary to everything you’ve learned, right? How often have you heard (or said), “You could have done better.” Just writing that sentence makes me feel like someone is staring at me, hard, over a pair of intimidating spectacles. “You could have done better.” Sure reinforces the idea that I’m a loser.

Yet, I might have had zero support — no extra hands — to do what needed doing. We can dwell on what the outcome could have been if I’d had some help… but when I acknowledge that what happened was due to the resources at hand, I can see that I did my absolute best with what I was given. And if this points out that I need to learn to ask for help, I can focus there — and get the tool I need for the future.

I might not have enough money to execute in the “proper” way — today, many of us are having to adjust to tight budgets and limited funds — but when I carp and complain about what might have been if I’d had enough money, I neglect what’s really real. And what’s real is what I’ve been able to actually accomplish with the money that’s available.

And, when I’m honest, sometimes the tool I lack is the physical oomph to get done what needs doing. I could say to myself, “Well, if only I’d gotten a better night’s sleep,” or “if only I didn’t have cancer,” or “if only I lost 20 pounds,” I visualize a different outcome that the one that really happened. That’s when I step into fantasy land.

Because it’s an unreal, possibly impossible outcome I’d be imagining. The outcome that happened is what happened. Dwelling on anything else is dwelling in fantasy. And inviting stress to come along for the ride.

When I know that am always doing my best, I can accept that some days I produce more, differently or better than other days. That’s just the way it is. But every outcome is always the best possible outcome given the tools I have at hand.

When I know I am always doing my best, I can also figure you are likewise doing your best. And that gives me the freedom to not be stressed about it — my job just may be helping you find the tools you need to do it differently.

Shift your thinking on this one, dear readers, and not only will your stress level plummet, but you’ll find that what you do becomes better and easier. Why? Because you already know it’s going to be your best. And like MacGyver, you’ll be amazed at what can be accomplished with just the tools you have at hand.

Broken For You

Sometimes you read a book at precisely the right time for precisely the right reason, and take away precisely the right message. So it was for me and the book Broken For You by Stephanie Kallos.

It’s the story of people who attempt to hide their brokenness by changing their names, taking on fruitless quests, hiding in lonely isolation or liberally using Guarnier Nutrisse Conditioning Color Masque Number 68.

Wanda Schultz has too many cracks to count. The product of a broken home, she begins fixing things at age six in a canny effort to fit in at her adoptive aunt and uncle’s home. As an adult, she chooses a “fixing” career, too, becoming a professional stage manager, fixing productions, actors, props and sets. The more she tries to ignore her brokenness the more cracks and fissures grow until, literally, her body is shattered and she must come to terms with her authentic self.

Margaret Hughes lives alone in a mansion, among the ghosts of people and things that once held so much meaning but also so much guilt. When Margaret opens her house to boarders — Wanda is the first — she finds the glue to mend her fractured life and let go of her paralyzing guilt and shame.

How many of us spend an inordinate amount of energy hiding our broken places? Pretending they don’t exist? We seek out the healing adhesive we think can be found in that one person, that one experience, that one surgical procedure, that one elusive Holy Grail of Something that will make us perfect, and make our troublesome pasts disappear. Yet, it’s only in accepting our broken places and applying a little grout and glue, that we are able to accept the authentic, happy mosaic of our lives.

From the book: “Look then at the faces and bodies of people you love. The explicit beauty that comes not from smoothness of skin or neutrality of expression, but from the web of experience that has left its mark. Each face, each body is its own living fossilized record. A record of cats, combatants, difficult births; of accidents, cruelties, blessings. Reminders of folly, greed, indiscretion, impatience. A moment of time, of memory, preserved, internalized and enshrined within and upon the body. You need not be told that these records are what render your beloved beautiful. If God exists, He is there, in the small cast-off pieces, rough and random and no two alike.”

Beauty, then, has nothing to do with age, or position, or value, or perfection. Beauty lies in the ability to look fearlessly at your own broken spots, mend them and make a new creation. Beauty comes when you allow others to know you for exactly who you are — chipped, cracked, fractured — and whole despite your broken places.

When To Quit

Every once in a while I have one of those weeks where it seems that every client is talking about the same thing. When that happens, I figure I’m getting some big old honking message.

And I have to write about it.

This week, the ubiqui-topic was “When do I quit?” And there seems to be variety in what it is people want to quit — quit smoking, quit a job, quit a relationship, quit worrying.

But how do you know it’s time? How can you be sure you’re clear, and leaving for the right reasons? What are the right reasons, anyway?

It’s time to quit when the person you are becoming is someone you don’t like. When you’re in a job, and as a condition of employment you are expected to fudge facts, shift numbers and lie to customers, you become a person who fudges, shifts and lies. Is that who you want to be?

A relationship that asks you to set aside your own personal goals, your own friends, your own hobbies — that asks you to nag, or to make excuses for another person, or to change your beliefs — who are you in that kind of relationship? You’re a person with no rudder. You’re a person with no self. Is that who you want to be?

It’s time to quit when you find that you love having the problem more than the problem loves you. If you find yourself talking about the problem all the time, stewing and fretting, worrying about it, analyzing it, turning the problem over and over in your head — is that who you want to be? Is that how you want to use your energy?

There’s an underlying ubiqui-thought we need to address, friends, and it’s: “I should be able to make this work.”

Maybe you could make it work. If you were King of The Forest and could control all the elements. So, let me ask you — do you control your boss? Can you stop him from giving you an ASAP assignment — at 5pm on New Year’s Eve? Can you stop him from lobbing f-bombs at you? Can you stop her from excluding you from important meetings, or distribution of key memos?

Can you make your boyfriend sober? Can you single-handedly restore your spouse to mental health? Is it possible to string together the perfect set of words that will make your boss sit up and say, “By golly, you’re absolutely right! I’m a jerk! I am going to change 30 years of my behavior just because of what you said!”

Ah, folks can dream. But we know the truth: you only control yourself, and you only change yourself. “Making this work” often means adapting yourself to something that’s unhealthy.

And you become, over time, someone you don’t want to be.

“Yes, but…” is another tactic we use to stay stuck in an unhealthy situation. “Yes, but… when he leaves his wife, stops drinking, goes to counseling and gets a job, everything will be perfect.” OK. But for now, he’s with his wife, drinking, avoiding counseling and unemployed. That’s what’s real. The “Yes, but…” you’re waiting for might never happen.

And who are you becoming while you wait?

You and only you have the opportunity, and the right, to live the life you are meant to live. Quitting that which is unhealthy for you and moving toward that which is healthy can be really, really hard. But it’s the only way you become someone you really, really like.

Internal Stress

A hundred years ago, society frowned upon those who were left-handed. In fact, the bias against lefties goes back quite a while. The Latin word referring to the left hand, sinister, means evil, while the word referring to the right hand, dexter, means correct. A hundred years ago schools “broke” lefties and turned them into righties. It’s estimated that seven to ten percent of the population is left-handed, so plenty of people were just plain wrong, perhaps even evil, in society’s eyes.

Imagine the internal stress for a young boy in those days who yearned to do the most natural thing in the world — to pick up a pencil and draw with his left hand. But he knew he shouldn’t. It was wrong. It’s not what everyone expected. He’d be shamed if he used the wrong hand. But he already lived every day with the shame of his innate preference for the “wrong” hand.

Do you struggle with similar internal stress? Plenty of us do. It’s being introverted in a family of extroverts. It’s being extroverted in a family that expects silence. It’s being a gentle soul in a workplace that expects you to be a shark. It’s being a shark living in a monastery. It’s wanting to live in the woods and paint when you’re expected to live in a gated community and be a lawyer. It’s wanting to live in a gated community and be a lawyer when everyone in your world values painters who live like Thoreau.

A few years ago I had the incredible opportunity to be at the Smithsonian when they brought out the rare Stradivari, and had virtuoso musicians play them. The sound that came from those ancient instruments! The skill with which they were played!

It seems that every instrument has one note it resonates to — the note that is true and clear. When this note is played, the instrument transcends itself and the musician and creates a wholly new, marvelous thing. Singers, too, have this kind of resonate note. It’s the note you sing when someone says, “Sing.” It may be sharp or flat, high or low — but it’s your natural note. And when you sing it, your soul thrums.

Internal stress comes from having to sing another person’s resonant note. You live in constant contradiction with your essential, true self. No thrum. Ever.

If you don’t know your own internal resonant note, don’t fear. You can find it. You may have repressed it in order to fit in, or, like our left-handed friend, to avoid shame — but, believe me, it’s still there inside you. How to find it?

Start by daring to live as your essential self. Be introverted if that’s the way you were born. Be loud if that’s how you really are. Be a goofball. Be serious. Be sentimental, be generous, be a hopeless romantic — be whatever you are when you’re truly, authentically your best self.

When you stop fighting your innate yearning, and just pick up that pencil in your left hand regardless of what people say — you will have found your creative, true self.

To defeat your internal stress, all you have to do is dare to sing your own note.

How To Like What You Do

Susan’s complaining about her job. Oh, no, she likes her work — she’s just not crazy about the people she’s working with. She’s in a high-pressure, high-performance field where you “eat what you kill” — in other words, she’s paid a percentage of the contracts she closes.

The more we talk, it’s apparent that Susan’s frustrated because no one in the office is interested in working on projects with anyone else. No one refers Susan clients. No one comes to the parties she throws. People poach each other’s support staff. She’s never worked in a place like this and she’s thinking about leaving.

I recommended Susan take the Myers-Briggs assessment. “But that’s just for teams!” she blurted. “What can it do for an individual?” [note blatant set up here, which neatly introduces the subject I really want to write about!]

Back in the early 1920s, Katharine Cook Briggs discovered the work of pioneering psychologist Carl Jung. Katharine had been doing her own independent research on personality — hoping to devise a tool to identify personality differences so that people could understand themselves and others — and in Jung’s theories found a workable personality type framework.

Katharine, the daughter of a college professor, had been home-schooled, so she home-schooled her own daughter, Isabel, in the same manner. In time, Isabel Briggs Myers — armed with just a bachelor’s degree, her mother’s insights and her own determined curiosity — developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

I love the idea that a mother and her daughter, working together, developed such a useful and insightful tool. They encountered resistance from the academic community who scoffed at their indicator — they had no training, no credentials! Who did these women think they were?!

Katharine and Isabel, mother and daughter, weathered that storm. Eighty-some years after Katharine began her research, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the the most widely used personality assessment in the world.

You may have taken the MBTI at some point — and found your personality type represented by four letters, E or I, S or N, T or F, P or J. Sound at all familiar? There are sixteen possible combinations. You have a preference for either Extroversion or Introversion. You either Sense or Intuit. You Think or you Feel. You Perceive or you Judge.

“But,” you say with a tiny whimper, “I am both Extroverted and Introverted. It depends on the situation.” You are absolutely right. Jung theorized that, at our best, we know when it’s appropriate to be Introverted and Extroverted, to Sense or to Intuit, and so on. The MBTI gets to what our innate preference is, regardless of which we may use in a particular situation.

Let’s try an example of preference. Cross your arms across your chest. Note which arm is on top. Now, switch your arms so that the top arm is on the bottom. How’s that feel? Awkward? Bet so. You have a marked preference for how you cross your arms, just as you have marked preferences for the way you see the world.

Neat, huh?

People with particular preferences tend to cluster in the same kind of field. Studies have shown, for instance, that people who choose the military have similar personality types — hierarchical, traditional, practical — and that makes sense, doesn’t it? Similarly, people in the nursing field tend to have similar personality characteristics — concerned with people, empathetic, open to solutions. Each type brings its own strengths and shortcomings, which naturally lend themselves to success or difficulty in particular fields.

After she took the Myers-Briggs assessment, I pointed out to Susan that one of the main problems might be that her type (ESFJ) has a strong preference for belonging. It’s important that she feel part of a team, that she work in a hierarchy with known roles and an objective system for promotion. That means she might not fit in with an organization that values and rewards autonomous lone wolves. To be happier in her career, she can 1) bring more belongingness into her current workplace, or 2) find a workplace that fosters belonging.

Her eyes opened with understanding, and her path forward became a little clearer. And that’s what Myers-Briggs is all about. Understanding yourself, and understanding those around you, so that you can be more effective and clear. Sure, MBTI is great for teams — and [shameless self-plug warning] I’m happy to come into your workplace to deliver a knockout program that will help your team become more efficient, communicate better, solve interpersonal problems and retain employees — but simply knowing and understanding your own personality type, and how it shapes your joys and your struggles, can be an eye-opening experience.

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