Leading And Living In A World Of Contradictions

Taken from a lecture to the Wake Forest University Panhellenic Council

By Debra J. Gawrych
CEO, Common Boundaries Consulting & Communications

A very important lesson in life is that the most successful people are not necessarily the ones who got the straight A's and did everything perfectly right. Here are a few important points to remember along the way:

Life is a paradox and full of contradictions.

Take something out of the current popular media for instance. In the movie Legally Blonde, a young Delta Nu from California begins her day believing that everything is wonderful and that soon she will have an engagement ring on her finger. Then her boyfriend dumps her and goes off to Harvard Law School. So begins the adventure of Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde.

She eventually gets herself together enough to follow him to Harvard, scoring well on her LSAT and the Coppola directed video didn't hurt her any with the selection committee. Although humorous and entertaining, the movie is full of lessons of leadership.

Follow your passion
Walk your talk
Have integrity and live your values
Respect others. Treat them the way you want to be treated.

The young ingénue look like "a beautiful dumb blonde", but succeeds not because of her beauty, but because of her brains, both scholastically and common sense. In the end, she prevails because of her willingness to be true to herself against all odds and winds up being a leader because of her courage and because she listens to those who follow her lead.

On a more personal note, what are some of the conflicting mandates you hear from people around you?

Told by parents and teachers to work hard, strive and get good grades, then you are admonished to take it easy and not work so hard when you get stressed out
Told by the media and people in authority that it is important to look good, then that it doesn't matter what you look like on the outside, it is what is on the inside that matters most.
Be athletic and watch your weight. Then celebrate your body type and don't worry about being too thin.
You have to do well in school to get a good job. It is implied that this will bring you happiness. The paradox is that happiest people are the ones who focus on the process not always on the end goal, because there is too much in life we cannot control.
Plan and have a goal in sight, then stop planning and go with the flow.

It is enough to make a person want to scream!

How do you make sense out of all of this conflicting information?

Learn to live with chaos.
Change does not take place in a straight line. You cannot always plan every step of the way. Change can be unexpected and appear to occur in a random fashion. Change occurs exponentially. The natural order of things appears to be chaos.
There is an order to the chaos, we may not always see the patterns.

According to research by Peter Senge from Dance of Change and Change; Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution by Paul Watzlawick et al., humans operate under the false assumption that we can control change, that somehow we can make it conform to our need for planned order. In reality, change in nature occurs in a linear planned fashion for awhile and as the pressure grows it begins to build steam until it explodes exponentially. The curve looks much like this:

as opposed to this:

How do you make sense out of all of this conflicting information?

Learn to live with chaos.
Change does not take place linearly, but exponentially in nature. At times the order is difficult for us to see.
Learn to focus on what you can control, not on what you can't.

Not all of what I am telling you was learned from others. Some of what I learned the hard way from my own experience.

In college and early in my business career I thought I had to be perfect and successful at a high level in order to be okay with the world. I was a pleaser to my parents, professors, bosses, to anyone. My expectations were not based on reality, but on some false image of perfection. They doomed me to behavior that made it less likely that I would be able to achieve that success. At some level I thought I had to do everything alone, that I needed to have all of the answers.

I became anorexic-bulimic. I say this not to shock you or to elicit a reaction, but to acknowledge that I had unrealistic expectations and that because of them I created a whole world of stress. I lived with this false sense of reality for years, all through school and into early adulthood. The price I paid was high, low self-esteem and a great deal of pain to my body. It took a huge emotional and physical toll, but the extraordinary part of the story is that no one seemed to know.

I appeared confident together and was a counselor and advisor on campus. My grades were high. I graduated with honors and was the first of my class to be accepted into graduate school and get a job. But I was miserable and felt like a fraud. Little stresses that less perfectionistic people could take in their strides threw me for a loop. Eventually I conquered my problem and my self-esteem grew.

If I could impart some wisdom from this experience, it would be to share with you a few insights.

True success comes from being a leader of your own life and well as what you do externally.

My company Common Boundaries and the book came out of the belief that in order to learn how to be an effective leader, you must first learn how to lead yourself. You need to understand your personal boundaries and who you are within them. Only then, will you truly be able to expand beyond those boundaries in a healthy way in order to find common ground, which is a key ingredient in being able to lead, teach and facilitate others. It will be a key ingredient to your success as not only an officer in your sorority but whatever you do in life.

Get real about what is possible. Have a good sense of current reality.

Denial is an ugly little secret that rob us of a clear view of the current reality. These images differ depending our individual circumstances. For example:

As a student, they may be expectations to get straight As, be the president of the sorority, volunteer, be a perfect daughter, loyal friend, remember everyone's birthday and be thin.

For a woman in her 30's or 40's if could be a housewife or executive who manages to raise 4 children expertly and efficiently while maintaining a Martha Stewart home.

What we miss is the psychological toll that is levied to maintain such expectations. Perfectionism and high expectations may look good and even be admirable, but what is the cost?

And what is the reality behind the seemingly perfect picture? The housewife or executive most likely has a housekeeper or nanny. It is not likely she is managing it all on her own. The college student may show signs of stress-anorexia, bulimia anxiety, depression or even burnout—little time for herself or friends. She may feel out of control.

Focus on what you can control, instead of what you cannot.

Stress is a way of life. We cannot control stress. It is important to focus on what we can control. I believe life is getting more complicated. We are bombarded with information. It is difficult to get away from stress and deadlines. Email, cell phones, hundreds of TV channels, the internet, palm pilots, the list goes on. We can't ever get away.

Last week I was embarrassed to have my cell phone ring during the premier opening of Harry Potter in Greensboro. The perfectionist side of me was mortified at the angry stares from the people around me, the more relaxed side of me laughed inwardly at the absurdity of a society where I am never alone, unless I push the off button. I can control the button and my reactions, not the reactions of others.

The most effective leaders lead by following their followers.

This means that you can be more effective by listening and following the wisdom of the very people you are attempting to lead. In fact that is the process we will be using tonight. Our success in any situation is greatly enhanced in our ability to listen to the wisdom of others and our ability to invite them to participate in the success of the project or organization. This has tremendous implications for incoming sorority officers. It means that you do not have to do it all by yourselves.

I encourage you to consider using the model of 360º sphere of influence. Communicate and lead the people above you (professors, resident advisors, Panhellenic advisors, parents). Those who are your equals-(peers, other sororities) and those under you (the girls in your sororities).

Be discerning about responsibilities you take on and the people who surround you.

Inherent in this is the knowledge of who you are and where you are going. At least what you know for right now. No one expects you to have all the answers. The only thing you need to know is where you are right now and from your inner wisdom and the best you can imagine, where you would like to go. To sum it up, what is your purpose and your vision. When you have a general idea of how to answer both of those questions, you can eliminate unnecessary burdens or energy drains from your life. How does this work?

When you start on a road trip to a faraway destination—take Florida for example. Do you keep getting off at every exit in order to see if it will take you to Florida? No. You know where you are starting—Winston-Salem and you know where you are going—Fort Lauderdale. It would be a tremendous drain of energy to keep getting off of the expressway, both your energy and the gas in the car. Instead, you can be most efficient and make the most use of your time, if you use a map to plan your route before you get on the road. Then you can choose when you want to stop. Perhaps to eat or use the restroom. The point is that is your choice and that is much more empowering than to be blindly heading down the road.

Life is much like that. Of course it is good to be spontaneous and allow room to let things flow. But in order to conserve our energy for the things we want to do, we must be careful not to squander it in on unnecessary actions or tasks.

There is so much we could talk about but this evening belongs to you. Tonight we are asking you to take the lead. You have an opportunity to fully participate in a leadership process.

Life is always uncertain. Nature is constantly in flux. If we're not living on the edge, to the fullest degree, it's usually because we're trying to control something that's really not controllable. We sleep on the same side of the bed. We park in the same space. We put lots of controls on our lives to keep things stable. But, the truth is, anything could happen at any minute. When we stop pretending that's not so and trust change, invite it in instead of hoping it'll go past our door today, when we let go and surrender-then life becomes magical.