Building what I once termed great “shit filters” is important, namely your own internal barometers of what matters. Leadership is as much about what one tolerates as what one accepts.

What are you tolerating about your life that sends a signal to those around that those behaviors are acceptable?

Coleman Barks is one of my favorite translators of the poet and Sufi mystic Rumi. He wrote of Rum that “Rumi’s place in the history of religions is as a bridge between faiths. The story of his funeral in 1273 is well known. Representatives came from every religion — Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus. When questioned about this, they responded, “He deepens us wherever we are.”

It occurred to me that regardless of religion or belief system, finding that which meets us and deepens us wherever we are is a pretty darned good barometer for what’s important.

And though we seem to be sleeping,
there is an inner wakefulness
that directs the dream,
and that will eventually startle us back
to the truth of who we are.
-Rumi, trans. by Coleman Barks

For example, I find myself, at odd times, obsessively cleaning the kitchen floor or running around putting books away. My long-suffering mother who nagged me to clean my room throughout childhood, my old roommates, and even my ex-husband can attest to the fact that this is not a longstanding habit, or even a lifelong inkling of an inclination.

I know exactly where these behaviors come from. I don’t even need my psychology degree to tell me so. Throughout my childhood, I watched my mother frantically clean whenever guests came over. For my grandmother’s rare visits, it was inevitable that no matter how clean my mother got the house, my grandmother took clean to an all-new level of compulsively anal that included a dust check above the refrigerator and over the picture frames. I have a vague recollection of attempting to stay out of the way and swearing I wouldn’t get like that when I got older.

Lo and behold, I’m in my mid-thirities and newly married again, and it’s like navigating a whole new minefield as dormant subroutines programmed into my brain wake up and behaviors pop up, and things come out of my mouth that I’m not used to hearing. Who knew that my spouse’s criminally irritating habit of leaving his work shirts hung on the bottom post of our stairway would be like a red flag in front of my inner bull? And when did I turn bovine in the first place?

A teacher of mine once said that “awareness precedes choice”, a maxim I take very much to heart. I can only be truly responsible over that which I’m aware of. (And by the way, I strongly feel that our global capacity to cause harm – as with the Gulf oil spill – is greater than our collective ability to take responsibility for it, and that’s a huge problem and a whole other blog post.) What role does awareness then have in dealing with these minefields? It’s a first step.

Tips on Dealing
1. Be aware. This is harder than it sounds. If you weren’t aware of it before, why would you start now? In addition, we human beings see what we are used to seeing, and what we are predisposed to seeing. I’ve watched a whole room of executives so focused on a task they were given of counting the number of basketballs tossed into a hoop that they did not see the guy in the gorilla costume walk into the middle of the basketball players and wave at them, and then swear that I made the gorilla up.

2. If you think you’re aware, rest assured you’re missing some parts. There’s a space for healthy doubt. A Zen teacher I had told me to really believe everything I thought I believed, and then turn around and doubt it.

3. Have a sense of humor about it. I may as well find channeling my grandmother funny, even if my husband doesn’t.

4. Honor it if it serves you. When I’m not regarding myself in astonished disbelief, there’s something neat about being connected back through two generations of truly amazing women, and the upside is also having a cleaner floor.

5. Honor it even if it doesn’t, and let it go. Those old patterns, even if the behaviors are destructive, usually have something to teach us. What I honor about the cleaning is the desire to have a clean, safe, inviting space for the people I love to live in and visit. That said, I can find better moments to exercise those needs. (Also, hiring an amazing woman to come in every couple weeks to clean the house worked wonders for me.) The key is a life of being less compulsive, being more at choice.

What are some of your event-based subroutines? Key triggering events could include falling in love, falling out of love, grief, parenthood, joblessness, new jobs, leadership, lines at Disneyland, etc.