Is this my habit or yours?
I used to make a lot of rules for myself based on past experiences. I’d break up with a lawyer and decide I’m never dating a lawyer ever again. I’d get overwhelmed at work and decide I should change industries. A relationship/situation would become unbalanced–and then I’d make some rule to prevent that type of relationship in the future. This wasn’t going well.
The worst part of having so many rules is that they didn’t work. At one point, I was applying rules from so many previous heartbreaks that I was ruling everyone out. There were a million ways a relationship could go wrong and I thought a million rules could prevent that.
Lately, I’ve switched from trying to control my reality with rules to recognizing when a pattern is mine and when I’ve fallen into someone else’s pattern. My patterns will keep coming up until I learn how to disrupt them.
Now, whenever I feel a reaction rising up to someone within me…I sit with that feeling and ask…
When have I felt this way before?
Who was involved in making me feel that way?
What did I make that feeling mean about me?
Often these feelings were created by my 3 to 8 year old self and it’s time to let them go.
For example, one of my patterns is to distrust white men. I can focus on all sorts of “data” for my pattern or sit with my 5 year old self that was almost sexual abused by a white male neighbor. Me projecting that all male leaders are rapists isn’t going to lead to less rape in the world.
Since I am human and humans are awesome pattern seekers, I am going to see every data point that supports my pattern. I am going to miss every data point that disrupts my pattern. This is how I can get stuck in “old thinking” without taking into account new information.
Women Grow's First Leadership Summit in 2015
My first attempt at working around this pattern was to only lead with women. I was a Director for Women 2.0 (now called Switch) and then Co-Founder/CEO of Women Grow. I thought I could avoid men but it turned out men wanted to support women too. And of course, it turned out after working with thousands of women, there were some I couldn’t trust either.
Running an international network of women working in the quasi-legal cannabis industry burned me out. At one point we had 60+ chapters meeting across 4 countries. I learned that bringing people together brings a lot of people’s patterns into my life. Now with hundreds of relationships to manage, I had to get much smarter about what was mine and what was there’s.
At first, I treated every problem at Women Grow as mine to fix. I was the CEO and so at the end of the day it was my responsibility. Trying to take responsibility for how thousands of women interacted with each other was a disaster. Especially because we had no ground rules on how to be in community with each other, everyone had very different conflict-resolution methods.
I learned the top “conflict-resolution” method employed by the women in my network was to collude with as many people as possible about how bad someone was until they left. In my first 60 days as CEO one of our advisory board members tried to convince the rest of the board that I should resign, because I was also interested in having my own cannabis business. It was this woman’s opinion that I couldn’t be CEO of Women Grow and have my own business because that would be unfair to the other business owners. I thought that running an organization encouraging women to start cannabis businesses wasn’t very genuine unless I was also participating. At the time, I went through a lot of drama and pain around this disagreement. I even offered to resign based on one person’s opinion.
Looking back on this conflict I can confidently say that I got sucked into someone else’s pattern. My saboteur had been competing with other women in cannabis consulting and was creating rules that she thought would make it easier for her.
I’ve learned there are three options for dealing with conflict…
Try to make all the rules to avoid all the conflict.
React to conflict as it comes up.
Act from kindness and neutrality when needed.
I’m leaning on the third option now.
Whenever I feel a reaction rising up to someone within me…I sit with that feeling and ask…
When have I felt this way before?
Who was involved in making me feel that way?
What did I make that feeling mean about me?
I also love this quote that has been attributed to a few different folks in the public eye…
“If you have a problem with me, call me. If you don't have my number then that means you don't know me well enough to have a problem.” ― Eleanor Calder
