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Margaret: Can We Stop Talking About “The New Normal”, And Try Instead To “Live in Liminal”?

Last month, I celebrated the American Thanksgiving with my two sons and one of their friends. Since the end of my marriage two years ago, I have been deeply resistant to holidays. Ours is a family that loved and valued traditions – and I couldn’t quite let go of the tradition of the four of us all being at the table. So, for the past two years, we’ve found a way to combine forces.

This has had the positive effect of no one needing to have a major holiday without our sons. However, as anyone who’s ever had a relationship end also knows, it’s had many tick marks in the “negative” column, too.  My kids have reported – with accuracy – that it has felt tense and awkward. One of my sons even said it felt like there was something decaying in the room – the decomposing space of a marriage that hadn’t been allowed to burn fully to ash so that something new might (or might not) be possible.

This year, my ex-husband wisely said: let’s not. And he resourced himself with other family members, and I got to spend the day cooking and enjoying a meal of gratitude with my grown sons.

And I realized, the morning after Thanksgiving, as I finished putting away the wine glasses and reflected on a great night, what I had been missing out on by holding onto the comfort and familiar of what’s now the old. We had a lovely night, in which I got treated to my sons’ culinary talents and adventure (deep fried turkey!), as well as a way we danced together during cooking and cleaning that was as delightful as it was oddly unexpected. This is a new way my family looked this year, and even though it is likely to change without notice, I loved it. And I have taken years to be open to this delightful new version. [Read more…]

On October 18, 2018 I received the most frightening email of my professional leadership coaching career.

Maybe I should back up a little… 

Just one month before receiving the aforementioned email, I led my first Executive Function Coach training for the Los Angeles Unified School District. Knowing that Executive Function, which involves planning, prioritizing, impulse control, and other high-level forms of cognition, is a key predictor of life success, for the past 12 years the Edge Foundation has gone into school districts around the country, training adults to coach young people to maximize their personal and professional potential. The 12-hour experiential training is made up of parents, teachers, staff and volunteers who are committed to improving the lives of young people who struggle with various conditions ranging from ADHD, Advance Childhood Experiences (ACES), various learning disabilities and issues of displacement from stable housing/food insecurities to name a few. As a result of this training, these staff/volunteers then coach at least one student every week, for 20 minutes. [Read more…]

Having an agreed understanding of what a word means – a distinction – enables us to have different conversations, which can enable us to achieve better results. For example, back in 2019 relatively few people knew what a Zoom call was. Today, millions of us share that distinction.

One distinction I have found particularly helpful is the difference between a position and a stand.

A position is against something – a negative reaction to something we don’t agree with. We hear about this a lot these days in politics, in the news, and especially on social media. That’s largely because it’s relatively easy to say what we don’t agree with, to object to an idea or another person’s view. We can find ourselves triggered when we hear or read a comment we particularly don’t like. We experience a feeling that comes from somewhere deep inside, which seems to rise up from the stomach. But the very existence of a position depends on its counter-position. In other words, take that counter-position away and our position can no longer survive. [Read more…]