Human Becomings and the Stories We Tell Ourselves
© Martha Wooding-Young, The Resilient Executive, LLC. Author, using Apple photobooth cartoon filter.
Wittgenstein famously said the self is just a shadow cast by grammar, but so often it seems much more substantial than that, doesn’t it? The reality is there are many versions, sheaths of self, based largely on our interrelationship with others. I made a list once of all the names different people call me – I came up with 23! Not just Martha and Mummy, but also Honey, Granny, Woody, Myrtle, and Mart, inter alia. Then I tried counting roles and identities and came up with 26 in just a few minutes: not just coach and retired Wall Street banker, grandmother, mother, wife, sister and daughter, teacher and student. What about a woman in a man's world, an accidental and somewhat reluctant feminist, a bit of a waif, a Tae Kwon Do black belt, both American and British, and neither, particularly since my DNA suggests that I’m a marauding invader, a combination of Celt and Viking? Talk about an identity crisis!
When I worked on Wall Street I experienced a seemingly constant tug between my identity as a banker, and my life as a contemplative and a neuroscience-based mindfulness teacher. During my coaching program at Georgetown I learned about polarities, and was delighted to take on the interweaving of Investment Banker::Contemplative. As a leadership coach living on a farm in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, I now live within the much happier braiding of polarities like Work::Garden, Coach::Woodswoman.
Of course each of these monotoned cartoon-like identities can be quite useful – it’s important that I be fully present with my best coaching faculties when with clients, and fully present with safety and conservancy considerations when I’m working in the woods. You don’t want to get careless with a leader in crisis, nor with a chainsaw or an exquisite sanguinaria canadensis hiding under a couple of oak leaves. But what about when we become trapped in one or another of the identities: the idea person, the reliable one, the one who tackles the hard problems, the answer person, the powerless one? Another flavor of this happens when we are stuck in one arena mentally while acting in another physically: mentally with our family while at work, mentally on the golf course while with our family, or mentally at work while on the golf course. When we get stuck in any single sheath of our being, we can lose access to the wisdom of the others. As Whitman said, “I contain multitudes.”
In order to access my intuition, I like to remind myself that I’m more of a human being, or even better, a human becoming than a human doing. When I notice I’m stuck in the rut of a habitual response pattern, exiling myself from reality as it is and acting like the hammer who sees a nail in all things, I remind myself that at most the cells in the human body are 10 years old. Our red blood cells turn over every 120 days; skin every two weeks, the stomach lining every five days! So who am I? I am a human becoming … I am a mama lioness – I love my family! I am a devoted coach – I love my clients. I’m a passionate gardener and woodswoman – I love Mother Nature. Daily, while chatting with my family, or embedded in nature, I have insights that help my clients unpack their knottiest challenges.
When we allow ourselves to let go of doing for a moment and return to embodied awareness, opening ourselves to the uninhibited natural flow of reality, as it is, it becomes so much easier to make connections between and among seemingly unrelated components of our lives, of our personalities, of the multitudes of who we think we are. We must be a little brave to do this … because the complexity and even corners of chaos become impossible to ignore. But if we can screw up the courage to take our definitions of ourselves a little less seriously, to put down the stories we tell ourselves through which we hold ourselves together, we slowly begin to see more. Each layer of pre-conception we bring into cognition and set aside seems to enable us to see incrementally wider and more clearly, to come more fully present.
Interested in what new connections you might make if you step out of your stories? Reach out — I look forward to wayfinding with you.
© Martha Wooding-Young, The Resilient Executive, LLC. Sanguinaria canadensis in the woods at Heartwood Farm.