The Practice of Gratitude

It's an easy thing to say, "be grateful."  But what that means on a daily basis is sometimes not so easy to think about, especially when challenges make us tense or confused. Should a client, faced with the possibility of a personal lawsuit against him by an employee feel grateful? Should the friend who just lost her job due to cut-backs feel grateful?  How about the couple on the verge of divorce? It's fine to say, yes, but these may be opportunities in disguise, or "it could be so much worse." From the standpoint of a bystander it's all too easy to dispense such wisdom. But we also know when things go haywire for us, we are usually want answers more than platitudes.  We don't feel grateful at all. 

Gratitude comes when we can actually get outside ourselves, a gift to be received only upon mastering and putting aside our self-absorption for awhile. It's that quiet, open, giving state held in contrast to our noisy troubles. It is the antonym of self-pity, and a synonym in many ways for appreciation, acceptance, and sometimes even wonder. 

To grow in gratitude I can begin by thinking of a series of circles around me, expanding outward. In the first circle I think of those to whom my gratefulness and thanks most easily flow. I begin with my family and friends and with mentors past and present.  That's the easy circle, and yet already there's a practice that all too often I neglect, which is to thank them. 

Beyond this first circle is another, with people who are or were more problematic in my life, people I may have mixed feelings about, where relationships may not have worked so well. Meditating on these people, I see I still hold some grudges, haven't quite forgiven this or that person, and need to be more thoughtful about that. Before I can be grateful I must surrender the baggage still there. This turns out to be a tougher practice, noticing how right I've needed to be in my grudges and how small.   

I can also extend the rings in time and place.  I begin to think of the political, artistic and spiritual leaders who have shaped the way I think and act. And I also find myself considering the little, synchronistic stuff -- the great good fortune one day of a chance meeting with strangers in the airport bar when I was feeling quite isolated, and the kind word of a professor long ago at college that gave me an emotional reprieve from being too hard on myself.

Pretty soon -- and in contrast to my challenges and troubles -- I'm sensing that indeed I do have an enormous number of things to be grateful for. People, Learning experiences. Events and incidents and turning points. Freedoms. Opportunities. Possibilities. Privileges I take for granted. 

And maybe more than anything, things unseen. At last I also begin to wonder and think about the hidden angels that have touched my path all along the way.

 

  Achievement and Trust Are Not the Same  It is said there are a number of kinds of trust in business settings. There's trust in another's competence, for example, and trust in another's fundamental reliability, integrity or consistency. In business settings seeing how these different kinds of trust interact is vital. But none of these forms is more important and complicated than fundamental interpersonal trust -- a complex, authentic, and mutually nourishing state characterized by honesty and an emotional bond of care for the well-being of one another... Read More...

LEADERSHIP CONVERSATION

Sandy Taylor Inspires Personal and Social Transformation

 

Sandy Taylor is Superintendent of three Alabama National Park sites that celebrate the Civil Rights Movement: Tuskegee Airmen National Historical Site, Tuskegee Institute National Historical Site, and Selma to Montgomery National Historical Trail.  She's worked for the National Park Service for 25 years, eight of which she spent as national head of Supervision, Management and Leadership Development. When I asked Sandy how she describes herself, she laughed. "I am the second oldest daughter of John and Mary Taylor. It was my parents who gave me the spirit to be a seeker, someone curious about things and always looking for a better solution -- and that led me to the Park Service. I always want to know how we can make that critical 1-degree adjustment, though what I really want might be more like 5% or 50..." 

 

Sandy, given you oversee sites that are all important to the Civil Rights Movement, what is your vision for the experience of visitors?  What is the essence of what you would like people to come away with?

 

I want people to become educated and inspired by great American stories. At all of the sites, visitors will come to understand the sacrifices people made to advance the cause of equality. For example, at Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site they will learn how the Airmen program was initially set up to fail in order to prove that blacks could not and should not fly as part of the war effort, but how it was also the airmens' own deep commitment to excellence and perseverance that stopped it from failing.  They'll learn that Eleanor Roosevelt, first lady at the time, asked Chief Anderson to take her up in his plane despite the fact that people on the ground from the White House were telling her no.  They'll learn how she also persevered and so they flew together over the area and had their picture taken together, and once that had happened it became impossible to deny the effort its due - because she had the President's ear. 

 

There's a kind of history that has been taught in our schools, and then there is the way things actually happened. The National Park Service has been exceptional in promoting the real story. By coming to these sites, people begin to experience what really took place. The history of minorities has been generally excluded from the history books, so when white visitors come here they may experience what they don't know, and people of color will often feel deeply affirmed.  And all will get a chance to see how we have all benefitted from the sacrifices of those who have come before us.

 

One of those stories, surely, is how the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights included a great many children. Many of them had been told not to march, but they did anyway against their parents' wishes, placing their lives in danger. For some it's a shock to understand both how vulnerable and also how strong they were.

 

Do we yet truly understand the Civil Rights Movement? Do we understand our own history?

 

It depends.  Many Baby Boomers saw what was happening on the news, watched it on TV.  It was in our homes.  But for others, not as much, and that's why the Park Service's work is so vital.  It's an effort to make the past alive. When I go to some of our sites related to the Civil War, for example, I can't help but be touched and enlightened by the art work on display and the letters of the time. It becomes personal and very, very real.  You see the decisions people had to make, and this does have an impact on the way you think. It's not always "enjoyable," in a sense, to learn our history, but it can be deeply moving and it can change us as people. That's part of what we are aiming for in all three of the sites I manage.

 

How do you feel your own leadership been shaped by leading these sites?

 

Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark, New Jersey, referred to himself in a recent Stanford commencement speech as "a physical manifestation of a conspiracy of love." That's how his father talked to him, giving him that phrase and calling him to think about all the people who had paid a price so that he could be where he is.  I feel exactly the same thing.  I am walking in a history that enables me to lead now, honoring the tenacity of the Tuskegee Airmen, their dedication, their commitment to excellence. I feel Booker T. Washington and the creation of the Tuskegee Institute as a way to bring blacks out of poverty.  I feel George Washington Carver, with all his inventiveness but with the altruism to not take any patents because he didn't feel his inventions belonged to him alone. It was Carver who invented crop rotation, literally saving the South's economy. And I feel the courage of the people on the bridge who were part of the march to Montgomery, who suffered.  I walk in Gratitude for all of these people. When I've had a hard day, I bring myself back to their stories and they lift me up and keep me moving.  It's like I have a responsibility to keep it going. It's phenomenal to be walking through a history book in this way.  There is so much servant leadership in it all.

 

You can bet that I do wonder why, in some respects, things are not the same today. But, ironically, to some degree it's the progress that's been made. Back then there were the lynchings, and so it was really a matter of life and death that drove the courage. We will always honor that, remembering that as part of their legacy, and our own.

 

What's moving to me is that people are still coming to terms with their experience and with history itself. Not too long ago, for instance, at an event here, a little boy of 7 or 8 grabbed Colonel Herbert Carter, one of the original Airmen.  The boy's grandfather had been a bomber pilot during World War II, and it was the Redtails, the Tuskegee Airmen of which Carter had had been a part, who protected those bombers on their missions as fighter pilots. The little boy ran up Carter and hugged him and told him, "Without you, I wouldn't be here." It was only a couple of years ago that the bomber pilots formally thanked the Redtails. At first, during the war, they had spurned them, fearing that because the Redtails were black they would not be able to protect the bomber pilots at all.

 

The point is that we are still in the moment of learning. And luckily, there are still a handful of Airmen, and there are still people who were at the George Washington Carver Institute, and there are still some people who were on the bridge out of Selma to speak to and connect with and learn from.

 

Sandy, how did your own upbringing and personal history prepare you for the work you are now doing?

 

I grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania in a mixed ethnic community.  In those days, if you were black traveling was dangerous.  You couldn't get a hotel or go to a restaurant so there were people along the way who were known to keep their houses open, and my parents did that.  There were always people coming through.  If you were in jail, my dad would come and get you out. My parents were strong Republicans and had a great sense of giving back.  They made sure we understood how important it was to share.

 

My dad had dark skin and a college degree. My mother had fairer skin and an 8th grade education. Between the two of them the relatives could always find something to dislike, and so they worked together to find a balance and to give us the best of all the worlds we were part of. We understood what we needed to do to represent ourselves well, so that whites would think well of us and blacks would not think we had left our race.  I was president of the Republican Club in high school, for instance, the only black in the group. We were exposed to everything and to all kinds of people, and given a choice about what we did.  My dad might say, "I prefer you not" to do this or that, but it was ultimately up to us. We talked over everything at the dinner table every night - you had to be there - and we learned how to go beyond who we thought we were. It was hard, and we were always trying to uncover something more, helping each other survive.

 

What projects are you particularly excited about now?

 

We just finished a book on the march from Selma to Montgomery - done by one of our staff members -- and it is being received really well. The booklet is titled "A March for All: Selma's Voting Rights Movement" written by our own NPS Park Ranger, Theresa L. Hall.  And we are approaching the opening of Hangar II at the Tuskegee Airmen site.  It burned down some years ago but now has been rebuilt and will house fabulous exhibits.  I'm also working with the community to develop stronger ties with local businesses and entrepreneurs, while being clear about the boundaries - what we do together must adhere to the values of the National Park Service.

 

Sandy, what do you want your ultimate legacy to be?

 

Once, when my brother was sick, I told him that I would pray that he would be healed.  He said to me, "That's not what you pray for.  What you pray for is transformation."  Just so, I want to be an architect of transformational change. I want to be the kind of leader who has the courage to make the hard decisions; the kind of leader who encourages and supports equality in a fundamental way, who has the strength of a Harriet Tubman telling slaves going north on the Underground Railroad that they cannot go back, they must go forward on the journey, because if anyone goes back it endangers us all.  Part of this transformational work is focused on faith and the journey, not so much on "success" or some endpoint.  With that faith, I become a civil rights leader in my own right.  That's what I want to be known for because in my heart that's exactly what I already am. 

 

 

MY LEADERSHIP BINDER

More Resources to Foster Reflective Learning

 

* A Balanced View. Consultant Joan Kofodimos, does a great job of separating authentic from blind trust in "The Dark Side of Trust," a short article that could be a wonderful resource for team discussion.