I spent most of this week at Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home (because no one wants to overwinter in Wisconsin, especially when you get to be in your 70's). I was there once again for a work event - the same work event I was there for the last time, the Academy as we call it: basically, a four day leadership intensive, boasting workshops, lectures, experiential hands-on exercises (improv and yoga, anyone?), plus delicious food and plenty of social time.
My company is a social company. The company culture is strong; it's one of the best things about my company. Our culture is special and alive and fragile and crucial. It needs care and feeding - I head up quite a few cultural practices in my region myself - on every level. This was culture at the leadership level, and the focus was on teaching leaders how to love, basically. There are many ways of approaching this same subject - from being "in / out of the box" (Leadership and Self Deception) to Strengthsfinder to even Myers-Briggs. There are many methods out there that all address more or less the same subject of being a humane leader, and they all touch on more of less the same topics: emotional intelligence, group dynamics, filters and triggers and biases, authenticity and vulnerability, self-awareness and self-reflection, communication, active listening and so on.
I'm familiar with much of this material. Some of it I know well enough to teach. I attend these week-long events (my second so far) to assist, to volunteer, to be behind the scenes staff, which includes anything from herding cats (and by cats, I mean in this case senior leadership) and running mics, to interacting with presenters to shape discussion and flow to bar tending. It's 100 people doing emotionally intense work for a week, so much of the time, you are a body that is available, SHOULD a need arise; you're an additional resource to ensure things flow smoothly.
It's kind of an odd role, because even though I've been to the Academy once, the curriculum was different, as were the participants (and participants matter: the ones who chose to share, and what they say, really is a big part of the whole experience), and I sort of gleaned more benefit from it than I expected. If you are supporting an event, you end up seeing most of the event, even if you don't actively participate. Plus, I tend to glean meaning and benefit in general from ANY trip I take - I learn on vacations, I understand things through travel and exposure to new experiences, so I learned a lot, which was great.
But the best part about this trip was the social aspect of hanging out, in many contexts - some, official, such as leading each other around in "blind following" exercises to doing yoga out under the stars in the desert, and some unofficial, such as the jacuzzi after hours. The "hotel" was actually a huge, confusing campus ("thousands of acres," two full golf courses, four pools, etc) with many multi-bedroom houses (villas and casitas), so it was a perfect setting for socializing - we were already staying together in houses, but it was as if we were in dorms, running into folks going here and there. Going to the pool and seeing your peeps in the hot tub, what could be better? Oh, B's here, there's R and A and the other A too.
It started to remind me of my high school or college years - the relaxed casual hanging out, the freely flowing beer and wine, staying up too late and having to go to class the next day. People caught rides or moved around from villa to villa. Where was the party? Here's one faction. Others have gone over to that other villa, some zipped away on their golf cart, others wandered over to the pool which is where I always went, since I love swimming and soaking, and both are event better when one has had some wine, as I had.
I didn't know or maybe I forgot, but drinking even the slightest amount of wine in the desert seemed to have a tremendous effect on me; I'm really bad at hydrating, even in San Francisco I forgot to drink enough water, so in the desert, it's almost impossible for me to drink enough. I basically just border on the edge of head achy anyway, and the slightest amount of alcohol brings on the tipsiness and the headache both. The weather was up to the low 100's - not to be sneezed at.
I always love this socialization - so crucial in a company that has a tradition of the workplace being the community; our co-workers, family. After 15 years, I know a lot of people, some of them very well, some of them not as well. I've got 15-year acquaintances, or people where I can meet them and say, "I've been seeing your name on emails for a decade." And I love my fellow team members - even the ones I don't know are just friends I have not met yet, truthfully. So I love social company time, and so does everyone else.
This particular event had some real highlights. Every team build / overnight I've ever been to has some special moments that are unforgettable, but this one was jam-packed with big ones. Nothing earth-shaking or dramatic, but the quiet, gentle moments of people learning who each other are, and starting to love each other, creating or deepening a relationship. I had a long conversation about this with one of the store managers: now, she told me, I'm going to go back and start using the word love at work.
That's the idea, and it seems to work. My company's leaders are all amazing, earnest people - they are showing up for the work, they are willing to dive in. Given the opportunity to dive deep, they do - not all with the same ability. Some struggle. Some get hit hard by these concepts. Most of them are familiar with some of the ideas and material, but some are not. Some get their minds blown. Everyone gets a chance to stop and think. We're all so busy, we can't reflect. This is get together and reflect time. Watching it all happen is incredibly inspiring. I heard people's stories and I cried.
I saw my company's co-CEO, a man I've known since the day I started, go up on stage to support and hold the CFO who was tearing up during her presentation. He handed her a Kleenex, and stood behind her, his head resting gently on hers, hand on her elbow, as she finished her presentation. It was a moment of true (and open) tenderness, and to see the leaders at that level - the highest, the people at the heart and soul of my company - exhibit such vulnerability in front of their leadership group stirred up deep emotions. It moved me to tears.
It moved everyone to tears. I thought, how can we be a Fortune 500 company? Look at this! Look at who we are. We're doing something right, because we know it's about building a workplace built on love and respect and we do it. That's the key part, actually doing it. This is what I love about culture. It has to come from the people, so it's real.
Our last night together was, for me, nothing short of magical. I had some intense, interesting, revealing, funny, touching conversations with other folks from my region - some of them I didn't know that well, although I do now! We opened up. We laughed a lot. We told each other personal things. We shared about what the work during the day was bringing up - what emotions, what ideas. We were inspired and we were confronted with our fears.
We also ended up, as I mentioned, in the hot tub. Not all of us, but most of the people from my region appeared, the ones I already knew and liked (or, let's face it, loved) and some ones that were relatively new. We brought our beers and our wine and soaked in the bubbling frothy foam. We told stories and jumped in the pool and someone always got up to turn the bubbles back on when they ran out.
We found our feet floating up, meeting in the middle in a sort of spontaneous group foot snuggle. It felt good and we all wiggled our toes together as we kept the conversation going. And then someone brought up toe sex, which is just a term for a sort of extreme, specific foot massage technique, in which one moves one's finger roughly in and out between someone else's toes. But you know, once someone demos toe sex in a hot tub of wine and beer-fueled co-workers who are going through a heart-opening conference, you know toe sex is going to catch on. It was more like that just opened us up to all enjoy any type of relaxing foot contact, from underwater foot massages, to just relaxing your feet against someone.
It got so you didn't know whose foot was whose, and it didn't matter anyway. We were laughing and telling stories and getting our daily dose of oxytocin, the so-called moral molecule and which we'd learned of that day. It's the "love" hormone, they say, and it gets released through simple human touch - from nursing mothers to hand-holding lovers, oxytocin makes you feel loved and want to love, and if you get 8 hugs a day, you release enough to basically be happy. We were doing our part in raising oxytocin levels; our toe sex was company-prescribed.
It certainly did me a world of good. The guys I work with - they are all wonderful in terms of personality and heart and spirit, plus some of them are just damn cute and/or sexy. The classic phrase "I wouldn't kick him / her out of bed" is widely applicably at my company; it's sort of a rite of passage to sleep with another team member, or at the very least develop a crush on one. There's a sometimes a tinge of the romantic in my work relationships, and as you know, I love romantic, intense, intimate moments. Bubbly communal foot snuggling counts, if done well, and we were doing it well.
Because it wasn't just the toe sex, it was everything the toe sex symbolized; it was what the toe sex meant. We were fearlessly connecting. We were willing to say, let's see if we can't break down the idea, at least on some level - even if just via feet - that there's a definitive boundary between us. Not knowing whose feet were nestled against yours suggested that the boundaries between what I define as "me" and what I define as "you" are not, perhaps, all they seem, and even better, may be less important than we generally think.
We opened up. One gentleman, not someone I knew prior to the trip - indeed, I didn't know him prior to when he showed up in the hot tub and he never even got in but just sat on the edge and dipped only feet in - really opened up. This process was turning him inside out; he was looking at places inside himself and he was all confused. We started talking; I listened while he talked - let's call him S. S told me of his childhood, how he was raised, how he wanted to raise his kids, how he wanted to lead his team, and how he was fighting his base cynicism, his lack of faith in things in general, in the universe. He wanted to believe, and he wanted to swim in love - now this is what he meant, not what he said; I'm paraphrasing here - but he wasn't sure how. He was all upset. He was in turmoil.
I listened with, I hope, compassion. Be gentle with yourself. Give yourself time, I said - you're in transition, transitions take time. This is deep stuff, things are moving on a teutonic level, you have to see where the shifts in you go, and be easy with it. Let it happen. He kept shaking his head: I don't know, I don't know, man. Am I going to make it? I assured him he was.
Eventually, it got far too late for me to stay up - although others closed it out much later (when my housemate came home, it was light out) - and I had to go, but I thought of S after I left. I hoped he would find his way. The next morning, while everyone was in session, my volunteer / facilitator duties took me back to Taliesin to do clean up while everyone else finished their final half-day the hotel, so I didn't see S again until it was time to close out the whole week.
In line with company tradition, we closed out this meeting as we do all meetings, with appreciations. People got up to share about what the event meant to them, to give thanks to someone for something - whether it was us applauding the head chef who directed all the amazing meals to folks just appreciating their roommates for lending an ear when someone needed to talk. S stood up - he looked better, he looked happy.
He spoke about what he learned, about how it was hard but how he came through and learned something so new, so important. At one point, trying describe the community of support, love and celebration (i.e. partying) we'd achieved, he touched on a classic symptom of community - a free flow of possessions and spaces. (We'd all gotten sloppy with articles - keys were jumbled, doors left open, and the next morning, people were returning socks and cell phones to their rightful owners). S summed it up, unintentionally, by saying how he'd met friends, and "I mean, my shoes are in someone's car..." It was so right on, everyone laughed. We all knew what he meant, because we'd all done it the night before. It may not have been toe sex, but it was something - some breakdown of barriers, some sense of flow.
S and I found each other after for a big, warm hug, full of goodwill. We didn't say much - no need; we just sort of acknowledged how it had been, and said goodbye. Later, as I headed out to my car, leaving the Academy, he was the last person to say anything to me. I saw him walking across the parking lot with shoes in his hand - he'd found the person who'd taken care of them for him. I laughed when I saw the shoes, and he saw me see them as we walked past each other. He held up the work canvas tennies, and said, "These have meaning now." I nodded. "They were just shoes before," he trailed off.
And that line just reverberated in me as I got into my car and drove through the silent, blooming desert. It was peaceful and blue and bright and clear. They were just shoes before, and now they meant something - they meant love. It's always like that, I realized - everything was just shoes before, and once you start doing the work - once you look inside, once you lower the barriers to love, once you start plugging into the source, once you begin to let go, once you feel fear but see it for what it is and don't let it stop you from loving, once you start being of service - once you do all that, things are transformed. Even tennis shoes can become sacred. How can it get much better than that?
My company is a social company. The company culture is strong; it's one of the best things about my company. Our culture is special and alive and fragile and crucial. It needs care and feeding - I head up quite a few cultural practices in my region myself - on every level. This was culture at the leadership level, and the focus was on teaching leaders how to love, basically. There are many ways of approaching this same subject - from being "in / out of the box" (Leadership and Self Deception) to Strengthsfinder to even Myers-Briggs. There are many methods out there that all address more or less the same subject of being a humane leader, and they all touch on more of less the same topics: emotional intelligence, group dynamics, filters and triggers and biases, authenticity and vulnerability, self-awareness and self-reflection, communication, active listening and so on.
I'm familiar with much of this material. Some of it I know well enough to teach. I attend these week-long events (my second so far) to assist, to volunteer, to be behind the scenes staff, which includes anything from herding cats (and by cats, I mean in this case senior leadership) and running mics, to interacting with presenters to shape discussion and flow to bar tending. It's 100 people doing emotionally intense work for a week, so much of the time, you are a body that is available, SHOULD a need arise; you're an additional resource to ensure things flow smoothly.
It's kind of an odd role, because even though I've been to the Academy once, the curriculum was different, as were the participants (and participants matter: the ones who chose to share, and what they say, really is a big part of the whole experience), and I sort of gleaned more benefit from it than I expected. If you are supporting an event, you end up seeing most of the event, even if you don't actively participate. Plus, I tend to glean meaning and benefit in general from ANY trip I take - I learn on vacations, I understand things through travel and exposure to new experiences, so I learned a lot, which was great.
But the best part about this trip was the social aspect of hanging out, in many contexts - some, official, such as leading each other around in "blind following" exercises to doing yoga out under the stars in the desert, and some unofficial, such as the jacuzzi after hours. The "hotel" was actually a huge, confusing campus ("thousands of acres," two full golf courses, four pools, etc) with many multi-bedroom houses (villas and casitas), so it was a perfect setting for socializing - we were already staying together in houses, but it was as if we were in dorms, running into folks going here and there. Going to the pool and seeing your peeps in the hot tub, what could be better? Oh, B's here, there's R and A and the other A too.
It started to remind me of my high school or college years - the relaxed casual hanging out, the freely flowing beer and wine, staying up too late and having to go to class the next day. People caught rides or moved around from villa to villa. Where was the party? Here's one faction. Others have gone over to that other villa, some zipped away on their golf cart, others wandered over to the pool which is where I always went, since I love swimming and soaking, and both are event better when one has had some wine, as I had.
I didn't know or maybe I forgot, but drinking even the slightest amount of wine in the desert seemed to have a tremendous effect on me; I'm really bad at hydrating, even in San Francisco I forgot to drink enough water, so in the desert, it's almost impossible for me to drink enough. I basically just border on the edge of head achy anyway, and the slightest amount of alcohol brings on the tipsiness and the headache both. The weather was up to the low 100's - not to be sneezed at.
I always love this socialization - so crucial in a company that has a tradition of the workplace being the community; our co-workers, family. After 15 years, I know a lot of people, some of them very well, some of them not as well. I've got 15-year acquaintances, or people where I can meet them and say, "I've been seeing your name on emails for a decade." And I love my fellow team members - even the ones I don't know are just friends I have not met yet, truthfully. So I love social company time, and so does everyone else.
This particular event had some real highlights. Every team build / overnight I've ever been to has some special moments that are unforgettable, but this one was jam-packed with big ones. Nothing earth-shaking or dramatic, but the quiet, gentle moments of people learning who each other are, and starting to love each other, creating or deepening a relationship. I had a long conversation about this with one of the store managers: now, she told me, I'm going to go back and start using the word love at work.
That's the idea, and it seems to work. My company's leaders are all amazing, earnest people - they are showing up for the work, they are willing to dive in. Given the opportunity to dive deep, they do - not all with the same ability. Some struggle. Some get hit hard by these concepts. Most of them are familiar with some of the ideas and material, but some are not. Some get their minds blown. Everyone gets a chance to stop and think. We're all so busy, we can't reflect. This is get together and reflect time. Watching it all happen is incredibly inspiring. I heard people's stories and I cried.
I saw my company's co-CEO, a man I've known since the day I started, go up on stage to support and hold the CFO who was tearing up during her presentation. He handed her a Kleenex, and stood behind her, his head resting gently on hers, hand on her elbow, as she finished her presentation. It was a moment of true (and open) tenderness, and to see the leaders at that level - the highest, the people at the heart and soul of my company - exhibit such vulnerability in front of their leadership group stirred up deep emotions. It moved me to tears.
It moved everyone to tears. I thought, how can we be a Fortune 500 company? Look at this! Look at who we are. We're doing something right, because we know it's about building a workplace built on love and respect and we do it. That's the key part, actually doing it. This is what I love about culture. It has to come from the people, so it's real.
Our last night together was, for me, nothing short of magical. I had some intense, interesting, revealing, funny, touching conversations with other folks from my region - some of them I didn't know that well, although I do now! We opened up. We laughed a lot. We told each other personal things. We shared about what the work during the day was bringing up - what emotions, what ideas. We were inspired and we were confronted with our fears.
We also ended up, as I mentioned, in the hot tub. Not all of us, but most of the people from my region appeared, the ones I already knew and liked (or, let's face it, loved) and some ones that were relatively new. We brought our beers and our wine and soaked in the bubbling frothy foam. We told stories and jumped in the pool and someone always got up to turn the bubbles back on when they ran out.
We found our feet floating up, meeting in the middle in a sort of spontaneous group foot snuggle. It felt good and we all wiggled our toes together as we kept the conversation going. And then someone brought up toe sex, which is just a term for a sort of extreme, specific foot massage technique, in which one moves one's finger roughly in and out between someone else's toes. But you know, once someone demos toe sex in a hot tub of wine and beer-fueled co-workers who are going through a heart-opening conference, you know toe sex is going to catch on. It was more like that just opened us up to all enjoy any type of relaxing foot contact, from underwater foot massages, to just relaxing your feet against someone.
It got so you didn't know whose foot was whose, and it didn't matter anyway. We were laughing and telling stories and getting our daily dose of oxytocin, the so-called moral molecule and which we'd learned of that day. It's the "love" hormone, they say, and it gets released through simple human touch - from nursing mothers to hand-holding lovers, oxytocin makes you feel loved and want to love, and if you get 8 hugs a day, you release enough to basically be happy. We were doing our part in raising oxytocin levels; our toe sex was company-prescribed.
It certainly did me a world of good. The guys I work with - they are all wonderful in terms of personality and heart and spirit, plus some of them are just damn cute and/or sexy. The classic phrase "I wouldn't kick him / her out of bed" is widely applicably at my company; it's sort of a rite of passage to sleep with another team member, or at the very least develop a crush on one. There's a sometimes a tinge of the romantic in my work relationships, and as you know, I love romantic, intense, intimate moments. Bubbly communal foot snuggling counts, if done well, and we were doing it well.
Because it wasn't just the toe sex, it was everything the toe sex symbolized; it was what the toe sex meant. We were fearlessly connecting. We were willing to say, let's see if we can't break down the idea, at least on some level - even if just via feet - that there's a definitive boundary between us. Not knowing whose feet were nestled against yours suggested that the boundaries between what I define as "me" and what I define as "you" are not, perhaps, all they seem, and even better, may be less important than we generally think.
We opened up. One gentleman, not someone I knew prior to the trip - indeed, I didn't know him prior to when he showed up in the hot tub and he never even got in but just sat on the edge and dipped only feet in - really opened up. This process was turning him inside out; he was looking at places inside himself and he was all confused. We started talking; I listened while he talked - let's call him S. S told me of his childhood, how he was raised, how he wanted to raise his kids, how he wanted to lead his team, and how he was fighting his base cynicism, his lack of faith in things in general, in the universe. He wanted to believe, and he wanted to swim in love - now this is what he meant, not what he said; I'm paraphrasing here - but he wasn't sure how. He was all upset. He was in turmoil.
I listened with, I hope, compassion. Be gentle with yourself. Give yourself time, I said - you're in transition, transitions take time. This is deep stuff, things are moving on a teutonic level, you have to see where the shifts in you go, and be easy with it. Let it happen. He kept shaking his head: I don't know, I don't know, man. Am I going to make it? I assured him he was.
Eventually, it got far too late for me to stay up - although others closed it out much later (when my housemate came home, it was light out) - and I had to go, but I thought of S after I left. I hoped he would find his way. The next morning, while everyone was in session, my volunteer / facilitator duties took me back to Taliesin to do clean up while everyone else finished their final half-day the hotel, so I didn't see S again until it was time to close out the whole week.
In line with company tradition, we closed out this meeting as we do all meetings, with appreciations. People got up to share about what the event meant to them, to give thanks to someone for something - whether it was us applauding the head chef who directed all the amazing meals to folks just appreciating their roommates for lending an ear when someone needed to talk. S stood up - he looked better, he looked happy.
He spoke about what he learned, about how it was hard but how he came through and learned something so new, so important. At one point, trying describe the community of support, love and celebration (i.e. partying) we'd achieved, he touched on a classic symptom of community - a free flow of possessions and spaces. (We'd all gotten sloppy with articles - keys were jumbled, doors left open, and the next morning, people were returning socks and cell phones to their rightful owners). S summed it up, unintentionally, by saying how he'd met friends, and "I mean, my shoes are in someone's car..." It was so right on, everyone laughed. We all knew what he meant, because we'd all done it the night before. It may not have been toe sex, but it was something - some breakdown of barriers, some sense of flow.
S and I found each other after for a big, warm hug, full of goodwill. We didn't say much - no need; we just sort of acknowledged how it had been, and said goodbye. Later, as I headed out to my car, leaving the Academy, he was the last person to say anything to me. I saw him walking across the parking lot with shoes in his hand - he'd found the person who'd taken care of them for him. I laughed when I saw the shoes, and he saw me see them as we walked past each other. He held up the work canvas tennies, and said, "These have meaning now." I nodded. "They were just shoes before," he trailed off.
And that line just reverberated in me as I got into my car and drove through the silent, blooming desert. It was peaceful and blue and bright and clear. They were just shoes before, and now they meant something - they meant love. It's always like that, I realized - everything was just shoes before, and once you start doing the work - once you look inside, once you lower the barriers to love, once you start plugging into the source, once you begin to let go, once you feel fear but see it for what it is and don't let it stop you from loving, once you start being of service - once you do all that, things are transformed. Even tennis shoes can become sacred. How can it get much better than that?
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