Reflections on Resilience, Fibromyalgia, Healing and Leadership Challenges

[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!

-Jack Kerouac, On the Road

At eighteen, the life-affirming dream of the Beat Generation grabbed and pulled me to the road. The romance of seeking the extremes of experience still draws me, but with a label of caution more fitting for fireworks. Because with each accelerating cycle of ambition, adventure, and achievement, I burn out. I do not burn like Kerouac's fabulous roman candle but into a colourless, lightless void. The result is an exact negative of the vibrancy that characterises the life and leadership to which I aspire. For this reason, and more, I have chosen resilience as a personal leadership challenge for 2017.

Resilience has traditionally taken a bottom shelf in my personal care arsenal, especially in comparison to its more audacious (and Kate-like) cousins like passion, drive, and boundless energy. Metaphorically, I imagined resilience as armour needed to protect oneself from difficulty.

Contrarily, psychologist Salvatore Maddi repositions resilience as not merely coping with change and complexity, but flourishing within them. In turn, this personal leadership challenge prompts me to reassess resilience as a reservoir of mental fortitude which boldly open us up to adversity, not shield us from it. To thrive, not to survive.

Similarly, within the field of Global Leadership Studies, resilience is described as the ability to deal with stressful feelings in a constructive way and to “bounce back” from them. For this reason, Mendenhall and colleagues regard resilience as a ‘threshold trait,’ essential to success as a global leader. Also, as a core characteristic of self-mastery, resilience is interlinked with other critical competencies, like comfort with ambiguity, humility, sensitivity, interpersonal engagement, optimism and openness. Reviewing the literature, I see my personal leadership challenge as linked to the behavioural dimension of resilience rather than its predisponsitional capabilities. Essentially, I must better manage a balanced, full and healthy life.

Inconveniently, the challenges to my equilibrium are more medical than attitudinal. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges in living with Fibromyalgia is that these limiting conditions do not fit into my personal narrative. So, instead of managing my anchors, I try to suppress them, which feeds into a predictable cycle of climbing then crashing. I mistook overpowering internal alarms with what Global Leadership scholars describe as personal mastery. However, systems thinking sage, Peter Senge, challenges the notion of mastery as a form of dominance. “People with a high level of personal mastery,” writes Senge, “are able to consistently realise the results that matter most deeply to them - in effect, they approach their life as an artist would approach a work of art. They do that by becoming committed to their own lifelong learning."

If I take a helicopter view of my self, I see that approaching my strengths and weaknesses as isolated and often competing parts masks the lacework of my full self and potential to flourish. To live with artistry and lead as a learner, as Peter Senge suggests, I must appreciate all aspects of myself as parts of my system and story. Perhaps my disability is even a strength directing me towards moderation. I must see myself as both a system and as serving within larger systems.

Using a systems archetypes approach, one could argue that my medical conditions and enabling character traits cause delays within my balancing processes. The managing principle is then to either practice patience or make the system more responsive. Both approaches require holding the vision, and focusing on long-term rather than short-term solutions which might fundamentally erode personal goals. For example, indulging in some forms of short term relief undermines my holistic wellbeing in the long-run.

I see my ongoing journalling and meditation practice as an opportunity for in-depth inquiry into my mental models, connecting with purpose and visioning, and translating that vision into personal leadership strategies. That said, remodelling one’s mind is a complex and life-long learning cycle. So transforming my personal paradigm will require patience and an evolving, multi-dimensional approach.

Donnella Meadows puts forward twelve leveraging points to intervene in a system. To begin with, Meadows suggests stabilising and small actions towards change in one’s parameters, buffers, and feedback loops. When applied to my mental map, these leveraging points would include concrete measures to ensure healthy sleep patterns, scheduling regular socialisation, fuelling my body with physical activity and nutritious food, and monitoring feedback loops through, journalling and meditation.

Diving more deeply into transformative change, Meadows’s outlines her four most effective leveraging points:

• the power to add change, evolve, or self-organize system structure;

• the goals of the system

• the mindset or paradigm out of which the system - its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters - arises; and

• the power to transcend paradigms.

Similarly, transcending personal paradigms is an ongoing objective of my dharma practice. I subscribe to an engaged Buddhist philosophy, which much like systems thinking, sees knowledge and awakening as multiple and evolving. Dharma practice has been my place of refuge for over a decade, but in my growing commitment towards resilience, I see that I must deepen my personal and philosophical enquiries rather than just expanding them across cultural systems.

In summary, beginning to understand myself as a system within systems is a step towards the personal literacy which will inform my path as a global leader. Though, by its nature I cannot predict how my metamorphosis might materialize, I have a deep conviction a steady foundation of resilience is required to let my full self flourish. With all humours in balance, I commit to let my learning change me and seek an awakened awareness of myself and others with open mind, heart and hands.

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