That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? . . . Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Identify one of your biggest challenges at the moment (ie I don’t feel passionate about my work) and turn it into a question (ie How can I do work I’m passionate about?) Write it on a post-it and put it up on your bathroom mirror or the back of your front door. After 48-hours, journal what answers came up for you and be sure to evaluate them.
Today I’m thinking about writing and all the resistance I’ve had to it. When I was doing a lot of
public workshops people would often ask if I’d written a book yet or if I was working on a book. I would always reply glibly, “I talk; I don’t write.” Kind, helpful people, believing the rationale I’d given them, offered solutions on how I could transform my oral presentations to written work by having
everything recorded and transcribed. Since I couldn’t reveal the real reason for my resistance, I now have many pages of transcribed talks from the 80s and 90s sitting in my files.
The glib statement I made about talking and writing wasn’t even true. I had been writing long before I started doing public workshops. In fact, I had started in an academic career where writing was considered as important if not more important than teaching. When first offered the opportunity to do
public workshops, I had to wrestle with my fear of public speaking. I had been so terrified of public speaking that I got laryngitis on the final day of my speech class in college. Fortunately, I discovered that my passion for the content of the workshops overcame my self-conscious fear of speaking.
The irony is that I went on to have a successful career as a public speaker for 15 years, working throughout the US and Canada, yet it never became a part of my self-identity. I always thought of public speaking as something I was doing while I was waiting to do my ‘real work’. In the early 1990s I had an opportunity to do something that felt much more like my ‘real work’ when I became involved in research and development in the field of personality. The first R&D project involved developing software that
delivered custom interpretations for a personality assessment that was widely used in industry, education and social service. That project led to revalidating and revising the assessment, now known as DiSC Classic, published by Inscape Publishing. Then, in 2002, I had an opportunity to create a new assessment based on a revised understanding of the DiSC Model. The product, DiSC Indra, was released in 2003 and is still being use by consultants and coaches. In addition, the new DiSC model became the development platform for the next generation of Inscape products.
Now the question for me is, “Having done all that, where do I go from here?” This Emerson challenge is giving me the opportunity to reflect on what I want to do and what is keeping me from doing it. Yesterday, I received a deeper understanding of my current resistance to writing when I thought about posting my Emerson challenge writings on FB and experienced my fear of being publicly naked. Since I’ve done a lot of writing in my field that has been published both formally and informally, I began to wonder what caused my discomfort. After some reflection, I began to see that the issue is not about writing in general. The dilemma is that the only things I want to write about at this stage of my life are the same things that will render me most naked and vulnerable.
With this new understanding, I took Jenny Blake’s prompt and created 3 Sticky Notes of my intentions framed as questions and placed them on the bathroom mirror. I must confess that they are posted inside the mirrored cabinet, in a place that no one else is likely to see them…
