Defining Moments

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Karen Mathieson

In the time it took a sheet of paper to shuffle through her printer, the future changed for Elise Ballard. To anyone else it would have looked like a brochure about adoption, snared from the Internet and intended to serve as a prop in an upcoming play. To Ballard, it conveyed a message she’d been blocking for years—that she had options about having a marriage, having children, having a life worth living rather than enduring.

Ballard was soon free of a relationship gone thoroughly bad, but she remained fascinated by the deus ex machina impact of a mundane office task. Fast forward a few years, and Ballard has researched, schmoozed, interviewed and written her way to the publication by Random House of the book “Epiphany: True Stories of Sudden Insight to Inspire, Encourage, and Transform.” Online, the complementary project of the Epiphany Channel provides updates and programs related to the book’s topic as well as photos, profiles and videos of others who have been, to be technical about it, gob-smacked by their destiny.

Neophyte fifth-grade teacher Carol Lanning discovered the strength of her vocation while helping a boy learn long division, and 33 years later is still moved to tears by the memory. The leader of the Agape spiritual community in San Francisco, Michael Bernard Beckwith, recollects the glory of biting into a radish fresh from the earth as a child of five before he describes the lucid dreams which have helped him to fulfill his mission as an adult. Stacey Lannert, who killed her sexually abusive father when she was 18 and spent the next 18 years in prison, recounts how she came to realize that one always has choices, even if they are limited to the color of one’s socks.

As Ballard notes, the lives of these interview subjects and the more familiar figures in “Epiphany” such as Maya Angelou, Mehmet Oz and Barry Manilow might be wildly different in externals, but all demonstrated four defining aspects of the epiphany experience:

  • The individuals in question were paying attention to their life situations to begin with, and were capable  of listening to what was for many was an actual, if occasionally disembodied voice.
  • A surety of belief—even in the face of social censure or resistance—that the experience was real remained absolute in the long term as well as the short.
  • In response to the compelling call of their epiphanies, every person Ballard interviewed took  action on the insight, even if the outcome was at first highly nebulous.
  • And finally, once they  committed themselves, serendipity ruled. “It is as if the world conspires to support your actions and decisions,” Ballard writes.

The people who spoke to Ballard for the “Epiphany” project also seem to have in common a reflective turn of mind and a willingness to be surprised—not always pleasantly—by their own potential. Watch author and playwright Lawrence Wright unpack the meaning of the phrase, “Take your place,” and follow the making of a citizen. Listen to Rupert Isaacson describe seeking help among the horse people of Mongolia for his profoundly autistic son, Rowan, and understand how a best-selling book and documentary (both called “The Horse Boy”) could grow from a family’s desperate search for healing.

Disparate in age, gender, occupation, and convictions political as well as religious as they may be, once we’ve met them online or in the book these are men and women whom we’d probably enjoy getting to know further. Isaacson comments in a video clip that, “We’re always feeling these blissful ripples coming off other people’s epiphanies.” In his view, “It’s the principal source of good in the world.”

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Stewardship and the Personal Pronoun

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Karen Mathieson

“It’s my nature . . .” Following the dots, I turned the mug handle from right to left. “I volunteer,” read the words on the other side. I poured coffee and pondered the play on meaning. Yes, it is my nature to volunteer. And yes, it was my nature—the part that grows in blooming, buzzing confusion in the wetlands, woodlands and prairies of northwest Oregon—on behalf of which I was spending this Saturday morning at the Native Plant Center near Lake Oswego.

Mug in hand, I walked back to my worksite between twin colonnades of young alders. There grew a poster child for native plant restoration, Aquilegia formosa, a columbine with gracefully curved red and yellow blossoms that attract equally photogenic hummingbirds. On this day, while ladybugs busied themselves with their harvest of aphids near my fingers, I was collecting seeds for plants the NPC will foster and return to their genetic homeland along the bluffs of the Willamette River.

As I stooped in the dappled shade to check for pods rattling with glossy black seed, I looked toward a sunlit bed of Solidago canadensis, a goldenrod that produces wispy seed bodies at the rate of 4.6 million to the pound. I remembered a September morning in 2010, when I was part of a team frantically gathering sheaves of the long stalks before those tiny parachutes could lift away in the wind.

A college student from Norway with an interest in restoration projects had stopped by for a visit that day. He seemed especially struck by the fact that apart from Marsha Holt-Kingsley, the Metro employee who runs the NPC, we were all volunteers. “In my country,” he told me, “I do not think we could get many people to do what is a government responsibility.”

“But it’s our land,” I blurted, surprising myself with the vehemence of my tone. I told the young Norwegian that local voters had twice approved bond measures enabling Metro to buy and conserve significant sites for parks and natural areas across three counties. I said Metro was managing the land in trust, but we knew it would take more than money for things to work out.

That made sense to me, if perhaps not to our polite visitor, but as I coded a collection sheet for AQUFOR on Saturday, I was still wondering what had compelled me to speak so forcibly of “our” land. It  remained on my mind Sunday morning, when I began the first leg of Hike 27 in the second edition of “One City’s Wilderness: Portland’s Forest Park,” by Marcy Cottrell Houle.

On either side of the Tolinda Trail, tree trunks bore witness to the labor of those who had wrestled English ivy to the ground a while ago, winning one round of an endless bout with that viciously invasive, non-native species. I happened to be wearing a shirt with a global message from Metro emblazoned in gold. “Restore. Relax. Roam. Reflect: Celebrate  your nature,” the text ran. It wasn’t likely any of the above had been on the minds of the folks who duked it out in the ivy removal project, I thought with a smile, and scrambled up the next rise.

“Your nature.” I was at the apex of my Sunday hike, sitting at the edge of a meadow on a blue-painted metal bench and reading in Houle’s book about the Committee of Fifty that banded together for the creation of Forest Park in the mid-1940s. Few of those people were alive now, I knew, yet thanks to them I had just traversed the width of one of the great urban parks of the world. Suddenly, I heard “your” less as a distancing second-person pronoun and more as the passing of a legacy. “Take this, cherish this, and pay
it forward with your sweat, your resources and your heart,” the word seemed to adjure.

Many years ago, backpacking in Oregon’s Eagle Cap Wilderness, I stood weeping beside the trail as I began to sense what the Nez Perce tribe had lost when General O.O. Howard and his troops drove them toward exile. It took standing in that place, feeling its presence, to teach me what Chief  Joseph and his people knew in their bones.

Just now I was turning the latest Metro button over and over in my hand. “IT’S OUR NATURE,” it reads. Perhaps, I thought, becoming stewards of the place in which we dwell feels so essential, so personal, because it is.

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Broaden, Build, Enjoy

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Karen Mathieson

It’s so much more than happy talk. Positive emotions such as amusement, curiosity or hope may not save lives in a crisis situation, but they make life worthwhile the rest of the time.

Negative emotions such as fear have their place, acknowledges Barbara Frederickson, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, and the author of “Positivity.” In the moment it takes an oncoming car to cross the meridian, we can swerve thanks to a hard-wired system that confers an evolutionary advantage now, as it did when the threat was more likely to be an oncoming predator.

However, decades of research in the Positive Emotion and Psychophysiology Lab at UNC Chapel Hill, where Frederickson is the principal investigator, indicate that thriving while we survive is a matter of opting for the upbeat. Frederickson calls it the “broaden and build” theory of emotional well-being and life enrichment, and it has profound implications for the resilience with which we handle stress in personal and professional situations.

Negative emotions narrow our perception of options, but positive emotions tend to broaden the sense of choices, which lengthens our engagement with an idea, a person, or an experience. “Joy, for instance, sparks the urge to play and be creative,” Frederickson writes. “Interest sparks the urge to explore and learn, whereas serenity sparks the urge to savor our current circumstances and integrate them into a new view of ourselves and the world around us.”

Oddly enough, our ability to read and respond to positive emotions in others can even help us pick up on social or physical danger. “By design, humans are exquisite insincerity detectors,” notes Frederickson. Someone smiles but leaves us cold? We’re observing—consciously or not—the lack of a crucial muscle movement beside the eyes that cannot be faked. (Cheer up: It’s the same muscle that gives us crow’s-feet.)

The hefty sub-title of “Positivity” is “Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3-to-1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life.” Technically speaking, the ratio in the mathematical model crafted by Marcial Losada cites 2.9013 to 1, but the essence is there: Reach that tipping point between the positive and negative in your moods and interactions, and life gets a whole lot better. Double that, and a nonlinear dynamic system (think the butterfly effect) takes over, producing extraordinary synergy in the work world and far beyond.

After her accessible, wide-ranging science reportage in the first half of “Positivity,” Frederickson presents a self-help program for improving one’s positive-to-negative ratio. The guidance is as practical and smart as the author herself seems to be. And, judging by the personal narrative she intersperses throughout the book, Frederickson has been heeding the lessons of her lifework. The original mad-for-more-data scientist says that now, “I try to balance my entrenched work ethic with a growing play ethic.”

Online Extra: Meet a self-proclaimed “serendipity hippie” from Finland, Riita Raesmaa, whose positivity ratio can be inferred by her self-description, “Always in beta. And passionately so.” Raesmaa’s blog offers a link to a video of Barbara Frederickson talking about the function of positive emotions.

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In the Leader’s Seat

Posted on June 27, 2011 by Karen Mathieson

Cheerful, sturdy, and down-home as her Oklahoma roots, Nancy Foster helped teach me valuable lessons about leadership the other day. Nancy is a purchasing agent for a hardware company, and in the normal run of things we’d be unlikely to meet. Then, at the invitation of my friend Amy Bright, who knows of my interest in collaboration, I attended a conference for people in the building industry—and there was Nancy.

The order of business for BUILD is a Friday dedicated to various forms of play, before a full group experience of collaborative process on Saturday. On the first morning, Nancy and I got acquainted during a van ride to Elk Lake, not far from Bend, Oregon. I learned this would be Nancy’s maiden voyage in a canoe, and suggested we share a boat on our guided tour. “I’ll sit in the rear,” I proposed, “and keep us on track.”

Oh-so-much-easier said than done. True, long before I lost my heart to kayaking, I did enjoy paddling a yellow Old Town canoe named Tippity Witchet. I never sat anywhere but the front, though. I had no real sense of what the Eagle Scout in back was responsible for in that heavy, flat-bottomed, high-riding, rudderless craft.

It was a good thing Nancy is one of the best sports around. She exulted audibly in the day—the blue of sky and water, the snow-capped vistas, the wave-snapping breeze—while putting her shoulder muscles to impressive use with every dig of her paddle. Meanwhile, I set a course that resembled nothing so much as the scalloped hem of a 1970s mini-dress.

So far as I know, there isn’t a video of my leadership performance that morning, and if one does show up on YouTube, please don’t tell me about it. After lunch on the beach, however, things went much better on the return trip. “You know,” I said to Nancy’s patiently stroking back, “I think I’m beginning to get the hang of this steering thing.”

Even better, thanks to the way acquiring a physical skill can amplify cognitive learning, I now possess muscle memory of some important tips for taking a leadership role whether on the water or in the workplace:

  • Stay alert to the changing conditions around you.
  • Anticipate the need for a course adjustment—if it’s obvious, you’re late.
  • Communicate clearly what needs to happen next.
  • Use the lightest possible leverage in order to maintain forward momentum.
  • Appreciate the people you paddle with. You’re all in the same boat.
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Clearing the Cache

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Karen Mathieson

Time was, we thought human memory was a giant file cabinet where past events remained neatly slotted, unchanging as the order of an alphabet. Now we know that most long-term, non-rote memory is created in an ever-shifting, associative web. We’re not retrieving tidy document folders but rather clumps of sense impressions, which current context leads us to assemble in slightly different ways each time. Generally speaking, then, we are quite unreliable witnesses to the events of our own lives.

Even so, when memory elements have been “wired” together strongly enough—by a startling incident, or by repetitions of everyday observation—they actually do “fire” together with remarkable consistency. Think of how often you’ve heard someone start a story by saying, “I’ll never forget the time,” or comment disparagingly that another person, “is always like that. Leopards don’t change their spots.”

Life, though, has a way of moving on. Sometimes we just have to clear the cache to catch up.

On the second Tuesday in September, 2001, while I was kayaking in British Columbia, terror rained from American skies. The following Saturday, I returned to the United States in a seaplane, sitting beside the pilot and holding a clipboard with emergency routing notes and passwords. We reached the southern end of Lake Washington only after an enforced landing at a marina in the San Juan islands, where bright hanging flower baskets contrasted with the grim faces of federal agents rifling the plane, our luggage and our identities.

The next time I flew was the second Tuesday in June, 2011. That decade provided me with plenty of solid reasons for not getting on a plane. I also told myself that flying—which had been a joy in my life since my teens—just didn’t sound like fun anymore. Somewhere along the way, the opinion hardened into a mindset.

Then a professional contract called for me to lead a class in Spokane, Washington. Driving there from Portland, Oregon and back in the course of a busy week really didn’t sound like fun. So, I shouldered a backpack, walked to a light rail station, and glided away to PDX. Thus I started a journey to understanding that while I was holding an image of plane travel as negative and constrictive, a process associated with vast tragedy, people had done what people do: They had adapted. They had moved on.

“There’s a lane wide open over here,” called a cheery TSA staffer, sounding for all the world like the greeter at a discount store. Less than two minutes later, I was tying my shoes again. That’s when I noticed the soothing background music was actually live.

I tracked down Lee Nicholas, a friendly man with a big pinkie ring and a fancy synthesizer set above the keyboard of a grand piano. Soon I was under the attentive care of a waiter at a nearby café.  Munching a pickle, I gazed upon the people strolling with their wheeled luggage through the blue-carpeted, light-filled concourse. “This is pleasant,” I thought.

Lee started to play “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” I winced—and in the next moment, knew my reaction was out of synch with reality. The line starting, “When a lovely thing dies” had likely gone back to being a romantic metaphor for the people heading to their planes, if they tracked on it at all. In my head, a  “browser” memory cache started to clear and update itself.

I dropped a tip in Lee’s bowl, listened to him play the title tune from his CD, “Above the Clouds,” and ambled toward my gate. Caught by a display of the curvilinear, fractal images of artist Sara McCormick, I paused and felt another breath of change on the wind. The red-orange palette of “Rome Burning” did jangle in my head and heart, but mutedly now.

The next day in Spokane, I talked about emotional intelligence with a group of 20 professionals. EI helps us manage both internal and external behaviors, I told them. We may not look forward to being criticized or dealing with conflict, for instance, but we can learn to handle the hot reactions that make us want to fight back, or flee the scene, or freeze in place.  We can release out-of-date, ineffective habits of interaction, opening ourselves to authentic connection. In fact, a motivated human leopard is quite capable of changing its spots.

This morning The Oregonian reported that weekday flights from Portland to Amsterdam will continue beyond the summer travel season. Reading the article, I caught myself in a daydream of bicycling along canals and standing in reverie before Rembrandts. Flying sounds like fun again.

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The Weather System

Posted on May 20, 2011 by Karen Mathieson

We worry about it. We moan about it. We sigh with relief about it. Yes, weather is always on our collective mind and on the tip of our tongue—especially when making inoffensive social contact with strangers.

Lately, though, I’ve become aware of how weather conditions help keep me connected to people with whom I share much more than a long wait for an elevator. These are my friends, collaborators, clients and colleagues, the folks who don’t need to do the weather-talk to find something to say.

It’s been a dank, dark half year on the lower Columbia and its tributaries. As rain, hail and (rarely) snow spattered against my office window, I kept a fleece-clad back to it all, facing a glowing monitor. Then I would turn to make notes during a phone conversation and spot a welcome rift in the  clouds. With a walk on my mind, I’d swivel back to the screen to read a newly-arrived project report ending something like this: “Oh, yay! There’s a sun break! Better take the dog out to catch it while we can.”

On one of the first warm afternoons of the year, I returned for a second shift at the computer after a short hike with friends in Portland’s verdant Forest Park. My inbox now held a message from a collaborating sole proprietor, with a comment on how difficult it was to stay at her desk while the sun was shining. I was glad to find out, an hour or so later, that with a final check made on her task list she was next heading to the deck with a glass of iced tea.

It heartens me how tied to nature we remain in the realm of Electronica. In any given day of recent months, I listened vicariously to a thunderstorm in Edmonds, Washington, or heard how digital images of blooming rhododendrons in a local colleague’s garden comforted snowbound family members in Montreal. I’ve learned more about people’s lives, about their moods, about what gives them joy or discomfort. It gives context, brings us closer—and that’s a part of human nature as much as the need to kvetch our way from one season to the next.

Then comes a May day like this, at the end of the work week: Blue sky, glorious sun, breeze wafting through leaves and needles in a hundred synonyms for green. Funny thing, the only message I’ve gotten for hours reads, “The truck is loaded . . . We’re going camping.”

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Verbal and Visual

Posted on May 12, 2011 by Karen Mathieson

The spirit of Ian Ballantine hovered as I led a breakout session for the 2011 Portland Communicators Conference yesterday. I  told those crowding the dimly lit library of the venerable Governor Hotel how the co-founder of Ballantine Books tapped a finger on an illustrated children’s book and said, “Mark my words, the future will belong to those who develop visual as well as verbal literacy.”

Three decades later, I have lived to see that day. Visual literacy, as three revved-up keynote presenters assured the conference, is essential to benefit fully from the myriad social media of the early 21st century. It opens a world as colorful and exciting as anything dreamt by L. Frank Baum, author of that deathless line, “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” It also permits people to connect with people face-to-interface, to process body language and tone along with words.

About the time I interviewed Ian Ballantine, Stephen Jay Gould brought out the first edition of The Mismeasure of Man. Gould’s trenchant consideration of profiling included evidence of the eugenic defamation of a New Jersey family, the Kallikaks, in which their  facial features had been altered on photographic negatives. Gould also quoted a 1980 letter about those 1912 images, from the director of photographic services at the Smithsonian Institution: “By contemporary standards, this retouching is extremely crude and obvious. It should be remembered, however, that at the time . . . our society was far less visually sophisticated.”

Photoshop and tabloids, anyone?

And then there’s Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, with its blazingly ironic redefinition of a fireman’s job. I gobbled that down at the age of nine, at a time when I read my way through a wooden apple crate of library books every week. A world which banned not only books but critical thinking in favor of omnipresent big-screen video was more scary to me than any horror film. It still is. And yet, I get a kick out of YouTube links friends ferret from the Internet and send my way.

The peril and the promise of visual communications has been a lasting theme in my life—as has my passion for good writing, whether on a screen or recording, or between the covers of that ancient handheld device, the book. My program for a conference titled “Communicating in a Changing World” will be no surprise: “Beyond the Emoticon: Making Every Word Pull Its Weight in the Digital Age.”

For the online experience, I filled in blanks on the demonstration and group engagement sections before uploading the session handout for “Beyond the Emoticon.” I hope this handful of suggestions will be useful if you, too, feel urgency about helping every word pull its weight in our changing world.

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At Sea with Serendipity

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Karen Mathieson

“Serendipity, that’s one of my favorite words,” many people have commented in the two years since I launched Serendipity Communications. A positive association is good branding, of course, but in this case it goes far deeper.

Among the most popular American small boat names is “Serendipity,” which reflects one common definition of the word as “a happy discovery made on a voyage.” But when was the voyage, and what were the discoveries?

Legend has it that the king of the island of Serendib—aka Serendip, Ceylon and Sri Lanka—wanted his three sons to gain life experience before they served the realm. The princes had been educated by fine tutors, but how would they handle the world beyond their own shores?

Very well, as it turned out. Once dispatched on their grand tour, the king’s sons not only survived their own challenges but found insightful solutions to the problems of others along the way. Their “happy discovery” was that a combination of intuitive strengths and acquired understanding prepares us to make the best of the unexpected when it arises.

“So, what you’re saying is, there’s no downside to serendipity,” one friend remarked when I told him this story. “Right,” I responded. “It’s about recognizing opportunity, and knowing what to do with it.”

Our lives hold so many storms, turns of the tide, and freshening breezes. My passion and my joy is to help professionals speak, write and handle interpersonal matters with poise and effectiveness. As an old saying has it, we cannot direct the wind but we can trim our sails. Thereby, we claim the birthright of our gifts and develop the skills required to make headway toward our goals.

No surprise, then, that three strong verbs put the wind in Serendipity’s sails: Create. Relate. Collaborate.  Those words will be among the category titles for postings to this new Ship’s Log—which not only sounds like more fun than a “blog,” but captures my intent to track on Serendipity’s own voyage.

Curious about the history of serendipity and its applications in the modern world? Check out the links of “The Saga of Serendipity” in this site’s About page sidebar.  And, please post a response with a story of how serendipity has touched your life—and how you welcomed it!

~ Karen

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