Humanity
Story Teller
Image source: Sharon Cauthen
Story Teller
By: Sharon Cauthen
Recently, I was clearing out a box of old photos and papers when I came across two pages of childish script. I knew instantly what it was, and I felt transported to a moment in time – the emotions of the day flooding back in an instant. The truth is, I’ve never forgotten what happened and how it made me feel. It was a simple story that went something like this…
When I was in fourth grade, our teacher assigned a creative writing assignment. I loved writing and spent much of my no-frills home life tuned in to my internal fanciful thinking or reading anything I could get my hands on. For the assignment, I wrote a story called Lifecycle describing in youthful detail, the beginning, middle, and the predetermined end. There was a special gotcha at the end of the story, of which I was particularly proud. I turned in my paper, eager for a good grade and some recognition from a teacher who never quite seemed to like me very much.
The paper was returned to me with a notation in bright red across the top – “Was this plagiarized?” and a score of F! The shock of embarrassment ran through my body as my face flamed red and my heart pounded loudly enough to drown out the sound of anything but its beat in my ears. Students sitting in nearby desks could see the terrible grade and the angry red writing scrawled on my paper. Having my clever idea and hard work dismissed as something I wasn’t capable of stung, and I felt tears threatening to spill over.
I had to take a note home to my parents who were none too pleased. They were the kind of parents who always stood behind the teacher whenever there was an issue, but on this one (and one other story I’ll save for another day), they stood up for me. You see, I had written the story at home, sitting at the kitchen table and I read it out loud to my family because I felt so giddy with the preciousness of my story idea and its surprise ending. There were a thousand things they would have believed the teacher about – but my ability to craft this story wasn’t one of them. Their faith in my storytelling skills gave me the runway and confidence to continue writing to this day.
I learned a lesson that day that superseded one young girl’s paper. It serves me still today.
Anyone in a position of authority can leave a scar with one ill-conceived or short-tempered remark, the pain of which may never be forgotten. Building up the confidence of others and recognizing their talents pays back and forwards.
Lift people up whenever you can. A simple acknowledgment that you see them and appreciate their contributions is important but taking the time to learn about their interests and passion projects beyond their daily job duties is heady stuff. It’s magical. The people who fill our teams are whole multifaceted humans who possess untapped potential.
One final thought. Believe people until there is a real reason not to. It’s been almost half a century and I still remember my creative writing assignment, and I vividly recall the feeling of knowing how it felt to be denied – and who believed in me.
LISTEN
This true story below shared by Sharon Cauthen.
“A single mother recently fell ill and went to Urgent Care with a sore throat, headache, and a fever of 101.5 degrees. The busy doctor ran covid & flu tests (both negative), looked at her throat, and said, “Your throat looks fine so that’s not bothering you, right?” The patient replied, “Yes. It is very painful, so much so that swallowing is difficult. It’s why I came in.” The doctor sent her home with instructions to take Tylenol for the fever.
After a very pain-filled night, she felt much worse. So much so that driving felt almost impossible, so she tried her tele-med option. That doctor said, “I’m sorry but I can’t see your throat well enough to make a diagnosis. Call back if you need anything else.” and the call ended. Again, she crawled into bed feeling defeated – in tears and in pain – not sure what to do next.
Later that day, she went back to the same Urgent Care. She could barely sit up and curled into the fetal position on the exam table. A different and very kind doctor took one look at her, listened to her story, and said, “I can see that you are very sick and in obvious pain and we are going to figure it out and help you get better.” Tears streamed down her fever-reddened face. A positive strep test, a steroid shot, and a strong antibiotic later — She started the road to recovery. But before the shot and antibiotics ever entered her body, she could feel the relief of having been heard – at last.”
It is not my goal that this conversation devolves into a healthcare system argument. Because this isn’t about politics, insurance, access to healthcare, or over-capacity medical staff. Those are important topics for another day. At its core, this story represents a simple failure to listen.
Over the last several years (and in all its iterations), the Multifamily Collective has been ringing the bell on the topic of human-centricity. The need to see, hear and understand the people who work with us. Team members are people first with all the multifaceted needs that come with the species. If you live and breathe a human-centric culture, you will inevitably experience a team member exhibiting the hallmarks of distress.
The thing that people in pain, be it emotional or physical, need more than anything is for someone to listen and validate that what they are experiencing is real and acknowledge that it is hard. Being an empathetic listener is key to helping someone feel heard.
The ability to listen is a superpower that each of us can improve with dedicated practice.
I encourage you to do the work and to develop your skills in how you engage in empathetic listening – not just hearing but truly seeking to understand. I am guilty, too, of being distracted by a full calendar and other pressing issues but how I engage with a person in distress in front of me is one of the most important measures of my humanity and my leadership.
Do you have tips that help you remember to listen intently with compassion before offering a response? Please share them with us!
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Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
Cracking Nuts
Pecan pies, divinity candy, roasted and salted, or just plain – pecans are ubiquitous in the south. Whether you call them pea-CANs or pea-CAHNs is likely down to where you grew up as the pronunciation was passed down through the generations. When I was young, we never bought pecans that had already been shelled – not when my parents had free child labor readily available in the form of my siblings and me. I remember that there was a pecan tree where we rode our bikes, and we could take as many pecans as we could carry. I was really bummed when that tree was struck by lightning, bringing our free pecans to an end.
We learned how to crack pecans by putting two nuts in your palm and applying pressure with both hands then picking out the meat and leaving the shell. If you’ve ever mistakenly left even a tiny bit of the inner shell, the bitter taste served as a reminder to be more careful next time. I recall that we had a bowl of unshelled nuts with a nutcracker and picks to aid in getting to the good stuff. The bowl had some sort of fake bark on the outside. You know it’s from another time when it’s labeled vintage and you can buy it on eBay for almost $70!
Shelling pecans manually may never come back in vogue but there are some things from the past that are worth the labor to bring them back. Good old Americana in the form of family road trips seems to be making a bit of a comeback. I know that seems like a far-flung idea what with gas knocking on the door of $5/gallon, but I believe that the pandemic has awakened a desire to return to earlier family experiences. If there is one way for families to reconnect, it’s a road trip. If you can survive days 1-3, there is a tipping point where you start to communicate with each other. But brace yourself – the early days can be a grind and have you questioning what sort of crazy decision started this mess.
Thinking about those endless drives to see roadside attractions and national areas of interest reminds me of some of the roadway giants – Howard Johnson’s, Holiday Inn, and Stuckey’s. Among the many things I looked forward to were the Stuckey’s pecan logs. Light fluffy nougat dipped in caramel and rolled in pecans, the Stuckey’s pecan log was too much of everything – delicious, sweet, and sticky perfection.
Stuckey’s motto – Relax. Refresh. Refuel. – signaled their role as a precursor to the modern convenience store. The Stuckey’s story began in 1937 with a roadside stand and a family-owned pecan grove but its brand heyday was definitely in the 60s & 70s with 370 stores in 40 states, which makes sense because that was pretty much the peak of the family road trip.
Over time, the stores went into decline, and the family business was sold. Eventually, the brand was diluted and its future was grim. Enter Stephanie Stuckey, an environmental lawyer who decided to revive the brand and her grandfather’s vision. It is an uphill battle by any measure, but if it can be done – this dynamo will make it happen. If you aren’t connected to Stephanie on LinkedIn or following her on social media, stop right now and do it. You know she’s got something going for her if the massive views on TikTok are any indication.
Stuckey’s comeback story is a master class in the power of one person, the importance of candor-filled storytelling, and social media done right. Whatever obstacles you face – grit, humor, honesty, integrity, respect, and authenticity will go a long way to improving your lot. So, I’m not going to rewrite Stephanie’s story when she tells it so elegantly. She says, “I invested in storytelling, and I invested in beautiful design.” She believes that spending strategic dollars on design is the most important aspect of branding. AND she is hanging onto the company sacred cow – that pecan log roll. Smart thinking.
I would kick myself if I failed to mention that Stephanie Stuckey has a standing invitation to be a guest on our podcast “Collective Conversations” any time. I would consider it a high honor to hear her story firsthand. So, if any of you know Stephanie – please connect us!
Do you have a Stuckey’s story? Or a brand revival story? Share them with us here or on our social media. We all learn from each other.
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Business is Personal
Photo by Bekir Dönmez on Unsplash
Business IS Personal
In The Godfather (1972) Michael Corleone infamously says, “It’s nothing personal, Sonny – It’s strictly business” when referring to the shooting of a colleague’s father. Far be it from me to tangle with a mob family but given the chance, I’d like to say, “You’re (dead) wrong.”
When team members come to work, either to the physical business center or through virtual/digital systems, they bring their whole selves with them. There is no imaginary coat hook by the door where the problems of real life are parked until the end of the business day only to be picked up and loaded on again before going home.
Businesses serve these whole humans. Pressures, which were mounting long before, have intensified over the past two years as team members’ personal and professional lives merged (and often cracked) under the pressures of the Covid-19 pandemic. The disruption of work-life balance, loss of workplace camaraderie, and lack of shared in-person experiences left many workers feeling disconnected from the business. Working parents experienced the additional burdens of juggling remote learning and feelings of constant guilt about not meeting the needs of either family or job.
As pandemic-related restrictions have eased and our lives returned to some new form of normalcy that never quite fit the original mold, businesses should be thoughtful about the path forward. Organizations better serve their people when they actively remove barriers to healthy, creative, mindful work including those physical, psychological, and cultural obstacles.
It is critically important to intentionally engage with team members and invite candid conversation. Develop an ear for what is not being said as much as what is. I encourage you to make it safe for team members to share pain points and develop strategies that adapt to meet the evolving needs of your teams.
Companies that invest in the true overall wellbeing of their workforce have better outcomes and higher retention. Team members feel the difference when the business views them holistically. In a time when talent is harder to source, companies have come to recognize the importance of working in service of the whole humans that make up their teams.
What are you doing to work in service of your team members and how has that changed in the past two years? Share your stories with us.
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Raindrops Keep Falling
Every week, I publish a morning vlog series as part of the Multifamily Collective content. As always, this week’s daily videos were each published as a stand-alone commentary, but in hindsight, it seems these particular videos may just be parts of the same story and I decided to connect those thoughts in today’s post.
Short-Term
In Short Term Memory, I encouraged our listeners to develop a short-term memory as it relates to adversities in their lives and instead to focus on your purpose.
We all tend to sometimes hyper-focus on our short-comings or mistakes – worrying over them as though they have some value when actually no amount of constant self-flagellation will erase those events. On the contrary, constantly beating yourself up only serves to distract you from your true objectives. Ultimately, your goals are starved for want of your attention while your missteps live only in history and pay you no dividends at all.
If your hours in each day were translated to dollars and you put all your money into the backward-facing bucket, how much is left at the end of the day to invest in your future? None. Exactly. But, if forgetting our personal mistakes were easy, none of us would waste our time thinking about them.
Unhappy
In Unhappy, I recount the startling results of a survey that stated that one in four Americans (25%!) classify themselves as unhappy. Those numbers are hardly surprising given the extended impact of the pandemic, increasing political division, loss of traditional social support systems, and more. Indeed, a troubling sense of dissatisfaction seems to be commonplace.
Once again, there are no easy surefire solutions. If there were, I would encourage you to join me on the rooftop because that is the perch from whence I would be shouting. While not a cure-all, it doesn’t feel like a stretch to say that intentional acts of kindness go a long way towards alleviating some of the world’s pain even if by just one person at a time. Finding opportunities to curate encouragement, joy, acknowledgment, and celebration seem to offer a plus-one scenario wherein you make someone else’s day better and yours is improved in the process.
Like A Kid
Finally, in Like A Kid Again, I tell the story of a recent miserable rainy winter’s morning in Georgia. It had rained all night and the roads were wet, puddles abounded, and I had every plausible reason to forgo my morning run. Except, my morning run is important not just to my physical health but to my mood and psychological wellbeing.
Once I made up my mind to run in the rain, unsurprisingly, I was soon splashed by cars, and every footfall caused a splatter. When you are out in a pouring rain, there soon comes a point where you can’t get any wetter. Instead of shaking my fist at the skies, I felt something akin to childhood well up in me, a remembrance of a time when playing in puddles was a joy-filled experience. My mood was elevated, my shoes were drenched, my heart felt happy, and my energy was through the roof.
The #3 Combo
In the exercise of sharing these stories this week, the combination may have answered my own questions – at least somewhat. Maybe it is possible to release the hold my mistakes can have on me and to shake off that feeling of discouragement by simply letting the rain fall on my face wholly invited and appreciated. The problems we face are complex and, while there are no simple cures, it turns out that there are countless opportunities for simple joy.
When was the last time you felt the rain, danced in the puddles and breathed in the moment for all its bliss? Somehow it seems that we have bought into the idea that happiness is found in expensive vacations at rodent-themed parks. Those can be fun – but so can the rain.
Share your joyful stories with us here or on our social media pages.
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