The Other Side of Abandonment

This is Part Two of a four-part series titled “You Cannot Be Abandoned.” You can find Part One here.

A week after Karla left me for the third time, I had to teach two leadership conferences, each to hundreds of entrepreneurs, in Colorado and California. The theme of the first was “Success vs. Happiness”; the second was on self-esteem and making peace with disapproval.

Trial by Fire

I wondered how I would be able to hide my emotions and talk about these themes without feeling like a complete hypocrite. I worried that some comment or question would cause my fragile façade to dissolve into tiny little pieces as I broke down into tears and limped off the stage, searching for the nearest broom closet to hide in.

We learn more from doing something than by thinking about or analyzing it. I stepped up in front of the first group and, for the first time in my life, felt deeply connected with the suffering within each person there. While I did not mention the tide of events in my personal life, I detected what people were feeling and shared the models in a much less theoretical and much more direct and personal way.

My teaching became my release.

Source: Kane Reinholdtsen / Unsplash

My teaching became my release. I spoke with a “stickiness” I had never known before; it was as if I were speaking personally to each person in the room, some of whom broke down into tears during the session. At the end, I felt like I needed to unglue myself from the participants in order to leave.

At the next conference, a few days later, it happened again. The outpouring of collective emotion that followed was unlike anything I had ever experienced: Messages after messages appeared in my email inbox and social media accounts from participants sharing the changes that had taken place in their lives since our brief time together.

I would like to say that I had forgiven Karla, and this forgiveness opened up my life to these new connections, but it would not be true. The way I connected with people was much simpler: I was suffering more profoundly than I ever had in my life, and this suffering enabled me to connect with the suffering within them.

First Step Toward Change

The actor Michael J. Fox clarifies the true meaning of acceptance. It “doesn’t mean resignation,” he shares. “It means understanding that something is what it is and that there’s got to be a way through it.”

Many people confuse acceptance with passivity, resignation, or capitulation to the status quo. This is a misunderstanding. Why? Acceptance is the first step toward change.

You cannot move forward until you first accept, without pulling any punches, where you are right now.

Source: Giulia Bertelli / Unsplash

When you accept the unmitigated, unvarnished reality of a specific situation, a particular emotion you are feeling, another person, or your life as you or it or they actually are rather than what you want it to be, you access one of the most potent tools for moving forward in your life: a sober, realistic assessment of what is in front of or within you.

Why, then, is acceptance your first step? Acceptance provides you with the real, up-to-date information you need to know how to move forward in your life.

When you cease attempting to convince yourself that you are someone you are not, or that you are feeling something you do not feel, or that another person is someone they are not, or a life situation is something it is not, in this moment—and in this moment only—you become capable of change. Your power becomes available to you.

Until this moment, anything you do will always be a misstep, like swinging a golf club without holding it firmly or launching a rocket that is not properly assembled and in place for takeoff.

The Power of Shared Suffering

In the weeks after Karla left me and my “trial by fire” at the leadership conferences in California and Colorado, I went for many evening walks alone in a remote park. My suffering was no longer just my own. It was now shared. It now had meaning. A good friend who had come to one of the conferences and knew what had occurred in my personal life put it this way: “Your pain is our gain.”

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While gazing at the evanescent colors of the sky each evening, I admitted to myself what I had refused to acknowledge for many years: I couldn’t put on a show anymore.

It was time to embrace and love myself exactly as I am. It was time to heed the words of the first Indian sage to bring Hinduism to the West at the Council of World Religions in Chicago in 1893: “If [the] truth is too much for intelligent people and sweeps them away,” advises Swami Vivekananda, “let them go; the sooner the better.”

I now had to embody what I was telling others, that this means loving even the parts of yourself that you perceive as undesirable, or unlovable, or that you are ashamed of—to love these parts as much as every other part, and to know that you are the only person who will ever love you unconditionally. I had been able to write and share that for many years, but now, for what seemed like the first time, I felt the depth of those words.

I stopped feeling like a victim. Instead of saying, “Why me?” I began to say, “Yes, me, and this is what I’m going to do about it.” I now understood that while I didn’t get what I wanted in my past relationship, I did get what I needed.

I realized that I had been approaching my life and leadership development work as a theoretical exercise. No matter what the issue—leadership, work-life balance, communication, team-building—I knew the research, developed convincing models to make the complicated more simple and accessible, and helped people enhance how they approached their careers and relationships.

Seeing the Same, Differently

Yet my life vision was shifting. It had been centered on helping people become more effective leaders. Now my vision was to help them become more authentic human beings. Starting with myself.

Effective leadership does not often result in authenticity, but being an authentic human being frequently makes for effective leadership. While my teachings had emphasized how to lead toward compelling results, I now taught how to lead with love and compassion.

Whereas before I had taught people that leadership means executing the most effective strategies, I was now teaching that leadership is acting with character and integrity. My new approach encouraged people to take a much more holistic, longer-term view of not only their success but also their well-being.

The irony is that I had subscribed to this philosophy all along; yet, as with everything else I wrote and taught, I had thought and said the right things, but had not known how to feel what I was writing and teaching. The deep suffering I experienced when my intimate life fell apart enabled me to reconnect with my heart, my values, and ultimately my love for humanity and myself.