Your Path Makes You

Many leaders live out of an illusion.

It’s an illusion that we can be the unconquerable masters of our fate and captains of our soul. This illusion has a deep root in the Western psyche, perhaps best captured in the 19th century poem Invictus by William Henley:

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.



In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.



Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.



It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

This ‘master of my fate’ life perspective is expressed in the notion of the ‘self-made man/woman’. It is regularly reinforced through the North American child-rearing mantra of: “you can be anything you want to be” and then echoed in adulthood via leadership gurus’ seminars and books. Just Google “you can be anything you want to be quotes” and you would think nothing can ever get in the way of our goals except our own level of belief in ourselves!

Reality check: No one is a self-made. No one finishes their life path the way they initially envisioned.

Truth check: You don’t make your path. Your path makes you.

This phrase "you don't make your path; your path makes you" came to me with particular power after a week of walking multiple paths along the Camino del Norte in August 2017. My experience in the previous 7 years was the crumbling of many of the best-laid plans for my own life and surprisingly, the successful accomplishment of some completely unplanned endeavours. These multiple events and circumstances created a zigzag pattern of experiences. I was reeling, wondering what to make of it all. I took a sabbatical for 3 months to try make sense of things, and this phrase popped up:    You don’t make your path. Your path makes you.

This isn't advocating giving up on dreaming and planning. It is about dealing with emerging reality and your ability to shift direction on the road to becoming resilient as a leader and person. Lets face it, plans get made, hopes are set high and then 'life' happens. Circumstances both within and outside our control determine the path we actually walk. In those moments, some things are demanded of you:

1. What CHOICE will you make? As I see it, there are 3 options. Accept, Refuse or Run. You have to determine in your circumstance what is called for. However, no matter your choice your path has already shifted to some degree.

2. What CHARACTER will you demonstrate? Your choice will call out your character. More important than the path you take is who you become as a result of your choice. Unplanned changes have a way of unearthing what is buried deep inside of us. A leaders' effectiveness derives more from character than skill, so pay close attention to what emerges!  Resilient leaders are not shaped by success so much as they are by challenge.

3. Will you accept the new CONDITIONS? This is the time for realism. Your circumstance and the new resulting path is what it is, so deal with it. The alternative is to keep living in your head and in a reality that does not exist! Acceptance doesn’t mean you must like the new path, but it does mean you receive it as a part of your new life. Only after acceptance can you begin to walk the new path with purpose and intention.

With great thought and planning I have designed many paths for my personal and leadership life, believing that I would become someone and accomplish something as I pursued the path. In all cases, I have experienced redirection and on occasion outright failure to arrive at my original destination. However, I am now the leader and person that I am not because I achieved my original plans, but because of who I have become in the process. I also believe that I am in my current position of leadership because of the character, interests and skills that have been shaped by my circumstances, because:

My path made me


Harv

“We can make our plans, but the LORD determines our steps.” Proverbs 16:9

A Leaders' Life of Insignificance

Day 6 - At Laida beach.  Thousands on thousands of people.  A throng.  Some thongs.  Some without any thong on.

Seriously, the huge numbers of people and my sense of alone-ness (enhanced by the fact that I could not speak Spanish) got me thinking:  “In the crowd of humanity, who am I really?”  In the context of 7.5 billion people on this planet, what is significant about me?  This got me thinking about the importance I ascribe to my work and my self.

One more thing has me thinking about this now as I write.  This week marks the second funeral in the last two weeks of people I have known well.  It also brought tragic news of a relative who suffered a massive brain hemorrhage and may not see consciousness or his family ever again.  The Bible says it’s better to attend a funeral than a party, because it causes you to think about how you are living your life. (Ecclesiastes 7:2). So, I am thinking about life and invite you to consider your own.

 

On that beach in Spain while walking the Camino, and now today surrounded by the loss of friends, relatives and acquaintances, this is a reflection on living a life of insignificance.

Like many leaders, I have always had a sense of importance and significance to my life.  This motivated and drove my leadership aspirations and future thinking.  The leadership seminar and book industry contributed by feeding this theme into my psyche and understanding of leadership. As a result, I have always looked for something better, greater and farther for which to strive.  Embedded in my thinking was always that I’d be part of a ‘breakthrough’, a significant team or an innovative thing.  On reflection, I have fulfilled some of those aspirations.  However as I looked at that crowd on the beach in Laida Spain, a reality hit me full force.   Like the waves pounding the surf, humans like me come and go throughout history.   Life rolls along.  Wave after wave.   A new swell of humanity hits the beach every generation.  Ha - in 30 years from now I likely won’t even be top of mind to my own kids!  Few people are remembered.  Few leave a legacy that humanity will store in its collective memory, or benefit from materially.

Leaders live to leave legacies, to impact others, to ‘make a mark’.  We have been enculturated into this characterization of leadership.  “You can do anything…You can be a change-maker in the world” and many other catch phrases populate leadership seminars and even parental guidance.  However, there is an insidious nature to this because it can – as it did in my case – inflate significance, diminish the present and drive a striving for future results that robs our impact on the here and now.

I challenge you as a leader to shift from a mentality of legacy to service.  Legacy too often is a selfish thing.  It’s about what you can leave behind; how you will be remembered.  Service is about showing up in the today to say – “How can I be of help?”

Finally, to all legacy-builders and world-changers: 

• Go to a funeral to remind yourself what is most important.  Discern what is most remembered from a life lived.
• Legacy isn’t so much what you leave behind in terms of professional or social impact.  A rude truth is someone else will eclipse your work down the road.  True legacy is the character DNA you introduce to your family and others who live and work around you.  That DNA will exist in the background, profoundly influential in the lives of those who remain after you have gone. 
• Calculate the cost of the ‘big thing’ you have committed to pursuing with your life.  In the grand scheme of things, is it worth the price you are currently paying?  How could you pursue this differently?
• We have dreams to pursue but only today to do.  Don’t live in your future to the extent that you lose today, because today is all you have.

On Day 14 at the Albergue Meurelo, before I set out on my last day of walking the Camino, I reflected again on this theme and wrote:

“I am significant to God and of insignificance to man.  In the grand scheme of the world, I am a drop in the ocean.  That does not define me as an insignificant person, but it does pull me back from grandiose notions about my role in planetary impact.  Most of us live local lives.  That has nothing to do with value or significance in God’s eyes, because he knows our name & calls it out among the billions of people on this planet.”

Harv

Please DON'T 'Press On'

More lessons from the Camino. But first I must digress.

Vacations for our family were all about the destination.  Definitely not the journey.  Dad was the driver, and I don't just mean the noun.  He DROVE to the destination.  Breaks were few and far between.  If you didn't pee at the scheduled stops, there was a glass jar with a sealed top in the back seat you could use.  Good thing we were 5 boys.  Never was sure how it worked out for my mom!

No joy in the journey.  It was all about the destination.

I grew to be attracted to phrases and sentiments like "press on".  I even signed my emails with this phrase.  Not anymore.

·        This penchant for pushing and pressing on was one reason I ended up needing a sabbatical. (see my first blog in this Camino series).  One of the greatest ironies and insights I found in the first few days of walking the Camino was how my walking habits were a metaphor for my life, and they weren't working well for me.  What follows is lifted directly from my journal.  Its a bit raw and I apologize for the language, but it reflects the level of frustration I felt at my condition.

      Day 11.  Liendo, Spain.  Yet another blister dammit.  Enough of this.  Enough of walking in pain and toughing it out.  I have done enough of that in my life. This is such a metaphor for my life.  Time for shorter stints and talking care of my body.  The point of this sabbatical was to take care of myself.  Now I see that I have basically walked this Camino like I have lived my life: Is my soul or heart injured?  Tough it out. Keep walking. It’s admirable on the surface.  Its great leadership optics.  But it’s an UNACCEPTABLE WISDOM.  The cost is enduring pain, a limp and an inability to fully engage the journey in joy.  Shit.  I’ve done it again.  I walk wounded far too often.  Sometimes we cannot avoid walking with some pain but most times, I can and should slow the pace and even stop in order to recoup and then proceed.  What’s the rush anyway? My importance?  My significance to the project or the issue?  Oh how I over-inflate my importance, which then makes me plow through because “if not me, then who, and if not now, then when?”  God is the power.  I am the servant. He asks me to participate, as I am able.  I am not an indentured servant with a whip at my back.  So why do I live that way???

My 'walking metaphor' taught me some things applicable to the vocation of leadership:

I tolerated rocks in my shoes for too long. Instead of taking ONE minute out of a 6 hour walking day to deal with the inevitable rocks in my shoes, I'd usually set a goal and say: "Once I get there, then I'll stop". Then I'd get there and foolishly set another goal, without dealing with the rock. (What motivated me to do this is too deeply pathological to explain!) Bottom line: I'd plow ahead in pain to reach a goal, instead of stopping to deal with the irritant.

• Leadership Reflection: We all have the strength to press forward and ignore small irritants. But little irritants, left long enough, develop into significant obstacles. STOP and deal with the irritant, whether its physical, spiritual, or relational. Life just works better this way. It's not worth walking the rest of your journey with a limp, or worse not being able to walk it at all.

You don't have to walk so fast. I set out to walk at my own pace, but got caught up in the Camino Pilgrim Scramble to get to the next location quickly in order to ensure a place to stay for the night. (Hostels were first come first served). This race for the destination took over the pace I desired in order to walk freely and with joy. The race mentality meant I was losing out on the beauty of the surroundings, the pauses to enjoy Spanish culture and food, the views (o those views!) and the rest opportunities at beaches, cafe's or mountaintops.

• Leadership Reflection: How you walk the path set out before you is what, in the end, distinguishes you and creates your quality of life (more on this in a future blog). Is it that important that you leave the legacy of: "They got there first"? In this short life you have, it's just not worth losing out on the beauty and joy of living. A famously rich philosopher-king named Solomon wrote about this in Ecclesiastes. Read this Biblical book.

Do not tough it out. This is more than a 'rock in your shoes' moment, or about the times when the situation demands some personal grit and determination. It's about when you are exhausted and spent in your leadership but decide to press on anyway. Some days I chose to keep walking despite horrible blisters. I remember one day after a few days of toughing it out, another ailment emerged: a shin splint. But as you have probably gathered about me - I plowed on that whole day anyway and limped into a forced day of rest.

• Leadership Reflection: Too many leaders press on so hard that they are then forced to rest because of complete exhaustion. That's costly to them personally, to their organizations and to the purpose/objective for which they have committed their lives. Build a regular 'sabbath' into your life, a time to step away from everything. Not only will it afford a time for healing where you may be hurting, but it affords your mind body & soul space for renewal and strengthening.

Get a grip on your pace of life and get yourself out of the race of life.

Harv Matchullis 

Can't You Read The Sign?

   

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign
Blockin' out the scenery, breakin' my mind
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign?

5 Man Electrical Band 1970

Essential to the El Camino are its signs.

My choice to walk the Camino del Norte only using the signs set out along various places like roads, curbs, walls, buildings, bridges, and trees meant I had to be vigilant.  No map. No GPS.  I wanted to walk like a pilgrim of old, sans tech. There was actually an excitement to intuiting the path 'au naturel' and if necessary, facing the challenge of getting lost!

After 281 KM of this I concluded that when you are consciously watching for signs rather than having a GPS (read: cultural) voice tell you where to go, your skills of 'noticing' become heightened.

We live in a world where others set out signs for us to follow.  Their aim is to prescribe the way you should go.  Political, media, religious, vocational institutions and a host other forces in our lives regularly set out their signs, beckoning us to walk in their stated direction.

People are reading a lot of signs and reacting to them, but I contend we don't 'notice' them very well. Just watch your Facebook feed and the comments section.

To notice is to discern.  Discernment is the process of making careful distinctions in our thinking about the truth of those signs for us.  Discernment asks questions like:

• Is this sign pointing in the general direction of where I want to go?
• Does this sign make any sense being here, now?
• Based on the signs that have brought me to this place, can I trust this sign?
• Do I actually want to go where this sign will direct me?
• Where will I end up if I actually followed this sign?

Unfortunately it's now a rampant habit in our culture to latch on to a position and lock into ways of thinking and looking at the world.  Any signs pointing to potential new ideas, new routes and new ways of thinking/being can't be 'noticed' because our eyes have become unaccustomed to looking at a sign and discerning it's meaning.  Signs are given attention only as far as they fit our existing biases.

How can you 'see' a sign for its own merit and make a decision? Some of my thoughts from following Camino signs:

1. Define the signs you are looking for. Not all signs have to do with you or your journey.  On the Camino it's a yellow arrow.  The arrow exists in a few different formats, but there's a distinctiveness about it you recognize as a pilgrim.  Those arrows (among many other arrows on the route) were the ones that had a reference to my ultimate goal of reaching Santiago de Compostela.   Life is full of signs, but which ones matter to you?  Much depends on your reference points. If your life & goals are ill-defined, any sign will get you somewhere. Reminds me of a quote by Lily Tomlin - "I always wanted to be a somebody.  I just should have been more specific."
2. You can't see if you are not looking! That's a Captain Obvious declaration, but...  Early one morning as I left Lezama, Spain I walked behind a fellow pilgrim who was very agitated. He was on his phone with someone, frustrated he could not see the signs. Somehow he hoped a remote person on the other end of the line could help him see! The comical irony was while on the phone, he was regularly walking past the very signs pointing out his way! The need for speed kills insight, so slow down in order to really see.  My best advice - if you can't find the signs it's time to stop, retreat, and reorient yourself. It may be you have forgotten what signs to look for. In the rush of life, you can only see well when you have silenced your mind and calmed your spirit.
3. Beware the Crowd.  Once while walking through a city I saw a crowd of pilgrims a few blocks in front of me.  So, believing they were on the path I wanted to be on, I lowered my personal sign-seeking vigilance and followed them.  After all, safety in numbers!  In one instance however, that crowd took a collective wrong turn.  If it wasn't for a personal check in at that moment on my commitment to look for the signs for myself, I would have blissfully been wrong with them.  I stopped, saw the sign they missed, and turned. BEWARE. The crowd can be safe and helpful but it can also cause you to pay less attention to the signs laid out for your unique pilgrimage. Crowd-sourcing your direction in life will cause you to lose the awareness and discipline of looking for your signs.  An example from my vocational context is the production and use of commonly themed, large-scale training programs for Christians, and the one-way communicative patterns of most church's' public gatherings.  It can produce a version of 'group-think'.  As a result of the need and desire for orthodoxy (and orthopraxis), the Church inadvertently produces pilgrims who can only walk with the crowd. I see this revealed in the rhetoric of many who can spout off clichés, platitudes and simplistic responses to life issues they commonly learned in these contexts. They have not always learned the discipline of discerning the signs for themselves. Frankly this applies to our politics too. ATTENTION: We each must walk our own journey and make up our own minds. This is not a declaration of independence from human community or absolute truth. However there also exists a walk that is unique to you and Jesus. He will set out the signs for YOU.  Are you building capacity to see His signs for your unique journey?
4. Train your eyes.  You can fall out of the practice of noticing and might even become lazy at looking.  After I had taken a day-long break from walking, on my return to the Camino the next day I struggled for a while to re-adjust my eyes to searching for the signs.  When you stop seeking the signs that point you toward purpose and meaning (and that affirm you are on the right path) your eyes will cloud over and perhaps even become desensitized. A host of avoidable and unavoidable life circumstances will affect our vision.  We all deal at times with  stress, transition, resignation, exhaustion and even just struggling to survive. But if not careful we can become used to not looking for the signs that guide our ultimate journey of life. If you are in a break-time for whatever reason, your vision may be cloudy.  Make the choice to keep looking.  The signs are there.  You just have to see.

Signs, signs, everywhere there's signs,

Blocking out the scenery of your own beautiful life journey,

Breaking your God-given, unique mind!

Don't settle for other's voices of 'do this' or 'don't do that'

Can't you read the signs for your life?  

Harv Matchullis

The Way of Wilderness

A few km east of Santander, Spain

Authors note:  After a period of sporadic engagement with this blog, I'm back.  I begin with a series of thoughts and reflections stemming from my sabbatical experience in 2017.  For part of the sabbatical I took a (very) long walk to rest, rejuvenate and relax after a period of burnout.  That walk was on the Camino del Norte in Northern Spain.  281 Km in 15 days along the mountainous coast along the Bay of Biscay.  Though I was still in the dry and cracked personal and leadership wilderness, I encountered the incredible beauty of this natural wilderness...and found Jesus waiting for me there.

If you have not yet walked into a personal wilderness, you will.

My story:

I WAS DONE.

For 34+ years I  have been a Christian ministry leader in Canada and around the world.  I thought I was resilient and indefatigable, but I had reached a breaking point.  For many reasons I found myself in a new landscape - a dry, barren wilderness of mind, soul and body.  I told my ministry board in Feb of 2017 : "I am done.  I'm exhausted physically & emotionally. While I can still 'see' into the future of this ministry, I am completely disconnected.  Professionally I can still perform, but its like I am having an out of body experience each time I speak or serve.  I can do it, but I am an autobot.  I can't go on and I don't know what to do".

With that I declared my leadership bankruptcy.  I had no plan of what to do. The first and only act I knew to do at that point was finally admit it.  Yet it took a long time.  I am fiercely independent and a 'press on' kind of guy, so this was a monumental admission.  There was no plan on my part for what was next, but I knew if I didn't take the first step of personal acknowledgement, I truly was 'done'.  Time to exit ministry and maybe even faith. It was that bad.

My board graciously granted me (and worked hard to provide) a 3 month sabbatical.  I owe them a great deal.  To my board - if you are reading this - I am humbled and indebted to your faith and courage to make this happen.  I know it wasn't easy organizationally. You did the right thing.


On my flight from Canada to start the El Camino in Spain I started reading Eugene Petersen's "The Jesus Way".  How serendipitous.  "El Camino" in Spanish means "The Way".  One quote pierced into my personal situation:

"Wilderness time.  Desert time.  Time to see the way of Jesus tested against the devils' way.  Time to  feel the terrible pull of temptation away from Jesus' way and realize it is a temptation to embrace illusion and to believe a lie.  Time to become aware of the immense and hidden abyss between the way of Jesus and the way of Satan." (pg 30).

Jesus was deliberately tested in a wilderness to determine if He would choose to act according to the ways of His Father or the way offered by Satan (Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 4). Jesus, the Son of God was led into a wilderness experience.  Did you read that correctly?  He was led into it.  A wilderness.  Deliberately.  By God. I emphasize these things because while at times I beat myself up for ever getting to the point of burnout and 'wilderness', my experience was not beyond the purposeful intentions of God for my testing and maturing.

On the road of leadership are tests.  Often wilderness is the context where God administers those tests.  In the wilderness you are stripped down to the essentials.  Survival becomes paramount.  What's most important comes into a focus you likely have never before experienced, because your very survival depends on that level of clarity.

My wilderness experience was a time to feel at a core level just how much I had embraced the illusion and lie that personal leadership skill and effort was the means to accomplish the mission of God in this world. I had plunged into the abyss between the way of Jesus and the way of Satan.

Jesus is our 'Camino'. He is our Way.  Jesus as the Way also means that the ways of Jesus are a part of the Way.  Once you have abandoned doing things according to His ways, you have succumbed to an illusion and believed the lie of Satan.  Over time, I had developed my own 'way' - driving to the ends according to my own means.  My ways were respectable and frankly, a reflection of  Western Christian leadership culture and expectations. Optically it all looked good.  The industry of Christian leadership training & seminars would affirm my approaches.  People went along with my tactics.  However, behind this illusion was a self-determined striving that lead to cynicism, emotional distance and a soul-sucking emptiness as a Christian leader.  When you live in contradiction to the Jesus way, even while trying to serve His purposes, those are the results.

Are you headed for a wilderness?  Are you already in one?  At the risk of over simplification, I offer  4 starting thoughts for your wilderness journey.

1. Don't beat yourself up over it.  Jesus is there and He is intending to test you.  Surrender to the lessons that will confront you.
2. Be courageous and admit where you are. Stop 'sucking it up' and plowing forward. You can do it for a while but at some point you will implode.  Your mind, body and soul were not built for that level of stress.  Something is gonna give.
3. Confront your fears around vulnerability and tell someone. I told my wife before anyone else, but she saw it long before I admitted it.  It was also hard, but necessary to eventually tell those who shared leadership with me.
4. Surrender any sense of control over what's next.  You are likely in this place because of control issues.  Jesus' full intent is to shift control from you to Him. (That truth easily rolls off our preacher-tongues.  It does not so easily show up in our daily service to the Master).

Much more to come...I'd love to interact with you if this is useful to you. Sign up for this blog to get regular updates, leave a comment or contact me personally at hbmatch@gmail.com

Harv Matchullis
...still leading, but from a different posture...