A Vision Story (Part One)

“You don’t look excited,” the nurse practitioner said to me.

“I really, really want this baby,” I replied, “and I have no idea how I am going to manage adding a third child [into the mix of my life].”

I had been in my role (first as incoming and then as official) CEO for six months when I found out I was pregnant.

Before accepting this role, I had spent several months trying to get clear on what I wanted for my life and work after spending ten years caring for, tending to, and working my ass off to support someone else’s vision.

As I networked (like it was my job) with an incredible array of professional experiences under my belt, people kept asking me, “But what do you want (to do)?”

And the truth was, I had no idea. Because I had spent my whole life doing the next logical thing. Graduate high school. Go to college. Go to law school. Get a job. Build systems and processes and general ledgers from scratch in a real estate startup where “sink or swim” was the training program.

By the time I left that company after ten years, I had managed maintenance, property managers, leasing agents, interns, insurance, marketing, IT, budgeting and reporting, and lease drafting and lease enforcement for our entire real estate portfolio. I had been first line of response to literal fires, floods and just about everything in between.

Up until the point when I reorganized myself out of that career with no back-up plan in place, I had given all of my energy, time and attention to trying to meet someone else’s expectations of me. Spoiler Alert: It was a fool’s errand but that doesn’t mean I didn’t give it my absolute all for ten years. I can be tenacious to a fault.

After nine months outside the gaze of my former boss and intentional time trying to get to know the woman I was then, I had a lot of clarity as I stepped into this CEO role in a leadership development organization for girls.

I was clear on who I aspired to be as a leader (and who I was determined not to be).

I was clear on what type of support I would need (both from myself and from others) in order to be able to show up as that leader with resilience, consistency, and in alignment with my values.

I had a clear vision for what this organization would become and how I wanted to engage our stakeholders to bring that vision to life.

And before the house of cards shifted under my foundation a few years later, we were doing the damn thing.

We integrated three legacy organizations behind a clear organizational vision, mission, values and strategic priorities.

We shifted the culture (a job whose work is never done but an effort in which we were making measurable strides).

We redesigned everything from program delivery to financial systems and policies to customer service efforts to volunteer management policies to internal leadership development processes.

I was being asked to sit on panels, participate in strategic planning, and facilitate conversations at the meetings of our chartering organization.

If you have never carried out wholesale change in an organization, you might not know that every single day is a lesson in grounded, focused, resilience.

We had thousands of stakeholders. Volunteers who had been in the organization for decades and who had strongly held opinions about every move. These volunteers were voting members of the organization and had to approve certain major governance decisions like the make-up of our board of directors (my boss) and the sale of property.

Many of these volunteer members had not had the opportunity to learn the leadership, communication and conflict resolution skills that we were now trying to teach our staff and the girls we served. We were shifting from a rules based, highly tactical organization to a vision and values based strategic organization. Everyone was being asked to play a new game in a new way.

I am not sure retelling the stories of the behavior(s) we navigated within that setting serves a purpose now. But to give an idea of the internal resistance we faced at every level, perhaps it is enough to say that I stood in front of the room of these same volunteers during one Annual Meeting and said “I have never seen an organization so willing to eat its own young.”

At the same time, we were under regular threat from outside efforts–from church leaders to radio hosts–to craft a destructive narrative about our values and intentions. I found myself sitting across the table from powerful religious leaders and responding to comments and questions from some of my own Facebook friends either perpetuating or asking me if the narrative was true. It wasn’t.

The first noticeable shift in my capacity to hold all of this–and to also be a mom, a wife (whose husband worked most weekends), and a daughter to a mother who had by then been living with cancer for a decade–happened when I found out I was pregnant with my third child.

After that initial interaction with the nurse practitioner, I spent the entire pregnancy talking to mom about what resources I was going to pull into my own life to keep me afloat (including how I was going to fit another human into our 1600 sq. ft. house without the walls completely closing in on me).

It is important to note here that it never occurred to me to talk to my husband about my fear and overwhelm. The dynamic in our marriage for a long time had been that I caught every ball that he didn’t (financial, medical, the house, the kid bedtime routine, etc). I hold shared responsibility for perpetuating that dynamic. I came up with solutions and implemented them. I didn’t consult. I made decisions and put things into motion.

I showed signs of preterm labor at 28 weeks pregnant and was put on bed rest. I continued to manage our ongoing organizational strategic planning process and my team from home.

I made a grievous error at 37 weeks pregnant when, in my panic about impending labor and concern that we were headed down a path organizationally without the right resources and structure, I overrode a commitment I had made to our still forming team and communicated that shift via email; basically breaking every rule in the playbook I had been co-writing with them since my arrival about a year earlier.

The day before I had my son, I spent in relational repair … apologizing for the breach of trust and recommitting to following through on the process we had started.

I drove myself to the hospital in hard labor with my son in the early hours of the next morning. I don’t remember a whole lot about those next early months of my son’s life (but I can tell you that it is possible to drive down the interstate and pump breast milk at the same time).

Come back tomorrow for Part Two of the story …

Love,
Booth