Stand in Your Own Truth

I can remember early on in my corporate career, amid a restructure that happened swiftly with a new guy suddenly at the helm one morning and several new faces around the Director’s table, I read a quote about speaking truth to power. I can’t remember the quote exactly, but it gave me courage to speak out in an attempt to influence the inevitable management restructure that was about to follow, and the allocation of resources.

In my corporate guise, I was a staunch advocate for the customers’ experience. However, generally speaking this was usually outweighed as a topic of discussion around the top table in favour of whatever the latest and greatest upgrades were in that company or organisation’s offer (with little regard to how it mapped to the overall customer journey and experience) and the vast and pervasive arena of financial tracking and cost cutting.

However, I felt compelled to speak my truth and quickly put together a paper for consideration; drawing the links between the service, the customer experience and the balance sheet, and carefully placed it on each director’s desk before anyone else arrived that next morning.

I’ll admit I was nervous. It felt like I was being naughty because I hadn’t asked anyone’s permission to do it, my boss wasn’t aware of it, though I did give him an apologetic smile and a heads’ up on his way through to his office where he found the same paper on his own desk.

The fact is, had I of sought permission, it’s highly likely it would have been denied since everyone was wary of the new head honcho and, even then, I knew the glaringly obvious fact that people don’t generally like to stick their neck out and speak their truth.

Given that the paper was bereft of any blame, it simply focused on the facts and objectives, there was no big backlash for or from my boss. There were some minor gains as a result. However, what I was naïve about at the time, was that I wasn’t speaking my truth to the real power. The new guy at the helm wasn’t really the head honcho, these guys were just players in the game, as vulnerable to losing their job as I was.

Yet here I found myself, many years later, no longer in a corporate structure and just as nervous about speaking my truth. Let me tell you about it and then I will share how life conspired to give me clarity and courage.

Over the last four years our family have started their journey through education. Entrusting our kids to anyone else is a big leap of faith as parents, the teacher-child relationship is among the most influential in our lives, and so we had chosen a system of education that we felt was closer to our own values than the default state system.

What I was completely unprepared for was the relentless ambush the parents and children face on their time and attention both within and beyond the curriculum, which is quite contrary to the founding pedagogy. While these are usually in support of activities and events that children enjoy, the harm comes from the fact that it is often requires time most parents these days do not have and most harmfully of all, it is all stemming from the school community, leaving little for anything outside of that.

Yet, in today’s world, where most of us are no longer living in the communities where we were born and raised, there is a bigger world outside school that we have to connect with and is healthy for us to do so. This is the world in which one’s family lives in other parts of the country or other parts of the world; and it’s important that there is freedom to connect with places, people, and other rich and rewarding activities and events that are not generated by the school community.

There is, of course, most significantly, the world within that we all need time to connect to. With so much of their time prescribed already within the school day, I feel children must be given time and space in which they can feel into themselves again, and to begin to become aware of who they are and what their true preferences are in life.

So with these gallant observations made, you may imagine some of the colourful conversations I have had with the school over these last years. I’ve often talked about my own anguish and self growth that has resulted through these articles, most usefully teaching me the value of saying yes to the things I can freely and joyfully, and no to anything else (making me a rather low contributor).

Then as I was watching the series finale of Grey’s Anatomy, I was struck by something the character Meredith Grey said “Let me clean up my own mess, stand in my own truth. What I did was wrong, but what I was trying to remedy was so much more wrong, and I stand by that”

It started me thinking about standing in one’s own truth. Unlike the character in Grey’s Anatomy I haven’t done anything wrong, yet I was feeling like I had. I was feeling like a victim and et, at the same time, I was feeling like the naughty kid again.

Yes, it is true that there was little – if anything – in the way of information about all the contribution and activity required that would have helped inform our decision before embarking on this educational journey. I have encouraged the school to look at this more, even created information documents for parents that I would have found useful, which were welcomed in words but not used in practice.

Having had a look at articles and forums across the globe where parents voice their insights, I believe this to be something of an inherent issue with this type of education rather than a localized one. It is also true that, for the moment, this is still the best schooling available for our kids within our locality. So, knowing I need to get in a better place on my feelings in this matter, I thought about what I can do positively rather than negatively.

​Rather serendipitously a podcast interviewing Fleet Maull popped up in my inbox. Fleet was talking about his book Radical Responsibility. While serving a 14-year prison sentence for drug trafficking in a maximum security facility, Fleet had come to understand there was no power in blame, and so had begun the process of self empowerment by asking “what can I do?”

It wasn’t hard to see the alignment, nor the theme of disempowerment to empowerment that I was attracting, I’m also reading Gregory David Roberts novel Shantaram at the moment. Roberts, like his lead character, is a former heroin addict and convicted bank robber who escaped from an Australian prison and found himself in India; in every way.

Both Fleet Maul and Gregory David Roberts’ circumstances were far more extreme and disempowering than my own, but it is often in these extremes answers can be found. Both men realised that that they could blame any number of factors for where they had ended up in life but, instead, both decided to get off the blame train and start to see their own part in what had happened and how they could more forwards more positively.

I was also listening to an interview with Mind Coach Vex King, who talked about his own process when he is triggered by something. Rather than respond from a point of anger, he instead focuses on his breathing and goes for a walk to lower his heart rate and distract himself out of the flight or fight response, allowing for more clarity in his thinking. It was also a good reminder that it is not helpful to vent as that further entrenches the victim thinking,

So with all of this in mind I decided it was time to speak my truth and to advocate to power. First I had to identify who that power is. The intended audience is the thought leaders and policy makers that globally shape that system of education today, but with the system having grown organically over decades and each school operating independently across the world, it took a while to assemble a reasonable list.

It also took me a while to devise a suitable advocacy piece with the main thrust being “less is more”.  I feel the saving grace of this system of education is that most state school systems in the Western world have not evolved either, so many parents are looking at alternatives. But I want them to be an alternative that lives up to the central theme, which is to enable students as fully as possible to choose and, in freedom, to realize their individual path through life as adults.

In short, in a world that desperately needs less vying for our attention, I want the schools to do less in order to be more in support of the awakening of human consciousness.

I was clear in my mind, with thanks to reminders from Fleet Maul and Gregory David Roberts, that appropriating blame is entirely unhelpful. I can see most people within the system are doing the best they can in oftentimes trying circumstances so, in order to evolve education, I had to step outside of that mentality.

A friend asked what I was expecting as a result. The answer that came to me was truly inspired by wisdom beyond that in my head. Am I expecting anyone – especially one vested in a particular system of education- to think "wow, we've been doing it wrong all this time!" ... no... but little drops do make an ocean, and it is on these seas we sail that slowly carve our landscapes.

So the real answer is I’m not expecting anything immediate, change out there is likely to be slow. My family will likely continue to experience the onslaught of requests for our attention, and I will continue to stand in my truth, making the best decisions I can in the moment in support of that.

But something else has changed immediately. I feel elated to have spoken my truth, free of the burden of blame on someone else. I no longer feel like a victim and I will do what I can each step of the way to honour that place within me that knows the most important thing I can all do is to stand in my own love and truth.

​As I believe German author and poet Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914) said Es gibt in Wahrheit kein letztes Verständnis ohne Liebe which, translated, means There is, in truth, no last understanding without love. When we step outside of the victim- perpetrator-rescuer scenario and stand instead in a place of self love and empowerment, then we are truly standing in our truth.

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