A Resilient Personality: The Power of Adapting to Reality

At one of our favourite spots to park and walk around in shallow sandy water, there is a sign telling boaters that the speed limit is nine and that it’s a no-wake zone. It’s also a dead end.

As one Seadoo blasted by, rocking our beached boat and threatening to set it adrift, I yelled and pointed to the sign, which was unfortunately off-kilter.

The operator responded by nodding, but not slowing his pace.

As we waited for him to come back out, we wondered where the cops were today and whether this guy had his operator’s card.

On his way back out, his pace was even faster, presumably to get by me faster, as I yelled and made angry gestures at him.

After the opportunity was over, I remembered what you are supposed to do. I got out my phone.

The very next people were going at the appropriate super-slow pace. “Is everything alright?” they asked.

“Just enjoying the shade,” I responded with a happy smile.

If I had a YouTube account, I’d post videos of the two for comparison with the caption, “Who’s the Canadian?”

To me, it’s super obvious.

In snowmobiling, if you see someone on the side of the trail, it’s common courtesy to ask if everything is alright. Sometimes, they need gas, or a tool, or a direction. You never know if they are just taking a break until you ask.

The opportunity to be helpful to a fellow human is something that I think of as Canadian, yet, in the wrong place, that kind of approach makes you an easy target.

Dysfunctional Tendencies

This is just another reason why I don’t live in a city. I want to be my sweet, helpful self, not my cynical, protective one.

Cities have become overrun with people, unable to deal with that many. There are not enough jobs, houses, or food. There is not enough charity for those who need it. Why is there a need for charity at all?

This is our Canada – so bloated that fundamental Canadian behaviours are dysfunctional ways to live. It’s a time when you have to question your natural-born tendencies and rein them in – a harsh truth at a time when Pride festivities have bloated into unrestrained celebrations of all things carnal. Cities can keep all that, too.

Sad realities, and this isn’t the Canada I want to celebrate.

I want Canada to be kind and respected, not how we are currently seen on the world stage and not what we’ve been called.

Difficult. Almost criminal. Cold and callous.

This year is the first year I’ve noted the absence of fireworks. Normally, I look forward to and love watching the display. I’ve filmed it in prior years. Yet, it makes sense to me that it’s gone. Not everyone, including the animals, appreciated it, but everyone was subjected to it. By that reality, it wasn’t fair.

But it did bring people together, and nothing has filled this space yet. Maybe my “yet” is overly hopeful, but I believe nature abhors a vacuum. My fear is that the vacuum has already been filled with something else, fatal to Canada’s personality.

Or at least as I knew it.

Questionable Uses of Power

When the next boat approached a little too fast, I was ready. I pointed my phone like a gonzo journalist and waited.

Immediately, the boat slowed to the appropriate pace and went by silently. Faces pointed deliberately the other way. There was nothing to see here, nothing worth posting or commenting on.

The next boat, though, did no such thing. As they sped by me, I yelled, “No wake zone, eh? Don’t worry, I’ve got the proof and your registration number. I’ll let the cops deal with you.”

In response, the boat immediately turned left. Shocked, we both watched to see if they could unbeach themselves, churning up sand as they did.

Apparently, they did not know that the green and red buoys straight ahead marked the safe channel through the many sandbars and shallow waters. Maybe that question wasn’t on the test. Maybe you are allowed to get one wrong and still get your operator’s card. I don’t yet know.

While I do have the video, but I might delete it without action because I’m not a gonzo journalist or a cop. I think karma was swift, and appropriate lessons were learned.

I learned that I love the power that pointing a phone provides, but I also know that, like all power, it can be both coveted and misused.

These days, children grow up knowing that power. I wonder how they are trained to manage it. What did they learn when the bank accounts of protesters were frozen?

What can you learn when people are afraid to speak freely? I was shocked to learn that I’d downloaded a government app that was a Trojan horse designed to collect my data. But most people won’t learn that because it’s not covered in the mainstream media.

Hiding in Plain Sight

One boater asked, “Do you know if it’s safe to get down here?”

When they heard the reply, they posed my partner’s name like it was a question. He laughed. No one recognizes him until he speaks. That is to say, they know his voice but not his face.

When you wear your name on your shirt every day, people read your name every day. When you are speaking to them about expensive, complex things, they are thinking about that when you are speaking and not your face. Just like that, you can hide in plain sight if you can remain silent.

But when you are the only one who knows the answer, you must speak up. It’s merely Canadian to put the needs of others before their own shallow desires. Or isn’t it?

It shocks me that people couldn’t see what was coming when Carney was running. Back then, it was discovered that he would “quietly fold” right after the election, as he has done. Yet somehow, people voted for him.

Was it faith in fairy tales? The fairy tale that we were in a crisis and he’d save us? A negotiating genius who’d stand firm against Trump, only to fold to every demand? Was it bills that silence and scare Canadians into not saying a word, and not sharing what they read?

When the question is “Is it safe?” the answer is never a simple yes or no. Safe passage is always a matter of how, and the only one who can tell you is someone who’s been there and back, three times.

The first is beginner’s luck. The second is a fluke. The third is the kind of proof that should make you stop, pay attention, and take some notes.

Throughout my career, twice, I was allowed to work to my personal strengths. Every other time, I was restricted and constrained by the expectations and demands of how I’d work. Until I hired myself, that is.

The first time, they knew and realized the fit would be fine because every relationship was one-on-one. When I worked as a Black Belt, I did it the same way – one-on-one.

I didn’t form a team and chair meetings like everyone else. I wasn’t a “project manager.” When I needed the answer to a question, I decided who would best answer it, and I’d ask that specific person. If three people each had parts of the answer, I’d ask them separately.

On project completion, I was given a budget to award my team. I went around and handed out gift certificates to perplexed people. I told them, “If anyone asks, say you were on my team.”

The second time, no one was watching me or trying to control me because I was expected to fail. That might be how I got away with it the first time, too, but this time I was aware of the line of failed attempts in front of me.

For the second time around, I managed completely differently than everyone else.

Instead of individual conversations, I had to meet the team together, since the team was the problem, not the individual players, or a simple machine, like in the first case. This time, I spent one week with them, and then the next week, totally alone. Or rather, back to one-on-one conversations as needed.

After a few months, I extended it to one week with them and two weeks alone because the team’s tentacles had grown exponentially, and I needed time to plan and recover.

Skewered by Success

I did a good enough job to be promoted to a position on an agile team, requiring face-to-face team participation all day, every day. As you can guess, I didn’t last long before I ran out of energy.

As an introvert, people are energy vampires to me. They drain me to exhaustion and I need time to recover. It’s physical and I can’t do anything about it. I’ve tried.

When I don’t get the time and hit empty, unhealthy ways occur unconsciously to ensure that I’m left alone. I explode, lose my temper, become rude and demanding to be around, start sniping and criticizing everyone and everything…I think you get the drift. It’s not who I want to be.

I’m afraid of losing myself around others. I agree to things that I don’t actually want or like to go along with others and what they want, only to end up later in places I had tried so hard to avoid. I need time alone to carve out my boundaries, insights, and intuitions. Around others, they are lost.

It took me fifty years to find myself amid all that noise of society and other people. I know I won’t get lost again, but I do know that I was lost.

Unhealthy ways aren’t good for me or anyone.

This need for solitude isn’t a medical condition but something I’ve learned to carefully manage. I need the freedom to be able to do so. In my whole career, again, only twice. It’s a world of extroverts out there, and they think everyone should work in teams together, a 24/7 party.

Kill me now.

Stigmatized by Solitude

One time, I tried to kill myself because I couldn’t find a different way to avoid spending the weekend on my boss’s boat with my coworkers. Yep, that bad. Instead of the boat, I spent the weekend in the loony bin.

Teams should not be forced on every employee as the only way to get work done. Far from it. You are paralyzing half your workforce.

Half the population is introverted, and if your workforce reflects the same diversity as the population, then half is the case. Maybe you screen out all introverts, which is just discrimination and not a good idea because introverts are where you are going to get ideas.

When it comes to introversion, I am keeping none of the truth of it to myself. This is a curtain that needs to fully come down so that people can recognize themselves and others.

Extroverts should recognize that their thinking out loud is drowning out other people who have already done their thinking and are ready to share. It’s not productive to keep the introverts waiting while the extroverts catch up.

Worse, when extroverts are running the show, introverts don’t even get to chime in with their ideas, and then everyone is off and going after some half-baked idea because there is no way a conversation can cover all the sides of an issue with appropriate depth.

As someone who has been in an overabundance of those meetings with a desire, attempt, and agenda to introduce a better way to arrive at a decision, I confess I hardly ever succeeded. My extroverted colleagues didn’t even try.

To them, the “best” decision was defined in a completely different way—a way that involved people and had nothing to do with ideas.

Saved by Status

During my first Black Belt course, I was the only one granted an exception to the criteria of level and status. Where everyone else had ten years of experience, I had two.

I was only two years out of university. Classrooms were still a fresh memory.

In one of the modules on statistics, each table was challenged to answer a series of questions as a group. I flew through the answers. My speed must have upset someone else at my table, who said to me, “Go take a long walk!”

It sucks when you are used to status and seniority and you are out of your element. Just watch Carney’s face as he goes from the experience of a CEO who has all the power to the candidate being questioned by reporters. He seems to think, how dare they, as he asks CBC’s Rosemary Barton to “look inside” herself.

How you expect people to respond to you is your personal reality. It’s no mistake that your personality is deeply entrenched in how you perceive reality. Is that reporter out to get you, or is she baiting you for information that the public needs to know while giving you the freedom to respond in any way you choose?

What if you didn’t believe in the status and rank of people as superior or inferior, and simply as equal souls? Then you wouldn’t have a high horse from which to fall.

If people can recognize you by your personality, you might be far too concrete to survive should your situation change.

Embracing New Realities

Change how you see the world, and the world you see changes with you.

One day you might be cynical, outspoken, and alarming, and another day, you might be sweet, silent, and invisible. There may be years in between these two days, but time passes anyway. To get there more quickly, check out my downloads.