Hello. Thanks for stopping by. If you would like to learn more about personal and organizational change, why not subscribe to the RSS feed. Or, if you're old school, Bookmark This Site

It’s time to share my story. So much of blogging is about the personal within the community that I’ve decided to get a little more personal about who I am and why I’m here.

Whenever someone decides to devote a significant amount of time to one fairly narrow area of inquiry – say, personal and organizational change – you kind of have to ask why. What’s the motivation for me to spend so much time on this when I could be curled up with a good novel or watching Harry Potter movies?

For the last week I’ve been thinking about my life story. I’ve begun to realize that many of the events I’ve been through and many of the experiences that I’ve sought out have led me down this very path. Now, I’m not in to sensationalistic public confessions (and I haven’t done anything all that sensationalistic in my life, anyway), but it seems to me that it would provide a lot of context to my readers if I were to share some of this perspective.

A Child Apart
“If there is anything we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.” Carl Jung

I was an only child for the first 3.5 years of my life. It was great. I had my parents’ undivided attention, a huge yard to play in, lots of presents, and the feeling of entitlement that many only children have.

Then my mother had twins.

I love my little sisters to death and I’m grateful every day that I have them in my life, now. At the time of their birth, however, I was unwillingly forced to learn my first hard lessons about change management. All of the sudden, everything in my world was different and I didn’t like it one bit. I’m quite sure that my lifelong interest in change was born on my sisters’ birthday.

The other interesting thing about having twin sisters is that my relationship with them will always be radically different from their relationship with each other. I’m not sure that anyone who isn’t a twin could possibly understand what it feels like to have an exact genetic copy of you running around in this world. From their first attempts at noise-making all the way up to now, they have their own way of communicating with each other. It’s a language I don’t speak, but I’ve always been curious about it.

Observing my sisters’ interactions was probably my first experience of research. I wasn’t a part of them, so the only thing I could do was stand apart and watch. This was a normal thing for me and it spilled over into lots of areas of my life. I was a curious kid and spent a lot of my childhood reading, looking at bugs and trees outside, and creating stories.

In a lot of ways, none of that has changed.

Music & Patterns
“Every Good Boy Does Fine” The Treble Clef

I was lucky enough to go to a school that hadn’t yet cut all music, gym, and art programs. My elementary school music teacher was a fantastic educator who truly loved music and teaching children. He taught us to read music, sing, keep time, and have fun with it all. Between those early classes and the gift of an incredibly cheap guitar from my aunt, I was soon asking for guitar lessons.

I took lessons on and off for a number of years until I got to be a pretty decent guitar player. After a while I began writing songs, which gave me the chance to work on combining words and music. A few years of this helped me notice that music is fundamentally a combination of patterns. Certain patterns of notes/sounds are pleasing to the human ear, while other patterns sound dissonant. This isn’t all that different from patterns of events. In the course of our lives, certain events are very comfortable and familiar, while those that deviate from those usual patterns are challenging and uncomfortable.

Like most people, I didn’t like the challenging and uncomfortable events that occurred in those days. I had a lot of anger problems as a kid and I was brutally hard on myself for even the most minor mistake. My family went through some challenging economic times and I took a lot of responsibility on myself for problems that I didn’t cause and couldn’t solve. Internalizing all of these negative emotions took a toll on my and I’ve had to deal with that ever since.

Fortunately, I never lost my curiosity and ability to step outside of myself and observe the world around me. This talent has served me well, as I’ll explain in future posts.

Ed. Note: If you can’t tear yourself away, continue on to Part 2.

Photo courtesy of cnw.