Q & A part two, the ultimate safe test

Question: Your blog has focused much on the mechanics of your experience (with more than a few perceived & probably real moments of abject terror)... As your fellow LPD alum, i am interested in what ways you've used LPD & other tools to feel, process, berate, transform your emotional, spiritual & mental self to better heal. How have these combined (or not) with Sawyer's support?

This is such a rich question that I have had a dickens of a time responding. I hope to honor the thoughtfulness with which it was proffered with an equal amount of thoughtfulness, which has necessitated several weeks' rumination.

For all of you outside my business school coven, LPD stands for "Leadership and Personal Development", a core class taken for six terms at Bainbridge Graduate Institute, where many of you know I completed an MBA in sustainable business last June. One of BGI's core tenets (where it differs from a "traditional" MBA) is in believing that students developing authentic interpersonal flexibility is probably the paramount skill for a future leader, or at least just as important as any one set of so-called "hard skills". To that end, we did a lot of work independently and in small groups, read a lot of books on "leadership" that really were about the deeply personal journey of understanding ones own worldview, ego, fundamental values, and motivations. Some of it was highly uncomfortable. For me, it often felt like a smashup between a recovery program and improv class: pretty enjoyable in the moment as I could just riff and go on instinct. Despite my light approach, hard truths kept emerging, like flotsam after a low tide. This work might have been more instrumental in my education and growth than the accounting/entrepreurship class. I truly needed both.

That was a long preamble to talk about that work and what it has to do with this whole cancer shebang.

There were many specific catch-phrases/concepts learned during that work that I could easily apply to my current situation. I would happily discuss them at length with any BGI-er who wouldn't first require a day-long session to learn the nomenclature.

However, one of the notions I keep coming back to, which i think the general public can conceptually run with is the "safe test". This is a tool to use to test ones long-held notions, to gently nudge them to see where their boundaries are permeable. In doing this work with some purposefulness, we often find these notions are assumptions which have calcified into personal "truths" we hold very tight, to the necessary exclusion of other truths. It follows that this "stuff" (for dire lack of more specific terms) is a collection of protective measures picked up in family-of-origin moulding, or during formative (typically painful) times in life. Pretty basic therapy fodder.

An example of a safe test would be for a person who believed that they were "shy" to plan a small act or gesture that they associate with non-shyness in a manner in which the consequences were slight enough that a perceived failure wouldn't tax their confidence significantly. Being purposeful about the planning and evaluating of the safe test is part of the learning. It's sort of like treating a phobia. Hate snakes? First look at pictures of snakes, then go to a zoo, etc. etc. working up to holding a snake.

For me, it has been super interesting to lean into scenarios that nearly all of us humans - young and old - push into the darkest reserves of our mind. In a word: death.

Safe test requires the sense that the consequences are tolerable, which is interesting, because I've never been as close to death as I am now. Of course, I have no way of knowing if this is actually true, but I have allowed myself to go there.

The safe test goes something like this:

If I am going to die, how do I really want to spend my day?

Asking myself this question daily yields the following revelation: there is not one consequence in acting authentically as myself, for myself, that is too scary to face.

This is the amazing gift you get when you get to tango with mortality. I've tasted it before, for sure. In my most evolved moments I think I could even hold onto it for a few days a time, but life and the constellation of learned behaviors and assumption always crowds back in to fill the space, complicating the beautiful simplicity with "stuff".

Fear of death is natural, instinctual and self-preserving. But I've been realizing that what most of us routinely engage in is more like fear of life.

How did that happen?

It's been my thought that my whole life leading up to my diagnosis had prepared me to deal with it, and the work I did with LPD was sort of a "master" level of study.

But like any "master" knows, getting to the recognized top level of skill is really when you accept the invitation to dive into a realm that is unfathomably larger than what you've already accomplished.

I'm really there right now, with my sniff, nuzzle, caress, tickle etc. of the concept of mortality. It's wayyyyyyyy bigger than what I'm grokking at this moment, and yet the more I "safe test" my assumptions the less I feel like I'm free-falling. Or more accurately, the more I feel safe in the free fall.

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If you've waded through this whole post, I congratulate you. (It may just be you and me left here, p. rost). It is incredibly difficult to articulate this stuff, and for good reason. A lot of it just exists beyond words.

I'll end by again expressing my gratefulness for all this experience has given me.