Find Meaning or Make Meaning?

I've been traveling a lot recently, working with a range of people up and down Australia's east coast, here in Perth, in WA's North West, and in South East Asia and have been involved in some great conversations about emotions, life's unexpected kicks and twists, incivility and conflict, morale and motivation, good bosses, bad bosses and jerks at work... in these conversations, I've been asked a number of times, 'How do you find meaning in work when X happens?' 

In this question X can be any number of things - from being restructured again...and yet again; no-one appreciates what you do; your boss /coworkers / colleagues don't care or treat you badly; you are only going to have to do the same routine, boring stuff over and over again; when your marriage falls apart; people let you down; your company is taken over; bad people get promotions and good people get exploited abused etc...

I wish I had an easy answer to this. I don't... though I do have a simple one. 

Reading Victor Frankl, Harold Kushner then meeting and working with an emergency aid worker on  a project in the remote North-West where we had time at the end of the day to sit and yarn about life, death and loss... at a time when I was still struggling to come to terms with my 12 year old son's death from leukemia, and my own face-to-face encounter with cervical cancer 12 months later...  I learned to ask myself two questions: 

1. 'What am I making of this?' 
2. 'How's that working for me?'
   

Before I started asking myself these questions, I thought meaning was something in the event itself, something that was outside somewhere, something that had to be found like a nugget of gold... and I'd searched long and hard for it out there, only to find nothing... nada... nix... and I was getting pretty down and very dirty about it! 

Yarning with my aid worker colleague one evening about how African women can possibly survive the death of not just one child, but two, three...ALL their children... it suddenly dawned on me that I was making meaning of my experiences and the meaning I was making was that this was personal... that this was all about me! 

The questions I yelled at the sky some nights (Why me?! Why my son!?! Why us?! Why did this happen to us!?!? What did we do to deserve this!?!) had at their heart a belief that my loss and pain was somehow directed at me.... 

This was the meaning I was making of things. 

And this meaning was making me miserable. Really miserable.

Yarning under the Milky Way with Bernard, I realised that I had been incredibly fortunate, privileged, to have enjoyed my son for 11 years without ever having that enjoyment darkened by the fear, that he would, in all probability, die before me. 

Until his sudden and unexpected diagnosis, I had lived, loved and parented him and our daughter, relaxed in the assumption that he'd outlive me. I had never realised what a rare privilege that assumption was. 

Listening to my aid worker colleague, and realising for the first time, that many, if not the majority, of women on this planet, live, love & parent their children in the full knowledge that they will likely lose them to illness, war or starvation, in childhood or adolescence, shocked me deeply. 

And woke me up to the stunning realisation that my way of thinking, my Why me?, was shockingly arrogant. 

I had, without realising it, turned the personal pain of loss and illness into something that was about me, directed AT me. 

The meaning I'd made was that these events were personal. And this meaning I'd made of things was making it impossible for me to move on.

I started wondering 'Why not me?' and this turned out to be a much more helpful question... it led me to question assumptions that I was somehow above the realities of life on this planet (I'd never realised I'd thought like that, but when I did, I was embarrased at my hubris). 

It led me to a deeper appreciation of all I had, and somehow connected me into the community of women, mothers, parents in the world who shared and understood the pain and loss of a child. It helped me make new meaning, new sense of my experiences... it wasn't about me. It wasn't about us. It wasn't personal. I felt comforted and no longer alone or persecuted.

I could make something of this experience... I could grow from it. 

So now when I'm miserable, or cranky or snarly, I ask myself those two questions: 

1. 'What am I making of this?' 
2. 'How's that working for me?'

More often than not I find that my misery comes from making it all about me... from taking it personally... and realising that leads me to drop that incredibly unhelpful and fundamentally arrogant meaning, and to make something better of the situation... to put it in perspective without dismissing the feelings. In other words I've learned (and continually relearn) that: Just because the feeling IS intensely personal, and real, it doesn't mean that the event is directed at me personally... it doesn't mean IT's personal! 

As leaders in organisations, we influence the meaning people make of things every day, even if we don't realise it. Perhaps we might help if we didn't take things personally or make things personal when they go wrong, get difficult, boring or painful... 'cause, on this planet... they sometimes just do!