This semester, friends, I have done a series of brave things that I can't tell you much about. I was left queasy and disheartened by the outcome of deliberations I was part of, and I resolved to see what I could do to make the situation better. I made a couple of scary appointments; I wrote (and rewrote!) a couple of scary letters. Today I sat in a room with the deliberating group again, and I told someone very senior that he was wrong, and why. My voice was calm but my heart was thumping loudly.
When I did the scary things I was mostly focused on the fact that they were scary (and hard, and time-consuming). But here is what happened as a result: five of the people involved in various steps of this process said, "Thank you for raising these issues; I agree with you." Best of all -- hurray! huzzah! -- a bad decision was reversed.
So this post is to say that if you have been hesitating to rock a boat that needs rocking, or to push back on a bad outcome, or to do some other flavor of hard thing-- maybe it's a good day to take a step forward. Sometimes people are just waiting for someone to say, "This needs to change."
Recent Comments