The last several months have been some of the hardest of my life. How’s that for an opening sentence? I’m going to share some of what’s been going on for me in hopes that it will help you continue your own growth as a leader.

Here’s a quick recap of my last few years. Other stuff went on, of course; consider this the highlights reel:

• July 2015: My dad dies. He was an extremely active 75-year-old who turned kind of yellow, and six weeks later he was dead of pancreatic cancer.
• July 2015-August 2016: Biggest work contract of my life. Way too busy, but it’s just a year so I can do this.
• Fall 2016: Physical crash! I get sick a lot. And then I get sick more. This is no fun.
• October 2016: Husband Josh can’t work anymore due to his chronic illness. We decide to put our house on the market in the spring and convert my mom’s house into a duplex so we can help her and she can help us.
• Thanksgiving weekend 2016: My sister-in-law dies of an undetected heart defect. There was zero warning and it was instant. She was 47 years old. We are all in shock. She and my brother live a block from my mom, and she did a great deal to help my mom after my dad’s death.
• December 2016: Josh and I decide to put our house on the market ASAP, start construction on mom’s house, and move as soon as we can.
• January-March 2017: Packing, purging, selling, cleaning, painting, listing, remodeling, and so on. Josh is still very sick, so it’s mostly on me.
• March 2017: Move into our new digs and close on our home of fourteen years. I start getting a lot of migraines.
• April-mid-May 2017: Another physical crash! I get 4-5 migraines a week. I thought everything was supposed to be better now that we’ve moved. What’s up with this?
• Present Day: Josh is still very sick. My family is still grieving two sudden, tragic deaths. I’m slowly getting better, but have to rest way more than I want to. I still get too many migraines and life still feels overwhelming most of the time. (But less often than even a month ago, so that’s progress!)

I share this list with you not to elicit sympathy, but because many of us go through seasons of great hardship. This is mine. I’ve learned something in this time that I haven’t recognized before: When we talk about great teams having grace, I’ve always thought of extending grace to others. I’m in a position now where I’ve had to accept grace from my team, and it’s kind of horrible. Yes, horrible! But it’s horrible because of my own dysfunction. I want to be strong enough to get through anything on my own. But I’m not. No human is. Rodger, Jeff, and Gerald have been amazing over these last several months. I trust them enough to share what I’m going through outside of work, and they care about me enough to help me through this by giving me a lot of grace.

Here’s a recent example: Jeff and I were scheduled to lead cohort 8 on their retreat on May 2-3. On the afternoon of May 1, Rodg walked into the office just as I was getting off the phone with Josh. We’d gotten some bad news about a treatment option. (I was crying a little, so it was obvious that there was something wrong.) Rodger knows me well enough that he didn’t even ask if I wanted to back out of leading the retreat the next day (it’s that dysfunction thing of mine. Of course I can still go!). Instead, he gently told me that I was not going and that he would make a few calls. Gerald taught another cohort solo the next day instead of teaching with Rodger, and Rodger lead the retreat with Jeff so I could be home with Josh and Avery and have time to work through my emotions. That’s a huge amount of grace. 

I’ve had lots of practice accepting grace lately, and I’ve learned a lot in that time (and continue to learn. It’s still hard not to be able to pretend I can handle anything thrown my way). Here are my big take-aways about receiving grace that may be helpful to you:

• Long-term, you serve your team best by accepting grace when you really need it: White-knuckling through the hard stuff sometimes just leads to a Red-X or two. And people can generally see that there’s something going on, even if you think you’re hiding it. You may actually make a faster physical/mental/emotional recovery by swallowing your pride (or whatever your brand of dysfunction is) and accepting that you have limits and that most people really do want to help.
• Receiving grace builds a stronger team: When you are struggling, you are vulnerable. Letting trusted people know about that struggle—letting them see that vulnerability—and asking for help builds even greater trust.
• Receiving grace might help uproot some nasty false beliefs: Deep in my heart for as long as I can remember, I’ve known that I need to be perfect to be loved and accepted. I’ve had a good solid chunk of time now where I’ve not been able to pretend that I’ve got it all together, and guess what? I’m still loved and accepted. That awful false belief is starting to die. I’m guessing that you have some nasty false beliefs lurking somewhere in your heart, too. Being vulnerable enough to admit that you need help might do more to kill that false belief than years of therapy or self-help or yoga or whatever. Those are all still good things, but most often a changed belief (I’m not okay and that’s okay!) follows a new behavior (acknowledging to my team that I need help and accepting loads of grace).
• Receiving grace allows others to give grace: This isn’t as simple as it seems. We teach how important grace is to great teams, and this means both giving and receiving. If we all have difficulty receiving grace, how can anyone practice giving it?

So there it is, my Red-X, full of grace because of Rodger, Jeff, and Gerald. They know me enough to know that I need help and that I won’t often ask for help when I most need it; they trust me enough to know that I won’t take advantage of their kindness; and they want to help me through a really tough time where there aren’t a lot of easy ways to help.

We all need to be the receivers of grace sometimes. I hope that you don’t have to get to a Red-X moment to ask for help or to realize your own limits. If you are staring that Red-X in the face, perhaps it’s time to reach out to someone on your team or to one of us. If there’s someone on your team who you are worried about, maybe it’s time to extend some grace or have that gentle, hard conversation about limits and Red-Xes and you-don’t-have-to-do-this-alone. Great teams trust each other, and great teams know each other, and great teams give and receive grace.

Lead on,
Meredith

Image by Steve Snodgrass. Used under CC By 2.0 license.