The Spanish Inquisition

“Our chief weapon is surprise, surprise and fear….”

Earlier this week, after having attended a meeting, I was struck by how, at what is conventionally understood to be my middle age, I feel remarkably unqualified.

And it wasn’t just about that particular meeting, I have a clear sense of being unprepared for life in general. I pay my bills and I take my dog for a walk (most days) and I go to work every day, but that’s not the leadership role that I imagined for myself as a child: it’s more like I’m a crew member. And there are a great many days when I imagine that I will find myself as one of the red-shirted crew members on the Enterprise: existing only to advance someone else’s story and to be phasered before the second commercial break.

Perhaps I am thinking this way, in part, because, in the transition between Presidents, there has been a lot of talk about leadership. The incoming President and I are almost the same age: that is the only thing we have in common. I can’t even get the dog to come when I call him and so I am dumbstruck at the prospect of being able to lead an entire country.

I could probably come up with a lot of rationalizations, but I suspect the primary motivator in my life is fear and this is what has kept me from taking more chances. I am always playing defense, reacting to events instead of shaping them.

As children, we think in terms of limitless possibilities. Our imaginations take us to places and situations that are risk-free. We fight monsters and rescue damsels in distress and do battle with evil wizards all before dinner. As adults, we learn about limits and the horizon that once seemed so far away starts to come closer until you get to a point where all you do is go to the funerals of your friends and all you think about is not falling at which point the horizon is at your fingertips.

My mother once tried to help me through an awkward teenage moment by counseling me that I was a “late bloomer.” It was another in a long series of lessons in what would now be described as “impulse control.” It was not my time, not my turn; my needs would be met later on. Today I am certain that little or none of that was behind her comment when she said it, but experience has helped to fill in the gaps.

How then do you know when it is your moment? What exactly should I be looking for?
Something clearly happened for the new President to tell him that this was his moment. Was it, I wonder, one of those “It just doesn’t get any better than this” beer commercial moments?

I have read a lot of biographies and the part that fascinates me the most in each of these stories is the moment when the subject goes from the supporting cast to the starring role in their own lives. And, because they are the subject of the book, it is almost always the part of the story that gets glossed over. Perhaps there is an assumption made on the part of the author that because their subject has been deemed book-worthy that all anybody cares about is what happened when they were children and after they were famous. At what point did they think they had the skills/ability/moxie to step into the spotlight?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to be a star, but neither do I want to get to the non-slip part of my life and feel as though I missed my moment.

“History is made by those who show up.” -- Benjamin Disraeli

Showing up is not enough, if it were, I wouldn’t be writing this. I show up a lot but I have never felt like I belonged anywhere.

As a teenager, I performed as a magician at a number of children’s birthday parties. I was never any good but I was and am fascinated by magic. Performing magic for children is rough because they are very difficult to fool. They absorb all of the information that comes at them and work to make sense of it, whereas adults are more likely to make assumptions based on their experience. If a child sees something that doesn’t make sense they call you on it. They look where they are not supposed to look and often see things that adults would never notice.

I bring this up because it is the over-arching fear in my life: that I am going to get caught, that I will be revealed to be a fake, that my lack of qualification will be disclosed.

So we have come to the essential conundrum: to truly “take my turn”—presuming I can recognize it when it comes—will mean embracing and overcoming my fear and stop being surprised.

--Graham Campbell
Associate Director