Small Kindnesses
My watch buzzed, urgently.
“You’re in a loud environment. 30 minutes at this dB level can cause hearing loss.”
I rolled my eyes. It was 6am and I was driving backroads, north — headed home from a conference in Orlando. I needed the loud music, not to keep myself awake, but to keep myself out of my head.
From all outside appearances, I should be driving home, high, celebratory. I’d had a GREAT week, meeting friends I had only seen online, working with a new team who supports me unquestioningly, and relishing the memories made dancing, talking, and interacting with people who both delighted me and delighted in me.
Instead, I felt anxiety gnawing at me, and I just wanted to hide under a rock instead of dealing with utility vehicles, fog, and a more-than-reasonable number of oddly-placed stoplights.
If you don’t know me, you’d probably think that I’m an anxious introvert and hate talking to people. But for those of you that do know me, this admission is probably surprising.
In fact, I had people tell me on this trip and in general, that they assume conferences and meetings are easy for me because I’m generally “good” at “people-ing”.
But I’ll tell you what, even if I’m “good” at “people-ing,” it rarely feels good at the end of a week.
It wasn’t just that I was tired. I questioned everything. Was I too effusive with that stranger? Was I too crass at that breakfast table? I didn’t meet up with that person who reached out to me because I assumed they wanted to talk about my old product but maybe I should’ve followed up harder. Did I do enough to set myself up for success this year? Did I do enough to make those in my orbit feel valued?
As I blasted BAND-MAID, I questioned where these anxious, swirling thoughts were coming from.
And I think it’s what Brené Brown calls a vulnerability hangover.
Conferences are hard if you want to be your true self.
I’ve been running the conference circuit in many forms since I was in grade school. Planning, attending, speaking, volunteering, making marketing materials, playing in the band…trust me, I’ve done it all.
When I was young, it was easy to turn off my brain and perform as expected or needed. Extroversion and blind optimism were prized in many of the community circles I was in; I internalized and optimized these characteristics. Although they were already natural to me, I interpreted them as vital for survival.
Today, after a pandemic but also years of therapeutic work, I find myself rightly questioning the need for unhinged positivity and unrelenting high energy. I want to connect with people, but I want to do it in a way that actually means something. I want to work with people who see and value the hard work that it takes to be a human in our ever-connected and evolving world. People who are curious and open-hearted. People who refuse to accept the status quo.
I want to find them, to cultivate friendships, to make the world a better place, not just make a buck. Yes, there are business goals for these trips, but I get to CHOOSE how I do it. And because I relish a good challenge, I choose something squishy and new and uncomfortable.
So going to a conference means something different to me, now. It means I have an opportunity to choose how I bring myself to the table. It means that I don’t have to put on a show, but I can laugh, speak, and sit with confidence and intention. I’m not a caricature or a number, and I refuse to reduce anyone I meet to an object as well.
I suppose, then, what I wasn’t expecting was that when I made that decision with confidence, it wasn’t going to be easy. I wasn’t expecting that when I show up as a real person, I have to grapple with experiencing things as a real person. I can’t dissociate from the reality of the way I operate in the world through alcohol or other dopamine-chasing behaviors. Instead, I have to carry that through, with all of it’s associated hard things: mistakes, emotions, and grace.
But it’s what I’ve chosen to do, and I think it’s the way forward for our industry and communities in general.
Our culture, and your Customers, are craving authenticity
We’re tired of being numbers. Look at GDPR, tropes about robocalls or Nigerian prince emails, how NO ONE wants you to scan their badge at your conference booth.
Those experiences are the result of 20 years of low-value, high-volume, skeezy and malicious business practices that for some unspoken scarcity-minded, lizard-brain reason, we continue to accept and perpetuate.
Our culture is screaming on every message board and in every conversation: we value transparency and follow-through. We value products whose teams admit mistakes and follow up with earnest solutions to make amends. We value companies that let us initiate conversation in a way that makes the most sense to us, that makes me feel less stupid and like we are reasonable and valued humans.
Traditional business culture says that we should keep growing and growing and growing, and to do that, the best performers must compartmentalize their professional life from their personal life. Between you and me that is goofy for two reasons. First, there is no possibility for unlimited, forever growth — that’s not how finite resources work. And second, all the humans you work with only have one brain, one lived experience. You can’t just expect everyone to turn it off, that’s a wholly unreasonable expectation. Their kid puked on their shoes this morning and they were late. Their spouse asked for a divorce last night. Someone yelled at them in the parking lot for no apparent reason and it triggered a PTSD response. They’re humans, not air fryers with different settings to suit your uptight scheduling needs.
In fact, tangentially, I even think that we’re having conversations on pronouns, race, and sexuality now, not for politics, but because we just want to be seen. I’m not your token queer multiracial woman to fill a quota. I’m opening the door for you to know those things about me so we can build a relationship. I want to be in community with you. If I didn’t want to build a relationship with you, you wouldn’t be given the privilege of even having that knowledge — it would mean I didn’t respect you enough to have these conversations with you. Maybe consider that the next time you’re sitting across from someone you don’t feel you agree with or that you need to eke some sort of social capital from. How can you show them that you value their existence as someone who has a life apart from being defined by their relationship to you?
They’ve experienced an entire world that you aren’t privy to, an entire lived experience opposite your own. They’ve created their own career and have their own ambitions, hobbies, families, and life goals apart from a title at a business or seat at a table.
You’re not alone.
With Balance blaring over my speakers and my steering wheel doubling as a drumset, I considered how this event was tough for me, but that it’s probably harder for people whose social batteries drain much faster than mine.
I thought of the women that I sat with at the conference’s “women’s breakfast,” and how even in 2022, they voiced frustration over being “hired because they’re a girl,” or being told that they are “good at delegating because {you’re} a mom,” completely disregarding the hard-won social skills that are under-compensated as “soft” skills vs. the industry-prized “hard” skills. I thought of the people who admitted to me that they stayed in their hotel rooms every night instead of going to the event-sanctioned parties because they had already had their fill of the noise. I thought of the first-time business owner sitting at lunch asking for advice and the way his voice wavered as he admitted he is scared and hopeful his timing and strategy work out.
I thought of how we’re in the middle of yet another wild period of instability and we’re all bone-tired, even if you’re not actively fighting your own fight. Twitter is eating itself this week, major companies are announcing rounds of layoffs, housing and rent is at a world-wide historic high.
As my friend Amber said in our podcast, Starting Seeds, this week, the world is hard and we all need a soft place.
So you can imagine my delight this morning as I stumbled across the poem, Small Kindnesses, from Danusha Laméris, penned in 2019.
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”
As a follow up to this poem, in April of 2022, the NYT crowdsourced what little kindnesses teenagers have experienced which was in turn compiled by Laméris into a collaborative poem. It’s a beautiful look into the things that we value, that make us feel alive and human, worthy in a sea of consumption.
Most of us won’t have the power to single-handedly change the world, or even our own company culture, but I choose to believe that each of us can actively cultivate these small kindnesses with intention in our daily occupation, and at conferences, and perhaps we can change the tide and give each other a soft place as we build the next version, a better version, of our world, together, one that doesn’t wear on us but are pure celebration of each other in all of our forms.
