Language Isn't Everything

Where does all this come from? How is our Ground Truth formed? Are we born with it and it’s true for our whole lives? How do our experiences shape it? What does trauma do to our brains, and how we experience our lives? What about experiences like growing up in dual-language or dual-culture families? Or the impact of immigration? Does the Ground Truth form first or do values? Or does it all form together? How solid does it stay over time? How much does it change? Or is it only the language that evolves for different life stages? Do we even have a self? Are we just a bundle of electrical reactions? Are we distinct souls made in the image of a Creator?

Real questions I’ve asked and don’t have answers to.

With all my enthusiasm for Unboxable Leaders and this process, I don’t want to overstate its value. It can be tempting in writing about business or “making the world a better place” to position one’s ideas or experiences as the Answer to All the Problems. I don’t think that’s what this is. I think it is useful. I think it is powerful—but it’s not everything.

Lulu Miller’s book “Why Fish Don’t Exist” is one of my favorites because she holds fast to the dangers of language as a method of pinning things down super tight and precise. “Precision” and “order” are aspirations that can lie to us when we pursue them against the facts of the world.

My feelings about Lulu in a photo

In her book, Lulu Miller weaves a wondrous text that is part biography, part memoir, and part science writing. Not unlike her roots in radio reporting (she now hosts Radiolab) which really does weave those things all the time. The biography thread tells the story of David Starr Jordan, an obsessive “taxonomist”, labelling all the “fish” he could get his hands in through complex labelling systems. Miller draws a clear line between this obsession with categorization opposed to evidence and his stance as a eugenicist—someone who advocates for involuntary sterilization of “undesirables” to improve the human species. If that sounds like the Nazi party, you are correct. Jordan’s work did show up as an influence in those policies.

Oh and Jordan is the first president of Stanford University. And may have murdered Jane Stanford, the founder’s wife?

(Yep. The book is also part murder mystery. Seriously, this book is UNBOXABLE and I love it.)

When we insist that all of what we see must have a name and that name is the RIGHT AND TRUE NAME, we can fool ourselves into thinking we have a handle on the universe. That we’re the ones in charge. That we can control what is and what happens next.

For Miller, the obsession with trying to understand the meaning of life was a big part in breaking her. She writes about suicide ideation and chronic depression that has followed her since childhood. How to make sense of it all? Was there an answer in religion? In Darwin? In science’s categories of names and meaning? No. Letting it all go was the only way to make it through.

The metaphor for all of this was giving up the word “fish” which contains within it the category of “fish” which is itself a lie. Fish do not exist. There is no actual way to differentiate any clear edges to such a term. For so long, we’ve said that under water mammals were “not fish” but everything else was… and yet there was a time when whales were also considered fish. And the frame keeps breaking the more we learn about what lives under the water that makes up the vast majority of the earth’s surface!

Miller talks about the freedom of broken categories this way:

When I give up the fish, I get a skeleton key. A fish-shaped skeleton key that pops the grid of rules off this world and lets you step through to a wilder place. The other world within this one. The gridless place out other window where fish don’t exist and diamonds rain from the sky and each and every dandelion is reverberating with possibility.

To turn the key all you have do… is stay wary of words. If fish don’t exist, what else do we have wrong?

Language can help us see the truth—or it can obscure it. Language lies. A name for your work might not be what you need right now. Fine with me. It’s dangerous to insist that anything is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Words are also not the measure of a purpose.

Verbal acuity does not determine value. A preverbal kid or a nonverbal person has as much life as anyone else. To suggest otherwise is gross ableism.

Miller again, bolding my own:

I have come to believe that is our life’s work to tear down this order, to keep tugging at it, trying to unravel it, to set free the organisms trapped underneath. That it is our life’s work to mistrust our measures. Especially those about moral and mental standing. To remember that behind every rule there is a Ruler. To remember that a category is at best a proxy; at worst, a shackle.

My deepest fear in putting my work in a solid form, between two covers, is that something I make will piss on someone’s inherent dignity. That I added to the weight of “shoulds” we all carry around, another assignment in the imaginary work that “must be done” in order to matter.

And if I stand too boldly on language and words and naming as something required for meaningful living, then I have in fact pissed on dignity.

As much as I currently have the skills to do so, I have drawn a tight fence around what this work is and what it can do. I must. Because as I’ve said before: I love you. And I want to do right by you. And I will mess it up. To quote Saint Swift in Folklore: this is me trying.

In that spirit, I offer my book and thinking with humility.

Being Seen and All It Changes

I was living in Bulgaria and teaching English, and it had been nine months since I had gotten my haircut. I didn't speak the language well enough to nuance how I wanted to layer or what vibe I wanted to. I was just putting it off putting it off, and it got really long, really, really long, the longest I've ever had it, and I decided it was time for something drastic--I wanted a pixie cut. I thought about it for years. I wanted to go with a completely different look and feel it was time for a pixie cut. So I asked around, as you do — who gets the haircut, what's going on, where's the place to be.

Went to a salon, sat down on the chair, and I told the two women, “All right, I'm ready for a big change. I want a pixie cut.” Showed them some pictures. And they looked at each other, and they looked at me and they looked back at each other and kind of shifted their weight a little bit.

And she said, “Are you sure? Have you asked your boyfriend. You know men like women with long hair right? Let’s give you a bob instead. Let's not do the pixie cut, let's give you a bob, and then we'll go shorter and then maybe you can see if you like it.”

I knew in that moment that I didn't want them touching my hair. No, don't touch it. So I acted like I'd gotten scared, and I was like no, no, okay, I'm too nervous. I'm not going to do this. So I left the salon and decided to go find somewhere else, someone who might see me might give me a shot.

Can you give me a really dramatic haircut. So I visited several other salons over the next couple of weeks, both in my city and in a nearby city, same conversation: “Are you sure? Have you asked your boyfriend? Men like women with long hair? Let's give you a bob instead.”

I was frustrated at this point in starting to get stubborn, I'm a Taurus. It comes naturally when I tell a friend about it. I was like, What, no one will cut my hair and he said, “I know the place. She's been trimming my beard for years. I will take you just come, I'll set the whole thing up.”

So he came as my translator and we walk into this tiny salon with one chair, and it really seemed like it was actually the entrance to someone's living quarters. It wasn't a big fancy place, it was a chair in what felt a little bit like a living room. I sat down, and the woman started talking to my friend Kal and she says, “I don't understand. You said that no one would cut her hair. What's wrong with her hair? She seems to have very normal hair--what's the issue?”

So we explained the whole story how no one wanted to give me a pixie cut. She threw up her hands, just like, like she really was confused she didn't understand what was happening. And she said:

If you want to change your life, it is my job to help you.

And I said, “You can do whatever you want to my hair. Whatever.”

She put it in a braid and cut it off. Then proceeded to give me the chicest look I'd ever rocked.

When I left that tiny one-chair salon and was walking back to my apartment, I kept looking at myself in the windows of buildings as I passed.

I think about her all the time. I think I've never really recovered from that haircut like it changed a lot for me. She did three things when she cut my hair.

1. She told me she saw me. She said out loud what I was actually after she saw what was happening, and said oh no I see you. This is about confirming a change that's already been taking place inside you. Let’s make it happen. Let's make it visible. I see it.

2. She also let me see her. I saw her as someone who could cut my hair, and do it in the way that I need it, the way that I was looking for, she gave herself a gift.

3. She took her work, and made it into something specific, made it into something real. I didn’t know haircuts could be a spiritual experience.

She named what was happening. She named what her work was about. She’d put in the work to get there. And then she made it real by saying it out loud.

What Even is a "Ground Truth"?

My favorite thing to do circa 2020 mid Pandemic was walking. The place I lived was highly developed but had protected wooded areas that clustered around key tributaries that ultimately fed the Potomac. I spent a few hours every day wandering through these woods and watching the water. It was the only thing that made me feel like myself. I wasn’t the only one. With the population density in my area, the woods saw a lot of foot traffic and it was nice to wave at people, how we’d give each other a wide berth but smile as it to say “so sorry, I’m not trying to be rude, just trying to keep you safe.”

Some of these walks were with my friend Kay. She’d started studying mushrooms and foraging. As we walked, she could see things I just couldn’t, even when it was bright orange like some happy chicken-of-the-woods . I just didn’t have the categories in my head that helped me see what was right there beside the path

On one of these walks together, I was telling her about my work and the term “The Ground Truth” that I’d started using. I learned it from Robbie who works in data science. But she told me the term had roots further back.

Back in the day, NASA invited people to help with satellite development. They needed people on the ground to confirm what the satellite image might be showing. An image might show what looked like a forest, but what was there in reality? How many trees? What kind? How dense were they? In this little square foot, what existed? How did that show up in a pixel on screen? 

Anyone could go to specific locations and document what existed to share with NASA. That’s how Kay knew about it—she was a kindergarten teacher and took her students into the woods to collect on-the-ground data that they submitted to NASA. The Ground Truth—the literal truth of what was on the ground—was used to refine and hone our ability to interpret satellite images.

The term later moved over into data science where it refers to the training data that an algorithm uses to recognize patterns, which is where I first learned it. Here’s an example: the CAPTCHA “Are you a robot?” prompts. It shows a picture, and we identify all the motorcycles. Two things happen here:

1. We as the human user teach the algorithm how to recognize motorcycles. 

2. The website is confirming that we are actually human because we recognize the complex shapes and symbols that add up to a motorcycle.

We provide the Ground Truth data, the information that allows something to recognize reality. 

The word ground in data science is a metaphor. Back with the satellite imagery, it was literal: what was on the ground versus what was seen from the sky. But in data science, ground refers to something foundational, essential to a structure even before said structure is built.

The word truth contains both fact and meaning; it is both reality and also a right orientation to reality.

Ground Truth = The Name for Naming

This is exactly what we’re looking for in developing a name that represents us accurately. It identifies exactly what goes into a True Name, both in its literal meaning and the associations it evoked.

• The process I used with my clients to name their work was about data collection: we went into our experiences of feeling most ourselves and asked those stories to tell us about who we are, what we do, and how we do it.

• The Ground Truth feels rooted and resilient. As a term, it visualized the secure place that would hold true through life stages, career twists and turns, creative ups and slumps, a solid ground from which to improvise infinitely.

• The Ground Truth used in our lives can be a singular statement that helps us to see the truth of ourselves and to live from it.

A New Definition

Ground Truth: Foundational name for your work. The idea, energy, or action that is present in individual and cumulative moments of highest impact. Internal-facing language. 

The Ground Truth Process: The steps by which one develops and uncovers the language that becomes the Ground Truth statement.

The Ground Truth Process is how we find words for what we want to say. It isn’t so much about discovery as it is uncovering—you know who you are. You know what your work is. You just need the words, the name, to tell us what it is. This is designed for individuals but has been used for partnerships and teams. Even businesses have a soul that knows what it is to be most alive, an essence to be witnessed, celebrated, and named.

And I love stealing words from science. They are always stealing regular terms and making it mean something different so why not steal those metaphors right back?!

The Real Reason You Can't Name Your Work (It's a Good Thing!)

I always learn something new about my life when friends come over.

We sit around the table for dinner. Or lean on the back of the couch. Or stand on the sidewalk as the kids run up and down the front hill. Or we sip coffee in a coffee shop. Or we zoom video call. Or put them on speaker. Or go visit their town for a weekend. Or pass through for quick visit.

No matter the context or reason, I learn something new. They’ll ask a question and I’ll answer it. Or they’ll ask a question and Robbie will answer it. And how we answer surprises us. Some new detail sneaks in. A flavor of how we’ve been feeling. The way the recent season connects to some past event in our lives. The summary and details changes with each person we talk to, because friendship changes with each friend, each unique human soul drawing out something different in us. And I get to hear myself and Robbie in a totally new way.

When we’re off on our own, little time for friends or connection, I tend to miss pretty key facts about my family, my spouse, myself. Even though I tend towards regular self-reflection, nothing quite brings it all to light like someone who loves me being curious and inviting me to say things.

There’s a good reason for this.

and that has to do with the nature of language. When we’re naming ourselves, we’re using words and we’re tapping into the language part of our brains, and there are some very specific ways that language is structured. It is both incredibly magical—and sometimes limiting.

Language forms in dialogue. Language only forms and evolves when we are interacting with other people. When we are in conversation. It’s a part of language that can actually feel lovely. But it can also feel like a barrier because we have, at least in America, so many stories about individual genius that we think we’re supposed to be off on our own in a cabin in the woods, generating new possibilities or coming up with our own name. Or we’re great communicators—we can talk to anyone about anything—but we still have a hard time naming ourselves. That’s because language is about dialogue.

Think about how you learn how to speak in the first place. As a baby, you learned how to speak when an adult got in your face and made sounds back and forth with you. That is how language developed in your brain. You figured out that the sounds you were making back and forth meant something and could cause changes if you combined certain sounds. The sounds started to have meaning.

But the other piece is that language is uniquely wired in our brains. When you figured out what a tree was, it was at a very specific moment in time, connected to a particular person who was helping you make that connection to a particular tree. So when you think about trees, you draw on a whole lifetime of experiences, specific to that idea, specific to you.  I can say to my sister, “You remember Grammy’s table?” and we both think of the idea of tables in general, the specific table Grammy used to feed us at, and all the family drama about who would get the table when she passed on. Our minds are able to attach complex realities and sensory experiences to the abstract structure of words spoken or read. We can say “Grammy’s table” and know the specificity and complexity of that phrase. Our minds fire networks of meaning, which have been knit and woven across our lifetimes. No two people have the exact same pattern.

This is why it’s hard to name our work. It’s why “branding” as an inside project can be wasted effort. If naming were easy, we would have done it already. Instead, it’s an elusive thing. I’ve found it ridiculously difficult for myself and only really came to clarity around it through years of conversations with friends, therapists, mentors, and most of all Robbie.

Language doesn’t form when we’re off on our own. We need someone to invite us to speak. We need to be heard. We need their reflections back to us. We need the wonder of seeing someone we know better than anyone in the whole world suddenly become new to us in what a friend brings out of them. We need conversation.

So it doesn’t surprise me that the people I’ve worked with, Unboxable Leaders each and every one, are phenomenal communicators in their own right. They are great listeners and often hold the container for their communities/clients/students to discover their own voices and words. But they can’t do the same for themselves.

My Unboxable Leaders often make the joke “the cobbler’s children have no shoes” but I don’t think that’s the problem here. It’s just how language is wired into our brains. Once you know that, all the guilt and slog goes away. It’s not that something is wrong with them or even that we’ve been trained to put ourselves last (though that can play a role). It’s mostly that we were told we had to be independently brilliant and in charge of all parts of our lives and work. And it’s not true. We only get words when we are in conversation.

The Ground Truth Process book won’t be same as being listened to by a real person. But I hope that it can instigate the dialogue. Be a friendly presence and structure as you go about naming your work. If you go through the steps and find it hasn’t quite worked, it probably just means it’s time to bring in another voice. Like tea, it’s often best when shared with a friend.

Dear Unboxable Leader

Below is the introduction to “The Ground Truth Process: Name Your Work to Lead with Intention and Conviction”.

It’s a love letter—which is what I think the entire book wants to be.

I love letters. I’ve always loved letters.

My favorite time to get letters as a kid was at summer camp. Someone would stand with a microphone, and if your name was called, you had hundreds of folks watching as you went to collect that little marker of care.

Then the summer before college, my friends and I volunteered for a week as camp counselors. I decided to handwrite letters to each of my fellow counselors; each note identified something I admired in each of them and a memory of them that I loved. I wanted them to know that I saw them and loved them.

I can’t remember the details of what I wrote. What I do know is that every single person wrote back. They coordinated so all the letters would arrive at the same meal. I had to walk to the front again and again. I acted annoyed, but I loved it.

There is nothing like being seen, of someone demonstrating in a tangible way that what makes you you is important and meaningful. It’s what we’re all hungry for.

It’s what I offered when I put words to what I saw in the friends around me. And what they offered by writing back to me.

My work to this day is about putting together words that capture someone at their most specific.

I’d tell you more about what the love letter wants to tell you except I think it does a better job with that than any preamble could offer.

---

Dear Unboxable Leader,

Your work and life are too nuanced, too rich for a simple label.

A box could never contain you.

And still: I mean it when I ask, “So what do you do?”

I want to know. 

I want to know what you spend your time doing and what you like about it and what part of it seems just right in your life.

I want to know what you do. Where are you in the things you make, the people you talk to, the tasks you have to complete?

I want to know how much time it takes to become what you are and whether you feel that it’s been worth it.

I don’t care about your title. I don’t even care if you answer with your job. 

I want to know what you’re proud of. I want to know what you create that matters to you and how it matters to you.

I care that you tell me something you love in this life.

I want to see you. I want to see you as someone who loves the world and lives in it with their whole being.

Tell me.

Tell me who you work with and what matters to you and what kind of change you want to make in the world.

Tell me what you know about your industry today and what you wish people understood about your job.

Tell me the weird things. Get nerdy—like, really, really nerdy—the parts you think aren’t relevant but are actually close to who you are as a person.

Tell me a brag or two. Let me see the vulnerability it takes to be proud of something.

Tell me where you’re going. Tell me what makes you angry in the world, what pisses you off to Roy-Kent-ripping-up-locker-room-benches levels.

Tell me what eases you, what calms you, what draws you in, what sets you at home.

I don’t care about the proof points of success and power in your industry. I don’t want to know you as successful. 

I don’t care how articulate you are. I don’t care about your grammar. I care that you speak and live with intention and conviction.

I care about your curiosity and what keeps you wondering and making things. You have no idea how powerful and skilled you are when you let curiosity lead the way.

I care about the way your face changes when you talk about something you love. How the secret joy is revealed in the softness of your voice, the breath in your cheeks, the pull at the corner of your eyes.

And when you ask me what I do, I want to tell you how my joy is in taking the language in our stories and seeing how it’s all connected, how every word is tied together in a perfect theme, a name that sounds like you. How we can put that thread into words and sing it like a song.

To do that, you have to let us see you.

Tell us your name. To name yourself is to let us in.

Not the name given to you by an industry or a job, but the one you give yourself, the one that helps you know what is yours in any room you go into, a name that lets you see yourself and everything you offer.

You know what your work is. You just need the words, the name, to tell us what it is.

Tell us how to love you. We’re ready.

Love,

Your Fellow Unboxable Dana Ray