Your Shade of Blue: Creative Mornings DC

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Transcript

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.”

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. She cut off the brain--bold first move in a haircut--and proceeded to style the chicest look I'd ever had in my life to that point. And 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 because I was like, “Oh my god, okay!” It wasn't this long, I couldn't actually flick it, but you get the vibe I was very, very into it. I was so in love with this new energy with this lightness to me.

She really gave me a gift at that moment. I hadn’t known that a haircut could be a transcendent spiritual experience. And it was that, because she named it. She said it out loud, she put the words to what was happening.

She did three things in that moment. The first that she gave me as a gift. She verbalized what I was actually after she saw what was happening, and said oh no I see you. This is about it, confirming a change that's already been taking place like let's make it happen. Let's make it visible. I see it.

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.

And the third is that she elevated a haircut. There are millions of people; we’re mammals, so most of us have hair and we need a lot of hairstylists in this world. I mean a lot of people cutting hair--but she elevated her work from a thing that we all need a commodity, into an art form. She took her work, and made it into something specific, made it into something real. And that is the moment that the haircut happened—not when she took scissors to my head.

I think about her all the time. I think I've never really recovered from that haircut like it changed a lot for me. And the reason is, how I think about how I relate to the power of that moment from her. I think of her as someone who is UNBOXABLE. She's not defined by cutting hair. It's just a thing that she does and expression of this deeper and truer work of changing lives and helping people do that. She's an UNBOXABLE creative, and when I think of the people in this room both the people I know personally, and the people I've met at Creative Mornings [shout out to Toni O'Boyle who is my forever coffee-line friend] we are UNBOXABLE. We are not defined by the industries that we exist in, the industries that we create, and the genres that we call our own. And there's this sense there's so much pressure, especially in this language around branding ourselves or defining our career trajectory. There's so much pressure to figure it out and to put a label on it. 

But what I want us to think about is not our labels but our names. How do we find a name that doesn't confine us but instead expands our possibility?

There are a lot of gifts to choosing this way of life. You get to choose what work you want to be doing. You get to define how you want to show up in the world. You get to give yourself permission to evolve and change. You don't have to play by other people's rules. 

And there are challenges. How do we make decisions in this kind of life where there's no set path? How do we find resilience and make it through the tough times? Again, there's no roadmap.

And how do we make sure that we see ourselves? Because we can't make the change that we want to make. If we haven't set where we're going, if we haven't said what we're trying to do, we haven't done the deeper work of naming what already is inside of us.

There's a reason it's so difficult. If this were easy, we all would have done it and this talk would not be happening, we could just go home. There are some real challenges and there's not a single person on earth who finds it easy to name their work, because again, we would have done it already. 

But there are some very good reasons, or very understandable reasons for why this is difficult, 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 that is structured that is both incredibly magical, and sometimes limiting.

So the first is that language forms in dialogue. Language only forms and evolves when we are in interaction with other people. When we are in conversation. This can feel like it's actually a lovely part about language. But it can feel like a barrier because we have, at least in America, we have so many stories about the individual genius that we think that we're supposed to be off on our own in a cabin in the woods, generating new possibility or coming up with our own name. Or we're great communications people, like 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. I love this detail which is why I'm going back for it. You learn how to speak when an adult gets in your face as a baby and makes sounds back and forth with you. That is how language developed in your brain. You figured out that sounds you were making back and forth meant something could cause changes if you combine certain sounds. It started to have meaning.

So, we're supposed to learn language and dialogue, it's literally how we learned it in the first place.

But the other piece is that language is also uniquely wired in our brains. When you figured out what a tree was you figured out it was a tree, a very specific moment in time, connected to a particular person who was helping you make that connection to a particular tree. So if you think about trees, you are drawing up a whole lifetime of experiences, specific to that idea, specific to you. So language while formed in dialogue, while this bridge between us is also something that we have to individually figure out, we have to define the words for ourselves.

And the reason we have to do this work, or why it's so wonderful when we do this work is because language is responsible for how we perceive and how we act.

How do we know this? There are some incredible research studies on the way that language impacts decision making and perception. So the first time I ever heard about this was many years ago, and I listened to a Radio Lab story called “Why the Sky isn't Blue”. It's a ridiculously cool story. But they start by talking about William Gladstone. He's a English Prime Minister obsessed with Homer. Like if there was fanfiction in William Gladstone's days, he would have been writing Homer fanfiction. That's his level of commitment to this author. And after reading the Odyssey for the millionth time, he recognized that there was something missing—that there was not a word for blue in any of Homer, no blue. Instead things that we think of as blue, like maybe water or the sky, they were always described with a different color. So if there was a stormy sea, it was the “wine dark sea” which is a badass description, but not blue.

And he was like “What's the deal with this?” and then another linguist named Geiger came along and he said, “Okay, well, the Greeks didn't have blue, but the rest of us got it eventually. So when did we all get the color blue?” and he looked at all of these ancient languages, ancient Chinese, the Vedic hymns, the Hebrew Bible, ancient Icelandic--none of these texts have the color blue in them. Zero. Exception being the Egyptians.

So why was that? This is the hypothesis: it seems that we have words, when we make something into a tool we have the access to replicate it and do something with it, we find a word for it. The Egyptians had a word for the color blue, because they had a dye from a plant that made the color blue. The rest of those cultures didn't have access to blue and a natural form that can be used to make things. What we have words for changes how we see what we see changes what we have words for. It's a dialogue. It's a dialogue dialectic conversation between that language in our brains.

To make this even cooler, there's this guy named Jonathan Winawer from MIT who did a study on different language speakers and their ability to recognize different color tones. So he had slightly differentiated shades of blue. And he had a group of Russian native speakers and a group of English native speakers. [By native we mean what they started talking with from childhood. They grew up speaking their first and primary language. That's what I mean to say.] And Russian speakers were significantly faster at differentiating between similar shades of blue. What was that about in Russian and conversational Russian, there are two completely different words for light blue and dark blue. In English, we differentiate the color blue with adjectives, rather than a different name.

This suggests that we have a specific name for, we have the ability to see and distinguish between different pieces we can, our brains have a category that lets us make decisions based on what we have names for. And we don't just have to receive names for things we can go make names, we can go figure out who we are. 

So as an UNBOXABLE creative what is your shade of blue?

When we name our work, we can be seen, we can be known. When we name our work, we can find a way through. When we name our work, we have an anchor to hold on to.

In the true spirit of the Panini pandemic partridge in a pear tree. The trash guys are here, they're gonna take trash out of my basement so if you hear crashing, it's fine, my building is not falling down, it's just, it's just the truck. I love it. Life is too good.

So how do we find a name for our work? I want to share a concept from, of all things, machine learning, listen, I majored in English, machine learning is not my area of expertise, but I love science terms because science terms just steal from regular conversational language and then they go make it mean something really fancy, and then it becomes a new type of metaphor that we can steal back. I love science terms. 

And this term from machine language is the GROUND TRUTH. What this refers to is training data for algorithms. So the information that you feed a math equation so it can recognize patterns, so it can recognize “Between Shades of Blue” as it were. You've all seen this in action. When you have to log into that one account for the millionth time and ask you to choose the difference between a motorcycle and a lamppost. You choose the motorcycle, instead of the lamppost. That is an example of this concept for machine learning.

You are doing two things at the moment. The first is that you're proving that you're not a robot. Congratulations! But you're also teaching a robot algorithm, on the other side, how to recognize reality, how to tell the difference between shadows in the world and the motorcycle. This is teaching self driving cars, how to make decisions, decisions, not sent to beings, yet how self driving cars can navigate the world as they move through it.

Two things are happening: you're demonstrating who you are AND you're teaching the algorithm you're giving experience from your life, your lived experience of the difference between a motorcycle, and a lamppost. And you are teaching it what reality is, how to discern between the different pieces.

This is what I want us to dig into. You have access to this kind of information about yourself. This comes from your lived experience.

The question that I want you to ask is What does it feel like to feel most like me? When do I feel most alive? And when have I felt that feeling? What does that experience feel like? In those stories is where we can find the name for our work. Where we are most alive is where we best contribute, where we are most ourselves, is our greatest chance of meaning and success. And when we can name that lightness in us, that is our chance to be seen and known to be heard and understood and to make the changes we want to make.

So I want to tell you a story about this from my life when I felt this feeling of a lightness, this ease. I was a senior in college. And I was assigned to lead a discussion on Annie Dillard's essay “The Eclipse”. Was in a nonfiction creative writing class, hence the study of Annie Dillard who is amazing and I would also recommend you go read this essay. But I read the essay three times and I took pages and pages of notes, and I had no idea what this essay was saying. It was literally just a story of an eclipse.

I made some really strong observations about the text and I came into the class for the discussion and I stood in front of the room. And I said, “I don't know what this essay is about, but I would like us to figure it out together. Here are some observations I've made.” And what ensued was this really beautiful connective experience, where we took language and our own lived experiences and we explored what an artist meant by the thing that they made. 

And there was so much permission in not having to decide one thing she was trying to say but the plethora of things that she was trying to say. Literally any Dillard sentence structure is just unreal. I got a really great grade on that particular assignment but that wasn't where the joy was the joy was leaning against that front desk and saying, I don't know let's figure it out together. 

There are two aspects to how we name things--there's how we name things for ourselves internally in our private language. If language is uniquely wired in our brains, we need to find the words that make sense for our combination of neural firings when we hear language so we need to do the internal work. And then we translate that externally to language that helps other people trust us and want to be part of what we're doing so there's two steps. There's internal language and external language. 

So my external language you heard at the beginning when Raquel introduced me: I work with unboxable leaders to name their work, so that we can be heard and known as we create the world as it could be. That's how I would say that to someone else that helps the people I work with see me and know what I care about.

But internally, if I'm trying to describe that elusive element of that story of being in a classroom and talking about an essay. I've verbalized it for myself this way that I hear what we're trying to say, so we can do what we're trying to do. I might not put that on a website. I'm sharing this because I feel like I want to hear, but you really never have to put this language on a resume or your LinkedIn. This is language for you. What does it feel like when you feel like you? What is the connective thread between those experiences and how you name it?

There's a very simple structure to this sentence so you go through all these experiences and then you put it into a name, a sentence and there's two pieces to it. 

I verb so that result.

I hear so that we can do what we're trying to do. 

I verb so that result.

And I know at least half of you have your pens and papers out and you're attempting to fill in this sentence as we speak. I would like you all to breathe. This process is not meant to be done in 30 minutes. I'm introducing you to a process that I hope that you'll take with you and reflect on. So, don't be like, “Oh my god I have to figure this out in five minutes.” This talk is almost over. No, that's not how this is gonna work.

You are exactly where you're supposed to be. [thank you Reggie Black for this well placed art piece] and you're good, you're good, you don't have to figure this out right now so just stay with me.

I want to introduce you to my friends Frank and Victoria who, for me, represent the resilience and hope and groundedness that can come from naming your work. Frank and Victoria are professional dancers in Pittsburgh. And a few years ago they were becoming more and more popular in their style called west coast swing, and there's a very expected path in the west coast swing community that when you get good enough, and you become well known that you go on what we call “the circuit”, which is a bunch of different events around the country and around the world. You compete; you add more points; you become more well known; you have students all over the place. This is how you make ends meet. This is what a career looks like. 

But they have parallel careers. Victoria is a nurse and Frank is a chef. They knew they loved their dancing and they knew they loved their students in Pittsburgh. And they were intrigued by these new opportunities that were coming up but they weren't sure what to do with them. So they went into their lived experience and they said “When have we felt most alive as a partnership, as individuals, what holds those experiences together?” 

And the result was this statement “I verb so that’:

We create from our roots to build soulful communities. We create from our roots to build soulful communities.

Externally, they just started describing themselves as soulful community builders. With this new name and understanding for what it always been true about them, they had always been soulful community builders. This was not aspirational, this was hard data, this was real. they started saying no to opportunities that weren't going to sustain their lives in Pittsburgh.They said yes to their city, they said yes to investing in a studio space they said yes to their local students, they said no to traveling on the road every weekend. Victoria kept her work. Frank realized that dance was his primary passion and he started to let the chef work go and put more time into teaching.

And then of course the pandemic, dance disappeared, especially partner dancing like we're not holding hands and doing anything anymore. But being soulful community builders didn't go away. It changed the way the expression of who they were changed. Victoria, ended up taking work as a travel nurse so she could be in places with lower trained nursing staff and to be part of their response to COVID. Frank found another part time job to help make ends meet. He's now doing landscaping and all kinds of other things in his parallel career. They were able to move houses so they have a bigger space for the future so they can safely teach people in their home. So community building has nothing to do with their artistry, meaning their career and their expression will change a million times over the course of their lives.

But this anchor that helps see them through, and I just, I just want what all to stop…

...Okay, sorry I'm getting riled up. I want all of us to have access to that kind of clarity, and we do it is available to all of us, we all have the ability to go into our experiences and start naming what those pieces are. I just really really want more of us to name our shades of blue to see ourselves the way my stylist and Bulgaria saw herself to verbally say out loud that this thing that I do is about changing lives. Not just cutting hair to meet a style or trend.

And some of us come pretty close, but there can be this hesitancy and fully leaning into it and fully defining it because once you define it if it comes this thing that you can't unsee. You know it. And then you have to make choices about it. Sometimes that's scary.

But at the end of the day. This is how we find our way through. It's by doing the deep internal work of putting words to what is already true about us to make it visible, to make it concrete.

Almost a year ago or a little less than a year ago, Kyle Dargan spoke here at Creative Mornings and he said that he hoped that pandemic would “invite artists into their roles as essential workers.” There's nothing I want to see more than that. But we're not going to be named by outside people in order we want to be we don't want the labels that the economy decides to put on us, what they decide essential looks like we get to decide that we get to name who we are and what we do and why it matters is what it means when I say that I believe words are action.

What we put words do changes how we see it changes what we do. It is not separate from action, it is a part of it is a visceral physical experience language is hardwired into our bodies, it's not abstract, it's tangible, it's tactile. And we can do something really really interesting with it.

So, what are you going to do? What is your shade of blue?