The ego, that mental image of yourself formed from your personal and cultural conditioning, attempts to provide you with a sense of security, safety, and worth. Your ego demands recognition and wastes energy in resentment if it doesn’t get enough attention. But the ego, by it’s very nature, is empty. It’s like a hole inside of us that is in a continual state of dissatisfaction and restlessness, constantly pursuing “more” to fill itself up. To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only the past and future are important to the ego, for these are what it depends on for its survival. While the ego is essentially dysfunctional, there are times when it can be a positive, necessary force, such as when growing into adulthood or pursuing certain goals. Then the ego can be helpful, providing you can observe it and not get attached.

There also resides in each of us, to a lesser or greater degree, an authentic self, a soul, an essence of who we really are. Your soul doesn’t care about rejection, titles, possessions, successes, failures, or how scared you are. The soul cares only about expanding and expressing itself. It is your guide, and your true source of power. This inner source of strength comes from developing your capacity to delay gratification, learning to courageously face the demands of reality without escaping, developing the capability to see the long-term effects of actions, and achieving quietness of mind. Such cultivation requires a lifetime of dedicated personal work, guided by masters. A cultivated, integrated authentic self is, in today’s world, a leader’s greatest tool. Cultivation, or becoming more fully human, is the primary leadership issue of our time and lies at the core of our work.

Deciding to embark on this arduous journey called leadership requires a decision to go inside yourself and learn to discern the impulse of the ego from the voice of the soul. If a decision comes from the ego, you’ll never be satisfied. You’ll always want more. Authentic leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great organization. It’s not that authentic leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious—but their ambition is first and foremost for the greater good, not themselves.

I end this blog with a wonderful poem attributed to a Chinese sage, Wu Wei Wu:

Why are you so unhappy?

Because ninety-nine percent of what you think,

And everything you do,

Is for your self,

And there isn’t one.”

David Irvine, Speaker and Author

1) Leadership is about inspiring and engaging people to work toward a compelling vision – by seeing the gifts and potential of others more clearly than they see it in themselves and being able to communicate it in their own unique way. Martin Luther King never said, “I  have a strategic plan.”

2) There are too many consultants and speakers telling organizations how to be leaders. Leadership is contextual. The best an outside consultant can do is help you decide what kind of leadership is needed in your organization to achieve your purpose and help you get there.

3) Leadership is about presence, not position. Great leadership cannot be reduced to technique or title. Great leadership comes from the identity and the integrity of the leader. Leadership is the way you live your life. Your power as a leader comes from being an integrated and real human being. This makes every person in your organization a potential leader.

4) You don’t get promoted to being a leader. You get promoted to being a boss but you don’t get promoted to being a leader. There’s a big difference between a boss and a leader. Holding a position of leadership is like having a driver’s license. Just because you have one doesn’t make you a good one.

5) You aren’t a leader until someone decides that you are. You have to earn the right to be a be called a leader, and you aren’t one until you have earned it in the eyes of others. In the words of Margaret Thatcher, “Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”

6) As a leader –  whether it’s in the home, your community, or in your organization – you will continuously need to balance supports with demands. You don’t help people by pushing them when they need to be supported, nor do you help them by supporting them when they need to be pushed. You never get this balance perfect, but great leaders work at it – every day.

7) Great leaders achieve organizational goals. Authentic leaders help you find your voice in the process. Authentic leaders align the interests, values, and goals of the organization with the interests, values, and goals of the employee. This is employee engagement at its finest, and it’s what attracts, retains, and inspires greatness. Authenticity is about finding your voice and inspiring others to find theirs. Authentic leaders earn their credibility by being authentic. You know when it’s real.

Leadership is ultimately about service. Turn your organization chart upside down. Take care of your people so they can take care of the customer. Serving, however, is different than pleasing. Serving is about meeting people’s needs so they can get their job done. Pleasing is about meeting people’s wants. Serving breeds commitment. Pleasing breeds entitlement.

9) Your best leadership program will be over a cup of coffee. You’ll never be able to lead by sitting at your computer. Make building trust your number one leadership priority and spend a large portion of your time connecting with the people you serve. Find out what matters to others and do all you can to meet their needs. Listen relentlessly.

10) Leadership isn’t about you. It’s not about how great you are, how noble you are, or how profound you are. Leadership is about others and what you do to give credit to others. If you are going earn the credibility to influence others – long term – you better have a strong enough ego that you can leave it at the door. Credibility comes from giving credit, not taking it. People don’t remember what you said; they remember how you made them feel.

11) Leadership is largely a matter of love. If you aren’t comfortable with the word love, call it caring, because leadership involves caring about people, not manipulating them. If you don’t care about people or about your work or about why you get out of bed in the morning, you might consider doing yourself and your organization a favor and get out of the position of leadership.

12) If you want to improve your capacity to lead, put your focus on finding ways to enjoy leading more. While I’ve met a few incompetent leaders who actually enjoy leading, generally speaking, the best leaders I know enjoy what they do. Put your efforts in finding joy in your work as a leader, and you’ll be a better leader.

What is your leadership philosophy? Have you shared it lately with the people you serve and love?

David Irvine, Speaker and Author

But for some reason I can’t seem to let go of Norway and the unspeakable tragedy that fell upon this beautiful country and her people. Perhaps it’s because my own daughter has been to Norway at an international youth camp. Maybe it’s because Norwegian youth have stayed in our home and endeared us to the loving and gentle nature of Norwegians. As I sit here in a state of shock and horror, I’d like to share some of my thoughts about responding psychically to tragedy, senseless and otherwise. Not because I necessarily have anything particularly wise or profound or helpful to contribute on the subject, but because writing this article may aide my own healing.

As a student of life, it is my belief that every experience provides an opportunity to grow and deepen our authentic presence so that we might influence the world with greater impact through that presence. Here are a few of my reflections from the Norwegian tragedy.

1.     Let life touch you. If you are going to earn the necessary credibility to be a leader, you have to be able to touch others. And you can’t touch others if you are not touched. You have to know the full spectrum of the human experience, both the ecstasy and agony of life. One of the qualities of authenticity is the willingness to be open and receptive. Take time for the important events in your life to strike home, to affect you. Don’t be in a hurry. Read the news. Be aware of what’s happening in the world. If something stirs you or irritates you as you read, sit with it. Write about it. Talk about it. Mediate or pray about it. Try to resist the temptation to run from it by shifting too quickly to your next experience. The journey to authentic living and authentic leading is through the heart. Learning to be still when discomfort surfaces can be a vital way to access your authentic self.

2.     Be objective about world events. In an age of technology, where scenes of violence and tragedy are so readily available to us, it’s not sensationalism that moves you or helps you grow. Much of the media’s portrayal of catastrophes is meant to entertain, to sell news, to keep us distracted. Don’t get seduced into the media’s obsessive exposé of violence that stimulates our curiosity. Study an intelligent approach to a tragedy for a measured time. Let your emotions and intellect come to the surface. Then let go and move on with your life.

3.     Accept pain as a part of life. The human experience is one of both ecstasy and suffering. When we accept that, we no longer suffer. To pretend that life should be void of pain, disease, and uncertainty, is both naïve and inauthentic. While senseless disasters and injustices seem to prevail, we would do well to not fight reality, but learn to face it – with dignity and grace. While it seems easier to accept “natural” disasters, such as hurricanes and tornadoes that kill people than it is to accept deranged people who deliberately destroy, the senseless destruction of life has been around since the beginning of time. It would do us all well to accept this. Acceptance is not the same as resignation. Acceptance of life on life’s terms, and living in alignment with the present moment is a surrendering process that leads to peace in the midst of unspeakable pain.

4.     Find a spiritual centre in the mystery. While many find religion a source of strength during chaos and uncertainty, discovering a spiritual centre is different. Religion gives you certainty; spirituality gives you peace in the uncertainty. Religion provides you a map and a path to take you out of the darkness; spirituality helps you embrace the darkness by valuing the mystery. Religion is a concept lived in the future; spirituality is an experience of oneness in the present. Religion is paint by numbers; spirituality is the masterpiece.  Religion is a prescription given for an ailing soul; spirituality is the spontaneous flow that prevents the ailment. The first is the response to sickness the second the absence of illness. While not necessarily mutually exclusive, religion and spirituality are distinct. When we accept and embrace the experience of being fully alive in the midst of suffering, injustice and mystery, settle our minds, and find within a deep and sustaining power beyond our own thinking, therein lies peace. When we let go of the need for certainty and security from a world attempted to be run on our terms, we begin, in the words of Joseph Campbell, “to let go of the life we have planned and embrace the life that is waiting for us.” This is the magic of fully being alive in this wondrous human experience. It is then that we can understand how leadership – the ability to inspire and engage others in a cause beyond self-interest – is not a position. It is a presence.

David Irvine, Author and Speaker

1. Give what you expect from others. Harlie engaged me by first being engaged himself. Leadership is about energy, and if you want energy on your team, you must bring energy to your team. Energy – whether it’s positive or negative – is contagious. Harlie was passionate about so many things. He was passionate about learning, about growing, and about life. As a former national gymnastics champion, he kept himself in great shape. He lived what he led. If you want engagement from others, you must be engaged.* We cannot give what we do not have.

2. Be motivated by love. Great leadership is largely a matter of love. If you are uncomfortable with that word, call it caring, because leadership involves caring about people, not manipulating them. Dad was tough on me when I needed it, but I never doubted his motive: he genuinely cared. He cared more about me than the results which were a means to a higher end. Harlie was motivated by love. You can’t fabricate love; people will see right through you. What you can do is decide to care about people. People don’t care how much you know until they know  how  much you care.

3. Live your passion. Our basement was filled with evidence of Dad’s passion: exercise equipment, a tumbling mat, weights. Every morning Dad would exercise at the crack of dawn. Although he couldn’t always get me engaged, especially in my early years, he lived his passion. He preached the importance of exercise without saying a word. When I was in junior high, Dad took me to the YMCA to teach me how to exercise on the parallel bars. I didn’t have the strength to lift myself up, much less do any maneuvers on them. After several disappointing attempts, Dad soon got the message: I was just not meant to be gymnast. Even though I have memories of him being disappointed that he couldn’t engage me in gymnastics, he kept his own passion alive.

4. Tune in to what drives people. When I was 14, dad was teaching me to drive our old 1954 Chev truck. When I pulled over into a farm yard a mile from our home, dad sensed that something was wrong. We sat in silence for a few moments and I opened up about an incident in physical education class. “We ran a mile  and I couldn’t finish it without walking… I came in last, but I want to be the best miler in our zone track meet next year.” Dad knew little about running, so we went to the library and found every book we could on running. Dad became my coach, and the next spring I won the mile race in our zone track meet. Everyone has a passion. Everyone is engaged about something. The key is to create the space to listen and tune in to what matters to people. When you are committed to helping people find and express their voice – their unique gifts and passion, you’ll get engagement.

5. Have a vision of greatness. Greatness wasn’t an external thing for my father. His life was about making a difference, not making a buck. He never had a mission statement. But he had a mission and it was expressed in how he lived his life. When you have a vision, whether it’s expressed explicitly or implicitly by your actions, it inspires people. In his “I have dream speech,” Martin Luther King did not say, “I have a strategic plan.” While plans may be necessary, it is dreams that inspire, uplift, and engage us. “If you want to build a ship,” writes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, don’t herd people together to collect wood, and don’t assign them to tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” Whatever your vision, live it well and you will inspire others to engage with you.

6.  Be a good gardener. Dad was a good gardener and he taught me a lot about leadership by the way he gardened. No plants ever grow better because you demand that they do so or because you threaten them. Plants grow only when they have the right conditions and are given proper care. Creating the space and providing the proper nourishment for plants – and people as well – is a matter of continual investigation and vigilance. But another reality about gardening is that you really don’t have much control over the harvest. Despite your best efforts, for a myriad of reasons, some plants simply won’t make it. You can’t engage everyone. It’s a reality we all live with.

David Irvine, Speaker and Author

The passion and promise in our work is to build cultures of trust that attract, inspire, and unleash greatness. What we have learned about culture includes:

1.     While goals give you direction, culture gives you the energy to get there.

2.     You already have a culture, even though you may not be aware of it or able to clearly articulate it. Culture answers these questions: What is my experience of being here? What is our way of doing things? What do we value? You are going to have a culture anyway, so why not have a great one.

3.     If you are committed to attract and retain the best talent, culture will be the most important investment of your time and resources. This is because your best people have a low tolerance for compliance and insist on engagement. The talent pool is not only shrinking, those within it are educated, connected, and grounded in the idea of personal choice. They want to be appreciated, acknowledged and loved. They want opportunity. They want to work with people who are non-judgmental, willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, willing to listen and mentor, willing to trust and willing to stand for their success. A tall order but that’s the new reality.

4.     Culture is not what people say, but how they behave. It is shaped one person at a time, usually starting at the top. People are watching all the time and if it is perceived that there is more reward for delivering organizational results than there is for how those results are achieved, then people will either disengage or disembark.

5.     You can either create your culture by default or design. If you are committed to create your culture by design, somebody has to make the decision about the kind of culture you are going build, and everybody needs to understand the process you are using to build it.

6.     While it is always easier to build than it is to change one, changing a culture is always possible.

Ten Steps To Building An Aligned Culture

Leaders of a culture or subculture live at any level of an organization. They are what we call “culture makers.” Culture makers are people within a culture who are committed to building a better environment around them, and thus are deciding to be leaders (with or without a title). These could be entrepreneurs, divisional leaders, department heads, non-profit or team leaders, committed employees at any level, or even parents. It is these culture makers that we focus on to build an aligned culture. So here, in abridged form, is our process for building an aligned culture.

Step 1. Define your culture. Decide on the scope of the culture that you are committed to build – that lays within your sphere of influence. Is it your company, department, division, community association, team, family?

Step 2. Define your leadership team. Identify your 5-6 key leaders – allies that you will depend on to build your culture. These will be people who have the positional power, capacity, and commitment to make it happen. Be sure you have a Chief Emotional Officer on your team: a person with the positional power as well as the passion (a monomaniac with a mission) to take accountability for the culture.

Step 3. Get alignment at the top. Identify your core values that you, as a leadership team, are committed to living. Have an “offsite” leadership meeting to ensure that you are all committed to living the values, first with each other and then with your entire culture. If you are a “subculture” – a culture within a larger system, you will want to take the larger organizational cultural value statements and make them real for your culture.

Step 4. Develop a team “code of conduct” with your leadership team. Once you have decided upon your core values, you will need to develop a process that outlines your promises to each other: how you will hold yourself and each other accountable for living these values. This is about turning values into specific expected behaviors.

Step 5. Assess Alignment – And Connect to Reality. Decide on a process for assessing your current alignment between your “vision,” your “claim,” and your “reality” as an entire culture. In order to do this you will need to pay attention to the “visible” culture and the “real” culture – your current reality. You may need to take the time to get into the hallways, the coffee conversations, etc. to get to the grapevine and current reality.

Step 6. “Roll out” your values with your entire culture. Once you are clear about the current alignment, meet with your entire culture. With your leadership team at the front of the room, outline your vision for this culture, your core values, your assessment of the current reality and the degree of alignment you see between your vision, your claim, your reality, and your leadership code of conduct. Explain how you expect to be held accountable for living these values as positional leaders – your promised actions as a leadership team.

Step 7. Have each of your leadership team members define – and build – their own leadership teams. Meet with each member of your leadership team and help them define their own leadership teams and go through the same process with their respective teams. This will continue throughout the culture until, ideally, every person is eventually assigned to a “leadership team” or at least closely affiliated with a leadership team.

Step 8. Engage your employees – at every level. Begin and sustain the process – and build trust – through the power of courageous conversations. Create conversations around your values. Turn conversations about values into mutually agreed upon actions and promises. Tell the story. Shine the light. Acknowledge when and where individuals lived one or more of your values. Repeat the message.

Step 9. Define how you will convey to stakeholders outside the culture how you will live your values. How will you convey your values to your customers? What needs to be written in your marketing materials/web site, etc.?

Step 10. Get your values into every system. Bring values into your hiring processes, your performance management system and HR practices. Only promote leaders who are living the values. Make it tough to not live the values.

David Irvine, Speaker and Author

The concept and experience of accountability needs rejuvenation. You have to get to the deep meaning of accountability. You have to be clear about who you are accountable to, “for what specific results,” and “for what matters most.” If you aren’t, accountability becomes just another organizational buzzword, or worse, a hammer to punish people,

Accountability, when understood and applied effectively, will transform the your organization, your work, and your life. Accountability is the keystone of trust, the foundation of labour and life.

In it’s simplist form, accountability is the ability to be counted on. Real accountability is rooted in the behaviour of people. It is not, as some think, a character trait or something embedded in an organization. Accountability is determined by how you act.

When people accept real accountability, life in an organization or in a relationship is straightforward and productive. No one needs a pack of dogs eating their homework or a fresh pile of excuses to explain incomplete tasks. People do what they say they are going to do—and paradoxically when this happens real accountability creates enormous freedom and the opportunity for creativity.

Real accountability leads us back to our roots as people with integrity, unleashing the human potential that can so easily be suppressed. In our complex organizations, our busy families and our fast paced society, accountability can be diffused or completely lost—and when accountability is lost, we lose touch with our core. When we grasp real accountability we get a grip on results.

Accountable Behaviours

Real accountability requires you to do four things consistently:

1. Take Ownership. No one but you cares about the reason you let someone down. Deciding, once and for all, that all blame is a waste of time, will change your life forever. Decide to give to others what you expect from others. Be the change that you wish to see around you. Deciding that you have helped create the world around you – and therefore you are the one to step into healing it – is the ultimate act of accountability. Ownership means choosing service over self-interest, contribution over consumerism, and gratitude andgenerosity over entitlement. Ownership makes you a force in the world that changes the world. George Bernard Shaw knew this when he said, “This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”

2. Carry through to completion the responsibilities entrusted to you. Henry Ford once said, “you can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.” Real accountability means only making promises you know you can – and will – deliver. Real accountability also requires you to search for and clarify accountabilities that are assumed in your roles, to judge which accountabilities you accept, and to carry those accountabilities through to completion. When you make a promise to someone you now have a creditor, where a debt is owed. Once you have made the promise, accountability means that you then deliver on your promise. When circumstances prohibit you from fulfilling your promise, let the creditor know as soon as you know, that the commitment is jeopardized. Negotiate, at this point, to minimize damages and re-commit to a new course of action.

3. Stand up for your actions. Real accountability depends upon transparency. Others need to know who did what, and who is accountable for doing something. Standing up for your actions in public is very relaxing when you are confident that you have acted ethically and with your best efforts. Standing up for your actions is another aspect of ownership, in that it means owning up to mistakes. Though owning up publically for the mistakes you make may not be comfortable, it takes less effort and results in more respect than hiding or running from the truth. No one ever thought less of a person who stood up and said, “I’m accountable for that.”

4. Stand behind your results. The effects of your actions—your results—matter more than the actions themselves. Yes, you sent the memo, but did the memo produce the desired effect? You explained to your child how much a pencil hurts when jabbed into an uncle, but has her behaviour improved? People are accountable for producing a result, not just for taking an action. Real accountability encompasses the unintended results as well as the ones you mean to produce. When you act to stop a child’s unsocial behaviour, you are also accountable for the effect your actions have on the child’s sense of safety and love. Or when you produce a high quality running shoe, you are accountable for the effect your plant’s effluent has on the local water supply. Real accountability requires an acceptance of responsibility for all the results your actions (or inactions) produce.

David Irvine, Speaker and Author

This quote doesn’t just relate to our education system. This quote extends to all forms of learning. Be sure you are developing yourself in a way that pushes you to expand beyond your established, conditioned way of thinking.

When is the last time you hung out in situations, environments, and in relationships where you were uncomfortable? When is the last time you exposed yourself to something that broke a particular pattern within you and around you? What does it really mean to learn?

I share Krishnamurti’s words not to be critical, in any way, of our education system, but to remind you that there is another education waiting for you, and that the teacher will be your authentic self, your own voice, your heart.

David Irvine, Speaker and Author

“Breathing New Life Into The Public Service: It Starts With You. That’s the title of the conference I recently attended. Best-selling author, David Irvine was the speaker for the day. He speaks about leadership, accountability and well, life. He inspires me and challenges me almost as powerfully as my faith. I heart David Irvine.

Now, about breathing new life into the Public Service and about how it starts with me. Sigh. I was thinking about passing on what I learned from the conference about organizational culture and how it’s up to me to make it a great one. I could also talk about accountability and how it’s about people being able to count on me. Or about leadership and how I can’t be promoted to be a leader, I have to earn it.

There’s so much I learned that day and I’m so pumped about it that I want to just blog about it all.

In my eight pages of notes from the session about culture, leadership, accountability and authenticity, there is one thing that I have learned. It’s so simple and so seemingly easy that you might fall off your chair when I tell you. Either that or tilt your head and go, “Really?” Yes. Really. So here it is. Friends, I’ve simply learned to PAUSE.

In the everyday challenges of work and life, I have learned to pause.

On my way to work, someone cuts me off. Pause.

Someone complains my ear off about something they don’t plan to change. Pause.

I get back my 360 degree feedback. Pause.

I present something I’m passionate about and someone rolls their eyes. Pause.

Pause. Pause. Pause!

It’s fascinating what we can do within an itty-bitty pause.

Within that pause I can choose to put on the full rage and let it ruin my whole day or shrug it off and let it go.

Within that pause I can choose to participate in a boy bashing, work bashing, boss bashing session or exercise my right to excuse myself from a potentially toxic conversation that helps no one.

Within that pause I can choose to find out who gave me a 3.5 (out of 5) score on leadership abilities and hurt them very badly or humble myself and accept the fact that I’m not perfect and I have oh so many “areas of improvement”.

Within that pause I can choose to let that eye-rolling dude break me down or use him as a stepping stone to break through my insecurities.

Within that pause I can choose to complain or do what I can to help fix the system.

That little pause breathes new life into my reactions. And when I breathe new life into my reactions, I breathe new life into my work… and breathe new life into my team… new life into my department… and yes, breathe new life into the Public Service.”

David Irvine, Speaker and Author

Working with organizational cultures, the single-most common request we get is how to build more trust and respect in the workplace. It is our experience that this is achieved through personal accountability – the ability to be counted on – which is the basis for personal integrity. Personal integrity leads to self-respect, respect for others who demonstrate integrity, and ultimately a respectful workplace. So in our view, personal integrity is the essence of building a successful culture of trust and respect.

As an engineer and inventor, Bucky understood the importance of strength within a design. Engineers are accountable for designing structures capable of handling conditions up to a certain limit. In the engineering world, the margin between safety and disaster is known as “structural integrity.” Similarly, our success as accountable people depends on our personal structural integrity. As the engineers of our own existence, our choices affect not only our own lives but also the lives of the people who rely on us.

By standing behind our promises and assuming a position of accountability, we begin to design a life of personal structural integrity. With this as our foundation, our work and service in our families, organizations, and communities will be rock solid. However, just as you could never design and build a structure to handle any condition, personal structural integrity will always have its limits. Because it is not rigid, but instead strong and flexible, and adaptable to life’s changing circumstances, it can meet almost any test.

Integrity comes from the word “integer,” which means wholeness, integration, and completeness. Being integrated is a necessary condition for self-respect, and self-respect is the basis for creating a respectful environment. Integrity means having clear, explicit principles and doing what you say you’re going to do. It’s about being honest with yourself and others. Integrity is deeply personal and therefore deeply applicable to all areas of life.

Integrity has everything to do with your success as a leader. Leadership – the capacity to illicit the commitment of others, is about presence, not position. Now more than ever, power, purpose, and privilege no longer reside at the top of an organization. They potentially live at every level. Great leadership cannot be reduced to techniques or tools or titles. While you may promoted to being a boss, you don’t get promoted to being a leader. You have to earn the right to be called a leader. Great leadership comes from the identity and integrity of the leader. Authentic leadership is achieved through the power of presence, which comes from being an integrated human being, a person of integrity. Integrity is, indeed, the essence of everything successful.

David Irvine, Speaker and Author

Here’s some reflections about my mother.

I suppose it goes without saying that I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for my mother, Joyce Irvine. But I also would not be who I am today were it not for my mother. The vital impact she had on me as a mentor, teacher, guide, and healer came from the strength of something that lay beyond all those roles.

Soon after Joyce’s untimely death in 1999, my sister and I were leaning out her condominium and discovered a worn-out box on the upper shelf of one of her closets. Curious to see what might be inside, we opened it to find hundreds of tattered letters. As we sat and started poring through them, we soon realized that these were piles of love letters written to Joyce by her young husband, Ted Harling, from the cockpit of a Lancaster Bomber over a war-torn Europe where he served as a flight lieutenant during World War II. Within the pile there was also a group of letters that were Joyce’s letters to Ted.

A deep and sincere appreciation along with a resounding sadness swept over me as we read these letters. We realized that many of those long missives written by an exposed, loving, romantic, and anguished young war bride were actually returned to her unopened after Ted was killed in action, leaving her a two-year-old daughter to raise with no father.

There are myriad ways that a mother can impact her son or daughter’s life, and something very profound happened to me the day I read my mother’s love letters. I started to see that beyond the traditional concept of “mother” is a real woman with genuine emotions, passion, pain, and pleasure. We expect our mothers to be the stable rock in our lives and amidst our expectations we somehow miss the authentic humanness that lies below the surface of what we know as our “mother.”

It seems strange that I didn’t see this vulnerable side of my mother while she was alive. I was blind to most of her romantic side, her fearful side, her imperfect side. I also know that in her need to be a “strong” and “good” mother, she wasn’t willing to expose these aspects of her personality. As for my part, I know that when she was alive I spent more energy reacting to her instead of valuing her. Now that our personalities don’t block us, I am able to appreciate her with a renewed level of respect, love, and gratitude. Having survived the death of two husbands, the Great Depression, World War II, being a single parent for many years, and pioneering a career at a time when mothers were expected to stay at home, my mother was perhaps the most courageous woman I have ever known. It has taken me many years to appreciate the strength of her audacious, compassionate spirit. She was a tremendous inspiration to me.

What I offer are three lessons from these insights:

1. Let us recognize the inner lives of our mothers. May we realize with a deeper sense of appreciation, not just the things that our mothers “did” or “do” for us or to us, but also who this woman is and was: a real human being with a real history, real needs, real dreams, real emotions, and real values. This is what we need to value most about our mothers.

2. For mothers, it is okay at times to expose your real feelings, to be more vulnerable with your children and not be afraid to show more aspects of who you are as a person. Your children need to see this side of their mother. How can we possibly help our children deal effectively with the traumas of life if we shelter them by hiding our vulnerable side from them? They need to see us facing life honestly as they must learn to do the same.

3. For those of you who are mothers, you don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be more fully human. As you come to know yourself and share this self with those you love, you will offer your children a gift of inspiration. And who knows: one day they may unwrap this gift. For those of you who are mothers, my hope is that as you take some time out of your busy lives to tune in and attend to the humanness of the “real,” authentic self that lives beyond the roles, responsibilities, and expectations that come with being a mother, you will discover more appreciation and compassion for yourself.

I conclude with a tribute to my mother by passing along some of her amazing wisdom I discovered in her journal, months after her death:

“Every parent, no matter how hard they try, will be both a blessing and a curse to their children. My hope is that my children will appreciate the ‘blessing,’ if not immediately then later in life, and perhaps more importantly that they will take the ‘curse’ and, like an oyster irritated by a grain of sand, over time use it as a catalyst to build layers of character and understanding—thus producing a pearl. —Joyce Irvine

I got it Mom. Happy Mother’s Day to mothers everywhere.