Integer Leadership Consulting

How do leaders build stability during unstable times? How do we human beings find security in the midst of insecurity that comes from unpredictability? Before we can do anything for others as leaders, managers, colleagues, friends, or family, we must settle this issue for ourselves, in our own minds and in the depths of our hearts.

The fact is is that life is unpredictable, unstable, erratic, uncertain, unforeseeable, fluctuating, and often capricious. In other words, we don’t know what’s coming our way, when it will come, or the manner in which it will arrive. I’m not a pessimist. My close friends would call me an indomitable optimist. Yet, there is great wisdom and not a little anxiety that comes from making room for the fact that life happens with our agreement or not. And when life unfolds it can be vicious and damaging as well as beautiful, ennobling, and beneficial. Try as we may to stack the odds in our favor, the bottom line is that life will happen regardless of how hard we seek to set the odds in our favor. This is tough to digest.

Janoff-Bulman (2004), in her excellent research into the ongoing impact of trauma, noted that random victimizations that are perpetrated against us or which simply happen to us as the result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time (insurance terminology would call the latter “acts of God” which means natural disasters) can leave us, over the long-term, with a complex sense of stability and instability, meaningfulness and meaninglessness. Even though trauma can leave us more anxious and aware of the incomprehensibility of life, it can also leave us with a sense of gratitude and a willingness to engage in life. We can be terrified yet we can also become life affirming. As Janoff-Bulman observed, “From a recognition of human mortality and fragility in the face of an uncontrollable, arbitrary universe, survivors reevaluate life and enthusiastically embrace living. By realizing the real and ever-present possibility of loss, survivors create value in their lives” (p. 133). Survivors of trauma understand this complex juxtaposition where others, who refuse to acknowledge it, may embrace an attitude of learned helplessness or perhaps embrace a form of prayer for protection and vindication.

I have always been captivated by the thought that prayer does not change God but rather changes us. This makes sense to me. It seems that prayer is often viewed as a defense against the calamities and vagaries of life. This is to say that if we pray enough and with the right heart and intentions then we shall be protected. If, on the other hand, we fail to “dial-in” the right formula and “life happens” we may easily feel that we simply got it wrong in the first place or deserved what we received. I see this differently. If prayer changes us, and I believe it does, then reflection and pondering upon the mysteries of life should at the same time ground us in the reality that we are just as susceptible as the next person who feels no need to pray to any higher power. When “life happens” we should not be thrown ultimately and finally into skepticism, rage, and doubt, although this may well be our initial response, but rather deeper into the conviction that God is at work in all dimensions of life…even in the face of traumas that impact us psychologically, emotionally, and professionally.