Meditation: Find Beauty Everywhere, three minutes

My style of leadership and communication is heavily rooted in steadfastness and compliance. I rarely seek to accomplish things by focusing on influence or dominance. At least this is what a leadership training session centered around the DISC personality test told me. You can take a free version of the test here. Once the traits were explained to me in detail, I found them accurate.

I was in a group of over 40 people, most of whom I did not know or didn’t know very well—though I was there because that will change soon—and we had broken into clusters based on our primary trait. One of the Ds (Dominance) asked: “How can I get you [the Ss (Steadfast)] to give feedback?”

What an interesting question.

I took time to ponder it—as my style is want to do—and realized that this is true. I am not prone to give feedback when asked both personally and professionally. At least not immediately. I like being asked about my day or my weekend or how I’m doing, but I’m not likely to say much beyond surface thoughts. At work, I’ll give feedback in a structured situation—I love formal goal setting and reviews—but otherwise, I tend to be more circumspect.

I know feedback has consequence. I like to know why I’m being asked something and how you’re going to use the information I give you. I want to be confident my thoughts will be clear and received as intended. I don’t like to burden others with whatever I’m feeling at the moment.

I hadn’t considered this about myself before. I imagine that awareness will be useful to me going forward. I’ll be more likely to ask some why questions and for additional time rather than be non-communicative or feel pressured to respond immediately.

40-something and I’m still learning about me. Who’d a thunk?

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If you’re in NYC over the next two weeks, you should head uptown and see Detained. It’s timely and compelling and well done.

This is coming out late tonight because I was distracted by Beyoncé’s Coachella performance this morning. It was on a whole other level. Please to send me your best explainers and deep dives into all the elements that went into making that magic happen. You can keep your think pieces though.

Right before I sat down to write this, Cardi B was performing on the ‘Chella livestream. Who is more delightful in pop culture right now?

On the plane ride to NYC, I read Annihilation and listened to the soundtracks for the movie adaptation as well as Westworld, The Cloverfield Paradox, and Arrival. They all go well together. The book is good but the film—which I saw first—did a better job of screwing with my head.

On the return flight, I watched The Shape of Water and the first Kingsman movie. I expected to like The Shape of Water and did. It’s impeccable film-making though I think Get Out will be the 2017 release that most people will still talk about years from now. Kingsman was a surprise. Outside of an off-putting turn towards the end that was out of left field and felt incongruous with the rest of the flick, it was quite fun for that kind of hyper-violent comic book adaptation.

Shana’s dictionary.

California is the future.

Dapper Dan is still the man.

And these are the things for which I’m grateful.

That includes you.

Yes, you.