I love your kind heart, and your stubborn streak.

I love how you look after you first wake up — red cheeked, eyes squinted against the light.

I love how your voice shows the wear of the day.

I love that you want desperately to do things on your own. And yet still want my help.

I love when you snuggle, and lay your head in my lap.

I love that you always want more choices.

I love that you test your limits. And mine.

I love that I couldn’t have known who you would be, and yet here you are, and I couldn’t be prouder.

I love your love of puzzles, in any form, at any time of day.

I love how happy lollipops make you.

I love that you try to figure out the lyrics of songs, and often do (though that Stornoway lyric is actually “Here comes the blackOUT,” not “Here comes the black cow,” but whatever, you’ll find out soon enough that songs are what you make of them.)

I love that you have an apparently limitless capacity to hear “London Bridge is Falling Down.”

I love that you can recognize Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, The Rolling Stones, Andrew Bird, Orchestra Baobob, Cat Power, Norah Jones, Madeleine Peyroux, and Stornoway — within a few notes. And that you tell us which one you want to listen to at night. And that Stornoway is your favorite. For now.

I love that sometimes, but only sometimes, you let me sing to you.

I love how much you love strawberries.

I love how you hug.

I love that you know which hat you want to wear in the morning.

I love that you want your Halloween pumpkin and Easter basket all year long.

I love that you remember the North End feasts, and can’t wait for them to come back.

I love that having you changed me forever. And forced me to let go.

I love that you look like you. Not me. Not Daddy.

I love that yellow is your favorite color.

I love how you say “Peter.”

I love that I’m Mommy, Mama, and Mom — depending on your mood.

I love how excited you are about the mixer.

I love how your eyebrows reveal everything.

I love how you experiment with words, and phrases (though my favorite, and not by a little, is still: “Well, hello lovelies, how did you get here?”).

I love how everyone seems to know you.

I love how much you love books.

I love that you love to explore, and at the same time, are perfectly happy to just sit and figure something out. Except when you aren’t.

I love that you have a hard time waking up in the morning.

I love that your impatience is a perfect mimic of mine — and that you’ll learn, too, just how much trouble that’ll get you.

I love that you’ve discovered Oreos. And make up songs about them.

I love that, every day, you make me glad you’re here.

I love watching you learn.

I love how much you love to help.

I love how you make people smile.

I love that you’ll keep yourself awake to hear the song you want to hear (and that, as a result, we had to learn to reorder songs on albums so you’d go to sleep sooner).

I love how you deeply you feel, and care.

I love watching you grow.

I love that you’re three, and in your head, that means that you’ll now eat all the things you won’t eat. But trust me, I’m not holding my breath on that one.

I love that, somehow and for some reason, you’re the first son I was blessed enough to have. And that you teach me as much as I teach you.

I love you — who you are, and who’ll you be.

Happy birthday.

The plans we make for ourselves are maps. And they’re flawed.

Think about it: when we make a plan, we’re taking reality as we see and experience it and trying to draw a path to a future, an idea, we can only guess at. We’re making a plan for what we (think we) want to do, to get a result we (think we) want.

But there are goals, and then there’s reality. Reality is what actually happens, not what we hope does. Yes, that’s obvious, but it’s a fact we tend to ignore.

All maps are flawed. They have to be — because every map is a representation, a projection, a two-dimensional interpretation of a three-dimensional thing. That conversion from one set of dimensions to another means that something will be — has to be — distorted, out of scale. (That’s why most of us grew up thinking Greenland could take Canada in a back alley fight….)

When we make our own maps, we, too, need to be aware of what we distort. But most of us are terrible judges of our own reality, and thus the maps we draw ourselves are suspect.

We get blinded by what we wish were true — about ourselves, about life. We get blinded by aspiration. By desire. Even by reputation.

But distortion isn’t the only danger lurking in the plans we make. There’s another: omission. What our maps lack.

When making a map, cartographers need to be as thoughtful about what they leave out as what they put in — because usually it’s what’s not on a map (the one-way street, the new building) that gets us in trouble.

So, too, it’s what’s not on our mental maps — the realities we haven’t planned for, or refuse to see — that get in the way of our goals. We forget to plan for past behavior and the force of habit. We forget to plan for our mental health, for our need to have unscheduled time. We forget we want to keep up a behavior for life, which makes the level of change we’ve laid out unrealistic, unsustainable.

We also forget there are some things in life that can never be planned: a chance meeting, an unexpected reaction, an unrealized passion suddenly found.

So the next time you’re making a map, or making plans, or setting goals, look – really look — for those monsters. Look for the things you don’t see, or rather, don’t want to see. Seek to disconfirm what you believe to be true. Look for the things that get in your way, for the things that have failed you in the past.

And realize that no plan can cover everything. No map is perfect.

But neither are we.

A wise friend reminded me recently that the universe has a way of making sure you learn the lessons it wants to teach you.

Two years ago, I had a baby. He was breech, which meant I had to have a c-section (I had wanted to have a hypnobirth). He didn’t gain weight, so I had to feed him formula (I had wanted to nurse him). A new boss at my former employer didn’t believe in workshifting, so I ended up leaving the job within months (I had wanted to work a four-day week).

Throw in a bit of post-partum depression that took close to a year to diagnose, plus all the stresses and strains of first-time parenthood, and I learned a key lesson pretty fast:

I’m not in control.

So it was with some surprise that, prior to the birth of my second son four weeks ago, I realized the universe was at it again…

A week before I was full-term, my husband got stuck in Amsterdam (I know, there are worse places to get stuck) because of a volcano named by a cat walking across a keyboard. A week before I gave birth, a water main serving Boston and environs broke, so we had to boil all our water for four days. And five days before I was scheduled to deliver, my blood pressure spiked due to “atypical preeclampsia,” and rather than head on home from what should have been an innocuous doctor’s appointment, I was carted off to Labor and Delivery in a wheelchair to have a c-section…right then.

But this time the lesson wasn’t about what I do and don’t control, it was about what I’ve learned.

Two births, two years apart, each with their own challenges, and both carrying lessons in control.

Same lessons? Not by a long shot.

Two years ago the lessons were about finding peace with my own decisions. This time the lessons were about finding peace with things in which I had no decision-making role at all.

It can be tempting, in the midst of crises, to feel like you’re right back where you once were. That you’ve made no progress. That you can’t catch a break. That the setbacks are some kind of greater sign that you’re not yet where you should be.

Life isn’t a circle, sending you back on the same path over and over. When we think of life, and change, like that we lose the effect of time.

Time gives you perspective. Time means you’re never in the same spot twice—like climbing a spiral staircase (which, looked at from above or below, is a circle). Yes, you occasionally face the same wall, the same types of challenges (or even the same challenges), but each time you do, you’re in a different spot. Sometimes higher, sometimes lower, but always different.

That’s what time taught me. What has it taught you?

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vincealongi/625732589/

I got angry today. Really, really angry.

I didn’t used to know what to do with anger, so I stuffed it down, closed it off. But you do great damage to yourself—mentally, physically, and emotionally—by trying to bury what you feel. I’ve done it. I know.

Anger needs air to flare…and to die. It needs to consume what caused it until there’s nothing left but ash, else it smolders on, weakening us from the inside out.

But it burns what it touches. It leaves scars.

Helping someone in the midst of it means risking the fire. You console those who grieve, calm those who panic, bring light to those depressed.

But how do you help those who burn?

Some turn away, but some run in. They don’t see the fire. They see you, burning.

Friends fight fires. They fight them with you. They fight for you. They give you air. They give you space.

They stay with you until the fire burns out.

Juror #3.

When you walk in for jury duty and they hand you #3, you know you’re in for it, whether or not you’re eight and half months pregnant. But there I was. Juror #3.

I’ve spent much of my adult life working to remove judgment from my outlook. I’ve had to. You don’t spend 11 years helping people at their most vulnerable without realizing that judgment from others is the last thing most people need…we spend so much time judging ourselves, and harshly.

And then Juror #3 was named Madam Forewoman, and I had to judge. And so did five of my peers.

It was a minor case, really: an OUI charge resulting from a fender bender in a convenience store parking lot. It wasn’t cut and dry, else the case would never have gone to a jury. There was no breathlizer (that we were told of). There were some pre-existing medical conditions. There was a field sobriety test ended before it was ever begun for fear of jeopardizing the safety of the woman charged.

And yet we had to judge.

“Innocent until proven guilty” is a tricky thing. It means you must assume, going in, that the person did not do the thing she has been charged with doing. In this case, it meant assuming that she hadn’t had enough alcohol to impair her ability to operate her car safely. That backing into someone else’s car was a simple accident, that her aggression was a reasonable response to the aggression of the firefighter whose car she hit, that her inability to stand without bracing on her car was related to the double hip replacement she had had three years before.

You have to go on the evidence alone. Not on opening or closing arguments. Not on what you sense, or feel. Evidence. And imperfect evidence, at that.

But when you’re given the responsibility of passing judgment, of declaring someone guilty or not guilty, of changing someone’s life in a concrete way we rarely ever know, it’s very hard not to be judgmental. We’ve become so used to passing judgment, of not giving someone the benefit of the doubt, that a lot of us don’t even see the little judgments we render all the time.

If you listen, you can hear them: “She should have…,” “If that were me, I’d….” “Why didn’t they…?”

Sitting in a tiny room, listening to all the little judgments and working with my fellow jurors to weed them out of our decision, I wondered when presuming guilt became the default, our first instinct. When did that switch happen?

When did we become that cynical? That distrustful? That…judgmental?

Or has the presumption of innocence always been so hard—and that’s precisely why it’s the standard to which we hold ourselves in courts of law?

Because true justice is not blind. Not at all. It takes in everything. It has to.

We have to put our judgments on the table before we can take them back off again. We have to realize all the biases we bring before we can take them away. We have to speak what’s in our hearts before we can clear our heads and see what’s actually there. And then we have to look at what’s left when all of that is stripped away—at the imperfect evidence of guilt or innocence—and make a judgment that’s free of bias. That lets you sleep at night.

We have to judge despite judgment.

Can you do that? Do you?

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/atoach/2830780815/

Ah, expectations. We have them. We set them. We manage them.

But they’re really just little time bombs of judgment, ticking away, waiting to explode.

You can’t “set” others expectations (though we try to all the time). People set their own expectations. Nor can you manage others’ expectations, even if they try to convince you that it’s somehow your responsibility to manage their thoughts.

There’s only one of you; there’s millions of them.

The only person you can control? You.
The only expectations you can set? Yours.
The only expectations you can manage? Again, yours.

So the only real option is to stay your own course, even if that course changes over time, as it inevitably will. The reactions we hear from others (the surprise, the dreaded “disappointment,” the vitriol) are their own resistance to change, or their frustration that what they thought they understood was not, in fact, the case.

We can only be responsible for our actions. Not the reactions of others.

Living up to the expectations of the masses is a fool’s errand.
It’s hard enough to live with our own.

Image: http://www.h4×3d.com/themes/bomb/

“I want to get this [insert project or goal here] done. But I haven’t felt motivated yet.”

A lot of us wait around for motivation to come. We end up waiting a long time.

The problem is motivation isn’t a cause—it’s an effect. And, like momentum (also an effect), it can serve to keep things moving once it’s in place. But we have to get it started. We do.

Motivation comes as a result of what we feel and think and do. It’s not a feeling in and of itself. We create it—a fact that scares the pants off of most of us, because we’ve often put all our “get things done” eggs in the “waiting for motivation” basket.

But it’s up to us—to our thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Those three—thoughts, feelings, and actions—are like points on a triangle. They’re inextricably linked. Our thoughts affect how we feel, how we feel affects how we act, how we act affects how we think, and so on. And that triangle really, really wants to be equilateral.

But sometimes it looks like this…

or this…

Our brains and bodies are a delicate ecosystem that works constantly to keep those three things balanced. When they are, we hum along getting things done, feeling in control, and looking forward to challenges, both at hand and ahead. When they’re not, we lose steam, revert to old or bad habits, feel overhwhelmed, and berate ourselves for lack of willpower and motivation.

In other words, when one point on the triangle starts to pull out of balance, the other two follow along behind.

The problem is, we can’t see our triangle, we can only feel its effects…usually in the form of lost motivation.

Here’s the secret: motivation doesn’t come unless we tell it to.

Like many things, the answer  to “finding” motivation lies within the same framework that creates the problem. When we’ve “lost” motivation, or don’t know where to find it, the power to get it back lies fully within our hands: by putting the triangle back to rights (or rather, equilateral).

You always have three options: change your actions, change your thoughts, or change your feelings. Because the three are inseparable from one another, changing one changes the other two.

Try it. See what happens.

In social media, “listening” as a term is fast-approaching overuse to the point of obsolescence. Yes, we need to listen (and watch). Yes there are all sorts of very cool tools to help you do that.

But the best tool? Your own ears. (And eyes.)

Next time you need to prove to someone the value of listening (and how very simple and powerful it can be), try this:

After you’ve been talking with someone for a while, stop and ask them:

Based on our conversations, what do you know about me? Tell me as many things as you can recall.

It doesn’t matter whether the conversation at hand is the first you’ve ever had or the 5,000th, nor whether those conversations have happened face-to-face, over the phone, by tweet, text, email, or through exchanged comments on a blog.

The point is, we pick up information about people whether we think we do or not. We also give out a lot of information about ourselves—again often unconsciously. Most of us never stop and put it all together, but then again, many of those who are paying good money for incredibly useful listening tools aren’t doing anything with those reports, either.

But making those connections, finding the right time and right way to match up a useful piece of information with what someone cares about, not only demonstrates the level of attention you’re paying, but more importantly, the level of respect you have for them, whether they’re a long-time friend or a (potential) customer you’ve just met.

Being able to show someone how much they’ve picked up by just listening to you (or how much you’ve learned by listening to them) is a powerful way to show the impact listening can have.

Can you fake it? Sure. But most people’s bullshit detectors are finely tuned.
Sincere listening—sincere attention—results in sincere action. Listening isn’t useful until you do something with it.

So try it yourself: pick a person you know (hell, you can even try this with me, in the comments), grab a sheet of paper (virtual or otherwise), and start to list everything you know about them. Not just the obvious things they tell everyone or that are clearly on display or that they’re known for, but those things they may have mentioned only in passing, and out of the normal context of conversation.

Off the top of my head, when thinking of people you may know, too, I can think of someone who’s an expert swing dancer. Someone whose father is a scalloper. Someone who almost missed making the connection with their now-wife. Someone who has a strange passion for personality quizzes (which I also share). Someone who takes care of foster dogs. Someone’s whose young life was marked with unfathomable tragedy. Someone who, for all their high-tech ways, carries their most important thoughts around with them in a pocket-sized notebook, filled with drawings.

Knowing these things about these people shapes what I share with them, and how. It shapes my understanding of their motivations, of their personality. It shapes how I interact with them, what I talk with them about, how I frame things. Maybe they don’t notice. Maybe they do. But I find that the more points of connection I can find and share with someone, the more useful and valuable I can be to them.

And isn’t that the goal?

So, have you been listening? What have you learned?

I’ll be the first to admit that my grammar’s not always perfect. In the rush to get things written, sometimes my brain disconnects from my typing fingers and something other than what I meant ends up on the published page. (My brain and fingers have some serious debates about homophones.)

But seriously, folks.

There is a difference between it’s and its.
There is a difference between your and you’re.
There is a difference between than and then.
There is a difference between there and their and they’re.

While you may dismiss some of those errors as a product of increasingly casual media or poetic license, not everyone does. Yes, sometimes it’s clear that, like me, your brain and fingers weren’t getting along. But it’s hard not to notice a consistent misuse of words.

What you write, and how, says something about you. Your level of care in how you express yourself often speaks more about you than the words themselves. It may not matter to you, but it may matter to people who matter to you: customers, prospects, friends, potential business partners.

So pay attention. And if you don’t know the rules—if you’re not sure—find out. Get it right.

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Image: davidsonscott15