COURAGE

WHAT BARBARA IS REALLY TEACHING US - BE BRAVE

By jackieacho, May 17, 2014

Barbara Walters is using her megaphone to tell us something important.  Can we hear her?  Is she breaking through our armor of modern culture and personal regret to pierce our hearts?  Does she fully realize how important it is and why now is the right time to say it, again, with feeling?!

“I was so busy with a career. It’s the age-old problem,” Walters, 84, said in an interview that will air on the upcoming ABC News special, “Barbara Walters: Her Story.” “And, you know, on your deathbed, are you going to say, ‘I wish I spent more time in the office?’ No. You’ll say, ‘I wish I spent more time with my family,’ and I do feel that way. I wish I had spent more time with my Jackie.”  – Laura Effron via Good Morning America

Her comments are making news now, but there is nothing really new here.  The age old problem is “Sophie’s choice“:  your career (=you) or your kid.  Neither are her comments a sudden revelation in this family.  There has been plenty of struggle for both Barbara and Jackie, especially during the teenage years.

Barbara Walters has had an incredible career spanning ~56 years.  Her story as a mother reads like so many powerful women who leaned in.  Several miscarriages.  Finally got her baby (adopted in this case).  No maternity leave.  Lots of outsourcing.  Plenty of money to pay for the best.  Fame, influence, kudos, accolades, awards galore.  What are we to do with her regret?  Do we chalk it up to choice again, and congratulate ourselves that we made the right one (or worry or hope or fear or get angry…if we’re not sure).

56 years of career.
5 years of early childhood.
That’s 9% of Barbara’s career, but 100% of the critical period when so much was set in motion for Jackie’s emotional wellbeing, her parents’ identity as parents (not just moms), and their lifelong relationship.  Parents open the bank of empathy for their children in early childhood, a bank which sets them up to deposit or withdraw from others personally and professionally for the rest of their lives.

We have research out the wazoo on what children need in this critical period of 0-5 years, and so much of it comes down to something that we’ve known all along:  love, given by the people so blessed to parent a child in this world.  The inconvenient truth is that love takes time.  How much time?  Well, my toddler daughter told me (while on my knees in my closet a decade ago), “I’m okay if you’re gone a day a week; I’m not okay if you’re gone more.”  Whaaaa?!!!!!  That would surely have ended Barbara’s career.

But did it end mine?  No.  So many of us - men and women alike- have the technology we need now to work around giving children what they need in early childhood, as well as making breakfast, packing lunch, meeting young kids getting off a bus, having family dinner, or being around in case teenagers decide to talk.  Entrepreneurship was my out.  Intrapraneurship can be too, if organizations realize the value of taking it.

I’m much luckier than Barbara Walters.  I’m also luckier than Barbara Acho, who faced a choice with a baby Jackie in 1968.  She stayed home.  Were my brother and I all she needed to feel fulfilled?  No.  My mother went back to school when I was 13 and has had a flourishing career as a therapist ever since.  My mom is not a perfect mother or professional; there is no such thing.  But she was brave.  Brave enough to chart a path that was unexpected, to do her best to give her children what they needed and channel her God-given talents into trying to make the world a better place.  Don’t get me wrong.  She was scared - of failing her kids, her potential, or both.  But that is exactly why she had to be brave.

Sophie’s choice is a false dichotomy which values neither children nor women (not to mention leaving fathers out of the picture completely!).  We can be braver than that.

That is what Barbara taught me.

Happy Birthday Mom.  Love you, Jackie

TEACHING OUR KIDS COMPASSION

Written by Michal Berg (Spiritualityforkids.org)

In prior post, I’ve mentioned that my parents divorced when I was eight years old, and after that my mom started searching out everything in Israel that had anything to do with spirituality: meditation, different temples, different methods, everything. And she took me with her. So I was exposed to spirituality from a very young age.

That experience made me aware of how important it is for us, as parents, to actually open the door to spirituality for our children. I remember how I felt as a teenager, when I found the Kabbalah Centre and met other young people who actually talked about more than just clothes, or what party they went to last week. It was very comforting, and it gave me inner strength.

We always say that the future is in the hands of our kids, but the only way our kids are going to grow up to be adults capable of making a difference is if they are equipped with the right tools and the right consciousness. This is why it’s so important to start with kids when they’re young; when they’re especially open to new ways of seeing things. Because the soul is constantly evolving, souls coming down into the world in this generation are probably higher and more elevated than we are. We want to work with them as early as possible, before their Light begins to get covered over.

Today I’d like to focus on compassion. This isn’t easy to teach, but as always the very best approach is to model compassionate behavior in our own lives - especially when it comes to dealing with our own kids and their limitations. Even if my kid is challenged to act in ways that annoy me, and I’d like him to change, I can still show compassion, which means I can feel his pain. I can understand where he’s coming from. I can understand that I might not have this challenge, but he does.

I’ll give you a mundane example. One of my sons is really messy—he eats in a messy way, and he always get his clothes dirty—whereas I’m a very neat person. Few things are more annoying for a neat person than to have a messy child, right? But that’s what I have. That’s just the way some kids are. It’s in the DNA. I’ve found that neatness isn’t something you can teach; you can try, but if you have high standards you’ll be fighting that battle forever.

So I’ve learned something here--to have compassion when my kids don’t have the same skills that I do. They don’t see socks on the floor. They really don’t. One gift of having many kids is how clear it becomes that they’re not just reflections of you. Kids are born into this world with their own personalities, their own strengths and weaknesses, and their own potential to do great things. Everyone benefits when you can feel compassion for those more difficult qualities, that would otherwise be annoying.

Another good way to teach kids compassion is by showing it to people outside our family. If my friend is in trouble, and the kids hear me talking to another friend about why the first friend is such a drama queen, that’s not helpful modeling. They’d be much better off hearing you on the phone with a friend saying, “I feel for her. She’s in a difficult situation, and I’m talking with her to find out how I can help. Even if I can’t help in any practical way, I can sit with her in her unhappiness, and help her bear that pain.”

There’s no better way to teach compassion than to be compassionate ourselves. As Karen Berg likes to say, “It takes work to understand a person deeply, but there are great rewards awaiting you if you are willing to become a compassionate and understanding person.”

The Empathy Paradox: Mastering Empathy for Others Begins With Knowing Yourself

Tahoe is my place for self-reflection – where is yours?

By Michael Zakaras
Michael is a writer and strategist who specializes in social entrepreneurship and public policy and works with ASHOKA.


I recently returned from a week at Lake Tahoe, where I’ve spent a piece of every summer with my family since I was five years old. My uncle has a cabin on the lake, and it’s unlike any other house I know because I exist there not only in the present but also in the past.

When I'm there, I feel the younger versions of myself accompanying me. On my first dive off the rock, they dive with me, filled with fear and joy and anticipation. I surface in the same bone-chilling water. My brother surfaces beside me. My parents look down from the deck, watching as always. The words permanence and continuity are abstractions. But there, at Tahoe, they come to life.



Tahoe is where I slow down, where I don’t chase things but let them come to me, and where I’ve developed values and ways of being that I have brought back to the rest of my life. It’s where I learned to be fulfilled by living simply: there has never been a TV at the house, and there are no tight schedules or fixed plans. Each part of the day simply eases into the next. We swim and hike and canoe, but most of our hours are filled with communal cooking, leisurely family meals, reading, and storytelling. And there’s an abundance of open time: for listening, for watching, for reflection. I’ll often bring a book and sit between two pines at the water’s edge only to never open it.
In this way, each summer gives me a chance to pull back from my immersion into the everyday world of school or work—of constant activities—and to ask myself what's been really good and what hasn't, and what should be changed. In recent years especially, as a young adult, I've gained a great deal of understanding from these times of quiet reflection. Tahoe serves as a retreat from which I return renewed and replenished for the rest of the year.

In the end, my uncle’s house is the place where I know myself best. My summers there have helped me look at my life as a whole picture. I take on different roles in the world, but I'm always a son and brother in our family. And more recently, a husband. I can put my latest successes and disappointments into a long-term perspective. I can see how much I've changed with every summer, and I can see how much, for better or worse, I've remained the same.


Empathy is ultimately other-regarding, but I’m convinced that mastering it begins with understanding yourself – your emotions, your desires, your flaws. And for me, it includes understanding how lucky I am to have Tahoe in the first place. In this way, empathy is hard: it takes awareness and perspective. It takes space. But in our world of relentless demands and distractions, it’s far easier to become self-absorbed than self-aware. Which is why it’s essential that we create this space for ourselves – in big ways and small – so that we can use our understanding of ourselves to better understand and serve others.