Leadership vulnerability and the wildness and preciousness of life
It is World Cancer Day this week: an important day of awareness of a disease that will impact one in two of us. But, for someone who has been affected by cancer, it can be pretty confronting. In the run up, I’ve been thinking about my experience of returning to work after cancer treatment and what that meant for me. I have lots of other thoughts on how returnees can be supported, but they are for another post!
My particular chemotherapy didn’t result in hair loss so I looked the same as I did when I left 8 months earlier for major abdominal surgery and chemo (‘great’, even, in a society that still too often equates thin with healthy). Appearances aside, I was profoundly different. Nothing you could immediately see. But there were the missing feet of colon, a whopping great scar, numb fingers and a dodgy immune system. Far more than that was a profound loss of confidence in myself, and the world around me, and constant lurking fear that the cancer was at work - unseen, unknown - somewhere in my body. The fear that unites everyone who has ever had a cancer diagnosis; far beyond the surgery, canulas and chemo.
Before my return, I’m ashamed to admit, I’d had this image of me returning as a medically storm-tossed leader, made more compassionate and inclusive by her experience of life threatening illness. A sort of post cancer white knight, but without the armour because, vulnerability. In reality, more often than not, I was exhausted, scared and aware that something inside had shifted so profoundly that my present didn’t fit.
I also hadn’t reckoned what having a shit cancer (literally) would do to the shine of my Brene Brown leadership vulnerability badge (think an adult version of the Blue Peter one). Daily on my mind were bodily functions which weren’t the usual watercooler fodder. And which the grind of back to back video meetings meant I often painfully ignored and felt uncomfortable sharing, even if it that might help others feel seen. No other leaders I could see were sharing details of their bodily functions, although I was seeing very senior people open up in vulnerable and inspiring ways about their mental health. Maybe I had just failed on the physical health side, and everyone else was super fine.
Immediately, my words give me away. Somewhere buried in all this was a shameful sense that I had failed. And that I didn’t really believe in vulnerability at all - that I was still wedded to the idea of leadership as strength. That I wasn’t strong enough to cope with the stress of work, and it had buried itself somewhere in my body and come out as cancer. Our minds can be pernicious beasts...
Contrary to all my promises to myself before my return, I kept pushing on, being ‘strong’, being stressed. I struggled to manage in a way that wasn’t armouring up, or breaking down. It wasn’t working. I couldn’t continue. I started to ask myself the ultimate open ended coaching question. As Mary Oliver would have it: ‘What did I want to do with my one wild and precious life?’. Nothing underlines that preciousness like cancer.
The answer wasn’t what I had been doing. My ambitions for myself had changed. If I’m honest, that had started well before the cancer. But I had been swept up in what I was doing, my perceived success and what I saw around me. It took my return post cancer to start to see that. So I committed to vulnerability again. I left the seniority, experience and status of my previous career (as well as some of the most wonderful, supportive and talented people you could ever meet), and decided to do what I loved: asking other people Mary Oliver’s difficult and uncomfortable question.
I don’t wish cancer on anyone, but I appreciate some of the things that it has opened up for me. But maybe don’t do what I did, and wait for the moment when the shit hits the fan (a phrase rather more resonant following colorectal cancer) for you to check in with yourself: what do you want to do with your one wild and precious life?
And just while I have you, a reminder of the symptoms of bowel cancer, and a general reminder that if anything doesn’t feel right with your body - however embarrassing or weird - get it checked:
Bleeding from your bottom and/or blood in your poo
A persistent and unexplained change in bowel habit
Unexplained weight loss
Extreme tiredness for no obvious reason
A pain or lump in your tummy
