In my speech at the farewell gala Grameen Foundation held in 2015, I mentioned that I would always remember from my time as CEO the “dynamic women” and “wise men” with whom I was privileged to work. One of those wise men was Norm Tonina, a former finance and human resources executive at Microsoft who served GF as a consultant twice in between a stint as our head of HR globally.
Like many people, I have a stack of books that I intend to read and try to go through them as time permits. But sometimes, a book skips to the front of the stack, most often because someone I trust has recommended it. Norm recently mentioned that he was encouraging everyone he knows to read Life is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age by Bruce Feiler. So I ordered it and jumped in.
As I plowed through the first two-thirds of the book, which is based on hundreds of in-depth life history interviews the author did with people around the country a few years back, I found valuable insights about how frequently people today face significant life changes (“disruptors”) and also massive ones (“lifequakes”) and how they can recover from and even turn them in to positive pivots. They helped me deconstruct some of the major disruptions, traumas, and transitions that I have experienced, personally and professionally. But up to that point, I would not have said that the book was one of the most meaningful I had read this year.
Then I embarked on a chapter about how at a certain stage of a major life transition people tend to get very creative. (This usually follows a period of feeling disoriented and even lost.) One of the ways that people channel this creativity is through writing. This made a lot of sense to me, since I sometimes say that during the last few decades of my life, I have tended to “write my way out of” problems. It turns out that I am far from unique in this regard.
Feiler shares a striking experiment on human subjects. In 1986, psychologist James Pennebaker had one group of students write about a traumatic life experience and another group write about superficial topics. Many in the first group cried while they wrote about what were clearly very meaningful and difficult memories. While they experienced more sadness in the short term, in the medium term they were markedly healthier and reported a greater sense of value and meaning compared to others. More than two-thirds said they understood themselves better.
In another study, people who were “laid off from their jobs who write about their feelings not only cope with the resulting marital, medical, and money woes more easily, they also got hired more quickly.” Twenty-seven percent of those who wrote found jobs within three months, compared with 5% of those who did not. By the seven-month mark, the 57% had found jobs, more than three times the control group.
Feiler attempts to explain why this works so well: “People who write about their most stressful life experiences develop greater insight into their emotions, can express themselves more fully, even show evidence of a strengthened immune system…. Central to the act of writing is a process of growth, of slowly gaining control of their narrative…. The act of writing speeds of the act of meaning-making.”
He continues, “Writing is a supercharged form of storytelling that we already do in our heads. It forces us to take ideas that are abstract and unstructured, sometimes even in the backs of our minds, and put them into some form that’s both concrete and structured. Along the way, the ideas become sharper, the emotions crisper, and the meaning clearer. And what once seemed like a solitary source of suffering begins to feel both safer and more universal. Also, by converting our thoughts into words, we participate, just for a moment, in the act of creation.”
As I read this chapter, I thought about how my letters to RESULTS volunteers in 1989 helped me navigate the stresses of living abroad as a Fulbright Scholar in Bangladesh, how writing my two recent books helped me make sense of leaving Grameen Foundation as its CEO and also the board of Fonkoze USA in 2015, and then transitioning out of another CEO job and another board role two years later. Most recently, writing up a traumatic experience of being caught in the vortex of a dysfunctional board of directors helped me gain some new measure of peace about that painful process.
I imagine that nonprofit leaders experience more than their fair share of disruptions and lifequakes. Being able to continue to lead effectively in the aftermath of such events is a major challenge. Of the many useful techniques described in this book, writing resonated most to me.
If you are struggling to recover from a traumatic event right now, as so many of us are this year, writing about your experience might be an effective way to accelerate your recovery and perhaps even to grow from it.
Not everyone is a gifted writer, but anyone reading this blog post can write. Feiler quotes the author James Baldwin answering a question from a student who asked about what it takes to be a writer. He said, “The only thing you need to become a writer is a table, a chair, a piece of paper, and a pencil.”