There’s a song toward the end of the play Hadestown in which Hermes sings, “The dog you really gotta dread is the one that howls inside your head.” It made me wonder how often we give in to the howl in our heads instead of listening more closely to the quiet wisdom in our hearts. How often do fear, anger, insecurity, ambition, or the need for approval drown out what we know is most important? Why is it so difficult to stay oriented to what matters most in our lives?
We have all been through orientations as we pass through each stage of life. Our kindergarten teacher oriented us to the rules of the classroom and the playground when we started school. There is even a 1986 book entitled All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum. I never really bought that argument, but I get what the Fulghum was saying: Share, play fair, and don’t hit people.
As we progressed through the school system, we were oriented to middle school, high school, and whatever college we chose to attend. When I went through basic training in the Army, the drill sergeant’s orientation was crystal clear: follow the rules or get KP duty! Obeying the chain of command had always been an unchallenged expectation until Vietnam, when the draft packed the Army with college graduates who had been taught to question authority. The howling we heard in the streets and in our heads left many of us feeling completely disoriented.
As a meeting facilitator, I learned to state the purpose, agenda, and ground rules at the beginning of every session. If the meeting was long or complicated, I always found it useful to reorient participants to where we were in the agenda or the content after each segment. It’s easy to get lost or lose interest if you aren’t sure where you are or where you are going.
Orientation, however, is about much more than knowing the rules, understanding the agenda, or finding our way around a new environment. It is about knowing where we stand, what matters, and what deserves our attention.
In this post, I want to explore five dimensions of orientation that may shed a different light on the topic: purpose, values, reality, self, and time.
Orientation to Purpose
I like to start each day with a reminder of my purpose. For me, it’s very simple: to facilitate, to write, and to help. In my interactions with the people in my life whom I care about, I try to do what I can to help them realize their dreams and aspirations. When I’m working with organizations, I try to facilitate meaningful conversations. And in my day-to-day life, I try to help wherever I can. If you are a reader of this blog, you know I’m a bit compulsive about my writing. This is post #476, but who’s counting. I’m not sure my posts add much value, but they help me clarify my thoughts, and I love writing like my wife loves knitting.
Purpose doesn’t have to be grand or world-changing. It can be found in the parent who sees raising thoughtful, independent children as a life’s work; the teacher who wants to instill curiosity rather than simply deliver information; the physician who sees the person behind the diagnosis; or the business leader who measures success not just by profitability but by the contribution the organization makes to its employees, customers, and community.
Purpose gives us a reason to get up in the morning and a way to evaluate how we spend our days. It helps us distinguish between being busy and being productive, between accumulating accomplishments and making a contribution.
Without a sense of purpose, we can become very good at doing things without being particularly clear about why we are doing them.
Orientation to Values
I’ve always found that the decisions we need to make in life—big and small—need to be based more on values than on options. If we only explore the set of options that might solve a given problem, it can be hopelessly confusing. Having a clearly defined set of values that anchors our decisions not only helps us make choices that are more congruent with our image of who we are, but it can also trigger ways to expand or combine options that are more aligned with who we want to be.
Consider a business leader who must choose between meeting a quarterly financial target and honoring a commitment made to employees. Or a parent who must decide whether to protect a child from disappointment or allow that child to experience the consequences of a poor decision. Or a community that must weigh economic development against environmental sustainability.
In each case, there may be several attractive options, but the more important question is: What do we value most? Is it integrity, loyalty, fairness, compassion, accountability, financial responsibility, or something else? Values are particularly important when they come into conflict. It’s relatively easy to claim that we value honesty, respect, and fairness when nothing is at stake. The real test comes when telling the truth might cost us a relationship, when standing up for someone might jeopardize our standing with others, or when doing the right thing is considerably more difficult than doing the convenient thing.
This is where the howl in our heads can become particularly loud. Fear, ego, resentment, and the desire to win can easily overpower our better judgment.
Our values are not simply words we put on a wall or include in a personal mission statement. They are the principles that guide our behavior when we have something to lose.
Orientation to Reality
In this age of disinformation, staying grounded in facts and evidence can be a real challenge. We are bombarded by multiple media sources. And, for good reason, we have lost some confidence that people are telling the truth. There seems to be a declining commitment to ensuring that what we say is based on credible and verifiable evidence.
What I keep reminding myself is that we are one of more than eight billion people on a relatively small planet in a vast universe. Earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and as a species, we have only been around for approximately 300,000 years. Our existence as a species represents an extraordinarily small fraction of the planet’s history. For some reason, contemplating these facts makes me a little more humble and reminds me that I need to challenge the illusions I have about myself and the world.
Orientation to reality requires us to distinguish between what we know, what we believe, what we assume, and what we simply want to be true. It means being willing to change our minds when the evidence changes. It means listening to people who see things differently and recognizing that our perspective is inevitably limited.
Sometimes the most important question we can ask ourselves is: What might I be missing?
Staying oriented to reality requires intellectual humility, curiosity, and a willingness to challenge our own assumptions. Without those qualities, we can become prisoners of our own perceptions.
Orientation to Self
Here’s another big question: Are we more self-oriented or other-oriented? Being self-oriented can manifest as selfishness, self-absorption, and self-centeredness. Being other-oriented can manifest as selflessness, generosity, and grace. Of course, neither is entirely good or bad. We need a healthy sense of self to establish boundaries, take responsibility for our lives, and pursue our aspirations. But when our sense of self becomes the center of everything, we can lose sight of the people around us.
One way to assess where we are on that continuum is to observe how much of our time we interact with others competitively, independently or unilaterally, collaboratively, or interdependently. A competitive orientation asks, “How do I win?” An independent orientation asks, “How do I get what I need?” A collaborative orientation asks, “How can we accomplish something together?” An interdependent orientation goes a step further: “How can we create something together that none of us could accomplish alone?” Consider the difference between a community member who asks what’s in it for me and one who asks what we can do to make our community better.
Our orientation to self also involves how honestly we understand ourselves. Are we aware of our strengths and limitations? Do we recognize the insecurities, biases, and fears that influence our behavior? Can we own responsibility for our role in problems, or do we spend more energy defending ourselves and blaming others than learning. Perhaps the most useful question is not whether we are self-oriented or other-oriented, but whether we have a sufficiently grounded sense of self to seek ways to help others succeed.
Orientation to Time
The question here is whether we live in the past, the future, or the present moment.
This is a tricky one. How do we honor the past, prepare for the future, and still be fully present in the moment? We can become prisoners of the past by continually revisiting old grievances, regrets, disappointments, or accomplishments. The person who cannot get beyond a failed relationship, the leader who keeps trying to recreate the glory days of an organization, or the individual who defines themselves by something that happened decades ago may be living more in memory than in reality.
Being present doesn’t mean ignoring the past or abandoning plans for the future. It means being fully engaged with what is happening now. It means listening to someone without mentally preparing our response, enjoying a meal without checking our phones, or appreciating a beautiful day without worrying about what we have to do tomorrow.
For me, a healthy orientation to time requires three things: learning from the past without being defined by it, preparing for the future without being consumed by it, and experiencing the present without taking it for granted.
Staying Oriented: The Organizational Connection
In several of the organizations with which I work, people have been able to come together over time to create strong cultures that are aligned with and enable sustainable strategies and high performance. Those organizations have foundations of deep trust and are able to engage in healthy conflict. They are committed to their organizational vision and mission, and they hold themselves and others accountable not only for achieving ambitious goals but also for operating according to a well-defined and measured set of values.
Even in these organizations, there are occasional setbacks and hiccups in their interactions. What I’ve found over time is that the organizations able to successfully sustain their cultures are those that remain continually attuned to building the trust required to work collaboratively and interdependently. They are deeply vigilant about threats to trust or declines in interdependence.
The same is true at the geopolitical level. The last 10 years have been completely disorienting. The results of recent election give us a fresh chance to get oriented to new possibilities. I hope we don’t blow the chance.
Perhaps that’s why the line from Hadestown resonates with me. The howl inside our heads can be powerful. It can tell us that we aren’t good enough, that we need to win, that we should be afraid, that someone else is to blame, or that we need more recognition, more money, or more control.
But the howl isn’t necessarily our compass. Maybe the challenge of living a meaningful life is to develop the awareness and discipline to recognize when we are becoming disoriented and to find our way back to what matters most.
To keep asking ourselves: Am I living with purpose? Am I acting on my values? Am I seeing reality clearly? Am I balancing my needs with the needs of others? And am I making the most of the time I have? We don’t need to get these things right every day. But we do need to keep finding our way back.
The question isn’t whether we will become disoriented. We will. The question is whether we will recognize it, listen more closely to what matters, and have the courage to find our way home. I’m hoping as individuals, organizations, and as a country we spend our time getting oriented to a new reality with new possibilities. May it be so.
Well done lad! Thank you!