A plan, a name, a sabbatical, and the surprising joy of meeting the road that rises up.
The Plan?
The plan went about as well as you might expect. Vague outlines don’t play nice with the iron triangle of project management. Time, scope, budget – all expanded. Which is usually a very not good thing. Unless you are taking some much needed time off to reflect on what really matters.
Friends, family, even the odd acquaintance were all encouraging. Even if my dalliance into the world of voluntary unemployment scared them on my behalf. Even as it became clear the best encouragement was to stop asking about the business I hadn’t gotten around to working on. Because I was driving across the northern United States with my oversized wiener dog, learning horse massage, listening to podcasts by the pool, writing a short memoir, and traveling on wide-bodied aircraft to visit loved ones.
Summer became fall. “Oh yeah,” I assured the kind inquisitive folks, “totally going to start working on the business.” I sort of meant it. By the time the winter solstice rolled around, I absolutely wanted to be working on getting my business launched. Except, I was heads-down writing my first book. As one does when on a vaguely defined sabbatical!
“Rachel, how is the business coming along?” Errrm! It was hard to justify the answer. Very slowly. Because I was blissfully absorbed in writing a story so personal, I (probably) would never allow anyone to read it.
I was torn. I hadn’t meant to write a novel. It started as a bit of creative writing meets grief journaling. Writing notes on my phone while sitting on flights and trains. Without meaning to, a story started to emerge from the phone doodles. And I’m a sucker for stories. I had to know how it ended. In the process, I fell in love with getting to know the characters. With watching how they emerged across the pages. Their strengths, their foibles. They had a lot to teach me, each in their own unique way.
A classic love or money choice.
I chose love. Albeit, reluctantly, with a fair amount of hem and haw. No point in walking away from a quite respectable job at a company folks have actually heard of, if I wasn’t going to give my spirit a chance to do its thing.
All of which is to say, my tremendous heart-felt thanks to the friends, family, odd acquaintances, and business services professionals who each, in their own way, encouraged and supported me to get to this launch moment. Who patiently witnessed Other Hand’s metamorphosis from a vague concept cocooned in my head to a real business offering real services. Whether Other Hand ought to be compared to a butterfly is not for me to say. But yes, I have an opinion.
During the wait, there was another recurring question. “What does the name mean?”
What’s In a Name?
The name Other Hand encompasses the three grounding concepts I bring to my work. And is a nod to a best friend who made dropping multiple-entendre a lifelong habit.
First
The training I received as an Economics major formed my approach to prioritization. Very few decisions or systems are clear-cut with a single answer. Most involve tradeoffs – weighing pros, cons, and probabilities. Evaluating a problem or system from multiple vantage points allow us to better understand what we need to optimize and what we might be willing to do without.
Econ majors love the (possibly true) story of President Harry Truman wanting a one-handed economist. Truman allegedly complained about how, after listening to a thoughtful analysis from his economic advisors, invariably the economist would follow with “on the other hand Mr. President” where a similarly thoughtful often contradictory analysis would be presented.
Second
As humans, much of what we do and must learn to do are a stacked set of skills. Once we master a particular skill stack, it is very easy to think of our new skills in the singular. When we are working with someone who has yet to develop the expertise required to perform a set of interconnected skills with ease, it is normal to get frustrated and unhelpfully critical. Our entirely counterproductive instinct is to rush the process, trying to force mastery to happen faster. Patience with the learning curve and empathy for the beginner’s plight are far more productive approaches.
One method I use to remember the necessary patience and empathy is to move a mastered physical task to the non-dominant hand. It can be a simple switch, such as putting the fork in the other hand, or more complicated, such as throwing a ball or handwriting. Try it! Sudden disorientation is typical. We must really think about what we are doing. The lack of muscle memory spikes the cognitive load. Even then, we might stab our cheek with the fork a few times. After a few attempts, intentionally or otherwise, the dominant hand usually will take over; fed up with the novice bumbling.
It is difficult, often painful, to learn new skills and to unlearn old habits. The best thing we can do is to be gracious and kind about the learning state.
Third
The work of Iain McGilchrist has been hugely influential on my thinking and life. Absent the privilege of being exposed to his work, I would never have been inspired or attempted to create this business. McGilchrist is a brilliant thinker, scientist, and author at the cutting edge of re-orienting how we in the post-Industrial West ought to think about ourselves and the world we inhabit. His books and lectures are profound and deep. Also, mind-bendingly dense!
It is not possible to properly and completely summarize his contributions. His core concept is how the left and right hemispheres of our brains uniquely “see” reality differently. Both ways of seeing are tremendously valuable, but the greatest value is when these two “minds” are in a proper balance with one another. McGilchrist’s key insight is how the world we inhabit in the West is disastrously privileging one mind over the other – leaving us, culturally and individually, with a far less vibrant vision of reality. Worse still, the mind culturally favored is more prone to be narrow-minded, self-deceiving, controlling, and exploitative.
This is, if more or less true, a great tragedy. And radically, one I find immense hope in. It suggests we have been looking for meaning and joy from the wrong vantage point. If we intentionally shift our perspective to the out-of-favor hemisphere – which typically maps to the non-dominant other hand – we can re-establish a more balanced way of experiencing reality.
A dramatic implication
From my own experience, this is how one can begin to discover the world we have always longed for. A reality which sometimes gives us the opportunity to put love before money, an unplanned novel before more sensible-seeming activities.
Now you know
To everyone who has raised their pom-poms for me on the journey to the entrepreneurial starting blocks, my thanks. And a special appreciation to two women who gave me a brilliant hand in crafting the aesthetic of Other Hand: Danielle Magner – digital marketer extraordinaire, and Sanja Susic – photographer of the soul. Working with these ladies has been an education and a privilege.
