A “Tropical Cyclone Information Statement” went out yesterday and I was reminded, yet again, that the meteorologists at the Canadian Hurricane Centre write like real people, and often inject wit into their statements:

Rain and wind is likely over the Maritime provinces with very mild, tropical temperatures and gusty winds south of the track and cold northeasterly winds north of it. Parts of central and eastern Quebec and eventually Newfoundland could even see some snow, so this will clearly be a non-tropical storm and this bulletin is in effect for the ‘tropical side’ of the system.

The CHC will track this for a few days and we will issue a bulletin like this again tomorrow and likely one Thursday. 

This post is an ad, of sorts, for Lisa’s Coach to Thrive program, a two-day leadership coaching workshop being offered this month and next:

We created this workshop for leaders who are tired of spending their days in the weeds and fixing all their team’s problems. We invite you— leaders, managers and professionals—to join us in our cozy downtown Charlottetown space for a playful and profound two-day course. You will expand your leadership toolkit, and become more coach-like, in the company of other growth-minded leaders.

It’s an ad, but it’s a heartfelt one. Bear with me.

The circumstances that led me to Lisa Chandler were, as many things are these days, coloured by COVID. We “met” in early December, but our relationship was entirely textual until we met face-to-face two weeks later. As it happened, I had a counselling appointment three days before that first face-to-face meeting and my counsellor, upon hearing the news that I’d met Lisa, and that Lisa works as a leadership coach, smiled a Cheshire cat smile.

What she suspected then, and what I know now, is that Lisa’s belief in and professional practice of coaching is built atop uncommonly deep skills in communication, openness, vulnerability, self-awareness; the components of ”the inner game.”

My counsellor may have grinned; on my side of the conversation I remained daunted by the prospect of dating someone with inner-game-juju: what if, using her “magic leadership radar,” she could see things I couldn’t, resulting in a lopsided coupling where I was the emotional dullard and she the emotional savant.

I need not have feared.

What I have learned in the last year could fill a book: Lisa and I, together, and not lopsidedly, have crafted—are crafting—a relationship that’s built on these “inner game” foundations. We talk. A lot. About our relationship. About how we’re feeling. About how we’re feeling about how we’re feeling. We chart and conspire and conjure. I have, along the way, learned the vocabulary of coaching, of conscious leadership, and that has helped me evolve, as a leader and as a parent and as a partner.

Lisa, for example, often talks of the notion of being “below the line” — at the effect of circumstances, defensive, blaming — vs. being “above the line” — curious, open, learning, taking responsibility — and how life is a dance above and below and above and below, and how it’s not such much that we’re one or the other that’s the most important thing as it is knowing where we sit. 

I woke up in a good mood yesterday, on top of the world, relatively speaking.

And then I encountered Olivia: “I’m cold and I’m tired,” she complained.

In real time I could feel myself sinking below the line, feeling at the effect of her mood and her protest.

“Fuck, not this again,” I told myself.

I stayed there for awhile, feeling like the day was going to be a write-off: Olivia would stay home for the day, I’d feel trapped by my parenting circumstances, and things, yet again, would be off the rails.

But I didn’t stay there.

I got curious.

I gave Olivia space, and then teased out of her that it wasn’t so much that she wasn’t feeling well, but that she was worried about what would happen if she wasn’t feeling well. She was worried about going to her day program, lapsing into the illness she’s just kicked, and being paralyzed by her inability to communicate this to her support workers. Knowing that, we texted her workers to let them know about this fear, and that she might need to rest and take breaks through the day.

Olivia calmed down. I calmed down. The morning proceeded smoothly for both of us.

I could have stayed below the line, railed against my circumstances, stayed in a funk, fought with Olivia. But I didn’t, and it was only by following my curiosity that I was able to get there.

It turns out that coupling with someone with a strong inner game is a good starting point for strengthening my own inner game, an inner game that circumstances have asked a lot of in recent years, an inner game that’s been pummelled from many sides and that needed some new colours.

I come from a school of Generation X upper-middle-class white men who were raised to think rather than feel, to play the hand we were dealt, to power through adversity, to confront difficult situations by simply saying “well, he’s an idiot, so there’s no point in dealing with him.” The notion that there was a thing called “personal development,” that we could grow our game, get better at things by looking inside, that was tantamount to woo woo sorcery. I’m fortunate that adversity has loaned me the capability to see beyond those limitations: I’ve learned to seek help, from counsellors, coaches, friends, neighbours, strangers. I’ve learned that thing that Lisa calls the “inner game” is malleable, capable of evolving.

So, Coach to Thrive.

I’ve been privileged to watch Lisa and her coaching partner Julie Ann develop this new program from the ground up, distilling what they’ve learned about taking a “coach-like” approach to leadership into a compact, focused two-day workshop for leaders in business, government, and non-profits. 

It feels weird to write “hey, you should go to my girlfriend’s leadership workshop,” as I am anything but an unbiased actor. But, if you’re in a leadership role, and you want to get better at it, I can think of no better investment of your time and money than taking two days in November or December to step away from your desk and focus on your inner game with the help of Lisa and Julie Ann.

More information here. Register here.

Looking more broadly, the price we pay as a society for our toxic individualism and patriarchy is our permanent estrangement from one another. If I can’t connect to you, I can’t connect to us. Whether it’s racism, class differences, or any of myriad other social plagues, its cost is always the same: a broken and dysfunctional system that prevents us from recognizing and caring for our neighbor with a flawed but full heart.

Bruce Springsteen, in the forward to Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship.

Clearly I have underestimated Bruce Springsteen.

David Cyrus MacDonald’s new Chattel Fixtures podcast is an entertaining look into real estate on PEI. His first guest is Steve Barber, impresario turned real estate agent; they had a good chat.

A coworker was having an issue logging into a website that requires two-factor authentication. We keep the authentication information for this site, including the TFA code, in a corporate 1Password account. 

While he was getting his TFA codes rejected 100% of the time, I was having no troubles, using the same account, same 1Password, etc.

The problem?

His system clock on his PC was running two minutes slow.

TFA codes are time-sensitive: the time is one of the factors in their generation (that’s why they expire every minute). If your system has the wrong time, your 1Password will generate the wrong TFA code.

The solution: he set his PC clock to the right time.

This piece by K’eguro Macharia may be the single best thing ever written about vegetables.

Or at least about beets:

I have roasted beets. I have roasted them when they are wrapped in foil and I have roasted them when they are wrapped in banana leaves and I have roasted them without any covering. I have roasted them on a bed of whole spices and I have roasted them on their own. Roasting does nothing magical. Roasted beets still taste like beet. And beets taste like dirt and despair.

Macharia has no love for cabbage either, which should cause my friend Ann, doyen of cabbage, to spring into restorative action.

All the experimenting I was doing yesterday with AI-generated images almost filled up my Google Drive. Fortuitously, Kris Howard pointed to this helpful Google tool to assist with identifying and pruning storage hogs.

Andy Baio posted Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model today, and I immediately followed his lead and used this (very helpful, clear) YouTube tutorial to train an AI model on the essence of Peter Rukavina, and then produced AI-generated images derived from that essence.

Here are the 18 images I used to train the model:

An hour later, Stable Diffusion was generating images like this:

I

Here’s a sampling of the 100 or so images that I generated, using prompts that evolved as I went along:

The thing about all this is that nobody really knows how it works. It’s like the anaesthetic of the digital world, a magic potion that does what it says on the tin, but by means unknown.

Almost all of the generated images look like me—if you know me, and you were shown one of them, you’d likely guess it was me. How does it do that? You’ve got me. I have no idea.

What’s clear is that the AI uses photos of me to train a model, a model that is enough to generate other images of me. Does the model “know about people.” I have no idea. Maybe it has just been fed a lot of photos of people, and it’s figured out the patterns. Regardless, it is all tantamount to magic.

And it’s frightening. Not in an Orwellian way, but more viscerally in a personal way: the AI is distilling the visual parts of what makes me me.

In my case, more often than not the AI comes up with derivatives that make me look like an old man. I am an old(ish) man, of course. But the ways in which this is true are accentuated in the distillation: receding hairline, grey hair, prevalent sweaters and button-down shirts. There’s no hiding from it.

We exist in the world—we survive in the world—through a combination of confronting both the reality of ourselves, and the magical thinking we tell ourselves about ourselves: the AI has no such need, and simply plays the cards it’s dealt.

The ramifications of this “digital mirror that shows us who we really are” for our mental health, individually and collectively, are far more concerning to me than losing my job to a machine, robot cars run amuck, and animatronic presidents.

The Favourites page that I set up in 2019 to automatically generate from the RSS reader, stopped working in mid-July when I moved my RSS reader to a new host. I’ve patched things back together, so you’ll find all sorts of fresh favourites to enjoy, and, if you subscribe by RSS, your feedreader will suddenly be filled with a torrent of them. Apologies for the drought.

Recorded for the 2020 Celtic Colours, These Hands, featuring English, Mi’kmaw, Gaelic, and French by Dave Gunning, Darren Stevens, Mary Jane Lamond, Nicole LeBlanc, and Kaia Kater.

Link from my old friend Eve, who, among other things, will teach you ukulele and guitar.