When Grace Becomes Your Superpower

When was the last time you surprised yourself by handling chaos with unexpected poise?

You've had a stressful week: a client complaint, technical issues, and a team disagreement. But there you are, still handling it with poise. Gate 22 brings the ability to bring grace to even the most challenging situations. It's not about being perfect—it's about handling adversity with calm, elegance, honesty, and emotional maturity, and forgiving yourself (and others) for the times when you stumble.

A Personal Story of Grace

This week's theme is very special to my heart. I used to have a cat named Grace. She was a beautiful, long-haired orange tabby, rare. We rescued her from a dumpster when she was two weeks old, and she fit into the palm of my hand.

She spent two weeks being bottle fed by the vets across the street from my little apartment in Sunset Cliffs, and I would go over there every day to hold her and give her some love.

The staff would tell me how she cried all day and the only time she ever got quiet was when I came to hold her. Maybe they were just telling me that so I'd adopt her, but I think they all came to love her almost as much as I did. They even kept one of her baby pictures on the wall in the office.

They called her Rosie and asked about her every time I brought one of our other two cats for an appointment. I would remind them that her name was Grace now, even though her chart still had "Rosie" written on it.

A state of Grace is something I have aspired to (even if on a subconscious level) most of my life. Maybe that's why I resonated with that name for her.

Something about the word grace just rings with a tone of quiet strength, maturity, elegance, and compassion—traits I found appealing. But, as I've come to learn, grace is so much more than that.

Having grace also requires accountability and not dishonoring ourselves by denying the inconvenient or unpleasant parts of our encounters.

The Three Films of Our Lives

I have varying degrees of success when it comes to acting with grace in my daily life. Don't we all?

Imagine if we created a film reel of the different scenarios we have experienced. What would it look like? We could edit them into three different movies, each portraying us as a completely different character:

• Film 1: The Bumbling Fool - The one where we unintentionally say something horribly embarrassing or hurtful. Like when I was thrust into that client meeting unprepared last month and filled the awkward silence with a joke that landed completely flat.

• Film 2: The Villain - Driven to our breaking point by moments of extreme stress and raw emotion. Remember that time when a team member missed a crucial deadline and I responded with a tone that left everyone walking on eggshells for days?

• Film 3: The Grace Embodied - The person who knows exactly what to say and makes everything come together with remarkable ease. Like when a client called with a serious complaint, and instead of getting defensive, I listened deeply, acknowledged their concerns, and turned it into an opportunity to strengthen our relationship.

We may all have one of these films with more footage than the others, but none of us is indeed only one of these characters. Grace is about knowing and acknowledging that we can all have moments we would prefer to leave on the cutting room floor - just because we are human.

The real trick is not just to shorten the number of takes where we feel we are slipping into the first two characters, but to acknowledge those moments as part of the human experience. We should approach them with humility and without judging ourselves (or others) too harshly when they happen.

Easier said than done, right? Yet, it sits at the core of our human relationships.

So much so that we can look to any culture or spiritual teaching and see this is as a central theme: The Golden Rule, Oneness, Ho'oponopono, and even the phrase "An eye for an eye…"