Kairos and the "Wake" of Leadership, with Karen and Matthew Fine
In this episode of the podcast, Andrew Cohn speaks with Karen and Matt Fine—business leaders, parents, and community contributors in Norfolk, Virginia. This is a conversation about simpler applications of spirituality in family and at work. Matt and Karen talk about their journeys, the impact of their personal spirituality in their household, and their work in the world. This broad conversation is full of wisdom and insight. The Fines are humble as they express their beliefs and their experience, however they offer a number of inspiring stories and invite us to use our experience and our inspiration to help us leave a positive “wake” as leaders in the world.
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Kairos and the "Wake" of Leadership, with Karen and Matthew Fine
In this episode, I speak with Karen and Matt Fine. Karen and Matt are an inspiring, wise, and approachable husband and wife who live in Norfolk, Virginia. This is a conversation that feels like a conversation with friends in their living room. There's a lot of simple and practical wisdom about how to live more fulfilling lives, how to parent better, how to cope with change, how to cope with crisis, and how to use our beliefs and our experiences in useful and real ways.
Karen and Matt talk about what's the wake we leave as a leader, and what's the wake that we leave behind us, both at home and at work. Matt is in the real estate business in Norfolk, Virginia, as well as an artist who makes some beautiful work. Karen is his wife, and she's been a chef and is involved in a number of community organizations. Matt talks about how he has adapted his style from what he calls a bull in a china shop to learn from Karen and her groundedness to be a leader in different ways in his work in the world.
They talk about using the twelve steps in their lives and share some of their own personal experiences that led to the application of these tools. We talk about vulnerability. Matt talks about the Enneagram. We discuss different dimensions of time, which is a fascinating application of those ideas, which I've talked about before, but a very unique application here.
Matt talks about the superpower and the genius he has of being willing to listen to his wife so readily. I appreciated that. Karen talks about the potential use of the title chief spiritual officer of the family business. There's a lot of wisdom and a beautiful ordinariness and inspiration in this conversation. I hope you enjoy it.
I'm joined this time by my new friends, Karen and Matt Fine of Norfolk, Virginia, land of the mighty Chesapeake Bay. I'm very glad to have you on. There are a number of things we have to talk about, and you bring a different angle compared to if there is a typical podcast guest, and so that's what I love about this conversation we're going to have. I look forward to hearing about you individually and together, and your interest in this topic. Welcome, Karen and Matt, to the show.
Thanks for having us.
Introducing Karen and Matt
How would you briefly introduce yourselves? Who are you, and what do you do? We can talk a little bit, but I want to give you an opportunity to introduce yourselves.
We've been boyfriend and girlfriend since we were 19 and 18 years old for 42 years. Married, 35. We met in college, and Karen took a ceramics class, and I was a struggling academian. She suggested I take this ceramics class, and I ended up in a sculpture class with this super cool dude named Demetrius Mavroudis, which is still a great name. I gravitated to sculpture after getting out of college and got a master's degree in New York City, Georgia.
My family always did commercial real estate here in Virginia Beach and Norfolk. Karen got pregnant with twins, and my grandfather put his arm around me and decided it was time for me to get into the family business. I developed self-storage with him and built 5 or 6 self-storage facilities and always kept up with my art career. I've also had the thrill of making a couple of feature films. About five years ago, I became president of our family real estate company, which is a much larger operation than I was doing before by myself.
I would add to that, I grew up in the Midwest, not from Virginia. Early on in high school, my dad was transferred, and we moved to New Jersey. One of the schools that was up and coming was the University of Richmond, and I had loved Virginia from passing through it. I idolized a neighbor of mine who had gone to school in Virginia, so I ended up at the University of Richmond, where I met Matt in freshman English at 8:15 in the morning. It was a very small class. It took a little while, but he grew on me. We started dating at the end of our freshman year, and have been together ever since.
I ended up graduating with an Economics degree and then went on to culinary school. I went to the Culinary Institute of America up in Hyde Park and got my associate's degree there, and then worked in the restaurant world for a number of years while he went to graduate school in Georgia. We moved back to Virginia, and that's when we started a family. That's how we ended up there. I guess from there, having children was an eye-opening experience, and we had two at once.
It's very efficient, by the way. It should be noted.
It was naturally occurring, and we didn't know to expect that, because fraternal twins come from the mother's side, but none in my family that I knew of had survived, so there weren't any existing. We found out Matt was doing an art show down at the beach. In a routine sonogram, I found out that we were having twins. I showed up down at the beach, and he had a piece that was called “With Child.” I told him we were going to have to rename one of your pieces. On we went and had twin boys, who are an absolute joy, very different human beings.
They happen to be born at the same time. Other than that, they're completely different people, but they get compared a lot. I think becoming parents was a big moment for us in that I don't think either one of us expected it. A lot of characteristics of our upbringing came up in the mix, and it created some tension for us. I think we were both currently, and we had role models of that. We agreed on the ends, but the means of getting there were not the same, and there was tension there.
For anyone who had children, two at once, and then we welcomed a third son to the mix, it is full catastrophe living, to quote the name of a book. You're at it so hard and so fast that it's easy to get lost pieces and parts. My big joke is I was never going to be a hand-slapper. Next thing I know, it's like, “My God, I'm a hand slapper.” We were young and we were growing up at the same time as our children.
There's nothing that grows us up more abruptly, more directly, and more importantly than parenting, I would say. Thank you so much. You come from different places, you wind up in the same place. Your work takes you to different and somewhat unusual creative, but at the same time, traditional spaces. I'm labeling, so forgive me.
Karen, you and I met in a class and through the Equus community based here in Santa Fe. We started talking about this. I started saying, "I have this podcast." You said, "Maybe I'd like to be a part of that discussion." I'm so glad that you said that, and then Matt is in the loop here. We had a little bit of prep back and forth leading up to this conversation. You've had this beautiful life together, you've learned about parenting, and you've expressed yourself in these different ways, whether it's in a workshop, a kitchen, or a synagogue. We may talk about that.
There's this topic of spirituality and leadership. The audience is going, "That's right, we're five minutes into this, and we're getting to the topic." There's this topic on spirituality and leadership. I'm curious to know, and I'll ask this as open-endedly as I can, what is your connection to this topic or your interest in this topic, and how does it resonate for you?
Connection With Spirituality
It speaks to a little bit of how we met. I mentioned that as parents, we had some tension about how to raise our kids. I didn't know how to handle that tension. It built up a lot of resentment. Now, I can look back and I had other resentments. The inability to deal with that, and then my husband's forays into all of the things that he does, which are great, created a lot of stress for me and I found some relief in alcohol.
Alcohol was part of our life, and it was something we both grew up with. It was a regular thing, and it started to become more than a social thing. It helped me numb the feelings, the shame, the inability to deal with the overwhelm. Thankfully, I can say that I ended up shortly after one of the films that he made with his brother, accepting that there was an issue, and I went to rehab. That was honestly when I had a big wake-up call, and I started practicing a twelve-step program, which is a spiritual program.
It opened my eyes to a whole world that I didn't know, I think I had an inkling of, but it has led me down a path that I could never have imagined and led me to places like Equus, and to meet the most amazing people who are on this same spiritual journey. I know spirituality is what we are. We are spiritual beings. Yes, we live human lives, but we're also these spiritual beings that span generations, and I get that. Spirituality is a huge part of my life, and everyone's life, but I don't think everyone is quite aware of it.
Spirituality is what we are. We live human lives, but we're also these spiritual beings that span generations.
It's a framework. It's a way of describing things that some people might describe as spiritual, and I would agree. Other people might describe it somewhat differently without a term like that, but I get it. I hear you, and what I'm hearing is that overwhelm/crisis/situation led you to a path of coping, a path of recovery. I hear in my head spirituality and leadership, and that has led to these new dimensions of your own personal leadership, and then therefore, how you brought that leadership out into the world, or in your home first perhaps, or with yourself first, and then your home, and then out into the world, if that's fair to say.
We all are leaders in our own lives, and we are leaders in so many different ways. It doesn't have to look like the CEO of a company. That is one type of leadership, but we all are leaders.
My piece of that is that I started watching Karen go on this spiritual journey, and that included prayer and meditation and the real thing. I would not be overestimating to tell you that she has read a hundred books, if not more. Some people have become prophets to us, the real truth-tellers in the world. It started with me. We both relate to Brené Brown. Many people have influenced her and thus influenced me. Richard Rohr is one of her favorites as well. My style of leadership was always fun, bull the china shop, we're not going to lose, and follow me boys kind of a thing.
I was doing nonprofit leadership, and I was running my own business, and something as silly as coaching a kid's lacrosse team. As Karen was reading more and practicing more, they said attraction, not promotion. I started finding more and more of this groundedness that she had and started applying it to my life. I was going to Al-Anon. I was also studying the twelve steps. I found myself using the twelve steps in my life in a deeper way as well.
There was this Richard Rohr quote that I saw the other day, listening to a podcast that Karen recommended to me because that's the way it works. Particularly, he was talking about men and father issues. He said that men can't handle power until they've gone through the journey of powerlessness. Step one is admitting I was powerless, and it can be over whatever. For me, this guy who always had this self-image of being powerful, we also studied the Enneagram, and I'm an Enneagram type eight is how I identify.
I have this way of speaking that's a little loud, and I'm emphatic, and I use my hands when I'm talking. I needed to take that huge step back as a leader and accept powerlessness. When I did that, there was the before leadership piece for me. Before, in 2019, my dad got sick, and I took over running. I went from 6 employees to 50. The employees were dudes who worked in a storage facility. It's very different than what we do at the family business.
When I say the family business, we have family members who are on the board. We have family members who are employees. Anyone who works in a family business will tell you it's complicated. To circumnavigate this without the bull in the china shop piece of me, it would have been, I’ve been accused of being a bully, but the way that spirituality has settled into me has allowed me to be a different work leader than I ever imagined. Certainly, that I’d been practicing.
The spiritual path is like our hero's journey. You are transformed, and it never ends. We hear that story, and we think of stories having an ending. It never ends, and there are always opportunities for growth along the way. I love the journey. I welcome the challenges because I trust the process. I know that there's a process that the universe has that is working things out. It's not just for me.
That's the beauty of it. I know whatever I'm healing and doing, it ripples out to the whole. Whether it's in my family and my relationships here, people that I don't even know because we are one thing. We're not separate. That's the thing that I hope that we're starting to understand more that we are all connected. That doesn't mean that we don't have our own individual uniqueness, but we are still connected on a spiritual plane.
An energetic plane. There are ripples. If you're ever thinking, "Do I have an impact on other people?" Turn to your kids, not to mention your spouse, and then your communities and your businesses that you're leading, etc. I hear you both describing the impact of your inner work on your outer activity and the impact that it has on how you show up in these different leadership roles.
I've said to my husband before, "Everything leads to the next thing too, and builds on." I've said to him that I don't believe that you would be in the role that you're in had this not been our path, because you would not have been the leader that was needed at the time. I trust that there's this unfolding of things at the right time. I love this, and I learned this in the class that we took, but there's human time, which is Kronos, which we think in our terms of this linear, and then there's Kairos, which is divine timing.
You spoke to the fact that there’s some residual sadness and grief that I wasn't the healthiest version of myself for my children when they were born and up until a certain age. That's my path. Better late than never, and they've watched me on this journey. That's been even more impactful than had they been young children and never seen it. The twins are 31 years old, and our younger one is 25. They've seen us walk through adversity and challenge and come out the other side. What a gift to be able to give them.
Spiritual Practice
I want to apply that idea of a spiritual practice back to the leadership piece for me. The biggest thing that I have learned through spiritual practice is my sense of awareness about myself. Like any exercise that you do, there is a little bit of a spiritual muscle. The more that I practice, the stronger it gets, and the easier it gets to do it. This idea of awareness, and Karen talks a lot, and I fully adopted this whole thing, She'd say, "I can feel it in my body before I know what's going on." When I have that sensation, it's the stop, drop, and roll. I need to stop what I'm doing and figure out what the feeling is.
I learned to do that as you're dealing with these family members and dealing with these business things that we were doing. It is the whole thing about learning to respond instead of react. It’s that awareness tool. Whenever I feel that thing welling up inside me, I know it's time to shut up. What I've learned is that my favorite word is, "I'd like to circle back on that," which means I took the time to sit down and process it and get my emotions out of it. I have something to say that hopefully will be helpful for everyone.
If nothing else, I can clear my slate and be honest about what's going on with me, as opposed to so many of the bull in the china shop reactions that I had that weren't healthy and weren't helpful. Way back when we agreed that it was going to be time for me to try and help run this family business, the number one guiding principle was, "I want to do what's best for the company." It's always been my filter on everything that I do. It's not what's best for me or how we make more money. It's what's best for the company. The company can do a lot of philanthropy. We were able to help enrich the lives of those who helped build the company for us. Our employees are important to us.
Wake Of Leadership: It's not what's best for me nor how we make more money. It's what's best for the company.
As is the community that supports it. They're very big on giving back to the community, very big. That's an important part of their philosophy.
The values of the company. I love the idea of learning to respond instead of react. That in and of itself, as a leader, is one of the things I hope that I'm able to help lead others to do and discover for themselves. I'm not afraid. The other big thing about being an Enneagram type eight is that we hate vulnerability. My journey to being vulnerable is to be able to explain this and say, "This isn't who I am, but this is who I'm learning to be.” I'm trying hard to do these things. I'm not going to do it perfectly. When I make a mistake, I'm probably going to be back tomorrow. Tomorrow, I'll come back, and I'll hold myself responsible and accountable. I will apologize and say out loud, “I'm trying, I'm trying to do this better,” because that's why I'm here.
Matt, I love the way you're explaining this so clearly. What I hear you talking about is that demands a willingness to question the way we're doing things. It demands a willingness to take a step aside, to take my hands off the wheel, either for somebody else to do it, or to trust something else to do it, or just, okay, I can put it down, and I can take care of myself, and I can question my own process. I can question my own mechanism and my own ways of working. I can get out of autopilot, which for most of us in the working world, or even in parenting, or even in marriages, can be a very challenging thing to do.
We do what we always do. It takes a crisis, or as I've heard it talked about, a disruption, to break out of that cycle. The break is a breaking open, not a breaking apart, if we look at it that way. I appreciate the way you're talking about it. I know it's much easier to say than it is to get to that point. It's a learning journey, but I appreciate the way you're saying this, and that ability to question the way I'm doing things. I can do it better. I'm willing to be vulnerable to do that.
I'll say it's funny too because we have a 41-year-old CEO, and he's very bright and very smart. He'll leave at the end of the day, and he leaves and says, "We know what we're doing." I go home and talk to Karen, and she starts asking probing questions. I'll show back up the next day, and he'll look at me, and I'll be like, "Yeah, I had one of those conversations." That is also part of me being vulnerable, to go like, "Karen, help me see it a different way." I know that we like to sew things up and call them done, but I have different thoughts today. That was yesterday, and I can't turn my back on what I learned last night, or what I talked about with Karen this morning.
It's challenging for him that he leaves at 5:00, and everything is one way, and I show back up the next morning, and it's changed a little bit. Karen continues to be an incredible filter for me. The partnership that we have, her not backing down from asking tough questions to me, you were talking about superpower on one of the other podcasts I listened to. My superpower is my ability to have this thoughtful, sensitive wife, and I'm smart enough to listen to her questions and reconsider.
That's such a classic gender thing. A man is a genius if he's smart enough to listen to his brilliant wife, that makes you a genius. It's a beautiful thing, isn't it? It's a lovely thing. It is a superpower because the pressures to keep going are so strong. Businesses value closure. We want certainty. We want efficiency. Efficiency means we're going to keep doing the same thing.
You're right, we're going to increase our efficiency. Innovation, for example, kills efficiency. When I work with leadership teams, and we talk about how we want to innovate, are you willing to be less efficient? Because if you're not willing to be less efficient for a period of time, you cannot innovate. You can't question your own practices while you're doing them efficiently over and over again. There must be a disruption to even have the conversation.
That's where they want to turn around and go back because that's uncomfortable.
They want to go back in terms of process, and they want to blame in terms of individual relationships. To your point, Matt, that's what happens. That's why change is so difficult, and innovation is so difficult. That's a lot of the world that I'm in with leadership teams. Coming back to the genius of listening to your wife, Karen, from your point of view, how would you explain, how would you describe, is a better word, and illustrate how you're able to partner in that way? What's the role of your journey and your, I hate to use the word, path? I have some friends who say to me, "There is no spiritual path." That assumes that there's a beginning, a middle, and an end. How does it work for you?
Trust
As Matt was sharing, I was thinking so much about how being able to do those types of things with other people involves trust. I have had to learn to trust something that I can't even describe some days. I know it's there because I've seen it work in my life. I know not everyone has that experience. I'm not even sure, Matt and I have had this conversation. Have you had that experience? My literal experience was I felt like whether it was true or not. My choice was between life and death. The life was you need to believe in something other than yourself and other than things that make sense to you.
If you aren't met with that existential choice, I don't know if you can. That's been such a gift in my life. I don't think everyone has to have that experience. For Matt and me, our relationship was strong enough that there was that trust. Even now, to some degree, he looks at me and somewhat reacts to some of the things that I'm saying, but he takes it in because he trusts me. He trusts this process too and knows there's something there.
It's not like I'm all-knowing or anything because I am not. I feel like I have been given a gift that has allowed me to tap into something beyond my own self that I want to share with other people. Thankfully, he's a willing participant because he trusts me and trusts our relationship. He has his own relationship with the universe, higher power, whatever you want to call it, nature. We get stuck on that a lot. I think it's confused a lot with religion, and they're not the same. They can be the same.
When I'm learning what I'm learning, I know it is not just for me. It is for me to share with others. The tricky part is who's ready to hear that? Sometimes you have to come in like a sideways door, you can't use the term spiritual. You have to disguise it a bit in ways that people can consume because not everyone is ready to receive that kind of message. You can craft it in a way that is something that they can receive.
I think I made a mistake. I'm getting more discerning on who and how I share what I've learned and what I know to be true and my true self with people because it can be, I don't want to say rejected, but if it's not. Early on, that probably triggered some old traumas in me too, and made me not want to share. The more that I go forward and trust this all, the more I'm opening up about it with other people. I'm trying to be very understanding of meeting people where they are.
What I hear is a certain level of respect and respectfulness. She said not everybody is ready. Some people don't relate to certain languages, or people come from different places or different backgrounds. I get it. I'm very careful about the word spiritual. That's largely because the word isn't particularly important. The impact is important, however, we would define the principles or the meaning and the application, that's what's important.
I appreciate the level of respect that you're bringing here and how there is a part of you that wants to share, express, and serve because that's what you do. That's what I'm hearing underneath everything you all are saying, service. That doesn't mean that it needs to be proselytizing or converting or having people use the language that you want them to use.
The more I've started to understand, it's embodying all of these things. Naturally, it comes out in your way of doing and whatever it is you're doing, in your actions. Runnymede, Matt's family business, one of the challenges for the coaching that Kelly had said is maybe you could be their chief spiritual officer. We all giggled because they were not ready for that. I did speak to the CEO about it and said those words. I said, “I understand that not everyone is ready for that sort of thing, but what do you think we could do?”
It was interesting because I've gotten this feedback several times in the last couple of months. He was like, ”You're already doing it,” because Matt, in the role he is in, is one of if not the most important influencers of the culture of the organization. My influence on him and my beingness on him has made an impact in ways that I can't even know. It's so exciting because it says that we're connected.
The impact and influence you're having on each other is clear and recognized whenever I hear you speak to the CEO.
I'll give you a real-life experience. Pretty soon after my dad got sick, luckily, he survived it, but he was near death. While that was going on, we were going through a complete business model change. All our real estate is in Hampton Roads here in Virginia. We were going through a disposition-acquisition cycle. We had 62 commercial real estate closings in about three years. We flipped a full third of our portfolio. We were out buying out.
We were also in Richmond, Jacksonville, Raleigh rather, and Atlanta. We were doing all these things during COVID, with my dad trying to die, realizing that as the business was changing, the employees that we had in the C-suite weren't the right people in the seats. With all of this going on, we had to let go of some kind thoughtful people who had given so much of themselves to the business. The test of being authentic and honest and caring, and yet still with this horrible task of how can we make this better? We can give you more runway.
The reality was we were changing. We couldn’t be half-pregnant. We couldn't half-change. We couldn't not change because of somebody who had done such great things for our family business. It was intense for about three years. As you probably know, if you're in the business, as the interest rates changed, the entire ability to do that was like the spigot stopped. During that time, my C-suite went from 63 to an average age of 43. It was time for them to take a breath and find their feet.
I was working with the coach at the time, and he said, "Matt, your challenge is you went from a wartime president where you were putting out fires and doing all these things. Now you get to be a peacetime president." You talk about wake. What do you want your wake to look like? You don't have to chop down every tree. It became this thing of being a cheerleader, an encourager, and a truth-teller. I was borderline amazed that if he hadn't used those words to me, wartime president to peacetime president, and let me realize I had to flip the coin and go to the other side and use these other skills.
I liked the other part. We were playing Monopoly, and it was hot and heavy and it was exciting, but all of a sudden, I was part of the beauty of having done all the work and having an incredibly supportive and understanding coach, mentor, and wife that has allowed me to somewhat gracefully make that switch. That's maybe one of the things I'm most proud of about the work that has been done for me, us, my company, community, and all that stuff.
Kairos
I appreciate the interdependence, the mutual support, and the openness to each other. It's quite lovely and inspirational, and practical, and real, and impactful. One of the things I love about this whole topic of spirituality and leadership is that it's inside and it's outside, it's personal and it's interpersonal, and it's impersonal in a certain sense. It's about feelings, and it's about numbers. It's about families, and it's about businesses, and it's about all of these things and how they all come together and how one impacts another because they are all connected.
We can't change for the worse. If I go spiraling down, I'm going to take my business with me, or if not my business, my career. These things are connected. As that tide can lift up, it's going to take my business, my team, and my career along with it. I appreciate the way you've impacted each other in such huge ways.
Could you talk about how you've talked about yourselves, your journey, and your impact on one another? How do you talk about your own learnings? Matt, you talked about it a little bit, in terms of what your wake is, and maybe how you might share with the next generation of leaders by saying circling back or something like that or modeling that ability to question your own thinking. I'd love to hear from you and Karen about maybe a story or two about how you have brought this to your work, and your work could be community work, the real estate business, etc.
It's funny. Karen brought up the Kronos-Kairos. It's funny because I have over 40 years of art making, I have named pieces Kronos or variations of that. I was talking about a piece that I was finishing up at a bank down in North Carolina. I said, “I'm thinking about some sort of a Kronos thing.” She started giggling. She said, “It's not Kronos, it's Kairos.” She explained it to me. I ended up naming it Kairos instead of some variation of the word Kronos.
We've talked more about it. I went in the other day and I wrote, I did some work, and I put a couple of paragraphs together, and I emailed it to the CEO and then my other family member, business leader partner in what we do. I said, “When I'm in Kronos looking at business, everything has to be on time, on track. If something doesn't go the way I want it to, then it's a perceived failure. When I'm in Kairos mindset, then it's all happening exactly as it should. I can breathe through stuff that used to want to freak me out. I want you guys to know that I'm trying to make the shift. When you see me getting all anxious because that guy won't sell us that thing when we need it tomorrow or yesterday, I will try to make the shift.”
Just by telling them that I'm trying to make this shift, it's funny how this has gone from this class at Equus to Karen, to me explaining it to my team to help me be more in this other mindset because it's very real. Time will happen when it's time. If it doesn't happen, that means another door is opening somewhere. I don't know if that exactly answers your question, but it's me taking something that I'm still stumbling and bumbling through being vulnerable enough to share it with these most important people in my life saying, “Help remind me when I'm not living up to what I'm saying I'm trying to do.”
It will happen when it's time. If it doesn't, another door will open somewhere.
It answers. Thank you for that because it's a great example of vulnerability and courage as well. Some are encouraged to say, “I've heard about this thing. I think it'll help over here. Let's bring this over. Let's talk about this. Let's make this part of the way we conduct business here.” Why? Because we'll get better results. I'm filling in the blanks for you. Tell me if this works. I'm going to project this onto you because it's going to preserve our sanity. Hopefully, it'll preserve our relationships and our individual stress levels. It's a better way to live to not have to think that we have to be in control of everything. That's the word that comes up for me very often.
Back to powerlessness. I can't make that guy sell me the land because I want it today.
I guess I use my kids as that type of example. I guess I try and live as authentically and by my values as I can and share that with them. Richard Rohr also has a book called Falling Upward. He talks about the first half of life and the second half of life. There's no way of avoiding this first half of building up your false self and the material world. It's part of this journey. Hopefully, you wake up at some point, in whatever way that is, and you realize there's more to it. I think that we all innately have that knowledge. I think because we get busy, we don't listen to it.
We don't listen to that still, small voice in there going like, “Is this all there is?” Follow those questions. Don't not listen to it and trust yourself. I know people can say that there have been times like this before, but I don't know if I agree. In our lifetime, some serious crises are going on. There's a general anxiety that everyone is carrying. That's why I feel even more compelled to do this work because I know that my nervous system if I can be in a place of calm and peace, can help create that around me.
That is so helpful where we are because it's easy to get caught up in the noise and caught up in the anxiety and the what-ifs and all that stuff. If you can stay in another place, we're also at the cusp of the most amazing time to be alive. I try and share that with young people too. Yes, there's this, but at the same time, there's also so much potential that we haven't even begun to explore. I'm personally super excited about it. I do have faith in humanity and the goodness of people. I hope to bring that with me wherever I go.
There's so much potential that we haven't even begun to explore.
Richard Rohr’s Wisdom
I'm hearing you describe it and it's almost like a little bit of a class on elderhood and perspective and wisdom. You're reminding me of Richard Rohr, a fellow New Mexican. I'd love to read something that I recently saw of his that might be bucketed under the second half of life or elderhood, and then let me know what you think of it. The second half of life is about confronting your container, confronting your ego, and breaking it. The whole container has to fall apart, or else you will be trapped in your own isolation for the rest of your life.
Your thinking can broaden. You can become more engaged with what's called the perennial tradition or what he calls the perennial tradition. This is the place where all of the world's religions concur. As Rumi said, smash all of the jugs, the water is one. As Richard Rohr says, that's true. There's one reality in this world. You stop worshiping your intellect, your mind, your reason. You recognize that spiritual knowing is a different thinking. The word that emerged from the desert fathers and mothers is contemplation. The contemplative mind knows differently. Unfortunately, after the Enlightenment, we focused only on the rational mind.
Once you deal with paradox and mystery, the rational mind doesn't know how to think there. Once you accept mystery, you're no longer egoistic or arrogant. The container is gone. Mystery isn't saying you can't know. It's saying your knowing is an infinite process. You start loving God or truth or love itself. They're all the same thing, after all, whatever you want to call it. Your definition of God changes from the judgmental old man to love. You recognize that we are all part of something more than we believe in something.
I love it. That speaks to my soul. He has been such a guide for me. I got to meet him when I went out there, and the stars aligned. It was such a special moment for me because he has been such a guide for me and so many. I love it when I hear the synchronicities of people that I follow or listen to, and they'll say something. I'm like, “They follow Richard Rohr.” He is the most humble servant you will meet. He is a vessel like he is. Those words resonate with me to my core.
One of the themes of what he's speaking that jumps out to me is meaning and recognizing the meaning that our lives have, whether we like it or not. Whether we capitalize on it, invest in it, and celebrate it or not, our lives have meaning. The opportunity to capture that meaning, leverage that meaning, and be deliberate about that meaning, which tends to happen more in the “ second half of life” or something than it does earlier.
We have the ability to have a little bit greater context and perspective. My work is about helping leaders recognize that individually and collectively. I love the different spaces that it can show up. Matt, you've talked about a little bit about your art. I believe that that is MattFineArt, lovely play on words there. Thank you. MattFineArt.com. That's one of the places where it lives for you and where you bring it out. Karen, you've talked about your family. You also do some board and community work. Would you want to say something about that?
It's interesting because I'm taking a break from that sort of thing. It's not that I'm not still participating, I'm just doing it in a different way. I look back now, and I learned a lot. I don't regret any of that, but I think that there was a lot of my ego involved and shooting myself because I was a stay-at-home mom. I had some time before they were gone. Raising kids is not an easy task. Unfortunately, for many years, it's not looked at as important as it is. Having a granddaughter, I can see from this angle that it's so much work raising a child, especially in today’s world. I don't envy people trying to raise their kids with all this social media and technology. It's tough.
I'm not doing it, I'm taking a break from that. I’m doing more of the work that I feel called to do, which is healing. I feel like my calling is to heal myself, but in so doing, I'm healing the world. I take it very seriously. It's like my job. I sometimes forget, and I think I'm not doing enough, but then I remind myself that I am, and this is important. It's okay that it's that kind of work. I don't think that gets recognized like other types of things that we do, but I'm okay with that.
I so appreciate it. I asked you this question that could be answered with, “I'm doing the following nine things and the following six steps or the following schedule and the following timing.” Here we are in this Kronos world of lists and numbers and bullets or something. I love that the accurate answer to that question is much more Kairos and open and about intention rather than about steps and boxes and spreadsheets because healing and growth aren't about boxes and spreadsheets.
No, it's not. It gives such meaning to my life. It lights me up. I know that this is what I'm supposed to be doing. It’s interesting for us that we’re doing this podcast. It came about a little bit as a joke of my husband. I told him I had met you and listened to your podcast, which landed for me like Richard Rohr's do. I shared that with him. He off the cuff said, “We should be on his.” At first, I didn't think that we fit the model because so many of the people that you've had are very accomplished, coaches and have lots of things behind their names. I realized that's not what this is about. I hope that whoever tunes in to this, realizes that we are all leaders. Those things are important, but they're not as important as we think they are.
In some of the podcasts that I've listened to of yours, this vocabulary of spirituality and how it applies to business. I was blown away by the phrases and how quickly people can articulate them. I view myself a little bit as the boots-on-the-ground guy in the petri dish. I was living that life that wasn't perfect. You throw in my wife's spirituality, me synthesizing that, and then how it spits out the other side. I like to hope that we've shown a different way or a practical version of how it's applied. The biggest truth for me is about feeling it in your body. Some days when I leave work, I feel good that I handled myself in a way that was respectful and I can be proud of and was authentic to me. For a long time, I was pretending to be the guy I thought I was supposed to be.
Beautiful. You've allowed yourself to question how you think and how you act. You've allowed yourself to feel, which is wonderful. You've allowed yourself to feel, which is a stretch for an awful lot of men, especially in the business world. Karen, you said there's a lot behind their names. You talk about some guests. What was the exact phrase that you said?
Letters, like they have accomplished things that I haven't done.
They have a lot behind their names, and you have a lot in your wake, to use the expression that you use, Matt. Whether it's your family or your immediate family, the family real estate business, the synagogue you've been on the board of, the other community work that you do, and certainly the art because your energy is poured into that art as well. I love the way you've said this. You're a practical demonstration of doing it your way in your space. I hope, God willing, it will continue to unfold. In five years, it may be a different way. Who knows? Let's not try to control that.
I couldn't tell you that I would be sitting here talking about this with you in a million years. I can't wait to see where this leads for both of us. It's exciting times. I think what leadership has been is evolving to be something that it needs to be. I think it's more of this type of thing, and it's exciting when I meet people like you and people. This is happening maybe not in our Kronos time as quickly as we'd like, but it is happening in Kairos time. I'm excited about what the possibilities of that look like.
Thank you. I am too. If people want to learn more about you, they can go to MattFineArt.com. The website of your family business, Matt, is TRCVA.com. I presume that stands for The Runnymede Corporation, Virginia. I believe that you're both available on LinkedIn as well if people want to contact you unless there's another way or another method.
That's fine.
I appreciate your participation, telling your story, allowing us to follow the threads and how it all comes together, and being so vulnerable with your willingness to change and live lives that are richer for you, and very beneficial for the people around you.
I can't thank you enough for having us because this has been such a fun experience. You don't know at the time when you're doing things what the result is, and it's not why you do it. I know that there are going to be so many good things that will come about whether somebody hears this or not.
It comes back to your talking about trust. You trust that will happen.
I do.
Beautiful. Thank you both so much.
Thank you.