LACE-UP
Notes on authenticity, listening, and Kiese Laymon.
“Think of the last time you felt genuinely heard.”
I was sitting in a packed room of 70 undergraduate students, plus a handful of adults. I was a co-facilitator for a conversation on authentic listening, and this was our lead facilitator’s prompt. In pairs, we each took three minutes to speak, uninterrupted, about the last time we remembered experiencing authentic listening.
My partner was a senior, Public Policy major, who had recently accepted a position at Capital One. She spoke about a presentation she delivered on the film Crazy Rich Asians in her Public Speaking course, and her surprise at the attentiveness of the other students in the course.
When I heard the prompt, I thought of Kiese Laymon.
Laymon is one of the greatest living American writers, but I do not know him personally. He has certainly never heard my voice.
I often do this – I am asked a direct question and I cannot, or will not, give a straight answer. I tried to think of other examples of feeling heard - examples of friends and family - but I kept coming back to Laymon. When it was time for my three minutes of speaking with my partner, it was too late for me to find a different answer.
The last time I felt genuinely heard, I said to my partner, was when I was reading a book. It was this week. I was reading Kiese Laymon’s memoir, Heavy.
Laymon and I are very different people – he grew up tall, Black, and hungry in Jackson, Mississippi. I grew up short, white, and well-fed. At the time Laymon was teaching Creative Writing a few hours north of his birthplace at the University of Mississippi, “Ole Miss,” where the in-state tuition was roughly $9,000 per year. The roomful of students I was sitting in had collectively paid Duke University over $19 million dollars for their degrees.
Laymon’s traumas are not my traumas, I told my partner, trying to honor these and many other differences between us.
Still, I saw myself in some of the stories he told. When he said, “It’s just so hard to find what healthy is once you’ve lived forty-something years,” for instance, it rang true to my experience.
I told my partner that when I read his words about masculinity, weight, and embodiment, a part of me felt heard and understood.
After our three-minute exchanges, the room quieted to listen to one of the university’s senior administrators reflect on authentic listening. She structured her words around the acronym “LACE Up”, standing for Love, Authenticity, Courage, and Empathy. She read a description of each commitment, taken from a 2018 article by Yvette M. Alex-Assensoh from the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Love: Be kind in the face of spitefulness, forgiving in the midst of pain, hopeful when all seems lost, and patient with people, but not with ignorance or injustice.
Authenticity: Authentic leaders have a firm grasp on their personal strengths and weaknesses. Admit your missteps and acknowledge when you are looking to others for support. In doing so, you invite others to be authentic as well, creating a more welcoming campus in the process.
Courage: Acknowledge fear, but move forward anyway. When the going gets tough on the diversity front, take a stand and defend it, rather than using the chief diversity officer as a shield.
Empathy: Take time to feel alongside the students, faculty, and staff that you serve. Seek to understand other perspectives, even when you disagree.
These are the keys to authentic listening, the senior administrator said.
It strikes me that of the four elements of LACE-Up, only one carries connotations of traditional masculinity. That would be courage, of course, with its ancient link to bravery in battle. The other three - love, authenticity, and empathy - are coded as feminine in our contemporary moment. Our senior administrator is a Black woman, and I can’t help thinking how infrequently similar words pass the lips of the white male senior administrators who are her colleagues. Colleagues who look and speak like me.
As a co-facilitator I was asked to provide a concluding remark on authentic leadership. I will try to be as truthful as I can with you, I said to the room.
The experience I described to my partner was one where I sat alone at a desk with a book and felt heard. Why am I more present and vulnerable with a book than I am with other human beings? With people who love me?
It isn’t a coincidence that Laymon’s book is about, among other things, the oddness of American men and their emotions. It is about cultural forces of traditional masculinity that push us away from honesty, authenticity, and self-understanding.
If I am not listening authentically to the people around me, I said to the room, it is probably because I am not listening authentically to myself. It is probably because I am afraid of what I will find.
If I am present and listening to someone else, it is probably because I am also present and listening to myself. It is probably because I have chosen to be gracious with what I will find.
“Think of the last time you felt genuinely heard.”
Perhaps the next time I am asked this question I will have a better answer. A person I know, at least, instead of a book. Perhaps I will be a different person, more capable of listening authentically to myself and to others.
For today, I am grateful for Kiese Laymon and for our senior administrator. I am grateful for the ways they challenge me to change.
I am grateful for my conversation partner, too. I hope we will speak again. I’ll try my best to listen.