Beauty strips of trees along the 101 in Oregon

We all have our default-mode patterns of behavior. These are well-worn grooves for how we act. It’s built upon years of pattern-recognition and success. These patterns can serve us really well both for our success and as a coping mechanism to lean heavily on in times of crises. And, it’s important to clearly see and recognize the patterns. This leaves us with choice.

I was recently driving down the 101 in Oregon. We were struck by the natural beauty — swathes of green forests emerging through the misty shreds of fog. Then we entered a strange corridor. Looking down the freeway in tunnel vision, you could see an endless curtain of green trees lining both sides of the road. Yet when you looked closely, the trees were quite thin and through the gaps you could see wide expanses of clearcut logged stumps. My activist partner explained that these trees were “beauty strips” left by the logging companies for drivers to admire, leaving them free to chop down the forests behind this scanty curtain.

As we approach the end of 2020, it’s a good time to evaluate patterns of behaviors to see if they might be “beauty strips” covering up desolation and pain or if they are true forests.

Beauty Strip 1: Money & Security

I worked in technology for 22 years, most recently at Facebook. The big tech companies pay really well in a mixture of cash, bonus, and stock options. They are notorious for over-the-top perks to take care of employees from free food and drycleaning to all types of on-site services. Facebook HQ would take care of all your errands providing every service you might want—gym, dentist, doctor, barber, masseuse, and bank.

Beauty Strip 2: Impact of Work / Success

It felt great to be a Facebook employee. My Asian parents could finally explain to their relatives what their daughter did and proudly wield the Facebook brand (much stronger internationally than in the U.S. and Western Europe) as a status symbol. My teams were designing products that we hoped were improving the lives of billions of people around the world. As designers, we aspired to do our best work, working on the latest devices, prototyping the most innovative interactions, partnered with a prolific engineering team that would rapidly ship the designs, and with access to quick data & research to see how well the products did.

Beauty Strip 3: Wearing Someone Else’s Leadership Armor

Since my Stanford computer science days and stretching through decades in tech, I was often one of the few females in a sea of male colleagues. I’d grown up in a Thai-Chinese culture with a strict tiger mom and had learned to adhere to stringent standards of good girl behavior. As I started leading, I learned how to adopt patterns of dominance, aggression, and interruption to get my voice heard in design firms and while performing for our primarily male executive clients. It worked really well and got me to a lot of professional success

Seeing Behind the Beauty Strips

The devastation behind the beauty strips. Photo by Toben Dilworth

Yet all three of these were beauty strips for me.

Behind both the money & security and impact of work/success was an unrelenting workaholic grind that took a toll on my relationships and family. I loved being a designer and much of my identity was wrapped up in professional success. These trappings were the beauty strips that masked stress, anxiety, overwhelm, and continual busy-ness.

Wearing someone else’s leadership armor let me bring my passion and ideas to products, and also brought me professional success. Yet it masked my own leadership style that I felt wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t confident enough to flaunt the compassion, kindness, and empathy. Those all felt too feminine. It also didn’t feel good to be the difficult person, the challenger who would push myself and others to perform to ridiculously unrealistic expectations.

These were all beauty strips for me, but they could be full forests for other people. Some of my clients are working in corporate as their day job, to pay the bills and provide security for their families as they spend time on their passions—startups and small businesses that will take time to nurture. Money and security is the absolute right bet for this context of their lives.

Evaluating the Pattern

When looking at some of these patterns, it’s useful to ask a couple of questions to figure out if it’s a beauty strip or a full forest.

How does it serve you?
We’re all smart people who have made choices leading us to the current path. How does the pattern serve you? What benefits does money, success,or a particular leadership style provide for you? What does it feel like to get these benefits?
Who else might it serve?
The pattern may also serve as a proxy for others around you. It could be financial security for your family or a job that you’re doing with the mission of helping a certain group of people.
Is this short-term or long-term?
Some of us make the mistake of jumping into a pattern that was needed for the short-term. But we never take time out to re-evaluate it years later. Is it still relevant? Does it still serve our needs?

Exploring the negative emotion

Ultimately, we can evaluate the patterns to see what type of turmoil or negative emotions they cause within us. If there is long-term stress, anxiety, fatigue, or sleeplessness, pay attention to these negative emotions. These are often clues to the devastation behind the beauty strips that we choose to ignore. Start to peek between the trees to see if these negative emotions have been suppressed or ignored for a while.

Bottom-Line

We all have patterns in our lives. It’s the default mode of our daily behavior that we rely on. It subconsciously gets us through our days. Every once we in a while, we need to pause as we drive down the freeway to evaluate these patterns. Are they shallow beauty strips destroying our long-term fulfillment, or are they genuine lush forests of patterns that serve us well?

Breaking Through Patterns