One of the unsung benefits of public speaking is that every now and again you're on the program with another speaker who inspires and expands awareness. This happened to me tonight at a weeklong "Leadership Lab" sponsored by the Brookings Institution where I have one of the speaking slots ("Virtual Teams in the Age of the Network").
Tonight, Robin Gerber, author of Leadership the Eleanor Roosevelt Way, among other books, was the after-dinner speaker for this group of government officials. Robin is a compelling presenter with a great message: optimism, commitment, and the ability to let things go all combine to produce the Eleanor Roosevelts of the world.
Eleanor Roosevelt was one of my mother's heroines and, as Robin told stories, I could hear my mother's voice. But there was one story Robin told that I'd never heard before, one that will certainly stay with me.
Franklin Roosevelt died suddenly in 1945 at "the Little White House" in Warm Springs, Georgia, where the literally "warm springs" helped in soothing his polio. Many who know the Roosevelts' lives know that Lucy Mercer Rutherford, Eleanor's social secretary and the woman with whom Franklin had had an affair, supposedly several decades earlier, was with him when he died. Rutherford had arranged for her friend, an artist, to be there as well, to paint President Roosevelt's portrait. He was sitting for the portrait when he had a stroke and died.
Eleanor arrived from Washington almost immediately, where she learned from a spiteful cousin that Rutherford was with the president when he died. It was a very low blow for Eleanor, who had been promised by her husband that the affair had ended long before. Quickly, Eleanor dismantled the houses they had lived in, finding among their possessions this last portrait. What did she do with it? She sent it to Lucy Mercer Rutherford. As Robin said, "She sent the portrait back," a metaphor for Eleanor's quite astonishing ability to move on, to not stay mired in the painful past.
Send the portraits back. Let go of what holds us back, even if a source of great pain. We all need to learn how to do this, myself at the top of the list. Thank you, Robin, for this wise counsel. By the way, Robin is, in fact, an attorney, and will see her first novel published come January: Eleanor vs. Ike, a fictional account of what might have happened had the great icon of women's (and human) rights run against the general in the 1952 US presidential election.