The New Law of the Lid

Sometimes in life, the best teachers arrive quietly and unannounced, and in my case, in a diaper.

Two mornings a week, I hang with my grandson, Theo. No phone, no email, no clients. Just me and a two-year-old emperor issuing royal decrees, usually about sippy cups, a snack, or the urgent need to explore the next kingdom of interest.

Our days have a liturgy. Stories, every morning, which he carefully curates and chooses with the precision of a librarian at the Bodleian. A walk with his trike, me behind him on the push handle like a chauffeur, taking directions from a passenger who can't yet say "left."  Elmo on the couch, cuddled in together. And long stretches at the window, his face pressed to the glass, transfixed by the chickadees and sparrows, as if he is beholding a mystery that adults have forgotten how to see.

I don't take my place in his week lightly.

In Robert Kegan's stage theory, Theo lives in the most self-centered stage of mind. His needs and agenda are the solar system, and everything else, including me, exists to serve that agenda. Ask him to do something he doesn’t want to (like clean up a mess) and you have committed a crime against the cosmos. A minute later he crawls into my lap with a book and settles in like the storm never happened. Emotions at this stage are weather, not personality.

The Lid

Leadership guru John Maxwell calls it the Law of the Lid: your leadership ability sets the ceiling on your effectiveness. Theo, who has not read Maxwell, has his own theory.

When he can't get the lid back on his sippy cup, he looks up at me with his big brown eyes and asks for help without words. I get low, stay present, and let him wrestle with it. Sometimes he figures it out. Sometimes he hands me the lid, watches me show him how it fits, and takes it back to do it himself.

Zero ego loss.

Zero need to be the hero.

In that moment, it stops being about Theo and starts being about us. Every theory of adult development I know describes growth the same way: we become less self-centered and more able to hold others in mind. We move from the self at the center to the self in relationship.

Theo isn't selfish. He's two. He can't yet step outside himself, because his wants aren't something he has; they're who he is. Growing up, at any age, means getting a little distance from ourselves. What we once were, we begin to see, and each time, more room opens up for someone else. Most leadership programs teach us new skills. This kind of growth is different. It doesn't add new apps; it upgrades the operating system.

No one ever finishes it. I see it in my clients. Every leader I coach still keeps a little real estate in that two-year-old part of the self: my department, my targets, my parking spot with the little sign. Under stress, all of us move back in. So when a forty-five-year-old CEO throws a sophisticated sippy-cup meltdown on Zoom, I remember Theo. I get low. I stay present. I wait for him to hand me the lid.

What Changed in Me

When my kids were little, I wrote an essay for the Grand Rapids Press about how playing with them pulled me into the Now. I called young children Buddhist monks without impulse control. I still believe it. But I was very much in the picture back then: the dad with a plan, sneaking lessons into the dinosaur games, proving something to my kids, to my clients, and mostly to myself.

With Theo, there is so much less of me involved.

It has changed my practice too. For years, part of me needed my clients to think I was brilliant. I needed every session to contain a good insight, preferably mine. That need has quietly loosened. I can give people more space, and when I do speak, it comes from a different place inside of me.

Some of that is age. Some of it is grief. My father, Jerry, died last year at 91, on the farm where he was born. In his final year, as Theo learned his first words, my dad was losing his voice. Theo was climbing stairs while my dad struggled to move. I have never felt the circle of life so acutely, and holding Theo helped heal a heart that was badly broken. At the funeral, my cousin, Fr. Mike Kuchar, said my dad was "lit from within." He never sought recognition. He just quietly did the next right thing for whoever needed it.

Three Ways of Making Room

This is where my faith and my psychology keep running into each other.

Christianity calls it kenosis. It's the word Paul uses for Christ emptying himself.  Kenosis is a slow, lifelong dying to self, becoming less about us so our lives can be more about God. Zach Williams sings it as a prayer: "A little more like Jesus, a little less like me."

Buddhism calls it anatta, non-self. The self I work so hard to protect (the competent psychologist, the wise grandfather, the man who doesn't need help) was never as fixed or solid as I thought. It's more like weather. Theo would understand.

Jewish mysticism has the concept of tzimtzum. In the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, a sixteenth-century rabbi in Safed, the puzzle is how an infinite God could make room for a finite world. If God is everywhere, where would the world go? Luria's answer is that the Creator contracted, withdrawing into Himself to leave an empty space where creation could exist. The mystics add that the space is never truly empty. A trace of the light remains, and a ray of it shines back in. God makes room without leaving.

Even the Creator needed to make space for something else to be.

I'm not comparing myself to the Creator. (Theo might, on the mornings I bring him M&M's.) But grandparenting, coaching, and leading at their best share a small version of that holy pulling back. We step back. We stay present without filling every inch of the room. And that leaves space for someone else to grow. It's the movement from I to us.

In a coaching session, that looks like silence I don't rush to fill. It looks like a question instead of my clever answer. It looks like letting a leader sit with the lid in his hands a little longer than is comfortable for either of us. When he finally hands it over, it lands in a space I didn't crowd, and often a more vulnerable one. On the rug, it looks like letting Theo turn the pages at his own pace, even when he lingers on one I'd have rushed past. He usually sees something I missed.

I don't expect to get very far with any of this in my lifetime. I realize now how many lessons I may have missed from the man lit from within who left me. But two mornings a week, I get to practice with my new coach.

Back on the Couch

Elmo is on. Theo is cuddled under my arm, a book already waiting in his lap for when the show ends. He has no idea he's the best leadership coach I've ever had. He's never read Kegan and he can't spell "kenosis." He just keeps showing me what it looks like to be fully present and to let someone else matter. I have a PhD. He has a sippy cup. I'm pretty sure he's ahead. Someday he'll grow out of being the center of his own universe. I'm still working on it myself.

I'm slowly learning to pick up what Theo's been laying down. And the next time I'm stuck, I'll do what he taught me. I'll hand someone the lid.

A note on names: Theo isn't my grandson's real name. He'll have plenty of time to decide how much of his story he wants to share with the world.

Dr. Joe Horak