Care and Careful

Careful and care are quite different from one another, but we often confuse them.Careful:

holding backwaiting until conditions are just rightbeing nice rather than genuinesaying what's expected, what's socially acceptableprotecting yourself - for the benefit of whom exactly?

Care:

coming in closeacting when it's neededbeing kind, which sometimes requires sharpnesssaying what will actually help, teach, free people updropping your defences so you can be of assistance

Careful keeps difficulty going when it feels too risky to act. Care does what it can to reduce it.Careful twists the truth for its own ends. Care speaks it.Careful is full of caution.And care is full of contact.

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Speech Acts 8: Between asking and responding

I have written often here about the difficulties we get into by uncritically saying 'yes' to requests so often. Resentment, frustration and overwhelm are often the result.Some of our difficulty comes not so much from the answer we give, but from overlooking a critical step, which happens between the request being made and the answer being given. We forget to talk with the requester about what they meant.Perhaps we get embarrassed. We're supposed to understand what's being asked of us, of course. Or perhaps we have forgotten that talking and listening productively is a much a form of action as 'taking action'.And so we rush in headlong, only to find that the proposal that was apparently urgent can wait a while. Or that when she said "I need to know all the figures" she meant just the three most important ones. Or that the budget constraints were much tighter than we expected. Or that the other project we're having to put aside is more important. Or that someone else was already on it.Sometimes we even find that the person asking didn't understand all the aspects of the request themselves, or the knock-on effect of our 'yes'.In my work in organisations I'm surprised repeatedly by how common it is to leave out this basic step - a dialogue between requester and requested that continues until both are satisfied that what is being asked has been fully understood. Often such a dialogue will result in a different course of action being taken, or discovering that none is needed after all.Unless we stop to talk with one another until a meaningful yes or no is possible, we're condemning ourselves to a cycle of wastefulness that none of us can afford.

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You can read more on 'Speech Acts' - conversations, requests and promises - here.

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What you can't do

Please understand this:If you want to stay in relationship with another, you can't force them to change to suit you.Yes, you can talk. Certainly, you can make requests. And yes, you can tell another person what emotions, what responses their actions stir up in you.But still, you cannot force them to change.Believing that you can is a sure way to resentment, frustration and resignation. For both of you.Instead, can you see the difficulties you are having as an opportunity for your own development, your own unfolding? An opportunity to live in a bigger narrative, one that has space for the chaotic, unpredictable, mysterious beauty and humanity that is each one of you?

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A luminous garment

We've allowed ourselves to become obsessed by youth.The way this has shaped our public lives is quite easy to see, from the relentless focus on youthful beauty in our media to the cruelty of causal ageism in the workplace.What's harder to see is how it is affecting the narratives we have about ourselves.We see all the ways that growing old is a falling apart, an endless series of losses, a disintegration. And so we try to stave it off, denying what is happening to us. As we grow older and as the time remaining to us diminishes, we become diminished in our own eyes. In this way we rob ourselves and others of our dignity.But here is an account of ageing from the Jewish mystical work, the Zohar, which points to a different possibility:

All the days of a person's life are laid out above,one by one they come soaring into this world...If a person leaving the world merits,he comes into those days of his life,they become a luminous garment.

Such a different way of looking, this - our inevitable, inescapable ageing as a gathering and weaving of the days of our lives into a single luminous garment. We wear the sum of all we have been and done in our bodies, on our faces, in our entire way of being in the world.This gives us growing older as an integration, a chance to unify ourselves, turning towards the shadow parts that we pushed away when we were younger.And it invites us to give up our dependence upon looking good or being liked, so that we can have our ageing usher us into the fullness of our humanity.

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Scattered

Could it be that we're so harried, so unhappy, so stressed because we've forgotten the simple pleasure and discipline of being up to one thing at a time?When we're committed to being always on, always connected, always responsive - and to reacting to every email, phone call, tweet, facebook posting, news report - how can we expect to lose ourselves, completely, in something that's both fulfilling and of value?Everything is interrupting everything else, all the time. And we keep it this way because we think we like it. It makes us feel important.And perhaps most significantly, it saves us from having to feel, really feel, anything in particular - numbing both our anxiety and our joy.

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Tight spirals

We discover early in life what the people around us expect from us. And we find ways of doing just that. Even if we've completely misunderstood what was being asked.Meeting these expectations becomes, before long, central to our identity. We know ourselves as this or that kind of person, and then actively work to keep the identity we've established going. It feels familiar and comfortable to keep having people around us respond to us in the way to which we've become accustomed.I learned early on to be the peacekeeper: the pursuer of harmony, making sure I and everyone around me remained undisturbed and untroubled; listening, supporting, staying quiet, defusing conflict, avoiding anger (my own and other people's).All these ways of being seemed, unquestionably, to be me.And of course they affected and shaped what was possible in any kind of relationship with me. Peacekeeping can be a great gift to the world, but also stifling and frustrating for others when anything genuine and troubling and sharp needs to be said.Other people around me took on other kinds of identity - the helper, making sure everyone is cared for and nobody is left out; the achiever, getting ahead and making things happen, knowing themselves through the outward signs of success; the challenger, being sure to be in control, using assertiveness and power to have things happen.We have powerful inner forces that keep us inside the bounds we've established - among them the inner critic, and shame. For years, if I would be ashamed - mortified - if I said anything that I thought might hurt or upset another. And I'd be eaten up by my inner critic if anyone dared express anger towards me.This is such an important topic because most of the time we can't tell that this is what we're doing - manipulating the world so it's just so - not too hot, not too cold, but just as we expect it to be.We lead this way. We relate this way.This is why we all need people around us who can see through our strategies and habits, who can see who we are beyond the tight spiral these identities produce in us - a spiral which keeps the horizons of the world smaller than we imagine, and smaller than we need.

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We don't do introspection

"We don't do introspection", they said to me. "None of this fluffy, self-indulgent, navel-gazing here", they continued. "We do action."

Of course. If you're going to lead as they were, in a global organisation, then right action is critical. But what they meant by "we don't do introspection" was "we aren't prepared to look at ourselves".

If they had an inkling, and most of us do not, of how much their actions were being shaped, out of their view, by

their personal preferences,by their fears,by years of habit,by their avoidance of reminders of childhood experiences (mostly shame),by the expectations their parents handed them,by their inner critic,by their longing to be appreciated, liked, respected, feared, in control

then they would perhaps have taken introspection or some rigorous self-observation more seriously. They would have been brave enough not just to look at their actions, but to look upstream at what was giving rise to them.

But they didn't.

They had asked for help because they'd been amazingly effective in taking action - action that had landed them and their organisation in deep trouble.

And now they were trying to get out, with the same excuses, and by doing more of what had got them into difficulty in the first place.

Crazy, and sadly all too common.

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The peril of having one story

The problem with being sure of your story - the one you have that explains to you who you are, who other people are, and what's happening - is what is inevitably left out.Your confusion, longing, terrified waking in the quiet hours of the night, your disorientation -

A sign that it's all over, and that you're lost?

An inevitable part of the human condition (experienced by many more of us than will ever let on)?

The birth-pangs of something new? Some new way of living, thinking and relating that is emerging into life?

Each story about what you're experiencing leads to a different place, to different possibilities.Each story calls on a different way of relating to yourself and others.Each story is sustained by different practices (what you're doing repeatedly in your actions, your thinking that keeps it going).And none of them is ever the whole story.Part of the practice of a life fully lived - and leadership well done - is the practice of finding new ways of telling what we're sure we've already understood.

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When trust happens

Trust, in the end, is not built by waiting until the conditions are right - "I'll be able to trust them when I feel confident and secure... when they've given me sufficient evidence that they are trustworthy"Instead, trust is always engendered most by our first extending our trust to others - which requires us to be open enough and vulnerable enough to let others in.And trust is deepened by exactly what we do when we experience breakdowns in trust. Closing down or backing off, declaring the relationship over or under threat, does nothing to build our capacity to trust others, nor they us, in the future.No, trust is built precisely by turning towards one another when it breaks down and talking about what is now possible and required. We invite trust precisely by how we respond when our capacity to trust seems most under threat.

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Unfolding

We spend the first part of our lives folding ourselves into the shape made available for us by our culture, our family and, later, our work.How else could it be?We are born with so many forms available to us, yet we must find ways of being understood and met by those around us so that we can survive and hopefully thrive. Even our rebellions are mostly a means of finding some way, some place where we can belong.But if we live long enough, we might gradually start to feel the constraints of our own folding-up. We catch a glimpse of a bigger freedom that's been there all along but which, so far, has been necessarily denied to us. And we begin so see how much of ourselves is unknown.We're mostly not taught what an opportunity is there, in the longing and uncertainty, the doubt and confusion, in the sense of being lost.Feeling that something is wrong, we turn away into distractions - a new job, a new relationship, possessions. But if we're lucky enough at this threshold to find people who can help us and be alongside us - friends, family, teachers - or circumstances that invite it, at last we can begin to unfold again.At last, an opportunity to give up on all you're sure about and discover a new way of being in life.Who knows what or who, even now, you might become?

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