The route of dignity or defensiveness

Many of us were initiated into fear from an early age, even if we grew up in the most loving of families. We came to know it intimately as we encountered the prospect of punishment. We feared being ostracised, feeling ashamed. We feared our most cherished possibilities being withdrawn from us by those with power over us. It was central our education system, and it is what gave such powerful impetus to our learning to fit in as we grew.And so as adults we come to rely on fear as a way of having things happen, and we hardly know we are doing it. We build it into our institutions, practices, policies and procedures. We barely see how we are creating circumstances in which we and others cannot speak up, cannot say what's true, cannot bring ourselves forward strongly. We are blind to how our own fear is shaping us.And fear's wish to hide itself - because we are fearful of speaking about our fear - means this can be the case even in those organisations with the noblest aspirations.So maybe it's time to ask some important questions - ones that may provoke some fear themselves if you truly address them, head-on.

Does the way you run your organisation draw out the dignity of others, or their defensiveness?

Their genuine capacity to contribute, or their wish to protect themselves?

Their care, or their fearful self-interest?

Their ability to do the right thing, or their skill in looking good?

Their capacity to tell the truth, or to hide things away?

What does it draw out of you?

And could you learn, even though you are afraid, to be someone who draws out dignity, contribution, care and truth in those around you?

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Fourteen questions about meetings

 While we’re talking about meetings, are you organising your meetings

So you can look good?So you’ll feel needed?Because you think you should?Because it’s what everyone else does?

Are you paying any attention at all to

Whether they’re effective for achieving what you intend?Whether you actually know what you’re intending?Whether people feel alive, connected, and able to contribute?The shifts in mood, engagement, and authenticity as the meeting unfolds?Whether your meeting actually helps people talk about what’s true and important?Whether you and everyone else are just marking time?

And if you’re invitated to join a meeting do you

Speak to the organisers to determine what they’re intending?Find out what your contribution could be before you say yes?See if there’s a more effective way for you to contribute than just turning up?Ever say ‘no’?

There are a million ways to communicate information, make a decision, come up with a new idea, learn from others, make a discovery. And just because endless meetings are what you do, it doesn’t mean for a moment that they’re the best way to have any of this come about.

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Decisions, emotions and our deepest concerns

We're often taught that emotions get in the way of good decision-making, and that it's our logical, rational selves that are most human.And, of course, it's true that emotions can get in the way of deciding well:

Deciding your future in an outburst of rage…Choosing who to recruit to your team from the midst of your frustration…Making a commitment from fear or panic…Or getting blinded by love, by resentment, by shame.

But your habitual, reactive ways with emotions are not all that are available to you.Emotions can be cultivated, refined, mined for their deep intelligence, if you’re prepared to pay attention to them over time, allowing them to reveal their complexity and depth instead of pushing them away. Behind your hot, of-the-moment reaction, which for some emotions may be very narrow indeed, can be something more rarefied, more significant, and with a deep intelligence all of its own.So before you act, before you decide, you could ask yourself:

What is this emotion drawing my attention to? What is it trying to say? What is it trying to protect? To what in my history is it attached? What care of mine is it expressing? What bigger commitment? What does it want?

and

Is there anything in all of this that seems true? That I want to take into account?

Reacting to your emotions in an unsophisticated way can be shortsighted, yes. But leaving emotions out of your decision-making means leaving out what matters most intensely to you.Because emotions are always in one way or another intelligently associated with our deepest cares, and our deepest concerns.

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What kind of person

Asking questions - significant ones, sincere ones - is a powerful way of opening up possibilities for yourself and for those around you.The best questions are the ones whose answers don't come readily. Such questions have the capacity to undo what you're standing on, and to unravel what you're most sure about.That way, something new can emerge. Some new way of understanding yourself. Something outside of the familiar world you already inhabit.It is the process of asking and inquiring itself that can change things. If the question is big enough, important enough, you might find that instead of answering the question, you are answered by the question.Which question you choose is important, though. The bigger the question you can ask, the bigger the change that's possible.How do I earn more? is not as big as What kind of work do I want to do? which is not as big as What contribution am I called to make?And none of these is as big as that most important of questions, the one from which every other question flows: What kind of person do I wish to be?

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What makes our difficulty possible...

Of course it's not just by being good that we think we'll be deserving of escaping life's difficulties.We imagine that if we make enough money (always more than whatever we have now), have enough friends, own the right kind of house or car, or make a name for ourselves, then suffering will not be able to touch us. That everything will be ok.And all the while we're pursuing this, we're turning away from life, denying our inescapable part in it. It's another version of the mountain myth about which I wrote in September.I wrote yesterday that part of growing up (which may come very late in life) is finding out that this is not true, and that there is nobody to save us from life itself.But releasing ourselves into life at last is our opportunity to discover that we don't need saving at all. That our life, which itself is so incredibly unlikely, is holding us at every moment. And that this is precisely what makes all our joy, delight, trouble and pain possible at all.

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On being good

When we are young we are taught that rewards come to those who are good. Good grades, good behaviour, good work, we learn, guarantee recognition and the next big opportunity. A place in a new school. A prize. A degree. A job.

And so as adults we come to think that being good will save us: from pain, confusion, failure, and from having to face life. If we’re good, the world will bring us what we want, and what we need. If we're good, we secretly hope, we'll be spared illness, and perhaps even death. People seen as good, we think, are exempt from all of that.

Growing up - whenever it comes - means finally finding out that none of this is true.

The world is not set up to guarantee, or owe, anything. It is not waiting for you to show how good you are. There is nobody to save you from life itself.

We'd better do our best, most important work not because of what it will bring us, or because of how it will look to others, but for its own sake, then.

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The way we do meetings... is just made up

Why do you do meetings in such an extraordinarily wasteful way?Perhaps because it makes you feel good. You get seen to be busy, involved, making things happen, even if the result of your time together produces disengagement, poor decisions made, and time wasted. Or perhaps because you've taken the form of meetings to be a fixed feature of the world - a 'truth' that is self-evident, unquestionable, just 'the way things are done'.But, simply put, meetings are just something that somebody made up. And you then took on. And, consequently, there is no 'right' way to meet.Which means when you find yourself, as so many do, locked in stultifying, oppressive meeting practices - that have you bored, overstretched, checking out, distracted, attending when you're not needed, or when you don't wish to be there - you're complicit in keeping things that way.Unless you choose to speak up. Unless you choose to change things.Which you could. If you stopped insisting that the way you do meetings is simply the way things are. And if understood that instead that meetings are an invention, ripe to be reinvented.

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For some powerful, provocative support in undoing your assumptions about what meetings are for and how to go about them, take a look at Al Pittampalli's book Read This Before Our Next Meeting. You'll see a whole new way of thinking about what meetings are for, and why most of them are an unnecessary, wasteful distraction.

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Taking responsibility for our stories

Given that we are the only creatures (that we know of) that can tell stories about ourselves;and given that we live totally, inescapably in the stories we tell;and given that stories of any kind can be more or less truthful, more or less kind, more or less generous, more or less creative, more or less freeing of our enormous potential...... given all of this, don't we have a profound responsibility to question the stories we were handed? To not just take things 'as they are'?And to actively find - and consciously live by - the most truthful, kind, generous, creative, possibility-freeing stories about ourselves, about others, and about life that we can?

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On Automatic

We often feel that we're exercising choice when it would be more accurate to say we're on automatic.So much that we do is invisibly shaped, far beyond our awareness,

by the culture in which we grew up (what 'one does' in this or that situation),by the long trajectory of habit,by the many untested assumptions that the world is this way or that way,by our fear,by our longing to be seen,by the expectations of those close to us,by the tension and shape of our bodies,and by the stories we tell.

Our automatic reactions are how we mostly navigate the world. It has to be this way. How impossible would life be if we needed to exercise conscious deliberation for each of the many things with which we have to cope in an ordinary day?But our automaticity is not, really, conscious choice.Alongside our necessary capacity for automatic reaction, which we share with all other animals, human beings have a unique capacity for self-observation and reflection. We can get on to ourselves, and bring about change in the narratives from which we're living, and in the actions and practices that keep them going. But choice comes only if we're willing to pay attention, to slow down for a while, to stop and really look over time, to find out what we're actually doing that might be quite distinct from the weary explanations upon which we so readily settle.The more frantic we are, the more intent on throwing ourselves into endless action, the less we're prepared to do all of this - to wake up from our reactivity, and take responsibility for our lives."I'm too busy to pay attention" we say, "I have too much to do."This is, at least, the plea made by even very senior people in many of the organisations in which I work.Being busy this way keeps us feeling safe, comfortable... at least we appear to have a place in the world this way, at least we can feel needed.But is a life lived on automatic, or an organisation run in this way, really an expression of responsibility? And is it really the life and work you're intending?

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Please stay

You asked everyone to join you for a meeting at 4.30pm."It will only last half an hour", you said.But it's now 5pm, and it's quite clear that the report you wanted everyone to read and comment on needs more time than you'd anticipated.Perhaps, somewhere, you knew half an hour was way too optimistic. And you were worried that if you were honest about the time it would take, nobody would come.But now the meeting has gone on way beyond the time you'd promised.What do you do to address this? Many people, it would seem, do nothing. The meeting's not finished, nobody seems to have left, and in any case, you all chose to be there, didn't you?It's embarrassing to own up to your miscalculation (or your deliberate manipulation). And so you save yourself from this by carrying on, as if nothing significant has happened.But you can be sure of something: the unremarked passing of your deadline is significant. You have broken a promise. And many of your participants, as embarrassed as you are to bring up that this is not what they agreed to, have checked out, mentally and emotionally, already.By continuing a meeting beyond its agreed time, and by keeping silent about it, you're making an unspoken request of your co-participants. "Please stay" (a request without a speaker, which you can read more about here).And because your request is unspoken, you're making it much harder, perhaps deliberately, for them to say no. After all, if you don't ask, you save yourself the possibility of finding out they had better things to do than stay around.It's a small benefit (you feel momentarily better) with a huge cost because you're creating the ideal conditions for resentment and resignation to grow. And a roomful of people who can hardly be expected to be engaged now, or in the future, in what you said was urgent, important work. 

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