writing

What shows up when you're around

It can be illuminating to notice what others bring you, and what they don't. Or, said another way, to pay attention to what shows up around you.

Do people bring you their anger, or only their gentleness?Do they make requests of you? Do they offer support?Will people tell you what they really think?Do they challenge? Or do they quickly fall into agreement with you?Do they show you what they're feeling?Or is it more often the rational, intellectual side of people that gets shown in your presence?

These repeating patterns may be so difficult to see that you take them to simply be the way the world is. But this obscures that you're actively involved in shaping the responses of everyone you meet. Your subtle cues - in language, expression, body - tell people much about what they can bring. You are always in the middle of allowing or discouraging, managing (or, put more strongly, manipulating) what can be expressed.In this way what shows up is not solely the way the world is, but a manifestation of your engagement with it.This can be illuminating to see, because you may well be actively involved in making it difficult for certain kinds of expression, certain kinds of topic, and certain kinds of mood to be expressed in your presence.And the result of that is a kind of impoverishment, for everyone.

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Forgiven

Forgiveness.Among the most healing of all human possibilities.Today, can you start by forgiving yourself?.. for your forgetfulness, your anger, your irritability, your desire to please, your frustration, your resentment, your boredom, your rushing, your waiting, your confusion?Can you forgive yourself, please, for everything you judge so harshly about yourself? And for everything that makes you, simply, human?

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Needing a no

What we most need in order to support our own development is the capacity to say no to ourselves.No to our habits, no to our preferences, no to our compulsions, no to doing the same thing we've done again and again because we like it, or because it's familiar, or because of all of our explanations that the world and I are this way.Our surrounding culture doesn't do much to support this move. Mostly we're socialised into saying yes - we come to believe that the answer to all our difficulties is saying yes to more activity (which leads us into busyness) or yes to more consumption (which numbs us to our more genuine needs).Until we can start to muster a sufficiently strong no to ourselves, we find ourselves imprisoned in a repetitive cycle of our own making.But if we want to be able to step into a bigger world of possibility for own lives and those around us, no to ourselves is the first and most necessary step.

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Interpreting emotions

Two different interpretations of your emotions:1. Emotions are just something that happens. They sweep in, and sweep out again. There to be felt, but not to be obsessed over, worried over, analysed. Emotions simply are.2. Emotions are of the deepest significance. They show you what you care about. They're the surest route to understanding what matters to you. Far from being an interruption to reason they are a form of intelligent, meaning-laden reasoning, and the heart of what it is to be human.So often we're blinded by the particular interpretation of emotions that we cling to.So perhaps if you find yourself obsessed with what you're feeling, you might try out living in interpretation 1 for a while.And if you treat your emotions as a nuisance, a distraction, and better left alone, how about a while treating interpretation 2 as if it's true?

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Performers

When people stand in front of a choir or orchestra for the first time and try to conduct, they often put in far too much effort.The result of all of this energetic arm waving? In many cases, hardly anything, at least in terms of getting the orchestra to do anything. All that work and energy put in, and relatively little to show for it.Much more subtle guidance is required to really support an orchestra in performing well. If the conductor puts in too much it leaves far too little space in which the people playing can respond. The more the heavy lifting from the front, the more those whose contribution counts for so much back off. Paradoxical, perhaps, but more effort from the front does not easily translate into more effort from everyone else.The same dynamic is at play in many other situations where leadership is called for.The more you insist that your team cannot be trusted (and that you must be the final arbiter of all quality, checking everyone's output for appropriateness and correctness) the less room people have to step forward. After all, while you're doing all the work (and doubting the quality of their contribution at every step) how much does anyone feel really welcome to bring themselves?It's incredibly difficult for people to be trustworthy unless they're trusted. And incredibly difficult for them to contribute unless there is space for their contribution.Just like the over-energetic conductor, your strenuous efforts to stay in control are most probably producing exactly the situation you're trying so desperately to avoid.Hard as it is to learn, because it feels like everything is at stake, it's your job to coordinate with cues subtle and clear and spacious enough that everyone can step forward and bring themselves.Only by letting go of what you are most attached to can you give others the chance of being the performers you're so longing them to be.

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Feet and Hearts

It's easy to be afraid.There is, after all, so much to be afraid about - for all of us.So much to lose.We walk our lives, afraid and hiding it, looking strong, looking good, denying how lost we can feel. We pretend we're not afraid because we can't imagine that anyone else could be quite as scared as we are. And because we have no idea where to look for support.But what about our feet, that carry us through a million more steps in each year of our life? The simple everydayness of feet, bestowed upon us by generations of ancestors we never knew. They support us. Perhaps when we're most scared we could simply, with humility, be thankful for our feet.And our hearts, pumping the blood that keeps us alive, beating some 100,000 times per day, tens of millions of beats a year, billions in a lifetime. We did nothing - nothing at all - to receive our hearts. They are a gift to us from life itself, the legacy that stretches back more than 520 million years (to Fuxianhuia protensa, the earliest known creature with a cardiovascular system) and beyond.Perhaps when we're feeling afraid and lost we can, in a very simple and straightforward way, turn our attention and gratitude to our feet and our hearts. And from there, wonder at everything else we've been given that supports us without us even having to do anything, moment to moment in the chaotic, uncertain, always provisional circumstances of our very human lives.

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Blowing apart your certainty

Every action, every choice, is inherently risk-laden.There's the risk that people won't like what you're doing, or that they won't like you.There's the risk that you misjudged, that you misunderstood the situation.And there's the risk that your choice could make a situation worse, that things might not turn out in the way that you or others would like.Far better, then, to keep the peace. To not act. To keep your head down.At least then you won't imprison yourself with the consequences of an action that failed, a decision that went wrong.But, here's the thing - your commitment to acting only when you know it will work out is itself a prison.And so acting, choosing, taking up your freedom - even at its most creative - always involves a necessary act of destruction without which it's not freedom at all.In order to act you need to be prepared to blow apart your certainty, and your surest conviction that you're doing the right thing.

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Concentric Circles

Whereas development in children is easy to see, because of the obvious physiological changes that accompany it, our development as adults - if it happens - is more subtle, but no less profound.

One way of describing successive developmental stages is as a series of concentric circles. With each developmental shift the world we inhabit (the world of possibility, action ideas, responses) grows bigger, including rather than replacing the world in which we lived before. Another way of saying this is that we find ourselves inhabiting a world with bigger horizons than we had known. And along with that, usually, comes new language to describe our experience, new skills, and new ways of relating to others and everything.

In Robert Kegan’s language (and he is one of the most comprehensive, thoughtful, and grounded writers I know of on this topic) our development is always in some way a shift in subject-object relationships. Or, put more plainly, we come to a different understanding of what is me (subject) and what is in relationship to me (object). Often, we find that what we’d taken to be obviously ‘me’ is only a small part of what being ‘me’ really is - a shift in which we discover that ‘me’ actually includes more than we could have imagined before.

An example. In an earlier stage of our development we relate to our emotions as if they are a feature of the world, enveloping us like the air we breathe (and similarly invisible). We’re frustrated, and so it's the world that is frustrating. We’re angry with another person, and conclude that they must be making us angry. We’re in love, joyful, and so the world is joyful. We feel despair and take it that the world is a despairing place.

In this way of being an adult the world, and we, are indistinguishable from the mood we are feeling. In this stage we’re subject to our emotions. It is almost as if, instead of having emotions we are being had by them. We can’t see that they might have something to do with us.

When the subject-object shift in our development comes we start to see that emotions are something we have. We’re able to say that we’re feeling anger about this or that, and feeling joy about something else or at some other moment. We see that although our despair or love seems all consuming it’s not the world that is despairing or lovely but a feature of our relating to it that has it be that way for us. We can understand too, maybe for the first time, that others really do often feel quite different from us - that we can feel anger about something while somebody else, quite legitimately and truthfully, feels joy. It’s not until our relationship to our emotions move from having us (being subject) to being something that we have (an object) that all this becomes apparent to us.

Concentric circles, widening, as we inhabit the world in a new way.

When emotions are object rather than subject many other possibilities open to us. We can question our feelings for their accuracy and appropriateness, rather than be swept up in them. We can open to the different experience of others, instead of insisting that they feel the same. We can start to wonder about our own relationship to our emotions in a way that simply was not possible when they were part of the invisible background that had us:

What is this emotion about?What draws me more towards some emotions than others?How is it that I’m participating in keeping sadness going, or joy, or longing, or despair, or frustration, or resentment?What can I learn about others’ worlds in all of this?

Indeed, it’s only when such a developmental shift happens that we really start to understand that other people inhabit worlds that are related to, but not quite the same as, our own. The world, which we were previously subject to - the world that had us - seems much more like something we have or are at least participating in. And it’s from here that a deeper understanding of, and compassion for, others can grow.

Cultivating such shifts matters because, as perhaps you can see, a world in which we fully experience emotions as something we have rather than something we are had by is a world in which we have much more freedom to act. And a world in which we are less imprisoned by what seems - so obviously - beyond us.

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Why development matters

Cry. Wave arms and legs. Make eye contact. Smile. Gradually reach for things. Raise head. Roll onto tummy. Crawl. Faltering steps. First words. Walking. Asking. Phrases. Dawning sense of self as separate from others. Friendships. Reasoning. Simple descriptions of cause and effect relationships. Adjectives. Adverbs. Understanding that others have their own world, different from mine.

These developmental stages that small children go through, if nothing interrupts them, are familiar and easy to see. They take place in a predictable order, each building upon those that come before.

What’s less easy to see is that adults go through developmental stages too. Like the stages in children they are sequential, each building upon the other. But unlike those in children, they come with no guarantee. If circumstances allow, we can continue our development throughout our adult lives, finding ourselves in new orientations to ourselves and others and life itself as we go. Or we can remain over long periods of time in a more fixed, static relationship with the world.

While the developmental stages in children are easily identified by corresponding shifts in physiology or skilfulness (stronger muscles that support walking, the capacity to speak and understand), developmental changes in adults are marked most clearly by shifts in our relationship with the life in which we are living. Put most simply, each shift brings about a greater capacity to respond to the inner and outer world and lessens the hold of our reactive, habitual patterns. Or, said another way, development brings about the ability to include more and more of the complexity of the world, relate to others who might be quite different from ourselves, and act in the pursuit of what’s genuinely important rather than what feels comfortable or familiar.

In many contexts, the world of work in particular, we don’t pay very much serious attention to development. We largely think of adults as fixed - able of course to learn some new kinds of skills but not able to significantly shift our orientation to the world by opening to wider horizons and greater possibility.

It could even be said that in many contexts we actively work against the possibility of genuine development, because as we become less rigid and able to respond in more sophisticated and subtle ways to what’s happening and what’s needed, we also start to question more. Our development wakes us up first to our own wishes and longing (what’s important to me that might be different to what I was taught or from what is being asked of me now), and then to the wishes and longing of ever wider circles of concern (the communities in which I participate, the society in which I live, the wider world of which we’re all a part). Our development opens up far wider horizons for possibility and relationship while at the same time, necessarily, having us ask questions about how we’re working and how we’re living. And this kind of questioning can be unwelcome in a world of targets and measures, performance ratings and behaviour frameworks, predictability and rigid process.

It seems clear to me that our development is important, necessary even, if we are to take full responsibility for our own lives and for the organisations and projects to which we contribute.

Because unless we can develop, opening more and more to ourselves and others, we risk sleepwalking through, in thrall to our preferences and habits, doing things simply because ‘they are this way’ or because ‘I am this way’, fixed in a predictable cycle of event and reaction.

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