You're furious at her.The update was late, twice as long as you'd wanted, and not written for the audience you had in mind. And the meeting where you have to present it is first thing in the morning.You're not just furious. You're frustrated, and not a little bit scared about what's going to happen as a result of all this.And in your fury you've said some things you regret. Some things that fail to see her dedication, the hours she put in, the way she set aside her own concerns in order to help you. By not seeing her good intentions, and by being so sure of your rightness, you've left her feeling hurt and wounded and confused, and wondering if her commitment to your project was well placed.And, when you're brave enough slow down a little and start to look more closely... which is difficult, because looking honestly hurts you, too... you start to see what you've known from the moment you asked her to take this on. You weren't clear. You were in too much of a rush. You assumed she'd know what to do without checking it out with her ("that's what she's paid for after all"). You were afraid to show her that you didn't, really, quite know what to do yourself.When you look closely, you start to see that your anger - real as it is - is not so much anger at her, as it is anger with yourself.And this is the crucial revelation.Because you see that you projected your own shame and your own self-criticism towards her. And you see that this primarily played a self-protective role. By being angry at her, you did not have to feel your anger with yourself. Covering up your own vulnerability and uncertainty allowed you to shift the burden - and the blame - her way instead of yours.And it is this revelation - seeing what you were really up to - that allows you to take responsibility, and to make amends.
Borderland
We humans are in-between beings, caught between known and unknown, past and future, the possible and the impossible.In this borderland it's tempting to try to be certain, to find enduring truths that we can rely on in all circumstances.But it doesn't take very much careful attention to see how lost we are and little we know, even when we know much: about what will happen, about the nature of the world, and about the nature of others. How little, if anything, there is that is certain, that we can absolutely rely upon.In such a world - and this is our world - we depend on interpretation in order to find our way. We have to choose, from the many possibilities available to us, how to understand the lives we live and the events we experience. And we have to learn how to discern between better and worse interpretations, because although many are possible not all are equally good. Some open up possibility, while others imprison us. Some bring forward human dignity and kindness, while others lead to resignation, resentment and cruelty. Some interpretations lead us to abdicate our responsibility, while others bring us into the orbit of care for life.And when we have chosen an interpretation, a way of making sense, we have to watch out for holding onto it too tightly. Because the moment we say our interpretation is the truth - that there really is only one way to see something - we close down life, and we shut the gates on a bigger kind of truth: one that is capable of including and responding to the very depth and complexity of the world that brings our lostness about.
Coaching Roundtable - an opportunity to learn together
On Sunday April 12th 9.30am-4.30pm, in London, there'll be an opportunity to learn with me and some of my friends and colleagues, and to find out about integral development coaching and the programmes we teach.We'll meet at 9.30am for a morning session on human development and, specifically, on the method we teach for skilfully supporting others in this. There'll be the opportunity to engage in conversation and ask questions, and to see a demonstration of coaching in action, as well as to find out about the many programmes we offer in this field.After a break for lunch we'll join together with graduates of our courses (who'll have been involved in their own session in the morning) to take up the topic of freedom. We’ll focus on cultivating the freedom that’s always available to us, and which can easily seem so distant as we encounter our habitual patterns, inner-criticism, busyness and distraction. You’ll have the opportunity to explore the constraints you (and your clients if you have them) experience, and to find powerful ways to declare, and take up, new freedom to act in life.It's going to be a wonderful day.All the details are here.We'd love to have you with us.
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Escape
When I stop and look, quietly and patiently for a while, I come to see how often what I'm trying to do is get away.
Get away from this experience - so that I can have another one that promises to be better, more soothing, less troubling.
Get away from this conversation - that's stirring up my familiar sense of not having done enough, not having been responsible enough, not having taken care enough.
Get away from this moment so that I have a chance of being at peace.
How pervasive 'get away' is for me! My habitual orientation, unless I take care of it, is away-from-here. It's predicated upon an interpretation of life in which there is, in some way, always somewhere or somewhen better to be.And that is an interpretation riddled with difficulties and troubles, not least of all because of the dissatisfaction it produces, and the small space it offers in which to act. My attempts to escape life turn out to be a prison of my own making.So I'm working on deeper in to this experience, this conversation, this moment.Truth is, I've been working on this for a long time already. Because it's tricky - there are so many opportunities and reasons to fall back into trying to get away.But work on it I must - we all must, I think - in order to be present to, and to contribute to, this crazy and breathtaking life into which I did not choose to be born, but in which I nonetheless keep on finding myself. And from which there is nowhere better, truth be told, to escape to.
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Waiting
I'm waiting for some friends to pick me up in their car.All around me, people are coming and going on errands, on their way to meet friends or loved ones or business acquaintances. Some are hurrying, others earnest, some struggling with the pain of simple movement. Seagulls are calling. There's a distinctive fresh salty tang to the air. The sun is low, soft-edged, orange-yellow in the late afternoon sky.But I miss all of it. Because a small device in my pocket, bevel-edged and glassy, has grabbed my attention. I'm enchanted, responding to emails, checking for news that I'm wanted and needed, feeling the weight and promise of everything I've offered to do for myself and for others.And I'm at least a little afraid of what I'll feel if I put this down.Wherever I am I always have something to do. I'm defined by my doing, my to-do, my not-yet-done. I become, always, some form of producer or some form of consumer.And, because of this, I no longer know so much about the art of waiting.I am rarely freed, rarely cut loose to fall into the depths of my own longing, my confusion, my boredom, or my simple capacity to wonder at all that is around me.
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When promises break
We'll never talk behind one another's backsWe'll take our concerns directly to the people who concern usWe'll always give feedback with care
When you have made agreements about behaviour in your team, in your organisation, in your family, it's unhelpful - and unrealistic - to expect them to always be upheld. Such expectations, in the face of the many breaches and breakdowns that will occur, can quickly lead you and others to assume your agreements were meaningless and insincere. And from such a position comes despair and cynicism - nothing can ever change around here. In such a light, our promises soon come to mean nothing.Far more powerful is to treat the original agreements as sincere and genuine, but inevitably in conflict with other equally sincere competing commitments which we all hold, for example our commitment
to not feel ashamedto look and feel supportive to others in their difficultyto be liked and respectedto be helpful to the person who's with us right now
In the light of this, you can use your own and others' inevitable breaches not as an source of resignation but as an opportunity to understand and respond more skilfully to inner contradictions. And as an opportunity to look together, with curiosity, at the very real difficulties and challenges of being in relationship with others.When we discover and talk about our inner complexity, and correct our actions from there, we create the possibility of responding to difficulty not with recrimination (towards self or others) but with learning. And in the light of this our promises, shaky and incomplete as they are, can come to take on a new authority shaped less by our expectation that they'll be perfect, and more by our understanding of what to do - together - when they break.
Make good art - inspiration for the start of the week
If you have time to watch one talk this week, I can't recommend highly enough Neil Gaiman's talk on the human imperative to make good art.Though he's talking to arts graduates (at the University of Philadelphia) his advice - a passionate plea that we not hold back our creative faculties - is a powerful invitation to all of us, whether we consider ourselves 'artists' or not, to live our lives themselves, as Abraham Joshua Heschel recommended, as art.His is a vital voice in a world where we'll all too quickly reduce ourselves and those around us to 'behaviours', to units of production, to the product of neurons firing or genes expressing themselves, or to passive consumers - and in the process forget to make the contribution that's really possible for us.[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikAb-NYkseI[/embed]
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A genuine treasure
Every complaint has at its heart a genuine treasure: a something that the complainer values and cares about.It’s so easy to miss this when we dismiss people as moaners, whiners, or nuisances.When our complaints are disregarded the hurt and resentment comes not so much from you not doing what we asked of you, but that you didn’t see us first and foremost as human beings with cares and concerns that matter.Instead of seeing complaining colleagues, customers, family as irritants, can you allow yourself to see the committed person behind the complaint? It’s a far more powerful, relationship-building, trust-developing place from which to respond.
Towards or away?
Watching Julianne Moore's sensitive and touching portrayal of a women with early-onset Alzheimer's disease in Still Alice, I'm struck by how much each of us stand to lose. Whether it occurs for us as the loss of our selves first, as it does for Alice, or in some other configuration, we'll one day lose all of our relationships, all of our possessions, all of our stories.We'll lose trees and buses, boring train journeys, washing the dishes, music, kisses, worrying about money, sun-filled afternoons, drawing, gazing into the eyes of another, learning, the saltiness of the ocean, tax returns, earache, job titles, paperclips, mountains.It's the knowing that Alice's departure awaits all of us, though in wildly varying forms, that makes watching it so tender and so affecting.And it raises a question for all of us - what to do with this knowledge?Surrender and despair because nothing ever works out anyway?Open ever more widely to the wonder of the life that is here already?Make ourselves feel strong, impenetrable, holding rigidly onto our ideas and fighting away what scares us?Retreat into a world of banal distraction, turning into what's trivial because it soothes us?Build towers and edifices - real or symbolic - so that our names are never forgotten?Damage and destroy others, using our destructive power to give us the feel of conquering death?Open ever more to the knowledge that we're all - all of us - in this together and act from there?It seems to me that we're always in the midst of choosing one of these responses, or others like them, whether we're paying attention to our choices or not. And the kind of life we lead will flow, in significant part, from the way in which we choose to run from life and death, and from the way we choose to turn towards them.
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Easy to say, difficult to do
Of course sincerity is often difficult, because we're afraid of its consequences. We're frightened that if we speak truthfully we'll fall short of other people's standards,
or we're afraid they won't love us any more.
We're afraid it'll get in the way of our looking good,
or we're afraid people won't understand us.
We're afraid it will open a can of worms,
or we're afraid our words, once spoken, will box us in to a future we do not want.
We're afraid that owning up to what we really mean will make us look weak,
or that it will cause conflict we'd much rather avoid.
And because of all these fears we twist ourselves, distort ourselves, so that what comes out of our mouths no longer chimes with the wishes, longing, and intention of our hearts and conscience. Perhaps, as I know I do, you struggle with this daily, finding yourself looking sincere but knowing all the ways you've fallen short, again. Perhaps you know this is only human. Perhaps you're starting to see the cost to yourself, and to others. Because there's only so much twisting a human heart can take, I think. At some point we each have to start teaching ourselves that the price of our insincerity is far greater than we had imagined, and the consequences of our fears, far less.
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