It’s no use screaming at a seed to grow faster.And it doesn’t help to nurse resentment or frustration, to say to the seed “how dare you do this, to me? How dare you keep me waiting?” All you can do is provide the care, water, light and support that will allow new shoots to appear. In the end, living things always take the time that they take.People are not so different from this. It’s no use insisting that we align to your needs alone, that we change to meet the strength of your insistence, your urgency. Instead, how about listening and observing carefully so you can find out what we need to grow. And then being witness to the beauty of our unfolding?If you orient this way to others, perhaps you’ll find that you unfold a little yourself.
Perfect world
You want a perfect world.You want a world in which you no longer have to experience longing or confusion. You want a world in which all your needs get met, all your desires.You want a world in which you get to be peaceful, undisturbed - in which you don't have to fight or disagree with others; or in which you know yourself always to be loved; a world in which you achieve unparalleled success and the recognition it affords; or a world in which your uniqueness is understood, treated always with respect and dignity.You want a world that will teach you, in which you can pursue a topic uninterrupted to its very end; or a world in which you feel no fear, a world in which you can trust. You want a world which will allow you to do just what you want; or a world you can control.All these wants, these hopes, the pursuit of which can carry you so far - and the pursuit of which can lock you in an unending cycle of desperation, resignation, comparison, cynicism and suspension (for, perhaps, you've decided that you cannot really live until you get what you want).So perhaps as well as wanting to bring about a perfect world, you could also attend just as vigorously to learning how to live in the imperfect, messy, always incomplete world. A world where people won't always show their love (but in which there is love, just the same). A world in which you will fail, repeatedly and painfully. A world which will not always seem to see you, and which cannot always reassure you. A world which will constrain you, and over which you cannot be in control. In short, a world just like the one in which we all live. And a world which, perhaps, alongside all your efforts to change or get away, you might find the possibility of loving, just as it is.
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Budding
We want our change to be public.We want visions, new behaviours, stories, posters, internal PR strategies.We want competency frameworks and snappy slogans - the three 'C's and the four 'D's.We want our leaders to model it.We want to cascade it, promote it, embed it, plan it.We want buy-in, engagement, champions, fire-starters.We want early wins. And charts of what is to come.We want to overcome resistance.We want change designed, predicted, and engineered.We want to measure it, chart it, and progress it.But sometimes - no, often - the change that turns out to matter to us is far from what we expected, and far from the world imagined by change managers and corporate roll-outs.It happens quietly and gradually, through the living actions of many. It emerges and unfolds, like buds budding.It comes about when we find new stories to tell one another or new people to talk with, new ways of listening and speaking, new ways of making sense, and new ways of practicing together.And it cannot be planned in advance because it's subversive - undoing our preconceptions and opening new worlds we could not imagine until they were upon us.
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2nd Birthday
Whether pride is considered to be a vice or a virtue has changed radically over time. Which it is depends largely on what you contrast it with.In the middle ages, in Europe at least, the opposite of pride was humility. It was in this sense that it became known as a vice or a sin - an improper inflation of one's self, a taking up of a position that was reserved only for God.But in ancient Greece pride was held to be the opposite of shame. Pride, in its proper place, was a way of standing tall in one's achievements, in appropriately valuing and honouring what it is that you have to bring to the world. Without pride, understood this way, we collapse into shadows of ourselves, holding back a contribution that, perhaps, nobody else will bring.Today is the second birthday of this project, On Living and Working, and I am proud of what's here so far. Writing these 655 posts has been illuminating, stretching, sometimes frustrating, and a daily practice of deep, heartfelt joy. And, it turns out, writing is a wonderful way to learn.From those of you who have written back to me, or who I have met, I also get a sense of the meaning this work has had for others, and of its practical use in the world. I'm enormously grateful to the many hundreds of you read and who share what's written here with people who are important to you.It's an enormous privilege to find that my voice in the world has an audience to whom it matters.
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Developing others - An opportunity to learn together in May
Change - in an individual life, in a work situation, in wider systems - can often be hard because, as I've argued previously, it usually requires a shift in both interpretation (the way we make sense of the situations we're in) and practice (the recurrent actions we take that build familiarity and habit).All too often, we find ourselves constrained by one or other of these and don't know how to loosen them enough that we can step into bigger possibilities for ourselves. And, all too often, we're called upon to help others and we don't know what to bring them that will help.But it is possible to learn to become skilful in all this. To become someone who can see into the situations of others with sufficient sensitivity, and who can bring fresh possibilities for interpretation and action with sufficient creativity, that something new can begin to open. A new freedom. A new way of making sense. A new kind of skilfulness in responding to the world.This is the topic we'll be taking up in May on the Coaching to Excellence foundation programme I teach a few times a year. We'll be introducing integral coaching - a powerful approach for supporting the development of people in the ways that I've described above. And a topic that's very close to my heart.We'll be in London on May 18-19, and there places still available.All the details are here.
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Poetry to change your life
Can poetry change, or even save, your life?More and more, I think it can, because poets - good ones at least - are doing something vital for us: finding a way of expressing in words that which is, ordinarily, almost impossible to express.Good poetry can awaken us to parts of ourselves that we have long left dormant, or suppressed, or have forgotten. Poetry can give us language to welcome back those parts we deny, or of which we are afraid. And poetry can give us language with which to hope again, to have some kind of faith, especially when we lose our footing and see how shifting, transient, unpredictable, and shaky our lives can be.If you've never encountered poetry this way (and many of us had poetry schooled out of us at school), a very good place to start is Roger Housden's book Ten Poems to Change Your Life. Housden will guide you through poems by Pablo Neruda, Galway Kinnell and, my favourites, Mary Oliver and Derek Walcott. And along the way he'll give you pointers about how to read, about how the poems can help you see your life and your work through new eyes, and about how you can use poetry to see others more fully and with a wider appreciation of the joys and pain of being human.
Images courtesy of Robert Montgomery
Five Books in Five Days (5) Seeing Systems
This week, five books that have the potential to profoundly change the way you understand yourself, others, and life.
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I have mentioned Barry Oshry's book Seeing Systems before, and I'm certain his work deserves a central place in the current Five Books in Five Days.
It's rare to come across an account of the complexities, tangles, suffering and possibilities of organisational life that is written with such directness, wisdom and lightness of touch, and which offers such possibilities for finding a path through.
Seeing Systems asks us to look anew at our participation in organisational life. Most importantly, it asks us to see our difficulties - and in particular our difficultie with others - as a systemic rather than personal issue, and to respond in kind.
And, unlike many other approaches, Oshry does offer us skilful ways to respond. None of them are easy, and none of them are simple. He describes new ways of both interpreting and acting that can cut through our stuckness, resignation and cynicism.
And he outlines the possibility of working with others in ways that are more dignified and truthful than the blaming and self-aggrandising (or self-deprecating) positions we so easily take up.
"We humans are systems creatures." he says. "Our consciousness - how we experience ourselves, others, our systems, and other systems - is shaped by the structure and processes of the systems we are in."
"There is a tendency to resist this notion;" he continues. "We prefer seeing ourselves as captains of our own ships; we prefer the notion that we believe what we believe and think what we think because of who we are, not where we are. I will demonstrate how such thinking is the costly illusion of system blindness - an illusion that results in needless stress, destructive conflicts, broken relationships, missed opportunities, and diminished system effectiveness. And this blindness has its costs in all the systems of our lives - in our families, organisations, nations and ethnic groups."
I'd recommend it highly for anyone who leads (which, in one way or another, is all of us).
Five Books in Five Days (4) The Three Marriages
This week, five books that have the potential to profoundly change the way you understand yourself, others, and life.
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There are three marriages in a human life, says David Whyte in his book of the same name. The first is a marriage - whether we call it marriage or not - to another person. The second is a marriage to a kind of work - whether we choose it, or it chooses us. And the third is the less visible, though no less important, marriage to the strange and shifting something we call our self. Each kind of marriage profoundly shapes us. And each can be a source of great dignity and meaning if we are willing to be patient and curious, and if we pay it the kind of exquisite attention it deserves.
The problem we most quickly get into, in the rush and bustle of our contemporary lives, is seeing each of these marriages as, in some way, at odds with the other. From this vantage point we must struggle always to get balance between competing forces - work is at the expense of the other, the other is at the expense of ourselves, attending to the self is at the expense of both work and relationship. And in this way we add to the sum of our suffering, because the only way out is to try to carve out more time for each, or to let one or more submerge beneath the demands of the other.
But there is another way, says Whyte. To separate the three marriages in order to balance them is to destroy the essence of all of them. Instead, we must lift our eyes to a bigger horizon and start to see how each informs the other.
"I especially want to look at the way that each of these marriages is, at its heart, nonnegotiable..." he says. We have to "start thinking of each marriage conversing with, questioning, or emboldening the other two... We can start to realign our understanding and our efforts away from trading and bartering parts of ourselves as if they were salable commodities and more toward finding a central conversation that can hold all of these three marriages together."
By refusing to divorce work from relationship from self, Whyte describes a path that dignifies and ennobles all three. Filled with examples from his own life and from the life of artists, poets and novelists, Whyte's book is beautiful and poetic from start to finish. And it has the power to radically shift the way each of us thinks about, and relates to, the foundational pillars of a human life.
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Five Books in Five Days (3) In Over Our Heads
This week, five books that have the potential to profoundly change the way you understand yourself, others, and life.
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What does it mean to live in a world in which so much shifts and changes all the time? In which we've undone so many of the old certainties - the certainty of authority, the certainty of religion, the certainty of our family structures, the certainty of morality? For we have, over the past century or so taken many of these apart, in many cases for good reason.
This - the way in which we are, most of us, swimming in a sea of complexity to which we have little capacity to respond skilfully - is the starting question of Robert Kegan's monumental book 'In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life'.
What does it mean that we live in a society in which we are, mostly, cognitively in 'over our heads'? And how should we respond to the onslaught of advice - about parenting, education, management, work, good living - that comes our way in the midst of it?
Kegan, a professor of at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is one of the foremost contemporary thinkers about adult development, and it should be no surprise that his response in this book is strongly developmental. It is not enough, he says, to continue responding to the world from the same frame or stock of interpretations upon which we currently rely. Bigger, more inclusive, more complex interpretations are necessary, and these always require us to develop the complexity and nuance and reach of our thinking. All of which, he argues, is a developmental task.
Kegan lays out with clarity and precision the sequential developmental stages available to all of us, with many examples and much grounded, rigorous research. And he invites us into a bold project - living and working in a way that encourages us to deepen and broaden the complexity of our minds, our capacity to respond to uncertainty, and to paradox, and to the shifting, fluid nature of our times.
Mostly, he says, we're not addressing this in our education system (which seems bent on teaching children how to pass tests but not how to learn, how to produce but not how to think or be creative), in our management and leadership education (which is fixated on behaviours rather than on developing complexity and responsiveness of thinking and action), in politics, and in how we parent. And, while he can offer no simple or easy path for addressing all this, he has much to show us that illuminates the possibility of cultivating a deeper, more skilful, more humane way of responding to the world.
A rigorous, stretching read, blending developmental psychology and philosophy, with acute observation about our society and what ails us, I think this book is essential reading for anyone who wants a more skilful, subtle response to the world than the latest fad or management-parenting-leadership technique. And vital for any of us who want to take more responsibility for the world in which we act, whether close in or in the leadership of bigger communities and organisations.
Five Books in Five Days (2) The Great Work of Your Life
This week, five books that have the potential to profoundly change the way you understand yourself, others, and life.
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'Discover your true purpose' they tell me, 'and everything will be well. A life of effortless ease, happiness, and joy beckons.'Some go further and include the promises of financial reward and security too.I've long thought such promises to be rather empty and hollow. Yes, sometimes it works out this way for people. But often when we find something approximating a 'purpose' that moves us, we find it takes us away from any kind of easy certainty. It might have us give up possessions, relationships, and a tried and trusted sense of personal identity in order to respond to something new and alive.More often, our attempts to work out what kind of purpose might fit us turn up little of note. We draw on the same old stock of possibilities handed to us by our families or education, and nothing seems to fit. In this case, we're struggling because in a way we have it the wrong way around. We're approaching 'purpose' as a way of getting what we want from life - an easy life, a happy life, a secure life - rather than asking what life wants from us. It's when we turn towards life this way that it becomes possible, for the first time, to listen for a future that meets our uniqueness, responds in a more open and wholehearted way towards the world, and gives us a chance to contribute.'Purpose', then, or 'calling', becomes an opportunity to discover what the world is asking for, and mustering a suitably creative and life-giving response.
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