It has been hard to write these past two months. The familiar flow of words and ideas have slowed to a trickle. My body has not moved into the work with the grace and flow with which I have become familiar. It's as if some kind of gridlock has taken hold, with each part - mind, heart, body - pressing against the movement of the other.It has been tempting to try to force myself into action, to believe the inner judgements and slurs that whisper into the vacated spaces. You'll never be a writer this way. You've run out of anything to say. You're not brave enough, smart enough, honest enough to do this.But this time, I am not so convinced by all the inner chatter as I once might have been. This time, I've been waiting - patiently, quietly - to see what wants to write itself through me.We make production and consumption the highest measure of value in our culture. But we are part of nature, born of nature, and we are subject to its cycles just as much as a field, or a tree, or a river.I am remembering that fields must lie fallow in order to be fertile,spring must turn to summer and autumn to have any chance of returning,and human beings must rest and nurture themselves - often - in order to flourish.
Stories
We can't help it. We're sense-making beings, us humans. And so you and I are always living our lives from a sense of story.The story profoundly shapes our interactions with other people, and with ourselves. Watch how you'd relate to your sister, your colleagues, from the narrative of 'the burdened one' - the one who has been handed too much to carry, and who can't find any place to put it down. See how much busyness it breeds, how little time to rest, how much resentment, how much of a sense of being in life alone.And see how differently you'd encounter all of life from the narrative of 'a healer' - the one whose responsibility it is to heal herself by taking care of her own body, mind and heart so she can take care of others. Or 'a painter' - looking for the hidden light and beauty in everything. Or 'a bestower of blessings'. Or even 'an ordinary person'.The stories we're living seem so compelling, so true, especially as they seem to account so coherently for everything that's happening. But any story is only one out of many possibilities, and each story conceals much even as it reveals.And so it's important to ask ourselves what other stories we could imagine, particularly those that would bring forward our virtues - patience, kindness, courage, imagination, integrity, compassion, love, commitment, steadfastness, playfulness - qualities that allow us to meet the world more generously, more creatively, and let more of life through.
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Blessings and Curses
At every moment in life, you can choose whether to be a blessing or a curse to others.How you open the door to her when she comes come, how you reach across for him when you wake, how you speak when you order your coffee, how you move through a crowded train, how you are with a crying child, how you put out the bins.How you answer the phone, how you begin a meeting with your pressured and anxious team, how you write the next email, how you announce your intentions, how you respond when you're hurt, how you listen to the request of a lost stranger.The capacity to bless will have its seeds in your capacity to bless yourself, which always means welcoming yourself and what you're experiencing rather than denying it, raging against it, or judging yourself for it.Will you turn towards that of you which loves without dismissing, or denigrating, or criticising it for its impracticality?Will you turn towards your fear and acknowledge how afraid you are with dignity, rather than pretending it isn't true?Many of the curses in the world arise from our denying our own very basic, vulnerable, mysterious, confusing humanity. Much of that comes from being afraid and pretending that we're not - a curse upon ourselves which curses others as we go. And many blessings come from the discovery that this one, brief, precious life simply won't go exactly how we want it.Of course, it's rarely as simple as just 'deciding' to bless as we go. Too much of us has been shaped by years of habit for that. But the good news is that the capacity to bless - which is given to all of us - grows with practice. And that you can start today.
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When hiding anxiety only fuels it
A story about the trouble caused when we can’t talk about shame and anxiety in organisational life:A global retailer struggling to meet the expectations of the markets, brings in a new measurement system for its stores, with more than sixty targets to meet.A daily ratings table of stores is published internally, naming those meeting the targets and those falling short. It’s described as a logical move to increase performance in difficult times. And at the same time, it allows the board to deny the anxiety they’re feeling: “we’ve done everything we can do, and we’ve responded in a clear and rational manner to market conditions”.Meanwhile, the ratings system has very effectively pushed the anxiety onto the store managers, where even respected, skilful, long-serving managers are reduced to a daily jostle for the top few spots. Unable or unwilling to challenge the system itself (after all, it’s apparently a rational response to the current difficulty), they start to put pressure on their department heads for the daily delivery of the targets. And, unable to start a conversation about how all of this feels to everybody, the department heads – fearful of being shamed – look for whatever they can do to hit their targets.This is where the real trouble begins.Because in the face of unnamable anxiety and the unbearable threat of shame, even respected, diligent department heads start to look for ways to game the system.Numbers are fiddled. Statistics reinterpreted. Orders are left piling up in the warehouse because nobody can keep up with the new standards for shelf layout. Items in the store are relabelled so that products look like they’re available when the mystery shopper team comes around. Staff members are taken off other important duties to work on the tills when queue-length is measured, but the queues are allowed to reach enormous and frustrating lengths at other times.The target numbers are, frequently, met – aside from for those few unfortunate store managers who aren’t wily enough to play the system – but standards drop relentlessly across the group and customers start to take their business elsewhere.Public shame, skilfully dealt with. Skilful gaming of the system, denied. The organisation becomes a system for avoiding anxiety rather than serving customers. Nobody talking about it – “it’ll open a can of worms”.You can see this same drama played out in hospitals, whole health systems, schools, retailers, service industries, transport, government, with huge and debilitating effect.And in most places nobody’s talking about what’s really going on, because we’ve made mood undiscussable.If we’re going to deal with all of this – and we must – we’re going to have to wake up to the fact that organisations are always made up of people, and people are always caught up in moods that shape what can be seen and what’s possible. Our insistence on understanding people as detached, strictly rational parts of a well-oiled machine is not doing anything to address these difficulties.And without the courage to do this, we’re going to condemn ourselves to a future of looking good while we undo our best and most important efforts.
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Losing it
This morning, after swimming, I overhear a conversation between two men who are sitting by the water. One has lost his sunglasses on an earlier swim and is quite distressed.'They were expensive. Armani.' he says. 'I paid a lot of money for them. And they are the third pair I've lost this summer'.He is too agitated to be present with his friend who, after some minutes of listening, says 'You seem really shaken up by this, too shaken up even to really be interested that I'm here with you. You're saying the same thing, over and over again. But,' and here he pauses, 'tell me something. Did you enjoy having them? Did they bring you pleasure? Because although you've now lost them, for a while you did have them too'.For a while, you did have them.And at that moment it occurs to me that this is true for everything, and for all of us. We wail and fret about what we lose, and rightly, because our loss is so often a source of suffering for us. But we will all lose our sunglasses, eventually, just as we will lose all our possessions, our friendships, our bodies, and everything we know.And because losing is terrible and difficult to bear, we can spend our lives fretting about what's yet to lose, and clinging madly to it, or becoming consumed with longing or remorse for what we've lost.And all the while forgetting that, for a time, we did have all of this, and missing the wonder that there is anything at all - sunglasses, friendships, work, life - worth having enough that its loss matters to us in the first place.
Dissolving
This summer I have taken up wild swimming, in the beautiful and tranquil swimming ponds on London's Hampstead Heath.It has been quite a practice in releasing myself into the unknown. The water is cold and murky and deep. It's impossible to see more than a few centimetres below the surface, and so entering is an exercise in letting go, in welcoming what's here, in giving up control.Once in the cool water, eye-line level with that of the ducks and birds that frequent the pond, I notice how quickly any sense of inner pressure subsides. There is really nothing to do here, nowhere to get to, and I start to see how much my own inner life is still dominated by assessments that are often invisible to me.Am I doing well enough? Being responsible enough? Getting enough done? Taking enough care? Being smart enough? Kind enough? Successful enough? I notice how often I feel sad, or deflated or frustrated because of an inner judgement that I'm falling short. And how often I rely on an equal and opposite assessment - that I did something well - in order to feel joy, or satisfaction or that I have anything to offer.But here, in the coolness and stillness of the water, I am struck by my inner quietness and expansiveness. Held in a body of water that is vast and calm I am vast and calm too, my sense of separateness from the physical world dissolving as standards and self-assessment dissolve.For a while I am the water itself, the trees, the birds and the sky. For a while I just am, and my beauty and value is the simple fact of being alive. And for a while I am reminded that I am not my assessments, even if I often live, quite unaware of it, as if they are what is most true.
Inside and outside
When we divide what's 'inside' us from what's 'outside' as if they were separate from one another we cause ourselves all kinds of difficulty.In much of our culture we treat working with what's 'inside' as if it's irrelevant, an indulgence, soft, a waste of time when compared with the hands on world of making, doing, deciding and acting. And we can become equally convinced by the opposite position - that we can't act until we've completely resolved some feeling or inner difficulty, or until we've studied and understood a subject from end to end.But inside and outside are a continuum, different aspects or angles on the same world. It might be most helpful to think of 'inside' primarily as that corner of things of which each of us has a particularly special, privileged view - and part of the world nevertheless.And so it is the case that the way I relate to others is very often the way I'm already relating to parts of myself. And that the way I struggle within myself is the self-same way I struggle with other people.And it's often the case that powerful 'inner' work is done 'outside' - for example by developing skill in relating to others I also develop skill in relating to myself. And that there are many riches to discover about the 'outside' world by the much undervalued art of listening attentively and with deep curiosity to the inner experience of others.
Why write about the critic?
Why write so much about the inner critic, as I have done here so often over the past three years?
- Because we all have one, whether we've caught onto it or not
- Because so many of us think we're the only ones
- Because it's a source of so much suffering for each of us - the world as brought to us by the critic is riddled with harshness, judgement, and fear
- Because when we react to the self-wounding of our own critics we very often cause suffering for others
- Because the critic has each of us living in a very small space, a tightly-bound world in which actions that would help us, and help those around us, are denied to us
- Because the critic is more interested in maintaining our safety than in our creativity, compassion and contribution
- Because the troubles of the world desperately need us - and every ounce of creativity, compassion and contribution we can muster
- And because there is no time to waste
Photography by Justin Wise
By doing
We've been taught to wait, to amass knowledge, and to know for sure what it is we're doing before we leap in. We've been taught that the only time to do something genuinely skilful, risky and creative - in other words anything that can make a contribution to the state of things - is when we know how to do it already. It's ample fuel for the inner critic, the part of us that would have us hold back until everything is just right. And it has us hold others back too.But, as Aristotle reminds us, when it comes to mastery the paradox is that
"the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing".
In other words, we have to jump right in, long before we have any skill, make many mistakes, and hang on in the face of our own demons, other people's criticism, and the many occasions we'll mess it up.Does your work, your organisation, your leadership, your life allow any space for this?Or are you keeping yourself and everyone around you in a tight circle of safe, predictable reliability?
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Atrophy
It's one thing to have good intentions about your relationships with others.You also need good practices to bring them about, repeated actions by which you
listenpay attentionstay open or defend yourselfshare your cares and commitmentschoose what to say and what not sayrespond to emotionsinterpret events as they happen.
When the practices that connect you to one another are neglected, relationships atrophy. At first slowly. And then quickly. Before long nobody can point to the moment when the trouble started nor to what it is that is missing. It's just that something necessary isn't there, something that once brought this team, this family, this organisation alive.And then it becomes easy to judge others and blame them for making things so hard. And to forget that it's how you're acting right now that's keeping things the way they are.Restoring relationships calls for more than wishful thinking, and certainly for more than blaming others. It requires waking up to the actions that genuinely connect people.And it requires remembering, a central act of all leadership: recovering the very ways of speaking and listening that once supported you, and bringing them purposefully back into being all over again.
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