How would it be if, instead of your enchantment with all that can distract you:
gadgetsemailthe latest fashionthe results for the next quarterYouTubeyour company's share pricethis week's celebrity gossipthe house your friends have
you instead allowed yourself to be enchanted by people and by life?
Surely there's enough in those two possibilities to fascinate and draw you in for more than a lifetime?
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How extraordinary that the fundamental constituents of everything - quarks, neutrinos, bosons, electrons - made a universe in which it was possible for human beings to arise.We, beings with the intelligence, creativity and ingenuity from early on to build tools, and make art.We, inventing devices to look back to the dawn of time and into the structure of matter so that, at last, the particles that gave rise to all of it can be seen.Surely we are life's own way of looking out at the universe, and back again at life.And how often we forget the wonder of it all in the thrum and thrall of everyday existence.
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You might like to deny it, but there's no way of escaping that you're a biological being.This means you're subject to all of the realities of biological life. You were born, and one day you'll die. You'll get ill. You will age. You must eat, sleep, exercise and rest sufficiently. All this to maintain your capacity to move in the world, to allow your body to repair itself. And if you don't, your strength and vitality will diminish more quickly than otherwise, atrophying over time. You'll become prone to the diseases and ailments that your body was once able to defend itself against.And because you're also a mammal you will need nurturing relationships and connection with others - the foundation stone of what distinguishes mammals from all other creatures.Because you're human you need art, inspiration, music, beauty, meaning, community, and society.You are not a machine, nor a brain simply carried around from meeting to meeting by your body. If you treat yourself as such, as seems to be called on by so many organisations, you'll eventually and inescapably suffer the consequences.And if you treat others as such, you'll surely rob them of the greatest contribution they have to bring your organisation - the vibrancy and creativity of their life itself.
Have you noticed that there are people around whom things get said that matter?It's as if their way of being in the world is a huge invitation to speak, to say what's true. People like this offer us safe ground on which to stand, and space into which to articulate what's important, without fear of judgement or rejection.They make it possible for us to say what we didn't know even needed saying, and in the process to discover much about who we are and what we're up to.You could say that people like this are a disclosive space for others.It is possible to cultivate this way of being over time, if you wish. It takes attending to the discipline of listening, of course. And beyond that it takes working on:
presence - the capacity to be here, in this moment, and nowhere else, even in the midst of strong emotions
compassion - the commitment understand and respond to others' worlds, even if radically different from your own
attunement - the ability to discern what other people are feeling, and how they're orienting to the world, which may be very different to what they're saying
Of course, there are also people who, simply by their way of being with others, close down the possibility of speaking. Their defendedness, their judgement, or their distraction speaks volumes to us about what's possible in their presence. Around such people the truth of what's happening gets covered over, hidden away.So being a disclosive space for others is foundational for leadership. It makes it possible for people to make their most important, most creative and truest contribution. And it's foundational for being in relationship, for parenting, for teaching, for coaching.Are you even working on this yet?
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Your team weren't nearly as excited as you wanted them to be about your proposal.
Your colleagues didn't deliver the report you were relying on.
The company changed its plans and now some of the work you did isn't needed.
There were 300 mails in your inbox this morning.
The shoes aren't lined up neatly in the hall.
You're leaving the house in a hurry and you can't find your keys.
The train was three minutes late.
An accident ahead of you held you up on the way to work.
You got ill and had to stop everything for a while.
Isn't the world supremely irritating at times? Sometimes it's downright exasperating. And there are times - perhaps often - when you just know that everybody and everything is out to get you.A huge move, that will free up so much, is to begin to distinguish between what's observable in the world, and what's your assessment of it. What's observable is what you could bank on others being able to see too, even those with very different personality or preferences to you. And your assessment is the interpretation that you bring to bear on it.You can start to see just what a powerful role your assessments have by considering how other people would be in the same situation.
Stuck in the car, in traffic, you might rage at the frustration, the unfairness, the sheer wilfulness of others to get in your way. All of which does much to stir you up and little to address the situation. Or perhaps you'll take the jam to be part of a much bigger picture that's far beyond your control, and figure out how to use the time for something that's genuinely of value.
When your team didn't go for your proposal, you could blame them, judge them for their incompetence and laziness, and let them have the full force of your disapproval - all of which is likely to stir up judgement, blame and resentment in them too. Or you can get curious. Find out what your part is in it all (perhaps you didn't make your original request skilfully) and what's going on for them that had them take up something else they felt was important.
When the shoes aren't lined up neatly in the hall, you can strop and strut and despair that nobody in your family seems to care about the home you live in, or start to look for the myriad other ways they're already expressing their love and commitment to family life.
In every case, start to see that it's not the world that is irritating, but that it's you who is irritated. The arrangement of the world (observable). Your irritation (an assessment).When you can own your assessments as yours, you can find out that there are assessments that bind you up tight and others that free you to act. And when you have your assessments rather than being had by them, you'll find you're way more flexible and powerful in moving the world than you've realised so far.
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Two posts today. This first, an opportunity to tell you about some ways you could come and learn with me in London in the coming months.From September 9-11 I'll be running, with my friend and colleague Clare Chandler, a three-day introduction to integral development coaching: a way of supporting others in their development that's profound, rigorous and pragmatic. The programme's suitable for anyone who's interested in the development of the people around them: including organisational leaders, coaches, people who'd like to be coaches, HR professionals, doctors, teachers etc. You can find the details here.And we'll have a slightly trimmed down two-day version of the same programme on November 4-5.Then in late November, we'll be joined by James Flaherty for the start of our year-long Professional Coaching Course, also suitable for anyone who cares about the development of others and of themselves. It's an absolutely extraordinary programme that produces people who can skilfully make a huge difference to others, and it changes lives. There's a description and details of the programme here.I'm looking forward to meeting some of you there.
Do you know what condition you're in?If you're one of the many people who never stops - at work, at home, at play - it might not be apparent to you.You could try this simple experiment: sit down for 10 full minutes, quietly, with nothing to do. Allow yourself to feel what's going on in your body as you do this.Does even being invited into this appall you? Does your body tense up at the prospect of being still for a while?Sit. Now does your tiredness rise like the tide? Can you feel it? Or the sadness that has been there for so long? The resignation, resentment, frustration? The joy, gratitude, hope? Which?Which?Your addiction to busyness, endemic in our culture and in our organisations, is supremely effective in turning you away from how you really feel, a numbing of yourself under the guise of productivity. And if you look, really closely, you might find it's not quite the productivity you've taken it to be.We've lost sight of this so much that busyness has, for many people, become unquestionable. We don't have a clue that there might be any other way to be.Does it seem that way to you?This is a question of utmost importance. The squandering of our time - and the huge pull on the resources of the world in running around in this frantic way - add up to a tragic missed opportunity to actually live. Which, in the end, is the biggest and most important opportunity any of us have.
When you're speaking you might think that mostly what's going on is the transfer of information, from your head into the head of another.But understanding speaking in this way misses what's most important about us.We're not computers - or anything like them - filled with information or data that can be transferred seamlessly, with unimpaired fidelity, from brain to brain. We're people, each with our own world: a rich, complex web of meaning, understanding, practices and relationships that is inescapably part of each of us.When you speak to another you're not downloading information. You're speaking from your world into their world, a world which might share much with yours but is also unknowable, vast, and more different from yours than you can imagine. And each time your speaking evokes the meaning, possibility and understanding that arises in their world, rather than yours.When you begin to see this, you'll appreciate just how different from you others can be. Then you can give up repeating yourself again and again, or blaming others for not understanding you.Instead, you'll work on developing your listening, so that the world of others becomes more available to you, and your creativity, so you can find ever new forms of expression that can reach across worlds and have the possibilities you long for come to pass.
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There's a story widely told about King Canute, the ruler of Denmark, England, Norway and parts of Sweden in the early 11th century.Perhaps you know it already. Canute takes his throne, courtiers and officials to the ocean shore and, setting himself at the boundary of the rising tide, commands the sea to turn back. Before long, all of them are knee deep in water and, in the popular telling, Canute's arrogance is revealed to all, leading eventually to his downfall.But the popular myth is only one telling. In another account, Canute uses the event to show his followers that there's a limit even to the power of kings - that there are forces in our lives which, despite our most strenuous efforts, cannot be overcome.More often than not, we're like the Canute of the first story. We push against life, demanding that it meet us on our terms, insisting that it unfold at our pace, commanding that it give us what we want - and damning it, raging against it when it doesn't comply. We misunderstand our enormous power to take charge of our lives as the power to take charge of life itself.But just like the tide, life has a way of happening regardless of our actions, regardless of our wishing that it were not the case, regardless of whether we like it. Our fighting is the root of enormous suffering and wastes so much of the precious contribution the world needs from each of us.Canute the second calls on us to see this, and to turn into life rather than push against it - to marshal its enormous power to propel us more deeply into the world. When we give up our shrill cry of "how dare this happen to me?", abandon the fight, and turn instead with our deepest acceptance, compassion and courage back into the stream of life as it happens, whatever that brings: this is when we're able to harness life's forces as our own, and when we've first stepped into the true power that is everyone's heritage.
In an ancient Jewish myth, before we're born a light is held behind our head so we can see the whole world, from end to end.And then an angel touches us on the lips, and everything is forgotten.Isn't that how life is for us? Born into the world as shining beings, with our own unique form, our own character and gifts, we quickly learn to cover ourselves up in order to fit in. Because the family we're born into already has its own culture, norms, language, and its own ways of celebrating and suppressing what we have to bring. So does the wider culture. And before we know it we're thrown into all of this, finding out which parts of us we can safely bring forward and which are too much for others to take.From the moment we arrive, we're forgetting ourselves, taking on what 'one does' in our society to get along, leaving much out, in order to make our way.And the task of adulthood, that allows us to bring our truest and most authentic gifts to the service of others, is to work always to remember what has been forgotten, that which was really right in front of us all along.
