Not acting is a kind of action, with its own consequences.Not choosing is itself a choice, a path followed that closes off other paths.Not risking has risks all of its own.It may look like disengagement from the world keeps you safe, but it's not so.Disengagement is its own kind of engagement.
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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For today, just this from Ted Hughes, shown to me over the weekend:
“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.”
This is our struggle. Our deep longing. Our fear. Our great hope.Will we find a way of living life in its fullest form? Can we elevate even the most humble of our endeavours to acts of great heart and boldness?It's our responsibility, because bringing genuine heart to our work and life is what makes it most alive, most human, and most generous.And it's important to say all of this, because it's the opposite of what most of us were taught - and what we still teach - in the way we organise our companies, professions, and careers.
Quite apart from the indoctrination we've had that organisations are like machines (and so the people inside them are like machines too), mostly we're determined not to talk about feelings at work because they force us to face the truth.If people are scared, they're scared. If angry, they're angry. Bored, they're bored, and so on. Aside from those times when we confuse ourselves about our feelings, or delude ourselves, there's no denying that feelings are true for those who are experiencing them.And so when people say "We can't talk about feelings here, it'll open a can of worms" what they really mean is "It's too dangerous to talk about what's true, about what's really going on". Similarly, claiming that feelings talk is 'fluffy' or 'soft' is a convenient excuse for turning away from a perhaps difficult, significant, and real conversation.The simple truth of what you're feeling, and what those around you are feeling, will tell you much about what's happening in your team and in your organisation. It will tell you much about what you and others actually care about (because feelings arise from what matters for us). And it can open up the possibility of facing the situation you're in, and acting upon it, together.We've already had enough trouble in the world of organisations because people wouldn't look at the truth of what was happening around them. Can you be sure your insistence that feelings are irrelevant doesn't have you join them?
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Good friends - the kind that agree with what you have to say, reinforce your prejudices and judgements, buy into all your stories, and work to keep your world (and hence their world) familiar and predictable?Or those who'll listen deeply, tell you when your ideas don't add up, show you a different way of seeing things when you're stuck or blaming or in denial, ask you searching questions about your life, and generally cause you a (very good, compassionate kind of) trouble?All too often we turn away from the latter because in their care for us they invite us to give up our cosy, comfortable way of being in the world.But only so that something new and expansive and much more alive can grow in its place.
If, like Zusya (see yesterday's post), our great work is becoming ourselves, it doesn't mean it's going to be easy."Just be yourself", people sometimes say, as if it's as simple as walking out of the door or choosing a different suit of clothes.But becoming ourselves involves being able to put down years of habit, of convention, of appropriateness, of fitting in, of pleasing people, of accommodating - and also the wisdom to retain that which was given to us and which we yet can really call our own.It requires mastery of many skills, each of which can require long practice and study:
the ability to discern what's ours to do;the courage to choose it, which always means saying no to something else;the capacity to stay committed when both inner and outer voices yell in objection;the ability to tolerate strong emotions, confusion and periods of disorientation;the emotional sensitivity to what's life-giving and what's numbing;the understanding required to know what's true;the attunement to what the world is calling for from us;the mastery of culture needed to appropriate what's already been given to us;the imagination and creativity to form it into something new;and the presence to be in life, with all its mystery, as it unfolds.
Becoming ourselves is neither a single act, nor a declaration.It is a life's work. A homecoming. And, ultimately, a work of art.
In a hadisic tale, Rabbi Zusya, after his death, is summoned before a heavenly court.He trembles as he prepares to put forward the case for his life, because he fears that he has not lived up to the standards he, and others, laid out for him. "Why were you not Moses?", he fears being asked. "Why did you not strive to become more like the greatest teacher and leader of your people's history?"And so it is for us. We fear we have not lived, because our lives are not like those of fame or fortune or great deeds. We fear that we'll be shown to be inadequate, because we were not able to seize life and shape it entirely to our will.But the story does not go as Zusya expects."Zusya," say the court "we do not care whether you were like Moses, or like any other great figure. That would have been an abandonment of yourself. We want instead to know, why you were not Zusya?"For Zusya, trying to become Moses - however noble - is a journey away from himself, and away from his life. But becoming Zusya, a far more perilous and uncertain path, is a journey back home.Why are the court so bothered about this? Because without Zusya being Zusya, something of genuine value is withheld from the world. Some unique, idiosyncratic, vibrant contribution forever denied to those around him, and to himself. A contribution that can never be fully realised as long as he is pursuing someone else's life. Discovering this is, in the end, Zusya's great work.And so it is for us.
Two kinds of problem:Easy
Those for which you already have language and concepts. The problem itself may be new, but you're able to say what it reminds you of. And, even if hard to resolve, you have a ready source of metaphors, questions, and practices which you can bring to bear in tackling it.
Difficult
Confuses you. You're lost for words and comparisons. There are no obvious practices to address what you're facing. The world, once clear, is thrown into uncertainty. Perhaps things aren't as you've taken them to be.
Easy problems fit the world as you know it already. They make sense in the particular interpretation of life already familiar to you, your colleagues, and your culture.But that's only one interpretation of many.Difficult problems reveal new worlds.In our rush-to-results culture we're prone to tackling all our problems as if they're easy problems. It makes it possible for us to take action. And it helps us feel safe.But many problems, particularly ones involving those most mysterious of creatures - other human beings - are at heart difficult, because others' worlds are at once familiar and vastly different from what we know.Solving such problems requires giving up our certainty in order to see the world afresh: allowing ourselves to be seriously confused; talking, and listening, and then talking and listening again; staying with the questions long enough that new kinds of answers become available; and allowing ourselves to be changed, rather than having the world and others bend immediately, compliantly, to our will.
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It's the mantra of our times, 'doing more with less'.And it seems to have produced a frenzy of pace, of panic, of pushing, of blame, of shame, of anxiety. Hours worked go up, the number of emails circulating go up, and we turn ourselves into production machines, compensating in frantic measure for that which has been taken away from us. Everything and everyone feels like they're on a knife edge.And yet we're not looking at the amount of waste this causes. The waste of attention as bodies first tire and then become exhausted. The waste of commitment as contributions are taken for granted. The waste of energy as we go faster doing work that's not actually needed. The waste of trust as promises are broken. The waste of good will as relationships are allowed to wither and decay.Doing more with less might, if you're a machine, mean turning the crankshaft faster. But if you're human, and working with others, it's going to involve a certain measure of slowing down rather than speeding up.You're going to have to slow down to have conversations for relationship with the people around you. Are you all committed to the same thing? Are you sure? Have you addressed the differences in orientation between you? Have you listened well enough to understand what each of you care about? Have you worked out how you'll respond to what you're learning?Going faster without doing this - and without returning to it regularly - is a way to become a supremely effective machine for producing resentment and resignation rather than the wholehearted commitment you're going to need to get anything important done.And you're going to have to slow down to have conversations for possibility. Do you know what you're actually aiming towards? Is everyone clear? Does everyone understand? Do you know how you'll tell when you're doing it? And how you'll address the inevitable breakdowns along the way? Without making time for this conversation, you'll be going faster but in different directions, spinning out further and further from one another as you go.And you're also going to have to slow down enough to have conversations for action, in which clear requests are made and clear offers made in return. Without skilfully doing this, you open up huge possibilities for duplication of effort, busy work, and the supreme waste of people working heroically to do something that nobody needs and nobody asked for. Modern organisations are full of this, and it leads to further resentment rather than the thrill of challenging work completed against the odds.It takes bold, courageous leadership to take a stand against the tide of action and get people talking to one another in this way, because somehow we've concluded that talking and doing are in opposition to one another. But unless you make this stand and make it possible for others to do the same, you'll be joining the growing ranks of depleted, exhausted organisations who tried to do more with less and ended up with a lot less than even they had bargained for.
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Four directions in which you might go when you experience difficulty:
fret about it all (looping in worry and inner chatter)lose heart (there's nothing that can be done)blame yourself for messing things upnumb or soothe yourself (for example with the soft glow of a screen)
and then, for each, further inner-criticism and self-judgement looms as a possibility:
"I always end up this way. I'm doomed to repeat this pattern again and again".
This self-judgement keeps you in a very tight spiral of blame and criticism in which there's little room to move.What if, instead, you accept that your way of responding to difficulty is just how you are? Then, instead of fighting with yourself every time, you can smile at yourself a little for being human, and for being imperfect.And you'll open up a little breathing space between your difficulty and your reaction, from within which it's possible to learn to respond with wisdom rather than with resignation.
