From where does behaviour appear?

In my work in organisations I frequently come across people trying to bring about meaningful change by making lists of 'behaviours' that people should take up. If we can just pin down how people behave when they're being loyal, or creative, or leading, or trusting - the theory goes - and can convince people to agree to it, we'll be done.But it is woefully insufficient. Easy to talk about, easy to imagine, and based on a misunderstanding of what human beings are.You can do a simple thought-experiment to show this. Start by making a list of all the behaviour that constitute 'trust' for example.Can you make a complete list? Whatever you write down, there will always be something important left out - some situation you didn't yet think of where trust would be expressed in a new way. A phenomenon such as 'trust' is way too complex, too rich, and too changeable to be enumerated like this.Now, look at the items you have written down on your list. Can you imagine situations where somebody does the opposite of what you've written but it still could constitute trust? For some items on your list the answer will be yes - because human behaviour is always contextual. We make sense of a particular moment in the light of the particular situation, its history, the future possibilities and intentions we're pursuing, and who is involved. There is no context-free list of behaviour that defines trust. We know trust when we experience it, but its way of being expressed is particular to this moment.Lastly, imagine a robot carrying out those behaviours - a robot that has action on the outside but is empty of feeling or meaning on the inside. Would that constitute trust? I don't think so.Can you see how this extends to empathy, leadership, friendship?Yes, we can make lists of behaviour that can help us understand. And, yes, bringing change into being does require us to change our actions. But our lists of behaviour can never be definite and they never are by themselves the phenomenon we are trying to bring about.Just because I've agreed to your list doesn't mean I'm going to be able do it in anything more than a robotic fashion, or know how to respond when I find myself and others acting 'outside' of the list.Bringing about change by tying people into lists of behaviour fails in large part because it's a technical response to a developmental issue.Instead of reducing trust or leadership to something measurable and observable in a fixed way, we need to look upstream at what gives rise to it, and work there. This takes new questions - more powerful, and more complex. How does trust appear in me, between us? What practices make it possible? How might we correct ourselves? And how do we need to speak with one another, when it's not appearing?

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Confusing Action and Relationship

At work we often confuse getting things done with doing good work. They are not the same thing.Sometimes the very best work comes precisely from not rushing into anything at all. And when we forget this we sacrifice quality for the sake of production, rushing to do things even when the doing will be manifestly unhelpful.Similarly we confuse conversations for action with conversations for relationship. We mistakenly think that to solve our difficulties with one another we need to produce things - policies, procedures, processes - rather than turning towards each other in new kinds of conversation.And so when we are having difficulty trusting our colleagues we make lists of 'behaviours' we imagine will help us. We say 'we'll be able to trust one another when we have better communication' and head off into producing plans to have this happen, rather than simply speaking directly and honestly to one another.We're scared, of course, because turning towards one another and extending trust and openness requires us to be vulnerable, to take the risk of being seen.And so we tell ourselves the story that talking is a distraction, and relationship-building soft, when there's the hard work of 'work' to do.But we forget that all work done with others only happens because of relationship. And that if we're not attending seriously to relationship as the foundation for all action, we're not attending seriously to our action at all.

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I've written more about this here and here.

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Becoming ghosts

Robert Montgomery is a poet who makes 'recycled sunlight' poems. This is one of my favourites.

It's a reminder of what I wrote about yesterday.

In the end most of what we leave behind us is very simple, however impressive our ambitions and our plans, however grand our status or fame.

Much of what we leave soon crumbles away.

So perhaps we can leave lives touched by our presence, and the way those lives touch the lives of others because they happened to meet us.

In that way we become ghosts in the lives of others, in the sense pointed to by Montgomery.

And perhaps we need to ask ourselves, most urgently and frequently, what kind of ghosts we are working on becoming.

Extravagant Purpose

A life of extravagant purpose, a grandiose mission to 'change the world' and 'leave a legacy'

~ or ~

Genuinely touching the life of each person you meet with truth, kindness and simplicity?Many people in apparently mundane roles change the lives of people they encounter simply by being generous enough and available enough to make genuine, heartfelt contact, person by person, in their work, in their family, on the street.Many in supposedly powerful roles hardly leave a mark.The repair of our world is mostly made in small, close in, contributions. The kindness and truthfulness that touches one person, lightening their load or reducing their suffering, has them make an impact on others' lives, and on the chain of lives they touch in turn.Don't underestimate the significance of ordinary lives lived consciously and whole-heartedly.They really can change the world.

Photograph by Kate Atkinson

Four truths

Three truths that you might be hiding from yourself:

• You will grow old.
• You will at some point, inevitably, get ill.
• You, and all of us, will die - as do all our projects, our creations, and even, over time, all that which we thought would be our 'legacy'.

Nobody escapes this. No balm, no cream, no status, no wishful thinking, no protestation of the unfairness of all of this will make a bit of difference. It is simply the way of the world.You can run away from this realisation for only so long. And then you have to choose - will you turn towards life because of it, or away?Because the fourth truth is simple:

• Right now, you are alive.

What kind of life, leadership, relationship, work is produced from your turning away?And what kind of life, what kind of leadership - what sort of fierce, practical loving-kindness - might be produced from living in the full knowledge that these four are the case, inevitably, for every single one of us?

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On Regret

It's the nature of all of our lives that we have to choose, repeatedly.

And because we have to choose, it's the nature of our lives that we experience regret.

Every choice we make involves not choosing something else.

Sometimes we forget this. We try to live without regret, as if we could avoid it completely. But that forces us in turn to live without choice.

And this in turn produces a bitter new regret all of its own - the regret of a life we have chosen to freeze in place.

And so regret cannot be avoided. But we can choose to feel it rather than run from it. This way we can allow our regret to bring us its hidden message, which is to remind us that we care, and what it is that we care most about.

Avoiding regret turns out to be a way of avoiding life. And turning towards regret a way of turning back fully, towards our lives and towards ourselves.

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Yes to your life

What would it take - how much walking, meditation, silence, prayer, music, reading, talking, singing, running, teaching, contributing to a community, making art - to at last say a wholehearted yes to your life?

Are you working on this?

Doing something, anything, that might even begin to make this a possibility?

And if you're not saying 'yes' to life, what are you doing instead?

With what cost to you, and to all those whose lives you touch?

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The filling of our holes

We're told again and again that the cure for our emptiness is always away from ourselves. The promise: there will be some product or some experience that will make us feel whole again.

Eat. Shop. Work harder, for longer. Watch this TV show. Wear these clothes.It's no wonder we consume so much. The distraction of consumption, with all its promises, never adequately fills the hole we're longing to fill.But there is another direction to turn - back into intimate contact with our own lives. This requires us to cultivate a relationship with stillness, with quiet, with practices and with relationships that allow us to be just here rather than spinning away into distraction so frequently.Here we might find ourselves able to be with our own emptiness, the yawning anxiety that there is nothing to hold us. And, paradoxically, in our sustained encounter with nothing, find that we are held by everything, by all of life, without our having to do anything at all.When we know our own holes but do not move to fill them, when there is no running away to do, we can start to live deeply in the lives we are living, knowing that emptiness is as much a part of our humanity as our love, our fulfilment, and our joy.

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The silence you create

I wrote yesterday about the power of 'naming the daemon' in our own lives - what can happen when we give truthful names to the moods and experiences that transparently shape us.Of course moods are not just private, personal experiences. They exist between people, in the background of all relationships, groups, organisations and communities. And here - in the public sphere - naming can have extraordinary power too.How often we say in our work lives 'enough of the soft stuff' or 'we don't talk about touch-feely subjects'. How often we spin the lie that somehow at work we are immune to human experience, or that it is in some way irrelevant to the action we wish to take.You can be sure that mood is ever present, despite attempts to say it is not so. Fear, anxiety, pride, love, shame, resentment, frustration and all their cousins will be shaping what can be said and not said, what is paid attention to and what is avoided, what can be done and cannot be done.A commitment never to talk about this, to avoid naming, gives up a measure of your power to take effective action, to change things.In the silence you create, you'll be had by whatever mood is shaping you, rather than having it.And so the courage to talk about it with others, to find words together for what's really there - for your shared fear or shame or pride or resentment or love -  must be one of the foundational responsibilities of anyone who considers themselves a leader.

Photo with thanks to Kate Atkinson

Naming the Daemon

When you're caught up in a something that's pulling you away from life, distracting you, narrowing your horizons, or having you act in ways that don't seem to match your intentions, you could try to give the something a name.

Is it anger, shame, resentment? Frustration, boredom, cynicism? Fear? Resignation? Your inner critic?

Names have power.Moods, and our own inner critic, are often transparent to us. They recede into the background of our lives - shaping the world without us knowing, but shaping the world nevertheless.But a phenomenon, once named accurately, starts to come forward from the background. It becomes possible to point at it and to have some kind of handle on it. The something you're in takes a step from having you to being had by you, just as in the naming of daemons in the old myths - once named the daemon's mysterious power begins to dissolve.So, when you're in some kind of difficulty, you could try to see what name fits best.

Anger? Fear? Frustration? Shame?

If you pay attention you'll know when you're on to something, particularly if you pay attention to the felt sense you're experiencing in your body. An accurate name, something that's true enough, will feel different, almost as if the phenomenon you're naming turns towards you in recognition, becomes willing at last to make itself known.And once named, first to yourself, perhaps later to others, see what new purchase you have on your situation. You may find that the invisible grip of the invisible something that has enveloped you will start to soften so that something new - a possibility or course of action - comes into view.

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