She said, he said

She:

[Sincere, interested. I wonder how he's getting on. Perhaps I can offer him some support]

"I'd like to arrange a chat with you about that project you're running"

He:

[Feeling anxious, hurt. People have been talking about me. I'm sure this is part of it. She's going to accuse me of something, I can feel it]

(aggressively) "Why? What do you want to know?"

She:

[Surprised. Wow, he seems very defensive. Can't he see I'm trying to help him? Feeling hurt now. I'm not sure I can count on his support. And I wonder if there's something he's hiding from me]

"I'm starting to worry about whether everything's going ok."

He:

[Suspicious, wary. See, I was right. I'm going to have to watch my back. I won't tell her about the difficulties I've been having getting this all done in time]

"Everything's fine. And I'm really busy. Let's wait a couple of weeks and I'll speak with you then."

She:

[Feeling anxious. I'm really going to have to keep an eye on him]

He:

[Feeling anxious. I'm really going to have to find a way to stay out of her way]

--

Can you see where the trouble starts? How quickly both are swept up in it? The silent part each person's inner critic plays behind the surface of the conversation? And how each person's certainty about what's happening quickly spins this conversation from sincerity to distrust? From contact to distance?

Stepping out of a cycle of mutual suspicion and hurt requires that we learn to spot our own inner critic at work so we project it less often onto others. That we remember that trust is created precisely by extending trust, and not by setting up constant tests that others must pass.

And it requires we hold our certainties very lightly indeed. Then we give ourselves a chance of finding out what's actually happening when we're in the complex, possibility filled dance of conversation with another person.

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Befriending sadness

What are the emotions you deny feeling?Sadness? Anger? Frustration? Longing? Disappointment? Love?Sooner or later, if you're going to participate fully in your life and in the lives of others, you'll have to turn towards all that of yourself that you push away. You'll have to bring down the walls that separate you from your own experience, that separate you from yourself.Every mood arises in one way or another from what matters to you. So learn, gradually, to befriend your sadness, your anger, your longing and your love for the gifts each of them contains.And then, quite possibly, you'll find out that every mood, even the most unwelcome, has something to reveal to you. Some new way of understanding the world. Some new way of understanding others. Some new way of understanding what you most care about. And some new way of acting upon what you're most genuinely committed to in this one life you call your own.

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When 'yes' doesn't build a relationship

Saying 'yes' to a request, where you mean 'no', might sometimes look like a way to build a relationship with the person who's asking.

Yes, I'll make that call for youYes, I'll come to that meetingYes, I'll join your committeeYes, I'll take on a heap of extra responsibility

But a yes that means no isn't really a yes, and so its power to build genuine relationship is much weaker than it seems. Before long your resentment and reluctance will show, as will all the times you subtly or overtly dodge the commitment you've made in order to attend to the things you really care about.A 'yes' that means 'no' doesn't build relationship because you can participate with at best a half-heart. And relationships founded on insincerity have little strength with which to sustain themselves over time.So practice yes's that mean 'yes', and clear, straightforward, honest and sincere no's that mean 'no'. Your whole-heartedness and sincerity will serve you both far better over the long-term than any attempt to manipulate the other person into liking you or respecting you.

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The heart of a complaint

Every complaint has at its heart a genuine treasure: a something that the complainer values and cares about.It's so easy to miss this when we dismiss people as moaners, whiners, or nuisances.When our complaints are disregarded the hurt and resentment comes not so much from you not doing what we asked of you, but that you didn't see us first and foremost as human beings with cares and concerns that matter.Instead of seeing complaining colleagues, customers, family as irritants, can you allow yourself to see the committed person behind the complaint? It's a far more powerful, relationship-building, trust-developing place from which to respond.

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Living the questions

We search for answers.

But we would be wise, in anything but the simplest situations in life and work, to live in the light of great questions.I argued earlier in the week that leadership, trust, empathy, and friendship cannot be reduced helpfully to lists of behaviour.Because a list is an attempt to answer a question that needs to continue to be asked in order to be alive. Because once we have an answer, everything is closed, spoken for, silent. Because simplistic answers cover over the great complexity in which we find ourselves. And because questions allow us to continually respond in fresh ways that answers cannot.Here's a reminder of all of this from Rainer Maria Rilke, who says it so beautifully in his 'Letters to a Young Poet'

I beg you … to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.

Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything.

Live the questions now. Perhaps then someday far in the future you will gradually, without ever noticing it, live your way into the answer.

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Learning with us in London in 2014

Two more opportunities coming up to learn with me and with my colleagues.Coaching to Excellence runs in London on May 1-2 and is a two-day foundation in Integral Development Coaching - a powerful way of working with people and their development. Suitable for you if you're a coach, consultant, if you manage or lead others, or if you simply want to make a meaningful difference to the development of people around you.And applications are just open for our Professional Coaching Course in Integral Development Coaching starting September 2014. It consists of 17 days together in London in four long-weekend sessions over the course of a calendar year. It's a programme that aims to open profound opportunities for your own development, courage, and capacity to act on what's important - and for your skill in helping others to do the same. We frequently have coaches, consultants, organisational leaders, entrepreneurs and educators as participants in the programme. Places are strictly limited to 20 in each cohort.Please be in touch through the form at the bottom of the About page if you're interested in joining us for either of these possibilities. We'd be delighted to talk with you.

Hunting down leadership

Of course, it is tempting to think you can bring about leadership or trust in your organisation by making a list of behaviours that express it and then getting everyone to agree to behave that way.But has it struck you that the list you come up with is just one point of view on something that's not fixed but very much alive? Whatever you list is only the surface manifestation of something much bigger, and much more important, than any list can express.A mandatory list of behaviours is likely to kill exactly the thing you're looking for.You'll have a much better chance of bringing about what you're hoping for by cultivating and ongoing and sincere inquiry in your organisation into what leadership or trust means... not an inquiry that seeks to end with a definitive answer, but a way of keeping on talking with one another - in short, a way of staying in the question.As we engage with questions -

What is leadership to me? What is it to us?Is this, that we're doing right now, leadership?How can we tell?What's making it possible?What's making it difficult?

- we do something much more important and more powerful than trying to programme people with the one right way to do something. We open up a new kind of conversation from which we can learn, and we continually deepen our understanding and capacity to respond.Don't smother something as important as leadership, trust or creativity by treating it as if it can be known. Much better to treat it as something mysterious and elusive that you're going to have to keep hunting for.

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Ordinary heroics

It's very easy - easier than you might notice - to slip into an almost constant background of self-criticism:

All the ways you should be doing better, being more diligent, pushing harder, being more reliable. All the standards and measures - formally identified or not - for you to meet. All the people you imagine are watching you, judging you.

Yes. Because you care about what you're doing, and how things are going.But how about, for today, declaring the inner-criticism committee free from their duties? They're more interested in keeping you in line and protecting you from shame than they are in helping you with what really matters to you.In the quiet their absence creates you might get to marvel at the ordinary heroics of your life. The strength and persistence you're bringing. Your capacity to keep going even at your most uncertain, day in, day out. Your ability to feel so much, whether joy or determination or sadness. The creativity and ingenuity you have to bring to even the most simple of actions. The relationships you're sustaining at work, at home.There's much to be said for recognising, with gratitude and humility, the enormous capacity and skilfulness and dignity you're mustering, minute by minute, that supports you in engaging with life in the way that you already are.Just living each day requires a set of super-powers we rarely stop to appreciate. And what you are sure are your failings are also marvels of this one human life you are in the midst of living.

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Hafiz - a poet of wonder and love

Some days, we lose touch with our essential aliveness, with the source of our power and agency in the world. And on these darker days it can be helpful to be reminded of the possibility and life that's always surrounding us, of which we're always inescapably a part - however separated we might feel.One source of help in this that I've found particularly valuable is the work of the fourteenth-century poet Hafiz, particularly in the beautiful English translations by Daniel Landinsky.

Landinsky's book A Year with Hafiz offers one poem a day for the entire year, and each is a tightly packed jewel - often uplifting, searching, frequently challenging, always loving. A wonderful resource for any of us who aspire to live fully in life.Here's one of his poems for this weekend, a reminder of the costs of the defences we put up between ourselves and the world:

That Shield You Hold

There is a shield you may still hold because ofso many battles.

I guess another conflict could begin at any moment,so maybe lugging it about could be of some use;or is it just an undermining habit?

Does it not get heavy, so much that yousometimes carry it on your head at noon?

And then do wonder, with your insecurities sointact... about casting darkness as fears canshadows

even if the sun is out, if the Sun is out - if Godis really all around in the middle of a beautifulday or night.

Yes, how amazing that a small umbrella or anillusion, held over your head... or clung to, canhide the stupendous fact of omniscient Light.

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Yes and no and...

When someone makes a request of you, there are at least four possible helpful responses.Many of us have only one of these in our repertoire, and a lifetime of habit that makes the others invisible to us:

1 Yes (which means, I promise to do what you ask)

2 No (I promise I will not do what you ask)

3 Here's a counter-offer (I don't intend to do what you asked me, but can imagine this alternative that might be acceptable to you)

4 I promise to commit later (I don't know yet how I'm going to respond to your request, but I can promise you a specific time by which I'll let you know).

You can build your capacity to respond genuinely to others' requests by practicing the responses that are less familiar to you.And if you're a serial 'yes-er' (as so many of us are) who then gets overstretched and resentful, practicing response 4 can open up much needed space in which you can settle on an answer that's true, heartfelt, and takes all your existing commitments into due account.

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