A wonderful line from this week's episode of Doctor Who, which reminds me that the proper response to difficulty, confusion and anxiety is not to turn away, but to turn in:
"Sometimes there are only bad choices...... But you still have to choose."
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If you want to get up to something meaningful and productive with other people, the first conversation you’re going to need is a conversation for relationship.In this conversation we’re discovering the basis for our collaboration.What we’re trying to establish, at minimum, is some sense of shared interest from which action can arise. A deeper, more powerful basis for relationship is shared concern about some issue or topic. And discovering shared commitment is more powerful still.Finding that we are all interested in technology might give a loose basis for some future collaboration. Finding that we are concerned in particularly about energy efficiency would provide a more focused set of possibilities. But it’s only when we discover a shared commitment, such as a desire to produce a high-performance electric car to go to market next January, that we immediately open clear possibilities for focused coordinated action.And all of that can only be accomplished by taking the time to talk.Conversations for relationship require us to slow down, to do our best to understand one another, to suspend judgement, to get curious, and to listen – deeply. We allow our own world to be touched, opened, by the world of other people. Done well, we give our aspirations wings – the trust of others, the shared sense of being up to something that matters.Perhaps you can immediately see the difficulties that arise if we dive into action without having this conversation. Yet it happens all the time. We declare ourselves ‘a team’ and think that will do the trick, when we haven’t even figured out whether we care about anything in common. And then we wonder why our experience of working together feels so listless and confusing. Or, because we can’t tolerate or talk about our feelings of anxiety and urgency we start to do things before we even know why we’re doing them, with all too predictable consequences.In the world of organisations at the moment the pressure to move quickly away from conversations for relationship seems to be growing, as far as I can tell. It’s like leaving out the foundations because you’re in a hurry to get the house up.We all know how that turns out.
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All the dead ends, the missed opportunities, the failings, the distractions - yes, these could be proof of your inadequacy. Yes, you could be right that your judgement is poor, you've missed your moment, and that it's time to accept you'll never be somebody.But perhaps you could allow yourself to consider another possibility - that the life you think you're meant to be living is not your life at all. That the dead ends, the missed opportunities, the failings and the distractions were all what it took to get you exactly here, right where you're supposed to be. That your definitions of what it is to be somebody are only your definitions, not an enduring truth about what it is to be of value. And that what you're here to do is really not yours to decide, but to listen for.The world is whispering its call to you always.When will you give up your pursuit of somebody else's life, the life that never was nor could be, and turn towards the life that only you have been given and that only you can live?
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I've been slowly reading Hannah Arendt's remarkable book The Human Condition, an exploration of the possibilities of human action as relevant today as it was on publication some 50 years ago.She was born on this day in 1906.Of the many striking themes in the book (which itself is a complex, challenging and enormously thought-provoking read) is human freedom, about which I have been writing extensively here over the past 18 months.For Arendt, freedom is the quintessential mark of humanity. Despite our tendency to fall into habitual and predictable routines, to constrain ourselves in our attempts to look good or follow the crowd, what is always available to us is the possibility of novel action. We can always, she tells us, initiate some new action that has never been tried before. Of course, we cannot ever really know its consequence - the endless chain of further actions that we will begin. But it is our human responsibility to act - to not go to sleep to ourselves - and then to act again in order to deal with the consequences of our acting in the first place.And each of us brings in to the world our particular uniqueness - a way of acting that's possible simply because we are here, and because although we are like every other human being we are simultaneously unlike any human being who has lived before.Arendt's work is a vital reminder of our responsibility, always present as human beings, to take responsibility for the condition of our lives, our work, our organisations, our society.
"The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle. The fact that man is capable of action means, that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world." -- from The Human Condition
I wrote recently about how our work is profoundly shaped by the telos or end-point towards which we point our practices. Teaching, parenting, leading, business, law, writing, art, coaching, politics - each have more or less appropriate end-points. The telos towards which we aim has much to do with whether we ever discover the rich seam of skilfulness, artistry, practicality and contribution that our practices and efforts make possible.As well as the appropriateness of the telos for the practice concerned, you can also think about the ambition or scale towards which you're aiming.Teaching is one kind of activity if the telos is bringing about an enlightened, educated society; and a very different kind if the telos is looking good or being at the top of a performance chart.Business is one kind of activity if the telos is serving others and making new ways of living or relating or work possible; and quite another if the telos is having a big bank balance.It's not that performance or money are unimportant here. But the ultimate end towards which you aim your practices can have a huge effect both on what's possible and what kind of person you get to be in the midst of acting upon them.One way of thinking about this is that you can aim your practices towards end-points of different size.You could choose an end point that is primarily concerned just with you (looking good, having lots of money, being liked, making a name); or one that includes you but also adds people you care about (your family, your company, your community); one that includes both of these and adds the society in which you live; or one that in some way addresses all of these and adds the needs of the world as a whole.And, ultimately, you can choose a telos for any practice that, if you wish, is aimed towards life itself, which necessarily includes all the previous categories.And if we were prepared to be that ambitious in our businesses, organisations and personal lives, we'd take into account wholly new categories of concern about which we're, mostly, hardly thinking right now.
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When I'm in the midst of difficulties, it's easy to come up with self-reinforcing justifications for my ongoing sadness, or fear, or despair - all of which are often a way of simply keeping the situation going.It's in times like these that I find these sage words from Merlin, in T.H.White's The Once and Future King, such a powerful reminder that there are alternative, and much more life-giving, paths available to each of us:
"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin… "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you.
How seriously do you take the aliveness of your conversations? Your meetings?When you don't pay attention to aliveness,you can easily find yourself in the midst of a conversation that's long since dead. You go through the motions, doing what one does, nodding and agreeing or arguing and debating, long after aliveness left the room.Perhaps you do this most of the time. Do you even know?When you engage in dead conversations, you're causing yourself trouble in all kinds of ways.(1) It's much more effort. Do you have any idea how much energy and force it takes to carry a person that's become rigid and immobile? Conversations are like this too.(2) You poison your own whole-heartedness and commitment. Trying to stay in a dead conversation brings about a toxic cycle of attrition in which you wear away your good intentions and capacity to contribute.(3) You smother your ability to discern what's important. Aliveness and mattering go hand in hand, and as you head deeper into dead conversations you're strengthening your ability to keep on doing what doesn't really matter.Dead conversations can span minutes, weeks, or years.And yet we seem to accept them as the norm in many situations.Much can be freed up when we pay attention to this, when we track aliveness as we go, and call out to ourselves and others as soon as we notice that a conversation died so that we can find another path rather than ploughing on.Because we're so used to accepting dead conversations, particularly in work, this can take some courage.But it's necessary, because we all have important work to do.And none of us can afford the cost of sleep-walking into the dead zone as often as we do.
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At some point we need to move beyond saying things the way we see them and learn to find words that other people can understand. There is an art - cultivated only through practice, sensitivity and careful observation - to finding words that can reach deeply into the worlds of others.But it's not enough to know what's the right thing to say, though this is itself hard enough.We also have to know when to say it.Until we cultivate our skill and sensitivity in matters of timing we will repeatedly say the right thing at very much the wrong moment. Without good timing we speak when we cannot be heard or, worse, we insist on speaking at a moment when others will get hurt, when our words cause outrage or confusion, and when our well-meaning efforts hinder others.Learning good timing is also an art cultivated through practice, sensitivity, and careful observation. We have to learn what actually happens when we speak might be quite different from the intent of our speaking or what we imagine happens.It's all to easy to console ourselves with 'I was only trying to help' while at the same time failing to spot that because of our timing we are not helping at all.
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Every couple of months I teach a two-day foundation programme in integral coaching in London. The next one is coming up soon - 1st-2nd December 2015.It's such a joy to teach this programme, and people who attend often say how much practical value they gain from attending, as well as a deeper insight into themselves and what makes their own development possible.I'll look forward, perhaps, to meeting some of you there.
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We could do, once in a while, with remembering that all we've taken to be solid, and all we've used to shore ourselves up against the riskiness of life, is hardly as solid as it seems.
Our homes, so sturdy, can be swept away by earthquake or flood, war or uprising.
Our money, so secure, can disappear in financial turmoil or upheaval.
Our position in society, in an organisation, undone both by our actions and by the stories of others.
Our health, undone in an instant by a virus, a bacterium, a clot unmooring itself.
Perhaps if we do this, just once in a while, it will help us to see again as human all the millions and billions of others who have lost this kind of security themselves. Perhaps it will awaken us to compassion, knowing that each one of them is just another one of us.Perhaps if we do this, just once in a while, it will help us to cling less tightly, to be more accepting of life's twists and turns - that what is had can be lost, and what is lost can be gained, and that life is a never-ending process of change. And in doing this, perhaps we'll be able to be a little less self-obsessed, and turn a little more genuinely and in deeper connection and care to all those around us.Perhaps if we do this, just once in a while, we'll have our eyes awakened to the miracle of whatever it is that we do have, whatever it is that we find we can truly rely on, and we'll find a way of undoing our sense of entitlement and our sense of resentment at life's unfairness.Perhaps if we do this, just once in a while, we'll have a better chance of living with a sense of gratitude for what is, and the possibility of dedicating ourselves to the welfare of everyone rather than desperately clinging on with only ourselves in mind.
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