Two different interpretations of your emotions:1. Emotions are just something that happens. They sweep in, and sweep out again. There to be felt, but not to be obsessed over, worried over, analysed. Emotions simply are.2. Emotions are of the deepest significance. They show you what you care about. They're the surest route to understanding what matters to you. Far from being an interruption to reason they are a form of intelligent, meaning-laden reasoning, and the heart of what it is to be human.So often we're blinded by the particular interpretation of emotions that we cling to.So perhaps if you find yourself obsessed with what you're feeling, you might try out living in interpretation 1 for a while.And if you treat your emotions as a nuisance, a distraction, and better left alone, how about a while treating interpretation 2 as if it's true?
Performers
When people stand in front of a choir or orchestra for the first time and try to conduct, they often put in far too much effort.The result of all of this energetic arm waving? In many cases, hardly anything, at least in terms of getting the orchestra to do anything. All that work and energy put in, and relatively little to show for it.Much more subtle guidance is required to really support an orchestra in performing well. If the conductor puts in too much it leaves far too little space in which the people playing can respond. The more the heavy lifting from the front, the more those whose contribution counts for so much back off. Paradoxical, perhaps, but more effort from the front does not easily translate into more effort from everyone else.The same dynamic is at play in many other situations where leadership is called for.The more you insist that your team cannot be trusted (and that you must be the final arbiter of all quality, checking everyone's output for appropriateness and correctness) the less room people have to step forward. After all, while you're doing all the work (and doubting the quality of their contribution at every step) how much does anyone feel really welcome to bring themselves?It's incredibly difficult for people to be trustworthy unless they're trusted. And incredibly difficult for them to contribute unless there is space for their contribution.Just like the over-energetic conductor, your strenuous efforts to stay in control are most probably producing exactly the situation you're trying so desperately to avoid.Hard as it is to learn, because it feels like everything is at stake, it's your job to coordinate with cues subtle and clear and spacious enough that everyone can step forward and bring themselves.Only by letting go of what you are most attached to can you give others the chance of being the performers you're so longing them to be.
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Feet and Hearts
It's easy to be afraid.There is, after all, so much to be afraid about - for all of us.So much to lose.We walk our lives, afraid and hiding it, looking strong, looking good, denying how lost we can feel. We pretend we're not afraid because we can't imagine that anyone else could be quite as scared as we are. And because we have no idea where to look for support.But what about our feet, that carry us through a million more steps in each year of our life? The simple everydayness of feet, bestowed upon us by generations of ancestors we never knew. They support us. Perhaps when we're most scared we could simply, with humility, be thankful for our feet.And our hearts, pumping the blood that keeps us alive, beating some 100,000 times per day, tens of millions of beats a year, billions in a lifetime. We did nothing - nothing at all - to receive our hearts. They are a gift to us from life itself, the legacy that stretches back more than 520 million years (to Fuxianhuia protensa, the earliest known creature with a cardiovascular system) and beyond.Perhaps when we're feeling afraid and lost we can, in a very simple and straightforward way, turn our attention and gratitude to our feet and our hearts. And from there, wonder at everything else we've been given that supports us without us even having to do anything, moment to moment in the chaotic, uncertain, always provisional circumstances of our very human lives.
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Shaped by the world
If you're always taking action, producing, making, shaping the world...... do you leave open any space for the world to shape you?What happens if as well as being the potter...... you allow yourself to soften enough that you can also be the clay?
Blowing apart your certainty
Every action, every choice, is inherently risk-laden.There's the risk that people won't like what you're doing, or that they won't like you.There's the risk that you misjudged, that you misunderstood the situation.And there's the risk that your choice could make a situation worse, that things might not turn out in the way that you or others would like.Far better, then, to keep the peace. To not act. To keep your head down.At least then you won't imprison yourself with the consequences of an action that failed, a decision that went wrong.But, here's the thing - your commitment to acting only when you know it will work out is itself a prison.And so acting, choosing, taking up your freedom - even at its most creative - always involves a necessary act of destruction without which it's not freedom at all.In order to act you need to be prepared to blow apart your certainty, and your surest conviction that you're doing the right thing.
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Concentric Circles
Whereas development in children is easy to see, because of the obvious physiological changes that accompany it, our development as adults - if it happens - is more subtle, but no less profound.
One way of describing successive developmental stages is as a series of concentric circles. With each developmental shift the world we inhabit (the world of possibility, action ideas, responses) grows bigger, including rather than replacing the world in which we lived before. Another way of saying this is that we find ourselves inhabiting a world with bigger horizons than we had known. And along with that, usually, comes new language to describe our experience, new skills, and new ways of relating to others and everything.
In Robert Kegan’s language (and he is one of the most comprehensive, thoughtful, and grounded writers I know of on this topic) our development is always in some way a shift in subject-object relationships. Or, put more plainly, we come to a different understanding of what is me (subject) and what is in relationship to me (object). Often, we find that what we’d taken to be obviously ‘me’ is only a small part of what being ‘me’ really is - a shift in which we discover that ‘me’ actually includes more than we could have imagined before.
An example. In an earlier stage of our development we relate to our emotions as if they are a feature of the world, enveloping us like the air we breathe (and similarly invisible). We’re frustrated, and so it's the world that is frustrating. We’re angry with another person, and conclude that they must be making us angry. We’re in love, joyful, and so the world is joyful. We feel despair and take it that the world is a despairing place.
In this way of being an adult the world, and we, are indistinguishable from the mood we are feeling. In this stage we’re subject to our emotions. It is almost as if, instead of having emotions we are being had by them. We can’t see that they might have something to do with us.
When the subject-object shift in our development comes we start to see that emotions are something we have. We’re able to say that we’re feeling anger about this or that, and feeling joy about something else or at some other moment. We see that although our despair or love seems all consuming it’s not the world that is despairing or lovely but a feature of our relating to it that has it be that way for us. We can understand too, maybe for the first time, that others really do often feel quite different from us - that we can feel anger about something while somebody else, quite legitimately and truthfully, feels joy. It’s not until our relationship to our emotions move from having us (being subject) to being something that we have (an object) that all this becomes apparent to us.
Concentric circles, widening, as we inhabit the world in a new way.
When emotions are object rather than subject many other possibilities open to us. We can question our feelings for their accuracy and appropriateness, rather than be swept up in them. We can open to the different experience of others, instead of insisting that they feel the same. We can start to wonder about our own relationship to our emotions in a way that simply was not possible when they were part of the invisible background that had us:
What is this emotion about?What draws me more towards some emotions than others?How is it that I’m participating in keeping sadness going, or joy, or longing, or despair, or frustration, or resentment?What can I learn about others’ worlds in all of this?
Indeed, it’s only when such a developmental shift happens that we really start to understand that other people inhabit worlds that are related to, but not quite the same as, our own. The world, which we were previously subject to - the world that had us - seems much more like something we have or are at least participating in. And it’s from here that a deeper understanding of, and compassion for, others can grow.
Cultivating such shifts matters because, as perhaps you can see, a world in which we fully experience emotions as something we have rather than something we are had by is a world in which we have much more freedom to act. And a world in which we are less imprisoned by what seems - so obviously - beyond us.
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Why development matters
Cry. Wave arms and legs. Make eye contact. Smile. Gradually reach for things. Raise head. Roll onto tummy. Crawl. Faltering steps. First words. Walking. Asking. Phrases. Dawning sense of self as separate from others. Friendships. Reasoning. Simple descriptions of cause and effect relationships. Adjectives. Adverbs. Understanding that others have their own world, different from mine.
These developmental stages that small children go through, if nothing interrupts them, are familiar and easy to see. They take place in a predictable order, each building upon those that come before.
What’s less easy to see is that adults go through developmental stages too. Like the stages in children they are sequential, each building upon the other. But unlike those in children, they come with no guarantee. If circumstances allow, we can continue our development throughout our adult lives, finding ourselves in new orientations to ourselves and others and life itself as we go. Or we can remain over long periods of time in a more fixed, static relationship with the world.
While the developmental stages in children are easily identified by corresponding shifts in physiology or skilfulness (stronger muscles that support walking, the capacity to speak and understand), developmental changes in adults are marked most clearly by shifts in our relationship with the life in which we are living. Put most simply, each shift brings about a greater capacity to respond to the inner and outer world and lessens the hold of our reactive, habitual patterns. Or, said another way, development brings about the ability to include more and more of the complexity of the world, relate to others who might be quite different from ourselves, and act in the pursuit of what’s genuinely important rather than what feels comfortable or familiar.
In many contexts, the world of work in particular, we don’t pay very much serious attention to development. We largely think of adults as fixed - able of course to learn some new kinds of skills but not able to significantly shift our orientation to the world by opening to wider horizons and greater possibility.
It could even be said that in many contexts we actively work against the possibility of genuine development, because as we become less rigid and able to respond in more sophisticated and subtle ways to what’s happening and what’s needed, we also start to question more. Our development wakes us up first to our own wishes and longing (what’s important to me that might be different to what I was taught or from what is being asked of me now), and then to the wishes and longing of ever wider circles of concern (the communities in which I participate, the society in which I live, the wider world of which we’re all a part). Our development opens up far wider horizons for possibility and relationship while at the same time, necessarily, having us ask questions about how we’re working and how we’re living. And this kind of questioning can be unwelcome in a world of targets and measures, performance ratings and behaviour frameworks, predictability and rigid process.
It seems clear to me that our development is important, necessary even, if we are to take full responsibility for our own lives and for the organisations and projects to which we contribute.
Because unless we can develop, opening more and more to ourselves and others, we risk sleepwalking through, in thrall to our preferences and habits, doing things simply because ‘they are this way’ or because ‘I am this way’, fixed in a predictable cycle of event and reaction.
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Reteach a thing its loveliness
The poet Galway Kinnell, a writer of exquisite and moving poetry, died this week.His poem 'St Francis and the Sow', which you can read in its entirety here, opens with these lines:
The budstands for all things,even those things that don't flower,for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;though sometimes it is necessaryto reteach a thing its loveliness,to put a hand on its browof the flowerand retell it in words and in touchit is lovelyuntil it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
This expresses so clearly a central responsibility of leaders (isn't that all of us?), parents, friends, coaches, consultants, doctors, nurses, teachers of all kinds - to act in a way that enables the people and systems in which we work to flower from within, of self-blessing.It is ridiculously easy to be cynical. Easy to create distance. Easy to forget the capacities that lie within us. And the easiest (and sometimes, in the moment, most self-satisfying) to pull people and projects apart with our knowing insight and sharp judgement, or with our world-weariness.And it's probably the hardest, and most necessary, to be someone who patiently, over time, brings about genuine flourishing by reminding us all of our most life-giving qualities - the ones we so easily forget - so they can be called into expression.
Organisations, projects, and our capacity to forget our own humanity
You may know the story of the Tower of Babel. A whole generation of people, those who have grown up after a world-devastating flood, conspire together to build a sky-tower like none ever seen before and are punished and dispersed across the world for their hubris and arrogance.Our hubris, problematic? Yes, when it dislocates us from the rich biological and social world of which we are an indivisible part, when we over-extend ourselves in pursuit of our wants with no heed to the consequence and impact.But the story itself is problematic if taken as a caution against human boldness and creativity, because these are the very qualities we most need in order to bring about a world in which we can all live.It is our capacity to imagine, to invent, and then to act in cooperation with others that have brought about medical, technological, social and political advances that have transformed the quality of life for billions. Confidence in our ability, acted upon with due consideration of the wider world, is no compromise of our humanity but a dignified and important expression of it.In an imaginative retelling from the 1st century work of Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, there are no stones available to build the tower, and so thousands of people are marshalled to bake bricks until the construction is some miles high. Those with new bricks climb the tower on the eastern side, and those who descend go down on the western side.Sometimes a person climbing up or down falls. When a person drops to their death, nobody notices. But when a person falls with a brick the workers sit down and weep, not for the life lost but because they do not know when another brick will come in its place.In this interpretation the compromise to our humanity comes not through building itself, but through the way in which we build. Or, said another way, our projects can bring about great changes in the material world at the same time as they bring about great changes in our social and inner worlds. We are inevitably shaped both by what we do and by the manner in which we do it.The danger here is not that we hope and dream and build and make and create. The danger that Eliezer is so keen to point out to us is that we easily do so without paying sufficient attention to the kind of people we are becoming through the doing. We become means-to-an-end, objects, 'it' instead of 'I', 'it' instead of 'you'.In this reading the story of Babel is a reminder of our endless capacity to forget ourselves and others as human beings even as we pursue our most human of goals.
Turning away
The more I look, the more it seems to me that among the most personally damaging acts each of us can take is that of turning away from truth.I’m not talking grand universal truths here – the kind that people claim apply across time and space and across people. It’s quite easy to see that establishing truth in this way is fraught with difficulty.No, I’m talking about something more basic and immediate: what’s true about this moment, this experience, from the place in which you stand.If you pay attention, it’s not so difficult to tell when you’re turning away from truth in this way. The truth that you are sad, or joyful, or angry, or despondent, touched or numb, feeling whole or split apart. The truth that this is difficult or painful for you. Or the truth that this is bringing you to life.The truth that these thoughts you are thinking, whatever they are, are what you are thinking. The truth that what you’re feeling in your body is what you’re feeling. The truth that this place is where you are, and that what you are doing is what you are doing.When we deny these simple, basic truths to ourselves and others – when we speak of ourselves inwardly or publicly with deliberate inaccuracy – we assault our own integrity. And we cause ourselves tangible harm, in our minds and in our bodies, by putting ourselves at odds with ourselves, fuelling the inner battles that pull us apart.And then being whole again requires a kind of return, a turning back to the part of ourselves that understands how things really are. A turning back to something simple, and straightforward, the heart of which we’ve known all along.