Solo or duet?

When your relationship with someone is proving difficult, when you're sure that they are acting against you or judging you, and just when you're sure that nothing can be done, the most helpful and most powerful move is to start making requests.Your certainty that nothing can happen from talking makes your powerlessness self-perpetuating. You're silent, because you think nothing can happen. You're silent, so nothing can happen. And you remain silent, because nothing is happening.It may well be that the other person is trapped in the same cycle, holding back from making the requests that would connect the two of you again. Your silence turns you into solo players.In the space between you - and in the stories that fill the quiet - difficulties multiply.So start asking for what you want. Encourage them to do the same.You may well discover that what is happening is quite different to what you imagined. That the other person has a quite different motive to what you thought. And that a conversation in which you raise your requests and concerns, listening deeply to the response - and in which they do the same - shifts things profoundly for both of you.

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Running from fear

We're afraid. Most of us, more than we'll let on.We're afraid that our lives will be meaningless. We're afraid of our aloneness. We're afraid of our ending.And, mostly, we're afraid of our fear. We're sure it means there's something wrong with us. We each think we're the only one who feels this way.So we hide how afraid we are, even from ourselves, distracting and numbing and enchanting ourselves with diversions and addictions and rushing and busyness that have our life pass in a blur, leaving us feeling shallow and out of touch with ourselves.We wonder how everyone else seems to have it so sorted (without realising that they are afraid, and hiding it, too).And we've forgotten (because we seem to have wilfully abandoned so much wisdom we could have been taught by those who came before us) that fear avoided and denied goes underground, holding us ever more tightly in its invisible grip. And that running from fear is really running from life.

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Rembrandt, luminosity, and the contribution of our gifts

Today, a visit to the Rembrandt exhibition at London's National Gallery - a shimmering introduction to the work of a man who so clearly loved human beings and was deeply interested in understanding human life, emotion, and meaning in all their shades of light and dark, joy and suffering.Such love for the world is much needed and yet, I think, for most of us very difficult to cultivate. Cynicism, judgement, resignation and despair about others (and about ourselves) are far easier for us to maintain. They are safer moods, less questioning, and with far less of a call on us to be open, vulnerable and affected by life than that called upon by love.Walking from room to room, it was impossible to escape the sense that exploring and expressing this love and wonder was the point of Rembrandt's life. Even in the midst of repeated personal tragedy, financial ruin, the ridicule of his peers and critics and his long fall from fame - even in the midst of all this, he never stopped painting.The room with his very last works, completed very shortly before his death and when his personal life had fallen apart, was the most luminous and transcendent and generous of them all. A powerful reminder of what it is to dedicate life to the whole-hearted contribution of our gifts. And how different from a life in which all our effort is expended trying to have things work out for us just the way we want them to.

Image: Self-portrait with two circles, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1669Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Who is to blame?

We assume that most, if not all, of our actions arise from within us. We talk about drives, preferences, goals and intentions as if they are, without question, the only forces that move us. And as a result we pay little attention to the way we're brought about by what's around us - the people, places and things we encounter repeatedly in our lives.The inner drive model gives much more weight than is due to our conscious selves - the explicit choice-making part of us that we most readily identify as 'I'. Much of the time, it's not this 'I' that's in operation, but a much more automatic, habitual aspect of us that's skilful at navigating through the world without needing our conscious intervention. This 'I' knows the world through its repeated interactions with it. It can navigate stairs, roads, chairs, doors, people, windows, showers, toothbrushes, pens, paper, phones, cars, trains... everything we have to do without really thinking about it.The automatic 'I' is sophisticated enough to take part in conversations, guide our speech (once the conscious 'I' has set an intention or a direction) and drive us home. And, rather than being separate from the world, it relies on the world to orient it. It is drawn out by the affordances that surround us - the door handles, keyholes, street crossings, utensils, chairs, keyboards, and people that we have become skilful at responding to by years of apprenticeship.We quite easily see that this is the case if we visit an unfamiliar culture where the tools, signs, symbols and practices make no sense - there we really have to think in order to get around (if we can get around at all). It's incredibly hard work. There is little or nothing to draw out from us the skilful, embodied, habitual, automatic response upon which we rely so much. In these situations we feel most acutely our separateness from the world as conscious, thinking, deciding beings. The rest of the time, when we're on automatic, in a culture with which we're familiar, there really is very little separation between ourselves and the world to which we're in the midst of skilfully responding.And this is one of the reasons why so many of our ways of accounting for the actions people take in our organisations are so unhelpful. Individual performance reviews and targets locate agency solely in the separate conscious self - we are punished or rewarded, hired and fired, blamed and praised as if it's only the separate inner world of thought and choice that's relevant to the actions we take. As if what we are in the midst of has no part to play in what happens.But we are, in significant part, being brought forth by what we're surrounded by. Which is why it should be no surprise that when we force people to leave ('manage them out') we often find the very same problems recurring in the hands of the next person into the role. We are blind to the history that's bringing about our difficulty. Which is because we're blind to the surrounding world of people, objects, places and systems that's bringing it about too.And so when trouble arises in our organisations it's enormously helpful to start looking systemically. Not simply 'who is responsible for this?', but also 'what in this system is bringing about this difficulty?'. Instead of 'let's get rid of this troublemaker' we could ask ourselves 'how are we, collectively, and our whole situation with its tools, procedures, relationships and environments bringing about this trouble?'.We'd save ourselves, and those we so easily blame, enormous heartache and practical difficulty if we were prepared take this seriously just a little more often.

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For a powerful and practical exploration of this topic, you could take a look at Barry Oshry's work, especially his book Seeing Systems.

Photo by Lior Solomons-Wise

Taking wing

Perhaps it's no surprise that our endless and often invisible self-judgement is quickly projected out into to the world and onto others.We build family cultures and organisation cultures around our wish to find, and correct, the faults we find in everyone. And we can easily make the central project of our lives comparing people to standards and finding all the ways they (and we) fall short.So how about a different project?What if you were to see and show people the possibility inherent in them that they barely know themselves? Not platitudes, not untruths, not clichés, not making-them-feel-better. Instead, the difficult and important work of noticing and naming what is waiting to come into the world through them.Who could you be if you dedicated yourself to finding the as yet unborn goodness in others - that which is struggling to free itself - and naming it for them so that it can take wing?

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With thanks to both Parker Palmer andRabbi Jonathan Wittenberg for the ideas that inspired this post.

Interrupted

Could it be that we’re so harried, so unhappy, so stressed because we’ve forgotten the simple pleasure and discipline of being up to one thing at a time?When we’re committed to being always on, always connected, always responsive – and to reacting to every email, phone call, tweet, facebook posting, news report – how can we expect to lose ourselves, completely, in something that’s both fulfilling and of value?Everything is interrupting everything else, all the time. And we keep it this way - make it this way - because we think we like it. It makes us feel important.And perhaps most significantly, it saves us from having to feel, really feel, anything in particular.The consequence? The successful numbing of both our anxiety and our joy.

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Learning with me in the Spring

eggsAs well as writing, teaching is one of my great loves.On Feb 16-17 I'll again be teaching a two-day Coaching to Excellence course in London. A great way to build your capacity to support others (and yourself) in their development. There's also one Feb 2-3 in Madrid.And March 19-22 is the start of the next intake of the year-long Professional Coaching Course (4 sessions over 12 months).Both are works of great love for me. I learn so much, every time, from being involved in them. And we always have some quite wonderful participants, who often go on to do big things with what they've learned. Maybe you'll be one of them.I'm looking forward very much to meeting some of you this year.

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Questions for the new year

You're not separate from the world.Put another way, you're always being brought about by -

the environments you spend time in and how you spend time in them - where you live, what you have around you, the place where you work, how you travel, the pattern of contact with the built world and the natural world

the tools you use and how you use them - smartphones, screens, pen and paper, pots and pans, musical instruments, technology, what you read (and what you don't read), money, the tools of any work you do

the social systems of which you're part - family, society, city, nation - with their rules, expectations, norms, culture,laws, stories about people and about what's possible

who you have around you - your family, friends, colleagues, those who'll tell you what you want to hear, those who'll tell you the truth, those who you can ask for help, those who ask for help from you, communities you're part of, solitude

and the conversations you're part of - what gets spoken about, and what doesn't

And this is one of the many limits of new year's resolutions. They assume that you are an individual shaper of your own world, when it's more the case that who you are, and so much of your way of being in the world, is being brought about by what you're part of.In that light, it might be helpful to go into the new year with some measure of acceptance, that not everything can be changed by you alone.And with some big questions in mind:

What kind of people do I want around me?

What kind of environments?

What kind of community?

Who am I becoming through what I own, and how I use it?

What conversation do I want to be part of?

Who can help me in all this?

And who can I help in return?

 Photo by Lior Solomons-Wise