Things to think

Some things to think that might help us do what we're really here to do:We're here and so soon we're gone.In comparison to geological and even to historical time our individual lives are the briefest flash of energy and vitality, and then we're done. For most of us it's true also that our lives are the briefest flash in our own personal experience - done way before we're ready.We're living longer than anyone previously in history.Which, if we're willing to seize the chance and to take our own development seriously, might just give us the time to develop the intelligence, sensitivity, and breadth of vision to solve the problems we've made for ourselves.We're going to have to get way more intentional about our development than we are now if we want this to happen.The world was here long before each of us arrived, and will be here long after we've left it.Seeing ourselves as part of something much bigger in this way can help us give up our self-aggrandisement and also our self-obsession, both of which keep our concerns and our lives in very narrow bounds.And maybe we can find out how much more there is than living a life in which we get comfortable or which is oriented first around our own likes and dislikes. Instead, seeing ourselves as the inheritors and custodians of a world can support us in having our lives serve everyone who'll come after us.There's nobody coming to save us.Many of us secretly wish for the moment we'll get rescued from all our difficulty and all our worries - by a parent, a lottery win, a leader, a messiah. Our longing has us place wishful thinking above meaningful action. Let's give this up and imagine that we are the ones sent to do what saving can be done.Each of us is an expression of life itself.In the our disorientation and our confusion, it can help to see how each of us, all of us, are an expression of life doing what life does - experimenting, learning, and responding.Seeing ourselves this way opens a huge opportunity to take responsibility. And perhaps to trust ourselves enough that we can participate in our lives rather than fight against them.

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When we don't listen to the response

As well as missing out 'yes' or 'no' at great cost to ourselves and others, we can fall into familiar ways of interpreting what others say when we ask for support.Some of us habitually interpret a yes from someone else as if it were no - leading to endless checking and rechecking, micro-managing and over-supervising, or just doing it ourselves. It erodes trust and soon leads to the people who might have once said a genuine yes holding back.Others habitually take no to mean yes - forcing or cajoling those around us into begrudgingly or resentfully doing what we've asked. This also undoes trust, undermining commitment and the genuine willingness to be of assistance.We make the same mistake with counter-offers, assuming when the other person offers to do something a little different from what we've asked that they mean either no, or that their objections are petty and to be ignored.This is important because when requests, and their responses, are handled with genuineness and attention it's possible to build deep bonds of understanding, fluid, generous support - vital in any relationship, family, or team. And when we wilfully misunderstand what is being said we quickly undo all of this.The antidote to our habitual misunderstanding? Learning to listen to what the other person is actually saying rather than to the familiarity of our own inner story.

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The responses you miss out

There are four kinds of response available to you when someone makes a request, but many of us hardly see that we have only one or two of them in our repertoire.You can:

  • accept (say 'yes' - a promise you're making to do what the person asked)
  • decline (say 'no')
  • make a counter-offer (an offer to do something different from what you were asked, but which you think might still satisfy at least part of the requestor's wishes)
  • promise to respond at a later time (when you don't yet know which of the first three response you'll choose)

So many people become habitual accepters of every request that they have to find sneaky ways out of the bonds of over-commitment they've created. And others habitually decline every request, binding themselves into a world with no support because they're more afraid of losing their freedom by being bound by a promise to others.Every response you choose shapes the identity you're building in your relationships with others. And by habitually missing out some responses you close off many opportunities.Who do you get to be if you only accept? And who do you get to be if you only decline? And which possibilities for relationship and meaningful action would you open up if you started to seriously practice the responses you usually miss out?

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Misunderstanding feedback

'Giving feedback' has become so much a part of what is considered good management that we rarely ask ourselves whether it's effective or question the premise upon which it's based. I think it’s time we did.

The very idea of 'feedback' as a central management practice is drawn from cybernetics. The simplest kind of single-loop cybernetic system is a home thermostat. The thermostat responds to feedback from the room (by measuring the ambient temperature) and turns on heating when required so to warm the air to a comfortable level. When the target is reached, the thermostat turns the heating off. It's a 'single-loop' system because the thermostat can only respond to temperature.

In a double-loop feedback system it's possible to adjust what's measured in order to better address the situation. If you're bringing about the conditions in your room to make it suitable for a dinner party you may need to pay attention to temperature, lighting, the arrangement of furniture, the colour of the table cloth, the number of place settings, the mood and culinary taste of your guests, and the quality of conversation. Single-loop systems such as thermostats can’t do this. But double-loop cybernetic systems allow us in principle to ask 'what is it that's important to measure?'. And, of course, human beings are far more suited to this kind of flexibility than thermostats are.

It’s from this way of looking that we get the contemporary idea that feedback - solicited or not - is what’s most helpful or appropriate for someone to learn to do the right thing. But it is based on something of a questionable premise. Thermostats, even very clever ones, and other cybernetic systems don’t have emotions, or cares, or worries. They do not love, or feel fulfilled or frustrated. They do not have available to them multiple ways to interpret what is said. They do not hurt, and they do not feel shame. They do not misunderstand or see things in a different way. They don’t have an internalised inner critic, nor do they have bodies that are conditioned over years by practice to respond and react in particular ways. They are not in relationship. They do not have to trust in order to be able to do what they do. And they do not have a world of commitments, intentions, relationships, hopes and goals into which the latest temperature data lands.

People have all of these.

When we simply assume that spoken or written feedback, even if carefully given, will correct someone’s actions or help them to learn, we assume they are more like a cybernetic system than they are like a person. Sometimes it can certainly be helpful - when the feedback is in a domain that both giver and receiver care about, given in language that makes sense, and when it meets the hopes and aspirations of the receiver with sensitivity and generosity. But many times we find that the very act of giving feedback wounds or confuses or deflates or misunderstands or treats the other person as if they don’t know what they’re doing. We find that the world of the giver is nothing like the world of the receiver. We find that our best effort to construct feedback according to the ‘rules’ mystifyingly doesn’t bring about what we’re intending. And then we get frustrated or disappointed, and try to give the feedback another way, imagining that if we can come up with a clever technique or way of saying it then our feedback will work.

Perhaps a place to start would be to stop thinking about people as if they were glorified thermostats. In order to do this we'd have to soften our ideas of truth in feedback - specifically the idea that the one who knows the truth gives feedback to the one who must be corrected. Secondly, we could start to think how many ways there are to learn how to do something well than being told how someone else sees it. And third, we could wonder how we can share the riches we do see in a way that gives dignity and maintains connection between both parties - starting by knowing when it’s time to request, demonstrate, reflect, inquire together, make new distinctions in language, show someone how to make good observations for themselves, or simply stay out of the way.

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A great gift

Ten years ago today I left my work in computer software to step onto the path that brought me into coaching, and teaching, and more recently into writing.Many people told me at the time how brave I was, to step so fully into the unknown. But none of it felt at all like bravery to me. I was afraid, confused and mostly very lost, stepping away from a familiar world into one with no shape, no certainty, and little sense of direction. What it did feel like was necessity. Though I had few words for it at the time, I had caught on to the way that my life, and the gifts I had to bring, were being strangled and ossified by the working life I was in the midst of living.During the foggy period of undoing that led to that moment it was my wife who brought me the gift for which I am most grateful. One afternoon, as I was sitting in my attic office, wrestling with my lethargy and disappointment, and trying to complete a software project that was long overdue, she walked in with a cup of tea and said "Do you have any idea how unhappy you are?". And all my defences, all my well-honed ways of looking ok to everyone, all of my fighting against myself unravelled. Her gift? The courage to see beyond the facade of personality and habit, and to speak to the part of me that was in the most pain and most longing to take wing. And once I was prepared to take that part seriously, to take care of it, nothing could be the same again.Ten years on, and in the midst of a life which calls on that once hidden part ever more deeply, the sense of being lost and of being on a path that leads who-knows-where has not lifted much. But I'm often able to understand it in a new way. To see that allowing myself to respond to life, in all of its messy unknowability, rather than fighting it, opens up huge vistas for contribution and connection. And to see that one of the greatest gifts of all can be to find people with enough love, and enough fierceness, to name the possibilities in my one and only life that I am so brilliant at hiding from myself.

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Your glorious ordinariness

There’s a certain harshness in wanting change, transformation, improvement all the time.Does it arise from feeling ashamed at how things are? At ourselves?A response to the gnawing of the inner critic – its demand that we do better every day?Today, can you allow yourself to know your glorious ordinariness? And the wonder of a messy, incomplete, everyday life? To feel the simple weight of the dishes as you wash them? To marvel that you can breathe, move, experience? To gaze into the eyes of your glorious, ordinary loved ones?There’s much to be said for turning our attention away, some of the time, from what we imagine needs to happen and into the exquisite texture of what is here already.

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The life beyond our narrow concerns

We're taught to ask ourselves the question 'What do I want to do with my life?'.But we're much less familiar with asking 'What does my life want to do with me?'.Asking this question requires us to see that there is a something called 'my life' that is beyond the usual narrow, more self-interested concerns that we hold.Beyond ego, beyond all the conditioning that comes from our culture, and beyond our familiar preferences lies something that is always calling to us, if we can quieten ourselves and be still for long enough.Responding to our lives in this way no longer means that things will definitely 'work out' for us in the way we've been taught. But it does offer the possibility of making a bigger contribution to life. One that goes far beyond what's possible when we only look for ways to be liked, to be safe, and to know how things are going to work out.

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Enabling constraints

Often, our attachment to personal freedom becomes its own kind of slavery.

When we demand freedom with no bounds, our endless right to choose, it's incredibly difficult to

enter into a relationshipmake a promise we'll have to keepmake a decision (because any decision closes off options)publish a blog post, letter, report, book

Our demand that we keep everything open closes off the very possibility of taking many kinds of action. In this way freedom becomes its own kind of slavery, a trap disguised as liberation.As a result it's often only through willingly submitting ourselves to particular kinds of limitation that we find any kind of freedom at all. In order to

deeply commit to someonetake a stand on something that's importantfollow a path that takes dedication and focus

we have to discover that the truest freedom sometimes comes in the form of choosing, deliberately, to be bound by enabling constraints.

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The courage to ask

Too often we use feedback as a hidden way of making requests or getting what we want from others and, in the world of organisations in particular, it’s got us into deep water.

Feedback is when we speak with someone in a way that shows them what they can't readily see about themselves. It’s valuable in all of our learning because we don't become skilful at self-correcting until we get to know ourselves from multiple perspectives.

Giving feedback that is clear, coherent, grounded and which serves everybody’s learning is quite a skill. It takes the capacity to describe phenomena accurately in language and to take into account the intentions and the world of the person to whom it is said. It also requires the speaker to understand timing and mood - even the most accurate feedback can be impossible to hear if brought at the wrong moment or in an accusatory or wounding way.

Requests are different. They are a way of speaking with another person in order to bring about an outcome that we wish for by way of their participation or support.

Making powerful requests requires that we are clear about what we want to have happen, and the ability and capacity of the person we’re asking to contribute to it. It takes an existing relationship of sufficient trust and commitment in order for the request to be meaningful.

All too often we give feedback not because we want to help someone else learn but because we want something from them.  But a request disguised as feedback combines the worst of both. The feedback is difficult to hear because it's not oriented towards the other person's learning. And the request is difficult to respond to with sincerity because it's not clearly a request - the listener can't easily determine what's being asked for nor the conditions under which the requestor will be satisfied.

Clumsy feedback when you want someone to do something easily results in confusion, hurt, and resentment. A skilful and thoughtfully made request, on the other hand, invites the other person into a conversation and gives them the dignity of a sincere 'yes' or 'no' in response to what you're asking.

So let's stop saying 'You're not pulling your weight' when we really mean 'Please can you give more attention to the project that's most important to me?'. And let's stop trying to get what we want without the courage to directly ask for it.

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