2nd Birthday

Whether pride is considered to be a vice or a virtue has changed radically over time. Which it is depends largely on what you contrast it with.In the middle ages, in Europe at least, the opposite of pride was humility. It was in this sense that it became known as a vice or a sin - an improper inflation of one's self, a taking up of a position that was reserved only for God.But in ancient Greece pride was held to be the opposite of shame. Pride, in its proper place, was a way of standing tall in one's achievements, in appropriately valuing and honouring what it is that you have to bring to the world. Without pride, understood this way, we collapse into shadows of ourselves, holding back a contribution that, perhaps, nobody else will bring.Today is the second birthday of this project, On Living and Working, and I am proud of what's here so far. Writing these 655 posts has been illuminating, stretching, sometimes frustrating, and a daily practice of deep, heartfelt joy. And, it turns out, writing is a wonderful way to learn.From those of you who have written back to me, or who I have met, I also get a sense of the meaning this work has had for others, and of its practical use in the world. I'm enormously grateful to the many hundreds of you read and who share what's written here with people who are important to you.It's an enormous privilege to find that my voice in the world has an audience to whom it matters.

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Developing others - An opportunity to learn together in May

Change - in an individual life, in a work situation, in wider systems - can often be hard because, as I've argued previously, it usually requires a shift in both interpretation (the way we make sense of the situations we're in) and practice (the recurrent actions we take that build familiarity and habit).All too often, we find ourselves constrained by one or other of these and don't know how to loosen them enough that we can step into bigger possibilities for ourselves. And, all too often, we're called upon to help others and we don't know what to bring them that will help.But it is possible to learn to become skilful in all this. To become someone who can see into the situations of others with sufficient sensitivity, and who can bring fresh possibilities for interpretation and action with sufficient creativity, that something new can begin to open. A new freedom. A new way of making sense. A new kind of skilfulness in responding to the world.This is the topic we'll be taking up in May on the Coaching to Excellence foundation programme I teach a few times a year. We'll be introducing integral coaching - a powerful approach for supporting the development of people in the ways that I've described above. And a topic that's very close to my heart.We'll be in London on May 18-19, and there places still available.All the details are here.

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Poetry to change your life

Can poetry change, or even save, your life?More and more, I think it can, because poets - good ones at least - are doing something vital for us: finding a way of expressing in words that which is, ordinarily, almost impossible to express.Good poetry can awaken us to parts of ourselves that we have long left dormant, or suppressed, or have forgotten. Poetry can give us language to welcome back those parts we deny, or of which we are afraid. And poetry can give us language with which to hope again, to have some kind of faith, especially when we lose our footing and see how shifting, transient, unpredictable, and shaky our lives can be.If you've never encountered poetry this way (and many of us had poetry schooled out of us at school), a very good place to start is Roger Housden's book Ten Poems to Change Your Life. Housden will guide you through poems by Pablo Neruda, Galway Kinnell and, my favourites, Mary Oliver and Derek Walcott. And along the way he'll give you pointers about how to read, about how the poems can help you see your life and your work through new eyes, and about how you can use poetry to see others more fully and with a wider appreciation of the joys and pain of being human.

Images courtesy of Robert Montgomery

Five Books in Five Days (5) Seeing Systems

This week, five books that have the potential to profoundly change the way you understand yourself, others, and life.

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I have mentioned Barry Oshry's book Seeing Systems before, and I'm certain his work deserves a central place in the current Five Books in Five Days.

It's rare to come across an account of the complexities, tangles, suffering and possibilities of organisational life that is written with such directness, wisdom and lightness of touch, and which offers such possibilities for finding a path through.

Seeing Systems asks us to look anew at our participation in organisational life. Most importantly, it asks us to see our difficulties - and in particular our difficultie with others - as a systemic rather than personal issue, and to respond in kind.

And, unlike many other approaches, Oshry does offer us skilful ways to respond. None of them are easy, and none of them are simple. He describes new ways of both interpreting and acting that can cut through our stuckness, resignation and cynicism.

And he outlines the possibility of working with others in ways that are more dignified and truthful than the blaming and self-aggrandising (or self-deprecating) positions we so easily take up.

"We humans are systems creatures." he says. "Our consciousness - how we experience ourselves, others, our systems, and other systems - is shaped by the structure and processes of the systems we are in."

"There is a tendency to resist this notion;" he continues. "We prefer seeing ourselves as captains of our own ships; we prefer the notion that we believe what we believe and think what we think because of who we are, not where we are. I will demonstrate how such thinking is the costly illusion of system blindness - an illusion that results in needless stress, destructive conflicts, broken relationships, missed opportunities, and diminished system effectiveness. And this blindness has its costs in all the systems of our lives - in our families, organisations, nations and ethnic groups."

 I'd recommend it highly for anyone who leads (which, in one way or another, is all of us).

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Five Books in Five Days (4) The Three Marriages

 This week, five books that have the potential to profoundly change the way you understand yourself, others, and life.

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There are three marriages in a human life, says David Whyte in his book of the same name. The first is a marriage - whether we call it marriage or not - to another person. The second is a marriage to a kind of work - whether we choose it, or it chooses us. And the third is the less visible, though no less important, marriage to the strange and shifting something we call our self. Each kind of marriage profoundly shapes us. And each can be a source of great dignity and meaning if we are willing to be patient and curious, and if we pay it the kind of exquisite attention it deserves.

The problem we most quickly get into, in the rush and bustle of our contemporary lives, is seeing each of these marriages as, in some way, at odds with the other. From this vantage point we must struggle always to get balance between competing forces - work is at the expense of the other, the other is at the expense of ourselves, attending to the self is at the expense of both work and relationship. And in this way we add to the sum of our suffering, because the only way out is to try to carve out more time for each, or to let one or more submerge beneath the demands of the other.

But there is another way, says Whyte. To separate the three marriages in order to balance them is to destroy the essence of all of them. Instead, we must lift our eyes to a bigger horizon and start to see how each informs the other.

"I especially want to look at the way that each of these marriages is, at its heart, nonnegotiable..." he says. We have to "start thinking of each marriage conversing with, questioning, or emboldening the other two... We can start to realign our understanding and our efforts away from trading and bartering parts of ourselves as if they were salable commodities and more toward finding a central conversation that can hold all of these three marriages together."

By refusing to divorce work from relationship from self, Whyte describes a path that dignifies and ennobles all three. Filled with examples from his own life and from the life of artists, poets and novelists, Whyte's book is beautiful and poetic from start to finish. And it has the power to radically shift the way each of us thinks about, and relates to, the foundational pillars of a human life.

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Five Books in Five Days (3) In Over Our Heads

This week, five books that have the potential to profoundly change the way you understand yourself, others, and life.

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What does it mean to live in a world in which so much shifts and changes all the time? In which we've undone so many of the old certainties - the certainty of authority, the certainty of religion, the certainty of our family structures, the certainty of morality? For we have, over the past century or so taken many of these apart, in many cases for good reason.

This - the way in which we are, most of us, swimming in a sea of complexity to which we have little capacity to respond skilfully - is the starting question of Robert Kegan's monumental book 'In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life'.

What does it mean that we live in a society in which we are, mostly, cognitively in 'over our heads'? And how should we respond to the onslaught of advice - about parenting, education, management, work, good living - that comes our way in the midst of it?

Kegan, a professor of at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is one of the foremost contemporary thinkers about adult development, and it should be no surprise that his response in this book is strongly developmental. It is not enough, he says, to continue responding to the world from the same frame or stock of interpretations upon which we currently rely. Bigger, more inclusive, more complex interpretations are necessary, and these always require us to develop the complexity and nuance and reach of our thinking. All of which, he argues, is a developmental task.

Kegan lays out with clarity and precision the sequential developmental stages available to all of us, with many examples and much grounded, rigorous research. And he invites us into a bold project - living and working in a way that encourages us to deepen and broaden the complexity of our minds, our capacity to respond to uncertainty, and to paradox, and to the shifting, fluid nature of our times.

Mostly, he says, we're not addressing this in our education system (which seems bent on teaching children how to pass tests but not how to learn, how to produce but not how to think or be creative), in our management and leadership education (which is fixated on behaviours rather than on developing complexity and responsiveness of thinking and action), in politics, and in how we parent. And, while he can offer no simple or easy path for addressing all this, he has much to show us that illuminates the possibility of cultivating a deeper, more skilful, more humane way of responding to the world.

A rigorous, stretching read, blending developmental psychology and philosophy, with acute observation about our society and what ails us, I think this book is essential reading for anyone who wants a more skilful, subtle response to the world than the latest fad or management-parenting-leadership technique. And vital for any of us who want to take more responsibility for the world in which we act, whether close in or in the leadership of bigger communities and organisations.

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Five Books in Five Days (2) The Great Work of Your Life

This week, five books that have the potential to profoundly change the way you understand yourself, others, and life.

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'Discover your true purpose' they tell me, 'and everything will be well. A life of effortless ease, happiness, and joy beckons.'Some go further and include the promises of financial reward and security too.I've long thought such promises to be rather empty and hollow. Yes, sometimes it works out this way for people. But often when we find something approximating a 'purpose' that moves us, we find it takes us away from any kind of easy certainty. It might have us give up possessions, relationships, and a tried and trusted sense of personal identity in order to respond to something new and alive.More often, our attempts to work out what kind of purpose might fit us turn up little of note. We draw on the same old stock of possibilities handed to us by our families or education, and nothing seems to fit. In this case, we're struggling because in a way we have it the wrong way around. We're approaching 'purpose' as a way of getting what we want from life - an easy life, a happy life, a secure life - rather than asking what life wants from us. It's when we turn towards life this way that it becomes possible, for the first time, to listen for a future that meets our uniqueness, responds in a more open and wholehearted way towards the world, and gives us a chance to contribute.'Purpose', then, or 'calling', becomes an opportunity to discover what the world is asking for, and mustering a suitably creative and life-giving response. Stephen Cope's book 'The Great Work of Your Life' is a practical guide to all of this, in particular to what it takes to create the conditions in life from which a calling or purpose can be heard and responded to. The conditions in which we can respond to our deep desires and fears. The conditions in which we learn, as Thomas Merton so eloquently put it, that holding back what is in us ultimately destroys us; and that bringing forth what is within us has the capacity to save, in many profound ways, our lives.The book is filled with examples of both well-known and more ordinary people who found themselves called to do something beyond their original conception of life, and many suggestions for reflection and practice. And it's well placed for anyone who is opening to the idea that there's something profound and important worth doing with our lives, beyond the narrowly conventional ways we've defined ourselves.

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Five books in five days (1) How We Are

This week, five books that have the potential to profoundly change the way you understand yourself, others, and life.

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"You keep saming when you ought to be changing"Lee Hazlewood, 'These Boots Are Made for Walkin'

We live our lives by treading beaten paths, hardly aware of how we are held the same by the bodily force of habit, the stories we tell about ourselves, the familiarity of our possessions and houses and workspaces, and the expectations of those near to us.Vincent Deary's wonderful book, How We Are, charts this territory with lucidity, clarity, and humour.

"We live in small worlds..." he says, "... and, usually, we prefer to maintain ourselves in the status quo, in comfort and predictable ease. It takes a lot to get us out of that - a compelling call, an overwhelming imperative. Or maybe we were pushed. But sometimes it happens."

"We are creatures of habit," he continues, "and we live in worlds small enough for us to come to know their ways and to establish familiar ways within them. Unless we are uneasy, unless something disturbs us from within or without, we tend to work to keep things the way they are."

The first of a promised trilogy, How We Are charts the many ways in which we keep our lives within familiar constraints, and offers a path for opening and responding to the call of a bigger world.It is enormously valuable reading for anyone who wants to understand themselves - and others - with increased insight and humanity. And a huge gift for any of us who want to chart a course into our own futures with more depth and responsiveness to life than offered by the slew of technique-oriented, brain-obsessed self-development books that fill the market.

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We deserve better

And so the skilful move is to find a way to meet what the world is calling for, and what the world is offering you, with interpretations that are big enough, and generous enough. It's each of our responsibility to find narratives, and the practices that go with them, that allow us to step forward and contribute.Anything less - stories about yourself that are too small, or too cynical - has you hold back what only you can bring.The world, and the rest of us, deserve much better than that.

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The truth in our practices

Stepping into a new narrative for yourself - a new interpretation of events that can be more truthful and open a bigger space of possibility - requires, as I’ve written here and here in recent days, that you also take on practice.

It’s the combination of a story that has explanatory power and the skilfulness to enact it that brings about a new world to inhabit.

It can easily look as if the necessary first step is the new story - a new way of explaining things. But it’s equally the case that it’s the taking on of new practices that can open up a world and allow you to discover new kinds of truth within it.

As long as you’re sure that someone else won’t listen to you, you’re silent around them. But it may be your very remaining silent that's giving you grounds for seeing things this way. How much chance does she have to listen while you, certain of your story, are not speaking up?

As long as you’re convinced that your work isn’t worth much, you hold back, speak hesitantly, make tentative offers to others that they, in turn, respond to without much enthusiasm. When you act this way, how much opportunity does the world have to respond to what you have to bring?

As long as you’re certain that the world is a dangerous, unforgiving place you triple lock your door and hide fearfully behind it. From behind your closed door you deny yourself the possibility of experiencing the world as it is. How can you possibly find out, with this set of practices, how different the world might be from the way you imagine it?

Our stories and interpretations are like that. It’s difficult to imagine our way out of them as long as we are actively sustaining them through the way we speak, listen, and act.

Often, then, the skilful move is to begin by taking on new practices that have the possibility of bringing a about a new and more truthful story. Start to experiment with speaking up. See what happens as you make bolder, more generous, more confident offers. Open the doors and begin to step outside to find out what the world is actually like.

As your skill in each of these deepens, your understanding of the world deepens too.

Find out the worlds that come into being as you practice speaking out, expressing yourself, participating in community, extending help to others, creating, being very still, listening, stretching, standing tall, offering, asking, declaring, exercising, dancing, thinking clearly, teaching, belonging...

In each case it’s the new practice that brings you into new encounter with the world. And it’s from here, if you’re prepared to keep going, that a whole new understanding can emerge.

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