Our fear of freedom is a profound source of difficulty in our organisations.We're afraid of taking up our own freedom, because with freedom comes risk, and with freedom comes responsibility.If I speak up, create something new, make a dent in things, allow my feelings to show, do what matters, say no to something, or question a process, person or idea... then who knows what might happen? I might inspire someone, influence a whole system, do something that really matters, fail, be embarrassed. I might be loved, adulated, judged, hated, despised or - for some of us worst of all - not noticed at all.No, better not to take up our own freedom.It's way too risky.And we're afraid of others taking up their freedom, because we fear our own wishes will be thwarted or we'll be ashamed.If others are free then I might get questioned, I may lose my sense of control, I may get judged, my ideas might be sidelined, I might be less powerful. I might feel vulnerable, afraid, surprised, opened. I might find out I don't know as much as I thought I knew. I might find a whole new path opening up before me, or end up somewhere quite different from where I expected.No, better not to allow others to take up their freedom.And so we curtail our liberty in every direction. We become the inventors of and followers of rules that don't serve us. We declare boundaries where none are needed, or fail to declare them when they could help. We stay small, in predictable bounds. We bury ourselves in email. We invent processes that keep us feeling safe and secure. We try to fit in at the expense of standing out. We do things because they're 'best practice' but not because they help. And we do what we can to avoid making a ruckus, inviting trouble, or allowing ourselves or others to shine.It's tiring. It leaves us diminished and scattered and at odds with our own aliveness.But at least it's safe.Or so it seems.
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We’ve made emotions, the inner critic, and what we feel in our bodies undiscussable in most organisations, perhaps especially for those with the most power and hence the most to lose.And the effects are far-reaching.Because without an honest conversation about our fear and vulnerability, and in the midst of the myth of the heroic, independently capable leader, we’ve rendered ourselves mute on one of the most important conversations we could be having: our first-hand account of what makes it so difficult, so often, to tell the truth. And what could help us.We become united in our silence.The consequences go far beyond momentary inconvenience, or the conversation you’re avoiding about a colleague’s performance. Because when we’re unable to tell truth, and tolerate doing so however it feels, we turn away from each other and from our capacity to act.In the spaces left by our silence, the seeds of great difficulty can grow, unrestrained – the seeds of organisational malpractice, self-interest, and denial. And soon, they grow in our society too, even though many of us have forgotten that our work and society are not separate from one another.How many more economic, ethical, and environmental crises are we willing to have our organisations be part of? How long before we discover our urgent need to turn to one another about all this, and speak up about what we see in ourselves that has us hold back?
At every moment, we stand poised at a threshold, with a choice to make.Do we choose life, awakeness, and responsibility for ourselves and those around us?Or do we choose to be asleep, on automatic pilot, reacting out of habit, fear, familiarity?Neither path is easy.And it's certainly not always straightforward to tell which is which.The path of habit might give us reassurance, comfort, and apparent stability at the cost of our integrity and the longing of our hearts.The path of awakeness might take us far from home before it brings us back again. We might have to face the mind-boggling consequences of our own aliveness. And we might have to experience uncertainty, confusion, shame, great joy, and the terrible and amazing wonder of writing our own stories.Many times, despite our intentions, we will find ourselves choosing the path that we did not intend to choose, which always leads to another choice. Turn towards ourselves with kindness or harshness? Own up to our own responsibility, or pretend it's nothing to do with us?And all the way through we have to face that what happens in our lives has less to do with which path we've chosen than we'd like to think. The path of responsibility is no more certain to lead to riches, success, or security than the path of being asleep.No, which path we choose is little to do with how life will turn out for us, and much to do with what kind of person each of us gets to be. And that is one of the aspects of being a human being in which we all get to have a say.
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Time and again, we human beings have had to find out that what we took to be most secure and most solid, was nothing of the sort.We put down roots, build houses of bricks and mortar, make plans for ourselves. And then, perhaps, we find them swept away in a storm or flood, in a war or earthquake, in political or economic upheaval, in illness or accident, in the ever surprising turns of life.And sometimes we realise this is how things are for long enough that we remember to turn towards the people around us, our travelling companions on this most audacious and risky of journeys, and appreciate their beauty and magnificence, their sadness and their love, and are able to just be with them for a while.
In the ancient Jewish tradition, people are thought of as having two primary orientations to the world – an inclination towards good (yetzer hatov) and an inclination towards evil (yetzer harah).The inclination towards good draws us out of ourselves towards what is most compassionate and most principled. And the inclination towards evil draws us towards our most self-centred interests, from which we care only for ourselves and not for others or the world.Surely, in this way of thinking, the inclination towards good is itself good and should be cultivated, and the inclination towards evil is bad and should be extinguished? No, say the rabbis, they are both good, and both necessary.How can this be?With only the inclination to good we risk spending all our time basking in the wonder and awe of life. Many possibilities for action are denied to us, because they cannot beknown to have positive outcomes. The inclination to good, on its own, is noble but paralysed, unable to decide what to do when uncertain about consequences, when the world in all its complexity and unknowability becomes apparent.And so we need the inclination to evil also. Given free rein, it dooms us to a life of self-centredness, of action purely for our own gain. But without it, say the rabbis, nobody would create anything. We would not build houses, bring children into the world, nor do the difficult and creative work of shaping the world around us. The inclination to evil, with its indignation and rage and cunning and huge creativity is what brings us into purposeful action.Denying either side leads to trouble. It takes both inclinations in a constant dynamic tension to have us act in the most human, and most humane ways.And this is the foundational task facing each of us if we want to act with integrity in the world: we must find a way of knowing ourselves fully so that we leave nothing of ourselves out. We have to stop denying and pushing away the parts of ourselves that we don’t understand, or don’t like so much. We have to take our fear and confusion as seriously as our hope and our joy. We have to stop pretending to have it all together.Integrity is exactly that – integrating all of it. When we bring our hope and our fear, our nobility and selfishness, our love and our disdain, our serious adulthood and playful childishness, our light and our darkness, each informs and shapes the other in a constant dance of opposites. And this is what brings us into creative and purposeful and appropriate action in the complexity of the world.
Everything I write about here is, in a very direct way, connected with one of my great loves - supporting the enduring growth and development of people.Growth in this case means something more ambitious than getting happier, or getting what we want. Instead it's being able to ever more skilfully turn towards the suffering and difficulty in the world with both creativity and compassion, and contribute to reducing it.And there is so much difficulty we face. Some of it is reflected in the large scale issues that we see on the news, but much of it is of a more ordinary, close-in, prosaic kind - in our workplaces and in our homes.Wouldn't it be wonderful to be someone who could make a contribution to all that, and find meaning and fulfilment in doing so?That's what we'll be studying and practising together on the two-day 
Money is rarely just money to us. Beyond being a means of exchange of goods or services, it's also wrapped up with meaning - written through with stories and symbolism, emotions, hopes, dreams, possibilities and, often, fears.And the story about money within which each of us lives profoundly shapes our lives, given that it is an inescapable feature of the way human culture has developed.A few thoughts about what money can be:
How much I am learning, and have yet to learn about, love.How much becomes possible when I see the joy and difficulty of my love and longing for others as well as my halting, sometimes conflicted love of myself, as an expression of a much bigger love - life's love for itself.And how life-giving to remember that very love's presence in the warmth of the sun, in the grey sky, in the call of a bird, in the clamour of the street, in the soft star-shine, in the cutlery on the table and the singing kettle and the pile of dishes, in the slide of pen on page, and in embraces, and in silence, and in separation and rage and illness and disappointment and despair and grieving.When I know love this way I am no longer afraid of isolation because I see even that as a way I am always part of everything, and everything, always, a part of me.
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