Just like me

When you’re irritated or annoyed with someone for the way they’re being, you may think “I would never be like that”.But the intensity of your irritation could be a sign that you’re experiencing a shadow side of yourself – a part of you, seen reflected in them, that you deny and which you do your best to keep out of view.Pushing the other person away is an attempt to push away the part of yourself you’d rather not see.And instead of believing all your judgements, you could start to recognise that what you’re seeing in them is, indeed, just like you. And then you have the possibility of reaching out to them with compassion rather than hostility, learning more about yourself, and healing what’s pushing the two of you apart.

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Planetary Bodies

Finding out how much you're shaped by the others who are around you could easily be a cause for resignation.After all, if it's not all down to you, what's the point of taking any responsibility for what you do? From here it's all too easy to attribute everything that happens to 'the system' or 'the culture'.But that would be too narrow a position to take, by far. Because - even in a complex situation such as an organisation, or a community, or a family - everyone is bringing everyone into being. Like the bodies in a planetary system, each of us is not only subject to the pull and push of others, but is an active part of bringing ourselves and others into our orbits around one another. We don't have unlimited power to shape what happens around us, but we're not at all powerless either.This requires us to take more responsibility, not less. To see change for the better as the result of many small acts of choice - choices that can only start with each of us.And this is why attending to our development is so important. Because development always includes learning to move from reacting to responding - seeing through our automaticity and becoming more able to be the authors of what we do as the world presents itself to us.

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Shaping One Another

We'd had a testy exchange earlier in the week and by the time we met, I was sure that he really had it in for me.Except, he quite probably didn't. But I was quite sure of how he was going to be in this interaction, and who I was in response. And so I was careful, detached, defensive, and withholding of myself. And the more I was that way with him, the more his sense of distrust and discomfort with me was amplified. Pretty soon we were both spinning away from one another in a spiral of distance and mutual recrimination.And what's startling about this is not, perhaps, the obvious point that my story about all this shaped how I was with him. It's that my story about him also profoundly affected how he was with me.  We don't just shape ourselves with the stories we tell ourselves. We shape one another, bringing each other forth even when we might think our stories and interpretations are private and personal.Seeing this opens up enormous possibilities.Firstly, and most immediately, that I might actively work to see what interpretation I'm bringing to people and situations, and believe my own stories less readily.And, secondly, we might start to question the highly individualistic accounts we have about what happens in our organisations. Because if the way he is with me is shaped by my stories, how much more so is the way we all are in our work shaped not just by our own stories but by the stories of all those we are around.In our organisations, and in our communities, we are all bringing one another into being. This renders many of our simplistic cause-and-effect accounts of performance and outcome very shaky indeed. And it ought to have us deeply question the way we give feedback, hold one another accountable, carry out performance reviews, explain success and failure, and blame others when things don't go the way we'd hoped.

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On thinking

I can think. I really can.I can think long, and hard, and deeply, about complex problems.And because I can do it well, I often live as if that's all there is to do in the world. To think, and to solve, and to work it out. As if this is what I'm here for.It's got me a long way. It brings many blessings. But it also creates great difficulty.When I live in this way, I have a propensity to believe the truth of my thinking, far beyond its actual truthfulness. I try to understand that which cannot be understood in this way - life, or relationships, or what I'm here to do. I think myself away from situations where what's called for is stepping further in. I seal myself away from the world with a shield of thought. And I judge myself mercilessly for not yet having thought enough or well-enough.When I live this way, my mind is never still. There is little room for mystery, awe, and wonder. I'm anxious (because no amount of thinking is ever enough). And because of this I'm working, hard, all the time, to work it all out.And what gets forgotten is that there are other kinds of wisdom upon which I can call. The wisdom of others. The wisdom of my heart. The wisdom of my body. The wisdom of breath. The wisdom of not-knowing, and of un-knowing. The wisdom that can only come from stillness.And my work, if I am to be fully in life, is letting go enough, surrendering enough, opening enough to let these other kinds of wisdom in.

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Learning to walk

What it takes to learn to walk:

Having things around us to hold onto - sofas, chairs, people's legsExperimenting - learning by doing rather than by thinking it throughPeople to model walking for usPeople to applaud us, encourage us onPeople who know what we're working on and are willing to let it happenFallingPeople who are willing to let us fallSpaces that will allow us to fallAllowing ourselves to be clumsyGentleness with ourselvesSufficient timeCaring enough about it to stay at itOur willingness to open to a new and unknown world

How rarely we allow our learning to be this way. Increasingly, and particularly in our organisations, we want learning to be quick, simple, obvious, least-effort, fail-safe, planned from end to end. We want to not make mistakes, not look stupid, not expose ourselves. We want immediate, measurable results.We want to not be troubled by what and how we learn.We want to know where we're going before we set off.We don't want to be surprised.We apply these criteria even to what's most rewarding, most meaningful, and most pragmatically useful to us.And even when it's quite the opposite of what's actually, most practically, called for.

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On love

Mostly we experience ourselves as separate from one another.We experience the way our bodies are separated from one another in space, the way our personal life history is distinct from that of others, and the apparent hiddenness of our inner world. And we conclude that in some fundamental sense the distance between us and others is unbridgeable, that we are alone.And it’s no wonder, because as well as what we see, the public discourse of the past 300 years or so has encouraged us to relate to life in this way. Rene Descartes‘ move to portray us as isolated individual minds, separated from everything else, plays a big part in this. And our increasingly individualistic political and economic narratives have split from one another still further.But when we look this way we’re looking only at the results of something, not the something itself that underlies it all. We take our separate and individual bodies as proof of our separateness, but we are looking too far ‘downstream’ as it were.If we were to look further upstream we’d see not just our separateness but an endless process of becoming that produces it all.We’d see the whole of human life renewing itself through the biological processes of conception and birth, each new generation of human beings emerging from the bodies of those of us already here. And we’d see human life becoming itself through language, culture, conversations and ideas, through the grand stories and narratives that shape us even as we shape them.Looking downstream we see our physical separateness. Looking upstream we see that we are expressions of a unified and ceaseless process of becoming that happens through us and because of us, and that produces all of human life.Sometimes we gaze at others and realise this. We see them not as separate, but as an expression of the selfsame life that we are. We realise that ‘they’ are really another aspect of that which makes us ‘ourselves’.And this, I think, is what we call love.

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Getting unstuck, and learning together

Our repetitive, habitual patterns – and our ability to create them – can be great supports in our lives. Who would want to have to reinvent every day the familiar paths we rely upon to get us up, dressed and fed? Or those that support us in navigating our way through our houses and cities, or in driving our cars? Or those that help us relate to the people closest to us?And yet there are times when our patterns become unwanted, because we’ve outgrown them or because they no longer serve the situations in which we find ourselves. Many of the changes we encounter in life – entering or ending a relationship, becoming a parent, losing a loved one, a promotion at work, changing career, stepping into a leadership role, growing from childhood to adulthood – require us to be able to identify the patterns that are no longer supporting us and let them drop away so that something new can be learned.But this can be far from easy. Often we don’t know our patterns well enough to be able to work with them. And even if we know them, we don’t always know what to do in order to break free.I'll be taking up this topic, as well as introducing integral development coaching, at a quarterly Coaching Round Table event in London on Sunday 22nd November, which is open to everyone. We’ll explore coaching in the morning, and in the afternoon we'll study the patterns we get stuck in from the point of view of the body, the imagination, and the narratives in which we live. You’ll have an opportunity to explore your own patterns, and to receive and give help to others in theirs. And together we'll see what new new ways we can invent of stepping into bigger possibilities for ourselves.I'm also teaching a two-day Coaching to Excellence programme in London on 7th and 8th December. It's suitable if you're experienced in coaching others or new to this work. We'll study together what it is to be a human being, how development comes about, and how we can participate more fully in our own lives and in the lives of others. And we'll learn ways of supporting ourselves and others to respond with wisdom and skilfulness to the wide world that presents itself to us.It's been very meaningful for me to meet many of you who read my work here at workshops and courses like this. Perhaps you'll think of joining us this time.

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Doing it by half

Maybe it should be no surprise to me by now, but I'm finding out anew what crazy standards my inner critic has, and how it holds me to them.For as long as I can remember, I've finished each working day with a queasy feeling of disappointment. Each day. And when I look closely, it's apparent to me that it's because I'm full of judgement about what's not done, how much more I could have done, and how much more I should have done. I can easily live under the spell of this - the curse of this - convinced that it is the nature of things for me to perpetually fall short.Perhaps you can imagine - perhaps you know from your own experience - what effect the constant comparison with an unreachable standard does to a person. At most intense it's crushing, diminishing. But even without such intensity it's like a gradual greying of life. There is little space for joy, abandon, deep connection or creativity when you're caught in a vice.It's not been easy for me to spot this. It's the nature of the critic to hide itself, to do whatever it can to present its standards and assessments as a simple feature of the world itself. But they're not. They're invented, or inherited, and either way they're open to question. I'm fortunate enough to have people who care for me enough to ask me to look at the truth of my own capacity rather than pushing all the time. And when do I look at myself this way, I see that the standard and what can be done by me in reality are off by a factor of about two.In other words, I can do about half of what the standards of the critic demand. Half of what I expect to do. Half of what I take to be the barely acceptable minimum.And seeing this is a huge liberation.When I tell the truth - I can do half - I free myself to put down an enormous burden of unkindness, and to actually do what I can do. And, in the truthfulness, my actions are so much less constricted, so much more natural, and so much more responsive to what's around me.And though I really can do only half, when I'm doing in order to respond to the world rather than to settle an implacable inner task-master, my goodness how much more appropriate and creative is the doing that I get to do.

Waking or Sleeping?

Both attention and absorption can be cultivated with practice.Absorption is not so difficult. We are presented with opportunities to practice it at every turn. Entire industries are devoted to selling us an easy, shallow kind of distraction that numbs us, keeps us from ourselves, throws us into self-judgement and comparison with others, and keeps us buying.But attention - learning to pay sustained, close, awake attention to life - is more tricky and troublesome, and it's perhaps for this reason that it's more marginal in our culture.It can be difficult to practice being awake in life because almost everything that could wake us can also be a path for going to sleep. The revolutionary success of mobile devices such as smartphones, for example, with their unparalleled capacity to connect us to the world, may be in large part attributable to their equal capacity to soothe us, to lull us into a distracted sense of busyness, being needed, and being entertained.And this dual possibility of waking or turning away is inherent even the rich, deep mindfulness practices developed in many spiritual traditions. These practices, increasingly fashionable in the corporate world, could teach us to be extraordinarily attentive and sensitive to what's around us, but are frequently presented as new methods for conforming to the status quo without being too troubled by it.Practice mindfulness and feel calm. Practice mindfulness and find tranquility. Practice mindfulness and you'll find your stressful job easier to bear. Practice mindfulness and you'll fit in to where you are with less self-judgement and less complaining. Practice mindfulness and you'll be less trouble. Practice mindfulness and you'll be tranquil enough not to ask difficult questions. Practice mindfulness, and go to sleep to yourself.Far less often do we see that mindfulness practices - a deep, rich, wide-open invitation into life - can help us develop deeper contact with our inner sense of justice and compassion. Rarely are we invited to see how this waking up to ourselves can lead us into to exactly the kind of trouble the world needs as we find ourselves disturbed, shaken, and enlivened by our attentive contact with life.As we learn to pay more sustained, awake attention to what's happening, we can find ourselves cultivating our capacity to speak up, to ask for what what we and others need, to stay in relationship as we explore deep and longstanding difficulties and disagreements, to stand out as different, to act on what's called for rather than just what we like or what's familiar, and to advocate on behalf of a life that's bigger than our own personal concerns.Both attention (waking up) and absorption (going to sleep) can be cultivated with practice.Which do you think we should choose?

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Absorption and Attention

This morning, on my way home, I walk past a book table outside a local charity shop. One of the books has blown to the ground and only when I've walked some distance, when I'm close to my front door, does it occur to me how easily I could have picked it up and restored it to its place.A small matter, perhaps, but one that's emblematic of a bigger concern: the actions that are denied to me when absorbed in something and not paying attention to the world around me. My absorption in thought blinds me what's called for, a simple opportunity to participate in a small kindness, and it gets me wondering about everything else I miss.I notice that I often walk a line between absorption and attention and that while both are necessary (absorption for the effortless skilfulness of dealing with everyday things, attention for responding in fresh ways to people and situations) absorption is much easier. It's familiar, comforting. It calms me. It takes me away from what's difficult. And it allows me to miss the world.When I'm absorbed I don't just miss books on the floor. I miss people. I'm blinded to their difficulty as well as their joys. And just like with the book, I miss the opportunity to contribute, to do what's called for, to be of use.I notice how absorption can be a purposeful act of turning away. I easily become absorbed, for example, after seeing distressing images on the news, or walking past people sleeping on the street, or when I know I've wronged someone.And so even if absorption in activity or in thought is a necessary and often sustaining part of being human, it can also be a way of being asleep in life.And it is why paying attention is so much more difficult. To pay attention I must allow myself to be confronted by the world. I have to acknowledge what's happening around me and within me. I have to allow myself to feel troubled. And I'm called to respond - to suffering, to difficulty, to books lying on the floor.And in this way actively cultivating and practicing attention, being awake, is a moral question.Because without attention I - we - slip into the easy thrum of habit and away from taking sufficient care of the world.

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