Asking for it

If your requests to others aren’t resulting in much in the way of action, you might like to look at whether you are actually asking anything at all.

“That office needs tidying”

“The rubbish is collected tomorrow”

“We’re spending more on travel than we should be”

“This is really difficult”

“It’s my birthday next Tuesday”

and even your silence

may seem to you like obvious displays that you need help. But they quite possibly sound nothing of the sort to the people around you.Indirect requests are a manipulation, a demand that others show they love or respect you by being able to work out what you really want. But when you don’t get what you were expecting the result is frustration and resentment. And confusion, for everyone else, when you’ve become annoyed, or angry, or withdrawn – and they don’t understand why.Over time, such vague requests erode the foundation of your relationships even as you’re trying to get people to come in closer.Please, if you want to enrol others in doing something that matters you, ask them directly for what you want.It creates so much more possibility and dignity for all of us.

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Overflowing

As David Steindl-Rast points out, we experience gratitude - we are able to be grateful - when we know our hearts as spilling over with appreciation for all that's around us and within us.And there's no shortage of life to fill us up.We needed do nothing to be given life, air, trees, sky, earth.Other people dreamed up and made and brought us trains and cars, electricity and hot water, paper, pens, computers, steel and wooden beams to build our houses, and interlocking institutions, intentions, people and practices that teach us, care for our health and security, collect taxes, entertain us, feed us, sustain us.We are inheritors of untold riches in the work of novelists, scientists, poets and philosophers. We needed do nothing to find ourselves in a world where all of this surrounds us, always.But when we experience our hearts as spilling over, when our cup is full, we so often try to make the cup bigger. As if, now we're filled, it's necessary to be filled up with more. The bigger the cup gets, the more it needs filling, and the less of the spilling over of gratitude and gratefulness we experience.We replace a life of wonder with a life of grasping. A life of what's here, with a life of what isn't. And a life in which we know ourselves and the world as enough, with a life in which we're always disappointed and despairing, and always wanting more.I'm writing about this today because I notice how often I fall into this way of seeing the world. And it seems to me that my work, perhaps the work of many of us, is to teach ourselves again and again to cultivate in us that which can love the world just as it is. To remember how to be cups that can spill over in response to the world, right at the same time as we strive, in all the ways we do, for there to be more of whatever it is to which we've dedicated ourselves.And what seems wonderful about all this to me is that the more grateful I can be at what is, the more capacity and energy I find in myself to make right what is not.

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Five narratives for leadership

Five narratives for leadership...... a way to get liked, respected, or to get what I want (all variations on an idea that leadership is an opportunity to fulfil my needs)... an application of expertise - being the person who knows what to do, reliably, so that other people can be told what to do too (leading by being ahead of others and having other people be like me)... a way to make sure people are measurably productive at what we've decided is to be done - rewarding with bonuses and prizes, threatening by withholding them, cajoling, pressuring, motivating, engaging, punishing, cascading (all variations on a theme that leadership is about getting others to produce measurable efficiency and productivity)... a way of inviting a new conversation - asking questions that nobody is asking, pointing into collective and individual blindspots, helping others say no as often as yes, welcoming truth and difference, enrolling in compelling stories or counter-stories that allow others to make meaning of what they're doing and free themselves to take action, and in doing so become skilful at coordinating their actions with one another (leadership as laying out a space of possibility by the stories and conversations we weave)... a way to help others marshal their efforts by meeting the realities of the world - learning how long things really take, going with the forces of life rather than fighting against them, finding out how to take care of ourselves so that we are resourceful and creative, giving up doing what's familiar in favour of what's needed now, working with the complexities and unpredictability of big systems rather than trying to pretend the world works like clockwork (leadership as a way of helping others ever more effectively and wisely bring their intentions to the world as it is)... a way of taking up our responsibility towards life - responding with acuity and sensitivity to the unknown and unknowable, taking care of the cross-generational consequence and possibilities of our actions, helping others overcome their fear and frozenness so they can contribute, being wide awake and present in the midst of it all and inviting others to be the same, helping others deepen their understanding of life and flourish within it, nurturing what needs nurture and undoing what needs undoing, practicing radical kindness, acceptance and generosity (leadership as a spiritual path)Are any of these what leadership is to you?And what's the consequence - for you, for others, for those who'll come after you - of the narrative you're currently choosing?

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Help, truthfulness, kindness

One of the questions I always ask my coaching clients is 'who is in this with you?'It's a way of asking three questions at once -

  • Who's helping you with this topic you're working on?
  • Who sees you with enough truthfulness that they can support you in making corrections and adjustments as you go?
  • And who is prepared to see you with the kindness you need to find your own kindness towards yourself?

Help, truthfulness, kindness - three qualities in others that are a vital, life-giving force for us human beings.We need people around us who'll be this way if we're going to flourish.But so often the answer is 'nobody'. There's nobody in this with me. I'm in this on my own. This is how it's meant to be. We don't see how crazily we're trying to be super-heroes, hauling ourselves up in the world with our own muscular strength, propelling ourselves along with inner harshness, and pushing away the heartfelt attempts of others to support us. And that in living this way we live our struggles alone, even when surrounded by others.It takes some softening and a large dose of letting go - of our own self-concepts and our attempts to control life - to let help, truthfulness and kindness in. But when we admit that we're neither omnipotent, nor meant to be, we give ourselves our best chance of taking up our place in the web of support that's around us. And it's a necessary step if we're going to play a part in our own flourishing, and quite possibly in the saving of our very lives.

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The right time to hope

There are a million ways to be. But we hold on tightly to the way of being that is most familiar to us - the one each of us thinks is who we are.And so when we're in trouble - or stressed, or feeling held back by the world or by ourselves, when we're longing, wishing, wanting, despairing - we tend to do more of what we already know to do. What we always do.Even when it hurts us.Even when by doing this, we keep the world the same as it has been for so long.We choose familiarity over our own growth, because familiarity seems to save us from risk. At least we know the world when it's this size, this shape.At least we won't be surprised.And, because of this, just when our habit is to rush to do something, it's often just the right time to wait. When we're certain we have to be certain, the right time to be curious. When we're most familiar with holding back, it can be the time to act. When we're sure we have to be strong, the right time to be vulnerable. When we're most ready to judge can be time to suspend judgement. When we're most harsh on ourselves it's the time, instead, to be exquisitely kind.And, when we're most despairing, it's often just the right time to hope.

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Cell walls

Human beings are not infinitely extensible.We cannot keep on taking on more, saying yes to more, stretching our efforts into the late hours, getting up early, piling it on, squeezing it in, pushing ourselves harder and harder, without soon hitting limits.First, perhaps, we reach the outer limits of what our relationships can take. But we say to ourselves that it's not too bad, that it's just the way life is, and we push on.Later we encounter the limits that our bodies and minds can take, and we return home first ragged and exhausted, then increasingly unwell. We're adaptable though. It doesn't take us long to get used to be stretched as thin as we can go. And before long we carry with us lasting damage from the stress hormones coursing through our bodies.And even though this kind of yes-to-everything is endemic in our culture and in many organisations, it's largely there because we have not yet learned how powerful 'no' can be.'No' is a boundary-making move. It's a declaration that separates this-from-that. It's through 'no' that we distinguish the important from the unimportant, what matters from what does not, and what we care about from what's trivial.We can learn much about this from living systems. In cells, for example, it's the boundary-making properties of the membrane, that which distinguishes inner from outer, that makes the self-producing and life-generating processes of the cell possible.A cell without a cell wall is just a splurge of protoplasm and organelles.And just as there is no outside without inside, there is no proper, genuine, sincere 'yes' upon which we can act without the necessary, powerful boundary-making of 'no'.

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That I would be good

Sometimes we need a simple reminder that behind all our judgements, our self-distrust, our striving to be different from who we are, our perfectionism, our living our lives as a giant and unending self-improvement project, is a basic goodness that we all share. A basic goodness that we quickly forget.This is a topic Alanis Morissette clearly knows about from the inside. Perhaps, today, this song might be just what you were longing to remember.[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMZReI2QrlQ[/embed]

Anxiety and fear aren't the same

Anxiety and fear aren't the same.It's important to see this, because they lead to different places. Anxiety - felt, allowed and responded to - can be an invitation into a new way of relating to the world. But fear so often leads us into actions that cut us off from ourselves, and from others, and from what's called for.It's David Steindl-Rast who makes this distinction in his wonderful interview with Krista Tippett at On Being.Anxiety, he says, is the feeling of being pressed-in by the world. It comes from the linguistic root anguere meaning 'choke' or 'squeeze'. The first experience of it in our lives, the primal experience of anxiety, is that of being born. We all enter the world through a very uncomfortable occurence in which we are squeezed and pushed and all there is to do is go along with it. In a very real sense going with the experience is what makes it possible to be born into life in the first place.And though we're born through an experience of anxiety, Steindl-Rast tells us, at that moment we do it fearlessly. Because fear is exactly what comes when we resist feeling anxiety, when we try to deny it or push it away. Anxiety can bring us into birth, while fear - our denial, our resistance to what we're experiencing - is a different move altogether: life-destroying, a totally different direction for our minds and bodies to take."And that is why", he says, "anxiety is not optional in life. It’s part of life. We come into life through anxiety. And we look at it, and remember it, and say to ourselves, we made it. We got through it. We made it. In fact, the worst anxieties and the worst tight spots in our life, often, years later, when you look back at them, reveal themselves as the beginning of something completely new, a completely new life."And what, he says, makes the biggest difference between anxiety and fear is learning to trust - trusting life, trusting the capacity of our own hearts, trusting others.We live in times that give many of us good cause for anxiety. But instead of collapsing and narrowing ourselves with fear we can choose to feel, and choose to practice trust. One step, and another step. And perhaps this way we can allow to be born in us a capacity to respond to our difficulties without turning away, and a greater ability to live without choking off our own lives or the lives of others.

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Undoing the spiral

We discover early in life what the people around us expect from us. And we find ways of doing just that. Even if we’ve completely misunderstood what was being asked.Meeting these expectations becomes, before long, central to our identity. We know ourselves as this or that kind of person, and then actively work to keep the identity we’ve established going. It feels familiar and comfortable to keep having people around us respond to us in the way to which we’ve become accustomed.I learned early on to be the peacekeeper: the pursuer of harmony, making sure I and everyone around me remained undisturbed and untroubled; listening, supporting, staying quiet, defusing conflict, avoiding anger (my own and other people’s).All these ways of being seemed, unquestionably, to be me.And of course they affected and shaped what was possible in any kind of relationship with me. Peacekeeping can be a great gift to the world, but also stifling and frustrating for others when anything genuine and troubling and sharp needs to be said.Other people around me took on other kinds of identity – the helper, making sure everyone is cared for and nobody is left out; the achiever, getting ahead and making things happen, knowing themselves through the outward signs of success; the challenger, being sure to be in control, using assertiveness and power to have things happen.We have powerful inner forces that keep us inside the bounds we’ve established – among them the inner critic, and shame. For years, if I would be ashamed – mortified – if I said anything that I thought might hurt or upset another. And I’d be eaten up by my inner critic if anyone dared express anger towards me.This is such an important topic because most of the time we can’t tell that this is what we’re doing – manipulating the world so it’s just so – not too hot, not too cold, but just as we expect it to be.And this is why we all need people around us who can see through our strategies and habits, who can see who we are beyond the tight spiral these identities produce in us – a spiral which keeps the horizons of the world smaller than we imagine, and smaller than we need.

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