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.
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.
Photography by Lior Solomons-Wise
The peril of having one story
The problem with being sure of your story - the one you have that explains to you who you are, who other people are, and what's happening - is what is inevitably left out.Your confusion, longing, terrified waking in the quiet hours of the night, your disorientation -
A sign that it's all over, and that you're lost?
An inevitable part of the human condition (experienced by many more of us than will ever let on)?
The birth-pangs of something new? Some new way of living, thinking and relating that is emerging into life?
Each story about what you're experiencing leads to a different place, to different possibilities.Each story calls on a different way of relating to yourself and others.Each story is sustained by different practices (what you're doing repeatedly in your actions, your thinking that keeps it going).And none of them is ever the whole story.Part of the practice of a life fully lived - and leadership well done - is the practice of finding new ways of telling what we're sure we've already understood.
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]
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.
We don't do introspection
"We don't do introspection", they said to me. "None of this fluffy, self-indulgent, navel-gazing here", they continued. "We do action."
Of course. If you're going to lead as they were, in a global organisation, then right action is critical. But what they meant by "we don't do introspection" was "we aren't prepared to look at ourselves".
If they had an inkling, and most of us do not, of how much their actions were being shaped, out of their view, by
their personal preferences,by their fears,by years of habit,by their avoidance of reminders of childhood experiences (mostly shame),by the expectations their parents handed them,by their inner critic,by their longing to be appreciated, liked, respected, feared, in control
then they would perhaps have taken introspection or some rigorous self-observation more seriously. They would have been brave enough not just to look at their actions, but to look upstream at what was giving rise to them.
But they didn't.
They had asked for help because they'd been amazingly effective in taking action - action that had landed them and their organisation in deep trouble.
And now they were trying to get out, with the same excuses, and by doing more of what had got them into difficulty in the first place.
Crazy, and sadly all too common.
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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.
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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Tight spirals
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.We lead this way. We relate this way.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.
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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