There are parts of us we know well - those that are in close - and parts of ourselves we know less well - the more hidden, invisible parts. Sometimes, simply giving a part its appropriate name allows us to see it and to interact with it more skilfully. The inner critic is one such part. Seeing it, naming it, entering into a different kind of relationship and conversation with it - all of these can be powerful moves in having it take up a more helpful and life-giving place in the constellation of entities each of us calls 'I'.But there are also parts of each of us that we have disowned or split off and that we barely see as part of ourselves at all. These may be parts of ourselves that we dislike, or judge, or abhor. Or they can parts we long for, but do not feel are available or appropriate for us. But parts of us they are, and since we can't bear to identify our experience of them with ourselves, we readily project them into others.So often, when we find ourselves disliking other people, when we get irritated by them, feel judgment or scorn or disdain or even hate towards them, we're seeing in them what we most dislike or scorn or are irritated about in ourselves. A simple way of saying this is that what we encounter in them reminds us so strongly of what we're trying to get away from in ourselves, that we try get away from it in them too.The very same process can also be in play with those we are drawn to, admire, or put on a pedestal. In this case perhaps we're seeing in the other, first, a reminder of split-off parts of ourselves that we deeply long to be reunited with but do not consciously know as our own. We feel drawn to the other person, or good about ourselves around them, precisely because of the feeling of wholeness and re-unification it brings about it in us.Perhaps it becomes obvious when described this way that the work for us to do with people who irritate us is not to try to change them (which in any case does not address the primary source of our irritation or anger or frustration) but to find out what it is about ourselves that we dislike so much and work with some effort and diligence to understand, turn towards, and accept it.And with people we love and admire the inner work for us to do is much the same if we want to love and admire them for who they are rather than because a hole or an emptiness or a longing gets filled when we're around them.Then, we can find, it's more and more possible to be around a wider range of people with openness and warmth and genuine regard. And it's also more possible to be close and compassionate with those we love most, who are so often the very people with whom we have the most difficulty because it's in them we find parts of ourselves most readily reflected.
A quiet and genuine joy
I remember the moment with gratitude, though it was tough at the time."You have no idea how self-judgemental you are", Andy had said to me. And it had cut like a knife. But he was right. I was thirty-five years old and had over many years become seasoned to the harshness of the world.I didn't know it as harshness to be so filled with self-doubt and such worry about how I was doing all the time. It was just the way the world was. Unquestionable. Invisible. And I had no idea that it wasn't so much the world that was harsh but my own inner experience.Andy's carefully timed observation was one of those moments when what had been in the background for so long came crashing into the foreground - when what I had been swimming in for so long was made apparent to me.It was a doorway into a profoundly new world in which I began to see that most of what I thought others were thinking about me was actually what I was thinking about myself. And that I no longer had to believe everything I thought so completely.Eleven years later, I'm still sometimes out-foxed by the shape-shifting cleverness of my inner critic. But I am more often, and more quickly, able to spot it and see through its ways of holding me back and of pulling me apart.And, more and more, in the space that envelops me when it steps aside, I'm able to feel a quiet and genuine kind of joy.
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The four of you
When you're talking with another person, remember that there are always more than two of you present.At the very least there's you, and them, and your inner-critic and their inner-critic.Whatever the two of you are visibly up to, there's an often hidden dynamic between the two inner-critics (who work hard to keep themselves invisible) as they jostle to keep you in line, watch out for attacks or supposed attacks from the other, spur you into defending yourself (often times when no defence is called for), have you be insistent or rigid or judging or withdrawn.And each critic spurs the other on, inventing slights and hurts, and anticipating what's it imagines is yet to come.All of this is one reason why you can sometimes look back on a conversation with bemusement and confusion. 'What on earth happened there?' you ask yourself. 'I thought we were only talking about this morning's meeting, but now I feel hurt and uncertain, and so does she'.One way to help yourself and others is to spot all of this and give name to it, at first to yourself. Learn the ways it shows up and what it gets up to when your attention is elsewhere.And then, over time, bring the existence of the critic and all its manifestations into conversation. This takes courage and openness. But bringing the inner critic out of its hiding place allows it to be seen and talked about, and responded to, and lessens its power to manipulate behind the scenes.Your inner world is always making itself known in the outer world, whether you like it or not, and it's true for everyone else too. The more you can give name to, and the more you can bring it forward from its otherwise invisible background, the more chance you'll have of working with it in service of you and everyone around you.
Yes to what?
Many of us will say yes to anything.If you observe closely for a while, you'll discover that this is effectively a yes to nothing. Wrung out and over-extended, you find yourself in a half-hearted, resentful relationship with others and eventually with life itself. And although it might look to you like you're only trying to help, it turns out that you're serving your own sense of being needed more than really helping anyone.The antidote to all of this is neither giving up nor retreating from the world. It's finding a genuine, wholehearted yes which allows you to discriminate; a yes that goes beyond looking good, getting ahead, or feeling better about yourself; a yes which allows you to genuinely serve; a yes that at last allows some things to be more important than others.Commit to a yes that comes from your deepest principles, your integrity, and your heartfelt longing to contribute to something bigger than yourself, and you'll find that a new form of clarity emerges. Now it's possible to respond with discernment, to say yes over and over again in a way that serves everything and everybody. To care for yourself and for others. And to say no, to what was never yours to do in the first place.
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When the conversation dies, what do you do?
When the conversation you are having dies, what do you do?Conversations die when you tune out of them, when you stop tracking your truthfulness about your experience, when you fall back on tired routines that mean little but keep you feeling safe, when you say what you think is expected rather than what's real, when you slip into jargon and abstract concepts, when you tell lies - even small ones - about yourself, and about others.When the conversation dies, what do you do?Many of us, I think, keep going as if nothing had happened.Occasionally, this is bound to happen.But repeated again and again, over hours, days, months, years - our diminished, fossilised conversations in turn diminish us and our relationships.Much of the corporate world seems to have made an art out of the dead conversation. Families, people who were once lovers, and whole organisations slip quietly into deadness without even noticing. Bringing the conversation back to life seems too risky, too vulnerable.The consequence?Feeling safe.And becoming ghosts.
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When trust happens
Trust, in the end, is not built by waiting until the conditions are right - "I'll be able to trust them when I feel confident and secure... when they've given me sufficient evidence that they are trustworthy"Instead, trust is always engendered most by our first extending our trust to others - which requires us to be open enough and vulnerable enough to let others in.And trust is deepened by exactly what we do when we experience breakdowns in trust. Closing down or backing off, declaring the relationship over or under threat, does nothing to build our capacity to trust others, nor they us, in the future.No, trust is built precisely by turning towards one another when it breaks down and talking about what is now possible and required. We invite trust precisely by how we respond when our capacity to trust seems most under threat.
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Misunderstanding feedback
'Giving feedback' has become so much a part of what is considered good management that we rarely ask ourselves whether it's effective or question the premise upon which it's based. I think it’s time we did.
The very idea of 'feedback' as a central management practice is drawn from cybernetics. The simplest kind of single-loop cybernetic system is a home thermostat. The thermostat responds to feedback from the room (by measuring the ambient temperature) and turns on heating when required so to warm the air to a comfortable level. When the target is reached, the thermostat turns the heating off. It's a 'single-loop' system because the thermostat can only respond to temperature.
In a double-loop feedback system it's possible to adjust what's measured in order to better address the situation. If you're bringing about the conditions in your room to make it suitable for a dinner party you may need to pay attention to temperature, lighting, the arrangement of furniture, the colour of the table cloth, the number of place settings, the mood and culinary taste of your guests, and the quality of conversation. Single-loop systems such as thermostats can’t do this. But double-loop cybernetic systems allow us in principle to ask 'what is it that's important to measure?'. And, of course, human beings are far more suited to this kind of flexibility than thermostats are.
It’s from this way of looking that we get the contemporary idea that feedback - solicited or not - is what’s most helpful or appropriate for someone to learn to do the right thing. But it is based on something of a questionable premise. Thermostats, even very clever ones, and other cybernetic systems don’t have emotions, or cares, or worries. They do not love, or feel fulfilled or frustrated. They do not have available to them multiple ways to interpret what is said. They do not hurt, and they do not feel shame. They do not misunderstand or see things in a different way. They don’t have an internalised inner critic, nor do they have bodies that are conditioned over years by practice to respond and react in particular ways. They are not in relationship. They do not have to trust in order to be able to do what they do. And they do not have a world of commitments, intentions, relationships, hopes and goals into which the latest temperature data lands.
People have all of these.
When we simply assume that spoken or written feedback, even if carefully given, will correct someone’s actions or help them to learn, we assume they are more like a cybernetic system than they are like a person. Sometimes it can certainly be helpful - when the feedback is in a domain that both giver and receiver care about, given in language that makes sense, and when it meets the hopes and aspirations of the receiver with sensitivity and generosity. But many times we find that the very act of giving feedback wounds or confuses or deflates or misunderstands or treats the other person as if they don’t know what they’re doing. We find that the world of the giver is nothing like the world of the receiver. We find that our best effort to construct feedback according to the ‘rules’ mystifyingly doesn’t bring about what we’re intending. And then we get frustrated or disappointed, and try to give the feedback another way, imagining that if we can come up with a clever technique or way of saying it then our feedback will work.
Perhaps a place to start would be to stop thinking about people as if they were glorified thermostats. In order to do this we'd have to soften our ideas of truth in feedback - specifically the idea that the one who knows the truth gives feedback to the one who must be corrected. Secondly, we could start to think how many ways there are to learn how to do something well than being told how someone else sees it. And third, we could wonder how we can share the riches we do see in a way that gives dignity and maintains connection between both parties - starting by knowing when it’s time to request, demonstrate, reflect, inquire together, make new distinctions in language, show someone how to make good observations for themselves, or simply stay out of the way.
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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.
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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Wild Geese
Lizzie and I were live again this morning, The source for this week's conversation was Mary Oliver's powerful poem 'Wild Geese'.We talk about the constraining effects of inner criticism and the limits of our over-effort to be good or strong or loving or clever. And along the way we stumble into some realisations about what's possible when we learn to trust something other than our own self-judgement, and reach out to others for help.And if you’d like to join in with the growing community that’s forming around this project, and the lively conversation that’s taking part in the comments, you can do so here.[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zru6Ze_rfRw[/embed]