The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by one pebble
Blaise Pascal
Everything you do makes a difference.
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big voice, little voices
When you’re thinking. When you’re wrestling with a dilemma. When you’re deciding. When you’re not deciding…
… what do the little voices say?
Often we have a big voice. The story we tell ourselves over and over. The loud voice. The constant voice. Maybe our inner critic. Maybe the voice of a parent, a teacher, a younger you. This is the dominant voice. The shouty voice. The “I told you so” voice. The voice that repeats what we believe. What we’ve heard before. Like the underlying beat of the song. The repeating chorus.
But what of the little voices?
What of the hushed whispers? The silent alternatives. The voices we barely hear. Those we discard as irrelevant; as background hum? What of the child-like innocent voices? What of those balancing perspectives – the ones we choose to ignore? The voices that maybe represent another belief? Those that speak for a wiser you, an unwounded you, a more rounded you?
In a choir there are many voices.
Listen only to the loud lead singer and you miss the subtlety of the song. The richness of the harmony.
Listen to the wisdom of the quiet voices. They hold the real truth. They speak a message you have ignored, a message you have dismissed. Listen and your thoughts will have depth, consonance and awareness.
are we all cheats?
The Olympics begin tonight.
The lead up has been tainted by the drugs debate. Competitors willing to take performance enhancing aids in an attempt to win at all cost.
I’m guessing many athletes and sporting competitors enter their sport because of a personal drive. An inner desire to perform at their best, to test themselves to the limit. Then it seems some switch to an external drive. An overwhelming desire to win medals, records, titles by whatever means. External objects, which act as testimony to their achievement, for which they are prepared to cheat to gain. Cheat others, but also cheat themselves.
Honesty and integrity sacrificed for a shiny object or piece of paper which draws admiration and congratulation from other people.
When do internal goals trump external ones and vice versa? How does external recognition become more valuable than internal truth? What causes that shift? Or is it there within certain individuals from the start?
Maybe this isn’t just about athletes and drugs? Maybe we are all vulnerable to lying to ourselves and to others so that we can be recognised, admired, valued, loved?
Maybe others have personal ambition trumping the perspective others may have of them – they don’t care what people think, they will just do their best for themselves. People who rob pension funds for example, so that they can buy yachts?
Maybe we’re all cheats?
the hardest simplicity
A friend of mine has just returned from a ten day meditation retreat where they spent the entire time in total silence. Between meditations they ate in silence, walked in silence, much as monks might.
He remarked how much learning he got from just being with his thoughts. For ten days, there was nothing else. He was able to pay attention to how his thinking worked. Noticing patterns in his thinking. Judgements, for example, of those around him. His fellow meditators judged for how they sat, ate, looked, or for what they were wearing. Thinking about conversations and meetings he would have, then reflecting and self criticising past conversations which might have gone better.
I contrasted this with a training session I had facilitated a few weeks ago. We asked the delegates to spend time , in silence, reflecting on their learning. After a short period we asked them how long that had been. The general concensus was seven or eight minutes, some thought more than ten. In reality it was four. Four minutes of silence with their thoughts and many couldn’t manage that. They wrote notes, checked phones, engaged in non verbal communication with neighbours…
We find it hard to notice ourselves. To be with ourselves.
Strange that something so simple is so difficult.
rumour has it…
Skill is only a rumour … until it reaches the muscle and is an unconscious part of you.
Balinese proverb
do organisations have emotions?
We were contemplating this today.
As human beings so much of what we do is driven by a felt sense, gut, emotion. We combine this with cognitive thinking; adding reason, logic, judgement. Together these ‘brains’ afford us sense making, a motivation, value, direction.
Organisations are good at the cognitive often. The logical behind the vision, the strategy, the goals, the measurement, the success. By and large, organisations try to connect with employees cognitively. They are often not so good at connecting with the individual’s emotions. They talk about engagement or about hearts and minds, but attempt to influence, inspire and manage these cognitively with data, plans, employee surveys, roll-outs.
And what of the organisation itself? Does it have a system brain over and above the collective brains of the component people? And does it have its own emotions?
Systemic Constellations theory might suggest it does. The system behaves according to its own needs, maintaining the integrity and balance of the system itself. So, if that’s true and if it’s working well, is the system pleased, happy, excited? If the system is struggling to maintain itself, does it get upset, annoyed, disillusioned?
If organisations do have feelings, how do we engage with those and what are the implications for the workplace?
So hard to explain…
Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Feelings are so hard to explain aren’t they?
We have these sensations that arise inside our bodies, that move, that have direction, have intensity. They’re hard to interpret, yet hard to ignore. We give them labels, because that allows us to communicate, but really the label does not do justice to the complexity and depth of the feeling, or its meaning and significance to us. We cannot rationalise them, talk them away, hold a conversation with them, like we can our thoughts. Yet our feelings are somehow more pure, more real, more now.
coned off mentally
Last week we were in London. We sat near the river. In front of us was an area of grass, taped off so that it could recover from its well worn state – presumably picnickers, sunbathers and walkers like us had rendered the grass threadbare. To the side, was an area marked off by linked metal barriers – the kind that are used for crowd control. Behind this protection were some pallets of building materials, a pile of some sort of mixed aggregate, some bags of waste and general rubbish – an adjacent building site suggested its purpose. Later we saw a newly laid concrete pathway, blocked by traffic cones, linked with tape.
Cones, barriers and tape to block areas off where we shouldn’t go. Areas that are out of bounds.
Do you think it’s like that in our heads too?
Memories marked out as ‘no go’ areas. Blocked by our unconscious mind as it considers them dangerous places, where we might get hurt; just like a building site. Our subconscious taping off parts of our personal history that need to be left to recover, like a worn out lawn; vulnerable, fragile and otherwise exposed. New experiences coned off, whilst we make sense of them, give them perspective and meaning; allowing them to set into our map of the world like newly laid concrete pathways.
one world … each
He offered her the world. She said she had her own.
Monique Duval
There is no reality. There is your reality, my reality, his reality, her reality. The simple fact is that what we see, what we hear, what we pay attention to, what we interpret, what we delete, what we distort, what we generalise, what makes sense for us… is all uniquely us, even when we seemingly experience exactly the same thing.
His world, her world, my world, your world.
losing things
Do you lose things?
I do. Keys are a favourite. Today I lost my phone – only for half an hour.
Sometimes I lose things that aren’t actually things. Like losing my way, or losing interest. I seem to lose time too. I look up and realise I seem to have lost several hours.
How do you lose something that doesn’t physically exist?
Ultimately though, these are all recoverable, or when push comes to shove, they don’t really matter. They can be replaced, recovered or simply forgotten about. We move on.
Don’t ever lose your curiosity though. Or your sense of fun. Or your compassion for yourself. Or your sense of who you are. Or your sense of belonging. Or your sense of value, or place in this world. Or your humanity. Don’t lose yourself.
These are harder to recover from. Hold them close. Guard them devotedly.
illuminated dandelion 