Aboodi Shabi

I’ve always loved this quotation from Anaïs Nin:

And then the day came when the risk to remain tight inside the bud is greater than the risk to blossom.

I think it’s such a lovely analogy for learning.

In my experience, both for myself, and in the people with whom I work, we usually only commit to real learning, by which I mean transformational learning, when the pain of living the way we have lived is pronounced enough for us to be willing to shake off an old habit, to leave our “comfort zones” behind.

The realisation of that pain, the awakening, if you will, comes in many forms. Joseph Campbell named it “the call”. Something happens to produce in us the awareness that life cannot go on as before. Sometimes we need to hear the call a few times before we respond, but there will come a time when we can no longer avoid it. Sometimes that happens because life “pulls the rug from under our feet” as the Buddhist writer Pema Chodron describes it, or sometimes it happens on a course, or during a coaching conversation.

And, then, having heard the call and made the decision to heed it, we can begin to take that awareness into action. In our work, we often talk about the importance of building new practices, new habits that will support us in developing the new identity we are moving towards, or in extending our range in the new direction. Without the practices, we soon revert back to “our old self”. We are what we practice.

However, there’s something else that also helps us to stay on track, and that is the conversations we are in.

One of the things I notice, whenever I embark in a new direction following a call that the practices are fine when things are going well, but that there will come a time, usually after a big step forward, when things might not go so well, or when we stumble as we take our first news steps.

For example, a few years ago, I did an Embodied Leadership course with Strozzi Institute to support me in developing stronger leadership presence, especially in my “front-of-room” work for Newfield, and in leading a team, and in being a team-member. I had a profound awakening of the cost of being a “lone-ranger”, and new that I had to begin to practice blending with others in new ways, after years of being self-employed, and “doing it my way”. Yikes! I left the course, with some new practices to help support this new direction in life, feeling optimistic, if a little daunted, by the possibilities ahead.

At first things went well, even excitingly. The practices helped me to build something new in myself, and I noticed differences in how I showed up in the team – they even noticed, too, which was gratifying.

But then there came the time when I needed to stretch further than before, when I found myself in some challenging situations where things didn’t go as I’d hoped, where I got “burned”. And it hurt. Sometimes it hurt a lot. And then, I didn’t want to do any of the practices – I just wanted to retreat back to my old self, to close down again, and my self-talk was all about “why bother growing? It only brings pain. Who am I to think I could ever really change anyway?”

In one particularly challenging episode, I got a huge amount of support from my business partner, Laura (Newfield’s European business manager). She and I are very close, and she’s become someone I trust enormously. Her response to my “burn” was to listen to me, to acknowledge how I felt, and to take care of me, and, at the same time, to gently, but firmly, remind me of my commitment to grow and extend. She pushed me to keep on going with my practices while acknowledging that I really didn’t want to – to keep blossoming, rather than to retreat inside the bud.

That experience was very important to me, both personally, but also in terms of learning something about change. Practices are vital, it’s true, but without the support of people who can genuinely hold and support the highest in us, we are likely to fail or give up when things get tough. Often, when we fall, we get re-assurance and comfort from our friends, but our friends tend to agree with us and can even encourage us to stay inside the bud, sometimes simply because they don’t want to see us get hurt.

It takes a combination of tender support and firm challenge to remind us of, and hold us to, what we are committed to – from people whom we can call committed listeners.

A committed listener can be a coach, a colleague, or it can be a strong friend – I now have a few such people in my working and personal life – people whom I know will care enough to not let me get away with wanting to retreat when the going gets tough, and it’s made a real difference. My practices have got sharper, and my learning has got faster and deeper.

We are our practices, as I’ve said, but it’s the conversations we are in that will determine our capacity to keep going with the practices when we most feel like giving up on them.

Reflections

What are you committed to? What practices are you committed to? Do your conversations support your practices?

Who are your committed listeners? Who supports you in your commitment to blossom?

Quote:

“The man, who, being really on the Way, falls upon hard times in the world will not, as a consequence, turn to that friend who offers him refuge and comfort and encourages his old self to survive. Rather, he will seek out someone who will faithfully and inexorably help him to risk himself, so that he may endure the suffering and pass courageously through it. Only to the extent that man exposes himself over and over again to annihilation, can that which is indestructible arise within him. In this lies the dignity of daring.” - Karlfried von Durkheim

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 27th, 2011 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.