Perhaps It’s Time to Tune Within.
I can ask you any question like ‘What is the meaning of love?’ and you will automatically drop down in the center of your body to seek the intuitive knowing you hold for the meaning of that word. You will find images and sensations in your body and use them to adequately express the meaning of it.
Similarly, I can ask you any problem question like ‘Why are you so angry?’ or ‘What is in your way of completing this project?’. And again, you can close your eyes, or tune within, drop down to the center of your body and find words and images that can walk you through a deeper understanding of the problem. If you are a human being, you intuitively have that sense of vague pre-verbal knowing within about the things that matter.
You carry this at all times. You can unfold answers to your problems that are exactly right – for you. And when you find the right images and words through this bodily knowing, you can experience a bodily shift – a sensation that washes over you like ‘Aha! Yes, I am on the right track.’
I have the privilege to coach leaders from different countries, in different roles, and in different kinds of industries, and witness this exact process – when I get to build the trust to use it. It usually takes a while. Most of the time and most of the people I work with are very well educated, and very well trained to ignore their bodies and use only intellectual muscles. I’ll start there. I am often there myself. It’s how our world is designed today. And let me be clear – I respect that. I love that we can make meaning of our experiences through our intellect, and through complex theories. I’ve been studying science and intellectual processes for as long as I can remember. Yet I’ve learned to recognize the moments where pure intellectual interaction has its limits. As needed, I can create a sophisticated framework to support learning and development in an area. Often, with a core intention – to slow things down enough to enable inner reflection.
In my recent experiences, I notice a craving for that kind of inner experience more frequently. I ran a workshop a few weeks ago, for about fifty people, and when I gave the option for participants to choose between a dialogue and an inner process of guided reflection – everyone chose the latter. Perhaps, we are all tired of entering conversations led by cognition where we can easily get lost in our individual and collective thoughts about why things are a certain way. Perhaps.
Perhaps, we have awakened to the fact that emotions, sensations, and inner experiences have a big place in understanding, processing, creating meaning, and enabling change. Perhaps we need to attend to these first. Even if we try to move forwards through logic and cognition, our actions are impacted by our inner state. Even if we try to make decisions purely through our mind, there is a lot more at play – all the narratives about ourselves, sense of identity, self-worth, and more. All our human conditioning influences our ability to discern and make choices. Perhaps we are ready to start attending to the inner work necessary to change our outer reality. Perhaps.
It takes something to start there. We have to turn the dial up on authenticity, vulnerability, and courage. It’s a process. Often, a creative process. It’s not tools, techniques, how-to guides, and practices that leaders need today. We can play with different ways to evoke that shift that happens when we start attending to our inner condition. Rather simply, we need the practice of dropping down into inner stillness to reconnect back with our intentions and our inner wisdom and cultivate the muscle of empathy before we can take any action.
It sounds so easy, and it can be the hardest thing of all. In the words of MIT Sloan School of Management Senior Lecturer Otto Scharmer – it’s the voices of judgment, cynicism, and fear that hold us back from entering a deeper dialogue with ourselves and with one another. It’s so tempting to stay in the comfort of the ‘It’s not for me!’ stance. And it's so nourishing when we walk at the edge of our awareness, finding a greater understanding of ourselves and the systems we have helped create.
We can only meet another, we can only create a transformation, as deep as we’ve met ourselves.
