When you get things wrong!
#Live Fully
“You’re right, Aileen”. I like to joke a little whenever anyone says that to me in conversation. After all, it’s usually just a throw away comment. A verbal tic. It’s not meant as a deeply considered judgement of what I’ve said or what I think or even who I am. So my light-hearted response is “I’m always right.” Of course, I know I’m not.
Yet it’s easier to say I’m right, than it is to say “I’m wrong”. Much easier.
As the early years of my sixtieth decade fly past (and they do), I often find myself contemplating all the times in my life when it might have benefited me to just say “I’m wrong”. Not that it’s a case of proving who’s right and who is wrong, since that’s never wholly the case either way. It’s simply that we are coming from different perspectives, judgements or experiences. Oh that there might be no judgement or fear when exclaiming “I’m wrong”. I wonder how our conversations might shift when, as opposed to investing energy in trying to prove things one way or the other, you might just say aloud, ‘I’m wrong’. Try it now – I have a sense that as soon as I don’t need to prove my perspective, and I say I’m wrong – even silently inside myself – I feel a release of energy. My whole body relaxes. It subtly stops fighting and struggling. It says I’m OK.
In my heart and mind I can now go back over time and admit ‘I was wrong’ on all of those occasions which ended up in tension, debate, argument or even breakdown. It’s a healing feeling – and I don’t often use that word. I’m reminded of the famous Rumi quote:
“Out beyond the ideas of right-doing and wrongdoing, there is a field I will meet you there. It’s the world full of things to talk about.”
Your turn: where might it bring relief to you to simply admit, to yourself or to others, that you are wrong? what do you notice when you do so? what pulls you into trying to prove you are right? what opens up beyond that idea for you? #Live Fully
One of the most common comments I hear in coaching conversations is “I don’t have time” or “when I get time”. We’ve all said it at some point. It’s a habit. It’s easy to convince ourselves it’s about time we don’t have.
What better to do on a rainy Saturday afternoon that tidy out my office. I started with my books and made slow progress as I found book after book that I wanted to read (some for the first time). One such gem I came across was the fable of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I remember getting it from my first coach.I sat down and got absorbed in it for the thirty minutes it takes to fly through this lovely story. I appreciated the many layers of insight it offers – if the reader choses to hear them. Yes it’s about a seagull who wants to live a fuller life than the rest of the flock who are content to fly in order to find food each day. That’s the norm. Jonathan, however, wants to stretch the limits of his full potential, to learn how far his flying can take him. He tries, tries and tries again and eventually breaks free from the perceived limitations and discovers how far he can go. By the end, he has inspired thousands of seagulls to join him in learning what’s possible for each of them. No more normal. You can see why I enjoyed re-reading Jonathan’s story. I’m always asking what’s possible? I always believe there must be another way, whenever we’re faced with a perceived limitation. And I love that he explores the concept of what it means to live free. Jonathan gets labelled as a rebellious outcast by the rest of the flock. He’s condemned for not being like everyone else and for trying to go beyond the norm. It strikes me how often we are perhaps like Jonathan: knowing there’s more to our potential, and striving to reach for it. It takes courage and self-belief to go beyond the everyday, ordinary of the flock.
There’s an underlying assumption that we need things to continue to make leaps and bounds of change in order to be successful. Thinking of the ‘next big thing’ can be exciting and inspiring. A grand vision. And indeed, especially in this world of technological and scientific advances there are indeed many big things that surprise and excite us. In my lifetime these have included the laptop computer (I learned to type on a manual typewriter and made copies on double backed carbon paper which I had to manually roll around a drum), the cellphone, and we went from my gran’s wind-up gramophone to vinyl records, cassettes, CD’s, stereo players and now online streaming. And that’s just the obvious stuff. We’re seeing electric vehicles become very real, personal voice assistants like Siri and Alexa and fully automated homes. So what’s next in your life or business? We can all want to be the one who discovers that next big thing. However, I suspect that in doing so we might miss the many small innovative things that lead to improvements and to making a difference too. I heard a story from a shop floor employee who had an idea for one small improvement that would increase the efficiency of the work flow. She raised it with her leader. Yet it wasn’t heard as something important enough to make a difference. It might take less than an hour to make the change. Yet no-one was willing to give it a try. Leaders need to listen for the small things as well as the big things that could make a difference. That small idea, left unappreciated, leaves the team frustrated and powerless. It might deter them from making any future suggestions for small changes that would make their job easier. Why bother?
For some time now I notice a physical reaction in my body whenever I hear the term “to get the best out of our people”. It’s been bugging me for a while so I was contemplating it on my walk this morning. I think it goes to the heart of the employer/employee relationship – and I might be being a bit provocative here – and to the psychological foundation for that relationship. I believe the words we use are really important and for a long time, I’ve realised that the alternative meaning of the word ’employed’ is something that is ‘used’. This may still be the unconscious foundation for many work relationships. Even those companies who have worked to establish fair and equal cultures of diversity and inclusion, still battle the unspoken status bias and assumed power plays that go back to the start of the industrial revolution (or before) when people were treated as resources to be ‘used’ to reach profit and efficiency goals. Oh my, did I not realise what Frederick Winslow Taylor was teaching in scientific management in my university days! Then it sounded like de-humanising production processes was a good thing because it made ‘companies more efficient’ and so could make more money more easily. Today we are waking up to the fact that it’s not ok to treat any human being as inferior to another. So even in power structures within organisations, I feel we need to really look into our hearts and ask how we might be ‘using’ people at their personal expense in pursuit of results. There’s just been a feature about clothes factories in mid-England where people are working for much less than minimum wage (£2.50 per hour) in unsafe conditions, all in the pursuit of cheap consumer goods. These employees are being ‘used’. No question about it. It’s not too extreme to say they are modern-day slaves. It’s inhumane and it’s happening in our own towns and cities. Most of us are not directly involved in those types of organisations. Yet our words carry weight wherever we are. I heard a high-level coach recently use those same words: that teaching leaders to be more coach like, would help to ‘get more out of your employees’. This coach showed no awareness of how contradictory that language is to the underlying intention of shifting the leader/team member relationship to a more human-respecting level. Really listening to the needs of people and building cultures and structures to support and inspire people as human beings seems to me more important than ever. Like Corona, our language can be another unseen or unheard virus that spreads with unfathomable impact and outcomes. It invites us to listen deeply to the words we use and to get rid of many of the cliches that we’ve inherited from earlier forms of business and organisation. I know we can change our world by changing our language. I see it all the time in coaching conversations – how one word can make a difference to what someone believes about themselves and to how they then choose to behave.
To me, coaching and leadership are a form of questing: going in search of the future life, work, relationships, goals, possibilities and success you truly want for yourself, your business and your family.