I am feeling energized, happy, light, even joyous. I have just spent the last few hours re-organizing the primary filing cabinet in my office. Many of the old, out of date files are now resting in a “to be shredded” pile or safely in a box to be stored. And there is space now in this same loyal filing cabinet for files that are current. Work I’m actually doing in 2023: current trainings and clients, projects I hope to develop, references that inspire me.
Discovering the Path through Resistance
Whew! I need to report this moment of celebration has had a long and winding path to get to this particular moment. You see, there’s a long, long, long (and familiar) pattern in my history where I often get stuck in a resistance to organizing and cleaning out my office space. Hello piles! And in the two years since the move to Asheville, there’s been an ongoing time crunch from setting up the business here and delivering this amazing Presence-Based Coaching work (virtually to boot during COVID!).
How did I get unstuck, you may be thinking?
I began to notice some mysterious urges in my body around the beginning of January. Urges to move towards cleaning out (!), which I noticed was coming from an aspiration in December 2022 to start the new year with a clean and tidy office space. I mindfully inquired into the deeper meaning of these urges to find the symbology of what was standing in my way as I internally balked at moving forward.
I began to see that my resistance to organizing my piles of folders on the floor, representing past projects, had to do with my tendency to not complete things (by, say, putting them to bed in a file cabinet). In addition, as I looked at what was already in my filing cabinet with no room for additional folders, I realized that it was filled with files that I moved with from my former house’s office in DC. I just stuffed the folders in there without going through them. And, even more interesting, they were composed of VERY out of date PBC projects, classes, etc. Like from 2015.
Out with the Old, Space for the New
Old, out of date stuff, that was taking up precious space. Space that now I want for current projects. I had this wave of insight, that the filing cabinet represented ME! What I was carrying around inside me, that was ready to be released, to make room for what’s next and new for 2023. At that moment I felt an uplifting energy in my body and heart, and I felt even more mobilized to take action. And I did!
And there you have it. A happy ending with my sitting here admiring my current folders now in the filing cabinet, and my beaming in appreciation not only of myself, but also of the new year’s possibilities.
Questions to get you started:
What deeper meaning might you find in a current challenge you are dealing with, that if investigated, might lead to insight and newly released energy and motivation to take action?
What’s really underneath the surface resistance to making the change you know you want to make?
What symbology can you find within your challenge that makes sense of it in a new way?
Mindfulness has been receiving wide attention lately in countless books, published research papers, and mainstream business literature. The physical and psychological benefits of mindfulness are indisputable, and the implications for coaching, behavioral change, and leadership development are profound. Coaches and clients alike can leverage their change work through these simple tips.
Mindfulness: What Is It?
mindfulness is a practice of paying moment by moment attention to our experience, as it arises, without judgment
Simply put, mindfulness is a practice of paying moment by moment attention to our experience, as it arises, without judgment. We cultivate mindfulness through any of a wide range of sitting practices, which can be as simple as closing the eyes and counting our breaths. Over time, mindfulness practice:
Develops our capacity to observe our experience objectively,
Replaces the inner critic with a neutral acceptance, and
Allows us to stay present with strong experience, and to choose an effective response.
Stay with me a moment. This will appear to diverge, but it’s temporary… we will come back to connect mindfulness into the change proposition that is central to all coaching and leader development.
The Top Down View Of Habits
Please understand that our culture tends to view behavior, and the patterns of default behaviors we call habits, through the lens of results.
In this view, organizational goals and objectives provide the context for all behaviors. Feedback, competency models, and change methodologies are designed to motivate leaders, and to support the development of new behaviors that are aligned with organizational goals. All of this takes place on the macro level of visible behaviors and organizational context.
A Bottom Up View Of Habits
However, habits are simply conditioned patterns of behavior that have become hard-wired and default responses to life’s complexities. We learned them at an early age because they worked then. Yet, given who we are now and our current challenges, we all have long-standing habits that limit our creativity, render us less effective, and/or cause suffering.
A bottom up view is that our habits arise from unconscious patterns of neuronal connections. Behaviors that worked in the past (say, when we were four years old!) become automatized by the nervous systems’ built-in learning mechanisms. Biologically, this is a great way to save processing bandwidth, time and energy: we don’t have to re-learn what danger looks like, or how to respond to it!
Once learned, however, our habits of thought and action become embodied and automatic. Never mind that our boss giving us difficult feedback about our sales presentation has little to do with our mother scolding us when we left a mess at age four; our nervous system reacts in the same way, and reacts far faster than if we thought it through and made a rational decision!
Five Mindfulness-Based Tips For Working With Habits
The bottom up view lends itself to exploration via mindfulness.
When, through practice, we pay attention to the nuances of our experience, we discover that all behavior arises from subtle unconscious impulses below the level of awareness. We begin to see that these “automatisms” can be directly experienced as urges to action before they lead to actual behaviors. We begin to intervene with ourselves, in the present moment, to choose more wisely how we engage with others and with life.
Tip One: Start Practicing
Begin some kind of mindfulness practice. (Guidance for this is important, and easily available; two starting points are Chade-Meng Tan’s Search Inside Yourself, another Sharon Salzberg’s Real Happiness.) Research shows that as little as 8 minutes a day of regular practice can have measurable long term benefits. The main thing is to start, and to stay with it. Don’t be an overachiever… this isn’t about “getting it right.” It’s about starting, and simply doing it. Every day, even if just for a few minutes.
Tip Two: Track Sensation
Mindfulness practice emphasizes accepting our experience without judgment
Include, in your mindfulness practice, specific attention to the sensations in your body. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s influential work on Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction includes body scans, a formal practice of directing attention into the body.
Tracking sensation (for example, our breath) can immediately slow our mental chatter and settle our nervous system, bringing us into the present moment. Sensations help us recognize, for example, that we feel impatient, or that we are sensing a disproportionate urgency that may lead to actions we will regret.
Tip Three: Accept Your Experience
Mindfulness practice emphasizes accepting our experience without judgment. We are not seeking to change anything, merely to be present with our experience. Our stance is neutral; we notice our judgment arising, and we simply accept that it’s there, and let it go.
This acceptance short circuits the sometimes automatic commentary and interpretation that naturally accompanies all experience. Through acceptance, we come to see the external situation as it is: objectively and dispassionately. And, we see, and accept, the internal reactions, judgments, and impulses that arise automatically in response to our situation, but which might not lead to the wisest course of action!
This neutral stance allows for a much more creative and expansive range of choices than the narrowed, reactive automatisms that often drive our behavior.
Tip Four: Observe Yourself In Action
Change requires being able to observe ourselves doing what isn’t working, and knowing what an alternative might be. Then, we must interrupt our well-rehearsed automatic tendencies and, in the heat of the moment, replace a habitual behavior with an unfamiliar one.
Self-observation is a rigorous daily practice of reflecting, and writing down notes, about the internal experience of our habits in action. For example, we come to recognize the subtle urges in our body that arise immediately prior to interrupting someone, or the way our own mental commentary comes in and prevents our listening to the person we are speaking with. These internal experiences are made more visible by mindfulness.
Tip Five: Learn to Stay Present with Action Urges
Impulse control is a demonstrated benefit of mindfulness. When we recognize, and stay present with our urges to take action (whether to grab a second cookie or to vent unskillfully in a meeting!) we discover the freedom to either act on the urge or not.
Familiarity with, and acceptance of, our habitual urges (which are revealed in sensation) liberates us from their automaticity. What we formerly were driven by, we now see objectively, simply as a phenomenon that is present, but one that has less and less hold over us. This is tremendously liberating.
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Mindfulness means witnessing ourselves in action. Doing so translates directly into greater choice, creativity, resourcefulness, and resilience. While this calls for discipline and consistency over time, over time the neural circuitry of presence, choice, relaxed alertness, and non-judgmental acceptance becomes increasingly embodied as a set of physiological defaults.
The benefits are indisputable, and the investment minuscule compared to the rewards.
I spent last weekend at an alumni retreat with the Institute for Zen Leadership. It was held at the Spring Green Dojo, a lovely Rinzai Zen dojo (“place of the way,” or training center) being carved out of the Wisconsin woods under the leadership of Gordon Greene Roshi.
The space is inspiring
The space is inspiring. Structures are built in part from thick walnut and oak timbers cut from the forest, milled at the on-site band saw mill, and joined with classic mortise-and-tenon joinery. Massive limestone slabs are quarried on the land. The dojo walls are thick to retain the wood-fired heat through Wisconsin winters.
Building a place to last for 300 years is not the easiest or fastest way to build. Speed and comfort are not the priorities here. Awakening is.
Here, the space is the Teacher
Here, the space is the Teacher. The stone, the wood, the ground, the forest are simply there, along with the coyotes and owls and sand hill cranes we heard in the night, and the Milky Way stretched across the sky. We are part of it all, simply another expression of this world.
Yet, even as we seek to shape it to our intentions, the rest of the world has no commitment to cooperate. No amount of good intentions make three-ton limestone boulders move themselves into position! The world shows up, and reveals us as we interact with it. The exquisite precision of this infuses the space in this special and not-so-special corner of Wisconsin.
I am no stranger to building, to hard work, to creating something beautiful out of imagination and the products of the earth. I have created beauty, and have loved the craftsmanship and artistry of working with wood, stone, glass. In an earlier stage of my life when this was central, the awareness and rigor I experienced this weekend were not yet available for me. Our handmade home in Boone was an expression of me, a way to form identity, to build the self.
Now, this space has reminded me of what I always have known. We, our work, the world are inextricable. All work illuminates us. The process of writing this new book exquisitely reveals when I’m expanded or anxious, how I’m distracted or energized, when I’m trying to be someone I’m not, and when life is simply arising through my fingers into words.
I’m writing a book. And, a book is writing me. There is no difference.
You are creating your work in the world. And, your work is creating you.
Our actions beget our unfolding. Always. We face and enter, and through the harnessing of our self towards our doing, we discover that we already are, that there is no self, that life simply lives through us.
Let the energy flow!
I began to notice some mysterious urges in my body around the beginning of January. Urges to move towards cleaning out (!), which I noticed was coming from an aspiration in December 2022 to start the new year with a clean and tidy office space. I mindfully inquired into the deeper meaning of these urges to find the symbology of what was standing in my way as I internally balked at moving forward.
Out with the Old, Space for the New
