This is a time when many of us will be faced with the challenge of “doing more with less.” How we face that challenge provides an opportunity for choice. We may not be able to determine which challenges we face – but we may have choice as to how we face them. NPR’s Chana Joffe-Walt explains: (Audio)

So many of my clients find themselves in a perpetual state  of physical and mental activity. I too am guilty of this “gerbil-like” mentality that keeps the wheel of the cage spinning. Dr. Lloyd J. Thomas, in The Value of Stillness, sheds some light:

“The Chinese word for “busy” is made of two characters.  The first is
“heart,” and the second is “killing.”  For the Chinese, to be busy is to kill the heart.
Children raised by insecure parents often learn that the faster they
talk, the faster they move, the faster [they] think, the safer they feel.  A
moving target is harder to hit.  Such children seek safety in the
speed of their activity and speech.  They take refuge in relentless
action.  When they feel insecure about what they know, they produce
more words and share them in rapid-fire, to hide their perceived
ignorance.  Constant motion keeps them from being caught.  Relentless,
busy activity distracts them from experiencing their fear.  They are
often misdiagnosed as “hyperactive” or having “attention deficit
disorder” when they are actually trying only to protect themselves
from a frightening environment.  Their constant motion of mouth and
body, kills their heart.

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Robert, has avoided his senior team for years. While they “run” the business, he tells himself that his job is to work “on” the business. Slowly, he is losing touch and now feels he needs to “re-connect.” He is considering instituting one-on-one meetings with each of his senior staff. This low agenda, “personal,” time with his key people feels intimidating. But with some prompting he is going to take a risk and blaze into this new territory with hopes of improving his communication with each of his key people.

When we take a risk and question into the unknown, receiving into consciousness thoughts and feelings that may disturb and riddle us, we are “blazing” new territory. Much like the early explorers, we have before us the opportunity to venture into relational terrain and find new and unexpected insights. But to do this, we have to listen.
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You are running your own business and have a team meeting scheduled for today. You are highly energized, focused and clear about your agenda. However, when you enter the meeting the energy in the room does not match your expectations. Things are sluggish or disjointed, so you take it upon yourself to “act” to “change” things. It can be a look, a gesture or your words which give you away. As you “confront,” you evoke your team’s defenses. You are perceived in a way that further distances you from your intentions, to connect. You can almost hear them think, “oh boy, not this again.” 

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There is some value to our innocence - it keeps us connected and empathically attuned to the people in our lives. As we navigate these difficult economic times, remember these people.

“Over the years, a practical and materialistic society can usurp the original mystery of childhood. We are sent to school early to “grow up,” to “be serious,” and if we don’t let go of our childhood innocence, all too often the world tries to knock it out of us. A hundred years ago the American painter James McNeill Whistler encountered this attitude in his engineering class at West Point Military Academy. The students were instructed to draw a careful study of a bridge, and Whistler submitted a beautifully detailed picturesque stone arch with children fishing from its top. The lieutenant in charge ordered, “This is a military exercise. Get those children off the bridge.” Whistler resubmitted the drawing with the two children now fishing from the side of the river. “I said get those children completely out of the picture,” said the angry lieutenant. So Whistler’s last version had the river, the bridge, and two small tombstones along its bank.”

(Kornfield, J.  (2000).  After the ecstasy, the laundry:  How the heart grows wise on the spiritual path.  New York:  Bantam, p. 9. 10)

One of the tools we work with is referred to as a Contemplative Collaboration. This approach to holding the collaborative process involves a significant increase of the participant’s consciousness to include the full range of human sensory awareness. Feelings, sensations, sounds, ideas, patterns – both positive and negative -emerge in a field of perception, sustained for long durations, revealing deep and often hidden potential that is here-to-fore cloaked in the comfort zone of “normal group functioning.”
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I work with passionate individuals and groups who know the value of awareness and the costs associated with functioning below one’s true potential. My clientele are CEOs, executives, management teams, business owners, performers, athletes and artists. The work functions to accelerate the implementation of professional goals, deepening the essential connection with true qualities of each individual, while removing obstacles and achieving sustainable results!

Challenge: You have well-defined business strategies and a history of success. However, lately the competition seems to have the edge. Your key personnel seem out-of-step with the changing economy, communications are “appropriate” but in service of personal or departmental agendas, and deployment of strategic initiatives is bogged down. This scenario or one like it needs an increased awareness to illuminate the dynamics affecting desired outcome.

Solution: You need insight into the behavioral changes necessary to: clarify agendas, open the dynamic to new initiative, and to bring about effective, rapid and sustainable results.

Reduce variability and improve performance:
Develop a consistent method to assess your interaction with others and maintain a disciplined approach to managing and improving your performance.
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“The best way to think about epiphany is to imagine working on a jigsaw puzzle. When you put the last piece into place, is there anything special about that last piece or what you were wearing when you put it in? The only reason that last piece is significant is because of the other pieces you’d already put into place. If you jumble up the pieces a second time, any one of them could turn out to be the last, magical piece. Epiphany works the same way: it’s not … the magic moment that matters much, it’s the work before and after” (Berkun, 2007, The Myths of Innovation, p. 8).