Inner + Outer

My friend Quanita Roberson reminds me, “there has to be an ‘I’ in team.” She’s pointing to the importance of a healthy and whole self, differentiated and present.

Another friend has recently pointed me to www.innerengineering.com, which offers practices from the yogic sciences on inner well-being.

Another colleague reminds me in our group facilitation and strategy work that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Plans may be brilliant. And necessary. Without a culture of support, or imagination, or connection — even brilliant plans wilt like water and sun deprived plants.

Beneath each of these reminders is an important teaching. The inner world has massive impact on the outer world. It’s way to easy, and seductive, and common to given 99% of our attention to things “out there”. And 99% of the time, it feels that attention to the “in here” is deemed wasteful, soft, or indulging.

It is my learning that people everywhere are ultimately hungry for the healthy internal (whether as a person or as a team or as a community) to be at the foundation of what is applied out there in our varied contexts of work and community.

My friend Kinde Nebeker and I continue to explore these teachings. Our medium together is The Inner and Outer of Evolutionary Leadership. Our next gathering is May 11, 2018 in Snowbird, Utah. I love the language we’ve created to find others that want to be in both the inner and the outer.

Please, peek your head up with us.

It’s the Story Under the Story That Changes Everything

Many of us, as formal and informal leaders, are learning that many of our most needed solutions do not exist in current systems of thought and practice. We work tenaciously in isolation, yet it is connection that brings creativity. We obsessively attribute causality to external circumstance, when it is internal awareness that holds greater promise for evolutionary contribution. Many of us know that we live in a time when we need further metamorphosis of our story of mechanical fidgeting with things and parts. We need awareness and alchemy to replace anxiety and authority that is ungrounded.

IOEL IV is for a different kind of leader and a different kind of story.

• for those irrepressibly compelled to burst into new understandings of reality and to share with their respective teams and organizations

• for those wishing to partner with life’s inherent organizing capacity in more organic, simple and life- enhancing ways

• for those willing to embody matured courage and presence to support real change

• for those hungry to wade further upstream to release us from the torrent of habits, individual and collective, that offer at best convenience and illusion of accomplishment

• for those who realize that the primary practice is consciousness, in which is embedded leadership in organizational system, not the other way around.

IOEL is not a therapy group. It is not a fix. It is a gentle, yet fierce commitment to get real (serious and playful) about exploring paradigmatic edges together and to call bullshit on antiquated yet still rewarded general practice. It is for those of daring to peek our heads above the fray to see who peeks with us. We are not alone.

 

Into the River

For many years now, an image of “letting go into the river” has been present for me. In the last couple of years, it has been growing stronger.

The image of river that I see is one with rather swift current. It is about 50 feet across. It’s shores are lined with evergreen trees, much like the rivers of my youth in Canada. The waters are blue / green.

The image within me includes being tethered to a shore, that, because of the current, is no longer strong enough to hold. I feel fear of this river. Yet, I also feel my inevitability of letting go, of giving myself to the river.

I don’t know what all of that means. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand it. Even trying to think it into being.  I’ve learned that images must arrive, just as Rilke, the Austrian poet of the early 1900s wrote, “You must give birth to your images. they are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the hour of the new clarity.”

Given life’s unfolding, and the reality of societal amplification and intensification, perhaps the lettings go for many of us are also amplifying and intensifying.

Meg Wheatley included a prophecy from the Elders of the Hopi Nation in her book Perseverance. It also feels present in my morning meditation.

Here is the river flowing now very fast.
It is so great and swift that there are those
who will be afraid, who will try
to hold on to the shore.
They are being torn apart and 
will suffer greatly.

Know that the river has its destination.
The elders say we must let go of the shore.
Push off into the middle of the river,
and keep our heads about water.

And I say, see who is there with you
and celebrate.
At this time in history
we are to take nothing personally,
least of all ourselves,
for the moment we do,
our spiritual growth and journey come to a halt.

The time of the lone wolf is over.
Gather yourselves.
Banish the word struggle from your attitude
and vocabulary.

All that we do now must be done
in a sacred manner and in celebration.
For we are the ones we have been waiting for.

This letting go, feels so essential as humans in discovery of the worlds to come. I hope for courage, for all of us.

75,000 Per Day

I am so enjoying the Intermountain Sustainability Summit today, hosted at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. It feels electric to me to be with people that are smart and so committed to clean and sustainable energy living.

My part as facilitator is small. Inviting a bit of informal open space in which people can connect by calling their own conversation. And facilitating a bit of a networking conversation yet to come in the day.

However, my delight in participating is large. This morning’s keynote Bob Perkowitz, CEO and Founder of ecoAmerica, was delightful. And informative. And as is often how it is with people from this profession, needing to be skilled and telling both the sobering story and the encouraging story of climate change.

Bob shares, that due to climate change, the pine beetle population is thriving. In Colorado and Wyoming 100,000 trees die per day. Phenomenal, right. How discouraging and alarming. It goes along with a lot of other “bad news” from the science perspective.

Bob also shares an encouragement. 75,000 solar panels are going up per day in the USA. Wonderful, right. Encouraging, and so worth celebrating! Former President Jimmy Carter put them on the White House. Former President Ronald Reagan took them down. Thirty ish years later, 75,000 going up per day and solar farms growing.

There are some environments so populated with good people and in good causes, that I just feel smarter by being in the room. What a treat today that inspires oodles of questions worth engaging together about not only transforming a future, but doing so, in some cases, one little step, 10 solar panels, at a time.

 

 

 

Right Where You Are

I have learned that it’s often easier to look externally, with obsessive thoroughness, for what resides surprisingly internally.

It’s habit. It’s societal pattern. It’s seduction.

I’m talking about the myriad of “if only” statements that most of us make. They have a truthiness to them, yet are primarily distraction and distortion from an ever-giving inner world.

If only I could get this project finished.
If only I could move to that other apartment.
If only I had better people to work with.
If only they understood.

These are all satisfying. But often, they overlook unaddressed internal angst, that continues to generate seduction of the external, even when some of them are fulfilled. Around the corner is another corner — always.

I love how American Poet Mary Oliver writes of paying attention to where you are. Of how much is available in the internal focus. Just because. Or because of what it improves in the expression and accomplishment of the external.

I Have Decided

I have decided to find myself a home in the mountains,
somewhere high up where one learns to live peacefully
in the cold and the silence.

It’s said that in such a place
certain revelations may be discovered.
That what the spirit reaches for may be eventually felt,
if not exactly understood.
Slowly, no doubt.
I’m not talking about a vacation.

Of course at the same time
I mean to stay exactly where I am.

Are you following me?

This passage reminds me of a premise that I actually believe, but sometimes lose track of.

In the anything is the everything.
In this moment, in this now, in these circumstances —
there is access to everything,
or perhaps the everything needed that can carry to the next moment.

Right where I am.