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May 16, 2016

Holding Space — 8 Tips for Facilitators, Coaches, and Guides from Heather Plett

I love the story that Heather Plett shares in this article she published recently. Heather is among other things, a practitioner and teacher of The Circle Way. She is someone I’ve only met online, yet some of my best friends know her well and tell me that we should meet!

Her article is tender, as it always is when caring for those that we love. It’s also wise. These are eight bits of wisdom that would do any facilitator some good as a starting point, or as something to come back to when a gut check is needed.

I’ve listed the tips below. The full article is worth a full read. Heather’s Ann reminds me of my Audrey, who was a different kind of care-giver (midwife for my first child), but also a great space-holder.

Give people permission to trust their own intuition and wisdom.
Give people only as much information as they can handle.
Don’t take their power away.
Keep your own ego out of it.
Make them feel safe enough to fail.
Give guidance and help with humility and thoughtfulness.
Create a container for complex emotions, fear, trauma, etc.
Allow them to make different decisions and to have different experiences than you would.

I love Heather’s closing paragraph that names “holding space” is a life time practice in the many walks of life we all find ourselves in.

May 12, 2016

Oh, These Places

Gambier

This is another photo from Gambier Island, just north of Bowen Island and west of Vancouver, BC. Yes, it is where I’ve met the last few days with a few of the stewards of The Circle Way.

As five of us were departing via water taxi, several of us commented, with awe, on the places that we have been able to meet in. Beautiful, as you can see. Sometimes remote, as this particular location was. Nourishing places, the kind that change you, not just on the outside but on the inside too. I’m not talking luxury of mansions and people waiting on us. I’m talking more of quality of connection, and us taking care of each other.

Combine that with some good process and it becomes a forever-remembered place. “Ah, remember that time on Gambier,” will be the utterance with appreciation. For us, our process was mostly held in Circle. Some in Open Space to help us accomplish our work. Some in training, where peers helped us all move along together in a project management tool that reminded me of the phrase, “if you want to go farther, go together.” Some in decision making. Some in discernment through a few unknowns and niggly issues.

These are places and processes that I know many people never experience. My grandfather for example, would know places like Gambier as a possible summer holiday spot to take his grandkids. But not as a place to work. And not in the way that brings us all into deeper layers of friendship.

I’m in awe myself. And grateful for this place and these people that awaken me.

May 11, 2016

Stewarding The Circle Way

Gambier

Yesterday, Katharine Weinmann, a friend and colleague in The Circle Way, invoked a couple of images that I loved to help shape the start of our working day together. There are ten of us gathered for three days. We are a board for the non-profit that supports The Circle Way. We are a core circle that stewards a transition from founder-lead to network-lead. We are in conversation. We are in imagining. We are in good listening. As we have been for the last three years in particular.

Katharine first invoked “kanata” a reference to Canada and some early meaning — “clean, pure, and sacred,” from First Nations peoples, likely Iroquois. We are meeting in a place that evokes this. Gambier Island off the west coast of Vancouver, BC. There is a deliberateness of simplicity here, an area living mostly off of the grid. It is accessible by water taxi.

Katharine then invoked another word, “baraka,” and Islamic word that connotes a quality of “ineffable grace.” Well, that’s a rather good invocation for how to work together isn’t it. I’m rewarded to be with people in this group that exude this quality far more than I do.

Then, the ten of us began. Each speaking a bit to share what we were arriving with. It’s the simple, and very wise beginning that is a check-in, in which some of the words below were spoken:

Hope for what we could accomplish together in moving the work of The Circle Way along.
Awareness of the contrast that “baraka” invites compared to some of the blatant animosity that populates political landscapes.
Welcoming an unknowing together — to not unintentionally impose a clarity to appease an anxiety that can often come with not knowing.
Stillness, to listen well.
Relaxed in knowing how we work in the form that is Circle and how it works in us. Some things happen just because we are willing, don’t they.
Welcoming change — we all know that at least part of our job is to evolve who we are together, what we do together, and how we do it.
Welcoming emotions — there is pain present in so many institutions and peoples that requires presence together and a welcome of new paths.

So we began. So we continue. Calling out the best of us in each other. That is something to be done with friends.

May 10, 2016

Is The Circle Way for Men — A Call For An Emerging Masculine

I wrote this short article to be deliberate about inviting men and women to participate in the practice that is The Circle Way, and in The Circle Way practicum occurring August 17-22, 2016 on Whidbey Island, Washington. I wrote it to shine a bit of light on some of the underlaying myths that may have men not feeling that this form of leadership is for them.

Below is an excerpt. The full article (two pages) is here.

“I want to re-language the gender-typing just a bit as it pertains to The Circle Way. The Circle Way is a methodology and way of being that is bedrock to the kind of leadership so often needed in these times and in today’s organizations. It is the leadership that is listening, which also happens to be a lifelong practice. It is the leadership that is being smart together. Yup, that’s gender free. It is the leadership that is diving deeply into purpose. It is the leadership that is shared discernment. The Circle Way creates leadership process that invokes the best of what people, men and women, masculine and feminine, can offer as gift.”