Category: General Learning

Recently I hosted with a colleague a workshop in which the primary focus was on presence. Our overall focus was on leadership. But our first gateway into that leadership was presence.

For this gathering, I wondered what books to choose as resources for people to peruse. I didn’t want to bring too many. Four seemed enough, one placed in each of the cardinal directions in the center of our circle. I brought some favorites. One by Pema Chodron (Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change). Another by John O’Donahue (To Bless The Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings). Another by Mark Nepo (The Exquisite Risk: Daring to Live an Authentic Life). These are each rich. They are books that I can randomly open to most any page and find a paragraph or two that deeply satisfies.

The fourth book surprised me just a bit. The Circle Way: A Leader in Every Chair, by Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea. It’s not the quality of the book that surprised me. It was the realization that I wanted this book as one of only four to encourage presence. The Circle Way — as process methodology and as way of being — has been helping me to develop my practice of presence for close to twenty years now.

Here’s three ways of how I’ve experienced that.

The Circle Way Invokes Stillness — Most of us live in rather frenetic worlds don’t we. Meetings on top of meetings on top of meetings. Multiple channels of data that we comb, cull, or that regularly ping us with the latest happenings. Our texts. Our news apps. Our email. Who hasn’t realized after a few innocuous clicks that they’ve fallen into a bottomless Facebook rabbit hole of Top 10 this’ or thats. So much stimulation and mass awareness can evoke a kind of adrenalin rush, doesn’t it. I feel that. It can be rewarding in the moment. It’s just not helpful as an uninterruptible pattern over the long haul.

I want to suggest, contrary to this frenetic pattern, that stillness (and a simple process for evoking it) is equally important. If it were a list of capabilities required for a job, I’d put stillness next to “ability to multitask.” The stillness that is bringing full attention to the matter at hand. The stillness that is not jumping ahead to the other meetings that you know you still need to prepare for. The stillness that is kindness, by offering the gift of our showing up undistracted with the people that we are with in the moment. The Circle Way is a simple approach to invoking and remembering stillness. It’s structure and practices inherently encourage it. Waiting. Passing a listening piece. Being able to see others in the group. Democratizing meaning-making.

The Circle Way Creates Turning To One Another — One of my mentors, Margaret Wheatley, wrote the book, Turning To One Another in 2009. It’s a very good collection of short essays that are at the center of people learning together. It’s also a primary narrative for what we are supposed to do together that I’ve been using since Meg wrote it. It is engagement. Encountering one another. Listening for what can’t be known by any individual but can only be known by people being together.

The Circle Way is a process methodology. It has structure. It has agreements. It has intention. It entrains a way to interrupt the pattern of isolation that many of us find ourselves in. Separation has been the game for many years now — human beings are skilled at buffering from each other. The Circle Way moves us from a classroom dynamic of “informing” to a collaborative dynamic of listening together for what is in emerging among us through our turning to one another.

The Circle Way Reveals Subtle — Many of us now know that there is always some level of mystery involved in our work, in our communities, in our families, and in our relations. Some things can’t be objectively named and measured. Yet they remain quintessentially important. Like the special something that makes Granny’s soup different than yours despite the same recipe. Like the grandeur that many feel, inexpressible in words, trying to describe their feeling at the Grand Canyon or other places of beauty.

The Circle Way can help us discover a feeling together, a subtle feeling, that isn’t secondary, but rather primary for influencing all of the tasks and things that we do. It gives us a kind of attainment, a coming into resonance. It gives us a gentle way of being together in an unknown or an unknowable. It gives us a way to discover subtleties that change the arc of the whole narrative.

I have flown many times from Salt Lake City to Seattle. Yesterday was a time when I happened to have a window seat, a clean enough window, and clear enough weather to catch a few vistas using my phone. I could see the Salt Lake Valley when taking off. I could see Seattle when landing.

Vistas often inspire, don’t they. Stretch the sight. Stretch the vision. Expand one’s imagination and range of perspective. They do for me. From top left to top right, then bottom left to bottom right, here’s the sequence from yesterday.

 

               

If I’m correct, the first is Antelope Island State Park, just north of the Salt Lake airport. It’s an island in The Great Salt Lake. The park is known for its free range antelope, bison, and bighorn sheep. The lake itself is known for its long skinny size (80 miles by 30 miles), it’s shallow depth (average is about 16 feet), it’s color that I don’t fully understand (lots of green, brown, and turquoise) but is influenced by its, well, salt. That’s the Rocky Mountains snow capped in the background, the Wasatch range.

The second picture is likely somewhere over Eastern Washington. It still amazes me to be able to pop up over the clouds, which you can see is a pretty solid blanket, and see the blue sky horizon.

The third picture is some of the breaking clouds coming into Seattle. I’ve learned that patches of blue sky like this in Seattle are often called a “sunny day.” Well, I suppose that is more true in months other than July and August.

The last picture is descent close to SEATAC airport. The ports are interesting to me, the amount of transportation and exchange that happen at the edge of a continent. The stadiums, home to the Seahawks NFL and the Mariners MLB teams. The body of water is Elliot Bay. That little tip of land just beneath the clouds is West Seattle where my son is now engaged in faith community service.

Big picture will always matter, right. Yes, the on the ground awareness too. But for yesterday, just the joy of some sights that I’ve seen often, yet don’t get to see or feel every day.

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There were many things that I learned last night. I learned them in the company of the group of 15 of us that gathered for the first session of “The Inner and Outer of Evolutionary Leadership.”

One of the questions that my colleague Kinde Nebeker asked of ourselves and the group was basic — “What is evolutionary leadership to you?” Thanks to Kinde’s idea, this question had a bit more nuance by inviting people to think of someone they would call an evolutionary leader, and from there begin to notice the qualities that that leader has.

We harvested a pretty good list of those qualities. You can see that in the picture above. However, as I was catching what people shared, I found myself wondering how this list was different from a list that we might have made 30, 50, or 100 years ago. So, I asked for second layer of harvest about what was different.

That’s the stuff in the middle, recorded in green. One that stuck with me was spoken by participant and friend Jane Holt, who I used to work with a bunch about five or six years ago through The Salt Lake Center for Engaging Community. “These qualities come from a value of ‘power with’ rather than ‘power over’.”

Good observations like that always send me into a mix of head-nodding ahas and awareness of questions that I want to ask the group. Questions that evoke story — When have you experienced power with rather than power over? What was that like for you? Questions that evoke relevance — What does that experience have to do with how we are together as a group (or team, or community, or committee, or…). Questions that evoke practice — What are one or two things you are committed to doing in the name of power with vs power over here?” It would be a great way to help set some agreements, right.

Evolutionary Leadership is a term that I’m continuing to come to learn a lot about. And like most terms, and learning about it, I find it best to approach that learning with some fluidity. Words matter. But they are just words. Just symbols and representatives of a meaning that sometimes can’t be found in words. Rather, a definition gives us something to be in relationship with. To center some noodling around and nibbling around to create an inner awareness, and if lucky, a practice.

“The world changes when a lot of people change a little bit,” said Willis Harman, mentor to one of my mentors. I feel very changed through little ways last night.

 

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Tonight I begin offering a 3-session series in Salt Lake City, three hours for each of the next three Mondays. I’m hosting it with my friend and colleague Kinde Nebeker. It is called the Inner and Outer of Evolutionary Leadership.

What “Evolutionary Leadership” means is one of the questions that we will engage. What’s different about that? What does that naming open up for us? What skills are needed? What dispositions? What practices? It is important to me to hold this term with some softness, just as it is with most other terms. It isn’t the precise definition that matters. Rather, it is our ability to be in relationship with those words as a symbol of something that is dynamic.

This series builds on what Kinde and I offered last October, some of which is harvested in the above photo.

Our focus for the first session is on the inner work of showing up. Presence is a central theme. Why presence now? What’s going on in the world that makes this important in and for any of us? What are the many ways that we can increase or practice our presence? What is one simple practice?

The second session will turn attention to the outer of hosting and convening people. Asking good questions. Creating ways for people to turn to one another. Harvesting.

The third session will give attention to integrating the inner and the outer. No, that is not perfect — I don’t want to unintentionally claim it to be so. In fact, one of the underlaying premises for me is that we must become more comfortable with uncertainty. No matter what we do in our jobs, in our families, and in our communities there remains fundamental uncertainty. I would suggest our efforts to ignore this or deny this create a lot of stress and misdirection together as we build programs and initiatives to remove something that can’t be removable. We don’t talk about that much, yet it feels essential.

I like the feeling of this beginning. Kinde is an excellent companion to work with. Ready, go.