#120: Action And Contemplation
Good morning friends
It’s exactly a year since I wrote I’m Still Standing. It was my telling of my three weeks inside Covid. I didn’t have it as badly as many of you did. Nevertheless, it was tough and scary. I continue to receive messages saying it is one of the best descriptions of journeying through that disease. I am grateful for those messages. I sure needed them in the depths of post-Covid depression.
A few months later I wrote The Story Behind the Story. I did so because my coaching clients told me how many people were struggling and had to simultaneously ‘get on with it’.
I shared my experience hoping that it would help us all to pause and check how the people around us were doing. It is as true now as it was then, there is a story behind all our stories. It is powerful to pause and ask. Truly ask and truly listen.
If you’d like to, send me a note, and let me know how you are doing. This letter has grown so much, that I don’t know most of you. I would love to meet you, even by email. I will respond.
Because of those letters, I got to meet Michael MacLennan.
Michael is, like some of you, one of those remarkable people who hold down a demanding corporate job and finds the time to found and build an organisation that makes a difference.
Nineteen months ago, he formed Covid Aid. Over the past few weeks, it’s been great to see their work celebrated. They were a Charity of the Year finalist in the Scottish Charity Awards and Michael is currently a finalist in Great Britain’s Entrepreneur for Good Awards. The recognition is well deserved.
/strategy
Reflecting on the year gone by put me in a contemplative mood.
That took me to a two-part podcast conversation between Brené Brown and Franciscan friar, Father Richard Rohr. Rohr is the founder of The Center for Action and Contemplation.
Innovation and strategy consultant, Ryan Till, introduced me to Rohr’s work some years ago.
Brown and Rohr’s conversation is delightful. It is filled with laughter. They admire each other’s work and ways of thinking.
Rohr is a provocateur, who unsettles certainties and entices us to engage with the mystery of life.
Asking difficult questions, being comfortable in complexity and being happy to not always know are all characteristics of a powerful strategist.
His centre’s name marries action and contemplation.
Almost all my clients struggle with being sucked into the everyday fray. And, they always find that when they create space for contemplation, their actions become more intentional, more powerful, and more strategic.
Without fail within a month or two of having created space for reading in their sector, for reflecting on the organisations’ challenges, they find themselves acting more effectively.
Sometimes, we can get stuck in strategy, desperate for certainty, hoping we can avoid the messiness of action and the failures that are inevitably a part of living. Yet catalytical contemplation must be enriched by the lessons of life, the lessons from action.
As Rohr himself put it “We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.” We need the action to bring learning back into reflection.
Rohr reflects that wisdom is “When you can put order and so-called disorder together”.
That is the essence of strategy, both personal and organisational. The ability to create order where one can, to be able to discern what disorder is complexity rather than chaos, and to act holding both.
/self
Brown structures her conversation with Rohr, by recounting some of her favourite quotes from the 33 books that he has written.
More than once he laughs loudly, as if amazed that he had written those words. At one point he declares “That is good. I’m glad that I said that”. And, in another moment, reflects “I’m constantly fumbling with these verbalizations”.
There is beauty in being able to see when we’ve done good work and to know that it requires constant effort and refinement to create it.
One of my favourite blunt Rohrian quotations is “Before the truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable.” There’s a hard honest truth there. Yet, as he says, “You cannot heal what you do not first acknowledge.”
And I love the challenge in his statement, “If we don’t learn to mythologize our lives, inevitably we will pathologize them.”
/soul
Rohr tells Brown that he’s read the mystics of all religions, and that “they’re always happy, they’re always free, and they’re always in love. They’ve moved beyond law and order, law and order is just a little starting gate, that’s all, to limit your egocentricity.”
Perhaps that is the gateway to a life filled with love, to relinquish control, to embrace the mystery of life.
Brown asks him “What does it mean to be humbled by the mysteries of faith?”
He answers that “It gives you process language, journey language, growth language…”
Listen to your language. Do you speak about the possibility of growth? Do you invite people to join a journey with you, to process with you?
Rohr takes exception to a world in which we “worship workability, predictability, answers”.
He fears that seeking control and certainty leads to “an artificial world where we can create circumstances in which we know, and that’s created a hubris, a pride”.
He says that it is with love that “… the world of infinity opens up, where you stop trying to limit her, him and make them into your image. Without great love, you cannot understand infinity.”
Our world is complex beyond our knowing. We have spent since the Industrial Revolution trying to control it. Perhaps to love it, we need to stop and step back. Give it space to form its infinite connections.
What might this mean in your world? What do you need to give space to?
If this is the first time, you’re reading strategy, soul & self, welcome! You can subscribe here.
All the best
Karl
PS: Two weeks ago, I spoke to a group of Masters and PhD students about integrating the demands of thesis writing whilst holding down a full-time job.
I turned my talk into 168 Hours, Headlight Sight and One-Inch Frames or Writing a thesis whilst working. If you know someone studying part-time, please share it with them.
You can learn more about my coaching practice here.