How to Make Mistakes
Happy Sunday everyone
My coaching practice means I spend hours each week in deep conversation with people across the world. My client base is diverse in every sense of the word, so by the end of the week I have a good sense of the forces shaping business and personal life. Those conversations blend with my studies to arrange into pattern that ultimately allows the words to flow onto the page, becoming this letter.
This cartoon by Ellis Rosen brought a wry smile to my lips. It is captioned,
“It’s just the abyss dear. Try not to gaze into it.”
A more contemplative take on the same principle, comes from this Buddhist story that I found in aikido master, Wendy Palmer’s book The Intuitive Body.
There was a farmer who had a beautiful horse that he loved very much. One day the horse ran away.
“What a terrible misfortune,” said his friends.
“We will see,” replied the farmer.
A few days later the horse returned with another horse.
“Oh how, lucky you are,” said his neighbours.
“We will see,” said the farmer.
A few days later his only son was thrown from the horse, crippling him for life.
“How terrible,” said his friends.
“We’ll see,” said the farmer.
A few days later soldiers came through the town, conscripting every able-bodied young man for war…
Of course, the Zen of clever cartoons and parables is a little trickier to get right in the tumult of daily life. This week’s letter is about going inwards, to use the resources that are us, to inspire and carry us. To use ourselves.
/ Strategy
Effective action depends on a clear strategy. Good strategy emerges from a commitment to learning, both from knowledge and experience.
Palmer cites a Chinese maxim about a seeker who climbs a high mountain to speak with a hermit sage about life’s meaning.
What is the most important aspect of one’s life?
Experience.
How do you get experience?
Good judgement.
How do you get good judgement?
Bad judgement.
John Le Carre’s A Perfect Spy capture this sentiment in a pithier fashion, “Sometimes Tom, we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.”
Of course, the wisdom that comes from mistakes is not a license for foolishness. Useful mistakes only come in the context of intentional application.
Palmer makes the point that, “When we reach the point in our training where we have achieved a sense of fluidity and enjoyment, a mistake can take on an entirely different meaning…Making a mistake can become a creative act.”
In other words, one first must cross a threshold of experience for experiments and mistakes to be useful.
A genuine curiosity about ourselves, others, and world is the basis of powerful strategy formulation. It allows us to open to answers that don’t follow from our preconceptions. It allows for the capacity for change. But, as we know from last week’s letter, change can be hard.
/ Self
How do we build the capacity for experimentation and curiosity?
It has always struck me as a profound irony that people who make their livings with their bodies – professional athletes – respect the importance of recovery and pausing, whilst politicians, law firms, consultancies, financial services, indeed most of the corporate world, venerate long, caffeinated hours and from that place make decisions that affect the livelihoods of most of us. I certainly have been guilty of 14 hour, 6 cappucino days for weeks on end. In retrospect, sheer foolishness. My worst decisions were made in those moments.
In a classic HBR article, The Making of a Corporate Athlete Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz reflect that one needs to build physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual capacity. So often we focus on only cognitive capacity. How balanced are you across those dimensions?
They state that the problem is not stress. Indeed, my readers relish challenge and stress (as do I). The problem is the failure to build in rest periods. Even micro-moments make a difference. Their research had shown that great tennis players adopt rituals to lower their heart rates between 15 and 20 percent in between points. They build in micro-moments of recovery.
What does this mean practically?
Well, Palmer says that “Energy follows attention”. Something that we can all do is adopt basic practices to build intentional concentration.
You know that I love BJ Fogg’s Maui Habit. It really is such a simple way to build your intentional capability.
As you’re sitting reading this…pause…breath in…and…exhale. Scan your body. Where are you holding tension? Are your shoulders hunched? Is your jaw tight? Actively release that tension.
In that moment, you increased the nett energy flow into your body. Oxygen added. Releasing tension stopped energy wastage. Find ways to do this every day.
To bring all of today’s letter alive, do somatic psychologist Christine Caldwell’s “Goofy Practice”. It is what you think it is. Around the table today, starting with the most serious member of the family, get them to make a funny face or do something silly. The rest of you emulate it. You’re experimenting, you’re paying attention, you’re learning, you’ll be breathing because you’re laughing and hopefully, you’ll release tension.
As Palmer says, “With training and discipline, we can begin to stretch parts of a second and discover that there are whole worlds within them.”
Through building your capacity for intention, you add time and energy. That gives you the space and resource to recover from the misfortune that will come.
/ Soul
I leant of Hawaiian surfer, Ha’a Kealanu via Paul Nicklen’s amazing photography. This video shows her running on the ocean’s floor carrying a boulder. It is a practice taught to her by her grandfather, so that if she made a mistake surfing a big wave, she’d have the capacity to stay under water. She is practicing to learn from failure. She knows she can fail and recover, and so she can learn from the mistake when it happens. She can be present to it. He taught it not because he didn’t respect her abilities, but because he knows the way of the water and he loves her.
Her post reads “And still we IMUA ✊🏾 ‘I Ku Mau Mau/ Kaulana Nā Pua’ look up the meaning behind the chant and song to have a deeper understanding of what Native Hawaiians dealt with and still have carry with us to this day.” Power both in movement and prose.
Karl
PS: You can subscribe here, and find me on LinkedIn and Instagram.
(This letter was first published on 28 June 2020)