If you want to experience something profound, help someone be fully seen.

I’m often reminded in our intensives how profound it feels when people are truly seen and heard.  I hope you’ve experienced this for yourself - what it feels like to say out loud some of the challenging thoughts and feelings living inside you, and the relief of someone receiving you with grace and not trying to respond or do something about it.  

But if it’s so powerful, why don’t we fully see each other more often?

Our thoughts can be over-reactive, judgmental, or exhausting.  Mine often are.  But I guess we need those thoughts  It’s where our “intelligence” comes from … right?

If you think about where your “intelligence” comes from, I bet you think of your brain.  But in our intensives we help leaders explore and listen to all three of their intelligence centers…

How do you know if your team is behaving in a way that is “healthy?”  A lot of thoughts may come to mind, but in our intensives we explore the ways our hearts can answer this question. After all, our heart tells us what we care about.  Our hearts also let us know when we’re not being fully honest with ourselves and others.  In fact, how much could you tell about a team or organization by answering these two simple questions…

When we start to work with leaders on being deeply present in the moment, we often hear people say something (not so) surprising: they don’t want to.  It may sound something like this…

• “It takes too much energy to be present all the time.”

• “I have way too much to do to be present.”

• “If I become aware of what’s really happening, then I’ll have to do something about it.”

I have versions of these thoughts all the time. And yet, to state the obvious, the present moment is the only thing that’s real. 

In the amount of time since we have last written, we’ve worked with leaders confronting massive staffing shortages, petitions, call-outs, contact-tracing nightmares, and countless sick students and staff – all while juggling their own family illnesses, disruptions to child care, lack of sleep, etc.  

These aren’t just "challenges."  They can crush the spirit. 

Our egos continually try to convince us that who we are is not okay or good enough and we must shift our focus to who we should be.  That can play out all kinds of ways, from self-criticism ("I should have spoken up in that meeting"), to emotional repression ("I should feel more happy about this"), to desire or envy ("I should have a better title").  The "shoulds" in our life can sometimes help us get motivated, feel safer, or (at least temporarily) avoid discomfort or pain.  

And, "should" can be the gateway to hell on earth.  

Acute staffing shortages, active Covid cases, and the mounting tensions around vaccination are pushing many of the leaders we work with to the brink, or, out of their organizations altogether.  Maybe it’s never been harder to survive as an education leader.  

But the challenges of “surviving” are not new - just more extreme than ever.  In many ways, the approach to ed reform has always been more hare than tortoise, and many schools and organizations- even before the pandemic -had built an existence of barely sustaining at the edges of people’s capacity.

There are probably countless opportunities to reset our approach and create something more healthy, nourishing and durable.  But if the humans leading this movement don’t personally go through their own “reset” process, we fear that broader change will not follow, because cultural change will not happen without personal change.

It only took a few hours for Arnold Beisser to go from being a 24-year-old nationally ranked tennis champion to a Polio survivor that could not stand, walk, sit, eat, drink, or even breathe unassisted. 

Despite that, he would go on to teach psychiatry at UCLA, lead a community mental health movement, and write several best-selling books. 

What allowed him to do it?  Radical acceptance of reality.  And his greatest legacy within the field of psychiatry and therapy is what he called the paradoxical theory of change: 

“Change occurs when one becomes what he or she is, not by trying to become something he or she is not.”

What do most people do when given the choice between sitting in a room alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes or subjecting themselves to a jolt of electricity? According to a 2014 study conducted by the University of Virginia, the answer is literally shocking, but maybe not so surprising.

Letting yourself “just be” and staying present in the moment is a deeply challenging exercise — and it only gets more challenging when we’re “the leader,” and we feel the eyes upon us.

Consider this question: How much of what we call leadership development is a process, not of learning, but of “unlearning”?

Vulnerability is a strength, not a weakness.

Why do some teams soar while others struggle? Amy Edmundson discovered the answer researching teams of nurses and Google spent millions coming to the same conclusion:

Psychological safety: The ability to work and grow without fear.