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Catch 22! Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Have you ever been caught in a situation where you cannot move forwards and you cannot move backwards? It is like getting caught in a traffic jam. If you barge forward, you won’t be popular, and you won’t succeed. If you do nothing, nothing will change.

Now sometimes, we do have to ‘sit tight’. The police are on their way and they will clear the jam bit by bit. It is best to chill.

But sometimes that isn’t the choice. Sometimes if we sit and do nothing, that is where we will stay.

But what if there are cars to the left of us and cars to the right of us; cars ahead and cars behind. What can we do?

Obviously, we have to start just like the police will: one car at a time. And we have to be strategic.

Did you have one of those games as a kid where you had 8 squares in a 9 square space and you had to move them around? And the first move might not look as if it would produce a solution?

That is what we have to do: move one square at a time. Patiently, and strategically.

This is easier said than done though, particularly when our emotions are involved.

Corporate poet, David Whyte writes about a cyclical pattern in our lives where we come periodically to a place which is ‘a traffic jam’. Our task, then, is to find the smallest possible thing to ease, not just ourselves, but everyone around us, out of the impasse.

I have picked FIVE quotations from David Whyte’s poems to illustrate the process.

1. The beginning. “anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you” (Sweet Darkness)

2. The call. “You are not a troubled guest on this earth, you are not an accident amidst other accidents, you were invited . . .” (What To Remember When Wakening)

3. Reawakening. “When your eyes are tired, the world is tired also. When your vision is gone, no part of the world can find you” (Sweet Darkness)

4. The departure. “Start close in, don’t take the second step or the third, start with the first thing close in, the step you don’t want to take” (Start Close In)

5. Begin the conversation. “”Your great mistake is to act the dream as it you were alone . . . Everybody is waiting for you.” (Everybody Is Waiting For You)

In more prosaic terms, our first step is always to notice we are in a jam, and rather than bluster and curse, consider the best thing to do about it. It is amazing how often we delay this simple first step.

Our second step is equally as hard. We chose after all to be on the road at that time. We didn’t want this result, but after all, we chose to be here, and when think about it, the jam chose to happen when we were there. The jam is an integral part of us and we are integral part of it. We are part of its story, and it is part of ours.

And it doesn’t get any easier. Are we communicating? Or have we taken it for granted that everyone knows that we want the traffic to flow again? Do they think we are just trying to push in? Are we alert to other people who want the traffic to flow again. And can they recognize us? What is it that we do, or notice, that alerts them to our sense of what is possible?

And are we holding back because it all seems too big? If the traffic were to flow again, what would we all be doing in unison, and what would be our part?

And who is really holding everything up? Is it us? Is everyone waiting for us, to pay attention?

Is everyone waiting for us, to start the conversation?

Here

Hat-tip: Sally.  Thank you.

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The eminent social scientist Karl Weick once said that social problems are often defined in ways that prevent us doing anything about them.

I have been watching the Zimbabwean elections closely.  As facts emerge, I have been listing them on a “secondary” blog.

The situation in Zimbabwe is as dire any conflict in history.  Can we move here?  Can we move there?  It seems the ultimate Catch 22.  Whatever we do may create more damage.

I believe however that much of our hopelessness comes from our own representation of what is happening.  Could we not, instead, look at difficult objective conditions that require resolution?

Today, people are starting close in, as the poet David Whyte would say.

Today, we are going to do something positive.  Today we are going to say thank you.  Today we are going to say we are with you.  Today we are going to send emails to the President of Zambia who is the current chairman of SADC.  Today, we are going to take 3 minutes to write a short, brief, courteous email saying,

Dear President Mwanawasa,

I write to thank you and the leaders of  SADC sincerely for convening the extraordinary meeting concerning Zimbabwe and to extend my support and goodwill for a resolution that is satisfactory to all the people of Zimbabwe and her neighbours.

Sincerely,

I am patching in a long excerpt of a post from Sokwanele that gives the email addresses of SADC.   Zimbabwe for a positive future.

TAKE ACTION

Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa has called an emergency meeting of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to discuss the Zimbabwean presidential poll delay. This is the first move by Zimbabwe’s regional neighbours to intervene since the elections on 29th March 2008. President Mwanawasa is the current Chairman of the 14-nation South African Development Community. This is what he said yesterday:

I wish to take this opportunity to commend the people of Zimbabwe for the calm and peaceful manner in which the elections were conducted.

Similarly, I appeal to them to maintain the same spirit of calmness which they exhibited during the elections as they await the results of the presidential elections.

However, given developments immediately following the elections, I have decided, as Chair of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to call an extraordinary summit on Saturday 12th April, 2008 to discuss ways and means of assisting the people of Zimbabwe with the current impasse as well as adopt a co-ordinated approach to the situation in that country.

Both President Morgan Tsvangirai and opposition leader Robert Mugabe will be attending the emergency meeting.

Support our democratically elected leader and take action.

What YOU can do

You can voice your feelings and SHOUT OUT for FREEDOM. Communicate with key SADC people attending the meeting.

Tell them that Zimbabweans have the right to live in a democratic, free and peaceful country. Tell them your personal experiences and why you want change. Make them understand what it is like to be in Zimbabwe today. Tell them we voted for change, we got change, and we want change now. Speak the TRUTH.

HOW you can do it

Email, fax or phone using the details provided below. Keep your messages real and honest but also short and to the point. Remember: thousands of us will be doing this so they will have a lot to read. Let’s make sure they can read and hear it all!

Be polite at all times. People don’t pay attention to angry messages (look at us: Mugabe has been angry with the people for many years now and we just ignored him and voted him out anyway). Anger does not work.

1. Call or fax or email the Zambian State House with a message for President Levy Mwanawasa:

• Tel: +260 1 266147 or 262094
• Fax: +260 1 266092

• Send an email to Mr John Musukuma, Special Assistant to the President for Press and Public Relations: johnmu@nkwazi.gov.zm

• Use the contact form on the Zambian State House website here to send an email:
  http://www.statehouse.gov.zm/index.php?option=com_contact&Itemid=3
• Bonus email: we’re not sure if this is a direct contact for President Mwanawasa, but just in case it is, copy all the emails you send to: differmu@nkwazi.gov.zm

2. Call or fax a message to President Thabo Mbeki - President of South Africa

• Tel: +27 (0)12 300 5200 and +27 (0)21 464 2100
• Fax: +27 (0)12 323 8246 and +27 (0)21 462 2838

• Send an email to Mr Mukoni Ratshitanga Thabo Mbeki’s Presidential Spokesperson: mukoni@po.gov.za

3. Call or email Lieutenant Colonel Tanki Mothae - Director of Politics, Defence and Security Affairs at SADC

• Tel: +267 361 1001 or +267 397 2848
• E-mail: tmothae@sadc.int

4. Copy all your emails to this general SADC email address:

• Email: registry@sadc.int

5. If you want to attach images to your emails, you can download copies of the photographs at the top of this mailing from the Sokwanele flickr account here:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/sokwanele/

6. Forward this email to everyone you know and ask them to take action too.

7. Be positive, stay strong, and never forget that we have won.

David Bolchover who wrote The Living Dead: Switched Off Zone Out - The Shocking Truth About Office Life and guest posted for the Timesonline, wrote on his book blurb that he left corporate life to do something with his life!

I also got an email for an organization that specializes in Career Shifts - you know those awkward career changes when you are going to do something different. They quote Howard Thurman whom I am sure David would like too.

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who are alive.”

British poet David Whyte says similarly:

“There is only one life you can call your own, and a thousand others you can call by any name you want.”

If you can’t bunk out to the nearest bookstore to look for one of his books of prose or poetry, spend part of Easter listing all the times at work and play that you have felt truly alive.

It would be great to hear which of those you could sneak into your work life . . .

Advice from an ‘old hand’ to a ‘new teacher’ whose class got the better of him : in Goodbye Mr Chips, which I watched over the weekened.

“You have some hours before prep starts. Go out. Out there under the sky. Look around. What is the saying? Distance lends enchantment to the view. Go out. Come back refreshed.”

Paulo Coelho offers the same advice. Don’t spend the day looking down. Look to the horizon.

David Whyte has the same advice. Sometimes the answer depends upon a walk around the lake.

Whenever life is bad, look to the horizon. Close your eyes and listen to the furthest sounds that you can hear.

And if you can, do it when you awake.  Do it in short 1 minute break.  Do it commuting on the way home.

Is that why you pay so much for a house or office with a view?

No spark had yet kindled in him an intellectual passion.  George Eliot

Those who do not understand their destiny, will never understand the friends they have made, nor the work they have chosen, nor the one life that waits beyond all others.   David Whyte in All the true vows in River Flow, p. 349.

Is this a new poem from David Whyte? The Sun.

“Belonging” is the theme of our age. “The House of Belonging” from David Whyte. “calling you into the family of things” Mary Oliver.

Belonging is a hard concept to grasp. Michael Bauwens has drawn this picture showing different understandings of belonging: me as part of a family, me as in let-me-be!, me as let-me-be(come), and me as going part of the way on the journey with you. Co-creation. I came across Barbara Sliter’s blog, Co-creatorship, in the last week or so too.

In my own evolving grasp of the concept, I am thinking in THREE steps:

ONE, can I begin the day with curiosity? Which birds are singing? Who is already up-and-about? What will the day bring that is totally unexpected and surprising? No”to do” list for me! Just an early morning welcome to the unknown as it is evolving around me.

TWO, can I begin the day with sureness? That my interest in the world will help shape it into a better place, alongside the interest of everyone else. The birds, the cat, the neighbor whose petrol mower is already going and shattering the peace, the motorway 20 miles away, the cup of coffee beckoning, the blogosphere which should be ignored this Saturday . . . That my interest is valued and creates safety for others.

THREE, can I be wholehearted? Can I approach everything I do today with energy, enthusiasm and warmth? Can my wholeheartedness for some or even most of my tasks (it is Saturday!) bring me pleasure and create more energy, enthusiasm, warmth for others, people and tasks?

At the end of the day, can I look back on a day when we have been surprised at what we have accomplished together? Not the race that we have won or the people we have vanquished.

Can I be surprised at what we discovered together, and how we continue to surprise each other? Do we go forward to another day, not dizzy with excitement but astounded, that we have found hidden depths in ourselves with all our failings and limitations? The hidden depths of ourselves and others. And do they feel it too? Not necessarily with bear hugs and noisy applause. Just gentle appreciation of how much their hopes and dreams, their wholeheartedness, brought warmth and enjoyment to the day for me.

“ how I want to know
that sun,
and how I want to flower
and how I want to claim
my happiness
and how I want to walk
through life
amazed and inarticulate
with thanks.”

David Whyte in a collection about the Hero’s Journey.

Synergy is not a word I like but do we have a better word for describing productive interaction between people? Alex from alwaysnewmistakes writes on how essential synergy is to doing well. Yeah. What a great post contrasting Venice in the time of Vivaldi with Silicon Valley of today. True, true, true.

And Alex makes the further point that it is not enough to be close to abundance. One must take part. My favorite author David Whyte puts it like this:

“I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you.”

Some months ago, I also picked some criteria for the conditions for synergy from an academic paper by David A Lane (I’ve lost the url, unfortunately.)

a. We must have a reason to interact (e.g., you make cheese and I like to eat cheese)

b. Our roles must be complementary (e.g, you sell and I buy)

c. We must interact often enough for a system to emerge (e.g., I must buy from you to keep you in business and you must have cheese to sell to me)

d. We must have permission to find solutions and opportunities to act.

David A Lane talks in terms of worrying less about the outcome and more about the quality of the interaction.  Indeed, I can go to my local deli and if they don’t have what I want, trust to them to produce something that meets my needs.   I once lived in a country where there was a flour shortage.  When the local bakery opened at 7am, I would go in and ask what is for breakfast? And eat what ever they produced!  Generative:  they were in the bakery business and I was hungry.   We could work out the rest imaginatively!   That is synergistic whereas going into a well stocked supermarket, isn’t really.

Synergy - I think it is an essential idea!

Alex from alwaysnewmistakes asks whether hope is responsible to achieving more than we think we are able.

I think of three gurus.

I think of Sun Tzu, the famous Chinese General (Sun Zi if you are used to modern Mandarin). He counsels us that battles are fought or won before they are started. He advises to pick our battles wisely and to only engage if the probabilities are with us. To fight in the “hope” of winning is to court disappointment.

I think of David Whyte and his story of coming across a frayed rope bridge across a canyon in Tibet and freezing in terror. I am not sure if he ever used the bridge. The point is that often we are not happy with where we are, we are reasonably clear where we want to be (over the other side), and we look at the gap between where we are and where we want to be, and our stomach lurches. In terror not hope. The contribution of positive psychology and positive organizational scholarship is how to move forward when we feel the absence of hope - or puke-making terror. The trick is to “Start close in, not with the second step or the third, but with the first thing”. It is also called recrafting, appreciative inquiry, and building the bridge as you walk on it. That ability to stomach, rather literally, the original fear and to look at what you can do rather than at what you cannot do, is key. Would I call it hope? Building hope I think. In my last post, I suggested ways of structuring to contain the terror of people around you. Sometimes we have to start with ourselves. We can’t think let alone lead when we are paralysed with fear. And if this sounds excessive, it is not. Even when you write a paper at uni, when you give your first lecture after the summer break, you can be frozen in fear. You could also be facing a cashflow crisis, or the loss of your biggest customer through no fault of your own, etc. etc. Things happen, to real people, and real people contain the fear and start “close in”. With immense self-discipline, because they are fortunate to understand the mechanisms of hope, and that hope is grounded in what we can do.

The third guru or set of gurus are the people who work on generative psychologies. Some of this work is very technical stuff on how we can produce more together than when we work alone. Great advances hardly ever come from having the right answers up front. They usually come from having enormous faith in the system. Birds seem to fly in a flock by following each other and taking care not collide - from those simple actions we get a flock. Great leadership is when you pose a question (much as Alex has done for me here) and through engagement with the question and each other, we draw out answers we couldn’t have imagined. It can be done alone but we do so much together. Alex’s point about synergy.

So great leaders have a sense of what is possible (get across the canyon), they contain their own terror and start working to establish the next step usually on the basis of what we have in hand and what we are good at doing, and then they work with the group to work out what to do next. Their belief in the ‘followers’ and customers and employees in business, must be massive. They must believe that the solution will emerge from the interaction. They must believe in the quality of people around them.

So is hope essential? Yes. But it is not ungrounded. it is so grounded that we can build the bridge forward. It is so grounded, it is credible and infectious. It is so grounded, we learn as we go with others with us on our journey.

Thanks, Alex

I have just discovered Jodee Bock’s blog. As I was whizzing down her latest posts, I found her piece on New Year Resolutions - aren’t we fascinated by our capacity for inactivity. She reminded me of David Whyte and I have taken the liberty of quoting what she says with two lines from one of David Whyte’s poems.

“If the WHY is big enough, the HOW will take care of itself. The WHY is the PURPOSE. When we’re clear on the WHY, then we can set the vision, which will break the WHY down, maybe into time chunks, for example. Then goals will take a bite out of the vision, and allow us those measurable milestones.” Jodee Bock

“What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough . . .” From “What to Remember When Waking” in River Flow (p. 351).

And is doing it easy?  I’ll write on that another day.

One of the hardest concepts to grasp in positive existential psychology, is the idea of open endedness.  It is an anathema to the soul of a psychologist trained in positive thinking and to a manager trained in “gap techniques”.  In the old school, we are supposed to define a goal or an outcome and achieve what we say we are going to achieve.  We are supposed to be competent and confident that what we say will work, will work.  We are supposed to be able to make more things work than our neighbor.

David Whyte talks of frontier conversations where we do not know the outcome and of places where we are not certain of our competence.

If we insist on defining things as competencies, then we need to check whether the people joining our organization can tolerate being in a situation where they do not know if they understand or will ever understand.  Equally, if this is a competence important to the organization, the interviewer needs to be in a likewise situation.  Great!  Two people don’t know what they are doing.  So my definition of a good interview is when I have learned something from the person I am interviewing!

Here is a quotation of his reprinted by Inner Edge.

I’ve just joined Steve Pavlina’s personal development forum. The posts are a bit reminiscent of “Dear Auntie Jane” though the younger people in the group won’t remember the one-to-many days when people wrote in to a newspaper or magazine. This is truly many-to-many in 2.0 spirit and people who join are knowledgeable about personal development and willing to share their ideas.

I posted a few replies to youngsters who felt disoriented and benefited in 2.0 spirit from reflections on my own life. I moved countries last year having done so five years earlier (so fourth city in five years). I was well aware how much time I was spending networking professionally and attending to functional things.

It’s really important to lead a full life with relationships close and social, casual and professional. Everyone should be pursuing a good range of sport, cultural and social activity. It reminds me of David Whyte quoting Rainer Rilke’s poem about the fire and the night. We don’t want to concentrate on the fire. It ignores the night. We want to look at the night which holds everything including the fire.

Hard as it can be when we are under pressure of immediate things-to-do, we need to cherish our wider night of activities we hold dear. Mindtools has an database system for building goals in all areas of our lives - though you can do it on paper too. It is well worth an annual springclean to check through our appreciation of the fullness of life and let the mundane details and work take their place in the wider scheme of things.

Minutes after  I drafted this post, I discovered MindGym,  a coaching site with a fresh approach.  Oddly, they think it is a good thing to be taking work home with you.  Sure, we all do - but a good thing?  Must take that up with them.  And folks, the MindGym is British! Yeah!  Must definitely get in touch with them.

I’ll believe it when I see it or I will see it when I believe - the difference between positivism and positive psychology.

I’ve been familiar with the Desiderata since I was a child (it was popularised by a pop singer in the sixties, wasn’t it?) and I have just re-read it.  Now I read the poetry of David Whyte, Otto Scharmer’s work on presencing, ideas of emergence behind The Legend of Bagger Vance, I see and hear a lot more in this well-quoted poem.

I’ve always thought that one of the best kept secrets of management theory is that middle management sucks.  Have you every noticed that there are very few movies about middle management and whenever there is a story about middle management it is about a submarine or boat where the “business unit manager” is far enough away from the “strategic leaders” to do some leadership, or we see the middle manager bailing out and rediscovering life as in Jerry Maguire.

Middle management sucks because it is all management.  It is all about “to do” lists.  Being a housewife is similar.  “To do lists” take up too much of our attention.  It is a percentage thing.  While everything on the the list is important, we should never allow our lives to be overtaken by what is urgent and important.  Urgent and important should be allowed, how much do you think?  1%?  And if you have so many urgent and important tasks, then the other 99% will just have to be many too.

But will we allow ourselves the freedom of work that is not urgent and important?  As David Whyte says, we make another “to do list” because we are scared that we are nothing and nobody without one.  Yes, it quite interesting when our “to do” lists vanish.  If we are suddenly ill.  Or when we change jobs and nobody knows who we are.  When we don’t get email and our phone doesn’t ring.  It is quite disconcerting.  We hang on to domination by urgent and important, though thoroughly dreary tasks that are large, because they are, but larger than ourselves and our dreams?

For the last 10 years, as a displaced person/migrant, I’ve oscillated between frenetic completion of to do lists of commercial tasks like residence permits, bank accounts, etc. etc. - things I hate to do at the best of times - and silence.  I think this is why migration is so miserable.  Not dealing with bankers and government officials - they are people too.  Not taking boring jobs.  The jobs are important in their own right.  Migration is miserable because we make the mistake of allowing the “to do list” and the silences that surround them be all that it is.

We have to resolve to reengineer our lives around a dream, around what we love to do and what others love us to do because we do it so well.  We have to allow the “to do” work and silences fit in to that space, not be our only space. We are letting priorities become goals and to constrict our spaces until we cannot breathe anymore - rather literally for some.

We need to sit down with a piece of paper and draw a little circle for our little life as a migrant, or as a housewife, or as a middle manager (those scare me more than being a migrant).  Around that little circle we should draw a giant circle representing our horizons and dreams.  And stare at the empty space between the two.  Pretty scary.  I feel my chest constrict.  I want to walk away.

I mustn’t.   I must start defining the points on the horizon.  The points I love and I am drawn to.  And then start filling in any points between me and there, any point at all, useful or not.   I need to take the first step and to put down the first point.

It is hard when immediate pressures are all around us.  And it doesn’t happen instantly.  We keep looking nervously at that tight centre of tedium.

So crisscross over.  Promise yourself you will be back to watch it like a pot on the stove or a sick child.  But branch out in each direction to see how far you can see.  It is only a piece of paper after all. Just add a point.  See if you can.

See if you dare lie a life when priorities take up 1% of your existence and are priorities, not limits and constraints.

I suspect that the most interesting concept in positive psychology, if you are a psychologist, is the relationship between the past, the present, and the future.

Our training is based predominantly on on linear models. We are trained to think that if we are X today, we will be Y tomorrow. Most of our tuition concentrated on teaching us to define and measure X’s and Y’s and it took for granted that today and tomorrow are independent.

Positive psychology is based on recursive models. The past does not predict the future; it is part of the future. Mathematically, we predict the value of X in the future, rather than the value of Y in the future.

David Whyte’s Midlife and the Great Unknown begins by addressing the relationship between future, present and past. To feel well, to feel vital, to feel alive, we need to be active, to be acting our future in the context of the present. In other words, always to be doing now what we want for the future, without the future being a separate place.

I particularly like David Whyte’s idea that we are all unique - well of course we know that, but do we act that way? Do we look at all our relationships with people, with events, with places and even with things and see a unique story that is unfolding and interesting in itself?

Related is the concept of mindfulness - to be fully present in events, not to experience their beauty or their ghastliness (ghastliness is real) but to experience be present.

It is a hard concept for we psychologists!

David Whyte takes about finding the frontiers of your life: the place where you face the unknown in an expansive way. I like the correspondence with Paulo Coehlo’s horizon.

David Whyte is a little guarded about his poetry but you can find the odd snippets on the web. If you haven’t encountered his work, I recommend you buy his CD, Midlife and the Great Unknown.

Born in Yorkshire, of Irish decent, David Whyte is a marine biologist, ngo worker, turned poet who writes about our relationship with work. There will be lots about David Whyte on this blog!