COACHING OBLIQUE SHAFTS OF ILLUMINATION

I don’t actually trust groups.  We all think in particular ways that aren’t the same.  So, the question of what we really care about…, we don’t actually get to it.  I get demoralized, or even depressed.  Alignment is everything.  The question, what do you really care about…, we don’t actually get to it. But almost inevitably, as we get deeper & deeper, we find where we’re not sharing values and commitments, and the whole thing goes to pieces.  I’ve seen that enough, especially in groups, to not trust them.  I know that in a day or a week or a month, we’re going to be back in the soup again.

All the way from three marriages to many attempts to collaborate, it starts out great – harmonious, purposeful, exciting.  And invariably, except for my present, wonderful wife, we get to something that one or more of the people doesn’t really want or is scared of.  I asked Zoe Marai, a brilliant counselor, ‘if you want to transform a whole company, or a whole group, what do you do?’  She said, well, you take the top people and find out what energy they avoid.  They’ve been avoiding it their whole lives, each of them as individuals, and now collectively.  Where won’t they go?  Where are they not liked?   And you train them and train them, and train them so they become able, if not to embrace, to at least deal with and operate from energies they typically avoid.  There are energies that get avoided.  Every time I raise certain kinds of things, it gets killed off. I don’t know how that is for other people.

It’s actually an energy problem, and the willingness to say the awful truth.  Nobody says the awful truth.  We talk about what works and so on, but then there’s the awful truth.  The biggest transformations I’ve been around have been when I’ve pressed the awful truth.  Somebody says something and I come back with, “That’s not awful enough.”  Then they say something else and I say, “That’s not awful enough.”  What do you experience about how awful it is that you can’t just go out and do it?  Eventually you’ll get to something that’s really awful.  That’s like the big stuck point for everybody.  From that, there’s almost always a huge transformation, huge breakthrough.

When we reach one of those areas, it is often something that we can then have disappear in the recognition of it.  Seeing how it’s using us, can we let it go?  Or is it something we need to keep revisiting over and over again? It’s a ‘Moment de Change’, a moment of transformation.  But in order to say the awful truth, you either have to have it as a discipline, which I do when I work, but if I’m too scared, I don’t do it.  I ‘cozy’ it a bit because I don’t want to make trouble.

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