Completion

Generally our world doesn‘t give much time or space for completion.  We‘re busy, busy, busy with lots of things to do and wanting to dash off to the next thing right now, thank you very much.

So, it‘s particularly important to create structures that have us focus on attending to completion.  Whatever the designated period of time (a meeting or a year) and whatever the designated measure (the solstice, the lunar calendar or our western calendar) it‘s important to take time to complete.

What does that look like?  Well, it as varied as we human beings are and usually involves some form of review, celebrating and honoring both successes and failures and savoring the juicy bits.

Really good completion leaves us a little empty (rather than stuffed full of recent past experiences) with room therefore for all the rich experiences that are to come.

For me, 2009 has been a particularly full year, rich with experience, challenge and learning.  So on this, the final day of 2009, I‘ll be spending some time reviewing and completing the year.

I follow a very basic structure used, I believe, by coaches around the world.  I make a list of several things:  My success and breakthroughs; failures and breakdowns; disappointments and unexpected surprises.  Anything that feels incomplete.  Then Henry and I crack open a bottle of great champagne and go over the year together, ending with some sort of ceremonial destruction of our lists. ..usually burning them in a fireplace.  I generally feel great at the end of this process.   Open, ready. . . complete.

I‘d be interested to hear how you complete and your thoughts on completion in general.

Intimacy

We are in an interesting state around intimacy. We are all LONGING for more closeness and connection in our lives. We yearn for it and are terrified of it at the same time. As we‘ve attempted to legislate and quantify (for good reasons initially) the WAYS in which we can be in closer connection with each other, we‘ve created so much confusion. Intimacy has become a scary, scary word. It‘s actually INAPROPRIATE to have intimacy in many workplaces. I think they mean sex?? My sister, who teaches second grade tells me that there are rules against intimacy between a student and a teacher. I think they mean touching???

Webster‘s defines intimacy as the state of being intimate. Okay. At first glance this seems to be completely unhelpful. However, after giving the matter some thought, I‘m inclined to agree with Webster completely.

Intimacy isn‘t an event or a thing; it is a state or condition that arises when we are able to be present with another…Right. Intimacy is a condition that arises when we are able to be present with and include what IS. In the other. In ourselves.

Relationship is at the center of everything we do and yet so often we try to be in relationship with the person that we think SHOULD be there, rather than the person who is actually there. Intimacy comes when we can include all that is there and remain connected around something larger than our disagreements or mismatched parts.

Lt. Col. George Kimsey a few months before he died.

My father has been my greatest teacher about intimacy. Growing up, I adored my father and also insisted on adoring the thing that I NEEDED to be there rather than the things that truly were there. He was in the Air Force, a military man from the peak of his pressed cap to the toes of his spit shined shoes and he felt it was his duty and his obligation to shape me up. It‘s what he knew. His fall from grace, the realization that he was very human and therefore imperfect, was traumatic for me.

As I grew older, I began to realize and accept my father‘s limitations and faults and love him, not in spite of them, but because of them. His way of loving may not have looked like I thought it should. It might not have been as consistent or clear or encompassing as I thought it needed to be. Maybe it felt like I only got a tea cup of love and I needed an ocean. What I came to realize was with that tea cup of love, I got the WHOLE cup.

Three years ago, my dad passed away. My two sisters and I got to spend the last three days of his life with him. It was a truly spectacular life changing experience.

On the one hand, what we were experiencing was extraordinary. On the other hand, nothing unusual was happening…a family in the process of loving someone over to the other side. It is those moments of realness and presence in which we must first rely on the interdependence and intimacy that is always there and then we are able to open ourselves to the experience of feeling it.
KKH

Authenticity

I think authenticity has gotten a bad rap! It‘s been pre-empted by lots of egos running around wanting to make sure that they are “seen” and “known” and that we hear “their truth”. “Hey, you know, I‘m just speaking my truth. I feel compelled to share MY truth. No, I can‘t do that it wouldn‘t be, you know, “AUTHENTIC”. It‘s just not ME.”

There‘s lots about MY authenticity and how I can‘t be around YOUR authenticity because it‘s different from MINE. It‘s not AUTHENTIC for me to do that or be there because it is not LIKE ME; or like my concept or understanding of ME, of who ME is. Authenticity winds up looking like it is self absorbed, totally “me” focused. That‘s not what I mean by authenticity.

In my experience authenticity is a process of opening to our most resonate center. There is mystery and magic in authenticity. Authenticity EXPANDS us, it doesn‘t contract us. It returns us to our natural and innate intelligent and wholeness.

Authenticity is about learning to embrace the whole of us; to be inspired to explore the vast continent of our inner landscape. Not so that we can have it mapped and defined, not so that we KNOW ourselves and carefully which parts are “good” and which parts are “not”. Instead the exploration is about reclaiming all the parts of ourselves and including the full glory of what it is to be human in all of its many manifestations.

We get to fall in love with the MYSTERY of ourselves; as opposed to the DEFINITION of ourselves.

Now this is a healing journey and in my own personal experience, it is the journey of a lifetime. One the other hand, it‘s quite simple: our most authentic and resonant selves are THERE, waiting for us to dive in and explore.

Tell us about your authenticity. KKH

AIR

This past year has been challenging for many. With full awareness of those challenges, I can‘t help but be curious about what is trying to happen. It is my sense that we (and I do mean the collective “we”) are attempting to allow the superficial to fall away so what is left behind is resonant and clear and more solid and real, like good steel that has been tempered by fire.

I believe that all of the intensity and drama unfolding in our world today is asking us to look inside ourselves to that essence place of spirit and wholeness. As coaches, our deepest role is to connect people, individually and collectively, to that part of themselves that we might call soul or essence or spirit. It is the flame that lives inside every human being which longs to create, connect, and to contribute.

I believe that together we are working to recover to wholeness. To return to a state of integration and integrity with ourselves, each other, and the world around us.

Authenticity brings us into integrity and wholeness within ourselves. Intimacy brings us into integrity and wholeness with each other. Response-ability brings us into integrity and wholeness with the world around us.

Everywhere I go, I sense a hunger, a longing for these three things and for the wholeness and resonance that they bring. It is my experience that this longing unites us across any cultural, racial or socio-economic divide. While our expression of these three things may look very different and unique from one person or culture to the next, the EXPERIENCE of them is unifying and life giving.

Authenticity. Intimacy. Response-Ability. AIR. We all long to breathe clean life-giving AIR.

We all have perfectly good lungs. Yet some people go years without taking a good, long, life-giving breath. Sometimes the circumstances of our lives are so overwhelming that it feels like we are suffocating; that we can‘t breathe. In certain environments, it feels as if people are walking around with a pillow head over their faces and suffocating, starving for one long breath of life giving AIR.

Sometimes our AIR gets toxic and then there‘s work to do. Perhaps that‘s the work of coaching: creating a structure for generating clean, fresh AIR and helping people remember to BREATHE.

Do you have a comment? Share it below. KKH

The Illusion of Separateness

I‘m recently back from 11 days on the land in New Mexico at a Black Lodge Introduction. This is a spiritual growth program based on ancient Mayan teachings. Black Lodge is an advanced next level of training; SIX 11 day retreats spaced out over three years. And people say our Leadership Program is long! 

Our teachers are WhiteEagle, RainbowHawk and WindEagle which in and of itself is completely fascinating. RainbowHawk and WindEagle are elders with RainbowHawk leading the way at 85 (86?). Something like that. Wow!

The work is at an energetic level and at the same time deeply personal. Imagine spending the better part of any day out of doors: around a fire, in some medicine wheel or other or with your body parked for several hours on a ledge overlooking a giant canyon.

Even though my recent ceremony was an “introduction” I am profoundly impacted. I feel reconnected to life in a way that is difficult to articulate. With the challenges of this past year, I had become a bit dry and despite my best efforts, had begun to feel isolated and lonely. Worst of all, I had begun, ever so slightly, to resent the challenges of 2009 and to feel a little victimized by the circumstances. I had begun to create quite a story about being worn down and worn out by it all. I didn‘t even realize that this context had begun to creep into my thinking; it‘s only in retrospect that I can see how much this story had taken over.

While I was in New Mexico, I caught a cold. The first I‘ve had in several years. Bummer right? Except during the ceremony, I learned how to work with that energy, how to welcome it, and allow the cold to strengthen my immune system.

I see now that the challenges of this past year are like this cold and have only served to strengthen me and build the fire of determination, vision and commitment within. I see that my “immunity” against doubt and fear has been strengthened. I am left feeling both humbled and deeply, deeply connected to the beauty of the work that we all do as we light up those diamonds of human consciousness at CTI and beyond.

At the same time, our light is not limited to or defined by these functions. It shines far beyond this form called CTI and illuminates the world. You are (as are we all) beings of light and as we move through our lives in ways that are life affirming, we create profound transformation.

As we go about our work it is easy to feel isolated and as if we are all working in silos. This is understandable. Our world (particularly our work world) is set up to create an illusion of separateness.

Yet how can we be anything BUT connected. How can light be separate from itself? The river of life runs through us and all the cells in our body (60 trillion of them!) are being constantly re-generated from material that already exists. It is not just a lovely idea to say that I am made up of you. It is scientifically accurate!

Please leave a comment. KKH

Designing Others

“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration; I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There really is nothing new under the sun. Back in 1790, it seems as if Goethe had a pretty good handle on things.

We are, in fact, the center of our universe and the choices that we make create and design our experience in the most tangible ways. Thus we are the authors of our own life.

 Goethe‘s closing point is quite profound. It underlines the essence of one of Co-Active Coaching‘s Cornerstones: that people are “naturally creative, resourceful and whole.” I find that when I relate to clients from this cornerstone, it is the naturally creative resourceful and whole human being who comes to the conversation.

Since polar bears EAT huskies, what assumptions might the husky and the polar bear have of each other?

When I had the privilege of delivering coach training inside a Federal Prison, I worked with criminal men who had done bad things, some of them very bad. The men believed that they WERE bad through and through. When we interacted with them through the lens of naturally, creative, resourceful and whole, that‘s who showed up in our classrooms. Their crimes did not define them totally.

 Yes, their law breaking activities became a PART of who they were but not ALL of who they were. There was a creative, resourceful and whole being living inside each one. Because we insisted on interacting with that part of them, that part blossomed forward in the most amazing ways.

 We create and design our lives and affect the people in them according to our assumptions and perspectives. I see evidence of this over and over again. I‘d love to hear your experiences around this topic both to the positive and the contrary. You‘re always welcome to disagree with me. I look forward to the conversation so please use the comment link below.

KKH

Embracing Disagreement

“If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn‘t thinking.”
George S. Patton

In my experience, it is our differences, not our sameness which unite us. I think it is vital for us to learn how to disagree with each other in ways that are simultaneously enthusiastic and respectful, passionate and sensitive.

When we can stand firmly in grounded commitment to our own unique voice and bring that together with openness to other, divergent points of view, disagreement can nourish and grow us.

By staying in the discourse, something new emerges which is much larger than the sum of two points of view. Far beyond a mere compromise, this adroit new approach is born from creative tension and carries previously unavailable possibilities.

I‘d love to see us all (and I include myself here) become more facile with disagreement. I notice, at least in the U.S., we tend to personalize disagreement and disagree with the PERSON, rather than the IDEA. Certainly, this has become a centralizing focus of partisan politics. The great tragedy of this is that it cuts our political leaders off from robust discourse on ideas and principles and instead, pulls the conversation to an immature level of name calling and personal attack.

There are times when we need to move quickly and it is vital that those in charge step forward and chart a course they feel is best for the good of the whole. Still, deep listening and the ability to disagree are critical in creating alignment and shaping direction.

It can be challenging to simultaneously hold self respect and deep listening, to represent ourselves with commitment, and at the same time allow ourselves to be shaped and changed by input from the world around us.

It is my hope that this blog will be a place for stimulating and energizing conversation where we discuss ideas and concepts. A place where there is passionate disagreement and enthusiastic dialog. Please share your ideas by using the comments feature below. I look forward to hearing from you.
KKH