How Do I Practice Global Listening, or the Convergence of Attention and Awareness
As we closed the Agile Coaching Circle for Europe time zones for September, this question was posted in the chat:
How do I practice global listening?
Great question, and one that we should have answered a long time ago. You see, in each of the coaching circles, we do a bit of teaching up front about some coaching basics, namely a coaching arc, powerful questions, and levels of listening. We then hold practice coaching sessions with a debrief of what happened. However, we’ve never written about practice tips or suggestions on how to work on a specific skill.
Let’s fix that, starting now.
Emergence in Systems, or the Crisis that Heals
I’m spending my summer hot, dusty, sweaty, and covered in things I don’t even want to imagine. And cursing. Lots of cursing. You see, I’m trying to help my parents clear out some of the “stuff” they have accumulated after a 52-year marriage, a ranch, teaching, and a rural veterinary practice. Thus far, I’ve rehomed 45 years of equine veterinary magazines, and I still have more to go. There are old textbooks, slide collections, bones, hats, journals, equipment, stories, tools, mementos, pictures, cards, photo albums, clothes, decor, and still boxes to be opened. There are barns, trailers, and places I probably don’t even want to think about. It’s a cruel, cruel summer.
Now might be a good time to mention that my dad was a veterinarian for over 40 years. He practiced in rural Montana, serving three counties and as any states. That meant that he saw a bit of everything: horses, dogs, cats, cattle, swans, elk, bison, large game cats from Zoo Montana. He still does a bit of consulting work, serves as a veterinarian for endurance rides, plus takes care of the horses, cattle, and dogs that he and mum still have. And when he isn’t a veterinarian, he ranches, keeping a close eye on his hay fields and rain clouds.
You’re starting to understand the cursing now, aren’t you.
When I’m honest with myself, I’m angry and resentful over having to do this work. For the past decade, I’ve been asking my parents to go through their “collections,” but to no avail. They always chuckle and agree that it needs to be done, but something else always comes first. My parents are unhappy with this summer’s purging activities, especially my father. He feels that I’m throwing away his life, and I’m unhappy that thus far, they tell me that they won’t leave me this to clean up but haven’t really done anything about the problem. We’re both digging in our heels. And this leads me to the question I’m grappling with:
What is happening in my system?
Meet, Reveal, and Align and Act: Embodied Action and Generative Change
A couple of weeks ago, I was in Barcelona for the first of a two-part training in embodied leadership. The training was also a good excuse to catch-up with a longtime friend, Dino Zafirakos and to meet his wife and two other coaching colleagues there in Spain. Dino is also a coach, and we co-lead, co-teach, bounce ideas off one another, and talk through scenarios and viewpoints. I’d recently been asked to think about the three iterative phases of relationship systems—Meet-Reveal-Align and Act—and a rainy day with forced sofa time was perfect to do just that. When I said, “Dino–help me think of a metaphor for “Meet, Reveal, Align, and Act,” he pushed it back to me and said, “What is a physical action you could do to embody that concept.” (So yes, he is a bit of an eye roll, but that is a story for another day.)
The thing is, Dino’s pushback was remarkably helpful, and it helped my thinking to move in new directions. “Meet,” “reveal,” and “align and act” are all verbs, and our verbal sparring reminded me to treat them as such. Thinking this concept through helped me to ask these questions:
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How can we embody the iterative phases and wisdom of Meet-Reveal-Align and Act?
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How can we share that learned, physical wisdom with the systems we serve?
What Is in a Voice, or How Systems Sing
A few weeks back, I caught a repeat airing of Krista Tippett’s “On Being” interview with acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton. Hempton travels the world, recording soundscapes like desert thunderstorms, the sound of wind in the grass, birdsong in deep forest. I remember first hearing this interview back in 2017 or so, and even then I was so struck with what Hempton was trying to do that I attempted to use his work with one of my teams. (Note: it didn’t go so well. The team called that experiment “log jam” and were kind of weirded out that I was asking them to listen to the sounds of the ocean inside a hollowed cedar log. But I digress.)
The repeated Hempton interview jogged another memory for me, this one of a choir of British military wives. Their husbands had been deployed, and to combat loneliness and to help them find home and connection, they gathered to sing. I don’t remember any of them being trained singers or even having much interest in singing, but coming together to raise their voices in loneliness, in longing provided an outlet that they didn’t even know they needed.
The combination of Hempton’s work with acoustic ecology and a choir of untrained voices made me stop and think about the concept of voice from a coaching perspective. What are the voices in a system? How do we listen to those voices? How do we lift those voices up? And lastly, how can we help people learn to “sing?”
The Radical Kindness of Good Boundaries
Boundaries are a marker, a line. On one side of the line, you feel safe, secure, but on the other side, you might feel unmoored, violated, unsafe. Boundaries exist to keep us safe, be it physically or psychologically. Brene Brown has a line that I love and repeat often: “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” When we are clear about our boundaries and our values, we feel secure. When we are unclear, it is all too easy for that line to be crossed, and we then feel ignored, unseen, of no value to others. Boundaries are a reflection of our values. When our values are threatened, who we are as a human is threatened, too.