Category Archives: Mindfulness

Listening Deeply–Essential for Leading

Coaching, Continuous learning, Mindfulness, Self-awareness, , ,

Considering that it is so essential for leadership, listening deeply sure is hard. I catch my mind wandering during meetings—making a grocery list, thinking of errands. I hear my inner judge evaluating instead of listening to the person talking to me. Sound familiar?

Four Levels of Listening

Recent work by Otto Scharmer sheds light on why really listening is hard. Presenting at a recent Community of Practice meeting, my colleague Cathy Geib explained Scharmer’s idea that there are four levels of listening.

  • At a superficial level, we hear through thick filters of assumptions, judgments, and confirmation bias. Instead of hearing the other person, we are locked inside the mind’s distorting echo chamber.
  • To go to deeper levels of listening, we have to listen with curiosity, seeking information that disconfirms our biases about the other person or point of view.
  • This curiosity, and the new perspectives it yields, prepare us for the fourth and deepest listening level, where we bring an open mind and can co-create real dialogue.

Heightening Self-Awareness

I’ve been using these levels of listening to heighten self-awareness and, using the practices I am learning, to help my clients. Heightening self-awareness begins with watching how we listen to our own thoughts and feelings.

To speak of my own journey of learning: I’ve lately been paying attention to my grief-transition process since losing my husband to cancer. One inner conversation goes like this. One voice says, “All the changes, all this newness, together with grief, tire me out. My old, striving life just doesn’t fit any more.” “Yes, but,” a second voice responds. “I’m a goal setter and achiever; I plow through to-do lists no matter what.”

The second voice often prevails because I’m very attached to achieving, having learned this “should do” script from my dear parents. I quickly label and then dismiss new needs for rest, a pause, and re-inventing my life. I am only listening to these emerging needs at level one, in other words, not listening at all.

A Way to Listen More Deeply

How can you and I dive below the surface to deeper listening? A practice of loving kindness helps re-pattern the mind. It works like this. Bring loving kindness to each thought—in my case, to both voices in my head.

Whatever is “loving kindness?” First, I acknowledge that both voices are real and true. Secondly, I gently accept both. Both voices are part of me; what if I were to accept and even welcome them? Embracing both voices frees me to accept my new needs for rest, for pause, and for re-creation. Acknowledging my goal-setting voice releases its defensive stance, and thereby loosens my white-knuckle grip on achievement as the one right way to live.

As a coach, going to and staying in a generative, deep-listening place is a core competency called “coaching presence.” To earn and maintain an International Coaching Foundation professional certification, coaches have to demonstrate skill in this and all thirteen other competencies. Check out the fourteen competencies. They are useful reminders for all supervisors and leaders.

Leadership IS Learning

Continuous learning, Mindfulness, Resilience, , , , ,

Each of us can boost our leadership by making learning a way of being. As Peter Vaill said in his book by that title, when learning is a way of being, “leadership is not learned;” leadership IS learning.

Start by trying on the notion that everything you do at work is a platform for learning. When you make a decision, face a challenge, wonder how to work with an employee, create something new or solve a problem, you can learn something new. Ask questions like,

  • What do I notice about the work experience I just had? What do I notice in myself? In others?
  • What choices did I make—whether or not I saw them as choices at the time? Did I get stuck? If so, how?
  • What were the results of my actions and thought patterns?
  • What could I do more of, less of or differently?
  • What will I do now?

tiki_questions2Reread my blog post on the Learning Compass (c) and you’ll notice that these questions take you around the learning cycle: experience; reflect; analyze by finding the significance of what just happened; think of choices; make choices that lead to action.

I recently read Sonali Deraniyagala‘s memoir Wave, which is about losing her family to a tsunami. Sonali decided to write about her loss as learning. No, there are no lessons; to distill lessons from the tragedy would have cheapened it. Instead, as she experiences waves of grief, she learns a process. She slows herself down, asking how the grief shows up in body, mind, emotions and spirit. Then she reflects, observing herself from inside and outside. By “outside,” I mean she sees herself in relation to her context– colleagues, community and the family she lost.  Gradually, over a period of years and in the reflective, analytical and active practice of writing, Sonali literally remakes herself.

We could follow a similar process both to learn about specific experiences and to learn how to learn better. Try this experiment. A couple of times during your work day:

  1. Look up from your desk. Take several long, slow breaths.
  2. Notice your thoughts, feelings and your body. You are gathering information, like a researcher or artist.
  3. What contextual things are influencing your work and your experience of it right now? Examples might be deadlines, physical surroundings, the technology you are using and the time of day.

Notice that this little exercise does not take much time. You are creating awareness as a step in learning. Without trying to change anything, notice whether there are shifts just because you are paying attention.

More on learning as a way of being in future posts.  Meanwhile, let’s all breathe.

Leadership Secrets

Appreciative inquiry, Leadership, Mindfulness, , ,

Poet William Blake’s poems are full of leadership secrets. Let’s find practical wisdom in this verse:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

Seeing a world in a grain of sand invites us to appreciate a single grain as a whole and as part of a system of beach, sun, perceiver and perceived. In our organizations, we have talented, accomplished staff all around us. How can we more clearly see three things: the light in individual colleagues; their contribution to the whole enterprise; our helpful influence when we pay attention to them?

One CEO I work with — no matter how busy he is — takes time each week to have substantial conversations with several staff members. What are they working on? How is it going? What are the challenges? What excites them? As leaders, we can also take this opportunity to express our appreciation. When you meet with direct reports, periodically ask them how you can support them.

To see heaven in a wild flower, we have to have an image of what we aspire to. We have to believe this aspiration is possible in order to create paths to go there.

We can start with a simple aspiration to see beauty around us every day. One young leader I know ends the day by taking five minutes to consciously reflect on her “daily delights.” Chester Nez, the Navajo World War II code talker, wrote in his memoir that during bombardments, he lay in his foxhole repeating his people’s prayer,

I walk in beauty. Beauty is around me.  Beauty is above me, beauty below me.

The Englishman William Blake and Chester Nez would have gotten on well. When Blake says, “to hold infinity in the palm of your hand,” he partly means that we have to believe in possibility — beyond whatever foxholes we find ourselves in — and also believe we can seize that better possibility. Furthermore, we have infinite possibility within us.

In our organizations, one way to discover and attain positive possibility is to use the frameworks and methods of Appreciative Inquiry. Invite stories about strength and success, and from these appreciative stories, glean visions, paths and practices for your team or organization. Find more ways to use Appreciative Inquiry at the Appreciative Inquiry Commons.

spiderweb in sunlightTo hold eternity, we must know how to be present in the presence of another person in the present hour. Leading an organization and living our days can be like a race. Try looking around in the airport at people running, ears to cell phones. Now try looking into the face of each colleague and passerby. What do you notice?

There is another leadership secret in Blake’s poem. Notice how he sees opposites as dynamic, back-and-forth possibilities, as both-and paradoxes instead of either/or. Try this experiment. Next time you catch yourself saying “but,” back up and substitute the word “and.” Do you notice a shift?