A willingness to be influenced

A couple of weeks ago I had another session with a team I have been team-coaching for a couple of years now. After all the work we have already done, they nowadays tend to just call me over when they have complex issues to discuss and find agreements upon. Often these are the themes that they have attempted to deal with a few times already, but got stuck, and so I come as a facilitator and a conflict mediator, to help them through.

In my work I always follow the principle first understanding, and only then solutions and so we started with a sociocratic circle of achieving deep and empathic mutual understanding by providing space for everybody in the circle to express their thoughts and feelings about the issue, while others being asked to reflect back what they heard, in order to check whether a true understanding has happened. The focus was not on repeating merely the words of course, but really hearing the meaning behind them.

Yes, to complete such a circle with a group of ten people took almost two hours, yet at the completion there was much more mutual understanding than ever before, and this resulted in profound shifts in the perception of the problem they were dealing with.

After that we have created the first proposal and moved into everybody giving a first response to it, and then the same thing happened that I always find so inspiring and touching. Four people that were beforehand against any other ideas but their own, and that would not even hear of any proposals like the one we were having on the table now, very peacefully and thoughtfully said that after having heard everybody, their own perception and understanding has shifted and they were now happy to go along with the proposal.

Witnessing these shifts is what brings juice and joy to the work I do. This is why I actually keep on doing my work at all. To witness this beautiful human understanding and connection to happen. When actually a true communication happens, not only people opening their mouths and letting some voices out, but actually also hearing each other.

Because after a quarter of a century I have spent in dealing professionally with human communication, I am pretty sure that human communication it NOT about speaking only. It is not only about persuading other people into our own little perception. No, it is far more than that.

It is primarily about listening to the different perspective and understanding what we did not understand up to now. It is about broadening our own horizons, seeing Life from many many different perspectives. It is about integrating it all and transcending it, as Ken Wilber would perhaps express it.

Communication is really about growing, through careful listening, into what we have not been yet. It is about transcending the old and limited ideas and evolving into new and deeper understanding. It is not about fighting for our tiny little worlds and trying to superimpose them onto others, trying to ultimately have power over them. What a sad little life this would be indeed.

It is about opening up. And yes, it is about a joyful willingness to be influenced.

A different kind of a communication training

My wife went to a high-profile communication trainer’s presentation, out of curiosity, to see what other people emphasise about communication and how they do it. She came home in a state of shock. This guy – the communication expert – was preaching that communication was a war, a struggle and that it was all about being better and stronger than the other one, that it was all about getting to a higher ground, having power over the other in order to finally crush them down. And win the battle. While preaching this, he was, with his superior rhetoric abilities, humiliating people in audience who dared to ask questions, making fun out of people not present, using the losers – winners distinction all the time… He was the absolute winner, of course.

When my wife described the scene to me, I was in a state of shock too. Wait a minute; this is what this communication trainer is teaching? That it is all about fighting, winning over, crushing down? I understand communication as coming together, you know, the communion, connecting, achieving understanding and then working together on finding the ways for meeting everybody’s needs, for cooperation and coexistence… And, pardon me; this is what I teach at my communication trainings.

Up to now I was living in a romantic world, I can see. I believed that every communication trainer saw communication, more or less, in the very similar way: connecting, getting together, and achieving understanding. I believed every conflict-resolution trainer perceived conflict resolution within a basic framework: achieving true understanding and respect of each other’s needs and values, then working together on finding strategies that will meet everybody’s needs. I believed we lived in the same world. How naive, how very naive of me.

I will continue teaching what I believe communication is all about, of course. But I will be less surprised when observing political arena in which everybody speaks and nobody ever listens. Because I will know that they have been taught, by their high class communication trainers, to attack, to humiliate, to make fun out of… They were trained to not listen, to not understand, to not move and to not be influenced. They were trained to fight and to win over.

I will understand that they are just being good students.

And then I will continue my fight with the windmills.

Damn self-promotion

Sometimes I am so tired of myself, really tired of certain themes that have been around since the beginning of my time. Just today, bicycling across the windy Mediterranean island with my wife, I realized (again) that all my talking, all my communication is actually a method of my self-promotion. Every word, every gesture, every single bit of my reaching out into the world is actually my ego trying to impress people, trying to sell them a certain image about myself. Why do I want to share anything, why do I try to be funny, entertaining, smart, why do I ever choose to utter a single word? Why do I write this blog?

It is always in order to sell an image about myself, a certain story of a certain Robert, to make you people buy something I want you to buy. It is an endless self-promotion and there does not seem to be any sort of a way out of it. This is sad, so sad. The reason behind this is simple, of course. It is my need to be accepted, my need to be loved.

But, man, am I tired of that. I do not want to be in this sort of interaction anymore in my existence, yet whenever I open my mouth, it is my personal commercials that come out. I can try to purify myself and my mind, but I am existentially locked in my perception and my mind, so this is going to be with me as long as there actually is me. The only way of connecting with people without self-promotion seems to be simply asking and listening to them with my heart. No talking.

But sometimes I am tired also of asking and listening. So… To remain silent until the end seems rather appealing.

You see, my vision, the one I have been carrying with me for about twenty years now, since my first encounters with the deeper nature of myself and the life, is to strip naked, to throw all the ballast away and to enter this life and this existence fully, directly, without any filters, with no impression management whatsoever, with no games and bullshit. Just pure existence, co-existence.

With years, though, the reality is slowly dawning on me that this is not fully possible in this world. My ego will always be around and every single quark of my being will try to impress people. I guess this is what is called human life. And I guess this is what is called human need for acceptance and love.

And perhaps there’s nothing wrong with it.