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Happy New Year!
‘Where has 2017 gone?’ ‘I lost all track of time.’ I find it curious how a subjective sense of time vs an objective measure of time can be and feel so incredibly different. Some hours, days and weeks seem to pass incredibly quickly. Others go on as if they will last forever. Our sense of perspective on time changes over time. For example, when I was a young child, World War 2 seemed like it happened hundreds of years ago. As I get older, paradoxically it seems closer. It’s as if how we perceive the time-distance is relative to how long we have been alive. The longer I live, the shorter the time-gap seems and feels to me. I’m intrigued by how some distant events in my own life feel as they happened just yesterday whereas some more recent events feel like they happened eons ago. I think it’s somehow related to how we experience those events emotionally, e.g. ‘Time flies when you’re enjoying yourself.’ Our perspective on time seems also connected to how far experiences from the past still affect us now or, perhaps, how far they resonate with what we are experiencing now, as if they set up a psychodynamic reverberation effect. Some say, ‘Time is a great healer’, as if the passage of times creates distance between us and the emotional impact of an event so that it no longer carries the same depth or intensity of feeling. It’s sometimes true. There is chronos time (sequential moments) and kairos time (pivotal moments). The New Year marks a point in time, a shift in seasons, a transition from- and thereby -to. For some, it marks a psycho-symbolic ending, a closing of a metaphorical door on whatever has gone before. For others, it holds a fresh hope to re-set our lives – a lot like the promise held out in the gospel. As the clock chimes midnight into 2018, what will the new year mean for you?
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Image of the invisible God.
In the beginning was the Word, the early word, the first word, mysterious voice talking behind the back of the universe, back before its beginning. The I am who I am word, the with-God word, the was-God word. A voice that called us into being across the reaches of infinity. The without-whom-nothing word, an unheard-of word behind words. World-making word. Speaking the language behind language. Body of the untouchable God. When babies try to tell us what they want by pointing, babbling, playing, copying, making us feel good by learning our names, playing out endless games of things appearing and disappearing, they hide behind their hands. Then take their hands away and, there they are. Bit by bit they show themselves. But were these also God’s desires? To recognise, to name and know. To communicate. To play some cosmic language game with us. God’s word play. To show and tell and communicate, to communicate. Weakness of the all-powerful God. The word became flesh. And the word became, wordless, flesh. A baby with no words. And the voice of the Maker became a hungry voice, a cry for food, a cry for milk. The voice that made gravity cried out for fear of falling. The voice that made women, cries for a woman’s breast, and screams with disappointment when it is denied. Crying of the invulnerable God. There are no words yet, only the cry of flesh. No way of telling, only the depth of need. If only this is God, this word-made-flesh, made flesh that looks, and feels, and acts like flesh, then now God is a small thing, is a baby, is a baby that can be dropped or hurt or left unfed left unchanged, left wet and smelly or be child abused. If this is God with no words, and if this wordless God is God, then God is flesh like our flesh, bones like our bones, needs to be taught…to speak. The word became flesh and dwelt among us. [Late Late Service 4, God in the Flesh, Glasgow, 1994] The best of intentions. How often we do things with good motives and yet, in spite of that, our actions have unintended consequences. It’s often because we haven’t known or understood the wider implications of what, where, when, how or with-for whom we do something. We may, for instance, offer support to a specific person, team or group…only to discover that a different person, team or group perceives that intervention as partisan, favourit-ist or creating unfair advantage.
Here’s an extreme. A friend was delivering aid to a poverty-stricken village in Sudan when he was stopped at gunpoint by militia from a neighbouring village. He was forced to the ground with rifle barrel pressed hard against the back of his head whilst the group relieved him of the vehicle and relief supplies. It turns out the group and its community were envious and resentful that they were being effectively ignored whilst supplies were being provided to a different village. Or here’s a less extreme example. I spoke with an emotional intelligence (EI) specialist this week about using psychological mentoring, coaching and tools to raise awareness and insight, with a risk that some clients may use it in weaponised form to manipulate colleagues or customers. It points to a real need to pay attention to wider systemic, cultural, ethical, political and longer-term considerations when seeking to do the right thing – a principle known as ‘primum non nocere’. If you’re a leader, coach, OD or trainer, here are some questions for critical reflection: When have you acted in good faith to resolve one issue, only to discover that your interventions have inadvertently incentivised, precipitated or exacerbated another? How do you manage the tension of never fully knowing or understanding the potential implications of everything – and yet still taking meaningful stances, decisions and actions? What is your best advice on ‘do no harm’?  I had a friend once, Norman, who was deaf and had tunnel vision – literally. He was able to see people and things directly in front of him but had no peripheral vision at all. If I wanted to gain his attention, I had to stand directly in front of him to sign. As I approached, I had to be careful not to take him by surprise, as if suddenly appearing out of nowhere. It was a tough lived-experience for Norman and made navigating the world and relationships very challenging. I admire his courage in how he handled it.
In common use, we apply the phrase ‘tunnel vision’ metaphorically to represent a person or group’s psychological state. It tends to be characterised by limited focus or perspective, lack of awareness of the bigger picture and unwillingness to consider alternative points of view. As such, we normally associate tunnel vision negatively with narrow-mindedness, a condition to be avoided or challenged. We need to think more openly, broadly or laterally if we are to be effective…or so we assume. Yet there are other dimensions to tunnel vision. Think of blinkers or blinders that enable a horse to focus on straight ahead by excluding a wider view and, thereby, to avoid it becoming distracted or alarmed by things around it. Think of choosing to focus intently and single-mindedly on a vision or piece of work in order to fulfil it, complete it to a certain standard or achieve it within a given timeframe. There are times and situations where tunnel vision serves us well to achieve our goals. There are aesthetic dimensions too. I walked along a train platform this week and noticed a beautiful snowscape through a porthole window. I was struck by how the window framed the view in such a way that it drew my attention to things I had never noticed before. It was as if I saw them simultaneously out-of context and in-new context, like how we see special qualities in a person, how he or she now stands out from a crowd, when we fall in love. So...as we approach 2018, is there light at the end of your tunnel? I worked with a leadership team recently where we experimented with reframing statements from problems-focus to solutions-focus to see what would happen if we did. The team had been grappling with difficult issues for some time which had led some to the near-resigned conclusion that there was little hope of change. I wondered whether part of the challenge and resulting mood lay in the psychological-linguistic framing of the issues rather than, necessarily, in the issues themselves.
I was curious and invited the team to be curious too about how the issues were being perceived, construed and articulated within the team – a kind of team self-talk, if you like. If someone said, ‘X will not work because of Y’, we experimented with reframing the statement as a question instead, e.g. ‘Given Y, what would it take for X to work?’ It shifted the conversation from a definitive, closed end to an open, curious, exploration of new possibilities and ideas. It created fresh energy too. I’ve worked with some clients where a person may comment that, for instance, ‘X is a good idea in principle but it would never work here.’ It’s often a response from someone who has worked a long time in the same place, has been around the proverbial block a few times or is starting to feel a bit jaded. I try to tune into the mood, acknowledge the underlying feeling and then reframe it: ‘OK, so what would work here?’ or, perhaps, ‘If X is a good idea, what would it take for it to work here?’ In my experience, solutions-focus works best when done in an open (e.g. prayerful) spirit, eliciting values (what matters to you – to motivate), creative visioning (what do you/we hope for – to inspire), appreciative inquiry (what’s working well – to build on) and affirming strengths (what are you/we good at – to draw on). Positive appraisal of the present with optimistic aspiration for the future lead well into: ‘So, what would need to happen for that to happen?’ and, ‘The next step?' You may be familiar with conventional brainstorming (sometimes reframed as, ‘thought showering’) where participants are invited to share as many ideas as possible. The underlying belief is that a free-flow of ideas in a group is likely to produce more and a greater variety of ideas than would be likely or possible for an individual alone. As psychologist Michael West points out, however, groups tend quickly to experience group-think where people influence each other’s ideas and start to think along very similar lines – thereby actually limiting rather than expanding the range of ideas that emerge.
In some cultures and contexts, political and relational dynamics also influence what people feel willing or consider appropriate to contribute in a group. In light of this, West proposes that it’s sometimes better to invite people to jot down as many ideas as possible separately before sharing in a group and, if expedient, to share them anonymously if that makes it more acceptable to do so. Bryan Mattimore’s creative ‘worst possible idea’ technique goes one step further and breaks the oft-felt pressure to come up with the best or right idea altogether. Instead, it invites people (light-heartedly) to generate an array of truly terrible ideas (e.g. as Ian Gray suggests, ‘illegal, immoral or unworkable’) and then to identify key attributes – i.e. what makes them so bad? If combined with reverse brainstorming, we can invite participants to engage in counter-intuitive activities such as swapping, ‘How could we solve this problem?’ for, ‘How could we make it much worse?’ Being playful in this way can reduce anxiety, snap people out of traditional thinking patterns and surface seeds of innovation that could prove transformational. So – what have been your best (or worst!) possible ideas? What did you do to discover or create them? You may have heard the expression, ‘To hit rock bottom.’ It’s often used in relation to reaching the lowest possible place in life, a place that is in effect devoid of all resources and hope. To hit rock bottom suggests a falling experience – having fallen from a better situation…to a deteriorating situation…to the hardest of all possible situations where it really couldn’t get any worse. Some argue that when things get that bad, they may need to be so before we find ourselves motivated enough to make the necessary, fundamental – even drastic – changes needed to resolve or improve them.
There are some parallels with use of extreme, evocative images, e.g. that of a ‘burning platform’, in change leadership. This fire metaphor conveys that the status quo is under threat and that we, by extension, are under threat too unless we wake up, smell the proverbial coffee and…not sure what comes next…presumably drink it – or at least use it to douse the flames?! It’s like, ‘Change or die’. It suggests that, at times, we need to compel ourselves or others urgently by painting dramatic, real or imagined (and sometimes a bit of both) scenarios that radically incentivise or force us to change. But do we really need to hit rock bottom or to face the wall first? Are there ways to galvanise sustainable change without prerequisite anxiety or near-despair? I believe we can learn here from the therapeutic arena. Some examples: in working with people at risk of free-fall, we can ‘raise the bottom’ or help ‘create firm footholds’ (e.g. support people early to face and deal with real yet less-devastating crises); use ‘motivational interview techniques’ that increase people’s intrinsic desire to change; use spiritual-existential coaching to help people build deeper and stronger foundations. As leader or coach, have you ever hit rock bottom, felt yourself falling or worked with people who have? If so, who or what made a difference? |
Nick WrightI'm a psychological coach, trainer and OD consultant. Curious to discover how can I help you? Get in touch! 
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