– 4 min –

YOU BETTER DO THIS

At first, we may have thought this working from home stuff was a pandemic adaptation. But the added flexibility felt by many, and the reduced cost of travel and office overhead welcomed by their organizations, are making hybrid and remote forms of working here to stay. Plus, many of us have been forced to do it long enough so that our habits have changed. In my world, a meeting now means an online call. A program now means an online rhythm of plenary and breakout sessions on Zoom. We are interviewing, hiring, coaching, teaching, mediating, celebrating, influencing and collaborating with people we rarely or never meet in person. For many of us, making our difference increasingly happens remotely.

Technology and learning platforms like Interplicity are wonderful for helping to close the distance. But there’s also something we need to do that no technology can do for us if we want to get on the same wavelength with people when we’re not in the same room. Namely, we need to be more intentional about getting a feel for their condition and context.

As Guy Claxton recounts in Intelligence in the Flesh, we as social animals are loaded with social circuitry and get a feel for others by making internal maps of them in our own nervous system. We do this through subtle mimicry and gestures that create a whole dance underlying a connected, in-person conversation. We also take in their energy through multiple senses – how they look, sound, smell – and overall “vibe”, which is a sense of the field around them. Finally, when we’re in the same physical place at the same time, there’s at least some common context we can take for granted.

Much of that changes at a distance. Sight and sound are thinner signals. Smell is virtually non-existent. Something of the person’s vibe is picked up, which I found a pleasant surprise as we moved our Zen meditation and Zen Leadership training online in the past year. But sensing that vibe takes greater attention and attunement. It’s not something one can do in a multi-tasking hurry. Moreover, we cannot take anything for granted when it comes to context. We may be sitting in a quiet office in the fresh air of morning while the person we’re talking to is juggling interruptions from their phone, noise from the neighbors, and an evening scramble with two pre-school kids.

So, what can we do?

We have a phrase that we use in the Resonate course for how we help others or get them moving with us: “Become the other; go from there”. We do well to open each conversation with a few minutes of feeling into the reality of the other person that we can, as accurately as possible, “become the other”. For example, it’s common to open a conversation with some version of “how are you?” But this is often a throw-away line, met with the perfunctory response “fine, how are you?” In the remote environment, we need to get beneath “fine”. So don’t breeze past this opening, but rather attend to it with deep listening, sensitive questions, and sharing what’s real for you if the other person is interested. Of course, we can’t force them to make an inner map of us, but the more sincerely and accurately we make one of them, the more likely we are to be skillful in the conversation. And the more likely the two of us are to resonate as one.

Similarly, in team meetings and larger groups, we need a way to get on the same wavelength. We may not be able to speak as deeply as in a one-on-one conversation, but it’s still important to get a sense of where people are starting from and give them a way to come together. For example, in online meetings of a dozen or so people, you might pass a simple talking piece from window to window, and have each person check in on how they are and answer a focusing question relevant to the meeting. In larger groups, you can break them into smaller groups of five to six and have each group bring back a summary around the focusing question. You might open a meeting by taking a few deep, slow breaths together, which is a simple, physical way to invite a common frequency across the group. If you want to get more comfortable with these and other connecting practices, the Resonate course will help you.

As the world of work moves more online for more people, the leaders who know how to close the distance will make the greatest difference. May you be one of them.

– 2 min –

HOW TO BE IN A MESS WITHOUT BEING A MESS

To resonate is to vibrate with. One of the first things people get a feel for, when coming through the Resonate course is that the quality of their relationships – from friends and family to clients, colleagues, and customers – is based in resonance. Phrases like “getting on the same wavelength” or “catching a vibe” are more than mere metaphors. The more relaxed and sensitive we are, the better we read people – i.e., literally vibrate with them – and the more attuned we are in how we engage with them.

On the one hand, this feels wonderful when resonance results in a super-connected conversation, successful influencing, or winning new customers. But it can feel not so wonderful when we feel pulled into another person’s suffering. A question I’m often asked is how can we be around people who are conflicted, traumatized or suffering without taking on negative energy ourselves? This is an especially potent question for people who face suffering daily as they teach, coach, counsel and care for people who are struggling or even dying.

One approach sometimes advocated is to protect ourselves from negative energy by putting up emotional shutters. While shutters can be temporarily useful when the emotional winds are too strong, resonance shows us the downside of this advice; namely, that we become less sentient, less alive. When we protect ourselves, our bodies tense up, we feel more separate, and our actions become more superficial and vacant.

There is another way — and that is to be integrated and connected in such a way that we can conduct energy of all kinds through ourselves and bring it to ground. At its best, our body-mind and breath can function something like a clear rain gutter that conducts water from the eaves to the earth. To get a feel for how this works, try sending an exhale down through your body, through your big toes into the earth. This is a physical, practice-able skill that hones our resonance and allows us to weather emotional storms. While you’re not literally sending air down through your toes, you’ll get a sense of breath-guided energy that can drop through your entire body. You might only get a sense of breath dropping down a short distance, but going no further. Wherever breath-energy stops or gets stuck, it reveals a place of tension that, in our rain gutter analogy, is a kink or break in segments of the gutter. Practice can repair our flow.

To follow the metaphor further, even if we start out relaxed and can conduct negative energy to ground as it passes through us and we vibrate with it, it may well trigger some disturbance in us. So, a companion skill, equally physical and practice-able, is to learn how to face our own conflicts and sticking points so that they don’t clog up our rain gutter. A clogged rain gutter cannot handle heavy rains, and the water may back up and pour out every which way. But if we clear out what’s stuck, a rain gutter can handle a torrent.

And so it is with us. When we know we can handle difficult energy, we can be more alive and present to a greater range of people and situations. By physically working with our own breath and conflict triggers – practices shared in the Resonate course – we can more clearly ground the energy of emotional storms. Rather than shielding ourselves, we can remain resonant instruments, empathetic and connected. We feel more alive, and as others experience a resonant connection with us, they feel less alone, less afraid. We may well find it’s when we are facing trauma and suffering that we can do our most significant, healing work.