Re-set
I’m sitting at Istanbul airport heading home after three days of facilitating a leadership workshop. I’m buzzing, and it’s not just from my double Turkish coffee. Yet again, the leaders have been engaged and challenging, my co-facilitators have brought in perspectives different to my approach, and we have all come out with new insights and learning. The client overall is everything a consultant / coach could hope for, the participants themselves universally smart, motivated, and what one of my friends calls ‘good people’.
I love travelling and also face to face facilitation…and yet, truth be told, looking at this upcoming event in my calendar last weekend, I was a little resentful of having to pack up and fly out. It was time away from the book I’m writing and where my head has been most of these last few months. I found my mood worsening in a downward spiral through delayed flights and transfers, lack of sleep, the room set-up, and lots of other massively minor irritations…
It reminded me of the old Cherokee legend I read a while back in Naz Beheshti’s Pause. Breathe. Choose. She writes of a grandfather relating to his grandson how we have two wolves inside us, constantly fighting. One is the Inner Critic of negativity and limiting beliefs, and the other the Inner Coach of positivity and growth. The little boy asks which one will win, and the grandfather replies, “The one we feed.”
Pausing, breathing, and choosing are more than emotional intelligence or well-being. That little gap produced in interrupting the flow and in taking ourselves out of whatever we are currently caught up in gives us the space to regroup, reframe, and re-evaluate options. It mutes our reptilian brain’s knee-jerk reactions of freeze, flight or fight so that our world opens up again. Once again we can make out and select from the paths leading to the horizon on all sides. We can find our Inner Coach once more.
The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear
Rumi
The coffee I’m drinking now is still just as over-priced as it was on the way in a few days ago. But now I’m re-energised, standing taller, full of new stories and experiences that will drive my writing in a direction I wasn’t forecasting, and I’ve had a brilliant time in Istanbul as always.
How much better does this coffee taste.
Julian
I help people lead their way forward with greater clarity
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