Communication

In a 'link' to my last post, I came across this quote while reading Marshall Rosenberg's Non Verbal Communication this morning written by the Sufi poet Rumi - "out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there".

This makes me think about the huge subject of 'communication' at work. We can perceive situations from a place of ideas of 'rightness' and 'wrongness'. We judge, analyse, and classify others according to our 'inner world'. The level of impact varies, sometimes leading to overt conflict and difficult relationships, often creating a difficulty for the people around them. A team member may start to 'cut out' a colleague believing themselves to be 'right', and the other 'wrong'. The other person might react aggressively in a counter-attack, defensively, with confusion, or perhaps by being vindictive. Managers have a responsibility to support people in understanding and getting to the bottom of the problem, and they need to develop their own communication skills in supporting and handling this conflict well. They need to understand that these prejudices, criticisms, blame, insults, put-downs, and labels come from unexpressed feelings. They need to spend time helping to unpick what is going on and the underlying cause of the conflict. They need to be impartial, to have compassion, to have a good sense of their own and other-awareness and motivations, and help people to express and understand their vulnerabilities, fears and anxieties that lie beneath the outward behaviour. A manager can help bring a new self and other- understanding and learning.

looking in the mirror

I made my third visit yesterday to see Anthony Gormley's Field for the British Isles which has been in Torquay for 6 weeks - today was the final day and I wanted to see it one last time before it left. Each visit has been a different experience. I got there early - I wanted to experience it in quiet, to contemplate it in silence.

I have been incredibly moved by it - so many layers and levels of meaning - from what is basically a lot of lumps of clay!

Gormley talks about the piece's subject - the experience of looking. His hope is that "the old formula of a 'subject who looks' at an object which 'is looked at' can be transmuted into us looking at ourselves".

I reflected on this - what do I see in and about myself by looking at 40,000 clay 'gazers'? The viewer is made the subject - I am being looked at. I feel unnerved- there seems an expectation of me. I look at individual figures and some make me laugh. I remind myself they are simply pieces of clay yet they are full of individual character. And I think about how the 'character' comes from the person who created each figure - they may have been 7 years old, they may have been 70 years old, each with their own history. The gazers link their makers with me, a viewer. The figures fill the entire space - the imaginative space is in the 'witness'. And I realise I have made a connection with these little characters - and feel sorry that they are going!

We often use the term 'looking at' in mentoring, Action Learning, and training. We take time out to 'look at' what is going on. We can discover that some of the things we see in others are parts of ourselves (there is model used in training to understand this concept called the Johari Window). We can become aware that what we see may be something different from what it is, and so what we 'see' is our assumption. We see different options for ourselves based on new knowledge. We can look in the 'mirror' and see ourselves .

Field of the British Isles : Anthony Gormley

Radiant thinking

I worked on a Mind Map today (see post below), for a presentation I am giving in a fortnight. I am intrigued by the photos of 'natural architecture' Buzan includes in The Mind Map Book. They illustrate the frequency the structure appears in biology.

A few moments later I noticed the dried flower of Allium christophii on my windowsill. I grew these for the first time this year and when they dry, they become this beautiful object, with the structure of the flower uncovered.

Buzan explains that The Mind Map is the external form of the brain's processes which he calls 'radiant thinking'. My Mind Map isn't finished yet - it is itself a reflection on, and illustration of, my learning over the last 6 months in Action Learning skills, and as I continue to work on it, it's still coming up with new connections.

the 'work' in silences

This section in Tony Buzan's "The Mind Map Book" jumped out at me today "...the space between items can be as important as the items themselves. For example, in Japanese flower arranging, the entire arrangement is based on the space between the flowers. Likewise in music the sound is arranged around a silence".

Twelve hours later, in the kind of synchronicity that so often happens, I heard classical guitarist Julian Bream on the radio on a programme about the lute ... "the silences are important in music -they provide the tension between the notes".

As it is in mentoring and Action Learning. These provide creative opportunities for silence - for reflection and to allow insights to emerge. A particularly 'insightful' question often brings a 'stopping' of words - and as a mentor or facilitator I can feel the palpable creative tension in that silence when I know that something is being revealed and realised within the person I am working with - a new meaning for them.