Inner Life…Outer Results

 Brett Wood explores the rela­tion­ship between inner work, per­for­mance and well-being.

“The win­ters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them.” – Parker J Palmer

I got out into win­ter the other night with a bunch of folk around a camp­fire in zero degree tem­per­a­ture in the blue moun­tains. I nearly didn’t go out. I mean… zero degrees, come on! I was so tempted to just stay on the couch and watch episodes of ‘Big Love’. I love my couch; my refuge, my com­fort zone, my cave; my retreat when I come home from facil­i­tat­ing world peace and all that other tir­ing stuff. For­tu­nately my wife, in her qui­etly inspir­ing way got me out of the house and into the winter.

It was a won­der­ful evening. In this speedy, impa­tient world where fast is the new slow, and manic is the new fast, it takes some­thing to dis­con­nect from tech­nol­ogy and task and enter­tain­ment and just stop and take a breath in the com­pany of oth­ers. I’m not say­ing my thoughts didn’t wan­der back to the couch now and then. I’m up to Sea­son 2 of ‘Big Love’ which is get­ting really inter­est­ing so, as I nod­ded car­ingly at peo­ple shar­ing their hearts around the fire, I secretly won­dered how long I’d have to stay and be polite and appro­pri­ately soul­ful & con­nected to my Fel­low Man before I could get back to the telly. But DVD’s are eas­ily avail­able, whereas camp­fires with real live human beings are rare, so I stayed.

Even­tu­ally I set­tled into the present moment, into the win­ter, into the com­pany of oth­ers, shar­ing thoughts and feel­ings and sto­ries. In zero degrees. It was both fresh and refresh­ing! And as a bonus, spon­ta­neously I dis­cov­ered a great clar­ity regard­ing a job I had com­ing up the fol­low­ing week. I sud­denly felt very clear and con­fi­dent on how to approach the job. It goes to show, when the con­di­tions are right, the inner teacher can emerge and fig­ure out solu­tions to our endeavours.

The upcom­ing job was me facil­i­tat­ing a group of senior lead­ers who would be com­ing together for a team day with the aim to have authen­tic con­ver­sa­tions with each other. As I dodged the gusts of smoke from the camp­fire it struck me how sim­ple and yet elu­sive authen­tic con­ver­sa­tion can be. Some­thing about a rit­ual like a camp­fire cir­cle helps, as does a will­ing­ness to trust in silence and to lis­ten beyond the inter­nal voice that chat­ters away in an inces­sant com­men­tary on what other peo­ple are say­ing.  “Authen­tic­ity” is a bit of a buzz word that gets thrown around like a Fris­bee in the cor­po­rate world and so often loses mean­ing. Around that fire I remem­bered that authen­tic con­ver­sa­tion has a very real flavour to it, though it’s hard to put in words. It’s an atmos­phere that
arrives when peo­ple get beyond the clever debat­ing and pan­tomimes of inti­macy and start really talk­ing, sur­pris­ing them­selves with the truth that emerges.

So I took my renewed and refreshed under­stand­ing of authen­tic­ity into my ses­sion with that senior lead­er­ship team. Sadly, the occy health and safety pol­icy of the hotel wouldn’t allow me to light a camp­fire in the sem­i­nar room.  But there were other con­di­tions I could cre­ate in sup­port of con­nec­tion and authen­tic­ity. For a start I got the room changed from the planned board­room to an open space with­out a whop­ping great table in the mid­dle. Then I used some of Parker Palmer’s guide­lines from his coura­geous lead­er­ship process.

The day was a great suc­cess. Con­ver­sa­tions that had been repressed in the back­ground, came into the fore­ground, so they could be dealt with, and let go of, pro­vid­ing space for some new and bet­ter con­ver­sa­tions to begin. Themes and issues emerged and some pos­i­tive actions effort­lessly flowed out of the group. This was, as I sug­gested to them, ‘inner work’. And this is my first blog in a series which will explore the cor­re­la­tion between people’s Inner Life and their Outer Results. There is a whole inner realm of thoughts, feel­ings, beliefs, val­ues, and an even deeper, mys­te­ri­ous realm we might call the soul. This inner realm dri­ves behav­iours and cre­ates tan­gi­ble out­comes.  There are many thought lead­ers cur­rently look­ing at the rela­tion­ship between the outer and inner realms. They sug­gest that these realms are habit­u­ally kept sep­a­rate, par­tic­u­larly in the busi­ness world, and this may come at a cost to both per­for­mance gains and well-being. I’m going to explore the work of some of these thought lead­ers, along with my own expe­ri­ences in my work at Be Learn­ing. My under­ly­ing assump­tion is– as Bill O’Brien famously said– when it comes to change… “the suc­cess of the inter­ven­tion depends upon the inte­rior con­di­tion of the intervener.”

Parker Palmer founded the cen­tre for courage and renewal and has been lead­ing retreats for teach­ers and lead­ers which focus on the Inner Life. I rec­om­mend his book “A Hid­den Whole­ness: The Jour­ney Toward an Undi­vided Life” – it’s truly a knock out. Or rather, a knock in.

Bill O’Brien was a pre­vi­ous CEO of Hanover Insur­ance and a pio­neer in insti­tu­tion­al­is­ing vision and val­ues in the work­place. In his mem­ory, the O’Brien dis­tin­guished lec­ture series has some great speak­ers explor­ing inner work for outer change.

If you like this post; You may also enjoy read­ing Inner Life…Outer Results (Octo­ber Edition)