Wellington, November 2, 2016

So it’s decided, I’m starting this blog.

I have no idea where I’m going with it and whether this blog will go beyond a few sporadic posts. But that’s ok, I will give it go. In a way, I’m starting my own ‘safe to fail experiment’ as David Snowden would call it. This one is very safe. Nobody knows about it! At least for now. Maybe I’ll tell people I’m writing this blog. Maybe some of you will find me. We shall see. The importance is to get started.

This blog is about being curious; curious about ourselves. So the first question I have to answer for myself, is what is driving me to write this blog? Why do I feel the need to share my thoughts and feelings with the rest of the world (even if the rest of the world never actually finds me!!!)?

That’s a good question. A complex one actually. There isn’t just the one reason why I feel compelled to write this blog. And for as much as I promised myself to let go of the need to be ‘right’ and perfect in this blog, I find myself having already re-written that part about 5 times! So I’m going to try one last time.

To start with, I love to think, reflect and share my thoughts with others! Next week I turn 44. I have started my coaching journey almost 9 years ago. This has been a beautiful, deep and at times very challenging journey…  It feels like I have open my eyes. And every time I open them, I want to open them even more! I have an urge to understand who I am, why I do what I do and what I don’t do. Since I have started opening my eyes, I realised that over the course of my life, despite all the studies I had done, all the places I have been to, I had actually not given much thoughts to any thing really. I had lived my life as if it was on tracks without questioning anything. For instance, I had never asked myself the big questions some people ask themselves when they are younger about whether or not they want to get married, have kids, etc.  Questioning these things, entertaining the possibility of choosing a different path than the well traveled, was just not on my radar! I had just gone with the flow in a reflect-less type way. Yet, at the same time, I could see some people getting quite agitated about big ‘world-type’ questions. I did my undergrad at Sciences-Po, a French school that has groomed generations of politicians. I could see them debating and arguing about these big questions. That didn’t appeal to me. I felt I had nothing to say. At the time, I actually thought of myself as a ‘no-opinion’ person and that’s just who I thought I was. The symbol of that ‘no-opinion’ self  for me was I didn’t have an opinion on death penalty! Who doesn’t???  I was not necessarily proud of it but I didn’t think there was any other alternative! I was fascinated by people like my sister who seemed to be born activists! But I felt I couldn’t, I wasn’t born that way…

Then a few years ago, I started teaching an ethics class at my local primary school. That was a life-changing experience. In trying to help to 8 to 12 year old think and grapple with complex ethics issues, I realised that I wasn’t necessarily a ‘no-opinion’ person, I had just not taken the time to think for myself! Topics like death penalty are such complex topics that except if you have a ‘visceral’ reaction one way or the other, or if you replicate what you’ve been told, you can’t just expect to know what you truly think!  You need to give it some serious thoughts! And that’s true for most subjects. As I now better understand my story, I can see that from a very young age I have probably been overwhelmed by the amazing thinking capacity of some people in my family. All my childhood I had been exposed to great abstract thinkers. I was ‘talked at’, ‘thought at’ but I hadn’t been taught to think for myself which would have required a move from ‘at’ to ‘with’. Really hard to do as an adult, meeting kids where they’re at instead of asking them to climb where we’re at…  Some kids can climb better than others. Unconsciously, I had probably decided thinking was just too hard and I hadn’t made the effort to climb, I was just listening, if even that… .

So now, it’s like I have opened the tap of my own thinking and I just can’t find the ‘off button’. I want to discover what I think and how I feel (capital ‘I’) on everything I am curious about! These days my curiosity goes beyond these big existential questions – not that I have answered them at all! – and at times I am actually surprised by what catches my attention, it doesn’t seem to be what catches most people’s attention! This week for instance I got all excited by exploring what triggered the physicality of our emotions and what didn’t. It all started from me noticing and comparing two of the emotions I had over the course of a few days: a very physical and emotional one  vs. a more cognitive one. That didn’t make sense to me and I got curious on what triggered the ‘body’ reaction. Got me to look into better understand empathy and the difference with sympathy; to reflect on the impact of showing our emotions, etc. etc.  I won’t say more as that might actually be the topic of my next post!  I just wanted to get you a feel for the kind of questions and train of thoughts I often find myself reflecting on.  I love grappling with all these questions , especially the ones around our emotional lives as our emotions so often derail us from the course of our lives!

So I love being in this deep inquiry more and at the same time it can be a bit exhausting, especially for the people around me!

So that’s actually another reason for me to write. To talk less and a be bit less intense with the people around me, especially the ones really close to me as I tend to be quite demanding in terms of attention and of conversational needs! I need people to talk to and to reflect with. People who might find an interest in reflecting with me on some of these questions that arise from our everyday lives.

As I say, I usually find that very few people ask themselves these kind of questions and maybe a plausible answer is nobody gives a damn because they have important jobs to do and there bigger challenges in life to tackle than to ponder on what one could call a ‘belly button challenge’. I agree. But I don’t feel I can do anything about these bigger problems, these ‘wicked problems’ as we now call them. My way of contributing to this world is by helping people think. I help them think in a different way so that if their calling is to solve these ‘wicked problems’ they have a better chance at making it happen. I help them understand who they are, why they do what they do or don’t do, how they function as human beings and how they sometimes come in the way of themselves. When given permission – and sometimes probably taking the permission! – I am as relentless about exploring the complexities of their inner lives as I am with my own!

And that’s another reason I want to write.  When I’m not in an ‘official’ coaching capacity, lots of my questions start with me noticing what’s happening for me. It’s the easiest and more natural place for me to go, especially given my passion for self-awareness! But that makes me feel and undoubtedly comes across very self-focused which I don’t like. These inquiries are about me and  at the same time they’re not. They are about us all human beings, when I understand myself better, I understand others better in how they are the same or different but I can only start making sense of others starting at my singular level..  In the past couple years, I have come to lessen the judging (a bit) and start appreciating that asking myself all these questions, being in this deep inquiring mode all the time is what helps me be a better coach, a better mum, a better human being. Still at times, it feels like self-absorption. So writing is my attempt at  helping others while I help myself. I also suspect that knowing I am writing in a somewhat ‘open’ forum will force me to broaden my thinking.

What’s also pushing me in that direction is that I’ve often been told that the questions I ask myself, my way of reasoning and of openly (some would shamelessly!) sharing my reflections helps some people figure out their own stuff. Sharing my thoughts and feelings openly gives them an invitation and a starting point to start their own reflection. They can react to mine. At times it’s like my sharing also gives them permission to share and talk openly about what’s real for them. My sharing speaks to some people (and probably puts off many others!) because as you might have already noticed, I have a very ‘conversational tone’. I think and I write as I speak, very concretely in plain English (or French). Now, that doesn’t mean I’m not long and convoluted but my train of thoughts tend to be easy to follow. I grapple with complex ideas with very simple language, mostly using my own brain. Sometimes, I over simplify but it gets the point across and structure the conversation.

Interestingly, up till now, what has come in the way of me writing an open blog has been because I have been too hang up on needing to know what I was talking about before daring to publicly talk about it!  I would LOVE to be an expert on human behaviour, to be well read and to remember all that has been written so far, but it’s not me. I do read a lot and attend hours of workshops, conferences and training programs every year but I don’t have an ‘academic brain’, I usually don’t remember what I read more than a couple weeks, I can’t quote the last book or last idea and my brain needs plain old English for it to understand – French also works, better even! I’m hoping that somehow I am integrating all this learning in a deeper knowing way but frankly, I don’t know! All that I am really good at doing is noticing what’s coming up for me and using my analytical and rationale mind combined with my experiences to attempt to understand what’s happening. I can do this for myself and I can do this and for others if only they are happy to throw their ‘stuff’ in the ring for us to push it around a bit.

I used to see this lack of knowledge and my struggle to understand and to express myself in more abstract way as a sign of not being ‘smart enough’. It was also a sign of not respecting  and honoring other people’s ideas. Today, I see these inabilities as a blessing (ok, maybe I’m pushing it a bit for the sake of the argument!). My passion to understand, my ability to make sense with ‘just’ what’s there and to express it in very plain English is what is helping  me connect with people deeply and very simply.

So these are all the reasons why I have decided to take my somewhat self-centredness and shameless sharing to a new level.

Why this week?

Because this week has been a big week, a ‘heavy’ week as my 13 year old Lucas would say. We have lost our first ever pet and beloved dog, Sunny, a cavoodle of 4 year old who got ran over in front of my eyes and of my 12 year old daughter’s; I have learnt that a person close to my heart is having to fight yet another cancer battle and today I have held the space for a colleague of mine also struggling with the potential loss of her husband to cancer.

Life is too short! I know, it’s a cliché. But this week, it felt really real.

I am tired of waiting to become someone I might never become. I am tired of feeling not enough. I am tired of not speaking my truth because I’m afraid it might not be true and not respect some smart ideas buried in a book I will probably never read. I am tired of not valuing what I have to bring to the party because of all that I don’t bring. A decent brain and analytical power, a solid common sense, a good intention and a reasonable sense of self-awareness, that’s is all that you need to have a good quality conversation, wouldn’t you agree?

I want my voice to be heard. I believe I have a contribution to make to this world and it comes from my ability to be a deep thinker, a deep feeler and a shameless sharer.

So this is what I intend to do with this blog. Share my thoughts, my way of making sense of things and hopefully, sometimes, you will find it useful. Sometimes, you might even like to join in in my inquiry to help me push the thinking deeper. I’d really love that. To make these inquiries that I have not just about myself but about others so that together, we can better understand how we function and make this world a better place.

My commitment to you is to always come from the heart and be real.

With love,

 

Sandra