From Magic to Messes…
Sheri Lynn Fella
Too often I feel I am surrounded by folks terrified by honesty and accountability… terrified to mess up and own it, terrified to be told they’ve messed up and need to own it, terrified someone else will pass judgment… terror here, terror there, terror everywhere.
And I can relate… because I mess up. A LOT. So, I have had to get really good at owning my messiness and even better at cleaning up the messes I make – unintentionally or not. And I don’t always get it right of course – which creates another opportunity for me to practice OYOS – Own Your Own Shit. A clever and powerful acronym I shamelessly borrowed from a highly respected client partner of mine.
Last month I wrote of my own experience with the power of pausing… I think it applies here. Terror makes you react… it is a survival instinct. And without self-awareness and being in tune with your emotions (hence your reactions), you risk doing just that… reacting. And reacting becomes a habit without pausing, without pacing.
This past month I witnessed powerful transitions in behaviors – some for the good, some for the not so good, but all having powerful consequences. Both unintentional and intentional, and both positive and devastating. Two particular situations come to mind because while they both involved accountability – one situation had two equally aware parties, and one did not. Hearing direct feedback when you aren’t used to hearing it, and hearing it when you are in a habit of reacting doesn’t give that feedback, no matter how it is delivered, a high probability of landing as intended, and as needed.
The other situation, where the two parties were open and ready for feedback, and where they were able to pause and not react, it resulted in a powerful new discovery that has already opened up new doors of innovation. Whereas, the initial situation likely harmed the relationship beyond repair.
Feedback shared between the two willing, open and aware parties was magic. Feedback given to an unaware, unopen, and uncurious party… well, it was a mess.
Without the awareness to pause and be curious enough to understand, we almost always will risk a ripple of reactions. If you are the reactor and you catch your emotions after the first ripple, or maybe even after the second, you have a chance to repair and to reset. But if those emotional reactions happen for more than a week, it is hard to repair and even harder to reset. Because if there is no accountability for the reaction, there isn’t much place for the other party to go except to leave. Staying without accountability means the risk is high the unilateral reaction would keep happening.
I read this quote earlier this month and it came to mind as these two situations unfolded.
“Saying how you feel doesn’t end good connections, it ends bad ones.”
And that surely did play out. While the possibility to move forward ended in one space, the innovation took off in another. Having the emotional maturity to hear both parties’ grievances and ideas, opened up all kinds of possibility that wasn’t present before. A simple question was all it took to ignite it… “Hey, that critique didn’t feel right to me. Would you help me understand what is causing your concern?”
One simple question in the pause. Rather than emotional reactions in the pounce – as in pouncing on the person who directly raised a business concern. And it makes so much sense why the pouncing seems to run rampant these days in our lives. Most of us are not consistently “well”, as in our well-being. Too many of us know the state of our over stimulated, over worked, over scheduled, over (fill in the blank) lives as “normal”.
I hope we vow to change that… even a little. A little change in all of us would result in a big change for all of us. Exhale. Pause. Get curious. What might you do next other than pounce? Or react? Or race to the next thing? How might you open possibility for yourself and others by deepening your awareness of your own well being?
March was full of fun madness from spring break to basketball games, and of course there were messes – that’s being human. And for April, Stress Awareness month, let’s do just that… let’s be human. Let’s bring awareness to the forefront and be less reactive humans by making even a small shift for our own well-being and see what happens. The messes will still come with being human… and with little shifts, innovation can come too.
