The world right now feels brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible. Coaches can support leaders in expanding their bandwidth to tackle these issues effectively.
We've normalised having massive amounts of our perception and mindset sacrificed, for the sake of a narrow bandwidth of operation dominated by left-brain thinking. We prioritise thinking at the expense of the wealth of information coming from our body, our emotions, and more transpersonal dimensions of consciousness. We already experience small moments where we truly feel our body and the world, where our perception of reality expands, and yet this is relegated to activities we take part in in our personal time.
For example, we’ve lost the ability to feel our emotions. We’re led to analyse them instead. Our culture is one of absence, in which it’s very difficult to share emotions. One emotion we perceive to be a blocker is fear. But when somebody is supported by a coach to feel safe enough to notice the fear and go towards it, there is often a huge opening to new sensations – those parts of their consciousness previously unavailable suddenly come back online. Fear doesn’t actually block us, it’s we who block fear because we don’t feel safe enough.
The world is shaking, and so a level of anxiety should be natural. Someone who isn’t aware of their anxiety is actually numb. Simply acknowledging that anxiety unlocks new ideas – not because of thinking, but because of the energy that is made available when we come back online. Our cultural addiction to only thinking actually prevents the higher levels of thinking that innovation comes from.
Thinking hijacks transformation, so our job as coaches is to bring awareness back to the body and emotions. We therefore need to be fully grounded ourselves and to be relentlessly present with our own body and emotions. A deep slowing-down is required – in order later to go much faster and get much more done with much greater clarity.
We also have to be unconditional towards what is – and it takes courage and maturity to stop trying to fix everything, when our tendency is to want to do just that. We need to trust that staying with the process will enable something to happen beyond anything we can manage simply by thinking. We need to accept that this will take us absolutely to the edge of the unknown – the greatest artists and scientists already know this, the greatest moments of breakthrough and creativity happen at that edge.
