The Guardian reports that it's the earliest Spring for a century and that feels right as I wasn't expecting to see my alliums and geums appearing alongside the tulips But that does seem to be the way of things - lots of things that we weren't expecting including (for me) working out ways that I could get onto the Downs and down to the sea using public transport if I needed to - as things continue to unfold in the wider world in ways no-one wants.
This month, there are glances at:
organisational intimacy
how grief takes many forms
the need for interval training
coaching supervision
poetry and more ...
I can't quite believe it'll be May already when I'm next writing this. And so between now and then, let's all remember the ties that bind us even when they might not be obvious.
I've recently started with a new coaching supervision group - being a participant, not running it - and it's great. It's my first time of group supervision although I had several years of a 2:1 'group' with another coach and there's so much richness in it.
And that reminds me of a few things. First that I have space to take in two new coaching supervision clients myself. Just email me if you'd like to chat about that.
Some of you will know that the US poet and activist Andrea Gibson died last year. And she filmed some of the last year or so of her dying time in the beautiful film Come See Me in the Good Light. Highly recommended.
Her partner Megan Falley has been writing about Andrea and her death through her own experience and this recent piece, where she challenges 'the notion that grief is best done behind locked doors, beneath duvets, with the blinds drawn. That it’s done in private, in pyjamas' really caught me.
For her, she says: 'my grief has looked like dance floors, red carpets, pink feather dresses, six inch gold platform shoes. It’s looked like crowd-surfing, costume parties, karaoke and spraying people with champagne. Like mascara running into an unchained smile'.
More beauty. You can read the whole of The Art of Grieving in Public here.
(pic: Cecile Duchene Malassin)
Organisational intimacy
When I run The Love Lab, I often tell participants that I could have called it The Connection Lab and more people would have signed up. Or I equally could have called it The Intimacy Lab, in which case way fewer people would have signed up. Intimacy in an organisational setting is even more provocative and confronting than love.
Which is why it's great to have the term 'organisational intimacy' used by Amy Elizabeth Fox and Nicholas Janni in a new Coaches Rising podcast where they talk about their new book, Leading in Chaos. In essence, how can we create the conditions for people to open up to each other about what they're feeling, or about what their life has been like? And how do conversations like that create the condition for connection, yes, but also for performance. Not traditional corporate thinking. And therefore all the more important. Take a listen here and see what lands with you.
(pic: William Scott
'Joy is an ember for or a precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity '.
Ross Gay
Interval training
How much can we take of all the tough stuff? Yes, Joanna Macy reminds us that we need to 'honour the pain of the world'. James Baldwin says that 'not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced'. And Deborah Rowland points out that 'most movement happens in the uncomfortable spaces' .
So I don't look away. I watch the horror-porn of the news. I read Carol Cadwalladr on Substack. I try and tune into the field of all those who are suffering. I do some light scenario planning about knowing the bus routes to the Downs in the eventuality of petrol shortages and thinking about getting in bags of rice and lentils.
But it's not all about that as several people are helpfully on hand to remind me.
Rob Brezseny reminds us of the need to practice 'rhythmic devotion and not constant immersion.'
He says: staying informed isn't the same as staying inundated and overwhelmed. We're not requested to marinate indefinitely in the spectacle of dysfunction in order to be a responsible citizen or a compassionate human. Overexposure dulls our responsiveness and degrades our discernment. Instead, let's engage in intentional intervals. Enter the fray, witness clearly, feel honestly, and then exit on purpose: skilful participation, not avoidance.'
Exit on purpose. Yes.
And Sharon Blackie, in her latest Newsletter talks about 'the need to remain fully present to what we love while we love it, even when anticipating its loss; and that we focus on the place where our feet are presently planted, and on changing the things that we have the power to change'.
She asks: 'Is that the best possible answer to everything we’re grappling with today? I don’t know for sure, but all my instincts tell me it’s a very good start indeed'
I agree. A good start. And so I also practice a rhythmic devotion to things like:
- regular walking on the Downs, just me and the skylarks
- the laughable deliciousness of bacon and halloumi in a hot cross bun
- watching 4 hares playing in the field on the Equinox
- Harrison Ford, comedy gold in Shrinking
- a deeply amateur and newly developing art practice
Whatever works for you, as a form of interval training, to give recovery before going back in. Do it.
I can pull up a couple more chairs at the table of The Love Lab running later this month, if you think you can make it. I won't run another one until 2027 and so if you've been hesitating, maybe now is the time?. A wonderful opportunity to experiment with love - meaningful and powerful work in person with practical application to take back into the workplace, community and other relationships.
If we are to begin well, we need to end well.
The quality of our beginnings is directly linked to the quality of our endings.
Focusing on a 'good ending' creates the conditions for good beginnings.
Full details for the September Endings & Beginning workshop is here. We look at creating good endings by exploring what palliative care and the role of an end of life doula can teach us, how we might work with ritual to create movement and release stuckness and remind ourselves that nature has most of the lessons we need to learn to do endings well come from nature.
In the March Acts of Love for Tough Times we looked at how letting go might be considered an act of love that's essential for these times we're in. The next session is 16 April with details here. The one after that is 28 May - details here.
(Pic: Isobel Harvey)
Poem
Yellow
When they turn the sun
on again I'll plant children
under it, I'll light up my soul
with a match and let it sing. I'll
take my bones and polish them, I'll
vacuum up my stale hair, I'll
pay all my neighbours' bad debts, I'll
write a poem called Yellow and put
my lips down to drink it up, I'll
feed myself spoonfuls of heat and
everyone will be home playing with
their wings and the planet will
shudder with all those smiles and
there will be no poison anywhere, no plague
in the sky and there will be a mother-broth
for all of the people and we will
never die, not one of us, we'll go on
won't we?
Anne Sexton
(pic: Gustavo Ortiz)
Good reads
I started (again) and then stopped (again) Olga Tokarczuk's House of Day, House of Night. It's a gorgeous book, and beautifully written but I seem to find it hard to make my way through it. So I read a belated Christmas present from a friend, the gentle The Beginner's Goodbye from Anne Tyler, which got me back into a fiction flow. And from there I flowed straight into The Boy From The Sea from Garrett Carr and that was wonderful. I do have a love of an Irish way of seeing things. And I might get back to Olga at some point ...
When several people send me the link to the new Design Love In, Marcus Buckingham's latest, clearly it must be bought and read. And it's good. He talks about deconstructing love so that we can be conscious and intentional about building it back in for our teams in organisations as well as customers. Plenty of great stuff. It's a smidge too instrumental for me in places (do these things and they will feel like love for your people...) but I'm being picky not least because there's not a thing in his suggestions that are not also very human and practices that are increasingly being concreted over in organisations. So I'd say read it for sure if you're interested in building human cultures in our workplaces. And if you're reading this Newsletter, then that's surely you.
Finally, I've been dipping into Wise Women, from Joyce Tenneson, a book of photographs of older women which is both beautiful and inspiring.
And at work
A very good day in London working a group of senior women leaders. (Working on leadership development programmes for women, often they start the first session saying some form of: 'we don't want to be treated as women, we want to be treated just as leaders'. And it's generally the case that by the second session they're saying some version of: 'wow, I had no idea how helpful it would be for me to be on a programme with only women and exploring all this leadership stuff though the lived experience of being a woman'.)
Some interesting new work in development with a long standing client to support them in building the capability of their HRBPs in Organisational Development mindset, tools and practices.
And delighted to say that I pulled out of some work offered to me because it would mean contorting both myself and my diary in order to make it work. In line with holding some stronger boundaries for me and my work this year, post op, I said no. It felt like a really bold move, but was really symbolic in showing me I meant what I said in Jan about working less in ways that drained me.
(pic: Chris Liberti)
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