So You Want To Be A Change Agent?! ...

~ from: "The Far Side" by Gary Larson 

I am a change agent. 

I call myself a consultant, but, I am a change agent, an agent for change. I have always loved the Gary Larson cartoon that you can see above, because, in being a true change agent, there will be a colluded understanding, though maybe not conscious, that you are out to transform the status quo. And, no matter how much confirmation you hear from the people who have asked you for your transformational vision, be it corporation, executive, friend, family member, or even your own excited self who has just registered in the next transformational weekend huzzah!, there will be what I like to call "kickback".

So here's a tip, offered from my own getting-up-from-my-face-in-the-dirt experience: practice listening. Like, no talking. Complete authentic facination with the other's point of view, with no attention to your own thinking from the past. Let it all be said, from them to you. All of it. 

The only question you might ask is: "Anything else?" And then: More listening. Eventually, when the person has emptied their world-of-issue into the clearing space of your profound listening, the only thing that will be left is what is truly real: love, affinity, and brilliant insight into the solution.

Anything other than this profound listening brings a world of drama - including our own personal drama - into the mix. Bull's eyes appear all around, visible targets for escalated dominating monologues, designed to take someone down, to protect the righteousness of our own positions.

Well, true interested listening will act as a calming buffer against all that cacophony of verbal insecurity. No kidding. Try it. It's a practice. 

And if you still choose to be a change agent, the bull's eye will be there, a magnet for resistance to change. But if you listen deeply enough, thereby acknowledging the speaker for the validity of their point of view - which you can honestly see if you are willing to stand in their shoes looking at life from their vantage point - you will deflect and dissolve any arrows or barbs coming your way. And they will see something new that frees them up from a previously constrained way of perceiving life experience.

As a true change agent, the bull's eye will always be radiating from you. But deep listening is like, well, the cool tee shirt you wear that covers it from their view.

Onward!

The Birthing of a Book

My Writing Desk, April 2014

I will be completing my first book and sending it to the publisher this month. It has been a long process! I find I struggle with writing in a very similar way that I struggle with painting, yet also the fulfillment from a writing session well done is the same deep satisfying fulfillment as a good afternoon in the painting studio.

But here’s the thing – a frustrating session is actually also fulfilling. Perplexing, doubts can creep in, yet there is a give and take in the creative process that I find missing in some of the other professional work I do, even though the other work is good work and makes a difference. The form that is being created through the tempering process of my own creative machinations looks back at me and we are in partnership – symbiotically corded together. I get up and walk away, but it works me and I work it until the next sitting. Such intimacy.

The give and take, the working through the possible creative choices, of color or word, activates the muse. The creative muse is the whole realm of inspiration and chaos and possibility. And such vastness of possibility of course could result in making choices that don’t quite harmonize – but you know you will eventually discover the right harmonics as they are thriving in the Eternal somewhere!

Sometimes one feels “stuck”, yes, and we get frightened if we think that we are then blocked. Yet we are freed when we realize that these are the essential periods of waiting, of letting the field of creativity lie fallow to replenish and reorganize from the realm of All Possibility, settling into just the right alchemical mix to produce the gold.

Birthing is the result of creation, which has its own timetable, the mystery of which is perhaps its protection.

“Okay, now here’s a question. Why do we think that being ‘stuck’ is a bad thing? What if ‘stuck’ is what you need to experience in order to be creative? Being stuck, there’s an assumption that there’s no movement, nothing’s happening, you’re in trouble, but maybe it needs to be rephrased. Maybe being stuck is churning and activating and bubbling and growing. … When we say we’re stuck, then … there’s got to be a better way … But you are finding that everyone gets stuck, so maybe we need to have those moments of just not doing anything.”

~ from The Captive Muse: On Creativity and Its Inhibition, by Susan Kolodny