Yesterday and today I had a 2 day training course and presentation skills. This couldn't be better timing given the speaking opportunities I will create in 2009 to promote my book. Yet I'm feeling a bit flat and deflated and I don't know what that's about. I am going to Amsterdam to start my 3rd weekend of the Team Management and Leadership programme with Landmark Education tomorrow. The programme is about expanding communication in Europe and the Middle East. I look back on this quarter as the quarter in which I lost my accountability for the customer delight game. Or to be more correct, first it was taken and then I let it go. I have chosen this quarter not to take on an accountability role of any of the games but to be the accountability for love & acknowledgement.
What this involves is having a team of people with me and ensure that all members of Team are acknowledged each week. I find receiving acknowledgement difficult. I love to give acknowledgement because it is a powerful practice for touching and awakening the heart. Also because at the most fundamental level there is no separation between me and another when I acknowledge someone else I am also acknowledging me. What I do for another I get back twice-fold for me but this is not the reason to acknowledge someone.
Acknowledgement that touches and moves the heart has to come from nothing. It is not acknowledging in order to get something or for some reason it is acknowledgement for the beauty of it and if it comes from that place of purity and nothingness it is powerful. Being accountable for love and acknowledgment next quarter will demand that I build up a relationship with the 46 other members of Team. This is something I have not done in this quarter or in my 1st quarter. Yet I know that transformation does not happen without connection and communication.
Such communication and connection does not always have to be through speaking. The power of listening to build up relatedness is often underestimated. I have found that I am most self-expressed and able to communicate effectively when I feel listened to. When I speak and I have the complete attention of the person I am speaking to then the words flow with an ease and grace that is not there when I don't feel I have the listening of another. This shows that how well we are able to communicate does not depend on ourselves but on the quality of the listening that is given to us. I will communicate most effectively with Team members if I listen and am completely and totally present to what is being said that if I speak.
But again listening brings about stillness which as I said in an earlier post the mind will fight against at all costs. It does this by bringing into consciousness judgements and evaluations about what is being said or else by speaking out opinions and judgements. One of the greatest achievements on the spiritual path is the ability to be with silence.......
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2 comments:
Hey Margaret!!
I'm gagging for the next installment - what's going on? I hope your not ill or anything lets have more postings.
Please! :-)
Thank you to whoever posted this comment today. It made me laugh and has given me the motivation to write again. I have spoken about how this journey is one of extreme highs and lows. I usually wait until I have the high after the low before I write. I feel that because I proclaim to have some insights into this journey that I have to always write when I have had breakthroughs and not in the midst of breakdowns.
I see now that this is just me wanting to look good to those who are reading it and isn't very honest. I have promised an honest account of this journey and this is not what I have been doing. This is not to make what I have been doing wrong, it is to acknowledge that there is a gap between the purpose I said that this blog would serve and what it is actually serving.
The impact of this pretence on me is that I feel under pressure to write only when I've had a high. The impact on my reader is that they are getting a skewed account of the journey (as it occurs to me). What I can promise from here on in is to write when I'm in breakdown as well as when I've broken through something. In that way this blog will be more authentic.
So thank you to the person for leaving that comment. It's woken me up!
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