What I learnt from Enrol Yourself - lessons in personal leadership.
What can living with the failings in my body teach me about living with the failings in our society?
That was my guiding question for a Learning Marathon in 2018. Six months, twelve strangers, each with a distinct inquiry to guide our way…
I ’d actually embarked on two marathons in 2018: hosting an Enrol Yourself #LearningMarathon - 6+months. And pursuing a long-held ambition to run a real one, 26+miles! At a crossroads in my life I was wanting to knit together a few seemingly disparate threads:
- My relationship with an incurable illness— in fact, three: asthma, eczema and AS.
- My decade long career in (and frustrations with) so-called ‘social change’.
- And a personal curiosity about how to relate to and value life itself.
Alan Bennett says “you don’t put yourself into what you write. You find yourself there”. Turns out that’s true for marathons too…
Failure
If both quests taught me anything it’s that ‘failure’ is a brutal word.
To fail implies that there’s something better out there, more perfect, more desirable. But look a little more closely, as I did, and the ‘perfect’ society, or ‘body’ ’is a mirage… In fact, our typical images of physical beauty in the early 21st Century — from makeup laden faces to bodybuilding inspired physiques — are entirely disconnected from genuine health. And for all our obsession with politics, there’s little harmony in modern public life.
And yet there was that word in my learning question: ‘failings’. Twice. ‘Failure’ was taking up so much of my headspace in early 2018. Making me feel insufficient. Driving me to notice failings. Obliterating gratitude. Obscuring the journey. In Parker Palmer’s words, my wholeness was hidden.
Luckily a friendly group of engaged and curious souls proved a tonic. Why not swap this blunt hammer of the word ‘failure’, asked someone, for something kinder, more humane?
An elder, Julia Mourant, gently reframed my thinking: “if you suggest an idea of ‘fixed’ you have to ask which of us are ‘fixed’? Rather than fixing goals and asking ‘what do I need to do’, how about prioritizing ‘how do I need to be’ in the world?”
Adding this learning to my embodied experience, training for the real marathon, I realized Julia was totally right. Far more useful than obsessing about the finish was the instinct to slow down and appreciate the journey. On the big day itself, I even sent some messages of gratitude en route. To my own surprise, they didn’t slow me down one bit. Somehow my pace quickened.
I began to reframe my learning question: what unique gifts has my imperfect but abundantly human body granted me? What opportunities are the gift of our particular moment in human history? To integrate: how do I marry my lived experience with those things that I notice needing doing in our world?
A Mirror
This idea that much of what I perceive inevitably mirrors my internal relationship with myself began to fascinate me.
Whenever asthma overwhelms me, like a suffocating wave, I start to become anxious, I feel time closing in, it can feel like the whole world is slipping away from me. When I’m in chronic pain, I find myself becoming quickly frustrated, I fight, I increasingly fixate on injustice... And when I feel healthy and well? Funny enough I begin to notice the life teeming in the trees outside my flat…
So how I see the world often seems to reflect how I am relating to myself internally. I started to play with breaking down the boundary — perhaps I am in nature, and nature is in me? Some scientific inquiries caught my eye: social stress can cause bodily inflammation, and vice-versa.
If this is true, perhaps our rising epidemics including depression, inflammation, chronic disease are not distinct from climate breakdown?
And maybe our individual level of mastery or authority has little to do with IQ and more to do with our ability to attend to what’s happening within ourselves, internally? Besides accumulating knowledge, maybe we should focus on cultivating more grounded wisdom? I found Rumi’s advice interesting: “maybe you are searching amongst the branches for what only appears in the roots”
Yet so many of us who’ve been involved in pushing for ‘social change’ (myself included), start the opposite way… We focus on the external world, we notice and name our frustrations with its injustices, we fixate on making it conform to some preferred vision… At least I know that’s what I’ve spent more than a decade of my professional life doing.
Leadership
“The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.” William A Ward
I started to wonder what any of this might have to do with leadership? What might a more masterful way in which to relate to ourselves and others look like?
Studying Shambhala Buddhism gave me some ideas. Beyond ‘power over’ there is ‘power with’:
Power with (and courage from) the knowledge that everything that has happened (good and bad) was supposed to happen.
Power in seeking to live with ourselves, each other and the earth we are made of more honestly, gracefully and compassionately.
Power with the human creativity that allows us to find joy even in suffering, moments of real cheerfulness even in the face of unrelenting negativity.
As Foucault says, perhaps “power is exercised rather than possessed”.
Rather than something to be wielded over others, I started to think of leadership as something more universal, more personal — a bottomless kind of well from which we can perhaps all learn to drink — marathon runners, change-makers and everyday folks alike!
3 More Reflections On Personal Mastery
The act of facilitating a Learning Marathon was in itself fertile ground for my inquiry. Observing myself and others I noticed:
- We all fall down, but how do we get up? A mindset.
We are all inherently fragile, for sure. So our mindset is pivotal. Not an all-conquering tough man (or woman) kind of mindset. Or some sort of risk averseness expressed as e.g. health and safety. Those are short-term, flawed sorts of resilience.
Instead, the masterful mindset prioritizes listening. Foregrounds attention. Exercises gratitude and vulnerability. Surrenders shame. Lets go of jealousy…
If we’re honest all of those emotions do come up. Adversity is inevitable. And finding the middle way between defeat and denial is not easy. But when I stopped fighting and began to accept ‘just this’? I got back up, but with full knowledge of my frailty? That was for me the precise moment at which I began to grow.
2. We are the whole and the whole is in us. A perspective.
Our bodies, like our societies, are organisms. For all of our attempts at grasping them, both are complex interdependent systems that evade total understanding, they’re neither mechanical nor linear, and they’re constantly shifting.
If we and our worlds are living, breathing, beautifully open systems. Cyclical; multiple; paradoxical. Then pain, suffering, misdemeanor — it also truly belongs as part of the picture. We mustn’t fear and suppress it. Neither should we enshrine and glorify. The whole system needs to be acknowledged.
Think like this and you can begin to let go of our need for centralized organs of power. At least I did. I also stopped looking at the world as some great competition for supposed scarcity. An anxiety-inducing myth… And instead, I began to notice that there is interconnection and abundant energy/possibility everywhere — fizzing, connecting, even impregnating the apparently empty spaces in-between.
3. Social acupuncture. An approach to intervention.
With any systemic breakdown, the symptoms are the first things we spot. For that reason, and also because they’re smaller, somehow easier to grasp, it’s hugely tempting to focus our restorative efforts here. Across body or society, there are numerous examples: from teenage knife crime and Brexit to the utter failure of Western medicine to heal chronic disease.
A practical example: in my own experience, with my 3 chronic illnesses, I’m sent to 3 different departments at one hospital, to see 3 different consultants, and given 3 sets of drugs. All of which simply suppress the symptoms... None of them actually do anything to heal me. For so many years so little progress.
But the acupuncturist looks through a wider lens, seeking patterns. Beyond the level of the symptom. Instead, they search for complex interdependencies, they seek to sense interconnection, and they work to release trapped energy that inherently wants to flow.
What does this mean in practice? Healthy intervention becomes less about imposed ‘fixes’ and more about restorative, transformative habits. It implies that we don’t need ‘empowering’ but rather reconnection.
Leading others?
Much of what I’ve noticed is easily transferable.
But one question remained for me: if so much is rooted in the personal, what’s the role of guidance, assistance, inspiration? Is there a place for any more classic conception of leadership?
I must confess I’m pretty suspicious of this domain. Power is seductive and as the ego grows so too does the urge to suppress anything that stands in its way.
For that reason Enrol Yourself was inspiring: redistributing agency, reconnecting us with ourselves and each other, proving just how much all of us could be trusted to propel ourselves without a ‘boss’.
There is a catch though. On our own, we’re actually mincemeat. Partly because we need to be pushed to truly show up, we need to be encouraged to find our own true voice, and we need to be accountable against our common failings...
That strength of character isn’t innate but largely cultivated. And partly through others’ perspectives — helping us to see beyond our bias, to aspire towards our better selves, to dare a little, etc.
So personal mastery also involves inviting in elders and mentors as well as supportive peers and allies. An invited-in form of external leadership.
Both trying to live with my long term health conditions, and trying to encourage commitment and performance across the 6-month learning marathon, these external forms of support are essential.
Maybe this all sounds obvious but looking at UK society around us it’s far from current reality. From the way Whitehall works to the nature of the average GP appointment, it’s a more enlightened form of help that’s severely lacking. Perhaps this is why coaching-inspired approaches are growing in influence?
How to be in the world?
Of course, this isn’t a thesis. Simply lived experience and a few reflections. Undoubtedly flawed. And in so many ways my learning marathon turned out differently to what I might have at first expected…
For one, I didn’t leave with a single new integrating initiative but a few new personal projects (you can see what those look like here).
But the principal magic of my own first learning marathon has been to help me begin to realize that what I do in the world is no way near as important as how I am in my limited here. I’ll embrace that as the answer I was looking for.
To quote Lujaina, a Syrian Christian refugee with a remarkable story:
There are things I can’t change, so I must change how I do relate to them, yes?
… and what does it mean, imperfection? There is something beautiful in imperfection”
