A Simple but Powerful Perspective
I’d like to share with you a very simple perspective that I find to be very powerful in supporting me in forwarding what I’m up to and supporting me in my practice of The Collaborative Way®. So, this perspective is: The only way I can move forward is from here. I can’t move forward from the way I’d like it to be, the way it ought to be, the way it should be, the way it could have been. I can only move forward from here. When I get that, it gives me the opening to start catching myself when I’m caught in these woulda-coulda-shouldas that are taking me away from being present to current reality. And I can recognize that, choose to recenter myself in what I’m up to, and now engage with real curiosity to find the way forward given this current reality, given I’m standing here. Given I’m here, what’s the pathway forward? Accepting reality in that way, not in a passive way, but in a way in which I’m bringing real intentionality to my engagement while embracing current reality–very powerful.
Start Where You Are
You know my son Cody, when he was a young boy, came up to me one day, and he said, “Dad, I can do five dips!” And we always kept a dip bar, dip apparatus, in the house so you could do dips, given my history as a gymnast.
And I said, “Oh, really! Fantastic, Cody! I’d like to see.” And he started to kind of wiggle out of that, and I said, “No, no, no, I really want to see. This is great!” And I got him in where the parallel bars were, the dip machine, and he jumped up on there, and he got up there, and he started pushing and trying to, and he almost got himself into a full dip. And I said, “Wow, fantastic, Cody! You can almost do one dip! And you know you can do five dips if you want to, but the only way you can do that is you got to start where you are, and where you are is being able to almost do one dip.” And he took that challenge on, and he can do a lot more than five dips now and has become, in our family, one of the fitness champions in the family.
Start Here to Deal With Challenging Situations
Or you’ve got that customer that’s so challenging and so demanding and so upset about things, and it just shouldn’t be that way. He shouldn’t be, or she shouldn’t be like that. Except if I can get–whoa, recenter, okay we’re here; this is current reality. Hmm, maybe I could get interested in what’s behind their demands. What’s behind their upset? What’s disturbing them? If I can get there, maybe I can find a pathway to a new partnership, a new way forward with this difficult customer.
Start Here so You Can Stay Present
Or when my wife Lynne had ovarian cancer. We’d been struggling for well over a half year trying to get her condition diagnosed. Today, I can look back and see that all of her symptoms were just the classic symptoms for ovarian cancer, and yet so many of these health professionals, each of the health professionals, that we went to failed to diagnose her condition. Finally, in frustration she walked into the emergency room at the hospital and asked for help, and the tech there said, “I think I know what your problem is. Let me take a CAT scan to make sure.” And he did, and it turned out just as he saw it–she had cancer, most likely ovarian cancer. Whoa man, you talk about how easy–if only it could have been–how come they didn’t see it? How come all these health professionals who we went to didn’t diagnose her properly? The problem with all that is that’s where there’s suffering, and that’s where we are taken out of being able to be present to what we were dealing with. By catching ourselves when we start just beginning to go down those tunnels where all there is is suffering, and then choosing to recenter and be present with current reality–with here–by doing that over and over again we were able to stay present to current reality. And we were able to deal much more effectively with what she was dealing with and do so in a way out of the spirit of our love for each other, and out of having, what turned out to be an extraordinary period of love and partnership in our life together. But that could only arise out of being here and continuously, from here, generating what was possible and how we related to those conditions. Those conditions didn’t change from being really brutal conditions.
The Only Place I Can Move Forward From Is Here
So wow, I found this perspective to be so powerful. The only place I can move forward from is here if. I want to move forward, it’s a good idea to get here. I hope you find this perspective useful for yourselves.
This is a great extension of what the Collaborative Way teaches. While it can inform the performance of each of the practices, it’s really fundamental. It’s fundamental to the underlying ethic of responsibility.