This morning I’m still ruminating on the fault lines running underneath the surface of the group that I’ve been facilitating. Funny that this weekend I was thinking, “I love my job!” and now I’m thinking, “My job causes me a lot of stress!”
Yesterday morning on my bike ride to work I decided that to honour the humanizing impulse I had to address the tensions I was feeling directly, and not to smooth them over and ignore them. I started the day with a check-in, and I started the check-in by addressing my goal to serve a humanizing impulse in all my actions, and to do that I think it requires addressing group tensions – but that by bringing them up, there’s also a danger of doing damage. And indeed: my approach helped some and alienated others. So, I continue to manage fallout, and continue to ruminate.
How do you learn from a ‘learning moment’? This is the same challenge I skirted around when I was asked that by another group I facilitated, because as much as I can say, ‘reflect!’ and ‘connect!’, ultimately that’s unsatisfying. There are no strategies or tools to whip out. It takes having sensitive feelers and then being skillful, and there are so few role models out there of soft and skillful handling of conflict – I have so seldom seen that in action – that we all have to make it up as we go along, and just… get better at it, I hope.
“Fail. Fail again. Fail better.”
The only other thought I have is that I don’t have a good distraction today to get me off ruminating about the group situation. Happily, I have a break from facilitating until Monday. And as I was riding my bike to work today, I realized that to best serve the humanizing impulse right now I need to take care of myself. So I stopped for a bagel and lemonade, even though I’m going to be a little late to a meeting. I’m almost done sipping my lemonade.
