In 2008, running the company I’d co-founded, we won a contract equal in size to our previous five years turnover. Transformative to say the least - financially, reputationally, commercially. All that you aim for in creating, running a company.
A funny time then to wonder…
"maybe my work here is done".
Sitting down for the planning meeting with my then business partner, that’s exactly what happened.
It was May, warm in our bright boardroom. The windows open, breezy. And, clear as day, the above thought enters my head. So out of context it was, I did what most men would do and stuffed it back into a box marked ‘Unclear, Unwelcome’, and got on with the task of running the company. For eight more years.
Unknown to me at the time, however, this was less a thought and more a seed. And it did what seeds do; there, hiding in the dark - slowly, imperceptibly, without noise or fanfare, it grew.
Meanwhile, I carried on. Running faster, efforting harder. Driven. Competitive. Wanting to do well. All this, a holding on tight to a perception of success, tight to money, role, status, identity, to a convenient answer to the ‘what do you do?’ question?
In holding, however, there is a suffocating, ever so slowly squeezing life from you, or the company you lead. in our case, a slow dying. From the ’08 high point all the way down to a ’16 tumbling out, a distress sale of sorts, me selling my shares to a partner, freeing me - and the company - scraping the bottom, if onto a new path.
This the cost of holding on.
Yours might be similar. Or come dressed in other clothes - be it a personal crisis, at worst, an illness or relationship collapsing. At mildest, an increasing flatness, tired, drift. Or a company crisis. Running faster to stand ever more still. Sales dwindling. Cash draining.
You too might choose to ignore, to bury the signs and signals in the boxed marked unwelcome.
Or…
Will you choose?
The opportunity which awaits the other side is profound.
Looking out the window as I write, leaves burn a bright red. The air is crisper. The long sky a November blue. The autumnal wheel readying to winter.
Nature moves in cycles.
In this, of course, is a deep wisdom.
At the right time, growth and opportunity is abundant and all around us. Funny then we invest huge sums into teams and people trying to force it. But growth forever is an impossibility. Everything has a time to die. Beliefs, ideas, companies, markets, systems. And us, of course.
To breathe new life into you, and the work you do, or into the company you lead, something first needs to be allowed to die. As hard as this might be. But stitched into every ending is a beginning, and vice versa. Creative Destruction tells us this.
From Head To Heart
The bit of me which needed to die was all head; pushing harder, running faster, competition as the goal. What was calling forth was more heart.
Pioneering brain hemisphere researcher, Ian McGilchrist shows us the left, in a simple re telling, grasps, clutches and manages. And believes it's in charge. It isn't.
The right hemisphere, by comparison, is rich, alive with connection, home more to intuition and imagination. In this broadening, from a left to right, a softening. From head to heart, we might say.
This is some of what reveals for me in the release. In the letting go.
A trusting more in the natural flow and rhythm. Less needing to control, manage and manipulate. As exhausting as this is.
And a creativity too.
I once read creativity as defined by our ability to sit with tension, with opposites. Sitting with opposites, with polarities, always lends something new. This is an embodied process, somatic.
For me, creativity is something richer: an ability draw out wisdom, insight, ideas from the depth of my belly, from somewhere bigger than me.
It is the journey down from head, into the body, into the heart, my source. And here we touch and taste into our intuition and imagination, the necessary bedfellows to logic and rationale. In here, we can more easily sense the right vs wrong move. Decision making flows more easily. Opportunities more readily present.
And we’re guided more by a wisdom, sensing when the holding on might be costing us something greater, richer, more profound.
In this place, there is less doubt and second guessing. We are less fearful, embodying more insight and perspectives which nourish me AND you: win win, by the old telling.
How To Let Go?
A few years back working with a teacher, I said something about my intention for the year ahead being to letting go. The teacher pointed me somewhere else: letting go isn’t something you do. That simply adds tension. Letting go, by contrast, is what happens naturally when we bring a care-full attention to where and how we’re holding on.
Let this guide you.
What's Waiting?
Wise old business writer, Jim Collins, wrote recently about an idea he called Encodings: the spirit, pattern, contributions you’re obliged to make. They run through you so deep, so powerfully and profoundly, they are somehow bigger than you. This an idea written about in many cultures, and by many teachers.
This, for me, the earlier mentioned creativity. The heart, as source.
In these times of profound change, a collapse and renewal inflection point, multiple systematic crises feeding back into and on each other: ecological, political, technological, geopolitical. The effects and impacts over the coming months and years likely to reverberate through and around you.
Amidst this, your ability to stand steady, to sense into right vs wrong, to understand the bigger patterns at play, will be a super power. it will be your surest ground too, the place of your richest contribution. Enlivening. Empowered. Excited, again. This the fruit of your Encodings.
This is the fruit too of the release, some of what might be tasted the other side of your own letting go.
If this resonates, let me know. I like to hear from you.
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