I’ve been pondering a comment Evan made on I’ve Been Thinking:
One of the paradoxes I confront repeatedly is that there is a skill of being present and getting out of the way. Focusing on skill I think is a great place to start, but we also need to be able to leave this behind. Hope this makes sense.
I agree. In my post I had written:
Even when I felt pressed by a deadline I was focusing at least as much on developing needed skills as I was on preparing a specific talk. I still took time out to experiment with, and practice, new techniques so they would be there for me when I needed them again.
I think that’s what Evan meant by focusing on skill being a good place to start. I was talking about building a solid foundation, not simply focusing on the immediate goal. But I was talking only in terms of building competence in practical skills. He was saying (I think) that we need to go deeper than that.
In fact, that’s where the real action was for me in preparing that talk. I was thrown by the project because a big part of me didn’t want to do it. I wanted to be doing other things. I was annoyed at the request because the woman who asked me sounded as if she needed a speaker to talk about stress management, but she wasn’t interested in the topic herself and didn’t want to be bothered about the whole affair. She had done her part by getting me to agree. Why should I do so much work for people who didn’t care?
The answer, of course, was that it didn’t matter if she cared or not…the topic is connected to my deepest values. I just had to take responsibility for the decision I had made (saying yes) and practice what I preach: Play your part well and let go of the results.
It was a good chance to practice the Traits of Stress, Hardy-Resilient People and the art of Optimizing Stress… in other words, to strengthen my foundation one stone at a time.
Thanks, Evan, for raising this issue!
This had me reflecting back on some times when I was so distracted developing new skills in pursuit of a goal that I lost track of the goal, missed the deadline, or completely went off onto a tangent. Probably I am the only one who has done that!
Looneys last blog post..
Looney,
I doubt that you’re the only one. There is a trick to striking the right balance, though. 😉
“Play your part well and let go of the results.” Yes indeed. That is all there is to action to be satisfying.
rummusers last blog post..Uncertainty In Management
rummuser,
Well…it is more fun if we enjoy the process. 😉
Letting go of the results is very important I think (I’m not claiming I can always manage to do it).
Hi Jean, I think we pretty much agree but are putting it a bit differently. My experience is that once I learn something well enough that it is part of me, I can then not focus on it as a skill any more. The skill is part of me as I encounter the part of the world I am focusing on. My guess is that this is roughly what you mean by the ‘foundation’.
Evan,
“…once I learn something well enough that it is part of me, I can then not focus on it as a skill any more.” Precisely. That’s what I meant when I wrote (in I’ve Been Thinking…), “I still took time out to experiment with, and practice, new techniques so they would be there for me when I needed them again.” It’s the practice that makes them automatic.
Playing my part well and letting go of the results is not an automatic skill for me either. 😉
That’s why when a life situation throws me I ask, “What skills do I need to learn?” If we treat situations like that as a test, we can check to see what we still need to work on.
My family and I went to Zion’s National Park in Utah about a year ago and on one of our hikes we noticed 50+ rock towers down at the edge of a river. We each went down and started building our own to contribute. What a perfect picture to illustrate your point. If you have ever tried to build one, it truly requires a strong foundational rock and a lot of patience to get it to stand on its own. Thanks for the advice, wisdom and the memory of a great day.
B. Wildes last blog post..In the "Back-then-Days"
Jean,
I had a wonderful art instructor once that hammered on the point that we made much better art when we “got out of the way”. It took me years of painting to really understand that but the best I’ve painted took no time at all and I really wasn’t “there”. To me, the learning skills thing is what I see when I am done.
suzens last blog post..Living with Passion and Without Money
B. Wilde,
Thanks for sharing your experience. I’ve never tried to build one but can imagine it would be tricky.
suzen,
For me the “learning skills thing” was figuring out how to get out of my way. That’s the most important thing I was really working on when preparing the talk…in the beginning I was definitely tripping myself up. The nice thing was I could see what was happening and knew what to do about it. I’ve been there, done that many times. When I was working professionally I volunteered for challenging problems, and the biggest part of the job was learning to forget about deadlines and get curious. If I started to play around sooner or latter I would get immersed in the problem and forget about everything else. The same thing happened this time. It was a good review.