This summer I returned to face-to-face work. It's been enlivening, stretching... and WOW my stamina has shrunk!
Lots of activity and attentiveness that came easily now need exertion.
It's sobering observing COVID patterns - exhaustion, guilt, short-fuses - and how little slack good people cut themselves on their own human limits.
Please resolve to be kind to yourself this season!
Oh but it was wonderful to coach face to face again!
I’ve recently returned from eight weeks in the UK, including three big pieces of work and several smaller ones. It was simultaneously good and hard to back in the thick of it. Retreat settings appear serene, but both retreatants’ silence and retreat guides’ accompaniment take sustained energy.
Spontaneous conversations with peers were a big highlight. Virtual work can be qualitatively very satisfying, but it’s definitely isolating. It’s a treat learning from colleagues in an unplanned way through much laughter and a curry, not just in formal online Supervision or via international webinars. Even for those of us blessed to have work through the pandemic, it’s been awfully SENSIBLE; no riffing on others’ ideas, no horsing around…
I have learned a lot about patience and impatience, pace, and the blessing of friends who listen superbly and don’t give advice! There’s always a danger for coaches and listeners to ‘share their wisdom’ and give too much advice or counsel. My experience of being a patient has reinforced powerfully that advice is rarely the most supportive thing.
Autopilot doesn’t really exist any more. We’ve been talking about VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex & ambiguous) environments on leadership programmes for years, but the current EXTENT of volatility is unprecedented. COVID has played havoc with so many of the parts of our life and work that WERE the fixed points. That’s one of the reasons why many of us are finding things “more tiring than they should be” – and Harvard Business Review et al. are steadily accumulating the data to explain why our brains are struggling to thrive in this abnormal amount of uncertainty. Coaches get to see how harshly most conscientious people judge themselves for struggling.
The power of beauty. The more our working lives are lived online, the more we need to consider feeding the non-rational parts of ourselves.
Art, photography, embodied activity, breathing, music … the tyranny of the prefrontal cortex to rationalise and bore us to death needs to be resisted!
This painting is by an exceptionally talented artist too ill to join a three-day meeting I was facilitating. She sent it as a response to some pretty 2D, thinky questions I had shared. She shook me out of my rut.
I don’t want to return to that much travelling. It makes no ecological sense, and it’s also draining. Travelling in COVID has pulled many of us from our coma of familiarity to see airports, trains and planes and “essential” travel with awakened eyes. Yes, face to face is different. No, it isn’t necessary as often as we used to believe it was. An extra treat for me is that my clientele has become even more international since the Pandemic began, so I get to relish and boggle at cultural diversity radiating out of my laptop screen every day.
My first event in Portugal is happening next week!- although that is serendipity rather than initiative. It’s the much-postponed European Ignatian Education Network Leadership Programme, and only Module 1 is being held here; very convenient for me.
Following that, most of this autumn and winter will be spent here in Portugal, working from home online. (I have 29 one-to-one clients at the moment; intriguing, wildly different, excellent people.)
I’m pacing myself (recovery-wise, COVID-wise and temperament-wise) not least because otherwise I’m a hypocrite to my clients! ‘Fallow time’: I really do believe that it’s only when we give quality time to the restorative that we do our best work. Got to practice what I preach, there.
The next work trip is Rome in March for Leadership Circle training and a coaching network gathering; another much-postponed event with superb peers I am keen as mustard to meet in the flesh at last.
Thank you for reading!