The words..like yes and courage

Yes” extends boundaries, establishes new playing fields, moves possibility from ideas to actuality. Actress and improve artist Tina Fey points to the opportunity yes affords us when she says, “the first rule of improve is agree—agree with whatever your partner has created.

 The second rule is yes, and—agree and then add something of your own. If I start a scene with ‘I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,’ and you just say, ‘Yeah…’ we’re kind of at a standstill. But if I say, ‘I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,’ and you say, ‘Yes, it can’t be good for the wax figures,’ now we’re getting somewhere.”

In our recurring dialogues, patterns of conversation, the habitual ways that we listen and speak, our first response often defaults around a “no” or a “but.” Toss in a few intricately constructed reasons justifying that response, and we find ourselves limiting the future in front of us.

For anything creative to show up in life—not accidental, not manipulated, not figured out—it shows up in our stand for possibility, in the “yes.” Standing for possibility comes from nothing and creates a generative field; “yes and” extends that field and broadens the game.

Nothing is the foundation for possibility—from nothing we are able to create with a freedom that’s not available when we create from something. In creating possibility, we get to know what’s available to us in being human.

 

Choice. It’s the word that allows yes and the word that makes no possible. It’s the word that puts the free in freedom and takes obligation out of the mix. It’s the word upon which adventure, exhilaration, and authenticity depend.

 

It’s the word that the cocoon whispers to the caterpillar. We tell ourselves, sometimes, that living a transformed life isn’t  that important, that it’s enough just to get by. We get wrapped up in our own concerns, particular points of view, or positions, and the idea of getting ourselves to a place where things can be great seems too big an undertaking.

 

If somebody had a magic powder to come and sprinkle on us and just through that we’d  be transformed, we might say, “No, thanks—I don’t want any!  Let me stay just as I am.” It takes courage to live in a transformed way—to wrestle with our resistances, to give up mediocrity, to live consistent with what we know is possible in being human. It’s always and only a matter of our choosing.

 

Communication, conversation, language are predominately thought of, anchored in our minds, as an expressing, a speaking, a vocalizing. That outward expression goes far beyond talking, far beyond describing or representing reality—it is in fact what allows for “who” and “how” we are in the world.

 

It’s what allows for the futures we create, where we evoke experience in others, where our ideas become clear and possible, where we share ourselves, and where others are expanded by our participation with them. Though speaking is not where things get handled—it’s not powerful enough. The possibility that there’s an edge, the possibility of impact, lies in our listening.

 

 Listening, we often think of as more passive—important, but somehow lesser or secondary. But listening is the clearing in which speaking can occur—without it, there isn’t any speaking. Listening is an action. Listening doesn’t receive speaking, it isn’t a receptacle for speaking—it gives speaking. Listening is the possibility for meaning, for understanding.

 

The possibility for being loved lives in one’s listening; the possibility for learning lives in one’s listening. Listening is what allows others to be—it’s where both the speaker and what is spoken come alive, exist, and flourish.

 

How we describe, label, hold things, think things—it’s within those frameworks that our lives unfold. There are no “facts” that limit possibility, there are only “conversations” that limit and constrain, or those that create and forward, what’s possible.

 

The “glass-half-empty” folks lean toward the idea that something’s wrong, something’s not there, something’s missing-as in problematic. The “half-full” folks are attending to what’s actually in the glass-as in what could be brought to the party-as in “missing as a possibility.”

If we’re going to create a possibility, it’s a matter of choosing, a matter of saying, and that’s the whole deal. It’s about discovering what’s possible in being human beyond the places where, unknowingly or knowingly, we might restrict or limit ourselves.

 

When we create “something missing as a possibility,” we set a point of choice, a point of commitment-things show up as openings for action.

 

For most of us, “I” is positional (“you” are there and “I” am here), a location in time and space, a point of view that accumulates all previous experiences and points of view. Does this “I” presume a substantial entity located inside our bodies, or is it located in our minds, our families, job titles, Facebook profiles, bank accounts—those trappings that help us maintain the meanings and understandings that we have up ’til now considered ourselves to be?

 

How we “arrive” at this identity is mostly inadvertent. Essentially it is built from a series of decisions we made in response to what we felt or saw (consciously or not) as failures to do or be something. When these “apparent” failures arose, we made decisions about how to compensate for, respond to, and accommodate ourselves to them. The degree to which who we are today is filtered by those early decisions goes unrecognized.

 

Whether it is one or 10 or even 40 years later, we still hold on to that with which we’ve identified—obscuring access to ourselves and leaving us no powerful way to be with whatever is going on. But stepping outside of our identity isn’t so easy—it’s achieved a certain density throughout our lives, and it is all we know of ourselves.

 

The idea that another whole idea of self is available can be disconcerting, invalidating. In setting aside those things that gave us an “identity” we “become aware that this so-called self is as arbitrary as our name. It’s like standing over an abyss, recognizing that ‘I,’ as we know it is not an absolute.”* 

 

It is here, with this recognition, where transformation occurs—where we can invent ourselves as we go along. This revealing of our selves to ourselves occurs in a profound way that can alter the very possibility of what it means to be human.

 

The Harvard Business Review might not be where you’d expect to read about fear’s pervasive presence, but an article there referred to a great passage from a Joseph Heller novel. The novel’s hero and narrator, Bob Slocum, a middling executive at an unnamed company, is driven nearly mad thinking that decisions might be made behind his back that could ruin his career and his life. He’s not alone in these thoughts. Slocum says, “In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid.

 

Each of these five people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps), for a total of twenty, and each of these twenty people is afraid of six people, making a total of one hundred and twenty people who are feared by at least one person.” The company, in other words, is a pyramid of potential panic, ready to topple when someone whispers, “Jig’s up.” *

 

Perhaps even more than sadness, anger, or disappointment, we find it difficult to deal with fear. Fear often keeps us from participating, from doing what we’re capable of—from experiencing and expressing the full range of possibility available in being human. This is not so much a function of the fear being operative, but rather of decisions made unwittingly long ago, and the automatic way we pull in our past experience. Old circumstances have the power, not us.

 

We don’t have to push down, work on top of, accommodate, or adapt to these old fears. We survived the first time, the second, third, and so on…. Completing a past fear includes recognizing that we would survive if the past repeated itself.

There’s a big difference between being realistic about what happened once, and being resigned or stuck that things have to continue to be some way now, or that they just are some way, or they’ll be that way again.

We have the freedom to choose our relationship to whatever it was back then, and that’s the beginning of building power. It takes enormous courage to try out new ways of being in the space where fear used to be.

 

There was a forest at the beginning of fiction too. Its canopy of branches covered the land. Up in its living roof birds flitted through greenness and bright air, but down between the trunks of the many trees there were shadows, there was dark. When you walked this forest your feet made rustling sounds, but the noises you made were not the only noises, oh no. Twigs snapped; breezes brought snatches of what might be voices.

 

Lumpings and crashes in the undergrowth marked the passages of heavy things far off, or suddenly nearby. This was a populated wood. All wild creatures lived here, dangerous or benign according to their natures. And all the other travellers you had heard of were in the wood too: kings and knights, youngest sons and third daughters, simpletons and outlaws; a small girl whose bright hood flickered between the pine trees like a scarlet beacon, and a wolf moving on a different vector to intercept her at the cottage.

 

Each travelled separately, because it was the nature of the forest that you were alone in it. It was the place in which by definition you had no companions, and no resources except your own uncertain self.¹

 

When we’re young, things can get out of control pretty quickly. We experience danger as a distinct possibility that’s “out there somewhere,” and it becomes a notion that stays with us, at some level or another, throughout time. So from a very early age, we’re kind of on alert. The idea that life can be dangerous doesn’t go away just because we become (more rational) adults. And when we carry around the idea that life could be dangerous for many years, even the notion of possibility can seem, well…threatening.
 

When we give our fears rein, even the smallest moments can be daunting. Fears arise when we look back, and they arise when we look ahead. Fears arise about ourselves, and about our reception from others. Whatever their origins, they prevent us from living fully. Whether a threat is real (a situation where our survival is at stake—our security, our health, keeping our families safe) or imagined (a situation that might await us, something that might happen—or where we might be made to look foolish, for example), it is all about survival.

Those moments of fear and anxiety—with the constriction in our chest, the fluttering of our hearts, the feelings of imminent danger or potential embarrassment—can be overwhelming, because we think some aspect of our survival is at stake.
 

Perhaps even more than sadness, anger, or disappointment, we find it difficult to deal with fear. Fear can keep us from participating, from doing what we’re capable of—from experiencing and expressing the full range of possibility that’s available to us in being human.

The disempowerment, constraints, and stops, however, are not a function of the experience of fear but rather a function of the meaning we’ve added, and the decisions we made, at a particular time in the past. Another way of saying it is that it’s not the fear that is operative, but the automatic way we collapse something that happened with what we say it signifies. It’s that automaticity that keeps us stuck in place, and what has us lose our power. Old circumstances now have the power, not us.

When we stop going for it—when we step back, play it safe, or say we can’t do something—we might avoid the experience of fear for the moment, but at the same time we are reinforcing where we’re stuck. We’re limiting our freedom, and cutting off possibility.

Being alive includes risks, threats, and danger—the possibility of “bad” things happening is always there. In planning our life to avoid those things, we’re essentially avoiding life—obviously not the wisest way to be alive.

The Harvard Business Review might not be where you’d expect to read about fear’s pervasive presence, but the following appeared in a recent issue and I thought it apropos: “I get the willies when I see closed doors.” That is the first line of Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, one of the handful of superb novels about business. Heller’s hero and narrator, Bob Slocum, a middling executive at an unnamed company, is driven nearly mad thinking that decisions might be made behind his back that could ruin his career and his life, or might merely change things that are, while odious to him, at least bearable. Without transparency, Slocum is a quivering wreck. He’s not alone.

 As the second chapter begins, Slocum says, “In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid. Each of these five people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps), for a total of twenty, and each of these twenty people is afraid of six people, making a total of one hundred and twenty people who are feared by at least one person.” The company, in other words, is a pyramid of potential panic, ready to topple when someone whispers, “Jig’s up.” ²

There’s a big difference between being realistic about what happened once, and being resigned or stuck that things have to continue to be some way now or that they just are some way or they’ll be that way again. Instead of wishing we could change our past experience—a futile exercise—we have the freedom to choose our relationship to whatever it was, and that’s the beginning of building power.

That’s the beginning of creating possibility. Possibility invites us into areas of creativity, of side or another, unsettle old realities. Our own identity, say, or the certainty of some fact, the behaviour of others, or even the meaning of words can come to be seen and understood in new ways.

It takes enormous courage to try out new ways of being in the space where fear used to be, and by choosing to do so, we come to be authors of our own experience. Choosing requires courage—and courage leads to the ontological question of being. Courage is rooted in the whole breadth of human existence, and ultimately in the structure of being itself.³

Courage can show us what being is, and being can show us what courage is, uncertainty, of paradox and surprise. It invites us to bring things into existence that haven’t existed, take a step to one

* Thomas A. Stewart, “Seeing Things,” Harvard Business Review, February 2008

1 Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built, pp. 24-25
2 Thomas A. Stewart, “Seeing Things,” Harvard Business Review,
February 2008, p. 10.
3 Paul Tillich, The Courage To Be.