Finding The Middle Path
I've decided to embark on an adventure. Indeed it's a sacred quest. A quest to find and walk the middle path. A path of alignment and flow. A path of possibility.
The quest was birthed during a conversation with some fellow Thought Leaders Business School buddies who were on the path to becoming a black belt. Not your typical martial arts kind black belt, but a leader who has blackbelt courage, depth and certainty in their field of thought leadership. Not for the money or fame but for who I will become and how I will grow and the path I will discover in the process.
I've just spent three days with this wonderful tribe of around 100 thought leaders - speakers, coaches and authors in Melbourne, Australia learning, sharing, brainstorming and transforming together. I took copious notes on my iPad, stayed up until all hours writing and researching and had dozens of stimulating conversations in the corridors and cafe throughout the immersive weekend.
I had a realisation however that I was still playing safe, small and secretive. A so a conversation with my enlightened Kiwi coach @LindaHutchings that provided a breakthrough. She encouraged me to craft my writings, my content and my intellectual property a place of being pissed off and angry rather than safe and standard.
"What really ticks you off?" Linda inquired. "What make you mad about your field?"
The more I thought about what angers and frustrates me about all that is wrong with the current dialogue and practice of creating workplace cultures and the leaders who lead them, the words, ideas and concepts just tumbled out. I hadn't realised until that moment, how powerful anger could be as it is not an emotion I tap into very often if at all.
Am I glad I did. I found a new stronger aspect of my voice in doing so found my main message.
With all the research available today why is it that work is still killing us?
Why is the rate of bullying in Australian workplaces much higher than the international average?
How is it acceptable that Nearly 42% of males report that they have been sworn at or yelled at in the workplace?
Why are we still following business models, structures and processes that were built
40-50 years ago and are no longer fit for the modern world?
Anger worked for me. It helped me go out to the edges of my topic - workplace culture - and helped me get better in touch with the emotions and experiences I have around the topic. Getting mad helped me strengthen my work, perhaps it could work for you too.
Just don't stay angry. Sure thing, get angry. Get mad. Get pissed. And then move into love.
Shift into passion, purpose, sovereignty. Once I got all my anger and frustration out, I moved to the other end of the spectrum and pondered how can we create workplaces that nourish, care for and grow their people? What kind of leaders do we need to help make staff feel whether they stay three months or three years that they've grown and left as better human beings? Milk your passion.
The strength I saw in the black belts was that their vibrancy and joy came from the acceptance and integration of their darkest depths, their hatred, fears and concerns, with their lightness and possibility of their deepest compassion, their care and their humanity.
A black belt I realised, is a person who has accepted both their lightness and their darkness, and brought them into alignment along a middle path.
They have generally forgiven themselves for any guilt, shame, anger or harm of the past and become open to the opportunity and a possibility of the future. This integration is what yogis would refer to as the middle path, where you realise you contain within you both polarities - the yin and the yang. When you pick up a stick you get both ends.
What's different you'll notice when you meet a black belt thought leader is their pure and clear energetic alignment. There's a lightness, a playfulness within them because they've embraced and integrated their black darkness along with their white lightness.
They've been through the process of swinging too far to the "I'm not good enough" pity party end where all seems lost and hopeless. They've countered and pushed to far to the "I’m too good for others" ego end of the spectrum. Both sides are just the result of a limiting story we are telling ourselves, neither is helpful and yet both are insightful.
My quest therefore should you choose to take up the adventurous sacred quest of your own is to do the work on your business, your topic, your role, your practice and more importantly on yourself. Being black belt means moving out of contrast and into the zero point, not chasing towards nor running away from, but simply finding the alignment to just be.
Less doing, more being.
AB O U T T H E A U T H O R
As an aspiring minimalist and tiny house dweller she believes in keeping things simple and making 10 degree shifts in all aspects of life and work so you can do less and achieve more.
She is the founder of company culture firm UQ Power, co-founder of Human Power and creator of The 10* Shift and the tiny house experiment The Joy Box.