The Host Who Has No Self

Intu­ition is a great well, one that draws on a deep­er sense of what it means to be human. In lead­er­ship, orga­ni­za­tion devel­op­ment and man­age­ment con­sult­ing work, it has enor­mous val­ue for it often opens doors to things that are most­ly hid­den from view: the staff mem­ber whose valu­able insights are being tak­en for grant­ed, the man­age­ment promis­es from years past that have become an assumed prac­tice of betray­als, the care­ful coverups by good peo­ple try­ing to do the right thing but who don’t feel con­fi­dent any­more, the ques­tions about strat­e­gy that have nev­er been asked. No one tells you these things, but intu­ition can lead you to them through an incli­na­tion of mind more than some oth­er kind of data. When it does there is often a very rich vein of gold to work with, an impor­tant oppor­tu­ni­ty to make things better.

I believe the fur­thest reach of intu­ition, beyond the “offi­cial” scope of most orga­ni­za­tion­al prac­tices, is about real­iz­ing a bet­ter or high­er self, and help­ing oth­ers do the same. What I mean by this is that we are all on some sort of growth tra­jec­to­ry to real­ize our best poten­tials, but we are all too often in a place of sta­sis where there is as much ener­gy in us to real­ize our poten­tials as there is “brak­ing” and resis­tance to any new iden­ti­ty. What gets us past the stuck point is intu­ition. We intu­it what we can be in thoughts that come for­ward in the emp­ty moments, thoughts about how we can come to our high­er sens­es, so to speak.

So we are not absolute­ly blocked. We may just have not been pay­ing atten­tion to the sub­tle mes­sages around us, mes­sages that have been uncon­scious­ly going out to the uni­verse and com­ing back to us through our expe­ri­ences. This is one of the most impor­tant rea­sons we can­not tell oth­ers what they should do with their dilem­mas. Rather the work is more fre­quent­ly about cre­at­ing envi­ron­ments and dia­logues that enable peo­ple to receive the inner mes­sages meant for them.

Carl Jung was known for his state­ment that “What we do not bring to con­scious­ness appears in our life as fate.” I most­ly agree with this idea, but it does­n’t have to be fate, per se — it can just be the every­day things that hap­pen to us, ones that aren’t near­ly as ratio­nal as we may think they are. I have asked myself, for exam­ple, “Why is it I am work­ing with this par­tic­u­lar per­son just now in my career?” or “How was I called to help this orga­ni­za­tion in this way?” My stub­born inner cyn­ic wants to dis­miss such ques­tions but anoth­er voice, part of the larg­er poet­ic enter­prise of liv­ing still asks, and intu­ition won’t be denied its due, ground­ed as it is in the Impli­cate Order of things.

The answers to these ques­tions are reveal­ing. “I’m work­ing with _______ because in dark­er moments I too often share his faith­less­ness about learn­ing.” “I was called to work with this orga­ni­za­tion to dis­cov­er just how pow­er­ful a real vision can be,” lead­ing me by asso­ci­a­tion to yet anoth­er thought: It can move minds to dif­fer­ent worlds, as a tru­ly vision­ary leader once told me about his own work.

Just the oth­er day, I hap­pened to pick a book from one of my book­shelves — a vol­ume of short sto­ries by Ray­mond Carv­er. It was mid­night and I was tired, but want­ed some­thing to fill one of those emp­ty moments. After read­ing a few sto­ries I noticed who had giv­en me the book, an old friend, a past client who had left an epi­graph on the title page from anoth­er author, Don Mar­quis. I’d for­got­ten who had giv­en me the book so it was a moment of gen­tle sur­prise and remem­brance to see my friend’s name on the page along with his thanks for our friend­ship. Some­how out of ran­dom­ness the book that night had come back into my hands to remind me that each of us is writ­ing a book of poet­ry just by being alive. What Don Mar­quis said was this:

“Writ­ing a book of poet­ry is like drop­ping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon…and wait­ing for the echo.”

To me, that’s the way intu­ition works, too. You wait for the echo and in some mag­i­cal way, it just arrives.

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