On Self-Trust, Part I — the River

Recent­ly I wrote about the essence of lead­er­ship as respond­ing to “the call to stand in an exposed place and bring change to the order of things.” I used the exam­ple of some­one with less pow­er and stature speak­ing up at an impor­tant meet­ing where she risked the pos­si­bil­i­ty of her ideas being dis­missed — and maybe los­ing some per­son­al cred­i­bil­i­ty as a result. Yet she did it any­way, an act of lead­er­ship that changed the “order of things.” 

All of us have faced such moments of truth. Either I say it now or I keep qui­et. Rosa Say in her com­ment to the post talked about how this “inner call might be silent­ly voiced in our self-talk each day with­out us choos­ing to act on it.” What she is refer­ring to is the per­son­al fear that holds any of us back from doing what is mean­ing­ful and right for us. Such fears are not lim­it­ed to speak­ing up. They can inhib­it us from doing any of the things we want to do with our lives. If you sense that you are liv­ing in only a cor­ner of your pos­si­bil­i­ties rather than liv­ing large and ful­fill­ing your poten­tials, chances are you are liv­ing with fear. Typ­i­cal­ly under­stand­ing this fear, legit­imiz­ing it, learn­ing to observe its impacts, and prac­tic­ing small, every­day acts of courage reduces fear to some­thing man­age­able. The reflec­tive turn to do so is often the start­ing point of a new kind or lev­el of self-trust.

In pre­sen­ta­tions, when I’ve put the ques­tion before audi­ences of how it is that some peo­ple seem to feel they can step into “exposed space” at work, almost uni­ver­sal­ly the first response I get is that the indi­vid­ual tak­ing the risk some­how already trusts the sit­u­a­tion and trusts the oth­ers who are there. Yet when I’ve asked peo­ple who have spo­ken up, made a tough deci­sion, or took action and ini­tia­tive, the answers I get have almost noth­ing to do with trust­ing the sit­u­a­tion or oth­ers. It has to do with “what’s right” or “what was need­ed at the time” or expla­na­tions such as “Well, I could­n’t just sit there and watch this hap­pen.” It was the cir­cum­stance that called the per­son to lead, even when being in the safe­ty of a trust­ing envi­ron­ment was not at all an option. 

So the answer to me is much more along the lines of self-trust. This is not to say that when a lot is on the line — and some­times the stakes are very high at work — that the goal is to jump blind­ly from the cliff. Gen­uine self-trust is not like that — it is much more of a stand that comes from the core of a per­son, an inner strength that tran­scends fear more than con­quers it. So how does some­one actu­al­ly devel­op that inner strength? 

First of all, I believe the strength is nat­u­ral­ly there. The soul­ful poten­tial has always been there. It’s born in us and is part of who we are. But there are a mil­lion inner voic­es the come from our past con­di­tion­ing that mod­er­ate and inhib­it this birthright. In fact, it can be a high­ly enlight­en­ing exer­cise to exam­ine these voic­es — actu­al­ly write them down and take a look at them. 

This will be a mistake.

Who am I to think I can do this?

This will just cre­ate a lot of trou­ble for people.

I’ll ruin my reputation.

It won’t do any good.

If Mom were here, she’d say I was being selfish.

If Dad were here, he’d say I was too big for my britches.

I’m just not ready.

All of these voic­es were learned. They have pro­tect­ed us from risk and pos­si­bly for good rea­son at an ear­li­er point in our lives. But today they prob­a­bly just add up to self-crit­i­cism, inner con­flict, and stuck­ness in the face of the real oppor­tu­ni­ties we have to make a dif­fer­ence. In fact, we may feel a true per­son­al need to make that dif­fer­ence, to stand up, to lead, and just as sure­ly at the moment of truth face walls of hes­i­ta­tion and self-dis­missal. All of which leads to depres­sion, blam­ing self and oth­ers, cyn­i­cism and, let’s call it out for what it is, the death of our true poten­tials (anoth­er word for soul) in the chains we’ve learned to wear.

Every­body I know wants to under­stand how to get past such stuck­ness and out of the chains. Those who promise it, from coach­es and coun­selors to orga­ni­za­tion­al pun­dits to spir­i­tu­al gurus, can get con­sid­er­able atten­tion on this issue. If they are smart and have suf­fi­cient tes­ti­mo­ni­als they can make quite a bit of mon­ey sell­ing their secret formulas. 

Except, over time, this stuff often wears off. The chains come back. I sense this is so because the stuck­ness is frankly, a per­son­al­ly sacred place, part of the ineluctable mean­ing of our lives that we must dis­cov­er for our­selves. Stuck­ness is giv­en to us as exact­ly the thing we most need to lis­ten to instead of try­ing sim­ply to get around, avoid, or escape from, as the fer­ry­man’s words in Sid­dhartha illus­trate. “The riv­er knows every­thing,” he says. The riv­er itself is holy. So then the ques­tion is how do any of us “lis­ten” to the riv­er, the thing that keeps us stuck? How do you and I actu­al­ly do that?

If you haven’t noticed the sub­tle shift of per­spec­tive from the fer­ry­man, here it is: in lis­ten­ing to the riv­er we’ve moved from over­com­ing per­son­al fear to engag­ing per­son­al mys­tery. There may be many cul­tur­al issues here. Amer­i­cans like quick fix­es and how-to’s. Riv­er? Hell! Dam it, pave it over, blow it up! Men­tion what is sacred or mys­te­ri­ous and not easy, and we’re like­ly to run for cov­er. Quick answers, bet­ter tech­nol­o­gy, sim­ple per­son­al solu­tions, that’s what we need. And yet, the cen­ter, the core of what we might most need to get at is right there stand­ing in front of us, most­ly like an ora­cle or tem­ple, invit­ing us to enter in. This is real­ly the place of the Unknown, where oth­ers don’t have the answer for you and you don’t have the answer for your­self, either. Lis­ten­ing to deep­er intu­itions is all you can do. It’s your whole job. That’s where the gold is.

Right here per­haps you might like to hear some suc­cess sto­ries. If you lis­ten in this way what will it be like? What can you hope to gain? How will you know when you’ve lis­tened enough and don’t have to any­more? But I would do you no favors in try­ing to tell such tales. Every sto­ry is dif­fer­ent. Every sto­ry would only be a reduc­tion and dis­trac­tion from your own expe­ri­ence. The way is unseen.

Just know that you now sit on the steps of a temple. 

*If you did­n’t see them, the fer­ry­man’s words about the riv­er are at the bot­tom of the page.

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