It Is Only When We Happen To Come Back to Where We Were Before That We Notice How We Have Changed
First published on December 2, 2020
We mostly don't notice the slight change that takes place over years. But sometimes, when we come back to the start, we can see things afresh.
In 2012, embarrassingly a year after it was released, I listened to the Waking Up The Workplace interview series, created by my brother and two of his friends. It was a series of interviews with the people at the forefront of Conscious Business. That wasn't necessarily the start of the journey that ended up with me working as a coach, but it was a part of it. Something about the idea of Conscious Business caught my attention, and something about the speakers - from Tony Schwartz to Tami Simon to Fred Kofman, literally the author of the book, Conscious Business - caught me, too.
In 2020, I have been studying Conscious Business, the book, as part of a coaching certification offered by BetterUp, a company I work for. It has been an absolute pleasure to return to that work, and to dive deep into the ideas and ideals that Fred Kofman shared in that book.
When I returned to London in 2014 after living in Yorkshire for several years, I looked actively for a conscious business to work in, so inspired was I by Waking Up The Workplace and the ideas that were in those interviews. They didn't, it turned out, really exist. Or at least I couldn't find them. In 2020, returning to the ideas of Conscious Business, returning to that place where in some ways this journey started for me, I have noticed another option: I can choose that my work is about Conscious Business. I don't know if I will, but that is so very different to my googling and emailing in 2014. Returning to these same ideas, eight years after I listened to that series, I can't help but see the shifts in me that have taken place over the intervening years.
In 2018, I read another of Fred Kofman's books, The Meaning Revolution. It is, impressively given the quality of Conscious Business, probably my favourite of his book, even more accessible and just as profound as Conscious Business. It contains a chapter, Die Before You Die, which - along with some other influences, as I outline in this article, still my most-read 12-minute piece - created a shift in me. That chapter invites us to consider our own mortality, pointing out that CEOs who have had near death experiences tend to be better leaders. Given that - as Kofman said in a training video I watched recently - the absolute best case for your life is that you grow old and die (after your parents and before your children), avoiding the concept of your mortality really isn't an option. An interesting thing about this is that once you consider your mortality - for me, once I consider that each coaching conversation could be the last time I get to coach that person, the last conversation we get to have - talking about our mortality becomes even more important, and even more obviously the right thing to do.
One day in 2018, after thinking about this, I dove into that conversation with a client. It felt edgy, bold, brave.
And today, something is different. This autumn I created an engagement where a requirement of the people paying me for it was that we would start with a conversation about their mortality. Slowly, by listening, feeling and sensing my way into moments of coaching Kairos over the last few years, waiting for those moments when speaking about death with clients is the perfect thing to do, my capability of holding that conversation has increased. To the point where it isn't edgy in the same way any more. Of course it sometimes is edgy, because for the people I'm speaking to, this may be the first time they have considered something like this. And it is almost always the first time we have considered it together.
But slowly, over many years, those slight changes have happened in my work, in how I feel about, deal with and work with this particular topic.
It is often only when we slow down, when we are shown a strange parallel with a moment of the past, when we happen to come back to where we were before, that we notice how we have changed. Gradually, slowly, imperceptably, maybe. But changed, we are.