Today I was reminded that listening for something may never help someone ever hear more, or potentially any better. The question of “if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise?” must be understood in part about having someone there to begin with, but also about whether that someone has the ability to hear the sounds that can occur from trees that fall. Hearing is not necessarily about willfulness to hear, but a developed competency to receive specific messages that occur in a particular situation, or relationship.

Each of us hear the sound of things sometimes long after the event, or for the first time even though it has occurred many times. In our relationships of love, we have received the petition for us to hear a need or a want that can seem for the other that things largely go “unheard.” Sometimes things aren’t heard even when the cry is loud. Therefore, I believe that listening ALONE is not enough to hear those things that are most important to hear. We need others to find the patience and skill to not speak louder or more often necessarily, but to teach us a new vocabulary, or use symbols that open our ideas and beliefs to the new . . . or sometimes the old that has never been heard. We need a quality of presence that isn’t screaming at us, but loves us as we need to be loved, so that we expand ourselves to attending and responding to what is before us.

The price for greater consciousness and personal responsibility is never cheap and never a solitary act. Meeting ourselves, a deeper truth, or another has less to do with intent and values clarification as it has to do with what we do with our power, and how we manage our pain. Listening, understanding, meeting, leading, sustainable impact is about letting go of a lesser form to allow a greater one to emerge. It is about shared grace that offers peace, charity and service in replace of want, certainty, and the illusion of safety.

“When lost in the woods what do you do? When lost in the woods what do you do? Listen to the trees, they know the way.”

Psychologist Carl Jung distinguishes our lives in halves. He states that the first half of our life is the process of individuation. This is where most of the energies of our family of origin, our educational systems, our institutions, our social norms, and most anything else focuses their attention, effort, and energies. As I see it, the gravitational pull of this initial stage is systemic, immense and deeply integrated into our psyche. Most of the people that I work with are still largely defined and bound by the effects of our initial need to find solid, safety, success, and solidarity.

But there is a second important act that asks us to integrate our collection of styles, perceptions, ideas of ourselves into something that is more authentic to what it means to be good. This calling is not to some moralistic posture, but to thinking and applying of ourselves to the situations and people of our lives in ways that supercedes our historic addiction to our own egocentric needs.

For some, the movement continues to summons an orientation past ethnocentric (the superiority of ones group) ideas and norms to a worldcentric/post-conventional (a commitment and practice of being and doing good for all people) lifestyle. This new activity of our lives is a chosen one that pushes past reptilian brain stem ethics to a neo-cortex, even spiritual standard. This act two orientation is about the maturation, alignment and practice of the highest intellectual, emotional, spiritual and social intelligence applied to situational, individual, and group needs.

There is more to unpack with this, but ask yourself the question: “How am I acting?” then do something to raise the level of your play.

I was listening to a leader speak about the ebb and flow, or uneven progress within a particular project he was assigned. He was frustrated with what he felt were long delays in achieving results. The coordination of a matrixed work environment that had dotted lines of accountability and alignment was proving to be difficult. This leader wanted synchronicity of thought and action in all of his efforts.

I see this same type of struggle for synchronicity in our personal lives. We want steady flow of measureable progress in our relationships, our experiences and in anything concerning our well-being. When we grow we don’t want the gap of maturity and immaturity to increase with those we love. When we want to rest, play, reflect, cut-loose, or an assortment of other options, we largely want the world around us to be “in sync” with where we are, or want to be.

I am growing in my conviction that the best leadership whether for professional and personal reasons is competence in strategically living the tension of opposites, entanglements, and de-synchronous dynamics. This process is not just about optimizing effect within the external situation, but the deeper changes within the life of the individual leader. Waiting, tension of opposites, lack of things going the way we want, are some of the critical elements for improvement. Maybe results aren’t as much about a smooth, straight, and upward pathway as they are about intelligent leadership within cycles, incongruence, and variation from our own idea, or ideal.

Your thoughts?

It amazes me how poorly most of us are concerning the fundamentals of getting along. So much of my work with leaders is focused on interpersonal competencies. Becoming a parent requires a minimum level of competency, likewise, the entry qualifications for groups, social networks, teams, or families, is oftentimes equally low. Interpersonal turbulence is created as we live our lives in the reciprocal volley of relationships. What one does, impacts generally not just another, but the greater whole.

We seem to forget about the requirement of playing by a common set of rules that governs our collective actions. The present norm is to do what we think is good, with special emphasis on it being good for ourselves personally. If this is largely true, the prevailing outcome within social networks is chaos. Chaos occurs as each individual defaults to their idea of what the group norm should be, even if it is “to each his own,” and remains accountable only to their opinion of behavioral integrity and goodness. The issue in this kind of chaos isn’t that people aren’t interested in doing what seems good, but that good for the greater whole requires more than intention, but outcomes that measureably are better in the judgement of the larger group.

As I look back on this past week, I see such evidence of how easy it is for our ideas to largely stay disconnected from our actions. I probably had more than thirty conversations with people who were espousing certain theories of action, but were living incongruent with their own impassioned pleas of what “our” conduct should ubiquitously look like. This isn’t the first time that I have recognized this tendency. I wish that I could find in my own life greater faithfulness to my ideas of how I should live. There are moments that somehow I feel justified in expressing outrage with this condition shared by all, and sometimes I do regardless of my consciousness of personal infidelity. My question is what links together intention and right actions that produce results in a timely fashion? In brief: our best effort in every moment. I have heard it said that excellence is doing things a little bit more, a little bit better than I just did it. Think about how different our lives would look as we practiced with a discipline toward just being a bit better than our last effort. As I look at it, the beginning point of improvement is in acknowledging reality as it is . . . even if it is merely the gap between our ideas and our actions. I think therefore I am, or as I act, I am?

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said: “you can’t step into the same river twice.” Although numerically this statement is generally not true, qualitatively we don’t experience the “same” situation or person as we have before. Our confusion with this statement can be found in the word: “same.” It does seem to our minds that we are meeting the same person, or experiencing the same experience as we have before, when we again meet a friend, or reproduce an act multiple times. We do like the sense that the world and ourselves can be controlled and fixed for purposes of maintaining predictability and order. For most of us, this seems to offer us the confirmation of the solidness, or permanence of certain experiences. We like the idea of solid and permanence because they lull us into an interpretation of our lives that suggets a certain standard of safety can be built and maintained. What shakes us is when we encounter a shift in the quality with others, situations, or in ourselves. Likewise, what hurts us is when we are inflexible with our interpretations of others, situations, or even of ourselves that sees us as qualitatively static.

I have to admit that I personally have been guilty of being attracted to this way of thinking and living. The dogma of my life seemed to create a warm nest that offered not only comfort, but also safety. I have too many times locked others, situations or even my ownself into hardened ideas, or labels that created a blindness to deeper and more profound truth of each. My growth, as well as the impermanence of others was not seen because it disrupted the dillusional idea that I could control my experiences. What I thought created safety and strength had the converse effect. The more profound reality was that I was not in a nest that offered the freedom of flight, but a cacoon that imprisoned me, and sought to do the same to others.

The insidious addiction to this false security scarred far too many days and people in my life. I wish that I could go back and reshape the past, but I now know that my past and present are deeply improved by staying alert to impermanence, and the discontinuance of trying to solidify myself and those around me. My longtime hold onto myself as I had constructed myself to be, inhibited me from being open and receptive to the new that was available each moment. When I stopped being obsessed with what I thought was me, mine, or who I thought myself to be, I became awake to the truth that there is no me worth protecting if I lose presence with the “now” and authentic contact with others. I learned that taking “hills” isn’t worth doing if it means that I no longer see the deeper truth of what is emerging every moment.