letting go of techniques to allow flow to happen
Transcript of this video:
When I was learning to ski a long time ago I remember a moment where I finally found a ski instructor I kind of trusted and he watched me in my very nervous attempts to ski down a bunny slope.
After a while he said he was going to take away my ski poles because what he observed was that in my nervousness I was using them defensively: like sticking them in the ground to prevent myself falling, using them as very clumsy brakes. He said only by taking them away could I begin to understand what their actual function was. I had to learn to ski without them to get into more of the flow of it and then realise that you could then add the poles back in and use them much more gracefully as part of your balance and in a skillful way to use them to lean into turns.
I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot lately. I think because there’s a kind of analogy — and I think there’s always a bit of a risk arguing by metaphor — but there’s a kind of an analogy for how I see, for example, people in my line of work, when they start getting enthusiastic about their favourite facilitation technique. I feel as if they’re sticking the ski poles in front of themselves. They think they’re using it to illuminate or to help, but sometimes I think they’re actually allowing their enthusiasm for the technique to get in the way of the more important thing, which is, I think, in facilitation, to feel a relationship to the audience. To use a slight facilitation cliche, to be reading, if you like, the energy in the room.
And I think my work now more and more is making choices moment by moment about what to do next — where really trying to feel the context, get a sense of what’s happening in the room and feeling what might be useful as the next step is how I like to work. If I get too far ahead of myself, if I feel I’ve got to stick to a particular agenda, then I feel like I’m allowing the poles to be in the way, to be using them defensively as brakes rather than allowing them to be part of the flow of facilitation.
It’s one of the things I’m going to be exploring at my workshop here in Cambridge in September — if you’re interested there are still places available, I’ll put a link in the comments.
Thumbnail Photo by Urban Sanden on Unsplash
