sitting with uncertainty
Transcript of this video:
My friend David does a lot
of work coaching in organisations.
And he told me a story of when he was in Italy
at a conference where he was on stage
to demonstrate his coaching practice.
And the woman sitting opposite was speaking in Italian.
Now, David’s a smart guy, he speaks Italian,
but he realised once she started
that he was struggling a bit to keep up with her.
So what he found himself doing periodically as she spoke
to describe whatever her issue was,
he would just go “si.”
And he, he realised that seemed to be working.
So that’s basically what he did through the,
throughout the whole coaching session, at the end
of which she declared herself be very satisfied.
And it’s a funny story, which I slightly hesitate to share
because I think the, the skill or the capacity
or the talent that David is demonstrating
is easily dismissed as not doing anything,
which isn’t really true.
If you know David as I do, when you sit in conversation
with him, you kind of know that he’s paying attention.
You can almost feel him thinking you have a sense
of him chewing over whatever it is that you’ve said to him.
And when you pause and he’s about to reply, you can,
you can really sense the cogs turning
and anticipate something very interesting that is going
to say in response.
So this, this capacity, if you like to sit with
uncertainty and slowly make sense of it,
has a fancy term for it, which the poet John Keats
created in the 19th century.
Um, he called it negative capacity (capability), I don’t think
that’s quite the right phrase for it.
’cause that sort of focuses on what’s not happening.
But what actually is happening is,
and I recognise this in myself when I’m at an event taking
in all that is going on, I’m experiencing a series
of feelings and responses and impulses and thoughts,
and I’m making choices, some conscious,
some much more intuitive of which of these things
to do something about.
And a lot of the skill of
facilitating a group is in the things that you don’t do so
that the things you do feel like they’re actually
contributing positively.
And I think, um, this capacity for, I think another way
of describing it, this capacity for presence, not a,
not a big extrovert, loud look-at-me presence,
but a, a presence that lets people know
that you are paying attention is one of the things
that Jordan Soiiday
and I are gonna be exploring in our
Unhurried Practice Group.
I’ll put a link to that at the end of the video
or, or down in the comments.
If you’re watching this on the socials.
Photo by Deniz Vatan on Unsplash
