We sat in silence for three minutes, and what came back from each of us separately turned out to be the same thing looked at from different sides.
A Member described what he had been doing as unravelling the stories about what we think we have to be or do, based on something historical that may be out of date, that may have expired. “I have to do this because I’m a business owner. I have to do this because I’m a dad. I have to do this because I’m the boss.” He also named the props that hold those stories in place, which are the mementos we keep on our shelves and the badges we wear on a “scout uniform”. That’s me, that’s what I’ve done. And then, as he put it, maybe not.
He shared how physical it is for him. Each time one of those comes loose, he feels a little more tension leave his body and his shoulders drop in relief that little bit further. He doesn’t have to respond to everything. He doesn’t have to be everything to everybody. He doesn’t have to play a role that somebody else placed on him, particularly a historical one.
Another Member had arrived at the same place from her own direction. She has had a lot of things put onto her over the years. People decided she was a leader because she is a good public speaker, and therefore she must be a leader. Her own sense of it is different. She speaks well, and she would rather be behind the scenes pulling things together. Then the roles stack up on top of each other. You become a wife, then a mother, then you are running a business, and each one arrives with its own set of expectations about who you now are. What she has been doing is pulling on all of those strings and asking which bits are actually true to her and which bits are not.
What came to her in the silence was connectedness, and an image of roots spreading out like a tree, each one a relationship. She values connecting with people deeply, and it is the thing she had let go of first whenever time was short. What she recognised is that it is not the secondary thing to be fitted in around the important work. For her it comes first.
She also said something about scale that is worth holding on to, and it may be your experience too. The part of her that connects with people quietly can feel small, because it isn’t loud and it isn’t out in the open. Her father died recently, and what she took from that was that it is fine not to be loud. He was not a loud man. There were two hundred people at his funeral, because he had touched that many lives simply by being gently present with them. Her conclusion was that this being her lane is fine. It is enough.
Another Member brought the same question from the world of work. In the industry he grew up in, people tie themselves so completely to what they do that it becomes who they are, and they can’t be anything else. If you’re a farmer, that means this about you. If you’re an accountant, that apparently means something too. Other people then hold you to it, and you start holding yourself to it. What he has done is establish some separation to that. He is a person first, and what he does with his time sits alongside that rather than defining it.
The word that came to him in the silence was Worthy, and he wasn’t sure at first where it fitted. What he worked out is that fifty years of training to dissect why something failed, so as not to repeat it, leaves a residue. He holds himself to a standard that he judges himself to fall short of more often than not. He said he must be carrying that more heavily than he had realised.
Then the first Member to share offered him something. He has a practice of looking at a person he may have judged and reversing time on them, picturing who they were at five, at four, as a baby, before anything “happened” to them. What he pointed out is that it works just as well turned around on yourself. Look at your own five-year-old and ask what he was trying to do, what he hoped for, what he was aiming at. Then extend him some kindness.
The Member he was relating to went quiet, and then told us that when he was five, in a bad drought, he was left on the side of the road on foot to watch fifty head of cattle graze. He said that is where a lot of his over-responsibility comes from. Can’t get it wrong. Can’t get it wrong.
I had my own version of this, and it arrived in the same three minutes. The word I got was coach, which is a word I no longer identify with. I had acted on it last week, by asking a team member to change my email signature everywhere from Founder | Success Coach, to Founder | Facilitator. Conventional coaching says I see these errors in you, which are in fact my perceptions, and I’m going to tell you how to fix them. Facilitating means recognising you as already whole and going from there. I’m still walking that line and getting better at it.
None of us set out to talk about identity. It is simply what was underneath, and it is what tends to be underneath when a room of capable people are willing to get quiet enough to look.
So here is what I would offer you. Somewhere there is a role you were handed a long time ago, by people doing their best with what they knew, and you may have been carrying it ever since without checking whether it is still yours. It might be the industry you’re in. It might be a label someone attached to you as a child. It might be a standard you hold yourself to that you never consciously agreed to.
Ask which bits are actually true for you. What is left when the rest comes off is closer to the truth of who you are.
“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” — Joseph Campbell
