Gelassenheit

I am just back from Boston, where I was honored to present at the Exit Planning Exchange (XPX) conference on Power and Love in Family Business. I had also been asked to speak to a smaller group of XPX leaders the night before the conference on a topic of my choice. For that talk, I was given the rare privilege of speaking to whatever was on my mind. The only guideline was that I speak about something that might be useful for the professional development of the people in the room. My talk ended up titled "Reflections on A Professional Life". It focused on what it means to be authentic in the context of being a professional advisor. The central surmise of my remarks was that we are most authentic when we are simultaneously living at both the edges and center of our lives. This, I suggested, was relatively easy to grasp in broad terms but very difficult to put into practice.

Most of us who have been in our professions for a while tend to live in what I call the “great grey middle.”  This is where we lead with our knowledge and are carefully cosseted in our professional personas. These personas serve to protect us, like armor, from actually having to engage authentically with the deeper humanity of those we serve. The singer-songwriter Regina Spektor calls this the “riot gear” we put on as we face our days. The deep problem with this professional riot gear is that it not only protects us from the perceived risks of authentic engagement but also cuts us off from the vitality of our own lives. We can easily live our professional lives in a kind of bubble wrap – we are protected, but we are also numbed. From the client’s perspective, they feel managed and occasionally helped, but not truly served. This is, I would submit, close to the essence of the commoditization of our services and our leaning more towards becoming shills than practicing professionals.

Living at the edges, I suggested, requires that we shed this riot gear and hazard something of ourselves in our engagement with the world. This more wholehearted engagement mandates a particular kind of deeply human vulnerability. Vulnerability has gotten a bad rap over the years – it just sounds weak. However, as Brené Brown suggests in her attempts to rehabilitate the notion of vulnerability, “Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren't always comfortable, but they're never weakness.”

There are signs that we are playing at the edges. We may feel we need to pay close attention because something is happening in the dynamics of our engagement that we don’t quite understand. Or we experience a heightened sense of gratitude or exhilaration for the work we have been given to do. Or we find ourselves gobsmacked by the wonder of it all. Most often – in the great grey middle – we are oblivious to these things. When we wake up from what Stephen Wolinsky calls our “trances,” we begin to recognize that these things have always been there, just beyond awareness, and that we didn’t have the eyes to see them.

The problem, of course, with living only at the edges is that it is frothy, untethered and insubstantial. If we are only focused outward, we become easily distracted and ungrounded. Thus, authenticity requires the development of a grounded center.

Here I turned for help to philosophy and the great insight of Post-Modernism that ontology (being) and epistemology (knowing) are hopelessly entangled – that they are made of each other. While this seems irredeemably abstract, this philosophic insight is actually having a massive cultural impact. This impact is reflected in a quiet but profound shift in professional services that is more felt than understood. It is rapidly separating technical advisors (purveyors of mere insight and information) from those who can derive value from deeper sources of wisdom.

We might learn something about this conflation of being and knowing from the German philosopher Heidegger, who spoke to the concept of gelassenheit. Gelassenheit is a difficult word to translate, but it has to do with a radically open listening to the deep patterns of entire contexts. One good way to get at this is through what business professor Otto Scharmer refers to as the U process wherein one engages others with more than an open mind (by suspending and bracketing our knowledge until we truly understand the situation), or even an open heart (seeing the other person before us with a kind of spacious compassion) to attaining what he calls an open will.

Listening with an open mind is hard enough for us as professionals. When we listen, we almost always listen “for” certain things, then run them through our professional matrix to give our best technical advice. To listen without “listening for” is hard enough. Having an open heart is often even more difficult. Here, I am not talking about caring for our clients in some sort of proactive or saccharine way, but rather about quieting our own emotional reactivity to a degree sufficient to create space for them to be as they are. We carry our judgments, frustrations, and resentments that impede our ability to be open-hearted, and, in doing so, shut down our ability to be truly useful to our clients. We are swamped with work and therefore are distracted.  We don’t mindfully make open-hearted space for the person right in front of us; instead, we serve our needs for premature or facile resolutions.

However, beyond these two difficult skills lies another territory entirely – the open will.

When we touch into these states, there is, as Heidegger said, “the spirit of disponibilité [availability] before What-Is which permits us simply to let things be in whatever may be their uncertainty and their mystery." It is in these states that we can listen to the deepest humanity in ourselves and in others, and, from the instrumental point of view of a professional adviser, take in the deeper patterns of subtle information that will allow us to be effective. It is from this ground that wisdom and true competence emerges.

It is from this context, and only from this context, that technical advice becomes truly meaningful. In this model of professional services, the technical grows organically not only from listening to our clients, but also from immersion in the gestalts in which our clients operate. The best professionals don’t simply “fix” a “problem” but rather approach the world with a kind of radical openness of mind, heart, and will that allows them to see paths through the deep uncertainties that their clients face and become genuinely useful in finding meaningful resolutions to those uncertainties. Action growing out of this groundedness - keeping the center and the edges connected - is the rare but critical capacity that I believe allows us as advisers to move beyond our professional persona to the more authentic engagement with our clients and ourselves.

© 2014. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.