Day 1 – Tuesday
At the end of Day 1 we were asked to quietly reflect and write down one insight from the day.
Here is what I wrote: The differentiator in performance is as easy and as hard as listening, believing and pausing.
The sentence rolled off my lips and came straight from my heart. It took me seconds to capture it.
You see throughout the day we had experienced a number of different exercises and the learnings from each of them brought it back to one of the words in the above statement.
Today I was fascinated at our focus on calling out only the strengths of each other. Our human nature seemed to want to list and listen to our development areas, yet the focus on this course is different. What do you like? What did you see the person do well? What’s good about this? It is clear that as humans we are not conditioned for this. We had to relearn this behavior, the behavior of strength spotting. What a great expression – strength spotting!
One observation I made a number of times during the day, both of myself and of others, is a level of nervousness and discomfort of staying in the moment. At one point I had something on my mind that I wanted to share with the group and I was so eager to say it that I interrupted a moment of something else, a moment that was important and had I been listening and present, I would have behaved differently. I would have waited.
I later saw others do the same. It made me wonder how many other moments had I missed, how many moments are we are all missing, all the time, because we are busy with our own thoughts and own agenda.
How many moments have I interrupted when learning was occurring, moments that mattered?
Serenity and calmness were role modelled today. The profoundness that came with this observation was beautiful. We all realized the power of pause, the beauty of a slower pace and the impact that we can have when we introduce things purposefully. Allowing ourselves to breathe before we begin, to ground ourselves in our chair and to pause and reflect when we need a moment. The speed at which we operate is not accessing the possibilities. We need to slow down to speed up.
The last insight of the day was that reflection is an action. This phrase was stated a number of times, so I can not take the credit for it, but allow me to elaborate on where I saw it have impact. It was at the end when the facilitator summarized the day for us. She shared her observations, recognizing individual contributions which was personal and courageous, she was not concerned about missing someone out and not afraid to name great examples, it was masterful. Throughout the day she had been reflecting and she pulled her reflections together and shared with the group. She was perfectly role modelling the power of reflection.
So as the day draws to a close, I am left wanting more, left curious as to what tomorrow will bring, hopefully a little less snow so that we can at the very least get to the meeting on time :-)
Tonight I go to bed grateful, grateful to be part of this.
Good night
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