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April 13 - September 19, 2021
Would you be willing to share with me the secret of Rule Number 6?” “Very simple,” replies the resident prime minister. “Rule Number 6 is ‘Don’t take yourself so g—damn seriously.’” “Ah,” says his visitor, “that is a fine rule.” After a moment of pondering, he inquires, “And what, may I ask, are the other rules?” “There aren’t any.”
It is not about telling other people not to take themselves so seriously, unless your whole group, like the company above, has voluntarily adopted the practice. But you can tell this joke, or any other, in the midst of a tense situation as an invitation to camaraderie. Humor and laughter are perhaps the best way we can “get over ourselves.”
What would have to change for me to be completely fulfilled? The answer to this question will clue us in to the conditions our calculating self finds threatening or even intolerable,
took as my premise that each man recognized in his heart of hearts the exact way in which he was being adversarial, uncooperative, childish, bent on revenge, and out to save his own skin. At the same time I was pretty sure that each man was feeling entirely justified in such behavior given his partner’s actions. In other words, I operated under the assumption that each partner’s central self knew the workings of his calculating self. I intended to speak only to their two central selves.
The practice in this chapter is an antidote both to the hopeless resignation of the cow and to the spluttering resistance of the duck. It is to be present to the way things are, including our feelings about the way things are. This practice can help us clarify the next step that will take us in the direction we say we want to go.
Being present to the way things are is not the same as accepting things as they are in the resigned way
It doesn’t mean you should drown out your negative feelings or pretend you like what you really can’t stand. It doesn’t mean you should work to achieve some “higher plane of existence” so you can “transcend negativity.” It simply means, being present without resistance: being present to what is happening and present to your reactions, no matter how intense.
MISTAKES CAN BE like ice. If we resist them, we may keep on slipping into a posture of defeat. If we include mistakes in our definition of performance, we are likely to glide through them and appreciate the beauty of the longer run.
when told by a violinist that a difficult passage in the violin concerto was virtually unplayable, Stravinsky is supposed to have said: “I don’t want the sound of someone playing this passage, I want the sound of someone trying to play it!”
When we dislike a situation, we tend to put all our attention on how things should be rather than how they are.
When our attention is primarily directed to how wrong things are, we lose our power to act effectively. We may have difficulty understanding the total context, discussing what to do next, or overlooking the people who “should not have done what they did” as we think about a solution.
Closing the exits means staying with the feelings, whatever they are. It means letting them run their course, as a storm sweeps overhead showering rain and thunder, only to be followed by clear patches of blue.
feelings can be likened to muscles—the more intensively you stay with the exercise, closing the door on escape, the more emotional heavy lifting you can do.
Abstractions that we unwittingly treat as physical reality tend to block us from seeing the way things are, and therefore reduce our power to accomplish what we say we want.
The more attention you shine on a particular subject, the more evidence of it will grow. Attention is like light and air and water. Shine attention on obstacles and problems and they multiply lavishly.
like bogeymen, are never anywhere to be found except in someone’s story.
Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.
When she was six years old, the story goes, she went into her first competition as a cellist, and she was seen running down the corridor carrying her cello above her head, with a huge grin of excitement on her face. A custodian, noting what he took to be relief on the little girl’s face, said, “I see you’ve just had your chance to perform!” And Jackie answered, excitedly, “No, no, I’m just about to!”
If you play that way, they won’t be able to resist you. You will be a compelling force behind which everyone will be inspired to play their best.”
Beyond the F--- It, which fast became part of the folklore of all my classes, and showed up in the students as a spiritedness in going beyond where before they might have stopped.
WE POSE the question again: “Where is the electric socket for possibility, the access to the energy of transformation?” It’s just there over the bar line, where the bird soars. We can join it by finding the tempo and lean our bodies to the music; dare to let go of the edges of ourselves . . . participate!
Enrollment is the practice of this chapter. Enrolling is not about forcing, cajoling, tricking, bargaining, pressuring, or guilt-tripping someone into doing something your way. Enrollment is the art and practice of generating a spark of possibility for others to share.
A “no” can so often dampen our fire in the world of the downward spiral. It can seem like a permanent, implacable barrier that presents us with limited choices: to attack, to manipulate our way around it, or to bow to it in defeat. In other words, a “no” can seem like a door slamming instead of merely an instance of the way things are. Yet, were we to take a “no” less personally, and ourselves less seriously, we might hear something else. We might hear someone saying, “I don’t see any new possibility here, so I think I’ll stick with my usual way of doing things.” We might hear within the word
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The secret was, I believe, that I genuinely wanted to share the music with the children, and I trusted their ability to respond to it and to be partners with me in our whole undertaking.
Ordinarily we equate accountability with blame and blamelessness, concepts from the world of measurement.
When I blame you for something that goes wrong, I seek to establish that I am in the right—and we all know the delicious feeling of satisfaction there. However, inasmuch as I blame you for a miserable vacation or a wall of silence—to that degree, in exactly that proportion, I lose my power. I lose my ability to steer the situation in another direction, to learn from it, or to put us in good relationship with each other.
the first part of the practice is to declare: “I am the framework for everything that happens in my life.” This is perhaps the most radical and elusive of all the practices in this book, and it is also one of the most powerful. Here is another way of saying it: “If I cannot be present without resistance to the way things are and act effectively, if I feel myself to be wronged, a loser, or a victim, I will tell myself that some assumption I have made is the source of my difficulty.”
Then, in this game, you take your practice one step further: You ask yourself, in regard to the unwanted circumstances, “Well, how did this get on the board that I am?” or, “Now, how is it that I have become a context for that to occur?” You will begin to see the obvious and then the not-so-obvious contributions of your calculating self, or of your history, or of earlier decisions that landed you where you are, feeling like a victim.
Being the board is not about turning the blame on yourself.
Those would be sentiments from that other game, the game in which you divide up fault and blame.
“I think I sensed that you did not have a thorough knowledge of the rules, yet I failed to enlighten you. For that I apologize.”
When you name yourself as the board your attention turns to repairing a breakdown in relationship. That is why apologies come so easily.
we would prefer to get our way as well as have good relationships—we don’t really want to have to choose between the two.
Imagine how profoundly trustworthy you would be to the people who work for you if they felt no problem could arise between you that you were not prepared to own. Imagine how much incentive they would have to cooperate if they knew they could count on you to clear the pathways for accomplishment.
In the realm of possibility, there is no division between ideas and action, mind and body, dream and reality. Leaders who become their vision often seem uncommonly brave to the rest of us. Whether from the middle of the action, or from the sidelines, they are a conduit for carrying the vision forward.
Under a vision, goals are treated as markers thrown out ahead to define the territory. If you miss the mark—“How fascinating!” Neither you nor the vision is compromised. In the pursuit of objectives under a vision, playing is relevant to the manifestation of the possibility, winning is not.
“I am here today to cross the swamp, not to fight all the alligators.”
Often just the use of the word we can shift the direction things takes. The WE approach: He says, “We’re apparently both happy with my work, and I sense our loyalty is mutual. Yet this salary doesn’t support the other commitments in my life. What do WE want to have happen here? How can WE make the whole thing work?”
I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big successes. I am for those tiny, invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of human pride. —WILLIAM JAMES
