Exposing yourself.
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“Speaking very slowly, ‘Did you ever feel,’ he asked, ‘as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren’t using—you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?’ He looked at Bernard questioningly.”
— Aldous Huxley, ‘Brave New World’
It’s a fancy London steak restaurant, maybe 10 or 12 years ago. White tablecloths, low lighting, soft seats with some sort of animal hide on them. Thick linen napkin in my lap, heavy cutlery in my hand.
I’m having an expensive steak, something tender, cooked rare, with a little blood oozing out onto my plate and mixing with the rich jus. Not gravy, just.
And to the left of my plate, in a ridiculously oversized glass, is a large pour of red wine. I don’t even fucking like wine. But you have red wine with steak. So here I am, doing fancy things I apparently enjoy because I have a few quid in my pocket.
Go back maybe 5 years earlier, and the meal would have been a bit less fancy, the drink would have been heavy liquor or beer (one of many), and the night might have rounded off with some illegal substances.
Later, an Uber home, maybe drunkenly scrolling Instagram or ordering something from Amazon.
Fast forward five years from that steak restaurant.
No meat, fish or dairy in my diet (vegan, in other words). Very little alcohol, and a nice, small beer when I feel like it. Certainly no class-A drugs.
No fancy restaurants. No more Uber, less Amazon (none at all now), no social media apart from LinkedIn.
Better sleep, earlier rising, daily meditation. Less TV and more books about spirituality, psychology and religion.
What changed? I’m not entirely sure, but it wasn’t a series of conscious or deliberate decisions.
We assume that changing is some cognitive process, a repeated deliberation over a choice and then making a different one based on some new knowledge we have.
Perhaps this is true for habits like going to the gym. But even then, how do we introduce the deliberation or the new knowledge in the first place?
I don’t stand in supermarkets with a steak in one hand and a tin of chickpeas in the other, locked in some inner struggle about whether I want to eat meat or not. The choice never arises in my consciousness. There is no choice. I’m a person who doesn’t eat meat.
How did I arrive here? I don’t know for sure, but one thing I do know is that it wasn’t from sheer willpower.
You can’t be changed by force. No one can make you change, nor can you make someone else change, nor - hold on - can you really change yourself.
The path to my current adult life hinged on a specific period 17 years ago when I realised I didn’t want to stay in corporate consulting. I decided to work with a coach, and that began to change everything.
Why did I decide to work with a coach? In short (and a story I’ve told before), I was miserable at work and confused about what to do. My friend Helen, a highly-ranked superstar consultant, quit to become an interior designer. I asked her what the hell she was up to and she said she’d realised what she really wanted with the help of a coach.
That was it. That element of chance (hmm…) that a close friend at work was able to introduce me to the idea of getting a coach to work through a confusing life situation. And working with my coach not only led me to all the things I’m doing now but all sorts of mad and weird stuff along the way that I couldn’t have imagined.
If you told 25-year old me that he was going to become a spiritual person, a meditator, a vegan who didn’t drink much alcohol, a person who works with shamans and psychotherapists, who researches masculinity and trauma, and literally hugs trees whilst offering them prayers - that guy would tell you fuck right off.
And yet here I am.
“In order to have a chance of being smitten, of falling in love, we must hazard ourselves on the path that our experiences and revelations open up for us.”
— David Whyte
‘Transformation’ is a word that’s often bandied about in my line of work. I have a certain queasiness about using it when talking about coaching. I’m sure I’ve used it to describe my work at some point, but it feels a bit pompous and self-inflated to me.
Many of my clients have radically changed their lives for the better through our work, but at best, I was a temporary guide for a journey they were already on - it started long before they met me, and was influenced by their exposure to all sorts of things.
I mean, I’m a great coach (and taking on clients by the way, just saying), but I’m not deluded enough to think I’m a wizard.
So much of how we change is about what we encounter that might influence us. And because what we are exposed to is so unpredictable and uncontrollable, so too is much of the way in which we change.
A little nudge that opens up a new possibility. A random conversation. A chance meeting. Maybe something causes you to unlock that particular viewpoint or neural pathway, just momentarily enough to consider something else.
Perhaps that little segment you saw on social media about the sugar in your syrup latte was just enough to encourage you to look at something else, or to notice an article a week later, about the long-term effects of refined sugar.
Maybe that’s enough for you to switch your drink. Or maybe you do some more research - online videos, a book, even some research papers.
Each exposure is opening up new possibilities and taking you away from an old one. At some point, you won’t be able to order that sugary coffee without knowing what it’s doing to your body, so you’ll try something else. You might find you like it just enough to try it again.
You might now go further down this road, beginning to notice how many calories, sugars and fats are in the various milks in your coffee.
And so, maybe a few months later, you’re no longer the person who orders a gingerbread latte with extra cream, or even an oat flat white - you’re now someone who orders black coffee. Fuck, how did that happen?
All of this started with some small exposure to something that offered a different perspective. How did that exposure arrive in your life?
That’s the mystery. So much of this is a mystery; we’re just kidding ourselves that we’re in charge.
In fact, I’d say the people who struggle most with change and are more likely to be dissatisfied with their lives are the people clinging on to the illusion of being in control, like lunatics gripping an imaginary steering wheel and thinking they’re driving a car.
The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.— Khalil Gibran
One implication of this is to consider what we are exposing ourselves to. Do we see mostly the same people, hang out in the same places and talk about the same things? That’s a perfect way to stagnate and become hostile to or fearful of change.
Yet even the most comfortable of people usually notice their boredom and look for something different, some deviation from the norm. Even if it’s something small like a different cafe or pub, a different holiday destination, a different weekly routine.
Those most likely to change are those most willing to expose themselves to different ideas and possibilities.
This is not quite Dweck’s growth mindset, which feels more like a conscious, internal process. This is exposure to newness that is perhaps intentional and mostly sheer chance/luck/destiny/fate/random.
But there’s another possibility that explains why I’m living as I am now. And that is that I was this person all along, buried beneath someone else. By some incredible grace, I went through years of shit that helped me to arrive here.
So maybe it is about exposure to difference, but only if you’re paying really close attention to what brings you alive, what draws your attention away from the scrolling, what makes you sit up on the bus, the person that makes you turn your head in the street.
You can’t deny those moments. The soul has its own personality, and it doesn’t care what you think.
“The soul is like a wild animal-tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is to go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge, and out of the corner of an eye we will catch a glimpse of the precious wildness we seek.”
— Parker Palmer
Tipping Point: navigating collapse and crisis.
“Then up jumped a great Fatman in one of the stadiums. He thought that he was god and that he could stop everything from moving. He thought that since he could, he had to. He cried out loud. He swore at the top of his voice. He fired off a gun and made the people listen. He roared and he boasted and made himself known. He blew back into the wind and stamped on the rolling earth and swore up and down he could make it all stop with his invention. He got up in the teeth of the storm and made a loud speech which everybody heard. And the first thing he said was this:
“If anything moves, I am the one to move it: and if anything stops, I am the one to stop it. If anything shakes, I am the one to shake it, and not one being is going to budge unless pushed.””
The modern myth for our times, Thomas Merton’s ‘Atlas and the Fatman’ (1966).
About me.
I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.
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At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.
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