I've been meaning to try this experiment for ever so I approached Daniel, the German, this morning.
I asked him to shut his eyes (which aroused some suspicion) and I put two bottles into his hands, one with water, one without. Still holding onto the bottles, I asked him to clench them as hard as possible. When his fingers turned white, I let go and asked him which bottle had water in it.
He couldn't tell me.
I've been meaning to do this forever because if this was indeed true, the implications were enormous.
i.e. When we are all tensed up, we are unable to sense what is going on around us in a way that we can when we are relaxed. And we are not just talking about losing a little bit of sensing, we are talking about not noticing the difference between a full and empty bottle of water.
So what?
Let's think of some challenging moments in the day. Re work - important meetings, speeches, difficult one-to-ones. Re family - dealing with children; expressing needs, managing emergencies. Re miscellaneous - doing admin, playing sport, eating.
The question to ask is - what are you missing from these situations if you are all tensed up; what are you not noticing; what is all that water, using the analogy above, that you are not aware of. And what would be different in these situations if you were more relaxed.
My assessment - a lot.
Let me give you one work-related example.Typically, when clients turn up to coaching sessions, they are very tense; they have come from a thousand things and are running onto a thousand things. They speak very fast and are breathless; some aren't breathing, lost in thought; often they are not sure what they want from the coaching session.
I normally greet this sort of entry with "Whoa Dobbin" and ask the client to sit and just notice; notice how they are, what is going on in the room, what is going on outside. And things tend to calm down. From this place, I ask again "what do you want from this session" and this time they know, they are clear, they are able to sense what they need.
This level of calm and being present appears to mean more options, more clarity and more ways to respond.
More breathing has obvious merits.
Something Practical.
Go on. Try it.
Two bottles, one with water, one without. Make sure that the water is room temperature and not cold. (Daniel spotted this one). And hand them to someone who has promised not to look. Repeat until you are a believer.
Second experiment - bring this awareness to some situations in your day and see what happens. I went road biking at the weekend and it transformed my experience - from nose-sniffing front wheel to nose-sniffing flowers for 40km.
Something New.
You haven't heard from Because It's There for a while because myself and two partners have embarked on a new project that has taken off dramatically and we have all been rather tense.
The mission of the new project is to make first-rate coaching affordable and accessible to Charities and NGOs worldwide. The idea is that we bring all the spare working capacity that exists in the coaching community and make this visible to charities and NGOs that desperately need this professional development resource.
We intend to ensure that any charity anywhere in the world can get access to coaching and therefore the name - coacharitiesworldwide. We have a work in progress website at www.coacharities.com
At the moment, we are working with 11 charities and 15 coaches. The intention is to take this to 50 charities and 40 coaches in three years.
If we are to get there, we better relax.
