11
Centering
These are days when no one should rely unduly on his “competence.” Strength lies in improvisation.
— WALTER BENJAMIN
A book is a linear creature; pages march forward from the first to the final, demanding some measure of logic and order. A book also impels its author to adopt a reductionist mind-set; topics are separated into chapters which are further separated into sections. This book, for example, contains a set of chapters, each describing a leadership competency. The result of this linearity and reductionism may be the erroneous conclusion that each competency is truly a discrete phenomenon.
The reality of commitment is, however, much more complex than a set of discrete competencies. Mind, emotions, and spirit are aspects of a single person, and winning minds, emotions, and spirits are inextricably intertwined. A story, which is the food of the mind, emotion, which is the product of feeling, and soul, which drives spirit, all interact with and influence one another in ways that are little understood. In order to win the mind, emotion, and spirit of a single person a leader must have equal facility with all three, and be able to distinguish when each is called for. In this way a leader connects with others at every level of being. In other words, winning mind, emotion, and spirit must be approached in an integrated way; in a way that respects all three and treats them as a whole.
The Discipline of Bringing In
The intertwined nature of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual commitment requires the leader who wishes to win all three to be capable of what M. C. Richards calls “Centering . . . the discipline of bringing in rather than of leaving out.”1 In a leader’s extended and ongoing dialogue with others, when the mind shows up, it must be brought in. When emotion shows up, it must be brought in. When spirit shows up, it too must be brought in. In order for each of them to show up, they must, of course, be invited. Leaders issue the invitations: Come to the party, bring all of yourself.
For Richards, centering is an activity of consciousness. It is not a state of being but a process and a discipline in which a person—an artist, a leader, anyone—engages from moment to moment with his experience, both inner and outer experience. In pottery, Richards describes it like this:
For in centering the clay on the potter’s wheel, one centers down . . . and then one immediately centers up. Down and up, wide and narrow, letting focus bear within it an expanding consciousness and letting a widened awareness . . . have the commitment to detail of a focused attention. Not “either . . . or,” but “both . . . and.”2
For a potter, it is not “either up or down,” but “both up and down.” Not “either widened awareness or commitment to detail” but “both widened awareness and commitment to detail.” Centering entails transcending apparent opposites, finding the unity that lives within difference. For leaders who win high commitment, it is not “mind or emotion or spirit,” but “mind and emotion and spirit.” For leaders, centering incorporates the ability to bond compelling insights and lofty visions with everyday reality, to connect values with deeds, and to align their own efforts with a larger concern. Centering is integrity in action. Richards continued,
You can perhaps feel the inner movement of a Centering consciousness that plays dramatically in the tides of inner and outer, self and other, in an instinctive hope towards wholeness.3.
The centering consciousness of a leader seeks wholeness while playing in the tides of inner and outer, self and other, in the merging seas of mind, emotion, and spirit.
A Leader at Work
The following tale shows how a leader employs the leadership competencies for winning intellectual, emotional, and spiritual commitment while playing in those merging seas. The tale is based on real incidents.
Nearly 200 people gather in one large room for a daylong corporate meeting. As they enter the room, each of them finds a seat at one of twenty-five round tables, seven or eight people per table. While they mill and get settled, an executive of the company, the “host” of the meeting, roams around the room. He shakes hands, learns names, greets old acquaintances, and gets a sense of who is present.
This does not look or feel like a typical corporate get-together; there is no imposing stage, very few suits and ties, no podium, and no one is preparing for a formal presentation. When everyone is seated and the meeting begins, the executive, dressed casually and with notes in hand, stands on a low platform at the long side of the rectangular room: the closest tables are just a few feet away. The low platform and nearby tables suggest intimacy between the executive and everyone else. He will often leave the platform in the course of this day and get even closer to the participants, occasionally joining them in discussions or simply observing them at work.
The executive leader for this meeting has become convinced that the traditional approach to such events does not produce results. He has addressed and attended many such traditional meetings, where someone stands at the front of the room, with a laser pointer in hand and a PowerPoint presentation at the ready. Minds may sometimes be convinced at such meetings, but emotions are rarely won, and there is almost never a true call to spirit. The more casual setting in this room, the proximity of the executive to the participants, and his willingness to “join the crowd” encourage rapport and dialogue, providing opportunities for everyone to be more authentic with one another than they normally are. These are all initial steps toward winning higher levels of commitment than the usual intellectual commitment.
Storytelling
The company sponsoring this meeting is an established and conventional insurance company that aspires to provide a broader range of financial services. Fulfilling this aspiration will necessitate higher levels of cooperation between divisions and departments, the sharing of information which had previously been held as sacrosanct and secret, and a greater measure of respect between groups. The participants are led through a series of experiences to help them understand the complex, competitive, and dynamic industry their company inhabits, to inform them about how the company makes money, and about how the company plans to respond to its new environment; this is the story the leader is telling. After the first such experience the participants have many questions. “How did we become so unresponsive to the outside world?” “Are we really as bad as it seems?” “What must we do?”
The people in the room were confronted with sobering data about the changing demographics, expectations and spending habits of their customers, about their company’s market position, and about their performance relative to competitors. The total picture was not pretty—but it was an accurate story. The leadership of the organization wanted to engage the minds of its people by providing them with the very information that executives had when they created the company’s new vision and strategy. In other words, the information was highly relevant, presented cogently and unforgettably, and everybody got the message. Interactive media encouraged mutual learning and dialogue between people from different slices of the organization. The information was shared in a way that allowed the people in the room to draw their own conclusions because people are more likely to act with conviction on their own conclusions rather than on someone else’s. In this situation the conclusion was inescapable: We must change.
Drawing one’s own conclusions is a particularly significant aspect of winning minds because as the mind reaches a conclusion the heart is often touched as well. One of the reasons that typical executive-up-front, PowerPoint presentations fail to produce results is that attendees are expected to understand and act on someone else’s conclusions. In the meeting we are attending here, however, both minds and emotions are being won.
Insight and Self-Awareness
During a question and answer period the executive tells the group how he feels about the company’s poor customer service. He speaks about measures of customer satisfaction, which are grim; he also speaks very personally about the hopes and dreams of customers, about the company’s promises to them, and about his own deep disappointment in the company’s failures. He is not haranguing the audience, but is simply and eloquently talking about himself—about his feelings for customers. There is not a sound in the room except for his voice. When he finishes, the entire room full of people seems to hesitate, stunned into silence, not quite believing that an executive of the firm cares in a heartfelt way about service and is willing to say so in such a public way. After this moment passes, a moment during which he scans the room nervously for some reaction, the room erupts in applause.
This executive was expected to deliver an urgent message. The message, honed in the company’s headquarters, went something like this: “We are not doing well. The competition is passing us. We have lost sight of our customers; we have squandered their trust and must reclaim it. We have an opportunity to offer a broader range of services. We have to stop obsessing over our internal skirmishes, pull together, and make things work for the people we serve. We have little time: We must act now.”
Prior to the meeting he told a trusted advisor, “I cannot fathom how we lost sight of the fact that what we do is help our customers fulfill their dreams. That is what we are supposed to do. We are supposed to help people fulfill their dreams. Their financial dreams, at least. That is what our customers expect of us. It is why they pay us.”
The way he spoke of his feelings, a message from him rather than from headquarters, was qualitatively different from the way in which he talked about the message he was expected to deliver. It is not that the message from headquarters was wrong, but that his own message came from his heart rather than from the pages of talking points he was given. His tone of voice was both more thoughtful and more passionate, resonating from who he is as a person. After some discussion and encouragement from his advisor, he decided to talk during the meeting about what he felt. His concept about helping people fulfill their dreams is the insight that will drive his own work to transform the company.
What he did during the meeting was difficult and courageous for him—he spoke of his own emotions. He then decided to make creative use of his own feelings to engage more fully with his audience. Like most executives he is quite comfortable with and good at logical discourse, and quite good at following a script. He had always assumed that convincing people—winning minds—was enough. He is learning that, in order to effect fundamental change in his organization, winning intellectual commitment will not be enough. He will have to also win emotional and perhaps spiritual commitment. In order to do so, he must authentically share what is in his own heart, and what his own spirit is called to do.
Emotional Engagement and Fostering Hope
A man in the audience says, “I am so angry and frustrated! How on earth did this company fall so far? I had no idea things were this bad. And I am afraid that we will never get back to what we once were, let alone compete in this new market. It is clear that we got lazy and arrogant at the same time. Can we really fix this?”
The man is responding to a question from the executive leader, who had asked the group, “How do you feel about what you are learning today?”
After hearing the man’s plea, the executive pauses for a moment, and then responds. “I feel pretty much the same way you do: sometimes angry and frustrated, and sometimes fearful. The job ahead of us is daunting, and we never should have gotten to this place at all. That part really ticks me off. How many of you feel the same way?”
The vast majority of people in the audience raise their hands.
“I don’t mean to deny the importance of all the negatives,” he continues. “But there are also many positives. Our company has new leadership that understands how important it is for us to talk together like this. We have a huge customer base. Some pieces of the business are doing well. We have sold off some pieces that we never should have had in the first place. None of our competitors has really figured it all out yet either. We are building the right technology. So we have a good start. The rest is up to what we all do next—after we leave this room.”
The executive’s public declaration of his own frustration and disappointment—“I cannot fathom how we lost sight of the fact that what we do is help our customers fulfill their dreams”—is an invitation to others in the room to bring their feelings to the dialogue. The tide of the meeting shifts from the storytelling of the mind to the sea of emotion. The executive understands that gaining emotional commitment is a matter of acknowledging and valuing emotions of all kinds because individual emotions cannot be neatly separated but are bound to one another in a complex stew of feelings. He knows that if he wants to win the energy of enthusiasm or passion, he must also acknowledge and accept the energy of anger, frustration, and other less comfortable and less constructive feelings.
This executive also connects—heart-to-heart, empathetically—with the audience when he confesses, “I feel pretty much the same way.”
Finally, the executive expresses his own optimism, a basis for providing hope to others. Not with false rah-rah “I know we can do it!” cheerleading. Instead, he provides concrete information—we have new leadership, a large customer base, and so on. He is expressing his own heartfelt hope, providing a basis for others to also feel hopeful.
This snippet of dialogue between an employee and an executive shows how winning minds, hearts, and spirits are intertwined and are not separate phenomena. Story, feeling, and soul—a leader’s artistic materials—are all at hand, the executive has equal facility with all three, and he is able to distinguish when his own mind, emotions, and spirit are called for to connect with and win mind, emotion, and spirit from others. He is practicing the discipline of centering, inviting everything that is present to contribute: both frustration and hope, both ideas and emotion, both his own inner world and the inner worlds of the people in his audience. Together, they are playing, as M. C. Richards wrote, “dramatically in the tides of inner and outer, self and other, in an instinctive hope towards wholeness.”
Vision and Rendering Significance
“When I first came to this company,” the executive tells the audience, “I sold life insurance. I believed that I was protecting people and their families from financial loss and possibly financial disaster. So it wasn’t just about selling insurance. I still believe that is what we do—we protect people and their families. The change will be that we will be able to do it in more ways.”
He recalls helping a widowed elderly woman by expediting payment of her claim. He then invites members of the audience to talk about moments at work when they had the sense that they were doing something larger than selling and serving insurance policies. There are many such stories.
Here the executive elucidates his own personal vision of protecting people and their families and connects it to the new vision of the company. He has also made a call for spiritual commitment—to a larger sense of purpose than simple self-interest. He has rendered spiritual significance to the new direction of the company—protecting people and their families. Just as welcoming all ideas creates a sense of intellectual safety, and welcoming all feelings creates a sense of emotional safety, so talking about personal experience of a higher calling creates spiritual safety. When people experience such safety they begin to believe, “I can take the risk to be who I am in this place. My mind, emotions, and spirit are all welcomed and valued here. I can bring all of myself to this purpose.” That belief is where commitment begins.
It Starts from the Heart
The semifictional executive described above has unknowingly followed the advice of improvisational violinist and composer Stephen Nachmanovitch, author of the book Free Play: The Power of Improvisation in Life and the Arts. Nachmanovitch wrote,
If you are giving a public talk, it is fine to plan what you might say in order to sharpen your awareness, but when you arrive, throw away your plans and relate, in real time, to the people in the room.4.
In contrast to the tale above, Chapter 6 told about an executive whose anxiety over speaking to a large group without a script overwhelmed him. His difficulties did not stem from not knowing the story he was supposed to tell. He knew it intimately; he had helped to create it. What he did not know was how to replace a script as his primary reference point for what to do and say. Once a leader is pledged to an atmosphere of improvisation and a dialogue that carries emotional and spiritual substance, no script will suffice.
The tale in Chapter 6 did have a good ending. On the day of the meeting, immediately after his opening gaffe, the executive sought counsel about the difficulty he was having. He discovered that he held deep convictions and far more than superficial knowledge about parts of the overall story that he was supposed to tell. Heeding the advice of others, he decided to focus on those parts of the story, on the parts that he cared about and could speak about in an extemporaneous way. By the end of the daylong meeting he had transformed fluttering eyelids into appreciative applause.
Where emotional commitment and spiritual commitment are at stake, the heart and soul replace the script.
This “relating in real time” that Nachmanovitch describes must happen everywhere in a leader’s realm; not just in front of an audience, but also in the day-to-day business of relating to others as a leader. In every discussion and decision. In every public act. Michael Jones described throwing away the plans and relating in real time as, “Moving from trying to perform according to a preset idea to being more present to the moment so that you are available for what is unfolding in the moment.”
The essence of such improvisation is creating with whatever materials come to hand. In the intertwined arts of winning mind, emotion, and spirit what comes to hand are the thoughts, feelings, and soul energy of the leader and the other people present. What is created is commitment. The materials are of two kinds—outer and inner. The outer material is provided by the environment and the people in it. At the meeting described earlier, the outer materials included such things as graphs and charts, questions and comments from the audience, and the mood in the room. Improvisation most often involves responding to those outer materials from the inner materials, what we ourselves think and feel, and the hum of the soul. Sometimes it involves only the inner materials, and it shows up as impulses to speak or act. Nachmanovitch says, “What we have to express is already with us, is us, so the work . . . is not a matter of making the material come, but of unblocking the obstacles to its natural flow.”5
Yes, preparation is needed. But so is an act of letting go of what has been prepared. Artists speak of this improvisational ability in prosaic ways. Painter and art teacher Robert Henri wrote, “. . . if you can at least to a degree free yourself, take your head off your heart and give the latter a chance, something may come of it.”6 M. C. Richards stated, “We have to realize that a creative being lives within ourselves, whether we like it or not, and that we must get out of its way, for it will give us no peace until we do.”7 Michael Jones wrote, “When I place the source of life outside myself, it is easy to feel restricted; I feel lifeless and dull. But when I follow what is flowing from within and trust it, I have never been abandoned; the well is always full.”8 Matt Catingub used to teach jazz improvisation but gave it up. He says, “If you look at where jazz came from, if you look at who created it, they didn’t learn it out of a textbook. They didn’t learn it because you are supposed to play this scale over this chord.”
Improvisation is crucial to centering. A leader’s improvisational ability demands mastery of the other leadership competencies, any of which might be called upon at any moment. Improvising artists, such as Nachmanovitch and Catingub or Robin Williams or Charlie Parker, can spontaneously produce seemingly magical acts of creation. When a leader has mastered the competencies for winning mind, emotion, and spirit, and is also able to spontaneously call on them, she is also capable of performing such magic.
Development Strategies for Centering
Centering is not a technique but a way of thinking and being. It is no simple discipline to practice or master. It involves, at the very least, developing a centering consciousness and learning to improvise.
Developing Centering Consciousness
The first challenge in developing the centering consciousness that fosters high commitment is to become aware of habitual ways of thinking and then knowing that there is an alternative. Habitual ways of thinking are very comfortable, personal, and interior mental routines which most people do not even notice in themselves. Here are a few of the ways in which leaders habitually think; they are all aspects of centering consciousness.
•Focusing on commonality as well as difference
•Seeking opportunity as well as problems and obstacles
•Focusing on learning
•Concentrating on accepting or changing self
•Sharing rather than withholding both information and feelings
•Focusing on listening and understanding rather than explaining or defending
•Looking to the present and the future as well as understanding the past
Centering consciousness is the antithesis of the consciousness that separates and classifies, reducing experience to its component parts in the search for understanding. That latter mind, for example, will insist on seeing mind, heart, and spirit as separate attributes. It may create an agenda for a meeting such as the one described earlier in this chapter that looks something like this: from eight o’clock until eleven o’clock we will win intellectual commitment, from eleven until two (including a break for lunch) we will win emotional commitment, and then from two until five we will win spiritual commitment. Centering consciousness, on the other hand, seeks to connect things, including things that are usually thought to be different. The meeting agenda created by a centering consciousness would allow for the emergence of mind, heart, and spirit whenever they show up, as did the agenda of the actual meeting that was described.
Leaders often benefit from the assistance of others who can help them catch themselves when they are trapped in habits of mind that need change, especially the habits of leaving out and separating rather than bringing in and integrating. Chapter 12 offers suggestions for how to find such help.
Improvising
When asked, “What do you tell people who want to learn how to improvise?” Matt Catingub says it is one of his favorite questions. His advice to aspiring improvisational musicians is, “Once a week, go to Tower records or Borders and pick up your favorite jazz improvisation artist—Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie or Winton Marsalis—and buy three CDs. And listen and listen, and then emulate, play along and listen to what they are doing. Do that once a week because it is ear training. You start learning from that. And you also get a great CD collection.” Eventually, he adds, you will learn to hear the sour notes; your ear will tell you what is right and what is wrong.
But all of the training, all of the listening and the emulating, will never be enough because, says Catingub, “Improvisation needs to start from the heart.” If it doesn’t, “It will be so contrived that no one is going to want to hear it.”
Learn everything there is to know about your story. Learn everything there is to know about your self. Watch and listen to other leaders. Then set aside everything you have learned. Be present and receptive in the moment. Pay attention to the various echoes of mind, emotion, and spirit from other people, from your surroundings, and within yourself. Trust yourself—play it your way. Surrender—abandon all hope for a particular outcome and all fear of failure. Give up any desire to control. Lead.
Summary
Centering, the discipline of bringing in rather than of leaving out, allows a leader to win the highest levels of commitment by employing all of his competencies in an improvisational art form. Doing so requires developing the discipline of engaging from moment to moment with experience, and honing improvisational skills.
Questions About Yourself to Contemplate or Discuss with Others
Who, in your life experience, was practiced at centering?
To what degree are you practiced at centering?
What is it about centering that rings true for your current leadership role?
How important is centering to your further development as a leader?
Notes
1.M.C. Richards, Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989): xviii.
2.Ibid., xx.
3.Ibid., xx.
4.Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play: Improvisation in Art and Life (Los Angeles: Tarcher/Putnam, 1990): 20.
5.Ibid., 10.
6.Robert Henri, The Art Spirit, (N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1984; 1923): 195.
7.Richards, Centering, 27.
8.Michael Jones, Creating an Imaginative Life (Berkeley, Calif.: Conari Press, 1995): 25.