Miriam’s Thoughts

This morning, beautiful sunshine and I wake up early, the kids still asleep. Even as I finish my exercising, I come back into a quiet house and the only sound comes from birds singing and a ticking clock…

I can feel how my body relaxes in this silence and struck by the intensity of the experience, I think back to a conversation with a colleague. She said “looking back, I don’t know how I did it. I guess I was just making sure I survive…”. The my visceral reaction to the silence this morning was a beautiful reminder of that.

I had a mini-version of surviving in the past months (and a few maxi-versions in my life earlier on). I tried to live and work in the middle of a construction site inside and around our house that interrupted my work, that left little silence to concentrate and was rich of disturbances of any kind. Once the noise had ebbed, the holes were filled, the dust had settled, I did what I always do – and I guess most of us: work extra-hard to catch up with “lost” time, go back to normal.

And just this morning I thought: how about getting curious how I survived? How about taking time to acknowledge I had a rough moment? How about taking time to recover before I press on?

And so here I am, taking my own medicine. With my clients, I often work on topics that involve trusting themselves and taking care of themselves. Over and over I see the power of just acknowledging: “it’s a lot that I do, and it’s Ok to feel tired”. That releases a lot of the weight of self-judgment, of the thinking that whatever I do, it’s never enough.

Even if there is little or no time to rest, taking a moment to notice what I went through and which capability supported me can recharge me quite a bit. In my mini-survival that was: I can be creative in finding places to work, I can delegate and set boundaries, I can overlook dirt and chaos, I’m OK without warm water for a few days in a row.

Today, I feel less guilty enjoying a work-free moment, enjoying that my kids sleep in (they are on vacation) and I do not get any request from them (yet). And I take my recovery more seriously.

How about you? What was a had moment you went though? How did you acknowledge it?

I’d love to hear from you!

In the past, my anger made me powerful and resilient – and I figured out it also made my blind and stupid at times. Often, actually, even if I don’t like to admit it. And there would be a lot more to write about emotions and how we choose how we use our emotions as information. But, today, there’s something else that wants to be written. And I feel more like screaming it.

The tears I cry are tears of rage about the fact that still in 2019, opportunities are not equal for women in the corporate world!

I have this absolutely wonderful, smart, talented and strong client who I had the privilege to accompany on a journey of deep personal transformation. I have also come to know her as an amazingly resilient and wise professional. She had been invited an assessment centre to find out if she is ready for promotion and just told me about her result…

It sounds like what I have heard a few times myself and witnessed many more: “you have all the skills we expect from an executive, you’re authentic, inspiring, creative – but you’re not hard-nosed enough!”.

The pattern is always the same, we are OK to train social skills to the hard-nosed and not ready to give a chance to those with high emotional and social intelligence to try themselves on tougher jobs or in tougher environments. The second category are very often women…

And my client? She says that if she one day becomes hard-nosed and numb, it’s time to do something different. What I want to say to her? This organization does not even deserve you! You are brilliant, you are resilient and strong to a degree many hard-nosed managers can only dream of! But why do these brilliant women need to leave organizations to be recognized?

Sometimes, some of them are lucky enough (like I have been) that there is someone in the organization who, against the common practice, promotes them and they get a chance to prove themselves. These bosses and mentors have the courage to work against collective unconscious biases. They are ready to be vulnerable and they act as true people leaders. Thank you, male and female role models!

And so, why do I choose anger today? I choose anger, because it still is great fuel… Fuel to not let things be, fuel to start a movement of change. And this anger is different from before. It does not make me blind, it makes me attentive and resilient.

And I also cry tears of sadness that we are still in a place where we think of women when we talk about diversity. In a time and age when women are as well (if not better) educated, we have still not collectively understood that we need all hands on deck and can’t afford to exclude 50% of mankind from finding solutions for the burning problems of this planet.

And to my client, I say – you are amazingly strong! Don’t give up and find a gang of likeminded humans that accompany you on your path. I’ll love to be a part of it!

This is a week we take a break. A break from work, from school, from the drill of the speedy mornings, from being indoors. This is also a week of taking a break from writing. A conscious one, not a “dragging my feet feeling guilty about not writing” kind of break.

And so here’s only a tiny post for you. A poem from Rainer Maria Rilke that spoke to me about how moving out of something is going into something else, about creating a world and letting it grow (the German original version is below).

The Way In
Rainer Maria Rilke

Whoever you are: some evening take a step
out of your house, which you know so well.
Enormous space is near, your house lies where it begins,
whoever you are.
Your eyes find it heard to tear themselves
from the sloping threshold, but with your eyes
slowly, slowly, lift one black tree
up, so it stands against the sky: skinny, alone.
With that you have made the world. The world is immense
and like a word that is still growing in silence.
In the same moment that your will grasps it,
your eyes, feeling its subtlety, will leave it…

Eingang
Rainer Maria Rilke

Wer du auch seist: am Abend tritt hinaus
aus deiner Stube, drin du alles weißt;
als letztes vor der Ferne liegt dein Haus:
wer du auch seist.
Mit deinen Augen, welche müde kaum
von der verbrauchten Schwelle sich befrein,
hebst du ganz langsam einen schwarzen Baum
und stellst ihn vor den Himmel: schlank, allein.
Und hast die Welt gemacht. Und sie ist groß
und wie ein Wort, das noch im Schweigen reift.
Und wie dein Wille ihren Sinn begreift,
lassen sie deine Augen zärtllich los…

I tend to think that our lives get more and more complex, even if technology helps us automatize and manage activities while we are on the move.

It can be overwhelming to hold the different areas of our lives apart and be confronted with expectations from different roles at the same time. How can I be available to a team when school calls? How can I be a good daughter to my aging parents when a project deadline approaches? How can I possibly I write an inspiring coaching program for a client when my child is sick at home and needs me next to them?

Priorities tend collide and in the middle of is just a human being. A human being with own needs, a human being with emotions and dreams. How can we survive in the middle of it?

Many of my coaching programs revolve around variations of this topic and one practice that I find very supportive on this journey is mindfulness. While I start small with my clients – finding minutes of mindfulness in a full day and observing maybe 3 breaths while not thinking anything else, there is also the possibility to train mindfulness in a more dedicated way: Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is a method developed by internationally known researcher and meditation teacher and is taught locally by certified teachers. It helps deal with somatic and emotional symptoms of stress and supports you in being more aware of when and how stress impacts you, how you can work with it.

For those of you in the Munich region, my Integral Coach colleague and MBSR teacher Karin will launch a new 8-week course this month. Check it out, it may be an answer to the stress you experience in your life.

MBSR with Karin in the Munich region

It’s been a while since I have written and been in touch with you. I really have no excuse for not writing other than that I didn’t seem to have anything to say… Or rather, I had things to say and just didn’t know if it would be interesting or appropriate.

There was quite a bit of judging myself for not writing, I had set myself a goal to publish two blogposts every week. It was about being disciplined, about getting into a habit of writing. It was also about staying in touch and offer something that is not coaching and still related to what I do. It’s about sharing how I may see things in order to offer some insights that can be useful to those people who live in a similar reality as I do.

 

This week, I got a chance to unpack this with my wonderful coach, Renée. I hadn’t written anything for 2 weeks, no practices, no blogposts, not my journal to reflect on the questions she had given me with my practice. Nothing. And while I had written things in my head, nothing actually made it on paper or into my computer.

What we found is that I always look for outcomes and impact and if this is not ensured, I’ll not even start writing. Sometimes, I’ll start and then those magnificent complex thoughts end up in a very straight forward and blunt text. I discovered how I always look for result in a measurable and tangible way while my coaching practice has taught me that some seeds take a while to grow to the surface. I have experienced that a subtle change sometimes can hardly be expressed with words and yet it transforms a life.

 

So, how can I know if a piece is worth being written, if it ultimately makes an impact?
I can’t.
I can only feel if something speaks to me, that something wants to be written and sit down and write. I can trust that if I write it with my heart and intuition involved it will ultimately serve someone.

 

And so I did.