A day off (sort of)
Tomorrow I’m getting up at 5:30am, and I have decided that I want to take a day off today.
It’s been amazing writing every day, and there are very few days left of my commitment. It feels like one of those so close yet so far commitments. I’ll almost be able to say that I wrote every day, but not quite. My eyelids are heavy this evening, my body still coming down from running on anxiety and adrenaline for half of last week. The next two days are big ones. I feel ready for them, but I also know they are going to ask me to utilise a particular skill set, one that asks me to be present and attentive, supportive and discerning, grounded and honest. I’m heading to London first thing to run a full day workshop on Navigating Uncertainty tomorrow as a facilitator for my friend Hannah’s self-care and resilience consultancy, Bird, and on Wednesday I’m running a course on Navigating Uncertainty with the same group. Having just done a full day of facilitation for her last week, which I wrote about, I am feeling very lucky indeed to get to do another two days this week.
I feel so lucky that I get to teach this work. I don’t ever dread doing it, and the conversations that take place in the organisations I facilitate in are always so rich, vulnerable and REAL. About six or seven years ago I read a great book called The Big Leap, which is all about finding your ‘Zone of Genius’. When you’re operating within it, author Gay Hendricks says, you really don’t feel like you’re working at all. It’s a sense of flow that is almost present when you’re in your Zone of Excellence, but with an extra sprinkling of that magical feeling that is so rare and so precious.
Anyway, the point is that doing this work feels as close to my ZoG as I’ve ever been. I don’t want to say it’s easy, because I don’t take it for granted at all. I don’t switch off and just get on with it. I’m present the entire way through, even though from the outside, I often appear to not be doing very much at all other than sitting in a chair while people talk to each other. But the whole time I’m up at the front of the room, I’m wondering how to phrase or frame a teaching point, I’m monitoring the feeling in the room, I’m paying attention to who’s engaging and who, if anyone, is switching off. I’m checking my assumptions, concentrating, making links between moments we’ve shared previously, thinking of pertinent examples to hold, and generally trying to emit with my thoughts and my being the sense that this is a safe space for people to take off their ‘work face’ and just be real, vulnerable human beings whose stories, emotions, doubts, questions, triumphs and worries are all welcome.
I ran this particular two day course last July in the same charity, and it was pretty special. So tonight, as I came on here to share that I’m taking a day off, I was thinking and wondering about the connections that are going to be forged tomorrow, about the stories that are going to be shared, about our common humanity. Earlier this evening while walking with Molly around Palmeira Square in Hove, I noticed myself doing my “before I facilitate” thing of thinking about how I’m going to set up the space, how I’m going to introduce myself, and how to frame the concepts we are going to be exploring.
I realised as soon as I hit the second sentence tonight that I would in fact be writing around 500 words or so tonight. They came after I’d given myself full permission not to. Or maybe on some level I had to trick myself. Maybe I refuse, so close to the 31st, to break the chain and so, realising my tiredness, I just coaxed myself on here with the promise that I would be simply announcing I was taking a day off. Once I had just started, of course, all these words came out.
This one is kind of like a journal entry I suppose. Maybe that’s okay. There’s no real parameters at the moment other than to simply write. So that is what I’m doing and that is what I’ve done. Time for bed now. Tomorrow is a big day.
Thank you, as always, for reading. It means more to me than you perhaps know.
(Photo by Davies Designs Studio on Unsplash. Thank you, Davies Design Studio.)