IS: The huge payoff from Noticing & Naming
Upcoming events:
- Sunday July 20: Community Hub Call 19.3 for members
- Tuesday July 22: The Oasis
- Friday July 25: public IS Connection Call
Last week's newsletter was "Wow (digesting DPS enthusiasm)" and the Community Hub session was titled "Fractal scopes of relating" (aka "The fun-house of perspective-taking").
Noticing and naming. I notice that I feel an urge to convey the importance of this core skill, and I'll name it in writing to you today. The words "noticing and naming" point to a simple move in the mechanics of execution, but can be so challenging in some contexts that entire organizations can get utterly stuck from the lack of being able to do it.
Why is this hard? Well,
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” -Carl Jung
and I also wanted to quote something which in my memory goes like
"what you cannot name will control you from the shadows"
...but I appear to have misremembered or invented it. Nyah, it's true despite not being a citation.
Noticing requires being attuned to the subtle signals that our embodied wisdom is producing, the results of our whole-system cognition. Naming requires safety, courage, and trust that whatever happens next will turn out alright.
When "noticing and naming" can flow, everything else flows too! When you either can't notice or can't name a dynamic - in yourself or in a group - the whole system immediately gets blocked, awkward, and starts spinning. I'm finding this to be a remarkably strong correlation with overall human system health. So much relational capacity is necessary in order to enable this kind of flow, but it can enable not just 10X results but results that otherwise just cannot be achieved at all without it.
That impact means that surprisingly large amounts of effort can be worth dedicating to establishing it! But it can be tricky to actually stabilize that culture, so it's risky and costly to try if the capacity doesn't exist. That capacity is a developmental unlock for individuals, and a space-holding unlock for groups.
The flow is the underlying thing that I'm following and relying upon. Noticing and naming is my best recommendation for spending the maximum possibly fraction of time in flow. It either gets us back into a state of optimal flow, or it helps us move away from situations where that's inaccessible.
Noticing and naming can require significant amounts of healing/waking/growing-up, and then, is almost all that's needed to quickly recover flow and thus maintain it. Life is flow, and flowing is living.
Cheers,
James