Let’s nail down one thing: going through the fire has nothing to do with firefighting. Although your skills as a firefighter would certainly grow, too. Trust me!
So, what is ‘fire’ then? Week by week, day by day we are confronted with situations that shake our solid grounding, when we get confronted by our fears, or meet our young, contracted parts, and we do not feel ourselves enough. Familiar? If yes, just bear with me. However, if you think this never happens to you, still I suggest the same, if you want to know about the hidden dynamics of your team.
We live in a world that is built on quick fixes, reacting to symptoms instead of taking time to look for the real causes and then take bold actions. A medical example: diabetes and high blood pressure has become our modern pandemic, affecting billions of people, taking a huge part of state medical expenditure, since the most widely used treatment for these diseases are pills. It is always easier to come up with a quick solution that ‘is how we do it’, than take time to investigate the lifestyle of the patient – quality of the sleep, eating habits, the ability to cope with stress, etc. – and motivate him to take the necessary steps, and supporting him in the process. And it is not (just) about the hunger for profit of the pharmaceutical industry. Again, putting it in that box would have been an easy and cheap solution, too. I am sure that the medical system itself is also a part of it. It acts as a firefighter although most of the diseases of our times are a result of our lifestyles rather than inflammations caused by bacteria or viruses that need radical and quick treatments.
My daughter is a dentist, and I was lucky to become one of her ‘diploma work’ during the time of her graduation. Both our patience, compassion, and trust toward each other was tested and very much challenged. I was afraid of the consequences of her potential mistakes, and she was afraid of the whole process, obviously. Although her teachers were around all the time, she needed to make her own decisions moment by moment. To be honest we had no clue what we had signed up for and there was little room for going into discussions about our feelings at that time. We just knew that we had to go through it and trusted the process that in the end everything would be fine.
The whole process lasted much longer than I expected, especially the actual time I needed to spend during the treatments as my daughter was slow and that was understandable. Still, I became more and more nervous and that affected my daughter as well. I remember that once she burst out telling her teacher that she got stuck and did not know how to continue. The answer of her teacher was: We never show our uncertainty in front of our patients, we stay strong!
Wow, that was the moment of awakening for me. I immediately realized the toxic dynamics we were all in, and how it poisoned the atmosphere of a process that could have been a beautiful transformation for all of us! My daughter was growing from a medical student into dentist, leaving dozen years of learning behind, starting to stand on her own feet and showing herself to the world, I was growing from a pure motherhood into an I-level friendship, too, leaving me more space to enjoy ourselves, and maybe the teachers were growing into a new role, as a new colleague was being born. But this whole process was tight, full of frustration from everyone and instead of enjoying the beauty of the transformation, we all suffered.
In other terms we were all growing into the next phase of our lives, an invitation to become more mature and that beautiful evolution was not seen and sensed into, and not acknowledged. The same evening, I discussed the process with my daughter, and we agreed that against all odds, we will be enjoying ourselves, get rid of all the expectations to do it right, we share our feelings honestly and also when we felt lost. This was a game changer. Suddenly and unexpectedly () our relationship matured. We will always be mother daughter for each other but something else was born, too. We became companions on a path that is built on feminine traits but not designed for women only. This is ‘tending and befriending’ our fears and struggles, instead of following the old ‘fake it till you make it’ pattern, and we can be more gentle towards ourselves and each other’s, too.
Heart Centered Leaders have this capacity: they can sense these harmful dynamics within the team and are able to slow down the process to avoid putting more pressure on the structures. It is not easy, but doable. They need to grow a capacity within ourselves first to be able to hold the tension while the whole team can grow into the next level of their maturation. We have been so fixated by finding solutions quickly that we tend to forget about the amazing possibilities these new births can provide. We might not just come up with better and more innovative solutions, but we can get closer to each other, learn new things and look at each other’s with fresh eyes.
Heart Centered Leaders slow down when they feel the fire, they turn inside, use their introspective capacities, then tune into the situation and take their actions very consciously. They create space to listen and spend enough time to let new things be born. If they have fears or hear inner voices of urgency, they take the hands of their immature parts and say: It is all right. I know, it is scary, it IS scary. But we go through it. Step by step, bit by bit. When we feel our fears, we stop and breathe. This is our way. And by the end we will be stronger, brighter and more trustworthy.
We grow up together. And it will be fun.