"The past is never dead. It's not even past" - William Faulkner
…and looking away doesn’t make it so.
The stories that we tell ourselves which shape our lives, our teams, our cultures, and our results might seem set but by opening ourselves to empathic connection, reflection and new perspectives we can create new emotions, more helpful stories, additional resources, and new possibilities. We are the living embodiment of our reflected pasts so by developing a new relationship with (and understanding of) the past, with less judgement, we can start to carry a new version of it in our hearts and what was once fixed might start to return to flow allowing different pasts, presents and futures to emerge.
How often in organisations do we run a quick lessons-learnt or retrospective session dedicating a single hour to the learnings of a team or group covering a period of anything from six months to a year of their lives, then proceed to lock up the output in a document so that we can point at it and discard our thoughts of real change just as quickly?
If this sounds like your team or organisation, don’t feel too bad. This seems to be our western cultural norm. We carry a bias for action, a loyalty to the future, regardless of what came before, or maybe because of what came before.
Many of our survival patterns are carried through the generations with great loyalty and without further consideration of whether they still serve as they once did.
Finding the keys to the future
If we were to stand in the origin of this cultural pattern, and our loyalty to historic blindness and emotional connection, how far back might we have to travel and how many locks would we have to open?
Maybe to how the west was won, when people travelled from across the globe to The New World? Back to the days when people spread across what we currently call America taking what they found, fighting for what they claimed, displacing and killing those who had existed there for generations? Or maybe before that to their European lands of origin, where they had resided peacefully before their ancestors were the displaced or the persecuted and their labours went unrewarded, and their families starved as the rich or violent reaped the rewards of their labours?
In these stories of our origins, looking back with open hearts was painful. Our ancestors lost loved ones, they made unspeakable sacrifices, and they wronged each other deeply. So maybe it is not surprising that looking back, accepting responsibility, and opening our hearts to connection and real change is something we culturally lean away from leaving us to continue picking up new patterns, limiting our possibilities further, carrying our accumulated pasts silently with us rather than leaving them to rest.
Surfacing these secret systemic patterns and unspoken rules in our quick-fire lessons-learnt sessions is unlikely, because of course we are still following the secret patterns of looking-without-seeing while we focus on the obvious, dooming ourselves to repeat the past until we recognise it.
Alternatively, as systemic coaches we can respectfully challenge these cultural norms and choose to step into the discomfort to craft sessions that encourage our clients to respect the principles of how the systems they belong in actually work; sessions that enable people past and present to feel valued and respected, while creating awareness on deeper levels without us having to explicitly name the work we are doing. These sessions just feel true, they feel right, and in this way we support people to find their place, work with appropriate authority, and to feel more confident and aligned with each other, with their predecessors and those yet to come, and across their three centres of intelligence from their gut, to their heart, and their head.
This is how we serve the system, the past and the future, and help our clients to do the same.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
And of course maybe this is not the origin of the pattern, maybe it is more recent, more ancient, or both. That is an inquiry I will leave with you.
And maybe you feel drawn to look, listen, and lead by different patterns and limitations….
At Agile Principles, we are experts in supporting leaders to listen to the systems shaping their results on deeper levels, so that they too create transformative results. Get in touch if you would like to see beyond the obvious.
Founder, Exec & Transformation Coach