Life Begins When Fear Ends

I saw this on a bumper sticker earlier today: Life Begins When Fear Ends. To me, it has meaning. As I began to shed my dialogue of fear, and all of the fearful voices that inhabited my heart for so long, I became able to connect to other people in more meaningful ways.

When we learn to listen and talk from the heart, the entire dialogue changes. And… it can be a little scary. Imagine you’re going to shoot for the moon, and they tell you you’re going to have to do it without the booster rockets. It’s that kind of scary. Why? Because our whole artform up until now, in conversation, has been to protect and shield our heart. You may think I’m kidding. Try it. The next person you meet, consider what it would take to tell them exactly what you are thinking. In a kind and sensitive way, respecting who they are and their personal boundaries as well as your own, consider saying what’s on your mind.

In Africa, I watched two men having a long dialogue together. They were each speaking different dialects, but they seemed to be understanding each other just fine. When they were done, I asked the man standing nearest to me, “Do you speak each other’s language?” He said, “No.” They had been talking fast, no gaps or hesitations in the dialogue. I was astonished that they didn’t know each other’s language, but could keep up with each other. I asked him, “Then how did you understand each other?” He put his hand on his heart and said, “We listened from here.”

I work on a small board of directors for a little, tiny organization that helps put together scholarships and educational opportunities for students. What we do isn’t rocket science. It just takes a willingness to be involved, and enough energy for participation. Essentially, we are doing a good thing and helping people. Our meetings should be relatively effortless, fairly light-hearted, the meeting of friends who are working together on a common project.

Why then, at our last board meeting, did I find myself talking to people who were still living with their shutters down in a “bunkered mentality”? Why was someone defending their turf, or taking “ownership” of the meeting, when our common goal was to be working together to create better opportunities for the students? My rather insubordinate thought was that the meeting might have gone a lot quicker if we had gotten out of the power player’s agenda and just talked together for 10-15 minutes, to agree what it was going to take to get the job done.

Even coming together for “feel good” projects, we often bring our sense of “this is mine” or “I’m right and you’re wrong,” and of course the famous “you’re not going to do it right so I have to tell you how to do it,” into the meeting. The concept of collaboration looks good from a distance, but when we get close to it, we cannot figure out how to do it. Developing enough emotional security, enough of a sense of ourself and what we are there for, that level of emotional work hasn’t been done yet. In our executive leadership teams and our boardrooms, we talk about “consensus decision-making” and team-building, but the actual moment of truth, letting go of control and being a participant instead of a decision-maker, is still elusive.

I invite you, next time you are sitting through yet another endless meeting at work, or a “household discussion about the finances,” to consider what sort of energy you are carrying. Are you happy to be there? Are you supportive of the core team and what you are achieving in this meeting? Do you feel heard? Listened to from the heart? When you had opportunities to speak, did you speak from the heart? We each have to have the courage to step forward as individuals and work from the heart, before we can hope to ask the group to join us. Yet each time we do, the meetings and the dialogues get a little bit better.

When we take the time to listen from our heart, things can change. When we take the time to speak and listen from our heart, we can reach across dialectical borders, ideological borders, and physical borders. In short, we can reach across the great separations that divide us as human beings. Trusting your own emotional balance, and trusting that the other people there with you will be their authentic selves, this is an opportunity to step into conversations with the courage required to lead from the heart.