Shower Thoughts, Stepping Back, and Learning Toward Wisdom

“Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day. You fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way.” –Pink Floyd, Time 

 Experiencing Wisdom and WITHness from Within. 

 Withness is the profound expression of listening, helping, and learning alongside a Client. For Process Consultants, this means that we cannot be ahead of the client, pulling them toward something. In the same way, we cannot be behind the Client, pushing them toward something. 

This means that the Process Consultant must be aware of themselves and where they are. Can you imagine walking next to someone without knowing where you are? It would be impossible! 

One of the ways Process Consultants do this is through learning in partnership. That kind of learning helps us remain alongside our Clients. Process Consulting also calls us to learn toward wisdom, to learn to exchange, and to learn toward posterity. All these forms of learning require space and reflection—a slowing down to ask, “What am I learning?” or “What am I noticing?” Learning in this way can only be done in a non-anxious space.  True WITHness always requires a non-anxious presence.

So how do we, as Process Consultants, remain non-anxious? One of the best ways is to slow down and take moments to check in with ourselves, reflect, and allow thoughts to wander. In other words, we Process Consultants must practice WITHness with ourselves by building time for reflection into our routines.  

Process Consultants need time to process and reflect on what they’ve learned with their Clients, their careers, their families, and even how to create a life worth living. To practice WITHness with ourselves, we must cultivate space for that. If we are scheduled back-to-back every day, Process Consultants are not WITH themselves.   

Fortunately, we do not need to adopt a daily 2-hour meditation practice to create this kind of space.  

In one of its blogs, the Mira shower company pays homage to the brightest ideas ever born in the shower. The list ranges from hit songs to award-winning novels, patents, and business plans. All of us have likely experienced that moment when a thought has eluded us and finally arrives in the shower, while walking the dog, or when in a group and someone says something that sparks an idea. These spaces of WITHness are only sometimes planned, significant, or deliberate. Sometimes frittering and wasting hours in an offhand way is exactly what we need. At other times, there are stretches in our lives where reflection doesn’t happen or takes a back seat to other priorities. The challenge is figuring out how to create space for it to return in the right season.  

In his book Step Back: Bringing the Art of Reflection Into Your Busy Life, Joseph L. Badaracco Jr. offers design principles to bring reflection into practice. He argues that reflection comes in many forms and spaces, creating a mosaic of reflection for life. Those principles are: 

1. Aim for Good Enough—Adopting a practice of reflection doesn’t require perfection. We don’t have to strive for ideal. Instead, when they find routines, practices, and space to reflect some of the time, Process Consultants can remain in that non-anxious space, even with themselves.  
2. Downshift Occasionally—Reflection requires pause. As the Mira blog celebrates, many discoveries and creations come from allowing our minds to run free. 
3. Ponder Your Hard Issues—This principle suggests taking a step back and considering problems or situations from several different angles to gain a fuller understanding. It sounds a little like Triple Loop Learning and Learning Toward Wisdom. 

 Last month, Scott Hackman encouraged us to build the muscle of discomfort and to ask questions of our Clients: 

What did we learn? 

What’s the takeaway? 

What growth have we witnessed? 

What mistakes were made? What was learned from them? 

What do we have now? 

What is evidence of the shifts we have experienced? 

These are great questions for Process Consultants to ask themselves as they build time for reflection into their practice and demonstrate WITHness to themselves. 

Written by Elizabeth Topliffe

Senior Consultant at Design Group International

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If you'd like to write a blog post for the Society for Process Consulting, please e-mail Lon L. Swartzentruber at lons@designgroupintl.com.