Hello

You don’t plant a seed and then the next day have fruit.  Whether talking about gardening, parenting, or visioning, the same is true.

Nourishment both energetic and material, opportunity, care, consistency, congruence, and mindfulness, are ever-present components in this development, growth process.  And it’s collaborative in the sense that you are being with while guiding forward.

The two biggest elements to true success in these endeavors is to remain mindful and to trust the process.

Applying mindfulness in everyday interactions takes faith. It creates faith too.  Lately my inner mantra has been “you have to trust the process”.  That doesn’t mean you are passive.  It means you are active, open, unattached, mindful and faithful.

Many valued aspects of life take time to develop, prosper, grow to maturity, and flourish.  Working to transform or create a healthy environment for learning or collaborating requires trust in the process and steadfast mindfulness.

And when there is an unexpected loss, or change in direction, the way in which you respond to that loss and integrate that transformation into the plan requires mindful, active interaction.

When working in groups you may find that you thought you had agreement but indeed you did not.

Under those circumstances it is important to go back to the beginning and see where you may have gotten off course from each other.  Usually there is a true agreement that then is affected by other matters or side concerns that are not brought into the situation openly. Other times there is a lack of agreement that has not been clearly identified.

In either case, due to this a slight skew a divergence begins to develop.  If people are not remaining connected and clear that slight skew can become a large divergence resulting in two parties that agreed at the beginning finding themselves with opposite positions.

This kind of divergence can steamroll, start out as slightly different and become very lopsided.  Remember when I talked about throwing pots on a wheel?  The slightest blip of imbalance becomes a wobbling mess because of the centrifugal force of the wheel and the faster you let the speed go the worse it gets.

I see this a lot in business partnerships, relationship partnerships/marriages, and parenting.

The same is true for collaboration in groups, especially if you want people to come to a consensus.  The slightest blip in this circumstance might be discussion outside the group which is called confidential but actually is a skewing of the process through an in-group/out-group behavior;  Or a beginning confusion about goals and priorities can have the same result especially if this is not brought to the fore to be resolved.

If you add speed, ie:  we have to decide immediately, or a lack of time, so that there isn’t sufficient evaluation of paradigms, and figure and ground theory, or investigation of perspective, then you get a greater imbalance in the outcome/product.

Once the process comes back together individuals are hurried and inexact in their decisions.  There is a dissonance of information, and therefore although they think they agree they end up with a lopsided thrown pot.

This usually happens when there are parties that don’t trust the process but want to control the outcome.  This occurs when there is an overall paradigm regarding power and resources that is a habit reaction pattern or a survivor scenario.  These are based on past experiences and interfere with interacting openly and mindfully.

Need to control outcome is based in survivor scenario mentality; trust in the process is based on thriving mentality and mindfulness.

The problem with relating in past time is that you are not actually seeing the situation in front of you.  Present time interaction means the relationship is happening in real-time and related to current events not past events.  It requires fuller, and more complete interactions, gathering information and being open to whatever outcome gets presented not attached to a specific outcome.  This is especially important in all kinds of relationships, decision-making, planning and visioning.

The first step is to slow down the process – when you immediately feel defensive, question yourself – what am I feeling and how is this different?   Then you can try to do some investigation about what the other person is actually saying, meaning, doing and see in present time what you feel.  Try to get a sense of the other person’s motivation, fear or block, or your own.

Sometimes it seems like things are going in the wrong direction yet may be part of the transformative process, because some things need to be broken-down before they can be re-built.

You have to discover if it is that or a skew in the process.

Having a faith or trust in the process allows for and engenders mindfulness and increases your chance for the best outcomes in parenting, relationship and group deicsion-making, planning, and visioning.

Staying present and having more thorough conversations rather than less, will help to continuously define the best step, focus, direction, or procedure while trusting the process and being mindful.

See you tomorrow.

Beth