When I started to think about and engage in mindfulness practices, I wasn’t sure what to expect. There was a lot of talk of being present, mindful, in the here and now, stepping into awareness, etc.
Hearing about these ideas made sense to me, and I could see how they were relevant for leaders. A few years later, I become aware of how little I understood these concepts at the time. The more I explored them, the less it seemed possible to connect them with some personal experience.
What I was missing was instructions on how to get there and what I would find there.
To be honest, there are none. Whatever instructions we receive, there is little indication of how it works or how the experience can be perceived.
It’s through practice that whatever instructions received become real and usable.
Nevertheless, Transactional Analysis and its ego states provide a theory of personality and an idea of what being present can look like.
The most important point is that being present is related to reality, and more specifically, the reality of the given moment. Being present thus cannot be about being happy or persistently ‘full of the joys of spring’; reality involves being appropriate to whatever is the situation.
Within the ego state model, one of the ego states is called Adult it is the one concerned with the here and now, the other two are called Child and Parent. The Child and Parent ego states can be considered as two different ways to memorize experiences we’ve had. May they be in our early childhood, or just an ego state ago. What this means is that at any given moment we are in one of the three ego states, either we reconnect with an existing experience, or we are open to connect with whatever there is in the moment and in the reality of the here and now. Once the moment is past, that experience is memorized in either the Child or Parent ego state “storage”.
Reconnecting with past experiences as memorized in the Child or Parent ego states can be a way to blur or replace the experience of the here and now. Being able to step into the Adult ego state, on the other hand, may be described and perceived as ‘responsive’, ‘alive’, ‘vibrant’, ‘in good contact’, ‘spontaneous’, and ‘autonomous’. All of which are attributes one can experience when being present. It doesn’t necessarily imply a lot of activity, it mainly enables an appropriate reaction to whatever is the situation. It includes being aware and connected to one’s own emotions and letting them go. It includes being aware of one’s thoughts as they are passing by. It also means to have a behavior that is coherent with one’s thoughts and emotions without being subject to them.
