Sitting together at a table, the two of us had met to move from an idea to a project. My friend started with sharing how she liked the openness of the space and the way it felt peaceful. It felt like a space where time had slowed down.
And that’s what we did.
Instead of jumping onto the idea and seeing how we could make it happen, she invited us both into a reflection of how we would want to work together. Following her guidance, we described the posture we both wanted to take up. The openness, the curiosity, the willingness to engage in and be clear about discomfort and how we’d see discomfort as a signal for growth. We shared how our relationship would be a reflection of what was happening between us. How it would influence groups we would work with and how these groups would impact our relationship. It meant to see our energies, the ones we would receive, share and create as well as the energy resulting out of our work.
We thought about the ways we think and benefit from reflection. How we wanted to combine it with a momentum towards action, without becoming busy for business sake. Which lead to integrating the impact of emotions in their multiple facets of bodily reactions, emotions, and feelings inviting us to see beyond reflections and actions. Staying with or the other being a way to hide from the other.
The openness and quietness of the space were helping us to open to one another and share ideas. The result of our shared ideas was an alliance between us which started to emerge. We’ll certainly revisit it when one or the other discomfort and new clarity will appear. But what we had after something like 45 minutes were the foundations of an alliance.
One we started using immediately thereafter to start seeing what the idea we had set off to work upon meant to us.
Based on my experience from previous projects I could see how the last part of the meeting had been much more effective based on the alliance we had established. Instead of defining, or seeking to “reverse engineer” an idea, we looked for the potential.
