The
lonely excitement of pioneering- Tim Goodenough For me the paradoxes of the mind are one of the most interesting aspects of the personal development world. I remember hearing Michael Hall being interviewed during coach training in 2003, where he spoke about his identity as a writer. Then later in 2007, he defined himself not as being anything (in terms of an identity), just a guy who could do "some stuff." Some stuff indeed. I remember sitting there thinking, I need to de-identify myself with my roles that I play, and just BE, and then maybe I too, could do "some stuff." Identity has been a fascinating sticking point for me in terms of my growth as a writer, speaker, trainer and coach. What I have realised in my last 2 years of Active Pioneering, is that I needed to first accept the role or identity of pioneer, to face the reality of what it is. The reality of excitement, curiosity, pressure, fear, stress and expectation - the reality that I had created for myself. Now, having accepted that identity, I have enjoyed the process of stepping away from it, and being curious as to how I had created it, to see if those frames or meanings are still serving me now. To de-identify myself, I first needed to accept the identity. I needed mental 'training wheels' to mentally collide with an identity, before I could jump up, dust myself off and step back from it. I hope to develop my mental skills to be able to miss out this 'training wheels' step in the future, but for now this is where I am. In the coaching industry we are all pioneers to some extent, my distinction between active and passive pioneering is simply an active pioneer challenges everything to find the answer for now, whereas a passive pioneer challenges themselves in applying an existing theory to find new distinctions for the current context. Passive pioneering provides the gift of revealing your own limiting frames and assumptions, as the theory has been proven, however you as the conduit or implementer of that theory are the area that needs to be fine tuned. The loneliness of active pioneering is that you never actually know if your new theory is limiting, or your own belief structure or frames are the limitation. You figure it out as you go. And you become very used to making mistakes, big and small. So having only started to get my head around this concept after 2 years, I would like to acknowledge the tremendous contribution Michael Hall has made by pioneering, out in front, for well over a decade (Its now being 13 years since the Meta-States model was created.) Thank you Michael, between you and Michelle Duval I would never have had half the useful tools for pioneering that I need. |
© Coaching Unity 2014 - All Rights Reserved