Principles of Generativity
Apply these guidelines, principles, and fundamentals:
- during conversations,
- before and after coaching sessions,
- in your day-to-day between sessions,
- in your inquiries, homework, journaling, reporting progress, assessment, celebrations, and goal setting.
Be a full participant.
Stay present with your whole experience during the coaching session.
Be an embodied listener and speaker.
This becomes difficult when we are speaking over the phone or computer. Distractions are ever-present; carve out a dedicated, uninterrupted time for the call; focus and center during the call.
Be curious.
Adopt an attitude of bold curiosity for what is emerging.
Attend to more than the words.
When listening, go deeper than the words that are being spoken, including your own words. Listen to our expression of our human condition that is presenting itself in the listening space.
Attend to your own reactions.
If you find yourself having any resistance or negative reaction to what someone is saying, take that as a signpost that is meant for you, not as a signal to challenge or fix the other’s perspective. The same is true for overly positive reactions in yourself. Do not diminish the other person’s experience by one-upmanship of the same kind of resonant experience in yourself.
Use your imagination.
As you are listening in this way, allow your imagination to bring up images and thoughts that do not necessarily feel connected to what is being said conventionally. Conventional discussions have a form that is not adequate to the imagination. You will be surprised how often the imagination will supply just the right piece.
Give time. Take time.
Allow the speaker to take the time to finish, to allow the energy of the speaking to flow through and complete itself. Trust that the group can offer you enough space and time for the energy of your speaking to enter the space and complete itself. Observing conversations as cycles of energetic dances that flow freely into and out of the space is a fantastic practice for learning more about the human condition.
Trust the natural pace of language.
Trust the ebb and flow of speech-act energy in the space. Do not hold back, do not restrict, do not hurry, do not disengage. Stay present, stay in the flow of the energy where it wants to go, how it paces itself.
Our meaning schemas are unique to us as well as unique to the moment. This richness can sometimes bear too heavy and we may resort to conventional, mindless discourse. The task is to stay present and come back to presence, again and again. Acknowledging our mind wandering off, falling out of presence, we can always come back to the present by sharing what we are experiencing, as these habits of mind come up.
Spontaneity with all of the human condition is a wonderful capacity to develop and practice.
Engage.
Show up, participate full-heartedly, push your own edges, share your insights and wisdom, and celebrate when inspiration and meanings arise. Observe and understand your impact on the world, and the impact of your engagement on self and other.
Practice, enact, embody, experience, and learn experientially by bringing your full potentials into your whole life. Your authenticity, spontaneity, generosity, vulnerability, integration, vitality, presence, responsibility, ownership, mindfulness, compassion, acceptance, curiosity, and patience.
By manifesting your potentialities observe what arises; trust, safety, sharing, participation, harmony, resonance, kindness, respect, service, affection, genuineness, expansion, spaciousness, expression, and imagination.
Practice inclusivity through welcoming, hospitality, valuing, inviting, allowing, completing, and giving.
Give support, care, intimacy; cheer up, celebrate.
Expand your consciousness through inquiry, insight, healing, growth, blessing, contact with the present, and meeting fully what arises. Extend the invitation.
Speak and sing your medicine, give us your gift, and shine your highest self.
Listen for and receive other’s medicine, other’s gifts, other’s light.
The conversation is created by someone speaking and someone listening. This conversation creates a transformative space. The listening is the cup, the container, the alchemical vessel that will hold the energies of transformation. An opening for intimacy with cosmos; touching the real; the most radical act of love. Be present to what emerges; receive and give.
Take a step forward; enact the new. Temporarily suspend your certainties, and surrender to the ways of cosmos. Maybe even see through the illusion of control. Get a scent of flow, maybe. Let the fresh pour in. The pain in the moment may be real, but carrying it over to the next moment is optional. Fear of discomfort may be more harmful than the discomfort of the encounter.
With not knowing comes uneasiness, discomfort, worry even; this is expected. These feelings are also close friends with excitement. Watch closely and you may invite joy into your experiencing of new ways.
Master yourself, become an exemplar for us all; of renewal and rejoice; of the greater potentials we may all bring into our lives. Thank You.
Carrying over burdens of the moment.
Tension and conflict, difficulty to include, not accepting what seems other; these all arise in our experience of self, other, world. We can attach, averse, or neither attach nor averse with the content of our experience. And then the next moment we are again free to choose. What you carry over is what will fill up your life. Choose.
Learning the new.
The idea of the beginner’s mind is a nice one. It reminds us that we need to make room for new perspectives and alternative ideas to emerge. Suspend our opinions and let go of our fixed ideas, for the moment being, so new learning can occur. Very well put.
Yet, adult learning does not happen in a vacuum. Receptivity is good, discernment, integration, and evolution is better.
Ideas taken to the extreme may not serve their purpose so well anymore. Pragmatic, functional checks and balances need to be in place.
See what works for you, for the benefit of all. Do no harm.
Give voice.
When you give voice to an idea, an insight, an intuition, a desire, a resonant feeling; it becomes an object of interest, something you can now shine a light on, inquire into, weigh and measure, take on and take off. You can choose to practice and embody it or put it aside for now. Bring forth your wisdom; let it complete itself. Express and contribute, reveal and enrich all of our lives with your abundance; with your authentic self.
Collaborate.
This is the natural choice. The idea of competition is the most unnatural and absurd of all modern ideas, and people have bought it. Rivalry and envy I understand, it is real, we have stories of it. Cane and Abel are not in competition, one is overcome by hatred and envy, so he kills his brother, so we’re told.
In the arena, games are played; there it is where we show our best selves, to inspire and honor the whole human race. It is never about I being the winner, it is all about pleasing the gods, showing what we all have in us, as a human species.
Collaborate, because it is what your organism does anyway.
Make commitments.
Make and renew 30-day commitments, announce, write down, and follow them; get clear on the next steps, always know the next step. Be watchful, habit structures will take over, silently, when you are tired, when you are hungry, when you are overloaded and overwhelmed. Be mindful. Know yourself, choose yourself, give yourself.
Goals.
Set specific, actionable goals. Take consistent action on your goals. Accept challenges, and stretch beyond familiar, comfortable ways of being and doing. Know your strengths, know your values.
With your aspirations in mind, your strengths and values in heart, stretch far enough to grow and near enough to come through.
Neither boredom nor breakdown will serve your purpose. Get support. Grow your network, your community.
Share your leadership and learnings, pay it forward.
Give support and give encouragement, empower others to become their own best selves, to achieve their own goals.
As you flourish, be a facilitator of others’ flourishing. Share your powers to activate your powers.
Become who you are.
Strengths and Values.
When we say, “be true to yourself”, or, “bring forth your authentic self”; we are pointing to the possibility of realizing our virtues and character strengths, our potentialities and capabilities. When we say, “be clear on what matters to you most, in life and business”; we are pointing to the importance of bringing our values into our issue at hand, to bear on the task at hand. Positive psychology does guide us in expanding our psychological capacities; positive organizational behavior does guide us in expanding our psychological capital; ACT does guide us in expanding our psychological flexibility. Capacities, talents, capabilities; a hierarchy and layers of human potentialities. A wonderful journey of unfolding. A lifelong journey. A life lived well. Emerging, unfolding.