One of the books that marked my childhood most deeply was Bernard Werber’s ‘Les fourmis‘ (the ants). The book took me along a colony of ants. It followed three independent-minded ants on their way to discovering the mystery of the killing finger.
The intriguing novel interlaced excerpts of a fictitious ‘encyclopaedia of the absolute and relative knowledge’ (or so). Those excerpts brought up anecdotes about human life. One of these anecdotes related the story of someone who ended up being trapped in a refrigerated truck. The unfortunate passenger described his slow agony progressively losing his senses and life as the cold was seizing him. Except, the encyclopaedia fragment revealed, refrigeration was not on. The person had simply convinced himself that it was on and he WAS FEELING the cold as if it’d been on.
This anecdote shows the power of the will. And of course it’s fictitious, but it doesn’t take much imagination or experience to realise how powerful our will is. Grit is revered for good reasons.
Will is what separates our life from mediocrity to grandeur. As the saying goes: “Do you have a life? Or are you just living?”, or as William Wallace would put it: “everyone dies but not every man really lives”.
Our willpower can open doors.
It can help us get over our fears and make our most amazing uniqueness come to life and shine through.
Or it can be what is preventing us from achieving anything. Limiting beliefs. A straight road to a mediocre (un-)life.
My Liberating Structures (LS) partners and I are embarking on a new adventure, a ‘learning journey’ that will help LS practitioners deepen their practice and find solutions to big or cyclical challenges over the course of six months.
One of the stepping stones on this creative exploration of liberating journeys is the set of limiting beliefs that hold us back, that crush our dreams and shackle us in prisons of our own making.
What are some beliefs limiting our ability to change the way we collaborate?
Jeremy, Nadia and I covered a number of these limiting beliefs. I’m pretty sure they will also blog about it. Meanwhile, here is my extended list of limiting beliefs that are in the way of collaborating better…
- Why fix something that isn’t broken? – and I’m usually on this side with this one, but sometimes it can also mean that ‘we don’t know what we don’t know’. Like no one could perceive the value of having a smartphone before they became popular and people started seeing what was possible with them. Ditto with all these stale meetings, insipid collaborations, fake cooperations… It could be so much more…
- All that change sounds like too much, aren’t we busy enough as is? To me this sounds like the same excuse we see on this cartoon on the right… Simply not acceptable, especially if the change puts people in the centre
- My colleagues will never accept this! Just try them! And if it fails but it feels like you’re failing for something that matters, get up again, fail again, fail again better, right?
- Who am I to tell people we should do things differently? Well, because you are the one that spotted it! And change can start at any stage, from any place, from anyone. Don’t worry too much, try it, and better ask for forgiveness than for permission 😉
- We can’t afford this, it’s too expensive! Except it isn’t, and rather all the wasted hours of bad or no collaboration are costing a lot more to companies and people the world around – just calculate how much a so-so one-hour meeting costs and it will put the cost of good collaboration in another perspective!
- Sorry but our culture is different. Ah, the ever-present ‘not invented here syndrome’. Yes it needs to be addressed (if people don’t feel like the initiative comes from them or at least corresponds to their reality, they won’t play ball) but actually if my experience across 5 different continents and various industries, types of groups etc. has taught me anything, it’s that there’s a lot more in common across all groups than we’d like to believe and culture is often thrown as an excuse to do nothing… No culture is worth ‘not considering’ something…
- Ooops, but this is going to make a lot of people uncomfortable… Yes, right, let’s just keep on sleeping, and let others sleep undisturbed! No one should be getting out of that comfort zone, absolutely (NOT). And you know what? Everyone will be happy when they will be made redundant because the company’s going bust for lack of ‘balls’ to stick its neck out of its comfort jersey… No, my friend, simply no!
- We just don’t have the skills for this! Well, how about you start developing them? Here and now? Baby steps! Keep going at it and as Atomic Habits‘ James Clear would have it, if you improve your practice by 1% every day for a year, by the end of the year you will have improved your practice 37 times. What are we waiting for? Technical excellence that’s the easy – if sometimes long – bit. Will is the difficult part, nothing else!
As you see, there are many obstacles we are setting on our way to happy, fruitful, wholesome, transformative collaborations.
Why? That’s for another day.
The point is: we are creating the walls of our own hell. It’s really about time we started to focus on the beautiful plains, fields, orchards and forests behind the walls.
As Jonathan Courtney at AJ&Smart would put it, how about we transform our limitations into ‘how about?’?
In a one-on-one with Never Done Before / Workshops work wonderful hostess Myriam Hadnes once asked me something like ‘what would you do if everything was possible?’ It opened an incredible surge of energy and ambition in me and so I know just how transformative our exploration of life on this planet can be, simply by believing.
And even though I might encounter real -not imagined- barriers further down the line, I’m willing to live by my dreams…
How about we all start to do that?
Related stories
- Itinerary of a (meeting) change maker
- When Liberating Structures becomes a lot more than ‘a toolbox’ and reveal their true transformative power…
- Structuring our everyday liberation, because facilitation magic is not just for the workplace
- New aspirations for new world, new me, new we, new then…
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