On Defenses

All our defenses are strategies which represent the continuation of protective mechanisms that were the highest possible self-protective response to challenging situations earlier in our life.

As practitioners our primary mandate is to respond with skillful means to these defenses which includes, but is not limited to, understanding the intrinsic wisdom and functionality of that which can look like derailers later in life; offering the executive an environment in which they are seen and reflected in the wholeness that awaits underneath these acts of hiding and shielding and deflecting; and to offer such unconditional love to leaders that their need for these protective habits systematically melts and heals.

That requires us, first and foremost, not to personalize any acts of resistance, defiance, cynicism or stuckness. Our sense of our own efficacy and inner meaning-making cannot be in any way based on how we are received or how immediately and overtly our invitations and interventions appear to be.

It also means we learn to embody a calibrated rhythm that can refine and modify our interactive style, degree of confrontation versus nurturing and oscillate in levels of depth informed by the immediate data, signals and presence of the executive or group in front of us.

We also need a sophisticated understanding of all the myriad ways that such self-protection shows up intra-personally in hacks to self-contact.

Such a lexicon includes: distraction, addiction, numbness and busyness in executive lifestyle. In the relational domain we might notice that conversations take place in levels of abstraction, constant generalizations. We might hear extrapolations that too swiftly universalize immediate experiences; mentalization; profound experiences being described trivially; disembodiment and speed in which meaningful comments are made without breathe, contact or intimacy, and uni-directional communication in which they are delivering messages outwardly but may in no way seem receptive to input, avoiding listening to be touched.

We have many tools to help offer the alchemical restoration to these interactive habits embedded in modern corporate culture: Precision of perception and commentary; attunement; mutuality; deep Listening; slowness and spaciousness; presence; our own self-expression; vulnerability and extending vast kindness. We also gift, with patience, our capacity for, and invitation to, higher valence emotional expression.

Most acutely we can bring an immediacy to moment to moment interactions speaking our emergent observations and offering our felt-sense of being with them. This alive current can break the entrainment of the distance and routinization that organizations live within. In so doing we bring the high, healing heat of Love. When we hear someone's truest song we bless it to resound into life.