LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD

I’m sitting in my home office this morning looking out on a lightly snow dusted lawn. Last night was to have been “snowmageddon” as the weather person predicted. And this morning, thankfully, the winds shifted and a much milder version of the storm has occurred.

I’m also thinking about the final lesson in a course I’m designing on Change. I've been on an 8-week journey with 7 lovely people who believed that I offered something that they wanted to learn. They have been my teachers too. They have taught me what they needed to learn and have been wonderful collaborators with my Inner Guide in creating this course.

But now I'm designing the final lesson. It’s hard to believe this group is coming to a close. I have all the skills I have learned about closing, unfinished business, and letting go. And, yet there’s something different that wants to be spoken in the final lesson of this program. It’s about living in the space that’s neither in the past, nor in the future. It’s about being so totally and completely present, that the past no longer defines us and we become empowered to co-create our future…and we write the stories of our lives from a whole new perspective.

Drawing on some of Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s work, we are working on our Big Assumptions. These big, bad assumptions are often core beliefs that operate unconsciously in our lives. They’re fear-based and they are our Protectors. Misguided, perhaps, but Protectors none the less.

These Big Assumptions (or perhaps you recognize this as a rule like “I’ll never allow myself to be seen as incompetent) were often created during a time in our lives when we had few choices about how to cope with overwhelming and unfamiliar events. Because they have become unconscious, even if the specific situation during which they were created no longer exists, this Big Assumption (or rule) may still be operating in our lives.

Once we've made these Big Assumptions conscious we have choices. But here’s something else that I've learned. Sometimes we don’t become aware of these assumptions until later in our adult life. As we’re untangling what we want to keep from what we don’t need in these Big Assumptions, our minds can take us down very self-critical paths.

As we come to this juncture of choices, endings, and new beginnings in our journey, it is here that we recognize the need for a new lens on the story of our lives, the story that has brought us here to this exact moment in time. The story that has shaped who we are – but not who we are to become.

This is the work of our cohort in the weeks to come.