Flowers

I like to leave ideas open.

Like opening a room where we can have the type of conversations we've been missing. We're in the middle of February, and while here in Brussels, people are well aware of vitamin D deficiency, quality conversation deficiency is vastly overlooked.

When's the last time you had a proper three hours + conversation with a dear friend? A conversation where you both struggle with all your might as if walking a tightrope, well aware of each other's sensibilities, but still choose to go whole heart in and to keep on trying and trying again until the four hearts and brains have finally shared all of their versions, said their peace, and feel like they've somehow graduated to the next level of connection?

I picked up the phone, paintbrush in hand, and he went straight to the nerve of the strain we'd been experiencing. “You're catching me off guard,” I said, to win a few seconds of time, “and I've had wine.” “That's even better.”

I'd just come back from a relatively quick first date (pleasant conversation, with a convenient time limit), where the bar tender had been especially generous with my serving of orange wine.

“Hah, in vino veritas is what you're saying?” “Yeah dude.” In we went. The highlight for me was his introduction to a rebuttal move in the first quarter: “I'm going to say this slightly defensively.” I smiled: if you needed one phrase to exemplify what caring for a relationship while being fully authentic looks like, you're welcome. Credits to him. Felt like an unexpected flower bouquet with a color palette picked just for me.

Very happy to have a solid excuse to share my thoughts through writing again: the visibility excuse.

Visibility about unresolved questions invites participation. Visibility from little stories invite connections and reflections. Visibility about value direction invites collaborations.

I am told that for people to understand the type of support I offer to relational ecosystems, it helps to have access to my thinking style in a non-threatening, or non-committed, manner. What I love about creative thoughts-feelings-analysis condensation exercises is that they feel like the second best way to catch up with all these other incredible friends of mine that I cannot realistically have three hour + conversations with regularly. If I can both reconnect with them in fresh and efficient way and potentially make new connections at the same time, amazing!

The idea of tension between personal, vulnerable stories and visibility to potential professional connections is understandable, and refutable.

While the last post touched on the idea of engaging with a classical therapy approach, it left out the fact that I have explored a wide variety of professional support from the very beginning of my work as a conflict resolution practitioner: if you're going to stand in the full storm of other people's emotions, tensions and distress; you better have your own inner storms in close, extremely close watch. One hour and a half of reflective writing every morning for the past ten years is a key component, but far from the only one.

A practitioner who pretends to be above this will struggle to earn my trust.

Bullet-proof confidence as a successful marketing strategy? Sure. If your definition of success is exploiting vulnerabilities for short-term gain, it is tried and tested indeed. A widely accepted definition.

My definition of success is to participate in nourishing the type of world I want to live in, in a way that ensures said participation keeps on growing in quality.

I don't know what that's going to look like, but apparently, documenting the process is part of the process.

You might end up getting sick of that word.

At the co-working space I'm at today, I semi over-heard two office attire men across the lunch room; one of them managed to place the word “operational” about six times in the span of three or four sentences. I later moved to a spot I thought would be quieter and a phone conversations went on about “products, products products;” I felt like I was in some parallel version of The Jetsons cartoon or some kind of satire, went to sit in an actual quiet area, and now here I am: “process process process.”

My cue to leave words for now, images calling.