Agile Living: Open Heads, Hearts & Hands

I’ve been referring to “Agile Living” for a while now, and in conversation with someone the other day, I realized that the words “agile living” are loaded with meaning for me. And I got to thinking that perhaps it’s time for me to unpack the meaning of Agile Living by writing something of an “Agile Living Manifesto.” I also wanted to start our journey of discovery around leadership and contribution by sharing what I’ve discovered so far about the contribution I want to be making in the world, and to tell you a bit about myself and what’s shaped my thinking along the way. This is a long post again – don’t worry, we’ll be back to shorter ones and getting into the experiential stuff I spoke about next week. So here goes…

My story & why I’m so big on Agile Living

I had a very stable, un-eventful & happy childhood growing up in SA. My parents and maternal grandparents were loving and devoted to us kids (4 of us!), and they did everything they could to provide us with safety and stability as we were growing up. I’m really grateful for that, not least because I’ve worked with a lot of children who’ve had the misfortune of growing up in emotionally and physically unsafe families and communities.

We’re a close family, and my parents would love to have us all living just up the road from them. My mother once asked me, “What did I do wrong that all my children want to travel and live in other countries?” Actually, I think it’s what they did right that’s given us the curiosity, courage and practical smarts to seek adventures and to want to squeeze the juice out of life. And perhaps it’s that sense of safety, stability and centered-ness that has enabled me to spend most of my adult life working in high-fear, high-change and high-stress industries, and to opt for a high-change, location-independent lifestyle, while still appreciating the value of a peaceful heart and mind.

I started my career journey in Social Work in South Africa, where I was doing trauma de-briefing counseling. I was working with children and women who were victims of violence and domestic abuse, and I was serving a notoriously violent area in Cape Town called the Cape Flats – an area that’s basically a continuous low-grade war-zone. From there, I spent a few years working in Child Protection in the UK, where I was responsible for assessing risks for children and making recommendations designed to eliminate risks of abuse and neglect and help those children to flourish. I was immersed in high-fear scenarios and it was crucial that I protected the quality of my thinking and observed and assessed each situation objectively without getting caught up in either the fears of the families I worked with or the fears of the department I worked for (and trust me, Child Protection Departments can be pretty paranoid zones!)

You might think that these are extreme scenarios, but experiencing and studying the extreme reveals the patterns that underpin less extreme scenarios. When I returned to Cape Town, I started my consultancy, Mine Your Resources, where I was working with employees of call centres in Cape Town. Call centres are very high-change, high-stress, demanding environments, and most of the employees are women hailing from the Cape Flats area where they have significant stress in their home and community life as a result of social issues such as domestic abuse, substance abuse, gangs, overcrowding and poverty. I began working with private clients who were young professionals and entrepreneurs – high-income earners who faced very different sorts of challenges but struggled with fear and stress just the same. I soon came to understand that stress and fear is not just a social or emotional problem. It’s a business problem – it’s possibly the factor that has the greatest negative impact on performance in the workplace.

In each of these roles, I’ve at times felt the disabling impact of stress and fear on the quality of my thinking, and I’ve witnessed it in the people I’ve worked with and for. I remember how I’d return from a day of listening to graphic, disturbing trauma stories (and fearing for my own life just being in the community), and my mind would feel numb and slow. I was supposed to help children to recover from trauma so they could restore their cognitive functioning and be able to learn at school, but I could barely think straight myself. In order to be effective, I had to quickly learn how to inoculate myself from the stress and fear triggers in my environment, calm my mind and restore the quality of my thinking. And once I figured out how to do that, most of my work boiled down to helping others to get out of stress and fear, so they could feel better, think better, perform better at work and solve problems for themselves.

As a result of my personal experiences and the skills I’ve learned, I’m passionate about helping people to let go of the need to control, get out of fear and stress and to live expansively through love, where they can be more of the person they’re meant to be and make more of the positive contribution they want to make. And for me, that’s what Agile Living is all about.

Agile Living, Stress and Fear

Charles Darwin said, “It’s not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

Agile Living is a response to our increasingly fast-paced, high-information world, where change, uncertainty and the triggers for stress and fear are growing exponentially as a result of technology and our increased global inter-connectedness. Our natural reaction in circumstances that are unfamiliar, uncertain or out of our control, is to feel afraid and pursue self-protective strategies. And our natural tendency is to resist change. But resistance, fear and self-protective strategies just get us more of what we don’t want. When we’re responding from fear, we hold back the parts of ourselves that are most important to us, we disconnect and close our hearts off from other people, we play it small, we’re restricted by limiting beliefs, we’re conflicted about what we really want, we’re drawn into memories of past disappointment and pain, we torment ourselves with fantasies of future catastrophes, and we tend to sabotage our own efforts with our blinkered, problem-focused thinking.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “Agile” as:

…marked by ready ability to move with quick, easy grace, as in an “agile dancer”
…having a quick, resourceful and adaptable character, as in “an agile mind”

For me, being “agile” refers to both mind and body, and it’s about being able to be responsive, flexible and adaptable, and being able to change in an effortless and elegant way. When we’re in stress and fear, we have a fixed mind that doesn’t move or change easily, and we can’t be agile and adaptable. Agile Living is about getting out of stress and fear, and living through love instead.

Living Through Love Instead

You’re living through love when you’re being fully self-expressed and extending your contribution, in spite of the threats and risks. Not when you’re looking at the world through rose-colored glasses and telling yourself there are no threats and risks. Not when you’re preparing for every last detail, so that you know for sure that you can beat all the risks before you’re willing to take any action. Living through love is about being willing and committed to be fully self-expressed and make your contribution, in full recognition of the risks of what you could lose, how you could be attacked, or how you could look a fool. Living through love is about choosing to be a participant and contributer, rather than a spectator or back-row critic in life. Living through love is about being committed to experiencing, doing, giving and being more – an ever-expanding life.

Open Heads, Hearts and Hands

Last week I spoke about the way that art-making can help you to re-connect with and express your Essential Self, by accessing your right-brain and often unconscious thinking processes. Pictures and metaphors can hold and communicate a lot more than words can. So, in my own process of exploring the essence of Agile Living, I took some time to paint and draw about it, and this is what I created…

As I was drawing, this picture came to me as a metaphor for Agile Living. Here’s what this picture’s all about… The quality of our thinking, and the assumptions we’re making about ourselves, others, and the world around us, determines everything else about our lives – how we feel, how we behave, and ultimately the life results we get. When we’re in stress and fear, chemical changes triggered by the body’s fight-or-flight response cause our thinking to become blinkered and rigid, and more focused on threats and self-protection. We essentially become close-minded. And when we close our minds, we close our hearts and when we close our hearts, we close our hands into fists that are closed to both giving and receiving, and become tools for grabbing, withholding and fighting.

Opening our hearts and hands starts with opening our minds, questioning the assumptions we’ve been making that have been triggering our stress and fear, and transforming the way we think. When we change our assumptions to more liberating assumptions – assumptions that make us feel free, then we naturally open our hearts to each other and to life itself, making our relationships more intimate and our lives richer. And our expansive hearts naturally open our hands so that our gestures become more expressive and generous, our hands become active tools for giving, creating, loving and healing, and we can make the great contribution that each of us is meant to make.

Agile Living Values

Agile Living is about letting go of dogma and rules and recognizing that, in a fast-paced, high-change world, your goals and plans will change along the way. What aligns and unites all your actions and provides continuity, are the Agile Values – the reasons that underpin and motivate the goals you set. The core values that underpin Agile Living – the values that open your mind, heart and hands, and the values I want to live my life by, are:

Curiosity:

Curiosity is the recognition that there are unanswered questions, and the desire to explore further. Curiosity isn’t attached to answers, and loves to generate further questions. Curiosity can tolerate uncertainty, not knowing and paradoxes, and enjoys the process of finding out more than the end results of finding out. Curiosity believes there’s always more. Curiosity thrives on diversity and loves finding all the grey areas between between yes and no, and the surprising contradictions. Curiosity loves to uncover assumptions and play the contrarian.

Connection:

Connection is about recognizing how we’re all connected – not just through technology or globalization, but on a spiritual level too. Connection is about awareness of, and consideration for the impact that your actions have on others and on the world. Connection is about real, honest intimacy with others and joining of hearts, prioritizing relationship over processes, tools and metrics. Connection is about staying close to your own Essential Self. Connection is about collaborative creation, working together in flat, lean, self-organized teams rather than competing, controlling or constructing complex hierarchies with positional leadership. In our multi-linked world, we’re all connected and everyone is a leader, influencing in every direction.

Clarity

In our information-saturated world that focuses on collecting and hoarding material possessions, living agile is about opting for clarity and simplicity, clearing your lives of clutter, having little attachment to material possessions, choosing simple pleasures, and creating lean, simple systems. Simplicity creates the space for calm, clear thinking and connecting with real priorities rather than getting pulled into busy-ness. Clarity creates the space in your life for contribution. Clarity eliminates the bureaucratic practices that weigh us down and resist and slow down evolution.

Creativity:

Creativity is about using your imagination for dreaming up possibilities and birthing solutions instead of worrying and catastrophizing. Creativity is about being able to create new connections between ideas that haven’t been connected before. Creativity is about creating things that never existed before, and actively shaping your environment to express your unique Essential Self. Creativity is about dreaming and bringing those dreams into reality.

Change:

Change is about continuous evolution, adapting in response to our changing environments, instead of religiously following a preconceived plan. Change is about being willing to drop old success strategies that are no longer relevant, and actively engaging and experimenting with new ideas and strategies. Change is about pro-actively leading desired positive changes in the world. Change is about living lean and not being attached to or dependent upon collections of material stuff, so you can easily and gracefully shift your direction. Change is about continuous movement that is graceful, living like a dance. Change is about being willing for your life to be completely different. Change is about committing yourself to being a catalyst and agent of change in the world.

Contribution:

Contribution is about participation and being willing to be actively and pro-actively involved in leading, solving problems, and creating new paradigms. Contribution is about showing up, giving, being willing to be seen, and having the courage to risk failure or ridicule when you take real action. Contribution is about placing your life at the service of something greater than yourself.

Agile Living Strategies

Agile Living Strategies are our tools for resisting the urge to constrict and self-protect in the face of risk, and to open our heads, hearts and hands instead. These are skills you can develop, and they’re the focus areas that I help people with. The 4 core agile living strategies are:

1.) Being able to create a calm, clear, resourceful mind

Because stress and fear gives us blinkered, inflexible thinking, calming your mind and physiology is the route to opening your mind, heart and hands. A calm mind feels good and has clarity, better quality thinking and the space for new ideas. A calm body moves more easily, has more energy, heals itself more readily, and lives longer – giving you the possibility of making a greater contribution. You don’t have to wait until you’ve been able to eliminate the stress trigger from your environment – you can create a calm mind now already, while you continue to work on dealing with those stress triggers.

2.) Mastering the change process

We have a natural resistance to change, because change brings uncertainty and unfamiliarity into our lives. But change itself is actually a predictable process with a series of stages that offer different challenges that need to be mastered at each stage. When you understand the change process itself, and know what challenges will need to be mastered in each stage of change, then you’ll become comfortable with change, and you’ll be able to elegantly lead yourself and others through change. Another important part of leading change is to have the tools for deciding what changes we want to make and negotiating change pro-actively in a way that balances focus and direction with openness to multiple possibilities for creating the results you want and being willing to test, fail fast and change strategies that aren’t working.

3.) Using your whole mind

We’ve been living in a very left-brain-directed world, where thinking in a linear, analytical, functional, binary, process-oriented way is encouraged and rewarded, while little encouragement has been given to nurturing our creative, synthesizing, tangential, intuitive, aesthetic and empathic ways of thinking. Put simply, left-brain-directed thinking is about analyzing and breaking things into parts, while right-brain-directed thinking is about synthesizing parts into new relationships and recognizing the whole. Both analyzing and synthesizing are crucial skills for Agile Living. We need to be able to analyze problems and limiting assumptions, and we need to be able to synthesize solutions and new ideas to create more of the life we want.

A core right-brain-directed way of thinking and being that has become an indispensable skill is the ability to develop rich relationships. Since globalization and technological advances have empowered individuals and virtually eliminated positional leadership, relationships have become the foundation for effective collaboration and leadership. Social support is also the greatest resilience factor in times of stress and fear – something we all need, to help us get out of stress and fear and live meaningful, loving lives, in spite of the chaos around us. Developing your ability to relate to others is one of the most important skills for thriving in this era.

4.) Dissolving limiting assumptions

Having an open mind is the entry point into creating an open heart and open hands. We all have a model of the world that we’ve created by interpreting our experiences of reality and forming assumptions about “the way things are.” We then filter and respond to our reality based on our model of the world and the assumptions in it. We can only ever conceive of possibilities that fit within the framework of the assumptions that we’re currently holding, so the foundation of being creative and agile is identifying and challenging limiting assumptions. As you approach assumptions with curiosity and start to question the prevailing assumptions, you can dissolve limiting assumptions and create new assumptions and paradigms that will enable you to create new realities… and customize the life you want.

This may well be the greatest time to be alive – if you’re willing to develop the Agile Living Strategies that will enable you to overcome the challenges, take up the opportunities and thrive.

Are You On Board?

I wanted to share this with you, because I know there are a lot of you who are already living in Agile ways, or aspiring to be… and I’d love to connect with you. And I’d love for you to meet each other. I’d love for us to cross-pollinate, collaborate and inspire each other as we all seek to make our contribution in the world. If the vision and values of Agile Living resonate with you and you’re keen to connect with other like-minded people and develop your practice of the Agile Living Strategies, then sign up for the blog updates by filling out the form below, or signing up for the blog RSS feed.

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