What’s Love Got to Do With It?
Experiencing the Transformative Power of “Sense and Respond”
Every single day of my life, I face opportunities to consciously make decisions in the name of love. Sometimes I succeed and sometimes I fail. But one thing is always there: the consciousness that absolutely everything has to do with love.
Reaching this consciousness was a diverse and often challenging journey.
My path over almost three decades as an entrepreneur, and two decades as a business consultant, has taken me through the transformational shift from “predict and control” to “sense and respond.” From stepping into the CEO position of our family business, to starting my first own business in parallel, up to this day, where I am fully dedicated to self-organization and to the fundamental shift it can bring to humanity and beyond. It has been a journey of personal expansion and a fundamental shift of consciousness that naturally started much earlier than my professional life.
I was raised with the unquestioned understanding that leadership is the domain of those who have outstanding traits. I was even led to believe that the capacity to be a great leader was something with which you were born, not something anybody could learn. A good leader was someone brilliantly intelligent, charismatic, determined, strong-willed, and possessing natural authority. Those who were born with these wonderful traits deserved to be in the position to tell others what to do. (I don’t intend to dwell on the gender issue, but needless to say, a leader was presumed to be male.)
The first role model feeding this belief was my father, of course. He was soon followed by priests, then teachers, bosses, politicians, public figures, and even my personal partners. It took a long time, including a marriage and divorce, before I finally asked myself the question:” Is this really the way I want to be in a relationship — in any relationship?” Although at the time I didn’t have an answer beyond “no,” I began asking myself:” What do I want, what do I need, and, most importantly, who am I really?” These questions connected with something deep inside myself — something with which I had never before connected.
Something had shifted, but I’d not yet seen the parallels between my personal and professional life. I therefore continued my work, developing and delivering leadership programs for corporations of all sizes, presenting and teaching in a way that was consistent with what I had learned from early childhood. I also drew from my own experiences, both as an employee and as an employer. I spoke about what it takes to be a good leader and how to inspire people. I presented on how to define goals and strategies, how to motivate others, and how to shape and define organizational culture. I taught communication methods, including those difficult conversations around hiring, firing, and conflict resolution. In a nutshell, all I did was help leaders answer the question:” How do I get people to do what I think is right?”
The longer I did this work the less I enjoyed it, but believing the feedback I got from my clients, I kept telling myself and others how much I loved my work, ignoring the mental and physical signals that should have told me that something was off.
At some point my body said:” Enough! I am no longer playing this game!” Only then did I stop. Not because I decided to, but because I suffered a major breakdown, a burnout that made it impossible for me to do any kind of work for almost a year. The only thing I could do during that time was anything around self-care, which eventually lead me to practicing presence and mindfulness. Through this, I finally could become aware of the sense of emptiness I had felt for a long time, but had been in total denial of. Slowly, very slowly, I learned how to become a witness of that emptiness and to reflect on it. I came to realize that the work I had been doing felt useless. I had been unhappy and unfulfilled for a long time.
Facing this realization was very hard. It scared me. What else could I do? At the same time, I somehow knew that now was the moment to stop myself from falling back into the habitual pattern of predicting (i.e., defining what I thought needed to happen), planning, and taking control. In this moment I understood, not just cognitively, but through a deeper sense of Self, that I needed to simply be with my realization, feel it, experience it; neither accepting nor rejecting, and without judgement.
I lack words to describe the quality of this completely new experience. For the first time in my life, I experienced what it means to be present. For the first time in my life, I could be with “it”, the now, be empty and at the same time be full of joy, grateful for this incredible sense of freedom and vastness of spirit. Only by being present and aware of what was, could I start to let go. Consequently, I could let come what wanted to come. And what came was the next challenge, in form of a big question: What is my work in the world?
This was 10 years ago, when “purpose” was a term hardly used. The words of the day were “mission” and “vision,” but those didn’t feel right to me. Looking back, it was at this point that I started to search and connect with my true purpose. At the time, however, I felt clueless. Meanwhile, through my mindfulness practice, I had begun to learn what it meant to be present. It was still early for me and I was struggling to truly accept the notion of “letting go” so that “letting come” could take its course. I had always been so “sharp,” proud of employing my analytical skills in quest of “understanding” and “knowing.” I had, frankly, been really good at predicting and controlling. But it eventually dawned on me that this was precisely what I needed to let go of, in order to develop the true capacity to:
be fully present in the moment; sense and be with it,
be open and hold the space for what wants to come; and to then
be able to respond accordingly.
I experienced how my mindfulness practice was positively affecting my personal life, but regarding my work something was still missing. I felt lost, believing that it was impossible to bring this experience into my work. More importantly, I was missing clarity about my calling, in other words, “the big WHY?”
Little did I know that the first deeply meaningful answer to this question was soon to emerge because of three very different, but similarly meaningful and impactful incidents.
The first came during a retreat I attended about mindfulness in coaching and consulting. As expected, a large part of this retreat was meditation. Over the days, I could sense my inner processes slowing down and every meditation became a deeper experience. And then came one specific meditation that brought me the strongest, most impactful, and most meaningful moment of my life (aside from the birth of my son). Words are inadequate to describe it. All I can say is that it was the most incredible experience of how I, we, everything, the entire universe is connected. It was a whole body, mind, and spirit experience, magnificent and enlightening. What I took from this experience was “love.” I understood fully and with every aspect of my being that everything is connected through love; that love IS everything. My mind told me: “What you just realized is so huge”. Yet, at a deeper level, it didn’t feel that huge at all. It felt clear, meaningful, and at the same time completely normal, which made it so surprising.
The second incident was of a very different nature: a 2-day Holacracy® Introductory Workshop. It sounded promising and I hoped it would give me at least an idea of where my work could possibly take me. After the workshop, I was on an emotional rollercoaster. It sounded almost too good to be true. Was this really possible? Would anybody ever be able to accept this shift? What was it that touched me so deeply during this experience? I had no idea at the time. All I could say was that I sensed something coming from a beauty behind it, that I couldn’t quite grasp. It was enough, however, to put me on the path of becoming a Holacracy Practitioner and Coach.
Soon after my training, in a conversation with a client about the practices of Holacracy, it “hit” me. I suddenly understood what it was that had touched me from the first moment. That the shift from predict and control to sense and respond is the organizational equivalent of what the shift to presence and mindfulness is for us humans:
sense into the present moment (be the sensor for the organization),
hold the space for what wants to emerge and (become aware of the possibilities to move something forward)
respond accordingly (process the tension)
What an incredible liberation this realization was. Finally, I had discovered what “the beauty behind it” was.
As others can affirm, the Holacracy learning journey is not always easy, but my work, especially after my epiphany, started to once more feel useful and fulfilling. The Center for Integral Leadership, which I had founded and where I was now filling roles, had a clear purpose and it was inspiring and motivating to contribute. I had learned to understand and to value the difference between the organizational context and the personal context, and with it the difference between organizational purpose and personal purpose. Yet still I was unable to fully sense and express my personal purpose in a way that felt right for me. I had a vague sense that it had something to do with love, but I held a hindering belief that “love” and “work” simply don’t go together. There was more to learn.
Then came the third incident.
Because “Holacracy governs the organization and not the people” it very soon became clear to me that when an entity implemented Holacracy, the context of the people who work there requires its own set of practices that are compatible with this new self-organized way of working. In quest of such practices, I participated in a training in Denmark on The Art of Hosting. Even though it didn’t bring the answers I was looking for, something fundamentally important nevertheless happened for me.
The trainers and participants were lovely and the atmosphere was caring, so I decided to offer up my own big question as a case to be explored. It was a very emotional moment to share my hopes and fears, my hindering beliefs, and everything else that had been preventing me from connecting to my purpose. Finally, one of the trainers commented, “In everything you say, I keep hearing this question: how can love be manifested in the corporate world?”
I was stunned. Her question was so direct, clear, and to the point. Still, my hindering belief made me answer,” But surely I can’t speak of love in the business world!” And she responded,” Why not?”. Stunned again, I let this question sink in and there is was — something shifted. Suddenly I could let go of my hindering beliefs. I realized what wanted to be spoken out loud, what I had not dared say for so long, what it is that wants to be “birthed” through me, and finally I could define my personal purpose:
The manifestation of love in the way we do our work in the world.
Now it all made sense. Everything is connected by love. Love is everything. Sense into what is, because whatever it is, it comes from love. Sometimes we must let go of something, and doing so with love creates space for something new that wants to emerge. And whatever that is, it is also love. Respond to it with love. Whatever we do, with consciousness in our actions, can always be a tangible, practical, manifestation of love.
Writing this makes me feel the deep gratitude I hold for my journey so far and for all the enabling love I have experienced. It fills me with curiosity and excitement about the journey ahead and the many places and contexts where I can share the story of my journey, and perhaps even more importantly, all that I still will learn from my fellow travelers.
