Not understanding to understand – aka use your tools wisely

Is there a right way to help?

This is a question which puzzles me, personally (as a friend, husband, brother, son, colleague) and professionally (as a communication and change coach).

It made me buy the book “The Art of Helping” (De kunst van het helpen, ed. Margreet Mossel, Het Noorderlicht 2007), a Dutch book with a collection of texts from Bert Hellinger about helping.

What did the book offer me with regard to my question?

Several insights.

Some of them I want to write down because they matter to me in a way which I can’t really explain. I’ll post them here in a series called “Is there a right way to help?”.

This is the first insight.

“Trying to understand is exactly the opposite of what I should do in order to respond appropriately to a situation.“

When I had this thought I immediately got the image of a soccerplayer trying to understand the game in order to decide what his next move would be. The result was that he froze. I felt my stomach ache and I got very nervous.

Survival tip 2: neoteny: why we will survive

In my previous post on flock behaviour I wondered how long we’ll be able to adapt, switching between individual specialism and flock behaviour. My answer today: as long as we’ll have …

neoteny

“You may not know this word, but it should be your biological first name and last name, because neoteny means the retention of immature qualities into adulthood. And we are by physical anthropologists, by many many studies the most neotenist, the most youthful, the most flexible, the most plastic of all creatures and therefore the most playful. And that gives us a leg up on adaptability.”

Wise words coming from Stuart Brown, founder of The National Institute For Play. Watching his talk at TED made me happy, because I could completely connect with Brown’s ideas on the importance of playing. The beauty of this lecture are the stories brown collected from real life, which hold the evidence of how important play can be for our survival.

Building a dam to stop a river is a bad idea

The more you try to block a river,

the more pressure you’ll meet,

the higher the tide will rise,

the more fatiguing it will become to hold your stand,

the greater the devastation will be when the dam breaks,

the more frightening the prospect of a breaking dam will become,

the more you’ll be willing to sacrifice your energy, yes even your life for something which you can’t keep from happening.

The more life becomes a struggle.

Maybe, maybe change is more about understanding the river.

Maybe change is about clearing the way and allowing things to happen differently.

Maybe change is anything but trying to keep things from happening.

In case you wonder: a dam just broke. That’s what happened.

Picture: When the Levee Breaks, by :© Jessicafm