My Soul…

Good morning dear reader & welcome to my world for another week. Over the last couple of articles I have been reflecting on whether anyone Follows their Heart or alternatively being Lost. In my further reflections the last few days, I have been considering again my own direction. I have lived most of my life with a cognitive knowledge I had a soul, however, almost no awareness I was supposed to pay attention to it. Typically, I hardly gave my soul a second thought.

This misdirected living has had significant consequences & touched many relationships & a great part of my life.  When you do not pay attention to your soul, you naturally end up putting all your focus on the externals of your life. You feed & fuel the doing side of your life, while starving the being side of your life.

When Parker Palmer talks about the journey of the soul, he remarks, “Everything in us cries out against it ~ which is why we externalize everything.  It is so much easier to deal with the external world, to spend our lives manipulating material & institutions & other people instead of dealing with our own soul.”   1

My natural wiring was to be ambitious & driven, & in some ways those qualities have served me well.  But what I did not comprehend, there was a shadow side to those traits. Often my ambition, which I saw as a strength, was an unhealthy need to be perceived as a success. Over time it became easy to wrap my unhealthy ambition which ultimately led to some unhealthy behaviour & thinking: posturing in conversations, name-dropping, & obsessing over leadership & growth, & ultimately a functional & pragmatic view of people.

A cousin to my unhealthy ambition was my drivenness. This led to being compulsively busy & always trying to live beyond my limits.  I believed the lie important people are busy people.  I often wore my busyness as a badge of honor. And I had no trouble rationalizing my insane pace because after all, I was busy becoming successful.

I was also completely oblivious to scripts I had been carrying since my childhood. One of those scripts I have now been able to identify was to “make sure everybody has a good opinion of you.”  This, of course, led to an unhealthy people pleasing & approval addiction.

These are all issues of the soul & emotional health [or EQ as I suspect they call it today], & they also impacted the teams I have worked with.  My drivenness has manifested itself in impatience with results, defensiveness, being critical, applauding workaholism, & putting projects over people.  I am sure the people I served with could expand on that list.

I am finally beginning to learn, people who are emotional adolescents will never be great team leaders.  

A friend of mine was in a team meeting where there was conflict in the room.   As he described the reaction or the leader to the conflict, he likened him to “the 5th form bully on the playground.”  Through defensiveness & intimidation, the leader quickly shut down the conflict & the conversation.  Everyone in the room “turtled up.” And, I guarantee you it will be a long time before they venture out of their shell again. The lack of emotional health by the leader & his self-awareness had a devastating impact on team health.

We all know people who knowledgeable.  They have sat through thousands of seminars, they have held leadership positions.  But their emotional disposition does not match their forty years. Instead of showing compassion, they are crotchety, critical, & mean. There is a glaring disconnect between their outward actions & their emotional health. They are broken emotionally, & everybody sees it but them.

Honestly, confronting our emotional health (or lack of) is one of the hardest things we will ever do.  It is not just your body that is in danger of being poisoned. Your spirit & soul (inner life) can be contaminated also.  

So, this week as we enter another Christmas my friends, work at paying attention to your soul. Listen to your emotions. Ask someone to help you understand what is going on beneath the surface of all your “doing”.
 
Thank you for taking the time to be with me once again. I hope my journey may encourage you also. This is Kenn Butler in Paradise, Nelson, with my best wishes for the Christmas season ahead. I look forward to being with you all again in the New Year.
 
 
 
 
 
www.kennbutler.com   



[1] Parker J. Palmer – Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. This book penetrates the soul, & it will definitely stir you to explore more of your own inner territory.