A journey to presence

As I’ve been building this website, I’ve been musing about life experiences that in hindsight could be patterned into various narratives about what ‘led’ me here. Insights are funny beasts… they don’t come from nowhere. It’s more like a subconscious collection of associated experiences that quietly build on each other in an aphanipoietic process until a critical mass is reached, and then something — perhaps with just the faintest association with that subconscious collection — breaks the surface into consciousness and large parts of the mass become visible all at once.

Earliest influential experiences for me probably accumulated while living on a yacht with my parents and eventually, younger brother, for a couple of years before I started school. I don’t remember much of this time in detail, but looking back, it seems to have exerted profound influences on my beliefs about reality and later insights.

Immersed in nature and nuclear family, protected by the boat my father built. The cultural norms of yachties — casual acquaintances who wouldn’t think twice about helping each other out of a practical jam even if they don’t much like each other; it’s just what you do. Decisions all revolving around constraints of reality: the weather, limited storage room on a boat, limited power and refrigeration. Always paying attention to surroundings, balancing risks, making sure there’s enough buffer but not too much.

Dynamic trust, context-driven. No such thing as a blanket “I trust this person” or “I don’t trust this person”. Always “I sense I trust what this person is telling me now, in this context.” (Or not.) After this, how could I fail to consider the influence of environment, of context?

A few years later, age 8 to 9, a 16 month long world trip with family. So many different environments, ecologies, terrains, cultures, ways of living, eating, dressing, speaking.

Tent camping and campervanning. Finding ways to be alone with other people in small spaces. Maps which tell you how to get to places but don’t tell you anything about the territory. Noticing that some people need to rotate the map, but others don’t.

Perspectives always shifting. Meeting other travellers… travelling was rarer then, especially an extended trip as a family. Again, a subculture of common interest shared across other cultures. People are all the same and all different at the same time, at different times. Having something in common creates links of trust, friendships.

And during this time, too, visiting Dachau, an 8 year old captivated by a picture of thousands upon thousands of shoes. Surely not all attributable to one evil person, but many many people who couldn’t have been all evil. After this, how could I fail to realise that the potential for good and for evil is in everyone, me included? And building on the previous, what was the context that made evil express like that? Again around the same time, reading Animal Farm. Hmm.

A couple of years later, we moved to a small beachside town where my father started another business. My mother decided she didn’t want to be there and my parents divorced, acrimoniously. I don’t remember feeling responsible for that, but I did feel responsible for my little brother and felt an external compulsion to choose a side. Tried doing that a couple of times but the world made no sense that way. My mother tells me I was the family mediator. I was just trying to understand what was going on and find a stance that felt real. Balancing perspectives. After this, how could I avoid the realisation that horrible behaviour can feel like the best one is capable of in the circumstances, and that intent and impact can be outrageously out of whack?

A sand dune I would recognise anywhere. We used to slide down it on cardboard boxes.

When I was 14, my brother and I moved from living with our father in that small town to live with our mother in the city. A few weeks passed between leaving one school mid-term and starting the next term at a new one. I grew a few inches vertically and the new white and navy school uniform suited me a lot better than the previous brown and gold one. I still wonder how much that shift in my physical appearance influenced the totally different response of my new peers to someone I felt was no different from the me who had been largely ostracised by my old peers. From pariah to being courted by the popular ‘royalty’ on my first day. I didn’t trust it at all, but that time I was the one avoiding group membership. After this, how could I ignore the role perception plays in people’s choice-making?

Several months later, a visiting career counsellor looked at my reports and said, “Well. Good news. You can do whatever you want.” Paused for a beat in case I had something to say, then, “Ok. Next!” Several days later I started wishing I’d asked them, “How do I find out what I want?” The concept was foreign to me. To that point, competence was all that mattered… and yes, I was competent at everything I’d tried except sport (which was, and remains even now, a bit of a sore spot). At any rate, this ‘want’ aspect was a new dimension to be considered, and I quickly realised that I was a complete imbecile in it. I chose subjects for my senior years based on keeping as many options open as I could, pending an answer to that knotty question of what I wanted, plus one that I thought sounded interesting (Logic and Philosophy). ‘Interesting’ was about as close to ‘want’ as I could determine at that point, although looking back, I suspect my interest was sparked less by the actual subject matter and more by my boyfriend’s offhand remark that my ‘maths brain’ wouldn’t be able to deal with philosophy. A challenge to my competence! Oh really? We’ll see about that!

Anyway, this is where the theme relevant to my journey to presence and presence coaching really starts to emerge… at least for the narrative I’m retrospectively weaving here. It’s commonly said of psychologists, therapists and coaches that they are driven by working out their own traumas and issues. There’s truth in the irony, I believe — in the process of working on one’s own issues, it’s hard not to develop expertise through contextual familiarity (all that experience!) and focused attention.

My journey of figure-out-what-I-want led me all over the map. In addition to trying to understand what motivated everyone I met (or observed, or read about), I started a few different university courses in an attempt to find out what motivated me. A Bachelor of Arts (which I ended up transferring most of my other credits to, so eventually graduated with that), Law, Commerce, Psychological Science, Engineering. Part of a Masters in IT, too, since I was working in the field as a business analyst and project manager, rather enjoyed solving problems, and thought a relevant qualification might be a good idea (maybe I wouldn’t get bored if I was working at an executive level?) My pragmatism was a feature by then, and tertiary study is expensive, so I’d always be considering whether I could see myself doing ‘this’ for 20 to 40 years. The answer which emerged was always “no”, so I moved on.

It took years to accept that I’m a generalist and am never going to be a specialist.

Fox, not hedgehog.

We are what we do, and this is what I have consistently done… developed basic competence, and moved on to the next thing before developing expertise.

In the meantime, I studied everything I could find on individual differences, motivators and psychology more generally. Models on models on models. They became toys in my hands. I noticed how the personalities and worldviews of judges shone through their written judgments under the layers of professionalism. I considered the properties of materials in engineering and made bad jokes about the psychology of different types of metals, then got curious about Mercury and started studying mythology for the archetypes. I picked up a tarot deck based on mythology and linked it back to the life I lived and observed around me. More models, more toys. I made them dynamic even when they weren’t supposed to be. Verbing nouns is fun.

I worked across a lot of different industries in different roles, too. Public, private, non-profit. Small, medium and large. I saw that the same patterns repeat everywhere. Human patterns. So that’s what Asimov was talking about with psychohistory! Complex adaptive systems. And there was something underlying in the philosophy of how we organise that isn’t integrated with nature, which always breaks or corrupts in the same ways. Systems within systems.

Amazingly, I’m still fascinated by this, by these complex, living, transcontextual patterns. The ‘meta’. This domain has become quite popular over the past few years, making my life richer than I had previously dreamed possible. It’s beyond thrilling to have found networks of people who share my fascination, even though we’re literally spread around the world… which means I spend significantly more time online these days than would be my ideal.

But I digress. There is a point I wish to make here.

Generalists are presently undervalued, I believe. There are skills required to be an effective generalist which are desperately needed in the world today, which cannot be properly honed within the limited scope of any specialisation. Abductive reasoning, rapid perspective switching. Discerning what is relevant (and how, to whom, and why, and when) in a new context. Zooming in to the concrete and out to the abstract and back again, and not losing track of where you are in that vertical dimension. Strategy that is inherently grounded in reality, not just theory. An ability to tell the difference, at a visceral level, between natural laws (which are thankfully pretty stable) and human constructs, which can be super-sticky and masquerade as natural laws, but really aren’t.

And for me, personally, sensing what might be described as “fittedness”. People really aren’t cogs in a machine or neatly divided into categories, and I can’t help but feel the unintended and nearly always unnoticed procrustean violence that is necessarily done trying to make it so (e.g. the unrealistic shapes of job descriptions and expectations, the contortions in CVs and the half-truths and scripted embellishments of answers in interviews). I can’t help but see the mixed up motivations in choices made, the bullshitting and projection, the trojan horse bundling and satisficing endemic in an overwhelming information environment. The bandaids endlessly applied in trying to ‘fix’ (or at least cover up) symptoms. The waste we generate in a bid to delude ourselves that we can have certainty in the ever-changing, uncertain process of living.

I hope that with presence coaching, I can use this gift-talent-skill to guide others much, much more rapidly through their personal heuristic-honing process than I went through it myself. There certainly seems to be a need for such guidance. When I listen to Q&As on podcasts about the existential risks we face, someone always seems to ask, “What advice can you give for applying all this in practice? How can I best be of service to the whole? How do I figure out what is mine to do?” And when the answer is (what I consider to be) a wise one, it is always in the form of, “I can only give a very general answer, because what is right for you to do as an individual depends on your personal context. A good place to start is to get your own house in order, physically, cognitively, emotionally, financially. Then find others and learn how to work together.”