THE HOUSE OF CARDS
One of the most important things needed for development and change is awareness of what you are doing. For this purpose, so-called ‘Experiments’ are used at Baak. I want to take you through one of my experiments at the beginning of this program to give you an insight.
We started the day and after the explanation of my development point, always wanting to do everything myself and do it right the first time, I went to work with my group on my experiment. In front of me was a deck of cards and 1 minute on the clock to build a house of cards. What are you going to do? I naturally make it as big as seems feasible within that minute. I feel the frustration bubbling up as my card house collapses for the third time and the stopwatch goes off. Now what? Not successful, not right the first time.
A fellow trainee immediately begins after this failure by asking, “Why did you build the tower the way you did now?” Well just because that seemed the best way to me. Why did you use so many cards? Well… It had to be a house of cards, right?”
The clue to the story: Two cards against each other would have been good too. I notice that this really gets to me and it feels like I’ve failed, why didn’t I think of that myself. The day passes and I let it sink in. At the end of the day I realize that this was what I needed, insight into why I do something the way I do. That what only feels good enough for me, is perhaps already more than enough for someone else.
HOLDING UP A MIRROR
A second situation that has stayed with me is a session with an actor and role-playing. For my assignment, I was in a situation where I couldn’t get two employees to move forward in a particular trajectory. I felt like I had to pull a truck. I present this situation to the actor and we start working on the case together with some other trainees who crawl into the role of my two colleagues.
Then we continue with role-playing, under the guidance of a professional actor. In my work, I have had trouble moving projects forward towards a desired result. A nice case to tackle! Together with a number of trainee colleagues, we start the case. I do what I always do, I try to set goals, identify action points and get people moving. It doesn’t work, my fellow trainees only become more passive and don’t like it at all. The actor stops the session and asks me how I feel about it. “Yeah, so that’s how it always goes…!” Okay one more time. And again, and again.
The actor stops the case and asks if I can do it really differently, put a little more feeling in it. This time I put my feelings in and distance myself from the content. “I notice that we are not making any progress this way and that you have little interest in it. Boom, it falls silent on the other side… Result: we start a discussion that is much more feeling-oriented, expressing underlying frustrations. When you make this negotiable, at least it becomes a lot easier to get these frustrations out of the way and you can move on to get real results.
AND NOW YOU
Do you also want a job where professional and personal development is central? And are you curious about the whole story? Then contact me via the contact form on the right!
