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mackenzian

Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

outcomes

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The gift of non-attachment

A touching moment as a tiny Piping Plover chick snuggles into its parent on a sandy beach in the early morning sunlight.
Photo credit: Ray Hennessy
Recently I talked with a former colleague about the gracious way our community had held space for both of us to outgrow and leave it.

“It’s been like an incubator,” she said.
“Like an eggshell,” I said.

If you’re a growing chick, there’s no point in getting attached to your shell. It nourishes you, makes you strong, and then you have to break through it to live a mature life. If you never push against your shell, you don’t become strong. If you never break your shell, you actually die.

And if you’re the person who’s called to care for growing chicks, there’s no point in getting attached to any of them. They eat your food, soak up your heat, break their first boundary, and will fly away if unhindered. It’s not that they’re flying away from you; it’s that when they do what they’re designed to do, they will fly.

Non-attachment, then, is a gift. It isn’t indifference but rather full and non-grasping presence. It keeps disciplining tools like rules, forms, and organizational structures in their place—secondary to people. And it also applies these tools as much as they’re needed to hone and amplify people’s contributions for wider benefits.

A shell serves its chick, and not the chick, the shell.

It’s non-attachment that allows a grounded, healthy mentor to teach, guide, and counsel mentees without becoming bruised by mentees’ choices or learning process. We learn to invest in our groups and peers without being overly bonded to their outcomes; we practice giving our best without trying to wrest others’ stories away from them.

“Non-attachment” can be deeply challenging to live when all our brains want to say is “Please don’t change anything!”

But as I talked with my colleague, I realized that this was the leadership mode that has had the best consequences for me and other real people who still have growing to do.

How does non-attachment show up in your work? Send me a note to tell me about how you’ve seen it in action.

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From the Stream: Roots, Relationship, Results

From time to time, I’ll pull content from my Twitter thoughtstream and share it with you here too. Follow me on Twitter if you’d like to be part of the live flow.

The thoughts below were inspired by a key quote from church this weekend. We’re two sessions into a series on hope.

“Choosing to be okay with not being okay” is anathema to perfectionists, our choice of last resort. But as long as our desire to hide from others (shame? pride?) trumps our desire to be known, we’ll be isolated. Even in crowds.

As long as our groups reward perfectionism and punish transparency, we’ll struggle to build sound relationships with each other. And until we can stand the vulnerability of being seen while not okay or seeing another who still has far to go, none of us will grow.

I was talking about relationship and character with friends this morning (based on Galatians 5 and John 15). Struck me how much we frame relationships as “work” and not “connection,” as if one “works” on patience or “works” on love and doesn’t express love/patience as the natural consequence of the relationship one has.

Someone pointed out that not everyone is “naturally” patient or expressive, and I agreed. In my life, both patience and love have resulted from my relationships and experiences shaping me: I see them as emergent properties, not wholly native ones. Certainly there’s a personality baseline, but most of my life has seemed to involve emergence, not scripting.

But our daily consciousness of crime trains us to focus on negative behaviors. Rarely do we talk about the quality of relationship that those behaviors arise out of or the systems of thought and action in which they seem logical.

So here’s my hunch. No relational outcome appears out of nothing. Every result is rooted in how we see our relationships and act in them. Not all causes are obvious. And not all are conscious. But they all create outcomes. There’s really no other logic that makes sense.

The question I ask in my relationships with people, organizations, and religious groups: can I identify new causes that can yield the outcomes I want and that serve us all in better ways? Can I become the new cause of improved results? Because if I can’t move beyond surface outcomes, if I can’t get to the level of cause and trigger, if I keep kicking around consequences with no root, I won’t make progress and I’ll struggle to understand why.

When you change your baseline assumptions, and the foundational actions you take because of them, new outcomes become possible. —@mackenzian