A question I see come up a lot in coaching, facilitation, and teaching work is..
A question I see come up a lot in coaching, facilitation, and teaching work is..
"What should I do here?" Or "What should I say?"
("what’s the best thing to do or say here…")
This often comes up when we can sense that a person is stuck, or when a conversation isn’t flowing the way we hope. Or when we feel uncertain about our ability to help, or make things better..
What a lot of us want to do in those moments is find an answer..
The thing to do or say that will help will make whatever it is feel better, or work better than it is…
So we often want to offer a tool, or maybe a specific suggestion, re-frame, or activity.
Before I say more, i want to emphasize that tools, tips, reframes can often be ‘the thing’ that gets things flowing again… they are important and powerful
And.. we can also open to something before we reach for the tool, action or words we offer…
Attuned presence
Attunement is the idea that we are allowing our sensory receptors to be truly available to what is unfolding, micro-moment by micro-moment in real time..
This means, we stay ‘vibrationally available’ to the other person’s (and our own) micro signals.. Without rushing to change anything just yet..
This release to change or fix (just for a moment) allows the 'brain-body-noticing-networks' a chance to become more involved..
When we move too quickly toward the thought and action of "what should I say or do?" .. we potentially close that loop.
We cut ourselves off from two things that matter enormously in that moment:
- The micro-signals we're actually detecting in the other person.
- And what our own inner intelligence might offer us in response.. if we give it a moment longer to work.
Again, this doesn't mean phrases or tools aren't valuable.. Sometimes they are an ideal starting point or spark for something new to flow.
But there's something that can happen before we go there .. a small window where, if we stay in our body just a bit longer, our ‘vibrational receptors’ get a bit more to work with.
We get to pick up on what's actually really happening. Something we might have missed. Something that might surprise us.
And that becomes a seed of a response that we offer.. an offering that might resonate in a way we could have missed if we hadn’t allowed our system to stay open a moment longer.
Here's something you can try as an experiment for yourself:
Notice when you feel the pull to offer an answer or something to fix the moment.
Take one moment longer to only notice..
What comes up in your body? Can you feel a sense of release, like an opening of the hands to whatever emerges?
And play with this question:
What else can I notice?
And.. What am I noticing that I haven't noticed before?
See if anything shifts when you ask that.
Again.. Not necessarily away from action.. But maybe an opening towards a more finely tuned version of whatever it is you’re offering.
I find that the words that tend to help most come from that place.
Wishing you a moment of noticing and surprise,
Stefanie
“Energy follows attention” means that we need to shift our attention from what we are trying to avoid to what we want to bring into reality.”
― C. Otto Scharmer, Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies
(I'm honored to be a part of a global initiative with MIT for advancing human flourishing... alongside great thinkers such as Otto Scharmer, Wiebke Denecke,.)
Lead nervous system work at a different level.
When we learn to attune more deeply (to ourselves and to the person in front of us):
- we create more possibility for flexible, adaptive responses
- we can access more of what all of us need more access to in today’s era: our own inner intelligence.
- we help others become more able to adjust in real time to what a moment is actually asking for.
That kind of adaptive flexibility can be really helpful when the tools and approaches we usually rely on don’t seem to be working.
That’s a a big part of why i created Teach the Nervous System:
We explore the neuroscience behind regulation and attunement, along with more precise language for explaining what you likely are already noticing in yourself and others (that other emotion regulation labels dont’ quite capture).
Inside, you’ll get a Nervous System Map to help you see beyond the usual regulation labels and attune more precisely to what’s happening in real time.
9 bite-sized modules. Lifetime access. $44.
→ Grab Teach the Nervous System™ here
