2-3-4 Friday

‘Seeking to spark the most potential within you per word of any online newsletter’

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This is part of a series of newsletters presenting my reflections following Tong Yee’s Level 2 Training, from 18 to 22 Nov. Please also note that none of this is in any way endorsed by him - it is a personal reflection on a personal experience.

A few weeks ago, from 18 to 22nd November, I was at a training with Yee and his team at And (click if you'd like to learn more, though I don't get any commission for recommending this). If you read his website describing the training, you might think it’s esoteric and hard to know what you’d even get from it.

This is a level 2 course that focuses on fully understanding and learning how to intervene on the complex group and system dynamics that each of us experience daily - at the workplace, at home or even in broader society.

But attend it, and you would find yourself looking at the world in a very different way.

You would see people crying, people hugging each other to comfort each other, and even getting into disagreements. All these is to mimic what truly happens in the real world, in a safe space.

Because if you’re honest, the last time you went to a class and sat there and listened, you probably never took much away.

You wanted the trainer to stop… but he didn’t.

Before I went for this training, I never used to understand why the charities I worked in seemed so …. weird.

I couldn’t place a finger on it but it came up in many different ways.

1. An operations manager, upon seeing a form that wasn’t submitted, following up by sending out an email copying managers and directors about the form I didn’t submit,
2. A manager wanting to take over the making of Powerpoint slides,
3. A colleague pointing me out in front of other colleagues, saying that I was doing my own things, and asking me if what I had learnt from what she had shared.

Let me place a caveat here. None of this was just about their behavior.

It was about my own.

Often when we experience something discomforting, we tend to externalize the blame and look at our colleagues, and wonder why they are behaving in this manner.

It’s harder to look at ourselves and wonder how we, ourselves are showing up in the systems we are part of.

When I used to work in charities, I was showing up as someone who thought I was more superior. I thought that with my overseas education, I had seen more of the world than them.

My historical operating script also was,

if I don’t shake the system, I won’t be noticed.

And when the system did not listen to me, I got angry, and kept the anger within me.

People who worked with me didn’t know what it was exactly within me, but I was off. They didn’t want to get close to me. If I got too close to them, they would start to push me back.

Which was why I experienced all those things described above.

As social workers, counselors, or people in the helping profession, we come into work wanting to improve things. That desire to change things would introduce a certain amount of heat to your organisation, sparking different reactions for different people.

So before you go in and shake the work system, it’s vital to actually know how you’re showing up within the system.

The question is, how do you get more aware of how you are showing up?

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It’s not about how you change the system, but how you’re first aware of how you’re appearing in the systems you are trying to shift.

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Of course the common answer is to get feedback. But in a culture like Singapore, people wouldn’t really tell you what’s off, until it becomes wrong.

The other answer is to understand how you are showing up in the other systems you are a part of. Like your family.

That’s often the system that gives us the most clues to our historical patterns of showing up.

Some questions to ask:

1. What is my relationship with those in my family?
2. Where are the parts that are strained? Why are they strained?
3. Where are the relationships I enjoy? Why are they that good?

Understand those, and you might better see how you’re showing up within your system of work.

In my own family, I often felt like an outsider. It was hard for me to connect to the traditional narratives they wanted me to play. Like becoming a doctor or lawyer.

As a result, I actively rebelled by running away. I would regularly stay at a friend’s home from the age of 14.

But it also began a pattern of avoiding confrontation when I faced things I didn’t like. I kept the unhappiness within me, though.

It was what made people uncertain when they first met me. They could see someone who was incredibly bright, but they did not know whether they could trust this person.

As you look into your own life, it’s worth asking,

what are the narratives in my family?

What are my own scripts?

You’d be in a better place to understand how you’re showing up, and how you might not want to show up in that way anymore.

John

Live Young, Live Well - Work Your Love

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