“...and you’ll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you’ve fed him for a lifetime.”
Overstating the obvious, Confucius was a smart guy.
Torturing the fishing metaphor a bit: learning to set a hook, choosing or making bait, the art of casting, reeling, landing, cleaning and filleting a fish all are easy skills to write down, but in practice, take an enormous amount of time, tutelage, patience, practice and more practice. We don’t become mature, capable anglers without first sticking ourselves with an errant hook, get grossed out by baiting a hook with a worm, losing a fish on the line or winding up falling in the water. Right? Then we land our first one! And we replay the experience in our heads: what worked? The bait? The location? Time of day? How can we replicate what worked so we can catch another and another and another to feed ourselves for a lifetime?
Teaching takes time, learning takes time; new skills require a maturation process: we don’t go from remedial to expert overnight or even in a year.The process insists on watching, talking, and emulating those who have mastered the skill. Practicing patience, cultivating an appreciation, indeed, reverence, of your surroundings river or sea. Making mistakes, understanding the challenges and how to overcome them, solidifying and curating new habits, initiating, developing, nurturing and sustaining them.
Ahhh, FIG themes! Sound familiar?
I had a conversation with a former client recently whose organization - a large regional municipally run agency - retained FIG as a resource for its employees who were extremely talented from a job skills perspective, but we’re struggling a bit with the interpersonal dynamics of the workplace. We worked together for over a year, she was ready to fly on her own, and I reached out after a few months to check in and see how she was doing. She was as enthusiastic, energized and engaged as I have ever heard her. She told me there was rarely a day where FIG, conceptually, wasn’t invoked in her brain, seldom a time when she interacted with fellow employees that our work and FIG’s curriculum together didn’t enter the equation in her personal interactions with fellow employees, and hardly a day went by that some conversation we’d had, didn’t enter her brain. She’s happy, confident, self assured and upbeat in her role as a professional and as a member of her unit.
We tell this story only to illustrate how learning takes time. When she first started with FIG, she was disconsolate, forlorn, and bordering on hopeless - not from the ability to do her job as an attorney, but from her confusion and despair about why it was SO HARD for people to ‘‘get along,” do their jobs, interact with each other professionally and just be nice! We teased out miscommunications, misunderstandings, possible misconceptions - both on her part and others’ - gave her words to describe behaviors, actions and attitudes, reasons they might be happening and pivots to adjust and steer potentially sticky situations towards her intended outcomes. We worked on being intentional in her actions, knowing where she wanted to go, and designing a path and strategy to get her there. We pulled apart the reasons for her struggles, shed daylight (the quintessential disinfectant) upon them and ultimately made them a little less overwhelming and less “big,” so they were manageable. We created room in her head to evolve more as a professional. The process took time, patience, courage, fortitude and grit, and we’re happy and proud to report she’s well on her way - we couldn’t be prouder of her.
An important point to note - yes, she learned these skills with FIG as her guide. However, she put them into practice and continued to practice, practice, practice every day. Now, she is on the path to mastering these skills for herself, and potentially even passing them on to others. She understood that these guiding principles - intention, boundaries, curiosity, and teasing emotion from fact - were tools in her toolbox to create change over time, not by an overnight miracle.
Belaboring the metaphor one more time, FIG helped her learn to fish.
We’re human beings with human attributes and we bring this humanness with us to work. Let’s recognize this, have patience with the, sometimes arduous, process of shifting perspectives, recognize our contributions to the issues in order to make space in our human brains for a more productive, cohesive and well functioning society in our workplace, shall we?
Until next time…