This is my eighth piece exploring what it means to lead with love. See the other pieces at the links below:
#1: learning love: a beginning
#2: what does it mean to be love?
#3: how do we lead with love through our mistakes?
#4: what is wrong with urgency? What is beautiful about patience?
#7: what makes it challenging to think clearly about urgency and patience?
These learning love posts began taking shape in my mind as I was designing a year-long curriculum for educators seeking to learn love and teach freedom. Parts of that syllabus have found homes in the various projects I work on, but I also began to write this series as a way to document that original curriculum in a structured way. That original curriculum had 5 units – slowing down was Unit 1.
I chose to begin with slowing down because I think it is an idea in social justice work that often feels most counterintuitive and challenging. I wanted participants to confront their own urgency first, and kickstart a journey of continuous unlearning from there.
I too, am unlearning urgency – it is a project of a lifetime. And I have learned on the way that my own urgency is almost always my ego kicking into superturbomode. I want to achieve something tangible and timebound to ‘prove to myself’ that I am good/effective/competent/valuable. I know this because when I shift into urgency mode, and something fails, I process it as a personal failure. The thought running through my head is what am I doing with my life?
When I “fail,” I am not, on first instinct, worried about the kids or the teachers or the work, but rather about what it says about me as a professional or as an expert – at least when I am in urgency superturbomode.
When I am in patience mode, it is different – I don’t make failures about me. First of all, I am far more likely to see “failures” not as failures but as challenges – things to learn from, work through, and address. In this state of mind, I care first and foremost about the work, and I am just in service of it.
There are many folks who write about this. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who I haven’t read, writes about flow most famously. Tim Davis, who led a TFI alumni workshop that I attended last year, talks about being in a reactivity-resistance loop and using attention (or mindfulness) to shift into a presence-purpose flow instead. In my fourth learning love post, I cited a few other resources that talk about slowing down and patience from an explicitly social justice/equity lens.
So how do we do this? How do we move from urgency to patience? How do we slow down, while making sure that we retain our urgency muscles (but not our reactivity or resistance) when we need it? I want to reiterate: this is a project of a lifetime. As I write this post, I am in a headspace where I am generally feeling relatively at ease when it comes to staying in and sustaining patience mode. This hasn’t always been true and won’t always be true.
But because this series started out as part of a curriculum, a syllabus, I have an assignment. What is your action plan to slow down? How will you try to move 1% closer to presence and patience rather than reactivity?
sruti teaches 