“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”
~Confucius
I was on the phone with a client the other day, and she was frustrated. At herself. At her team. At the circumstances.
She detailed for me what had happened. Long story short, she’d stepped away from work for a few days to handle a personal matter; her team missed an important deadline on a project; and she lost her cool.
She snapped at them, and then she snapped at herself in her mind.
By the time we were on the phone, she was overwhelmed and quite frustrated.
“You’ve told me to be dispensable,” she said to me. “I was dispensable, and it all went wrong! And then I lost it!”
I let my client vent – even at me – for a while, and then I asked her, “Well, what went right in this situation?”
“Nothing,” she snapped.
“Well,” I began again, “If there could be a positive, a learning to this, what might it be?”
She paused.
I asked, “If we are working toward radical acceptance, even of the hardest stuff, what might it be that went okay enough?”
After a bit, she started to talk and to list a few things. The team had made a mistake and had worked it through with the colleagues they had let down. She had snapped at them and then quickly acknowledged that and apologized. And they’d all sat down to map out where things fell apart and how the team could handle future projects more successfully so that she could step away and be dispensable.
“Okay,” she finally ended with. “Okay, I see that we learned from this, but I still wish it hadn’t happened.”
I agreed with her. It might have been much easier and better if things hadn’t gone awry. And, perhaps they’d gone awry on a project that had space for that, instead of one where the same challenges would have completely set things back beyond repair.
“I’m not saying that everything that goes wrong is fine,” I told her. “But I am suggesting that even in the things that aren’t fine, there might be some good. Some beauty even.”
I shared with my client how I have seen – with myself, with other clients and colleagues – that even the worst circumstances and outcomes can have at least a modicum of good, of beauty, in them, and that when we open our eyes and minds to that, we are more likely to find it and see it and benefit from it.
If you enjoyed this post, you can read more like it in our book, The Power of Thoughtful Leadership: 101 Minutes To Being the Leader You Want To Be, available on Amazon.
For support in finding more beauty, even in the tough stuff, contact Robyn at rmcleod@chatsworthconsulting.com.
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