This week and last, I have been greatly inspired by The Feedback Fallacy, an article published this Spring in the Harvard Business Review and shared with me by a friend who does lots of coaching. Coaching and mentoring don’t seem exactly the same to me, but I love learning about how adults learn and thinking about ways to support real growth in each person. One of the insights I came across a number of years ago while studying Chinese language in Taiwan was that adult learners learn best from meaning rather than repetition. This fact has continued to resonate with me as I have taught over the years and today I want to explore how meaning-making becomes medicine.
For me, medicine is all about meaning-making in the sense that if you give meaning to your dis-ease or your discomfort, you instantly gain empowerment, a knowing of your own. Your own knowing may or may not “solve” your situation, but your own knowing gives you an indispensable foothold in any situation. Without doubt, this kind of foothold in your own knowing, in your particular situation is the BEST medicine!
Now mentoring, in my estimation, is all about finding and mining your own medicine, finding the meaning inherent in your own experience. There are lots of ways to go about this, but most important to mentoring is connecting you with your own essence, your own blueprint for what has meaning in your life. So often when you seek help, you are looking for someone to tell you what is wrong either with you or your approach. Unfortunately, that kind of feedback doesn’t really work to improve your situation. From The Feedback Fallacy:
“Focusing people on their shortcomings or gaps doesn’t enable learning. It impairs it.”
Meaning-making medicine and mentoring do not focus on what is wrong with you, but instead cultivate and strengthen what is right, what we call in Chinese medicine, upright qi, the relationship between you and what is working well. Your body and being have so much knowing already, yet it can be new and sometimes challenging to access this knowing that lies deep inside you and lives through feeling and sensation rather than words. When you mine these deep places, you may not have words for what you find, but you can still hold your experience in ways that make this kind of knowing available in a flash. This is the kind of knowing that happens when you see a beautiful fawn and her mother strolling through the yard, or glimpse the moon through the clouds. You know without doubt that these moments enrich and nourish your being.
I’d like to support you in nourishing your being, enriching the soil of your life, so you can stay connected and powerful in any and all circumstances. Making your own medicine, you could say, moment by moment. I use meditation practice, Chinese medicine, poetry, movement and ritual to nourish, enrich and support your growth.
There a lots of ways to work with me. A Change by Choice or Custom Case Call, either of which will give you the opportunity to try out a mentoring session with no commitment. If you think mentoring sounds like the right kind of support for you already, you can sign up right now for 3 months of mentoring (6 meetings) and use those 3 months anytime in the next year.
