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4. By Yvette Elcock

Letting Go (2020) to Let Come (2021)

In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings. He usually has two faces since he looks to the future and to the past.

He seemed a fitting starting point for our Midland Regional December 2020 meeting. 

I’d like to start with a big thank you to Anne Archer for her deft hosting and facilitation of our last session for 2020.  I also want to extend a welcome to Karen Dean, attending for the first time with all her wisdom, and to everyone else for their continued support of our work together.  What started for me as part of my AOCS Regional role has in fact become a wonderful forum of learning and support.

We started by changing our names to a one-word reflection of how we had found 2020 and a whole variety of words and their accompanying reasons showed up:

• Discombobulating
• Appreciation
• Adventurous
• Consolidate
• Patchwork
• Inventive
• Exciting

And as we shared our reasons for being present on the session there was a theme around the importance of an end of year ritual or practice for many of us to anchor reflections, let go of what was no longer necessary in service of recalibration and acceptance of what was to come.

As I type this now, I think about my family, friends, colleagues and clients and wonder if I have missed opportunities to encourage them to do their version of a reflection?

Anne set up the first session as a chance for an individual and collective review of 2020 and our learnings. She invited us to consider:

• What has informed us, and our work?
• What is emerging that we can tune in to individually and collectively?

For me I noticed the ongoing presence of self-doubt and how I now framed it less as a ‘gremlin’ and more as a question: What is it in service of?

And I noticed the warmth of the sharing and the authenticity of the group.

We moved into smaller parings to consider what did we want / need to learn in 2021? And what dd we want to bring with us into this year?

I was a little surprised to hear me saying that I needed to:

• Meet me more where I am in the way I do with others in my personal and professional life
• Acknowledge respectfully that my planning and organisational strengths are resources to harness rather than control mechanisms to diminish
• Distinguish learning how from remembering that….

Our next experience was to practice generative dialogue via a listening round on the question of ‘What is our collective gift to the world?’.  Anne set up the process for those who had not previously experienced it:

• Hold the underlying intention that everyone matters
• Follow the systematic approach
• Have a Chair
• Work to agree the question around which to dialogue
• Agree the order or direction of the round
• Ask a volunteer to start
• Keep attention on the person speaking
• Stay quiet unless your turn until the end of the round

Emerging thinking included:

• Curiosity
• Compassion – a theme – for ourselves and others
• Hope
• Hold safety and a safe space
• Calmness, stillness
• Leading with love
• Be the change, nourish the world by being, be who we really are underneath our thinking

Our checkout process invited us to think about our intentions moving forward and to what interventions we might commit to have the impact we wanted based on our emergent thinking and collective gifts.  We also offered an appreciation to ourselves and to the group which covered some wonderful points and a desire to continue to meet in 2021.

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