I’d only worked within Heart of Business for three months when I helped with last October’s Path to Profitability Retreat. Learning how to prepare for the retreat happened in a chaotic, crash-course sort of way, by necessity.
I stayed in my own room in a separate building from Mark and Holly.
Not once did we take time to debrief between sessions or days. I had little sense of how the five days would unfold. I just ran from one moment to the next hoping my related past experience and a handful of Heart of Business know-how would get me through.
I knew that I needed to make sure everyone was comfortable, that communication stayed clear between us and Still Meadow Community staff, that the microphone made it to each participant before they began speaking during sessions, and that I was to learn as a participant at the same time.
I was exhausted emotionally, physically, and psychically from the outset. I did the best I could as I tried to know the way before having made the journey.
The Second Time Around
With last month’s Sacred Moment Seminar, I was able to draw on my past experience. I felt on top of the planning. There was no crash-course, and I didn’t have to adjust to a new environment.
Mark, Jim, & I stayed in the same house. We spent each evening talking about how the day went, and Heart of Business in general. We laughed, ate, and cried together.
During the days, I was responsible for as many and more elements of the seminar as last time, but this time I was relaxed, confident, more present, and self-caring. When it was time to go, I was tired and ready, but this time I left feeling full. I didn’t have to go home to recuperate.
Listening to the Labyrinth
On the way back to my room after our last dinner of the Sacred Moment Seminar, Diane asked me if I’d like to go for a walk with her.
“Yes,” I said without hesitation. I was tired, but welcomed the chance to be outside surrounded by Oregon woods spending time with someone I hadn’t seen since last October’s retreat.
“Would you like to walk the labyrinth with me as well,” she asked.
The labyrinth? I’d stayed at Still Meadow twice now and hadn’t heard a peep about a labyrinth.
“I’ve always wanted to walk one,” I admitted.
As we took off, Friday’s dense cloud cover began breaking up behind us. With little effort, we arrived at the grass field where the inconspicuous labyrinth had been mowed into life.
In agreed upon silence, Diane and I walked single file toward the entry. The circle looked small as I approached. At the path’s inner end point, the circle’s center, there was a modest altar of odd baubles signifying many personal meanings. Paradoxically, it was only about four feet from the entry. A few direct, off-path steps and there you’d be.
Of course that would defeat the purpose . . .
Following the path, I walked around, winding in, out, back a bit, forward again, and around. The sky’s clouds were now blown into dramatic pieces, reflecting pink and orange shards of evening sunlight. A great horned owl’s haunting hoots rose up from the northern outline of Douglas firs.
The Rewards in Honoring the Process
The labyrinth path was many, many times longer then the distance from the entrance to the center. The time it took to reach the center brought depth and meaning to my arrival. I was present for it in a way I couldn’t have been if I’d denied the process and stepped in directly.
Before falling to sleep that night, it struck me how different I felt during and after the Sacred Moment Seminar than I did during and after the Path to Profitability Retreat. It’s hard to relax into a sense of place and responsibility, to be at your best, until you’ve gained some ground, taken the time to get there.
You can’t be there or expect someone else to be where you want them before the getting there happens.
Including Time in the Equation
Time can be one of our most important training tools. Even with the most detailed instructions, plans, and earnest effort, the element of time is required to accumulate knowledge, experience, efficiency, and familiarity.
Shortly after coming home from the Sacred Moment Seminar, I came across these words of Sufi master, Hazrat Inayat Khan:
“Man appears to be most independent of the influences and yet man is most under the influence of time; not only his body and mind, but with all affairs of life. Verily the one who knows the influence of time knows the secret of life.”
There you go, take it from a master. 🙂
Making the Most of the Time Tool
Yes, time–practice, experience, integration–on its own is an unavoidable ingredient to successfully accomplishing new endeavors, projects, or tasks. And there are ways to include it gracefully:
- Check your expectations.
I went into the Path to Profitability Retreat expecting myself to read minds, pick up loose ends out of context, and absorb the teaching like a focused participant. I left no room for the extra energy required in new situations. I could have asked for help, requested time with Mark and Holly to talk about expectations. I could have built in more time to re-juice. I could have worried less about being perfect. Mark and Holly could have given more thought to my needs as a new employee in a demanding, new situation.
- Define goals, expectations, and roles ahead of time.
The more time you spend considering how to best train an employee, the less strain they will experience while in the learning process. If there’d been time, it would have been great for Mark and Holly to have provided me more guidance about my role at Still Meadow before arriving. When your employee is competent and self motivated, it can be easy to forget that they’re learning what you may now be taking for granted. Allowing for the space and time to walk the labyrinth, rather than expecting yourself or another to arrive in a couple shortcut steps makes a difference in quality and outcome.
- Put yourself in your employee’s shoes.
As you are guiding them in their training process, remember the first time you took on a similar project, task, or event. Take a further step even and consider how they might best learn, notice if they integrate information differently then you and make adjustments. Making time to check in and debrief during the fall retreat would have helped me stay realistic about my learning process and capacity for competence.
- Consciously build in time for learning.
I certainly didn’t have realistic expectations during the fall retreat. I leapt across the labyrinth wanting to take care of everything like a pro. I wanted to relieve Mark and Holly of any extra burden, even though I didn’t really know what I was doing. I’m a quick study, but there’s a price for pushing that hard. If Mark had built in time for my learning curve, I still would have needed to learn by doing–taking the time, but it may have been much less stressful.
Make sure you account for the journey time needed when introducing or taking on something new. It will be much easier to evaluate how well you’ve learned after the second or third time through.
Be patient with your employees; be patient with yourself. Give yourself, and those who work with you, a reasonable amount of ins, outs, backwards, and forwards to reach the desired destination.
