Weeknotes #30: Anchoring Dispositions
You are reading ‘Like person, like coach’: explorations at the intersection of personal narrative and coaching practice:
‘Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues.’
- Alasdair MacIntyre
Last time I wrote about how we can learn a lot about our values by directly noticing our behaviours. For a while now I’ve been thinking about the ongoing work we need to do to bridge the gap between what we notice and what we actually want to practice.
I’ve found inspiration in the words that other people use to describe their chosen dispositions: ways they choose to show up to their day-to-day experience and work. Here’s a couple of examples I often refer back to: Parker Palmer’s 5 Habits of the Heart; Ghandi’s 7 Social Sins; On Being’s 6 Grounding Virtues; The Seven Homecomings.
It’s hard to sit down and take a clear, honest look at how we orient ourselves towards the world and how this shapes how we then respond to it. I’ve sat down to try and identify three that anchor me right now in the kind of person I want to be day-to-day:
1. The person I am in the presence of, at any point in time, is the most important person in my life. This is so that I learn to delight in the other and in our connection.
2. Today is an opportunity to better someone else’s life with a simple action. This is to remind myself that I need others and others need me.
3. My day-to-day efforts contribute towards the wellbeing of someone else consistently and for the long-term. This is to feel and act as part of something larger than me.
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Disposition:
the tendency of something to act in a certain manner under given circumstances; prevailing tendency, mood, or inclination; the predominant or prevailing tendency of one's spirits. [Merriam-Webster/Dictionary.com]
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How might these dispositions look like when applied to coaching and social impact work? Three dispositions I want to be growing into right now:
1. Moving from proving myself to my team towards contributing my qualities and skills to my best ability towards our collective goals.
2. Moving from judgement and labelling people and behaviour to increasing compassion and decreasing fear-based behaviours.
3. Moving from performative expertise to grounded, informed, boundaried presence.
How do we know we are practicing our dispositions? A few things that help me are asking the teams I’m part of for feedback; therapy; supervision; friends who can gently nudge at my growth edges. For me, a large part of this work lies in living with an open heart - hard, hard, hard: (this is a poem I wrote that feels relevant here)
I read somewhere
That things like kindness
Claim us
without our say.
Someone I used to know
taught me
we turn tender
when another has learnt
to meet our knives
with their heart.
Since I shared Offerings for 2024, I’ve been receiving gorgeous invitations from you
to participate in programmes, podcasts and partnerships. It’s been such a joy - thank you. I continue to look for opportunities for collaboration. If you’d like to work with me, here’s some options to start with:
1-2-1 Coaching for Individuals and Organisations in the Social Impact space
Hire me as a guest writer/speaker for your website/publication/podcast/event.
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If you enjoy reading Like Person, Like Coach recommend it to others. Get in touch at iacobrbacian@gmail.com or find me elsewhere online.