Could Letting Go of Your Idea, Be the Best Idea?
I’ll be comparing a three-day “potty learning” process to a leader retreat/team building retreat. Buckle up!
I attempted a three-day “potty learning” approach with my youngest recently. This meant three days of watching my child like a hawk, mostly confined to one carpet-less room in our home. The most challenging part about this approach was that I was directed to keep calm and not fight back when there was push-back (a nearly-two-year-old’s favorite thing to do). Even if she said definitively that she needed to use the toilet, but didn’t want to sit on the potty, I had to say, “Okay, keep listening to your body” (followed by direction as to what to do when she does need to go).
What made this so challenging? I had a specific idea/agenda/way I wanted it to go, but if I had spent three days trying to push my idea through, I would have simply solidified her resolve to NOT use the potty.
Without my own self-imposed pressure to “make her” do something in 72 short hours, I had no other job than to support her in her learning and celebrate when there was a success. With all of our time together, I not only got to observe her learning a new skill (or at least the very beginning stages of a new skill), I also got to hear her singing songs that she’d learned at daycare, that I may not have noticed if I’d spent the weekend fighting battles. She picked up new words and phrases while we were together and we played with hand-me-down toys that I wasn’t sure she was ready for, but she was!
Have you, as a leader, ever put all of your energy into pushing through your own idea? What was the result? Did people gleefully go along with it, giving their best, most creative selves or did they do so, but with some resentment and therefore… not their most creative selves?
In contrast, what happened when you stepped back and let them learn and innovate? What did you learn yourself? Were you surprised? Did you notice a skill/talent in them that you’d never known about?
If you have a leader retreat or team building retreat coming up, how might you step back and simply observe. Instead of pushing your idea through, put all of your focus and curiosity on discovering and celebrating the strengths of each person. What are you noticing that they’ve learned since you’ve seen them last?
If you are looking for ideas for a team building retreat or leader retreat, I’d like to suggest opening with improv to set your team up to have productive, innovative and collaborative conversations (that includes the difficult ones!)
The beauty of improv, is that you can only be “successful” if everyone agrees to let go of their own idea for the scene and work together, focusing on “making each other look good.” Set the stage by establishing that you will:
Actively listen to one another
Look for what can work vs. what can’t work (by using the “yes, and” principle)
“Make each other look good” - intentionally looking for ways to set one another up for success.
Be present, instead of thinking more about what we’re going to say.
Who knows, you may uncover new talents that you never knew were there!
*If you are interested in learning more, whether you are getting together in-person for your leader retreat or team building retreat, or if you’d be more interested in virtual improv for team building, please click on the links below!*