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By Mary Bast
David Whyte, in The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, writes, "If there is one common experience of complexity in the workplace, it would be the experience of feeling lost... in the difficulty of a situation or in our very arrogance or nervousness over a problem." Having been a lover (and sometimes author) of poetry most of my life, I was delighted when a client gave me tickets for one of Whyte's workshops. One of the poems that he recited for us (and cites in his book) is a teaching tale in the Native American tradition by David Wagoner. It was a thrilling personal experience to hear in Whyte's resounding and dramatic voice this response to the question, "What do I do when I am lost in the forest?" (shown in part below):
Stand still, the trees ahead
and bushes beside you
are not lost...
Stand still, the forest
knows where you are.
You must let it find you
Observing Whyte's impact on others in the group also gave me the courage to use poetry in coaching business executives. It's so hard to help people change beyond the superficial, behavioral level. Our hard work may or may not make a visible difference in someone's effectiveness or wholeness as a leader and as a contributor to an organization. I'm sure each of you has experienced, as I have, the difficult journey from the first "ah-ha" of seeing your self-defeating patterns. There is so much buried in each of us, however, symbols that can help us break through – in fantasies, dreams, projections, artistic expressions.
I use anything I can that might take my clients to that symbolic level, through stories, humor, or even symbolic gifts. For example, to a CEO who was a life-long sailor, criticized by her team for not giving them enough praise, I gave a ship in a bottle to represent her stopped-up emotions. In this article, I'd like to show how powerful poetry can be in "arousing hearts."
Richard
Richard desperately wanted to understand the intensity of his emotional response to perceived slights from his peers. He suffered from the "Patrick Henry" syndrome: a strong desire to challenge, even if it could mean organizational death to him. But he would agonize for days on end before acting. For example, one of his peers had conducted a planning conference without informing Richard. This person, according to Richard, was just "running his own show, as usual, without any concern for the importance of others' participation!" He did eventually talk to his colleague, who was actually quite responsive. But Richard said he spent the entire weekend prior to this meeting "eating myself up inside."
We worked on many issues. I'll only relate one story about Richard's response to poetry. He had always insisted that his parents were wonderful people against whom he'd had no need to rebel, yet he felt there must be some basis in his background for his current testy responses. At one of our meetings I read to him Nina Bogin's Initiation, II, which includes the lines:
I...entered
the house as calm and ephemeral
as my own certainty:
this is my house, my key,
my hand with its new lines.
I am as old as I will ever be.
As I finished the last lines, Richard sat stunned and his eyes welled up with tears. When he was able to speak he said, "My parents have always treated me like a child – they still do. I never realized before how much I want to prove to them that I'm a man." From this moment, he was able to observe how defensive he was with his colleagues and began to let go of his need to constantly defend his manhood.
Emily
Emily was the Executive Director of a highly efficient, results-oriented mental health service agency who placed the highest priority on client advocacy. She was described by her team as "highly interpersonally oriented" and "very genuine with her feelings vs. taking a cool, rational approach." She hired a coach because she had a lot of innovative ideas for the burgeoning managed care industry, but found it difficult to influence her peers. Part of Emily's emotional health came from recognizing how she had been thinking only of others' needs and the toll this eventually took on her. She learned to set boundaries and assert herself quite directly. This breakthrough came when I faxed her Mary Oliver's poem, The Journey. Emily was so enamored of this poem that she now keeps a framed copy in her office (an excerpt appears below):
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice...
"Mend my life!"
Vern
I especially want to include an example of a tough guy, someone for whom it was nearly impossible to let down his guard. Vern was very concrete, logical, and out of touch with his feelings and his fear of vulnerability. He was also a very strong and responsible leader who hired a coach because someone who worked for him had complained to upper management about his profanity. The first time we talked he demanded, "If you can't say 'F___' in your own office, where can you say it?"
I coached Vern on some techniques for developing his staff, delegating more, and being less controlling so that he wouldn't be stressed by such long hours. We even developed a desensitization procedure for profanity, which did not involve electric prods! I discovered that Vern had written poetry when he was in college, so I asked him to express poetically the feelings behind his profanity. He came back with a really somber poem about fall that ended with the phrase:
Soon today the tree is bare,
naked and alone in the long dark of winter.
In discussing the images that his own poem evoked, Vern said, "I've always looked at the dark as a friend because it hides you, protects you." This conversation led to a deep awareness of his fear of intimacy and dedication to being alone. He no longer needed profanity to push people away.
Author's Note: The phrase "I meet my shadow in the deepening shade" is from Theodore Roethke's poem, In a Dark Time.
Mary Bast has a doctorate in social psychology and has been an executive and personal coach for many years, working with such companies as CSX, General Electric, and Mattel; with leaders and employees of small businesses and non-profit organizations; and with individuals and couples from all walks of life. She uses many processes and tools, including the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and a model of nine personality styles called the Enneagram. Mary’s vision is that her clients break free of self-defeating patterns to transform themselves and their relationships. She is committed to short-term results and especially to long-term, integrated change. She can be reached through her web site Out of the Box Coaching or by e-mail at coach@breakoutofthebox.com.
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