WORKING WITH CONCEPTS
Connell Fanning, Assumpta O’Kane, and Marija Laugalyte
We tend to comfort ourselves with the idea that we can change our minds, almost readily, if something demands it. But is that the evidence about what happens at any given time?
Do we not observe people who, when confronted with an incontrovertible argument, nevertheless balk at allowing the argument to change their mind? While the merits of an argument may be acknowledged and even accepted on an intellectual level, we nevertheless observe resistance from ‘within’ the person as a whole, as it would seem.
What is going on when there is such resistance?
In this series, as we have mentioned, we use daily experiences to observe how we think and therefore, by extension, how we respond to demands to change our minds. To observe how we are thinking it is necessary to think in terms of an example. We have also suggested that a useful practice for training ourselves to observe how we are thinking is first to observe public figures dealing with their problems, in particular by attending to statements which reveal how they are thinking.
Demand on CEO of large organisation to change thinking
We can take, for example, the recent situation facing the Commissioner of the (London) Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley, effectively the CEO of a large organisation, and how he initially responded to an aspect of a major report about problems with his organisation.
The inquiry by Dame Louise Casey was established after two police officers shared photographs of the bodies of two murdered sisters on a WhatsApp group. The central finding of was that the Metropolitan Police as an organisation is “institutionally racist, misogynist and homophobic” (The Guardian).
The Commissioner, while generally welcoming the report, specifically rejected this characterisation of his organisation with the excuse that the term ‘institutional’ is “quite ambiguous” and has different meanings for people. This was despite the fact that the Casey report, as well as earlier reports, provided a definition of what is meant by ‘institutional’ and the Commissioner himself acknowledging that “I get it’s systemic, I get it’s cultural, and we’re going after it”. This rejection was demonstrated in the face of a number of major reports over decades, starting with the Macpherson report almost 25 years ago, arising from the inquiry into the investigation by the Met of the murder of a young black man, Stephen Lawrence, which pointed out that the Met is institutionally racist.
Casey was prompted to respond, saying the Commissioner “has potentially missed his moment” and “I worry for him, and I worry for that because he is an outstanding leader.” (The Guardian) The moment for the Commissioner she would seem to have in mind is to change how he thinks by taking on board the, apparently for him, new concept of an organisation being ‘institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic’.
The Commissioner is not alone in this stance. Responding positively to an external demand to add concepts to our current portfolio of concepts can be a difficult task, such are our habits of thought. This is the matter of interest to us here.
What is happening when we resist a new way of looking at something and what does this tell us about ourselves, and how can we use our resistance as an opportunity to grow?
The first thing to note when we resist a concept is that we are probably not even aware that we are resisting. Or, if we have some awareness that we are doing so, we will most likely feel justified in our rejection. Our energy is directed into the work of protecting ourselves against this concept and making sure it does not get past our protective barriers. We want to keep the concept at arm’s length and prevent it from unsettling us. Our behaviour may appear irrational and perhaps even crazy to other people, but for us it makes complete sense.
When resistance takes hold, it is initially expressed through our behaviour. The type of behaviour will vary from person to person. For example, while some may be defensive and argumentative, others may withdraw and become sad or even depressed, while others still may become vindictive and righteous.
So why do we reject certain concepts or ideas which are in themselves simply ‘tools’ to help us think with?
A way to understand our ‘rejection of concepts’ is to come at it from a personal development point of view. In developmental terms we may not be aware that we are stuck in our way of thinking. Something about this concept has triggered us, and we don’t like this unsettled feeling.
However, as we advance in our development, we become capable of ‘holding the trigger’, of stepping away from the situation to create a ‘space apart’ from the busy world and slow down to explore what we are rejecting. In our evolving personal development there is a big question to ask ourselves: are we open to look to ourselves and be honest about what we might discover about ourselves?
Fundamentally, as part of slowing down, we have to first recognise that we are responsible for forming and using our concepts. When we reach this awareness, we will have developed ourselves beyond making excuses, blaming others, or being judgmental of others.
We fill in the content of concepts all the time in our lives from our direct experiences. This filling in of conceptual content can be understood, for the purposes of analysis, as coming through our faculties of feeling, emotion, reasoning, and intellect.
Some concepts we simply absorb from others without any reflection or analysis, and for the most part we are unaware of them. Consider our concepts of family, society, nationality, race, justice, kindness, and so on. These we may take on board ‘naturally’ as we grow up. There are other ‘concepts’ we might take on in a more deliberate way following reflection – for example, careers, qualifications, training, wellbeing, friends, partner, children, ambitions, and dreams.
Thus, whether we are aware of it or not, we are forming our concepts all the time. The quality and reliability of our thinking with concepts will greatly depend on how we balance our faculties of feeling, emotion, reasoning, and intellect in a seamless natural way in our behaviour.
Personal development therefore is about us developing ourselves as a ‘whole person’, since it is in our wholeness, not in our separateness, that we have the resources for forming concepts which lead to good judgements.
This can be easier said than done. We become attached to our concepts, we personalise them, we identify with them and form habits which are laid down through repetition over several years. Indeed, when we meet a familiar concept in the world which another person is using in a different way to us, we can instinctively react to what we see as a misrepresentation of the concept in the situation at hand.
Is this what might be going on for Mark Rowley? Is he stopping to consider that he may be using an old version of a concept which is blocking him from engaging with the situation he is in right now? Is his old concept of ‘institutional’ too small for the gravity of the situation he is dealing with?
The fact is that, for many of us, when we are in the process of ‘resisting’ we may not see ourselves objectively.
Sometimes we may rely on others to alert us that there may be something we are not letting into our consciousness. This person is someone we trust and know that they have our genuine interests at heart. They will be able to feed back their observations to us and, as our ‘trusted critical friend’, once we calm down and enter a safe space, we can be open and listen. Initially, it is not easy to find the courage to recognise that we are ‘not seeing something about ourselves’. It is not easy to know that we are not ‘right’, ‘perfect’ or in control of ourselves. It takes courage to own up and see what obstacle is blocking our pathway. Finding such courage in ourselves is an important part of the work of personal development.
Because courage is needed, some of us remain, at least temporarily, until we are ready to move on, living in this conceptual blind spot of resistance. In time, with the help of a ‘trusted critical friend’ and our own commitment to working on ourselves, we may be able to let go of what we are holding onto; we can lean into the fear and anxiety of what we are resisting. We can step forward into a new ‘opening’ in ourselves where we become curious and prepared to unpack what we have not been able to recognise in ourselves before now.
As always, we can turn back to ourselves to ask the question: How do we live in a way that supports and accelerates our own personal development and prepare for the complexity in our lives, including in our jobs?
When we observe people like Mark Rowley apparently trapped in his own concepts, how do we respond? What would we think about ourselves if similar demands to change our way of thinking were made of us?
Do we understand how useful personal development habits can be for us?
Hence, the next time we feel we are resisting taking on a new concept, we can consider it as an opportunity to become aware of what is going on in response to what is happening on the outside.
Without this awareness, we are being controlled by what we cannot see, and resisting new thinking will continue to hamper us.
This raises the question of how do we do this messy work of drawing on the head and the heart, on thinking and feeling? One of the best-established answers is through undertaking a developmental conversation such as provided by the new ‘Reading The Leadership Mind’ experience from The Keynes Centre. See here bit.ly/3kX3IxX
Assurance: The Keynes Centre does not use any large language pattern modelling (so-called ‘Artificial Intelligence’) software or similar Information Technologies in the research and writing of our articles because we wish our readers to know that we are relating to them directly through our thinking and writing.
