let’s look at the second element of AIM.
Richard, a high-flier, is unusually quick thinking and passionate – he can be fun to be around but also breathtakingly energetic. He leads a successful team in a demanding industry. He has a wife and two children, but he doesn’t see them much because of work. He wants results and seems to get them. But he struggles with one key issue. He is so quick to react that the people who work for him are scared of him. They’re unwilling to open their mouths in case he dismisses their ideas or judges them as incapable. The same is true at home – his wife and kids don’t tend to share concerns with him because they think he will offer quick ‘solutions’ and tell them to just get on with it and stop complaining. Listening and empathising are two things Richard is not known for.
Richard is determined to change his behaviour. His marriage and his long-term relationship with his children depend on it. He also believes that for his team at work to function even more effectively, there must be more sharing of ideas, learning from mistakes and more confidence in speaking up.
When we first met Richard, he was aware of his behaviour and the effect it was having but he didn’t know how to stop doing it. Teaching him listening skills, or telling him the benefits of collaboration and empathising – things that he was already well aware of – would make no difference. Coercion, persuasion or teaching: in his case they wouldn’t change anything.
Instead, what we’ve been helping Richard do is to become interested in how he’s behaving now. To focus less on what he is trying to become and, rather, first inquire about how he is.
This may sound paradoxical but if you inquire into your current experience with interest, rather than trying to be something else, you may naturally respond and change it.
If we ask you, right now, what’s your posture like while you read these lines? What position is your spine in at this moment? Which muscles are tight and which are relaxed? While you question and find answers, there’s a good chance that you’ll subtly change your posture in response. This doesn’t come from trying or forcing – or us explaining about good posture and then telling you to do it. It comes from simply noticing. And that noticing doesn’t happen unless you inquire in the first place.
The people we have worked with tell us of the key role inquiry played in their path towards being more vital and alive. They learned to take an interest in their own experience.
Jenny is a nurse. She is compassionate and precisely the sort of person you would want to be responsible for your care if you were in hospital. Always wanting to be even better at her job, she practised her AIM with us over several months. She felt that it was her ability to inquire into her present-moment experience that made the most difference to how she dealt with her patients. As she explained:
‘I ask myself, “Why am I feeling like this? What’s this feeling? What am I sensing?” And I’m interested in it rather than trying to just make it go away.’
Exploring these sorts of questions openly and robustly can be very effective. Simply asking a question and exploring all that follows can lead to change – in and of itself.2 This might be in an individual’s working life or their life outside work. For example, asking someone to consider how and when they speak up well to their boss encourages them to realise how they speak up and how effective their boss is at listening.3 They might go away from that conversation with a better understanding and a deeper commitment to speak up more. Or they may walk away frustrated, as they begin to see how their boss silences them. That might lead to them applying pressure on their boss to change his or her behaviour in the future. Either way, the system is changed.
Asking questions leads to change.
Inquiry is the ignition key – if we’re stimulated to wonder and ask questions, we give ourselves a moment to pause and reflect. If we do not inquire, then we have no impetus to do anything differently or to learn. If we don’t learn, we won’t change.
META-AWARENESS
When we do Mind Time practices, we deliberately (but gently and kindly) bring attention to our present-moment experience. Then our minds wander. Then we notice that wandering and we bring our focus back to our present-moment experience. In this way, we are exercising the parts of our brain involved in observing and describing experience, as well as those involved in focus and attention. In doing so, we build our capacity to do this to a degree that allows us to call these brain networks into action when we need them most in our daily lives.
This sort of awareness is different to simply having a general sense of understanding. The sort of awareness we are talking about is meta-awareness. As we saw earlier, ‘meta’ means ‘beyond’ or ‘at a higher level’. So we are pointing towards a specific type of awareness. It describes a particular way of observing and being able to describe what is happening in the ever-changing stream of your experience from moment to moment.
This can be a tricky idea to grasp, although it will become clearer when you actually try out any of the Mind Time practices.
Sometimes the stream of our experience is calm and steady; sometimes it’s much more turbulent. We can think of it as made up of four elements – our thoughts, feelings, body sensations and impulses. These combine and recombine in all sorts of unpredictable ways.
The stream of our experience – our thoughts, feelings, body sensations and impulses – is always flowing, always changing, from the day we’re born until the day we die. And here’s the point: we can be immersed in that stream – just experiencing. Or, at key times, we can notice the stream. We can see what’s going on with us. In that moment, meta-awareness occurs and something new and subtly powerful enters the picture.
Meta-awareness enables us to choose.
When we are aware of our thoughts, feelings, body sensations or impulses as just that – as just a thought, just a feeling, just a sensation or just an impulse – a new freedom can enter the picture.
We can think of meta-awareness as a wonderful capacity that allows us to do two seemingly contradictory things at once. On the one hand, we’re still in the stream of our experience because we can’t ever leave that stream. So long as we’re alive, we’re experiencing. But meta-awareness allows us at one and the same time to step for a moment onto the bank of the stream and to see it flowing by.
With meta-awareness, we’re both in the stream and ever so slightly apart from it – objectively observing it, noticing what’s going on.
Imagine you are on a tall-masted ship – one with big sails and a crew of 50 hard at work on the deck. You hit a storm. You cling on to the side, unable to move. Meta-awareness is the ability to climb up into the crow’s nest. You are still on the ship – you are intimately aware of how the lurching of the ship makes you feel; you feel the wind rush at your face – you are very much in the experience. But, crucially, you are also ever so slightly distant from it now and able to look down on the rest of the crew, able to see the storm and how it is affecting the ship. You can see the bigger picture.
Peter is a quiet, introverted single father. He took up the Mind Time practices we shared with him partly because he was experiencing quite high levels of anxiety as he tried to manage commitments of work, being a father and also a carer to an elderly parent. For him, it was developing his ability to observe his thoughts rather than be ruled by them that made a crucial difference. He explained:
‘The practices gave
