Balance and trust: working out loud

Finding our balance is not always easy, but without trust and a broad perspective, backed by humility, we cannot learn

I was struggling to find a balance last week: trying to finish some writing, attend a number of meetings, the conference i was speaking at, travelling, all against a background of some frustrations i was trying to deal with. In short: my mind was elsewhere and i kept losing focus. It’s strange but, when that happens, i can become more negative: more likely to look for faults in others, perhaps less likely to accept them in myself. The relationship between mindset and performance is complex, but i do believe that we have to start with balance and trust.

As regular readers know, one of the founding principles of this blog is to always be positive: to never identify problems without exploring solutions, to never be critical without showing understanding. It’s not just a matter of being nice: it’s about being in the right mindset for learning. The Social Age is about sharing, about humility in leadership and a willingness to change our stance over time, in collaboration with community. My own thinking and stance evolves over time, so why would i not credit that in others?

I guess that being mindful is having the ability to spot when we lose our perspective: to take steps to adjust that balance, to let go of the things that frustrate and annoy us, to focus on the positive.

Trust and integrity are important in learning, all the more so when we look at social learning within communities: without trust, we cannot easily collaborate. Similarly, working out loud, the Social Age trait, only really works when we have trust in the audience to judge us over time, not in the moment. Strangely, organisations are not always good at this. It’s not something easily captured in process or regulation: the fact that meaning emerges, that sometimes we have to make mistakes in order to find where our learning is?

So this week i’m away in Amsterdam, writing and developing some new ideas: i’ve packed the iPad, some books, some clothes, but i’m trying to leave last week’s mindset behind so that i can truly learn.