July to November 2022 was like no other four months I have lived. My experience and understanding of myself and my practice of group relations shifted. My finally posting this on this blog, gives me a sense that it has something to do with my ability to authorise myself. It has been supported in no small order by a recognition that I am a beneficiary of the love, grace, leadership of others!  

This poem spoke to me many times during this period.

Full poem by Arun Kamal, here. Loosely translated it means –What is my own in this life, Everything is taken as a debt, All the metal belongs to these others, Mine is at best is the action at the edge.

Recruitment is the first step to creating the learning community that will be the workshop. GR workshops dont give answers – they help open questions for explorations. So to talk to someone about the workshop means tapping on tangible benefits one has experienced of GR work. This personal experience seems the strongest currency for recruitment. When recruitment efforts activated this experience in a system, it could result in someone expressing interest, but as significantly, this led to a past member acknowledging their own learning. When recruitment becomes unconsciously some kind token offering to show our allegiance to GR or an offering to the director, we may lose the potential of these recruitment conversations.

Plenaries have been spaces where, in my experience of myself as a consultant, I would wait a fair bit before offering something. Two things happened in this workshop. One, the task of the plenary got clearer to me – as sense making collectively, a place which is not just a village square of the workshop where learnings/insights/dilemmas/feelings are published. It is also a place where these are worked with in public and further exploration and collaboration is possible. Second, the role of director made the collective management role alive for me. If you see something, you say it in the most helpful way that is feasible at that time. So my earlier avoidance was an avoidance of my collective management role!

Talking of role, the GR idea of role is an action verb! You clarify your role by acting on it and each time you act you increase your own authorisation, leading to greater clarity! A dominoes effect almost! In working with colleagues before the ICS, I thought I set the boundary by setting the brief of the presentation. I did not engage with my colleague’s plan for the session for the first ICS. The experience showed that it was important to go through the presentation together. I struggled however to ask my other colleague who was doing the second ICS – to share and agree to the flow of the session. ‘System in the mind’ evoked for me was approval by a ‘senior’. I also had unworked with feelings with the colleague, which evoked guilt. I could not access the authority of my role and something that was needed for the task of that event. I finally found my role and he found his, quite close to the session. It was with the third ICS, when my colleague shared the presentation ahead of time, I found my role with respect to ICS. It is to be clear on the way the conceptual framework that is being offered as food for thought in that particular ICS. It is something that should be also discussed in the staff meeting. Seeing the PPT helps us all see how the ICS connects with the here and now of the workshop and be better prepared to complement with examples and ideas to strengthen the core ideas.

Experiencing one’s impact on the system, helps strengthen one’s intention to act with responsibility. It makes you want to get your shit together so that everyone can do the work that needs to be done! One staff gathering, I quickly debriefed on an open question from previous night, which pertained to RAAG and also an area where I had been challenged on the stance I had been taking. This was in a short break, just before my colleagues were to consult to SSGs. Seeing my colleagues rushing out to reach the workrooms in time, even as I was just finishing what I had say, I realised, what had I filled them up with? Could I have waited for a bit longer?

The staff room has always been a place of refuge for me in a workshop – a place to sit, think, reflect. I experienced this time the staff room as a place to connect. For me and those who were not consulting to events at that time, as a place for conversations – deeply personal, interpersonal but moving something for oneself and also for the system. We work with each other in the informal space – the staff room is that transition place between the interpersonal and the system.

My pre workshop dreams had recurrent themes around menstruation. Associations on these were with some sense of shame, staining and also whether I had it in me to do this work. The experience of the LTTUC was an experience of interdependence. How little one can do after one has brought the constituents of this workshop system together! At the same time, so much can be done when one stays in one’s role and trusts others to be in theirs. In one dream, I was wearing green pants, like surgeons wear, and one was not clear if the liquid on me was sweat or blood! I saw the GR traditions as the green giving a supportive fabric to do and to cope with the pursuit of experiential learning. An almost obsessive focus on members, idea of collective management, authorisations and accountability to the primary task to name a few. Also, the scaffolding that GRI as sponsor has put in place which allowed for new directorates to offer a good enough container for the work to happen!

Directing the LTTUC is among my biggest professional achievements. It was generative. A very gratifying experience of working with staff, members, venue, office, designers to create new experiences with and through group relations frameworks – something I have benefitted from so much. I have even deeper gratitude for the directors of events I have been part of, for their leadership. For anyone invested in working with GR frameworks, a director’s role is something to gear up for – as a way of giving back and to give to oneself and one’s practice.

I was authorised by Group Relations India, to direct a Group Relations workshop – Listening to the Unconscious in Self, Groups and Systems – in November 2022. This two part blog captures my reflections on this experience.

If my dreams post the LTTUC workshop are a road to the unconscious, they tell me the extent of my fears – on what all may go wrong in the workshop. From the rooms not being set, to me forgetting my role or even absenting myself from staff meetings – my dreams were somewhat nightmarish. My biggest fear of leadership speaking through these themes of letting down or being let down. Can I depend on others? Can I take the responsibility of their depending on me?

In my intention for the workshop, I wished for staff, members and myself to be learning and to experience the basics of group relations. This informed design of our first preparatory staff meeting where we looked at the primary task of each event and our experience of being in these events as consultants and members. We had to remind ourselves as staff system that we needed to practice what we were expecting members to do – sometimes expectation from members were more than what we were ready to do ourselves. This brought a degree of humility to the task of consulting and a jointness in the learning enterprise.

A second intention was to find and express joy and play in this learning. Day 1 of the workshop and the first concept session on unconscious and self, refreshed for me the intense and spontaneous nature of our defenses – to protect oneself from hurt and challenging the idea one has of oneself. If the challenge to self is experienced as a sting, how can it also be a process of joy?

I learnt that an insight need not show me what I am not – not doing/not being. I can also see GR as a way by which I can strengthen my intention. I accept the presence of the unconscious, I also need to accept the limitations of my ability to counter it or manage it. In fact, we got a new name for this phenomenon – In-turn -alization.. see something, name it and then see if you can skilfully manage it by yourself! In -turn-alization approach will deplete joy in GR work.

Holding some ideas about myself lightly allows for new discoveries and re-examining of cherished assumptions. I found that thinking about these assumptions about oneself by and of oneself is easier to handle. Unpacking assumptions one holds of others, and then seeing what that says about you, is a painful and difficult re-examination of oneself! These feelings when not worked with, can lead one to derail the task.

I have had a lived experience with male privilege and entitlement and how fragility in men gets projected on the women in authority. I became aware how I had perhaps loaded more onto these experience and I was lodging my apprehensions of colleagues privileging working for their ambition or narcissism and abandoning task, in my male colleagues. Why do I locate this fear more in men, when envy, narcissism and working with women in authority are wider phenomena – something I have encountered in myself too!? Acknowledging these feelings needs me to acknowledge and own my experiences – as a girl child, a young girl and a woman – and the projections I may have loaded on these experiences over the years.

Once named, I could ask myself what is this fear of being let down, abandoned or of being let down, that I locate in certain people, and my consequent stances? Who then do I also set up as those who I need to validate me and for me to feel accepted or acceptable? These words emerged from this emotional turmoil

Listening to the unconscious is first listening to one’s own fears and assumptions about oneself and about others – held so deep that they are unknown. It seems at times safer to stay with one’s consciously and unconsciously arrived at assumptions or conclusions than to put them out, meet them again and again; and invite some new experience to challenge and reexamine them. To listen to the unconscious entails trading permanently the wish for comfortable endings, with a commitment to courage and curiosity.