Skills That We Have and Skills That We Are
We can acquire a broad range of skills in an average human lifetime. We can learn how to speak one or more languages, we can learn to play one or more musical instruments, we can learn how to dance, how to cook, how to run a company, how to restore an ecology.
But something must already exist that makes it possible to learn and deploy all of these skills. That something bears the same relationship to learning and education that learning and education in turn bear to all our activity. Thus, we can readily sense its extraordinary importance. We can think of that something as a more primordial set of skills, as skills that we are, because they somehow go completely together with our being.
Anything we could think of as truly wisdom-based leadership or wisdom-based learning must include working directly with these skills that we are, rather than restricting its approach to knowledge or skills we “acquire”. We need these primary or primordial skills to properly cultivate and deploy all other skills and knowledge.
Wisdom in part means the practice and realization of precisely these primordial skills. “Primordial” here refers to the whole of ourselves, beyond the limited part we habitually experience as the conscious ego.
When we want to improve some aspect of our life at all, we typically focus on improving acquired skill in the relevant domains. A leader who wants to lead better will go to a life coach, an executive coach, a public speaking coach, a confidence and charisma guru, a systems thinking teacher, and so on. But, if they instead work on this core set of skills, every other area can improve.
In some ways, even this description sounds abstract. Let’s instead consider a professional singer. If a singer wants to improve their sound—so they can hear the difference—they will go to a vocal coach or a teacher of singing technique. But they can also go to someone expert in these more primordial skills. That teacher may know nothing about singing. But as the teacher helps the singer improve the primordial skills, the singer will hear the difference—as will the their audience. It’s that precise. These skills underlie every activity, and improving them can improve absolutely anything we do.
We have all become very used to the common approach of improving any particular skill by means of working on that particular skill. But this common approach leaves its own foundation unknown, and thus leaves our true nature unknown.
In other words, training in skill that we are brings us closer to what we are, closer to self-understanding and self-acceptance. Failing to directly address the skills that we are makes our development as human beings a hit-and-miss affair—which is why we regularly meet people famous for their skill as leaders, musicians, poets, or whatever, and equally famous for their crassness and unhappiness as human beings.
Discussing these soul skills in writing involves significant obstacles and dangers. Perhaps one of the worst challenges arises from the fact that the words used to refer to these skills can seem all too familiar. In a moment we will consider some of those all-too-familiar words, and we must do our best to let go of any preconceived notions we have attached to them.
This relates to the need for training and experience. These skills demand extensive instruction and practice, and we can consider only the most basic aspects of them here. They have philosophical, psychological, cultural, and ecological dimensions we cannot include, or can only hint at.
We will focus here on four of the skills that we are. We can give them the following names: awareness, acceptance, connection, and nondoing. Our typical use of these words covers over their function as skills that we are, so let’s think of these as four foreign words or technical terms whose meaning we must find out in experience.
In one way or another, we begin with awareness. Awareness means to pause and perceive, to STOP-and-SENSE, to relax in a moment of coming awake, coming alive and alove.
“Pause” and “STOP” indicate that part of this skill has to do with our physiological constitution. Awareness as a skill inhibits neural firing and mindless habit. It’s like a person lifting a cigarette to their lips, out of habit and addiction, and then realizing they can stop. Their arm stops, before the cigarette reaches their lips, and then they relax it downward. The compulsion may reassert itself. Something in them wants to light the cigarette. But they don’t have to. At least for a moment, they can inhibit the response, even if they only catch it after it has gone into motion.
We touch here on the essence of freedom: The ability to become aware of what we are actually doing (not what we claim we are doing or think we are doing), to discern its efficacy and ethical quality, and to stop when we find it unskillful. In order to do something more skillful in any given situation, we often find it essential to stop doing the less skillful thing.
If a leader seeks more charisma, we can teach them various hacks that will potentially improve their ability to relate to others. But a far more powerful approach involves teaching them how to stop doing the things that get in their own way, and begin to see.
We should emphasize that a kind of retuning of the senses happens with this skill. We don’t perceive very skillfully. As we look with care, we will notice that some things that feel right in fact involve a lot of unskillfulness and a lack of attunement with reality. Thus, when coaches, colleagues, or mentors tell us to “trust” our feelings, we need to recognize that our feelings may need an education—otherwise we’d never blunder as we do.
If we appreciate the challenges this creates for us, we can arrive at some measure of compassion for ourselves. As we navigate our lives, we do indeed go along with what feels right. If our perception gets out of attunement, then our basic sense of which way to go, what paths to choose, how to move our lives forward, and so on becomes out of whack, and we have to inhibit what seems right to some part of us. But that misguided thing seems right based on habit, not based on genuine insight and attunement with what is.
We need to go by feel, but in a holistic and wise manner that allows feeling to come alive again. By means of awareness, we retune the senses, and we access senses and ways of knowing we hadn’t previously allowed to guide us with any great consistency.
Awareness as a skill arises as a gentle, life-affirming No to our habitual reactivity, and it restores our beginner’s mind. Awareness pacifies and calms.
Next comes acceptance, a life-affirming Yes. It smiles. This skill feels joyful—arises as joy—and expresses our basic positivity of mind. It says Yes to what is, to what is actually here (revealed by awareness), so that we can work with it.
This skill embodies Yes to all that supports us to do what needs to be done. We say Yes from the heart, from our flesh and bones, in our guts and in our blood.
This Yes doesn’t mean we become a doormat or a victim, or that we surrender into passivity, pessimism, meekness, or capitulation. It means that, even if we must exit a situation, we still affirm our lives at that moment, and we don’t ignore reality or fall into delusions or any kind of self-deception.
Compassion training belongs to this domain of skill. The nature of activation and positivity cultivated in compassion training relates to a profound acceptance of life.
Physiologically, acceptance relates to neural excitation. In a narrow biological sense, learning means neural tuning: Learning involves a relevant or contextually optimal balance of inhibition and excitation.
Right now, if all your neurons fired at once, you couldn’t function and might die. Same if they all inhibited. Every thought, word, and action involves a specific blend of inhibition and excitation. To learn something new, we must inhibit anything that doesn’t accord with the aspect of reality we want to attune with, and we must excite what does.
Next comes the skill of connection. The word has become trite, and we have to try and recover its subtle meaning and profound potential. By connection we mean the unseen interwovenness that allows us to fully receive the support of the world.
Connection refers to our relationality, in its active, non-reified aspect. It arises as a living skill, not a concept, and not a matter of “connecting” “to” “something,” of “feeling connected,” or anything sentimental or precious (in the pejorative sense).
We deal here with the opposite of any woo-woo or loosey-goosey notion. It has to do with skillful, successful action in the world. The word “connection” quickly becomes abused and then emptied of its most important meaning, so we must turn to practice to arrive at its true meaning and significance.
“We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.” W.H. Auden
When we conscientiously practice connection, we let ourselves be lived by wisdom, love, and beauty, and thus everything we do has a rightness and righteousness to it, and everything we do embodies the wisdom of discernment and creativity, and a nurturing mind that can take care of each being and situation, sensing its utterly unique qualities, needs, and gifts, without covering over their fundamental equality.
When the skill of connection becomes encumbered, we operate on the basis of manipulation and control. We become attached, addicted to fantasies of perfection, chasing the rushes, the highs, the thrills of idealized people and situations, and we lack the wisdom of discernment that allows us to appreciate fully the uniqueness of each being and each situation without covering over their fundamental equality.
Physiologically, we enter here into activation of the motor pathways. We must see perception and action holistically, but, in relative terms, we can speak of connection as the basis for movement. This allows us to begin moving as if from “outside” of ourselves, in a manner of true inspiration.
This brings us to the final skill: Nondoing. We should emphasize at this point that these four conceptually separable skills have no separation in our being—the being of life itself and the moment-to-moment activity of our lives. They all come together (or, they arise altogether), but we can speak in a relative sense and say that, “finally” we come to nondoing, which presents some special challenges.
Nondoing means deeply trusting the wondrous, mysterious, magical emergence of life—right here, as our very body, speech, and mind—right now, the emergence of the whole cosmos, the active, interwoven presencing of wisdom, love, and beauty in, through, as our mind, heart, body, world, cosmos. We function like an aperture through which the entire mystery, the entire implicate order shines forth into an explicate order (to borrow from David Bohm). We are the whole mandala of the cosmos. It’s an expansive vision.
Philosophically, nondoing indicates the perfection of skill in such a way that we transcend all ordinary skill. Physiologically, nondoing relates to active and balanced perception-and-action, highly skilled knowing-as-action.
In practice, we often find ourselves needing to emphasize inhibition, and the graceful balancing of inhibition and excitation. We gently quiet motor neurons we don’t need in the present moment (e.g., letting go of the impulse that will lead to shoving our foot in our mouth), and we allow acceptance and connection to evoke the ones we do need as we keep quiet the ones we don’t (so that we say something more skillful, or just let silence do its work).
The concreteness applies to all activities. When performing any activity, we rarely need to have our shoulders up at the level of our ears—yet we often do. When teaching or learning, we don’t need tension in our wrists as we write something for the class to see, or when we take notes—yet we often do. We don’t need to pound the keyboard when we type, or squeeze the life out of our pen when we write. We don’t need to subtly abuse our body and our world as we go about our activity. But we find these signatures of doing all over our action in the world.
We see nondoing in the effortlessness of elite performers. Grace means just the action, with nothing more or less. The ice skater’s triple Lutz has no wobble, no added tension, nothing extra, and nothing missing. The jazz musician’s playing feels unforced and totally alive in the moment.
However—and let us get absolutely clear on this—nondoing is not the same as flow. Rather, nondoing goes beyond flow. Nondoing provides everything we seek from flow, and it provides much more. If we stick with flow, we lose ourselves.
Nondoing is how everything functions. Thus, practicing nondoing, we return to reality, return to all beings—like returning home, returning to Ithaca, returning to mountains, rivers, and the great Earth. We return when we pause and perceive, when we inhibit the habitual impulse or reaction. We return as we say Yes to the present moment, and we connect to the powers that live us, and allow them to function without manipulation or control. We deeply trust the emergence of the mystery—the emergence of the mystery as our thought, speech, and activity—as if we are watching a magic show and also creating the magic at the same time.
All of this can sound abstract, because of its precision in experience. The skills are the incredible functioning of life, beyond our habits of manipulation and control, and beyond the limited and fragmented ecologies of mind we usually restrict ourselves to.
Anyone seeking ultimate success—a holistic success of self and world, and a fulfillment of their very highest potentials—must eventually focus on these skills. It’s best not to delay this work, even for another day. The whole world depends on it.