Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog

This post details the first of my Six Principles of Personal Development that every manager should know, which is:

1. Acknowledge things, without judgement, as they are

You are exactly where you have chosen to be.

Through many years of working with (pretty experienced) managers, mostly on MBA programmes, I am convinced that this is the most fundamental PD principle of them all. My conviction stems from the observation of  both how (for all sorts of good reasons) un-self-aware many mid-career managers are, and of how radical the “ah-ha” can be when they wake up.

This principle asks just that you acknowledge the truth of your own present, of where you are, of who you are and how you are. That’s all, no opinions on whether or how you construe the past and the future. And what’s more to do all of this with a challenging and genuinely curious frame of mind, without prejudice or censorship.

Some people are driven to Management Education and development by their sense of being “trapped” in their past. Others are obsessed by something in the future that, necessarily, must always appear just beyond their reach. They seem always to be in pursuit of something they don’t have. The symptons of this malaise are beautifully and poetically illustrated in the following Tom Waits lyrics, from his song ‘Foreign Affair’ :

‘most vagabonds I knowed don’t ever want to find the culprit
that remains the object of their long relentless quest
the obsession’s in the chasing and not the apprehending
the pursuit you see and never the arrest’

Where are our heads? At first glance, a lot of us appear to prefer to occupy a prison of the past or an artist’s impression of the future. Closer inspection (or introspection, in fact) should reveal that both of  these concepts are existent only and entirely in the present. The past is no more a cause of the present than the ship’s wake (to borrow an analogy used by Alan Watts) is the cause of the present position of the ship. That’s not to say that the idea of the past does not have use. Without it, “here” would have no meaning’, we would not know that there is such as thing as the present. Nor would we be able to construct the idea of a future. Our sense of agency, of acting in the world, is reliant on the coming together of these three ideas?

Acknowledging ‘what is’ is a principle that runs through all other, or further, aspects of PD, and represents a fundamental commitment to mindfulness of practice. Notice, suspend judgement and… let go.