True to yourself!
I was at an awesome unconference a while back. (Play4Agile) In one of the sessions I had the opportunity to explore what it was like to try and meet people at a whole different level. I could write an entire blog on what that was like, maybe I will some other time, but now I want to share what hit me the most.
The participants and I came up with a few questions, you would sometimes like to ask people, but you don’t normally do that in a day to day situation. It’s not like you look at the person sitting opposite from you in the train, you look them in the eye and ask: what would be really painfull to talk about right now? Right? Right. As much as you’d like to know, you probably wouldn’t get an honest answer anyway… Way to uncomfortable.
However, there might be situations in which it’s perfectly okay to ask awkward questions. In our session, we agreed to ask each others these questions. But the answer was not supposed to be your own. No, we were asked to tune in to the person asking the question and trying to answer it if it was asked to them!
To me, it was really hard to tune into the persons I talked to. But as hard as it was, it was also nice. It was nice to have a question asked and to be allowed to just sit there for a while, in silence, looking the other in the eye, gently, with compassion, trying to find the answer to the question asked.
The question I asked on of my partners, was: Where can you be true to yourself? Which is something I’ve been struggling with for a while. I was curious if my partner could help me figure it out a little more.
She also took her time. But when she answered, I had instant goosebumps, all over my body. She said… and she was so right:
I think… I can be true to myself almost anywhere and anytime… As long as I spend enough time with me.
