Boy have I been thinking about this...what to write, what to write. What of Schein and Block and process consultation can I truly embrace as my own? What can I take of theory and practice that becomes me, that I can integrate and make authentic, individual to me?
I love paradox and part of what attracts me to process consultation and its purveyors is the paradox that exists in what process consultants do--solve problems without being the expert, leading through collaboration, confronting in a helping relationship, knowledge through ignorance. Here is what I am beginning to know as my philosophy of process consultation practice:
1. Above all, do no harm. Help as much as you can. Always care--One of the things I've come to realize through the readings about and practice of process consultation is that the helping & caring relationship requires us to sometimes do and speak about hard and painful things. It is not just being empathetic and supportive (although it is this too). It can be about recognizing and confronting fear and anxiety and bias and other nasty stuff inside ourselves and others. And it's not enough to just recognize--as process consultants engaged in helping relationships, it means finding ways to tease to the surface the things that we shy away from, from which we constantly avert our eyes. It means confronting pain. I feel as a process consultant a strong obligation to do this--it may just take me a while to become skilled in the practice. And it will always require that I care.
2. Just when you think you know something, access your ignorance. Remember that you may know nothing. And in that moment, you know something--Schein writes about accessing your ignorance, being aware of our own ORJI cycles and intervening at the times when we get in our own ways. The danger of being a consultant of any kind is that we fall into the role of expert, that we succumb to the allure, to our ego's desire for stroking and to the expectations of others. When this happens, we have suddenly and dramatically lost our ability to influence and help others to solve their own problems, we have lost our power to empower, and thus we have lost our power. Ignorance is the path to knowledge and I WILL walk that path.
3. Show up, be present. That's enough--It's enough because being present means having presence. Being present means observing self and others and all the data that is possible to note (until our brains get full and can take no more!). Being present means knowing all of it IS data--including and most of all those things about ourselves that we think we must hold onto because we mistake our beliefs and behaviors and attitudes as "self". Being present does not just mean being a body in a room. It means recognition and in the recognition, we give life to what is already there but that might be ignored. Acknowledging something as data gives it life and allows it to breath. Being present, having presence, means sending the ego of self into the back corner and putting it in its place so that real life can come out to play without fear of being punished or sanctioned or judged. This I truly believe.
4. Be true to the practice. Get the business of process consultation done. Always, always be flexible and responsive to provide what is needed in any given situation--again, another paradox. Block has convinced me that accomplishing the "business" of process consultation at every step of the way--contracting, data collection, feedback, dealing with resistance--is very important. A way to gauge being true to the process of process consultation is to ask,"Have I completed the business of this particular stage?" Schein has convinced me that one must be flexible and true to the data that is presented in the moment--and that this might mean, at times, it is necessary to be a "pair of hands" (but that always being a pair of hands undermines process consultation). It might mean taking a chance to share data with someone who is not your primary client because sharing the data is a helping intervention in the moment.
I see myself as a process consultant. A few months ago, I was interviewing for a job and I said in the interview that I was looking for a place to work in which I fit--where the timing is right for me to contribute my best, to hone my craft. Process consultation is a craft I plan to hone for a very long time, with philosophical underpinnings that blend very well with what I already believe about life and people; and a practice involving a skill set that has lots of room for growing. I plan to nurture the process consultant in myself and where ever I see it lurking in others. It is lurking in all of us, in various stages of growth, just waiting for someone to notice and ask for our little process consultants to stand up and help out--by helping all of us get to answers without telling us what the answers are!
I see myself as a process consultant. A few months ago, I was interviewing for a job and I said in the interview that I was looking for a place to work in which I fit--where the timing is right for me to contribute my best, to hone my craft. Process consultation is a craft I plan to hone for a very long time, with philosophical underpinnings that blend very well with what I already believe about life and people; and a practice involving a skill set that has lots of room for growing. I plan to nurture the process consultant in myself and where ever I see it lurking in others. It is lurking in all of us, in various stages of growth, just waiting for someone to notice and ask for our little process consultants to stand up and help out--by helping all of us get to answers without telling us what the answers are!
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