Episode 3.06: Ambition
THE PODCAST: December 15, 2020
ON WILLPOWER, TRUST AND A FUTURE THAT CLAIMS US
Tim & Tuesday host a far ranging conversation on how they relate to ambition and willpower in their work. How is our drive helping, and hindering, our ability to do the work we love?
Together, Tim Merry and Tuesday Ryan-Hart are THE OUTSIDE—systems change and equity facilitators who bring the fresh air necessary to organize movements, organizations, and collaborators forward for progress, surfacing new mindsets for greater participation and shared impact.
3.06 — SHOW NOTES
Tim: We just had a rich and far ranging conversation on how we relate to ambition and willpower. That pervasive sense of reaching into the future, grabbing what we think the future might be by the scruff of its neck, and bringing it back to the present and saying “let’s go for it” and how that may be hindering our ability to do the work we love right now.
Tuesday: Tim and I are in a lot of reflection about “what is this?” “How do we want to go forward?” That comes up today - the idea that maybe a future is claiming us rather than us claiming a future and pulling it back. We’d love to hear what is claiming you?
Tim: I’m having an internal conversation about how much I drive for a desired outcome. The conversation for me is how ambition, drive and vision, and an ability to see the future, jives or dances with the reality of where we’re at and the uncertainty of where we are going. I’ve often been driven by where I want to get to.
Tuesday: This idea that ambition, drive, making things happen, the ability to see a different future, the ability to articulate a different future, the ability to set our sights on something and go there/get there has made both of us, and The Outside, successful. It’s quite interesting at this point, where we’ve had a Fall of reflecting, of questioning that drive and ambition. I think it’s about inquiring about it: Is it needed now? Does it fit for us now? How and when does it fit for our clients and when does it not? Because we work with the idea of living systems, it feels like ambition becomes something different when we bring it into the natural world.
Tim: Ambition is an over-developed muscle for me. I think a lot of my career and my life has been dependent upon my ability to articulate, in a charismatic and inspiring way, alternatives to how we're working together, to how we could be structured or organized. I think that the root of my success has been this ability to charismatically draw for people how things could be ‘other’ so they would buy into a different way of working right now. I think that works better when you're running events. I think that ability to inspire and motivate what an alternative future is when you're creating a pivotal moment for people, I think it can really serve. But that's not enough to sustain the day-to-day grind of getting change done. It starts to feel shallow. It starts to feel disconnected from reality.
Tim: I think a lot of my practice has been reaching out into the future firmly grasping something and then, like dragging it willy-nilly regardless of resistance, into the now. If there was an image, it's like I'm reaching out my arm and firmly grasping something from the future and dragging it back through time to try and insert it in the present. And I think that's how I've approached a lot of this work. Just recently I’ve been in a conversation that has been a lot softer, which is like, we'll reach out, scoop up some of the stuff from the future, and then you bring it back to the now and then you sprinkle it like spices in your stew or you sprinkle it like seasoning on the stuff that's cooking right now.
Tuesday + Tim: As you were just doing that, Tim, I thought about how responsible and central it makes us when we have to grab from the future and pull it back. It's up to us to make that happen. We become responsible for the outcome. When we do that, when we're the visionaries dragging stuff from the future into the now to inspire people to do it, we take ownership away from people. How much does that centralize us in our work and our responsibility to making it happen?
Tuesday: I'm sure many of our listeners can identify with being kind of the over-responsible, make it happen kind of people, which I think gets to my own imagery recently about this idea of, like opening up my heart, which, if you all could see me right now, I have two hands kind of like opening up my heart and I've been saying the word unclenching, because my way of moving through the world, I think from the earliest days, was to kind of clench up and pull it back and then hold things really tightly and move them forwards. I've got two fists over each other and just kind of moving it forward. But the motion is quite internal. And so as you talk about allowing an ambition, I think part of what I'm trying to determine right now, for myself and for The Outside or my part of The Outside, is how do I open up, unclench, allow and really be guided, listen for what wants to happen and move in that direction like maybe the trees are listening for what nutrients will come in that will make them grow a certain way or waiting for the sun and then moving toward it because that's what's being called for. And so I have to allow and be guided. And I wonder what that has to do with ambition?
Tim: I’m constantly reminding myself, at the moment, not to get ahead of the game. If I think about 2021 for The Outside, what’s the next step? Don’t plan this any further than it's happening. Think about what needs to happen now, rather than planning into the future. So I think that's been a big piece for me. And there’s also something about how I've generally leveraged my willpower to get somewhere and to get something. Now I'm leveraging my willpower to be here. And it's really different. And I think I've always known willpower was essential to change work. I've always known that ever since I was a young man, you know, willpower was essential in many ways to survival for me in different times.
Tuesday: I think that's such a really interesting reframe of willpower. The idea of willpower to being present to what is, the idea of willpower being something that is necessary. And so I've been thinking about this idea of really surrendering will and how much willpower it takes to surrender/to be guided? Because there's this trust piece that we’re beginning to circle around, which I think is, if you are going to give your will to being present now, or if you're going to give your will to being open to being claimed, there's a fundamental trust in life that has to be present. And so, as you were talking, I was thinking, but to allow yourself to be claimed, to put your ambition in service of life, or whatever wants to come or whatever you're being claimed, requires a huge amount of trust.
Tim: What’s claiming me? What's claiming you? Listener? Like what's claiming me? What is it that is claiming us right now? Not, what solutions are we rushing to because the context is so fucked up and scary that I almost can't rest unless I'm taking an action, you know? But what is happening to me that if I stepped into it, may carry me more towards a future I want or a future that is meant for me? There’s a real willpower in that.
Tuesday: It feels like the willpower we're talking about now - that pivot - is maybe not less willpower, but it's will based in trust. I can trust myself. I can trust my relationships. It can trust life. So I’m going to be here because I don't have to anticipate all of this future that I have to guard against. I can just take the next step, or I trust that whatever happens in the future, I can meet with this will.
Poem: Sung by the one and only, Tim Merry - “To be a Pilgrim,” from The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
Song: “Love Like There's No Tomorrow,” by The War and Treaty
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Duration: 46:19
Produced by: Mark Coffin
Theme music: Gary Blakemore
Episode cover image: source