Brexit and Becoming Unstuck: An Open Letter to Theresa May
Barcelona, Brexit, Beijing…
My morning radio is full of deadlock and dilemma.
Here’s the thing, when we’re horns to horns with someone, paralysed with no way to ‘get them to move’ then we’ve already lost sight of the answer.
That phrase, “when you’re in a hole stop digging,” comes to mind.
It’s time for something new. I don’t mean ‘new’ in terms of the content of the ideas, I don’t mean “oh try this negotiating strategy,” or “let’s think outside the box,” or working out what the latest blue-sky strategy might have to teach us.
No, I mean a new level of understanding of where the stuckness is coming from and therefore where the solution will come from.
No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.
I don’t know that Einstein ever said the words that are often (I suspect mis-)attributed to him, but it’s a cute phrase and it serves a purpose.
Because ‘another level of consciousness’ is exactly what we need right now.
Consciousness (and, please, feel free to call it ‘perspective’ if that’s a more acceptable word in the world in which you move) is what is happening when we see how our experience is created, and therefore, in that moment, we can step beyond our experience to create something completely original, something that had not occurred to us until then.
Just as my 17 year-old son can play all out to win Call of Duty against his friends, he can equally as easily put down the PlayStation controls, come downstairs and talk to his mum. Game forgotten.
Because he knows, at some level, even as he’s immersed in the battle, that it’s a game.
Being able to do this when we are in the very hardest of situations, when we are in an “I’m right and you’re wrong,” place, is essential to strategic thinking and political problem solving.
I urge you, Mrs May, to step outside your thinking self for a moment, to look to the plane where you can see life as something that we create as we live it, and not as something fixed or intractable.
From this place of consciousness, of ‘higher perspective’, we have access to an infinite number of new ideas.
We are never attached to what we think of the arguments (or of each other, or of ourselves); we can see through the fog that has clouded our vision and we can access what is new and what beyond anything we have thought before.
As Sam Harris says, “Consciousness is already free of everything that remotely resembles a self.”
If you were to look there for a way forward with Brexit, or with anything, if you were to remove the self, if you were to care less about backroom politics and tabloid headlines and more about taking action on what your soul knows to be true, you would see that this, and only this, is the solution to a deadlock.
I am not naive; I don’t say this without experience of your world, the world of Westminster and Brussels. I’ve spent time there. I know the difference between those who listen to their heart to guide them and then use their head to get there, and those who listen to the external chatter and then flip and flop with no direction, getting, unsurprisingly, nowhere.
Mrs May, we do not know each other and I am not here to criticise you or your colleagues, I am here only with an offer of help.
I see beneath the mask, I know what it takes for a lifetime of public service. But now it is time to look in a different direction.
Mrs May, Theresa, Prime Minister, when you’re ready for a conversation, please call me. Tomorrow, next week, next year, never. Any of those is perfect.
I am not attached to an outcome, only to being here when you are ready to hear a deeper truth.
From my heart to yours. Indeed, from my soul to yours.
And, in words more beautiful than mine,
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.
~~ Rumi
With love,
Cathy
❤
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About the author
Cathy Presland is an expert in transformative leadership. She has more than two decades of experience in government and international organisations and her focus now is to support passionate individuals and organisations who are making a positive impact with the work they do. Find out more at https://cathypresland.com
