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What Is Co-Active?

At its most basic, Co-Active means simply “being in action . . . together.” Or perhaps it might be more appropriate to say “being together . . . in action.”

The co represents the relational and receptive aspects of our world. The active follows and represents the action-oriented aspects. As the pace of our lives has quickened, we have become increasingly action oriented and results driven. It seems expedient to dispense with all the soft stuff of being and just push to get the job done that is right in front of us. This, however, leaves us feeling disconnected and desperate for meaning and belonging. We wind up with what we might call the hamster wheel experience of life as we run around alone in circles desperately trying to get things done, only to find ourselves right back where we started.

This is why it is so important to begin with essence and state of being, or co. Action arising from this place of being and receptivity is whole and integrated rather than disconnected and driven. In order for us to experience life as whole, our actions must be grounded in being and our sense of connection to a larger wholeness. When the co and the active are linked together, the action of our life is nourishing and fulfilling.

Karen, one of the authors of this book, was teased by her colleagues because they saw her smiling as she responded to emails. When asked why she was smiling, Karen responded, “Well, I’m thinking about the people who will be reading this email and the things I enjoy about them. I imagine the relationship between us, and it makes me smile.” Thus a task that could be dreary and isolating became joyful because it held a balance of both co and active, even though Karen was physically alone.

The hyphen in Co-Active is significant because it holds both the interrelatedness and the balance between co and active. The hyphen represents the paradox of “both and” rather than “either/or.”

Generally, we tend to live in an either/or world. Either we can be effective and get the job done, or we can care for the people in our lives. Either we can take a break and attend to our well-being, or we can work hard and accomplish things. Yet everything in our natural world teaches us that these two energies of co and active weave together in every moment. So, like the yin and yang of ancient Chinese Taoist philosophy, co and active dance together to create wholeness, togetherness, and balance.

The Co-Active Way: Recovering to Wholeness

Whether applied to medicine or to Eastern philosophy and systems, wholeness is the state of being unbroken or undamaged. Thus, through the lens of Co-Active Leadership, we see people and life as unbroken and undamaged—as whole, interrelated, and connected.

In the Co-Active approach, wholeness, while often forgotten, is actually quite natural and accessible to us all. Thus, the Co-Active Way is both a journey and a practice of recovering to this natural state of wholeness over and over again.

The journey is one toward greater responsibility and faith in ourselves, in others, and in Spirit, whatever our particular understanding and expression of that might be. The practice is to strive to live our lives as an expression of that responsibility and faith each and every day.

This recovery to wholeness is a critical imperative of our time. We live in one of the most precarious and exciting moments in recent history, which is shaped by unprecedented challenges and opportunities. The solutions to those challenges will need to serve the many rather than just a few. The opportunities will need to become more accessible to those who have been and are marginalized and forgotten.

With the advent of the internet, we have access to all parts of our planet and a wide range of information on all kinds of subjects. Goods and services move freely across borders. New viruses and diseases spread around the world at lightning speed. A natural disaster in Japan almost immediately affects markets in New York. We now see more clearly how our personal decisions affect our relationships with ourselves, with each other, and with the whole.

The Four Cornerstones of the Co-Active Way

Four essential beliefs form the foundation of the Co-Active Way. We call these beliefs cornerstones because they are the pillars upon which both the journey and the practice of the Co-Active Way rest. Each cornerstone speaks to a different aspect of wholeness, reminding us of our better nature as human beings and orienting us toward a more positive and life-affirming way of interacting with our world.

PEOPLE ARE NATURALLY CREATIVE, RESOURCEFUL, AND WHOLE

We believe that people are, at their core, naturally creative, resourceful, and whole. They have within them all the resources and power that they need to meet the challenges of their life and are worthy of respect simply because they are human beings.

Sometimes this creative wholeness is inaccessible, buried deep beneath pain and all manner of disease and disfunction. It’s also important to separate this essence state from action. People do awful things to each other, and they must be held accountable for those actions. In orienting from this cornerstone, people are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole, quite separately from what they do.

If you believe that people are broken and in need of fixing, they will likely perform to your expectations. If you view people as generally creative and resourceful, it’s more likely that you will find those qualities in yourself and in others. As we create our world together, every day, it’s important to pay attention to where we are placing our attention. So often, people feel powerless and ineffective because they have been told that they are wrong and that they don’t have what it takes to lead effectively.

For several years, Karen had the opportunity to work with male inmates of several prisons. This was a real gift, as it taught her a great deal about how people are trained from a very early age to view themselves as unworthy. The men with whom Karen worked knew for certain that they were not leaders. They began life being categorized as “problem children.” As teenagers, they graduated to being “juvenile delinquents,” and as adults, they moved on to be criminals and convicts. Their view of themselves as defective had been consistently reinforced for much of their lives.

Karen and her co-leaders remained committed to viewing these men as valuable human beings who were capable of goodness and wholeness. While firmly believing that they should be held accountable for their actions and for the crimes that they had committed, Karen and her co-leaders also maintained that they were whole and resourceful human beings, capable of learning and responsibility and worthy of respect and love.

Over time, the men began to turn toward this positive regard like sunflowers toward the sun. Many began to change the way they dressed and talked. Others reached out to repair relationships with family members and loved ones. Some began to talk about how they could make a difference in the world and how they might be able to prevent others from making the kinds of choices that had cost them so much.

Not all of the men opened up. For some, that creative leader within was buried deep beneath the scars of societal injustice. Others were battling the cumulative impact of years of addiction. Still, there was a considerable change in many of the men. For Karen, it deepened the understanding that we don’t really know what has happened to people and why they act as they do. While people must be held to account for their actions, they are still human beings worthy of respect and love.

If we believe that people are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole, it’s much more likely that they will show up that way. If we respect the being of people (co) while at the same time enforcing accountability for action (active), wholeness and recovery become more available.

DANCE IN THIS MOMENT

Dance. The very word implies agility and flexibility. This cornerstone speaks to the ephemeral and ever-changing nature of our lives and calls us to engage with life fully in each moment, free from assumptions about what should happen next.

The past is gone and the future is yet to come. Our life is lived in the moment. While it’s true that we can learn from our past and it’s useful to plan for the future, that’s not really where life happens. We are most creative when we are able to dance with whatever arises in the moment rather than from a fixed and rigid plan.

This idea of dancing in this moment is much more than a whimsical, frivolous notion. Our world is changing rapidly. There are any number of recent events that were previously outside the realm of possibility, and any illusion that we know what the future will bring has been shattered. We are being called to surrender to the life that is unfolding around and within us and to participate fully as a cocreator by giving ourselves over to the dance of creation and evolution.

The more we are free to dance in this moment, the more we discover the opportunity for movement, learning, and flow. We are able to embrace uncertainty and change as we give ourselves over to the dance of creation and evolution.

INCLUDE THE WHOLE PERSON

There is a wonderful passage from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,”

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)³

Each of us is in fact large and contains multitudes. Each of us is a unique and complex constellation of different selves that often contradict each other.

We spend an inordinate amount of time trying to segregate these different aspects of ourselves into tidy compartments. We have our professional self, complete with requisite costuming and sometimes-rigid rules of behavior. We have our personal self, which must be held differently.

We are sensate beings with complex thoughts and emotions. The notion that we need to hang our personal self in the closet when we arrive at work leads to workplaces that are cold and lifeless. Wouldn’t it be easier to just let go of trying to keep it all so separate and instead strive to be a whole human being at home and at work?

Human beings are not a collection of parts like a machine. It’s impossible to separate our body from our mind or our mind from our spirit or our emotions from any of these things. Including the whole person means that we stop trying to compartmentalize and suppress the aspects of being human that we would rather not deal with.

Emotions can be messy and frightening, but they are an important part of our human experience. Trying to suppress or deny them leads to all kinds of physical and psychological disfunction as our bodies struggle to express the emotions that we have pushed away.

Including the whole person is important in our relationships with others as well because it challenges us to see and include the whole person beyond the labels that we put on each other. We are not our labels or our roles, and we must learn to see each other first as a whole human being rather than objectifying the other person according to labels or to the past. It’s useful to remain curious about our own unconscious biases toward certain types of people and awake to the blind spots that are an inevitable result.

Practicing this cornerstone also challenges us in our relationships with our loved ones because it means that we must allow all of the other person, even and especially the parts that we do not like. We cannot be in any kind of close relationship with the parent, child, or significant other that we wish were there or believe should be there. We can only be in true, deep relationship with the full, complicated person who is actually in front of us. This cornerstone challenges us to give space to the full humanity of the people in our lives—to the aspects we cherish and also to the aspects that drive us crazy.

EVOKE TRANSFORMATION

Transformation and evolution are essential ingredients in life. If we look at the natural world around us, we see that all of life is consistently in a cycle of birth and death, of emergence and transformation. Transformation is occurring constantly. Bringing conscious choice to it provides fertile ground for personal development and learning.

So how do we evoke transformation in ourselves and each other? The verb evoke commonly means “to draw forth” or “to summon.” A few synonyms are excite, call forth, awaken. Some antonyms are stifle, silence, repress.⁴ So, while Evoke Transformation is the most directional of the four cornerstones, it is also spacious and inviting.

Evoking transformation doesn’t mean that we try to control or dominate the people in our lives so that they fit into who we would like them to become. Instead, it inspires us to hold the very best possible expansion for others, whatever that might be. When we Evoke Transformation, we have the courage to tell the truth without attachment. We can ask very direct and challenging questions cleanly without needing to be right.

The cornerstone of Evoke Transformation reminds us that we are here in service of evolution, our own and others’, and implies that we are all on a journey together toward a larger consciousness. It is an invitation to participate ever more fully in the unfolding mystery of life and to contribute however we might to the evolving journey of humanity.