Reading this newsletter means you are interested in Nancy Kline’s Thinking Environment as a way of being. As a way of being with clients and colleagues and friends and also as a way of being with yourself. Welcome 🙂
Over the last few years, as I’ve watched Nancy scrutinise the Thinking Session and embrace the uncertainty of ‘not knowing’ in order to discover what might work even better, as a practitioner I’ve felt both exhilarated and challenged by what’s emerged.
It’s been hard to let go of the sturdy metaphor of 6 Parts, with its implied linearity (the human mind loves a line from 1-6!). It’s been hard to get inside the newly fluid metaphor of waves and pauses, that demands of us to consider in each moment exactly what the Thinker needs next in order to go on thinking for themselves. It’s been hard – and it’s been worth it a thousand times over.
It’s taken us out to the edge of our thinking. It’s meant being more fascinated by what might emerge next and be better, than in what we know works well already. And it’s meant revisiting so much of our Thinking Partnership practice in order to refresh this profound, life-changing way of being through these new considerations and questions.
(NB If you are interested in discovering more about what this means for your practice, do please let me know, as I’m currently considering creating a one-day “Thinking Partnership Revisited” supervision session for TTT Coaches.)
These changes show us how courageous you have to be in order to submit your own thinking to the consistent scrutiny that sits at the core of this way of being. It’s demanded a whole new book in which to explain fully what’s been discovered to work even better. That’s living the meaning of ‘being more drivingly interested in what could be better than being attached to being right’.
It’s shown me the immeasurable value of staying true to these 10 Components, which demand the dismantling of denial wherever it shows up and impedes our thinking – including inside our practice.
It means that we cannot know what might turn up next in response to further scrutiny and further discoveries – that it’s never over. It means going right out on the skinny branches of what we are discovering, noticing how uncomfortable that feels – and taking the leap anyway. Isn’t that the only way to progress?
So it’s been quite a year! Where have you found yourself out on the edges of your comfort zone – and what were the benefits of taking the leap?
