Surfing the VUCA Waves

So, I guess it makes sense that my very first experience recorded in this blog would be the event that incited this blog’s existence in the first place.

My CEO & Director are super believers of creating a healthy and safe space to inspire good change in their employees; whom they treat as family (Yes. All 140 of us). And so, the most recent workshop – that they had probably worked very hard to make happen – was introduced to us. A 3-days full workshop called VUCA 2.0: Authentic Relationships.

I was sort of coerced into joining this workshop. Originally, if I could, I would have sat out because knowing my leaders, I knew that this workshop is going to be just full of speaking out, trying new things and just generally, a lot of extroverty stuffs. Here’s a hint: I am definitely NOT an extrovert. This entire workshop sounded suuuper uncomfortable and I have to do it for THREE days?!

Obviously, I ended up joining in the end. The main reason was my colleague telling me, “Yes, Phish. It is going to be helpful.” (It wasn’t much of a coercion… but I was going through tough times and I guess I just needed to hear that sentence)

So, I jumped right in.

Anddd guess what? It was pretty mind-blowing.

So, okay. I still don’t know if I should bombard you with 3 days of information but I am going to start by explaining what VUCA is.

VUCA is a concept that originated with students at the U.S. Army War College to describe the Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity of the world after the Cold War. And now, the concept is gaining new relevance to characterize the current environment and the leadership required to navigate it successfully.

Dr. Sunnie Giles, Forbes

Yeah, I did not explain it. Dr. Sunnie did. I just copy and paste ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

VUCA 2.0: Authentic Relationships is a workshop that was mainly focused on giving us the tools to counter said VUCA-ness that happens in life. I know. Tools sounded hella boring but I assured you (with my 27 years old ADHD-like mind) that it felt the complete opposite. I guess it does not hurt that our trainer was Yvonne Sum, leadership coach and author of “Intentional Parenting”. TLDR; Yvonne was a pretty damn good trainer.

The tools ranged from reading eye patterns to mapping across the good and the bad, to learning which metaprogrammes we belonged to, etc. Big big words – I was scared, too – but they made sense. And like I said, I won’t touch on the tools specifically in this blog post (unless you want me to. Then I can make another blog posts on them) as I am supposed to focus on why this workshop gave me new experiences.

I guess it was kinda obvious. I am an introvert. This event was geared towards extroverts. Mix the two and boom! New experience! Yay! To be specific, this workshop allowed very high chances for me to have to speak to people I don’t normally converse with. I was in a great dismay when I was partnered with people who usuallyyy, I would stay away from; because they have scary faces, because it is always awkward, because I feel like they don’t like me, etc.

The strange thing is… I found out that all these people who I normally avoided, are super nice people who are just doing the very best they can. I found out that all these scary faces are going through some sort of pains in their life, much like I do. I found out that all these seemingly perfect people are actually struggling with their own internal fears, that most of us could not even see. And most admiringly, all of us in that room on that day were so eager to learn and to change. For the better.

When I realized all that, I could literally feel like my prison of thoughts breaking out a little and there was this orange glow of light flowing in. It really overthrew my view of people and after I walked out of the workshop on the last day, it felt really surreal. Like I am seeing the world in a new light. It took me a while to re-calibrate, honestly. But, I regretted nothing!

Thank you for reading!

I will end this post with my greatest learning from the workshop:

People make the best choice they can at the time. (Also, see it this way. People are always doing the best they can with whatever resources they have at the time. Bad actions sometimes almost always stemmed from good intentions)

NLP Presuppositions No. 4