There is a moment – quiet, maybe disorienting, often unspoken – when something in us knows before it can explain.
How often have you been present when a decision was taken that somewhere in your body you felt would be wrong, but didn’t know why. And how often have you watched that play out?
You might be in a leadership meeting, a change initiative, or deep in strategic planning. Everyone's speaking fluently in the language of metrics, frameworks, outcomes. And yet – somewhere in the space – you feel the system trying to whisper something else. It isn’t easy to hear what that whisper is saying. Asking to pause, to listen, is not the way it is done.
This is the moment where many feel paralysed, because no one taught us how to speak from that place. Even if you know how, perhaps it doesn’t feel acceptable. And if you are the odd-one-out who intentionally practices sensing awareness or has a spiritual orientation, you've likely felt that your inner work doesn't have a language that lands in boardrooms, decision tables, or systems design.
Here, I am writing for both the ones who don’t know but feel something, and the ones who know but can’t speak. I have been both. I have oscillated between two worlds and sometimes still do, even though I know they are not separate and not different. That is a scientific truth, but we have been taught something else, and our habits, particularly in business, are to treat them as two worlds. The truth is that they are one field – fragmented only by language, tempo, and the training of attention.
It has seemed as if you have to split yourself to survive and I am not alone in having done so. I spent a lot of my work life in that closet, occasionally coming out to a few people I trusted or whom I thought knew me well enough not to be dismissive. Sometimes I could say just enough to cause a pause to happen. Occasionally I could couch my intuition in rational ways that might influence a meeting.
This Substack is a bridge.
A threshold space for those who are sensing the new, but still fluent in the old.
For leaders who suspect intuition isn’t soft, but strategic.
For seekers who want their inner work to ripple outward in grounded, systemic ways.
We may not be able to build the bridge here, but we might sit in the gap together and listen for what’s wanting to cross.
With you in the listening,
Jon
Resources:
If you are looking for Organisational Development support, including Team and Leadership Development, there is information here. Click the button for an introductory call.
Find my books at:
The Science of Possibility: Patterns of Connected Consciousness
Your Access to Possibility: 7 Amazingly Simple Success Keys to Creating Your Life Consciously
7-Stage Parenting: How to Meet your Child's Changing Needs
Reinventing Capitalism: How We Broke Money and How We Fix it, From Inside and Out