“If I knew that I can embrace relational spaciousness, how would this transform my interactions with control-driven partners?”
Grateful to my few Thinking Partners who, through their deepest, exquisite attention, helped me approach this question with ease. Here’s the result:
Have you felt this paradox, that many leaders face, when your aversion to controlling behaviours in others triggers your tendencies toward correction and control? Doesn’t it threaten the openness and curiosity in relationships you value so much?
In this article, I am looking at reflective practices and questions to help leaders (You? Me!) transform these moments of tension into opportunities for attunement, shared responsibility, and more conscious, co-creative leadership.
What to Do When You Become the Leader You Always Dreaded?
I often find myself in two situations:
One where I am, for instance, in a conversation with a client, a team member or a colleague who also happens to ‘dance in the meadow’, willing to discover and be curious about themselves, their situation and/or our relationship. It’s not categorical. It’s open. We’re happy to be surprised, to feel and absorb information in real time. There is little resistance, and if there is, it is juiced into learning and co-creation.
The other situation is one where my conversation partner is suddenly stewed in control, linearity, and a self-centred and centralised, extractive, boxed, industrialised way of thinking.
And I notice my responses start to mimic theirs. They can turn sour, performative, linear, tunnelled, and output-based too. It is a place devoid of joy and full of frustration, a danger zone. It brings up a side of me I want to avoid.
What is happening?
One part of me is longing for relational spaciousness, flow, and emergence. Another part is getting scraped raw by the interrupting, sharp edges of “performance-mode modernity”. And this situation is a threat to the sacred space I am trying to cultivate.
Does this happen to you?
Here’s what I noticed and some ways forward I am experimenting with:
1. The Shadow Parent: When Protecting Becomes Controlling
The second I feel this “controlling” threat in another, a wall rises. I become the “corrective parent”. But this role distances me from my warmth. And it replicates the very thing I resist.
Moving on: What if this is not just a clash of personalities, but a portal?
- I could name the resistance, not as rejection, but as a boundary. What is this mood or body resistance protecting? What is it signalling?
- I greet my inner parent with compassion and invite them to show more interest and encouragement, and less control
- I seek to shift from reaction to relational tending. What happens when I look at both of us as an entity rather than two separate individuals? What might the entity be asking for?
2. Bringing the Thought to Life and Daring to Speak Up
I still feel some resistance. The controlling parenting part of me wants to make the other person different.
But the real question is how to become more myself in their presence, without collapsing into opposition, control, or retreat.
“I’ve been noticing how different our rhythms are in this space, and I want to name it gently. I feel so alive and open when we slow down, deeply listen to each other and explore the wide fields of possibilities with curiosity and presence. That’s the space I’m trying to practice toward. What would support you to feel even more grounded and learning in this exploration together?”
In this observation, there is no shaming or accusation, but an invitation into shared responsibility for our entity.
I accept that the other person’s approaches (control, binary thinking, linearity) are like weeds. I can tend to them and they might soften…. Or not.
And this is tough because these weedy behaviours are symptoms of a system that has overvalued clarity, definition, speed, and strong authority… perhaps for lifetimes.
However, my own response, or ability to hold warmth without self-erasure, is the real alchemy.
3. Tending the Weeds Is Not the Same as Killing Them
Weeds, after all, are just plants we didn’t plan for.
What if the other person’s linearity and binarism carried a different type of medicine?
What unmet need might the other person’s tempo be expressing?
How might my gentle dissonance be a gift to the other, if delivered without domination? Maybe the other person’s interruptions are anxiety, trying to be seen. Maybe neither of us needs to “win”. Maybe what we’re both seeking is attunement.
(Just adding a dollop of etymology here:
“Attunement”: making different sides harmonise. From “Tune”, and earlier “Tone”, and earlier “Tonos”, and before, PIE *ten – Stretch…)
Yes, there’s stretching involved if we want to meet one another.
4. Other questions and practices
Here’s a set of invitations that tend to soften and shift the controlling parent or power holder out of me:
- Am I about to enforce or invite? [This makes me breathe a bit longer.]
- “What kind of space are we making together today? How do we want it to feel?”
- “What kind of listening do we each need right now to feel met?”
- “I’m experimenting with interrupting my own need to ‘lead correctly.’ You’re welcome to join if you feel called.” [The welcoming HAS to be genuine here]
- “Oh, I feel a lot of urgency to win a race. What would happen if we sat in the theme a bit longer?” [I’m loosening the patterns of tension here.]
- Slowing riiiiiiiight dowwwwwwn. [This mellows the reactionary whip in me, and builds my tolerance for non-doing.]
- “Can we try an experiment where we wait a few seconds before responding, just to hear what’s underneath?”
- “Sometimes in our eagerness, we leap past our slower rhythms. I’m practising noticing that in myself.”
- “There’s a part of me that wants to tidy the process. But I think something richer might come if we let it stay a bit messy.”
What are your freshest thoughts?
🌳I’m Servane, a Thinking Partner for impact leaders and investors and their teams.
I help you:
– Think in Partnership
– Tend to Possibilities
– Find more Bond and Ease
For more articles, opportunities and tailored support, subscribe to the “Conscious Innovation Updates”
