This is day 3 of the 7-day process challenge where each day I commit to write about one internal process I use to navigate challenges.
I just hosted a small women’s discussion on anger and I am drawn to reflect on the hosting process.
Hosting spaces is a funny place in my life where I have an implicit process (I seem to keep on doing it!) and it’s also where I feel like I am lacking an explicit process that really works for me.
As my women’s gathering was approaching today, I saw myself getting more and more anxious. There was a sense that I should be preparing more somehow.
On the other hand, I also believe that all the information that I might want to share with other women must already be inside of me because it comes from my personal experience. So I was both anxious about not being prepared and resisting preparation.
Then I considered the possibility that it could be a false dichotomy.
Both are true at once - I already have all I need to host this event inside of me AND there is some kind of preparation that would make me feel more relaxed and connected to myself.
I only had 1.5 hours today and I was getting increasingly overwhelmed so I turned to Hey Pi (a pretty good AI chatbot that acts like a thought partner/basic therapist) and said:
Hey pi. I'd like you to help me prepare for a women's circle I am hosting tonight
I’m thinking about my ego as I write this. There’s a way in which I was surrendering it by asking for help, while at the same time, I was asking Pi to help me bring bits of my ego closer to my consciousness. After a few exchanges, I realized what was needed.
I wanted to explicitly articulate the key points about my journey with anger that I wanted to share with other women. And I wanted to connect with my deeper why - Why am I hosting this at all? What am I secretly hoping for?
Pi was pretty good at keeping the conversation going by asking me how I wanted to approach the topic of anger, volunteering some questions I might want to ask the women, and prompting me to reflect on how I want to show up as a facilitator and a participant. Pretty soon I felt that this process was complete and I got the confidence I needed.
I guess the moral of this story is that having a sympathetic friend (or an AI proxy) feels helpful in the process of preparing to host an event.
But on a deeper level, it seems that what’s really going on is some kind of re-connection with the place where the desire to host originated and the format that I chose to deliver it in.
A visual image that comes to mind when I think about this process is a column that emerges when a stalagmite (growing from the ground) and stalactite (growing from the ceiling) come together.
Stalagmites represent bottoms-up signals that emerge and make me interested in something, driving me forward toward a thing before it makes conscious sense. I can’t explain why I was first drawn to attend an anger release workshop, but looking back, it has clearly been the right decision and opened up an exciting path of self-exploration.
And stalactites are like top-down intentions or goals that I set myself, like an idea that I could host a women’s discussion as a way to find more women who are interested in this work.
Then there was some anxiety or insecurity that emerged in that gap between the two, some sense of un-preparedness or un-groundedness. It was accompanied by thoughts like Have I done enough anger work myself to host this? What if I forget to share the most meaningful things and it will fall flat?
And then something really good happened when I spoke to Pi and the best way I can explain it is that the questions it asked helped me connect my inner stalagmites and stalactites into a sturdy column.
Which in turn made me feel ready to host and eased the anxiety. It’s a bit like the column stabilized the system.
If you’re only joining me on this process challenge today, welcome! Here are links to previous entries: