One of my favourite quotes 💡📌

"Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows."

Rainer Maria Rilke

Leadership Spotlight ✨✨

Hineinhörchen

How often do you take the time to listen within?  Truly within?

There is so much noise everywhere all around us all the time.

Some days, when I am being asked my opinion on something as mundane as dinner or what time to meet friends or which type of something I prefer, I cannot answer that question.  My head is so full from a day packed with noise that it simply cannot handle even one more thing.

I simply need a moment to listen within.  To mentally wash off all the noise and thoughts and ideas and projections from others, to tune into my own inner voice.  A few moments of sitting, walking, swimming – being in silence with myself is usually only what it takes to do so.  And when I say silence, that is what I mean: no podcast, no music, no Netflix.  No distractions or numbing.  Being alone in my thoughts and having the opportunity to listen to those only.  Often, I need some sort of movement before I can really tune into myself – much like how yoga effectively primes the body and mind for meditation.

I call this moment of listening within Hineinhörchen.

Twenty-two years ago, I first heard the term by my professor in ‘Religion, meaning-making and philosophy of life’ at university.  I studied in Belgium, where I am from, and translating the name of the course from Dutch is not an easy one.  This was a mandatory course as part of my master and, even though I might not have picked it myself, I am to this day very happy to have been made to take this course.

Hineinhörchen is an old German word which means “to listen deeply or attentively into something”.  The first part of the word suggests direction inward, as in you listen not just at the surface but truly into your core.

We discussed the word in the course in the context of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch thinker and writer who got deported to the concentration camps under the second world war.  She used the term in one of her diary entries in March 1943:

In that diary entry, she was referring to a concept from Rainer Maria Rilke, a famous German poet, called “Weltinnenraum” or “World inner space”.

Rilke writes:

Without going into a full-on explanation of Rilke, what he means with this line of poetry, is that by looking outward, something grows inward (“the tree”).

And listening within, hineinhörchen, helps uncover the tree itself.

The connection with leadership

I realise that all of this is a lot more ethereal and very different from what one would expect from a newsletter by a leadership coach.  And yet I often find - even more so when things get very busy - that going back to the inner work and re-reading poetry, philosophy and literature is what helps me centre.

There is so much management, business and leadership advice out there.  Each one of those proclaiming to be the magical silver bullet.  Sometimes I too get sucked into this.  Life gets busy, meetings pile up and deadlines get shorter.  I know.

Yet deep down, we all know that there is no such thing as a silver bullet.  There is listening within, and honouring the time it takes for insights to become clear and to eventually firm up so much so, that they are ready to be acted upon.

Everyone is different and thus everyone’s approach is different.  And thank god for that.  How boring life would be, if we all just followed the same checklist of the leadership guru-du-jour and all magically created 7 figure returns in the space of 6 months.  How on earth would we make sense of all that rapid, textbook success?

Why it works

Remembering that all good things take time and build on reflection rather than continuous action is what often helps me to allow myself to breathe.  And I find it to be the same with the clients I work with.  None of them are patient, which I like (and can very much relate to) yet in slowing down and listening within, they get the amazing results they seek to find – ironically, often faster than if they had rushed it.

One of my clients asked me to catch up after five months.  They wanted to tell me that they had now been promoted twice, got a raise, were now recognised in the entire company for their expertise and left their leader in awe.  That was not the best part.  The best part was that they had made changes in their personal life too. They were happier and more relaxed than ever before.  Work did not feel like work and there was plenty of time for all the good stuff in their personal life. 

We worked together for a little over 6 months.  There was no standard program or framework.  There was only listening within, growing those insights and then acting on them.

Hineinhörchen.

When was the last time you listened within?  Did you take some time during the holidays to dig into that silent nudge I spoke about last?

When you do, let me know what you’re hearing?

/Jessy

My right now resources 📊🔎

A short overview of stuff I’ve been engaging with lately

• Book 📚️ Die Gedichte by Rainer Maria Rilke (one of my favourite poets)

• Music 🎵 a playlist with cheesy old Italian classic songs

• Watching 🎥 Gilded Age season 3

• Podcast 📻️ Ep 308 with Will Packer on The Mel Robbins Podcast

• Software 👩‍💻 All things AI - inspired by AI Her Way