On acceptance
Some things just are - we cannot explain everything, nor are there causes and reasons and something to blame ... this was a conversation I had recently with a dear friend and colleague who found herself collapsing on the floor one morning with an undiagnosed tumour that had ruptured, causing massive internal bleeding. We reflected on this - that there was no "knowing" or rationale or causality - it just happened. She found this really comforting through quite a dramatic, shocking episode - acceptance of what is.
Carl Rogers wrote, "the curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change" - this deep level of simply being okay with what is, whatever that may be, is profoundly transforming.
Radical acceptance means clearly recognising what we are feeling right in this moment and not judging that, but rather bringing compassion to the very experience of noticing. It is rooted also in the Buddhist belief that suffering comes not directly from pain but from one's attachment to the pain and is also defined as the ability to accept what you cannot control without judgement, which reduces the attachment and therefore the suffering caused and exacerbated by resisting them.
In coaching and supervision, this concept and the practices that we may create from this are profoundly healing and restorative. If the core of what we do is helping our clients to witness what they are experiencing, noticing and perhaps exploring the feelings involved and accepting that all or part of this is beyond what they can control, then we support their development, we help them to increase their capacity for dealing with the complexity and often difficulty of the landscape they inhabit.
The increased capacity for acceptance is at the heart of building psychological safety too. Since the developmental meaning-making stages of Expert and Achiever are particularly present in the meaning making in most teams and organisations, it is so helpful to support building, exploring and accepting new and other perspectives - diversity and inclusion.
This feels like a deep and gentle journey, really at the heart of self-compassion.