Inner Development with Ashley Wain

The Inner Development Goals (IDGs) highlight the importance of an ‘Inner Compass’ along with ‘Openness and a Learning Mindset’.  A powerful method for this is the practice of ‘inquiry’. Rodger and Chellie have studied ‘inquiry’ in great depth through 15 years as students of The Diamond Approach, for which inquiry is the central method. Chellie has woven the inquiry method into her books The Catalyst’s Way and Wayfinding Leadership. Both Chellie and Rodger use inquiry in their leadership development coaching and workshops.

Rodger recently interviewed Ashley (Ash) Wain, an inner development expert and teacher of the Diamond Approach.This blog contains an extract from that interview.  You can hear the 54 minute interview in full at the links below to Rodger’s podcast ‘Your Money Matters’.

How to listen:

Click here to the podcast on Spotify

Click here to listen on Apple podcasts

If you would like to be added to the Catalsyt Leadership mailing list and receive the full transcript of the podcast, please email rodger@rodgerspiller.com. Ash is currently offering introductions to a new Diamond Approach Group being created in New Zealand. The next introductory weekend is in Auckland 22nd - 24th March – Rodger will be attending.

Rodger:…The IDGs highlight the importance of “having a basic mindset of curiosity and a willingness to be vulnerable and embrace change and grow is an essential quality for an effective person in the world who's wanting to make a difference within business”. They also talk about a quality of self-awareness, which they define as “the ability to be in reflective contact with your own thoughts, feelings and desires. Having a realistic self-image, and ability to regulate oneself”.

A key practice within the Diamond Approach is known as inquiry. It's a very powerful methodology. It's a methodology I've applied, certainly in my capacity as an investment adviser, and also working with business leaders. So individual investors, businesses, everyone can benefit. Can you explain what is meant by inquiry and how you see that it could assist in these aspects of the IDGs that I've just referenced, like openness and the learning mindset and self-awareness,

Ash: Those aspects of the IDG's that you mentioned, actually, they express very well, our orientation to inquiry. Inquiry is our main practice. And it's a practice that suits people in the modern world because it uses the mind’s use of reason. You don't have to get out of your head, you need to use your head and use it intelligently. And the orientation of inquiry includes this openness, and this curiosity, and a willingness to question what you think you know. One of the main obstacles to our inner development and to the discovery of our inner nature is all the things that we already think we know about the world. Unless we're willing to be open, which means being willing to see that some of those things may not be true, then not a lot is going to change. The practice of inquiry really lines up with these particular IDG elements.

What makes inquiry really suitable for modern people is that it aligns with our sense of individuality, a sense that we can find out for ourselves. But at the same time, it's a very detailed and rich teaching on how we can find out for ourselves. If we're going to find out for ourselves, we need to have that openness, we need to have that curiosity. And we need to include also all of us, all of ourselves, but also we need that capacity for self-reflection. In inquiry it's not just an awareness that's aware of everything going on around us or even everything inside of us. Inquiry turns the spotlight around on our attitudes and our assumptions and our ideas. In a sense, the self that we bring to the inquiry - it's not sort of let off the hook. In fact, it's centerstage. 

So, whatever we're exploring, whatever the question is that we want to inquire into, it includes us, it includes what we already think we know about that question - that includes our attitudes to the topic, it includes our history around it. When we turn the spotlight around on ourselves and look at what we're bringing to the question and we're really open and willing to see and willing to have that challenged, what we find is that whatever opinion we have, whatever we think we know, normally has a history to it. And we can follow that. And we can follow it right down, and very quickly realise that we hold this particular view, or we have this particular perspective, not because we've got a lot of evidence for it, not because we've really thoroughly investigated all the data or even investigated our own immediate experience about the topic.

But we can find we hold that opinion, because that's the opinion our dad held, or our mom or our friendship circle. And we've never really questioned very deeply where that comes from. We may find that we hold a certain opinion because it fits with a certain ideology that was prominent in our in group when we're at university. And then we just go on assuming we think we know. And, of course, all of those influences if we're willing to look at them, to look at the origins of our opinions, to look at where it all comes from, they can get a lot lighter, they can unravel, and we can discover an openness and a not knowing that is fresh and open and clear.

And in that space of not knowing, real knowing can come - a kind of direct understanding of the topic that includes us, that includes who we are. And what we find if we engage in inquiry in this way is that who we are develops - as our assumptions and our ideas and our opinions open up. That changes who we are because who we are is largely built off of those positions and ideas and assumptions and self-images that aren't accurate. So, the practice of inquiry syncs up very well with what they're talking about with these Inner Development Goals.

Rodger: Can you give us a specific example of how inquiry might be useful, considering the context I  business where oftentimes, people are given feedback as part of their leadership development. They might have gone through a 360-degree questionnaire process where the people that are reporting to them and indeed the people that they report to have to go through and answer a whole bunch of questions. And of course, we're not perfect, no one's perfect and so, there will be something that comes back, feedback wise, which could be really challenging. And one example we often get is people aren't as good listeners as they think they might be. However you could see it beneficial for listeners, can you unpack the specifics of inquiry a little more?

Ash: Sure. So firstly, getting feedback can be very challenging. And if someone gets, let's take your example, so someone gets the feedback, that they're not a good listener, and might feel kind of upset about that. So, if you were to not inquire, you might just go off and read a book about how to be a better listener, or you might drown your sorrows, or do whatever you do to regulate when you feel offended, or hurt, or so on. And then you go off, and you get a book about listening, or you get some coaching on listening. And you do your best to be a better listener, that would be a conventional approach.

If you were to inquire into that, you start with your experience where you are. You've just gotten that feedback, and many people would be offended or angry or agitated by that. And so you'd start with that to begin with. So, yes, it does put you on the line. No one is saying that this work is easy. In fact, it's tremendously challenging to actually do any kind of real inner work and inner development. To inquire in that moment means to stay with the feelings that come up after the feedback. And if you stay with the anger, and the agitation, you might find that you're hurt, you might find there's some hurt there.

And if you stay with that, you might find that you're way more hurt than you would like to admit. And that actually you find yourself clamouring to put together all kinds of defenses to put back in place your professional armour - your professional mask. But if you stay with a hurt, you might find that that actually just opens up and you feel much more vulnerable. And you might see as you stay with that, that actually, what is hurt is a self-image of yourself as being a good listener. And you can explore that self-image.

You may find that self-image comes from that you were told by your mom you're a good listener, and you just kind of develop that idea about yourself. And that idea sort of stayed entrenched as part of your identity, completely independent of whether or not you actually listened to people. So, it can be this old sort of cherished self-image that you have, that you realise is just a self-image, and actually doesn't match up with your behavior. And when you really see the image and you see where it comes from, it can sort of lift off - you can realize that's not who you are. And there can be an opening and a space that comes in.

So, there's a whole process that can happen. If you want to explore yourself as a listener. You can, and that's your topic of inquiry, you can actually take the intention of “what is my immediate experience of listening?” The inquiry is always grounded in our immediate experience now - on all levels: our body, our feelings, our thoughts, but it can also include our history. So you explore your immediate experience of listening, what is it like to listen? What’s my history of it? What's it like when other people really listen to me? What's it like for me when I think I'm listening? What's really going on in that moment? So, you can really investigate all of that and take it as a topic of investigation. But for it to really open up and bring a kind of transformation, where listening becomes intrinsic and natural to who you are - we need to be willing to see the self-images that are there and to see that they're not true. So, there is a vulnerability involved, for sure with that…