The messy middle is a courageous space of possibilities

The messy middle is a courageous space of possibilities. 

When I meet with potential organizational clients, I tell them my work - resilience building - lives in the messy middle within leadership and team development. This often elicits an uncomfortable chuckle. I smile. When we move forward in our work together, they’ll understand soon enough.

The messy middle is the space between the status quo and the edge at which you’d drop into overwhelm or numbing (hyper and hypo arousal states). Neuroscience research shows that the brain flips into overload and defensive posturing if we initiate the change process too quickly or without ways of going around the brain’s defenses. This means we can’t jump right into solutions (sorry, not sorry). Solutions have to come in at the right time otherwise it’s hustling and muscling your way through change and you and your team will end up right back where you started, often having compounded the issues. That’s why we scaffold this messy middle.

I learned scaffolding back in the day as an educator. Fun fact: did you know I started out as a Montessori early childhood teacher after college? Talk about messy. It actually prepared me well for graduate professional classroom spaces. We as adults are bound to act out our childhood issues if we don’t develop genuine self-awareness and learn skills to heal our personal issues within our professional spaces. 

Much of that then interplays with the messy middle of change management and professional development. Imagine really - the perfect storm - unhealed personal issues colliding with other dynamics all held within an organization trying to make changes. That’s why I tell folks all professional development, if done right, is personal development. Anything else, honestly, is a waste of time and money. Not likely a popular opinion but I’ve seen these patterns enough.

This is why modern business models of change management do not stick. In a recent conversation with a leader, they talked about spending so much time getting buy-in for every little initiative they want to implement. I explained that’s because the change process in organizations is backward. You have to build a resilient team - that means a team with people who have developed individual self-awareness and resilience competencies with a team of others who are doing the same. This gives everyone shared language to navigate the messy middle with boundaries and accountability. 

This feels slow in the beginning for folks, but it is critical for people to open up enough to grow their tolerance for discomfort. The concept of “we go slow early on, to go fast later” is actually one I learned from Waldorf pedagogy. It really captures that you have to lay the foundation for people in really embodied and engaged ways so that the lessons are like second nature. This gives people the skill sets to navigate the messy middle of life and work. 

Are you interested in exploring what this work might look like for you? For your team or organization? I create tailored workshops for teams and trainings for leaders, educators, and managers. Let’s talk!