Imagination can be a wonderful thing. Oh, the innocence of a white canvas waiting to be explored! Something fresh, something new – the dawning and manifestation of something not previously known. No doubt, it’s a new beginning inviting transformation.
Reimagination is something quite different – likely more demanding, more challenging. It doesn’t invite you so much, as it waits for you. Perhaps it waits until you’re ready, or at least reluctantly willing. There is never the perfect time – for its time is, most often, long overdue. Reimagination doesn’t invite a transformation.
It IS the transformation.
Reimagination is the experience of cultivating an open mind to be able to take an ingrained perspective, belief, opinion, or some other idea that you have known, held, or thought you fully understood for a good long while … and then seeing it in a completely new way. While it may very well call upon your imagination, it first takes something much more demanding – unlearning. It demands an undoing.
This is probably true for most anything where I’ve come to “know” it so well that I take my own “knowing” for granted. It’s a case where my perceived understanding is a given in my own mind. This is precisely where the possibility of a deeper understanding comes to an end. A dead-end.
Over the last two decades, I’ve clearly seen the importance of reimagination in walking alongside so many in my work on integrity. Most importantly, the deeper I’ve explored the essence of integrity, I’ve experienced this need for reimagination myself. It has become so important, that my Circle of Integrity program doesn’t begin with learning –
It commences with the invitation to unlearn.
As a cohort begins their Circle of Integrity experience, I pose a very simple question: Am I willing to have an open mind to rediscover integrity in ways that I’ve never seen it before? The participants come to know that this isn’t a question we ask one time, but one we revisit each time we meet. For in the experience of reimagination, when things get messy and unknown, I want to retreat to the safety of what I’ve always known. And retreating is a backwards movement.
Anthony DeMello, in his book Awareness, names this in a very raw and real kind of way:
The most difficult thing in the world is to listen, to see. We don’t want to see. We don’t want to look. If you look, you lose control of the life that you are so precariously holding together. And so, in order to wake-up, the one thing you need the most is not energy or strength or youthfulness or even intelligence. The one thing you need the most of all is the readiness to learn something new. The chances that you will wake-up are in direct proportion to the amount of truth you can take without running away. How much are you ready to take? How much of everything you’ve held dear are you ready to have shattered without running away? How ready are you to think of something unfamiliar?
Imagine a real estate developer trying to build a new building on top of whatever was already there. While the clearing appears to be an ending, it is indeed the necessary step to a new beginning.
For instance, the most common definition of integrity is “honesty” or “what I do when no one is watching.” It makes sense and sounds good, while it suffices for moralistic compliance. Sadly enough, this familiar “limiting nature of knowing” is what keeps us from an exploration enabling a reimagination — that ultimately paves the way to a deeper understanding. Soon enough, in the example of integrity, we see that “honesty” and “what I do when no one is watching” are not definitions, yet simply one example of lagging indicators that flow from someone being in a state of integrity. There is a big difference between being a definition and being a lagging indicator. As you might imagine, this can be an ingrained “knowing” from which it can be hard to honestly let go. Yet it is a clearing that is necessary to begin.
It does, however, seem to be worth it. For example, a small sample of the expressed benefits, from those who have participated in the Circle of Integrity have included such things as:
MORE: awareness, introspection, sense of purpose, self-reflection, and pleasure in life
GREATER: appreciation, focus, discernment, depth, and relaxation in how I fit into our world while not trying to over-steer life
BETTER: relationships, empathy, outcomes, clarity, and relationship with the goals I set
LESS: zero-sum thinking, anxiety, strife, and sweating the small stuff
In so many ways the benefits point to the essence of integrity being whole, entire, integrated and an authentic experience of connection.
While the courage to unlearn sets the stage necessary to explore a deeper relationship with integrity, it applies to most every area of our life, most every challenge facing organizations, most every dynamic in our most meaningful relationships and the most intricate deepening in our spiritual life.
Reimagination has its own way of demanding from us because it is longing to give us so much more.
In full confession, conducting the Circle of Integrity demanded my own unlearning. During the pandemic, I created a revised 5-week virtual format of the program. Whether it was the public version for which anyone, anywhere, could register – or the private version available for leadership teams to experience together – I became convinced that 5-week format was a more powerful experience than the prior full day in-person format. One day, a friend said: John, don’t be so stubborn – the same benefit can be experienced from many formats. I must admit, it took some letting go, but I ultimately realized that the “unlearning” at the beginning was the key to making a variety of formats equally valuable. So, in 2023, new options have been added (click here to see) to the on-going availability of the 5-week option. No doubt, I’m still learning about the value of unlearning! Perhaps you are too.
As always, I’d love for you to share your thoughts and insights below!