Something I value about a Gestalt way of relating is the unending possibility and immediacy of the present moment. Today I’m going to give some attention to the paradoxical theory of change as it pertains to managing one’s inner experience in contact with the world. Applications, of course, translate across personal and professional domains; if one draws such a distinction in the first place.

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One of the many arts of adult life is balancing one’s needs with the explicit and implicit
demands present with different people and contexts. For example, you are at the park
with your family and a work call comes in. Attending to work during family time may
impact intimacy with your family, yet you want to get the task done. You are talking with
a friend and suddenly your attention is drawn to the sound of a bird or the warmth of the
sun, so you miss what they’re saying. A high-stakes conversation is underway and you
find yourself feeling nervous, so you speed up and potentially damage the clarity of your
message. You are a leader in an organsiation facing an existential challenge and layers
of communication throughout are breaking down. Identity, family, leadership, innovation,
budgets all pull at your attention at once. How do you stay with the humanity of what’s
happening while being an effective leader?

In Gestalt, this skill of attunement to inner and outer stimuli is sometimes called the
ability to “bracket off.” The idea, put forward by Erving and Miriam Polster, is that in
order to maintain a sense of choice in the present moment, one must develop the ability
to negotiate competing demands that arise simultaneously, while staying alive to one’s
experience in the here and now. While it may seem obvious at first glance that, in order
to respond fully to sensation in a given context, one must be as present as possible to
that context, actualising this stance in the world takes work. We might call this inner
work. This work takes shape in a few ways.

One piece of work that often arises at this boundary concerns what Beisser termed the
“paradoxical theory of change.” The paradox is that change rests on the full, albeit
temporary, acceptance of the present status quo. You might approximate this to the
phrase ‘trusting the process’. It is not to be equated with a disposition of naive hope and
pray. Within this idea, Gestaltists suggest that, in order to glean the wisdom of the
unknown, one must be willing to suspend habitual thought patterns and responses, and
instead stay with what is continually emerging as figural in one’s own frame of
reference.

This stance is riddled with trickiness. For example: on what figure, when to stay and for
how long are just a few of the questions that may arise. These are valid questions, for
only on an intimately personal level can one know the felt sense of what is true. Take

the person at the park who receives a phone call. Is their choice to have their phone on
them symptomatic of a distracted way of being in the world? Is the work call a diversion
from personal issues at home? Is the ability to be responsive to work in private life a
mutual agreement made in order to make the family unit work? On the theme of
attending to a figural something, what feels like lingering for one person may feel like
staying in contact for another. Is the phone always on and responded to as an
automatic habit? Does one pattern of behaviour always dominate contextual nuance
etc.

The question of how long is also an interesting one. To linger too long on a sensation is
to remain in the status quo in a way that can become static and thus remove oneself
from the immediacy of the present moment. Equally, if letting figures go is forced, we
abort the continuity that each moment naturally has with the next, and contact is broken.
Developing this capacity for “being with what is” can take the form of building reflective
capability, slowing down, developing body awareness and expanding one’s capacity for
feedback. Many busy people I work with find it challenging to make space for the
seemingly elusive gems within stillness. Indeed, as someone who definitely used to be
a busy ‘doer’, I can empathise with the frustration and, quite frankly, reluctance to slow
down when every fibre of being is screaming for more, faster, better.

However, the cost of not attending to the process of attunement to one’s own figural
experience is that figures from another’s creation are likely to be swallowed instead. I.e.
living someone else’s life. This can lead to burnout, resentment, dissatisfaction, and
depression.

I have personally found when I am under-resourced, faced with many competing
demands and not listening to what my body is telling me that I either linger far too long
and get depressed or that I act on impulse and get overwhelmed. Through taking the
time to be with the mushy, often anxiety-inducing complexity of experience with a
trusted guide, sitting solo and with others, I find my ability to listen to the deeper
rhythms of my humanity improves. From this place, I am better able to respond and
make choiceful, grounded decisions on how I want to be moment to moment. Choice is
a wonderful, powerful thing. And it’s hard work.

Another aspect of this work in bracketing off involves accepting the very real lack of
synchronicity between the needs of one person and another. This may seem obvious,
yet it has significant implications for how we show up in dialogue with each other and
those we lead. Because each of our experiences of the world and ourselves is unique,
the way in which we communicate and receive this uniqueness will always fall short of

perfect translation. Just as a clock does not “tell time” but quantifies change through its
structure, so too language does not perfectly map wants and needs between people.
To relate well within this limitation, it is important to remain curious about one’s own
needs, wants and reference points while also staying open to those of others. It can be
a delicate line to tread in the betweenness of dialogue.

For example, to have the awareness to hold space for others such that this holding
does not silence your voice or having the awareness to take up space that does not
dominate others. This is not work that can be done talking with a chatbot and often
involves developing active listening, empathy and curiosity through graded experiments.
A lack of bandwidth for holding natural differences between people can show up in a
number of behaviours, including dominating, stonewalling, surface-level agreement, and
withdrawal. Some useful practices in this realm include work on feedback, mindfulness,
and boundaries while good listening space requires time, non-judgement and a degree
of risk from those involved. On the upside, developing a disposition of courageous
curiosity helps break through damaging habitual patterns and strengthens relationships.

“Life is as clear as the nose on your face when you are willing to stay with what is
presently clear, moving from one moment of actual experience to the next, discovering
something new in each; something which moves forward, developing the theme of its
own movement and culminating in illuminations which were inaccessible in the
beginning.” This apt summary by Erving and Miriam Polster highlights the immense
potential available through attuning to present, contextual, and personal needs with a
curious disposition.

The beauty of this way of working and being is that nothing is ever truly stuck. Any
sense of stuckness can instead be viewed through the lens of benefit and cost in
relation to a particular context at a particular moment in time, what we might call
attunement. How we responded to get our needs met as a child may serve us well in
some contexts and less so in others. Through awareness, we gain the choice to choose
which figural something we want to spend our attention on, and how.

Rather than placing a metaphorical label over the issue, Gestalt invites us to stay with
what is, trusting that through this process of being with emergent uncertainty, insight
emerges organically and more fully.