Training as Initiation #1
There’s a thought that’s been fluttering around in my head for a few months about why training for professional and personal development often seems to lack the potency we might wish.
Sure, people are informed, even challenged. They go away with some new knowledge and skills, and hopefully a different attitude. But it rarely changes their lives. Now, maybe you think I aim too high. But the stuff I tackle in a training course – Assertiveness, Confidence, Optimism, Empathy, Motivation, Stress and Anger Management, Communication Skills, Emotional Intelligence – all have the power to shape someone’s life success and happiness. They are truly ‘big ideas’. They have the potential to shift one’s paradigm forever. So how do we let them do it?
My provisional answer: we link the training to an initiation.
What is initiation? “A rite of passage ceremony marking entrance or acceptance into a group or society. It could also be a formal admission to adulthood in a community or one of its formal components. In an extended sense it can also signify a transformation in which the initiate is ‘reborn’ into a new role.”
We tend to think of initiations as relating to secret societies, religious orders, or tribal societies. But, in this wider sense, it includes those ceremonies that mark graduation from school or recruit training, and entrance into a new way of life.
Such rites of passage involve three elements. (1) Separation – the initiate is detached from their normal life patterns and situation. (2) Liminality – the initiate is introduced to the new perspectives and lifestyle of the group. (3) Re-incorporation – the initiate, having completed the trials and assumed their new identity, reenters society.
Unfortunately, talk of initiations these days is limited to university lectures in anthropology and university misbehaviour. The men’s movement is an exception in taking the notion to heart. For example, the work of The Mankind Project states its purpose as: “We are an order of men called to reclaim the sacred masculine for our time through initiation, training, and action in the world.” This initiation comes through their New Warrior Adventure Training course.
In light of the above, it is ironic that what made me first think about the connection between training and initiation was a book called A Women in Your Own Right: Assertiveness and You by Anne Dickson. It’s one of the original and still one of the best books on the subject of assertiveness. But it was the title of the second last chapter that caught my imagination: (18) Assertiveness as a Way of Life. Why yes! Of course! That’s it! (I thought.) Assertiveness isn’t just about theory and techniques. Assertiveness training should be an introduction to a new way of living.
In my next blog, I’ll look at how we could accomplish this in a learning environment.
Image credit: Wonderlane.
