For a long time, I didn’t know there was a difference. Yes, in my head and linguistically. Through all kinds of concepts. But not in my body and whole being.
Organizing is part of it, of having a business. Creating beautiful programs, bringing groups together, having a wonderful location where people can be with each other. That’s simply what you do when you do this work. Right? We have De Drie Essen, we genuinely enjoy co-creating together, we have that inextricable connection with potential, we have the energy. We work in incredible places around the world, with an ever-growing number of international groups and companies. In short: everything is really, truly very ok.
So, we do it. I do it. As a matter of course. And besides: opportunities that present themselves, that you can create, you take them when you have the means. A deeply ingrained pattern. Sleeves up!
But there was something underneath that self-evidence. Something I couldn’t name for a long time.
A ‘have to’ that went deeper than calendars and putting food on the table. A have to as if something were at stake. As if something would go wrong if I didn’t. As if I would lose something, or there would be a shortage of something, if I did it differently. An urgency that factually made no sense and yet was there. Stubbornly present, somewhere beneath the surface.
The strange thing was that I had known it in my head for a long time. That nothing was at stake. That I had gathered enough experience, that I was enough, had enough. That rational knowing was there. But in my body, something else was true: it had to happen. Working, being active, doing meaningful things. And that body simply had the final say.
So, I started exploring. Where did that have to actually come from?
Somewhere in that search, my grandfather appeared. A pastry baker in a small Christian village in the Netherlands, who on June 16th, 1950, was left alone with seven young children, between ten and two years old. His wife, my grandmother, died in childbirth, along with their eighth child. She was thirty-five …
When I think about that, it touches me. Still.
And I don’t know whether his have to and my have to are connected. But something in me resonates: this fits. That the self-evidence of always being switched on, always carrying on, often accompanied by a certain heaviness, comes from somewhere. From further back than I myself go. Even just holding the question of whether they might be connected gives me something. Space, perhaps. And if it is so, then I have something precious that he never had: the choice. Not to have to, but to get to. Because I can.
I recognize this in many of the people we work with. Leaders who intellectually understand perfectly well that they could let go or do things differently and yet don’t. Teams or organizations that know a fear isn’t real but are driven by it all the same.
The mind that says: this isn’t necessary. The system that says: it is. That’s how it works.
For me, the shift didn’t begin with an insight. Not with a decision. But with an honest question, which presented itself carefully at first, then more and more insistently: do I actually have to do this?
And when I truly looked, not with my head, but by fully connecting with that question, the answer was: no. Not really. I get to. Because I can.
That difference, between have to and get to, is small in language and large in the body. Have to pulls you along, sometimes compulsively. Get to returns you to yourself.
I expected a feeling of liberation when asking the question, having conversations about it, exploring it. But that wasn’t there, or only partly. At first it was mostly unfamiliar. Like winning a gold medal at the Olympics but not quite being able to believe it. Because when the have to falls away, what remains? Or better: what takes its place? Where does space open up for something else, space that had been so completely occupied by that drive, that urgency, that sense that I needed to create something?
It was quieter inside me than I was used to. And I need more time with it. But in that stillness, I notice something. I’m dancing with it. It doesn’t always flow smoothly yet, but I’m becoming a better lead in the dance.
And something else has taken its place. A kind of childlike curiosity. Like the evening before the Dutch ‘Sinterklaas’: that childlike, expectant feeling of presents, something is coming. What’s in it? What fits? What will arrive that I perhaps haven’t thought of yet?
From May onwards, we work by invitation. In-company, and through programs and workshops at home and abroad. Not because it’s a smart strategy. But because it fits. Because I want to feel that I’m somewhere because I want to be, not because I think I have to be.
That feels like something to me!
Curious what this means for you or your organization? We’re here, by invitation.
~ Dees van de Hoef
