Lesson: Mastering Presence with Diana Chapman

Step #8 Joy & Sexual: Expressing good feelings

Another emotion that we're finding might be just as difficult in some cultures to feel as others is joy. So one of the things I get feedback from teams, especially sales teams say, "We do all this hard work and we create these great milestones and yet we don't stop and celebrate. It's just push right through the next thing. And we didn't get to really let our joy come all the way through." So I say, "Are you giving yourselves plenty of time to let that place of something wants to be celebrated. Is there enough space for that? Or do you pinch around that and say, 'We can't celebrate because we want more and we don't have time to celebrate”? That's another big story, "We don't have time right now to celebrate."

And so my experience is that if you don't let that joy come all the way through, you'll start to back it up and then the system, honestly, unconsciously, will say, "I don't want to take on more good things because I've got all this joy backed up." So I see a cost to not being able to reliably move joy through. It won't let more to be celebrated come through.

And then finally sexual feelings, which is another one that's been very taboo in the corporate world, so much so that there's lots of legalization now around that. But sexual feelings is that energy that says, "Something wants to get created." And now that can certainly be connected to the sexual act, but that's a very small part of the whole breadth of what sexual feelings can provide. So sexual feelings is that creative, juicy, engaged, dynamic energy that makes us want to go innovate. And what we see is if you're not allowed to have that juice inside of your own self, if it's not okay to have sexual feelings, then it's more challenging to pull forward that juice to go and make things happen.

So we say, "Can you celebrate feeling sexual? Can you allow all that to be here? And can you find ways to be with that energy in a way that's friendly to you and others around you without being threatening?" So we know how to use that now to enjoy the sexual feeling inside of myself without thinking I'm supposed to do something out there with it.

One of the things that we've called into companies where it's a very sterile sexual environment. Women aren't supposed to look very feminine. What we find is that sexual energy then ends up getting spewed out on the sidelines through people having sex with employees and then they're getting fired, and all this drama comes in. And it's like the sexual energy's going to go someplace. If you kink a hose, it's going to start spitting out there at the source. And so all kinds of "na, na, na," starts happening if we don't have a health way to just be with sexual feelings.

So we had a lot of pushback like, "Why do you call it sexual feelings? Why can't you call it creative feelings or creative energy?" And the reason why we specifically say we want to keep it to sexual feelings is because as human beings we do get physically attracted to one another. It's not something you can control. It just happens. And if we can all just let ourselves learn how to be with those sexual feelings, breathe with them, move them all the way through, enjoy them, and then use that fuel to innovate with, we're going to have a lot more collaborative ease with one another.

And if we don't know how to do that and, "Oh my gosh, I'm attracted to John over there and every time I'm in a meeting with him I can't stop thinking about him," and then I'm not really present to the meeting anymore and I don't know what to do and maybe I shouldn't be on the team anymore and what does this mean about my marriage. Everybody gets into all kinds of off the present moment thinking.

And it would be so much easier to go, "Oh, there's John. I love the way I feel around John. I just enjoy my sexual feelings around him." And it doesn't have to do with John really. It's just I get this feeling inside when he's around and I can enjoy that and then bring that to the table and then what are we going to work on next.

So we wanted specifically to do that because we think our culture still has so much old thinking around sexual energy. So you'll read it 49 times in our book that we'll talk about sexual feelings and what wants to get created. One of the things people will say is, "I have some juice around that idea." And if everybody at the table goes, "Something's tingling, something's getting aroused here as we talk about this particular possibility of how this might move forward," we go, "Oh, something's alive here. Let's go that direction." It's actually an intelligence that says if something wants to get created, keep going.” So if you're aware of it, if you can go, "Oh there's something there," it actually will help you get clear about do we go this way or that way.