Arrive With an Empty Cup
The full cup, the toolkit and the tools, are a defence to protect us from the unknown.
These words were spoken to me today: arrive with an empty cup.
The person was a teacher, burger in hand, mouth full. On their lunch break. Choosing to spend an hour with us to talk about the work they’re doing.
Helping children be the best they can be. Thinking about the systems that judge, reward, prevent and guide those children and how unhealthy and unfit for purpose those systems are.
I asked the teacher what I could do to help, and their response was simple.
Arrive with an empty cup.
Most people I meet arrive with their lived wisdom, experience and credentials held out for everyone to see. Most don’t really see anything at all; only existing in a template that was designed for them by somebody else.
We arrive full. We arrive carrying our burdens on shoulders slumped from looking at our screens for far too long. We arrive with our assumptions buried deep in every conversation, and we arrive with the solution sketched out in our minds, before anyone has actually described the truer problem to be solved.
Bringing our tools, our experience and all the lessons we’ve learned along the way feels like a generous act, yet it functions as an inability to hear and see. An act that is both deaf and blind.
And because we arrive with full cups, we fail to see people. We hear the first half of every sentence and start drafting our reply. An attempt to build our own credibility instead of honouring theirs. We chip away at what someone else has to offer us, sanding it down to fit what we already believe, what we already know, instead of building something new with them. Together. From their inherited wisdom as a starting point, not our own.
Simone Weil, the French philosopher who gave up the comforts of the world she lived in to work among factory lines, wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. She understood what attention meant, by not just sitting, but living in someone else’s world. Rare because it cost her something.
To attend fully to another person, we have to set down our own preoccupations for a time, and most of us are unwilling to be that unguarded for that long. The full cup, the toolkit and the tools, are a defence to protect us from the unknown.
From being changed.
Which is precisely why emptying it is a creative act of leadership.
Creativity is so often described as generative, as output, as having the ideas. But the deeper creative act is also receptive. A willingness to let someone else’s way of seeing enter our world and rearrange the furniture.
I’ve come to realise that every new thing I have helped create has begun in a moment where I knew less than the person in front of me. The communities my team and I work alongside don’t need our solutions. They need our skill set placed in service of the change they already know they need and want.
The teacher eventually finished their burger. Mouth full. Still chatting and laughing with me, about all manner of things. Even empty cups. I could see in his eyes — gentle, hard working, fatherly, wise beyond his no more than 40ish years — that he was quietly asking me, and you, something important.
Stand up from where you’re sitting, step outside and listen to the world around us. Talk to people; of all ages. Ask them lots of questions. Be curious and listen. Go to the local footy club, pick a team. Watch. Listen. Meet with that person you admire. Be polite and respectful. Don’t parade. Listen.
Walk alone with your thoughts, and listen. Write and listen.
Sit with someone you care deeply for, and listen. See the world through their eyes. Feel the world the way they feel it. Sense it the way they sense it.
Don’t parade. Don’t posture. Don’t contest or foreshadow.
Leave your tools at the door.
The teacher taught me that the empty cup is a gentle discipline. One I fail at daily. Yet I take the discipline up again each time, and each time I do, each time I listen and each time I see through someone else’s view, I notice that my empty cup is full.