It’s a skill I most value in myself and others and one that’s stood me is good stead both in work and life.
Whether it was dealing with employee deaths during my HR career, public speaking nerves in the early days of my authorship or simply responding to life events, composure is something that not only moderates our response and regulates our emotions but can leave us feeling clear and calm to face what ever is in front of us. To respond rather than react and to come from a place of considered logic rather than blind panic!
People often ask me how do we learn to be calm and composed? Whilst I don’t run any courses that focus on this I do run plenty of training and coaching sessions on self mastery and it gets the same result. Here’s why.
I don’t believe calm, clarity and composure is something new we need to learn. I believe it’s a capability we all have deep within, it’s just that we’ve lost touch with it. It’s not something we learn it’s something we are. Our busy lives, workload pressures and information overload has seen us so far removed from this natural state we think it’s a new skill we need to master. Rather than something we’re born with that we can tap back into once the stress and overwhelm subsides. Calm and composed is our natural state. Just like water before the weather stirs it up or a stone is thrown into the lake.
It comes from deep knowledge of self and if we can keep coming back to this seed within that’s our essence, without all the stress and busyness, we’ll find this is where the calm lives. It’s when we get still and quiet we can tap into this state of being. We remove the layers of stress, busyness and distraction and find it’s been there all along.
When we know ourselves we’re more grounded, we’re better able to regulate our emotions and we know our triggers. It’s about creating the conditions to be our best self. Calm and composed is not something we learn, it’s something we are.
When I run retreats I’ll often talk about the concept of a retreat within. A feeling and a place of peace my attendees can take with them long after the retreat ends and a place we carry within that we can retreat to anytime, even during daily life when we might not have a cottage in the country complete with massage and sauna. This place within where we find peace is our natural state of calm and composure and it’s accessible to us anytime, if we cultivate it. And by that we have to find time to be quiet and still long enough to allow the busyness and distraction to subside and open up this place of inner peace and calm.
It’s from here we make our wisest decisions, tap into our intuition and find the ability to respond rather than react. It’s a place where equanimity lives, a sense of inner peace and groundedness.
So rather than having to learn to master another skillset. Try finding some space to be still and quiet and see if you can tap into your natural state of being, this calm inner peace that exists in all of us if we stop long enough to find it.