Over the past month, I have engaged in two training experiences as a participant rather than the facilitator. Each experience was excruciating. 

I usually at the beginning of each workshop ask my Mastering Projects participants how they learn. I've learned to respect and encourage the different ways people assimilate new information. This is because I have learned to respect how I learn. I learn by savaging the offered information, curing the meat and tanning the hide, before finding some way to incorporate it. This process always surprises and often confuses me. How do you learn?

The first workshop was meant to qualify me for providing a service. I entered the workshop overwhelmed by the hundreds of pages of assigned "prereading" I had not completed. I stayed until the end, but refused to sit for the qualifying exam. I felt so disqualified by the end of the workshop that I did not want to be associated in any way with the "qualifying" organization. 

What was my problem? The workshop was focused upon passing a multiple choice exam. Since the concepts were simple and the exam had to be challenging, much of the test was centered upon remembering details of arcane research methods rather than on certifying an understanding of the central content of the material. It was a barrier to entry.

This felt unsafe. I was deeply offended by the idea that qualification was based upon irrelevant issues. Colleagues counseled me to simply jump through the hoops, but I could not engage. I internally savaged the material, the teaching method, and the qualifying examination. Once I'd savaged it, as the workshop's meat cured and as I tanned the hide, I was able to pull useful material out of the experience. I left the workshop feeling qualified, for I had found a way to qualify myself, but I was shaken by the passage. Why couldn't I simply sit and absorb? Why all the fussing?

The second workshop was very different. This one focused upon personal work, dealing with the gunk that clogs effective engagement. I learned more about this gunk than I had expected to learn. I was unsure about this workshop, entering off center and curious. Over the first days, the facilitators helped the participants create a "safe" environment. We outlined rules of engagement. We worked in small, non threatening groups. We were each encouraged to engage as we prefer to engage. I have never been to a workshop where more care was taken creating safety. Yet each safety-encouraging activity left me feeling more threatened. By the afternoon of the second day, I was nearly shut down, running on about 5% power, present but unavailable even to me.

I fled to my room, sub vocalizing a savaging commentary, where I spent the next hours hiding out, curing this latest meat and tanning this curious hide, working the contradiction through my mind. I felt more threatened as safety increased. How strange. Others came looking for me- to console and encourage- but I wouldn't answer my door. I felt impaled. I was in no shape for reassuring conversation.

A dialogue with my partner helped. She noted that she had first engaged with me because she wanted a "safe" relationship, but that the more the relationship deepened, the less safe it felt. This was clearly not because I had become more threatening. She had encountered this same contradiction. But was it really a contradiction?

I concluded after several hours' struggle that my threatened feeling was not the real issue. The real issue was my expectation that I would not feel threatened there. My feelings shocked me because they seemed so alien to the context. But the rules we created and the exercises we engaged in to make safety were really no more than whistling in the dark, because we were preparing ourselves to do some seriously scary work. The problem was my expectation that I might engage in such high-wire antics without feeling threatened. I shifted my expectations and felt my energy rise. 

We require seat belts, even though some will be trapped by them. We add air bags even though they kill a few. We create safety devices but none of them are fool proof or infallible. At some level our sense of safety is mere whistling in the dark, an artificial palliative to real threat. This place is not safe and cannot be made unconditionally safe. The rational response is to feel threatened, but so encumbered we can't make much headway. So we make up stories about how secure we are in absolutely insecure places. 

This is a lesson worth remembering. As I reengage as a facilitator, I will remember to take the time to whistle in the dark. I will be more deliberate in encouraging these feelings of security, even though they don't make anyone anything more than feel safe. Most importantly, I won't take it upon myself when a participant feels threatened. We do important work and important work is inherently threatening. 

This realization fits neatly into my learning process. Perhaps I savage new information because I feel threatened by it. I should feel threatened by it. New information always has the potential to tangle my internal model of the world, which is the most scary possibility for me. I cure the meat and tan the hide to find a way to assimilate the new stuff, and this leaves me feeling safe, whistling in the dark as my model of the world quietly shifts inside.