Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott and you find me in a thicket of gorse bushes.
These are bushes that have got very spiky,
Thorny leaves on them and I'm just touching them now and they really they really do prickle.
These gorse bushes are just moving from flower to developing seed pods.
I'm looking at them,
Come and looked at them up close really for a little while and these seed pods are beautiful.
They've got this sort of like furry white encasement and over time as the as the seeds ripen eventually one day they pop open in the sunshine and they sprinkle their seeds everywhere and you come up and you can hear this like little tiny popping sound going on around you and it takes you a while to realize it's the gorse bushes popping their seeds.
It's a little bit gray today for that and they're not quite that far advanced these particular seeds but I'm actually standing in the thicket because there's quite a strong easterly wind and I just want to shelter myself as I reflect on today's question and the question that I want to ask today and I wonder if you're curious to ask this of yourself is what are you actually in control of?
What are you actually in control of?
And it's just a question that I find really useful.
One of the things I engage with is coaching people and particularly coaching leaders of schools.
I often am told by these leaders that they describe themselves as control freaks.
They like to try and control everything in their school and there's a sense as they speak that they absolutely and totally and utterly believe that they have the ability to control everything.
If only they had the capacity to be more in control things would be okay.
So it's always a little bit disarming when we reflect in our conversations when I'm reflecting with leaders about well do they really have control?
Do they really have control?
And it really landed for me this question the difference really between control and intention.
I mean I think absolutely we might set an intention but ultimately we have no control over the outcome.
So when I went walking and I walked on my pilgrimage I set out to walk across the country from the southwest coast to the east coast of England but my intention was to walk it but I had no control over whether that was going to happen.
I had no idea if it was going to happen but I did set an intention.
And the other day my husband and I we went to the cinema to watch a film but the film that had been downloaded had been downloaded without subtitles so we weren't able to watch it because it was in a foreign language.
And our intention had been to go to the cinema to watch a film but we weren't in control of whether we actually saw it or not.
And in fact what came out of that experience it was a lovely local cinema with table and chairs and you get china cups with tea in them and it's just a wonderful experience.
It's not really about how good or bad the film is it's about the experience of going to this tiny little cinema.
But one of the outcomes of this is that the person,
The manager in the cinema was so apologetic and she said let's everybody have tea and cakes on us.
So we ended up having tea and cakes and just feeling really warm and fuzzy about how great people are like nobody really complained everybody enjoyed their free cup of tea and a cake and we all felt nourished even though we had gone to see a film and we hadn't seen the film.
And this is what I think is so important about the recognition or the question of am I in control because you see if you are in control and you are able to control everything including the outcome that you want to get then what you miss out on is all the other stuff that happens in between.
Like if we were able to control that we were going to watch this film and actually watch the film from beginning to end then we wouldn't have had this other experience that actually was probably more enjoyable than the film itself.
A real sense of connection with fellow human beings.
So I think for me the question is what might I set as an intention absolutely but what am I actually in control of I mean that's that's a very different thing a very different thing and I'll just be curious for you where you feel you stand between being in control or setting an intention are you ever really in control?
