(I039) "Care, But Don't Carry"

"Care, But Don't Carry"

By Anette Lan

Before we can learn, we have to unlearn.

Nobody told me unlearning would be harder than learning. That it was its own skill.

When I wrote Ensō, A Tree Still Grows, I thought I was writing about resilience. I was unlearning forty years of what I thought I was supposed to do.

After Saturday's keynote, a journalist asked me what "care, but don't carry" looks like in real, everyday leadership. The question landed harder than my talk had.

I had been carrying everyone else's tasks and calling it leadership. I had been hired for it. The pace I set for myself was the pace I would have been asking a team to keep. That was not leadership. That was a pattern I would have been teaching them to call leadership.

In The Courage to Be Disliked, Kishimi and Koga teach an idea from Alfred Adler. The separation of tasks. Whose task is this? Mine, or theirs?

I had been carrying many people's tasks. I had been calling it leading.

Putting them down was the easier part. Speaking in a way that did not break the relationship was the harder one. Kim Scott calls this "Radical Candor". Care personally. Challenge directly. Without the challenge, it becomes ruinous empathy. Without the care, it becomes aggression.

In English, care and carry are nearly the same word. To care for something is to carry it. To not carry it is to stop caring. The language gives us one move where there are two. By the time the body notices, the brush has been leaking for months.

In Japanese, there is te-banashi (手放し). Te is hand. Hanasu is to release. Together, the open hand. Not the empty hand. The hand that was holding, and chose to open.

There is sekinin (責任). Usually translated as responsibility. The second character, nin, means entrusted. Given. Placed in your hands. Not what you can carry. What was actually given.

There is kokoro (心). Heart. Also mind. Also spirit. Also the place that knows before the rest catches up. When we say heart, we are using a fragment.

The body knows first. We are not taught to trust it. I listened, deeply, into my body and into my own knowing.

Socrates said it and it has stayed true.

“I know that I know nothing.”

The unlearning is what clears the way for the new way of learning.

In Japanese, shoshin (初心) is the beginner's mind. The second character, 心, is kokoro itself. The mind that begins again does not begin somewhere else. It cuts through the old way and finds the heart that was waiting.

I stopped doing every task. The work moved faster because I was more discerning to MY tasks.

The opening on the left side of the circle is not a flaw. A closed loop has nothing left to enter.

None of this is my wisdom. I read it, watched it. I am only now living it. The Courage to Be Disliked. Radical Candor. The books that took time to integrate, but that is the HA HA HA that is necessary to find the AHA moment of learning.

“What are you carrying that is not yours?”

We live in a paradox. Technology is changing work faster than we can name what it is replacing. The faster it moves, the more we are asked to know who we are. To trust our own human intelligence.

These are not the things AI will take from us. They are the things AI is making more valuable.

This is where my work lives. At the bridge between the wisdom that has always been here and the unknown future of work. I build tools that open capacity, so the time you save can be spent on what only you can do.

If this is the unlearning you are in, you do not have to do it alone.

I teach leaders how to get out of the weeds. How to see the pulse of their language. How to connect deeper on their own terms. All of it reframes how we will lead differently.

Check out Miru Pulse Inc. to learn more.

The Reframe Workshop is where the practice lives. Ensō, A Tree Still Grows is the book that began it.

Find me at www.mirupulse.com to find more capacity and www.ensomindset.com to find the reframe.