Ep. 26 Building Belonging in Relationship

In this episode, Katie talks with Mike Holton, COO and faculty member at CRR Global, about the importance of building belonging in our relationships. Across this conversation they discuss: 

• Belonging as a form of acceptance
• The individual work that we can only do together
• Making the unconscious conscious
• Learning how to bring more belonging to our relationship with ourselves

Mike Holton has a lifelong passion for working with and developing leaders across the globe. Alongside his roles at CRR Global, Mike has spent a career working to develop organizational capabilities within the Global 2000.  In the coaching field, he has worked as an agile, leadership, couples, team, and organizational coach.  Over the last few years, he has transitioned his focus to working with clients in the space of Trauma. The most important role Mike plays is being a husband and a father of four amazing children. This role has shaped him and continues to develop him as a person today.

For over 20 years, CRR Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to build stronger relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one relationship at a time

We believe Relationship Matters, from humanity to nature, to the larger whole.

Transcript

Key 

KC – Katie Churchman 

MH – Mike Holton 

[Intro 00:00 – 00:06] 

KC – Hello and welcome back to the Relationship Matters podcast. We believe Relationship Matters, from humanity, to nature, to the larger whole. I’m your host, Katie Churchman, and in this episode I’m talking with Mike Holton, CEO and faculty member of CRR Global, about the importance of building belonging in our relationships. Across this conversation we discuss belonging as a form of acceptance; The individual work that we can only do together; making the unconscious conscious and learning how to bring more belonging to our relationship with ourselves. Mike Holton has a lifelong passion for working with and developing leaders across the globe. Alongside his roles at CRR Global, Mike has spent a career working to develop organizational capabilities within the Global 2000.  In the coaching field, he has worked as an agile, leadership, couples, team, and organizational coach.  Over the last few years, he has transitioned his focus to working with clients in the space of Trauma. The most important role Mike plays is being a husband and a father of four amazing children. This role has shaped him and continues to develop him as a person today. So without further ado I bring you Mike Holton, talking about building belonging in relationship. 

KC – Hi Mike, welcome to the Relationship Matters podcast. 

MH – Hey, how are you doing Katie? 

KC – I’m well thank you, how about yourself? 

MH – I’m good! It’s the morning and it’s kind of a sacred time so I’m doing really good. 

KC – Today we’re talking about belonging, and why it’s important for us to hold as coaches. So, I’m curious, what does belonging mean to you Mike? I wonder whether we start there. 

MH – Yeah. You know, I’ve thought a lot about this and I think the way I think about it has evolved and probably will continue to evolve over time, but I think for me right now, belonging, it’s like accepting all of me and can all of me accept all of you? I think that’s a journey, it’s a journey I’ve taken and I think it’s a journey that many clients are on the path of taking. It’s just that place of acceptance, it’s like who am I, right? What are the aspects of who I am. You know, often we take about inner and outer roles and ghost roles, it’s like can I accept, one can I have an awareness around the roles that I hold and can I accept all of that, right? And can all of that accept all of you as a person and then create this new space around connecting and belonging in the world. And you know, it’s interesting, I love this quote from Suzanne Stabile and The Micah Centre, she often talks about, for her mantras it’s like the individual work that we can only do together, right, and I think that’s so true about relationship coaching, systems coaching, is we all have individual work to do but we can’t do it by ourselves, it’s in the relationship is really where the work happens, at an individual level around belonging, around acceptance and around growth. 

KC – That is really fascinating, the way you framed that around belonging being more of a journey than a destination. I think I had a sense that belonging is something we either have or we don’t have, but are you suggesting that it’s sort of a continual process that we need to keep checking in with? 

MH – Absolutely. I mean I think, for a long time I would hold it as a destination, yep, you’re in. You’re in the group. But what’s interesting is that we’re always evolving, so the person I am today is not the person I will be tomorrow and so it’s kind of like, you know, we just don’t… it isn’t a destination. It’s not like hey, we hit it! We’ve got a hundred friends and we’ve got a good job and people like me, no, things change overnight. You know, we love the principle of systems are in a constant state of her. I think that’s really true for us as individuals as well, we’re always emerging, right? So I think the belonging is a continual journey. And I remember as a kid, what it meant to belong was very different to what I think it means today, right? As a kid, I grew up in Seattle, the home of what people would know as Microsoft and Amazon today but back in my childhood it was grunge, so belonging as a kid was kind of like are you wearing flannel, do you have long hair and a skateboard right? Nirvana and Pearl Jam we’re kind of the music scene and Seattle was kind of put on the map, not because of technology but because of music scene that was created not just in Seattle but across the world. But belonging then was, for me as a child, was you know flannel, long hair and a skateboard. Today that’s not true. We still sport our flannels but it’s very different, right, and I think about belonging and the challenges that we have in this world around belonging, it goes really deep, a lot deeper than that. 

KC – I’m becoming aware of how belonging can so easily become a check box and how we might do, say, the design team alliance and we do our design leader alliance and we’ve checked that box but actually we’ve gotta keep on our toes as it relates to things that belonging, because as you say, they’re constantly evolving as things change and move and we change and grow too. 

MH – Yeah, and as leaders we check in everyday with that. We check in everyday on the design team alliance or the design leader alliance because things have changed, things have evolved, you know maybe if we’re co-leading with somebody our co-lead’s evolved, we’re different. It is an evolution, right? And again, you know, it’s kind of like, I think another thing is what’s emerging in the world today that we need to create space for, and I’m not saying you need to create space for everything, there’s definitely certain things that I don’t wanna create space for, but there’s an intentionality right around what do we wanna create space for and what do we wanna create that belonging and acceptance, and what’s the impact? What’s the impact when we create belonging, what’s the impact when we don’t create belonging? And is that the impact we wanna have in the world? I think, for me, fundamentally the inquiry you need to have is how do I accept all of me so that all of me can accept all of you, and then we can drop into relationship and go further together. And if I reject part of you then we’re not, there’s just something that’s missing. There’s, I can’t really go that far with you if I’m like well, I’ll take this part of you Katie but that part, you can just leave behind, right? I think often that’s what we do, right? Or we dream up of, when we’re in relationship sometimes I think we dream up like oh I really like this aspect of a person but I’m not so crazy about that person, but that’s part of who they are as well and so how do we begin to accept that in them? And here’s what I would make up. You know I had this great conversation with one of our students in the classroom recently and we were talking about pronouns and they were like sometimes when people use pronouns I feel like there’s a check off the box, they don’t really mean it, they’re just like hey, at least in North America we do, we often do two things when we start classes, we do the landing knowledge to acknowledge the land that we’re on from people from the first nation and then we do pronouns, and we just move on. But it’s interesting because we had this great discussion how often when people say that they really like, is this a place of creating belonging for them or is this just like hey here’s my pronouns we’re moving on, right? And I think the spirit of using the pronouns is it’s really creating a sense of belonging for all to be however they wanna be, and people can tell, right, like are you phoning this in today or is there really something that matters to you? Which is, you know, I guess tied back to the podcast name, Relationship Matters, right? And does it matter? So then I think it goes back to our conversation in how do we create belonging in the systems that we’re involved in? 

KC – What I’m noticing from the way you hold belonging is it’s very much a two way street. I think it would be easy to focus on how do I create belonging for my team or how do I create belonging for the students I’m working with, and it all to be out there, but the way you’re holding it is it’s very much about what I hold in myself or allow in myself, also then enables me to hold more or less in the people I work with. So it’s a parallel process in many ways belonging, what we allow to sit within us, I imagine, expands what we can hold in our systems that we work and live within. 

MH – Yeah, you know, it’s kind of, it’s interesting you say that because it reminds me of the first system is self that we often talk about and work with, right? The first system, the one system I might have control on is my own system and so how do I begin to work with that? And don’t get me wrong, sometimes what I’ve noticed with people, and you can see a lot of this in at least politics I think sometimes in the US, it’s my identity depends on me accepting or rejecting your identity, and so, it’s like the way I relate to myself and the way I create belonging for myself is the way I’m relating to somebody else and the way somebody else is, it's like that person is right or wrong, or I belong to this group and because this is, this group has an identity that I subscribe too and again, it just goes back too, it still goes back to that conversation around belonging. It’s like I can only accept you if you fit this particular mold, right, if you have these three things checked off then I can accept you and you’re a good person. It’s not, it’s so many different people have that inherent conversation, it’s like well you’re only a good person if you do these three things and you’re only a good person if you do these three things, like, and they conflict, right? But my sense of belonging is based off of somebody else vs do I accept all of me and can all of me accept all of you? 

KC – So do you feel that belonging is, in many ways, a way to align and meet people at a deeper level? 

MH – Absolutely. I think, you know, cause I think at the core, to me a lot of times belonging is one of the key things people are looking for. So I think Richard Stroze, I listened to him talk once around three things we all want and it resonates for me, he used to talk about, probably still does, but safety, belonging and dignity, our three things that are all of us are looking for in this world. And I think it’s a really profound statement because at the end of the day people do wanna feel a sense of belonging and if we do wanna drop deeper it’s like how do we create belonging in somebody? How do we create, you know, safety, how do we allow them to have dignity? And that allows us to drop down further. I think sometimes that theory in that you, the theory you, it’s like getting down at the very bottom of the you, right, like we can only do that by creating a sense of belonging in ourselves that allows that belonging in others. 

KC – So in terms of bringing more of a sense of belonging to both ourselves and the work that we do, what’s a great starting point because this might not be something that is on our radars in the day-to-day. 

MH – Well you know it’s interesting, I was thinking about like a dozen different things that you could do, so I don’t know if there’s any one thing that I would be like oh, yeah, start here. I think it’s, one, I think some of the work that we all have to do is making the unconscious conscious, and in the space of this topic around belonging it’s like how do I make the unconscious parts of me conscious? And how do I begin to really work with that? Faith and I, and I’m sure the listeners know Faith fairly well at this point, but we do some work around secret selves. And it really, it’s about bringing those unconscious aspects of who we are forward and really beginning to work with that and beginning to accept those aspects. And so to me I think the place that I would probably begin with anybody is how do we begin to make the unconscious aspects of who we are as a person and make them conscious. And sometimes by just making that stuff conscious and putting it out there in front of us we can actually begin to work with it, vs often the unconscious kinda drives, it’s driving the bus, I always kind of joke that our secret selves often have the car keys and sometimes they’re driving us places we don’t wanna go. And so, yeah, that’s the place where I would probably start, is beginning to make that unconscious conscious. And it’s kind of like the next step for a lot of us is asking the question can I be with that? And then if the answer to that is no, can I be with the no? And continue to unfold that, just like, oh, well can I be with the no, it’s like no, well can I be with that I can’t be with it? And beginning to do that work, so it’s like oh I can’t be with it, ok, then what can’t you be with? And then get curious around that and it just kind of, this continual unfolding around exploring what can I be with when I’m around myself and what can’t I be, and understanding that is probably where I’d go. And I think that, you know, if I was gonna take it one more step because I could probably just, if I kept going, you know, it’s like we make the unconscious conscious, we begin to ask ourselves can we be with it and then I think, when we go, I think the next step is letting go of the judgement. Letting go of well this is neither good or bad, this is just who I am, and allowing, even the ugly parts of who we are, even the parts that we might be ashamed of, giving them a little bit of room in ourselves and honoring what is the wisdom, right? What is, whatever they brought for us, what did they bring? Maybe that’s protection, maybe that’s survival. But there’s some, you know, all of us have parts we don’t like about ourselves and so can we create a space and stop making it right or wrong and instead lean into what was the wisdom of this aspect, what did this aspect of who I am as a person, how did it serve me? How did it help protect me? Whatever it is, I mean I think, if I think about some of the aspects of myself it’s like a lot of it was around survival. I’m not really proud of those aspects, I don’t really want them to be driving the bus but if I really acknowledge what they did is, shoot, they kept me alive as a kid, right? They helped me survive my childhood in a way that I’m still here today where some of my friends aren’t. So I have to honor that part of it and do that work. And then bring all of that mess, at least for me it’s kinda messy sometimes, and bring that when I meet somebody! It’s like this is all of me, right, it’s not that I’m sharing that or wearing it as a mirror badge but it’s who I am as a person and just acknowledging that yeah, sometimes I’m a hot mess and it’s ok that you might be a hot mess too. Let’s be a hot mess together and drop into relationship and what do we intentionally wanna create? And I think that becomes a beautiful way to be connected in this world, the makeup if we all had the capacity to do that more often with people, there might be a few less fights, there might be a few less, you know, shaming the stuff that goes on, there might be a little bit more belonging. Who knows what this world could create if we just had, again, going back to that sense of, if we had more belonging in this world what could we actually create? 

KC – That’s such an important point around when there are parts of ourselves that we reject, turning it into well how is it trying to be helpful? Even if it’s unskillful, how is it trying to be helpful? And it makes me wonder, around belonging, I think, I came into this conversation expecting us to focus on belonging and where we have belonging and how to bring more belonging and I wonder actually if there’s quite a lot of growth opportunity in the areas where we feel we don’t belong, whether that’s in ourselves or in our teams, the learning there in terms of what’s showing up for me. Has that been your experience, both in yourself and with the people you work with? 

MH – Yeah, it reminds me of, like sometimes I don’t wanna belong, right? There’s a part of me that it’s like I don’t wanna be a part of that group! And it’s not even a bad group to belong too but it’s interesting when I notice that coming up in myself, like I don’t really want to be a part of that group, it’s time to get curious. Like what’s in me that doesn’t wanna belong or associate to that group and why, right? And there’s usually something in me that either doesn’t wanna be exposed, doesn’t wanna emerge, and there’s something to get curious about. We often talk about signals, so there’s this signal around I don’t want that, like why? So there is a lot of, I think to your point, there’s a lot of inner work that can show up around that. You know, even things, it’s like I would say when groups reject us, we might try to belong to a system and the system might say no or no thank you and rejecting that request for us to join that group. There’s something to get curious about, right? There’s something to maybe understand how that group, maybe have empathy for that group around why they’re saying no. It’s probably a little bit of a tangent but one of the things I’ve been working on with my coach is, often when somebody says no it’s also, it’s not necessarily rejecting the person, it’s just rejecting the request, and what’s interesting is I often collapse the two, right? Like for me when somebody says no they’re rejecting me as a person and that’s not always true, a lot of the times they’re just rejecting the request. They’re not rejecting the person. And how often we collapse that in, you know, whether that’s in relationship, in personal/professional, it’s like they’ve actually said no to me, they hate me, but actually it’s not true, they just said no to this request, they didn’t necessarily say no to who you are. 

KC – I don’t think I realized how much belonging can be a mirror for the mind. I think I thought about it more outwardly, as we mentioned, we tend to like to focus, particularly as systems workers, on the systems out there, but actually all those moments where we sense that edge, where we don’t belong or something’s not right, if we can turn towards that, that relationship, with that lack of belonging there’s an edge to cross and there’s probably a wealth of knowledge about self. 

MH – Yeah! 

KC – Yeah, it’s interesting, I didn’t think about it as a mirror for those states that we so often show up in, those patterns. 

MH – Yeah. Well if I think about it, I think you mentioned parallel process right, so as we turn towards belonging or we feel this sensation in our system, it is, it’s a signal, right, like the sensations that we’re having in our body is a signal often for something that’s wanting to emerge, we talk a lot about that in intelligence, and so these are all signals and what’s wanting to emerge in the new secondary, I think that’s the place to get curious about. But it is a lot of inner work, right, so I think this always comes back down to either it’s the inner work of the individual or it’s the inner work of the system itself around how do we create belonging? 

KC – Yeah and I think quite often this word acceptance is thrown around, oh yeah we just need to accept ourselves, we need to accept each other, and I don’t know if we really know what that means. So, in terms of sort of creating belonging in yourself and the system that you work with, has acceptance been a key part of that and if so, what does that look like for you? 

MH – You know when you say that it feels like I’m checking something off, like in me, what’s coming up in me and I don’t know if this is what you intended or not, it feels like oh yeah, if I just accept that, I just need to check those three things off and I’m… it’s almost like a form that I feel like I’m filling it out, that’s just what’s coming up in my body at least when you say that. I think it’s more around, I guess it’s going, can I be with that? That’s the question I ask myself. It’s not can I accept that, it’s can I be with that is the curiosity I would, in the language I use. Can I be with the fact that maybe I’m overweight, or can I be with that, I don’t know, can I be with somebody’s temper, can I be with I might get upset? Can I be with shame I might feel because of something I did? And so it’s, I don’t know, I guess to me it’s like I don’t ever ask the question can I accept that and maybe it’s because for me so long accepting meant I was checking something off and it’s more of a can I be with it? 

KC – And I’m presuming the sort of tree diagram doesn’t end there with yes/no, if it is a no it’s can I be with the no and the not being able to accept this right now and that’s sort of another peeling of the onion you could say. 

MH – Absolutely, yeah. 

KC – I don’t think I realize sort of how, well this is very much, I think, a part of inquiry and awareness, this piece of belonging, because every level and layer will sort of reveal something else about the system, whether that be us or our family systems or our teams. 

MH – And then I would tie back into what we were talking about earlier around belonging is a journey not a destination, right? It’s this continual unfolding around and understanding around what’s emerging in me and can I be with that? What’s emerging in you and can I create a space for that as well. And so it’s just, it’s never an acceptance check list. It’s just a can I be with that. And here’s the magic of it – if we can get to that zen space, even for a moment, and I don’t, again, I think, I can’t always be with everything all the time, there’s plenty of times where I’m like I can’t be with that and I might get upset or I might withdraw, you know there’s movement around, for me, and there’s oftentimes where I’m like I just can’t be with that, I’m out. And that might not even be a verbal out, that might just be a mentally I’m checked out, right? Or, you know, I’m mad so I’m gonna get angry at that. But in those times that we can create that sense of belonging and can I be with that I think people can feel that, they can feel that in their bodies and there’s this space that people wanna be around those that accept who they are all of them. And that’s the magic, right? I think that’s the magic, when we’re coaching with people it’s like we don’t, we’re not attached, right? When I first started to learn to coach there was always this conversation around non-attachment which I think we’re always attached to stuff, we just get a lot better at self-managing our attachment. I’d like to meet somebody that’s not attached, really truly not attached. And I feel like that’s kinda sad too, like if you’re not attached to anything then that feels a little bit like an empty life. So yeah, non-attachment, right, I think that’s the beauty, but I think to me it’s not about attachment it’s about belonging. It’s like I accept all of you and I don’t have a judgment against it, I don’t have any shame against that, I’m gonna create a space of dignity here for us to be in relationship so we can spend time coaching and go deeper to work on the stuff that only you can work on but we need to be able to do that together, because again, it’s like I do a lot of work in the trauma space and what’s interesting to me in the trauma space is that we are wounded in relationship. In relationship to something, that’s where we experience trauma often. We only really find healing, I think, really completing that journey by healing with relationship, so we get hurt in relationship and we heal in relationship and I think that’s some of the power of coaching that we don’t always articulate, is it’s in the relationship of coaching I think often people can find the healing that they’re looking for. And sometimes healing is man, I can be with myself now and that’s ok. Like, I’m ok as a person and I’ve done my, I’m doing my work, I’m aware of myself and I really, I think that’s some of the magic that we bring as a coach. And if we can’t be with a part of who, we can’t create that sense of belonging with one of our clients, the system that we’re working with, they feel that! And that’s a part of work that they won’t be able to do with us if they can’t accept that part of who we are. They might be able to do other work with us but they won’t be able to do that particular work that needs to be done if there’s a part of that system that we reject. 

KC – I remember an experienced coach, quite a few years ago, said to me we attract clients who are sort of at a similar place in their journey. And I’m sure you’ve felt this too but the more work I’ve done on myself the more I can hold in my clients too, and it’s interesting then how the level of complexity but also some of the depth that shows up is different now than it was, say, five/six years ago. 

MH – Yeah, and I agree, like I think when I started coaching a lot of it was, I don’t wanna say it was surface because it was really meaningful but what I do now for coaching is so much profoundly different from when I started out with. And they’re both beautiful, there were some beautiful moments when I started coaching years ago, to now, but the level that I’m able to go deeper, when I’m able to hold for my clients is so much more profound I think than I could years ago when I started. But I think that’s your point, it’s the work that we’ve done on ourselves, right, it’s the capacity we’ve grown to allow belonging in ourselves that creates the space for others to have belonging in their own systems. 

KC – I wanna underline something you said before about how belonging, you don’t feel can be an acceptance checklist, and what came up for me when you said that was, so is belonging a relationship then? 

MH – Yeah! Absolutely. I mean now that you say that it is a relationship, it’s, you know it’s interesting I’ve never thought about it like that but it’s like, I guess it’s like what’s my relationship to belonging? I was in a car, yeah, it’s interesting that you say that, huh. Because here’s what I makeup – if hold relationship as a belonging it’s something that we’re active in, right? And we’re actually engaging in, we’re investing in, and it’s something that needs to be nourished, and it’s kind of like, there’s lots of stuff that I come across like wow, I had no idea, right? And in that moment, if I’m standing in belonging as a relationship and I’m in that relationship, yeah, everything belongs and there’s a place for everything, then I can bein to be with everything that comes at me. Vs well I accept this and this, it’s like ooh, I forgot to check that one box off so I don’t actually accept that but I’ll accept these three things, and so to me, I love considering the idea of belonging a relationship to be in and how are we actively in a space of creating belonging with people. 

KC – That feels much more like a dialogue then, it’s not you deciding all of the shots about what belonging means or doesn’t mean, but it means also having a say in that too and that’s going to shift and change as we evolve and the systems and the life that we live evolves too. 

MH – Yeah! 

KC – Thank you so much, Mike, for this conversation. I wasn’t expecting to get here at all and it’s been fascinating being on this journey with you around belonging. 

MH – Yeah, thanks for having me! It’s always a pleasure and I love listening to your podcast. 

KC – Thank you, take care Mike! Speak soon. 

[Music outro begins 28:19] 

KC – Thanks to Mike Holton for that interesting conversation. Here are my key takeaways. Belonging isn’t a check box that we can tick off and move on from, it’s a continual journey that requires constant attention and tuning. Systems are in a constant state of emergence and so what created belonging before might not be sufficient in the present or future. How can we honor the parts of us that we really don’t like? Can we create a space where we stop making it right or wrong and ask what is the wisdom aspect of this part? How is it trying to help me? When we accept more of who we are, even the uncomfortable parts, we can hold more in other people, we can use our internal challenges to drop deeper into relationships with others. Belonging can be a mirror for the mind. When we sense we don’t belong or don’t want to belong what might these signals be trying to teach us? And finally, I want to leave you with this question; if we could create more belonging in the world, what might be possible for our collective systems? Thank you for listening to the Relationship Matters podcast. If you enjoyed this episode please share it with your colleagues and friends so that we can continue to spread these ideas across the globe, and if you haven’t already, do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode. And for more information on the ORSC courses please visit CRRGlobal.com. For over 20 years, CRR Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to stronger relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one relationship at a time. We believe Relationship Matters from humanity to nature to the larger whole. 

[Music outro 30:27 – end]