Each of us, consciously and unconsciously, holds the promise of becoming ever more complete and empowered. We may delay or avoid, but in time, if ignored, our body and mind are taken up with everything from mild annoyances to life-taking disease. Life gives us some time, the genetic and situational cards dealt us by the Fates, and an amazing engine of becoming - the Learning Edge.
At the Learning Edge, true renewal comes by standing firm at one of many finite edges of our ego - one foot anchors us in the rational light of what we believe we know, the other foot is hidden on the dark side of the wall... engaged in, absorbed by and inseparable from the unfathomable vastness of real life. The creative tension between the two spaces brings the Edge alive.
In the diagram, the larger circle represents everything there is to know, do or be in the world and the smaller circle represents the current extent of our knowledge. We refer to this as our power, and the point where we are pushing the limits of the circle as our edge. Regardless of how much we know, how experienced we are or how old we are nobody can fill the bigger circle, there is still a great deal available to learn. This model is useful when coaching particularly able people - no matter how effective someone is there are limits to their effectiveness, and most people find pushing those limits to be rewarding. Most people are already curious about pushing the learning edge out a bit in some aspect of their lives. The man in the picture is looking over the edge, perhaps a little apprehensively, because working at the learning edge can be a bit like stepping off familiar territory; it is exciting and scary at the same time.
Our power is what got us where we are, in some ways it is who we are. There is nothing wrong with the power, the reason we need to push back the edge is that our circumstances have changed and our power is no longer appropriate in every circumstance. We need some new tools in the toolbox. This is not about stopping things that are bad and starting things that are good, this is about adding to our power by learning. Being more effective by having a greater range of tools available to us.
The act of pushing out the learning edge is like taking things that are just below our consciousness and bringing them up to being conscious. We know these things at some level, the act of telling someone's story back to them as if we were them helps with this process, it's like hearing ourselves think aloud.