A friend of VIM Executive Coaching, and quite an amateur comedian, proudly announced over the weekend that “everything he needed to know, he could find on TikTok!” We took the bait and asked, “So what is the most important earth-shaking fact you have found in the past month?”
We braced ourselves and expected something about politics or current events relating to a troubled world. Instead, we were told informed, “Chimps almost always peel bananas from the bottom-up, while humans usually peel them from the top down.”
“That’s it?”
“What, you were expecting something trivial?”
More slippery than we think
We must admit, that given the millions or billions of bananas people eat each year, we don’t talk much about the peels. While we are business coaches and not food technologists, we don’t know many uses for banana peels. Other than the (kind of cruel) cartoonish jokes about people slipping on peels, with comments in the cartoon bubbles saying “Ouch!” or “Yikes!” we hardly think about the discarded skin at all. Our friend assured us there were many online debates over banana peeling, chimps versus human and all that stuff.
Of course there is a silliness about it all. A 15-second video on banana peeling is hardly a weighty matter. Again, though we are not in the food business, we are fairly certain that regardless of the peel removal technique, the banana tastes the same and surely, the result remains the same. At some point, we eat the fruit and forget about the rest.
The debate, of course, is readily transferable to many parallel situations not quite as slippery. Take, for example, mindfulness and executive leadership.
The slippery peels of executive leadership training and indeed, the more slippery peels of the many online courses guaranteed to lead executives to the elements of mindfulness “within hours or days or over a weekend,” are problematic at best.
Here’s where the slips and falls come in; the more a person forces or wills themselves to be mindful, the more elusive mindfulness becomes. It is almost like the cartoon character who does everything in their power to avoid slipping on a banana peel, to go flying on a patch of ice. Perhaps, that is the true origin of the term banana split!
Certificates on the wall
For we have seen the many certificates on many office walls proclaiming the executive leader took a three-day course and became a mindfulness master. And, we have also had many of those leaders come in for mindfulness coaching because their organizations could not work with them.
Just as we are not in the food technology business, we are not in the role of judging mindfulness seminars or courses, most of which are fundamentally inadequate. Condensed courses have their uses (just as we understand researchers are exploring many potential uses for banana peels), however the real goal of training is to reach authenticity and mindfulness. In other words, virtually no person (or primate) favors eating banana peels over the banana.
Mindfulness and authenticity are cultivated. They are the results of guidance, facing truths and the incredible gift of self-reflection. There is no time limit to such understanding. For some, it could be a couple of weeks, for others, several months. Peeling away from the top down, or bottom up, is irrelevant. The important part of it all is to embrace the journey.
The path toward mindfulness can be wonderful. The “wonder” part isn’t getting a certificate to be stored in an HR file, the real wonder is to embrace and use the self-knowledge we acquire.