Equanimity is the ability to observe your fear with out reacting to it in  a way that enables facilitating collaborations between very different types of people and organizations. It was a trait that I started to value when I worked in government.

 

When I started my job in the Costa Rican government as Director of Innovation, I was excited about all the amazing things that I was going to be able to achieve by collaborating with people like me. Not surprisingly, an innovation ecosystem, and its surrounding politics, has many very influential people that are not like me at all! After various failed attempts to get things done ignoring many of those people, I realized that I was going to have to step out of my comfort zone. But how could I really get people that were so different to push in the same direction?

 

After picking up a regular meditation practice, I started to feel much less reactive to things that used to really get me going. This helped me realize that when I have a hard time accepting another person it is because there is something about that person that reminds me of a part of me that I don’t accept in myself. My way of organizing projects organically started evolving in a way that allowed me to involve very different people from their positions of strength. This would not have been possible if I hadn’t learned to watch my instinctive impulses without acting on them.

 

Today I am still leaning into those areas of myself I don’t fully accept in ways that are allowing me to intentionally experiment with ways to accept those traits in myself and others. I have found that being able to collaborate with the full range of human personalities unleashes creative solutions that are not possible when some of those people are not invited to the party:)