Aha Moment! Circle Walking

Sometimes an ‘Aha moment’ can be triggered by a word, sound, picture, gesture, experience, or just staring out of a window waiting for the muse to appear.

For Sue and me a very significant business ‘Aha moment’ occurred while driving home from a facilitators’ conference we attended in Seymour a couple of years ago.

At the conference we did an exercise where everyone formed a circle, called ‘coming into circle’.

In the car I said to Sue that ‘coming into circle’ reminded me of Pa Kua.

‘What’s that?’

‘Well, it’s an internal martial art where you walk around in a circle.’

‘Tell me more.’

‘In Pa Kua, sometimes known as Ba Gua, walking the circle is a basic training exercise where a person walks in a circle either clockwise and anti-clockwise and occasionally changes direction. And Pa Kua has a symbol that has eight sides, each side representing an aspect of life.’

Then we got talking about our values, our philosophy and the connection to Pa Kua, circle walking and the symbol.

We were about half way to Melbourne and in our excitement we pulled over to the nearest café to scribble down notes about what we had discussed. Three hours, many napkins of scribbled notes and several cups of coffee later we came up with a new model, based on those shared values and philosophy and the 8 sided Pa Kua symbol (with slight modifications of the traditional descriptions for the eight sides).

Our model is called the AQ-KQ Framework , combining Appreciative Intelligence® and Kinaesthetic Intelligence, and is now used in our work with people who are seeking a true transformational change.

Sometimes when the ‘Aha’ experience strikes you just have to stop and do some circle walking in your own mind to discover which circle you should now walk.

We’re glad we did even though our cappuchino bill was huge!