Two-way Relationships

A surgeon once said to me, in the middle of a conversation about health, that the people who work in healthcare are often the least healthy among us. He said it with a kind of rueful honesty, the way someone names a thing they have known for a long time and have not yet found a way around. He runs a hospital. He operates on bodies. And he was telling me, without quite saying it directly, that the relationship he had with his own wellbeing was almost entirely one-directional: outward, always outward, toward the patient, the institution, the cause, the craft — and almost never back toward himself.

I have heard versions of this from senior leaders across every sector I have worked in. The mental health practitioner who cannot find time for their own therapy. The family head — and it is most often a woman — who has organised everyone else’s flourishing so thoroughly that she has forgotten, or was never permitted, to include herself in the arrangement. The development professional who has given a decade to the wellbeing of communities they serve and who, if you asked them privately, could not tell you when they last felt genuinely nourished.

There is a word for this pattern: inauthenticity. Not the theatrical kind, where someone is performing a self they do not inhabit. The structural kind, where the gap between what a person teaches and what they live has grown so wide that the teaching itself becomes hollow. When a doctor is visibly unwell, something in the patient tightens. When a leader speaks about psychological safety while their own nervous system is in permanent emergency mode, something in the team does not quite believe it. We feel the gap, even when we cannot name it.

Two-way relationships, as a mindset, begins here — not with the relationship between self and other, but with the relationship between self and self. And it asks the most basic question first: are you giving yourself what you are asking others to give?

The belief beneath the surface

This mindset stems from a deceptively simple conviction: that all relationships — including the one you have with yourself — require space for more than one. They require the capacity to receive, not just to give. They require the acknowledgement that giving and receiving are not opposites but a circulation, and that when the circulation moves in only one direction for long enough, something begins to die.

For leaders, this is deeply countercultural. The grammar of leadership, as it is most commonly taught and rewarded, is fundamentally about output. What are you producing? What are you driving? What are you building? The question of what is returning to you — what is nourishing you, what is sustaining the person who is doing all of this producing and driving and building — is either treated as personal and therefore irrelevant to the professional context, or deferred indefinitely to a future in which the conditions will finally be right for rest.

The conditions are never right. The future with adequate time for self-renewal does not arrive on its own. And the leader who keeps waiting for it will eventually arrive at a version of themselves that the surgeon named — depleted, hollowed, still technically functional but no longer genuinely alive to the work in the way that made the work worth doing.

Two-way relationship with the self is not self-indulgence. It is the foundational condition for everything else in this series. You cannot practise interconnectedness from a place of chronic depletion. You cannot hold the belief in potential for change when your own capacity for change has been exhausted. You cannot allow emergence when you are too exhausted to tolerate uncertainty. You cannot bring genuine curiosity to diversity when you are surviving rather than living.

The relationship with self is where the whole framework either holds or collapses.

The question of enough

There is a concept that I find myself returning to when I think about what a healthy relationship with the self actually requires: enoughness. The felt sense — not the intellectual position, but the embodied, somatic knowing — that what you have done is sufficient. That you, as you are, are sufficient.

Leaders, almost by professional formation, are people who have learned to outrun that feeling. The next milestone, the next target, the next level of impact — there is always a reason why now is not yet the moment to pause and register that something has been completed, something has been given, something has been enough.

This is where the ego enters the conversation, and it is worth being honest about it. There comes a point in most leadership trajectories where the cause and the self become difficult to disentangle. Where working for something becomes a way of being someone. Where the role begins to provide the identity, and stepping back from the role — even briefly, even for rest — feels like a threat to existence itself. Leaders start to think of themselves as indispensable. It is almost never true. There is nothing permanent. Ever. And the question worth sitting with, quietly and without self-punishment, is this: at what point does working for a cause become fodder for the ego? At what point does the giving become a way of avoiding the receiving — because receiving would mean stopping, and stopping would mean having to be, rather than do?

Nirvana, in one reading, is precisely this: the state of knowing when enough is enough. For self, for others, for the planet. Not as a resignation, but as a completion. The teacher who is so genuinely nourished by the act of teaching — so present, so aware, so compassionate toward their own learning as well as their students’ — that they become a living demonstration of what they teach. If this were the norm rather than the exception, something fundamental would shift in the world.

What 50-50 actually means

Michelle Obama has spoken about marriage in a way that I think applies far beyond it: a marriage is never 50-50. There will be times when one partner is only at 10 and the other has to carry 90. There will be periods of 30 and 50, and gaps unaccounted for, and seasons where the arithmetic simply does not balance. What sustains the relationship is not the equality of each moment but the commitment to the wholeness of the thing over time, and the willingness to be honest about where each person actually is rather than performing a balance that does not exist.

This reframe changes everything about how we understand equity in relationships — professional as much as personal.

In teams, we tend to manage for outputs and measure for equality. We divide tasks, assign roles, track deliverables, and call this fair. But what we almost never track is the relational fabric — the invisible labour of holding a team together, of absorbing the anxiety of a difficult moment, of noticing when someone is struggling and creating the conditions for them to say so. This labour is real. It is often enormous. And it is almost never equitably distributed or acknowledged, because it does not show up in any project plan.

A two-way relationship mindset in team leadership asks different questions. Not just: is the workload divided fairly? But: what is each person giving and what are they receiving — in terms of meaning, in terms of development, in terms of being seen and known for who they are rather than what they produce?

That is the crux of two-way relationship thinking applied to leadership. Not equality of transaction, but meaningfulness of exchange.

Create for and with

There is a particular failure mode in institutional leadership that two-way relationships exposes with uncomfortable clarity: the tendency to create for people rather than with them.

We hold youth festivals where older adults discuss what is best for youth. We design health programmes for communities without asking those communities what health means to them. We build evaluation frameworks to measure impact on people who were not present when the framework was designed. We locate the headquarters of organisations working in rural Tamil Nadu in Chennai or Bangalore, and we wonder why the interventions feel disconnected from the reality they were meant to serve.

The grammar of for is one-directional. It positions the designer as the one who knows and the recipient as the one who receives. It is, structurally, a one-way relationship — well-intentioned, often genuinely caring, but still fundamentally extractive of the intelligence, the agency, and the dignity of the person on the other side.

The grammar of with is different. It requires that the other person — the youth, the community member, the frontline worker, the person whose life is most directly affected — has a seat at the table not as a token presence but as a genuine shaper of what is being created. It requires that the designer’s knowledge is held as one input among many, not as the authoritative frame into which everything else must fit. It requires, above all, the willingness to be changed by the encounter — to arrive at a design that neither party would have reached alone, because the two-way relationship between designer and community has produced something that the one-directional relationship never could.

This is not slow or inefficient, though it can feel that way at first. It is the only approach that produces interventions that communities will sustain after the external support withdraws, because the community was never a passive recipient — they were always a co-author.

What it feels like when it works

I want to offer a personal example here, because two-way relationship is a concept that is easy to describe and difficult to fully convey without the texture of actual experience.

Some years ago, I was part of a facilitation team offering wellbeing programmes for organisations — working alongside seasoned practitioners of organisational development, people who had been doing this work for far longer than I had. I was offered a paid opportunity to observe the programme for a year, and then invited to hold space in the following year, also paid. One of the senior facilitators chose to forgo part of their own compensation in order to include me as a paid member of the team. They gave up their shade, as it were, so that I could receive the light.

What made that experience genuinely two-way was not just the gesture — significant as it was — but the quality of what surrounded it. There was explicit, articulated gratitude for what I brought. There was honest, specific feedback on what had landed and what had not. There was a way of being in the room together that made me feel like a colleague rather than an apprentice. In return, I brought something to the programme’s participants that the team valued. We both left enriched. We both left more seen and heard than we had arrived.

That is what two-way relationship feels like in practice. Not a transaction. Not a performance of fairness. A genuine circulation of value, recognition, and growth — in which both parties are changed by the encounter, and both are more than they were before it.

The whole in one

Two-way relationships, in some sense, brings together all of the earlier mindsets into a single coherent way of being.

Interconnectedness tells us that what we do to the other, we do to ourselves. Two-way relationships is the practical expression of that belief: it is interconnectedness enacted in every conversation, every decision, every moment of giving and receiving.

Potential for change tells us that people are not fixed — that growth is possible at every stage, for every person, under the right conditions. Two-way relationships creates those conditions: it is the generous attention of one person toward another that most reliably catalyses the change that neither could have produced alone.

Emergence tells us that the most significant outcomes arise from the interaction between parts, not from the vision of any single designer. Two-way relationships is the posture that makes emergence possible: the willingness to not-know, to hold space, to trust that what arises from genuine encounter will be more than what either party brought to it.

Diversity tells us that there are always multiple sides to every story. Two-way relationships is how that space is created and maintained: through the active, disciplined practice of listening as carefully as speaking, of receiving as consciously as giving.

And two-way relationships with the self is what makes all of the others sustainable — because a leader who cannot receive care cannot sustain the giving.

Living from this place

If you have read all five essays and you are asking — as a leader genuinely wrestling with what this means — how do I actually live from this place, day by day, I want to answer as honestly as I can.

There is no checklist. There are no protocols. If this became a compliance exercise, it would defeat itself.

What it means to live from this place is to cultivate a practice of awareness in the present moment — as fully as your current conditions allow, which will vary, and that variation is not a failure. It means building the capacity to witness what is happening to you, in you, around you, on a moment-to-moment basis — with curiosity rather than judgement. To respond rather than react. To ask, before each significant decision, which of these mindsets holds the key to arriving at this choice with full heart and conviction. And then to make the decision, own it, act on it — and record, somewhere, that it may need revision if time and circumstances reveal something you could not yet see.

This capacity is built like a muscle. It does not arrive through reading. It develops through practice — through the repeated, imperfect, sometimes frustrating work of returning to awareness after you have lost it, which you will, and returning again.

The five mindsets in this series are not a framework to be applied. They are a place to operate from — a quality of being that, over time and with practice, becomes less something you do and more something you are.

I do not know if I will say the same thing again at a later time. That, perhaps, is the most honest testimony I can offer for what it means to hold these mindsets for real.