On Living, Leading, (Re)designing, and Coaching

Empty Stories

2009-09-03T06:13:00-07:00

All stories are told by a teller. The story we're telling determines who the teller is. And the teller determines what story is told. All this is always happening simultaneously.

But any telling can only possibly be partly true as it always will only be part of all that happened. "Just the facts, ma'am," doesn't include what your pulse was when the accident happened. Why is that? So much is left out. Perhaps even the most important parts ... left out of our telling. But we don't know this and we take our telling to be who we really are, to be who they really are, to be what really happened.

So what are we to make of this? We aren't really the character we are in our stories we tell about ourselves. Our stories are empty.

But we can't stop telling some story, can we? I don't know. Probably not. We will continue to tell stories to our friends and co-workers, to our children, to our parents, and to ourselves. We can't give up our storytelling.

So what can we do? We can hold our stories lightly. We can let our stories go when they no longer serve us. We can joyfully invent new stories. And we can take our true role. Perhaps who we are is some great mystery that is acting a part in a fictional play about ourselves. We laugh and cry. We long for love. We suffer. We love feeling the sun as it hits our faces. We relax in the warm embrace of our lover.

Can we enjoy living life - acting in the play - for its own sake and not because, in our story we are coming to someplace or going away from someplace? What if, in reality, there is no coming or going?

Love,

-Steve

Clarity dissolves resistance

2009-09-02T10:19:49-07:00

My topic for today's musing is resistance. I'm talking about the kind of resistance we experience when we try to make a change in our lifestyle, like adopting a new diet or a new practice like physical exercise or meditation. We all know this kind of resistance. We see it in our friends and family when they try to make changes. But, more to the point, we know this kind of resistance because we do it too.

When we meet this kind of resistance to change in ourselves many of us try one of these three strategies. We either try to push harder, try to dangle a bigger carrot or wave a bigger stick, or we resort to shaming and guilt trips also known as self-criticism. But none of this really works does it? In fact, all this amounts to is meeting resistance with more resistance. This is not a recipe for change. It leaves us in some form of stalemate with ourselves.

What is this resistance? It turns out that this is the most important question to answer when we meet resistance. Here is what works - answer these questions and engage these practices.

Where does the resistance show up in your thoughts? Identify these thoughts when they arise.
Where does the resistance show up in your feelings? Feel these emotions as fully as you can.
Where does the resistance show up in your body (as perhaps tension or stiffness)? Sense into these areas of your body.
Where does the resistance show up in your actions? Observe yourself taking these actions.
Where does the resistance show up in your dreams? Reflect and journal about these dreams.
Where does the resistance show up in your relationships? Speak openly and honestly to these people about how your resistance is affecting your relationship.

Answering these questions and being with all the ways that your resistance is show up is meeting resistance with curiosity and openness. Answering these questions brings clarity about the nature of your particular resistance. Your clarity melts the resistance in the fire of your own attention. New and creative ideas begin to appear, fresh feelings rise up, your body wakes up, and new possibilities for action show up.

Meeting resistance with more resistance never works. Meeting resistance with curiosity and openness brings clarity, and clarity dissolves the resistance. Try it and let me know how it works for you.

Love,

-Steve

Tool Use Expands our Body Maps

2009-06-26T10:50:20-07:00

Our brains have a map of our body that it uses to locate our body in space and generate effective action. Research has shown that the more we use tools, like hammers, tennis rackets, guitars, etc., the more our brain includes the tool itself within our body map. Neuroplasticity at work!

(See the weird creepy article in New Scientist about how our brains could adapt well to cyborg implants.)

What does this say about the nature of our body? Does our body, in a practical sense, really end at our skin? Well, our physiological/biological body does end at our skin. But is that all there is to our body? This research suggests that our brain wiring doesn't operate that way. Instead, our body map has extends to include the tools we use.

I'm a tennis fan and I love to watch Roger Federer play. He is so masterful at the game that his play is like a moving meditation ... grace ... beauty ... power ... touch. I have often thought that he uses his racquet as if it were an extension of his body. By my observations, I think the same can be said of the court itself. He moves so gracefully that it is also like an extension of his body. Could it be that his brain has a body map that includes the racquet, the court, and the net? I think so.

What implications does this understanding have for how we take care of our bodies? If our body doesn't stop at our skin ...

-Steve

Rebuilding Trust in HBR

2009-06-02T06:56:07-07:00

Harvard Business Review also sees trust as central to the economic recovery. Their June 2009 issue is dedicated to the topic of rebuilding trust.

Enjoy!

-Steve

Waiting for truth to surface

2009-05-21T12:43:03-07:00

"We often don't take the risk or time to stand before another long enough for their truth to surface. This is what I need, for you to wait till I can get there, all fresh from the deep. After all the trouble we go through to find each other, we must wait over and over for our loved ones to break through with their wisdom." - Mark Nepo

A tectonic shift in the landscape of trust

2009-05-12T22:57:36-07:00

What is happening in the world today? I believe that, among many things, there is a tectonic shift in the landscape of trust.

Historically, we have placed our trust in authorities - politicians, business leaders, spiritual leaders and leaders in the scientific community. We have an unflagging trust in rationality. And we are living in challenging times amidst global recession, climate change, loss of jobs, pandemics, terrorism, war, etc. These are times of crisis. And in the midst of these crises our trust is being shaken. What can we trust? Whom can we trust?

When we feel our trust being shaken many of us are thrown into one of three different moods. We are either resigned that things aren't going well and they will turn out however they do. We are resigned to that and there is nothing we can do. Or we are resentful. We get angry with those in positions of authority in which we placed our trust. We are angry with them for their limitations (e.g., not being in control of things) and angry with them for their abuses of power and their violation of our trust. Or we deny that what is happening both locally and globally has any impact on our lives. We say to ourselves, "It doesn't matter, I'm going to live a fine life anyway." Those of us in denial are living in the misguided notion that it is possible to live in a bubble detached from the impact of what's occurring around us.

Neither resignation, resentment, or denial are moods that compel us to invest in building a different future. Instead, they compel us to continue ceding power and trust to others.

We need to cultivate a different mood: hope. Obama brilliantly did this in his campaign. He stood for the possibility that the future can be better; that the abuses of trust and power can be overcome. He stood for the possibility that together we can design and build a lifestyle that works better for all.

Of course, there is a danger that we will again place our trust in Obama as the latest authority figure. And when he fails to deliver what we expect, then we will find ourselves being resentful, resigned, or in denial.

Each of us must take responsibility for cultivating hope and optimism in our own lives. Each of us must step forward ... trust ourselves ... and be a leader in our own lives and the lives of our loved ones.

I think we are in the midst of a tectonic shift in the landscape of trust. From a historical perspective, this shift is more like an 8.0 earthquake. We are being called more and more deeply to find the part of ourselves that is not afraid and in which we can trust without question. We are being called to find our source of inner guidance, our source of true leadership and express that. In a significant way, this shift is a call for a kind of collective spiritual awakening.

I'm not saying that this earthquake will do away with political leaders, business leaders, spiritual leaders, or scientific leaders. They will still exist and we will still need to trust them for their expertise, their unique viewpoint, and their positions of empowerment to affect certain actions. However, in the future we will not cede all of our trust to them so blindly and excuse ourselves from the table. Instead, we will take our place within the conversation, within the collaboration, within the decision-making and the action.

Already today we see patients taking their medical care more fully into their own hands. Patients are researching options for addressing their medical concerns on the web so that they can more fully participate in the conversation and decision-making with their physicians.

Given what has happened in the financial services sector, I imagine that more transparency (and regulation) is just around the corner. This transparency will be demanded of people like you and me who, trusting more fully in themselves, seek to enter the conversation with their banks and financial advisors in a more consciously empowered way.

Hope compels us to take responsibility for the way things are and step forward to build things anew in a spirit of collaboration and community. However, we can't wait for hope to arise before we take action. In fact, it is in taking action to build a future that works better that we evoke hope in ourselves and others. This is a great act of Self-leadership and if we quiet ourselves enough we all hear the call to take this step forward.

No action is too small. You can do more with what you have than you think. The end of these crises will not, in my opinion, leave us back where we were before they started. That life and lifestyle is gone. This earthquake will leave the landscape of trust permanently and fundamentally changed. We will need to find new paths, new approaches, new collaborations, new communities in order to survive and flourish both locally and globally. We will be living in a new world. And, in a very real way, we already are. Day by day more of us awaken to the realization that we are already in a new world.

In this new world new capabilities and skills will be needed to survive and flourish. Today I can see at least three broad capabilities that everyone will need.

Self-leadership - everyone will need to be a leader in their own life. Everyone will need to learn to trust themselves and to face into life's challenges as true leaders do - simultaneously in contact with their fears but also able to bring forth a constructive response from the depth of their capacity, their resourcefulness, and their creativity. In this new world, spectators won't last very long.
Entrepreneurship - everyone will need to see and respond to the world the way an entrepreneur does. They will need to see emerging unmet needs and re-vision and re-fashion themselves and their collaborators and communities in ways that offer to fulfill those needs.
Self-education - everyone must learn how to learn. Change is occurring at an ever increasing rate. Novelty is winning by leaps and bounds. Those that cling to "the way things have been" will stop being competitive. In fact, the ability to learn and develop yourself, your organization, and your community faster and more powerfully will become the primary competitive advantage.

The world that we are awakening into is the world of the "compassion worker." Many years ago noted management theorist Peter Drucker coined the term "knowledge worker" and heralded that knowledge work will be the primary unit of production in the coming age. Well, the coming age came and went. Of course, I'm not saying that knowledge work will disappear just as Drucker wasn't saying that industrial labor would disappear.

What I'm saying is that knowledge work has to grow up and mature. And that will and is happening as more and more deeply care is being brought into the mission and structure of work. Riane Eisler has a new book that looks to speak to this (I haven't read it yet but it is on the stack :-) called The Real Wealth of Nations. According to the blurb she proposes a reinvention of economics in which caregiving is central. And, most curiously, she propses this as an alternative to both capitalism and socialism.

So the world as I see it will be filled with entrepreneurial leaders who see their primary business as caregiving of some kind and who are able to learn and adapt to emerging unmet needs and invent new possibilities to fulfill them. Pehaps this is just my dream, my hope. It may be, but this is the world that I am personally investing myself in building.

Love,

-Steve

The Seven Most Important Questions in Facing Tough Times

2009-01-29T19:08:56-08:00

These are tough times for many of us. In tough times it is easy to get overwhelmed. How do we cope? Change is inevitable. Where do we start?

When things change in the marketplace, new possibilities open up and some current possibilities close down. Just an ancient mariners lived by their skill in reading the changes in sea and weather conditions, we must live by our skill of reading the changes in the world we live in.

Lately, I've been having conversations with the people in my life - friends, clients, business partners - framed by the question "what now?" Given the new world we are in today, what now? What is the world that we are already in? How must our responses be different? How must we be different?

Below are the questions I've been asking people. I think these are the seven most important questions we all need to be asking ourselves today in the middle of our tough times.

I invite each of you to consider them in the context of your own life.

Question One: What is your biggest struggle right now?

Of course, I have no idea what specifically you are struggling with. But let me take away some common false answers to this question. Your biggest struggle is not that you lack time, money, or energy. Your biggest struggle is also not that you lack willpower or discipline. In fact, your biggest struggle has nothing to do with lacking anything. The interpretation that your biggest struggle comes from a lack of something leaves you disempowered. How helpful is that? Not! So let's not go down that path.

I'd like to suggest one place among many that you should consider in answering this question. What if your biggest struggle comes from something that you aren't facing fully instead of something that you are lacking? And what I mean when I say "facing it fully" is seeing, acknowledging, owning, and responding to it fully.

In these times there is a lot of fear and even panic. Nobody can get credit, people are getting laid-off, ecological crises seem closer than ever, Obama is going to change things but we don't know (but hope) that they will be better. There are lots of things to be afraid about.

As humans, when we feel afraid, most of us do what we've always done when we feel afraid. Maybe you are already thinking of what you do as you read this. Some of us hide, some of us attack, some of us run away, some of us freeze up. We all have our own particular responses to our fear that life isn't turning out the way we want it to.

When we react out of fear we are not authentically responding to what's happening now. How could this be the case? Because our reactions to fear are learned and conditioned habits. Our response to fear is pre-determined. But there is no pre-determined response that is ever going to be an authentic response to what's happening. We can't act with skill in facing our situation when we're reacting out of habit.

How can you overcome this? Get to know your own habitual responses to fear intimately. What do you do when fear arises? Your ability to acknowledge and own your automatic response reduces the power they have over you. And that - facing your fears - opens the possibility of doing things differently and for generating an authentic response to what's happening.

What I'm proposing is that maybe your biggest struggle is freshly facing that which you don't want to face. Follow the trail of your fear that life isn't turning out.

Question Two: What is your biggest opportunity in this situation / in this market?

The way I see it, your biggest opportunity will always involve doing something new. It may be bringing forward latent gifts and talents that you have, widening your community, bringing a new level of focus to your work and life, or having a difficult conversation, or taking a bold action. In a business sense, maybe your biggest opportunity comes from a new product or service offering or maybe it comes from deepening customer loyalty. Your biggest opportunity could be anything and I'm betting it will require doing something new. Here's my take on what's at the core of this "something new."

For many of us our biggest opportunity in this market will come from rewriting our future. You might be thinking, "What on earth do you mean? The future hasn't happened yet." And you would be right, the future hasn't happened. But that doesn't stop us from having stories about the future.

As humans, all of us live within a narrative or a story about ourselves, our life, and our work. One of the funny things about the stories we have about ourselves is that we've already determined the ending. We can't, it seems, live our lives unless we have some certainty about the future even if it is made up. Mark Freeman, author of Rewriting the Self (a book which is excellent, demanding to read, and nearly impossible to come by), points to our need for stories with this rhetorical question:

"Aren't stories ultimately defensive delusions, created as a means of defying the onslaught of time, with its accidents, its unforeseen and unforeseeable consequences, its nameless and unending future?"

We create stories with already determined endings as a defense against the true uncertainty and unforeseeablility of the future. Knowing how it all ends helps us live day by day with the uncertainty of life. However, knowing how it all ends is also a recipe for circumscribing the limits of what's possible in our lives. Our greatest opportunity opens up by letting go of the certain ending we hold so tightly.

Since we can't seem to live into the future with zero certainty, we need to make up a new ending for our story. So, who are you going to be? What are you going to do? What are you going to have? All of these questions are open for reconsideration when we invent new possibilities for our future. Rewriting our future - today - and living into those possibilities in a way that they become our reality is the idea.

When confronted with the question "what is your biggest opportunity in this market?" most of us allow our thinking and imagination to only range within the possibilities that we already included in the ending of our story. So I'm not asking what are your biggest opportunities to play out the story you already know how the ending to. I'm not asking you how to win the game you are already playing. Instead, I'm asking you, "What are the opportunities to reinvent your story's ending, to reinvent the game you are playing?"

If you are a CEO or businessperson, your thinking here should be informed by your study of demographic trends, economic forecasts, an interpretation of the changing political landscape, and a grasp of how newly emerging technologies are shifting the competitive landscape. However, to realize your biggest opportunities, you must not take the game you are playing for granted. You must not take the ending to be certain. Instead, change what it means to win the game - change the end of your story.

Question Three: What crossroads are you at in your life and work?

Question One and Two are challenging but they empower you. Therefore they are questions worthy of true consideration. These questions empower you because they challenge you to 1) be true to and face the results that you actually have in your life and 2) to be true to the freedom you always already have in how you fashion yourself (your public and private identities), your relationships, your commitments, and your responses. These questions empower you because they call forth the full measure of your authenticity.

Question Three brings the first two questions together. This question challenges you by saying, "Well, you can continue on the same path, doing more of the same, and generating the same results OR you can take a different path. Which will it be?"

I encourage you to take up this question in as much specificity as you can. To say generically, "I choose to take a different path" without a concrete definition of what exactly you will do differently is useless.

What are the specific crossroads? In your closest relationships? At home? At work? In your career?

The crossroads you are at is an opportunity for you to redefine yourself, to redefine your relationships, to acknowledge and re-commit to what you deeply care about, and to generate new results.

Question Four: As you engage the world, what is most important to conserve?

Conservation is an often overlooked but critical part of any change. Change is a funny thing because we want it badly but we hate being in the middle of it. Usually when we go about making a change, we don't know what we are getting ourselves into because we don't know what has to change in order to make the change that we want in the first place. This is why being in the middle of change is so scary for people. When we are in the middle of the unsettlement and uncertainty of change, it seems to have no end or limit.

A powerful way of allowing ourselves to be in the uncertainty of change is to start off with a clear definition of what is being conserved.

Again, please answer this question in a specific way. And if you are leading change within your organization, speak openly and often about what is important to conserve in the midst of this change.

You might be temped to answer this question by stating your values. Values are great. Go ahead and state them. But you also need to take your thinking to the level of action. What are you going to keep doing the way that you are already doing it?

Question Five: What is your "guiding star" as you navigate through the changes you need to make?

How many times have you found yourself in the middle of doing something differently and felt disoriented? Probably a lot if you are like most people. So what do you do when you get disoriented? What or whom do you consult to get re-oriented?

It is odd (but maybe not surprising) that people often launch off into new territory without packing a compass. They don't have a way of getting their bearings in the middle of the the new ocean they are sailing in.

Like all the other questions here, I'm suggesting that you really take this up and really look to see who or what is your guiding star. And just as before, let me take away some answers that I think are false.

Your guiding star isn't some leadership expert or self-help guru. It isn't a book or a method or a process or a plan. Your guiding star isn't your mentor, coach, priest, or spiritual guide. Of course all of these may be helpful but they aren't your true source of guidance. Your compass isn't outside of you. You are your own guiding star. You might be thinking, "But I'm the one whose disoriented, remember!?" Yes, part of you is disoriented - the part that is trying to get things to turn out a certain way.

Whenever we try to get life to turn out a certain way, we can easily get disoriented. We all have parts of us that are trying to do exactly that. However, as human beings, we also have an indestructible Self that is always whole, unitary, complete, and fully present. Our Self isn't trying to get life to turn out a certain way because from it's perspective life has already turned out. And how it turned out is how things already are.

The amazing paradox is that when we fully accept where we are, true guidance for the journey shows up within us. This is what living and leading from Self is all about. How do we do this? In a way the real answer is different for each of us. However, generically how we do this amounts to letting go of needing to have life turn out a certain way and tuning into what we actually feel and sense in the moment. This is like tuning our radio to the "guidance" radio station.

Question Six: What commitment do you hold that makes this conversation necessary for you?

I'm making a big assumption with this next question - that you already have something that you deeply care about that makes engaging these questions truly worthwhile for you. But I'm on safe ground because human beings are caring beings. We just are.

Most of the time what we care about just hangs around in the background of our thinking and acting. From what I've observed in my own life and in the lives of my coaching clients, when our cares and concerns just hang out in the background we tend to drift through life. And when we are facing tough challenges in life and work, drifting doesn't help that much. Drifting leaves us feeling powerless.

If we bring our cares and concerns into the foreground and into sharp focus by actually stating them as commitments, suddenly we've set ourselves in the driver's seat. We've set ourselves up for driving instead of drifting. And that is empowering.

I used to start these conversations with this question. However, engaging the previous questions tends to prime people to consider this question for real. So take a look at your answers so far. What cares and concerns have been present all along but hiding there in the background? Bring them out into the open by writing them down as commitments that define who you are.

Question Seven: What action are you going to take next? With whom? By when?

My commitment to anyone who enters this conversation with me is that it be of significant value to them. One of the ways that the value becomes real is through the new actions that people take. Again, I'm asking for real concrete and specific actions. So what new actions will you take? With whom? By when?

The Eighth Step: Do it all over again and again and again

The last step isn't a question. The last step is to make working with these seven questions into a practice. Working through these questions just once is powerful however vastly insufficient. To be truly effective over both the short and long term, your answers to these questions always have to be fresh and alive. Stale answers don't work.

I hope that you've found this article of value. I'd love to hear your comments and questions so please share them on this blog.

I want to thank two friends of mine, Ken Homer and Robert Masters, for being in conversation with me as I thought about these questions. Both of these men are wonderfully gifted coaches and I'm lucky to have collaborators of their caliber. Thanks guys!

Take care,

-Steve

Changing the Way We Change

2008-08-09T06:00:00-07:00

This past weekend I picked up the published version of Charles Leadbeater's book "We Think". I've been tracking this project since he published the full manuscript in draft form in 2006 for public editing - a bold and courageous move for an author.

Here is a short video summarizing the major points of the book produced by Charles.

So here is my take about what is happening - we are changing the way we change and this has a direct impact on how our identities are constructed, how people trust us, how people value us, and how well we are able to generate value for others.

And ... people and organizations that don't change the way they change will start dropping like flies. Well, that's a bit extreme. For sure that will happen to some in markets where competitiveness depends on sensitivity to fast-changing customer needs and wants.

Why do I think this will happen? Because what was previously through impossible - changing practices en mass on a global scale in a short period of time - is now possible. And the time period is growing ever shorter as the years go on.

All of this is being fueled by new social technologies - internet, wikis, facebook, myspace, linkedin, google, etc. - but is actually an expression of a new way of being, a new way of relating, and a new way of changing.

And, I might add, this new capacity for change is arising just in the nick of time to resolve the massive breakdowns in sustainability that we have on this planet. Those breakdowns will not be resolved through management decisions or legislation - although both will play key roles. Instead, they will be resolved by "us" working together collaboratively.

And it seems to me that the challenge in moving forward with this is that whenever anybody says something like I just said - that we must work together collaboratively on a global scale - we see this as without any real traction and without any substantial ownership. Somehow the idea seems overly idealistic from the perspective we currently have.

And yet if you've read Paul Hawken's latest book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World you'll see evidence of "we think" in action. This isn't an ideal, it is a reality! Here's a Paul Hawken talking about this to some Googlers.

Enjoy!

-Steve

Design Futures

2008-08-08T06:00:00-07:00

Many of you know that I am a fan of Australian Tony Fry's work. His book A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing is a challenging read, however, it is perhaps the most brilliant book I have ever read. He tackles our unsustainable way of being at an ontological level. Simply put, reading (and practicing with) this book changes who you are.

Here is a quote that struck me from his e-zine called Design Philosophy Politics:

"The rate at which the condition of unsustainability is expanding and becoming structurally embedded, is totally outstripping the creation of responses, technically, culturally and politically. Much that travels under the heading of ‘sustainability’ is still token, partial and underdeveloped. In both the built environment and in industrial production what is often being sustained is the unsustainable. This is not an acceptable situation. If we are to have any choices about the form of the future we want for our selves, our children and those who come after them then ‘we’ have no option but to act with greater imagination, energy and purpose.

To be in a position to act is to be in a position of privilege. Certainly with the advantages that Australia enjoys there comes ethical responsibilities to create and share pathfinding solutions nationally and internationally. ‘Design Futures’ is a way to name and develop this activity. It demands new thinking, ways of organising, practices and an enormous amount of grit and creativity. It means facing problems in all their horror and not being defeated by them. It means coming to understand that a significant part of the history of humanity, across all of its diverse cultures, is a history of attaining what seemed at the time to be ‘the impossible’."

Tony Fry speaks about how our unsustainable way of living is being structurally embedded. I couldn't agree more. And to connect this to the recent thread on the body of sustainability, primary among these structures is the body.

The other thing that Fry does particularly well is to write in a style that frankly and directly confronts us with the challenges of our situation but in a way that ignites optimism instead of giving in to resignation. What a gift.

Take care,

-Steve

The Body of Sustainability includes an I-thou

2008-08-07T10:48:13-07:00

Yesterday I posed the question "What is the body of sustainability?" I proposed one notion, the body of sustainability has our minds and bodies be integrated not separated. And I pointed to many of the problems that such a separation brings forth.

Today, I want to explore the separation between each other. Here I'm going to use Martin Buber's lingo. Buber recognizes that we can have I-it relationships where I, as a self, relate to you, as an thing.

From this I-it relationships we get all kinds of social injustices, wars, and abuses. We treat each other on the basis of our differences - how different can a self be from a thing, after all - and not on the basis of our sameness. The enemy feels fear and wants to protect their children's future too. I know I'm oversimplifying things here. But I'm not trying to make subtle distinctions about war.

The alternative to I-it relationships is I-thou relationships wherein I as a self relate to you as a self - as another human being with the same legitimacy as I have. This is the foundation of true contact, true relationship, and true love. I'm proposing that the body of sustainability is an I-thou body.

In a comment to my post yesterday, Lisa Christie brought forth Riane Eisler's distinction of dominator relationships and partnerships. To me, the very basis of a dominator relationship is an I-it relationship. I-it is the foundation of slavery, abuse, and dictatorship.

As the unsustainability of our way of life becomes more acute, how will we respond to our fears that will naturally arise? Will we defend ourselves through domination? There are many who see this as the only viable alternative. It certainly seems like the oil-grabs that are in progress throughout the world express this response. Surely we must find ways of being with each other in facing the crisis of sustainability instead of over each other. Can partnership be a more creative, more productive, and more effective protection of our children's future? I say YES.

Buber's I-thou is the heart of true contact with one another and therefore at the heart of partnership. However, we can't truly contact another if we are not first in contact with ourselves. For me, this is where integration of self and body meet integration of I and thou. Being in contact with ourselves means that we don't have our bodies as objects that we posses and that we don't have ourselves as disembodied beings. Being in contact with ourselves is being an embodied self. And it is out very bodyhood, as Medard Boss pointed out (with echoes of Martin Heidegger in the background), that brings forth our coexistence in a shared world with others. In being in contact with ourselves true contact with each other becomes a reality.

So in healing the I-it wound with I-thou contact we again return to the body - the body of sustainability.

Thanks to those who have responded to my invitation to engage this question.

Take care,

-Steve

The Body of Sustainability

2008-08-06T09:43:50-07:00

This past weekend I launched a new graduate level Integral Coaching course at New Ventures West called Deepening the Somatic Stream. In Integral Coaching, we recognize that people develop in different ways. We call these ways "streams of development" adopting Ken Wilber's lingo. The streams of development we work with are somatic, emotional, cognitive, relational, spiritual, and integrating. This course is on deepening development in the somatic stream.

I posed a question to the group as a project over the 5-month duration of the course. The question is ...

What is the body of sustainability?

Here's my premise ... and I need to start waaay back at the beginning.

When we were born, each of us was born (dare I say thrown) into a cultural narrative not of our own design or choosing. As we grew up in our family, we began to learn and embody our culture. We learned how to speak the language, how to attend to customs, how to behave, how to relate to others, what is forbidden, what is valuable, etc. We learned how to be a Jewish-American from New York or an Amish farmer from Pennsylvania or a Native American from New Mexico or whatever. And we learned this as simply who we are - as a way of being.

And our way of being is self-sealing. What I mean by this is that the ways we act bring forth the world we live in. And the world we live in brings forth who we are. Have you ever talked to a fundamentalist and realized how their worldview has lots of self-consistency. And anything that doesn't fit, they reject in order to maintain the self-consistency of their worldview. Well, that's the way we hold worldviews even if we aren't fundamentalist.

Here's the key part of this. In the beginning we didn't have a narrative. Then as we lived and interacted with first our parents and siblings, and then others in our extended family and neighbors and friends and teachers, we embodied a narrative. I say embodied a narrative because that's how it works. Our culture lives in our bodies. And we express our culture through our speech and behavior and relationships. We express our culture through our actions. And if there are little tikes around, they pick up the culture from us and embody it themselves. This isn't something that we were conscious of, it simply occurs. This is one of the wonderful inventions of "who knows what or whom" that has supported our evolution thus far.

But our future evolution isn't something that we can take for granted. Today we find ourselves in a "wicked mess" of crises. In this post, I'm going to focus on our sustainability crisis.

The way we are currently living isn't sustainable. I'm not going to ground this assessment here. Others have and can do a much better job of that than I can. But let me say that this is an assessment that I accept.

So where did our unsustainable way of living come from? Well, I hate to point fingers but it came from our parents and grandparents and the culture that they embodied and passed onto us. We (and by we here I am mainly talking about the Western world) have an unsustainable culture. And it lives in our bodies and is expressed, reinforced, and passed onto our little tikes through our actions. In short, we have a body of unsustainability. As as the rest of the world (such as China and India and perhaps some day Africa) adopts our Western ways in order to become competitive and stake their own claims on prosperity we in the Western world are getting to see the unsustainability of our ways in stark relief.

So it seems to me a natural question to ask what is a body of sustainability? And how does one go about building one? And how to you "undo" the body of unsustainability?

These are big questions but maybe y'all would like to join me and my students over the next five months in being with these questions.

Disembodied Selves Leads to Over-consumption

Here's a starting place ... from my observation, the very heart of our unsustainable culture is the interpretation that we are separate from our bodies. And because we are separate from our bodies we abuse our bodies. We overeat, we work 80-hour workweeks, and we pop sleeping pills so we get enough rest to keep pushing ourselves. If we do pay attention to our bodies it is some sort of home improvement project like building a six pack or liposuction. I saw a brochure for a spa the other day in my local organic grocery store that advertised "body management" services. It is as if our bodies are unruly and need to be disciplined.

In the West we have antipathy for our bodies thanks to Calvin and St. Augustine who had difficulties with their own bodies and their own sexuality. We blame our bodies for being sick, for being too weak, for not looking good enough, for falling in love with the wrong people, for being addicted, for being clumsy. It is as if we didn't get the life we wanted because of the body we have. We have our bodies like a cage we live in. It is no wonder that we seem to either deny our embodied life or try to take it on as a home improvement project.

This split between ourselves and our bodies creates a disembodied sense of self, lack of true contact with others, detachment from the world, disintegration of our life, meaninglessness, resignation, stagnation, and suffering. In short, our lives seem deficient and empty in some essential way. It is as if there is a giant abyss in the middle of our lives that we must fill in order to bring significance and fulfillment to our lives. So what do we throw into the abyss to fill it up? We throw in new cars, iPhones, fancy food, fast food, lots of sex, new shoes, alcohol and other state altering substances, etc. This abyss that's smack in the middle of our lives isn't really a secret. Marketers know all about this and use it as leverage to sell us the latest stuff. But in all these years of consumption, how many of us have managed to fill the abyss? No one.

So my first notion of the body of sustainability is a healing of this split between ourselves and our bodies. As human beings we are embodied beings. We are not disembodied selves in possession of a body. We are bodied selves. And perhaps in this recognition comes the true resolution of the deficiency we feel. Perhaps it is not new cars and phones and other consumables that we need to fill the abyss but it is ourselves, our conscious bodies, that will fill the abyss from the inside out instead of from the outside in.

In her book Getting Our Bodies Back, Christine Caldwell makes the point that addiction is dissociation from our body. This seems right to me. And as a culture we are addicted to eating, drinking, sugar, oil, and shopping malls. What if our bodies really don't need all that? If we were integral with our bodies instead of dissociated from them, would our way of living be more sustainable? I believe the answer is a definite YES.

Earlier I pointed to how our worldviews are self-sealing. It often takes a big breakdown or crisis in order to break the seal. And when such a break happens, we can either choose to re-examine our cherished beliefs about ourselves, our relationships with others, and our world and develop a new worldview that resolves the breakdown ... or we can ignore the breakdown and pretend things are business as usual. So here we are, on the precipice of a planet-wide breakdown. What will we do?

So this is my first notion of building a body of sustainability - heal the split between ourselves and our bodies. We haven't looked at the separation from each other and from the planet. For sure they have a big role to play here too. More on that later.

So ... please help me distinguish the body of unsustainability from the body of sustainability. What new interpretations are needed? What interpretations do we need to drop? What new practices are needed? What old practices do we need to stop?

Take care,

-Steve

Living from the right hemisphere ...

2008-03-22T09:34:36-07:00

This TED Talk has been making the rounds on the internet lately. But it is so good - perhaps the best TED Talk ever - that I wanted to share it. Enjoy!

A year or so ago, I was working my way through Betty Edwards "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain." If anyone is interested in how to make the switch between a left-brain observer and a right-brain observer, her work is one excellent place to start.

-Steve

What is Effective Activism?

2008-03-20T11:26:30-07:00

What makes for effective activism?

Lately, I've been having a conversation with my girlfriend Donna about the topic of activism. We've both observed that as activists protest and "fight" for what they think is right they are 1) either preaching to the choice - namely, the other activists with them or 2) alienating passers-by with their outrage. Not very effective, eh?

A comment made by noted spiritual teacher David Hawkins at the outset of the second war in Iraq comes to mind: "Pacifism is not peace." He was criticizing the pacifists who were protesting and pointing to the performative contradiction that they are waging war on war. This isn't, as Einstein famously said, addressing our problems at a higher level of consciousness that the level that created them. Instead, this is addressing them at the same level and also not very effective.

Of course, there is a lot in the world today that is "protest worthy." Domination of business by mega-corporations, practices generating climate change, social injustices, pollution, human rights abuses, war, occupations, corrupt politicians, political special interest groups, and on and on.

Then there are "awareness raising" groups. These groups aren't protesting or fighting but instead are pointing to what's really going on. Pachamama Alliance (who I am a big fan of) comes to mind. But I have to say it - awareness (insight) is not behavior. New awareness can lead to new behaviors but often those new behaviors aren't sustained. Why? Because the structures that reinforce the old behaviors over the new ones are still there reinforcing old behaviors. So we may buy a reusable grocery bag and use it once or twice but then the convenience of paper and plastic bags usurps the function of the reusable bag soon after.

I'm currently working in Ireland on a large culture change project for a major bank. Certainly there are parallels between that kind of change - spotting provocations to change, introducing new interpretations and new practices, shifting assessments, and generating new results - and the kind of change that activists wish to bring about. Of course, very different scales from several hundreds of people in my culture change case to millions if not billions of people in the changes activists are trying to bring about. But I wonder what activists might be able to appropriate from the practices we know to be effective in changing corporate cultures.

Here are some (early) ideas:

People have to clearly see and own their current way of being (as a reaction from the past to get things to turn out a certain way, for example, so they can be safe, be happy, be satisfied, be recognized, etc.).
People have to feel that their current way of being isn't being attacked by others. Instead, it is being appreciated and understood as an expression of people's good intentions and as reasonable and rational ways that people have adjusted to and dealt with past difficulties and traumas. If they feel their way of being is under attack, then they will entrench and defend and some may even go on the offensive (as the U.S. did after 9/11).
People have to see the pay-offs they are trying to get in their current way of being (to "be" something or someone) and the tremendous costs they are suffering to get them. And, of course, how out of balance those things are and how unnecessary the costs are when being isn't somewhere to get to but instead somewhere to come from.
The difficulties and traumas have to be "completed." Those difficulties must be owned. Yes, that's what happened in the past. Pay homage to it. But stop reliving it. Stop acting from it (really, reacting to it). This is where working with the strong emotions that are fueling the current way of being comes in.
A new way of being must be declared by the people (who step forward as leaders in the moment). Think of the Declaration of Independence as a good example of this. A group of influential people mutually declared their independence from King George and a new way of being and living together was created.
Then people have to be shown and demonstrate to themselves that there are ways to live in the present and respond to what is actually occurring from this new way of being that address the concerns they already have better than the old ways (instead of reacting out of the past to get things to turn out in such a way that past difficulties and traumas aren't re-experienced).
Then all the structures that were born of the old way of being and put in place as controls to get things to turn out must be undone. People will feel nervous about doing this. They will feel unprotected. People need lots of support from each other at this juncture. Life isn't safe. You can't always feel protected. But you can always respond to what's happening in the moment. And often, with time, we come to see that in the past we wanted to feel protected but the limitations and costs of protection were actually more painful, more damaging, more traumatizing than the threats they were supposed to protect us from.
New structures are born of and reinforce the new way of being.
New behaviors and new results are generated and sustained.

To me one of the interesting aspects to this approach is that it doesn't fight to change the current way of being but instead builds a new way of being simultaneous and co-located with current way of being and simply invites people to make the jump.

This is what I have learned about culture change in corporations. It isn't an easy journey. It isn't a safe journey. But it is the journey of life - fully of vigor and vitality, full of drama, heroes and heroines, successes and failures, grand elations and deep disappointments. Making the journey takes leadership but not the kind of leadership only offered by a figurehead. It takes leadership by those who are willing to create the new way of being and those willing to make the jump in the context of their own lives. These people are the true leaders.

How this plays out on a larger scale is still a mystery to me. Maybe you all can help me make the connections. I'd love to hear from some of you ... what makes for effective activism?

Take care,

-Steve

The case of Aravind

2008-03-19T17:36:30-07:00

The following video shows what's possible when you declare a new future possibility and act in the present to make it a reality.

I hope you are inspired by this as I have been.

Take care,

-Steve

Being a leader in our life, our relationships, and our work

2008-02-03T10:57:13-08:00

This article is written by Steve March and Julie Manga, Ph.D. and is being simultaneously published in New Ventures West's newsletter Distinctions and this blog.

This is the first in a series of articles in which we explore the practice of leadership. The publication of each article will be followed by a FREE teleseminar to discuss the topics raised. To register for the teleseminar refer to the instructions at the end of the article.

What kind of leader are you called to be in your life? Surely, there isn’t just one answer to this question. And, there is no way to answer the question once and for all. Instead, we offer this question as a way to stay present with what’s occurring in your life, as an opening for creatively and effectively responding moment-by-moment to the opportunities and challenges you face.

In addition to the many challenges we face globally – ethical and sustainable development, clean water for everyone without conflict, bringing population growth into balance with resources, meeting growing energy demands safely, improving the status of women worldwide, etc. – each of us is also challenged locally in our work and home life. The certainty of work and livelihood is eroded for many. We face an overload of information, without a sense of how to discern what is useful. Our lives are tightly scheduled with many competing commitments. Families and communities are increasingly fragmented. And the pace of life in our society continues to accelerate.

Leadership is called for in order to face and address these challenges at all levels, but what kind of leadership? We suggest that it isn’t useful to think about leadership as a particular role or position, such as CEO, President, or Prime Minister, or as set of personal qualities like charisma or steadfastness. And leadership doesn’t require followers. The kinds of challenges we collectively and individually face and the accelerating velocity and unpredictability of our circumstances call for new leadership ways of being from us all. More of the same won’t work.

Each of us is called to lead. We are each called to respond fully to our situation moment-by-moment with everything that we are in order to bring about something that is bigger than ourselves. Each moment is an invitation to lead. Repeatedly accepting the invitation to lead requires developing ourselves – for example, our self-awareness, capacity and resilience, and professional and personal relationships – so that we have the compassion, wisdom, and courage to move things forward in the face of difficulties.

Each of us has already answered the question “How am I going to respond to the situation of the world?” This is a fundamental choice that everyone has made consciously or not. Do we step in, sometimes quietly, sometimes audaciously, risking who we take ourselves to be, or do we step back and take care of our own world as if it were separate from everyone and everything else?

Many of us step back because we look at famous leaders – Mohandas Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Margaret Mead, Martin Luther King, Jr., Colin Powell – and say to ourselves, “I’m not like them, I can’t lead.” True, we aren’t like them. We are like us. Comparing ourselves to famous leaders is a self-defeating path that ends in resignation. We have a tendency to idealize famous leaders and to forget that they are human too. Let’s not let our imperfections stop us from courageous acts of leadership and instead bring all of ourselves into those acts.

Leading is an action that we can all take and that we are called to take. Many of us may have the experience of a junior team member stepping up and overcoming difficulties to move things forward. In this moment our colleague is leading, stepping into leadership, stepping into being a leader.

Maybe it’s time to stop waiting for someone else to declare you a leader and to declare yourself one.

We invite you to attend a FREE 60-minute teleseminar on February 26 at 9 am
Pacific time (Noon Eastern) on the topic of stepping in to your life, your relationships, and your work as a leader. In this teleseminar we will lead you through a personal inquiry about your own capacity to step into life as a leader—how you experience the call to lead, obstacles you encounter and ways of relating differently to those obstacles. Space is limited. To register, please call Julie Manga at 617-869-9638.

Integral Leadership LLC provides powerful methods for people to uncover and express leadership in their life and work. Being a leader doesn’t call for abandoning parts of ourselves. Each of us, as a leader, is called to bring all that we are, all that we have learned, and all of our skills and creativity and focus them on bringing something into existence, making something happen, and generating results. Investing ourselves in life and work this way is challenging and fulfilling. In our programs you will directly experience your ability to be a lead authentically and develop your capacity to respond in an integral fashion to situations that call for your leadership.

Unsettling Our Common Sense

2008-02-02T13:53:30-08:00

The world is a mess.

Mechanisms can't cope with messes. But people can.

Here is a pair of important questions for anyone who wants to address the world's messes:

What so special about people that we can cope with messes? Find that! Conserve that! Expand that! Apply that!
How can we unsettle our common sense that supports and promotes mechanisms (e.g., technologies in the outer world, and fixed reactions/conditioned tendencies in the inner world).

Here is a hint ... work with the fears that support and reinforce the mechanisms until you discover that who you truly are is really more than big enough to cope with the messes. Oh ... and the messes ... they are mostly if not wholly created by our fixed reactions to our fears.

Take care,

-Steve

A little humor

2008-01-31T16:53:59-08:00

Banging your head against the wall consumes 150 calories an hour according to Chris Chittenden in his latest newsletter. That's too funny ... I couldn't resist sharing it.

Hope you are all having a good day.

-Steve

Living in an "Age of Fluid but Stable Identities"

2008-01-29T09:27:49-08:00

We all have many identities. For example, I'm a good, smart, and athletic person. But also I'm not enough, wounded, a failure, and an idiot. And I'm also a coach. I'm a Californian and an American, and a son and a brother. I'm a tennis player and a blogger. Sounds familiar? Of course, you aren't me, you're you. But just like me you have identities - many identities. Reflect for a moment about all the ways you know yourself - about all the identities you have.

Identities are really important. They bring focus to our lives, relationships, and work. They open certain possibilities as well as close them. Anyone who has tried to make a mid-life career transition knows too well the power of identities to open and close doors not only in the eyes of others but especially in our own eyes.

Some identities - like being a Mom or a Dad or a winner - can bring great satisfaction and fulfillment. While other identities - like being a loser, someone who was fired, or someone who made a mistake - can bring embarrassment, shame or guilt. In some basic way, the quality of our life seems attached to our identities.

We get that identity is important from an early age. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is a common question that we get from relatives and other adults when we are kids. We are also socialized into group identities. That is, we get that there is an "us" and a "them." And further, we get that we have to protect “us” from “them.” I grew up in the cold war era where movies and the nightly news were a frequent reminder of the threat "they" posed - real or imagined.

And we reinforce our identities throughout adulthood. We introduce ourselves as our identities ("Hi, I'm Steve and I'm a leadership coach."). And through our conversations we reinforce our own and other people's identities ("Did you hear that she cheated on her husband?" "She's cute, what kind of work does she do." etc.). We know people and interact with people as if they are these identities.

And notice that even as we pass from this world, we have great concern for how our identities will live on beyond our death through our legacy ("He was so generous with his time and money." "He was the winning quarterback for Superbowl 2007.")

I think that through the lens of legacy we begin to get closer to what identities are and how they function in our lives. Through identities we deny our death. Life is full of change and uncertainty. We've been hurt before and we want to be protected from the threats in our life. We yearn for security and certainty and in our identities we find hope that our yearning is not in vain. And this yearning that identities seem to fulfill, it ties our quality of life to our identities.

In order to provide this security, protection, and certainty identities must be fixed. That they are fixed is what generates the sense of security, protection, certainty, and legacy we desire. Our identities have a "once and for all" quality to them. For example, "Once and for all I am the winner of that race" or "Once and for all I am the President that year."

But are our identities who we really are? No. Fixed identities live in fixed assessments of a fixed world. But the world isn't fixed and neither are we. Our identities veil what is actually happening by projecting their fixations onto what's happening. Our identities are sourced from the past in continual reaction to the past events and circumstances.

Earlier we noticed that in some way our quality of life seems attached to our identities. It follows that if our quality of life is poor then one option is to change our identities rather than trying to buy, accumulate, or consume our way to happiness.

For a long time, we've held changing identities as suspicious - as something done by con artists and impersonators. Changing identities has been on the margin of society, perhaps with the exception of actors who take on identities for entertainment. But there is a shift happening in the world.

Change is being embraced more and more. The world is changing and change is accelerating. We no longer expect careers, employers, spouses, or communities to be unchanged over the span of our life. More and more people are experimenting with virtual identities (avatars) on the internet. The internet encourages us to understand ourselves as decentralized, multiplicitous, and flexible. And we also get that the identity we are in Facebook or Second Life or, dare I say it, Match.com isn't really who we are - its just an identity.

This shift that we are beginning to experience around identity opens up new possibilities for improving the quality of our lives. More and more we see that we have many identities - none of which is truly who we are - and because of this we can construct and reconstruct our identities to heal past wounds, generate more self-esteem, lift the burdens of shame, make a career transitions, and on and on. Changing identities is no longer on the margin of society but is on the move toward the center.

We live in an “age of fluid but stable identities.”

Take care,

-Steve

Persistent Complaints

2008-01-21T22:38:45-08:00

Lately, I've been applying the insights of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy to the problems faced by some of my coaching clients.

One observation is that many people have persistent complaints - complaints about "the way other people are", about "the system", about "working for the man", about "the way things are", etc. But having these complaints doesn't really change anything. In fact, they're more of a burden that we carry than an effective way of getting our needs met.

IFS approaches people as having multiple Parts and a unitary Self. From an IFS perspective, Part of us has a persistent complaint. The beauty of this distinction is that we get to be Self and to work with the Part of us that has the complaint instead of just complaining. The distance that we get from the Part allows us the space to explore what the Part is really up to? What is its job? What does it fear will happen if it isn't doing its job?

One of the key insights of IFS is that every Part has a good intention. The Part of us that has the persistent complain is actually trying to protect us in some way. In other words, there is an underlying care that gives rise to the complaint. Our reactiveness - our persistent complaints in this case - disconnect us from what we care about. When the Self consciously recognizes and aligns with this underlying care rather than allowing the Part to reactively complain, new possibilities for effective action arise to express the Part's care.

Here's a short self-observation exercise for you to work with this:

What are some of your persistent complaints?
What are the good intentions and cares underlying your persistent complaints of your Parts?
What new possibilities for action (other than complaining) open up through owning that you have these caring Parts?

Take care,

-Steve

Richard Strozzi-Heckler in Strategy+Business

2008-01-17T11:14:21-08:00

Recently, Strategy+Business magazine published an article on the work and contribution of Richard Strozzi-Heckler, founder of Strozzi Institute (which I am a graduate of) to the development of embodied leadership.

I thought you all might enjoy the online "reprint" of the article called "The Dance of Power."

Richard's notion is that leadership is neither an art or a science but, instead, is a practice.

I hope that you take some time to learn from Richard's experience, compassion, and wisdom.

Take care,

-Steve

Links for 2006-10-08 [del.icio.us]

2006-10-09T00:00:00-07:00