Then the trainer said quietly, ‘Alright folks, is anyone here willing to bet their car that all of you will deep your work for the whole weekend?’  He said it seriously.  I knew he meant it.  It was not some kind of joke or a sarcastic comment.  The guy really wanted to know if anyone in the room was not only willing to commit personally to keep the guidelines, but was also willing to bet their car that every one of the 94 others would as well.

I raised my hand.  When I say, ‘I raised my hand,’ it was more like ‘I experienced my hand raising.’  I felt a tingling all over my body and a kind of electric hum in my ears and an excitement in my belly that I have only known in deeply profound spiritual experiences.  Catharine leaned over and whispered, ‘Are you serious!?’  (We only had one car. . .)  She saw that I was.  I whispered something like, ‘It’s O.K.  We’re all going to do it.’

Now, I have to tell you that I knew right there and then that we would do it.  My statement was not a prediction, nor a statement of probability, nor a hope, nor even a belief.  It was more that all those.  In a language we were to learn later on, it was a promise, a declaration, a stand taken.  It was one of the most powerful things I have ever done, and I knew at the time that my commitment and declaration were contributing mightily to making it possible. I struck me then that where I was at the moment was called ‘faith.’

Whew. . .  I can still feel the tingling of excitement when I recall this and write about it.  I ‘got’ the workshop about empowered communication in the first ten minutes!  The rest of the workshop was very useful.  It gave me a frame of reference for understanding my promise regarding our car, for seeing what had not been happening elsewhere in my life, and introduced me to a way of accessing that creative ‘place’ again and again.

By the way, the guidelines turned out to be fairly simple but challenging things like:  Be in your seat ready to begin on time each time we start, including after breaks; Always have your notebook with you and something to write with; No drugs during the weekend, including alcohol.  There were times in the workshop where people ran in, breathless, just before the second hand hit the starting minute, and crashed into their seats.  The long and short of it is that we did it. Every person kept every agreement for the entire workshop.

The Trainer told me later that in his seven years of doing the workshop, this had been the first time that a) everyone had come back after the break, thus promising to keep his or her agreements, b) someone had actually been willing to seriously bet his or her car, and c) that all agreements had been kept.  I told him that I saw them as connected, that my stand may have created the possibility for participants to overcome things that always ‘come up’ in the circumstances.

At the workshop Catharine and I came in a little excited, greeting a few new people and some old friends we saw among the 100 or so who were in the hotel conference room.  The trainer was introduced, and, after a few opening remarks, he began by asking, ‘How many of you are willing to abide by the guidelines of the workshop during this weekend?’

Now, what would your first question be?  Right:  ‘What are the guidelines?’  ‘Perhaps you didn’t understand the question,’ repeated the trainer, How many people are willing to abide by the guidelines of the workshop during  the weekend?’  More rumbling in the room and, ‘Well, I could answer your question if you’d just tell me what the guidelines are. How do you expect us to agree to something we don’t know about?’

At this point I started to laugh, I mean really laugh, one of those body-wracking, gut-wrenching kind of laughs.  I found myself in the middle of a moment of enlightenment, when time stands still and life suddenly makes sense and you see things like you have never seen them before.  I laughed until I cried, and all the while the now seemingly insane questioning of the Trainer by participants was continuing.  Catharine leaned over and asked if I was O.K., and I joyfully replied, ‘Oh yes!’

Soon the trainer said, ‘O.K., let’s do it this way. . .  In a moment we will take a break.  After the break, whoever is back in their chairs is saying that they will abide by the guidelines for the workshop (which he had still not revealed).  Your returning to your chair indicates your commitment to do this.  Alright, let’s break.’

We re-entered the room and sat down, looking around to see how many empty chairs there were.  None!  We had all come back.  It was amazing! Every person had committed to abide by the still-unknown guidelines.  The trainer said something like, ‘Great! (all of Erhard’s people said ‘Great’ a lot. . .) So all of you are committing to abide by the guidelines, right?’  The group shouted things like, ‘You bet your sweet______, cowboy!,’  ‘This is Spokane!’ and other equally proud and challenging epithets.

Then the trainer said quietly, ‘Alright folks, is anyone here willing to bet their car that all of you will deep your work for the whole weekend?’  He said it seriously.  I knew he meant it.  It was not some kind of joke or a sarcastic comment.  The guy really wanted to know if anyone in the room was not only willing to commit personally to keep the guidelines, but was also willing to bet their car that every one of the 94 others would as well.  (Next week I’ll tell you what happened next. . .)

MY FIRST CONTACT WITH EST

I had been avoiding Werner Erhard’s workshop for years, mostly because of what I saw as the ‘hype’ surrounding the enrollment/recruiting process.  (Once these people got your name, you couldn’t shake them!)  Ironically, it felt exactly like being on the other end of a conversation with an intense true-believer from a fundamentalist religious sect:  Unpleasant, and a major hurdle for many people getting into the seminars.  But basically, est never seemed like anything I needed to bother with.  Just some more ‘California hot tub bullshit,’ as a friend put it.

Then my long time colleague and consulting partner, Bob Crosby, announced one day at a Staff Meeting that he was going to something called ‘The Communication Workshop.’  This was, in itself, very surprising to me, since I had learned most of what I knew in the area of communication from Bob.  He ‘wrote the book’ on Communications.  What could he possibly see in this workshop? I mused.

The weekend of the workshop came and went, and at our Staff Meeting an Monday morning, Bob was not there.  We started without him.  A few moments later the door opened, and in walked Bob.  He sat down, looked me right in the eye, and said, ‘John, I blew it.  I’m late.  I know my being late make it tough for you and the team to work.  How can I make it up to you?’  It was said with such clarity and straightness that, somewhat surprised and delighted, I responded, ‘I think you just did!’

The changes in the way Bob communicated and conducted himself in the months following were frankly astonishing to me and to my colleagues.  Bob and I had been close friends and partners for 12 years, and I had become resigned to some of his characteristics.  But they changed.  They changed.  Bob simply changed in areas where change seemed to be at least unlikely, and in some cases, even impossible.

I was stunned.  I said to myself, ‘I must go and see this thing which has come to pass!’  My wife, Catharine, and I signed up for the next Course with Bob as our Sponsor.

THE EXPERIENCE OF TRANSFORMATION

Erhard borrowed from and integrated the thinking of people like Ludwig Wittgenstien and Martin Heidegger, who were philosophers probing the boundaries of language and reality at the turn of the century.  Theirs is the study of Epistemology (from steimos—to stand, and epi—on or upon, thus, ‘to stand on’);  ‘How do you know what you know?’  They also explored Ontology, the study of being.  Their basic questions:  ‘What does it mean to be an authentic being?’

The answer, for Heidegger, was that our world appears as we experience and describe it.  It is hard to translate in English, but according to Heidegger ‘the thing itself’ doesn’t actually have an independent existence apart from our language.  It is not that we talk about a thing which is ‘out there’.  The ‘thing’ actually appears for us in our languaging it. Like Adam and Eve in the garden, God says, ‘You name it!  And whatever you name it, that’s what it will be.’

What we do all day is walk around naming everything, and in that naming, we create reality.  Then we forget that we are the authors of it all, and we come to believe that our own namings are ‘the way things are.’  For Erhard, there is no way out of this ‘vicious circle’.  It is, for us, the way things are.  It is the human condition.  In that endless loop there is no possibility, no space, for anything but projections of our own world.  And that means that there is no space for anything new or creative to show up, only more of the same.   Only by creating—or I world say—discovering a place which does not now exist—a place which is outside the naming loop—can breakthrough or transformation take place.

Standing in this new place is brought about by a declaration, a promise, a word, you might say.   In this process, the circumstances are not are not relevant and are not given any weight in the making of the declaration.  Therefore they cannot detract from it.  It is a very powerful place to be, and is the place from which all true acts of creative change and transformation originate.  There are no techniques for getting yourself there.  There is only your stand to be there, living as if you were there.

This act of commitment (or faith) does not change the human condition.  It empowers us to be in an extraordinary way in the midst of the human condition, bringing forth something which was not there before.  W.H. Murray’s quote is invoked here:  ‘The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.’

When that happens—when a stand is taken—the world changes.

Before her death in 1992, my then 71-year old mother declared herself to be an alcoholic, something my father never could bring himself to do.  She made a promise/took a stand/gave her word that she was a recovering alcoholic.  The world was immediately different, for her, for her friends and co-workers, for me, for the most distant star in the universe.  Talking about it, even trying hard, doesn’t create transformation.  It may produce change, but it’s that familiar kind of change that doesn’t make a difference.  Taking a stand, giving your word and then becoming your word, that changes things.

It is easy for me to see how the parables of Jesus ‘worked ‘ in this light.  They broke the loop of people’s epistemologies, just for a moment, which allowed a crack for something new to show up.  That’s when up became down, rich became poor, being first became last, death became life, and what was trapped became free (saved).

Do not take this course if you have any fears about examining who you are or why you work, live and breathe as you do now. Take it as climbers and divers take the heights and depths. Take it in order to know where it is possible to go.

–Virginia Robinson, VP-HR, Toronto, Canada

John Scherer’s work reflects the kind of wisdom won, or perhaps gifted, by a life lived in courage, openness, and service. Come to the table. Share in the feast. Bring your warrior heart.

–Elizabeth Gorla, Leadership & Personal Development Coach, Embercombe, England

To register or for more information, email info@scherercenter.com with ‘Five Questions Weekend’ in the subject line. Hope to see you there!

This is the next in a series of blogs connecting the Five Questions approach with its philosophical and spiritual development roots.

The stated and intended outcome of the world’s great religions is changed lives.  This usually means not only an ultimate transformation—e.g. salvation, nirvana, satori—but also some kind of penultimate here-and-now, I-can-see-it-in-your-life change.  In spite of the central place of transformation in their theologies, however, mainline western religions have not addressed nor explored the process nearly as much as you would expect.

That may be one reason why mainline religions have recently become less significant in people’s lives.  More and more folks looking for something that makes a real difference are looking elsewhere.

In the late 1960’s a controversial figure, Werner Erhard, emerged as the head of a California-based movement which enjoyed a rapid popularity.  He established a large network of people who were graduates of a seminar he designed and led, called est, derived from the Latin verb, ‘to be.’

Without intending it, the est workshop represented a bridge between the search for meaning by everyday people and the transformational work of Jesus as I understand it.  Even though Erhard’s trainers denied it, it appeared to me that they were teaching a process for believing. The content of belief was not their concern.  The experience was.

As a life-long student of Jesus, especially his parables (which I view as transformational encounters), I want to offer here a few theological reflections on the Erhard approach and summarize what might be of value for spiritually-oriented change agents.  It will be too brief, highly personal and incomplete, but perhaps it will invite conversation into a contemporary philosophy of change.

I also believe Jesus would have a few things to say to Werner Erhard, and I will briefly describe what appear to me to be missing ingredients in his approach.

• After college I served as a Combat Officer on a destroyer in the US Navy during our Vietnam experience, serving in the Atlantic and Mediterranean Fleets.
• Then it was off to Seminary, where I followed five generations of J.J. Scherer’s, becoming Lutheran Chaplain at Cornell University.
• After several years there, I was invited to move to Spokane, Washington, to create the country’s first competence-based graduate program in the emerging field of applied behavioral science.
• From there the work as a consultant and speaker took off and here we are.

Many seminar participants and leadership clients have asked me to be more public about the spiritual development aspects of my work. One senior engineer from Boeing who was attending the Leadership Development Intensive (LDI), came up to me after his 3-1/2 day experience and whispered, ‘I know what you’re up to here, John! You have created a spiritual development program thinly disguised as a leadership development course!’ He was now upset. Quite the opposite. He was inspired.

So, it is with a mixture of hesitation and excitement that I ‘come out’ here on the Five Questions blog and begin to share some of the philosophical, even theological, underpinnings of my work. If you are a traditional Christian, you may find what I have to say disturbing or even blasphemous, but this is the direction my life experience has taken me and my ‘working theology’. . .

In our last two posts we shared two powerful perspectives on the depth and breadth of the dramatic changes going on in our world. Confronting the unknown range of impact from these changes can be both shocking and freeing. To move you into engagement, we are asserting a set of New Rules as part of what we are calling Reality 2.0^TM and inviting you to try them on. We are not claiming that they are the Truth or an extraordinary economic insight on our part.  Rather, they are a proposition meant to provoke fierce investigation of reality and stimulate creative thinking.  They are intended to bring each of us more present to our world and to call forth far more effective actions on our parts.
 
Reality 2.0^TM: The New Rules
1) All Bets Are Off
2) All The Rules Have Changed
3) All Contracts Are Invalid/Restructurable
4) It’s Never Coming Back
5) No One Knows The New Rules
6) Fear Is Everywhere
7) If I Try To Hold On To Any Of The Way I Think It Was I Will Die
Play Ball!

Our clients have begun exploring these rules with each other in our group sessions and are having insightful and  productive conversations.  Several have introduced them in conversations with their teams as a way to break through the veil of fear and pretense that has many people frozen.  Test-drive them yourself and let us all know what you learn.

There are important ‘negative’ aspects of who you are right now that you need to look squarely in the eye and get to know and accept as important parts of your reality. If you live in Chicago and you are planning a trip from there to Los Angeles, you have to start in Chicago. Every transformation begins with you standing completely, even gratefully, in the current space you occupy, exactly as it is.

As human beings, we have a tendency to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’. We try hard to be only the ‘good’ or ‘positive’ side of who we are, relegating other,  ‘bad’ or ‘negative’ or less acceptable aspects to the trash heap, denying to ourselves and those around us that anything like that could possibly be in us. You will find that your transformation will not come from ‘polishing your (positive) act,’ but, perhaps surprisingly, from resurrecting a handful of discarded ‘negative’ qualities. In later blogs I will show you how to take these rejected ‘shadow’ attributes and turn them into ‘stretches’ for transforming your life, and thereby, your world.

New Water From The Old Well

The difference between ‘changing’ something and ‘transforming’ it is that changing implies replacing, or in some way negating, what is there now. Transformation, on the other hand, implies reaching deep within what is there now to find the seeds for a new shape, a new reality. It is more like the true meaning of education: from its Latin root e-ducare, to draw out, as in drawing water out of a well. You can think of transformation as drawing new water out of the old well-by going deeper than you ever dipped before. The way to get your bucket deeper into your well is by taking on powerful questions, instead of jumping at attractive-looking answers. When you wrestle with these five life-changing questions, explained in the book, things will start to shift inside and around you, starting with your understanding of who you are.

Charlotte, The Woman Living Half a Life
Charlotte, a PhD child psychologist, came to the Five Questions Weekend with a vague sense of unhappiness, unusual for her, since she had long prided herself on being the eternal optimist. In our interaction, she explained that she had been trained by her mother to ‘always look for the silver lining.’ Whenever illness or loss occurred, she was told not to discuss it with neighbors-or even anyone in the family-out of fear that talking about it would validate its existence and give it energy. So she had been going through her life avoiding things like sadness, failure, loss, poverty, and laziness (a real no-no in her family).

At one point I said to her, ‘Charlotte, my good friend Mark Kelso, a gifted musician and songwriter, may have something for you here. He puts it this way:

Half of Everything
I want the up, but not the down; I want the smile, but not the frown.
I like the Yes, but not the No; don’t want to stop; just want to go.
Don’t want the darkness, just want the light; I want the day, but not the night.
I want the honey, but not the sting; I want half of everything.

I like the fire, but not the burn; I want to know-don’t want to learn.
I like Hello, but not Goodbye; I want to live, don’t want to die.
I love to scratch, but not to itch; I love the goddess, but hate the bitch.
I want the honey, but not the sting; I want half of everything.

I like the half that makes me happy, and hate the part that makes me sad.
I love the gorgeous, the sweet and the good; I hate the ugly, the bitter, the bad.
I like the pleasure and hate the pain; I worship the sun and shun the rain.

I want the honey, but not the sting; I want half of everything.

© 1995 Mark Kelso, used by permission, Muddy Angel Music www.muddyangel.com

‘Can you see,’ I challenged her, ‘how much energy you have been expending in a futile attempt to live half a life?! You are constantly having to sort, to eliminate large chunks of reality: ‘I’ll let this in, but not that.’ What if you simply embraced all of life-and all of who you are, regardless of whether it seemed initially to be ‘positive’?’

After some minutes of intense interaction, Charlotte relaxed into acceptance of a particularly ‘negative’ aspect of her life: her rage. She saw what she had been missing, saw how much energy she had been expending in a futile attempt to keep her anger at bay, saw how OK it was to be a person who occasionally got angry. Through tears of relief and exultation, she blurted, ‘No wonder I’ve been exhausted, unhappy and felt so ineffective!’

Charlotte, like each one of us, is operating with a powerful picture of ourselves: how she-and the world-are supposed to be. As you will see, that picture, given to you in childhood, is incomplete and woefully out of date. Next week we’ll look at how that happened.