Category Archives: Transformation and inspiration

Tea and coffee and the whole damn thing

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I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

~ T S Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

It was about to rain, the cafe looked warm and “we’ll have a quick latte”, we said, my friend wanting to put off the dreaded administration awaiting her at home, but guilty too. Then something happened. We saw real teapots and proper cups and ordered tea instead. She had a green cup with a gold rim, me a yellow one. And inhaling the honey vapour of Melbourne Afternoon the conversation went off-piste into matters wild and deep and never before said, matters in the earth of her life since she was small. We spoke strong and straight, and I saw the moment her shell cracked open. I saw her spirit move in freedom. Afterwards, we came out into the street new people.

I gave up coffee spoons twice over that day. I’m now measuring out my life in conversations.

***

Image: Konstantin Makovksy

Happy at work? Part 2

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The story so far:

Two receptions. A university starts a conversation about creating a happy, positive workplace and is ridiculed by staff and observers alike. A business magazine publishes an article suggesting employers thank employees for their work and an online leadership forum reacts with dismay and fury. Both audiences assume the employer is being false and manipulative, and is asking them to be false and manipulative too. What is going on here?

Here are some speculations.

I hear a couple of unexamined assumptions in the audiences’ reactions. The first assumption is that work is work and it’s not supposed to be enjoyable. The old Protestant/Calvinist streak is alive and well in our thinking here. We might have had “The Sixties”, to the faux despair of conservative or Tory politicians, but no matter how much love was free and how many bongs were smoked, they are a pimple on the bottom of an elephant in comparison to the depth and breadth of the Calvinist mindset and its commitment to joylessness.

The second assumption is that it’s not possible to enjoy work. Possibility can certainly occur like this. Damn infuriating! Talk to someone luxuriating in some beautiful, faithful misery of their own, suggest it could be different, and then see what happens. All I can say is you’d better watch your eyes. As for some poor schmuck who comes along and suggests it is possible, and, moreover, as in the case of the university, “we’d like you to do it”, well, the fury will be untrammelled.

This second assumption is starting to approach another factor, a deeper one, which may be what’s really running the show. It concerns the fear of blame, and the confusion about blame and responsibility.

We are enraged with the idea work may not have to be hard, disagreeable and coercive because it raises the spectre that our suffering may not be inevitable and this is a problem.

If our suffering is inevitable, then we can feel ourselves free from the fear of blame. Because it’s always blame, the premonition of blame, that’s lurking in our consciousness. Our Western culture is weaned and steeped in blame. We are all scarred with it almost from birth, and we will do anything to avoid it.

If, however, our suffering is not inevitable, well then that’s when things start to get tricky. If we were to admit the possibility that our suffering at work, our suffering in any sphere of life, were not inevitable, then a question would arise: who is responsible (or in the terms we’d hear it, who is to blame) for our suffering?

And then we may start to see, out of the corner of our eye, that we are there. We may start to see we bear responsibility for our lives and our experience in this moment, including our happiness and our suffering. Around the same time the stoppers in our ears, placed there by our own hand, might fall out and the call to give up blame and resentment and do something different might reach us at last.

***

In summary, my theory is that we ridicule the idea it might be possible to be happy and satisfied at work because we prefer the prospect of our suffering to the prospect of taking responsibility. The former is familiar after all; we know how to play that game. The boss is the boss, and we are the bossed, and if each of us just plays our respective roles, the world will go on turning. We may be miserable, but we’ve survived this far, and we’ll continue to survive.

For many people, however, there comes a day when the bankruptness of this stance is no longer tolerable. On that day, an opportunity presents itself. The opportunity to be a leader. When that day comes for you, what will you choose? To be a whinger, or a leader?

***

Image: Painter on the Road to Tarascon, Vincent van Gogh

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Plagiarism and integrity

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Yesterday, I said I considered it wasn’t my business if someone were to copy or plagiarise my thoughts. I view it as a matter of integrity between the person and themself, and, anyway, they’re welcome to it because there’s plenty more where that came from.

The power of the integrity point is not to be under-estimated, as I learnt a couple of years ago.

A student in the US wrote to me offering me money to take my blog offline for a week or two. She was about to submit an essay for her college course on the writer and Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi, and she had used some of the points from two posts I’d written about him. Before I had a chance to reply, she wrote to me again asking me to disregard the previous email. She apologised, and said she had changed the essay to make it clear she was using quotations from this blog.

I still find this pretty thrilling. Someone taking the time and effort to make her actions and the breach of integrity crystal clear, and giving up her ordinary human concern for looking good.

Did you know the word “integrity” has from time to time been the most popular search term on Google?  Integrity, in ourselves and others, is  immensely attractive and compelling.

***

Image: Shoes, 1888; Vincent van Gogh

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Out with “hard”

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At the beginning of this year, I was complaining to my coach about an ongoing personal issue. It’s a well-rehearsed subject this one, and I was giving it yet one more turn around the block. She put it to me that I was always having to have the issue “handled”, always feeling I had to be dealing with it in some way, and she asked me to consider a proposition.

Say if you were to declare a holiday from the issue? Say if, for this year, you were to say you were not “doing” the issue? By all means, communicate and respond as normal with the people involved, just don’t be “working on” or “doing” the issue.

This was startling to me, and very exciting. And so I did it. I declared I was not dealing with the issue in 2012.

Four months later, the results are remarkable. I’ve discovered nothing actually happens when I don’t deal with the issue. It doesn’t all go to hell; in fact, it’s the reverse.  Since I’ve given up trying to force or fix the matter, things I’ve wanted to have happen in the area have arisen of their own accord. In addition, I’ve got back the time and energy I previously spent dealing with it. I hadn’t realised how much of myself I was giving to the issue, and all to no avail.

The other day I saw another way to use this practice.

There’s a general agreement out there in the world that writing is hard, and unless it’s hard it’s no good. There are umpteen blog sites dedicated to the issue, and the stand-out is Steven Pressfield’s.

Pressfield has it that writing is hand-to-hand combat in the trenches, and he named his book on writing accordingly, The War of Art. He talks every week on his blog about the struggle, the beast he calls “resistance”, the hard. His commenters do likewise.

It’s a very common view; Pressfield is only the keeper of its flame. It pops up everywhere, and I’d been getting more and more seduced by it until the other day.

The other day it occurred to me I could simply do what I’d done earlier in the year with the other issue. I could just declare I wasn’t “doing” hard for a particular period of time. So I have declared for the month of May I am not doing hard. If I’m writing or contemplating writing, or doing some other task, and it starts to occur as “hard”, I will do one of two things:

  1. lay aside the task and do something else
  2. do the task in a way that does not occur as hard.

At the end of May, I’ll assess how it went and make a declaration for the period beyond or another declaration entirely. I’ll tell you how it goes.

***

Agreeing to create beauty

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An orchestra is … the only community that comes together with the fundamental objective of agreeing with itself. Agree on what? To create beauty…

With those words, Jose Antonio Abreu, an economist and classical pianist from Venezuela, had me.

In 1975 Abreu started a small children’s orchestra to share his secret about the profound effects of music-making, and today he is the founder of a program in Venezuela called Sistema involving over 300,000 children. Pilot programs based on Sistema are now being run around the world in the US, Scotland, England, Canada, New Zealand and, since 2008, Australia.

Yesterday, I attended one of the rehearsals of the Crashendo orchestra, the Sistema program established for the children of Laverton primary school in Melbourne. Laverton is a suburb regarded as being socially disadvantaged, with a high immigrant population. In the orchestra I found tiny wee girls from China with ribbons tied to their violins, sweet delicate boys from other parts, and bigger Australian-born children, one boy jumping over garbage bins in a single bound, two girls with small teddy bears in bags labelled “With love to Mum” perched on their music stands.

Their music tutors for the day, the astoundingly patient Laura and Eric, by whatever miracle, brought together this chirping, squawking flock of birds to play a hornpipe dedicated to “Cap’n” somebody-or-other and a tune called Barrier Reef featuring some of the children playing pizzicato.

Along the way they were many fits and starts: some of the children had forgotten their music or hadn’t written in their fingerings as they’d been asked; teddy bears fell on floors and had to be retrieved; the cellos went on a mini-strike because the violins were holding them back, and one boy cried over a disagreement he’d had with another child and declared himself “too stressed to play”.  But there were points at which the smoke cleared for a moment and in that moment something else was emerging.

One such moment came when Laura asked the double bass to play alone. After he finished, she asked him,

Did you notice something? Did you notice that everyone stopped talking while you played and that it was absolutely quiet?

The boy, who’d been very distracted, was still. At another point, she explained to the violins how the cellos were playing an octave lower and to have them be heard it was the job of the violins to “fit themselves into the cellos”. When they played the next passage it was markedly different.

In the final ten minutes they all sat and played together under Eric’s guidance, and there was a moment, I swear, when the six young girls on the violins next to me had me do a double-take. Hello, I thought. Where had this clarity come from?

***

As the Director of Sistema Australia, Christopher Nicholls, says:

There’s so much more to children than people give them credit for. They have an enormous capacity to be brilliant.

Chris has kindly agreed to be interviewed for my book about people being leaders in the world. What I know of him already is that he’s committed to having children live extraordinary lives, to having them experience joy and beauty and the grace of human harmony.

Sistema and the Crashendo program exists by virtue of Chris’s commitment and the generosity of people contributing their time and funds. It is one of the principles of Sistema as Abreu created it that no child has to pay to participate. Everything is provided by Sistema, including the instruments.

It really takes something to have this happen, to wrest something new from the ordinary inertia of life, and create it ongoingly. At present, Crashendo needs $60,000 for the rest of 2012. You can make a donation by clicking here.

For more information about Sistema and the Crashendo program, including a short video of Crashendo’s first concert, click here.

To read a recent New York Times article about Sistema, click here.

***

Image: Some of the children I met from the Crashendo orchestra in Laverton, Melbourne

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Fear? Oceanic.

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We never know the truth by being told it.
We have to experience it in some way.
That is the abiding grace of history.
It is the theatre in which we experience truth.
~ Greg Dening, Performances, 1996

I want to tell you about my week. Not much happened outwardly. Inwardly, I had a revelation. I started to get present to the fact I’m not present to the world.

By world I mean my experience of the world. As I started to glimpse this huge and fundamental fact I also started to get what was the stuff of my experience of the world. And I’m stunned to report it is fear.

Fear of other people, fear of not being liked, fear of losing love, fear of disapproval, fear of failing, fear of succeeding, fear of not doing what I want to do, fear of getting old, fear of the weather, fear of going to the shop and not getting a parking spot, fear of not having anything to wear, fear of having a bad hair day, fear of this and much much more. Fear of everything, fear on principle.

My fear is oceanic, and somehow I’ve completely missed it till this week.

There were a few things that came together to make it possible. I want to tell you about one because it may give you something too.

***

I was talking to a friend and she asked if the word “coward” fitted for some way I’d been being in a situation we were discussing. I easily turned this down. “No”, I said, “I’ve always known myself to be courageous.” Courage was the one thing I knew I could always count myself for. I may doubt myself in various ways, but never on this score.

Afterwards, I got curious about the discrepancy. How could it be, I wondered, that that word had presented itself to her and yet I had utter confidence in its antithesis?

The next day I happened to pick up a book on leadership I hadn’t yet read and the book fell open at a page entitled “fearlessness”. The author* made a distinction between courage and a quality she translated, from a Buddhist concept, as fearlessness.

Courage, she said, was the ability to act in the moment, to do what was required, with little or no thought. To save the drowning child, run into the burning house, speak up in the face of danger. Fearlessness, on the other hand, is the ability to go through fear to the other side. Not to dispel fear or overcome fear, but to experience fear on a sustained basis and break through it into a space beyond it. The Buddhists, and also I think the Hindus, call it abhaya.

When I researched it further, I found this sentence from a Tibetan monk:

Cowardice is not being present to fear.

Which was not at all how I thought of cowardice, if indeed I’d ever thought of it.

Here was a way in which both possibilities – courage and cowardice – could co-exist. One could know oneself as being courageous, and yet suffer an absence of fearlessness.

Around the same time I had a deep, bodily reaction to something that with my new attentiveness I now recognised as fear and sadness, and I saw I never usually let myself feel it. It’s unpleasant and shocking, and usually it’s ruthlessly suppressed by some aspect of my being, covered over, in my case, with boredom, restlessness or irritation.

This covering over, something I’ve not even been aware of, has made me oblivious to my fear. It has made me a coward.

***

As crazy as it sounds, I’m exhilarated and intrigued to know myself as a coward. It’s an entirely new thought and it offers ways of being I didn’t know were available.

Over and over, I learn that in order to see something new, one first has to give up what one knows.

***

* Margaret Wheatley

The sexiest thing

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A little while ago, my coach on the book project, who’s also my coach on everything, got engaged to be married. I asked her who her fiancee was for her and this is what she said:

When I wake up in the morning I just know that ahead of me I’ll be laughing and having fun for most of the day. He’s someone I can absolutely rely on, he’s calm and laidback and complements my tendency to driven-ness, and he’s a great father [he has a young son from a previous relationship].

Wow! Is that not the description of the man every woman wants? As for that “someone I can absolutely rely on”, that idea of integrity, is that not the sexiest thing? For men and for women, even though we might not be used to thinking of it as an attraction, especially in the case of the latter.

***

Image: Another sexy thing: Harry Connick Jr, who popped up on Law and Order: SVU the other night. Finally, a man the match of Olivia.

Context is decisive

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Rosamund Stone Zander* tells an anecdote about going on a skiing trip to improve her skiing. On the very first run her plans went awry.

I slipped and fell on a patch of ice. From then on I became vigilant, tensing up in resistance whenever I spotted ice, and, unfortunately, there was plenty of it.

She was having a miserable time and was about to abandon her project and come back another time “when real skiing was to be had” when it suddenly occurred to her she was operating under an assumption:

that real skiing is skiing on snow.

She saw immediately that if she were going to be “a New England skier”, she had better include ice in her definition of skiing.

Thereafter, she says, she “redrew the box” in her mind so now she had it that “skiing is skiing on snow and ice.” The next run, and all the runs after, were very different. Her physical self now “coordinated easily” with her new way of thinking and she “welcomed the ice.”

***

The box in her mind, and the one in ours, is our context. It’s essentially what we delineate as ours or “it”. Everything outside the box is not-ours or not-it. Dealing with the not-it of our lives is exhausting, futile and disempowering and yet we spend a lot of our lives doing precisely that. We regularly fail to get that we are the ones who drew the box and we can re-draw it at any time.

I used the distinction of context on a recent consulting engagement. Never the most patient person, I was getting frustrated at the glacial pace of the project. Tasks that would normally take hours were taking days, and whole weeks were going by with very little progress. No matter how I tried to hurry along my various colleagues and the client, nothing worked. And yet every time there was a hiatus I would stop earning income because it was a time and materials job.

At first I considered ending the engagement and walking away. Technically, I had fulfilled the terms of the contract because the contract end date had already past. In my heart, however, this wouldn’t have been honouring my word. I may have signed a contract formulated around time, but the unwritten clause, to which I’d also signed up, was that the job be finished.

As soon as I got that walking away was not an option, I saw what hadn’t been working and it had everything to do with my context.

The context I had had was that completing the project meant completing the project as quickly and smoothly as possible. In this context, the glitches, delays and misunderstandings were not “mine”, not “it”.

Yet say if I re-drew the box to include the glitches and delays and misunderstandings? Say if I invented a context that said completing the project meant completing the project in the face of glitches and delays and misunderstandings?

As soon as I got this new context, the frustration fell away. And, wouldn’t you know it, the project re-started almost immediately.

The glitches, delays and misunderstandings didn’t necessarily go away; what went away was my resistance to them.

***

* Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, The Art of Possibility; this book just keeps on giving.

Image: Alpine skiing by Leroy Neiman

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Conversational polka

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He was funny and theatrical and I was having a good time talking to him. Then I started to notice that every so often he would make a bid to lead the conversation into the “downward spiral“* and that his poison of choice was politics. What else?

When I noticed it, I decided I was not joining him. I felt too full of happiness that day to be taking no low road.

The first time it happened I mildly acknowledged one of his points, and he was satisfied. At least for a bit. Second time it happened, I offered nothing. Third time it happened I decided I had to enter the dance in earnest. I started a conversation for possibility instead and invited him into it.

At some level he registered the deviation, and was big-hearted enough to choose to follow my lead. He tried the old gambit once or twice more, but his heart wasn’t in it now, and each time I just invited him back into the conversation for possibility. We talked and laughed for hours, and both of us felt exhilarated when we said goodbye. As Homer S would say, we were “embiggened”.

***

In the past, I was a downward-spiral-talking addict. I would do whatever it took to get people to talk doom and gloom with me. I still remember the kind of voluptuous hunger I felt to participate in yet one more session, and the twinge of triumph I’d feel when the old familiar strains would start up.

Nowadays, it’s different. My default position is that I’m not engaging in such conversations. Some days, I forget and get caught up in it again, but most days I’m not going there.

The impact of the downward spiral conversation is vicious. It disempowers the direct participants, and through them, proliferates in the conversations of all the people they come in contact with. It kills the possibility of anything new. It makes us immensely boring to ourselves.

If someone starts a downward spiral conversation in your vicinity:

  • disengage by saying something like, “this topic makes me feel disempowered [or unhappy or demoralised, etc]; I’d like to talk about another topic”, or
  • start a conversation for possibility.

***

* Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, The Art of Possibility

Image: Conversation by Piet Noest

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Resurrections

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“It’s a life of crucifixions and resurrections,” said the priest. “Of course,” I thought, “that’s what Easter means.”

***

Last weekend, my mother’s quilting club put on their bi-annual quilt show. It was held in a white art gallery overlooking a bay. The sun was out, the gardens just starting to turn gold.

They’d set up a table selling raffle tickets at the local shopping centre in the preceding weeks, and on the morning of the opening one of the club members talked about the show on a major Sydney radio station.They were overwhelmed with visitors, some who’d driven for hours. The gallery staff were caught off guard. Having advised the club they could not provide their own tea and cakes, the cafe was now overrun with quilters desperate for a cup. The queues persisted for hours.

My mother had several of her quilts on display, as well as three quilts for sale. So many were the quilts, they had room to hang only one of the quilts she had for sale; the others were merely draped over the nearest spare object.

She could have sold the quilt on display at least 10 times. She had people fighting over it, and scores of people asking her about the colour palette and technique. Afterwards, she had a phone conversation with the woman who bought it and the woman told her she had come to the quilt show with an academic in textiles who had described the quilt palette as outstanding.

It was the same story with the quilts that weren’t even hung. She had numerous offers for each. One woman, on learning someone else had just bought the quilt she wanted, asked my mother if she would take a commission to make another. In fact, my mother not only sold all the quilts many times over, she got several requests for commissions and offers for the quilts which weren’t for sale.

My mother and her quilts were the talk of the show.

***

My mother will turn 80 this year. For most of her life, she has considered herself shy, and she frequently suffered in social settings. She was often unhappy and frustrated. Then about 12 years ago she discovered quilting and her life has been transformed. She found something that satisfied her need for creative expression, for passion, for friendship and sociability, and since then everything’s been different.

My father died in July 2010 after being married to my mother for 51 years. The first nine months were awful, and I feared for her life too. Now I see she’s turned a corner. Another resurrection has occurred.

***

Image: The classic Roebuck quilt (not my mother’s version)