Category Archives: Transformation and inspiration

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)

The feared communication

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So, I haven’t exhausted the topic of truth-telling yet. I’ve got something more to say.

A few years ago I took the series of courses known as the Curriculum for Living offered by Landmark Education. The first course in the series of three is the Landmark Forum; the second is a course known as the Advanced Course; the third is a course that stretches over 3-4 months which is called the Self-Expression and Leadership Program.

I’ve been a participant and a coach in the latter program, and there’s an exercise in the program that never fails to stun people. The exercise requires each participant, over the course of the program, to interview at least five people who are close to them. They can interview as many people as they like, but five is the suggested minimum.

The interview structure and set-up

The interview consists of five questions:

  1. What are my strengths?
  2. What are my weaknesses?
  3. What can you count on me for?
  4. What can’t you count on me for?
  5. If you were speaking on behalf of the people who know me, how would you describe me?

Participants are carefully coached on preparing for the interviews. They are told when inviting someone for an interview, they are to make it absolutely clear that:

  • the interviewee is free to say whatever he or she wants to say
  • the interviewer is eager to have an absolutely truthful conversation
  • regardless of what the interviewee says, the interviewer will not react to, nor in any way, dispute their answer.

Participants are encouraged to invite their nearest and dearest, as well as their nearest and not-so-dearest, into an interview. People generally interview their husband or their wife, their siblings, their parents, their bosses, their friends, their work colleagues and so on.

Interviews can be conducted by phone, or face-to-face.

The outcome

As you’d expect, many people are terrified at the prospect of this exercise. Some put it off until the very end of the program, some don’t do it.

Most people, however, do take it on, and listening to them talk about it is an extraordinary experience. People who might not have said a word for the entire 3-4 months, stand up and talk about what their boss said to them, or what their wife or their brother said to them, and they are exhilarated. “I was expecting something really negative and it wasn’t at all! What a surprise!”, they usually say, their faces lit up, their whole body moving freely.

What’s happening here?

The relief is huge. But why relief? Because we spend our lives fearing a certain communication is about to come our way. You know the one I mean. That certain communication you think is designed just for you that you feel might very well kill you if you heard someone saying it to you.

So potent is the fear of receiving this communication, we design our lives to make sure no-one ever says it. For example, we enrol in endless courses and proudly insist on our teachability to ensure we never hear someone telling us we’re dogmatic or closed-minded, say.

When participants do the interview exercise, they discover without fail that the feared communication is not there. Interviewees inevitably say something quite different.

Multiple effects

The exercise generates multiple effects, not merely the relief of not hearing the feared communication.

It also uncovers any unfinished business between two people. Because participants quickly realise it’s impossible to invite a person for an interview, or in some cases, to complete the interview, unless the unfinished business is addressed. Suddenly, it’s there staring you in the face and you have a unique opportunity to resolve it.

By far the biggest impact of the exercise lies in experiencing oneself as someone who is not afraid of the truth, someone who can handle truth-telling. For this reason alone, the exercise is priceless.

***

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Too little said, too much communicated

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I’ve been thinking about this matter of lying that came up in the last post, and it occurred to me we operate under three assumptions when we’re considering whether to be truthful with others:

  1. Only what’s said counts
  2. The person to whom I’m talking is small and fragile and couldn’t possibly handle the truth
  3. No-one will know I haven’t been truthful if I just say nothing.

1. Only what’s said counts

We have it that we’re not communicating if we’re not speaking. Wrong. The unsaid is communicated, and the unsaid shouts louder than the said. Not only does the content of the unsaid shout, the fact of it does too. All of us are geniuses of the first order when it comes to knowing something is there, something is off. As the great US novelist, Anne Tyler, has one of her characters say of his family situation:

Too little said, too much communicated.

And saying something rather than nothing doesn’t change the equation one jot if the something is not the truth. Withholding the truth and giving a “white lie” instead is still a case of the unsaid. The fact of the lie, the fact of the withholding, registers. It registers in the speaker and in the other person and in the world.

The world is not merely the said; it is also the unsaid. The world is not merely the things; it is also the non-things. The world is not merely being; it is also not-being.

2. “They are small and fragile and couldn’t possibly handle the truth”

Only one thing to say here, and I’d suggest a mirror would come in handy. Who is small and fragile and not able to handle the truth?

All of us are large and able. Unexpected wonders occur when we give up our listening of others as small.

3. No-one will know if I haven’t been truthful

Wrong again. You’ll know.

***

Image: Photograph by George Roder

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Good-looking

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There’s a passage by the best-selling author and philosopher, Alain de Botton, that makes me laugh like … well, “like a parent on the opening night of a school play.”

… my priority was to be liked, rather than speak the truth. A desire to please led me to laugh at modest jokes like a parent on the opening night of a school play. With strangers, I adopted the servile manner of a concierge greeting wealthy clients in a hotel … I sought the approval of figures of authority and after encounters with them, worried at length whether they had thought me acceptable. When passing through customs or driving alongside police cars, I harboured a confused wish for the uniformed officials to think well of me.*

Priceless. I see myself as an seven-year-old walking down the street in a new dress with my mother and sister, holding my sister’s hand for once, preening and thinking to myself  “Everyone will think we’re so good.” Or my father, driving the five of us, telling us to “sit up straight” as we passed a police car.

Wanting people to think well of us, wanting to look good, is universal, fundamental and the root of much anxiety and difficulty. It was running the show in a story I heard yesterday.

***

A writer was invited to speak at a conference about happiness and its “causes”. For some time leading up to the event he was worried because he did not feel happy. How was he going to speak on happiness to 1,000 people when he was feeling unhappy?

The event went ahead and he spoke on this and that, and did not come clean that he was struggling. A little while later he did come clean, though not with the original audience. He confessed to his blog audience instead, and his unhappiness over the lie was still palpable.

His story has a number of interesting angles. You can look at it from the angle of integrity. From everything this man has written in the past, the absence of integrity will be eating him alive. It also vividly demonstrates our desire to look good. It was so strong in him, as it is in all of us, that it overrode his desire to be honest, even though honesty is what he regards as the “calling card” of all his writing. Do you get that? His desire to look good at the conference – his desire to be seen as a happy person – trumped what most mattered to him, the very essence of his identity.  Small wonder he’s feeling miserable.

There are a number of things he can do to restore his sense of self, but that’s a post for another day.

Consider that true freedom, true peace of mind, happiness even, lies in giving up our desire to look good.

***

* Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

Straight-talking is not about changing anyone

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When we contemplate speaking with a colleague about something that’s bothering us, there are two things that usually stop us. The first is fear; the second is resignation. Fear doesn’t need any explanation, nor any discussion of remedies. There’s just “do it”.

Resignation is more subtle. Underneath resignation is the thought “they’ll never change”. In this we’re perfectly correct. People don’t change, or don’t change as a result of us speaking with them. However, something else can change, and that’s the relationship.

Here’s an example from my own experience. It’s about a small everyday concern, just the type of thing that can make our work lives miserable.

***

By the end of week one in the new workplace, I realised it wasn’t unusual my new manager was talking constantly. She was always like this. When I’d get out of the lift in the morning I’d hear her strong, ex-smoker’s tones from the other side of the floor, and ahead of me would stretch the prospect of a day sitting at the neighbouring desk being battered by a stream of her random thoughts and complaints. She never stopped talking. It wasn’t stuff that required an answer or a comment; it was literally the contents of her head. And because she was highly anxious, the contents, let me tell you, were no picture.

It was like sitting next to a car alarm.

By week two I knew I had to do something. The next day I invited my manager for coffee. Over coffee, I told her the ongoing conversation was making me distracted and unable to concentrate, and I asked her what we should do. As you’d expect, she was taken aback at first and she said what I’d suspected. “It’s what I do. I have to say my thoughts out loud.“

She said a couple more things including “I can’t not do it”, until she realised I’d asked a question and then the conversation took a little turn and I knew it was going to be alright. She suggested I wear headphones if I wanted quiet, and that I tell her if I was working on something that required extra concentration. She also suggested we review the situation in a few weeks’ time. I agreed and we went back to work, with me feeling happy because she was genuinely concerned and because I’d got to say what was there for me.

Eight months later when the project was complete and I was going on to my next consulting engagement, my manager took me out for lunch. Over lunch, and again in a card, she thanked me for my work and acknowledged me:

Trust is the most important thing to me, and I just knew I could absolutely trust you to do what was required.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence she cited trust. She cited trust as a direct result of the conversation eight months earlier. Because here’s the thing: she did not change her talking habits one iota. She was just as loud and talkative at the end of the eight months as she had been at the beginning. What changed was our relationship.

We went from knowing each other only as manager and subordinate, to knowing each other as human beings. I got she was someone who was prepared to participate in a difficult conversation with generosity and aplomb, and she got I was someone who wasn’t prepared to hide things. And thereafter, I just cut her some slack when she went on and on, and she gave up the micromanaging and let me run things as I thought fit.

What started out unpromisingly ended by being a satisfying experience for both of us. And I’d work for her again. Neither of us changed. The relationship did. And it was the relationship that did the work of having us operate together successfully. Where two people are concerned, the relationship is a third and infinitely powerful participant.

***

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Five kick-arse questions

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A couple of years ago on this blog I discussed a woman who was going round asking people a question and turning their answers into a book (hey, books are created on a lot less). Now, I didn’t mind the idea; it was just the question that sucked:

Have you had a happy life?

I ask you. Is that not a dumb question? Not least because you gotta catch people on their deathbed it seems to me before you’d get a response. Who else would be strong enough to give an answer to that question, except the dying?

And if the past tense thing is not enough to make you squint, there’s still the whole beside-the-point thing. Really, there’s only one correct answer to this question and that’s “who cares?”

No, no, no, questions are precious jewels and have to be handled accordingly. Here are some not-so-dumb questions for your delectation over the weekend.

1. What does it mean to be?

Martin Heidegger was a philosopher with a very big insight, in fact, the biggest since about 500BC.

Consider that every time we say something like “I am confident”, “I am no good at numbers”, “They are stingy”, “John is always on time”, “My wife doesn’t understand”, “My son will never get a job”, “Muslims are x” or “Christians are y”, we are communicating our understanding of what it means to be.

Heidegger realised all these instances of the verb “to be”, all these is’s and are’s, indicated that we think of Being as something fixed and immutable in time and space. Not only that, he said, we’d been thinking of Being as something fixed and immutable since the time of Socrates over 2,000 years ago.

Before Socrates, Heidegger realised, it had been a whole other picture. The pre-Socratic Greeks did not think of Being as something fixed and immutable, but as an arising into presence, an arising and an abiding. The ancient Greek term is poïesis, from whence the word poetry, and it translates as something like coming forth, emerging.

What would life be like if we thought of people and situations as instances of poïesis, as instances of being which arise or emerge according to context, as mutable, malleable, contingent, something that can be called forth? Every time on this blog I seem to be saying something weird, or something you may not get, consider that this is where I’m coming from, or intending to come from.

2. What is Nature asking for?

When I read this question by Rosamund Stone Zander in The Art of Possibility I was stopped in my tracks. What is Nature asking for? Man, I love this question.

It occurred to her when she was out in a canoe “on a dazzling summer day off New England’s coast” and she found herself “not knowing how to cope with so much beauty.” What is Nature asking for?, she thought. The answer, when it came to her, “springing from a naive part of me”, was that it’s asking us to participate.

Her question, and answer she found, reminds me of a favourite, half-remembered quotation of a fisherman, from a Daphne du Maurier book:

his dull eye surfeited with undigested beauty.

3. How to live?

All the great writers are asking this question. The greatest of the great, such as Leo Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf, are asking it explicitly. Like all questions, only more so, it demands its asking, over and over again.

4. Who am I being?

This one’s the natural corollary of question 1. If what it means to be is not what we think it is, who might we be, now and in every moment? If being is not fixed in time and space, but is called forth, who or what might we call forth?

If I’m facing a difficulty — if I’ve lost my job, if my marriage is breaking up, if one of my children is in danger, if I’m facing illness, if I’m uncertain or I’ve lost my bearings — who am I being in the face of it? Am I being righteous, indignant, resentful, bitter, timid, passive, resigned, a victim? Or am I being trusting, powerful, resourceful, in action, courageous, mighty, loving, inventive, accepting, forgiving?

Who are we, who we be, is in our hands, not in our circumstances.

5. How do you stop the wind from coming through the other end of your telephone line?

The inimitable Totsymae asked this question this week, and had me and thousands of others pondering the mysteries of ending telephone calls. Tots, you are a gem.

***

Image: Piazza d’Italia, by Giorgio de Chirico, 1913

Relationships: The Art of the Well-Met Breakdown

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When an upset occurs in a relationship, I often go straight to the script of my most successful play entitled “Relationships are hard work”. Here are some of its best-known lines:

“This always happens.”

“It’s just not possible for us to have a relationship.”

“This person is really not for me.”

“It’ll never work out.”

What I sometimes forget is that there’s another play showing in the theatre next door. This one is the lesser-known “Relationships are hard work and it’s not a problem they take work” and it has two sub-plots:

  • a successful, thriving relationship is a series of well-met breakdowns
  • breakdowns are an opportunity to bring forth something that is missing in the relationship.

Which play are you starring in?

***

Two blows for freedom this week, via language

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First, we had a ballot to decide who would lead the Labor government and be Prime Minister of Australia. Would it be Julia Gillard, the incumbent, or Kevin Rudd, the man who was pushed out of the role two years ago?

In the week leading up to the ballot, Ministers and other parliamentarians launched a war of words on each other. Not on the members of the other party, but on each other, the members of their own party and their fellow Ministers. The words were vicious, destructive, the kind you might spit out in the bitterest of your bitter moments. And it was all in public. The whole country looked on in shock and amazement, and the imminent demise of democracy seemed a foregone thing.

Then, late in the day, one Minister, Anthony Albanese, a man who had kept his silence for the week, held a press conference and spoke with integrity. He described, with tears in his throat, how he had given his life to the Labor Party and to “fighting the Tories”. He recounted the achievements and gifts of both Ms Gillard and Mr Rudd and honoured them as “formidable politicians … with good hearts and smart heads”. He stated without drama or side that the deposing of Rudd had not been correct, and for that reason, he would be voting for him in the ballot. In saying this, he was going against his close colleague, the Prime Minister, and allying himself with the camp that was not predicted to win. Yet he said it anyway.

The result was immediate. As one journalist put it,

the runaway public invective between the party’s leadership contenders screeched to a halt.*

Everyone woke as if from a nightmare. People remembered who they were. Both leadership contenders, burnished by another’s dignity, responded with grace. The Prime Minister refused his resignation despite the fact he would be voting against her, declaring him a man who “always wants to put the best interests of the Labor Party first”, and Mr Rudd found words of collegiality, “What we’ve done together under my leadership and Julia’s has been fantastic for the country.”

One man, one speech, and everything changed.

***

Second, in a thrilling surprise, we had Bob Carr, a former premier of NSW who had retired from politics six years ago, installed as Australia’s Foreign Minister.

Know what? I don’t care what Carr does or doesn’t do as Foreign Minister. What I care about is that he is a man with a Vocabulary and he’s not afraid to use it. With his beautiful resonant voice, politics might be microscopically easier on the ear and brain cells.

***

* Misha Schubert, The Sunday Age, February 26, 2012

Situations pertaining to leaders #4

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Last week I had the opportunity to interview one of the leaders of a large charitable organisation whose mission is  “enhancing life and increasing hope for disadvantaged, marginalised and oppressed persons, especially women and girls”.

The organisation has existed for more than 150 years, and sprang from the work of an order of nuns whose vision and commitment still animate the organisation today. The leader shared a story with me about how he and the organisation discovered what integrity really meant.

The test

About 15 years ago, the organisation faced a test. The State Government, led by Jeff Kennett, a deeply divisive figure in recent Australian political history, had just overturned the basis on which governments and charities had worked together for decades.

Until that point, charities worked together to assist their clients. They shared information with other organisations, and each organisation looked out for the other. They understood the efforts and successes of one organisation benefited all.  At one stroke, however, the government decided that henceforth charities would have to compete against each other for government funding.

Shocked and confronted

Each organisation in the sector was thrown back on itself to contemplate a future in which they would be isolated, competitive and obliged to assume the role of supplicant.  It was a time of deep despair and dismay for all organisations. Many doubted whether they would survive, and they feared for the lives and wellbeing of their clients.

At first, this man’s organisation was no different.

Shocked and confronted, the leaders of the organisation gathered together to choose their course of action. And that’s when the spirit of the long-ago nun who founded the order, a woman known as an “innovator, an ambitious person, impatient of authority”, rose again.

The group decided they could not take the government’s money on these conditions and they decided to speak out about it. They considered their long and illustrious history and the impact on the thousands of clients should their organisation not survive, and then they chose to fight anyway.

The eye of the storm

It was the beginning of a very difficult period in the life of this man and his organisation. They were subjected to threats, had to make staff redundant and endured, he said, “many sleepless nights.”

The threat to the organisation’s survival lasted for many months and was only resoundingly decided when the government, against all predictions, lost the 1999 election.

Looking back on that time, the man said while it had been “torrid” and hugely confronting, there had been many unexpected benefits from the organisation’s refusal to participate in the game of competition; its refusal, as he put it, to “sell their soul”.  One of them was the impact on writing their next mission statement.

Shortly after it became clear the eye of the storm had passed, it happened to be their business-planning season. This time, he said, writing their mission statement was a whole different exercise. This time everyone was conscious they were choosing words they had to be able to stand by should the situation require it.  Everyone had gotten that

it’s one thing to talk about integrity, it’s another to live it.

***

Image: Girl not alone, 2011, acrylic, gold leaf and coffee filters on canvas, 135 x 240 cm, by the wonderful Ghadah at Pretty Green Bullet

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The multiple effects of acknowledgement

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Recently, I’ve started doing an acknowledgement exercise each morning. For five minutes, I write down as many things as I can think of to acknowledge myself for.

I started doing this because I noticed I was producing results but not appreciating them. Instead of stopping and acknowledging the fact I’d made something happen that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, I was preoccupied with the things I hadn’t yet made happen.

I was living with the two birds in the bush, not with the bird in my hand.

So for the last week I’ve been doing this acknowledgement exercise each morning, and it’s making a difference. Not only do I get to experience the accomplishment and satisfaction I was foregoing previously, it also illustrates some curious phenomena.

One phenomenon is that it takes courage to do this. There is resistance to articulating one’s results and it shows up in thoughts like “I didn’t really do that; I had help” or “Yeh, well, I got lucky there” or “I think I’ll pass on doing this exercise today; I don’t really need to do it …”

Another is that it can be very surprising to discover what one wants to be acknowledged for. Often, it’s not what you think.

One of the best storytellers I’ve ever met – Marcelle Bernand, a leader of Landmark Education’s Communication course – has a great anecdote about the effect.

Marcelle and her sister had had a disagreement and in the process of sorting it out, they concocted a game. The game was to tell the other person what they wanted to be acknowledged for, and then have the other person acknowledge them. Of all the things Marcelle could have asked to be acknowledged for, she chose one. She asked to be acknowledged for being the person who cleans the lint filter on her sister’s clothes-dryer.

***

Image: Poster by Saint-Genies and Roland, c1960, courtesy of Galerie Montmartre, Melbourne, Australia

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