Tag Archives: Rosamund Stone Zander

The value of coaching, use in case of resistance

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Whenever I take my glasses off (usually they fall off), I panic. For one split moment, the grass becomes green fuzz, the sun, an overflowing cup of honey. There’s nothing ugly or aggressive about nature blurred. But I don’t know where I am. I can’t recognise friends. At any moment I could trip. That’s how I felt with Hanui’s playing – beauty glimmered all around me, but nothing was defined. I was helpless in a blur of colour. The transformation Hanui underwent brought clarity, and with it, a more intricate, true beauty. The pristine architecture of Bach finally rose up to its aching glory.

Music student, Amanda Burr, on the performance of a fellow student from The Art of Possibility, by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander.

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Image: courtesy of Liquid Paper

Possibility: Part 6

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This is the final part of the series on possibility and The Art of Possibility, by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander.

I can’t take my leave of this glorious book without discussing what Roz and Ben call the practice of  “Giving an A”.  The practice was born when Ben, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic orchestra, was about to start a new 2-semester course teaching 30 graduate students at the New England Conversatory of Music.

After 25 years of teaching Ben realised he was about to start another class with the same old obstacle in the way: that the students would be in such

a chronic state of anxiety over the measurement of their performance that they would be reluctant to take risks with their playing.

This time he did something different. He sat down with Roz, a therapist, and together they speculated about how they could move the students from the world of measurement – the world of right, wrong, good, bad, better than, less than, success, failure – into the world of possibility.

Ben describes what they came up with. “Roz and I predicted that abolishing grades altogether would only make matters worse … The students would feel cheated of the opportunity for stardom and would still be focused on their place in the lineup. So we came up with the idea of giving them all the only grade that would put them at ease”; the only grade that could “finesse the stranglehold of judgement that grades have over our consciousness from our earliest days.”

He announced it to the students as follows:

Each student in this class will get an A for the course. However, there is one requirement that you must fulfill to earn this grade: sometime during the next two weeks, you must write me a letter dated next May, which begins with the words, ‘Dear Mr Zander, I got my A because … ‘, and in this letter you are to tell, in as much detail as you can, the story of what will have happened to you by next May that is in line with this extraordinary grade …

In writing their letters Ben tells them to “place themselves in the future, looking back, and to report on all the insights they acquired … I am especially interested in the person you will have become by next May.”

The practice is a dramatic success, and not just with the students giving themselves an A. Because in exploring the idea Ben and Roz see it can be used in many different ways, including giving an A to others. There is so much more to say about the power and magic of the practice, and I could go on for posts and posts. For now, I want to end by including the letters written by two of Ben’s students and my own letter to Ben, from six months in the future.

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Dear Mr Zander,

I got my A because … I changed from someone who was scared to make a mistake in case she was noticed to someone who knows that she has a contribution to make to other people, musically and personally … Thus all diffidence and lack of belief in myself are gone. So too is the belief that I only exist as a reflection in other people’s eyes and the resulting desire to please everyone … I have changed from desiring inconsequentiality and anonymity to accepting the joy that comes from knowing that my music changes the world.

Giselle Hillyer

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Dear Mr Zander,

I got my A because I became a great gardener to build my own garden of life. Till last year I was intimidated, judgemental, negative, lonely, lost, no energy to do what-so-ever, loveless, spiritless, hopeless, emotionless … endless. What I thought so miserably was actually what really made me to become what I am today, who loves myself, therefore music, life, people, my work, and even miseries. I love my weeds as much as my unblossomed roses. I can’t wait for tomorrow because I’m in love with today, hard work, and reward … what can be better?

Sincerely, Soyan Kim

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30 June 2012

Dear Ben,

I got my A because I gave my leadership project everything I had – my passion, my joy, my commitment – and I discovered I had so much more to give than I knew. I also finally discovered what you discovered: that people are always more important than the project or task I’m involved in.  What I love about the person I’ve become is that I broke through the limit on my creativity and expression that I’d often come up against, and which was one of the reasons I started my blog years ago. Now the limit is no longer there and I have become to expression what Jacqueline du Pre was to music, “a conduit for music to pour through”. As you say of her, I have the

radical confidence about [my] own highly personal expression that people acquire when they understand that performance is not about getting your act together, but about opening up to the energy of the audience and of the music, and letting it sing in your unique voice.

Yours in possibility,

Narelle Hanratty

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Possibility: Part 5

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A few days before Christmas I heard a British man speaking about his abhorrence of Christmas, and the lengths to which he goes to avoid it. This year he was spending the time in Australia;  last year, he’d gone to the Congo (of course, Australia, Congo … same diff).

He cited the hypocrisy of feeling, the consumerism, and so on. In short, he served up all the ready-to-hand “agreements” about Christmas in a two-minute burst of heat and fear.

What he left out, to my ears, was the source of the fear: that at Christmas we come face-to-face with the state of our relationships.

In the book The Art of Possibility, Benjamin Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic orchestra, tells of a time he came face-to-face with the state of his relationships: when his second wife

walked away from the marriage midstream.

Luckily, his wife saw something he couldn’t quite see at first. He tells the story thus:

At the same time [as leaving] she asserted – though at first I did not listen – that we would always be in relationship, and that it was up to us to invent the form. Clearly the family had not been thriving under the arrangement we’d had. ‘Let’s invent a form,’ she said, ‘that allows us to contribute to each other, and let’s set a distance that allows us to be fully ourselves.’

Get that? At this late, late stage, she raises the possibility of something completely new.

He gets it.

Going down for the second time, I understood and grabbed hold. I saw the whole thing was made up and that the game of success was just that, a game. I realised I could invent another game.

The game he goes on to invent he calls “being a contribution”. What he means by that is a post for another day. For now, what matters is what each of them saw.

His wife saw that no matter if they were married or divorced they would always be in relationship. Moreover, her stance also implies something much broader: that all of us are always already in relationship. Whether we are married, divorced, or strangers to each other. We don’t have to establish or build a relationship: it’s already there. What we do, if anything, is call forth something already there.

Benjamin saw that something new was possible. Amid the pain and shock of the marriage breakdown new ways of relating and being presented themselves to him. He was not being given by his past or by his circumstances, he was being given by the future.

What both of them saw was that if the present form wasn’t working they could invent a form that did work.

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Today I’m thinking about that British man, so full of hurt and fear, and hoping someone invites him into a new game. I may see him again, and if I do, I’ll invite him myself. What about you? What new games, what new forms, are you inventing for your relationships in the coming year?

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Image: Engadin ski marathon, Switzerland by Valentin Flauraud/Reuters, courtesy of The Guardian

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Possibility

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It’s obvious now some time has passed, and it was definitely what I wanted, even if I kept the want largely secret from myself. Writing a book about leadership requires the writer to confront the things that keep her from fully realising her own leadership.

As each week passes, I’m encountering another constraint in my own relationship to leadership. One of the most basic is not confined to questions of leadership and people attempting to write books about leadership. It affects all human beings and all situations.

It concerns possibility. This post is the first in a series about possibility.

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