Friction is Your Friend: Why Sharing Values isn’t always Valuable

by Jean Russell

I hear about it all the time… Collaborate with people who share your values. Really? You know why they say this? Because it is pleasant and easy. When you are around people who share your values you can agree all the time, because you are using the same basis for your judgements. There isn’t much friction. Maybe people who like writing about collaboration find it easier to achieve flow states when they are not experiencing friction. Maybe.

Friction Friend

But friction can be your friend. And not just when you are applying the brakes. You want to make a spark or start a fire? Friction. Friction can be your friend when you are trying to be creative. Friction can be your friend when you are trying to start a business. Friction can be your friend when you are trying to spark dialogue with your community.

Let’s take business for example. I have seen startups where two partners may as well have shared one head they were of such like mind. And neither of those minds had much business sense. Both were visionary. They valued the exploration of ideas. They seemed to struggle to come up with a way to generate revenue to keep going and reach some lift. Neither had much talent or interest in operations. On the other hand, you can take a very profit-centric person and team them with someone who values customer and community and away they go. That is not to say they don’t experience conflict or even strong conflict. They do. But they learn how to balance it. They don’t confuse sharing values with being valuable.

Sharing is great. Share something with your collaborators. Values is just one axis. You might share a goal: keeping your neighborhood clean. But you might have different values driving the goal. One neighbor, Samuel might value the number otherwise known as property value which they believe is impacted by how clean the neighborhood is. Another, Joan, believes that “broken windows” talk from Tipping Point and feels that a cleaner neighborhood breeds less crime. Joan values being safe. And a third, Sandeep, simply values tidyness. Fine. They all want it clean. Share the goal. From different values.

A friend of mine, Steve Crandall, worked at Bell Labs. In one of his delicious storytelling sessions Steve mentioned working with someone – for years – who had a polar opposite political perspective. And yet, in the creative innovation space, the two of created well together. They didn’t need to share values to be innovative together and enjoy the pleasure of that work together. They shared a practice of innovating.

Value Time

There are certainly times when you should connect on your values. It can help reinforce your identity and give you support that you need. But if you want innovation or you want to connect a neighborhood or you want to create dialogue across political boundaries, work with the friction of different values and connect on some other dimension.

As I learned from Valdis Krebs, “connect on sameness and profit from your differences.” Please be intentional about which dimensions of difference and which dimensions of sameness.

Co-Created Solution Design Workshop at Chicago Bioneers

by Jean Russell

I hope you will join me November 2nd in Chicago for a workshop on Co-Created Solution Design at Chicago Bioneers.

This workshop is for you if:

you work with others that you don’t have total control over to come up with new ideas or actions
you want to tap into the wisdom of a group and go beyond what any could do alone
the same old problems are present and you know you need to approach them differently to get better answers

My goal for the workshop is two-fold:

give people ways to redirect conversations to be more co-creative
offer several different approaches to achieving co-created solution design

Why Co-Created Solution Design?

Since January 2011, a small group of facilitators working on social entrepreneurship and international development have come together to find ways to impact the system of social innovation globally. We call ourselves ci2iglobal, which is short for Collective Impact and Innovation Institute. With a collective 100 years experience in the area, we pooled our experiences together to figure out where we can be most useful. We believe a crucial part of the difference we can make is spreading the work of co-created solution design.

Collaboration might be the hot word of today, but we believe co-creation gets closer to our intent to help solutions arise from group creation. Too often gatherings come together and the path or outcome has been pre-determined. And it limits the engagement of all stakeholders, which is vital to successful social innovation. Co-created solution design provides a method – a process – to create solutions, but it does not presume answers. It opens questions to be answered by the group.

While much of what we do is about getting something done together, what actually gets done depends heavily on the relationships between the participants and their commitment to action.

I remember very vividly learning first hand the difference between advice and self-generated solutions. On the second day of my coach training, we were asked to provide advice to our partners on how to achieve one of their goals. We talked at them for 30 minutes. Then we were asked to listen as they thought through another challenge. The difference startled me. I am a quick thinker and prided myself on my ability to offer useful advice. However, the solutions my partner came up with had deep understanding of all the forces at play. Most importantly, my partner hesitated in implementing my solution, whereas the partner eagerly looked forward to testing the self-generated solution. The difference in engagement and commitment was tangible for me. I have tried to listen more and advise less ever since.

Co-created solution design is just like that, except it is working with groups and even groups of groups on larger systemic issues.

Strategies

I will be highlighting three different strategies for doing co-created solution design:

Engaging Exploration – Use when there is not much of a time limit and a need to see and act within a large landscape of possibilities.
Flash – Use when there is very little time and a strong base of existing knowledge and awareness.
Creative – Use when you need a very well fit and very novel solution.

So, how do we do it?

Come to the Co-Created Solution Design workshop to find out! After the workshop, I will share some of the materials from the workshop here for those of you who can’t make it.

Give it away now!

by Thriver

I get asked a lot to do many things for free. All the time. And I find I sit in a tension between advocacy for the content of the work – give that away to promote the work – AND that my work is a service process that I earn a living from.

So people ask for me to help put together events, curate things, or advise on their projects. But I also make a living facilitating events, curating and managing projects, and consulting. So when do I say yes to the free services they ask me for and when do I say, “yes, and that costs money.”

I can sense by gut when the opportunity doesn’t seem to be reciprocal. But describing that sense of reciprocal benefit in terms that can become principles for consistent action…that seems more tricky. How do you manage it?

photo credit: askingdave

Is it worth it to do for free?

Events:

A major conference in one of my fields has historically given me a free pass to be an energizing presence in the space. They aren’t asking me to run the event. I get to do my thing. And they get the benefit of my more subtle forms of facilitating – network weaving, curiosity infusions, etc.
That exchange seemed worth it to me. This year the benefits are not clear or pressing enough to them.
A conference in one of my fields – but directed more toward specialists – asks me to be on an organizing committee for 9 months. To even attend the event I will spend a thousand dollars on airfare – not to mention numerous hours of pre-event meetings. I might increase visibility of my work, but not to a broad audience. That didn’t seem worth it. They aren’t offering money and the visibility gained isn’t ideal. I might learn some, and I already have enough social contacts in that arena for my needs.
An innovation event raising money to do the event via crowdfunding asks me about curating some of the event. Hmmm, the right kind of audience. And, if this was not my content audience, I would be charging at least $3000 for design, coordination, and production. I will have to think about this. It would have to make my organization visible to the tune of a $4000 sponsorship in lieu of fees, I think. At least for my effort at this time and not living in the location of the event.

Consulting:

Someone designing a values-driven community asks to pick my brain for an hour. It actually takes about 3 hours between the email and follow up, the scanning of documents to offer useful feedback, and then the actual conversation. They are not likely to be paying for consulting later. Benefits: continue building reputation as someone who can think through the complexity of a social ecosystem and flow dynamics. Yes. Good. And costs: my time and energy aren’t being valued with anything but gratitude. I am not getting visibility, social contacts, nor learning. I have historically just done this sort of thing for the sector. Over and over. I am starting to feel like setting the limit at 1 hour is not enough. I should restrict these freebies to 30 minutes or just publish a guide of questions for a reasonable fee. Anything of my time over that needs to be an hourly rate through the Agency.
Someone calls needing to make a decision on a potential partnership or collaboration. We talk for 45 minutes. I ask questions. We clarify. A decision is made. We could call this social capital building. And you might say that if the person had to pay they would simply skip the counseling. However, I am failing to use the social capital I built with them before it starts depleting (passage of time – these things don’t hold value indefinitely). I need to start making it clear that I charge for this. That will show up over at the Agency in the next month too.
I am on the board for a project and the collaborators on that project have a massive meltdown. I mediate over the course of two weeks to get them to a clear outcome, agreed process, and personal development for all sides toward positive feelings and “ownership” aka responsibility all around. Of course this is free – I might not be on the board to serve that purpose expressly, but I am happy to give my time to them. However, I ought to also be more clear about providing this kind of mediation as a service. That is definitely invisible to the market. Again, that will be showing up in the Agency in the next month.

How do you decide what to give away? When is it worth it? How do you do your cross-capital forms accounting?

Find Awakening

by Thriver

…whever you are.

It is that time of year when those of us who know burners get to watch our social media feed fill up with photos and anecdotes about this year’s burn.

I have never been. I hear it is transformative. And last year a friend who has been a burner gave the best advice, I thought. She said, “Jean, people go to Burning Man to see and be a part of something that they didn’t think was possible – so many people functioning together in gift economy and with agility.” (okay, something to that affect) And then, “But Jean, you already believe in that and you already live in the gift economy all the time.”

photo credit: Ashley Steel

And I think this was fantastic insight. (And part of why I fear getting vastly disappointed if I went to the burn). It is not the thing itself that is all that phenomenal by itself. It is how it transforms and awakens those who come to have the experience.

I politely decline when friends invite me to this transformative retreat or that one. Not because I don’t think my friend was transformed by it. I believe that was their experience. But I don’t go because I have to find my own.

“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” – Zen saying

It is not the burning man experience… or going to an ashram in India… it is not about a jungle adventure in the Amazon or going to Africa, India, or somewhere else. It is not about a spiritual retreat or a personal development methodology. It is about you coming to your own awakening – through whatever portal is available at the time you are ready.

It is about getting out of your own sleep to see something you haven’t seen and do something you haven’t done to keep yourself awakened. To discover awe. To explore what is possible that you didn’t know was possible. Find what awakens you – and do that. And then find the next thing that awakens you…

At some point, you begin to build the muscles of the mind and spirit to be awakened by awe. And then – it is not burning man or Marrakech… it is the light in your window and the flower in the garden that brings you to new levels of awakening. Because you know how to awaken. To perceive anew. To refresh yourself.

The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean– the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down–
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver, The House Light Beacon Press Boston, 1990.

Multi-dimensional Constructions

by Thriver

For simplicity’s sake, we often pretend we live in a one or two or maybe three dimensional world. By which I mean, for example, in the world of “identity” I am a white woman from the middle class. Those are two “planes” of the conceptual realm. The first thing we need to correct is that these categories have some clear boundaries (are points) rather than being spectrums (a line of even a plane) where very little lives in the “ideal position” really.

The next thing we can do is layer them, especially when we talk about power. I have a sex, gender, and sexuality… I have a color, I have a financial upbringing and current financial status, I have an education, I have a professional background. I am a point where all these instances intersect across many planes.

Source: bustler.net via Jean on Pinterest

I have particular empowering and disempowering experiences… I have a degree of many different kinds of intelligences and physical abilities/inabilities. I have an age. I have a religious upbringing (or not, really, in my case) and a spiritual practice that is current. I can go on and on! All of these layers/planes of dimensionality, connect me to communities, some of them make me more central in those networks and some of them push me to the edges. Some of them conflict with each other, shoving me away from those communities.

The conceptual world is not flatland. The world of identity is not a flatland (despite how social networks used to try to singularize identity). Live in the rich multi-dimensionality of being human – of your existence and awareness. I try to… it is an ongoing practice in a flatland world.

———

This was originally posted to Facebook and then modified and posted here. On Facebook, the following comments were particularly delightful to me:

Alexander Laszlo

and if you are not a being at all (or only in the expository fixedness of our linguistic forms), but rather a continual emergence? More like an aroma, shifting, flowing, emerging – more becoming than being. Then the dimensionality of which you write ebbs and flows through multiple domains in which we find the confluence of others. And it is these others which, in the final appreciation, form and flavor our sense of self.

Charles Hope

Luck and success hide in the cracks between, in the contradictions, in the rounding errors glossed over and stubbornly ignored by the pragmatic grown ups.

John Manoochehri

This makes a certain kind of sense, but leads to, as a lot of emancipatory philosophy, a world of texturelessness and unmanageable complexity. There are countless dimensions, you rightly describe, to being and experience. But which are the most important? And how do navigate without those kinds of obvious signals? I can’t spend all my life interpreting each moment’s dimensionalisation, can I?If my child is hungry, and I am focussed on another dimension of their life, their capacity for artistic creativity “hey, don’t cry about food, let’s do one of those great paintings you do! come on!”, or I am not sure which of their dimension to relate to “ok, I know they are hungry, but what about their art – or their capacity for body movement, or what about nature, maybe we should learn about gravity, or or or …” – I am obviously failing them.So, multidimensionality is good. It is also a dangerous abstraction.

The problem with a lot of equalising, emancipatory thought is that it dismisses all hierarchisation, priority setting, difference, as necessarily normativising, power-brokering, wrong.

Bad move. We must learn to tame benign hiearchies, differences. Otherwise, we drown in righteous speculations and make judgements based on post-modern whim or worse.

Jean Russell

John Manoochehri, I think you are right to be concerned about being lost in noticing the dimensionality. I think of it more as a perspective tool. For example, am I feeling locked out of things because I am a woman? If so, what other dimension do I have more power to achieve my goal? Maybe I have social power at a different level? Maybe I have intelligence of a certain kind. If you feel blocked in motion because of one dimension, look at the other dimensions within you. That is not to promise a just world to those who are resourceful – it isn’t just and won’t become so. It is that there are many hierarchies, and we navigate their power, in part by being at different points on different planes. All in fluid flow. #gratitude

Jean Russell

I don’t want to get to to tied to the instance of identity – as my point is that conceptual fields that relate to things like geographical landscape, limit our ability to grasp the full dimensionality of them. This dimensionality may explain to some people how my brain has learned how to think about things (twisting planes and intersections acting as an axis point to pivot).

Facilitation Algebra

by Thriver

We have all attended events in which we had to yawn. The pace is slow and laborious. We are stuck in a chair listening the whole time, and the mind wanders to what is on the buffet table that we can nibble on.

Imagine if we assigned a rating for degree of engagement when we gather people together for group work. Let’s say we collapse, for simplicity, the difference between engagement of speaking, learning, or connecting, and just say engagement.

If I have forty people in the room and only one is speaking, the engagement of the speaker, I hope, is maximal. Some percentage of the room, depending on what is said and their interest, is in various states of engagement. We might be able to calculate, if we knew those degrees, the sum of the level of engagement in the whole to what is being said (minus degree of engagement on other devices or to other topics in mind).

Let’s say the activity is introductions, and each person is speaking for 1-2 minutes about themselves, so the group knows itself. It will take 60 to 80 minutes to go around the room. It will also, usually cost, the facilitator energy to police the 1-2 minute limit unless they use a device like a pre-written 3×5 card to keep people brief. (I have used these cards to keep within intro time limits and then made harvest documentation by having them post to a wall using an association method, which can be quite helpful in knowing ourselves as a whole.)

Now, let’s say, instead, I ask those forty people, as part of their introductions to each other, to organize in space around the room as if it was a map of the world. I give them a compass point and four locations to work from. In 3 minutes the group has some sense of where everyone is from and who is near them. They all used their bodies, and had to talk with 2 or 3 others to be sure they were in the right relation to proximal people. What is the algebra of engagement of this activity? Assume there was no need to move chairs or change the room to do the exercise. In 30 minutes of these sorts of exercises (align yourself on a spectrum of interest in… or belief about…, for example). For documentation, you can have someone take photos of the arrangements.

The art of facilitation is the crafting of optimal processes for engagement and achievement of collective goals. There are no perfect solutions, and every group has needs to be addressed that shape the processes that can work. Facilitation is the art of creating process that moderates the flows of individual engagement and catalyzes the flow of necessary information leading to action.

Abra cadabra – work with the algebra of group energy to achieve outcomes to make magical experiences of flow and contribution.

When designing group process ask:

who will be in active engagement during this process?
who will be in passive forms of engagement during this process?
is there another way to achieve this outcome that would change the active and passive engagement ratio?
if each person’s time and attention has a numeric value, and I do the algebra, have I optimized the value in the group? Is there excess capacity that I could/should engage?
how simply can I explain what the process is?

photo credit: www.metaphoricalplatypus.com

Nobody Warned Me

by Thriver

Nobody warned me what this journey would be like. No one took me aside and said – your beliefs, your very morality will change on this adventure. So before I embark on the next endeavor within this adventure, let me share a bit about what I discovered. Cause I sure wish someone had warned me. Not sure that would have stopped me, but warnings are nice.

1. Forgiveness

No one warned me that I would learn deep lessons in forgiveness. Of myself. Of others. But sure enough, it came. I thought it was enough in my twenties to have learned compassion for those who I perceived wronged me because they too were caught in their own struggles and patterns, often spanning generations. But no, that wasn’t enough. It had to go further. I had to learn to forgive myself for the paths not taken, the options chosen that led to pain or failure, the consequences of what I had – at one time – thought was right action, but turned out to have negative consequences I didn’t want. I had to learn to forgive myself for hurting those I loved when I made difficult choices. And perhaps deepest of all, I had to learn to forgive myself for being hurt by others.

If this idea is new to you, please sit with it. Take agency for all the experience you have. Every emotion you have, you can be responsible for. Whatever – and I mean WHATEVER anyone has done to you, you can choose how to respond and whether to be hurt. If Nelson Mandela can walk out of prison and love South Africa and the people there, then you can get off your emotional victim high horse and recognize that you have a choice in whether to be hurt or not. Do you take the high road? And when you don’t, please forgive yourself. You are doing the best you can with what you have, right now. At least that is what I keep telling myself.

One of my favorite plays is Death and the Maiden where a woman who endured torture and rape as a political prison has a surprise visitor – the torturer – in her home and at her mercy… what should she do? It can be easy to claim moral high ground until you find yourself in such a position. And the only sane way out, I think, is to forgive even yourself.

2. Progress is nonlinear.

Oh, the plans I have made! They are small next to the gifts I have been given by allowing myself to embrace what shows up in my life. Boldly. Embracing it boldly. Looking back, the most crucial decision points were not on any plan. When Jair mentioned thrivability to me in February 2007, I wasn’t looking for it. There was no plan. I felt in the deepest parts of my being a soft flicker that said – follow this. And over time it grew louder. When I think of the most crucial people in my life, there was no plan for them or how they would fit. When I look back at the Thrivability Sketch – it started as a light nudge from two advisors. I started it with small intentions. As the first steps worked, it got bigger. By the end it had doubled in size and was much more than I had imagined it would be.

When I look back on any given day, I am ashamed at how little of the task list is completed. Even when I look at a week of working, the actions are not adding up to what I want to have happen. And yet… at the end of a month, quarter, or year, I am always astounded at what has happened. Beyond what I could have dreamed. I can’t figure out how that happens. It must be nonlinear. So now I just go with that. I set intentions and then just work with what the universe and my network bring to me.

3. There is Life after the Cleanse.

When you first go through the cleanse – the detachment from worldly positions to seek a life of meaning, it is like a giant high. Euphoric bliss, I found my version of god, and it is purging possessions! I love thee. But no one told me there was life after the purge was over. I lost 50 pounds… no really, it was more like 2 tons. I dumped a 4000 square foot house, a husband, 70% of my belongings, city life, and just about anything else that represented my old life. That was 2002-2006. I got my coach training, and immediately went about double leveling up my integrity and alignment. Talk, walk. Talk, walk. Talk, walk. I was on a super sustainability high. I was even blogging for an organic lifestyle brand. And I still felt like a green fraud for a long time, like I wasn’t “sacrificing” enough unless I was living in the woods with a knife completely off grid. Well, no thank you.

But there is life after the cleanse. At some point you stop getting rid of worldly possessions and maintain some sort of balance of inflow and outflow of goods. At some point you settle on a fair-trade organic diet some percentage of the time, but not every bite. At some point, there is no high left. It just becomes the humdrum life of the everyday. You can’t squeeze more meaning from it. Would I feel just a little bit better if I went to the farmer’s market? Only if I feel like it. It doesn’t define me. I am not THAT.

Over five years after the purge, and I have completely adjusted to my new life. I am thinking about finally getting rid of some of the books that I hang on to. I don’t need to be THAT either. And maybe that is part of the secret to purging. Hold up an item – ask, am I this thing? If you say no, I am not this thing, then you don’t need it. Just keep what you use at least once a year and that which you ARE. Everything else is just crowding your experience of life.

When I am not defined by what I have or have given up, I have a whole new world to create in terms of what I want to be.

4. Justice – There isn’t any.

As a kid, I had a very solid notion of justice. And as I grew older, it was important to me to be part of doing justice. And somewhere along the journey, I woke up to how much that was about me and not about anyone else. The world is not a just place. It isn’t fair. My playing sheriff isn’t going to make it fair. In fact, there are usually so many forces at work, that what is really fair has a very complicated and nearly never ending cascade of actions needed to keep balancing out the fairness.

What I needed most of all was to be okay with myself. Not anyone else. Not anyone’s actions. Just me and mine. This started as a light hint – a sense that I was the only person I had to live with for the rest of my life. Just me. No one else. But it built into an awareness that I should do what I needed to create the life that I wanted. And I didn’t want a life of chasing down other people for what they did or did not do. Creating my own life was much better than trying to bring about justice from others. It may seem really selfish, and perhaps it is. But instead of spending my night worrying about how someone had wronged me, I could sleep peacefully dreaming about what I wanted to do next. My mind-time was free of the anger of being wronged. I simply started to let go.

So when I got divorced, we didn’t fight over money. I didn’t worry about it being a “fair” or “just” division. Instead I focused on what would allow the kids to know they were loved and what was going to foster a healthy relationship with my ex. What did I want to go to bed at night thinking about? The toaster oven? No. I still have random moments where I think, “what was I doing giving him so much of what we built together?” but those moments pass quickly. I can buy the stuff, if I need to. I can’t buy peace of mind or relationships.

Maybe justice is what we can give ourselves if we want to love our own life. This isn’t just “turn the other cheek” – it is turn the other cheek and forget-about-it rolled up together. I am trying to give myself the gift of that mind-time freedom to go about my life starting right now with what I have right here.

Next

I wish someone would tell me what is coming down the pipeline next. What deeply held belief or assumption is going to get deposed next? And how is that going to feel? And what will it then get for me? If you know, please share.

Hold Space

by Thriver

Recently a friend commented on how crucial holding space is. It needs unpacking. What do we mean when we talk about holding space – both interpersonally and in groups?

A room holds space. A circle of chairs holds space. My arms around you hold space for you.

The foundation of a house holds space for the house to be built. It touches the ground. It makes the house stronger and more resilient. But you don’t go looking at the foundation unless you are buying the house or it seems to have trouble.

Holding space seems invisible. It is hard to see, but you can sense it is there. When it isn’t there or isn’t strong, the lack of it is very noticeable.

As a facilitator, holding space for a group of people to do something together involves:

creating physical space that is conducive to the task.

What do people need to do with their bodies?
What relationship do their bodies need to have to each other?
Is there light, fresh air, refreshments to keep bodies fueled?

creating emotional space that enables action on the task at hand.

How do people feel welcomed and invited to engage?
Is the emotional desire to get what matters done greater than the emotional desire to rest, resist, or sabotage?
Are there clear boundaries for good behavior? Who enforces boundaries and how?
Does each participant feel respected and appreciated – valued for their time, skill, and experience?

creating intellectual space that sparks wisdom and creativity.

How do people know they can safely contribute wild ideas?
How is the critical (refining) phase made distinct from the generating phase?
How do people know they can move beyond impressing each other to doing something together?
What helps contributors feel like they are a part of something larger than themselves?

In one on one dynamics, holding space for an individual to do something transformative, vulnerable, or bold mostly involves:

creating physical and intellectual space

Same questions as a group for both, plus
Does the individual feel safe – physically, from distractions, eavesdropping, etc?

creating emotional space

Can they have their experience of their emotions without having to defend, justify, or argue them? (even if that is painful to the listener)
Can they explore a thought or feeling without being interrupted or distracted?
Do they feel a respected? Experience engaged neutral listening?

Holding space for someone is not about responding to the emotions or words and gestures. It is about observing the emotions with the individual. Being beside them in the experience they are having, not as a respondent (even if it is about you), but as a companion in the experience.

And this can make holding space for someone really really hard for us. We have to move out of ourselves and into a space of an objective compassionate observer.

When you make a chair or a house, there is a tangible visibility to the work. You can see it happening, measure it, check against specs, and watch it function over time.

When you are holding space, there is a very intangible and invisible quality to the work. Conspicuousness in holding space shows a lack of grace. You can’t see the “magic” of it. You can’t touch it. When space is well help, people feel at ease, as if they can be themselves. At the highest level, it can be about stepping deeply into another person to experience with them what they notice and feel, which requires an incredible amount of vulnerability on their part.

And this is magnificent gift, when space is well held people can bring forth their best self.

Pragmatism

by Thriver

It may seem like I am an optimist and the whole thrivability effort is full of utopian idealism. I am sure, for me, that is not the case. I am a pragmatist. While I love exploring, if the exploration doesn’t result in something that matters and gets tangibly completed, I feel like I wasted the time. And I abhor wasted time.

Back in September at SOCAP, I was speaking with Whitney of Culture Counts. She has a personality assessment tool, and pointed out that I was primarily someone driven to learn, share, and do what matters. This, of course, flattered me, so I decided it was accurate.

At The Agency, which we just launched, I talk about being bold, pragmatic, and inspired. I carefully chose these three things because I think each alone is a lost cause, but together they are an unstoppable force.

Inspiration – infused with spirit, from a refreshing perspective, forward-looking.
Bold – a real stretch or leap, requires courage and fearlessness, significance.
Pragmatism – getting it done, working with what is.

Pragmatism is about creating a feedback loop from practice to theory and back to practice again. Looking at whole sections of my life, I can see my drive for this. Like when I decided to leave academia because it wasn’t enough about practice in the world at large.

There is a figure eight, cutting back and forth between getting things done and reflecting on what is the right thing to get done based on what has worked.

I can only tolerate so much debate and minutiae before I have to ask: what are we doing? But then, I can only tolerate so much doing before I have to ask: is this the best approach? Is this thought through carefully? Are we using what is known to inform wiser action? I love process, but only process that leads to results and action. Being, and mindfulness feel very important to me. And yet, if being isn’t leading to doing, then it seems like a pretty narcissistic practice.

Dance. Hold the tension between. Watch for indicators of being too far in one direction or the other, then correct course.

Getting what matters done requires a solid focus on getting things done, and a wisdom to know what to do and how to best do it. And that is what The Agency is all about catalyzing.

Transparency and Living Well

by Jean Russell

What is a good life? What is it to act with intention on the life you want for yourself? What matters? What doesn’t? When are you thriving? Are you contributing to thriving around you – in your family, community, and the world?

My whole life I have been gnawing on questions like this. And perhaps I have become so accustomed to acting on my answers without any fanfare that I didn’t stop to think it might be useful to anyone else. I don’t know how you are navigating these changing times. I will be transparent here. If it is useful to you, then I am honored. Everyone must come up with their own solutions, and I worry that this will seem self-righteous (which would offend me). So I qualify – again – your answers are yours. Great. Do that. I am not a better or worse person for my choices. I was triggered to write this post by something Vinay Gupta wrote about what he called the “Precariat” or people living on the edge of the capitalistic system. And then by Venkatesh Rao on Ribbon Farm writing about leaving the middle class. So here is my story.

Deep history. I grew up in the country on some acreage my father took a lot of risk in buying. Our money, tied up in land, with four kids on an assistant professor salary was tough. We took to growing our own food, planted an orchard, and avoided any more loans. When my parents did spend money, they bought as high a quality as they could afford. As intellectuals, my parents were considered upper middle class. As income earners, I wouldn’t think so. That said, my home – which my Dad built himself – looked like something in Metropolitan Home. Always ready for a photo. Immaculate. Designed. Elegant.

I never thought too much about the strange dissonance of living in such elegance while never having new clothes and using the dozen toys we had. (My kids have more toys under their bed than I remember having in my entire childhood, but more on that later.) So I guess I have always straddled the middle class by having certain things be high quality, and the rest be either forgone, DIY, or budget. This is what Venkat and others are calling Trading Up.

Early Independence. I started running my own financial life at 13. When my parents divorced that year, they decided the child support checks would go directly to me. I put it in the bank. When I started my sophomore year at 17, I used the money – not only to pay for college myself – but to get an apartment near campus. I was, for the most part, a saver, and I continued the Trading Up approach. It was almost a game to see how long I could make it last. Money was independence. And I was going to make sure I had independence. Then the child support stopped when I turned 18, and I had to shift to earning a living and using my savings.

Anti-Capitalism. By 21, I was in love with a much older man. A theater director. He wasn’t quite a marxist, and said simply that he was anti-capitalist. Consider it personal tutoring in the pitfalls and consequences of capitalism. The world was unveiled for me, as a new narrative about the system and poverty wove into my thinking. I was losing any desire to be rich as I saw that the rich of the past made their money off the poor people’s labor. After eight years of this sort of thinking, I was tired of being in a head space of theory. I needed to see for myself. I left the art world for international finance – the belly of the beast. [If only they had known that I was, at the same time, getting published in a marxist literary journal!]

The Beast. Within a few months, I could see that the income ladder was a drug. The more you got, the more addicted you were to having it and dependent on it. It was never enough. There were so many wonderful and good hearted people around me, who were totally addicted to this drug – money. I decided not to play the game that way. It was 1999. I got married. We were cash poor, house rich on the North side of Chicago. I was making $800 car payments, which would have been enough money to live on each month in the 90s for me when I was in college for a decade. I married a man who had bought a house at 28 and started fixing it up. He was a hoarder too, but he hoarded stuff where I had hoarded money itself. We went to garage sales every weekend and the flea markets too. Most of our disposable income went toward “investments” in goods. I had the feeling that I could have anything I wanted, if I waited for it to show up. Not because we had a lot of money, but because the pricing in this backyard economy was so reasonable. The 1900 square foot house underwent renovations DIY style, while it also began to fill with stuff. We were way ahead of most of our peers in our “adult-like” activities – having kids, house, car. But they had money to have a nightlife. We didn’t. Were we middle class then? I don’t know. Probably, but not in the usual ways. What else would you call it?

Cashing Out. In 2003, we decided to sell. Our second child was born in ’02, and we wanted to be closer to family, get out of the money pit of the house, and real estate was peeking. (If you need help with drywall, wood floors, cabinet installation, siding, painting, etc, I can probably be useful.) We sold for well over twice what we had bought for. It was like finally getting one big check for all the hours over years laboring on the house. We bought a 4000 square foot monster of a house near where my family lived. It needed no work. There was plenty of room for stuff. And 3.5 bathrooms to clean. There were things I loved about it: the dental work, the two story bay window, the master bath. Upper middle class luxury down to the wood trim. We bought it with cash – no mortgage. We paid off any debt. We bought mid-century modern furniture and a home theater. We had landed. We intentionally stepped off the ladder. We hardly needed to make any money at all. 20K would have cleared our living expenses. I ramped up my business (writing and design work), and we focused on our two kids.

Integrity and Guilt. A few things happened in quick order. I was online and began meeting social entrepreneurs. I was writing, for work, about child survival issues in Africa. And my environmental awareness kicked up a notch. I got training as a neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) coach thanks to my core client. My marriage had been struggling for years at this point and finally collapsed. I had a crisis of integrity. Yes, I had felt like everything I had been doing was intentional and aiming toward a good life, but my perspective had been narrow. I went through a massive overhaul toward a much deeper level of integrity. And along with it suffered a great deal of guilt.

The guilt was accompanied by a lot of gratitude, so I never would have spoken of it as guilt at the time. I was grateful for what life had given me. But underneath that was a guilt over the privilege I felt.

I walked away from the house and my marriage. Did I really want another pinball machine when we had 8 arcade games already? Could I raise my children in a house where their own bedroom was the size of entire homes for millions of people in the world? Could I really have my house be the largest part of my carbon footprint? No. I can make it seem clean in hindsight, but it was messy at the time. Lots of learning. Lots of beating myself up over my choices and their outcomes. Lots of feeling that it was all a wicked mess. And the guilt masked as pride at my frugality, haunted me, driving me toward ever greater frugality.

I rented a small apartment. Took only what I needed from my past life. And switched gears in my work and lifestyle. Since 2005, I have lived off 15-25k a year, supplemented in 2010 by the finalizing of my divorce and cashing out of the house. At first my ex just took care of the kids while I worked on my business and paid child support (which fully supported him). My kids now have nearly every video game console made since Atari came out. And most of the games. A near endless supply of movies and music. Every toy they can dream of (just not when it comes out, they have to wait until it shows up at a garage sale). They have such a state of abundance it is hard to come up with things they want or need. They cycle through things in order not to be crowded out of their giant bedrooms.

After 2 years, I decreased his dependence on me, and he started selling all the stuff he had been hoarding all those years. He now seems to make a decent living as a seller on ebay. He lives in the backyard economy. And I have been living in the gift economy. And I feel guilty of that too.

Appearances. The outward appearance of my lifestyle seems vastly richer than my actual living. Trading Up again. I fly to NYC, San Francisco, New York, and Boston regularly – as in about one a month. And sometimes I fly to other places around the world and country. It looks pretty jet-setting. Few would realize that most of this is paid for by clients or other people and that I can travel at far less expense than the usual middle class person. I stay with friends instead of hotels. I avoid taking taxis. I am humble enough to graciously allow others to buy my meals (and then try to treat someone else so I can keep the karmic flow going). I rarely attend an event that I have to pay for. I ask my network to pitch in to help me financially when I need it and can see value for them. I buy organic, fair trade, lifestyle products, but I may hardly eat for several days. I get frustrated when someone in my network asks for my financial support, and I can’t give it when I want to because there is no such thing as “spare” for me now. I can go days without spending money, and I gawk at the goods for sale wondering how anyone else can be buying all this stuff. Or why they would.

I have learned how to stretch resources out. I know how to live a very frugal life – and live it well. I could write a book on how to move to a town and set up a home in 30 days on $150. I could give classes on finding serenity when you don’t know how next month’s few bills will be paid and you have cut everything out that you could.

But I have become so good at it and stopped chasing money so long ago, that I am now at the opposite end of the spectrum. I don’t seem to remember what abundance feels like. I would feel guilty for having it anyway. I don’t feel like I am thriving. I feel like I don’t catalyze abundance in the network around me either, as I use the spare resources I have learned so well to ferret out. I worry that I lessen the resources available to others doing important work.

I don’t think thriving is just about getting beyond the middle class defaults and money-drug-ladder addiction. I don’t think it is about being so frugal that you wither away into nothing. I think thriving is about making more out of less for more people. Life enabling more life. But maybe someone else has a better idea of how to answer it. I need new answers, of that I am sure. I Traded Up a lot. I still need to be mindful not to “Act Dead” too.

Questions. What I wonder now is how I can be responsible with the gifts I have been given? I have talents that are valuable in the world which others would pay to have access to. And I have denied myself and these people those talents for some misbegotten sense that I was acting with integrity by living so frugally and with what I looked at as high standards. I have a great deal of disdain for sales. Even of my own work, even when I think it is very valuable.

I wonder what it would look like to use what I have and earn what I can and be responsible to myself, my family, and my network with what that brings me.

Any suggestions? Some rebalancing would be really useful, before I start selling my furniture in the name of some grand notion of the boot-strapped entrepreneur.