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.
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.
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This was originally posted to Facebook and then modified and posted here. On Facebook, the following comments were particularly delightful to me:
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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?
My grandfather was the foreman for bridge-building crews. And for the last year or so, I have been focused on building conceptual bridges from the old economy into the new. Maybe that is a grandpa gene.
As I have been exploring this work of bridging from the old to the new, one of the things I am becoming certain of is the need to give people who resist change enough ground of the familiar to stand on. What of the old way do they get to keep? When they know what is safe for them, it is easier to allow for specific changes and a degree of uncertainty. The uncertainty is contained.
MindTime really got e thinking about this. It is a mapping process for distinguishing between people who think about the future, people who focus on the present, and those who live in the past. As I have always been so future-focused, it didn’t occur to me that other people would be holding onto the present or the past. Once I walked through what those perspectives experience, I realized how really valuable they are. People who help with continuity of the present give us all a sense of one thing leading to the next, that there is predictability about our work, and they keep the systems running. They stabilize the chaos of the future-focused, which can be living in multiple even contradictory futures. Those who are past focused are like memory keepers. They put our past glory into deep memory. They are often creatures of habits. Their attention is not on how to make what they do better, instead they attend to how fantastic (or terrible) it has been and then play it out.
If we want to build bridges from old ways of being and doing, we need to be sensitive to these different mindsets.
In the past, I have adopted chaotic change. If I changed my relationship, I would also change my appearance, my home, my job, or any other elements of my life that I could, all at once. My mother told me, after my divorce, that I should imagine each of these areas like a leg of a stool I am sitting on. When I change too many of them at once, the stool loses balance easily. This has become a powerful metaphor for me. What is it that I am going to hold stable, while I make these adjustments?
Bridge building is like that. It is about helping people acknowledge that what has been done isn’t working anymore, inviting them to the possibility that there might be something that would work better, and then being clear about what they get to keep that is familiar and stabilizing to them.
If we are helping past-focused people transition, we can call into their minds where the individual or group has made transitions before. If you can use an epic adventure narrative, then it helps even more. If we are helping present focused people transition, it is useful to remind them of parts of their day that will remain the same. By making the change appear smaller than the continuity of the past, it becomes less threatening. Then, once it isn’t as much of a threat, we can focus on the value of the benefits to be gained, and living into what the daily activity of that possibility might be like.
I have just returned from an incredible event in Asheville, North Carolina on the DIY Economy. I helped facilitate two sessions on building the coalition for the DIY Economy that Josh Middleman convened. Here are my notes and drawings with brief explanations for those who were not there.
Together, we are building a new, Do-it-yourself style economy. Or maybe a Do-it-ourselves economy. And some of us are taking up the work of building bridges from the old economy to the new economy.
A key, suggested Grace Kim, from GOOD magazine, to forming coalitions is a clear shared goal. After doing much of the work below, the draft statement of our goal is: Acting together to create ___ economic ecosystems grounded in people having agency. We coldn’t fill in the blank in the time allotted. Maybe you can help!
I suggested, reflecting on a values exercise from the first day, that there were three main camps attracted to the DIY Economy: those who value autonomy, those who value social justice, and those who strive for resilience. All of those camps share an interest in individual agency. Together, we discussed. (You could call autonomy the more libertarian or pro-business group, but the value they are honoring is autonomy.)
To encourage us to think beyond our own values to include others, I shared the following graphic from my work with Gerard Senehi on Evolutionary Philanthropy. The evolutionary change with the highest opportunity for impact includes all the other approaches, because it perceives them as pieces contributing to the health of the whole ecosystem.
To work at this Evolutionary level, we must appreciate our differences while bonding over our similarities. Valdis Krebs of orgnet.com uses the phrase, “connect on your similarities and profit from your differences” to capture the idea that if we are too much alike, we don’t add to our creativity by connecting. My ideas are like your ideas. If we have too much difference, we can’t find common language, perspective, or understanding to be creative together. However, the middle range, enables us to use the friction of our differences to increase our creative ability. Thus, by coming together, whether from social justice work, resilience, or from autonomy, the creativity of the whole can be increased.
So how do we get more creative together in building the DIY Economy? We can borrow from the strategies being employed by others and merge them – mashups – with our own. Here is a draft map of some of the ways people are practicing and innovating in the DIY Economy.
To move forward together, we need to continue this conversation, building out our shared goal and the diversity of the tools and strategies. We have several audiences to reach – not just the general public. Here is the map of the spectrum of people for us to be speaking our DIY language with and to:
The next steps for coalition building from here could be:
organizing strategies by which camp and making a more exhaustive list
discovering and mapping specific examples of the strategies
creating a DIY Economy toolkit or game with selections from strategies
map the strategies across domains, for example, which ones are through the legal system and regulation?
inviting event attendees to tell stories on blogs and in magazines, answer DIY economy questions on quora, using the language of our shared goal and being clear which audience from the engagement spectrum they are speaking to.
Much gratitude for all who attended our session including: Josh Middleman, Caroline Murray, Robert Leaver, Rachel Berliner Plattus, David Brodwin, Grace Kim, Mark Frasier, and who else did I miss? Eli?
Things that have been fascinating me for a couple years… things I believe are crucial to the emerging age:
Relationship of node to network in defining context and therefore meaning. Picture the image and quote misattributed to Lincoln on Facebook. Lots of stuff on the web is creating a crisis of context. Globalization produces a crisis of context. Nomadism destabilizes contexts. Blurs boundaries.
Not only is it hard to maintain context once we unhitch from absolutes, we need to get a better grasp on what portability information has. And how it gets corrupted as it travels. I am not going to argue that it should not get corrupted, this is part of cultural dispersion and the lifecycle of ideas, but we need to better understand that lifecycle in a world in which things are evolving at different paces concurrently.
Trust and how it operates with specificity within a context. I don’t just “trust” the way the word is often used vaguely. It is specific. Specific person, specific action, specific timeline. Trust is a lubricant (for better or worse), so how do we encourage it and discourage it when cultivating flows?
Emotions in decision making and motivation. We aren’t as rational as we thought or wanted to be. We are highly emotional. Knowing this about ourselves, how do we use that to our advantage? How do we work gently with these emotional creatures around us?
Boundary spanning. Boundary crossing. The dance of discernment and integration. I think a lot in network diagrams…. I have always been someone on the boundaries between in some critical way. Much of the last 20 years has been about shifting away from silo models, whether in education, organizations, or social networks. We integrate again. And yet, disaggregate too.
Multiplicity. I am not a single identity. I have several online. I have many more inside me. I belong to many tribes, many networks, and many communities. I flow between them, but not with the same people. How does the multiplicity within me and within networks encourage resilience? How does it make things brittle?
Time. Again, this is about discernment. Something is going on with time. Asynchronous communication, synchronous around the globe. Time on a clock. Duration. The varying experience of time. Time as a distance. Time as a frequency or beat within a pattern…. What is going on with time? And how does it influence all of the above.
Do you have insights on these? What might I read to figure out more?
I am incredibly excited to announce our affiliation with ci2iglobal, the Collective Impact and Innovation Institute. We have been hard at work behind the scenes for over a year, working together to share our wisdom, create useful tools, and facilitate powerful events and laboratories. Our event, We_b, in January at the HUB Brussels brought together some of the inspiring innovators we know in the social sector to test out our individual offerings as a collective.
Why am I incredibly excited about this collective and our events?
Because this is the most phenomenal team I have ever been honored to work with. We are 6 women with a cumulative experience of over 100 years in facilitating social change in global contexts! How often are you in a room with that much experience? More than that, we live and work on three continents now, but we have lived and worked on 6 continents. It doesn’t get better than that until you go to Antarctica!
We have experience scaling up social initiatives around the globe, fostering international collaborations, bringing micro-finance to developing countries, measuring impact for Ashoka fellows, and working with the European Council.
I think it is also important that most of us are old enough to have had long careers in international development while being young enough to be early and eager mavens in social technologies. We get social technology. We get cross cultural dialogue. We get impact assessment. Not just ideologically, but practically and experientially.
The power and capacity that puts in the room when we hold an event is enormous, but that isn’t all. There is more! All of us have done enough of the personal development and group process work to show up in these spaces with egos in check, curiosity in front, and driven by purpose focused on the group outcome.
Somehow the magic combination of this led all of us to explore system sciences and thus we come at our social change work with a core value being the health and evolution of ecosystems – be they human or environmental.
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For the last year or two I have been working on this Action Spectrum model. It started with conversations with Herman Wagter, who offered the basic elements and configuration. Then it evolved in conversations with Valdis Krebs, discussing the social network applicaitons. Concurrently, I was in dialogue with Gerard Senehi discussing transformational philanthropy. I have presented it in conversations with philanthropy professional, social change agents, and thought leaders of various disciplines. I continue to be surprised and delighted by just how powerfully people respond. Hours later, I find people sketching the concentric circles and speaking into them. I hope you find it useful too.
Fit
To me, the Action Spectrum is a framework for understanding the choices we make about the actions we take. It enables us to see these actions as a portfolio where we can perceive risk and understand metrics to expect.
“In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.” – Darwin
Fit, to me, is not about strength. It is about right placement. The three-toed sloth is not the strongest creature, it simply fits with the environment it lives in, and thus endures.
I am very keen to steal the term “ecosystem-based adaptation” from the climate change contingent and apply it to business ecosystems. Let us point very directly to what pivots are all about – improving the fit in the ecosystem, for example. I believe the action spectrum is the framework for helping us develop our fit and take appropriate actions within our ecosystems.
Intention
This fall I intend to write another book, at the urging of Grant McCracken, this time on the action spectrum, what I call multi-membrane organizations (or living business ecosystems), and risk management. Christelle Van Ham and I are discussing her risk management framework and how she and I can do that work together. Goodie! A writing partner!
Enjoy!
I would love to hear how this feels to you, where you can use it, and what stories you see as examples.
You know when something bugs you enough, you just have to give voice to it. This is one of those moments. I guess I make some pretty big judgments about public speakers based on their ability to answers questions in public forum. Often based on standards I am not sure I could meet, but so it goes. Today, I will play the critic.
Last fall I had a chance to see Tufte speak at his art gallery. I arrived a tad late and snuck into a chair off to the side. He took questions at the end. As he answered each question, my jaw lowered closer to the floor. I slouched down in my seat, feeling defeated. My hero! He was failing me! Later I was able to come back to an appreciation of his work, even if I don’t appreciate his ability to respond to questions. But let’s look for a minute at what triggered me to sit there aghast.
1. Asked a question about infographics for social media, Tufte basically responded that professional journalists do a good job of creating ways to understand this data. This answer completely fails to understand the nature of the medium… the publsihing by anyone should also be data-fied by anyone and not left to the old world of media.
2. Asked a question about infographics for biologists by a biologist, Tufte said that Scientific American and another magazine have great infographics by biologists. For all he knew the questioner was one of those published in said journal looking for more help! He didn’t do anything to narrow down the question to respond to the specific needs of the person asking, and thus made a vacuous circuitous answer that provided nothing of value. And it took him seven minutes of pontificating to do it.
Part of this issue is that many of us are not good at asking questions. It isn’t just Tufte being dull.
Fascinating
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing the totally fascinating Alain de Botton speak on his latest book, Religion for Atheists. First, let’s be clear that Alain demonstrates fabulous speaking talent. His stories are delightful, the logic of them disruptive and curious, and the pattern he uses is both refreshing and at the same time clear enough that you know that you too can repeat what he is doing with other cases you think of. The success of his talk comes from the alignment of layers of skill. He asks interesting questions that makes you see something familiar in an unexpected way. He selects stories that take you on a journey of experiencing to see for yourself. He has an emotionally engaging and comfortable presentation style that works for his presence of being. All those things we love in a compelling speaker, and more than that he can answer questions. Or things that are offered as questions but aren’t indeed questions.
People who said things during the question period at the end of the talk did one of several things that drive me totally nuts with that kind of slow-down-for-the-accident fascination…
Let’s make a list of all the fascinating car-wreck ways to “ask” questions:
Minutiae. Pedantic. Make a statement adding something minor and unimportant to the topic for broad audience. Shows a profound disregard for other people’s time as well as lack of being able to discern relevance and importance. Usually publicly perceived as someone over-ambitious to be acknowledged as adding value.
Evangelist. Affirm the topic of the talk and add a personal quip to it. Again, shows a lack of regard for time constraints and relevance. Usually publicly perceived as a narcissist or pawning for affection.
Contrarian. Finds any random point to disagree with. I say random because the effort seems so clearly to be an attempt to spark verbal brawls and so little to do with finding deeper understanding. Whether they admit it or not, the goal seems to be to diminish the speaker. Usually publicly perceived as a bright individual with a vengeful need to upset others through their talents.
Wanderer. Means well, but can’t focus their thoughts well enough to offer any clarity in their inquiry. You wonder, did they ask a question? What was it? How many parts did it have? How are those things related? Reveals disorganized thinking. Associative thinking is great for brainstorming, it isn’t appropriate in public questions responding to a prepared talk. Usually publicly perceived as a naive fool, harmless beyond the time consumed by their traveling story/statement/question.
What other characters have you seen show up?
And I can certainly think of times I have played most of these roles. It is hard to meet someone you revere and think clear enough to ask a decent question.
Alain did a brilliant job of dealing with each of these characters as they showed up to “ask” a question. For bonus points he would even answer a two part question to completion, even if answering the first part led him through a story. He was gracious and good natured. A model of elegance. If I achieve such a level of skill when I am twice his age, I will be quite happy.
When I read How to Ask a Question in the Chronicle, I thought it would be useful to summarize for you here:
Pick one thing you want to know – that you think others might want to know to.
Check to see if you are coming from curiosity. If not, be quite until you are.
Whether you agree or disagree with the points stated, does your offering to the dialogue add value and display respect?
Does it feel like improv? a) does the content feel fresh or new? b) do you “yes, and” to allow the speaker ground to stand on even if you qualify a statement or clarify a concept? c) does it feel like we are here together, sharing the stage for a larger audience?
As the article linked above suggests, avoid the meta-speech. I wonder if this point involves meta-speech already? Say the point, not the internal dialogue you have.
If you are going to disagree or start a debate, begin by voicing respect for the speaker. Say what you like abou their perceptiveness or viewpoint, then ask about the point where your view diverges from theirs.
Watch the “I am a” statements. Identity politics is obscures how different we each are. You are you, speak from that and for only yourself unless you officially represent a group.
We are here to learn from and with each other. Let’s foster a question/answer culture that promotes it.
ps. most of these “ask a question” points also apply to conversations and apply broadly. 😉
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I was an efficiency nut as a kid. I remember figuring out that 9 bites was the most efficient number of bites to eat, politely, a piece of bread or to cut french toast. I love being really, really productive. And I can be so quick and effective that the dishes are done and the kitchen cleaned while you slipped into the bathroom for 2 minutes.
However, being productive when we are talking about creative acts is completely different. It is not a matter of having a system to handle all the details of things to be done. It is not a matter of staying focused. So much of this seems to be left-overs from the factory world. Start the clock, run the system, get the output. Right, well the rewards for productivity of mechanical tasks need to be different than the rewards for creativity. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the productivity process for creative tasks differs significantly from mechanical tasks.
Creativity is a matter of grace and the muse. Yes, there are tricks to bringing the muse to you. I say muse, because this just seems magical. Not because it necessarily is magical, but because we just don’t know enough about it. So, what do you do about it?
Yes, you can just sit there until something comes out and keep working it until it gets decent. But that is, in my experience, a paltry second to the brilliance of the muse when she arrives. GTD is not going to help me get a poem written, an innovative approach to approaching my market, nor a creative solution to the challenge in my business. It will help me deliver on the tasks I put into my plan.
So I have other games and techniques. This is what works for me. Your mileage… may vary… of course.
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Take the pressure off
You know when you are trying to remember a word or reference and you can’t do it? Then you shift your attention elsewhere, and suddenly the answer comes to you? Yep. Take the pressure off. I walk, do the dishes, or otherwise occupy myself until the insight comes. Creativity seems to often be a background process – it isn’t about focusing the conscious mind on it. It is about letting the rest of the mind make the connections.
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Hold Space
When the slightest hint of muse is present, I put other things on hold and listen. I regularly juggle my tasks for the day to accommodate the muse when she arrives. If now is the moment to draw the graphic or write the article, then I do it now. If it doesn’t feel like now is the moment, I move onto other things until the feeling hits me to do it. I know that seems passive or irresponsible. Too bad. Do what works.
Last summer I got stuck trying to figure out how I wanted to facilitate an event. I was stumped the day before the plan was due. The client wanted a lot of work across different dimensions pushed into a short timeframe. I slept on it. I woke up still unsure. I walked away from my desk, and I did something else for awhile. I felt nervous that the idea might not come, but I decided to trust myself that it would. In my walk down the hallway back to my desk – boom, insight, and the whole plan came into my mind ready to be written up. It was done with an hour to spare. After the event, the client gave me one of the best testimonials I have ever received.
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Give Yourself What You Need
If you are an introvert, and I am, then allow lots of being alone time before expecting anything creative to emerge. It can take a whole day. I know it isn’t in the planning calendar, but trust the process. If you are an extrovert, go do that.
Time and again when I try to force myself to get work done on the clock, and that work is creative, it seems to take three times as long. I can’t focus. I resist myself. I have learned to just allow myself the hour of doing something else so that I will cooperate with myself when I attempt the task.
Not everyone has the luxury of doing this. And it does seem to me like a luxury. But I have learned to give myself that so that I can enjoy and be effective when I do the work.
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Follow the Seasons
I allow myself a “winter” to let things percolate while I appear dormant. Then I get excited in my “spring” with the bursting forth of new ideas. Next, I care for them over “summer” and harvest in the “fall.”
I have had lots of conversations with colleagues about the emotional dip after a creative surge. When I offer the seasons metaphor, there seems to be a giant internal sigh of relief. As if we expected ourselves to, once we create output, to continue at that level indefinitely. Or we expect ourselves to get emotionally high from it. However, that doesn’t take into account what motivates you to be creative. If you want recognition, then you might get the emotional high once the work is out in the world being acknowledged. But if your motivation is connecting with others in a co-creative process, then your emotional high might be in the middle of the effort. Learn what gives you the emotional high from creative efforts, nurture that, and allow yourself space for the other emotions that flow in the seasons of your creativity. Your flow. Not the expectations of others.
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Productivity-obsessed people seem to think they can have harvest season all year long, as if they are optimizing a factory. If they could just get the right mechanics in place, then they can perform at their top levels of creativity continuously. Nope. Not me. I don’t work that way. And I allow that and work with it. I think it brings my work freshness, aliveness, and vitality to not be pushed through some deadline-driven productivity machine.
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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.
https://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.png00Thriverhttps://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.pngThriver2012-03-29 20:30:292016-03-29 14:09:57Nobody Warned Me
Multi-dimensional Constructions
by ThriverFor 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.
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This was originally posted to Facebook and then modified and posted here. On Facebook, the following comments were particularly delightful to me:
Alexander Laszlo
Charles Hope
John Manoochehri
Facilitation Algebra
by ThriverWe 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:
Bridging
by ThriverMy grandfather was the foreman for bridge-building crews. And for the last year or so, I have been focused on building conceptual bridges from the old economy into the new. Maybe that is a grandpa gene.
As I have been exploring this work of bridging from the old to the new, one of the things I am becoming certain of is the need to give people who resist change enough ground of the familiar to stand on. What of the old way do they get to keep? When they know what is safe for them, it is easier to allow for specific changes and a degree of uncertainty. The uncertainty is contained.
MindTime really got e thinking about this. It is a mapping process for distinguishing between people who think about the future, people who focus on the present, and those who live in the past. As I have always been so future-focused, it didn’t occur to me that other people would be holding onto the present or the past. Once I walked through what those perspectives experience, I realized how really valuable they are. People who help with continuity of the present give us all a sense of one thing leading to the next, that there is predictability about our work, and they keep the systems running. They stabilize the chaos of the future-focused, which can be living in multiple even contradictory futures. Those who are past focused are like memory keepers. They put our past glory into deep memory. They are often creatures of habits. Their attention is not on how to make what they do better, instead they attend to how fantastic (or terrible) it has been and then play it out.
If we want to build bridges from old ways of being and doing, we need to be sensitive to these different mindsets.
In the past, I have adopted chaotic change. If I changed my relationship, I would also change my appearance, my home, my job, or any other elements of my life that I could, all at once. My mother told me, after my divorce, that I should imagine each of these areas like a leg of a stool I am sitting on. When I change too many of them at once, the stool loses balance easily. This has become a powerful metaphor for me. What is it that I am going to hold stable, while I make these adjustments?
Bridge building is like that. It is about helping people acknowledge that what has been done isn’t working anymore, inviting them to the possibility that there might be something that would work better, and then being clear about what they get to keep that is familiar and stabilizing to them.
If we are helping past-focused people transition, we can call into their minds where the individual or group has made transitions before. If you can use an epic adventure narrative, then it helps even more. If we are helping present focused people transition, it is useful to remind them of parts of their day that will remain the same. By making the change appear smaller than the continuity of the past, it becomes less threatening. Then, once it isn’t as much of a threat, we can focus on the value of the benefits to be gained, and living into what the daily activity of that possibility might be like.
DIY Economy
by ThriverI have just returned from an incredible event in Asheville, North Carolina on the DIY Economy. I helped facilitate two sessions on building the coalition for the DIY Economy that Josh Middleman convened. Here are my notes and drawings with brief explanations for those who were not there.
Together, we are building a new, Do-it-yourself style economy. Or maybe a Do-it-ourselves economy. And some of us are taking up the work of building bridges from the old economy to the new economy.
A key, suggested Grace Kim, from GOOD magazine, to forming coalitions is a clear shared goal. After doing much of the work below, the draft statement of our goal is: Acting together to create ___ economic ecosystems grounded in people having agency. We coldn’t fill in the blank in the time allotted. Maybe you can help!
I suggested, reflecting on a values exercise from the first day, that there were three main camps attracted to the DIY Economy: those who value autonomy, those who value social justice, and those who strive for resilience. All of those camps share an interest in individual agency. Together, we discussed. (You could call autonomy the more libertarian or pro-business group, but the value they are honoring is autonomy.)
To encourage us to think beyond our own values to include others, I shared the following graphic from my work with Gerard Senehi on Evolutionary Philanthropy. The evolutionary change with the highest opportunity for impact includes all the other approaches, because it perceives them as pieces contributing to the health of the whole ecosystem.
To work at this Evolutionary level, we must appreciate our differences while bonding over our similarities. Valdis Krebs of orgnet.com uses the phrase, “connect on your similarities and profit from your differences” to capture the idea that if we are too much alike, we don’t add to our creativity by connecting. My ideas are like your ideas. If we have too much difference, we can’t find common language, perspective, or understanding to be creative together. However, the middle range, enables us to use the friction of our differences to increase our creative ability. Thus, by coming together, whether from social justice work, resilience, or from autonomy, the creativity of the whole can be increased.
So how do we get more creative together in building the DIY Economy? We can borrow from the strategies being employed by others and merge them – mashups – with our own. Here is a draft map of some of the ways people are practicing and innovating in the DIY Economy.
To move forward together, we need to continue this conversation, building out our shared goal and the diversity of the tools and strategies. We have several audiences to reach – not just the general public. Here is the map of the spectrum of people for us to be speaking our DIY language with and to:
The next steps for coalition building from here could be:
Much gratitude for all who attended our session including: Josh Middleman, Caroline Murray, Robert Leaver, Rachel Berliner Plattus, David Brodwin, Grace Kim, Mark Frasier, and who else did I miss? Eli?
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Some of this harkens back to the work I was fascinated with: Field Building – Digital Media, Play, Persuasion, and Field Building, Motivating Participation, and What is Field Building.
Recent Fascinations
by ThriverThings that have been fascinating me for a couple years… things I believe are crucial to the emerging age:
Do you have insights on these? What might I read to figure out more?
We_b2 and Ci2iGlobal
by ThriverI am incredibly excited to announce our affiliation with ci2iglobal, the Collective Impact and Innovation Institute. We have been hard at work behind the scenes for over a year, working together to share our wisdom, create useful tools, and facilitate powerful events and laboratories. Our event, We_b, in January at the HUB Brussels brought together some of the inspiring innovators we know in the social sector to test out our individual offerings as a collective.
Standing on the wisdom of that experience, we will be having We_b2 in Brussels June 16-17.
Are you (or someone you know) looking for new ways to:
If so, then make plans to come join us.
Why am I incredibly excited about this collective and our events?
Because this is the most phenomenal team I have ever been honored to work with. We are 6 women with a cumulative experience of over 100 years in facilitating social change in global contexts! How often are you in a room with that much experience? More than that, we live and work on three continents now, but we have lived and worked on 6 continents. It doesn’t get better than that until you go to Antarctica!
We have experience scaling up social initiatives around the globe, fostering international collaborations, bringing micro-finance to developing countries, measuring impact for Ashoka fellows, and working with the European Council.
I think it is also important that most of us are old enough to have had long careers in international development while being young enough to be early and eager mavens in social technologies. We get social technology. We get cross cultural dialogue. We get impact assessment. Not just ideologically, but practically and experientially.
The power and capacity that puts in the room when we hold an event is enormous, but that isn’t all. There is more! All of us have done enough of the personal development and group process work to show up in these spaces with egos in check, curiosity in front, and driven by purpose focused on the group outcome.
Somehow the magic combination of this led all of us to explore system sciences and thus we come at our social change work with a core value being the health and evolution of ecosystems – be they human or environmental.
I find that to be incredibly exciting. Intoxicating, in fact. come get intoxicated with wisdom for your life and social change efforts. June 16-17, Brussels HUB for the We_b2 Co-Creation Lab.
Action Spectrum
by ThriverFor the last year or two I have been working on this Action Spectrum model. It started with conversations with Herman Wagter, who offered the basic elements and configuration. Then it evolved in conversations with Valdis Krebs, discussing the social network applicaitons. Concurrently, I was in dialogue with Gerard Senehi discussing transformational philanthropy. I have presented it in conversations with philanthropy professional, social change agents, and thought leaders of various disciplines. I continue to be surprised and delighted by just how powerfully people respond. Hours later, I find people sketching the concentric circles and speaking into them. I hope you find it useful too.
Fit
To me, the Action Spectrum is a framework for understanding the choices we make about the actions we take. It enables us to see these actions as a portfolio where we can perceive risk and understand metrics to expect.
“In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.” – Darwin
Fit, to me, is not about strength. It is about right placement. The three-toed sloth is not the strongest creature, it simply fits with the environment it lives in, and thus endures.
I am very keen to steal the term “ecosystem-based adaptation” from the climate change contingent and apply it to business ecosystems. Let us point very directly to what pivots are all about – improving the fit in the ecosystem, for example. I believe the action spectrum is the framework for helping us develop our fit and take appropriate actions within our ecosystems.
Intention
This fall I intend to write another book, at the urging of Grant McCracken, this time on the action spectrum, what I call multi-membrane organizations (or living business ecosystems), and risk management. Christelle Van Ham and I are discussing her risk management framework and how she and I can do that work together. Goodie! A writing partner!
Enjoy!
I would love to hear how this feels to you, where you can use it, and what stories you see as examples.
The Art of Dialogue in Public Space
by ThriverBugs
Last fall I had a chance to see Tufte speak at his art gallery. I arrived a tad late and snuck into a chair off to the side. He took questions at the end. As he answered each question, my jaw lowered closer to the floor. I slouched down in my seat, feeling defeated. My hero! He was failing me! Later I was able to come back to an appreciation of his work, even if I don’t appreciate his ability to respond to questions. But let’s look for a minute at what triggered me to sit there aghast.
1. Asked a question about infographics for social media, Tufte basically responded that professional journalists do a good job of creating ways to understand this data. This answer completely fails to understand the nature of the medium… the publsihing by anyone should also be data-fied by anyone and not left to the old world of media.
2. Asked a question about infographics for biologists by a biologist, Tufte said that Scientific American and another magazine have great infographics by biologists. For all he knew the questioner was one of those published in said journal looking for more help! He didn’t do anything to narrow down the question to respond to the specific needs of the person asking, and thus made a vacuous circuitous answer that provided nothing of value. And it took him seven minutes of pontificating to do it.
Part of this issue is that many of us are not good at asking questions. It isn’t just Tufte being dull.
Fascinating
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing the totally fascinating Alain de Botton speak on his latest book, Religion for Atheists. First, let’s be clear that Alain demonstrates fabulous speaking talent. His stories are delightful, the logic of them disruptive and curious, and the pattern he uses is both refreshing and at the same time clear enough that you know that you too can repeat what he is doing with other cases you think of. The success of his talk comes from the alignment of layers of skill. He asks interesting questions that makes you see something familiar in an unexpected way. He selects stories that take you on a journey of experiencing to see for yourself. He has an emotionally engaging and comfortable presentation style that works for his presence of being. All those things we love in a compelling speaker, and more than that he can answer questions. Or things that are offered as questions but aren’t indeed questions.
People who said things during the question period at the end of the talk did one of several things that drive me totally nuts with that kind of slow-down-for-the-accident fascination…
Let’s make a list of all the fascinating car-wreck ways to “ask” questions:
What other characters have you seen show up?
And I can certainly think of times I have played most of these roles. It is hard to meet someone you revere and think clear enough to ask a decent question.
Alain did a brilliant job of dealing with each of these characters as they showed up to “ask” a question. For bonus points he would even answer a two part question to completion, even if answering the first part led him through a story. He was gracious and good natured. A model of elegance. If I achieve such a level of skill when I am twice his age, I will be quite happy.
How to Ask a Question
photo credit: quinn.anya
When I read How to Ask a Question in the Chronicle, I thought it would be useful to summarize for you here:
We are here to learn from and with each other. Let’s foster a question/answer culture that promotes it.
ps. most of these “ask a question” points also apply to conversations and apply broadly. 😉
Creative Productivity is not Mechanical
by ThriverHowever, being productive when we are talking about creative acts is completely different. It is not a matter of having a system to handle all the details of things to be done. It is not a matter of staying focused. So much of this seems to be left-overs from the factory world. Start the clock, run the system, get the output. Right, well the rewards for productivity of mechanical tasks need to be different than the rewards for creativity. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the productivity process for creative tasks differs significantly from mechanical tasks.
Creativity is a matter of grace and the muse. Yes, there are tricks to bringing the muse to you. I say muse, because this just seems magical. Not because it necessarily is magical, but because we just don’t know enough about it. So, what do you do about it?
Yes, you can just sit there until something comes out and keep working it until it gets decent. But that is, in my experience, a paltry second to the brilliance of the muse when she arrives. GTD is not going to help me get a poem written, an innovative approach to approaching my market, nor a creative solution to the challenge in my business. It will help me deliver on the tasks I put into my plan.
So I have other games and techniques. This is what works for me. Your mileage… may vary… of course.
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Take the pressure off
You know when you are trying to remember a word or reference and you can’t do it? Then you shift your attention elsewhere, and suddenly the answer comes to you? Yep. Take the pressure off. I walk, do the dishes, or otherwise occupy myself until the insight comes. Creativity seems to often be a background process – it isn’t about focusing the conscious mind on it. It is about letting the rest of the mind make the connections.
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Hold Space
When the slightest hint of muse is present, I put other things on hold and listen. I regularly juggle my tasks for the day to accommodate the muse when she arrives. If now is the moment to draw the graphic or write the article, then I do it now. If it doesn’t feel like now is the moment, I move onto other things until the feeling hits me to do it. I know that seems passive or irresponsible. Too bad. Do what works.
Last summer I got stuck trying to figure out how I wanted to facilitate an event. I was stumped the day before the plan was due. The client wanted a lot of work across different dimensions pushed into a short timeframe. I slept on it. I woke up still unsure. I walked away from my desk, and I did something else for awhile. I felt nervous that the idea might not come, but I decided to trust myself that it would. In my walk down the hallway back to my desk – boom, insight, and the whole plan came into my mind ready to be written up. It was done with an hour to spare. After the event, the client gave me one of the best testimonials I have ever received.
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Give Yourself What You Need
If you are an introvert, and I am, then allow lots of being alone time before expecting anything creative to emerge. It can take a whole day. I know it isn’t in the planning calendar, but trust the process. If you are an extrovert, go do that.
Time and again when I try to force myself to get work done on the clock, and that work is creative, it seems to take three times as long. I can’t focus. I resist myself. I have learned to just allow myself the hour of doing something else so that I will cooperate with myself when I attempt the task.
Not everyone has the luxury of doing this. And it does seem to me like a luxury. But I have learned to give myself that so that I can enjoy and be effective when I do the work.
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Follow the Seasons
I allow myself a “winter” to let things percolate while I appear dormant. Then I get excited in my “spring” with the bursting forth of new ideas. Next, I care for them over “summer” and harvest in the “fall.”
I have had lots of conversations with colleagues about the emotional dip after a creative surge. When I offer the seasons metaphor, there seems to be a giant internal sigh of relief. As if we expected ourselves to, once we create output, to continue at that level indefinitely. Or we expect ourselves to get emotionally high from it. However, that doesn’t take into account what motivates you to be creative. If you want recognition, then you might get the emotional high once the work is out in the world being acknowledged. But if your motivation is connecting with others in a co-creative process, then your emotional high might be in the middle of the effort. Learn what gives you the emotional high from creative efforts, nurture that, and allow yourself space for the other emotions that flow in the seasons of your creativity. Your flow. Not the expectations of others.
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Productivity-obsessed people seem to think they can have harvest season all year long, as if they are optimizing a factory. If they could just get the right mechanics in place, then they can perform at their top levels of creativity continuously. Nope. Not me. I don’t work that way. And I allow that and work with it. I think it brings my work freshness, aliveness, and vitality to not be pushed through some deadline-driven productivity machine.
Nobody Warned Me
by ThriverNobody 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.
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.