Human to Human • Tenneson Woolf

December 14, 2016

Core Practices of Life-Affirming Leaders

From my work in the 90s with The Berkana Institute, where we often affirmed, “Whatever the problem, community is the answer.”

Meg Wheatley wrote these practices. I found myself looking for them as a resource to use at the Engaging Shadow series that Kinde Nebeker and I are hosting. Engaging shadow, or as one participant spoke, befriending shadow is important work that connects to these great practices.

Core Practices of Life-Affirming Leaders

Here are some of the behaviors and practices of leaders who are able to nourish and evoke the best qualities in people. By doing so, these leaders affirm life’s capacities to self-organize in creative, sustainable, and generous ways.

Know they cannot lead alone. In these complex times, no one person is smart enough to know what to do. Many different perspectives are necessary in order to gain a fuller understanding of what is happening.

Have more faith in people than they do in themselves. This is especially important in organizations and nations where people have been oppressed or told they’re not capable of being creative or powerful. Leaders patiently and courageously insist on peoples’ participation as the means to discover their potential and contribute to the organization.

Recognize human diversity as a gift, and the human spirit as a blessing. We each see the world differently. When we share these unique perceptions, we gain a larger perspective of what’s going on. And it is only our great human spirits that bless us with hope and possibility even in the worst circumstances.

Act on the fact that people only support what they create. And only act responsibly for what they care about. Therefore, leaders engage people in anything that affects them. Decision-making processes expand to include more and more voices.

Solve unsolvable problems by bringing new voices into the room. Systems grow healthier as they connect with those formerly excluded. New and different information changes how we define the problem, and make new solutions available.

Use learning as the fundamental process for resiliency, change and growth. When reflection and learning are built in to all activities and projects, people become intelligent. We quickly find workable and innovative solutions. Without reflection, we keep repeating our mistakes.

Offer purposeful work as the necessary condition for people to engage fully. When people know why they’re doing their work and connect with the purpose of it, they then assume responsibility for that work. They become creative and work hard to find the most effective solutions.

December 13, 2016

Man Up

To a mythology of perpetuated unmatured psychology and misdirected masculinity that is wreaking havoc, and yet oddly inspiring evolutionary directive.

Thanks Roq.

Thanks Guante, American musician, hip hop artist, National Slam Poet Champ — among other things.

Ten responses to the phrase “Man Up” in three and a half minutes.

December 12, 2016

On Shadow — To Try

engaging-shadow

Last week at the first session of our series, The Inner and Outer of Evolutionary Leadership: Engaging Shadow, Kinde Nebeker offered a “To Try.” It was homework. It was practice. It was a call to attentiveness.

Feel it.
Be willing to explore if there is a kernel of truth in it.
Follow clues, and feel it again, now for difference.

This is solid advice and practice that I’ve taken to heart myself in the last four days. And even though it is practice that feels familiar, there is something additionally powerful in being reminded. What’s happening for me is what Kinde and I invoked in the group — “you will get what you are willing to look for.”

It’s feeling like a lot. Mine is a kind of terror, mentally and emotionally, about a suppressed thought that I generally have preferred, unconsciously, to keep suppressed. That thought has even more power when connected to a few life experiences that were painful. It’s easy to see how the movie playing inside of me can become so rigid, fearful, and punishing.

As Kinde and I shared with others in the session, when working with shadow, there are some closely related landscapes. Trauma is one. Conflict is another (or at least a gateway in to shadow). Even sabotage. And, there are many important and related ways of working with these. Therapy and counseling come to mind. The Work of Byron Katie is another, that is so good an interrupting the movie.

Feel it — this is very much about being willing to stay, unprocessed as Kinde reminds me, in the feeling. The ickiness. The painfulness. The fearfulness. The immediate impulse to deny. My partner Teresa Posakony teaches that these are all responses of contraction, neurally entrained liked carved canyons in our minds and psyches, that activate our reptilian brains — the ones that know mostly flight or fight. She says, “the part of our brain that we need for such experiences is mostly offline because we default to contraction.” Stay in the feeling. The stickiness. The ache in the back of the neck. The ever so slight turning of the head away, as if we can look away, and avoid, making it disappear. We all do this — let’s not kid ourselves. This is a call for awareness and interruption, not perfection and denial.

Explore the kernel of truth — of the “it.” That nasty thought or feeling that we are trying to stay clear of. I love what my friend Caitlin Frost does with these kernels in her Work of Byron Katie. “It may be true, which can be freeing to realize. Just because it is true some of the time doesn’t make it true all of the time.” I find that the sharing of these embarrassing kernels can become such a humanizing process together. We get to recognize a widely shared experience, shifting it from a mythology of extremely isolated.

Follow clues — I love the way Kinde speaks of this as clues to liberation. It’s not court room testimony clues that we are looking for. It’s not proof and absolutism. Nor is it a mind game to convince us that everything is OK. It’s clues that unlock the hold that a blind spot, or a shadow-infused stress, or a trauma-impacted rigidity can have on us. The surprising (and yet not) thing is how many clues there typically are. It turns out the world is not colluding against us.

I’m grateful for this simple “To Try.” I’m excited to move our attention in the next session from this awareness of shadow in self to exploring how shadow becomes part of groups. And I continue to hope for an evolution of who we are as humans, and how we are together, in the needs of communities, large and small, that we claim as dear.

December 8, 2016

Lose Your Mind

bowen-forest

Ever wanted to lose your mind? I know, it sounds crazy. Cuckoo. In my family growing up, the phrase would have been “losing your marbles.”

At Soultime, Men’s Retreat last weekend, one part of the ritual that we created with each other was a time to be lost. Not a lot of time. For most it was a couple of minutes with eyes closed in the forest, and guided by another person who didn’t have eyes closed. It was safe. For me, I wanted it to be as long as possible. This symbolic act matched a part of the story we were engaging for the weekend, a story of people not being seen for their gifts, and thus getting lost.

Creating the ritual at Soultime is a choice. It’s never the same, which is part of what gives it life. It usually has four or five parts to it. It typically takes 1-2 hours to prepare, and 2-4 hours to do. It’s a time to not look at time. Just be in the ritual.

I didn’t know why I wanted to get lost last weekend. But it was clear, I really wanted it. It was the thing I most cared about when we were first imaging what might happen. I was hoping “lost” would last for a couple of hours, just that part of it. I felt a bit weird saying it out loud with the others, and in reflecting later. “I just wanted to be lost. I wanted the feeling.” Of course, a part of them was wondering what was up for me in this. I was too.

A few days later one of the key reasons for wanting to get lost became more clear for me. I wanted to lose my mind. I wanted to be in less thoughts. Less rational thinking. Less planning. More feeling. More freedom with time. More “stay here until we are done.” I wanted to give my rational mind, my speed and efficiency mind, a rest. Some time out. For me it meant sitting in the forest seen above. I had good rain proof pants, a good coat, hat, gloves. It meant feeling the ground and the surroundings around me. The slender tree trunk, three inches in diameter that I would lean against for a moment, feeling it’s strength and anchoring. It meant feeling the moss under me, picking some of it, and smelling it. Feeling it in my fingers. It meant putting my forehead on the ground.

Not seeing evokes a very different presence in life. A paying attention to many other layers of sensation. Paying attention to intuition. Perhaps those are all some form of mind, sure. But they feel like a different part. I have full intent to keep my rational mind — it serves me very well. However, what became clear to me is that the experience of losing mind, getting lost a bit, can be quite a comforting thing. Like remembering an old friend.

Thanks to the Soultime men for the journey together.