Human to Human: Blog and Podcast

Today I leave for this event, on health transformation in Washington State. I’m cohosting it with Paul Horton, Faith Trimble, Teresa Posakony, Phil Cass, Chase Napier, and Judy Hall. I’ll have a few days in Seattle before we begin working as design team on Sunday.

This one is unique in that there is an “Executive Day.” It is an option for participation on the first day only of what is a three day event. Yesterday we had a team call, some of which was focussed on design for this first day in particular. Judy Hall asked the most relevant question, I found, “How to be a good sponsor?”

From the conversation that followed, what I heard and stitched together is several chunks of design.

• We need systems awareness. It’s important that all of us continue to see ourselves in a broadly connected system, even in its complexity, rather than in a widely fragmented system. Isolation is a belief of convenience.
• We need a grounding story. In this case, Phil has much to tell of his experience in Columbus, Ohio. The work must be real, not just hypothetical. People will be able to find themselves in that.
• We need to focus on key questions. It is our questions that will shape the work and the integration of people working on it together. The premise her is that there is nothing as useful as a good question to invite people into learning together.
• We need engagement. The primary purpose of a meeting like this is to have people turn to one another. It suggests that wisdom comes from engagement by the group. It matters that we tell our stories with one another as a way of creating fabric to take on such complexity together.
• We need focus on an inner transformation. Phil says it well. “Unless the inner changes, the inner state of the leader, there is not much that changes or sticks in the outer programs. The programs come and go, each with their value. But there is not getting around the need for our inner change.”

Tack on a welcome and check-in at the beginning, and a good check-out at the end. That’s a good day that might look something like this.

 

 

I’ve been looking through a few old folders in which I collect phrases, images, and articles that mean something to me. Check this one from Christina Baldwin, spoken at the Circle Practicum in August 2015.

“There is a kind of grief when you find what you want. It is the grief of fulfillment.”

I’ve seen this kind of grief often, though have not named it so, when people experience a moment of meaning in how they are being together. It’s an awareness of what is. It’s an awareness of what could have been all this time. It’s a grief, perhaps, for the walls of protection that many of us have built around us, thinking them necessary, yet realizing that they aren’t.

Grief has many reaches.

 

 

Excerpted from full article here.

There is a notion that I have learned from one of my primary Circle teachers, Christina Baldwin, that I want to state and then tweak. “Fifteen seconds of silence in contemporary culture,” she says, “can be profound.”

As a culture, I would suggest that many of us have raised chatter — filling communications and relationships rather than listening for the natural silence of them — to an unchallengeable norm. Many people that I meet have grown uncomfortable with even short moments of pause. “They’re awkward.” “They’re uncomfortable.” “They’re unnatural.” We tell ourselves these things, don’t we.

The tweak I want to offer on Christina’s statement is that by extension, “fifteen seconds of listening can also be profound.” And I want more than fifteen seconds of that too.

In my experience, Circle helps four levels of listening to occur: to self, to each other, to the group, to the subtle. Circle, among all other things, is most centrally that for me — a way to listen well in a world that has so frequently replaced listening with noise. Circle is not a whiz-bang, flash-in-the-pan, new-fangled methodology. And no, I don’t believe Circle is a fix all for all situations. But good connecting and good listening will always help.

 

One of the people I’m really interested in learning more from is Pema Chodron. She is an American born Tibetan Buddhist and teacher to one of my closest friends. I have not met Pema in person. I know however, a comfort and a sanity through her words that I hear from a CD collection and from her writings.

One of those bits of sanity for me are these words, “This very moment is the perfect teacher.” This is her opening line from the CD that I’ve been listening to several times over the last week. It has weight. In the last several months, it has become a very important reminder to me. This very moment of frustration. This very moment of fear. This very moment of embarrassment. I’m learning more about this very moment of joy, exhilaration, and laughter also, but those don’t grab my attention in the same way. Perhaps they will in the future, or in one of the upcoming very moments.

Pema is reminding me of something that I learned through my grandmothers. “There is always something to learn.” One of my grandmothers taught me to think this. Another of my grandmothers taught me to feel this. They taught me that there is always a plethora of material. The obvious ones like my early days of university classes in Edmonton, Alberta. Or in the loss of a community league hockey game that I played. They helped also with the more challenging ones. The loss of a girlfriend. The loss of innocence. The death of my father.

There is always something to learn. My grandmothers’ invocations helped me make sense of things, as I was want to do. Just as it is now with Pema’s reminder, this very moment is the perfect teacher. Those words help me to pause just enough, to interrupt runaway thoughts and give my attention to what’s in front of me, and to remember that if nothing else, there is opportunity to make just a bit more sense of this interesting journey that is life, starting with the simple moment in front of me.