Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

As of this afternoon, my latest post has been replaced by spam in Google Reader. I’m mystified because the feed content in Feedburner appears to be okay. If any of you have any ideas about how to fix this, I’d sure appreciate your help and advice. Please send me an email. I’ve changed my Google password for sure. Spam is definitely one of the shadows of social media.

My prayer: Lord, protect us from those who create this wreckage for a living.

I know. I know. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

The term “visionary leader” usually refers to a gifted person who sees farther into the future, inspires us with rich possibilities, and acts to tangibly realize a compelling dream. The gift this person possesses can be in any discipline, from technology, sciences, medicine, music, to politics or social change.

Okay. So far so good. AND, today, in organizations, above and beyond technical or purely managerial gifts, the need is also for visionary leaders who can facilitate a major shift in culture — in our human relationships at work. I would call this person a visionary workplace leader.

I have been blessed in my work as a consultant to meet a few such people. They see farther into the human dimensions of our enterprises. Despite the other business challenges that are present, these are folks who simply love to work in the garden of helping themselves and others grow. They see potential in everybody and are constantly wondering how to help this person or that one past their conditioning and self-made limits.

I am reminded, for example, of a client business owner who offered support to one of his managers, a key report who had been working in a virtually 24/7 mode since he had been promoted, a year or so earlier. Everything was being handled personally by the manager and with withering perfectionism. He was not delegating effectively at all and the 3 AM emails were getting completely out of hand. As a result of this schedule, the manager’s capacity to make good judgments had gone down somewhat, so despite the perfectionism his judgments and decisions were also sometimes mistakes. In addition, the manager’s family life had been deeply affected. He could never let down, and when he finally did, too often he became little more than an irritable couch vegetable. My client, the manager’s boss, was so concerned about the manager that he hired me to work with them both as a coach. The manager was blaming my client for many of his problems, saying that he had to work harder and harder for fear of mistakes and getting into trouble with his boss, my client. My client was a shrewd boss with high standards for sure, but he had no intention at all of burning the manager up with too much work or responsibility. And, in fact, the manager was making mistakes.

What my client recognized is that he had a stellar performer who simply needed to get a grip. Instead of denying the manager’s allegations or criticizing him in return — turning the problems back on him — the boss agreed to do something different. We created an “intervention” of sorts with boss, wife, manager and me all in the same room for most of a day, talking about the effects and natural consequences of his continuing along the track he was on. The manager had no idea my client cared about what he was doing to himself so much. It was quite moving to see him, in the course of our meeting together, accept that care from boss and wife together. Over time, the manager made a major shift in his approach to his job.

Visionary workplace leaders are people who love the development of the human spirit, in both self and others. [They are, of course, my preferred client type.] The fact that they are humanistic does not mean that they are “soft” or unbusiness-like. But they do business differently.

In terms of their responsibility for the culture of their organizations, they:

• believe in truth-telling and compassion in relationships

• accept that not everyone wants to grow and this is not a reason to reject or feel superior to anyone

• understand that even when people genuinely do want to grow they may not know how to grow past their own chains

• understand that real growth, real change takes time

• ask for and receive feedback about their own leadership, even when this is embarrassing or painful; and then act on this feedback constructively

• see themselves as “the one who goes first” to demonstrate what true leading and openness are like in real time

• dive deep in relationships by asking telling questions about meaning, purpose, value, and where the person is at, not just the colleague or employee.

• repeatedly voice the value of trust in relationships and create opportunities for others to build trust-based, collaborative relationships with one another as part of their day-to-day work

• operate from a position of responsibility, not blame, and go into “undiscussable” conflicts with courage, authenticity, and humility

• are vulnerable as individuals, just as they encourage vulnerability in others as a strength needed to overcome relationship challenges

• see family and personal relationships outside of work as just as important as the business and business relationships

• are sensitive to a broad array of social issues, including social justice and the arts

• sees his/her own life as an unfinished work of art.

When I look back over this list, the first thing I also see is that these visionary leaders have an identical concept of their preferred relationships with customers. Whatever service or product is being provided, that outcome is connected to a real person. So quite naturally, the goal is to provide genuine value in the human relationship as much as in that service or product.

Having written these words, I wonder how it is we ever got to a world in which such people are visionary leaders instead of what we normally see in the business leaders we have. So many, even if they say that growth is of interest to them, really don’t seem to live that value at all, either in themselves or in their relationships with others, employees and customers alike. Instead, they seem to occupy an emotionally stunted space that conveys superiority to other people and they exhibit a certain politically thick skin or a “teflon” facade around feedback; a harsh defensiveness or arrogant dismissal when it comes to “undiscussables” that involve their own behavior. There seem to be so many leaders who just want to be immune to complaints, especially the ones about them. Can you blame them? So instead of having the strength to listen, learn and act, they recede into the comfortable belief that it is the other people who are really the problem. Such leaders may see themselves as quite sensitive to human concerns, and most, I would say, are good people who have great potential. But, for now, they are actually operating from their own shadows — or better said, their shadows are actually operating them.

This means there is one additional characteristic of visionary culture leaders. They work from an understanding of the part played by the human heart. They know in what ways they are unfinished as human beings and are highly sensitive to what that means. So with genuine respect for life, and mindfully, they are able to let the heart lead in exactly those places business needs it most.

(For Feedblitz Subscribers: Direct link to blog posting. Direct link to Oestreich Associates website.)

Business culture is an accretion of layers, just like the crust of the earth. While the surface often represents the current moment in history, dig a little and you are likely to find something less sophisticated, empowering, and inclusive. A “default” business culture — meaning what we revert to given no other input or direction — lies below the felt aspirations of many firms to create more open workplaces. This default culture is a set of practices and assumptions based the negative side of old-style formal hierarchy. It includes such “invisible rules” as:

These and other related beliefs do not operate all the time, but are still in the ground beneath our feet, and sometimes by only a matter of inches. Sometimes, when things become dysfunctional, that default system comes back from the grave. Effective leaders reject these older beliefs and act in ways that ensure the “zombie” culture stays in the ground where it belongs.

To fully “drive fear out of the workplace,” it is essential for everyone to be involved in actively rejecting this antiquated culture that divides the world into messengers who get shot and leaders who don’t listen. Both are stereotypes reflecting our fears of one another and our need for self-protection. “Actively rejecting” means moving into action and personally behaving in ways that contradict these negative background beliefs.

The courage to speak up and the courage to listen are the way out, and they require us to “stay in the tension” of the moment, the anxiety, stepping past all of it, particularly the fear that our sincere engagement with others will cause damage, distress, and repercussions or that we will simply experience humiliation and anger because nothing will be done about the obvious organizational problems we chose to bring forward. If we have two enemies in this work it is precisely the fear of repercussions and the belief that nothing can change.

Change can happen, but only if we actively choose to create a different kind of workplace, one where people seek and express understanding rather than make disconnected and insensitive speeches behide one anothers’ backs. Change happens only if we refuse to let fear guide our steps because fear is the essence of the old rules. Change happens only if we choose to address what is right in front of us.

This all works best when it is done in the name of being of service to one another and to our customers. This is a matter of letting our best selves move forward together.

It is essential to understand that rejecting this background culture is not the same as rejecting people.

We have all participated in the negative side of the default culture. We’ve all been carriers and are all responsible for its presence. We have all contributed to it at one time or another, particularly when things have gone wrong or there have been tough challenges. Here are some of the ways we can move forward together. This is certainly one of those circumstances that calls up the dictum often attributed to Gandhi: “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

None of this is to say that our only task should be the rejection of old ways. That’s only the beginning of a different kind of workplace freedom and with that rejection comes the responsibility to define and live — as best we can — what culture we do want. I was encouraged a few days ago to find “Your Culture is Your Brand,” an article by Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh, as a great example of the experiments, innovations, and new thinking that are needed to bring alive positive, value-based work cultures.

Between these two realms of old and new, of unconscious victimization and conscious choice, is a cultural cross-over point of major proportions. Many organizations are ambivalent about which way to go and are some type of mashup of both worlds. Some seem to want to rely upon and return to the past; some strain for the future. This can be an anxious space but also a good one for forging our own leadership. Opportunities abound. Surely this is a time that will shape and define us and our organizations for a long time to come.

(For Feedblitz Subscribers: Direct link to blog posting. Direct link to Oestreich Associates website.)

Most of us live in multiple worlds simultaneously, the world of our professional life and our personal life probably the most obvious example. Much of the time this compartmentalizing helps us maintain balance, but sometimes it also creates a person with multiple souls, none of which is entirely fulfilled. Insofar as we manage the balance, there may be a sense that life is good, but there is another way of looking, which is to focus on individual unity across the boundary lines. Sometimes, for example, if I am using some type of temperament inventory with clients, I am asked how best to answer the questions. “Should I answer these about the person I am at work, or answer them about the person at home?” It is interesting, isn’t it, that our work and home personalities might vary so much.

What is of special interest to me is the one who is the same in both environments, the one who shows up in the transit between the worlds. This is the person who has left the office or left the plant but isn’t home yet. It’s the person who has left home but not yet arrived. Who is this person?

Some years ago, I traveled a great deal for my work. I traveled so much to Madison, Wisconsin where I had a number of clients — and ultimately friends — that I felt I was living two lives. The only place that really seemed like my own real space was on an aircraft. There I could think just for me; I didn’t have to be anywhere else; I was in the middle passage. Once I realized this I stopped working on planes, and I also stopped doing chores such as paying my bills. I began to more thoroughly enjoy the transition, an anonymous person. I enjoyed the pleasure of being a ticket.

Sometimes, metaphorically, I think we get on planes and yet we don’t know where we are going. The transition, the ticket is the thing — maybe the question we are trying to answer. I met a woman not too long enough who found at a certain point she just wanted out of her high-level assistant to the president role for something different. So she sold her house and most of her possessions and bought a one way ticket from Minnesota to Chile. She had never been there, had no contacts, and didn’t even know Spanish. She just went. A few years later, she found herself buying another ticket, this time to Bolivia, and so on…These are to me cross-over points, where the soul is free precisely because it is in transition. There is anxiety but also excitement. There is a sense of self like no other, and simultaneously a question of personal identity. Who is the person flying? Sometimes we proudly and publicly cross to the other side of something in full daylight; sometimes we sneak across the boundaries in the dark. It’s as if we can’t live with the stone of stability alone. We must also have water, the symbol of transition and of transcience, cutting through our lives and our work, through the stone of adopted identity to find something even more fundamental below.

Without such a sense of the water that flows, a work-life balance doesn’t seem like it makes much sense to me. It can’t be just a balance; it always includes a transition that is itself a world of its own. I sense this place is sometimes the most vital part of a person, a place where an individual is open, reflective, hungry for the downhill run, the thrust over the falls. It’s no surprise that sometimes strangers on planes have very personal conversations, or suddenly find themselves in a group of people (as I have a time or two) who can’t stop laughing.

Most of my contribution in the world is actually when those I help are in transition between their worlds: work – home, professional – personal, past – future, this career – that career, manager – leader. Sometimes, for example, when asked to help a supervisor or manager who is in trouble, I may ask why that individual has set up the situation to create such a powerful personal and professional challenge at that moment. This is often helpful because it changes the context of the conversation from “I am in trouble,” to “Hmmm, I seem to have brought circumstances on myself in order to learn something.” So then the conversation can change to be about deeper life-learning, not simply getting out of an embarrassing or otherwise difficult situation. The whole situation could move in moment from intellectual problem-solving and blame to a deeper journey about meaning and presence, qualities held at those precious cross-over points called insights. But who is the person who has these insights that bridge the worlds?

I continue to find it fascinating that about one third of the hits to this weblog come from searches for “leadership poems” or very similar words. They come from people all over the world. Yet I don’t really know what any given person is looking for. Is it inspiration from a famous leader? Or is it to wake up some part of that person’s own leadership self? A google search, simple as it is, could point to an inner cross-over point, too. Simply putting the search out there to the cyber universe — and real universe, too: “leadership poems,” “poems about leaders,” “leadership poem,” “poem abut leadership,” etc., etc. apparently can make a difference. I’d like to think these words are an invitation to touch some destination not yet defined, meant especially to find the water that wears down the stone and, like all experience of the heart, connects everything as it splits the stone gradually in two.

Photo Credits: First three by Dan; the fourth by daughter, Victoria

[This is the second of a two-part, three-way post narrated by Dick Richards. Many thanks to him for initiating this project. You will find the same post at both his site and Deb Call's site. Read Part 1.]

Whatever we believe to be our gifts of age, it seems impossible to conclude anything but that they derive from experience. This is true not only for the gifts mentioned in Part I — freedom from making judgments, inner confidence, acceptance and fruition — but for so many others unmentioned so far, such as wisdom, peace of mind, continued commitment to a purpose, or enjoying the fruits of former accomplishments. It also seems impossible to conclude that these gifts are given to all. There are many who have them in great measure, and who revel in them and use them wisely, but there are also many cranky and unhappy old men and women who seem not to have them at all. If the gifts are truly gifts of age, then it is probably more accurate to say, rather than that the gifts are not given to all, that all are not able to receive them.

Dan wrote, “Acceptance is not a perfect word. It does not fully convey the sense of flow, fulfillment and peace of mind that I associate with it. It doesn’t fully express the sense of grace. But I like it because what I hear in it is not the part of accept that means endure but the part that means receive. As in receive a gift. If I’ve learned anything, it is how to receive. It was a friend, a psychic, who first told me — as I was waiting for insight at the bottom of my lonely pit — that I needed to open myself and learn to receive (was it this that changed the pit to a well?).”

“You are trying to do everything on your own,” she told Dan. “You don’t trust the universe and you don’t see that the physical reality of your circumstances, the physical world itself, is thin as tissue paper.” She related the story of a man and his wife, clients of hers. The man was washing the dishes one evening when he heard a ker-plop into the soapy water of a bowl in the sink. Reaching in, he pulled out a ring. He had never seen the ring before. He took it to his wife who exclaimed, “Where on earth did you find that? I haven’t seen that ring in twenty years!” Dan’s psychic friend explained that it had just come through in order to help the woman deal with what it symbolized to her, some unfinished business from the past.

“I’m sure I privately scoffed at the story,” Dan wrote, “Yet I would say this has turned out to be what has happened to me, too. Something, a coin, a ring, has come through that tissue paper thin wall of time and space. Its gradual recognition has had a miraculous effect. I do a better job of receiving myself just as I am and receiving others just as they are. I’m more open. The wars between me and me have diminished over time, replaced by an inner connection to the flow. I know I’ve embraced something — or it has embraced me.”

Becoming more open to receiving what is available to us, rather than struggling along possessed by the desire to have things our own way, appears to be a pre-requisite for acquiring the gifts of age. And Deb pointed to a few other prerequisites when she wrote, “Age brings wisdom, a commonly held belief. Although wisdom is not confined to older folks, wisdom can manifest new strains, or gifts, as we age, if we remain aware, open, and reflective.”

Aldous Huxley summed it up this way, “Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.” It is what we do with our experience that determines whether or not we are capable of receiving the gifts of age, and approaching our experience with awareness, openness, and a habit of reflection appears to be prerequisite.

Deb experiences a bittersweet quality to realizing it has taken her fifty-seven years to arrive at her inner confidence. “But some things just can’t be rushed,” she wrote, “Like the silky taste of an aged Cabernet, or the patina on a piece of old bronze.”

She confesses, “Over the past two years I have been envious of women with silver hair. Not gray hair, or white hair, but silver hair. It happened again a few weeks ago while out hiking to a waterfall. I saw a vibrant looking woman in her forties with beautiful silver hair. Contrary to our youth-driven culture, she did not look old in her silver locks.” Deb will turn sixty in 2011. “That’s my target date to have grown out my roots and become dazzingly silver-haired, whether it be au natural, or with the help of my hairdresser.”

This September, Dan, at fifty-nine, will marry “a fabulous woman and soul-mate.” He explained, “We met on eHarmony a few years ago. I haven’t been married in a decade and that will complete a cycle of some kind. I feel I am coming home, maybe for the first time. Indeed, what a lesson, learning to receive, and a ring it is that shows up. Who on earth would have guessed?”

I am the oldest of our troika. I have eight years on Deb, seven on Dan. Unlike Deb, I’ve been bald for a long time and don’t care at all about what hair I do have. Like Deb, judgmentalism feels less satisfying to me, and I no longer care much about proving something to others. Unlike Dan, I would probably not have scoffed at the psychic’s story about the ring. Like Dan, I have had to learn how to receive and was remarried at about the same age that he is now.

I can say from my “elder” position to both of them (and perhaps to you) that if you remain aware, open, reflective, and receptive, the gifts of age will keep getting better, at least for the next seven or eight years, which is all that I can speak to.

[This is the first of a two-part, three-way post. Many thanks to Dick Richards for initiating this project. You will find the same post at both Dick's and Deb's sites.]

“Life has a way of stripping away the nonessentials one year at a time, until we’re left with our real selves, unashamed before the world, refined by experience, shaped by the things we’ve learned and the passions we’ve pursued…”


–Author Unknown

I asked Dan Oestreich and Deb Call to join with me (I’m Dick Richards) in creating a post about “the gifts of age” because it seemed that we were each plowing that field in our individual blogs. So this is a collaborative effort and it has been my privilege to put our thoughts together and to act as narrator for this two-part adventure. These two posts are being published simultaneously at our blogs.

In response to my invitation, Deb wrote of a lessening of judgmental attitudes as one gift of age. “Smack in middle-age,” she wrote, “I find that life has softened my edges. With perspective I rely less on black and white thinking. Being judgmental feels less satisfying. I haven’t extinguished these traits, as my husband will attest, but engage in them less frequently.”

She also recognizes another gift of age, which she calls inner confidence. “I distinguish this inner confidence as a willingness to be my “real self,” she wrote. “It differs from the external, ego driven confidence I developed from accomplishments as a way to prove something to others. Inner confidence means I no longer have to look a decade younger if I don’t want to. Inner confidence means I can celebrate middle age my way, even if my friends and husband don’t get it yet. It’s about my recognizing whose story I’m listening to about how to do ‘middle age’.”

As an example about listening to her own story rather than someone else’s, Deb wrote, “The other day I stopped into my eye doctor’s office to pick up an order of contact lenses. I happened to glance down and see a woman’s magazine. Sally Field sat on the cover. The headline read ‘How to Look Seven Years Younger.’ I had my Eureka moment: this is an old story foisted upon American women about how to age. Who cares? Obviously I don’t anymore. The real gift of age is the one I give myself, the inner confidence that says I don’t need anyone’s permission anymore to be the natural me!”

Dan told a story which led him to yet another gift of age. He wrote, “Fifteen years ago I embarked on a major mid-life learning and change process. I thought at the beginning I was refining the work I did for pay. It did that in a major way, and it overturned everything in my personal life as well. Figuratively, I went down into the pit, the well of grief, I believe the poet David Whyte calls it, to find the golden coins. It was a very tough period emotionally, enormous highs and lows. I lost many relationships. I was often–usually–at war with myself over something. The one coin I seemed to have brought back I would call acceptance.”

Dan’s story reminded me of a friend in his late eighties who told me that he was having trouble remembering names. I asked him how he felt about that, expecting to hear a tale of frustration and loss. He replied, “Oh, I’ve accepted it. Right now I have one problem; I can’t remember names. If I don’t accept it then I’ll have two problems.”

Non-judgmentalism, inner confidence, acceptance. And I will add one more gift of age, fruition.

Fruition means, the condition of bearing fruit. Seeds planted in my mind have sometimes taken years to bear anything but anemic fruit. For example, sixteen years ago I had a sudden flash of insight: “I don’t have to prove anything to anybody.” But an insight is not a change, and for many years thereafter I continued on the path of proving various things about myself to various people. Today, while I still work at extinguishing the urge-to-prove, I finally feel confident that I no longer desire to prove anything even when old impulses to do so arise. This fruit is now robust, but it has taken sixteen years to fully understand, integrate, and practice not-proving. Those years came only by aging.

The kind of fruit we get depends, of course, on the seeds we choose to nourish. I like the following story to illustrate the point. Two elderly Jewish men, who had met in and survived a Nazi concentration camp, came together again many years later. The first man asked the second how life had been since their liberation from the camp. The second man told of a life of contentment and accomplishment, said, “I’ve forgiven them for what they did,” and then asked the first man about his life. The first man told of a life of resentment and woe and said, “I’ll never forgive those bastards.” The second man shook his head sadly, “That is all too bad,” he said, “It seems they still have you in their prison.”

The seeds we choose to nourish, and their effect on the gifts of age, will be the subject of Part 2 in this series.

I have been thinking about a phrase I used in my last post about self-trust. Symbolically, I said, I have “a god at my back,” meaning simply that there is an energy that supports me from within when I meet difficult circumstances. Many people report having this sense, and know it has gotten them through hard moments or hard times. I think of Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame and her recent TED talk on creative genius. In this short, inspiring presentation she talks about the “glimpse of God,” the inner genius that is expressed through art, the product of gifts that are only “on loan” to the artist. We know them when we see them in others. And I would add that we feel them come through ourselves with a deep sense of flow.

I am reminded of a colleague, I’ll call her Linda, who worked for a very tough, demanding CEO. After the holiday season, company managers and their teams got together for what promised to be a celebration of a highly successful sales effort. Linda’s team had surpassed all their projections and they were riding high. However, instead of recognizing these accomplishments with praise, the CEO chose instead to publicly criticize members of Linda’s team in the meeting for their lackluster performance. In that moment, Linda stepped between the CEO and her team and immediately asked the CEO to direct his remarks to her, not her team members. If he had a problem with the team’s performance, she said, he should plainly address it to her. She also asked the CEO directly why he felt a need to criticize a team that just surpassed its projections — a question for which he had no answer. Later, and after a long series of conversations covering many months, Linda and the CEO decided together it would be best for her to leave the firm. It was more than clear to her that the CEO loved his opportunities to grandstand and hook people into confrontational meetings through outrageous criticism. I think of this story because I know Linda well and I can see her there standing her ground calmly, asking for respect. To listen to her tell the story is to experience her profound genuineness, her real truth and authenticity. This is a classic case, as is the story I told in this post on leadership as a calling, of someone willing to move into tense, uncomfortable space in order to change the status quo. When such demanding moments happen and we have the privilege to see someone leading, it is exactly this same “glimpse of God” that Elizabeth Gilbert eloquently described in her speech. We have all seen and felt that divine energy come through.

I believe this is one of the most challenging thoughts I could possibly put forward about leading. Because what I am not doing is presenting a formula for how actually to respond when the tough moments happen. I am not sharing a list of key phrases to use with people in power, suitable for Powerpoint. I am not catering to intellectual solutions that please the ego and attempt to use slick interpersonal technique to replace truth in the moment. And I am certainly not telling anyone to go back to church to learn more about all this simply because the language sounds spiritual. What I am saying instead is that unless a person wakes up to their own source of this energy, the leadership they might bring will always be bounded and their presence diminished.

Perhaps you feel some anger, as I do, for the situation Linda was placed in, or some anger that in the end she decided to leave without any particular change or new understanding by her boss. These are the shoulds of the situation and they are precisely what trap us and victimize us, along with fear of letting out the force within. If I were to speculate, I would say that Linda was larger than the situation and she did what she was destined to do. No one speaks easily of this reality — that once the sacred energy has learned to express itself, the leader’s path becomes unique and therefore alone. This does not mean that the leader has no friends or community or cannot sustain difficult relationships. To the contrary. But it does mean that the inner strength that moves people out of conformity and compliance also causes them to see differently and to take paths that they alone can take.

Over all the hilltops
There is silence.
In the tops of the trees,
You feel
Hardly a breath.
The birds have fallen silent in the woods.
Simply wait.
Soon,
You too will be silent.

– Goethe

In my last two posts on Self-Trust (here for Part I and here for Part II) you probably noticed a strong emphasis on images and metaphors. In Part I the image of the river and ferryman are dominant, leading in Part II to an exploration of the image of the temple. I have used these images to support a shift in focus from the conquest of fear to engagement with personal mystery, with the fundamental goal of liberating personal potentials, especially the potential to lead “in exposed places.”

If you are not familiar with the use of images in this way, it is easy to have a reaction — either to feel invited into a very different world, or to be put off by the “illogical” nature of the process. As a coach, I have frequently found such images to be especially powerful in the efforts of clients to know themselves and gain some form of liberation from blocks and inner barriers, especially when conversation alone has not seemed to do the trick. For example, I once worked with an Executive Director level client who expressed considerable anger with the people who reported to her. Our work together seemed to go nowhere until I asked her to draw a picture of her life. She drew colorful fields, one inside the next with high fences between them all. As we studied and explored this drawing some important aspects of her past came to light, including a private and secret promise she had made to a deceased child, a promise that she had never shared with anyone. Once that came into the open, many other important connections appeared, including a particularly critical key to her agitation with the people who reported to her. Understanding the image led directly to relief and changes in her own patterns of leadership behavior.

If you are a skeptical about such processes, I don’t blame you. But I also have seen some very remarkable things happen when people allow images to come forward. A client once told me — after the fact — that he had intended to undermine my request for a picture of his situation. He set out to sabotage the process by just “scribbling out anything” on a piece of paper. When he was done, however, he broke into tears because despite his conscious effort to derail the exercise he found that he had drawn a symbolic picture of his family members and their relationships — a series of circles and “vines” that revealed the painful distances among them all. In yet another case, the client saw how an otherwise beautifully well-ordered drawing had been “marred” by a blotch of dark-colored formless scratches in one part of her work. The blotch, she quickly realized, was her own disappointment with herself and her job situation and how that was marring her life. This, in turn, gave her insight about the back pain she had been experiencing and also her own collusion in the problems she wanted to solve. These interpretations of drawings were not the result of going to some sort of dream catalogue to find out what this or that symbol meant. Water or horses or images of flying or purely abstract forms don’t always mean the same thing. They mean only what they do only in the context of a particular individual and his or her situation. It is the person who unlocks their significance.

Such images can show up through a variety of methods. They may emerge from meditation — disciplined or freeform, from writing fairy tales, from art forms such as collage, poetry, sculpture, or dance. Sometimes the image has an immediately apparent meaning, such as the fields and fences of the the Executive Director, but just as often they represent less obvious, more ambiguous messages that are equally powerful. The fact that they do not explain themselves easily causes us to think about them, wonder about their interior meaning over time. If you want to learn more about such processes, I suggest taking a look at the sections on active imagination in Robert A. Johnson’s classic study, Inner Work: Using Dreams & Active Imagination for Personal Growth. For even greater understanding of the roots of the notion that “psyche is image,” access Jungian psychology and modern derivatives, especially this well thought out collection of excerpts from the work of psychologist, James Hillman.

Now back to rivers and temples. It is an interesting exercise — and you might want to try it — to draw some symbols for yourself in the context of shifting your own perspectives. You can do this by first imagining the obstacle that you are facing, a place that you experience hesitation, anxiety or fear and that you sense limits your potentials. Once you have done this, then take that same energy and “convert” it to an image of a temple, where the temple represents the fear transformed to awe. I want to emphasize right away that drawing in this context requires no artistic skill whatsoever. In fact, if you do have artistic skill, the exercise may be a little less useful for you. This isn’t about an elegant picture; it is about the experience of seeing something that is inside you, that is part of your inner world.

Let me share a personal example. If I were to draw an image of my fear it would look pretty much like an abyss or bottomless pit. A big dark mass. (I used to think and feel exactly this way about my finances — and it’s still easy to feel that dark emptiness doing my taxes!) When I convert that energy to awe. I get something like what you see below, which I constructed using Powerpoint and Photoshop, tools that work for me just as well as pencils, pens or paintbrushes. (Click on the image to make it larger, if you like).

Looking at this image, what I see is that the energy is still “hot” — there’s fire in this temple — but there is also a god there, too. Surrounding the temple is the natural world and a path that naturally leads up floating steps to the interior. When I see the god I experience the conversion of that fearful energy to something that reframes it as an awesome mystery. I have objectified it into a set of symbols, uniquely mine, offering a sense of transcendence. On the steps of this temple is where I do my taxes, write my books, confront awkward situations and mistakes, and step out into the exposed space. It’s on those steps that I experience self-trust. As long as I am there I am not falling into any pits. The god is present and literally “has my back.” There are moments, even, when I would say the god actually speaks through me, a kind of radiant presence, but this is definitely not something I can make happen. It’s simultaneously humbling and strengthening. What I sense at such moments is only that there is flow.

To be sure this is a very literal rendition of the transformation of energy. The image actually doesn’t do anything beyond reminding me of inner coordinates. It is a symbol, after all, not the thing itself. The image simply helps get me little closer to a source of strength (translate that as self-trust) by pointing to a sacred dimension in the heart of the fear. That’s the key. The temple image I have created is a powerful metaphor for an aspect of me that I can call upon when fear creeps in.

Why don’t you try this, and if you like, send me your thoughts about the experience of creating such an image, along with a jpg of your drawings? It will be fascinating to post and compare a few images here. To do this give yourself some quiet time. Use whatever medium suits you: paper, pen, paintbrush, computer graphics, etc. Try to focus on a situation or challenge that ignites anxiety in you, that you can actually feel just thinking about it. Try to get to the very heart of that anxiety. Allow whatever image of that anxiety to emerge. (A friend drew himself as a little boy with a towering robed and hooded figure pointing down at him). Then remind yourself that this image is not to be overcome but to be transformed. Allow instead an image of some kind of temple, however you define that term, to come to mind. See if you can get an approximation of that down on paper (or cyberpaper) in some way, and send it along to me as a jpg. How did it feel to do this? What does the image mean to you? Let me know.

If you need inspiration because you are not used to using images in this way, try googling images for fear and for temples on the net. For example, as I was writing this post I came across this stunning photograph of a temple entrance by Craig Ferguson.

My last post was about how we can foster self-trust as the central means to overcoming “stuckness” and conflict that holds us back from fulfilling our leadership potentials. If leading is responding to the call to stand in an exposed place in order to change the order of things, then by definition leading relies on self-trust, breaking the chains of the inner hesitations we might feel to speak, act, and take initiative. I ended the post with the metaphorical, and perhaps enigmatic phrase, “Just know that you now sit on the steps of a temple.” This post is about that temple. And just so you know, “temple” to me does not connote any particular religion at all. In my own mind’s eye, metaphorically, the temple is simply ancient and definitely not of the ego’s making.

To the contrary, the temple represents a critical shift in perspective — from trying to overcome the personal fears that we see as holding us back to engaging the personal mystery that ultimately makes us whole. The very obstacle we are trying to get past needs to speak to us, speak through us, and if we can listen to it, then deeper personal learning and transformation can come forward. In turn, this helps dissolve the obstacle and transcend the fear. It is this transcendence that we come to call self-trust.

Suppose for example that you want to stop everything else that’s going on in your life and take your sailboat solo around the world. Or you want to start a small business, but you have no experience doing so. Suppose you want to write a book, coach a basketball team, open a school, get out of a bad relationship, do more for social justice or sustainability. Suppose when you go to work, you’d like — just once — to speak your truth about the staff meeting that everyone feels is a waste of time but no one has the guts to bring up with the boss who owns the meeting. These are your dreams, and they risk remaining fantasies unless you act. They are the places you are not leading your own life and as a result have no influence on others.

Another way to put this is:

solo trip = temple
small business = temple
write book = temple
coach team = temple
start school = temple
end bad relationship = temple
lead social justice effort = temple
promote sustainability = temple
speak up at staff meeting = temple

Within each of these temples — and whatever yours are in real life — is exactly the energy needed to engage, begin, embark and persist. And here’s the kicker, that energy doesn’t belong entirely to you. It’s given to you, so long as you respect and honor that this is, in fact, sacred stuff. Some use words such as destiny to cover this ground, meaning the unique combination of personal choice and fate operating in a person’s life. If it helps to think of this sacred stuff as your destiny, great. I think the simpler word, calling, will do just fine.

Life — especially organizational life — is usually a maelstrom of events, conversations, projects, daily routines, changes, crises, challenges and accomplishments. What happens I think is this: in the midst of the whirlpool, the person who leads comes up exactly to his or her points of hesitation and then consciously or unconsciously chooses to see this as a profound moment, chooses to let whatever is in that temple speak. The beauty, of course, is that the “god” or “goddess” within, the genius of the person, meaning the true spirit of that individual, shows up in that moment. From the outside, when we see that true spirit show up, we call it leading. In that moment of truth, the beautiful, real, vulnerable, strong person appears before us. We memorize such moments, take them right into ourselves at a cellular level because they remind us how incredibly meaningful life is and how it can be even more meaningful — anytime, at any moment — with our help.

The image of what the leader did becomes indelible and we wonder, how could she or he have done that? Told the truth about the crummy staff meeting, sailed solo to Indonesia, started the school in a back-room of the house, organized the “take back the night” march, wrote the book that led to the book that won the Pulitzer Prize. What we are actually watching is the movement of something that is literally awe-some in people’s lives. Unfortunately, all too often, having experienced that wonder we quickly retreat, avoiding the the awe because it reminds us of our own personal fears and unrealized potentials.

What we can always do is face that temple and let ourselves be drawn forward toward it. Are you trembling? Then the force within that temple — within you — is especially great. And you can rely on the god or goddess who resides there to give you what you need. The sacred welcomes those willing to enter in.

Perhaps many of us will always want to go some other way. We don’t want metaphors; we want formulas. We want “established business models” and concrete techniques. Useful but incomplete, I would say. We want proof rather than what, with a little self-reflection, we already know. But if this is so, then, ultimately, we will also be faced with the inconvenient truth of our stuckness, our subtle wars with ourselves, and our inability to transcend the private fears that govern our lives and our relationships with others and that keep us in chains. We have enabled ourselves to become smaller.

There is no greater betrayal than self-betrayal, and that is exactly the thing that keeps us from self-trust.

Along with posting a new page on this site, A Place to Reflect, I want to share a few thoughts about inner work. By inner work, I mean any self-inquiry in which your aim is to tap wisdom from a personal, intuitive source. This may be about the largest questions that face us, such as “who am I?” or may be about incidents, reactions, relationships, patterns in behavior or circumstances that create important questions for you. Sometimes called soul searching, inner work is about finding insight based on exploration of our inner, subjective world, including feelings, thoughts, motives, impressions, dreams, images, fantasies, intuitions and sense of spiritual connection. In practical terms, self-reflection can be deeply satisfying or deeply disturbing. On any particular day, it can yield much or little in terms of understanding, a glimpse of eternity or simply an escape from the harsh realities of the world. Self-reflection is both the “hard look in the mirror” that reveals uncomfortable facets of personality and the discovery of vast reaches of beauty, awareness, and mystery that we hold within us.

We are all endowed with the capability to reflect, but we cannot do so without interrupting the flow of daily activities and discourses and make a turn inward. Our conditioning deeply colors whether and how that inward turn is made. I recall a woman asking me a question during a presentation at a university. She said, “I think I understand what you mean, but whenever I look inside the truth is I don’t find anything there! What am I supposed to do?” I suggested to her that perhaps what was there had been “numbed out” by her own conditioning. If you were raised to believe that the inner world has nothing to offer, that because it is not “verifiable,” or that it is “just feelings” or that it is only “navel-gazing,” then, sure, why would you find anything when you looked? I sense that many people have a skepticism about the existence or value of their inner worlds. But, of course, that very reaction comes from where? An inner world.

The art of self-reflection is simply about being open internally, allowing messages to come forward. A message could be a phrase, a feeling, an image — or an event that is unexpected and meaningful, such as a chance encounter. Here’s an example. I was sitting on a hill one day thinking about the nature of my work in the world. Suddenly, I seemed to fall backwards deep into the earth itself and when I “returned,” I felt a strong sense of kinship with the large rocks, the waving grasses, the blue sky and clouds that surrounded me. As I continued to gaze down the hill, I imagined a figure, a medicine man of some kind. He held two feathers. I closed my eyes again and asked what the two feathers symbolized. Right away an impression came to me. One was called, “inner strength;” the other, “psychic understanding of the world.” Those terms surprised me. I hadn’t been thinking about either inner strength or psychic understanding, and yet they felt vital to the questions I was holding about my work.

Okay, so what? Well, these two “feathers” continued to have a great attraction for me. Not long after my hill experience, I went to a local store and found two beautiful turkey feathers with leather loops attached to them. They have hung for many years on a wall in my apartment, along with a small medicine bag that was given to me by a colleague. These artifacts are a source of solace to me. They remind me that not all things come logically or even consciously. They lead me to argue less and accept more, traits that benefit me in my work and in my life. I suppose I could be judged by people who believe this is all poppycock, but I choose to believe I received a boon that day on the hill.

The art is in allowing meaningful messages to come, which is often a form of imaginative listening and seeing (and maybe tapping other imaginative senses, as well). Sitting by the ocean, words or music may form in the sound of the waves, or perhaps I see a shape on the stony beach that interrupts my other thinking. Is that seaweed or some strange sign? I could say, skeptically, “well, it’s all nonsense” or I could say with more openness, “how interesting, I wonder what that means?” I often think this is a matter of practice — a practice of illogical association that upon reflection has a deeper logic to it, if only I will give it a chance to emerge.

Technorati Tag: Reflective Leadership

Richard Stine might best be described as a “visual philosopher.” His canny representations of the human condition are great stimulants to self-awareness. This one, for example, has always been a favorite of mine. Stine has a gift for combining whimsical drawings with deep reflections. I happened to be reading his fabulous book, The World of Richard Stine the other day and found the following passage about defensiveness. It’s a gem:

How do you objectify fear once you’re so involved in a situation that it goes psychologically out of control?

How does one step back from the self-protection mechanism that injects complicated situations with an overabundance of emotion?

Sometimes willing yourself to be courageous through it all does not work. The emotions well up and overtake one’s good intentions so much that having control never gets past being just a good idea.

My experiment right now is to attempt to lessen the emotional complications by communicating as simply as I can–to try not to feel that I have to attack or be on the defensive when I have to deal with a tough situation. Just express the truth as I see it, and then let things develop the way they will, without trying to force them one way or another.

Technorati Tag: Openness

PS. A last thought…I just put up the page to the left, A Place to Reflect, and would appreciate your feedback.

My father died last Saturday at the age of 96. He had been coping with a series of small strokes that affected his hand movements, hearing, and speaking. He had been a master carpenter most of his life, so his senses and eye/hand coordination were his most fundamental tools. The losses had added up a little too quickly. He communicated frustration and depression. And so he did the most logical thing to cope anyone could do: he went to sleep. He stopped eating; he spiraled down; he started receiving morphine and a few days ago he simply didn’t wake up anymore. I saw him a few hours before he died and it was so clear his spirit had already departed a lingering body.

What homage can a son pay? Perhaps only to tell the story.

My father, Kurt Karl Oestreich, was a strong man. He had to be. He grew up between the World Wars in Germany. In 1937, to save his family from harm by the Nazi Storm Troopers that were harassing his village, he escaped Germany to become one of the thousands of refugees on the road. The Storm Troopers rode into town spraying gunfire. They tortured leaders of opposition parties (which included my father) and their families. Everyone was watched. Over the next three years, after crossing the border, he really only had himself to depend on. He knew hunger and fear and learned to keep his wits about him as he traveled from country to country. He accepted help from good people along the way; saw others abandon their principles and sometimes abandon their lives.

Eventually he was able to emigrate to the United States. But here he also had to defend himself against those who thought he might be a communist or a fascist. He learned the language, and did so without formal training. He became a citizen and enlisted in the military, where he was given the choice to go back to Germany as a translator or go the front lines in the Philippines. He chose the latter. He was soon stationed at Fort Lewis in Washington State and through mutual friends met my mother. He went off to war without marrying her in case something happened to him. He was lucky and they spent their honeymoon at a lodge on Vancouver Island, a place he could fish, his most important hobby.

They were both a little old for marrying in those days, 34. They didn’t have a lot of money. They bought an aging farmhouse on a hill and twelve acres, half in pasture and orchard, half in woods. The farmhouse had only one piece of indoor plumbing, a single cold-water tap that ran from a storage tank in the forest behind the house. They fixed the place up, and they had gardens and animals — ducks, rabbits, and sheep. They had kids, my older brother and me. My dad rebuilt the house, put in the plumbing, built the garage, reshingled the whole thing from scaffolds he built himself. After what my dad had been through, I’m guessing this was pretty close to heaven. It was a dream — of stability, self-sufficiency, and a family that lived without fear.

My father had the kind of intelligence that is forged, not inherited or particularly nurtured. He was practical because he had to be. He was a perfectionist because of the price of mistakes in his world. As a result, he also sympathized with the underdog, whoever that underdog might be. And as a consequence, my brother and I learned empathy for those without money or power, for those who had been tortured or discriminated against for things they couldn’t help, like the color of one’s skin. He hated guns and violence. On the farm, he might take out his .22 caliber rifle to shoot at crows stealing cherries or the feral cats that stole the neighbor’s chickens. One night, hearing strange sounds outside our house, I remember he left it sitting next to the door. But weapons in general and wars on any scale, fighting — they were all anathema. He had known the stench of dead bodies, though he never talked of it, never told boastful stories over a beer. No, what my father was was the classic immigrant who worked his behind off every single day so that his children could have something better than he’d had, so that his wife didn’t worry. How many nights did he come home from his work only to go out in the darkness to care for the animals, get wood for the stove? How many weekends were given to shoring up the foundation of the house with new cedar posts or haying the fields in preparation for the winter? There was one value that was more important to him than all the others, easy to name: duty.

He was not, for as sensitive a child as I was, the easiest person for me to grow up with as a father. He could be cool and distant and frankly a little scary. I identified and connected with my mother (who survives him, by the way, also 96). He saw me as that younger son, “Danny-el Karl” he would say, who “always had his nose in a book.” My brother, the incipient engineer, was more comprehensible. My father didn’t seem to enjoy the conversations about relationships and psychology that were natural to my mother and me. Chances were, as those conversations happened at the kitchen table he was on the couch in the living room reading and napping beneath his beloved newspaper. There were years when the truth was that I was angry with him because I felt so misunderstood and distant. And yet…and yet…he was also the man who paid the bill when I went to the fancy Ivy League college. He was the man who told me to pursue my talents. “These are fantastic ideas,” he said to me one day when I was thirty or so. “You must do something with them.” He was the man who whispered, “You can do more than you think you can.” His perfectionism, over the years, drove me crazy and demanded that I use my talents, make a “contribution to the world,” his definition of manhood. When I wrote my first book his only comment was to point out a misprinted word on page 37. No praise. No recognition. It brought back all the horrendous memories of those nights we brought home our report cards. “Why is this subject an A-? Why not an A?” An interrogation. Although he had only achieved an 8th grade school education, there was no question that every grade he’d ever received in school was an A — oh, forgive me, not just an an A, an A+.

And yet, and yet. There are so many fine memories — him digging in his garden after he had retired, finding the hidden potatoes. Fishing on the ocean or in a stream or lake. My father knew how to sit in silence for hours, waiting, knowing the fish were there. He had never brooked silliness or tangled lines from bored sons. Fishing was serious business. We did our best to wait for the pole to tip, learning to set the hook just so. The dark waters of the lake could last all day, all night if necessary for him. He could be there, watching the tip of the rod the same way I now find myself waiting for understanding of what is beneath the surface in the organizations I work with. My father would have said his downfall was his impatience, his lack of “temper.” But he was, of course, a man who had been tempered more than most. I find myself aspiring to the same.

I’m the kid in the back tossing his hay

Of the many gifts he gave me I want to mention one of the most valuable. When I was eleven, he gave me my first camera. I learned to take black and whites by his hand, understand f-stops, shutter speed, and focusing, things that matter but are easily lost to automation. By then, he had personally progressed to the saturated beauty of Kodachrome, a slide film popular many years ago. Kodachrome made the colors of any life rich. The reds were glorious, incomparable. They had passion written all over them. My brother and I lay on the floor of our living room, our mom barely in the chair having just finished washing the dishes, as he carefully inserted, one by one, the slides into his projector. A vacation, perhaps, or Christmas. There was always a critique, some of it funny — what captions could we come up with? — and some of it a disappointment in exposure or composition. I learned something there of my father’s true soul.

It would be easy to dismiss this carpenter. He kept a low profile. His humor was in puns, not ribald jokes. His beauty was in the formal wood carvings of flowers he did by hand with his knives and his lathe turnings of vases and plates done in the basement. He could be good at a community meeting where you needed the voice of reason spoken in a tactful and unassuming way. He didn’t want to stand out. He worked for 30 years for one company and then he retired, having survived it all, the economic ups and downs, the years of rising at 5:15 AM, the mountains of his favorite breakfast, Raisin Bran. In his heart, he accepted life as a contest between good and evil and he knew exactly what it was that the good looked like. It didn’t make waves. It was quietly courageous. It was an example. It fought for the underdog. It was smart. It survived.

He was a gracious, hard, imperfect, demanding and sweet man who knew how to adhere to rules of faith and duty that are all but forgotten. I have no longing for that older world. His life was born from things we have little understanding of today, but should never forget.

I wish your spirit well, Dad.

You earned your keep, my father. And now I hope to do the same.

Technorati Tag: Love

Yesterday, as I do a few times a year, I walked a labyrinth located near where I live. I have posted before about using this ancient tool for reflection. It was a cool day, gray overhead, but I found it as easy as ever to engage the path to the center, meditate for awhile there, and then return — out the way I came in. I was not holding any particular question in my mind, but rather simply observing the nature of reflection itself. Come with me on that walk.

I have noticed lately a major jump in hits to this site from keyword searches for “reflective leadership” or similar terms. I posted a definition not too long ago. In this post, I want to come at this definition from some other angles. In a sense, this definition is never done. Reflective leadership is always extending and revising itself because the very process of reflective leadership demands that. For instance, it seems clear that some people use the term to mean simply “leaders thinking about things” rather than doing all the time.

At this level, questions such as “What key decisions are coming up?” or “How do we spark more innovation on the ABC project?” are examples of reflective leadership.

At another end of the spectrum, however, the questions are much deeper, perhaps including such personal inquiries as “What are my insecurities and how shall I address them? How are they reflected in this organization? What are my real motivations? What are my shadows and blindspots?”

And from yet another angle, the questions that drive reflection may be as deep but more externally focused, such as “What is the change in the world I want to make? How can I best use my gifts to build community? What will genuinely bring us together around [a particular] issue?”

All of these directions get lumped into the bucket of reflective leadership. What unifies them, even at the level of the thinking versus doing, is the notion of stopping and making a subjective inner turn to look in the mirror of what is happening. In this sense, reflective leadership depends on a person moving to a “meta” level — reflecting on their work and themselves. All forms are legitimate, and I would say typically people will move as they grow from the thinking/doing dilemma to the larger issues of meaning. Left-brain consideration gives way to right-brain intuitive, even symbolic thought.

Four Types of Reflective Experience

Some years ago, the insight came to me that the real change agents in the world were not people, certainly not me. The real change agents were the reflective experiences that go on inside people, and the best I could do would be to provide opportunities for those reflections to occur. Have I followed this notion in all my work? I wish I had, but the truth is I still spend way too much time advising and not enough helping others focus on the wisdom they can find within themselves.