Culture

The Unique Privilege of Meaningful Work

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Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? — Mary Oliver

After I wrote my previous post about privilege, I was more attuned to the presence of privilege in my life and around me. It is in the nature of privilege to remain invisible to those who have it, and I wanted to make use of my heightened awareness to expose and explore other forms of privilege. This brought me back to a topic I alluded to in a very early post about despair and never fully explored: the privilege of having work that emerges from passion, from a calling, from a sense of meaning. This is a form of privilege that cuts through social class, though also tends to align with class privilege.

Culture

Talking about Money and Privilege

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Some time ago I was sitting with a group of Nonviolent Communication enthusiasts on a cold winter night, watching the fireplace crackle, eating, laughing, and talking. The group invited me to support their development as a leadership group of their community. A few years before they had gotten together to make NVC known and visible in their town. When I was visiting, they were celebrating their success, as more and more people in their town came to know about NVC through their efforts and have come to trainings they organize. Now they wanted to take their work to a new level, to break free of the social homogeneity of their group and its members, to reach into communities and populations they had not yet connected with.

Culture

The Extraordinary Challenge of Wanting to Create Change, Part 2: Beyond the Personal

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Last week I wrote about how we can approach individuals when we want to see change in their behavior. I ended with an exploration of relating to children, which can serve as a possible entryway into exploring change within organizations, the original context that started me thinking about this rich and difficult topic. The similarity between the context of organizations and the context of parenting has been striking to me. In particular, in both settings the power difference is vivid and clear, as is the expectation, common to both relationships, that the one with power is the one who knows what’s best. Supporting Culture Change within Organizations
My recent work with organizations has been the direct catalyst of this entire line of inquiry.

Culture

The Extraordinary Challenge of Wanting to Create Change

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In the last few days I’ve been almost haunted by realizing how often we want others’ behavior to change. We may want to see change in some small, annoying behavior that our child does, or a major harm created by the CEO of a transnational corporation. It has recently dawned on me that no matter the person or the behavior, creating change in another’s behavior is, in essence, a monumental task. And then again – why am I so surprised, when I know how difficult it is to create change within ourselves when we actively want to create such change? When, on top of how difficult creating any change is, we add the extra challenge that the other person may not want to create the change that we seek, it’s no wonder that we so often don’t manage to create the outcome we want outside ourselves.

Empathy

Who Benefits From Empathy?

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When I am able to show someone a possible way of making sense of another person’s apparently inhuman acts, the relief, the restoration of possibility, are almost indescribable. Something melts that may have been encrusted for decades.

Culture

Some Thoughts about Trust

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Trust, like safety, runs deep. When we don’t experience trust, as when we don’t experience safety, we shut down, protect, and hide our vulnerability. We also, in both cases, tend to place responsibility for our experience on the outside. It is extraordinarily challenging, when we don’t experience trust, to recognize it as our experience instead of assuming that whoever we are not trusting is simply not trustworthy. It is similarly difficult, when our experience tells us that we are not safe, to step outside of the conviction that “it” is unsafe to be where we are.

Culture

The Long Arc of Commitment

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Once we recognize a core value, we draw an arc that extends from that moment to the end of our life, hoping and longing to have the integrity to live in line with that value.

Culture

Our Habitual Responses to Authority

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I have known for some time now that the models of authority and leadership we have inherited are deeply flawed and fully embedded in the either/or paradigm which underlies our way of living. We lack forms, models, and habits of collaboration which are essential for transforming the way we use power. I have looked at some of the dilemmas and challenges that this presents to any of us who take on responsibility and leadership anywhere and want to do it with care and integrity. One of the obstacles to collaborative leadership that I have looked at is the tragic phenomenon of pervasive disempowerment which makes the challenge of collaborating from above that much more difficult. People hear demands when they are asked to do something by a leader; they remain cynical about efforts to solicit their input and participation in decision-making; or they persist in not expressing themselves honestly even when a leader is committed to creating a no reprisal environment. Once I began to recover from my despair about not finding ways of changing relationships with people from my own position of limited power, I recognized, sadly, that the same forces that shape how those in power act also shape our responses to those in power.

Culture

Are Judgments Wrong?

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For myself, based on years of learning, practicing, and teaching, I can say with definite clarity that I prefer the consequences of speaking without judgments to what happens when I use judgment words.

Culture

The Demon of Doing Well

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This is how life is. Birth and death. Flowering and decay. They all happen at once. I want to enjoy in full and mindfully the good times, and to accept and savor the bad times.