Last week I was working with an interesting group of 60 Aboriginal folks who work within the Canadian Forces and the department of National Defense, providing advice and support on Aboriginal issues within the military and civilian systems. We ran two half days in Open Space to work on emerging issues and action plans.
In an interesting side conversation, I spoke with a career soldier about fear. This man, one of the support staff for the gathering, had worked for a couple of decades as a corporal, mostly working as a mechanic on trucks. We got into an interesting conversation about fear. He said to me that he could never do what I do, walking into a circle and speaking to a large group of people. I expressed some surprise at this – after all I was talking to a trained soldier. I asked him if he had ever been in combat and experienced fear. He replied that he had been on a peacekeeping mission in Israel and that at one point in a threatening situtaion he had pointed a loaded gun at someone and awaited the order to fire, but he didn’t feel any fear at all.
We decided that it was first of all all about the stories you tell yourselves and second of all about training and practice. The fear of public speaking – fear that would paralyse even a soldier – is a fear that is borne from a history of equating public speaking with a performance. In school for example we are taught that public speaking is something to be judged rather than a skill to be learned. Imagine if we gave grades for tying a shoelace, or using a toilet or eating food. If we performed these important but mundane tasks with the expectation of reward or punishment, conditional on someone else’s judgement about them, having nothing to do with the final result, we might well develop fear and aversion to these things too.
The fact is that the fear of public speaking – glossophobia – is widespread and this makes me think it has something to do with public schooling. Our training leaves us in a place of competence or fear, and, as much of the training in social skills is undertaken implicitly in school (including deference to authority, conditional self-esteem and a proclivity to answers and judgement rather than question and curiosity) we absorb school’s teaching about these things without knowing where they came from. Certainly when I grew up – and I was a little younger than this soldier I was speaking with – speaking in school was generally either a gradable part of reporting on an assignment or was competitive, as in debating, a practice that was prevalent in my academic high school that sent many young people into competitive speaking careers as lawyers and business people. If you were no good at this form of speaking, the results of being judged on your attempts to get a point across were often humiliating. You lost, or you skulked away with the knowledge that people thought you sucked.
In contrast, my friend’s ability to find himself relatively fearless in an armed confrontation was a result of his military training, which, when it comes to combat, is all aimed having a soldier perform exactly as my friend had – calmly and coolly, especially in a peacekeeping role.
These days, in teaching people how to do facilitation, I am increasingly leaving the tools and techniques aside and instead building in practices of noticing and cultivating fearlessness. When you can walk into a circle fearlessly, you can effectively and magically open space. If you harbour fear about yourself or your abilities, it is hard to get the space open and enter into a trusting relationship with a group of people. Once you can do that, you can use any tool effectively, but the key capacity is not knowing the tool, it is knowing yourself.
How do you teach or learn fearlessness?
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I have had an interesting few days working with Aboriginal leadership from around North America. In Michigan last week, I helped convene 24 folks interested in what indigenous leadership means, and today I am here in Port McNeil BC, hosting a community to community forum between First Nations and local governments.
One of the things that folks in the rest of indigenous North America don’t realize about the cultures of the west coast is how radically different they are from the cultures of the plains, desert and forests of the rest of North America. This is true in many ways, but especially true in the way the individual is perceived.
IN Ojibway culture for example, the individual is important. The integrity of one’s personal path is virtually sacred. So much so that Ojibway Elders never teach people by correcting them. Instead they will make broad pointers, refer to hypothetical people or talk indirectly about situations. Shaming is a very powerful force, and people will go to great lengths to avoid doing it. In general, hints are extremely subtle.
On the west coast however, the social world is very highly segmented, and in traditional communities, a strict hierarchical class system is in place from chiefs all the way down to slaves. Protocols are extremely important, and breaching protocols entails elaboration restitution and reconciliation before the natural order is restored. In this sense, west coast cultures are similar to Hawaiian and other Polynesian cultures as well.
I was faced with these two different cultural contexts in the last two weeks as I went about my work facilitating groups. In both cases, I experienced these cultural norms as participants were suggesting changes to process and the way I was facilitating.
In Michigan, we ran a circle process to help understand themes that were emerging from a cafe. In the circle, the conversation became more and more high level and eventually it came time for us to stop talking theoretically and start sharing stories. One man who was present, a Gros Ventre psychologist and teacher, made a very subtle hint about this saying “it will be good to ground these ideas and exchange stories.” It sounded like a very general comment, but it was offered, from his perspective as a very specific request: let’s move on.
When we didn’t move on, a Hawaiian professor spoke up, much more directly and suggested that I wrap up the circle and get to an Open Space process. That’s what we did and the energy began flowing again.
IN contrast today, while hearing a round of introductions, a young man was introducing himself but was going beyond the one things I asked people to say about themselves. At one point I interrupted his train of though with a friendly reminder about saying only one thing so that we could allow everyone to have a chance to speak. Instantly one of the hereditary chiefs rose, and in a big resonant voices said “point of order!” He then chastised me for “taking the talking stick out of that young man’s hands, and that is something we never ever do.” I apologized to the chief and the young man and he continued his introduction. It became a little teaching moment for the whole gathering, local politicians feeling their way into working together and the non-Aboriginal ones were quite nervous about protocol violations. Luckily I have no such qualms about making mistakes – in my 15 years on the west coast, I could never hope to be perfect all the time – and in apologizing, everything was set to rights and we continued, but the power was very visible in the room.
These kinds of deeply cultural ways of speaking and teaching and correcting are radically different between a Gros Ventre academic and a Gwasala hereditary chief. It’s one of the things that makes working in Indigenous communities so interesting and so challenging. Never make assumptions about what you think you know, and what is going on in the room. Every culture is different, has different thoughts about speech and different ways power is used. Understand that you can never hope to comprehend them all fully, not without years and years of living in the community, and even then, mistakes are made. Most important is to be yourself though, because although it is possible to violate protocols unconsciously, it is not possible to reconcile if you are anything other than authentic with people.
When all is said and done, that is probably the essence of the teaching for this week.
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Following a great talk from Gil Fronsdel on how self is constructed, I had a nice insight yesterday about personal identity.
Fronsdel says that when something happens, there are three things going on:
- There is the reality
- There is what we think about the reality
- There is the “I” that is thinking.
These are conditional, that is, they depend on and arise from each other. When I see something, I think something about it and my self in strengthened. For example:
- It’s raining today
- I hate rainy days.
- I’m not suited to living in a rainforest!
In Buddhism, we get locked into suffering when we think ABOUT something and then believe that thought. Who we are, our core identity, is in fact a set of stories we believe about our preferences about reality.
As a facilitator, this simple construction is a very important tool to use to reach clarity before working with a group. Imagine this construction:
- People are yelling at each other.
- They are in conflict and I hate conflict.
- I am a peacemaker.
So yes, but in the moment, you are going to suffer some when the meeting you are running counters your experience of yourself. You will think that you are failing if you are “a peacemaker” and yet your participants ar eyelling at each other. As a facilitator, when I get caught in that kind of thinking, I notice that I immediately become quite useless to the group. Why? Because I have left reality and I am spinning around in my thinking about reality, suffering and self-involved as my identity and ego get challenged.
People who have no thoughts about conflict are incredibly resourceful when yelling arises. They simply see yelling, they are able to listen and observe and notice what is happening. But those of us that are still working on our comfort with conflict might shy away from it, shrink away in fear, try to paper over differences or deny the reality of the moment in favour of a temporary comfort.
This is why it’s always good to work with people, especially with people who are afraid of different things than you are.
Working on this stuff is a key personal practice for me. I do it with meditation as well as working with Byron Katie’s method, called “The Work” to inquire into the thoughts and beliefs that are causing me suffering. My partner Caitlin Frost uses The Work as a cornerstone to her coaching practice, and it’s a real gift to have that available in our little firm. It lets me do much more than I ever could on my own. I’m curious wht your experiences are and what your practices are to challenge the constructions of mind that limit your own work in certain situations.
Tomorrow, a post on what this process looks like at the collective level.
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Last year I was invited to give a talk on the shapes of community engagement for a conference sponsored by the BC Treaty Commission called Forging Linkages and Finding Solutions. This is the slide deck I used and here is a transcript of my talk.
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In many large group processes I use, small groups are asked to facilitate some of the process. Recently, on the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation mailing list, there was a call for easy guides to help people facilitate these kinds of groups. Turns out that there is lots out there, including:
- 37 guides collected on NCDD’s own website
- Some resources from a climate dialogue project in Seattle
- The Conversation Cafe guidelines
- Bare bones version of the Let’s Talk America guidelines
- More detailed issue guides from the Everyday Democracy project
And a few more that I use:
- Hosting in a hurry, the guide I put together for the Art of Hosting community
- PeerSpirit Circle Guidelines
- The Art of the Powerful Question
The idea here is resources that help conversations become deeper, more focused and more engaging.