Mipun Mehta is a blogger I love reading, especially for tidbits like this::
“At this restaurant, you don’t get billed for your food. Pay what you like, their slogan reads. It sound unbelievable but there’s a fully volunteer-run, high-end restaurant — Annalakshmi — where they trust that everyone will pay their fair share. And the food was awesome too!
A very kind lady, who has been there since Annalakshmi opened in Singapore 20 years ago, spoke with us for a bit. I asked why she does this, and she replied, ‘I don’t know. It just fills my heart. I don’t really have any expectations. I just do it.'”
Hmmm.
I was once half-jokingly called “optimistic to the point of uselessness” which is a badge I wear with some pride as my fool’s marker.
Optimism has been on my mind today. I’ve just been turning over these words: optimism, hope, faith, responsibility, trust. No reason, no particular cause to examine these ideas, just a little synchronicity in blog land that got me musing a little.
Partly it comes from a bunch of work I am doing in which people in various walks of life are dicovering their emerging futures, and it’s partly about some of the blogs I am reading. For example, today I read this article on overcoming fear, uncertainty and doubt:
Reaching a personal goal brings about a sense of accomplishment and personal satisfaction. To achieve your goal, learn how to identify the gremlins of goal derailment, which primarily consists of FUD. You can defeat FUD imagining yourself achieving your goals, tuning out negative remarks by others, personal negative self-talk and finally, surrounding yourself around others who have similar interests. Once you have learned to defeat FUD, you will have gone along way in achieving your dreams � it happened for Dylan and it can happen for you.
And then I see at Caterina’s blog, she writes about John Stockdale, the one-time US Vice Presidential candidate and survivor of 8 years as a PoW in Vietnam:
How did Stockdale survive when he didn’t know if he were going to live or die or see his family again?
“I never lost faith in the end of the story,” he said, when I asked him. �I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
I didn�t say anything for many minutes, and we continued the slow walk toward the faculty club, Stockdale limping and arc-swinging his stiff leg that had never fully recovered from repeated torture. Finally, after about a hundred meters of silence, I asked, �Who didn�t make it out?�
“Oh, that�s easy,” he said. “The optimists.”
“The optimists? I don�t understand,� I said, now completely confused, given what he�d said a hundred meters earlier.
“The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We�re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they�d say,’We�re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
Another long pause, and more walking. Then he turned to me and said, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end�which you can never afford to lose�with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
That’s from Jim Collins’ “Good to Great.”
So my musing is going to questions about strategies for holding open hope without blinding onself to challenge. What do you think?
By the way,
here’s a guy who is in the middle of it all at the moment. Get well soon, Lorne.
I have put some photos up from the Open Space I did in the Fort Rupert big house last weekend. Enjoy!
Reading Adam Kahane some more and thinking about listening:
If talking openly means being willing to expose others to what is inside of us, then listening openly means being willing to expose ourselves to something new from others.”
— Adam Kahane, Solving Tough Problems p.73
It is a truism to say this, but I’ve been pondering the deep implications of this statement and what it means for a practice of listening and opening that becomes a leadership skill.
It is almost impossible to describe what it is like to listen from the heart. We easily talk about “speaking from the heart” or making a “heartfelt” appeal, and we recognize this in someone who is deeply and honestly communicating their truth. We can probably all identify moments when we have heard people speaking from the heart and we may even be able to remember moments when we were capable of this kind of power. One becomes solid in a way that is out of the ordinary. One feels anchored and firm in conviction and confident of the words one is using. It is sometimes accompanied with tears or other hints of emotion but at one’s core there is a steadiness that appears almost otherworldly. One develops a sense of mutuality with the other, and the boundaries begin to blur.
It is by no means a run of the mill state of being for most of us, but it is far more common than it’s attendant skill: heartfelt listening.
If it is possible to speak from the very centre of one’s being what does it feel like to listen from that place, to listen as the Dalai Lama says “with the heart?” How do we cultivate that in daily life?
My experience of listening with the heart was drafted in the Cariboo region of British Columbia. When I was working with the Federal Treaty Negotiation Office, my job was to bring together third party stakeholder to provide governments with advice on treaty negotiations with First Nations. Most of the people I worked with in the Cariboo were virulently opposed to treaty making when we started working there in the mid 1990s. They were loggers, ranchers, miners and business people, among others, and although some understood that reconciliation of the land question was an important and inevitable journey for British Columbia, most thought that treaties would put too much land in the control of First Nations and erode the ability for the resource sectors to make a living in the region.
This was a real fear, although it was based in a story about First Nations that was loaded with assumptions about competence, vengeance and paternalism. Our challenge was to find ways of hearing the interests of these non-Aboriginal stakeholders and bring them to the negotiating table in a way that resulted in agreements that would work for all parties.
If we were successful, it was because I think we learned to hear at a heart level what people were saying to us. AND I think our sincere desire to know these folks gave us the questions that they could ask of each other too. Over years of eating, drinking, working and traveling with these folks I came to realize that people in the Cariboo, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal share something in common: they care deeply about their region. When they perceive a threat to the future of the Cariboo they react like a parent protecting a child: they become defensive and then aggressive.
It was this defensive and aggressive reaction that gave the Cariboo region its poorly deserved reputation. For me it was hard to hear white people talking about Aboriginal in racist terms. It was hard to hear resource industry workers talk about how they felt about environmentalists, people with whom I shared more in common. And it was hard to hear Aboriginal people talking about white people in sweeping generalizations because my background is mixed ancestry and I take great pride in my Irish heritage.
If I was to work effectively with these interests I knew that I would have to hear deeper than the words, right into the heart of the experience and the story. Without fully understanding that, there was no way we could fashion common ground.
What I learned in the Cariboo was what it feels like to listen without blame or judgment. It feels very much like one is holding something open, as if you have your arms raised above your head and you are keeping a tent from collapsing in on you. You can find it hard to breathe, and if for some reason the conversation should switch into a reactive and blaming mode, there is a visceral feeling of the tent coming down., The conversation becomes smothering, people talk on top of one another, and the listening evaporates. Working in this environment taught me to remain open and to hear what people were saying, beyond the “goddamn Indians” comments.
The last time I went up there to work was in 2003 when I facilitated an Open Space session with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people from government, businesses, the resource sector and the community. In the closing circle I made the observation that my five years of working with these people had taught me that deep below the bluster were individuals who cared so deeply about this place that they couldn’t think of letting go of any part of it. I suggested that far from being a hindrance to treaty settlements, this would work in their favour, because a future without care and passion and connection is not a sustainable future. The result of creating sincere dialogue and listening between groups like that is, with the right questions and enough time, they come to see that deep commonality in each other.
To create new realities, we have to listen reflectively. It is not enough to be able to hear clearly the chorus of other voices; we must also hear the contribution of our own voice. It is not enough to be able to see others in the picture of what is going on; we must also see what we ourselves are doing. It is not enough to be observers of the problem situation; we must also recognize ourselves as actors who influence the outcome.
— Kahane P. 83
Folks in the Cariboo are continuing to work together and the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities are in a place now with each other that 10 years ago would have seemed impossible. Listening to one another with heart has made this future emerge.
As humans, using our deepest faculties, we really have no idea about just how much we can accomplish.
Gabriela Ender, the creator of OpenSpaceOnline has a new eBook available from her site talking about how OSO works and its various applications.
You can download the eBook for free here. Among the international Open Space practitioner community, there is general consensus that Gabriela’s software is the closest thing in cyber space to participating in a face to face Open Space Technology meeting.