* I would rather teach people to think beautiful thoughts than to create grammatically correct sentences.
* I believe that beauty and justice are inextricably intertwined and I want to bring more of both into the world.
* I believe that the greatest inventions, discoveries, and solutions emerge when people start asking the right questions.
* I believe that you have to ask a lot of questions in order to get to the right ones.
* I am happy when I can help bold creativity blossom in those around me.
* A little part of me shrivels up inside when I find myself stifling creativity with too many rules and judgements.
* I am easily distracted by colourful markers and clean white paper.
* I believe that personal leadership is more important than positional leadership.
* I choose community over team, circle over hierarchy, and family over corporation.
* I believe that shared stories open doorways to transformation.
* I am less productive when I haven’t had time for deep contemplation and equally deep play. The two go hand in hand.
* I believe that our differences are important but that they should not divide us.
* I delight in making new connections with people whose ways of looking at the world intrigue me. I am open to letting them change me, if it’s for the best.
* I am committed to hosting and being part of more conversations and inquiries that follow spiral patterns (moving inward to deeper wisdom) rather than linear pathways.
* Deep and soulful listening is often the best gift I can give anyone, and so I strive to keep my mouth shut and my ears open more often.
* I believe in walking lightly on this earth, and hope to some day use fewer resources for my own personal gain.
* I want to be open-minded and open-hearted and to live with delight as my constant companion.
* I believe that vulnerability and truth-telling can serve as catalysts for deep relationships and profound change.
* I believe that in order to create one great work of art you have to be prepared to create at least 100 mediocre ones first.
* I believe that time spent in meditation, prayer, and body movement is never time wasted, and I hope to some day live like I believe it.
* I believe that God created each of us to do good work and that we cheat our Creator and our world when we let our self-doubt and fear keep us from doing it.
* I want to bring more colour and light into otherwise dreary spaces.
* I strive to be more courageous tomorrow than I was today.
* I believe in daily transformation, continuous learning, and growth that doesn’t end until the day I exhale my last breath.
* I am committed to doing my best work, which is at the intersection of creativity, leadership, community, and story-telling.
Note: this piece was included in this month’s newsletter. If you haven’t subscribed yet, be sure to do so, over there on the right.
Last week while I was in Toronto, I had the opportunity to spend an afternoon in St. James Park at Occupy Toronto. I found the experience to be very moving and I’ve been thinking about it a lot since.
What struck me first when I entered the park was the lengths to which people have gone to turn the park into an intentional community. One of the deepest values that was apparent immediately is the value of caring for each other and creating a safe and welcoming environment for everyone. The other value that’s clear is the value of volunteering whatever gifts you can bring for the benefit of the whole.
There is a food area where donated food is available free of charge, a free library where books are shared and free classes are taught by volunteers, a medical tent, a logistics tent, a recovery tent (for people in 12 step programs), a safe women’s area, a silent meditation area, a volunteer sign-up area, a town square where general assemblies take place twice a day, a music zone, and an information table for people who are new to the park. While I was there they were looking for volunteers to set up a children’s area. Everything is free and everyone is welcome.
Shortly after I arrived in the park, I discovered why it had been so quiet – participants were returning from a rousing protest march. They brought great energy and enthusiasm to an otherwise quiet space. Here’s a short video capturing some of the energy they brought with them:
The energy wasn’t all positive. Clearly there had been conflict on the march with one group wanting to march through the financial district and the rest of the group prefering to stick with the initial plan. Apparently someone had told the police that the group that wanted to go to the financial district was planning to incite violence. The people in that group insisted that it wasn’t true. As their voices raised in frustration, a few people stepped out of the crowd to offer them deep listening and a way to reframe their stories so that they could once again offer positive energy to the group.
The true test of a community is how they handle conflict, and though there is much to admire about the intentionality around the Occupy movement, they are not immune to the challenge of having various factions in their midst bringing different viewpoints and differing passions. Gather people with passion into the same space and at some point, you’re bound to experience conflict.
As soon as the marchers returned, the general assembly began in the town square. Young facilitators did their best to manage the energy in the large and passionate group. Using the human microphone (the speaker shouts their words, and then the group shouts them back so that more people can hear), they tried to give voice to all of the concerns and ideas as they arose. To increase people’s opportunity of being heard, they asked us all to break into circle groups to offer our personal ideas of what things should be done in the future. After the circle time, spokespersons from each group brought the offerings back into the larger group. Then, at the end of the meeting, a speaker’s list was formed, inviting anyone who still felt they had something important to say to add their name to the list.
The process wasn’t perfect, and it was clear that the facilitators were learning (and making up) the process as they went along. Those of us who have facilitated large and passionate groups know that it’s challenging to give voice to so many people, especially when there is conflict involved.
I would argue that those imperfections and efforts are what makes the movement beautiful and potentially powerful. No, the movement is not one of perfect clarity (as the critics continue to say). Each person brings a different desire and restlessness to the circle. But what is remarkable is that so many different voices are coming together to create circles, live in community, and share their questions, passions, ideas, and alternatives for the systems that have begun to enslave rather than serve us.
Whenever something new is emerging, we have to be willing to walk through chaos to get there. We have to have the patience to sit in the ambiguous spaces. We have to let the questions sit heavily on our hearts.
One of the speakers who stood up during the general assembly spoke the words that have resonated the most loudly for me since that afternoon. “People say that we are a leaderless movement,” she said. “I would suggest that instead we see ourselves as a leaderful movement. We must ALL see ourselves as leaders in this new journey we’re on.”
And THAT is the beauty of the Occupy movement. For the community (and movement) to succeed, each person has to step into personal leadership and offer their gifts into the circle. Those who have medical skills have to show up at the medical tent. Those who can teach meditation, have to show up in the meditation area to coach others. Those who are facilitators need to offer their skills to the general assembly. Those who are good at diffusing conflict need to step in and help where they can.
Each person brings his/her passion and ideas and a willingness to listen to the passion and ideas brought by others.
That’s wisdom that goes far beyond the Occupy movement and right into our lives. Whatever your gifts are, show up and offer them for the good of all people. And then listen and receive what others have brought.
YOU are a leader and you need to step into that role in order to serve the people who are waiting to be served. That’s the only way community can work.
At the beginning of every Creative Writing for Self Discovery class on Thursday evenings, after I ring the bell to welcome people into the circle, I read a poem. Usually it’s from a fairly serious, weighty poet like Mary Oliver or David Whyte. We don’t deconstruct the poem like we all used to do in high school English – we just sit with it for awhile and let it seep into us. Sometimes I read it twice. And then we share the way that the words may have pinched or soothed us.
Yesterday I thought it was time for a bit more whimsy and fun, and so I brought in my favourite Dr. Seuss book, Oh the Places You’ll Go! Earlier in the day, I’d spent a fair bit of time with the book, coming up with what I thought were some good writing exercises to use as a follow-up to the book. I was well prepared for a fun, engaging, imaginative class.
Before going to class, I read Bob Stilger’s post about a workshop he’d co-hosted in Zimbabwe. Bob wrote an honest critique of how he and the rest of the hosting team had run the kind of session they’d been hired to run but hadn’t done enough to respond to what needed to emerge in the room. “We did not work well with the needs and hopes present in the room,” he says.
Bob’s words made me wonder, “Am I doing enough to allow the needs and hopes in the room to emerge? Am I creating enough space for people’s stories to be told in the way that they need to tell them, rather than imposing my own style on them?”
This is, after all, why I teach this class in circle instead of a more traditional hierarchical structure. I don’t see myself as the expert in the room, transferring knowledge to my students like a mother bird dropping worms in hungry mouths. I see myself as a co-learner with them, exploring stories as a way to get to our deeper truths. In the words of George Bernard Shaw, “I’m not a teacher: only a fellow-traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead – ahead of myself as well as you.”
Yesterday, after reading Oh the Places You’ll Go!, but before launching into the well-planned writing exercises, I asked participants to share the writing they’d done in the week since we’d met. The assignment had been an exploration of personal voice and the passions and delights that are most easily communicated when one speaks in his/her most honest voice. One women shared a beautiful poem that began with words that were something like “my voice rises when I see someone fall.”
The second person to offer something up admitted that she was having a hard time sharing in class. At the first class, she’d openly shared a vulnerable and raw piece about loss and loneliness, but since then something had blocked her from sharing. She feared her writing was all going to the same dark places and she wasn’t sure of the validity and value of that for anyone other than herself.
At that moment, the circle proved its worth. We honoured her reluctance, we recognized her pain, we shared our own pain, and before long we’d entered a deeper place of conversation than we’d been in the past three classes. We talked about the universality of loneliness, and reflected back to Dr. Seuss’ words about the lonely place as one of the “places you’ll go”. We admitted the shame we felt when we’d been lonely in the middle of marriage or parenthood, or a gathering where everyone else is shiny and happy. We talked about the “slumps” and “waiting places” that Dr. Seuss so wisely defined for us.
And then we talked about how these stories connect us with each other and make us feel less alone. We discussed the value of writing these stories and sharing them in order to touch other people’s pain and walk the journey with them. We wrestled with the fine line a writer must walk between being personal and vulnerable, and yet being universal and not too self-absorbed.
Together, we took a deep dive into “the places you’ll go”.
At one point I glanced at the clock and realized that my well-planned exercises would never see the light of day. And when the tiny voice of regret whispered in my ear, I wished it well and sent it on its way. And when the slightly louder voice of my internal critic tried to insist that “you need to maintain order in this class. You need to share your expertise and exercises or people won’t get what they paid for,” I smiled, and then leaned in even closer to the person whose story was slowly and tentatively emerging.
In the end, we let the stories in the room (with a little help from Dr. Seuss) guide our adventure last night. We never got to the assignment, but it didn’t need to be done. We let the whimsy of Dr. Seuss take us from the not-so-good streets to the high heights, past the Bang-ups and Hang-ups, through the Slump and to a place where the streets are not marked. We raced across weirdish wild spaces, sat still in The Waiting Place, found the places where the Boom Bands are playing, let ourselves experience the lonely place where we met things that scare you right out of your pants, and in the end, tried to believe that we will succeed (98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed).
Throughout the course of the evening, we went to all the right places, even though none of them were the ones I’d carefully orchestrated.
The further I go down this teaching and leadership journey, the more I realize the value of the ambiguous spaces – the spaces where we let go of our plans, let go of certainty, let go of agendas, let go of “the way things have always been”, and open ourselves to possibility. It is in those spaces that true creativity can emerge. When we let ourselves (and the people we lead & teach) get a little lost, we can write deeper stories, ask deeper questions, and find deeper meaning.
It’s a scary place to go, and it’s hard to convince ourselves (and the people we’re with) that it’s the right place when we’re supposed to be “in charge”. Nobody likes to feel out of control. It’s scary for the leader and it’s scary for the people being lead. (I remember being reprimanded by former staff for letting meetings slip away from the agenda. There was fear of the unknown in those reprimands.)
And yet, if we want to go to deeper places, we have to be more comfortable with ambiguity and confusion. Rather than trying to enforce our own plans, we have to be willing to let the stories in the room shape what needs to be done. With caution and respect, and an intuitive sense of when it’s time to steer the ship back into safer harbour, we as leaders and teachers need to risk security for creativity. Otherwise, we’ll never leave the shallow water and we’ll never know what’s possible.
This greater comfort with ambiguity is, I believe, one of the gifts of feminine wisdom.
And now, for your inspiration, here’s John Lithgow reading Oh the Places You’ll Go!
One of the things I love most about the work that I now do and the learning I do to support it, is that I’ve had the opportunity to develop deep and beautiful friendships with many amazing women of all generations. As I wrote in this post, I believe that we must all take responsibility for being conduits of this wisdom work – both receiving support and wisdom from women of older generations, and passing it down to the generations following us.
One of the women who has served as mentor and friend to me (and, truth be told, I have also had the opportunity to return the mentorship, so it’s a mutual benefit thing) is Margaret Sanders. I met her last year at a circle/story workshop, and I was drawn in almost immediately by the warmth and wisdom I saw on her face. She is an amazingly gifted educator, mentor, host, and wisdom-sharer.
It has become increasingly clear to me that we, as middle-aged (and younger) women, need strong role models in the generation ahead of us. We need women like Margaret who have forged a new path for women in leadership to support us, encourage us, and lend us their wisdom. I am grateful that I have Margaret in my corner, believing in what I do and challenging me to continue to move forward.
I asked Margaret to share a bit about her life as she steps into this new stage of “active wisdom”, and this is what she wrote…
I am a woman who turned 65 this year, and it rocked my world! Not just a minor tremor. It’s been a full-scale earthquake.
I believe there is significance in my story for others, because I have come to realize that I am at the front line of a surging crowd of baby boomers who are about to face the same thing.
This is my story from the front line:
I don’t see myself as a senior person, but other people do. The arrival of my Canada Old Age Benefit Card in the mail (seriously – who knew?) confirmed my new status as a person. Over the past year, colleagues who valued my presence in working with them or mentoring them have moved on in their careers, and that has caused me to question what I ever could do – or did know. I have been mired in the ditch of questioning whether and where I have value to contribute to this world.
I left my job as a school principal to care for my mother when my father died. She suffered from dementia, and needed “mothering” until her death a few years ago. I successfully reinvented my professional work to be able to give her the kind of loving attention she gave me all of my life.
It’s startling to realize that I am in this situation as a pioneer; I have no role models in my family history for what it means to be a professional woman. As a woman who has been successful and highly regarded for her expertise, who must re-find her place in the world upon seeing opportunities for paid “work” vanish, coincidentally, as the 65 year mark arrived.
Because I have been a new kind of mother model for my 40ish age children, they are extremely competent and confident professionals, spouses and parents who have no need of mothering. I’ve done myself out of that historical elder role.
I have Wisdom, expertise, energy and good health, and I am not sure what to do with those gifts in the currents of today’s world.
My views are broad, wide and long-term and I have come to see things in the way of Proust’s simplicity on the other side of complexity. Younger professionals are focusing on the absolute necessity of meeting today’s challenges. Their lives are frequently frenetic, and they have little time to “waste. ” [We live on completely different planes, and necessarily so – but my deepest instincts tell me that my wisdom has potential for changing their lives.]
I have lots and lots of things that I want to do to remain stimulated and independent and contributing over the next few years. There is a cost associated with all of these things. I want to continue to be paid for the value that I possess. I am trying to figure out how that might work.
So, I am at the point of reinvention again. Unlike all of the other transition points in my life where things seemed to resolve fairly quickly, it is taking a while to rebuild who I am and what I am about. But the good news today is that I know my experience is going to add up to something significant. And my reason for that today is that we have a new 46 year old premier-elect in Alberta, Canada and for the first time he is a woman. I am one of the shoulders upon which she stands. (Her mother died a few days before her election, and the one person she wanted to call first with the good news was her mother.) Invisibly, from behind this front-line head-line news, my experience and the experiences of the women surging behind me, enabled this new story to begin unfolding.
We baby boomer women have stories to tell, and our stories are changing the world. That may be where I come in …
It was 1992. I’d just gotten home from spending an evening with my boyfriend (who became my husband a year later).
“Your dad called,” my roommate said, as though it were just an ordinary every-day occurrence.
“My DAD called?!? Are you SURE?” My dad didn’t call. Ever. It just wasn’t his thing. In all my life, I got only a handful phone calls from him, and the other four were various Christmas Eves when he needed me to pick up a last-minute present for Mom. This wasn’t Christmas Eve.
“Yeah, it was your dad. I’m sure of it.”
What did that mean? Was I in trouble? Did something happen to Mom? My heart leapt to my throat.
“It didn’t seem urgent. He just wanted you to call him back when you were home.”
Phoning Dad back wasn’t an easy thing either. His farming lifestyle meant that he was rarely in the house, and he didn’t come in for meals at the times when normal people did.
Eventually, I made contact. “Dad? You called?”
“I heard from Mom that you were thinking of becoming a teacher. I just wanted to tell you that I think you should. You’d be a good teacher.”
And that was about the extent of the phone call. My Dad was a man of few words. When he spoke, the words were usually calculated and important.
At that time, I was in the early stages of my government career. After finishing an English degree, I was wrestling with what I should do with my life and was contemplating an after-degree in Education. That’s what my dad had heard.
He hadn’t heard it directly from me though. I wasn’t in the habit of discussing my life’s plans with my dad.
It wasn’t always easy being my father’s daughter. He was a stubborn man whose love for his farm often seemed more evident than his love for his children. And yet, he was a wise, astute man, and there were many things I greatly admired and respected about him. He was a lifelong learner who placed great value on education (though he had very little formal education himself). He had clarity of vision on some things like few people I know. And, despite his rather conservative worldview (and the fact that he never allowed me to do scripture reading in church because of my gender), he admired strong and eloquent women. (Canadians of a certain age will remember journalist Barbara Frum – one of my Dad’s hero’s.)
Though we didn’t often have heart-to-hearts, my dad saw things in me I didn’t always see in myself. He offered very few compliments in my life, but those he offered were golden. He didn’t exist in a world where women were supposed to be leaders (and he never overtly encouraged it in me), but he saw me as a leader. Once, after we’d had to move all of his tools out of the old house that was about to be torn down, he’d said to me “I felt better when I knew you were the one taking the responsibility. I knew I could trust you to take charge.” And he saw me as one of those strong women he admired. Once, after I’d gone through a really difficult personal valley, he said “I knew you’d survive. You’re one of the strongest people I know.”
His recommendation that I become a teacher felt serious. I wasn’t sure at that point that I really wanted to be one, and yet if my dad saw it in me, perhaps…?
Despite my dad’s advice, I didn’t become a teacher – at least not then. I went through the process of applying for the after-degree program, but “forgot” to show up for my interview. Something about it didn’t sit right with me. I wasn’t sure I had enough patience to hang around with children all day every day.
I stayed in my government career at the time, and soon found my passion for communication and leadership. Before long, I was rising in the ranks and finding a place that fit.
My dad’s words never left me, though, and as the years evolved, I kept feeling a silent tug – my teacher heart wanting to emerge.
Last year, after several years of dreaming about being self employed and longing to leave my non-profit leadership job to work as a writer and consultant, I finally took the leap. I had no idea what was ahead, but the timing felt right. Within minutes of having a heart-to-heart conversation with my husband and deciding that it was time for me to quit my job, I got an email from the university, asking me if I would consider teaching a writing course. The message came completely out of the blue. Someone had recommended me for the position.
It was just the sign I needed to affirm that I was making the right move. I gave my notice the next day.
I taught that first course, and then I taught a couple more, and yesterday I was offered three new courses. Plus I have several one-day seminars lined up for the coming months.
From the first day I walked into a classroom, I knew I was where I belonged. I was energized, engaged, and happy. That first class full of students was just what I needed to affirm that I was doing the right thing. They embraced me and told me again and again how much they liked being in my classroom. I heard things like “you know how to build trust in your students” and “you taught us a lot about writing, but more importantly, you taught us how to live and work with integrity and boldness” and “you made us go deeper than we expected to go”.
Nearly twenty years after Dad gave me the advice, and eight years after he died, I am a teacher. I took a winding path to get here, but I don’t regret the path. I picked up a lot of the skills and confidence and wisdom and seasoning I needed along that path before I could stand fully in my teacher role.
Though I enjoy the courses I teach at the university, I know that this is not the end of the road. I don’t plan to spend the rest of my life teaching students how to write effective press releases or persuasive emails.
I want to teach people to write with passion, to live with boldness, to embrace creativity, to challenge themselves, and to dare to lead. I want to foster people’s imagination and help them re-experience the wonder they left behind with their childhood. I want to be a catalyst for positive change.
To start with, I’ll be offering an 8 week in-person course in “Creative Writing for Self Discovery“. (If you’re in Winnipeg, I hope you’ll check it out.) And in a few weeks, I’ll be opening registration for a few more online leadership workshops.
I wish you could see me now Dad. I am a teacher. Instead of taking the traditional route to get here, I’ve forged my own path. It’s been worth the journey.
There is so much bad news out there, if you look for it. Riots in London, failing economies, famine in East Africa, changing climate causing erratic weather disasters… the list goes on and on. Some days it feels like the whole world is crashing in around us.
It’s enough to make a person completely discouraged. It’s enough to make a person want to bury her head in the sand, and choose to live a self-focused life instead of spending seemingly useless energy on problems that are too big to manage.
Everything I see tells me the same thing over and over again… we need a big hairy audacious paradigm shift.
We need to imagine the world differently.
We need to imagine leadership differently.
We need to imagine ourselves differently.
We need to imagine community differently.
We need to get our heads out of the sand and instead of paying attention to the big ugly negative news, turn our attention toward each other.
We need to keep on caring for each other even though it hurts sometimes and often feels like useless resistance in a tsunami of bad news.
We need to start insisting that our news media focus on the good in people and not just the bad.
We need to engage our creativity and collaboration and stop listening to those people who tell us that consumption and competition is what makes the world go round.
We need to stop believing that the economy is our god and over-consumption is okay because it feeds the economy. We need to seek happiness in other places than shopping malls.
We need to turn to each other, focus on building our communities where we live, and trust that the benefit of local communities will have far-reaching impact (as my friend Kathy Jourdain so eloquently suggests).
We need women and men who will rise up and shift the tide away from aggressive “command and control” leadership to participative “engage and collaborate” leadership.
We need to sit in circles and tell each other stories that will help us understand and celebrate each others’ differences and similarities.
We need to get our egos out of the way and start admitting that the only way to find a new path through the weeds is to trust each other to contribute the necessary skills. And then we need to believe that we are better together than alone.
THIS is why we need more feminine wisdom in leadership. It’s not about women taking over from men (and making their own sets of mistakes). It’s about trusting the wisdom that tends to be more inherent in women than in men. (Even the Washington Post says so.) It’s about engaging our creativity, spirituality, compassion, collaboration, and empathy in the way we lead. It’s about letting our right brains contribute to our decisions as much as our left brains.
None of these problems is going to be fixed overnight. In fact, even using the word “fix” shows limited thinking on our part. These things are not simple problems with simple solutions. There is no linear logic to apply, like a math problem on a high school exam. We can’t just assign more police to the streets of London, for example. We need to look at the systemic problems that shaped what happened long before anything erupted. There is deep complexity that will require a lot of deep thinking and collaborating and failing and trying again and meditating and engaging in conversation.
When change happens, there is always a time of great chaos before new solutions are found. It feels like much of the world is in that place of chaos now. This is not a time for despair. This is a time for hope and creativity. This is a time to gather together and lean on each other.
The world needs new ideas. The world needs YOUR ideas. Get your head out of the sand and start sharing them.
What struck me first when I entered the park was the lengths to which people have gone to turn the park into an intentional community. One of the deepest values that was apparent immediately is the value of caring for each other and creating a safe and welcoming environment for everyone. The other value that’s clear is the value of volunteering whatever gifts you can bring for the benefit of the whole.
As soon as the marchers returned, the general assembly began in the town square. Young facilitators did their best to manage the energy in the large and passionate group. Using the human microphone (the speaker shouts their words, and then the group shouts them back so that more people can hear), they tried to give voice to all of the concerns and ideas as they arose. To increase people’s opportunity of being heard, they asked us all to break into circle groups to offer our personal ideas of what things should be done in the future. After the circle time, spokespersons from each group brought the offerings back into the larger group. Then, at the end of the meeting, a speaker’s list was formed, inviting anyone who still felt they had something important to say to add their name to the list.
And THAT is the beauty of the Occupy movement. For the community (and movement) to succeed, each person has to step into personal leadership and offer their gifts into the circle. Those who have medical skills have to show up at the medical tent. Those who can teach meditation, have to show up in the meditation area to coach others. Those who are facilitators need to offer their skills to the general assembly. Those who are good at diffusing conflict need to step in and help where they can.
