I read a lot, not as much as I’d like, which I would like to blame on the super-addictive UFC, Guy Frieri, not to mention the time-consuming tasks of Facebook, Twitter, and well, OK, I admit, the occasional spider solitaire game (sigh)… Though in spite of such vices, I do manage to get through several books a month. And this past year I’ve read some truly outstanding books. There is an art, I think, to finding and choosing great books. It’s actually not so easy. No matter what reviewers say, I have specific interests, and no amount of praise can interest me in, say, books about a recent election. And even if the topic does draw me in, I’m a slave (as we all are) to my particular thinking style, and I get easily impatient with how some authors think. And for reasons unknown, some things just won’t stick, no matter how riveting the topic is. What I’ve discovered is that in my search for good reads, how I find the book is a good clue to whether or not I’m going to love it. So for anyone a bit like me, I’ve included in my list below how I got tipped off to the book. So, here we go, a round-up of the best books I’ve read in the past year, in no particular order, and a note on how and where I found it. Continue reading…

This past week I was in Yachats attending the Mindell’s seminar, and pondering the question they were posing, what moves you? Writing about motivation, leadership and learning, we can begin to forget this question and think that ‘I move myself.’ I decide. I lead. I determine a course of action, what strategies to take, what directions to pursue. But it’s not so simple. The “I” is not necessarily a unified thing. We each have multiple and conflicting parts, drives, desires, reactions, needs. Continue reading…

Last week the American Psychiatric Associations released a draft of DSM-V, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The final version is set to come out in May 2013. It has a number of proposed revisions which have been widely blogged about, including a new diagnosis of hypersexuality. In just about every post I’ve read, at some point, the author proposes Tiger Woods as the poster child for this new diagnosis.

As a blog on power and leadership, I’ve spent a fair amount of time here discussing instances in which power goes awry, in particular, why and how public figures and leaders torpedo their careers by engaging in risky sexual behavior. How can public figures like Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer and Tiger Woods, believe their sexual behavior can be kept secret from the world?  It is easy to see it as a mental disorder and it very well may be. Undoubtedly we’ll even find the gene that’s responsible, but making this a medical disorder keeps us from contemplating it as a behavior on a continuum, one we’re all prone to. Continue reading…

I asked my trainer and owner of Recreate Fitness, Nathan, if he would coach a “cross-fit club” with my 5^th grade boys from the I Have a Dream foundation. It’s one of my kids and leadership clubs I’ve been doing. It’s definitely been fun, but also challenging. Some of the games and activities require technique, balance, or strength. And even the most athletic kids, the ones used to winning the races and being chosen first, suddenly find themselves in the unusual position of struggling. They realize it’s hard, and not something they can just do. For kids who aren’t confident or kids who have been taught to expect praise for whatever they attempt, their first response is to get impatient and frustrated. This is a critical moment in our emotional development which has profound lingering effects. When progress isn’t immediate, when gratification or success is deferred, the difference in how we manage that moment is critical to our success in life. The well known “marshmallow test” shows how kids deal with delayed gratification.

So how are my boys managing this? Well, a few of them get serious and focused. A couple of them just give up after one or two attempts, and wander onto something else. Some internalize their frustration, and get upset with themselves. And others externalize their frustration. They get angry at the activity itself, me, Nathan, or whatever they deem is in their way of success. One of them, Adbul, has really gotten my attention. Continue reading…

I spent the first week of January in Victoria, B.C., at a conference that brought together leaders from two very different sectors: social change agents and leaders in the personal development field. Our goal was to develop a framework for a personal development program to support social change agents and activists in their work. On that first evening there was a lot of goodwill, but just as much skepticism. I had my doubts that the personal development facilitators who represented very diverse models, could develop a common framework. Likewise, the social change agents had different social agendas and diverse political analyses. And between the two approaches to change, the personal and the political, was a lengthy, thorny relationship and strikingly different perspectives and worldviews.

And yet, in spite of these gaps in frameworks, language, and perspective, the conference was a great success. There was an astounding capacity to listen, learn, share ideas, and grapple with and find meaning in the differences that arose. Over the course of the four days, an appreciation of each others’ knowledge and experience began to grow, and a sense of trust and teamwork organically emerged.

On the plane ride home, exhausted by happy, I began to wonder why it came together so well. And it dawned on me that this was not the first interdisciplinary and cross-modality project I’ve consulted on. In fact, the last four major projects I’ve worked on all involved extensive, interdisciplinary engagement. Was that a coincidence, I wondered, or is there something about interdisciplinary teamwork that appeals to me? This got me thinking more about interdisciplinary teamwork, and working with stakeholders across disciplines and industries. What kind of teamwork is needed? Is a different kind of teamwork required? What are the particular challenges and unique approaches needed to make interdisciplinary teamwork successful? Continue reading…

The last decade is a strong contender for the title “the decade of dubious leadership.” From the handling of Katrina to the collapse of the banking system, it was a disastrous decade for leadership. Ironically, it was also a decade during which more was written on leadership than ever before. I’m hoping for a better decade of leadership, and here are my top five leadership trends I’d like to see take off in the coming years. Continue reading…

What’s the solution for solving the health care mess? Global warming? The economy? OK, these are bad examples, obviously if we knew, and if it were that easy, they’d be solved. But the question I want to ask is, why do we wait to tackle our problems until they are so complicated, so messy, so escalated that they require Herculean efforts? Continue reading…

Just finished a weekend training seminar on bullying in Auckland, New Zealand. It was terrific to have so many participants there involved in workplace bullying and harassment work. What’s increasingly evident as I tackle this topic around the globe is the role of cultural attitudes. To adequately fight bullying, we have to reduce our cultural tolerance for abusive interaction. Many cultures deride sensitivity and praise people’s ability to “suck it up,” to be tough and strong, and not be “so sensitive.” The tough guy is a cultural icon, the action figure we admire and emulate. But to get underneath the problem of bullying, we need to value sensitivity and respect as much as toughness.

In Brisbane this week and I just finished teaching a seminar on the Unfinished Work of Ancestors, exploring  how our relative ease and/or discomfort in the world is influenced by generational issues and attitudes, known and unknown, seen and unseen. The wars, famines, forced migrations, poverty, and challenges of our ancestors still reverberate through us today, and influence how we live with others, deal with such issues as money, relationship, work, authority.

Is it really possible to change our patterns of behavior that have been laid down for generations? How long does it take to start a new pattern when there are powerful generational forces influencing us?

It requires far more than a change of circumstance or fortune to change behaviors. It requires a new attitude, new worldviews and these are difficult to establish. research into changing generational patterns concerning poverty and education show that, among others, the follow two factors are crucial in helping change behavior:

• mentoring and relationship, someone who not only advises or supports the change, but who models the new behavior, giving us picture of a new possibility.
• high expectations, a parent, teacher, mentor or family friend who expects us to succeed.

In short, a different worldview about ourselves and about what’s possible.

I’m getting clearer on what this blog is about. I have started to call it, to myself at least, Learning and Leading. While leadership and power is a main focus, looking over the posts, I see that a great deal of what I write about involves the problems of learning to lead. And that reminds me of Jerry Maguire.

I love the movie Jerry Maguire, (yes, the one with the memorable one-liners like “show me the money,” or “you had me at hello)” because Jerry Maguire captures so perfectly the jet lag between knowing something and living it. One of the greatest and most frustrating psychological puzzles has to do with the difference between our espoused beliefs and our actual behavior. I’m not just talking about hypocrisy but about knowing. Just because we can think something, or even deeply believe something, doesn’t mean we know what it means as a way of being, as a day-to-day behavior. We have to learn by living it.

Jerry Maguire, a brilliant and successful sports agent has an epiphany about his profession. Unable to sleep one night, troubled by his conscience, he writes an inspired manifesto, a call to arms to his fellow sports agents, reminding them that the essence of the profession is the relationship between athlete and agent. He exhorts his colleagues to put the relationship and the well-being of the athlete at the center. And then his world falls apart. Because of or in spite of his insight, he loses his job, his colleagues steal his clients, and he is left with nothing, save one whining and difficult client, played famously by Cuba Gooding, Jr. (who won a Best Supporting Oscar for the role), and a timid and loyal staffer at the agency, played by Renee Zellweger.

The rest of the movie shows Jerry learning, and ultimately living the morals of his manifesto. And it’s not pretty. He doesn’t deliberately set out to consciously live them; in fact, he really hasn’t a clue that his manifesto has anything to do with him. This is what learning really is. We get an insight, or discover a truth and yet are not yet able to live it fully. Learning is a Hero’s Journey. To follow the call of our insight, we have to go on a journey. Jerry had the insight, an idea about love and friendship, but hadn’t gone on the journey. He didn’t know what it meant to live from love, to be truly in relationship with someone else. We are all Jerry Maguire. We know something intellectually; we get an insight or know something as an idea, but to transform the ideal into a lifestyle, to live it, feel it, and model it in our every action, in our micro-movements and interactions, that is the Jerry Maguire story, the hero’s journey of learning. And mine as well. I’m uncovering what I’m writing about. I had an initial thought, and while sort of true, my deeper interests are only now beginning to reveal themselves. And I’m grateful to have a few readers following along as I discover more deeply what I mean.

Thanks to Kerry Goldstein, perception engineer extraordinaire, for the inspiration.