I have always thought of death as a sort of dénouement. The mysteries of existence will be revealed to us at the moment we die. And one of the biggest mysteries I’m anticipating that death will dispel is: why do we resist ourselves?

Why do we need resolutions, New Year’s or otherwise? Why do we need so much high-powered resolve to do things that are meaningful, important, good for us, or desirable? Why do we need so much encouragement to accomplish our goals and dreams, some of them quite mundane: getting up earlier, writing two blog posts a week, eating better, or exercising?

Those tasks in and of themselves are not that onerous. Some may even be pleasant. What is the internal obstacle that resolutions are meant to undo? Why is the human condition so fraught with inner resistance? (more…)

I can’t help but be influenced by the end of year recaps at this time of year –the best of this, the worst of that. It’s definitely a time to reflect, review, and plan. I love spending a few days, usually somewhere between Christmas and New Years, reflecting on  the past year, what I’ve accomplished,  learned, did, things I didn’t do, and then meditating on my sense of the coming year. It’s not just about goals – but also about what I sense is on the horizon. I try to feel my way into what the coming year will bring. What tendencies are stirring? Fantasies? What have I been daydreaming about? What projects are coming my way? Things that feel really important, I’ll work into more practical goals – I’ll set small benchmarks, assign them a time and place. I’ll look into my schedule and prioritize.

Looking backwards is fun, too. One of the things I like doing is reading through my agenda, journal and writing, seeing what I have done over the past year. Sometimes I read back several years, and two things always jump out at me. First, I’m always pleasantly surprised to see that I really have accomplished some things. I know, it sound a bit crazy, But I am one of those people who suffer from feeling there is way more to do than what I have time for. So seeing the things that have actually happened is always refreshing.

The other thing I notice is that even as I change, I stay the same. I think we all d0. We really do have theme songs, and no matter where we end up, we have something very recognizable about us. I saw this recently, since I just launched my newly revised website, thanks to the collective genius of Team Diamond (Suzie Schofield, Jim Parker and Bryan Capitano). I was looking for documents related to my web server and it gave me an opportunity to look at websites past. Like Scrooge in his vision, I dropped in on earlier iterations of myself. So what is it that didn’t change? Well, looking back at my earlier web presence, before blogs, before Web 2.0, before social media, I was playing around with different ways to create community with my website. Are there any readers out there who remember:

The Village Well? An email string on research and creativity?

Hi-5 – top 5 favorites submitted by different contributors?

The Process Work Wiki, or pwiki, which later was Processworkinternational?

OK, enough of the past for now, soon I’ll be drunkenly singing Auld Lang Syne and making promises I won’t want to keep ….

Wishing you all happy holidays, and thanks for reading. It’s a pleasure to not change along with you all!

Last post I talked about what makes a good learner, sharing some of what I presented at my seminar in Australia, Beyond our Grasp: The Art, Science and Flow of Learning, Performance and Change. This post deals with the challenges of giving and getting feedback and coaching others’s performance.

Having to give and get feedback is a topic that generates a lot of conversation- whether we are teachers, managers, supervisors, or coaches. A lot of the literature on feedback and performance centers around the problem of information: What information is relevant? From what sources do we gather it? How do we deliver it? And for the one receiving feedback, the same: What do I think my strengths and weaknesses are? Am I open to the feedback? But often overlooked is the conversation between the giver and receiver of feedback. Feedback is a process, not a delivery. At its best, it’s a conversation and an exploration. Let’s look at the two parts of the conversation.
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Atul Gawande, in an article for The New Yorker, writing about the soaring cost of health care, looks at the role dying and the terminally ill play in those costs:

Twenty-five per cent of all Medicare spending is for the five per cent of patients who are in their final year of life, and most of that money goes for care in their last couple of months which is of little apparent benefit. … In the past few decades, medical science has rendered obsolete centuries of experience, tradition, and language about our mortality, and created a new difficulty for mankind: how to die.Technology sustains our organs until we are well past the point of awareness and coherence.

Death is the enemy. Though it’s not just death in the literal sense. Admitting defeat can be hard, and refusing to give up can cost us dearly. Whether the President or Congress continues to escalate a war in the hopes of finally turning it around, or someone stays in a troubled relationship in the hopes that things might just get better, it’s not easy to raise the white flag. (more…)

In the wake of the recent G20 in Toronto, my friend Annahid and I were talking about the state of social change movements today. Annahid has been on the front lines of social change her whole life, and is founder and senior partner of Anima Leadership Institute in Toronto, which offers leadership programs for individuals, teams and organizations in support of transformative change, so she’s got a pretty good perspective on the movement. She was disheartened by what she saw as the same old divisive rhetoric, and the tendency to “battle might with right.” In an email exchange, she wrote, “the complexity of our current environments and systems means that no one individual or group can possibly have all the answers required. Our strategies and solutions instead must innovate in their ability to integrate different perspectives and knowledge.”

Annahid is hosting a series of talks on Animating Social Change, and asked me to speak about Deep Democracy. What social change innovation does Deep Democracy offer, she asked? Not so easy to say as I first thought, I discovered. Is it the creative techniques for working with conflict? The teleological view of disturbance and conflict? The embrace of non-consensual experiences? The way it views marginalization as both an inner and outer process? All yes, but something else, something’s missing. Then it occurred to me, Deep Democracy is not just an innovation, but a disruptive innovation. Clayton M. Christensen, in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, differentiated between sustaining and disruptive innovations. He describes disruptive innovations as ones that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect. Deep Democracy is disruptive because it puts individual development back in the center of the conversation on systemic change. The split between inner and outer, personal and political is radically revisioned in Deep Democracy. Here’s how I see Deep Democracy’s disruptive innovation: (more…)

A friend posted this great video clip of Viktor Frankl on Facebook. What an extraordinary man he was, and what a treat to see him in action.

Frankl’s analogy of learning to fly and how he learned to aim ‘north’ to arrive at his destination, reminded me of my high school yearbook quote. In the 70s, it was fashionable to put a quote underneath your photo. Most classmates had rock lyrics, like, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” but I was captivated by a line from a Robert Browning poem, “Ah, but a man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” (more…)

While it’s been quiet on the blog front, it’s been a storm of ideas, activities and projects in the back office, so to speak. I just arrived down in Yachats for my much anticipated and much needed end of year retreat, and I’ve got several projects I’m looking forward to spending time with. Here’s a little overview:

• I’m fascinated by Scott Miller’s work, His research into what works in psychotherapy raises a lot of questions about change and growth, specifically why and how do people change? It seems that rather than any one modality, there are a few ‘meta-therapeutic’ factors that account for efficacy in psychotherapy. Part of what prompts me to look at this more closely is my interest in the future of psychotherapy. Will psychotherapy endure as a profession, or will its ideas and methods become absorbed into the larger discourse of change and learning?
• Kids and leadership! For my work with the Dreamers, the 4th graders I’m sponsoring as part of the I Have a Dream Foundation, I’m starting a “Kids City Club.” Field trips to city hall, the police, local TV station are all part of a project on helping kids understand how the government works, and how the city runs. Part of this will also include learning about the local city council’s proposal to revitalize their neighborhood, and then making a presentation to the city council on what changes they’d like to see.
• Happy to see one of my favorite authors, Doris Kearns Goodwin, get such great publicity of late. Also happy to see how much history is referred to in current events. Just before the election, while traveling overseas, I read her book on FDR, Eleanor and the home front during the war: No Ordinary Time. Tremendous book, and like Team of Rivals, eerily relevant for the current economic crisis.
• Just one thing more on Team of Rivals. When reporters asked Obama how he would avoid having a “clash of rivals” rather than a “team of rivals,” he said he wanted “vigorous debate” as he was “a strong believer in strong personalities and strong opinions.” He cited the dangers of groupthink, where all data confirm the theories and ideas already agreed upon. I’m happy to see such a discussion on the front page about the value of and necessity for conflict.