John Renesch: Exploring the Better Future

The Inverted Corporation: Shameful Organizational Citizenship

I read an article in Businessweek* the other day and learned more in detail about how U.S. corporations are avoiding federal taxes by a process called “inversion” – essentially having a post office box in a low-tax foreign nation as their “legal address” which subsequently means they needn’t pay taxes until they bring the funds back into the U.S.  

According to Americans for Tax Fairness, an estimated $90 billion a year in federal taxes are being avoided due to this manipulation. They further estimate that U.S. corporations are presently holding $2.1 trillion in untaxed profits offshore.

This deferral process can be delayed indefinitely as long as the earned profits remain offshore. Architects of the tax evasion scheme have called it “Flip Flop,” the “Panama Scoot” and other nicknames taking pride in the work they have done in both designing the scheme and defending it against IRS challenges over the past thirty years.

This year, according to Businessweek, “inversions have received more attention than ever, as well-known companies such as Burger King and Pfizer announced plans to change their addresses (Pfizer didn’t follow through).” According to Americans for Tax Fairness, “Burger King’s planned ‘inversion’ will allow the company and its leading shareholders to avoid an estimated $400 million to $1.2 billion in U.S. taxes between 2015 and 2018.”

If this practice is to be made illegal it must be done by Congress. In July, President Obama called the practice ‘an unpatriotic tax loophole’ and urged Congress to put a stop to it.” Businessweek quotes the President: “’My attitude is, I don’t care if it’s legal,’ he said earlier in 2014, ‘it’s wrong.’”

As far back as the 1980s, shortly after the first inversion deal was tested, a congressional committee called the scheme a “mockery” of the tax code. Despite this, corporate lawyers have succeeded in defending this practice year after year against the IRS lawsuits, resulting in more regulations, more laws and more complexity, “each permutation more complicated than the last,” according to Businessweek.

So Congress, can’t you go against all the lobbyists to whom you feel beholding and act in the best interest of your country, and close the loopholes that keep these trillions of unpaid tax dollars offshore? Any good citizen of this country pays their share of taxes to support all the services from which they benefit. This needs to include corporations, who are much bigger lobbyists than any individuals.

Shareholders in these corporations must approve these tax dodges. So, shareholders, if you own stock in a company that is planning one of these inversions consider disapproving it as a good deed of a responsible citizen.

Taxpayers, you are the ones being negatively impacted by this huge loss of tax revenue. Can’t you demand that your Congressmen and Congresswomen take a stand against this unfair evasion of taxes – this wrongful dodge of responsible corporate citizenry? Corporations have lobbied their way into having plenty of advantages already, including “personhood.” Let us require them to pay their share at least in this regard and deliver significant revenue to the federal coffers as well as returning a much needed multi-trillion dollar infusion of capital into our domestic economy.

*Bloomberg Businessweek, December 22-28, 2014, p. 50-53

Wealth Gap Unsustainable: Duh!

A friend of mine with a wonderful sense of humor is planning to publish a book whose working title is The Tao of Duh which will include examples of glaringly obvious, slap-myself-on-the-forehead “ahas” along with many personal witticisms of her own. I love the title (and the author, Leslie Eveland) and am urging her to get it to press ASAP. Meanwhile, I am amazed at how many glaring “duhs” there are out there and how we devour them as if they were not already obvious.

One example: In September 2014, Harvard published a study* declaring that the wealth gap is not only unsustainable but is growing worse. Why does it take a university like Harvard no less to publish something so obvious to anyone who is paying attention to current trends? Why do nearly 2,000 Harvard Business School alumni around the world need to be surveyed on this subject when anyone who is awake and observant of global developments already knows the trends and doesn’t need to read an expensive study to confirm it?

In a 2011 post to this blogsite I wrote about the growing wealth gap since Egypt’s Tahrir Square protests were fresh in our memories. I included the 2007 graph below to illustrate my point:

Even in this seven year old graph, the wealth gap had been widening for nearly thirty years. With the Harvard study just out, I looked for some more current stats and found this Federal Reserve comparison that brings us into 2014:

According to the St. Louis Fed, this graph shows that:

    U.S. economic growth is not translating into higher median family incomes. Real GDP per capita has     increased since the year 2000 [blue line here] while the real median income per household [red line     here] has not, indicating a trend of greater income inequality.

So the gap continues to widen. And like any widening crevasse it will eventually fracture or erupt, leading to a revolt of the disenfranchised, those who wake up to the reality that the scales are tipped to create more wealth for those who already have it. Anyone who has been paying attention to this multi-generational trend knows this and anyone who knows how people respond to mass injustice knows what is possible.

Can this really be news for anyone? Isn’t this obvious – the biggest duh of them all?

As Eveland likes to say, “A duh is not a duh when you don't get it.”

The Harvard study, which received tons of publicity in all major media outlets, was treated as big news. So apparently the media thought it was real news and they weren’t stating the obvious. Clearly, they didn’t “get it” yet either.

What happens when something is “unsustainable”? What happens when something cannot continue? Exploring potential scenarios about what it means is often avoided, possibly because such implications may not only be speculative, but also get really messy. What happens when an established powerful system grinds to a halt? My best guess is chaos of some sort – global system collapse, stock market crash, widespread depression, public demonstrations and rioting, and martial law, to name a few possibilities, come to mind.

Hopefully, there will be a political transformation whereby the injustices will be seen not only as unsustainable but grossly unfair and conscious thought leaders “who get it” will stand tall for large scale reform of the system before mass chaos breaks out.

For my conservative friends, I am not talking wealth distribution; I am talking about restoring our economic system to one that is truly a free market. I am talking about removing all the systemic advantages that have been put in place over the generations by those with power. The supposed “free market” isn’t really free anymore. It has been rigged. People know this; they may be pretending they don’t know this, but they do.

If this kind of courageous leadership does not emerge soon we might not be able to avoid a revolution of a more violent sort – one that could involve riots and bloodshed.

One way or another, there will be a revolution. It could be hard. Or it could be soft. That is our choice. And we don’t need a Harvard study to tell us that.



*Harvard report: "An Economy Doing Half Its Job"

Is the World Ready?

“How do you know what the world is ready for?” These are the words of actress Anne Heche from her memoir book Call Me Crazy, a conversation she was having about whether the world was ready for a pair of lesbian actors (at the time she was Ellen DeGeneres’ partner) to come out of the closet.

                                                                              Anne Heche

How many times have you heard the expression, “I guess the world isn’t ready for (fill in idea or issue)”? Most often this conclusion is arrived at by someone who is seeking a rational explanation for why an intended outcome hasn’t been achieved. This phrase has long been used widely to explain unsuccessful attempts to change social systems.

Recently I experienced a surprisingly strong reaction upon hearing a friend speak these words, a reaction I cannot recall having all the other times I have heard the words, or even spoken them myself. Suddenly I was wondering if such a conclusion was a cop out, a consolation fabricated by the egoic mind. Like Heche, I was questioning who can determine what the world is ready for. What degree of audacity would be required to come to such a conclusion?

For anyone not familiar with what I do, let me explain why this subject has me so engaged: my work these past several decades has been advocating a new paradigm for how human beings relate to one another and to planet Earth. I envision a new consciousness – a “new story” - that transcends the status quo and demands a more mature approach to the challenges facing humanity today. It is an approach that includes environmental sustainability, spiritual fulfillment and social justice for all.

One expression of my work includes FutureShapers, LLC, a company I co-founded in 2012 whose mission is to “inspire, support, develop and accelerate the consciousness of leaders in executive positions so their organizations become less dysfunctional, more effective, conscious, socially responsible and life affirming.” In our view, the biggest global crisis is not climate change or population or pollution; the biggest crisis in the world today is that of responsible leadership – what we refer to as “conscious leadership.”

Is the world “ready” to embrace conscious leadership? I know large numbers of people realize the existing paradigm isn’t working for them; and they may not think in terms of paradigms. Large numbers of people are hungry for something they are not getting these days, something they may not even know how to talk about. While they may not describe these missing qualities as I would, phrases like “is that all there is?” “lack of meaning,” “unfulfilling work,” “an inner emptiness,” “yearning to make a difference,” “concern about the future their children and grandchildren will inherit” are usually met with spontaneous head nods. These responses tell me that the world – not our current leaders but the people - is not only “ready” for this change but practically starving for it!

Explaining that “the world isn’t ready” takes the pressure off those who are attempting to make change happen and places responsibility on a not-yet-ready society. It diverts responsibility by telling a different story about why the intended outcome failed. This assertion, while reasonable and logical, is egoic audacity in my view.

While we are on the subject of the ego, I suggest that declaring anyone or any group “isn’t ready” for what one might be offering is another expression of the egoic mind, implying that “the other” is less informed, less conscious, less ready or basically “less than” we. It is another way to feel better than those who “aren’t ready.”

Asserting that the world isn’t ready for what you are offering is disempowering, an expression often based on resignation, sometimes cynicism. Once you make this assertion there is no logical sense for trying to make change happen anymore. This reversion to “why-botherism” would be not only foolish but you could appear crazy.
One of my favorite quotes is from George Bernard Shaw who wrote:

The reasonable person adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to themselves. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable person.

Logic and reasonableness have gotten us into the mess we’re in. Let’s get unreasonable and rattle things up! 

Many of us know that real social transformations most often occur when relatively small groups of committed citizens take a stand for the change to occur. The founders of the U.S. numbered fewer that sixty delegates to the first continental congress. There was significant opposition to the country becoming independent, and this posed real danger and risk for this small band of committed people. 
    
                        

                          Activist “Mother Jones” (1837-1930); Copernicus (1473-1543)

Often, these stand-takers for change are perceived to be radical, extremists and revolutionaries. Mother Jones, Gandhi, Caesar Chavez, Rosa Parks, Gloria Steinem and Copernicus come to my mind. They were willing to be labeled “fools” or “crazy.” Do you remember Apple’s famous commercial that began with “Here’s to the crazy ones”?  The last line in the ad is:

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

So back to my questioning whether anyone of us can determine what the world is ready for, Whether it is voting rights for women, national sovereignty, farm workers rights, civil rights, women’s liberation, demystifying a scientific myth, or a revolution of consciousness - who can claim that they know what the world is ready for?

I believe that the world is ready to consciously evolve and accept our interconnectivity, our collective relatedness, our interdependence, our stewardship of this planet, and a compassionate recognition that the well-being of all of us comes ahead of the selfish wants of any one group of us. This is the stand I need to take, and I make this declaration based on the thousands of conversations I have had with people who know something is amiss.

This animated video, created to accompany a short talk by my mentor and friend, the late social scientist Willis Harman, makes a compelling argument that for any of us to feel secure in today’s world we all need to feel secure. It is time for us to be responsible for everyone on Spaceship Earth.

I have answered the question “Is the world ready?” for myself. I now ask you, dear reader, to answer it for yourself. And, should you agree with me, take your own stand and start acting like it is your stand rather than agreeing with those who have convinced themselves that there’s no sense in trying to change things because “the world isn’t ready.”

Surprise Consequence with National Park Intervention

Thanks to Mac Carter for this film about the return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. We never know what the consequences will be when we do an under-thought intervention in an established complex system. This one worked out pretty well. Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q. Thanks Mac.

                                                            Yellowstone National Park

But complex system interventions do not always go so well.

I am reminded of Chairman Mao’s eradication of sparrows as part of his Four Pest Campaign (also known as the “Great Sparrow Campaign”) in the late 1950s which resulted in the Great Chinese Famine a couple of years later in which tens of millions of Chinese died of starvation. Some estimates go as high as 36 million deaths!

While no doubt well-intended, Mao’s eradication project was meant to eliminate “pests.” But they had not allowed for the fact that the locust population went unchecked by the now-missing sparrows and thus created a huge ecological imbalance. The locus populations ballooned and came back in swarms, devouring crops and leaving huge masses of people without food. So these types of interventions in complex systems don’t always work out so well.

Intervening in any complex system without tons of thought about possible repercussions, and having a diverse group of people involved in the process, is unpredictable and dangerous. Without these precautions, we could be responsible for large scale unintended consequences such as those experienced by the Chinese almost sixty years ago.

Lesson for system thinkers: Never think you know the eventual outcome when you intervene in a complex system; respect living systems and engage them with humility and curiosity; and stand ready to make corrections if things start running amuck.

As Winston Churchill said decades ago, “We have created more complexity than our thinking can handle.”

Howard Thurman: America’s Unsung Hero

Howard Thurman (1899-1981)

Not everyone will have heard of Howard Thurman but he has had much positive influence in the world, especially in the United States. After his 1935 meeting with Mahatma Gandhi in India, he brought Gandhi’s message of nonviolence to the U.S. In my view, one of his most meaningful legacies was his mentoring Martin Luther King, Jr. on the subject of nonviolent social change. 

Thurman was a former classmate of King’s father and so paid close attention to the young King while he was in graduate school, ultimately becoming his spiritual advisor. It is said that wherever King would travel he would always have a copy of a Thurman book with him. In fact, some believe Thurman was the pastoral leader of the civil rights movement. So who is this man who is possibly one of the least-appreciated visionaries of our time when it comes to social change?

So who is this man who is possibly one of the least-appreciated thought leaders and visionaries of our time when it comes to social change?

Born in Florida and raised in the segregated South, Thurman graduated from Morehouse College as valedictorian in 1923 and was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1925. He served as a church pastor and as an academic, equally comfortable in either the classroom or the sanctuary. He also travelled broadly, which included his trip to India to spend time with Gandhi.  In 1944, in the midst of high racial tensions due to a rapid increase in the African American population in San Francisco Bay Area shipyards during World War II, Thurman left his tenured position at Howard University and co-founded The Church for the Fellowship for All Peoples in San Francisco. It was the first interracial, intercultural church to be established in the United States.

In 1958, Thurman was invited to Boston University (BU) where he became the first black dean of Marsh Chapel and a faculty member of the university. While tenured at BU he continued his pastoral duties in San Francisco, where he died in 1981. During his lifetime Thurman authored 20 books.
Another of his legacies is The Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground, located on the campus of Boston University. The Center was founded by Dean Emeritus George K. Makechnie in 1986 “to preserve and share the many legacies of Dr. Thurman, who spent his life working to break barriers of divisiveness that separate people based on race, culture, religion, ethnicity, gender, and sexual identity.”
To close, I’d like to share a quote by Thurman. It was my original introduction to the man and has become one of my favorites:

Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.


[END NOTE: Last month, we celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in the U.S. – a national holiday celebrating King’s life and legacy. Having just drafted this piece, I watched a two-hour special on King on the History Channel. While I was moved to tears at the inspiration he was and the tragedy that ended King’s life prematurely, I never heard any mention of Thurman and the influence he had on this remarkable man.]

Getting High and Getting Low: The Occupational Hazards of Being a Visionary

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world." -  Oscar Wilde

I was recently asked how I was feeling about the future of the world and, in that precise moment, I shared that I was feeling some despair. So I responded honestly. It seemed like a harmless enough comment to me – and quite truthful in the moment. However, the person listening to me interpreted what I told him and concluded that I was deeply depressed – perhaps suicidal - and became very concerned about my well-being. He even called back afterward to “cheer me up” which I assured him was unnecessary. I explained that I was a firm believer in feeling my emotions and, like it or not, despair was a natural human emotion. Avoiding any emotion, even those I don’t enjoy, is not only very unhealthy but leads to denial and all kinds of problems down the road. Besides, emotional repression murders one’s visionary capabilities.

As a futurist who advocates creating a desired future rather than predicting some projected outcome based upon the past, I am used to living with two realities – the one that we’re in and the one I see as possible. I suspect that any visionary knows what I’m talking about here – living with this “delta,” this gap between “what is” and “what can be.”  This would apply not only to people like me who want to shape the future of society but also inventors who are taking on huge undertakings in technology, the creative arts, architecture, community development and other areas of human endeavor.

Anyone who is a serious advocate for major change of any kind needs to feel the emotions that naturally ebb and flow as their expectations go unmet and inevitable reversals occur. This is particularly true in paradigmatic shifts, where old behaviors get really exaggerated as they get close to changing, getting more entrenched than ever as the change appears inevitable.

Depending upon how ambitious the vision may be, a visionary can face public ridicule, peer invalidation, sarcasm, and all sorts of other criticism. We have all heard stories about exceptional visionaries whose ideas were scoffed at in the early stages only to be heralded as mighty inventors or inspirational leaders at a later time – oftentimes after they died.

If one cannot sit with these feelings, in all their intensity, coping mechanisms will usually creep in which can include delusion about the progress being made, rationalization about the status quo, distraction through addictions, or chronic depression. Several people I have worked with in the past hit a wall of despair and chose to retreat to less-challenging tasks. When I asked them why they said it was just too discouraging. In other words, they found it too painful.

Coping mechanisms can poison one’s vision. They relax the tension that provides the energy for maintaining the visionary’s commitment. Or, perhaps better stated, they numb out the unwanted feelings. One needs to know the feelings of disappointment, despair, hopelessness and even powerlessness and be intimately familiar with them if one is going to hold the “space of possibility” for big visions to be manifested. Taking solace in a drink or a stupid TV show might provide some temporary relief from the feelings but it won’t further the vision.

I call these unwelcome feelings “occupational hazards” for the visionary.

Feeling my emotions as deeply as they are in me, neither avoiding their intensity nor wallowing in them for days on end, keeps me in the present – the “now’ – and helps to keep me more authentic. From this place I can be most effective in bringing about the vision I foresee.

Recently, I was asked to describe the future I envisioned if we didn’t choose the “better future” which I write about frequently. I started to describe the future I see humanity headed for unless we make some fundamental changes in how we treat one another and our planet Earth. As I was speaking, I began to sob – feeling a huge wave of despair about what I was describing and another wave of sadness about the collective choices we have made that are leading us to this reality. It was incredibly moving to feel so deeply about one possible scenario for humanity. When I finished, I felt clearer and more energized to continue advocating the positive alternative – the better future which is equally clear to me.

While feeling these “negative” emotions isn’t at all enjoyable, it is absolutely essential if I am to remain empowered about the vision I see as totally possible, despite the course we are on presently. Unlike ‘intellectualized’ emotions (thoughts that sometimes pass for feelings) which cannot be experienced and released, true emotions are part of the human experience. The only unhealthy emotion is an unexpressed one.

Another popular myth about emotions: “expressing” an emotion means dramatizing them or “acting them out.” Wrong! Expressing an emotion simply means feeling it – now, when it comes up - not years later in therapy or exploding inappropriately sometime down the road as something or someone reminds us about it. When one feels rage, it doesn’t mean you have to throw something or hit anyone. It simply means feeling outraged, or fury, or intense anger.

I once told a colleague I was feeling some rage and her face changed noticeably. I asked her what was going on and she confessed that my words put her “on alert” – anticipating that I might be about to have a tantrum of some sort. I explained that feeling outrage was all I was doing and that I had no inclination to act it out. She understood what I told her intellectually but she remained somewhat guarded nonetheless. This was a reminder to me that many people still think “expressing our emotions” means acting them out in some sort of immature or harmful way.

Another myth is that if one allows one’s feelings to surface they may never go away. Contrary to this common belief, fully-experienced emotions can be processed in mere minutes. Once one learns this, and sees how quickly these feelings pass once they are fully-experienced, one cannot help but wonder why we store unexpressed emotions which usually take years to process at later stages in our lives. It is such a waste of energy!

People who claim they don’t allow their feelings to “run them” – who routinely suppress their emotions so they “won’t get the better of them” – are in fact being controlled by their unexpressed emotions. Keeping the wraps on feelings takes energy like storing radioactive rods from a nuclear power plant. Lots of time and restraint is needed to keep the toxicity from leaking out and doing great harm to others.

People who can tolerate big gaps between present-day reality and their vision for the future, without the need to somehow lessen the tension between the two, make good visionaries. Most people won’t deal with this tension and seek to reduce it as a means of feeling “more comfortable” – choosing one of the coping mechanisms I mentioned earlier. Living with this tension between “what can be” and “what is” makes for an interesting life, as well as challenging one, to be sure. But the true visionary wouldn’t have it any other way. After all, it goes with the territory!

While there are the potholes along the road to getting there, the payoffs are incredible when the visions start coming into focus.

Hats off to all you visionaries! May all your dreams be realized.

Twelve Obvious Truths That Were Not Always So Obvious

Recently a group of us were asked to share whatever “obvious truths” we saw in the world. I used this as an opportunity to review my life from this perspective, noting what I had learned over the years and now see as “obvious.” For the most part I was previously oblivious (pun fully intended) to most of these truths, so here are the truths I have learned that now seem quite obvious to me:

1.  Events that I once thought were negative I now see as having a very positive side to them. In the long term, they were very good for me. Not just some of them, but all of them!

2.  I do not have to put up with anything or anyone I find unpleasant; I have a choice in the matter.

3.  The truth really does set you free. It is not just a motto on a building.

4.  Always be current in my communications with anyone I care about; you never know when they may not be around to hear what you have to say. It used to be when someone died there was always something I wished I had said to them. Now all my friends know I love them and we are current with all matters of the heart.

5.  Never pass up an opportunity to give someone a compliment. It costs so little and could make someone’s day.

6.  Worry is a waste of imagination. It is fear of something that hasn’t happened and most probably will never happen anyway.

7.  Forgiveness is a selfish act; failing to forgive only hurts the person holding onto the resentment.  I used to hold onto resentments thinking it would be wrong to forgive, falsely thinking that forgiving them meant making what they did alright. As the recently-passed Nelson Mandela said, "Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies."

8.  To believe one group can have security while others don’t is pure folly. The world is so interconnected there is no way one group can feel secure while other groups don’t, yet we persist in this folly of believing it can (see this video by Willis Harman).

9.  The loudest voice telling me that I cannot achieve what I dream about is usually my own. Thanks to lots of personal development work that healed much of the trauma from my early years, I realized that I was my own worst enemy.

10. There are always choices - no matter what the circumstances, we always have choices; making no choice is a choice of its own. This was one of the toughest insights I had to accept, letting go of the idea that I never had a choice and that life was forced on me.

11. No one can empower me except myself. This flash came to me after hearing for years how employees need to be empowered. As if anyone has the power to give another person the means to become more powerful.

12. Complaining about something without taking any action to correct it is irresponsible; if a condition deserves criticism, it deserves an honest attempt to change it. There is a companion truth to this one: complaining to anyone who has no control over the problem is dumping on them.

There you have it – twelve truths I learned as I matured in my consciousness over the years, most of them learned since I turned 40.

The Serenity Prayer Unpacked

I have known of “The Serenity Prayer” since I was ten or eleven years old, from when my mother joined Alcoholics Anonymous, which was in its first decade of existence. The prayer still enjoys great popularity with 12 Step groups of all kinds as a tool to help people recover from addictions and achieve serenity in their lives.

For the past nine or ten years, I have made this prayer part of my spiritual practice saying it several times a day, either to myself or out loud. For those who are not familiar with the Prayer, here it is:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

the courage to change the things I can,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

I find this powerful prayer so simple to recite yet so challenging to practice. So I decided to reveal some of my personal challenges by dissecting it a bit and taking a deeper peek into my own challenges in regard to acceptance, change and making the distinctions between what I can do and what I can’t. Perhaps my own experience will evoke some insight for you, dear reader.

First of all, I often have trouble accepting things and labeling them as “unchangeable” – things that I can’t change, that is. I am deeply aware that I have the most control over changing myself and the least control over changing others. Despite this awareness, I feel called to do my best to change the world for the better by writing and speaking publicly and starting ventures that may have some influence in making the world a better place. This is my calling. It could be so easy to think some large social problem is beyond my capacity to influence positively, and therefore either ignore it or deny it exists. Yet those of us who live in democracies* all have some responsibility for things that affect us, don’t we? We are all part of a society that played some role, if not by our deeds then by our inaction or silence in allowing the problem to emerge in the first place.

Examples: For me, I know I myself cannot influence the path of asteroids or the orbit of the Earth and I accept that. I know I cannot change global warming by myself but I can still make an effort to influence people who can change things.

Then, the next challenge in the Prayer: having the ability to make change happen as well as the courage to act. Sometimes we can bring about change by being part of a movement, a crowd or community, each doing our part to make change happen.  Challenges do not require us to have all the skills or even all the courage to take them on. Often, large scale social change comes about from the actions of groups of committed people, not necessarily the bravery of one individual.

Examples: Praying for the courage to stand tall for what I know to be the right thing to do for the sake of all humankind, even if it risks provoking the wrath of those who disagree with me, even if they are friends. I pray for the courage to tell myself the truth and not fall into ego-generated grandiosity or fantasy. I pray for the clarity that brings about wisdom.

When friends used to sarcastically ask me if I was “still trying to save the world?” it hurt sometimes. I recognized they saw me as some sort of modern day Quixote, tilting at my windmills, saving my “damsels.” Clearly, they would not waste their time tilting at these windmills nor did they see any damsels in distress. They put their time to a different use.  As I got clearer about my calling and the need to influence change, however, the hurt diminished and I stopped taking the wisecracks so personally. As time has passed, more and more people seem to be recognizing these windmills and seeing that perhaps they are problems.

So now having looked at all of these things – things I can and cannot change - how do I make the distinctions to either muster the courage or accept the serenity, to try to change things or accept them? Where does this wisdom to know the difference come from?

Example: For me, the wisdom comes when I get clearer. I get increased clarity when I tell the truth, as difficult as it may be to recognize, about what I can and cannot do and what I can influence and what I cannot.

Well, “The Serenity Prayer” is just that, a prayer, a request of God as we understand him or her. Once I accept that there can be something greater than my individual will, a power greater than my own willfulness and ego, once I accept that “higher power” I will have opened the floodgates for the serenity, the courage and the wisdom to come through.

*Anyone living in a dictatorship or under fascism of any sort obviously has less control over things. To my knowledge, no one who subscribes to this blog lives in one of these countries. If anyone does and has another point-of-view about this, I would love to hear from them.

Soft is Hard: The Challenge of Engaging People In the Meaningful, Transformational Work We Like to Call the “Soft Stuff”

Those of us who have been doing transformational work in its various shapes and forms have all faced the challenge of talking about paradigm-shifting, meaningful large-scale change and gut-retching existential reinventions in a way that people can comprehend.  There are times when it is like we are speaking a foreign language that people don’t understand.

I have been offering “soft stuff” for the past 30 years, through my writings, my talks, coaching services and the various forms my conscious leadership work takes, most recently offering people the opportunity to commit to their own self-transcendence by joining a FutureShapers Roundtable as a Member or becoming certified to Host and lead Roundtables.

The soft stuff is difficult to quantify, something we all like to do in this materially-oriented society. It is hard to measure, another thing we love to do. In addition, the soft stuff requires deep personal introspection, which can often challenge previously unexamined assumptions which may be difficult to do for people, especially if they are not used to doing such an internal inventory.

                                                             
                                                                            Brian Whetten

More recently, I have come to know Brian Whetten, an enrollment coach who works with people who do meaningful work, many of whom are executive coaches or personal life coaches. Whetten has been coaching me and my FutureShapers partner Tom Eddington for several months, and we have learned much from him. As a result of more than ten years of research, Whetten has determined that only 10% of the value in a coaching relationship, for example, comes from what the coach does; 30% of the value comes from the coach’s presence – who they are and how they show up in the relationship - and a whopping 60% of the value comes from the client’s own commitment to the work. I found this to be a major news item! This also applies to people offering soul-nourishing, transformative products and services, not just coaches. He contends that enrollment is the primary tool we have for creating client commitment, where 60% of the client value comes from.

This finding is in stark contrast to selling breakfast cereal or computers where the buyer merely has to say “yes’ or “no.” In this enrollment process, the “buyer” has to meet the vendor half way and put some “skin in the game” themselves in order to receive the most value. At first take, this seems wrong because it goes against all the ideas we are used to as a result of being the target of mass marketers and advertising all our lives. Whetten writes: 'So while we tend to think of [enrollment] as some “yucky” thing we have to do in order to serve our clients, it’s actually one of the most important services we have to offer. And it’s not just about coaching. What we’re talking about is the ability to support people in creating any type of sustained, positive change. Whether you’re a manager looking to get more out of your people, a holistic practitioner wanting to support patients in developing new wellness habits, or a consultant seeking to add value to an organization, if you’re in the business of change, where you’re seeking to make an impact in the lives of others, enrollment is a big piece of your job.'

Enrollment as “one of the most important services we have to offer”? How’s this for a paradigm popper, a mental model-buster, a reframing challenge? Whetten points out that real change – such as that offered by transformational products or services – scares people. He adds that the deeper the changes we want or need to make, the more these scare us. How can we support people in addressing this resistance and creating the changes they most want to make? The most popular approaches to resistance, he tells us, are either “attack” or “avoid” – the former being slick and aggressive sales approaches and the latter being people giving away services and struggling to stay in business.

Whetten writes about a third way, and the way that is the most authentic and effective. He writes: 'The surest way to know if something is a great decision is when the voice of intuition says “Yes,” the voice of reason agrees, and the voice of fear says “Hell No! Run Away!” Our opportunity is to help our clients understand this, help them look for their “Yes, Yes, Hell No’s!” and then help them commit to creating the changes they most want to make. Our opportunity is to help our clients discern the difference between their truth and their fears. We want to listen to their fears and honor them. The voice of fear has a very specific job. That job is not to stop us from taking action. It’s to warn us of a potential danger. When we slow down and honor the voice of fear, without attacking it or avoiding it (which is really just fight or flight – meeting fear with yet more fear) the voice of fear feels that it’s given it’s warning and done its job, and so it quiets down and lets us get on with our goals. It’s the third way of enrolling clients, that’s both clean and effective. Mastering it allows you to turn “selling” into one of the greatest gifts you can offer – both to your clients and yourself.'

A big gap I’m seeing is between what people say they want and what they are willing to commit to; how much are they willing to be changed to attain the level of consciousness they claim to want? I addressed this in my Mini Keynote editorial in August. As vendors, we need to meet our clients and customers midway across the gap between what we are offering and what they want, transcending their fears and others bits of resistance they may be sitting on. If they want what we are offering they must be more engaged than the passive purchase process we use in buying produce, cereal or an automobile.

From my standpoint, the hard part of engaging people is breaking the pattern of “selling” I have learned after a lifetime of being exposed to mass marketing and advertising, and learning to have two-way exploratory conversations, not one-way sales pitches, reciprocal commitments by both parties in the relationship, not “overcoming objections” and tactical presentations.

Another lesson I learned from Whetten is that what we are offering isn’t for everyone. We are not selling cereal. Having a transformation shift is not for everyone! We are offering a transcendent experience that many people yearn for but most avoid. Our offering is for the people who really want it, who are committed to going through whatever they need to go through in order to achieve the level of consciousness they claim they want. They need to be engaged with us! They need to engage their fears as well.

About a year ago I was watching a TV special on Africa and recall the host talking with a Sudanese farmer about a local crisis in the community and the challenges of getting local officials to act responsibly. This uneducated elderly man told the host, “You cannot wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.” Some people are pretending to be asleep. Trying to enroll them is a waste of time; I and my colleagues need to focus on people who really want to be awakened and are not pretending.  



NOTE: Here is another website with some of Whetten’s free offers: http://www.sellingbygiving.net/ 

Mister Smith is Dead: They Don’t Go to Washington to Serve Anymore

Do you remember the old James Stewart movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”? Probably few of you recall seeing it when it came out in black-and-white in the late 1930s but it has been a popular movie on television for many years, often airing around the holiday season since it evokes sentiments of justice, idealism and good winning over evil.  “Jefferson Smith” (played by Stewart) goes to the nation’s capitol to work with his childhood hero only to discover the many shortcomings of the political process. True to Hollywood, good wins out in the end, despite attempts to corrupt Smith at first and then to cover him in scandal.

Stewart and Jean Arthur (lead roles in the movie)

According to the IMBd website, the director  - Frank Capra - has “received many letters over the years from individuals who were inspired by the film to take up politics.” The movie surely continues to inspire idealists who want to serve their country through bettering the system from the inside out by enduring all the humiliation of running for office in order to “bring democracy back to the people.”

But the system continuously devolves into gridlock and dysfunction as each new rookie politician succumbs to the toxicity and corruption they encounter in city, state or national politics.

I have been writing about system dysfunction in Washington for several years and have viewed it as a “systems problem,” which I define as “when well-meaning, competent people keep trying to correct the problem and it keeps getting worse.”

The other day I happened to catch an interview of journalist Mark Leibovich on his latest book, This Town:  Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!-in America’s Gilded Capital. Leibovich is the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, based in Washington. In 2011, The New Republic named him one of Washington’s “Most Powerful Least Famous” people whose “political writing is among the finest and most feared.”

          Click on picture to watch video

Leibovich provided a detailed account of how Washington has been grossly distorted by the relatively recent (last twenty years or so) explosion of money in politics, turning the city into “a mecca for glitz, gold and greed” according to PBS. The book is exposing the perverse and pervasive narcissism of Washington’s ruling class, again according to PBS. He spoke about how “money rules the day and status is determined by who you know.”

Watching the interview on TV, what caught my ear was his reference to the “Mr. Smith” movie. He talked about how most of us think people go to Washington to serve the people, like Mr. Smith did in the movie, like the way it is supposed to be in the “greatest democracy in the world.” “However,” he said “now people go to Washington to get rich, to make money.”

While the system is indeed dysfunctional and needs a major overhaul, perhaps even a complete rebuild, people are not as much the victims of “the system” as I have been asserting. Many are. Leibovich identifies a good many from both parties who are contributing to the dysfunction and ripping off “We the People” from what we are entitled to and lining their pockets through greed and more greed.

I am writing this while raw with this new recognition/perspective, feeling more outrage, even at some of my former heroes whose haloes have become tarnished as a result of this revelation. I’m feeling more disappointment, more sadness and more hurt than I ever have over the state of our nation.

As I expressed in my email to Leibovich, my hope is that enough people who can do something about this will become enraged enough to actually do something about it and make it illegal for politicians to get rich at the expense of the people who elect them.