As a child, I recall my mother yelling at me in Yiddish, Hak mir nit keyn tshaynik!, whenever she felt pressed. To me, it simply meant “back off or you’ll get what’s coming to you”.
Years later, I learned its literal meaning, which like so much of the Yiddish language is expressive of the feeling state: “Don’t bang a tea kettle at me!” It’s a tactile reminder that we all have thresholds that trigger reactive modes, our fight-flight systems go on red alert and feeling states of fear, anger, and disappointment are not far behind.
The Natural Native, one of the six ways of knowing and leading in the new online series I am co-presenting, prompts us to remember the other half of the human equation. We are not only primed for reactivity, but also for peace, harmony, and creative responses to a world that is often banging the tea kettle at us.
The Natural Native Way explores what it means to be at home in and with oneself, no matter what is going on around us. It is a way of knowing deeply connected to nature and all of life. It is recognizing that we can depend on inner ways of knowing such as intuition and insight as well as being open to guidance from nature, wisdom traditions, and our own ancestral lineage.
Six Ways of Knowing and Leading
Way 1: The Servant Leader – Respond to your deepest calling to serve.
Way 2: The Circle Wizard – Understand the nature of this ancient human practice.
Way 3: The Natural Native – Be centered in yourself in connection with the Earth.
Way 4: The Space Steward – Attend to the aesthetics of spaces where the work will take place.
Way 5: The Crucible Guardian – Guide and protect the space as we remake ourselves.
Way 6: The Ritual Intercessor – Guide rituals that ignite healing, connection, and transformation.
Since 2016, David Sibbet, Gisela Wendling, Ph.D., Holger Scholz and I have been collaborating on the topics of leadership and the sacred.
A wonderful series of retreats and online learning journeys have emerged from our work called LEADING AS SACRED PRACTICE (LASP). In this time of pandemics and increasing concern for social justice, ethics, and wise action, we have released our first eBook about a different way of leading and knowing. Join the LASP email list & download the eBook!
What we need more than shouting our answers out loud is a quiet confidence in not knowing. We need better questions and most critically a practiced tolerance for allowing the new to arise from the old.
From the perspective of neuro-science, not knowing is an intentional choice to inhibit the part of the brain wired for certainty, predictability and control. Not knowing doesn’t mean we ignore what we know. It means we hold what we know lightly so something new can emerge. We listen to voices other than our own, seek to understand the system we are part of, and bring to light underlying assumptions limiting our thinking.
When addressing the value of uncertainty, I like to reference the concept of “negative capability,” a term initially articulated by the poet John Keats in 1817. He described it as the capacity of being in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Organizational theorists were drawn to its implications for leadership. They observed how leaders, when encountering situations of great ambiguity, moved into defensive behaviors that only made things worse. And they noticed three specific defensive postures.
The first was to become overwhelmed, reflected in behaviors such as avoidance, postponement, or the inability to come to a decision — not because of the uncertainties but because they were in a state of fear or overload. The second defensive behavior was hyper-intellectualization; going into an explanatory mode that sounded good but resolved nothing and often was associated with becoming emotionally unavailable. The third defense– maybe the most common of all – was moving directly into action without thoughtfulness or consideration of consequences.
The linguistic root of the word “capability” is associated with holding or containing. I just bought pots for bamboo and was told to buy ones with thicker walls because bamboo can crack through the thinner pots. In the same way, our emotional and conceptual containers need to be strong enough to hold discomfort and large enough to cultivate new ideas. By negative, Keats was not referring to pessimism or destructive thoughts but the rare ability to be empty of pre-conceived solutions. By naming this ability a strength, he was shining a light on a leadership skill necessary for encountering volatility, ambiguity, and complexity – a skill we need now more than ever.
Third annual conference September 3–7, 2018
Beuerhof Farm, Vulkan Eifel, Germany
We are all at once both a composition and a composer. We have the ability not only to compose the future of our own lives, but to help compose the future of everyone around us and the communities in which we live.
~ Maya Angelou
With colleagues Gisela Wendling, David Sibbet, and Holger Scholz, we are excited to announce the third annual gathering of our Leading as Sacred Practice conference. We will be returning again to the extraordinary land at the Beuerhof Farm, Vulkan Eifel, Germany. In 2017, we had an equally extraordinary gathering at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, Calif.
As with my previous works, The Stirring of Soul in the Workplace and The Power of Collective Wisdom, I am interested in bringing to the forefront a network of leaders and organizational practitioners who have the spiritual conviction, psychological sophistication, and behavioral skills to create positive change. A sense of humor, playfulness, and stubborn persistence to do good will also come in handy. Perfection is not necessary or sought. We are not coming with answers but with a faith in the co-creative process.
From a systems perspective, emergence is a phenomenon in which something new arises from interactions among smaller or simpler components. The economist Jeffrey Goldstein describes emergence as “the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems.”
My colleague, David Bradford, tells the story of the birth of National Training Labs, a pioneering center for the study of group behavior that began shortly after World War II. Leland Bradford, David’s father, was one of NTL’s founders.
In 1946, there was a workshop led by my father and his two colleagues, Ron Lippitt and Ken Benne. The purpose was to train community leaders to facilitate discussions in their own towns about housing for minorities. The participants were from the state of Connecticut. The workshop’s leadership team included Lippitt’s mentor, Kurt Lewin, and Lewin’s graduate students from MIT who were doing research on group process.
During the conference, in the evenings, the workshop leaders got together to hear the observations from the graduate students discussing the day’s events. It so happened that one evening a couple of the participants wandered into the room during the evening discussion. Lewin’s high regard for democratic principles likely played a role in allowing those persons to stay.
What is the role of the sacred in your life? Have the sacred dimensions become marginalized, dismissed, or ignored in the organizational world? Is the sacred purely a personal matter relevant only to the individual or is it part of our group and collective evolution toward social cohesion and resilience?
Please join me during the week of September 5th for an extraordinary five days of learning, reflection, and collective discovery. The first days of the conference will be dedicated to exploring how the sacred was first illuminated in our lives and how that initial experience has grown or faded over time. Then, with the visual magic of my colleague and co-host David Sibbet, we will begin to map our collective journey, showing how the sacred reveals itself in various patterns as we discover our learning edges in the process.
During our time together we will investigate how ritual, ceremony, and the natural world are central to remembering and recreating the sacred in contemporary times. The conference will be held on the exquisite land of the Beuerhof in the middle of Vulkan Eifel, in Germany. This land has ties to ancient European roots and has been deeply influenced by Lakota Native American practices, including a sweat lodge on the facilities. We expect the land itself to be a powerful participant.
For those of you who have followed my work from The Stirring of Soul in the Workplace to The Power of Collective Wisdom, you know that I believe the personal is embedded in the Universal and that we are constantly co-creating the collective fields by which we operate in. This conference represents a living laboratory and celebration of these ideas coming into global awareness.
Please register during this early bird month for a discounted rate. I hope to see you there.
