Following a great talk from Gil Fronsdel on how self is constructed, I had a nice insight yesterday about personal identity.
Fronsdel says that when something happens, there are three things going on:
- There is the reality
- There is what we think about the reality
- There is the “I” that is thinking.
These are conditional, that is, they depend on and arise from each other. When I see something, I think something about it and my self in strengthened. For example:
- It’s raining today
- I hate rainy days.
- I’m not suited to living in a rainforest!
In Buddhism, we get locked into suffering when we think ABOUT something and then believe that thought. Who we are, our core identity, is in fact a set of stories we believe about our preferences about reality.
As a facilitator, this simple construction is a very important tool to use to reach clarity before working with a group. Imagine this construction:
- People are yelling at each other.
- They are in conflict and I hate conflict.
- I am a peacemaker.
So yes, but in the moment, you are going to suffer some when the meeting you are running counters your experience of yourself. You will think that you are failing if you are “a peacemaker” and yet your participants ar eyelling at each other. As a facilitator, when I get caught in that kind of thinking, I notice that I immediately become quite useless to the group. Why? Because I have left reality and I am spinning around in my thinking about reality, suffering and self-involved as my identity and ego get challenged.
People who have no thoughts about conflict are incredibly resourceful when yelling arises. They simply see yelling, they are able to listen and observe and notice what is happening. But those of us that are still working on our comfort with conflict might shy away from it, shrink away in fear, try to paper over differences or deny the reality of the moment in favour of a temporary comfort.
This is why it’s always good to work with people, especially with people who are afraid of different things than you are.
Working on this stuff is a key personal practice for me. I do it with meditation as well as working with Byron Katie’s method, called “The Work” to inquire into the thoughts and beliefs that are causing me suffering. My partner Caitlin Frost uses The Work as a cornerstone to her coaching practice, and it’s a real gift to have that available in our little firm. It lets me do much more than I ever could on my own. I’m curious wht your experiences are and what your practices are to challenge the constructions of mind that limit your own work in certain situations.
Tomorrow, a post on what this process looks like at the collective level.
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Last year I was invited to give a talk on the shapes of community engagement for a conference sponsored by the BC Treaty Commission called Forging Linkages and Finding Solutions. This is the slide deck I used and here is a transcript of my talk.
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In many large group processes I use, small groups are asked to facilitate some of the process. Recently, on the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation mailing list, there was a call for easy guides to help people facilitate these kinds of groups. Turns out that there is lots out there, including:
- 37 guides collected on NCDD’s own website
- Some resources from a climate dialogue project in Seattle
- The Conversation Cafe guidelines
- Bare bones version of the Let’s Talk America guidelines
- More detailed issue guides from the Everyday Democracy project
And a few more that I use:
- Hosting in a hurry, the guide I put together for the Art of Hosting community
- PeerSpirit Circle Guidelines
- The Art of the Powerful Question
The idea here is resources that help conversations become deeper, more focused and more engaging.
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From my dear friend Peggy Holman:
A few weeks ago, I spontaneously created a new form of convergence with a group of about 20. I think it can work well with groups of 60 or less, and perhaps with groups up to 100 or so.
I was intending to do what I always do these days – follow the energy and re-open the space for what has heart and meaning for taking a next step. Instead, because the meeting was intended to both give the group a chance to bond as well as set priorities for their work, something else emerged in the moment.This was a first meeting of a diverse group that was dealing with a challenging subject: the transformation of the field of corrections throughout the USA. They had spent an evening sharing stories about their work and a day in Open Space, exploring, “How can corrections, in collaboration with other human services, help cultivate a strong and healthy society?”. The last morning, we began with a conversation about their work together as a prelude to opening the space to identify their priorities (as established by the sessions that were called).One participant was very concerned whether this “arbitrary” approach of following the energy would lead to the best priorities. I suggested that we see what emerged and then determine whether a more rational approach should be employed. Given the culture of the group, I sensed in that moment that the people in the room needed to know where each other stood – what each of them would choose as a priority. And since bonding was part of the purpose of the gathering, I asked each of them to write on a sheet of paper the inquiry they felt was more important to pursue, the subject they personally felt most passionate about. No one hesitated.Once they were done writing, each read his or her topic aloud. Then they physically got up and moved to join with others who had said something related to their topic. The landed in 2 groups, split about 1/3 and 2/3rds. This degree of coherence was quite stunning for them. They went off to talk about their topics. When they returned, we checked in, as promised, on whether these were the best priorities. The group was almost giddy with excitement. No question. They were clear they had the right priorities.another great day (or two) in Open Space,
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I was just putting together some materials for an Open Space training workshop I’m doing in Prince Rupert, BC on Friday and I compiled three useful approaches to facilitating action planning in Open Space. The first is my own version of moving to action, the second is Diana Larsen’s approach to prioritizing ideas by impact and energy and the third approach is Jack Martin Leith’s approach to project planning, which he blogged here.
The three are in an easy to download .pdf. Enjoy.
UPDATE: I would be remiss not to point to Lisa Heft’s site, where she dilligently collected dozens of variations on convergence and action planning.