Johnnie Moore posts a touching analysis of what drives bullying bosses in organizations. Some recent research concludes that a perceived sense of incompetence can cause people to lash out against others. This has been my experience. Our culture demands answers, expertise and bold confidence in making decisions. Most people are trained starting in pre-school that these traits are in the domain of the individual and that your success depends on them. What is missing is training in asking questions, seeking help and acting from clarity. In schools, these practices are forbidden in exam rooms, where students are evaluated on their …
Coming back from a lovely Art of Hosting at Tamagawa near Nanaimo. Lots bubblig out of that one, and so here;s the first little harvest. Our hosting team (the excellent David Stevenson, Colleen stevenson, Paula Beltgens, Diana Smith, Caitlin Frost, Nancy McPhee, Teresa Posakony and Tenneson Woolf) checked in together around this question: What would it take to be ambushed by joy this weekend? This question sprang from a notion of joy as an operating principle; What if noticing joy was a basic agreement about how we will work together? From that came this snippet of a poem that …
So happy that Tom has started using a posterous site to share his thoughts with the world. He’s been writing great stuff lately: We are geniuses at impacting the world while preventing impact on ourselves. As we solve our lives into greater and greater separation from the built-in learning mechanisms of evolution, nature has to stretch further and further to heal itself, to get us to pay attention, to stop treating feedback as a problem and see it as an increasingly urgent invitation — indeed a demand — to change. Yet still we go further and further out on the …
A couple of men with megaphones tilt at artificial order to reveal the beauty of free humans. Sometimes free speech can be annoying or not what you expect. It can seem a little uncomfortable or a little strange. When I watched this for the first time I have to admit that I felt a little stressed, but I realized that in simply talking through a megaphone, peacefully and standing in the chaos they were creating, these two guys are revealing an edge inside me, a limiting belief that, when I let it go, makes it possible for me to experience …
“My grandmother was the one that inspired me,” said my friend Liz over lunch at the Valley Inn in Bella Coola. “She said that the world was once all together, and then it came apart and one day it will be all together again. So I just try to bring things together.” Liz is a pretty remarkable woman. She worked for years in family reunification in Vancouver, bringing together First Nations kids with their birth families, reconnecting them to their culture and communities. She is at home now in Bella Coola on council, working for the Ministry as a social …