Last week I was working with an interesting group of 60 Aboriginal folks who work within the Canadian Forces and the department of National Defense, providing advice and support on Aboriginal issues within the military and civilian systems. We ran two half days in Open Space to work on emerging issues and action plans.
In an interesting side conversation, I spoke with a career soldier about fear. This man, one of the support staff for the gathering, had worked for a couple of decades as a corporal, mostly working as a mechanic on trucks. We got into an interesting conversation about fear. He said to me that he could never do what I do, walking into a circle and speaking to a large group of people. I expressed some surprise at this – after all I was talking to a trained soldier. I asked him if he had ever been in combat and experienced fear. He replied that he had been on a peacekeeping mission in Israel and that at one point in a threatening situtaion he had pointed a loaded gun at someone and awaited the order to fire, but he didn’t feel any fear at all.
We decided that it was first of all all about the stories you tell yourselves and second of all about training and practice. The fear of public speaking – fear that would paralyse even a soldier – is a fear that is borne from a history of equating public speaking with a performance. In school for example we are taught that public speaking is something to be judged rather than a skill to be learned. Imagine if we gave grades for tying a shoelace, or using a toilet or eating food. If we performed these important but mundane tasks with the expectation of reward or punishment, conditional on someone else’s judgement about them, having nothing to do with the final result, we might well develop fear and aversion to these things too.
The fact is that the fear of public speaking – glossophobia – is widespread and this makes me think it has something to do with public schooling. Our training leaves us in a place of competence or fear, and, as much of the training in social skills is undertaken implicitly in school (including deference to authority, conditional self-esteem and a proclivity to answers and judgement rather than question and curiosity) we absorb school’s teaching about these things without knowing where they came from. Certainly when I grew up – and I was a little younger than this soldier I was speaking with – speaking in school was generally either a gradable part of reporting on an assignment or was competitive, as in debating, a practice that was prevalent in my academic high school that sent many young people into competitive speaking careers as lawyers and business people. If you were no good at this form of speaking, the results of being judged on your attempts to get a point across were often humiliating. You lost, or you skulked away with the knowledge that people thought you sucked.
In contrast, my friend’s ability to find himself relatively fearless in an armed confrontation was a result of his military training, which, when it comes to combat, is all aimed having a soldier perform exactly as my friend had – calmly and coolly, especially in a peacekeeping role.
These days, in teaching people how to do facilitation, I am increasingly leaving the tools and techniques aside and instead building in practices of noticing and cultivating fearlessness. When you can walk into a circle fearlessly, you can effectively and magically open space. If you harbour fear about yourself or your abilities, it is hard to get the space open and enter into a trusting relationship with a group of people. Once you can do that, you can use any tool effectively, but the key capacity is not knowing the tool, it is knowing yourself.
How do you teach or learn fearlessness?
Jack Ricchiuto was writing about narrative the other day:
We need to start reviving the narrative aesthetic where stories are more fields of countless possibilities than linear in nature, where the possibilities of meaning are more infinite than finite. We need to stop calling sound bites stories, which they’re not. We need to call stories the narratives that evoke a sense of wonderment more than conclusion.
Stories are dear to my heart and storytelling is a practice that seems more and more about who I am. I think one way to help people become story tellers is to practice inquisitive listening with them. When I run AI interviews for example, I often invite people to practice being Elders. I invite them to tell a story the way an Elder tells it, with a lesson buried in it. And start from the beginning and give over the sense of what it was like to be there. For listeners, I invite them to practice being students and learners, listening to the storyteller as if that person was telling you something of great wisdom and importance.
When we enter into this kind of relationship, we create a storyfield that deepens our inquiry, our learning and our relationships.
Robert Paterson is doing some interesting work these days:
KETC, a client of mine, the Public TV Channel in St Louis, has been chosen by CPB to test how well a public TV station can be in Convening the wide community of its city to come together and help each other cope with a giant crisis. Here is a link to the background.I am writing today to offer up an early report. This week we held the first on air/web town hall meeting.
For the first time St Louisans could see that they were not alone. The room was full of all sorts of people. St Louisans could see the enormous amount of help that was there for them. They could hear stories of all the things that could happen for bad or good. They could feel hope.
The crises is the mortgage crises in the US which is having some devastating effects on communities, neighbourhoods cities and regions. This is some compelling use of storytelling, to explore the crises, get in touch with voices who are in the thick of it and provide news you can use, which is the only news which is important especially as systemic level change is taking place. Stories like this help people move beyond passive consumers of disaster and tragedy and get involved in taking responsibility for their own lives and the lives of their communities.
Jack Ricchiuto on the “point” of stories:
It’s a good day when we’re open spaces for the stories of others. We close this space by hoping people get to conclusions in their stories. Stories are not about conclusions, they’re about the weaving of reality from the fibers and colors and textures of our experience.
I was in a workshop yesterday, doing a little teaching about organizational forms and at one point I was going to tell a story about working in networks. Something came over me and I stopped and said “someone tell me a story about the reality of working in networks.”
Instead of talking, the participants took over, crafting their stories to provide little teachings about the stuff we were learning about. Be open spaces for the stories of others.
Photo by Santa Rosa
“The wise ones of olden times say that the hearts of men and women are in the shape of a caracol, and that those who have good in their hearts and thoughts walk from one place to the other, awakening gods and men for them to check that the world remains right. They say that they say that they said that the caracol represents entering into the heart, that this is what the very first ones called knowledge. They say that they say that they said that the caracol also represents exiting from the heart to walk the world”. The caracoles will be like doors to enter into the communities and for the communities to come out; like windows to see us inside and also for us to see outside; like loudspeakers in order to send far and wide our word and also to hear the words from the one who is far away.”
A beautiful story of the Zapatista revolution in Mexico. In the 14 years since the Zapatistas pressed their claims in Chiapas, the architecture of the snail has become the way that the people talk about their revolution: it starts in the centre and spirals outward, and slowly and surely, it gets where it is going:
The United States and Mexico both have eagles as their emblems, predators which attack from above. The Zapatistas have chosen a snail in a spiral shell, a small creature, easy to overlook. It speaks of modesty, humility, closeness to the earth, and of the recognition that a revolution may start like lightning but is realized slowly, patiently, steadily. The old idea of revolution was that we would trade one government for another and somehow this new government would set us free and change everything. More and more of us now understand that change is a discipline lived every day, as those women standing before us testified; that revolution only secures the territory in which life can change. Launching a revolution is not easy, as the decade of planning before the 1994 Zapatista uprising demonstrated, and living one is hard too, a faith and discipline that must not falter until the threats and old habits are gone – if then. True revolution is slow.