I turned 48 this week. My friends and family helped me feel loved. My 14-year old son Michael, for example, tweeted “Happy Birthday father o’mine.” And a new dear friend sent me a photo from the Tibetan Plateau:

She wrote it just days after helping a few dozen boys, students at a monastic school in Tagong, move into a new home and school–a building that a few of us came together to purchase on behalf of the monastery.

I first met the monks in Tagong in September of last year when a few of us drove for four days on fairly tricky roads to bring supplies from Chengdu into Yushu where an earthquake had destroyed so many homes. Depending on the roads, Tagong is a day or two drive from Chengdu. (See this post: How I Spent My Summer Vacation)

When I first encountered the boys, I could barely contain my desire to help. That September, though, we had another mission–to get to Yushu.

Later, last January, I came back…to Yushu, to Chengdu, and to Tagong. I wrote a post at the time asking, quoting Tracy Chapman, if you knew you would die today, saw the face of God today, would you change? I vowed to help move the boys from a shelter that was little more than tree branches and plastic sheeting into something safe and warm.

Months of discussion, planning, more discussion, lots of tea (sweet and butter), lots more discussion (this is, after all, Tibet), and just about a week ago, the boys moved into their new home–a recently renovated, three story traditional Tibetan-style building. They are warm and safe and the snows have just begun.

My new dear friend wrote to a few of us:

We just returned from a trip to Tagong to help students and teachers move to the new school. Everything went smoothly and every one was very happy about the new school…on the 9th we had breakfast at 9:00 am, and then went to the old school to help the students move. Students, teachers, and helpers from the town had already started moving…the school also had five tractors to help haul large items like furniture and firewood.

Everyone was happy to work and help with the move. Everything but firewood was moved before lunch. For lunch we had a very simple and delicious meal prepared by the students in their new kitchen. After lunch the students drew numbers for their new beds, then they made their beds and put all their things away. The helpers from town, the TVP [Tibetan Village Project] team and the teachers started moving and stacking firewood. We spent the whole afternoon on this task; it was tiring work but we are happy that students have a stockpile of firewood for the winter. We worked until 5:00pm but there was still some firewood left to move.

On the 10th we had breakfast at 9:30am and then went to the school to visit the students and teachers. It had snowed overnight, so the students were busy outside clearing the snow, in addition to stacking the rest of the firewood…on the morning of the 11th [we] visited the school’s greenhouse. We were excited to see that the vegetables in the greenhouse were growing very well…the students were still busy cleaning the new school, and they expressed happiness and satisfaction with the new school. When we asked for their opinion of the new school, they told us that the new school is warmer and bigger than the old one, and that the new school has a big yard outside where they can play, eat, and enjoy sunshine. They also said that they want to study very hard and be beneficial to people in the future.

A few weeks ago, during that last trip to Tibet, I traveled with some old dear friends. They rightly asked if, given the enormity of the poverty in the region and the systemic changes that will need to be made to create enduring prosperity, for people to move from trying, as they do now, to live on 12 cents a day to be lifted into the magical realm of living on more than a dollar a day (and thereby no longer be classified as “ultra-poor” but merely poor), did it make sense to invest in one school, one village, one building.

As I lay on my bed that night at the lovely Heavenly Jewells [sic] Hotel (by far the nicest hotel in Tagong), I came across this passage from The Gift by Lewis Hyde:

The begging bowl of the Buddha, Thomas Merton has said, “represents the ultimate theological root of the belief, not just in the right to beg, but in the openness to the gifts of all beings as an expression of the interdependence of all beings…The whole idea of compassion, which is central to Mahayana Buddhism, is based on an awareness of the interdependence of all living beings…thus when the monk begs from the layman and receives a gift from the laymen, it is not as selfish person getting something from somebody else. He is simply opening himself to this interdependence.”

I knew then that I would make the gift that would catalyze the purchase and enable the boys to be warm before the snows came.

A few days before their move into the new building, I was in Ljubljana, Slovenia. I’d been invited to come during my last trip, a trip I wrote about in the post Born Somewhere Else.

Over the course of five days I did six talks. My talks ranged from the pragmatic to the esoteric; from How to Lead and How to Raise Capital to How to Survive the Startup Life. The latter talk, essentially a distillation of the workshop Ann Mehl and I developed around my post, Disappearing into the Fire, seemed to be especially poignant for people.

The night before that talk I woke from a hazy jet-lag troubled sleep and, sitting in my room at the Union Hotel, I changed the presentation, adding some pictures from my trips to Tagong.

I was nervous when the talk began because I had shifted things and didn’t know how the 150 or so folks in the audience would respond. I had nothing to fear; from their tears I knew I had touched their hearts.

My intent was to use the photos to talk about the work being done in Tagong. I shared that work as an example of a way in which I try to embody my one-third, one-third, one-third life balance rule. One third for the inner you; one third for the outer you; and one third for the Other–those who embody our interdependence, those to whom, out of the depths of our compassion, we save not only them but, in the process, ourselves.

In my mind the Indigo Girls are singing She’s Saving Me. And the last lines–She’s saving me I don’t really think she knows it/It’s a strange way to show it as distant as last night’s dream unravels/She’s saving me I’m a very lost soul/I was born with a hole in my heart as wide as my land-locked travels–repeat as if the needle is stuck in the groove.

Earlier this week I saw my Buddhist teacher, the one who gave me the gift of “the one-third rule.” He asked me about my trip to Slovenia. With just the slightest hint of pride in his student, he said, “Ah, I see. You are giving them, the Others, the strategies you’ve used to save yourself.”

The gift of giving to the Other is the most powerful salve for closing that hole in your heart, the one that’s as wide as your land-locked travels. Placing alms in the bowl (be it a building in Tagong or a strategy to survive the every day violence of work) feeds not only the begging monk before us but the begging monk within.

Jerry Happy Birthday.

Related articles

• Road to Tagong (turtlestravel.wordpress.com)
• Motorcycle Monks and the Yak-men (turtlestravel.wordpress.com)

I must hear that five times a week. It’s as if we think that the existence of the plan, a set of action steps which we intend to take, will somehow make all of the anxiety go away.

“No you don’t,” I often say, infuriating my clients.

“But I don’t know what to do about…”–fill in the blank:

“…my job.”

“…my mate.”

“…my being lost, stuck, frightened.”

Just tell me what to do, they often implore.

And just as maddeningly I’ll say, “Tell me what you want to happen.”

Because, in the end, it’s not really that we don’t need a plan to make the change we desperately know we want. The problem is we think the plan is the answer when it’s simply a means to arriving at the answer.

The hard part isn’t coming up with the plan. The hard part is bearing the stage of “No action” necessary so that the right amount of data can unfold. And then, when you know where you want to go, where you need to be, exactly how you’d like the change to manifest, the steps to getting there lay themselves out the way the Yellow Brick road revealed itself to Dorothy.

Adapted from the forward I wrote to a friend’s new book…

Connect. Think. Do.

I’d first gotten the call, an inquiry call for coaching, two weeks previous. In a follow-up conversation, one of the team, one the five co-founders of a hot  local startup, came to the phone with a simple plea: “Help.”

In the year since they’d begun their efforts, they’d successfully raised the necessary capital, begun operations, and even turned a small profit. But this tight-knit team was at each other’s throats. We agreed to meet for an all-day session, all five of them, for six hours, starting early on a Sunday morning. It was about the third hour when the breakthrough happened.

The presenting agenda was, as I call it,  “The five-year old” soccer team problem: everyone wants to chase the ball and no one wants to play their position. It’s a common problem and one I felt at ease in addressing. But, as the morning unfolded, it quickly became apparent that the roots of all the fighting, all the chasing of loose balls, were layers of unmet needs.

And then there was the breakthrough.

I’d spent part of the morning briefly but consistently modeling one of the aspects of Nonviolent Communications (NVC) techniques most useful in the workplace. The aspect was around giving feedback using of the model of OFNR, Observation, Feelings, Needs, and Request. (I’d honed these skills working with my friends/teachers, Miki Kashtan, Martha Lasley, and Marie Miyashiro as they developed a program called Making Collaboration Real for using NVC in the workplace.)

As the morning progressed there came a moment when Mark felt compelled to respond to some things Nicole had done.

“Nicole,” he began with some coaching from me, “I notice that you prefer to work on a single task at a time.” He paused and I encouraged him to check that out.

“Is that right?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s hard for me to move onto the next task when I feel the first isn’t complete.”

“When you do that it makes me anxious that all the things we need to do won’t get done.”

“I have a need,” he continued, “in fact, the company has a need, for multiple things to be worked on simultaneously.” Pausing to make eye contact with me, he took a deep breath—courageous conversations require vulnerability–he then made a request, “So can you tell us what we can do to help you handle more things simultaneously.”

Not bad, I thought, for a guy who’d just started the practice of giving nonviolent feedback. But then something really magical happened: Nicole’s eyes began to soften, to “shine”, as some say.

The nervousness in the group was palpable; they wanted to move on—we so often turn away from another’s pain simply because it’s not bearable to us, it’s too evocative—perhaps—of our own stuff. I knew they had to hold steady.

I checked in with Nichole; I held a space that Mark had, in fact, opened by his honest sharing of his inner motivations, his inner needs.

“Nicole, how are doing?”

“Well, I was thinking about Mark’s observations. I started paying attention to the feelings I was having, the tightness in my own chest even as he made the observation.

“He’s right,” she continued, “but I started to ask myself why I needed that. And then I realized…I’m afraid I’ll get hit if the thing I’m working on isn’t perfect.”

The pain that had been in the room had now been named and everyone in the room connected with it. Nichole told a story from her childhood of literally being hit if she didn’t get everything on her homework correct. And she wept.

Suddenly this disjointed, angry, fighting-at-cross-purposes team of brash, young, brilliant start-up executives jelled into a single, compassionate, and loving unit. Suddenly the arguments over who got to play CEO and who took notes and got coffee during the meetings became far less important and everyone, myself included, connected with that kid inside all of us who worries about failing and disappointing an aggressive and demanding parent.

The story of this team, and so many other stories from my coaching and venture practices, resonated with me as I read the first drafts of Marie’s new book, The Empathy Factor. Over the years, I’ve served on more than a few boards of directors, worked with both for-profit and not-for-profit companies. I’ve watched companies get born and grow into success stories. I’ve watched large companies falter and miss opportunities. I’ve watched small not-for-profit organizations struggle through the maturation process; some succeed, many fail. And every one of them, and every one of the people endeavoring to do the sacred work of creating something of lasting and enduring value, could benefit from the lessons laid out in The Empathy Factor. (Marie’s got a compelling video on the underlying precepts here.)

My clients, the startup team struggling to become a Team, underwent the process that Marie refers to forming as “an empathetic connection,” a necessary step before educating, explaining, or justifying; she calls it “Connect-Think-Do.”  And, in doing so, they experienced the transformative power of empathy.

She writes:

Any form of educating, explaining, defending, or justifying before someone feels heard or understood, creates more separation than connection in my experience. Therefore, I like to ask people if they would find value in me explaining something before I begin sharing the information with them. When they’re not ready to listen to what I have to say, they likely have needs for understanding, expression, more information, or the like. This is a clue for me to connect with their feelings and needs. When they’re ready to listen to me, they might pause and stop speaking in such a way that I notice they’re now open to hearing what I have to say. Many times I’ve had people say, “Now I’m ready to listen to you.”

On that Sunday morning, the team created a connection that was so powerful that when it came time to explain, to educate or even to understand, the mutual empathy was so great that, unmet needs could be spoken aloud and the foundation for those needs to be met was laid. They were ready to listen to each other.

Marie makes a compelling case for wider-spread use and awareness of the core NVC techniques not just in situations where the violence of our interactions is so apparent but also in the places where we don’t necessarily see the violence done everyday in the name of productivity:

“As I studied the model of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) that Marshall [Rosenberg] taught,” she writes, “I understood what he meant. I could see the unconscious and unintentional disregard for the feelings and needs of people, both in everyday relationships and in the world of the businesses, nonprofits, universities, and government agencies with which I worked. I observed that the workplace is full of what I call silent pain. I like to tell the groups I work with that I estimate about 30 to 50 percent of what is said in workplace meetings is not what is heard.

She goes on:

Our workplaces are two-dimensional because the process of empathic connection requires a literacy and comfort with two human qualities that have been systematically devalued and misinterpreted in the world around us. Our organizations are born out of this same consciousness and simply replicate this world condition in our workplaces. These two misunderstood qualities are:

1) Our ability to be fluently aware of our feelings without judgment of them and 2) our ability to then connect these feelings to related human needs that are being met or unmet.

 

“Our problem,” she adds, “seems to derive from our entrenched conditioning in using the emotions of fear, guilt, shame, and anger, as workplace motivators [my emphasis] instead of proficiency with connecting to our own or one another’s feelings and needs.”

Is it any surprise that people joke that work is a four-letter word?

The Empathy Factor is a call for ending the subtle, persistent, and awful violence to the Self done everyday in the name of profits and productivity. But more than a call to action, it also offers proof that–ironically–building a more compassionate, empathic workplace is precisely the path to greater productivity and, consequently, profits.

Indeed, one of the most highly regarded business writers, Warren Bennis, asserts in his classic treatise, On Becoming A Leader:

In order to lead a Great Group, a leader need not possess all the individual skills of the group members. What he or she must have are vision, the ability to rally the others, and integrity. Such leaders also need superb curatorial and coaching skills—an eye for talent, the ability to recognize correct choices, contagious optimism, a gift for bringing out the best in others, the ability to facilitate communications and mediate conflict, a sense of fairness, and, as always, the kind of authenticity and integrity that creates trust. Nothing about the world today is simpler than it was or slower than it was, which makes the ability to collaborate and facilitate great collaboration more vital than ever.* [my emphasis]

Marie details how The Empathy Factor facilitates this vital collaboration. More important, she shows how managers can build organizations where empathy is the core driver of their success.

Last week, I met with one of the team members of that original group. In the months since our first meeting, there’s been pain and growth, laughter, success and failure. As we talked about his transition, his taking of his seat as the leader of the group, he reminded me of the transformation possible by simply pausing to check in on yourself and the team. Connecting with the on-the-ground reality creates a tremendous basis for the hundreds of decisions that have to be made every single day.

We laughed as we enjoyed a moment of recognizing both the work that’s been accomplished to date and the fearsome work that has yet to be done. And I watched as this first time CEO manifested not only Connect-Think-Do but the even more powerful Connect-Think-Lead.

*From the revised Introduction to On Becoming a Leader by Warren Bennis, Basic Books, New York. 2003

Related articles

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• Chapter One NVC – Interacting Skills (dfolstad58.wordpress.com)
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