Two Hashtags

Nez Perce National Historic Park - Spaulding, Idaho

 Behind every political deal in this country, the first casualties are always the ordinary people, who are barely treated as human.

Ai Weiwei

Chinese artist and activist

The modern world is a world of large, complex institutions. These institutions replaced the social world of families and communities. Instead of relationships being at the heart of our national society, we have politics.

The way politics is conducted in the modern world is to simplify the issues so that there is no longer any thing to think about, it is just about the emotion of the subject. Combine emotions with the power of images you have a toxic mix that alienates people from the realities of the world at large by distracting them with politics.

This is true across the ideological spectrum. This isn't a left / right thing. It is how institutions manage their "relationship" to people. As a result, we live in a world of greater conflict, division and confusion than is necessary.

This is particularly true with the question of race. For me, two hashtag phrases frame this place of race in America.

One is ‪#‎BlackLivesMatter‬.

The other ‪#‎WhitePrivilege‬.

I find these two phrases saying things that may be missed, or, that their most passionate promoters may or may not see. Yet, we need as a society and as individuals to talk about the deeper meanings of these phrases.

Those who speak about #WhitePrivilege are speaking about the privilege that White people have had in the USA since the day Columbus stepped on shore. All that they assert maybe true. Some of it is ugly, some of it is not. The question that confronts those of us who are White is "What should we do about it?".

So far, since this idea began to be promoted, I have heard of no one who has stepped down from their position of privilege so that someone who has been disadvantaged by that privilege may find opportunity which presently is not given to them.

This idea is a political message. All contemporary political messages are inherently dialectic, saying two things.

The #WhitePrivilege message has two messages.

To White people it is a reminder that they should feel guilty for their privilege. But their guilt does not require any action. By simply holding a belief in #WhitePrivilege our guilt as White people is relieved.

The more insidious message here is the one reminding African-Americans that not only are they are still victims of racism, but they are depended upon the White establishment for its resolution. In effect, in my opinion, #WhitePrivilege is a code word for #WhitePaternalism. Is that not the political system that African-Americans and other minorities have found themselves in?

I find #WhitePrivilege a sophisticated version of the liberal White racism that I heard in my seminary urban ministry course 35 years ago. At that time, an African-American scholar spoke to us about the racism of Whites. I found his words hollow, and prejudicial, unwittingly making the claim that Blacks were in effect helpless in the face of #WhitePrivilege. And yet, here he stood speaking to us as an authority, looking very much like a representation of White privilege, except with dark skin. I knew then, that this was not directly about race, or rather about our relationships with one another as the races, but about the politics of race. Politics in this instance is a code word for power. This is what #WhitePrivilege has always been about.

I am suggesting by this post that #WhitePrivilege is really a reminder to the African-American community that their benefits as citizens have always come as a result of the ‪#‎WhitePaternalism‬ of those who lead the nation. I don't think that those who speak of #WhitePrivilege realize that they are saying this. I think in their earnestness to resolve racial conflict, they want to take responsibility. But continuation of the paternalism that has been at the heart of the American political system towards all minorities is not really a suitable answer here in the second decade of the 21st century.

The other phrase ‪#‎BlackLiveMatters‬ rose up as a way to focus public attention on the rate of violence brought against Black males by law enforcement officers. It is a movement not unlike the conservative Tea Party movement seeking to draw attention to issues within their communities about how the government, in this case, law enforcement agencies, treat them.

Whatever the merits of their cause, the politics of the nation, and not realities of the local communities, is where these issues are being addressed.

There is a deeper message, however, in this phrase that I believe is worth reflecting upon.

#BlackLivesMatter is, also, a statement of the recognition that African-Americans are people, not merely victims, but people worthy of dignity, respect and honor. The power of language can get at this point this way.

If I was to call Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr a Black man, everyone would acknowledge this to be true and quite obvious.

However, if I was to say that Dr. King is a man who is Black or an African-American, then I would be saying something different. I would be first saying that he is a man. He is a man who was a son, a husband, a father, a pastor, a national Civil Rights leader, a Nobel Prize awardee and ultimately, a martyr, who is Black or African-American.

When we say #BlackLivesMatter, we are speaking about people who are more than the color of their skin. They are people like you and me. People who live and work to fulfill their dreams, care for their families, and participate as full citizens of their country. Much about us may be different, but those differences should not divide us, but rather enrich our lives as citizens of the same nation.

Politicians may or may not get this because to do so complicates the messages that they are trying to communicate to their political base. Politicians don't want us to think. They want us to believe in them. Belief often requires suspension of our critical thinking faculties. They want to touch our emotions, so that we are not thinking too much on election day.

When I think of #BlackLivesMatter, I think of Dr. King and Rosa Parks. I think of W.E.B. Dubois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright, of Roberto Clemente, of Tar Heel basketball star Charlie Scott, and, of my high school football coach, Baxter Holman. I think of friends and colleagues over the years through whom I've become a better man for knowing them. I think of the beauty of Yolanda Adams as she sang on The Tonight Show. #BlackLivesMatter because they are rich in contributions to the cultural and intellectual life of America.

When I think of #WhitePrivilege, I think of the Clinton's, the Bush's, the Trump's, and all those White men and women who have served in Congress, and yet have not figured out that the vast majority of problems this country faces, like race, are products of their own failed leadership. Why is it that fifty years after the voting rights act and the war on poverty was instituted that we are still dealing with those issues. I'm convinced that is because it is politically expedient to do so.

Institutional nature of modern society is essentially political in nature. Politics in this sense is both a product of image, of appearance, and, of transactions and exchanges of privilege. I have something you want, and, I will exchange it for your vote or support at the next election or team meeting. The more transactional our society has become, the more toxic its political culture.

What's the solution?

It begins with our own perception of the world. It is important to understand that the institutional nature of our society dictates how we view other people. When people have the opportunity to meet and get to know one another, the similarities of our lives take on a greater presence than our differences. Politics emphasizes our differences because that sequesters communities into voting factions.

However, when we perceive our world as foremost and fundamentally, a series of interactions with people, then race takes on a different perspective.

Let me suggest as you walk down the street today, look each person you pass in the eye, smile and say "Good day.", "How ya doin'?" or nod your head. Many will return the gesture, others won't.

Learn to strike up a conversation. If you are respectfully curious, you'll find a way to begin a conversation.

Listen. Appreciate. Don't argue.

Learn to see who this person is from their perspective.

Politics tells us that we must defend our position. Why? Because our self-identity is so fragile that must have a political identity to feel secure. This is another reason why politics has become so toxic in America.

Forty years ago, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of life is bound up in relationships. If we were to place our emphasis on building relationships across political, cultural and racial lines, then we'd find the capacity to restore peace and prosperity to our communities.

In the end, #BlackLivesMatter because their lives are like our lives and the lives of people everywhere. They matter and are worthy of respect and honor.

And privilege, whether White or otherwise, matters only when responsibility is taken to use that privilege to build relationships and community that serve each person.

A Horizon for Self-Reliance



Henry David Thoreau
Journal, 18 October 1855

Wallace Stegner in his collection of essays, Marking The Sparrow's Fall, writes on American self-reliance.

"Henry David Thoreau was a philosopher not unwilling to criticize his country and his countrymen, but when he wrote the essay entitled 'Walking' in 1862 ... He spoke America's stoutest self-confidence and most optimistic expectations. ...

(Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism) reports 'a way of life that is dying - the culture of competitive individualism, which in its decadence has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme of a way of all against all, the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self.' ...

Assuming that Thoreau spoke for his time ... and that Christopher Lasch speaks for at least elements and aspects of his, how did we get from there to here in little more than a century? Have the sturdiness of the American character and the faith in America's destiny that Thoreau took for granted been eroded entirely away? What happened to confidence, what happened to high purpose, what happened to hope? Are they gone ... ?"

The American virtue of self-reliance sounds archaic compared to the modern conventions of self-improvement and self-help. The difference is worth noting.

We think, possibly, that Thoreau's time was much simpler, and being self-reliant was easier to achieve. Today, everything is so complex. We may wonder whether being self-reliant is possible? 

Self-reliance today as compared to Thoreau's day is quite different. As the world has become increasingly complex, to think that we can do all that we need to do on own is a recipe for frustration and aggravation. Unlike in Thoreau's day, today, we interface with so many organizational structures. Independence as described by Wallace Stegner is no longer really possible. As a result, self-reliance has to be understood in the context of living and working  in organizations. There we must related to a widely diverse set of people. Self-reliance and people skills go hand in hand today. 

Self-reliance is not narcissistic self-centeredness. It is rather the ability to know that we can walk into any situation and know that we can figure out how to function well in it, making a difference that matters because of who we are and what we desire.

My series of blog posts Situational Awareness gets at this reality.




This is a core skill of self-reliance.

The Horizon of Self-reliance is not independence but freedom. Our freedom to adapt to situations, to connect with people in meaningful ways, and, to take initiative to make a difference that matters.


To find out more about this way of approaching our lives, sign up for my email list which will go live in 2017.

The End of Work



"The use of horse labor used to grow along with the population and the economy. In the United States horse labor grew 6 fold from 1840 to 1900. But then it plummeted as internal combustion engines replaced horses on farms, in factories, for transportation. Does the same fate await humans, or at least some humans?"

In ten years, what do you think these young women in Glasgow will be doing to earn a living?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics link in the above blog post shows that the work for people will available to those who are more intellectually developed and capable of handling more complex, adaptation oriented work.
These stats show that our society and the economy that under girds it is changing dramatically. The push to automate the functions of business is a continued recognition that people are simply components in a system. While the age of production passed a generation ago, the age of information is built upon the same foundation that people are expensive and superfluous in a global economy. This is not just a capitalist development, but also the same outcome that comes from governments that seek to integrate all aspects of society under their control.
It is time to admit that the large institutions of business and government, those that I refer to as the forces of global integration, are not going to be the source of new jobs in the future. We need, you and me, to begin to establish a parallel economy based in individual human initiative that does two things.
One is to build networks of relationships that provide a communal platform for economic enterprise that supports families and strengthens local communities.
Second, we need to establish a culture of initiative where the creative endeavors of individuals becomes the core purpose of an educational system that is preparing people for the realities found in these statistics. This means we must shift the mission of educational institutions away from preparing students to work in systems of production, to being able to create their own businesses and networks of relationships.
I’m convinced that every child should have been provided experience in creating a business that monetizes some idea that they have by the time they enter middle school. Repeated attempts to start projects and new businesses at a young age will foster a culture of collaborative independence that is the parallel economy that we need along side a global economy of integration.
Let me then ask you the following questions as a way to move you into action.
If you had to do one thing in the next year that would make a difference in your local community, what would that be?
Is it important enough that you would give up some aspect of your life to do it?
Is it the sort of thing that you could find a way to monetize it if you found yourself on January 1 out of the job you currently have?
Living with this perspective in mind is how we'll adapt to a world where the global forces of integration have no place for human beings to contribute.
Read the whole article linked above, and especially connect to the links of the jobs that are growing and declining.

Two Forces of Globalization



Ai Weiwei






One is the force of global integration of business and government.



The Force of Integration







The Force of Personal Initiative










The Context of Organizational Structures

It is important to understand how organizational structures function in society.

Organizational structure has no voice, but it has force.

It is invisible because its presence is so comprehensive.

























Five Questions for Understanding










It does not have to be, however.





The Sources of Leadership Confidence

Tooth of Time at Dawn

Where do you find confidence?

Especially, where do you find it in moments of great challenge and pressure?

It comes as a gift from people who care and love us, who believe in us, and see within us something that we don't see in ourselves ... our potential for impact.

If we do not have those kind of relationships, it may just be because we have not shown our confidence in other people.

Imagine a work team where part of your team's discipline is the expression of both confidence and gratitude towards one another. Imagine a work environment where we tell one another that we appreciate the gifts and strengths that they bring to work each day. Imagine the difference this would make.

Here is the key.

We must nurture in others what we desire for ourselves.

Read that last sentence again ... slowly.

If we want confidence in ourselves, we must show confidence in others.

If we want affirmation, then affirm others. If we want understanding, then be understanding towards others.  If we want love, we must love others.  If we want accountability, then begin to hold others accountable.

To do this requires us to be intentional about our relationships. Just don't just float on vague expectations that are unfair and unrealistic. Be clear and intentional about your relationships with others.

Relationships of confidence, therefore, are mutual ones.

We give and share. We receive and give thanks.

We celebrate and we mourn.

It is from this deep richness of life, in all its manifestations, that we discover the confidence to live through life's transition points, to begin new ventures, and, to discover in ourselves that which has been suppressed by fear, cynicism, and, self-doubt.

This one key ...

We must nurture in others what we desire for ourselves.

... is the source of leadership confidence.

What is Leadership?


"It's time to stop talking about leadership, and lead."

The voice in my head. One afternoon.

Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

July 1999.

Over the past three decades I've lived and worked in the world of leadership. Part of my passion has been the desire to understand the intersection of organizational structure, culture and human nature with the phenomenon of leadership. From early on in my training and study, it was clear that my perception of leadership is different than many who write about it and the practitioners of the leader craft.

Two Trends

There are two trends that I see that I find problematic for effective leadership in our world today.

The first is the relationship of organizational leadership to globalization. Many people think that as we have become a more globalized society, that we are living in a much larger arena. The fact, that during the course of a day, that I can engage in conversation and project work with colleagues in Europe and Asia would initially suggest that this is a much bigger playing field. However, I am convinced that one truth remains.

It is that all work is local work.

It ceases to be local when a business no longer requires human beings to do the work. Regardless of how big an environment that we live and work in, the work is still done in communication and collaboration with people whose proximity to us is made closer by both their physical presence and the aid of modern technology.

I want to suggest that the importance of local proximity, even through a screen, has become even more significant as our possibilities for world-wide impact have grown. In some respects, our vision for that impact has not kept up with our reach.

People no longer dream of grand visions. Our lives and work are more fragmented, more confined into ideological and socio-political enclaves. The Steve Jobs' and Elon Musk's of our world stand out as visionaries because they are exceptions, and not the models to follow.

I take my reference point for this perspective, President Kennedy's Houston Speech in 1962. In that presentation, he challenged the nation to believe that we could go to the moon within the decade.


And we did. 

I have tried to identify similar grand endeavors that were presented to the people of the world that catalyzed society to act in unity and harmony toward a grand goal of achievement. I have yet to identify one.

The second trend has been around as long as I have been involved in the world of leadership.

When James Magregor Burns published his text Leadership in 1978, we were a few years passed landing on the moon, the end of the Vietnam conflict, and, the Watergate scandal. From Burn's Wikipedia entry:

Burns shifted the focus of leadership studies from the traits and actions of great men to the interaction of leaders and their constituencies as collaborators working toward mutual benefit. He was best known for his contributions to the transactional, transformational, aspirational, and visionary schools of leadership theory.

This was a significant shift in understanding the nature of leadership. Yet it is a shift that has never been fully realized. Today we still live in a time where conceptions of leadership presented to us in popular media are about individuals whom some editor or producer has determined to be today's great leaders. This personalization or celebrity-ization of leadership marginalizes many people whose leadership is an embodiment of Burn's description.

These transformational leaders live in the shadow of their shared accomplishments with their partners in leadership impact. They are individuals and teams that are not interested in the title leader, or any other title like, facilitator, convener, mentor, catalyst and servant.  These transformational leaders are the hidden leaders that do not attract large advertising budgets, but makes every organization on the planet function as well as they do.

What, then, is Leadership for Today?

Leadership begins with individual initiative. If every person who reads these words would do one thing that they have never done before, based upon some concern or passion to make a difference in the world that really matters, then we'd notice. People in Mumbai may not notice what's happening in Monte Carlo, or people in Memphis know what's happening in Munich, but the people in those locales certainly would. 

We live in a time of great pessimism about leaders and organizations, which in many cases is justified.  I'm not a pessimist, nor am a starry-eyed optimist. I am very much a realist who believes that the strength of a society is found in the individual leadership of its people.

So, may I encourage you to focus on two things.

First, look closely at your local community. Where you have questions, ask someone. Find out what needs your community has that are important to you. It maybe education or children's health, or, racial reconciliation.

Take seriously the idea that you can make a difference. Do not let the pessimism and fear that exists in so many places convinced you not to care.

Second is to decide to do something to make a difference. Understand that most of the leadership we do is not world changing in the moment, but when combined with thousands and millions of other individuals' initiative, then impact can truly be world changing.

Where to begin

If the two areas of focus is a bit much, as I'm sure it for some people, then may I suggest that you look at the story that you'd like to tell about your community. Write a short story of what your community would be like if all the major issues began to be resolved. Just try a sentence at a time, then a paragraph. This is how I began to learn to write years ago. Words, phrases and fragments of sentences on scratch paper.

If you write something, send it to me. Let me celebrate with you a statement of hope that could become a reality if folks like you cared enough to take initiative.

This is what leadership is today. It is the best part of us giving ourselves to people and places we care about.

Listening to the Stories People Tell Themselves





People are, everyone of us, "embodied narratives." Our lives are unfolding stories that embody the values and desires that may or may not make sense to us. As a result, humans are beings who seek to make sense of the world they live in.

We all interpret what we see, hear, smell, touch and taste from our own perspective of experience. We put words to those sensory experiences to give us meaning and connection to other experiences and people.

People gather in bars to watch their favorite team play in the playoffs. They share a common love for their team, but each person's experience of that affection is different.

If you are a person who wants a life that is not mediocre and simply derivative of someone else's life, then learning to listen is a most important skill.

What Listening isn't.

Listening is not waiting to speak.

Listening is not preparing either a counter argument or a story which is to one-up the other person.

Listening is not being silent.

What I call listening is what others call active listening. It is seeking to understand what you are hearing in the context of the person who is speaking.

I don't know how many times that I have been listening to someone, trying hard to understand, and when I respond, thinking that I'm doing so appropriately, that I've missed the point that she was trying to convey.

Particularly with people we are just meeting, there are always missing clues that would help us better understand.

For example, a couple years ago I attended a festival day of the Laguna tribe in New Mexico. I had met a group of people from that tribe at a conference in Phoenix earlier in the year. It was there that I met Mollie Curtis who created the beautiful vase above. Their festivals are about their tribe, their families, and their traditions. I had lunch in the home of one family whose members were on the dance team.

As a Southern-born Caucasian, on the surface, this is an alien world to me. However, the longer I watched and listened, I realized that many of my own values are shared in their culture. As a result, I began to understand who they are.

Being able to listen and understand the other person is essential in a global culture that is a diverse as the world is today.

How To Listen.

1. Cast aside your assumptions that you already know and understand what the other person is saying.

Listen with openness, not judgment.

2. Whatever you are being told, there is a back story.

If we approach our communication with other people as one seamless thread, then we will realize that no conversation ever truly begins, but rather is a continuation of one that is constantly going on in our head, and the other person's as well.

When I tell about the time that I got our scout troop lost on a backpacking trip, I'm also saying something about the time as a child that I got lost and separated from my family at the county fair.

An anecdote always has a purpose other than the subject of the story.

Several years ago, I was facilitating a discussion with a congregation about the kind of pastor that they wanted as their search for a new one began. One member rose and with tremendous anger told us about what he didn't like about the previous pastor. In this instance, the back story was about values that he felt were apart of who they were as a faith community, yet were missing under the former pastor. What the man was telling us through his anger was what he loved. That was the back story in this situation.

3. Ask the other person to validate your understanding of what they are saying.

This is a act of respect. "Did I hear you say ...?"  "If I heard correctly ... "

4.  The stories we share are stories we tell ourselves that ground us in a way of life that makes sense to us.

Listen for the story.  It embodies something important about the other person. It is a way they define themselves.

5. In listening, the other person is sharing a part of themselves. Seek to find points of understanding and mutuality. Be grateful, and give them thanks.

These points of connection are typically based upon shared values.

When I first met Mollie Curtis, our connection was in the beauty of art as an expression of God's presence in the world. Beauty transcends the specifics of life. Today, I look at her vase and not only marvel at its beauty, but also her artist craft.

For listening to bringing unity and understanding to people, it demands of us to be grateful for their willingness to open themselves up to us. Listening maybe a tactic of communication, however, it is also how we bridge the gap that separates two people from genuinely understanding the another.

Truth is in the Shadows


In the 1960s, I remember being told not to trust anyone over 30.

Now, we don't know who to trust.

This article about Peter Young, "the jet-setting terrorist", is a fascinating look into the collusion that exists between the media and those who seek exposure for their ideas and causes.

A quote from the article:

"The unspoken conspiracy that you speak of, that exists between journalists and those seeking publicity is very real. If you have a story that provokes—real or not—they have the time. Give them the promise of traffic and a little plausible denial and you’re in. I’ve received tremendous insights from Trust Me, I’m Lying and your Creative Live course. I got to work on The Jetsetting Terrorist the day after finishing the latter. Your point that there is a harmony of interests between journalists and those who wish to hack the media is very powerful, and has proven true."

Here's an example of how this works. Two reports about the same thing. Two very different messages.

Cancer Rates Soar by 6000% Near Fukushima Site, New Reports Show

Why the Cancer Cases in Fukushima Aren't Likely Linked to the Nuclear Disaster: An increase in thryoid cancer may just reflect the intensive testing of children.

Who, then, can you trust when it comes to messages that are delivered by various media, whether newspapers, television, social media or your neighbor next door?

I am convinced that you can only trust yourself.

You have to do your own research, just like a journalist, with your "BS" meters set on "extremely high" if you want to find out what really is going on. Then you have to decide without really knowing whether you are right. This means we must hold fast to our values, and, never buy totally into whatever any person or media is telling us.

As I wrote about Marshall McLuhan yesterday, everything now is marketing and sales. And as one of Seth Godin's best marketing books taught us, All Marketers Are Liars, because they tell stories.

This is the story that NBC and Brian Williams wants to go away because next year's presidential election is an opportunity rich environment for the manipulation of the "news". If you remember as you read everything about the campaigns of the candidates, that every writer, producer and media coordinator involved is trying to communicate a message, not the news, but a message intended to obscure unpleasant realities about themselves and their intentions, and, expose the perceived weaknesses of whomever they decide needs to be put in their place.

Just remember.

Truth is in the shadows.



A bird in search of a cage



It's Your Turn - Seth Godin



From page 23:

Making everything okay.
There are three problems with freedom.

Things often don't turn out precisely the way we hope.
Resolution takes too long.
And we might fail.

Let's look at these three.






  Seth Godin

In the summer of 1995, our family moved to Hendersonville to start a new chapter in our lives. At that time, I started a consulting practice, Community of Leadership, LLC, that has been my principal focus of work for the past two decades.

Over the past five years, it has become increasingly obvious that the consulting work that I was doing had run its course.  The context of work and business had changed significantly, and, how organizations used consultants had changed as well.

In the spring of 2012, I came to the conclusion that everything that I had been doing was done. I did not take that as a defeat or failure, but simply as one of those transition points in life and work that I continually talk about with people. I began a process of self-reflection and prayer to discern what my impact should be over the last third of my life. I knew that if everything is ending, then it means that something is beginning.

In November of last year, I came to a final realization as this process of reflection on personal change reach a climax. The realization that I came to was for me to restart my work required me to move away from Asheville and Western North Carolina where I’ve lived for the past twenty years.

As of March 1, I begin the next chapter of my life and work as a resident of Jackson, Wyoming.  While many of the details and the timeline are still in their formative stages, my plan is to focus on two projects. One is the writing of a book on personal leadership that I’m calling “The Story We Tell Ourselves.” This book, based upon my Circle of Impact Leadership model, rises from work that I’ve been doing with a group of young women who are in an addiction recovery program here in Western North Carolina. These women embodied the desire, the will and the commitment to change unlike any group of people that I’ve ever known.  They are my inspiration for writing a book that I’m convinced with inspire others as these women have inspired me.

My second project is the restart of my Community of Leadership business as Circle of Impact Leadership Solutions. My purpose is to produce tools and products that support leaders and the development of leaders in organizations. I do this from the conviction that the approach to leadership that we all followed in the 20th century into the 21st, is no longer viable or healthy. Instead, I see a great need to develop organizational structures that equip and empower all the employees and constituents of an organization to take leadership initiative in problem solving, collaboration, and internal communication.

I do plan to split my time between Jackson, Asheville and Ventura, Ca. I look forward to those of you who travel to see the Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks to let me know you are coming. As many of you know from me, friendship transcends time and space.  As my new work develops, a new website will be created, and, opportunities to speak and conduct workshops will be sought. We are at a very tenuous moment in human history. It is time that we all, regardless of who we are, where we live and what role we play in our families, businesses or communities, focus on the contributions that we individually and collectively need to make to create a more peaceful, sustainable world.

May you inspire leadership initiative in others.

Ed Brenegar

My Resolutions for 2015


"Take good care of yourself."

Zach Brittle

Typically, at the turn of the year I've posted some thoughts about how to approach the coming year. This year, I've decided, because of this post, to post my own resolutions.

My Resolutions for 2015


Listen more. Read more novels. Read more ancient literature. Learn, not to know more, but to live better.


Sleep more. Be more physically active; spend more time outside than inside. Cook more. Take more cooking classes.


Pray more. Spend more time with people who have gone through trauma and hardship. Practice integrity and generosity.  Say No to meaningless distractions, and, Yes to things that are acts of gratitude.

Family / Friends:

Talk with my children every week. Be better connected to my cousins and aunts. Make my home a place of welcome and retreat. Love others as I wish to be loved. Make new friends, care for old ones.


Restart my business with fresh purpose and initiative. Write and publish “The Story We Tell Ourselves”. Learn how to generate new streams of income in a changing economy.

In a couple weeks, I'll have more to say about some of this.

May your 2015 bring you, your families, friends and colleagues opportunities to make a difference that matters that are filled with hope, joy, love and peace.

The Situational Awareness series






Here are the posts the series on Situational Awareness:

Three Keys to Situational Awareness

The Speed of Change

The Social Space of Situational Awareness

Social Conformity and Situational Awareness

In the Moment of Situational Awareness

The Story We Tell Ourselves

The Story We Tell Ourselves












Seeing the Situation















"I sell insurance."

I'd respond with,

"What kind?"


"How do your new customers find you?"




Another Approach


3dLeadership - Purpose-Vision-Values




I ask:






I ask:







I ask:










I ask:











Find other posts in this series on Situational Awareness:

Three Keys to Situational Awareness

The Speed of Change

The Social Space of Situational Awareness

Social Conformity and Situational Awareness

In the Moment of Situational Awareness

The Story We Tell Ourselves

In the Moment of Situational Awareness





From this place, situational awareness enables us to discern the influences that affect us both internally and externally. From those perceptions, we gain perspective. We can because we see the distinction between external realities and inner strengths. The external realities of the situation we are in seeks to control and absorb our attention. Our inner strengths are those qualities, so may say character, that enables us to move into a wide variety of settings without losing our sense of who were are.

External Realities - Inner Strengths 

Here's a depiction of this perspective that resulted from my engagement with a group of young women who are each in the midst of a dramatic life change.

They identified the six eternal realities that they must address in their lives. Then from our exploration of them, we came up the ten inner strengths that would be most helpful for adapting to those realities with the greatest benefit.

The conclusion is that we need "tools" for coping with challenging situations. This is why situational awareness is a skills-based capacity, and, not just a tactic or an idea.

Here's an example of what I mean.

Like many of us, I often encounter people who are panhandlers, asking for some spare change for various reasons. They may or may not be homeless. They may or may not be telling me the truth about why they need the money. Their reasons don't really matter. What matters is the interaction we have at the precise moment of our encounter.

My values tell me that each person, regardless of their life situation, should be treated with dignity as a human being. That doesn't mean that I have to approve of their life choices, or whether they have the self-respect that should accompany that sense of dignity, or that I should even trust them. It is that without a belief in the inherrent dignity of each individual, we do not have a foundation for a relationship that allows for us to honestly explore what is possible between us.

If a person on the street, who asks me for help, is clearly not high or drunk, then I will do something to help him or her. It they say they are hungry, I will take the time and buy them a meal. If they say they are hungry, yet do not want the meal, but the money, then I know that there is an ulterior motive in their request to me.

I tell them that is all I am willing to do. (This reflects the boundaries that I have set for my interaction with this person.)

If they say they need a bus ticket, I may drive them to the bus station. If I am convinced that this is a legitimate request. I will ask them lots of questions to determine whether the story is legitimate. If I'm satisfied that it is, then I will help them.

If they are drunk or smell of alcohol, I'll send them to the local agency that works with people in need.

I hope you see by this scenario that I have constructed a way of being situationally aware that does not place me in conflict with the external realities are clearly designed to do so. Many of our interactions with people are intended to put us in a compromised position, so that we give against our wishes and our own interests. The key is being prepared to relate to the person or group as they present themselves to us right now, in this moment, not historically, or as may happen in the future.

I have decided that to treat people with dignity, who lack self-respect and feel no reciprocal dignity towards me, requires the kind of internal strengths identified above. 

To learn to do this brings freedom and peace of mind to our relationships, both those with whom we live and work everyday, and, those whom are strangers that we encounter outside of our normal environments.

Situation awareness is a type of intuition into a particular situation.

We see into it, connecting different observations, sensations with logic and past experience.

We see into the situation as a result.

Let's take this interaction a step further.

The dignity I offer to a person asking for help is to believe what they tell me. To respect them as a human being, and to establish a relationship of trust. Even if this is for a minute or two, it is important to do this.

Social conformity, which I wrote about in my previous post, is derived from the need for secure external circumstances. The goal is to minimize the internal discomfort that we may feel as we encounter all kinds of people every day. These feelings of discomfort are the ground upon which we build the inner strengths that we need for situational awareness.

There is a kind of natural co-dependency that occurs when social conditions are secure and constant. It is the picture of happy families and homogeneous communities in movies.

Times of social and economic disruption are more traumatic for people. Their emotional health and sense of self-worth become dependent upon the support and constancy of external circumstances. In other words, when personal security is found in conforming to some social expectation, we lose the best parts of our individualism, and become more resistant to change and social difference.

When a person goes through a divorce, loses their job, finds their children are disabled in some manner, or the nation goes to war, the community experiences a catastrophic natural disaster, or at a more superficial level, their favorite sports team fails to win the championships that everyone expected them to do, then these are not simply emotional blows to be weathered as better times return. Instead, these changes may be threats to one's own sense of self, or identity.

Returning to my scenario of the panhandler, if I give her or him, I then tell them the following.

"I am giving you this money trusting that you are telling me the truth. I have no way of knowing this. But you do. This money is a gift to you. In response, I only ask you that when you are given the opportunity, that you do the same for someone else. I am asking you to give to someone as an act of thanks for the gift that I am giving you right now."

The money is not the point. Establishing a rapport of trust, dignity and mutuality is.

To act in this way requires discernment that is learned at a deep level. It requires of us to be able to listen to the story behind the story, to ask questions that get to that story, and from that awareness, determine whether there is a possibility of establishing, even for a moment in time, an open, trusting relationship. If we can do this once, we can do it again and again.

The risk is that I may have totally misread the situation, and I have squandered the price of a bus ticket or meal on someone who is simply using me. That is the price I pay for treating people with dignity. I accept that, and am willing to take the risk because of the times when the response is one of deep gratitude.

The point is not the money, but the story we tell ourselves about who we are in social situations. My story is about dignity, trust and generosity.

In the next post in this series, I'll write about the story we tell ourselves. I've written about this before in The Edge of the Real: The Unfolding Story.

Social Conformity and Situational Awareness





One of the most challenging aspects of being situationally aware is learning how to deal with the social conformity that lies at the root of all social environments.

Social Conformity and Self-knowledge

Much of our socialization as children and adolescents was not intentionally focused on developing situational awareness as I describe it. Rather, we were taught various ways of conforming to the social requirements of a particular situation.

Social conformity breaks down situational awareness by suppressing individual initiative.

The institutional form of social conformity requires us to think less for ourselves by operating according a set of prescribed codes and processes. Ironically, the "expressive individualism" as Charles Taylor describes in his book, A Secular Age is at the same time conformity to a wider consumer culture.

I believe ... that our North Atlantic civilization has been undergoing a cultural revolution in recent decades. The 60s provide perhaps the hinge moment, at least symbolically. It is on one hand an individuating revolution, which may sound strange, because our modern age was already based on a certain individualism. But this has shifted on to a new axis, without deserting the others. As well as as moral/spiritual and instrumental individualism, we now have a widespread "expressive" individualism. This is, of course, not totally new. ... What is new is that this kind of self-orientation seems to have become a mass phenomenon.

... With post-war affluence, and the diffusion of what many had considered luxuries before, came a new concentration on private space, and the means to fill it, ... And in this newly individuated space, the customer was encouraged more and more to express her taste, furnishing her space according to her own needs and affinities, as only the rich had been able to do so in previous eras.

While we perceive ourselves as individuals, we still make choices that are motivated by the fear of rejection or retribution for standing outside the circle of conformity. To think for ourselves in a situationally aware context requires us to have the self-knowledge that enables us to see social situations more objectively, to engage people without personalizing the interaction, and to discern what is in the best interests of the group.

Social conformity produces a personal identity that is formed by external conditions governed by institutional rules and defined by objects that provide us our identity.

Consider all the groups a person experiences from kindergarten through high school. Family, academic, sports, arts, religious and community organizations each have a set of guiding values. From place to place, town to town, organization to organization, each one provides a developmental experience that may or may not have the intention of creating stronger, mature, life-ready individuals.  Each institutional situation does require some sort of accountability to the goals and values of the group. An over-riding concern, therefore, is when social conformity is accomplished by cohersion, threat and fear. An extreme example of this would be the practice of hazing as an initiation rite into membership of a social organization.

Group oriented organizations can provide lessons in how to fit in, to play the game that others control, and how to win or excel as a group. One of the realities of this situation is that some people are better at whatever the purpose of the group is. Whether it is math class, football or band, there emerges a recognition that every group is ordered according to those who are the elite players, and those who are the support ones. Every kid knows who the cool, the key, the elite members of their school or group are. It is a part of the process of social organization and conformity.

This kind of institutional social control is a product of a time when our society was based upon people working within large institutional organizations. If you are going to grow up, work in a factory, in a corporate environment or any large complex organization, knowing how to play the game of social conformity is essential to success. There are multiple boundaries that a person must learn to negotiate to function well in those complex settings.

However, this kind of social conformity is becoming less and less beneficial in society. Institutions are no longer capable of sustaining life-long employment where the benefits of fitting in are rewarded. Instead, in today's world, advancement comes through not fitting in, of moving from one organizational setting to the next, as a means of finding the most advantageous place for ones' gifts and talents to be expressed. In effect, advancement is "expressive individualism" as a life strategy.

As a society, social conformity works less and less for more and more people. A recovery of genuine identity is essential. Today, we need to develop the self-knowledge that provides skills of objectivity, engagement and discernment.

The virtue of self-knowledge is that it provides us the foundation upon which we can develop the social awareness that is necessary to be effective in a global world of connection.

As I have explored this aspect of our lives, I believe we can say this much.

Situational awareness begins with self-knowledge.

I can stand apart; I can see what is going on; I can empathize with a person; I can avoid compromising situations.

With self-knowledge I grow out of the need for every situation to be about me, and I lose the fear of what happens when I do not fit in.

When I am able to be myself, without losing myself, then I am able to see how to build relationships of understanding and collaboration that create strong families, organizations and communities.

Find other posts in this series on Situational Awareness:

Three Keys to Situational Awareness

The Speed of Change

The Social Space of Situational Awareness

Social Conformity and Situational Awareness

In the Moment of Situational Awareness

The Story We Tell Ourselves

The Social Space of Situational Awareness





Situational awareness functions in real time and in real places. Think of it as a relationship, as a connection, to people, places, ideas, structures, institutions and to one's self. The space is a kind of gap, a discernable distance, between me and the other. This space is a situation that calls upon us to think, to engage, to decide and to act in a way that reduces the distance that exists between me and the people and situations that stand apart from me.

Situational Awareness is the skill that enables a person to establish community, peace and reconciliation in places that are fragmented, broken and in transition from what they once were to what they will be in the future.

These social relationships are varied and inter-mingled in time. They follow patterns of attitudes and behaviors, but not always in a predictable fashion. To be socially aware is to observe all that is taking place in a space, and, then, understanding how to respond appropriately.

Here's an example.

Walking into a coffee shop on the way to work, you are talking on the phone. You acknowledge the server, see your best friend in a business meeting in the corner, nod an acknowledgement, and, read an ad on the community bulletin board for a local theater group's play to be performed this coming weekend. The phone call ends. The order is placed. An introduction is made to the friend's business contact, and, order for tickets to the play made from the smart phone all within a matter of just a few minutes.

However, what if this typical busy, non-stressed moment in your morning, randomly includes the following. After you've order your coffee, the person next to you picks up their coffee, the lid pops off, and the hot liquid goes all over her and the floor at your feet. As you turn to find some napkins, you see that your ex-mother-in-law is standing in line behind you with your ex-husband's new wife. Then a text message buzzes, and it is your son letting you know that he has been in an auto accident on the way to school, and that he is okay. 

We move through situational spaces that require us to observe, engage and act. If however, we personalize all these situations, we then demand that each of these situations function for our benefit.To personalize a situation is to make it about ME, and, to narrow and confine the possibilities for interaction and impact.

To practice situation awareness is to see a larger picture, where my needs, wants, desires and demands, are not at the center, but just another set of considerations to be addressed in that moment of decision.

To treat this moment from a socially and situationally aware perspective is to take the initiative to help the woman whose coffee has just spilled, by reaching for some napkins, and to begin to help clean up the mess on the floor. At some point, you wipe coffee off of your own shoes. Instead of ignoring your ex-mother-in-law, you go over say hello, and introduce yourself to your ex-husband's new wife. Then you pick up your coffee, step aside, and text your son asking whether he needs you right now.

If, in each of these situations, we are unsure of ourselves, lacking the confidence to know what to do because we are unsure of who we are, then we avoid having to make these choices. We may stay hunkered over our smart phone, reading email as if no one else in the shop matters. We present an image of strength and detachment in order to block out intrusion.

Charles Taylor speaks about these spaces as a moral space, as "a space of questions" that require us to make distinctions. These distinctions that we make in these situational moments are answers to the fundamental question of who am I in this particular setting at this moment in time. If everything is personalized, or, if we lack confidence to make those decisions, or, if we have no clear idea of what we believe or value, then these situations fill us with fear and anxiety. What happens in situational space reveals who we are at our most basic level.

This is why living in the world of The Spectacle of the Real can be so attractive. We vicariously live through the lives of others, transferring responsibility for acting as a person onto the celebrity or the news opinion reader, instead of discovering the life that is available to us to live. The development of Situational Awareness is a path towards understanding who we are, finding our identity, and with humilty and confidence, understanding how we are to fit into all the social situations that we find ourselves in everyday.

Find other posts in this series on Situational Awareness:

Three Keys to Situational Awareness

The Speed of Change

The Social Space of Situational Awareness

Social Conformity and Situational Awareness

In the Moment of Situational Awareness

The Story We Tell Ourselves

The Speed of Change



In 2010, I wrote a post, Change: No Lines, No Waiting, where I stated the following.

Whether you are 25, 50 or 75, dealing with change isn't about who you are or what you do. It is rather about putting yourself in the position to make a difference, to make a contribution, to create impact. ... (I learned that) how I dealt with change was too abstract, logical, rational. It didn't deal with reality.

I'm been thinking about the speed of change.

A lot of people want to slow change down. They want time to adapt to it. I've become convinced that we need to speed up change. We do because it forces us to simplify our life and work. Squeeze out the non-essentials and a higher level of productivity results.

I know. It is all very counter-intuitive. The faster you change, the slower life becomes. I know it sounds like something out of the Matrix. But, it is true.

As I edited and republished that post last night, I began to think about the "speed of change" phrase.

Two images come to mind.

Image One.

Change is like a wave.


A large wave. It comes at you, and if you are standing still it hits you - Whappp! - then drags you in its wake until it has moved on, and you are left gasping for air. Then the next wave of change comes along, hits you, and instead of being the master of change, you are hanging on for survival.

Instead of standing still and being hit each time by change, you have to climb on top of it and ride it until it begins to run out of steam, you curl off of it, to prepare for the next wave.

This is the kind of change we are all in today.

I'm no different than the rest of those who have been run over by a wave of change that came out of nowhere, doesn't even have a name, and is gone.

I am fast coming to the conclusion that what we once thought of as stability, consistency, and continuity in life was just our experience of the slowness of change. There has always been change, but it just never reached the level of a hurricane storm surge. Until now.

What is it about us as human beings that we want to remain where we are?

Why is change what we resist instead of boredom and unfulfillment?

Why are we willing to make our world small and confined just so we can feel in control?

If it sounds like I'm calling for us to give up on our commitments and do whatever is before us, that would be wrong. That is not the point, at all. Instead, it is questioning what we mean by commitment, focus and staying the course through to the end. It is questioning what we think it means to be effective and successful.

Life today is not a placid pond where we can gently float through our days.


Instead, life has become an endless series of big waves, roaring down a mountain river full of rocks, whirlpools, massive amounts of water in your face, with no place to escape, it seems.

One after another we are seeing changes happening in our world that are totally disruptive to everything we have told ourselves is the way the world is.

Change forces us to simplify. We simplify by being clear about our values, and clear about the impact we want to have. Too many of us are more committed to the processes of our work than we are to the impact. When process takes precedence, we become disconnected from the outcome of the process. I know I live in a world where process is everything, and hardly anyone can say what the outcome of our work is.

The speed of change magnifies the problem because an overly process-centric organization cannot maintain former process levels when things speed up. The wave of change crushes processes. Instead, we need to know how to trim back the process, and move to knowing how to create impact in the moment as the opportunity presents itself. That is how to ride the wave of change.

Image Two.

Change is a door, a threshold, to what is next.


Showing you a door is misleading. It suggests that we enter, and we stay awhile, but that doesn't get at the real issue at the heart of the speed of change.

Instead, let's see change as a series of doors in an endless progression, coming at us an increasingly level of speed.

Between each door, we enter a specific context or situation that demands that we perform at our best. As I was thinking about this, this scene from Monsters, Inc came to mind.

This is what change is like. Moving from one context to the next, without continuity, and, at a pace that does not allow us time to think through every single possible option.

The speed of change requires us to think fast, decide fast, act fast and move on fast. 

It means that we need to have more than tactical skills for change, and, more than a long range strategy for impact. It means we have to be prepared to be the person who can walk into the room and know what we have to offer to whomever is there.

This means that we have to simplify our lives, become more clear about who we are, who we are not, and, what we want from the life and work that gets offered to us on the other side of every door.

Even this picture doesn't fully get at the real issue we face with the increasing speed of change. There is something deeper, more personal at work in this context of change.

The modern world has robbed most of us of the confidence that former eras had from doing, making, creating and crafting things. Today, we are manipulators of objects, processes, financial resources and people. We do one thing, but we rarely see the outcome of that one act of work. The result is a vague sense of accomplishment, or, none at all.

Today, we find our confidence in our affinity towards ideas or symbols. For example, most people I know who are die hard Democrats or Republicans find it easier to tell you why they are not members of the other party, than their own. Their affinity is not to the outcome of the party's policies, but to the culture of symbols that the party claims as their distinctive value.

Same with sports teams. I have been a Boston Red Sox fan all my life. Not because they won, but because I started following them as a kid, and still do. People follow the Dallas Cowboys, America's Team, because they symbolize something specifically American in the minds of many fans. 

The confidence that we find in these associations is not the kind of confidence that makes it easy for us to deal with an increasing speed of change. We look for strength and security in our affinity associations. It is why fans are fickle, faithful until a rainy day spoils the parade to the championship or election.

To gain the confidence that we need, we have to be able to quickly move into a new space, and, know what our contribution can be.

This is what I mean by having a story that we tell ourselves.

We enter a room. We don't know these people. They may be Yankee fans or hate football. There's no affinity. Yet, we have to deal with the situation as it is presented to us. The story we tell ourselves is of the impact that I can have with at least one person. Just one person is enough. Maybe two is better, but one is enough. Because one can lead to more.

We are not thinking about how to fit in the group. We are thinking about how I can connect with these people so I can make a difference in their lives right now. Making that connection is essential to finding what it is that we can do to create some good in the moment that we are there.

There are three things we need to recognize every time we pass through a new door.

Context: We need to be able to see the social, relational, cultural and organizational context quickly.

We need to be able to assess what is going on, so we can move into action. We cannot assume that what is on the other side of the next door will be the same as the last two or ten doors. We must develop the capacity to understand what is going on as quickly as possible so we can move to begin to make a difference.

Content: We need to have something to offer people.

This is the content of our thoughts and character as a person. We enter into these situations confident that we have the substance to make a contribution that means something to someone or the group.

This content is best presented as a story. It isn't the story I'm telling myself, but the one that I've prepared to tell others. To not have a story is a lack of confidence. To have a story is not egocentric or arrogant. It is rather being prepared to connect with people at a deeper level than is typically happening at the moment of introduction.

Connection: We establish connections with the people because it will be these relationships that move with us through the change we experience.

As we encounter the speed of change, we need to move more quickly than we have in the past. We will find when we do, that much of what we are now doing is adapting to changing circumstances. The quicker we do so, the better off we will be.

This is what I've learned. I no longer fret over change. If anything, when I see change that needs to be made, I'll become more impatient, ready to move through the door and catch the wave as it moves forward.

Resistance to change has as much to do with our lack of confidence as it does with the change itself. Fight the resistance. Be clear about what you stand for as a person. Keep telling yourself your story.

Look for the opportunities to make a difference, do it, and move on. What we'll find is a new set of patterns in our life and work will emerge. This is the truth I have found, and so can each of you.

Many thanks to David Pu'u for the wave pictures. Check out his pictures, videos and blog at

Top Leading Questions Posts 2004 - 2015

Top Leading Questions posts 2004 – 2015.


I'm celebrating ten years of writing blog posts here at Leading Questions. Those posted here are ones that I find have two qualities.

The first is that what I said when I first posted it is worth hearing again.

The second is that these posts represent my own perspective and voice.

I hope you find them helpful.

Thank you for reading.

 1. Leading Questions  

2. Who Stands With You 

3. A Relationship of Confidence 

4. Passion and Success 

5. Being the Leader-in-Relief – Boston Red Sox 1918 

6. The Leader’s Quest 

7. Agoraphilia - Pertinax

8. The Source of Confidence 

9. Confusing Roles: Board Member or Consultant 

10. Why Friendship is Different 

11. Most CEOs Say Flexibility and Adapting to Change Now Vital to Competing Worldwide 

12. Pioneering Creativity - Being Emotionally and Intellectually Engaged 

13. What is Community 

14. A Conversation about Strategic Planning 

15. The Community of Leadership – Updated 

16. Can the World of Business Be Characterized as a Moral World? 

18. Visioning – How to get the picture 

19. Betraying "What's Right" - The Moral Order of Leaders, Part 1

20. What is Trauma? - The Moral World of Leaders, Part 2 

21. The Gentle, Kind Leader - The Moral World of Leaders, Part 3 

22. Trust and the Social Power of Institutions – The Moral World of Leaders, Part 4

23.  Why Don’t People Participate 

24.  Scouting Principles of Leadership 

25.  Climbing the Mountain of Change One Step at a Time 

26.  The Great Planning Myths 

27.  Why SWOT analysis is no longer adequate 

28.  Translating Ideas into Action 

29.  To Dream 

30.  The Hope of The Children of Men 

31.  The Workmanship of Leadership 

32.  When Hope is a Hindrance 

33.  Moving from Talk To Action To Impact 

34.  The People of Scotland – Slainte 

35.  Extraordinary 

36.  Leaders – Nature or Nurture? 

37.  Sailing With A World-class Sailing Team 

38.  If you want to transition to the next level, then … 

39.  Moving from Thinking-in-part to Whole 

40. Innovation on the Montana Plains 

41.  A Counter-intuitive Paradoxical Social Being 

42. Values 2.0 Now 

43.  31 Questions series ebook 

44.  Say Thanks, Everyday 

45.  Customer Relations in Hard Times 

46.  Now is the time for great leadership to demonstrate itself 

47.  Thanks Completes the Bunko Cycle 

48.  A Revolution in Thanks and Welcome 

49.  Receiving a Gift with Gratitude 

50.  Saying Thanks, Everyday – A Revolution in Communication

51.  Where’s the Love? 

52.  Bigger Than Simply Saying Thanks 

53.  Is Gratitude the Greatest of Virtues 

54.  The end of institutional convention and the beginning of the age of welcome 

55.  The Hostmanship of Saying Thanks, Every Day 

56.  The Relationship Factor in Johnny Bunko 

57.  The Leadership Gap 

58.  The Subversive Nature of Thanks 

59.  Leadership in Times of Suffering 

60.  Saying Thanks Every Day – my inspiration for this ethic of giving 

61.  The Personal Side of Hard Times 

62.  Beyond the Charts 

63.  Bridging the Gap between Idea and Application 

64.  Do you know who you need to know? 

65.  How to make a transition that matters, with new afterword 

66.  Homage 

67.  Changing Jobs? Five Questions to Ask 

68.  On Fear

69. Three Communities and Change 

70.  The Continuity of the Local 

71.  Creativity for Creating Impact 

72.  Being Authentic in Inauthentic Times 

73.  Resolving Complex Issues Simply 

74.  We Are What We Do 

75.  D-Day’s 21st Century Message 

76.  The New Intelligence 

77.  How Risk Tolerant Are You 

78. To live honorably is to recognize how we are connected together 

79. Celebrating Our Founding Ideals 

80.  Let The Tribe Be The Tribe 

81.  Banking on Cupcakes 

82.  To Initiative Is To Lead 

83.  Are Your Customers Commodities? 

84.  Creating a Communication Culture 

85.  Have Notepad, Will Consult

86.  The Uncomfortable Nature of Leadershp 

87.  Managing Morale in a time of change - a Triiibes e-book 

88. The Subverting of Hierarchy 

89.  Making It Simple, and Then Following Through 

90.  The Real Secret to Success 

91.  “If we live in a state of constant fear, can we remain human?” 

92.  Notes on change in search of a presentation

93.  The Communication Bug-A-Boo 

94.  Starting with a Client’s Perceived Need 

95.  Perspective for 2010 

96.  You are replaceable ... You do realize that, don't you 

97.  Alignment 

98.  Counter-cultural Collaboration 

99.  Ten Actions that Make a Difference

100.  Just Knowing You Are In Transition Doesn’t Mean Much

101.  Change: No Lines No Waiting 

102. Experience 

103. A Dozen Thoughts on Thinking, Communication & Relationships 

104. An Idealist in the Midst of Cynics 

105. Changing the Factory 

106. Creating Healthy Partnerships 

107. Why Alignment Matters 

108. Closed Collaboration 

109. The word keeps popping up 

110. Qualify Your Network 

111. The Sweet Spot

112. 7 Virtues of the 21st century Organization 

113. The Choice 

114. Alignment and the Myth of Balance 

115. How to make your ideas connect 

116. Leadership Emotion 

117. No Rules, Just Relationships 

118. What We Know 

119. Honesty 

120. To Be a Welcoming Leader

121. After 15 years, this I've learned, with a new update

122. When Starting a Group 

123. The Journey and the Guide 

124. Stuck 

125. Ten Leadership Gaps 

126. What is Good? 

127. Tradition and Change 

128. Tradition and Change, part two 

129. A Fine Line 

130. The Moral Component 

131. The Unnameable Problem 

132. Fragmented, Compartmentalized or Connected, Aligned for Impact 

133. The Ascendency of the Local 

134. How To Be A Local Leader 

135. Organizational Obsolescence 

136. Trend Lines Going Forward 

137. The End and The Beginning 

138. The Future of Trust 

139. The Social Bond

140. Return on Initiative: ROI for the 21st Century

141. The Initiative Generation

142. Creating An Open Culture of Gratitude 

143. The Kindness / Gratitude Connection 

144. 10 Assumptions about Change 

145. Three Turns 

146. Lost Horizon-New Frontier 

147. From Fragmentation to Wholeness 

148. The Age of Connection 

149. Parallel Structure of Networks of Relationships 

150.  Gaining Perspective 

151.  The Benefits of Adaptive Learning 

152.  Measuring Leadership 

153. Leading by Vacuum

154. Still Water Still Flows

155. Networks in Transition

156. Understanding What You Have To Offer

157. Three Things To Know When Making An Offer

158.  A Century of Difference

159. Relationships in Transition

160. Life’s Transition Points

161. Twelve Ways We Know We Are At A Transition Point

162. In Transition, Start with Connections

163. The Value of Failure

164. The End of Binary Faith

165. A Culture of Alternatives

166. Simple Happiness

167. The Frontier is Within

168. The Platform of Desire, Part 1

169. The Platform of Desire, Part 2

170. The Platform of Desire, Part 3

171. The Platform of Desire, Part 4

172. The Platform of Desire, Part 5

173. Change Early, Not Late

174. The Sweet Spot

175. When the Souvenir becomes a Social Object

176. Being Trustworthy

177. What Defines Us?

178. Living in the Worlds of Ruthie and Rod

179. The Spectacle of The Real

180. The Path to the Real

181. The Reason for the Real

182. Reclaiming the Real through the Living Past

183. The Map of Memory

184. The Lost Maps of Reality

185. Hope that is Real

186. The Art of the Real

187. The Edge of the Real: The Fragmented World

188. The Edge of the Real: Fragmented Boundaries

189. The Edge of the Real: The Call of Desire

190. The Edge of the Real: The Unfolding Story

191. Ten Years, Ten Questions, and, Ten Lessons

192. Values 2.0, Now

193. The Edge of the Real: The Leader’s Call

194. Three Keys to Situational Awareness

195. The Speed of Change

196. The Social Space of Situational Awareness

197. Social Conformity and Situational Awareness

198. In the Moment of Situational Awareness

199. The Story We Tell Ourselves

200. Truth is in the Shadows

Three Keys to Situational Awareness


Recently I began to work with a group of young women who are in an addiction recovery program. I meet with them each week to work on the life skills they will need once they graduate.

One of the skills we work on just about every week is situational awareness.




This is where I begin in describing situational awareness.

A friend invites you to a business-after-hours event or a presentation at the local community college. You arrive. Walk into the room. Don't see your friend. The room is filled with people that you do not know. They are mingling around talking with one another. What do you do?

There are two choices.

You find a wall, or the corner of the room, and hope no one sees you.

Or, you begin to introduce yourself to people.

Situational awareness is a missing element in many people's lives. The rapid deterioration of relational and social skills needed for a healthy society is a result.

The lack of this skill is manifested in making every situation about me, instead of about the group or the other person. This is either out of fear or by forcing one's own personality upon a group. In either case, this is a product of the weakness of individual self-perception.

Situational Awareness is a skill, not a cultural condition outside of us.

It is a capacity to see, to engage, and discern what I am to do.

Because situational awareness is a skill, it requires preparation, practice and the mastery of those skills. Anyone can learn them. Even the most introverted person can learn how to walk into a room, function well in that social environment, and walk out having accomplished a specific goal for their time at the event.

In addition, I know no skill that is more valuable than being able to function well in situations that are uncomfortable and alien to our past experience.

Three Keys for Situational Awareness

I have found situational awareness one of the most important skills for individuals and groups who are in the midst of change. There are three keys to developing the skill of situational awareness: Objectivity, Engagement and Discernment.


The key of objectivity helps us see things from a detached perspective. We can, in effect, stand apart from the crowd, read it, and know what we are do in response.

It is virtually impossible to be absolutely objective. Absolute detachment is a mental disorder requiring a total loss of empathy, or the inability to emotionally connect with people. That is not the kind of detachment I see.

The kind of detachment that I am describing is the ability to stand apart, and see the various facets of a situation. It is the ability to not personalize the situation as being about me. When we make a situation about me, we are unable to see the range of motivations that may be affecting the attitudes and emotions of people.

To personalize is to narrow our situational awareness, and make it more likely that we won't understand what is going on.

Walk into a crowded room of strangers. What are the power dynamics of the room? Can you see who is comfortable, who is shy, who likes to draw attention to themselves, and how long to spend with each person that you meet. This kind of detachment identifies why we want to meet someone, what we'd like to see happen in the encounter, and how to structure the beginnings of a new relationship.

This is more than making connections, telling my story, picking up some business cards and leaving. It is about seeing the opportunities to make a difference in the room at that very moment.

To be objective in this way is to see time suspended, so to speak, in the moment. With this person, I am fully present, attentive to what they are saying. I'm listening to connect. I am not looking at my phone, thinking about my next appointment, or observing the person that I see over her left shoulder. I am right there in the moment, not thinking about myself, but about the person before me.

Objectivity, therefore, is the ability to connect with another person in such a way that we understand who they are and how we might contribute to their life or work. This is an essential ingredient in every sales call and every service encounter that we may have.


For this kind of detached objectivity to work, we need engagement. It seems counter-intuitive to say that being detached requires us to be engaged.

To be engaged is to emotionally connect with the people we meet in the room.

We are detaching ourselves from making our interactions all about us, about validating some perception about ourselves by other people.

Engagement requires a kind of empathy that sees into the life that this person is leading. As social settings and communities become more culturally diverse, less homogeneous, we need the ability to engage people as people, as individuals, rather than as objects of interest, a point of sale transaction or out of fear. Doing so, as well, with respect towards the social and cultural differences that distinguish us one from the other.

The portal for engagement, the path into an engaged relationship begins with the ability to listen. Every person's story is a set of cues about who they are. Even those statements and stories that the other person uses to hide themselves, or present themselves in a stronger position than they actually are, or, simply to lie to us, reveals who this person is. We are the same way.

We want to manage other people's perception of who we are as if that perception is a brand. However, the more manufactured that perception, the less engaged we are. The pathway to engagement is through the kind of vulnerability that Brene' Brown describes.

Engagement, as a result, is how we establish ourselves as authentic people. Not by showing authenticity, but by being authentic. By this, we must learn to be transparent (vulnerable), open, listening, while at the same respecting boundaries. The boundaries are ours, not the other person's. For essentially what we are doing by enagaging the other person is establishing the ground for trust.


In the social context of a room of strangers, we need to discern who people are and know what I have to offer in that situation. 

Recently I attended a celebration event for some friends. As I walked into the living room of the home, I saw that I was the only male in a room with 35 women, two-thirds of them I did not know. I immediately realized that my presence could create an awkwardness in the room. I didn't go hide in the corner. I didn't pay my respects to the host, and quietly leave. Instead, I went around the room and introduced myself to every one present. I did so to create an individual comfort level between me and each person in the room. The event was a great celebration and I came to know some new people whom I respect for their support of the cause we were celebrating.

Discernment is a process of seeking answers to the questions we have about people and situations. I'm trying to answer, for example. Do I know this person from another context? Do we have any mutual friendship? Are we Facebook or LinkedIn friends? Is he trustworthy? What is she interested in? Am I am being trustworthy? How far can I go in being transparent with this person? Do we share some value or commitment that gives reason for us to develop a relationship or a friendship?

This is why discernment is the third leg of the stool. It helps us answer the questions that flow through our minds in new or dynamic social situations.

The goal of engagement is to determine whether there is the possibility for a relationship. For a relationship to work, or be healthy, or, happy, requires each person to be open and trustworthy. It is important to understand that our responsibility is to be open and trusting, not really to determine whether the other person is. The engagement and interaction will bear this out in time.

Establishing clear boundaries for our relationships is so important. These boundaries must first be my boundaries. Without an understanding of how far I'm willing to go in being transparent and vulnerable, I cannot see or discern to what extent the other person or persons are open, trusting, and, whether they have an understanding for what is appropriate for the situation in which our relationship is being formed.

Discernment, therefore, is a skill that understands how to translate the values that guide our lives into decisions that affirm those values in action.

This is how learning to be situationally aware can lead us to find strength for our lives and build relationships of openness and trust, so that in any situaiton we can make a difference that matters.

Find other posts in this series on Situational Awareness:

Three Keys to Situational Awareness

The Speed of Change

The Social Space of Situational Awareness

Social Conformity and Situational Awareness

In the Moment of Situational Awareness

The Story We Tell Ourselves

The Edge of the Real: The Leader's Call


The Edge of the Real is a boundary, a border, a threshold, a decision, action and change.

It is discovered as individuals take initiative to act upon their own discernment. It is found as people decide to no longer passively adopt what is trending as their concern. It is realized in individual decisions to act passionately on those things that matter to them.

The edge is a place where values move from being abstractions of absolvement of responsibility to actions of change that make a difference that transforms situations, organizations and people's lives.

Each time a person takes initiative to do something whose impetus has risen up from within the person, that person is exerting leadership. They are leading, not as a positional leader within an institutional structure, but rather as a individual human person.

This call to lead comes from within us, and stimulated by our engagement with various settings of our life and work. The call to lead through one's own initiative is born in three desires that define us as individuals.

Three Desires-Impact-NoFill

The desire for personal meaning roots us in values that define and guide us in life.

The desire for happy, healthy relationships provide a social environment where we find not only affirmation and love, but also the challenge and encouragement to reach beyond the edge of social conformity.

The desire to make a difference that matters leads to become agents of positive change.

These desires constitute a call upon our lives. They beckon us to cross over the threshold from hanging back, going along with the crowd to stepping forward to leadership.

This is not a call from someone else, or some group asking for us to take a responsible leadership in their organization.Though it may align well with the opportunities that others present to us. It is in knowing what our desires are, and especially, the difference we want to make with our lives that begs us to walk out the door of the room or the house that confines us within an already preset conception of who we are and what we can achieve.

As I write this, I'm in the middle of conversations with a variety of people about the creation of a new business. The form of this business as it has been presented to me aligns well with my own three desires. At a time, when many people my age are contemplating retirement, I'm looking at what I'm going to acheive over the last third fo my life.

Initiative is born in our own desire to cross over from feelings and notions of what is important to actions that validate and confirm the importance of our values, our relationships, and the desire we have for a better world.

This is why all leadership begins with personal initiative, and why leadership in this sense is open to every human being.

In order to embrace our desires, and, move towards taking initiative, we must confront reality as it exists right in front of us. The hyper-reality presented to us in all forms of media is an alternative reality that is many situations is meant to divert us from seeing the real world as it is.

If we are serious about making a difference, we must develop a healthy skepticism of all those who identify themselves as advocates for one position or ideology or another. To lead requires us to abandon narrow special interests in favor of looking at the larger realities that affect us.

To move in this direction requires self-confidence and a network of relationships which provides us support and honest critique so that we maintain a healthy balance of thought and action.

The Edge of the Real is the next action we take based on our own convictions that something must be done. Whatever that something is, do it whole-heartedly with passion and commitment to the process of discovery and development that leadership requires.

To stay on track regularly ask the Five Questions.

The Five Questions - Work-Life Coaching Guide

 Ask them in real time. Ask them regularly. Keep a journal if you need to track progress.

1. How am I in transition right now from where I was a week ago, a month ago? What has changed about my ideas, relationships and life-work situation?

2. What is the impact I'm having right now? What difference do my ideas, relationships and my impact upon my life and work situations make that matter?

3. Who is being most significantly impacted by me and what I am doing right now?

4. Are there opportunities opening up for me that I need to take initiative on, right now?

5. If problems do I need to address right now? What obstacles do I need to remove or work around?

Asking these questions brings clarity and direction to our acts of initiative. Do so and you'll begin to see that The Edge of Real is an awareness of what is possible right now.

Take the initiative that this picture suggests and you'll begin to see things that were hidden before. Be open to what is possible. Take care to maintain balance, especially as it relates to the financial resources that you need and are required for new ventures. Take a step at a time, and each subsequent step will become more evident sooner and more definitively.

This is what I've learned about living at The Edge of Real, and continue to learn as I begin to plan the creation of a new business. As always, if you need help, or, just a conversation, get in touch. For after all, my desire and purpose is to Inspire Leadership Initiative.

Values 2.0 Now

Lemhi Dawn 12 9-16-04




The Value of Values





Values: Museum Artifact or Living History















The Difference between Values and Value-added


Value is a measurement of appreciation, impact or benefit.


Values are ideas that define meaning or value.






Values 2.0, the Interaction Paradigm






These two approaches can be distinguished in this way.

Values 1.0 - Ideas - Icon - Irrelevance

Values 2.0 - Ideas - Interaction - Integration - Impact


Values 2-0-Interaction


Creating a Culture for Interaction









Collins & Porras Diagram








The Nature of Interaction








There are three human interaction functions that are enriched by values.

Communication in all its forms.

Decision-making and its implementation.

Evaluation of both people and company performance. 






Creating a Culture of Trust

At the beginning of this post, I wrote,





Values - Culture of Trust

This diagram illustrates this connection.



Trust is earned by the integrity and impact of the organization.




Ten Years, Ten Questions, and Ten Lessons


The First Post

On July 4, 2004, I posted my first blog post here. I wrote,


Questions lead to insight, focus, direction and action. 


What are the questions driving your work?


What's on your mind today?

Amazingly, I've stuck with that aim, to ask questions that can help us better understand what leadership is in the 21st century.

Here are Ten Questions that I have after ten years of blogging.

Ten Questions

Let me begin with a question that novelist Walker Percy asked a half century ago. His question still resounds with truth for me.


My 21st. century questions are not much different. However, I'd say the context and answers to my questions are very different. This is why asking questions is essential to living well in our time.

1. Why are people afraid to stand on their own? Why are they so willing to let other people think for them, and be dragged into divisive social / political controversies that have no other end that to secure the status quo?

2. Why are the revolutionaries of my childhood as resistant to change today as those they challenged when they were young?

3. What is it about power and wealth that closes off life from the living?

4. Why is darkness, death and human brokenness so elevated in contemporary film, television and literature, and yet so unacknowledged in our lives? Why are zombies and sociopaths today's (anti) heroes?

5. What would happen if 10% of the population of every nation lived lives of sacrifice?

6. What happens when the world of hyper-reality and the Spectacle of the Real collapses? Will we be free or lost?

7. Why is it so hard to put our values into action? How do we cross the gulf between idea and action? Why is it so hard to do this together, in community?

8.  Who do you believe in? Who do you trust absolutely? Who believes in you? Trusts you, absolutely?

9. What do you hope for in the future? Is it a blind hope against hope, or, is it a guiding hope that helps you to answer the questions that face you every day?

10. Where is love in your life? Who do you love without fear or doubt? Who loves you, sees you as you are, and still, at the end of the day, says, "I love you?"?

Over the past ten years, these questions and others like them have become increasingly important. From asking questions like these, I am learning things about life, work, people, leadership and the time we live. Here are ten of those lessons that have changed me as a person.

Ten Lessons

10. Write to Find Your Voice

Learning to write with one's own voice maybe the greatest means of self-discovery that exists. It took two years of writing my blog before I began to regularly say things that were my ideas, and in my voice. Before, all I did was comment and criticize, which in retrospect, is all that is expected of us today. It has much less value and benefit to the writer and to readers than sharing your authentic voice.

9. Write to Leave a Legacy

To write with one's own voice is to create a legacy of thought which is unique and valuable to future generations. Writing with this purpose is to create an historical marker that says, "This is who I am or we are, right now at this time in human history." The measure of our writing's value is not what people think today, but what future generations will think. I recognize that most of my writing over the past half decade is to those in the future. They will be in a better position to grasp what I've been seeing.

8. Writing is Leading

I define leadership as personal initiative to make a difference that matters. When I write, I want to make a difference. I am choosing to take the time to create posts that can have an impact with people. Writing is an act of the will that overcomes all sorts of emotional and intellectual obstacles in order to affect change in some way. The person who is most often changed by writing is the writer him or herself, and why the leadership of writing is so important.

7. Observations and questions

A blog is a chronicle of our observations about life. To write well, we must have something we want to say well. That something comes from the questions we ask, and the observations we make. This requires us to think for ourselves, and listen to others' perspectives with a critical, yet fair, ear.

6. Crossing Boundaries, Exploring the Frontier

We all live with boundaries of thought and expression imposed upon us by people who have no direct relation to us, and, yet, claim some kind of personal, familiar, cultural or intellectual authority over us. As a writer, and as a person, one of the most important things to do is to deny the power of those who would silence your voice. Stand up, and with conscious purpose, obliterate those boundaries that confine you in the prison other people's fears and prejudices. Go, in writing or life, and pursue the farthest, wildest frontier possible. Do not settle. Do not be satisfied until you have discovered your authentic voice.

5. Writing in context 

Context is important for any kind of communication. In writing, there are many contexts. There is the style on the page which organizes the words in an inviting way. There are social, cultural, philosophical, historical, familial, ideological and spiritual contexts to writing. Each provides a landscape for perspective and understanding for what the writer presents. It is, therefore, essential that the writer understand the time and place in which they write.

4. Writing is Personal in a Social setting

I write for myself, but always with particular people and groups in mind. My writing is a sorting out of my observations, reading, thoughts and feelings that need order. I am doing this within a social context that helps me to better articulate my thoughts. I've learned that to have a voice is to speak, and to speak is not to hear one's own voice, but to let others hear it. In so doing, a connection is made that can become more deeply personal in the best sense.

3. Tell a Story

My writing is my story. It is not just the story that I'm telling you my readers, but, more importantly, it is the story I tell myself, to remind me of who I am, what matters to me, and how I choose to live my life. The writing is one facet of the story I am telling myself. Without it, I would be lost.

2. Writing is an Expression of Three Desires

My writing is a expression of the Three Desires - Personal Meaning, Happy Healthy Relationships and to Make a Difference that Matters that are a part of the Circle of Impact Leadership perspective. I write to discover the meaning of my life, work and relationships. Through my writing, I have come to see that Integrity, Intimacy and Generosity are values that define who I am. Those values guide me through my relationships and help me to know the impact that my life and work have. Without writing this blog, I never would have found the mental and emotional space to discover these deep truths for my self.

1. Write for Love

I write because it brings pleasure, peace, purpose and progress to my life. In other words, I write for love as an expression of my gratitude to be one person living at this time in history. Without love, the words mean nothing. With them, everything.

The Next Ten Years

I know that over the next ten years, I will not post another 1200 posts. I will continue to write. My plan is that over the next 18-24 months, to take posts that I believe have value beyond the moment of their publication, and rework them for republication in some form.

A Word of Thanks

Thank you. Thank you very much for taking the time to read my posts. Every post I publish, I do so with the sense that no one will ever read them. But you do, and your comments to me in various ways is very gratifying. Thank you again for honoring me with your time and attention.

My advice to each of you is that you write. Write in some form, in some way that helps you discover your voice. Begin by writing a chronicle of your own thoughts and observations. Carry a notebook around. Write down words and phrases, draw pictures, all for your own benefit and remembrance. Take pictures that help you to remember the context of some observation or conversation. Listen, watch, ask questions. You'll find something that calls you to write. When you do, share it with someone. Share it with me, if you want. Let your life grow through the questions that drive you through pain, suffering, love, and joy. Be honest and real, and you'll find what you did not know you were looking for.

Again, thank you. Now onto the next ten years.

The Edge of the Real: The Unfolding Story


Our Stories, A Story of Wholeness












What Defines Us.









The Story We Tell Ourselves








A Unique Story 






Writing Our Stories






The Edge of the Real: The Call of Desire




Sarah Coakley, PhD.

Cambridge University










Philosopher James K.A. Smith, writes,




The Three Desires





Our Three Desires are

for Personal Meaning, for Happy, Healthy Relationships,

and, to Make a Difference That Matters.

 Three Desires-Impact-NoFill
We desire for our lives to have personal meaning.






Circle of Impact- simple




We desire to have happy, healthy relationships.




















We desire to make a difference that matters.







The Leadership of Making a Difference That Matters






The Call of Desire






The Edge of the Real: Fragmented Boundaries


 To dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe, to bear with unbearable sorrow, to run where the brave dare not go. To right the unrightable wrong, to love pure and chaste from afar, to try when your arms are too weary, to reach the unreachable star. This is my quest, to follow that star - no matter how hopeless, no matter how far. To fight for the right without question or pause, to be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause. And I know if I'll only be true to this glorious quest that my heart will be peaceful and calm when I'm laid to my rest. And the world will be better for this, that one man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage. To reach the unreachable star.

The Impossible Dream - Mike Leigh

Man of La Mancha

Mike Leigh's classic song tells a story of a man who late in life has found a calling. The quest unites all parts of him, transforms him into someone new, different, alive. The man becomes a character in his own life's play. He is now Don Quixote del La Mancha, knight errant. From this new sense of identity, the man bridges the gap, crosses the boundaries that once confined him in a fragmented existence of doubt. No longer. He is now on a mission that gives him life to the end.

The question the play raises is whether Don Quixote is a man who is a fool or a man who is more alive that all the rest of us. The answer is left to the audience, for in the end, it is this question that defines us. Who are we? Are we the fragmented soul, torn between the competing demands and defining expectations of others? Or, are we whole, a complete person, alive and flourishing along our own self-identified path of life?

Fragmented Boundaries

The boundary between our inner selves and the outer world is where we can see the fragmentation of our lives. It is here, along these fragmented boundaries, that wholeness can be discovered.

A fragmented life is a divided existence between the random, arbitrary moments of change in the external world, and the feelings of purpose and confusion within us. The external world cannot provide a kind of static, secure continuity for life. Our outer life exists in time, a context that is always changing. Moments following moments, some repeating what has gone before, others, random, new and incomplete. Yet, it is that unchanging experience of continuity and wholeness that many of us seek. We desire meaning, connection and a way to see that our lives count.

With wholeness, the gap that exists between our inner and outer lives is bridged. Not just bridged, but rather melded together so that there is little distinction between these two aspects of our lives. We discover a continuity of movement in time that has a logic often missed in the fascination of The Spectacle of the Real. Continuity is created through the intentional, and adaptive, choices that we make that find tangible expression in the outer world. It could be said that ...


Our inner self is sometimes like an idea and other times a feeling, like a vapor, here one moment, then gone. To understand how this connection functions, we must begin to act consciously, with intention and discernment in the midst of time and change.

Here's an example of what I mean.

It is a familiar story. A wife and mother faithful to her husband and family over many years of marriage discovers that her husband is having an affair with her sister. This is a double blow of disloyalty to the heart of her and to her family.

How is she to respond to her husband, to her sister, to her children, to her parents and their friends, and, most importantly, to herself?

Is her loyalty to her husband a part of who she is in her inner being, or is it an acquired conventional social behavior?

What about the disloyalty of her sister?  How should she respond to her? Can she forgive her?

What of her husband? Is there hope for reconciliation with him?

Ultimately, she must come to understand how to feel about who she is as a person, a human being, a woman, wife, sister and mother? Is she less of a person because of their betrayal and her embarrassment? Or, is she a person defined by an inner core of truth; her own inner sense of well-being that is the foundation of her life?

At a point of crisis, who we are, and how we define ourselves is not measured by our response to the offending party, or the situation, but, rather, in our response to ourselves. Is she the same person now as she was before she learned of her husband's and sister's betrayal? Or has this now historic and defining event in her life, changed her. Is her own response to their disloyalty, quite possibly making her a stronger, wiser person?

The Wholeness Relationship

Wholeness is not merely a philosophical ideal, nor, a commercial marketing gimmick. It is an integral, interactive relationship between three parts of our lives, our Body, Mind and Spirit.  To be a whole person is to discover an integrity by our acting upon the ideas, desires and perceptions that constituted our sense of who we are. 

To understand how to move towards wholeness we must look deeply at the fragmented condition of our inner selves. To see ourselves as fragmented persons living in a fragmented world is to understand the fundamental relationship between our mind, body and spirit.


In this picture, the Mind, the Body and the Spirit serve as way to define the functional aspects of our inner selves. Here's how I see each.

The Mind

We experience fragmentation when the Mind is isolated into a closed hyper-rationalism (for example) that submits all experience to a rational explanation. Cogito ergo Sum, I think therefore I am. I am my thoughts first and foremost, everything else is subordinate.

The weakness of the mind in isolation can be seen in the inadequacy of a rational answer to the simple question between two lovers. "Why do you love me?". There may be a logical answer to the question, but is it an answer that satisfies the one loved, who asked the question?

This is a picture of the boundedness that Charles Taylor writes about in A Secular Age.

"I started off explicating this understanding with the notion of mind. Thoughts, etc., occur in minds; minds are (grosso modo) only human; and they are bounded; they are inward spaces.

... What am I gesturing at with the expression of "thoughts, etc."? I mean, of course, the perceptions we have, as well as the beliefs or propositions which we hold or entertain about the world and ourselves. But I also mean our responses, the significance, importance, meaning, we find in things."

I see the mind as the culminating point of a process of discovery. The mind provides a point of clarity where many notions, impulses, sensory signals come together into a relatively clear, always unfolding perspective. The result is an understanding of the world around us. It is what we finally call our perspective. When we become too bounded, too locked into our minds, too closed or detached from our physical experience that comes through our bodies, then our mind's capacity to perceive the outside world clearly is inhibited.

The limitation or boundedness of the mind can also be seen in how often we find we do not have the words to express the deep feeling of love that we have for a person. We stammer, shift on our feet, look away, and finally, say, "I don't know, I just do!?" Life is more than words. This is especially realized in our relationships with those whom we are the closest.

The Mind is a powerful tool for organizing all the information that we receive, giving it order, providing perspective, and helping us understand what we are to do. But it does not do this alone. When it is united with our Body's experience in the world, along with our Spirit's desire for life which is good and full, then the Mind's contribution elevates it all, and the Mind, sort of disappears while it flourishes in making sense of life at this moment.

The Body

Our body isn't just a containment vessel for our mind. It is a sensory collection and distribution device for engaging in a meaningful connection to the world. Our sensory lives come through our five senses - taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing. Each sense contributes to our understanding of where we are. A perfume counter in Paris smells, looks and sounds different than the tastes, colors and sounds of the market place in Murree. We take sensory data in, which give us clues as to where we are, and how we are to respond to our surroundings.

Isolate one sense above them all, and perspective is lost. When we taste something that is incredibly sour; our eyes fold into our heads; our mouths squeeze the source of sourness to close off our taste buds; whatever we hear vanishes; and we lose touch with our surroundings

Permanently lose a sense, and the others compensate. Our senses, through our brain chemistry, function as a magnificent system of engagement with the world. Together, they provide us a physical connection to the outer world that helps us make sense of where we are, and who we are in that context.

Friends of mine who have lived with addiction of some type, tell me that when they were using or consuming the object of their obsession, that their body was full of sensation. For many they did it to feel, or, to not-to-feel, or to feel alive, to be free of the constraints and pains that their minds could not resolve.

A life lived just through intense sensory experience ceases to be our lives. It is a fragment of our life. Instead, it is more like a machine running at full force. Kachunka, kachunka, kachunka, kachunka, kachunka ... until some part fails, and the machine broken, stops. The machine of our senses is doing what it is suppose to do, transfer sensory data to the brain and back to the body. The Mind-Body system is a glorified human reinforcing feedback loop. When healthy and whole, we are in touch with ourselves and the situations we are in. We know how to respond. We are, what many people call, present

When out of balance, through the isolation of our mind, or, over stimulation of our senses of taste, smell, hearing, sight or touch, we lose the connection between our inner and outer lives. The boundary between them becomes a gap that must be bridged. 

This is what I see in the hyper-real world of The Spectacle of the Real. Images, sounds and snippets of thought without context (sound bites) rush at us through the screen filling our mind with sensory data. Our mind adapts to the sensory overload, processes it, and makes sense of it.

Yet, when our senses are disembodied, through the sensory experience of the screen, our engagement with the outer world is partial, incomplete, and lacking in a context. Our five senses cannot integrate us into the story that is presented to us.  We are left looking at a world that is detached and isolated from us, as if we are only partially alive.


Take for example this picture. It is obviously a picture of the ocean, taken at the beach. But, which ocean, what beach, what time of day, dawn or sunset? To see a picture of the ocean with a beach scene is not the same as standing on the beach seeing the ocean. The picture is a vicarious, suggestive experience. It is a substitute experience that touches our mind's imagination. It still has value for we can still see beauty in a picture without being present.

It is still a partial, incomplete experience. Here our sense of sight is isolated from the smell of the ocean; the feel of wet sand between our toes; the wind blowing through our hair; the taste of saltiness from the water; and, the sound of the waves coming ashore. To be present is to have a complete experience of the relation between the ocean and the beach. The picture is suggestive of what could be. It is a substitute for the real thing.

When our bodily experience is separated from our mind's rational understanding, we find ourselves living in a random, sometimes chaotic series of sensory experiences that must be repeated for the experience to be retained. The screen is an addictive vehicle for sensory overload that gives us a life that is ephemeral and transitory.

This experience is unique to the modern world. Prior to the filtering of sensory data through electrical technology, first with the radio, the electric light, the kinetoscope, and the telephone, then later through television and the computer screen, our sensory experience was an embodied one, rather than a mental one. To see the beach, you had to go to the beach. To hear a symphony, you had to go to a concert hall. These embodied experiences provided a complete sensory context for understanding. Today, less so.

An event, which is mostly engaged through images on a screen, takes on a fragmented character. The television coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings was just this way. Here's my description of the news coverage from The Spectacle of the Real.


We are moved by the images. Their repeated presentation envelopes us in a story, a partial story, without context or human connection. Is it our story? No. Whose story is it? Is it the victims story? The bombers story? Not really. It is the story through which the producers and reporters draw our eyes and ears to the screen, transfixed by the spectacle unfolding before us. 

When the Body is isolated, either in over-stimulation of our senses, or in our physical absence from the context that engages our imagination, we experience the broken nature of modern life.

In the past, wholeness was limited to the social and physical space a person inhabited. I still remember my grandfather telling me how his world changed as a child when he first heard a radio, and realized that there were people who lived elsewhere.

Today, to be whole, we must see that our lives are fragmented by design. We live in a time growing global awareness, yet we are detached from the reality that people in other places that we see on the screen experience. We can travel to foreign lands, spend a week engaged in some kind of social benefit activity, be with people who are culturally very different than us, then, return home with a feeling that we understand a whole new culture.

What we do not realize is that to understand another culture, we first must understand our own. I'm convinced that most of the people I know do not understand their own life setting. They live in it uncritically, in a numbed state of confusion, and tend to blend into whatever is trending that day.

We are daily immersed in a fragmented culture that detaches our inner selves from the outer world. It is difficult to pinpoint just how fragmented we are, because their is no real context for doing so. Bridging this fragmented gap in our lives requires that we be more than just being physically and mentally present. Wholeness requires a deeper part of our human self to be engaged. 

The Spirit

Herman Dooyeweerd, a 20th. century Dutch philosopher / theologian identified the "core of human existence" as the heart, the spiritual center of a person. It is not the physical heart, but rather a metaphorical heart. That intangible, mysterious part of us that beats to a certain passionate rhythm that is individually ours. Here, I'm identifying this Spirit as our human spirit, seen from my own experience and observation of others. This spiritual center is that place where passion and purpose emerge to bridge the mind / body divide. Each of us, everyone of us I am convinced, has a purpose, or, as many refer to it, a calling. There is some core part of our being that provides the ground for bridging the inner and outer parts of our selves. It is this that I see as our human spirit.

As I have sought to find ways to explain this core aspect of our human lives, I keep returning to experience of human love. How do two lovers know that the other loves them? When we speak of the chemistry between people, when that chemistry is filled with euphoria, ecstasy and, often, deep erotic desire, we are not simply speaking of some logical abstraction of the mind, or, some overwhelming sensory feeling or, just the function of our brain chemistry. We are identifying something much deeper within us. Something that is inscrutable, without the kind of boundaries that enable us to objectify the phenomenon. It is something that is whole, deeply personal, that grows and emerges as we nourish it.

This feeling is not simply sensory, which lasts only while it is stimulated. It is also not simply an idea, a objective proposition defining one's intellectual understanding of love. Rather, this spiritual core is something other. It is that thing that wakes you in the night with vivid scenarios of beauty or horror. It is something so deep within us that we cannot grasp it as a whole. Instead, it grasps us, swallows us whole in its significance.

When this spiritual presence is missing, there is a sense of emptiness, alienation, and ennui. It is this aspect of our fragmented selves that poets, philosophers, psychologists and theologians have pointed to as the mark of the modern age upon human life. This is why zombies seen to be a fitting image for the lives of many people today. The walking dead fragemented, broken, half alive, unable to love, share or see other human beings except as sources of their own ravenous need to consume.

Our human spiritual core is at the same time the heart of our lives and the most mysterious and untouchable. For our Spirit to flourish, to bring us to wholeness,  requires action. We must to do something as it passionately calls us into action. This is what love is, and love is at the core of our spiritual being. Without love, we are dead, simply human thinking, sensory generating machines, which are fragmented and broken. When love emerges within us, whether for a person or a cause, it is then that we begin to see how we are to live in the outer world.

In my next post, I look into what I've identified as three desires that drive our human spirit. By moving towards these desires, we begin a path towards wholeness that carries across that threshold which is The Edge of the Real.

The Edge of the Real: Our Fragmented World

Big Hole Battefield 1


Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity

Charles Taylor


The Teacher in Ecclesiastes wrote a very long time ago,

  a time to be born, and a time to die;
  a time to kill, and a time to heal;
  a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
  a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
  a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
  a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.




The Hyper-reality of the External World










The Numbed Self, or, The Hyper-Real Inner Life











At The Edge








Two Questions








Reclaiming the Real - a Leading Questions series


RECLAIMING THE REAL series. (March - October 2013)

What Defines Us? - "It has become clear to me that the way we understand what defines us has to change."



The Reason for the Real - "The reason for the real is to create environments where doubt, suspicion and anxiety are replaced by trust, understanding and peace."

Reclaiming the Real through the Living Past - "Recovering the real from the hyper-reality of today's culture of the spectacle is partly accomplished by remembering the past as a living reality, here and now, in the present."


The Lost Maps of Reality - "If we are to recover reality from the nullification of our minds and souls, then we must reclaim the context of history as a the map of memory, connecting past and present together as a living reality."

Hope that is Real - "Hope is visionary. It is something we can see, something we can imagine that is worth holding to, worth sacrificing for to gain a greater good in the future. In the case of Admiral Stockdale, he could see making it through, and going home. What does the unnamed author of lost hope see? Hard work and commitment without hope of success."

The Art of the Real - "Context matters because it is the ground upon which we live in the real."

THE EDGE OF THE REAL series. (March-May 2014) 



The Call of Desire - "Desire is a longing which bridges our inner life with the outer world. It is a longing for connection, completion, and relationship."

The Unfolding Story - "Our unfolding story is not the one we tell others. It isn't a brand or a marketing narrative. It is, instead, the story we tell ourselves."


THE PLATFORM OF DESIRE series. (November-December 2012)



Part Three: When Nature is a platform, like any social or organizational structure as a platform, it influences what we value and desire. Or in the words of James K A Smith, what we love. To live in nature is to love it, but not in the abstract sense of love, but in the deeper sense of understanding, of respect, and of a relationship that requires listening and giving.”  

Part Four:  “The Platform of Hyper-reality- The world of social media is very far removed from our premodern ancestors' experience. Our experience is not one of a constant awareness of the physical danger of the natural world or of life on a farm. We live in a world mediated through sophisticated technology that, for many people, has removed them from any direct exposure to the world of nature."

"We live in an immersive world of an always-on information feed directed at our sub-rational desires. And the worst of these onslaughts focus on our fears, not our ambitions.”

Part Five: “Desire isn't just an idea. It is a movement within us drawing us towards some value or experience or person."

"This drawing, like water into the porous membrane of a sponge, is the activity of connection.”

THE SITUATIONAL AWARENESS series. (August-October 2014)




Three Keys to Situational Awareness - "There are three keys to developing the skill of situational awareness: Objectivity, Engagement and Discernment."


The Social Space of Situational Awareness - "To practice situation awareness is to see a larger picture, where my needs, wants, desires and demands, are not at the center, but just another set of considerations to be addressed in that moment of decision."

Social Conformity and Situational Awareness - "Social conformity breaks down situational awareness by suppressing individual initiative."



The Art of the Real


Aviary Photo_130247938124161624


Christian Smith

What is a Person?





The Inadequacy of Analytical Observation



Let's look at what he is saying here.

















What is good art?














The Choice




Ask yourself these questions.







1. That our lives have personal meaning.

2. That our relationships are to be health and happy.








Hope that is Real


Over twenty five years ago, I first encountered the writings of Admiral James Stockdale (second from left in above picture). They were writings about philosophy and life as a prisoner of war.

Stockdale was the highest ranking US officer imprisoned by the North Vietnamese. His story is one of strength and resilience in the face of torture. His attitude and behavior, during the eight years that he was in the Hanoi Hilton prison, provided the leadership that made it possible for other POWs to survive the ordeal.

Jim Collins did the world a favor by bringing Admiral Stockdale's story to a wider audience. In his book, Good To Great, Collins presents the leadership principle, The Stockdale Paradox.

The Stockdale Paradox is two practices, that when joined together, provide a strength of character that is hard to match. Collins describes it as the capacity to,

"Retain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, AND AT THE SAME TIME have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."

This is a way that people can maintain a clear connection to reality, even in the midst of the most difficult of circumstances.

Loss of Hope

Hope and optimism have always been part of the public face of leadership. Yet,  I know many people in positions of leadership who are filled with doubt, disillusionment and lacking in hope for the future.

One of the reasons is the effect that living in a world of images and hyperreality has upon us. I call it, The Spectacle of the Real. In this culture, our sense of self, our self-perception and awareness, is established by our outward appearance. This is more than whether we are young, handsome and pretty. It is seen in the products we buy, the causes we join, the celebrity figures we follow and the way we spend our off-time.

A friend recently recommended to me a book by a popular business consultant. He did so because he felt that the author and I where addressing leadership issues in the contemporary world in very similar ways. I will not name her or her book out of respect for her past work that I have found innovative and useful. This book is a personal cri de coeur. It crosses a boundary of expression that is not simply an author demonstrating her change of mind, but rather raises questions about the perspective that she has presented for the past two decades. She reveals her own loss of faith in the ability of people to change the world. Is this a way of grabbing her audience's attention, or is she really a person who has lost hope?

My reading of the book left me with the uneasy feeling that her loss of hope has led her, not to self-reflection, but to blaming the public for not recognizing the genius of her ideas.

Here's how she frames her loss of hope.

Many of us – certainly I’d describe myself in these terms – were anxiously engaged in “the ceremony of innocence.” We didn’t think we were innocents, but we were. We thought we could change the world. We even believed that, with sufficient will and passion, we could “create a world,” one that embodied our aspirations for justice, equality, opportunity, peace ... This vision, this hope, this possibility motivated me for most of my life. It still occasionally seduces me into contemplating what might be the next project, the next collaboration, the next big idea that could turn this world around. But I’m learning to resist the temptation.

This is not a book that contemplates what we might do next, what we’ve learned from all our efforts, where we might put our energy and experience in order to create positive change. I no longer believe that we can save the world.  Powerful, life-destroying dynamics have been set in motion that cannot be stopped. We’re on a disastrous course with each other and with the planet. We’ve lost track of our best human qualities and forgotten the real source of satisfaction, meaning and joy. ...

But now, for many reasons, hope is hard to find and the good people who have created successful projects and built effective non-government organizations (NGOs) are exhausted and demoralized. They keep doing their work, but it’s now a constant struggle.  They struggle for funds, they struggle with inept, corrupt bureaucracy, they struggle with the loss of community and the rise of self-interest, they struggle with the indifference of the newly affluent. The dream of a new nation of possibility, equality, and justice has fallen victim to the self-serving behaviors of those with power.

Yet I have not set out to write a book that increases our despair. Quite the contrary. My intention is that we do our work with greater resolve and energy, with more delight and confidence, even as we understand that it won’t turn the world around. Our work is essential; we just have to hold it differently. ...


Hope is such a dangerous source of motivation. It’s an ambush, because what lies in wait is hope’s ever-present companion, fear: the fear of failing, the despair of disappointment, the bitterness and exhaustion that can overtake us when our best, most promising efforts are rebuked, undone, ignored, destroyed. As someone commented, “Expectation is pre-meditated disappointment.”

The author, with respect to her, is a victim of The Spectacle of the Real. She considers herself one of the experts who has the answers for solving the world's problems. She is so confident about the work she and her colleagues have been engaged in, that she cannot imagine, how on earth the world has not embraced the relevancy of their message. Her loss of hope is essentially a loss of faith in herself. She is a victim of her own celebrity and the followers who tell leaders just how important they are.  There is more that I could say in critique about her book, but that is not, ultimately the point of this post.

The Stockdale Paradox

To stay connected to reality, and remain hopeful about the future, requires resilience and circumspection.  Hope must be held within the context of the way the world actually is. Not the way we'd wish it would be.  In other words, if we can embrace reality and maintain hope, then we are more than likely to find a way to achieve our life and work goals that we would otherwise abandon.

In his book Good To Great, Jim Collins describes his first encounter with Admiral Stockdale as they walked across the campus of Stanford University.


Collins, after few minutes of reflection asked,

"Who didn't make it out?"


"The optimists? I don't understand," I said, now completely confused, given what he's said a hundred meters earlier.



To this day, I carry a mental image of Stockdale admonishing the optimists, "We're not getting out by Christmas, deal with it."

Reading Stockdale's account of his imprisonment, In Love and War: The story of a family's ordeal and sacrifice during the Vietnam years (co-written with his wife, Sybil, a national leader of POW wives, who brought public attention to the plight of POWs and their families), provides the backstory that illustrates the principles he described to Jim Collins.

I want to use the Stockdale story as a mirror to reveal that the unnamed author of lost hope is one of Stockdale's optimists. She lives with the resignation that " I no longer believe that we can save the world."   Her statement is not a judgment about the world, but, in truth, about herself. She believed, naively, in my estimation, that the power of her ideas, and her approach to leading are self-evidently the way the world must go. All we must do is follow her lead. Her disillusionment came in seeing that "Powerful, life-destroying dynamics have been set in motion that cannot be stopped."

Sadly, and most importantly, she does not believe that she and her colleagues will prevail in the end. Instead, "that we do our work with greater resolve and energy, with more delight and confidence, even as we understand that it won’t turn the world around. Our work is essential; we just have to hold it differently."

This is an odd denial of reality and loss of vision for how we can adapt to the realities of the world as it exists. On the one hand, she believes that the world cannot be saved. Yet on the other, she still believes that her work is essential. What is missing is reflection, circumspection, and positive self-criticism. She needs the capacity to look at her own reality, at the brutal facts of her situation, assess and recognize her own failings or limitations, and then to understand how to work with greater resolve and energy, with more delight and confidence, to prevail in the end. Her problem is not her ideas for change, but a lack of grounding in reality.

The line between idealism and defeatism is thin.  What this unnamed author of lost hope needs is the inner strength of resilience to the face of obstacles that stand in the way of changing the world. Embedded within her philosophy is a deterministic perspective that sees the world as a system of emergent forces that are outside of our control. If she is correct, then her loss of hope makes sense, and we should join her. If, on the other hand, there is freedom to affect these impersonal forces, to foster change in the world that makes a difference, then her loss of hope is not grounded in reality, but in her own fear or loss of faith in herself. 

To embrace reality in this way requires a capacity for self-learning that is more than philosophical, but at the practical level of character development.

Hope in the Midst of Torture

NVA Rope Torture
North Vietnamese Rope Torture

In a speech that Stockdale gave following his return, he speaks about the US military's Code of Conduct that was the ground upon which POWs lived under torture.

"I am not aware that any POW was able, in the face of severe punishment and torture to adhere strictly to name, rank, and serial number, as the heroes always did in the old-fashioned war movies, but I saw a lot of Americans do better. I saw men scoff at the threats and return to torture ten and fifteen times. I saw men perform in ways no one would have ever thought to put in a movie, and because they did perform that way, we were able to establish communication, organization, a chain of command and an effective combat unit. ...

Unless you have been there, it is difficult to imagine the grievous insult to the spirit that comes from breaking under torture and saying something the torturer wants you to say. ... But I and many others were tortured in ropes ... The reason it was important to take torture ... was to establish the credibility of our defiance - for personal credibility ...

In short, what I am saying is that we communicated. Most of the time most of us knew what was happening to those Americans around us. POWs risked military interrogation, pain, and public humiliation to stay in touch with each other, to maintain group integrity, to retain combat effectiveness.

We built a successful military organization and in doing so created a counterculture. It was a society of intense loyalty - loyalty of men one to another ..."

To live in this kind of life situation requires circumspection paired with an indomitable commitment to prevail over the brutal facts. This is not egotism plus stubbornness. Rather, it is self-awareness and resilience.

In his memoir, following a torture session where he surprised his torturers with an outburst of anger, Stockdale writes, 

"Anyway, I'd committed myself to another course now. Live and learn, live and learn. The rules of this ball game would change as we went along. But for now I was spinning the web, and I like it better on this side of the fence. Time would tell."

This is the attitude of prevailing.

Hope in Hard Times

Many people I know have experienced hard times. They have lost their businesses to economic collapse. They have lost children to suicide or drug and alcohol abuse. They have seen their marriages end, or lose their spouses to cancer or other diseases. These people have every reason to have lost hope in the future. It is out of these relationships that I developed my Transitions in Life & Work program.

What I've learned from these friends and colleagues, as well as from my own experience of change, is that hope is not blind. Hoping against hope is not hope. It is the loss of hope.


Hope that is Real.

Hope - to believe in a better future - in the midst of an embrace of reality - confronting the brutal facts - requires us to live in the real world. Real as in the opposite of fake. Umberto Eco wrote in his Travels in Hyperreality,

"... the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake. ... the frantic desire for the Almost Real arises only as a neurotic reaction to the vacuum of memories; the Absolute Fake is offspring of the unhappy awareness of a present without depth."

A present without depth is a future without hope. It is the loss of the past as a living reality, the loss of reality as a context for understanding and, the loss of an embodied presence that gives a clear sense of who we are.  The hyperreal present is one without a past, a future or hope.

Admiral Stockdale's POW war experience is analogous to our present culture of simulation and hyperreality. His captors created a fake world of isolation built around the false charge of criminality. The entire context of the prison was intended to break down the body in order to reach the mind and heart. Reach the mind with doubt. Reach the heart with lost hope. 

It was a game of propaganda. The intended audience for the fruits of torture was the American public who would view this artificial hyperreality through the screens of televised news and their morning newspapers. The aim of the North Vietnamese was to create a hyperreality where the POWs looked like they were healthy and well-cared for, and had come to see the rightness of the North Vietnamese Communist cause. In effect, the war on the minds of the POWs was also a war on the minds and hearts of Americans in their homes across the country.

The Spectacle of the Real is a similar form of propaganda. It's methods are not physical torture. Its aim is the same. Isolate the individual into a present that has no past, nor future. This is a culture of alienation and lost hope. The Spectacle of the Real is an emotional vacuum that creates a longing for the real that can only be met through the emotional attachment to consumer products, celebrity entertainers, politicians and, the 24/7 broadcast of opinions and adviced by authorized experts.  The is not an artificial reality, but a fake one, an unreal one that seeks to end individual thought and initiative.

One could describe this system of the spectacular in the words of the unnamed author of lost hope,


Admiral Stockdale challenged a similar system in the Hanoi Hilton prison by creating a communication system that connected the POWs together. It was essential to their survival and their ability to resist the propaganda efforts of the North Vietnamese.

At one point during the POWs' resistance to be used for propaganda, Stockdale issued a general order not to volunteer for a bomb-debris cleanup in Hanoi. He writes in his memoir,

"... it was a trap - that for every prisoner, every shovel, there would be two cameramen snapping propaganda shots continually, and there we would be in the world press: 'American prisoners of war go to the aid of North Vietnamese patriots as Yank bombs rain on the city of Hanoi.' ... we made up another general order ... 'No repent; no repay; do not work in town.'"

The result of this defiance was that Stockdale was handcuffed in manacles, both feet and arms, and place outside in a open courtyard exposed to the South East Asian sun.  After three days, they came to take him to interrogation.  He writes,

"I sensed I was going over toward Heartbreak (an isolated section of the prison), and my anxiety was high enough, with the cuffs still at full ratchet, that I called out my name: 'Stockdale, heading for Heartbreak!' In the midst of the noon-hour quiet, I knew some prisoner would pick it up. Position reports become an obsession when you realize how close you are to permanent isolation or even death."

Hope that is real amounts to a belief in one's capacity for adaptation and resilience. In our culture of hyperreality, the loss of hope is the loss of belief that one can prevail. This loss at the inner core of lives requires us to create change in ourselves that builds character for face to face confrontation with reality.

Ultimately, what I've learned, and Admiral Stockdale's story confirms it, is that prevailing in the face of the brutal facts cannot be done alone. We need others in our lives who believe in us so that we may believe in ourselves.

The reason I did not name the unnamed author of loss hope so as not to isolate her any more emotionally than she already is. For to lose hope is to accept emotional isolation. 

Finally, how do we have hope that is real. Three suggestions.

Follow The Stockdale Paradox. Be absolutely convinced that you will prevail in the end, and at the same time, face up to and deal with the brutal facts of reality. The more you practice them, the greater confidence you have to stand on your own and be less subject to the hyperreality of modern day consumer and political propaganda.

Establish relationships where Admiral Stockdale's two principles live. We need people in our lives who believe in us. We need to believe in ourselves, but also in others as well. Where those relationships are strong, we can face the brutal facts of our world, with resilience and hope. These relationships require honesty, transperancy, integrity and mutual caring.

Learn to see how hyperreality is a fake reality. The whole point of this series of essays on Reclaiming the Real is to recover a belief that we can make a difference that matters.  It is so people like the unnamed author of lost hope, the men who shared prison life with Admiral Stockdale, and the people you and I live and work with everyday, may not lose hope, and find ways to live lives of meaning and impact.

May it be so for us all.


The Lost Maps of Reality



This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,

Henry V

William Shakespeare

History is more than a record of past events. It is the story of the actions and decisions of people, and as in this scene from Henry V, the shared experience of endeavor. The Spectacle of the Real, on the other hand, wants no part in the kind of history shared by King Harry and his "band of brothers" on the fields of Agincourt. Rather, they seek the public's passive attention to their opinions, in effect to nullify the living presence of the past.

In my post, The Map of Memory, I write,



History carries a deeper resonance than simply my story or your story. It is even more than our story. It is the story that illuminates the present so that we can understand why life is the way it is, how we got here, and where we might go in the future.

There is a great divide, greater than the span of the Grand Canyon, greater than the length from our world to the end of the universe, greater than the distance from mind to heart. It is the divide between individual initiative and acquiescent passivity.

This difference is the one that exists between a life lived to the full, and a life that is viewed vicariously through personalities portrayed in the virtual world of the screen. This latter existence is what I see as The Spectacle.

Look, watch, observe and be a spectator; don't speak out, just listen; don't think, just comment; don't imagine, just accept; don't act on your own initiative, just do as you are told; don't remember, just be in the moment.

This is the message of The Spectacle of the Real. A life suspended in order to absorb the opinions and conjectures of others. To do this, one must detach oneself from time and the course of history. One must live only in the moment, and forget the continuity that exists in time.

But history does exist. It is all around us. It is discovered in places of honor, remembrance, restoration and reenaction. It is where families gather to remember lost love ones. It is where communities restore historic districts. It is where people gather to commemorate significant historical events.  In these settings, history can live as an act of remembrance. In others, the commemoration is The Spectacle, where the historic occasion is just the excuse to direct people's attention elsewhere. Where history lives, we can become a part of the story as it connects to a past that informs us of the realities of the world in which we live.

William Cronon writes about what American historian Frederick Jackson Turner told his students,

"... they must bring to the past their most urgent concerns of the present. "Each age", said Turner in 1891, "writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions upper-most in its own time. Pursuing that idea, he argued for a history that would study not just politics and elites, but the social history of ordinary people: "the focal point of modern interest," he wrote, "is the fourth estate, the great mass of the people.' A history that would do those people justice would have to study many fields-literature, politics, religion, economics, culture. It would have to focus on places and regions which past historians had ignored, places which, as luck would have it, were also home to many of Turner's students. It would have to turn to untapped documentary sources and apply new statistical techniques to their interpretation. It would have to set American history in the context of world history, and it would do so not by simple narrative but by studying problems. If these things were done, then the histories of ordinary people in places like Wisconsin or Kansas or California might come to have the significance they deserved. "History has a unity and a continuity," wrote Turner; "the present needs the past to explain it; and local history must be read as a part of world history." "

This is The Map of Memory, where the connections between generations, between past and present, between my story and our story becomes a panorama of understanding that we can share.

This living narrative is lost in The Spectacle of the Real. History is swallowed up, digested and regurgitated, as the authorized perspective replaces historical context. We, then, suspend our skepticism, that is at the heart of learning, in favor of a passive acceptance of expert opinion.

Without critical awareness, understanding the causes and meaning of moments in time becomes unnecessary. The goal of those who profit from The Spectacle is a passive, attentive following, who believe what they are told and accept what they see as true.

The Spectacle, therefore, is the active nullification of individual initiative and thought.

History Must Be Destroyed

French critic Guy Debord, writing in the context of Europe between the 1960s and 1980s, makes this point about the Spectacle's effect.

"With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning. ... One aspect of the disappearance of all objective historical knowledge can be seen in the way that individual reputations have become malleable and alterable at will by those who control all information: information which is gathered and also – an entirely different matter – information which is broadcast.  Their ability to falsify is thus unlimited. Historical evidence which the spectacle does not need to know ceases to be evidence. ... Never before has censorship been so perfect. Never before have those who are still lead to believe, in a few countries, that they remain free citizens, been less entitled to make their opinions heard, wherever it is a matter of choices affecting their real lives. Never before has it been possible to lie to them so brazenly. The spectator is simply supposed to know nothing, and deserve nothing. Those who are always watching to see what happens next will never act: such must be the spectator’s condition."

The Spectacle is a form of domesticated thought control. It is the efficient management of public opinion through self-censorship and collective shame. 

All we need to know about what to think, who to trust, what to buy, who to vote for and what not to say is gained by listening to the expert pundits who fill the internet and television programming with their opinions and prejudices. To doubt is to court humiliation and shunning. To be a person free of having to think for him or her self, and take responsibility for making a better world is to listen, follow and do nothing. It is a kind of noble passivity where one feels apart of some great following, while contributing very little.

Bloggers know that embedded in the comment section of their weblogs lies a public seeking intellectual communion with others. The comments may be rude and disrespectful in many cases. And many are parrots and trolls who simply comment to suppress alternative comments. Yet, seeing one's ideas in print along side dozens or hundreds of other commenters creates the sense that individual contribution and mass support is possible, and can make a difference.

That difference can be made only if our perspective is broader than whatever is on the screen of our computer or television. To think independently, we must learn to read the Map of our Memories within the context of history. We need to realize that the context that we are often fed online is non-existent.

In order to think, to understand, to make our own choices, and act upon them, we must reconnect with our history.  We must look beyond the moment and recognize that what is happening now is a product of what happened in the past. It is all connected, and by making the connections, we gain wisdom for our lives, our families and communities. Here's an example of what I mean.

The Context for Understanding

Torkham - Kyber Pass - Afghan-Pak border
The border village of Torkham - Kyber Pass - Afghanistan-Pakistan border - July 1981

If we knew our history and the history of other peoples, would we have ventured into a war in the mountains and on the plains of Afghanistan?

But we did go. Do you know why? Was it to fight the war on terror or secure our rights to oil? Did we go because we didn't not want to show weakness in the face of terrorist destruction? Or, did we go to project American strength and confidence in the world?

See how confused our reasoning was. All those reasons are not reasons, but attempts to justify what essentially was an unclear context of understanding. These are the reasons that are derived from The Spectacle, which is founded upon the projection of unquestioned authority. For all the bright and intelligent experts who have continued to speak about the war on terror, not a one, in my opinion, has yet to provide a clear historical context for our actions, both domestic and foreign, since 9/11.

What do you think? Are we in a better place as a nation today than in 2001?

While I do believe America is exceptional, I also believe that it requires us to be far more humble and circumspect than we have been in our response to terrorism.

To know the history of the Afghan region is to know that war is not occasional, but perpetual. It is to recognize that no one invades and conquers. Rather one leaves as a stalemate is reached. It happened to the Soviets. It is now happening to us.

Without historical perspective, we believe anything. Collect the right images together, and anyone can be fooled for a fortnight. Then the next Spectacle is upon us because there is no real historical continuity, only momentary linkages.

Without historical perspective, we believe that history is on ourside. We look at the outcome of the Second World War, and think, we can do it again. We tried in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and now on the steppes of Central Asia. What has been the outcome? What is the endgame? Can there be a perfect outcome? Can there ever be an ending? These questions are much more easily answered when we have a understanding of history's continuity over time.

At the heart of that history is remembering the failures that brought perspective. What did we learn from our past wars?

From the Civil War on through to the current war on terror, what we learned is that if we apply enough technology, enough young creative minds and bodies to the battle, then we can defeat any foe. At least that is what we tell ourselves. In other words, we learned not humility, but hubris.

As a mindset, this hubris is applied every where American power can be exercised home or abroad.

I see this because as a person born and raised in the American South. As the descendent of men who fought on the side of the Confederacy during the Civil War, I grew up in a region that understands what it means to lose a war, and the consequences of that loss. Many of those who fought in the Vietnam conflict feel in similar ways. Yet, their loss is not to the Communist forces they faced but rather from their conviction that their country failed to stand by them as they put their lives on the line for their country.

North Carolina Memorial at Gettysburg

Two members of my family served with the 55th North Carolina Vounteers, one, my great, great grandfather, Alfred Belo commanded the regiment at Gettysburg, and another, his brother Henry, died later, during the Battle of The Wilderness. The following two quotes are taken from Jeffrey Girvan's history of the regiment.

"Once in the Confederacy, North Carolina made important contributions to the South's quest for independence. Approximately one-fifth of all the provisions and supplies used by all Rebel armies came from the Old North State. An estimated 125,000 men from North Carolina eventually served in Confederate regiments and state militia units ... at least one-eighth of all soldiers who fought for the South were from the Old North State. Only 19,000 of these fighting men were draftees. Over 23,000 North Carolinians deserted during the war, more than from any other state in the Confederacy. By the end of the war approximately 40,275 North Carolina soldiers had been killed in battle or had died from disease while serving in the army. One-fourth of all Confederate soldiers killed on the battlefield were from North Carolina."

This is part of the historical context of the Civil War. Why did all these men leave their homes and venture off to fight in a war? Is it simply to preserve the institution of slavery as we are informed today during the 150th anniversary of the war? Or is there something more going on that gives reason to their service.

"The 55th North Carolina was probably one of the least homogeneous regiments from that state. The ranks of the unit were filled by men from every region in the state and represented over 20 counties. This regiment was a microcosm of the state. These counties varied in political ideology, social institutions, total population, slave count, and economic stability. The majority of the counties represented in the regiment contained less that 4,500 slaves, but the unit had a company of men from Granville which according to the 1860 Federal Census had more slaves than any other county in North Carolina. ... Most of the soldiers who fought with the 55th owned no slaves and worked as yeoman farmers or farm laborers. Although farmers constituted the majority of the regiment, there were also blacksmiths, teachers, merchants, lawyers, doctors, and mechanics. it is reasonable to assume, on the basis of the soldiers' letters and the 1860 Federal Census information, that most of the men who fought for the 55th were not strongly motivated by questions regarding slavery. However, they still felt motivated to resist when "outsiders" invaded their soil, and they were not about to let Yankees dictate how they should live their lives."

There is much more to be said about the historical context of the reasons why these men from North Carolina and the South would go to war against their own countrymen. It is the story that is missed in the coverage of the 150th. anniversary observance. It doesn't fit the narrative because it isn't simple or image based. This lost of historical reference points means a loss of perspective about what it means to be an American.

What is it that drives people to visit a battlefield like Gettysburg? Is it a shared experience of battle as soldiers? Is it family history? Is it a desire to understand this pivotal moment in our nation's history?

Today, what does the Civil War, understood both from a Northern and Southern perspective, tell us about how we should have approached the war on terror?  What about other threats to the nation?

In the end, what drove these mostly farm boys to war was an ancient notion of honor. This idea is gone, totally eradicated, from The Spectacle that is presented to us each day in Washington, on Wall Street, and through the media. If you look there, you will not see it. You must look away to those who do not seek your attention, but rather live quiet lives of service to their families, neighbors and communities.

What has not been lost by the public is an understanding of the importance of trust in relationships. People who venture to military parks like Gettysburg, whether they are aware of it or not, come because honor is, ultimately, the only answer to Why did they fight. And they seek, whether they realize it or not, the lost virtues of honor and trust that are fought for on battlefields wherever citizen soldiers fight.

Recovering the Lost Map of Reality

In my post, The Map of Memory, I present a perspective that characterizes our memory as a map. The more connections there are, the more detailed the map of memory, and the greater our understanding of the landscape of meaning.

French theorist Jean Baudlliard's Simulacra and Simulation, written a quarter century ago, is today more relevant than ever. He writes,


Walking the battlefields of Gettysburg during the 150th. anniversary of the battle, I wondered whether there were sufficient reference points for the thousands of people present to understand what had taken place. More than anything, as troop movements are described, cannons fired, and heroism celebrated, I wondered if anyone would leave with an understanding that these thousands of young men did not come to play war games, shoot their cannons recreationally, and go to battle to have stories of heroes to tell their grandchildren. They came to kill as many men on the other side of the battlefield as possible in the name of honor.

The Spectacle avoids death in these terms. Death as the purpose of fighting wars. Death to the Spectacle is something to sensationalize, as the daily murder trials that fill newspapers and televised news shows. We become immune to death when the killers become celebrity personalities. It becomes a game whose purpose is to divert us from reality.

The nation's awareness of the deaths on 9/11 are the exception. Within a few short months, though, we loss our historical perspective as Americans cheered the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. I am not a pacifist. I believe that war is often necessary and unavoidable. I respect and honor the men and women who go to war. But I do not at the same time view it as a game, a Spectacle for our amusement. I hate the deaths that result, the loss to families and communities, and the desensitization to death that results.

French cultural philosopher Guy Debord, who was the first to write this phenomenon in Society of the Spectacle and two decades later, in Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, writes,

History’s domain was the memorable, the totality of events whose consequences would be lastingly apparent. And thus, inseparably, history was knowledge that should endure and aid in understanding, at least in part, what was to come: ‘an everlasting possession’, according to Thucydides. In this way history was the measure of genuine novelty. It is in the interests of those who sell novelty at any price to eradicate the means of measuring it. When social significance is attributed to what is immediate, and to what will be immediate immediately afterwards, always replacing another, identical, immediacy, it can be seen that the uses of the media guarantee a kind of eternity of noisy insignificance.

This is how we came to lose our maps of reality. What is reality, if not a clear perspective where we can see ourselves in both a positive and critical light. We have lost this capacity for self-criticism as individuals and as a nation.

The things that provide us a basis for understanding the past are being lost in the unreality of the Spectacle.

History isn't simply facts, dates and names or a rationale for contemporary ideologies. History is a living human context of conversations about who we are as people and how we inhabit time and space on both a local and a global scale. It is also what has truly mattered in our lives when we reach our lives' end.

George Santayana is famous for having written, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”


All this requires is a willingness to think for ourselves and take responsibility for what we learn. That's all.


The Map of Memory


Parker Homestead near Three Forks, Montana


                                         Time past and time future

    Allow but a little consciousness.


                          The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,

                              The moment in the draughty church at smokefall

                           Be remembered; involved with past and future,

          Only through time time is conquered.

Burnt Norton

Four Quartets

T.S. Eliot



William Faulkner wrote in his novel Light in August,




Remembering in Context.








Memory in a Lockbox



The Wikipedia entry on memory provides a similar description.





Memory in Context







The Map of Memory






Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes in Phenomenology of Perception,





A Map of a Moment in Time





Memory as a Living, Ever Present Story




Lee Anne Fennell describes Faulkner's literary world as,









Mapping Our Memories







Reclaiming the Real through the Living Past

Aviary Photo_130143349190604384"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Gavin Stevins

Requiem for a Nun

William Faulkner

The Spectacle of the Real penetrates into all aspects of contemporary life. It isn't just about the media, or the news, politics or sports. It is also about family and history.

Families get trapped into the culture of the spectacle when the externals of consumer choice determine how a family positions themselves within the social environment of their community.  The context of history provides a counter-balance as past generations' culture of identification provides perspective for self-identification.

The advent of "moving pictures" over a century ago in films and later television initiated the use of images as a way to depict the real world. Over the decades, the image on the screen became increasingly a hyper-reality.  Post-World War II families, as presented on the screen, were understood to be a cultural standard for what a typical, traditional, middle class American family should be. The emergence of a new and growing middle class marked the shift of families out of the the poverty of the Depression era as a new society of consumers, with Hollywood and Madison Avenue as their guide.

Television's presentation of families shifted over time to become less traditional to more hyper-real and spectacular. Beginning with the traditional family of The Donna Reed Show, to all-male families of My Three Sons and Bonanza, to the pristine frontier family of Little House on the Prairie to the blended family of The Brady Bunch, each family represented a type of growing hyper-real traditionalism, where what constituted a family became less and less defined. 

The ironic genius of Norman Lear in the late 60s and 70s, entered new families in shows like All in the Family, One Day at a Time, and The Jeffersons as the traditional understanding of the family was turned upside down.The span of television's perspective on the family came full circle as the Huxtable's of the Cosby Show were an updated affirmation of traditional family values and structure.

The_Loud_Family_1973All these shows, though were fictionalized families in situation-comedies and historical dramas. Even as a kid, I knew they were not real families. Then in 1973, An American Family premiered on PBS. This was the first truly reality-based show. The series followed The Loud family through their daily lives. One son, Lance, came out as gay during the series. The parents, Pat and Bill, separated and divorced during the series. It began the trend toward reality television that continues to this very day in series like, The Real Housewives of Orange County. 

The spectacle of hyper-reality is detached and voyeuristic at its core. It builds around the attraction of the images and stories whose unbelievability makes them all the more believable.There is fascination in people who are somewhat like us, yet, not like us at all. This is the pull of hyper-reality.

As a result, history has become less a continuing story of the past, but, rather, a design backdrop for the present.

History as Context for the Real

My son Troop and I have a long running, ongoing conversation about history, its place in the modern world, and its effect upon our family.

As a young man, he is seeking to understand history through the craft of writing novels. I find his insights deep, rich and expansive. He has begun a multi-volume history of one North Carolina farm family through many generations. The first volume of this family's story, The Knot of Home, will be published later this summer. Here he describes the cycle of stories that he has begun.

Stories have beginnings and ends, we all know, but sometimes we aren't aware of the start until we have already reached the finish.  Maybe we were simply unaware of what was happening, or were born at the wrong time to have seen the whole of the story from its inception. 

Arlen Breckenridge came to realize this too.  Perhaps he feared that he was at the end of the cycle, that the family ways would all die with him.  But that gave him the ability to look back to the beginning of his story, embodied in his family, and understand.

The Knot of Home, though chronologically the last, is in truth the first of several books in The Breckenridge Cycle.  Each book in the Cycle will examine the roots of the American agrarians, their values, their ways, and what they fought to build and preserve, often in vain, as America modernized.  The Cycle will illuminate for all Americans what has been lost and forgotten, but what can be remembered and upheld, if we just have a little imagination.

Following one of our late night conversations about history and our time, I asked him to put in writing what he had said. Here's a portion of what he sent.

Rather than a distinct collection of facts that we know are right, have been tested and proven, are easily definable, and can be used to justify any theory or position on the world (present and past) in a neat, bibliographical form, history is rather a massive, ill-defined, humbling dialogue, both between individuals, but also larger groups, communities, etc; and also between the self-conscious thinker and his acknowledgement of his own influences, personality, and tendencies.

The latter definition encompasses everything - every discipline, field, tool, etc. - as a way for understanding the world in relation to the past (which is really the only real world, because it colors our view of the present). Thus it can build something by the agglomeration, juxtaposition, tension, or negation of various ways of looking at the world.

To get at both a certain true historical reality and thus a workable method for living in real, current world (two sides of the same coin), I am not writing any academic history. I am not dealing with facts, because the tested and proven facts that I was given by those who have "done the work" before me do not explain the reality that keeps poking its Cyrano de Bergerac nose through the curtain. Thus I combine from different sources - folk tales; philosophy; my own archaeology of past behavior in certain groups of "backwards" people; personal letters; psychology; traditional histories; and literary archetypes. These all prove to be different tools for getting at the same thing, which you will never do perfectly. For choosing one of these methods for understanding is as arbitrary as choosing "facts." There is no rational (or otherwise) criteria for choosing facts as criteria. But if you understand the uses of each method and are prepared to create a dialogue between them (both in your own head and potentially between other people who represent a given method), then you stand a chance at working out some kind of synthesis. ...It is all context, then. It is also the universal. ... Thus the dialogue runs on, getting closer to the truth, but always needing expansion. (Emphasis mine.)

This historical context for recovering the real is a dialogue that takes place with many contexts, not just one or two.  Most of us can access these histories. They are embedded in our families and the communities where we live. We do so by talking with others, doing some leg-work, doing research online, and being aware of the historic connections that exist between the present and the past.

The Context of Family

I have a photo file of grave markers of the members of my family, from both my mother's and father's side, going as far back as six generations. I have been accused, jokingly, but not without cause, of practicing ancestry worship; it isn't worship, but honor and remembrance.


The scene above is of the Brinegar Cabin where Martin (1856-1925) and Caroline (1861-1943) Brinegar settled after they migrated into the mountains from the foothills of the Piedmont region of North Carolina in the late 1800s. This cabin is preserved by the National Park Service within the boundaries of the Blue Ridge Parkway (Mile Marker 238.5). The Brinegar's (notice the different spelling from mine, Brenegar) are "distant" cousins. We have to go back about five or six generations to find the family connection between my father's line and Martin's.

The story of Martin and Caroline and their cabin provides context for understanding my father's father's family who lived within a twenty mile ride of the Brinegar's before they moved to the mountain. Seeing the contrast between Martin and Caroline's life and my grandfather's family's life in town has provided me and my family perspective on who we are.

What is that story? Martin's lineage were farmers. My grandfather's were merchants, clerks and government workers.

On both sides of my family, I cannot find a single farmer within the past five generations. One great, great grandfather was a Presbyterian minister. Another great, great grandfather was a newspaper man, and his father ran a general store. My mother's father's mother's grandfather (my great, great, great grandfather) was a farmer in the Swannanoa River Valley of Buncombe County, North Carolina. One great grandfather was a lawyer, another a banker. Others were politicians and civic leaders. My father's father worked as clerk for a tobacco company. My other grandfather was a lawyer and a veteran of the battles in France during the First World War. No farmers after the first half of the 19th. century though.

What does this family history tell me, my siblings and my children? It shows how we were part of the growing modernization of the region and the nation. That there are reasons why we are more mobile, less rooted in the soil, and why our consumer tastes are more urban than rural.

I understand the reasons why my mother's mother told the stories that she did. Why she impressed upon us certain values. Why family was important. It wasn't about pride. It was about history and honor for those who came before us, and about never bringing shame to the family.  It is identity and meaning that links generations of my family over the past 300 years.

My mother was a Morrison. Our Morrison line came from one of three brothers that came over from Scotland in 1750. Those three brothers ended up in the Rocky River community of Cabarras County, north of Charlotte, North Carolina. Two sisters there have done the genealogical research and produced a volume on each of the brother's lineage. It is fascinating to see time through the lives of these families. It is more than a history of the nation. It is a tangible way to understand the social, economic and political changes that have taken place over the past three centuries.

My father's family came to America in 1730 on a ship from Germany into Philadelphia. The Bruenenger's, as the name was spelled then, eventually migrated, like my Morrison kin into the Piedmont region of North Carolina. The two families were only about 65 miles apart. And yet, it was not until around 1949-50 that my parents met, and these two families were joined in their marriage.

Our family histories are not just about family, but about identity, place and community. In understanding them as living histories, we begin to understand ourselves within the context of each day's historical transition from the past to the future.

Traditions: Dead or Alive

I know many families that are broken, as spouses, children, siblings, parents and grandparents are at odds with one other. There is something missing from their relationships. It is only partly the self-centered independence of our time. That is too simple an explanation for the problems that I have seen in many families during my lifetime. 

The lack of a broader context for understanding who the family is, and the obligations that come with being family is a greater contributing factor. The weaknesses that I see are not because these families are not following a traditional path of recognized family values. In fact, many of these families, that are in distress, are very traditional in their approach to being a family. The reality though is that the family doesn't work for each member. There is a failure for the family unit to provide a sufficient environment for the child to discover her or his identity in the context of the history of the family.

For many families, the expectation placed on the younger generation is that they will follow along the path that previous generations have trod. That loyality to home and hearth is to resist change, and sublimate one's own personality and sense of call in life to the family. This is the heart of Rod Dreher's story, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, where he leaves his small town Louisiana home to discover his course in life, returning after the death of his sister, to discover a part of his family's life that he had missed by moving away.

Col AH Belo - 55th NC CSA
Col. AH Belo - 55th NC regiment, CSA

This also part of the story that my son Troop is writing in his The Breckenridge Cycle of novels.

We all wonder what it means to go home. For Arlen Breckenridge, it is no different. Leaving his North Carolina farm to fight a bloody war across Europe, Arlen finds that the memory his own home, a real and lasting place, is the only thing that makes him fight on. He hopes to protect it and return to it. But when he returns the hero, Arlen is a different man. His little rural world has changed, too, and Arlen is left almost alone, trying to bring the soil of his old farm back to life. Was all his sacrifice, misunderstood by everyone around, all for nothing? Or can he find redemption in how he has changed, able to make his home, his farm and family, live once again?

The larger context of family history is recognizing that each generation has had to establish their own path, while maintaining connection and respect for the past. At the heart of this context are values that provide a basis for understanding what has worked and has not worked in the past for families.

How we approach our family's histories is a guide to how we can approach history in general. If we close off understanding of the past because there are unpleasant aspects of it, the presence of the proverbial horse thief or scoundrel, then we also close ourselves off to a recognition of values that are worthy of elevation, and have served to define us as people.

Younger generations often struggle with the forced allegiance to family traditions that seem without logic or reason.  This is often their parents and grandparents fault for failing to articulate the significance of the values that are at the center of their family's history. Families, like other traditional social and organizational structures, can fall into the trap of simply doing things because that is the way it has always been done. However, if they looked back in their history as a family or group, they'd see that those hardened traditions had a beginning in time that were created with the same sort of resistance to change as new ideas today

There is a difference between traditions that are alive and those that are merely habitual. The difference are values that provide the glue to the relationships. Values, when they are elevated to a place of engagement, are a living context for families. 

In my own family's history, I go back to the decision my great, great, great grandfather, the proprietor of the general store mentioned above, gave to his son to make at the outbreak of the Civil War. The choice was to stay home, help his father run the store, or leave as a volunteer, and if so, the store would close. He chose to join the Confederate volunteers from North Carolina and spend the next four years at war. 

Choice, responsibility and contribution are values that are part of my family's past that live on in how we function as a family today. The strength of those values provides the glue that holds us together as we live in different parts of the country and world, and as we, like all families, go through times of trial.

Living within the context of history enables us to know and understand who we are. This is particularly true for families. Without a grounding in the past, even if that past is not one of strength, provides a context for knowing what are the values upon which we can build our future. 

Recovering the real from the hyper-reality of today's culture of the spectacle is partly accomplished by remembering the past as a living reality, here and now, in the present. Memory becomes an important aspect of this process of recovery, and is the subject of the next post in this series.

Poetic Postscript

2010-11-08 13.36.32

After posting, I decided to add this poem by Kentucky farmer and writer, Wendell Berry.


Wendell Berry

And Now in the Abbyss I pass

Of that Unfathomable Grass …


Dear Relatives and friends, when my last breath

Grows large and free in air, don’t call it death –

A world to enrich the undertaker and inspire

His surly art of imitating life, conspire

Against him. Say that my body cannot now

Be improved upon; it has no fault to show

To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh

Has a perfection in compliance with the grass

Truer than any it could have striven for.

You will recognize the earth in me, as before

I wished to know it in myself: my earth

That has been my care and faithful charge from birth

And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound,

And all my hopes. Say that I have found

A good solution, and am on my way

To the roots. And say I have left my native clay


Traveler to where? Say you don’t know.



But do not let your ignorance

Of my spirit’s whereabouts dismay

You, or overwhelm your thoughts.

Be careful not to say


Anything too final. Whatever

Is unsure is possible, and life is bigger

Than flesh. Beyond reach of thought

Let imagination figure.


Your hope. That will be generous

To me and to yourselves. Why settle

For some know-it-all’s despair

When the dead may dance to the fiddle


Hereafter, for all anybody knows?

And remember that the Heavenly soil

Need not be too rich to please

One who was happy in Port Royal.


I may be already heading back

A new and better man, toward

That town. The thought’s unreasonable,

But so is life, thank the Lord!



So treat me, even dead,

As a man who has a place

To go, and something to do.

Don’t muck up my face.


With wax and powder and rouge

As one would prettify

An unalterable fact

To give bitterness the lie.


Admit the native earth

My body is and will be,

Admit its freedom and

Its changeability.


Dress me in the clothes

I wore in the day’s round.

Lay me in a wooden box.

Put the box in the ground.



Beneath this stone a Berry is planted

In his home land, as he wanted.

He has come to the gathering of his kin,

Among whom some were worthy men,


Farmers mostly, who lived by hand,

But one was a cobbler for Ireland,


Another played the eternal fool

By riding on a circus mule


To be remembered in grateful laughter

Longer than the rest. After


Doing what they had to do

They are at ease here. Let all of you


Who yet for pain find force and voice

Look on their peace, and rejoice.


from Collected Poems 1957-1982, Wendell Berry, North Point Press, 1985.



Leaders Open Doors - by Bill Treasurer - A Leading Questions Review

Some things that touch me emotionally very deeply. LOD cover















Opportunities Make a Difference; Opportunities Create Change


They provide people the opportunity ...

to prove themselves,

to find new meaning in life and work,

to have a second chance to make a difference,

to practice open-door leadership for others,

to become a person of integrity and authenticity, and,

to know how to build relationships of loyalty and trust.


The Difference Matters




The Reason for the Real


... is trust.









The Path to the Real



The Gift of Gravity (1982)

Wendell Berry



The Liberating Limits of the Real





 The Embodiment of the Real in Time.












The Embodiment of the Real in Space.






















The Path through Space and Time











The Spectacle of the Real


Afghan Mujahideen camp

Afghan / Soviet War

Chitral, NWFP, Pakistan

July, 1981




Afghan man - Peshawar desert camp


Simulating the "Real" Story?





Political Speculation.











Simulations Abound




Spectacle as Simulated Reality  





The Game of Entertainment




Living in a world of impermanence.














Recovering Reality









Living in the Worlds of Ruthie and Rod

WP_001664Rod Dreher's memoir of his sister, Ruthie, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, is a simple story as the subtitle suggests of "A Southern Girl, A Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life." Yet, it is much more. 

It is a story of many layers, dealing with the realities of small town life, how we as modern people deal with death, and ultimately, in its own way, a mirror of America in the 21st century reflecting the fragmentation into societal enclaves of rich and poor, urban and rural, communal and individualistic, and the local and the global.

The story is told through the perspective of Rod, Ruthie's older brother, who grew up as the son who sought adventure through the world of ideas as a journalist, living for two decades in Washington, New York, Dallas and Philadelphia. His ambition was viewed with suspicion by his sister, who thought him "uppity" for leaving the small Louisiana town of St. Francisville and their families corner of that rural world, Starhill. As the teller of the story, he shows his frustration at being mistrusted for his longing for new worlds, as if the world of home was not enough to build a life upon.

As Rod tells this story, this conflict between he and his sister is never truly resolved. Ruthie dies without Rod and her truly reconciling the differences that had existed since childhood.This makes their story more indicative of the way families actually are. This isn't a story with a Hollywood ending, though there is much wisdom and goodness to be discovered in it.

Their relationship rings true as symptomatic of many modern relationships. Each are individualists, even Ruthie in her singular focus on family and homeplace, could not see beyond her own individualistic preference to see that her brother was pursuing his own desire for meaning in life. Her care for her students, believing in those from the most impoverished, least advantageous backgrounds, stands in contrast to her relationship with Rod.

Having spent some time with Rod as he came to Asheville on his book tour, I identify with how family relationships are sometimes much more difficult than our social and professional relationships. In effect, there was only an upside in believing that her students could become anything that they set their mind to doing. But there is conflict within a family when the family traditions are not sufficient to hold some members at home. I see this attachment to the past, which is what it is, as a way many people refuse to address the realities of the contemporary world, and as a result end up denying not only their responsibility to a wider world, but also their potential for making a difference that matters.

For me this relationship between Rod and Ruthie is the most interesting in the book, and worth reading by families so that conversation about expectations can be had.

We also see that small town life, for all its communal closeness, is not idyllic.  There is a tendency not to be able to see beyond one's own self-interest and that that of one's clan. Urban and suburban communities can be just as self-interested, just as easily denying an obligation to care for those who are less well off.

However, what distinguishes this story is the character of Ruthie Leming. For all her narrowness about her small town, she was a woman of extraordinary love and caring for people beyond her family. In fact, it is quite evident that her impact is global and not just local because of the care she gave to her students. It is people like Ruthie who make communities worth living in. The question is why are there not more like her. I hope the book inspires people waiting for something to move them into action to become more like Ruthie.

Small towns have advantages that big city life has a much more difficult time providing. Namely the closeness of family and friends who meld into one's family in ways that a cosmopolitan existence cannot afford. The ease that people move in and out of the Leming household during and after her death from cancer; how the community rallies to raise money for Ruthie's hospital bills through a concert, and how the spirit of Ruthie served as a bond for community that made life in their little community richer, are pictures of life in rural communities.

Rod tells his own story as a contrast to Ruthie's. He is like many people I know who are very cosmopolitan in their tastes. They find it easy to move between various cultures, finding commonality with people from all points on the globe. Yet, as his sister goes through her bout with cancer, the pull of family and Louisiana eventually uproots the Dreher family from their life in Philadelphia as they move home to Starhill.

Family and place are two of the three themes that make this book a thought-provoking, engrossing read. However, it is the question of the communal and familial nature of death and dying that is played out in Ruthie's illness which may be the most important insight that Dreher provides.

As an ordained minister, who has been in and out of pastoral roles in churches over the past three decades, I can say that we American's do not deal with death well. For Ruthie, she faced it by denial. She trusted her physicians to do the right thing. She went about her life as if the cancer did not have a hold upon her. As a result, she did not talk with her daughters about her illness. As Dreher notes, she answered her daughters questions truthfully, what few questions they did ask. So, she proceeds on with life and then it ends suddenly without notice.

What is clear is that death affects families differently than one's circle of friends. Her friends come to the home and celebrate her life the next day. But her family lives daily with her absence. Life never being quite the same without Ruthie at the center of it.

Reading her story, I was taken back to my own parents' deaths. My mother at the age of 48 in her sleep while on vacation. My father just three years ago this week from a sepsis infection that he acquired following knee surgery. For my mother, I had not seen her in two weeks. She was gone without any time to prepare. I am still numb 35 years later. For my father, we knew he would not survive, so my sisters and I had the time to say good bye. In both cases, the relational vacuum created by their passing is never filled. I'm certain this remains true for the Dreher and Leming families of Starhill.

As I had time with Rod last weekend, we talked about Ruthie. I told him that I had a strong identification with her. Her relationships with people are similar to mine. Her belief in people is very much like mine. I have said in many settings that "I believe in people so they can believe in themselves." I would have loved to have known her, and even though I did not, I miss her. I understand her, her motivations and the way she led her life. I also understand the choices that Rod made as a young man, the course of his life, as I made similar choices that led me away from my family to seek a course in life that we often call ambition or purpose. There is not a simple, single choice to be made between country or city living, or between family and ambition. There are choices we make every day about the kind of person we wish to be, and the life we want for ourselves and our families. In effect, life is lived one day at a time, one relational encounter at a time, with intervening moments of decisions that mark the long course that our lives take.

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming is an important book. It is a book to be read and savored in conversation with family and friends. Rod Dreher's story isn't about everyone moving back to their home town. It is rather about being much more conscious that all our decisions carry with them both positive and negative implications. Ruthie Leming's life made a difference that mattered to the people of West Feliciana Parish. Rod Dreher's life through his writing is also making a difference by the telling of Ruthie's story. And we the readers of his fine book are the beneficiaries of both of their lives, and for that reason we are richer for it.

In Addition

Here's an additional thought that I had about the book that I posted to my Facebook page.

Been thinking about The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, by Rod Dreher.

It is such a honest and real book. It is one of truth as it deals with the pain and suffering of life, which is, in large part, familial and relational.

I've been having conversations recently with people my age about how many of us in our 50s and 60s are really unhappy. The people I'm thinking of have achieved everything that wanted. Yet, to talk with them there is a hard edge of bitterness lingering in the background. They aren't happy. I've come to the conclusion that this is so because all their relationships are structured to be professional and non-intrusive. The conversations are built around opinions and making distinctions between people who are with us and those who aren't. It is such a defensive posture to life. No wonder they are unhappy.

In Rod's book, it is James Toney, son of Miss Clophine Toney, his childhood friend, who became an evangelist who says it best as he eulogizes his mother.
"She was carrying a cross, ... because let me tell you something, if you don't sacrifice for your brother, if you don't sacrifice for your neighbor, you not carrying your cross."
"Aunt Grace told me the other day that of all the presents she got from everybody, those (Miss Clophine's) meant the most. ... Why? Because there was so much sacrifice. She sacrificed everything she made, just to give."

You have to read the book to get where this is going.

I wonder about these people I'm thinking of and their unhappiness. Do they have anyone whom they truly sacrifice to love? What is it that they are giving up for others? Or do they see their giving and sacrifice as a kind of victimization?

This is the hard truth of love, that without sacrifice, there is no love, just connection.

First, I hope you'll read this book.
Second, I hope you'll give this book to family and friends.
Third, I hope you'll find someone in that group of people with whom you can talk about the wisdom that can be found in this book.

Happiness isn't a commodity you buy at the store. It is a product of relationship and living a life where giving, and, yes, sacrifice, are part of what gives life its joy.

In a recent blog post, What Defines Us? , I ended with these words,

To live is to love.

To love is to give.


Read the book.
Thanks Rod for the posting.

What Defines Us?

2010-11-08 13.36.32













To what extent are we defined by ...

        What we do?

        Where we work?

        Where we were born?

        Where we went to school?

To what degree do  ...

        Our choices,

        Our actions,

        Our network of relationships, and,

        Our daily work and recreation schedule

                ... define us?      



The Question of Potential










The Question of Impact


Impact is the change that makes a difference that matters.





To envision our impact is to imagine our potential.



The Shift in Question


I am (fill in the blank).




The Question of Identity




The Place of Desire






Three Goals of Life-Work - Simple









To live is to love.

To love is to give.



Being Trustworthy





Without trust, nothing is sustainable, things begin to fail. 

How do we measure trust?











What Trust is Not.


Trust is about relationships.







Becoming a Trustworthy person


















The ancient Greeks had four different words for love.

Phileo - friendship

Storge - affection

Eros - embodied, sexual

Agape - selfless, unconditional love






Leadership, Authenticity and Trust.










It is not something you fix and move on.

It is learning to be a trustworthy person each day.



Honor and Recognition - Top 50 Leadership Blog

Honor and recognition are not always the same.  Linchpin headshot

However, from Jon Warner of the Ready To Manage blog, they are.

Jon has honored me by including me in his Top 50 Leadership Blogs listing.

I'm number number #36. Yep, I'm honored and happy for the recognition.

Thank you, Jon. Make sure you visit his blog often. He addresses important aspects of organizational leadership.

Also, check out others who are on the list. Many are people I know, follow and read often. You should too. You'll become a better leader and person for it.

When the Souvenir Becomes the Social Object


ThisMightWorkCover WP_001368






How a Social Object Works









Using It Might Work as a Source for Social Objects




  LizardShutUp Passion AbundanceScarcity  PeopleNotOrganizations TrueFans LazinessEmotionalLabor LastForever Soon Ideas1-2





If this still seems a bit weird, try this.



This takes effort, but I'm certain it is worth it.


The Sweet Spot


There are two continuum that we all live on.

Between our talent and our skills.

Between what we love and what we hate.

The Talent - Skills Continuum

It would be nice if we could live out at the edge where we are at our most talented, and are doing what we love. But life and work doesn't work that way.

Talent is great, but without skills, we don't achieve what we desire.

Skills are fine, but if we aren't really talented in this way (Remember Johnny Bunko?) then we end up frustrated, disappointed, hating what we do, and quite stressed over it.

Most of us live in the middle between our talent and our skills.

Think of talent as your strengths. (If you don't know what they are then check out StrengthsFinders. It is a helpful guide to finding your talent.)

If you spend more of your life & work at the Skills end of the continuum, and not somewhere in the middle, then you will always feel that you are overcoming huge obstacles to getting things done.  You need to move to closer to where your talent is.

Talent is where we connect with our desires. We know that we are gifted and see it reflected in the satisfaction we get from utilizing our talent.

If you are at the other end, where you Talent rules, then you need to develop Skills that help sustain your Talent's vitality. Talent is a resource that is optimized by Skills development.

The Love - Hate Continuum

This is where the stress gets manufactured.

If you do what you love, then you are free. If you are in a situation that you hate, the emotional toll grows with each day.

Think of your emotional life as a well, a cistern, waiting to be filled. You can fill it with pure, clean water, or you can poison the water with the toxin of stress.

Find what you love, and live and work with it. Let it fill the well of your life with joy, peace, freedom, fulfillment, fun and a real sense of impact. This is where fun in life & work is found.

Finding The Sweet Spot

Doing what you love and are talented to do would seem to be the sweet spot on these two continuum. Ideally that is true. But in reality, that spot is closer to the middle on the Talent - Skills continuum and closer to what you Love on the other.

Here though is what is important to understand.

The price of living on these two continuum is emotional. Call it stress if you will, but it is emotional.

We hide this emotional toll because many more of the skills that leaders need are analytical, decision making ones.

We spend a lot of time in our heads. We think through problems, make decisions, implement them, and move to the next one.

It is that transition from one analytical process to the next that builds up the pressure.

It is important to understand the connection between our minds, our bodies and our emotions. There are many scientists who understand the science of this better than I do. So, do your own research. But here is what I've learned.

Rationalized Emotion

I've come to see that most of what we think is rationalized emotion. Our motivations begin down deep inside of us, and come out emotionally in some settings, like in sports, and yet in organizational / work settings we find them expressed as rational thought.

We all know people who are like emotional time-bombs. They seem rational on the surface, but they have a hair-trigger anger that creates fear and stress in people. That is a picture of this connection between our emotions, mind and body.

The well of emotions needs constant replenishing with positive emotions. If those emotions are not there in your life or work, then you need to begin today to address them.

Time to Make Changes

If you know you are stuck in a situation that is more stressful than fun, where you talent is under-utilized, where you hate not only what you do, but the whole context of the work, then you need to make some changes. The sooner you change the better. Waiting only fills the well with more toxic emotions.

Where do you start? Start with the Circle of Impact Guides. If you are new to them, here is a helpful guide to understanding the sequence of ideas in the guides.

Circle of Impact-StepbyStep


Change Early, Not Late

Seth-ChangeEarlyLatePage 24 and 25 of This Might Work This Might Not Work (Behemoth) by Seth Godin

This is EXACTLY right.

I remember years ago, my father, one of the best judges of people as an HR guy that I ever knew, said to me as we were talking about one of my consulting projects,

"Son, the best time to fire someone is before you hire them."

My rule of thumb #2 (Rule of Thumb #1 is "Everyone needs an editor.") is

"Never wait to change. It only complicates things and makes them harder."

Ok. That said, there is a continuum of change response that is worth recognizing.

Don't take Seth's words or mine as license to become a Change Junkie.

Instead, ask what is your purpose or mission, and will this change make it more likely that you'll achieve it.

Let's reorient this whole question.

The question should not be "To change or not to change"

The question should be "What change do I need to make right now?"

The assumption is that change is normal and necessary.

It is what we now call adaptability which is how we function in the transitions that we are constantly experiencing in our lives and work.

The Five Questions - HandoutPostcard

The first question of The Five Questions that everyone must ask is ...

What has Changed? How am I in transition?

If you are in the midst of a serious, overwhelming transition, then ask this question.

When was the last time I was happy, content and at peace with my work and life?

Whether your memory of that time is accurate or an illusion, it does not matter. What does is that the memory of this point in time is a starting point in understanding that transition that you are in.

Ask about what changed during this time? What changed about your perception of your purpose or in your relationships or possibly with the context of the work you do. These are three areas that are always present in our lives, and where our awareness of change has its greatest impact.

The second thing to recognize about this memory of a time in the past is that it reveals two things. The first are values that matter to us that we'd like reinforce or reinvigorate in our life or work. The second thing is that it points to a desire or desires in our heart that tell us what we love and want to see as central to our lives.

For example, lets say your company is bought out by a larger firm. Your memory points to how the company used to be like a family, where everyone care for one another. Now, that family feel is gone, and the pressure to perform is greater than you have ever experienced.

What you discover in that memory are the values of relationship and connection in the work place, and, that you love working for a smaller firm.

With that awareness, you can better understand the transition that you are in, and, the change that might be necessary in order to find that place of work and life that is meaningful for you.

This is what change is really about. Finding the right place where our desires for meaning, relationships that are happy and healthy, and a place where I feel my life matters can be realized.

So Change Early, Not Late. When you know that change is necessary, then begin the process of planning for that change.

What you'll find is that your capacity to change not only grows, but its negative impact upon your life diminishes. Why is this?

What I've discovered is that as we change, the speed of change increases. As it increases, it becomes simpler. Holding back changes inevitably means we must manage a host of obligations and expectations that have been thrust upon us by situations and people that may or may not carry meaning or impact for us.

The key is being very clear about your values, your purpose, and, how your team or group works together in the context of the transition that is taking place.

Doing the same things in the same way is not how we avoid the risks of change. It is how we embrace of the risk of irrelevance.

The risk of not changing is greater than the risk of changing.This is because we may think that not changing is just one decision, the same one, repeated over and over again, day after day.

To embrace change as the process of the transition we are in is to see that every decision is a new one and that when we make those according to values, purpose and a clarity about the impact we want, then we move forward to those decisions to see the path forward.

James C. Collins, who along with Jerry Porras wrote Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies make this point about how we function in an environment of transition.


 There is a fluidness about change, that once encounter, we discover a sense of flow moving through the moments of decision.

Simply put, change and change often. Not as a change-junkie, but as a responsible leader who both initiates and responds to change. Learn to do this and you'll never miss the fear and the doubt that accompanies change decisions. You'll find that the stress of change is not in the change itself, but rather in growing into a mindset that almost sees the connection between the past, present and future as happening simultaneously. I know this sounds crazy, but this is exactly what my own experience has been.

2013, The Year of Leadership and Healing


In the book, she tells of Roger Ulrich's experiment .








In this video by Sternberg, she explains her work.



Healing, the Unexplored Leadership Strategy





What Healing Requires






Cultivating Authenticity: Letting Go of What People Think

Cultivating Self-Compassion: Letting Go of Perfectionism

Cultivating a Resilient Spirit: Letting Go of Numbing and Powerlessness



Cultivating Creativity: Letting Go of Comparison


Cultivating Calm and Stillness: Letting Go of Anxiety as a Lifestyle





Healing, the unexplored territory of leadership


Three Goals of Life-Work-CircleofImpact





The Platform of Desire, Part 5

IMG_2304The Desire to Connect



You walk into a room at a business after hours event. You register, get you name tag, and turn around and look at the crowd. Who are you looking to meet? Who is looking to meet you?

We are drawn towards particular kinds of people. What is it that us draws to them?

You sign up for an online dating service, and out of the dozens of possibilities, one person jumps off the page. Why this person?

What draws us towards this one individual rather than another?

Why can we talk about the synergy between two people who only met two minutes ago? What is it that draws us into relationships where we are prepared to trust, to be vulnerable and change our business plan immediately?

It is the intangible nature of human desire. It is beyond rational. It really isn't subrational, but rather supra-rational. It is beyond explanation. It falls into the realm of faith.

What is it about the connection of human desire that causes us to flee the safety of the fortress to venture out into the unknown to discover what lay in our heart's desire all along.

Many refer to this as a call, a voice that constantly beckons them onward, to risk all for the sake of that source of passion deep within us that refuses to be quiet.

This is the magic that happens between two people or within a team when they stop playing the game of control and risk management, and pursue a call they share to make a difference that matters.

In other words, it is love that draws us together. The love of ideas, of people and of the change that we can create together. This is the desire that lies deep within us that calls us to accept and honor its all or nothing demand upon our lives.

The People We are Drawn Toward

At a most basic level, we are drawn toward two kinds of people.

One type are those who affirm or validate who we are. They are like us or complement us by helping us see the inherent value of who we are. These relationships appreciate us for who we are right now. These are family and friends with whom we have happy moments each day.

Often these are people we've known a long time and with whom, even if we are very different in personality, we feel comfortable because of our shared life experiences together.  These are people with whom we share similar values. These are our peeps.

The second kind are those people for whom we feel a kind of longing. This longing is to be different, better, fulfilled, complete, or known for some facet of our lives that the first group cannot see. These people set a standard for their life and work that we view as higher or more ambitious, and therefore is desirable. We desire relationships with them, hoping that some of their magic will rub off on us.  We desire what we think they have. More than anything, we want their respect, and a connection to them.

These relationships may not be with people that we know or with whom we spend most of our time. The relationship may be virtual as on Facebook or Twitter. A connection is made when they like a link that we post. A social media connection with this person fulfills a longing for association with someone whom we perceive to be the person we wish to be in the future. These persons symbolize for us the values that matter to us, that may seem beyond our reach, yet live down deep within us as the desires that we have for our life and work.

We need both of these kinds of relationships. However, neither speaks to the character of the relationship, only to a type of relationship.

The character of our relationships matter.  I thought of this when I came across this selection from the Diary of Anais Nin.


She could easily be describing the relationships that many of us have through social media platforms. We desire connection. But too often it is superficial, lacking depth.

What then does it mean to have relationships of depth?  This is the kind of relationship that I wrote about in my post Still Waters Still Flow. There I write,

"Am I setting up an impossible scenario for our relationships? Of course I am! For without a standard, an ideal, or a vision of the highest in human experience, then there is no clear direction to the flow of our lives.

When the love I describe becomes complete within us, and seeks out others who also have found a completeness in the love within them, then a depth of relationship results that changes us. We are transformed by loving, not simply by the idea of love.

All these human characteristics that we celebrate and honor, like Respect, Trust, Confidence, Responsibility, Courage, Empathy and Self-sacrifice find a ground upon which to grow. For ultimately, flow rises from our own capacity to be the person we wish others to be.

I wish I could say that all this can come without pain or suffering but it can't. In fact, it is the very comforts of our modern life that stand in the way of a fulfilled, complete and flourishing life. Those comforts present the appearance of strength and completeness. But too often they are the curtain that blinds us to harsher realities of the world.

For still waters to run deep requires the dredging of the stream bed of our lives to remove all those barriers to flow. The more courageous, the more willing we are to raise the standards of our life and work, the more willing we are to be committed to do the hard work of changing our lives, the more willing we are to defy fear, and move into unknown territories of discovery, the more we will discover that still waters still flow bringing peace into a world of conflict."

For these kinds of relationship to flourish requires a setting or an environment for our relationships to grow. Increasingly, I'm convinced that this is difficult to achieve when the relationship is only in a virtual context.

Digital or Analog, Virtual or ... ?

What do we call the setting of relationships that are not virtual, that exist outside of an online digital social space? To say they are analog, physical or real does not capture it well. What are our relationships that exist where we live, with whom we encounter in physical proximity to one another.

Lacking an adequate terminology, I've decided to use a sacramental term that Presbyterians and other Protestant Christians use to describe the relationship of God to the eucharist, the sacramental meal that Christians observe in worship. That term is Real Presence.

I'm using real presence in a non-religious way. It is the relationship that develops between people who find their life and work connected at a deeper level of meaning and impact than with other people. The result is that they are drawn together in such a way that the traditional social media platforms are an insufficient for the purpose of the relationship. In other words, they find they need to be in physical proximity to one another often enough to advance their relationship's purpose.

To be really present, requires us to be open and vulnerable, attentive and willing to adapt to each opportunity as it appears. Real presence is living each day with intention and commitment. I realize that these are familiar words to people today. The challenge is not knowing the meaning of these words, but deriving our meaning of life from living them each day.

There are many people that I've met online with whom we now have a relationship of real presence. We are constantly in touch with the living our of our lives. We are not simply observing and commenting in a detached manner. Our relationships to one another matter. As a result, we are drawn to be with one another in a physical sense. And so we make the effort to travel to be with one another.

Let me return to my question from above. Why is it that we connect with some people and not others?  Is it because the place where we meet and develop our relationships is conducive for the kind of relationship we seek? Is it because there are certain values that we share that can flourish in either a virtual or a physical context?

This is a complex question. To understand it we must understand ourselves. To understand ourselves demands that we understand the kinds of environments that are most conducive to making the kind of connections that we truly desire.

This is an important question because so many of our connections are virtual, operating only within a digital context. Yet, we are not virtual people, digitized, pixelated images or text narratives on a screen. We are embodied persons whose whole selves experience the movement of desire flowing through us.

Developing Platforms for Desire

We are at the beginning point in the evolution of the digital world. What it will be in a decade or in fifty years is pure speculation.

I am convinced that because we are desiring beings (James K A Smith's term), that the structure of society and organizations ultimately adapt to who we are. It is never smooth, however.

Today, we are at the end of the industrial era, without real clarity about what is to follow. Current global social and political forces are aligned to avoid change as much as possible. Resistance to human evolution is futile. And at the heart of our evolution as a species is the drive our desires for meaning, healthy relationships and lives of impact.

As a result, there will always be a tug-of-war between those forces that seek to control the evolutionary course, and those who choose the freedom to adapt to change as it presents itself each day.

As social media platforms develop, change and die, new platforms will emerge to meet the opportunities that come from human social interaction. The challenge for the developers of these platforms as I've said previously in this series, is not really how to monetize the platform, but rather how maximize the ability of people of shared desires to collaborate to make a difference that matters. The mousetrap has been invented. Now is the time to make a better mousetrap.

There is much more that can be said about the relation of human desire to the virtual online world. For now, this is sufficient.

The Platform of Desire, Part 4

The Platform of Hyper-reality



As Marshall McLuhan wrote, “It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.”

Philosophers and social theorists call this hyper-reality. Italian author Umberto Eco writes that "the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake." French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation, writes,

"Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referrential being, or a substance. It is the generation of models of the a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal."

Albert Borgmann, in his insightful book, Holding Onto Reality, describes the transition to this hyperreal world through a description of how the place of information in human experience has changed. There are three different ways that information connects us to reality. There is ...

Information about reality - Our direct experience of the natural world.

Information for reality - Our experience of information as an interpreter or chronicler of reality.

Information as reality - Our experience where the medium is the message.

Here's one example of these three types of information.

Each of these forms of information can be seen in this video of the finale of Gustav Mahler's 2nd Symphony played by the Seoul (SK) Philharmonic Orchestra. (Don't skip this experience.)


The first type of information, about reality is seen in the singers and musicians actually playing the music. They are engaged in actually playing the music, not simply listening or observing it being played.Think of the experience of the choir and musicians, as the symphony reaches its peak of intensity during the last three minutes. This is a direct experience of the music as it was created to be experienced by the composer.

The second type of information is seen in the sheet music that the musicians are reading to follow the score. The lyrics of the score printed in the audience's program and projected on the overhead screen. This information enables the musicians to play together, and the audience to have a higher level of understanding of the meaning of thought behind the writing of the symphony.

The third type of information is our experience of watching and listening to this concert at another time, in another place, in a totally different and private context.  This third engagement is the platform of the hyper-real. The experience transcends the experience that Gustav Mahler envisioned when he wrote the work. Imagine listening to a recording on your IPod while standing at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon or in the middle of Cathedral du Notre Dame in Paris. The recording creates a transcendent experience, providing another layer of experience that provides a way of personally interpreting the meaning of the physical place where you are standing. 

It is a wholly different reality. This YouTube portion is only 9 minutes of a symphony that is almost an hour and a half long. This fragment of the symphony, while dynamic and moving, is not the whole experience the symphony was designed to provide. Mash this video with other video content, and the information of the original becomes farther and farther removed from the original.

This virtual reality transcends the original. It is now no longer a representation of an event that took place in a specific place, at particular time, with people who were the participants at that moment. It is now a video that serves a different purpose. It has become its own reality.

The Hyperreality of Social Media

Social media is a platform for hyper-experiences of this nature. It is a medium where we can create relationships and experiences that are reflective of experiences that would not have been possible a generation ago.

Platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, intentionally guide the interaction that people have through it. I am convinced that people are changed by them.

The question that this raises for me is whether the purpose of the platform and the purpose of their organizations are the same.

Does Facebook's need to monetize the platform (organizational purpose) become the driving force that over time changes the purpose of the platform? 

Is it a social platform or a sales platform? Can both co-exist?

Here are other questions.

How would the platform of Facebook develop if the question of monetization never needed to be asked?

What if Facebook was only about the personal and social development of people in relationships in a global society?

What if the now shareholders at Facebook never asked about share price and dividends?

I ask these questions to highlight the importance of understanding the effect that social media platforms have. As a platform for human interaction, they different than anything in the past. The speed, immediacy and hyper-reality of these platforms changes us. It elevates old virtues like patience and listening.

The Difference between the Platforms

There are host of online tools that serve the interests of business people world-wide. For example, there are meeting platforms, conference call platforms, shared writing platforms, and all that can be done visually on a global scale.

In my work, I use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, along with many of the Google doc features. I use Skype as my office phone.  I use Pay Pal, SurveyMonkey, Slideshare and Scribd. I blog on Typepad and Wordpress platforms. And I have a Ning site. Each one is different. None are complete in themselves. All require skills that must be developed in order to take advantage of their benefits. All take time to master.

I am immersed like so many in the multitude of platforms that exist in the social media universe. And I, like I suspect many others, are dissatisfied with what they offer. For this reason, many of these platforms will not last. I say this because I am convinced that they are designed based on a certain perception, even philosophy, of human nature.

I like Facebook because it keeps me in touch with lots of people. I like it better than Twitter.

Google seems to me to be the only one of these platforms that really understands what I want, but its approach is less than appealing.

Ultimately, the difference between the platforms is not their companies' problem, but mine. I have know what I want to do with them, and use them for that purpose. But like much in hyper-reality, the old reference points fade, and new ones emerge.

For example, where most people use Facebook to stay in touch with friends, family and colleagues, and others use it as platform for promoting their business, I use it more like a blog, as a place to engage people with ideas. And I find Facebook better for this than Twitter, Linked-In or Google+.

So, the difference then, is not just between the platforms, but between the people who use them. This means that the platforms of social media are a dynamic environment for human interaction, where peoples' lives can be transformed.

The Frontier of Social Media

Where does the hyper-reality of social media take us?

Is it a suitable and sustainable platform for our human desires for personal meaning, healthy, happy relationships and to make a difference that matters?

Is its virtual, almost disembodied state bode well for the ability of organizations to create collaborative structures that are prepared to replace the failing organizations of the industrial era?

These are the kind of questions I'll be asking as we continue to move through this series.

The Platform of Desire, Part 3

Lemhi Pass 26 7-14-04

The Platform of Nature

Prior to the industrial revolution, and especially prior to discovery of electricity, a person's life was lived within the confined space of their village. Social experience happened within the community of family and neighbors. People would gather in their homes, around the backyard fence, in church and community pot-luck dinners. Their world was small and confined to the close proximity of their town.

My grandfather once told me that the most significant invention he saw in his 94 years of life was the radio, because it opened up the world beyond the small town where he grew up. Listening to what was happening in Europe gave him the idea decades later to take my father to Paris on an American Legion trip. The medium of radio opened up the world to my grandfather, and the impact was felt by my father and later by me and my sisters.

This experience of openness to the world beyond that which we can walk or ride on the back of a horse in day is new in human history. While the radio began this trend, its technology matured into what today we know as computers and the interwebs. This has changed us socially, and it has changed how we relate to the natural world.

In an interview with Krista Tippett of the radio program, On Being, novelist and essayist, Marilynne Robinson speaks about her childhood growing up in Idaho.

Ms. Tippett: ... Marilynne, you grew up in Idaho, which you describe ... as a place of more austere but intense beauty. ... how do you trace the roots of your sense of mystery ... as something that came to be an animating force for you as a novelist and a writer.


My grandparents had a house built actually by my great-grandparents, which was modern by the standards of the late 19th century and so it had a sleeping porch. You were supposed to sleep out there so that you wouldn't get tuberculosis. There was no ambient light. And it was amazing because at night you would hear the mountains. You would hear coyotes, you know, and there was no other light. There was no sense of human presence aside from my grandparents' house. (Emphasis mine.)

Robinson's description of her childhood experience with the "platform" of the Idahoan mountains points to how a place or a setting or an environment affects our sense of who we are and our sense of meaning and purpose.

As seen in Robinson's story, in the past there was a clear distinction between people and the natural world. It gave proportion to the place that a human being fits into the natural world.

011_11 2002 5

For me, riding on the back of a horse in the wilderness south of the Yellowstone border gives me a sense of my smallness in the midst of the vast grandeur of nature. It does not diminish me as a person, but provides perspective to see that I am not the center of the universe. Proportion is an important perspective to have. It can open us up to a much larger, wider world, if we choose to see it that way.

This sense of proportion is not limited to those of us who love the mountains. It is also a product of immersion in the life of the sea. My friend and colleague David Pu'u is a man of the water. I've learned much about life from his life-long love of the ocean. I've come down from my vantage point in the mountains to join him and the circle of surfers, artists and scientists involved in the Ocean Lovers Collective. When I asked David to describe the impact of the ocean as a platform, in the way that Robinson speaks of the mountains, he directed me to this video that he produced several years ago. It captures what I was seeking.

When Nature is a platform, like any social or organizational structure is a platform, it influences what we value and desire. Or in the words of James K A Smith, what we love. To live in nature is to love it, but not in the abstract sense of love, but in the deeper sense of understanding, of respect, and of a relationship that requires listening and giving.

To live outside in the natural world is to experience something different than what one feels driving through a natural setting in an automobile.

Chitral-Gilgit district border

Traveling through the NorthWest Frontier Province of Pakistan in 1981, our experience walking was quite different than riding in a Jeep. Walking, we encountered people. We saw little things along the road that we would have missed. And without the noise of the engine, we could here the wind and the sound of the water rushing down from the glaciers that we passed.

Humans in Nature

Some of my perspective has been formed by German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg who wrote that human beings were the most physically vulnerable and the most intellectually creative of all animals. To survive the physical harshness of nature, human beings had to use the creativity of their minds to develop clothing, shelter, tools and sustainable food sources. This human vulnerability was true throughout the pre-modern era, before electricity, in-door plumbing and central air-conditioning. And away from the technology that we've developed to support human existence, we are still the most physically vulnerable.

In earlier times, people understood that life was fragile, and depended upon others for support and safety. Creativity was not just in creating tools for survival, but also social structures to support human existence.

Victor Davis Hanson writes about how the cities of ancient Greece grew up as a place for agrarian farmers to gather to sell their crops and support one another.


In the pre-modern world, the land was the platform for civilization. Today, the virtual world of electrons, bits and bytes and social media is that platform.

In the next post in this series, I'll look at how technology has changed the experience that we have. And look at the mediating role that the various platforms of technology and human institutions, like social media, have upon us. And how these platforms affect the formation of our human desires for meaning, for companionship and our ambition to create impact as human beings.

The Platform of Desire, Part 2

Desire or Rationality?






Desire = Love








Max Patch Edge


Jackson Hole Valley






A Structure for Desire?






The Platform of Desire, Part 1







The Structure Lives















Social Media Platforms as Organizational Structures




Here’s where I see the shift.




What is it about social media that makes it so appealing?



These are the questions that I find most compelling.


The Frontier is Within

IMG_0258A century ago Frederick Jackson Turner declared that the frontier was closed

A half century ago, President John F. Kennedy, challenged the nation to believe in the frontier of space as he focused attention on going to the Moon.


A hundred years from now, what will people have said the frontier that we crossed and settled was? As I reflect upon this, I don't think we really know.

The Frontier of the 20th Century

When Turner presented his frontier thesis, what he saw was the emergence of science and expansion of education as the frontier boundaries of the 20th century. What he could not have known was that the 20th century would also become a time world war and violence between nations, and by nations towards their citizens.

While our science advanced, our humanity retreated into barbarism.

Of course, human beings have always been blood-thirsty. But the 20th century marks a level of the sophistication in the practice of genocide, slavery, eugenics and war that is unprecedented.

This development was not so much a failure of science, for science as a culture was never in control of its own advancement. But rather a result of the social, political and economic philosophies of the modern age that emerged during the 18th. and 19th. centuries that gave a rational basis to the violence on such an enormous scale.

The humanistic philosophies of the Renaissance, which drew upon the ancient philosophies of Aristotle and Plato, and the ancient religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, gave way to the ideologies that diminished human beings into utilitarian means for industrial and cultural advancement.

As modern people, we celebrate individualism and freedom as the ultimate purpose of human society, and yet turn a deaf ear to the sufferings of people singled out for extinction by their governments. We are following a logical course of the ideologies that have dominated the last two hundred years of human history. What is the future of a planet where death on such a massive scale is hardly mentioned by presidential candidates. Is our only option to throw up our hands in defeat and let violence suck the life out of civilized societies?

I have wondered over the past decade or so why it is that so much of visual culture about the future has become so apocalyptic, and less hopeful. Compare E.T. the extraterrestrial (1982) , Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series from a generation ago to films and games like The Road (2009) , The Book of Eli (2010), the Resident Evil series and, most recently books, films and television series about zombies, vampires and alien invasion.

Does the shift from an optimism about the future, as expressed in President Kennedy's challenge, to a darker, apocalyptic one reveal our own deep insecurity about the future capabilities of technology?

Walker Percy's question from a generation ago still resonates deeply as a question that remains to be answered.


Maybe, to paraphrase a biblical reference, through the advancement of technology, we have gained the world and lost our humanity.

The question of our time is, then, "For what purpose, and to what end does our technological advancement lead us?"

One Step Removed

I have thought a lot about frontiers over past decade, as my interest in the Lewis & Clark Expedition grew. I found in their story both the inspiration for venturing toward the frontier, and the cautionary lessons that can guide us.

I've concluded that we are one step removed from understanding what the frontier of the future is.

I know that there are all sorts of predictions about the future. I'm not talking about predicting the future. Predictions are largely taking current knowledge and extending its development into the future.

Instead, I'm talking about a frontier of the future of what is unknown and undiscovered.

This is a different mindset that requires a humble openness to the future, and a certain skepticism about what we already know and have achieved. In effect, we do what the best scientists and explorers have always done, look forward without prejudicial assumptions that bind discoveries into a preconceived understanding of the future.

The future is the horizon upon which we set our bearings, our aspirations and the validation of our values.

The difference between being an explorer rather than a futurist is that the futurist stands in the present looks towards the future, and the explorer, instead, leaves the present behind to embrace an unknown future. 

In the past, explorer's were individuals of vision who largely made their discoveries out of the public's eye. Today, we need more than individuals who are willing to venture into the unknown, we need a society that will. As the old saying goes, "the thinking that got us here is not the thinking that will get us out of here."

This first step in pioneering the future is to reorient our lives and world so that we see ourselves living on the frontier. For this is what I see, the end of what we've known for 500 years, and the beginning of a new epoch of discovery.  This reorientation is the frontier that is within each of us that must first be crossed before the larger horizon of the future can be identified.

The Next Frontier is Within

Explorers do not decide to go, and then walk out the door. They prepare.

The preparation that we need now is the frontier that is within each of us. The focus of preparation is simple. The execution is difficult.

We can begin with this question.


This starting point leads us to the frontier within. The frontiers that we then must cross is intellectual, social and spiritual.

The intellectual frontier is to think for yourself, thinking with open observation, without prejudice, yet with skepticism toward your own conclusions. 

The social frontier is to make connections with people, establishing relationship of respect, trust, and mutual support and collaboration, so that shared discovery creates new communities of understanding for the future. 

The spiritual frontier is recognizing there is a reality beyond the material and beyond that which I can control, which is intelligible to those who embrace it with openness and a willingness to learn and adapt to its frame of understanding.

Once the frontier within has been embraced, then the next frontier will show itself.