Archive for the ‘Collaborate’ Category
Standing at Intersections
Opportunity stops before it starts.
Again and again I notice friends and colleagues are motivated at interstitial places: those places between things. Between projects. Between jobs. Sometimes between spouses. Between highs and between lows. These are the spaces where reflection has a natural grip, before busyness kicks in again. These are the spaces that open the opportunity to go a different direction, because in that space there is a kind of seeking.
Motivation rises at an intersection, direction is questioned and a brand new openness to a different way can suddenly rise out of seemingly nowhere. Sometimes it can feel completely unplanned, but it is often the space itself, with the psychological or economic pressures on either side that suddenly make a new path seem right.
I encourage loitering at those intersections, because that is where people seek help. I’m a copywriter: I like helping organizations locate and move in that new direction. I like working up the words and ideas that frame the problem or the solution or the intersection itself. And beyond that, I’m a human with faith who likes to help people move forward—maybe only because I’ve been helped forward by so many.
Being available at an intersection makes it quite likely you’ll say something that has the power to illuminate someone else’s choices. And it’s likely your words or theirs will open up the intersection before you, too, the one you didn’t know was there.
Who knows what engine will be fired up by your conversation at an intersection?
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Chuck Hagel: Rogue Defense Conversationalist?
Quick: Put this guy in charge before he goes back on script
Phil Stewart writing for Reuters today caught the newly confirmed Secretary of Defense in an unguarded moment. In that moment—behold—candor:
“We can’t dictate to the world. But we must engage the world. We must lead with our allies,” Hagel said in what appeared to be unscripted remarks.
It sounds like Stewart was caught off-guard as well, but maybe he should not have been, given Hagel’s record and further comments quoted.
This seems like a positive development to me. Let’s quickly put Hagel to work before he reads and signs on to our usual defense script—maybe he can work out that dialogue before anyone realizes what’s going on.
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Image credit: Reuters
Bending HIPAA Toward Spontaneity—Just for the Health of It
What if our propensity for over-sharing helped us get healthy?
Writing for Fast Company, Jennifer Miller reported on a study that showed the amazing stickiness of Facebook status feeds over other literature. Miller queued up the notion as “mind-ready content,” which is a pithy way of getting at the heart of the study. It seems the immediacy and poor spelling and bad grammar we expect in status updates all have a way of indicating spontaneity. And one of the study experiments suggested:
…the remarkable memory for microblogs is also not due to their completeness or simply their topic, but may be a more general phenomenon of their being the largely spontaneous and natural emanations of the human mind. (Major memory for microblogs abstract: Mickes L, Darby RS, Hwe V, et al.)
We’ve been witnessing the rise of social media to help people lose weight, get exercise, eat right, among a sea of many other activities. It is the telling and the reading—all on a fairly spontaneous level—that has great persuasive powers. Not to belabor this point, but it is not just reading about others’ success that can motivate behavior change. It is when we ourselves record our progress (and lack thereof) (in public and not) that also motivates change. If you’ve ever recorded the calories you eat in a day or the money you spent in a day, you know how awareness jumps to high alert.
Can these facts about human motivation and memory be harnessed by physicians? Should healthcare have a social component…generally? Privacy on the web—always a moving target—would seem to have hit the immovable object of what the US considers protected health information: those rules the medical community follows to ensure medical records stay private. But encouraging patients to share what they are comfortable sharing, is there a possible positive health outcome in that? Maybe. Maybe not. Who is itching to read about their friend’s infection (sorry: bad word choice)? I have no desire to read colonoscopy stories. But on the other side, will we start to see spontaneous-ish declarations from our friend the corporate doctor/robot that encourage us toward healthful habits—based on our Facebook feeds?
One wonders.
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Image credit: Ben Giles via 2headedsnake
How did you become a philosopher?
Claude Lefort on Meeting Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The questions with which Merleau-Ponty was dealing made me feel that they had existed within me before I discovered them. And he himself had a strange way of questioning: he seemed to make up his thoughts as he spoke, rather than merely acquainting us with what he already knew. It was an unusual and disturbing spectacle.
— From “How did you become a philosopher?” by Claude Lefort, translated by Lorna Scott Fox in Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 98
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The Etiquettes of Therapy/Religion/Business
When must we say “No!” to etiquette?
We don’t talk in elevators. Many of us avoid taking a cell phone call in a restaurant. We don’t use church language at work. And we don’t use plumbing words at church (those words that come with a pipe wrench in hand and head under a sink—according to Steve Treichler). We observe all sorts of behavior habits and patterns from day to day, all of which we call “etiquette.”
In Encountering the Sacred in Psychotherapy (Guildford Press, 2002), James and Melissa Griffith attempt to bridge a taboo of talking about God with clients in their psychotherapy practice. As you may or may not know, conversation is key therapeutic tool and Griffith and Griffith believe therapists too easily dismiss a powerful ingredient when they don’t allow for stories of how people’s faith effects whatever is the topic of therapy. The caveat is that Griffith and Griffith have opened themselves to hear all sorts of faith stories—not just those they might have considered orthodox. The two therapists tell of their own journey toward openness to the varieties of ways patients tell personal stories. By the way: let the record show that openness to hear the wide variety of things our conversation partners say is not the same as giving up on our deep-seated beliefs. We too often confuse openness with wishy-washy. Not the same.
I was initially attracted to the Griffith and Griffith book because of the details they reveal about conversations: how to help each other talk, the amazing nature of a simple conversation, and the mechanisms of speaking that prove so healing. Along the way I’ve come to realize they’ve done something substantial by breaking down a Berlin wall between problems and potential solutions (though perhaps psychotherapy practices have changed quite a bit since 2002).
Over the years I’ve found that colleagues at work will talk about all sorts of stuff in the course of a day, from money to sex to faith to the Twins to the boss to marriage and kids—plus everything else. This is to be encouraged—this flow of words is both natural and cathartic. It’s all about encouraging relationships (which are the primary source of joy for many at work) and work talk routinely breaks across walls of etiquette.
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Even My Agnostic Friend Says: Pray Your Day
Multiple Causation Skeins
A thinker I respect—someone who continues to pop out a learned book for her tribe of university professors every year or two—told me one of her habits for writing. As she gets down to the task each day, she records a “wish” in her journal.
“Call it a wish,” she said. “Call it a prayer. But it’s a focus. It is a thing I ask.”
This thoughtful friend comes from a Christian tradition but doesn’t abide the wonder these days. I’m hacking her advice to note this practice: I find myself asking—no, make that recording specific questions, specific prayers, at specific times as I start various projects through any given day. My ask/prayer is for all kinds of stuff that is on my plate for the day, from paragraphs of copy to working out a tangled manuscript to organizing my client’s technology tell.
My friend practiced her “ask” because of the focus it presented. The focus helped her move forward. That is what I want to do as well. And more: I still suspect there is wonder tied up in the minute by minute actions of any given day. I still think our meaning-making is composed of “multiple causation skeins,” to quote Mark Noll. So my ask is directed and hopeful and often historic (yesterday’s ask text) and tries to make room for much bigger things that could be at play through my tiny actions.
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Is Your Job Fulfilling? (Shop Talk #3)
Depends: what do you mean by fulfilling?
An art director and I were talking once about the different jobs we had done over the years. Al said he did some work as a freelancer he was not particularly proud of: wasn’t bad work, just didn’t highlight the creative style he had become known for. Why did he do it? “Well, I had a family and a mortgage and…you do what you gotta do.”
This is my story, too. It is everyone’s story.
An English student asked me how someone writing for an agency or corporation can find fulfillment when the writing is essentially voiceless. By that I understood she meant that the writing was not coming out of some personal deep need to communicate. I get what she means and I think this is an important question. But I also think we romanticize the production of art, novels and poems.
I’ve been arguing that work and art sometimes fit hand in glove and sometimes stay at opposite ends of our daily teeter totter. I’ve been arguing you need both to make either work. If you just have paying work, you are not exercising your creative self. If you just are creating, you’re broke and maybe you don’t have a place among real people in real life. Here are a few things that happen when work and art find a way to live together:
- Workmanlike attention: Our work with its deadlines and status updates helps us (sometimes forces us) to be productive. This is useful when it comes to delivering on our art or craft. Just getting to it—every day—is the way we produce anything. None of this waiting for enlightenment stuff.
- Having a place among people: isolation is not good. Those colleagues and bosses and clients who critique our work help shape it (no matter how painful). In the same way as we try to explain our craft or art to others, it gets shaped as well.
- It is your job to develop a voice. It may not be your voice, but it must be a believable voice. And to run that voice through the gauntlet of critics and peevish managers and lawyers and regulators is no small feat. The voice you produce can become a team or corporate asset. That is something to be proud of.
- Now is not forever. If you are not producing the art/poems/novels you intended, find a way to get to it. This usually involves owning up to the myriad excuses we present for not doing it. And if today’s work is less than fulfilling: start looking. It’s the steely beauty of the free market system that you can change. Recognize that this job is for now and not forever (more and more I’m convinced different seasons in life hold different tasks and levels of fulfillment. Plus, we are personally changing all the time, which means fulfillment is a moving target.)
Several of the hard-bitten copywriters I know would say “Who has time for writing outside the office?” To these I would say your own art and copy is a gift to yourself that pays back in meaning and insight.
There’s more to say about this. What would you add or subtract or say to my student?
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Low-Life Exiled Son of a Hooker
A Leadership Story You Never Heard in Sunday School
Jeff, son of Gil, was a fighter. Jeff’s mom was a prostitute—which deeply embarrassed Jeff’s brothers. Jeff’s brothers—born of Gil’s wife—told Jeff in no uncertain terms he was different, not up to par, had no share in the family business and had to go. So he did: Jeff moved off to a different country. In that different country he attracted all sorts of has-beens, slackers and ne’er do wells. Jeff’s low-life friends went out and did their low-life stuff together.
Years passed. Jeff’s brothers took power and a neighboring nation declared war on them. So they called Jeff to lead the attack. Jeff said, “Why? I thought you hated me.”
[under their breath: we still do you son of a…and maybe we hate you even more now but] “Come be our leader.”
So he did. He proved to be a hot-head and prone to rash vows, but Jeff first tried to reason with the opposing army. When that didn’t work, he went and busted them, which did work. But in the process he vowed something very precious to win the battle. It was a promise he would deeply regret and remains entirely barbaric today (hint: don’t wager treasures from your own home).
I read this story a few days back and it reminded me that all sorts of people get enlisted to lead us forward. My favorite ancient text points to a leadership tree composed of a family of deceivers, a tongue-tied retiree, a prostitute, and this son of a prostitute—just for starters. One thing these losers had in common, even beyond a sense of calling, was trust in some One larger than themselves as they faced a need way out of proportion to their tool box.
So…just because you don’t have what it takes to move your team or family or people forward, doesn’t mean you should not consider the task. Look for a way to trust, which seems a good way to proceed, given the frailty of our human condition.
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Image credit: Thom Ang via Frank T. Zumbachs Mysterious World
Dummy’s Guide to Conversation #14: Please Say More
How To Be A Verbal Philanthropist
I always like it in the classroom when the professor says to the student, “Please say more about….” It is a sign of active listening, a phrase which pulls the reluctant student further into the conversation.
“Please say more” is irresistible in its eagerness to hear more of a person’s thinking or reaction or opinion. It is also a demonstration that people and their thoughts and ideas are important. And it is a crazy generous way to engage in conversation. Generous because by nature we rush to fill the space between someone else’s words with our own thoughts.
When someone says to me “Please say more” I feel honored and free and engaged—almost like having been given a gift.
Being a verbal philanthropist doesn’t cost much—just your attention.
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Image credit: Neil Swaab via 2headedsnake
You might also like:
- Listen Up: #2 in the Dummy’s Guide to Conversation
- Listen to Other People’s Stuff:: #6 in the Dummy’s Guide to Conversation
Please Read Jonathan Sacks “The Dignity of Difference”
How to Escape the Orbit of Xenophobia
There is so much good to say about Jonathan Sacks’ The Dignity of Difference: how he welcomes the stranger, how he shows the impact of considering everything as a marketplace endeavor (this approach does not end well: people and relationships don’t fit the calculus of the marketplace), how the work of covenant might well be the glue that binds a global culture together and helps us overcome our stunning differences (just like communities have for centuries).
I like that Sacks grabs texts from the Old Testament to reframe very modern difficulties, like how Abraham honored the stranger, which speaks to our own ambivalence about people different from us. But Sacks also draws on old Jewish wisdom and criticism to help put those stories into context. I like how he pits Plato against Moses and dispels the notion of dualism and the notion of perfect forms. In doing this, he has opened a way from the ivory tower where pure academics lives apart from the rest of life. I appreciate his examples of Jewish scholars who were also workers. Thinking and working should be intertwined, much like Matthew Crawford wrote about so successfully.
You may get the sense this is a wide-ranging book, and it is, though a delightful read at each step. All this material—and he does make it fit together—is in the service of helping the reader reconnect with the wonder of what we can learn from each other. Rabbi Sacks Jewishness is a vital piece of the puzzle: as someone from a tribe that famously wandered for a long time, he thinks his people are uniquely positioned to welcome our world’s current batch of strangers. He may be right about that. In Sack’s view, people of true, deep faith learn to value the faith of others, even as they hold to their own.
My one critique has to do with the other end of the Bible Sacks quotes from freely. I would offer that the mystery of the very Jewish Jesus who was also the Christ greatly enhances the story of tolerance and inquisitive curiosity Sacks seeks to tell. The apostle Paul, in one his letters to his friends in Corinth, talked about being an ambassador to any and all, representing to the any and all the reality of being in relationship with God. My take on Paul, with a nod to Lord Sacks, is that those compelled by the Christ have every reason in the world to both hold firmly to their faith in the Christ while simultaneously listening deeply to those around them.
Many of you will stop here and point out how firm faith is more often used as a battlement from which to sling arrows. I don’t deny that has happened. And I confess we’ve not done well in that approach. But faith in the Christ offers both solid ground and excellent motivation for listening, though this is not the kind of thing you hear from the outposts of conservatism.
If you have opportunity to read The Dignity of Difference—do it. It is challenging and a tasty intellectual meal, and possibly life-changing.
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conversation is an engine 