Adjusting the Gray Matter

Tara Parker-Pope on How Meditation May Change the Brain: (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/how-meditation-may-change-the-brain/?src=me&ref=general) 

Money quote:

“M.R.I. brain scans taken before and after the participants’ meditation regimen found increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress. A control group that did not practice meditation showed no such changes.”

 The Energy Management Model (http://healingleaders.com/eplmmap.aspx) encourages us to manage our personal anxiety so that we might maintain resourcefulness and self-calm in response to reason-killing fear.

If meditation is a way to rebalance the gray matter, we would do well to include it in our daily living.

Howard

Spirits and the Shower

“Everyone who’s ever taken a shower has an idea. It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something about it that makes a difference”.

Nolan Bushnell – Founder of Atari

Here’s a story about how I came to understand how the spirits work for me. As you might also gather from the quote above, it’s also about the shower and the spirits who visit me there.  Bear with me. I’ll connect the dots.

I was facilitating a company meeting, where employees had gathered to build their first business mission statement and a set of shared values.

My facilitation process has evolved over the years.  Early in my practice, I led group thinking towards a specific spot on the horizon, one I could see but most others could not.  I was the so-called expert who was assumed to know exactly how outcomes should look.  Clients sometimes recommended my services to others saying they should be “Howard-ized”.

Fortunately, as I matured, I came to understand my role as guider-of-process.  I learned to encourage groups to reach whatever end point they came to know they wanted.  I learned to tell clients that countless ways, about most of which I knew nothing, are available to them. As I became more aware of my own truth-of-value, I relaxed.  Now, I start group process work with the statement, “Don’t worry, you can’t offend me when you disagree”. What I do now is tell stories, suggest basic formats for thinking, and remind participants when they have strayed from dialogue (good for creative thinking) into discussion (not so good for creative thinking). 

It is better this way.  Explorers grow and mature when they know they are finding their own way.

At this particular gathering, where an intimacy had begun to grow among the group, a team member revealed her fears about balancing life’s demands, including those of her job. She spoke with a quiet panic about how her energy resources are often completely depleted.  When depleted, she said, she loses the capacity to find answers to important personal questions and solutions to difficult work problems.  I’m pretty good at detecting obvious and even subliminal detachment in groups. I saw none around this particular table as the woman spoke.

Her courage to speak had given us a gift.  I invited dialogue among all in the room about resources where energy is abundantly available with helpful solutions to seemingly insolvable problems. 

I told a story which was still unfolding for me in the moments just prior to stepping into the room with them to begin our work together.

The night before, I told them, I had come to the end of another in a series of days focusing on a crisis building in my family.  I had spent several weeks engaged in this crisis with discouraging results.  Options, solutions, suggestions and coaching were having, in some cases, a worsening effect.  Facing another troubled night of sleep; knowing I would awake to more of the same; discouraged and depressed with my own “failure to fix”, I called on the universe for help.  I asked the healing spirits for assistance and guidance beyond my capacity to discern myself.  Then, I feel asleep.

The next morning – the morning I told this story to the group – I got into my shower.  Usually in the shower my mind is filled with random thoughts.  Some are relevant to the hours ahead.  Others seem to have nothing to do with anything other than to distract and tax brain energy and time. On this morning, I shifted between the family crisis (“what can I possibly do next?”) and the upcoming group facilitation (“how am I going to do”?) and a rich range of disconnect topics in between.

And then an inner voice:  “This is what you must know. You have lived a rich and remarkable life!” said the voice.  And my brain changed.  It dumped the topical processing and danced with the message.  I have lived an abundant life.  I have seen much, known experiences, learned to be more awake than asleep.  I have learned to be deliciously surprised and often amazed by something or someone every day.  It wasn’t gratitude I felt so much as calm.  It wasn’t so much excitement as a replenishment of creative energy.  I held it.

Minutes later; the next best constructive step to take in the family crisis came to me.  I acted on it immediately (it required a brief conversation on my mobile phone, which I did on the way to my engagement) and the result was immediately hopeful.

As I walked into the morning’s facilitation session, I thanked the spirits for their help, compassion and energy.

This is the story I told the group.  It was the only thing I could think to say in response to the woman who expressed her pain about “not knowing what do to” about the crush of daily problems, demands, anxiety and exhaustion.

The room was quiet for a moment.  Then, I heard a different voice – not the woman who had started all this – softly saying as if only to himself, “Holy Shit!”

So, I said one further thing; “The universe is full of resources for us.  These resources, call them compassionate spirits if you will, are eager to assist us with new ways to see and abundant energy for living.  All we have to do is ask and listen”.

Our group set sail for the rest of our morning voyage, playing with ideas, bouncing stuff off each other, refining and honing and producing a new way of being as a company of people with a clear mission and inspiring values to follow.

Each of us, perhaps I more than any, had learned the value of saying what I see.

Howard

I have a dream!

“Don’t look at my finger. Look at the moon!”

A recent experiment in animal intelligence revealed that dogs are in some ways, smarter than chimpanzees. You can point to something (like the moon) and the dog is intelligent to look at what you are pointing to. A chimpanzee will merely look at your finger.

On this day when, as a nation, we remember the life, the work and the dream of Martin Luther King Jr., it is tempting to look at the greatness of this man. To stop there, however, I believe would be missing the point of his life. This man is important not only for who he was to our nation but also for what he pointed to. I believe the essence of what he pointed to was the truth that we are all the same and worthy of love, dignity and respect. Every individual matters. Every individual can make a difference in our world.

The leader in me also goes beyond what he was pointing to; and considers the act of pointing itself. Here is the full richness of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  The courage of a leader to courageously stand up and say what he sees. Not only could this man see the barbed wire of racism in this nation, he could see beyond the barbed wire to a better world, a better nation, and a better person in each of us.

Friedman, in his Introduction talks about the need for leaders to get up in front of those they lead and give an “I have a dream” speech.  Giving voice to a vision – that’s the challenge before us as leaders. That’s looking beyond ourselves to the vision of what could be ahead. What’s your dream as a leader? And to whom do you need to tell it?

Steve

I can kill any plant…

“I can kill any plant in 2 weeks, provided it’s healthy when I get it!”

These are the words of a dear friend of mine as she bemoans the fact that all of her plants end up dying as a result of her inability to give them proper care.

I was reminded this morning of an important lesson as I went to water my own plants this morning. I believe plants have their own consciousness, their own intelligence and, if we listen, are able to communicate important lessons to us.

I started my task with the attitude that I want to get this task over with and check it off of my “2 do” list. I hurried through filling the watering pitcher using both hot and cold water as a way to fill it faster. I rushed over to water my first plant, a Norfolk Pine that has been with me for nearly 20 years, through two wives and two families.

While pouring the water and eying the next plan in line, I heard a thought in my head. You can relax and call it my active imagination if that makes you feel more comfortable. I believe these words came from my plant companion.

“I need more than water to thrive and to grow. I need your love and attention.”

Plants are cool that way. They don’t hide what they need. They don’t make you guess. Nor do they scream. They are honest and patient beings.

Before I was done watering all the plants in my house, my thoughts went to the present media-fueled controversy in response to the Arizona shootings. The debate has centered around whether inflamed political rhetoric contributed to this tragic event and if so who’s to blame. Responsibility has been tossed around like a hot potato among all involved. The debate seems to be whether or not this kind of rhetoric does actual harm?”

The question I have in my head is quite different. (surprise, I know) my question isn’t, “Does politically inflamed rhetoric, ripe with violent metaphors contribute to violence?” Instead, I would ask, “Does this way of speaking and behaving do anything constructive?” Does it build people up? If it doesn’t, what use is it? Why do we have to debate whether it’s harmful? Why can’t we settle this debate by asking, “Is it helpful?” (We know it sells, that should make us even more suspiciousness of using it.)

Plants have a way of picking up on our vibes and responding accordingly. Call it subtle energy, receiving electromagnetic impulses from our brains or our heart (the heart is a transmitter that can emit measurable electromagnetic waves up to 10 feet away). I don’t know what to call it but it’s there. My plants deserve my attention. Do the people around me deserve less?

I suspect if we could see the energy plants seem to “see” around us, we’d pay a lot more attention to what we put out there, in terms of our speech, our writing and even our thoughts. How about going beyond mere rhetoric or even our behavior (civility). How about considering practicing “energetic hygiene?”

Steve

 

Tucson

When we began this blog, Steve and I considered how to work with news-of-the-day stuff.  We want to be careful about this.  Our intent has been to focus on what we think we’re learning about leadership.   We believe this requires us to maintain an objective distance from hot topics.  We understand that overlaying our thinking on top of highly divisive popular conflict might impair the thoughtful rational contemplation needed to discern, consider and work with the Energy Management Model.  This stuff is, at base, about the individual’s choice to react to emotional hijacking with rational detachment.  Points of view are less important than responses to them. [ We wrote a newsletter piece during the 2008 presidential election comparing levels of observable non-anxious behavior between the candidates. One reader came down hard on us for our “partisanship”.]

Yet, this week, I am compelled to write something about the violence in Tuscon.

We are seeing the kinds of reactions to this awful event which illustrate how utterly toxic individuals and groups can become when seduced, influenced, and even led by emotional immaturity.  Specifically, we observe hyper-defensiveness.  Our “leaders” seem unwilling to engage in any meaningful dialogue about why such violence plagues us.  And, we are besieged with media coverage about those who are in a panic to absolve themselves of any small portion of responsibility when “crazy” happens.  While some call for more “civility”, I have heard no one ask him (or her) self  first, then others, to develop the maturity which civility requires.

 Hyper-defensiveness.  Blame displacement.  Red flags of emotional immaturity.

It’s an irony.  Those repressed emotional maturity lack the maturity to know.

There’s a whole lot of talk.  There’s very little or no quiet reflection.  Until that equation is reversed, we’re doomed to more of the same.

The Real Courage

In recent visits with employees in client organizations, I’ve been talking about the idea that organizational systems aren’t very much different from family systems.  I see some interesting facial expressions by way of reaction.  It is an idea, for some at least, which hasn’t been considered.  For many, the connection becomes immediately personal and includes a fair amount of discomfort.  I suspect one’s discomfort reveals a sort of shock that work place experiences are not all that different from family experiences.  

Once the surprise passes, I detect two different – even opposite – reactions.  One is a flat-out rejection of the idea. “No way am I going there”. (My 20 month old grandson is refining his skill of instant non-verbal head shaking when offered something he doesn’t want. His rejection begins before the suggestion is fully articulated. He’s catching on fast.)  Accepting the connection is too much to contemplate.  The line between personal life and work life has been carefully and fully defined.  Like the guy said in the movie, Love Actually, “It’s a self-preservation thing”.

The other group, once the idea is absorbed, begins a new thought journey.  “If this connection is possible”, the thinkng might go, “what are the implications for understanding more than I do?”  This is the courageous group.  These individuals are willing to give themselves gifts of contemplation and insight. 

Our Energy Management Model implies a starting point for us.  We can raise our level of self-awareness and deepen out understanding how energy can work for and with us.   We can know more about our relationship to energy and the non-anxious places to which healthy energy can transport us. With that clarity, we can see helpful parallels like similarities between work systems and family systems. 

Once we see clearly, we get healthier.

Howard

Resolved

Were I to make a new year’s resolution list (I never do, but humor me), it would have to include a few key things about leadership which I ought to apply to myself.  When Steve and I talk to leaders about “getting better”, we always start by suggesting they pay better and sometimes exclusive attention to themselves.

So my new years resolution should be about paying better attention to myself.

It should be about working on my own maturity.

Bill Plotkin, author of “Soulcraft”, has also written “Nature and the Human Soul”.  As I work through it, discerning new insights into how one transitions through life, some highly relevant thinking connects to Healing Leaders.  (Remember, Steve and I are beggars telling other beggars where we found some food.)  Plotkin writes, “When we take an honest look at the people in charge of the governments, corporations, schools, and religious organizations of industrial growth societies, we find that too many are psychological adolescents with no deep understanding of themselves of the natural environment that makes their lives possible.”  Psychological adolescents – often ourselves – possess still developing emotional maturity.  In this case, “adolescent” is not an indicator of physiological age.

Plotkin also writes, “…the most potent seeds of cultural renaissance come from the uniquely creative work of authentic adults. All such adults are true artists, visionaries and leaders, whether they live and work quietly in small arenas, such as families, farms and classrooms, or very publicly on grand stages.”  (The italics are mine.)

Food!

Pay attention to my own  psychological maturity.  Become an authentic adult.  My new years resolve.

Howard