Executive coaching typically focuses on individual development, not on group processes. There are very few coaches who can separate and then integrate the two—monitoring group processes as well as acknowledging individual talent.

Look for someone who is familiar with coaching communications, processes, and noticing and integrating talent.

Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address – May 21, 2005

David Foster Wallace

Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here’s another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious

guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”

It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there’s the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting

this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education — least in my own case — is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you

finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children

will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

We are social beings. We are social beings who learn about who we are through making sense of interactions. We create stories and narratives to make order of these events.

That means we learn through our experiences with others and deepen these by integration and self-reflection. The more deeply we live, the more complex our branch and root systems are.

As social beings, we seek to develop complexity and our brains are interwoven with faces of people and markers of places. Any person who interacts with others, who travels and integrates other cultures, or who reads with depth of interest has the chance to grow and change more than those who are shut off from new experiences. They will tell you that they have grown and changed through others.

Changes in our situations affect us as well. Sometimes not positively.

Trees which are easiest to move have fewer roots.  The oak is very difficult to move without traumatizing the roots, which must be bound and protected from shock during transference. The palm tree is easier to move as it has shallow roots.

If you have ever revisited an old neighborhood where you grew up, you may feel uneasy or sad if the house where you grew up is no longer being cared for.

This is experience and response is shared universally, by all human beings.

We carry our stories — our narratives. We are social beings who learn through experiences with others and deepen these by integration and self-reflection through creating narratives.

We carry in ourselves a sense of who we are and work to create continuous meaning. By considering our stories, we can care for our branches and roots and keep expanding in strength.

Leaders do the work of contributing to a better world, though they live with fear and self-doubt.

Steven Pressfield, one of my favorite authors on Resistance wrote: “Self-doubt can be an ally” (p. 39). The questions we ask of ourselves to be sure are often guiding us the direction we need to go. “Can I really do this?”

These days, as I write my dissertation and book, I’m asking myself, “Is my vision really inclusive?”

Yes. It is. I know it is. “Will anyone want to read it?” Yes. Someone will. That part is out of my hands. But I know that I am writing for others, not just for myself.

I am including my past knowledge of years of group psychology in my vision for leadership teams. This requires living with fear and uncertainty.

Why?

Fear and uncertainty are my signals that I am moving beyond what has been. Fear and uncertainty are markers of isolation, even temporary aloneness.

I see these as cues from evolutionary wiring, built into our DNA. In the past, to move beyond the group was to risk one’s life. If we are creative beings, we feel the fear as we are drawn to the threshold to the next thing.

Whether you are a choreographer or an actor, the fear guides you to the next open door to your next creation. Whether you walk through it is up to you. If you have disciplined yourself to move ahead, you will probably do it.

Your experience and self-control guide you through the process. You self-monitor, you check on the resources, and on the well-being of the co-creators. You cooperate for really big projects.

At each stage, there is an element of fear or what Pressfield calls Resistance. Resistance presents a lot of niggling questions. “Can I really do this?” “Can I enlist help?” “Can I explain this?” “Can I sustain this thread of agreement?” “Can I encourage others?”

This is not about being personally able to accomplish and envision the work, it is about meeting all the little stages successfully that draw in others to co-create: communicating, persuading, encouraging, and helping others to grow into the vision which you are creating.

So I embrace the fear and uncertainty as a sign that I am onto something significant and worthy of attention.

Thanks to people like Steven Pressfield I understand Resistance as a sign that I am approaching something worthy and worth developing some discipline to accomplish. So I adhere to a daily healthy discipline of showing up and moving ahead, no matter if the fear comes and goes. And if I weaken, I rest and move ahead, renewed and refreshed, knowing that I have accomplished the task of overcoming Resistance again. I have continued past the fear, discouragement, or self-doubt that is hard-wired into this DNA, past the voice that warns me not to move outside the cave.

Reference
Pressfield, S. (2002). The war of art: Break through your blocks and win your inner creative battles. New York: Warner.

Women are in the forefront of creating a new leadership paradigm.

“Results from a recent survey provide evidence that women bring distinct personality and motivational strengths to leadership roles — and do so in a style that is more conducive to today’s diverse workplace“ (Greenberg & Sweeney, 2005, p. 33).

Findings from the survey were that women leaders are more persuasive, have a stronger need to get things done and are more willing to take risks than their male counterparts. Women leaders are inclusive and collaborative. They combine openness, flexibility, empathy, and strong interpersonal skills. These characteristics are not restricted to women, but they are setting the bar.

Women leaders are especially skilled at seeing all sides of a situation, which enhances their persuasive ability. They can zero in on objections or concerns, weigh them appropriately, address them effectively and incorporate them into the grander scheme of things, when appropriate. Women leaders are able to do this because they genuinely understand and care about where others are coming from. This allows them to come at a subject from their audience’s perspective, so that the people they lead feel more understood, supported and valued.

Reference

Greenberg, H., & Sweeney, P. (2005). Leadership: Qualities that distinguish women. Financial Executive, 32-36.

Leadership is changing from competitive to cooperative.  Leaders were once singular heroes.  The singular hero is no longer enough to accomplish the size of tasks ahead.  Now we have ensemble leadership. As we move from soloists to ensemble players, to cover the multiple roles, we must understand the principles that allow for top performance in a team.

A shared leadership model or complementary responsibility model is replacing the single hero model (Kets de Vries, 2007). This impacts the coaching approach, changing it from adjusting individual performance to identifying and monitoring group processes.

However, functional teams don’t just happen, says J. R. Hackman, the Edgar Pierce Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at Harvard University leading expert on teams. Individuals in teams need to know their strengths, weaknesses, and have protocols for how to work together. The important thing is to exploit each one’s strengths and allow them to get help in the areas where they are not so great.

In his book Leading Teams, Hackman recommends 5 steps to supporting and creating functional leadership teams:

1. Teams must be real and clearly defined. People have to know who is on the team and who is not.

2. Teams need a compelling direction. Members need to know, and agree on, what they’re supposed to be doing together.

3. Teams need enabling structures. Teams that have poorly designed tasks, the wrong number or mix of members, or fuzzy and unenforced norms of conduct invariably get into trouble.

4. Teams need a supportive organization. The organizational context – including the reward system, the human resource system, and the information system – must facilitate teamwork.

5. Teams need expert coaching. Rather than focus on individual performance, which does not significantly improve teamwork, coaches should coach teams as a group in team processes – especially at the beginning, midpoint, and end of a team project. (Coutu & Beschloss, 2009, p. 103)

According to Hackman: “[T]he first few minutes of the start of any social system are the most important because they establish not only where the group is going but also what the relationship will be between the team leader and the group, and what basic norms of conduct will be expected and enforced.” (Coutu & Beschloss, 2009, pp. 102-103)

Hackman said that each team needs clear role and task definition, as well as an ongoing sense of freedom to improvise.

The team needs to feel okay about new ideas that arise, even ones that seem to question their present methods.

Teams that try to sustain harmony at all costs may reward only those who appear to be “team players.”   By refusing to reward,  or even ostracizing, those who question where they are going and how they are doing it, these teams may be losing out. Creative dispute can save a project.

Hackman, of Harvard, said, “There’s no one right style for leading a team…. The best team leaders are like jazz players, improvising constantly as they go along.”

Hackman says that one of the greatest detriments to a team is to lose sight of the objectives and be at a loss as how to communicate and check along the way. The next is to lose a sense of individual identity in the group: knowing who is strong at what.

According to Hackman, the key junctures to bring in a group or team coach are: at the beginning, to set a tone and communications standards and to identify the task; the middle, to review how this is going as a process, and to monitor the focus on the task; and the end, to review how it went and release the team from the task so that they can move on to the next ones. The complete team will be able to monitor its progress through these transitions.

Both experts say that teams require outside resources and support to be free to improvise, to develop their communications, to freely dispute and clash, and to get the appropriate range of leadership talent acknowledgement suited to the objectives. They need framework, structure and monitoring.

A well appointed team which understands its strengths and can identify its roles is definitely one step ahead of the game.

Reference

Coutu, D., & Beschloss, M. (2009). Why Teams DON’T Work. Harvard Business Review, 87(5), 98-105.

Kets de Vries, M. (1994). The leadership mystique. Academy of Management Executive, 8(3), 73-89.

Kets de Vries, M. (2004). Organizations on the couch: A clinical perspective on organizational dynamics. European Management Journal, 22(2), 183-200.

Kets de Vries, M. (2005). Leadership group coaching in action: The Zen of creating high performance teams. Academy of Management Executive, 19(1), 61-76.

Kets de Vries, M. (2005). The dangers of feeling like a fake. Harvard Business Review, 83(9),108-116.

Kets de Vries, M. (2007). Decoding the team conundrum: The eight roles executives play. Organizational Dynamics, 36(1), 28–44.

I appreciate Conan’s words of gratitude on The Tonight Show.

On a gentle morning before sunrise I went for a walk in a meadow and recorded this intermittent bird trill on my iPhone. As it started to rain, the bird kept singing. It was a lovely 3 minutes listening to the soft sounds of rain on earth and the bird communicating his enjoyment. If you play the recording and look at the photo I took from where I stood (also with my iPhone) you may get a sense of the moment. (On an iPhone download an app like Fstream to listen to this MP3).
You’ll hear the rain drops get heavier, some plopping on the phone.
Finally, I was getting damp so I turned off the recorder and walked down the hill back to a dry kitchen and cup of tea.
But the birds kept singing. 
Birdsong on a rainy morn before sunrise

Rainy sunrise

I have often thought that the way a person does a small thing reveals who they are. Even small things, small acts of kindness, can make a big statement. This is a story about a small act of kindness by Marilyn Mosley Gordanier, a global environmental pioneer and visionary in virtual education.

In 2006 Marilyn was invited to be the keynote speaker at the World Championship in Cooperation in Stockholm. The WCIC was for children to express their wishes to the politicians to protect the planet. The children asked for the protection of water. I had the honor of being invited to accompany Marilyn as a consultant to the Global 500 Forum, affiliated with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The WCIC Stockholm event, also affiliated with UNEP, was incredibly organized, involving the entire city. A fabulous woman named Kaysa had enlisted the cooperation of the city and many volunteers to host and move visitors from around the globe from place to place and from ceremony to ceremony. Streets were closed for the children to hold their parade and stands were erected in front of the Parliament buildings for the Water Ceremony, in which the children from various countries brought some water from their home to add to a specially made vessel–a bowl carved from ice.

It was three flights, over 30 hours, and no sleep between LAX and touch down in Stockholm.

As we deboarded the plane, a young woman with shoulder-length chestnut hair in a summer dress and low-heeled sandals greeted us at the exit, and took our bags to the car, saying she would be our driver and guide for the next 3 days.

Charlotte was strong of spirit and game for adventure, but she confessed to us that she was uneasy driving. (I supposed the public transportation in Stockholm is exemplary–unlike California, where we have little choice but to drive everywhere!) So Marilyn immediately offered to sit up front to keep her company.

As she promised, for the next three days, Charlotte took care of us, escorting us to the next celebration or entertainment, making sure we didn’t get lost in between. As a well-dressed, feminine political science graduate student, Charlotte was as informed about the city, nation and government as she was about lip-gloss!

The day after we got back to California, an email from Charlotte said:

“Dear Marilyn, I need to tell you again that I’ve never met people like you and Renita before…. One thing that made a big impression on me was on the day of your arrival when I was assigned to drive you to your hotel and you sat in the front seat with me to be supportive because I didn’t like driving. That was such a sweet gesture and nobody has ever done something like that for me before. I believe that you see people and that is a very good quality that not many people possess.”

(Charlotte also recommended a shade of lip gloss.)

I have thought about this moment of leadership… and how it touched someone so much that she felt compelled to write about it. And now, nearly 3 years later, even I can remember the impact of that gesture.

What I have found is that the leadership gesture, such as sincere consideration for others, has creative impact. Making a difference starts with the people right next to you. And leadership is often cumulative… seen in the accumulation of small acts.

In a competitive market it is more important than ever to establish trust. You can do this best by demonstrating congruency between your values and your business service — i.e., integrity.

Clinical psychologist and executive coach Manfred Kets de Vries, professor at INSEAD, Global Leadership Programme, has been put in a way that I like: achieving a link between your inner theater and your outer world, namely how you respond to your circumstances, such as how you run a business and interacts with others.

As Kets de Vries has explained so well, your inner theater consists of patterns you learned as a child and throughout the turning points of your life. Most people, if they are lucky have had more than one parenting experience.

It starts with your parent(s) and may continue to the next circle with grandparents, aunts and uncles, or older cousins.

Later it continues with teachers in school. Teachers should realize what a sacred trust is being placed in them. Teachers can uplift or shred the self-esteem of a child.

In adolescence, mentoring is sought. If an adolescent is fortunate, he or she will find a wise adult in whom to put some degree of faith, to learn to follow someone trustworthy. This is a profound experience, which should be cherished at any point in one’s life.

As an adult, whenever that time may come, one is the parent over one’s own growth. One has figured out how to chose friends, lovers, time alone, and pursuits that keep nurturing the growing sense of self.

Many call this the sense of Self. Whether you capitalize it or not is up to you. I capitalize it in the tradition of the I-Thou relationship, a term by which Martin Buber described in just two words, the pattern of connection between self-respect and social respect. The respect that one has for oneself continues to others, and vice versa. Thus, there is an interplay of strengthening.

As you enhance and strengthen your own life narrative, your story, you will have a surprising effect on others. They resonate even more with you.

It follows that self-transformation and improvement sets up an opportunity for others to shift in small ways. This is the beauty of the process: it affects your life, and through you, it affects others. The ripple effect, that has so often been talked about, and so often disregarded as cliche, has real meaning in the I-Thou relationships.

In my work, my calling and commission have arisen out of I-Thou respect. This has infused my narrative methods practice in coaching leadership.

I have a commitment to protect and provide conditions for your optimum inner theater to reorganize. My commitment includes respect for confidentiality, non-interference, and respect for the thoughts and experiences of others. I actively question inconsistencies. At a certain point, the inner theater begins to reorganize in a tangible way. This takes a surprisingly little amount of time. Then the client is able to build new structures in the inner theater, and then from this state, they can further reorganize the inner landscape in a self-empowering process.

While the effects are immediate, the inner theater keeps integrating and strengthening long afterwards. The inner theater, reorganized and restructured, works toward maximum evolution. The benefits continue and increase long after the session. This is due in part to the inner urge to be authentic, and is due in part to a ripple effect. Once the inner theater manifests clearly in one’s own mind there are at least two products. One is better brain functioning, and the second is the social impact, receiving feedback from others. These two muscles continue to work together to build upon themselves, increasing energy and effectiveness.

This cohesion of values in the inner theater is what I call integrity. Integrity leads to trust. And in an increasingly confusing world of chaos, this is a great opportunity to open doors of connection based on trust.