Being Powerful in the Moment

by Miki Kashtan

When I was leading a retreat in Ohio a couple of months ago, I was bussing my dishes one day, later than we had been asked to do it. The person who works at the kitchen, prepping, serving, and cleaning, was there in that moment. So I said something like: “I am regretting bringing the dishes here so much later than the time that we were asked and making life harder for you. I was caught in a conversation and didn’t notice the time.” To which she said: “Don’t worry about it, it’s OK.” Instead of letting it go in that moment, I persisted. I said: “It’s not OK with me. I know you are working hard here, and I wish to support you, at least to acknowledge that this has a significant effect on you.” That’s when she raised her head from what she was doing , turned to meet my eyes, and said, in an entirely different tone: “Thank you.” I knew that, for that small moment, she had an inkling that she mattered.

I am likely never to see this person again. Still, when I sat down after this exchange, I felt thoroughly satisfied. Within the one moment that life brought us together with each other, I knew I did the most that I could see possible to move in the direction of my vision of making life work for everyone.

I have had such interactions with people for many years. Perhaps because the training was, largely, about leadership and power, I had an insight that shook me up a little. I suddenly understood what it means to be powerful in a new and different way that tied it to the present moment. At any given moment, I am in a particular place, with exactly the people I am with, in the circumstances we are in. it’s within that context, moment by moment, that I can find my most powerful self. Whenever I think about the people I would wish to be with instead to be more effective, or the activities that would be more meaningful, or any other such thought, I literally take away from my power, in that moment. It became clear to me that if I can remember in each moment to choose the actions that most move in the direction I want to move within those circumstances, I am de facto becoming my most powerful self.

Invitation to Help Me Choose a Logo

by Miki Kashtan

After several years of blogging quite regularly, I am getting ready to upgrade myself to a new platform on Wordpress, and to do a variety of things (publish two books, create some learning products, etc) all of which could benefit from having a logo.

Amazingly enough, I have been gifted with the voluntary contribution of a graphic designer and NVC person from India. I love her art (she is also doing illustrations for another project of mine) and her heart, both.

Several sets of eyes have looked and looked at these possible logos, and we have narrowed it down to three options. I would like to get all your support in choosing. Please take a moment to look and decide, and let me know here which one you like . You also have the option of letting me know you like them all equally or none.

Here are the three options below:

Click here to give me the feedback. There's also room for you to leave comments at the bottom.

I plan to keep this open for a few days, closing end of day Monday the 19th.

Thank you for participating in my movement forward in this way.

Miki

Myths of Power-With: #6 - Unilateral Choice Is always Negative

When "unilateral" is oppressive

by Miki Kashtan

Along with the beliefs that hierarchies were fundamentally power-over structures, and hence irredeemable (see Myth #4), in the past I equally fervently didn’t see any role for the use of anything unilateral. Again, unilateral choice or unilateral force became synonymous with power-over, and I was committed to never imposing anything on anyone, for as far back as I can remember. When I first heard from Marshall Rosenberg about the protective use of force, I was quite uncomfortable.

It’s been quite a journey since those days to have arrived at the conclusion that I want to learn to overcome my aversion so as to be able to consciously choose to make unilateral choices, even to use unilateral force, when I believe that choice would attend to the maximum needs possible under the circumstances in which I find myself.

When it's protective use of force

The first of these is the protective use of force, both individually and collectively. I consider the entire project of nonviolent resistance to be an extension of the protective use of force as applied to structural situations. Just as in the case of stopping an individual from inflicting harm, nonviolent resistance uses the force of a collectivity of people to create conditions that would allow harm to stop, all the while remaining open to dialogue. 

In addition, I want to illustrate the challenges of this myth using two more examples, each of which illustrates another aspect of what the choices might be about that would lead us to unilateral actions that affect others directly.

Exploring Authenticity

by Miki Kashtan

My mother used to say, 'If you will lie, you will steal; if you will steal, you will kill.’
‘That is a bit harsh don’t you think,’ I said. ‘We all lie a little. Sometimes it is a way of being polite.’
Anger flashed across her face.
‘No, no, no, no, no! A lie is a lie. The grace that is the real oil that eases the frictions of life is truth spoken in love.’

-- from Halloween after Ms Sandy (A Short Story)
by Valerie Elverton-Dixon (at right)

Until some time in my mid twenties, I was unable to lie. Except as a child, and only to my parents. It wasn’t exactly a moral decision, more like a physiological impossibility. To this day, although I have trained myself, in some very exceptional circumstances, to manage to choose to lie, any time I assess that the context I am in cannot tolerate the full authentic self that I am, I disappear into some internal void, paralyzed and shut down. I see it as a limitation of mine, an inability to make choices about what I say or don’t say, to whom, and how. I experience this as dramatically different from simply being a value of mine that I choose to live by. Consequently, I gravitate towards those people and places where I feel free to express the fullness of who I am. 

Like so many of us, I grew up imbibing the implicit dichotomy between authenticity and care, truth and love, honesty and niceness. Whereas many people I know have chosen the polite end of this dichotomy, my internal deep demands on myself always painted me into a corner of being honest to the point of being intimidating and difficult for people to be around. Not that I don’t care. Rather, in the frozenness of struggling to find room to be authentic when I believe I can’t be, I found no access to expressing the care that almost invariably is part of the fuel for the authenticity.

When I discovered Nonviolent Communication (NVC) I learned how to integrate verbally what was in my heart to the point where more and more of the time my expression of self also registers as care in those hearing me. Surprisingly, the main vehicle that brought me to this integration has been the path of vulnerability I’ve been on since 1996. The less of my internal energy is consumed by the attempts to protect myself, the more I find peace and calm in expressing the truth that lives in me, and the more room I have inside to find and express the care, naturally.

Moral Dissonance

by Miki Kashtan

The term moral dissonance has a variety of meanings. I learned the meaning I will discuss here in a conversation with a woman who owned a grocery store in a low-income neighborhood in a mid-size town in the US. Her grocery store brought fresh, local, mostly organic food to what had previously been a food desert. It was teeming with life, and served more functions than just being a place where people could get food. Our conversation was about her anguish when she found no other solution than to call the immigration officers as a way to deal with the violence and disruption caused by a group of young men that started showing up in the neighborhood. It wasn’t so much that she was afraid of losing her livelihood if they stayed, she told me in visible distress. She trusted that she would be able to relocate to another district and do well financially. It was her concern that if she relocated there would be no services left for the majority of the local people. 

Her moral dissonance was about inviting in an agency representing aspects of the federal government she actively opposed (restricting immigration) in order to protect something that was precious to her (community empowerment and service). There was no way she saw to align all her values together in making that choice, hence the experience of dissonance.

In Defense of Complexity

by Miki Kashtan

When I was a girl, somewhere before ten years old, it was already clear to those around me that I wanted adventure in my life. At the time, I asked my mother why it was that the people and children in the books I was reading had all these astonishing adventures and I didn’t. It is only in the last couple of years that I had the sudden awareness that I did, indeed, grow up to have a life full of adventures, even if I’ve never tracked down a murderer or exposed an international network of crooks, as the heroes and heroines of my childhood books did.

It was this sense of adventure that was ignited when I received the itinerary for my recent trip to Thailand and realized that I had, twice, a six-hour stopover in Shanghai. Without thinking twice, I decided to find my way to Shanghai, to experience, smell, see, walk in that city, feel for myself what it’s like to be in China. I’ve been curious about China for many years, both culturally and politically, and I wasn’t going to miss this opportunity, despite the warnings of the travel agent.

When this turned into actually having people waiting for me at the airport, people from the Chinese Nonviolent Communication (NVC) community, I was so excited I could barely wait. Then I met Yin Hua, the person who’s been most influential about bringing NVC to China, who stayed in Shanghai an extra day after doing a workshop there (unrelated to me, just perfect timing), and the two of us got lost on the subway and barely made it to town. 

The second time I didn’t even know there would be people waiting. I was getting ready to go change money and hop into a taxi when I heard my name, and was greeted by three smiling women, local to Shanghai, who took me under their wings and into a car that one of them had, heading into just the perfect part of town, where old and new, beauty and rush, commercial and residential all mix together. We walked, we laughed, and we ate dim sum Shanghai-style.

Quite apart from this level of excitement, I also had an adventure of the heart and soul. One of the women who greeted me, Liu Yi, spoke English so well that I wondered where she learned it. That’s when I found out that she had lived abroad, in the West, for six years, then four years in a remote province in Western China before going back to her home town. What a story, I thought to myself, so many people would find this choice unthinkable, and yet she was so clearly radiant and pleased to be where she was. The inevitable why jumped out of my mouth, along with letting her know that I was living outside my own country of birth, and we launched into an intensive and satisfyingly connecting conversation. 

Myths of Power-With: #5 - All of Everyone’s Needs Are Equal

by Miki Kashtan

One of the core principles that shows up in just about everything I write is the commitment to holding everyone’s needs with care. This, with a specific focus on holding with care everyone’s needs for meaningful choice, is the core guideline I use for understanding how to apply the power I have. For as long as those [in my circle or organization, ed.] with less power than me have access to choice, I am satisfied with my use of power. 

That said, I’ve always been uncomfortable with the addition of the word “equal,” which changes the principle to “holding everyone’s needs with equal care.” Aside from the philosophical uncertainty about how equality of care can even be measured, I don’t see it as either possible or even desirable in all situations to hold all of everyone’s needs equally. In fact, I believe that the insistence on equality of this kind can compromise both the effectiveness and integrity of movements and groups.

This is why I have replaced the word “equal” or “equally” with “full” or “fully.” I can say, with far greater ease, that I can hold everyone’s needs with full care even when I don’t hold them with equal care.

As I see it, power-with means finding the path that, relative to the purpose at hand, supports maximal empowerment and participation on the part of all. That doesn’t necessarily mean equality, though often it would. Here are two concrete examples of when I see a difference.