The Extraordinary Challenge of Wanting to Create Change

by Miki Kashtan

In the last few days I’ve been almost haunted by realizing how often we want others’ behavior to change. We may want to see change in some small, annoying behavior that our child does, or a major harm created by the CEO of a transnational corporation. It has recently dawned on me that no matter the person or the behavior, creating change in another’s behavior is, in essence, a monumental task. And then again - why am I so surprised, when I know how difficult it is to create change within ourselves when we actively want to create such change? When, on top of how difficult creating any change is, we add the extra challenge that the other person may not want to create the change that we seek, it’s no wonder that we so often don’t manage to create the outcome we want outside ourselves.

I now believe that we can create change outside ourselves only if one of three conditions is in place. One is that we have enough resources at our disposal to stop the behavior that want to see changed, or to deliver such unpleasant consequences to the person doing it that they would choose to change. Another possibility is that the person recognizes a need of their own that motivates them to create the change we seek. And the last path is that through dialogue the person chooses to create the change because of care for our needs, or because of trust in our intentions for their well being. As someone who is committed to being a change agent, it’s quite humbling to recognize this. Humbling in particular because in my appetite for supporting change I am prone to attempting to stretch people into creating change beyond their own capacity to integrate it. If I truly take in what I am discovering, I may choose to change how I work for change, and, most certainly, my approach to working with others to support change in happening. I am early enough in my explorations about this that I don’t quite know yet how my work will be affected. For the moment, I am drawn to embarking on the exploration of what these conditions mean in three realms: personal relationships, organizational change, and social structural change. Given the bigness of this topic, I plan to focus, today, only on personal relationships, and come back next week to look beyond the personal.

When We Want Our Loved Ones to Change

Within our families and circle of friends, our clearest path to change is likely to be dialogue. I have long believed, and have experiences of it with several colleagues and my own housemate, that when two people have sufficient trust in their care for each other, a conversation about change in behavior can be relatively easy. The key is to be open to inquiry. If you do something I don’t like, there is no automatic formula about what would happen. I want to explore with you what it is that bothers me about the behavior and what it is that leads you to engage in the behavior. It’s only then, when we have that understanding deeply settled and trusted, that we can decide, together, whether you will change the behavior, I will adapt to it, or we will find a creative solution that transcends the either/or terms we began with. One of my little sorrows is knowing just how few people have experienced the magic that happens in such conversations when the goodwill is intact and the heart skills are there to support the flow of communication and connection. It’s not about having no conflict; it’s about having conflict that leads to more understanding and more satisfaction.

When We Want People to Change

by Miki Kashtan

Recently I heard from one of my friends about the challenge of dealing with a 15-year old who was using curse words at the rate of two a sentence. My friend, let’s call her Jenny, was very distressed about this, and wanted my help in figuring out how to get this behavior to stop.

This got me thinking. It was evident to me right away that if the same behavior came from her partner, she would have responded differently, and even more differently if this were a neighbor, a co-worker, a supervisor, or a staff person she supervises. What varies, I realized, is the nature of the relationship, not the effect of the behavior itself. In each type of relationship we have some belief about whether or not we have the “right” to expect a behavior change from the other person.

Jenny knows me well, including what to expect of me in terms of my parenting philosophy, so I knew she would be open to hearing my very radical views about parenting. So I shared with her my own memories, from very early on, of how I wanted to raise the children I thought I would have (before deciding at 17 that having children was not for me). I’ve been both blessed and cursed to have vivid and acute memories of what it was like to be a child in a world of adults. I thought then, and I still think now, that no one asks children if they want to be born or if they want to live with the very particular parents they have with their very particular preferences. The whole idea of children “owing” something to their parents never made sense to me. Not as a child, and not even as an adult. And yet I know that most parents have a sense of both responsibility and entitlement to influence their children’s behavior.

Resilience when Working for Change

by Miki Kashtan

I have often wondered why it is that there is so much strife and conflict in so many of the communities and movements I know of. This has been especially challenging to grasp when the groups I am talking about are generally committed to a vision of a peaceful world and the individuals in them aspire to personal integrity and compassion in their relationships.

I am very well aware I am not the only one wondering about this, and many have had things to say about it already. Some think of it as inevitable, part of human nature. Some think of communities as going through pre-determined phases. I find my heart sinking at these thoughts, because of my own deep sense of human dignity, and because I have so much faith in our capacity to transcend any static notion of who we are or how things must unfold.

Some others invoke centuries or millennia of practices of domination which have been passed from generation to generation through our education, through wars, through our governance and economic systems, and through the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be human and how things should be. In this view, each of us is brought into this world and becomes part of these dynamics regardless of what, if anything, is our essential human nature. Tragic as this view is, I find it more palatable, more consistent with my own heart longings, because it leaves room for the possibility both that as individuals we can overcome our personal habits, and that as a species we might learn collectively how to create new systems, structures, and practices that will support us in interdependently engaging with others to create a world that works for all of us and the rest of the natural world.

Why We Want to Create Change
I don’t know why it took me so many years to ask the simple question I discovered today: why it is that any of us would work for change - either as personal growth or as our contribution to social transformation. Since I think of most everything through the lens of human needs, a part of the answer became immediately obvious to me: we work for change because our needs, on balance, are not met in how the world operates or in how our individual lives unfold. Anyone whose needs are mostly met is less likely to want to create change.

With this clarity came another: if our needs, on balance, are not met, that’s likely to mean that we have less resilience. Resilience, in the online English learners’ dictionary, is defined as “the ability to become strong, healthy, or successful again after something bad happens.” As a colleague once remarked, when our needs are often not met, any one experience of unmet needs can become unbearable, whereas if our needs are overall met, any one experience of unmet needs is much less significant.

The implication of this simple insight were unsettling. Could it really be that those of us who work for change are, in some ways at least, less resilient because our needs are less often met? If so, wouldn’t that be a reason why more things would appear to us as attacks, people slacking off, or the like; why more of the time we would feel afraid to say what’s on our mind because the weight of potentially not being received can be more debilitating; or why we would get angry easily when conflicts arise?

Young Haitian Soccer Players after Earthquake

Sources of Resilience
If, indeed, our lack of individual resilience is a contributing factor to the many challenges of working with others and trying to collaborate, then if we want to work for change we need to find sources of strength, activities, relationships, or other strategies that nourish our sense of well-being so that we can face situations with more presence. The possibilities are almost endless, and I would love to see a focused discussion in many circles about what can add to our resilience. To get started, here are some sources of resilience that I know have worked for me and others.

Solidarity: The experience of being in community with others who are experiencing the same hardship can be a source of immense support. Bell Hooks, among others, describes how segregation in many ways helped African Americans develop pride and resilience, because they developed an entire parallel society with many successful role models of business people, teachers etc., while integration has sapped both for many. Much would need to be explored about what conditions make this kind of togetherness supportive, and when the very issues of strife and conflict can interfere with the added resilience.

Gratitude: I have already written about how a practice of gratitude can provide immense fuel for life. After a year of consistent and daily gratitude practice, I find that I can now have immediate access to gratitude even in tough moments, and literally feel the increased resilience that arises spontaneously from tapping into gratitude.

Faith: As someone who lives without a god or higher power of any kind, I am well aware that people of faith often have much more capacity to withstand challenges and difficulties. God, or any other source of faith, is something to lean on, some profound heart assurance that a force exists that will bring about a longed-for outcome. For just one example, I imagine that for Martin Luther King, Jr. to say that the arc of history bends towards justice required faith. In the absence of a transcendent source of faith, my own relies on human dignity, on our ability to transcend circumstances, on the grandeur of our spirit. I aim to cultivate and deepen my faith, so I can lean on it more in times of great challenge, especially when I feel helpless and in despair in the face of the immensity of human cruelty or lack of care that I so often perceive in the world.

Spiritual Practice: If conflict involves temporary or longer-term loss of empathy, compassion, generosity, or care for self or others, this means that those capacities get most “tested” in those times when others (or ourselves in many cases) act in ways that don’t work for us. This has led me to recognize that we can increase our resilience by embracing a consistent spiritual practice that strengthens our ability to withstand unmet needs, so can access choice in how to respond to those difficult moments.

Vision: I wish so much that we lived, already, in the world of my dreams, a world without coercion, based on willingness and generosity, trust and sufficiency; where enough needs are met for everyone that violence becomes a thing of the past. For now, that vision in itself becomes a source of strength for me. I have found, repeatedly, that clarity of vision sustains my energy even in difficult circumstances. As I am reminded of possibility, my passion rekindles, and I find more capacity to accept the obstacles along the way.

From Mistrust to Collaboration

by Miki Kashtan
Lately, I have been invited to support managers at different levels who attempt to embrace a collaborative approach to management within their organizations. Despite their clear intentions and strong commitment, I have seen a pattern arise that slows down and sometimes even subverts their efforts. The good news is that tips exist for addressing the factors that interact to create this tragic consequence.

Residual Habits

Our intentions are rarely sufficient by themselves to change long-seated habits. Since hardly any of us were raised with models of collaboration, we have learned to retreat or charge, give up or attempt to impose, direct others or follow their lead. For many managers this shows up as frequent bursts of anger. Even when managers embrace the intention to collaborate, without the existence of role models they are likely to revert to anger when they are not happy with someone’s choices. This occurs even if they are deeply committed to honoring everyone and creating a culture of experimentation where choices are never penalized.

Tip: Transforming patterns of angry behavior takes ongoing effort and commitment. Two key practices are willingness to show up vulnerably in our full unprotected humanity when things aren’t how we like them, and the deep work of embracing uncertainty and letting go of making things be exactly what we want.

Unrealistic Expectations

After some years of working in various settings, I have come to believe that many people have very, very little faith that anything can change. They go to their workplace day in and day out bracing themselves for what they don’t like in the environment, especially in terms of relationships with bosses. Even when they care deeply about the actual work they do, they still protect themselves on the relational level. Initially, what took me by surprise was seeing how the longing for respect and care don’t disappear, they just go underground. Once I start doing anything with the management, employees have a small surge of hope which unfortunately lacks any resilience. One city government I worked in, for example, I met first with management and then with the workers separately. I received a unanimous request from the workers to train the management first. Management agreed, and the workers were satisfied with this choice. Then, when I came to meet them again a few weeks later, the workers were entirely demoralized, because they expected to see change happen overnight in order to be able to hold on to any sense of hope that change could happen at all. Given that change of this kind takes consistent effort to integrate and make visible, this is a particularly tragic stumbling block in shifting to a culture of collaboration. 

Tip: One way to address unrealistic expectations for immediate change is to acknowledge the expectations explicitly. For a manager to make such an acknowledgment is consistent with the willingness to show up as fully human. That willingness can offer reassurance to employees that the work and the manager’s commitment are sincere. Managers can also ask for feedback on  their ability to create the shift to collaboration, which sends the message to  workers that their voice counts and that their input may be taken seriously.

Disempowerment

Managers are not the only ones with deeply ingrained habits. Time and again I see situations where the person in the position of power is seriously committed to transformation while others continue to respond in a disempowered manner. They withhold their opinions even when asked; they say “yes” when they would rather not do something; they don’t ask for support when they need it; or they put up with behavior that distresses them without ever providing feedback. The net result is that the manager is left too much to their own devices for creating change that in any event is high stakes and difficult to integrate.

Tip: If we are truly committed to creating  change, one thing we can do is to take on employees’ mistrust and go out of our way to support their empowerment to meet us collaboratively. This goes hand in hand with all the other practices. We are called to invite feedback and express gratitude even when it hurts, so that we can continue to learn and  employees have a sense of mattering. We are also called to appreciate people when they say “no” to us so that they can increase their sense of freedom and choice, without which collaboration is meaningless. When organizational norms, often not of our own doing, interfere with more options for collaboration, we can be transparent about what is or isn’t possible, and a focus on facing the reality of the situation collaboratively.

Signs of Hope

The cultural context in which we all operate is not set up for collaboration, leaving us without models to emulate. Most of us grew up in an environment of enforcement and authority, and have likely internalized an either/or perspective that makes it challenging to engage collaboratively when there are differences in perspective or wishes, especially when those are compounded by power relations. Nonetheless, we can move towards greater and greater collaboration through understanding these patterns and embracing the willingness to stay the course for transformation, even in small ways. Change can come from unexpected places, too. As soon as even one employee becomes empowered to tell the truth and work collaboratively with the manager, others can see and learn, and the entire atmosphere can change. Wherever we are within an organization, if we plant seeds of change and water them patiently over time, we can harvest the sweet fruit of collaboration.    

Separation, Connection, and World Transformation

by Miki Kashtan

Last night I saw the movie I am by Tom Shadyac. In case you don’t know – Tom has been a writer and director of numerous comedy films which have netted him billions of dollars. In the course of the last number of years he has been on an incredible journey of shifting his values from success and consumption to simplicity, love, and compassion. He sold his mansion and established a foundation with the money. Here’s what his website says: “Ultimately, the goal of The Foundation for I AM is to help usher in a more loving, kind, compassionate, and equitable world for all.” The movie tells some of his story, and also sets out to answer two key questions through interviews with a number of well known thought leaders such as Desmond Tutu, Howard Zinn, and others: What’s wrong with the world, and what can be done to change it?

I enjoyed the movie tremendously. I appreciated the footage that served as background to the interviews, and his appearances on the screen that were interspersed with the interviews. It’s a rare documentary, in my experience, that manages to balance information, a strong point of view, and entertainment. This is what I experienced with this movie. I was inspired by seeing someone make such a personal journey of rededicating his resources to a cause other than personal consumption. I very much recommend it to anyone interested in these topics.

In addition, I have asked very similar questions, and have been thinking about the overlap between the movie’s answers and my own, as well as differences that were provocative and have already enriched me. The movie focuses on the profound role that the story of separation and its derivatives – scarcity, competition, and massive consumption – play in keeping war, domination, and poverty in place. I also was so happy to see a movie that shows some of the evidence that has been mounting in recent years that is challenging the core assumptions of separation. This evidence is so strong now, that researchers at UC Berkeley talk about “the survival of the kindest.” All of this was very compelling.

It was the “what can we do about it” part about which I was left puzzled and somewhat disappointed. It was a version of “Be the change” that leaves me lacking confidence about achieving the phenomenal mobilization towards change that I believe is necessary. The prescription, if I understood it correctly, is to make a commitment, all of us, to shift our internal story to one of love and compassion, which is, as the movie suggests, the fundamental nature of being human. If all of us do this, says Tom, then the shift will happen.

The movie calls for a massive waking up, a critical mass of people changing their actions and choices. What’s missing for me is first taking a serious look at how we can get enough people to wake up sufficiently. The challenge is immense, as I see it, because we are called to change millennia of deeply ingrained habits of separation that are often activated immediately when we see others take actions – personal or otherwise – that we don’t like. I am called to respond to this challenge. I want to find ways to sustain the loving orientation beyond the moments of epiphany. I want to learn more and more what keeps the story of separation so deeply ingrained. I want to provide vision, inspiration, and concrete practices that support making loving and vulnerable choices despite the strength of the message of separation.

The second missing piece for me is an understanding of the systemic and structural dimension of the life we live. It’s not just the stories in our heads and bodies. It’s also the organizations we have created, the institutions and norms that govern our lives, the economic engines of allocation of resources, the schools that educate our young, and the societal legacy of so many forms of separation that are beyond attitudes of individuals. Perhaps I am being small-minded, and I am open to that possibility. I simply can’t see that enough individuals can make enough change and create enough connection between them to shift that entire structure. To use a recent example, so many Egyptians came together and managed to topple the government. I am thrilled and in awe of this event. Does it challenge the fundamental logic of having a government that’s elected in particular ways and into which ordinary people don't have a real say except during the moments of election? I don’t think so!

Riding home I continued to discuss these rich questions. Then an idea arose that gave me some pleasure, much curiosity, and a little hope. If, as I also believe, we are equally capable of love and compassion as we are of conflict, protection, and separation, then there is likely an ongoing flow of opening and closing that happens to each of our hearts, in an entirely different rhythm and orientation than anyone else. Sometime we converge and have moments of exquisite love and intimacy. Sometimes we diverge and can’t connect. Tom shared, for example, that he noticed how much love there was in church communities that then doesn’t stay for the daily living outside the service. Something happens in times such as the Obama election that galvanized so many people, or the Egyptian uprising, or even something as small as a group of people getting together to share their experiences in a workshop. That something may simply be a form of synchronization of rhythms and orientation of the openness. How this happens is entirely mysterious to me. I am clear that people like Gandhi and King or the young people that organized the Egyptian mass demonstrations knew how to do this. Somehow they could issue a message that included enough vision and enough attentiveness to the real suffering of people that everyone could open up at once and a movement was born. That makes sense to me, and helps me understand how change becomes possible.

I am called to respond to this challenge, too. Beyond the individual level of functioning, I want to keep learning and teaching ways of working together, of creating organizations and systems that embody the same principles we love as individuals, and help us synchronize and move closer to harmonious functioning. There is much to learn, and much that is already known about taking love, heart, and empathy to the larger levels of functioning. I want to hold out, without wavering, the real, tangible, and practical possibility of establishing social systems that make room for everyone to thrive.

Personal Growth and Social Change (Part 3)

Part 1 of this topic was posted on Aug 8 and part 2 was posted on Aug 10.

The person who raised the question prompted this mini-series concluded that social change takes “groups of people organizing together [and] taking visible, observable action in the world to help create change.” In this next post I want to take on the extension of the practices and consciousness of nonviolence to the group and organizational level.

Maximizing Willingness for Efficiency and Sustainability
Two challenges that people face when coming together to organize and work for change are how to function together efficiently in the face of different opinions and wishes, and how to sustain the energy over time. Focusing on willingness as an organizing principle of group functioning addresses both of these challenges.

Willingness is distinguished from preference on the one hand, and from any notion of what should happen on the other hand. Attempting to reach decisions that everyone is happy with is likely to result in more meeting time in groups than most people can tolerate, and is one of the obstacles many people experience to wanting to go to meetings and commit to working with a group. Even with time and heated discussions, often fatigue and resignation result in some decision being arrived at rather than a fully chosen decision that is acceptable to all.

In my experience, to reach collaborative decisions we need only focus on what people can live with willingly and distinguish is from what would be their most desired outcome. With sufficient facilitation skill and attention, many decisions can be arrived at with surprisingly little tension and within a timeframe and level of engagement that are much easier for people to experience. The essential tools are the capacity to identify and create collective ownership of needs, and the skillful application of a search for willingness rather than preference. The underlying principle is the unwavering commitment to having everyone matter, holding everyone’s needs with care. Both the commitment and the skills are necessary to be able to maintain togetherness in the face of differences.

On the other end of the spectrum another common challenge results from doing things because of thinking they should happen rather than because we are truly willing to do them. Taking action based on “should” thinking can often breed resentment or burnout. I am more and more able to accept having things not happen rather than having them done without true willingness, so that whatever does happen can be sustained over time without stress. I think of it as a deep discipline to be willing to let go of whatever has no one willing to do it. I was inspired in that growing commitment by the words of Thomas Merton: "To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.”

Leadership and Power
One of the challenges I see to people organizing to create change is what I see as an aversion to power and authority. After experiencing the ways that power can be used to create so much harm, many are understandably challenged to see a useful role for the exercise of power, and prefer to create leaderless groups in which everyone participates equally and fully in all decisions. As I already suggested above, in the absence of skillful facilitation such practices often result in conflict, and/or inefficiency, and/or lack of decisive action (often, though not always, as some groups do function for years on the basis of fully participatory consensus).

If we are to succeed in organizing large masses of people to create a world that works for more and more people in more and more ways, we will need to figure out how to offer effective leadership rather than no leadership at all. I envision structures that empower people to take leadership and responsibility and offer support and feedback to those who do. Instead of abdicating power as a way to ensure we don’t recreate structures of domination, I see a possibility of shifting from using power over people to using power with people, in ways that attend to everyone’s needs. The challenges are immense and yet surmountable.


In my next post I plan to attend to two remaining pieces to complete this mini-series: what are the kinds of actions that people might take which would be consistent with a nonviolent approach to social change, and what are the systemic implications of a needs-based approach to social organizing.

after the fact: before the next post I ended up posting 2 parts of a response to this one, to which I am linking here for anyone who wants to read the whole mini-series sequentially.

Personal Growth and Social Change (Part 2)

Part 1 of this topic was posted on Aug 8.


NVC in Support of Social Change
Most often I almost forget that NVC is an acronym that contains the word “communication.” Instead I tend to think of NVC as a set of principles and practices to integrate the consciousness of nonviolence into all levels of living:

• Personally, practicing NVC offers one way of accepting Gandhi’s invitation to bring nonviolence to one’s thought, word, and action.
• Interpersonally, NVC conflict resolution and dialogue tools can contribute to the conversations, negotiations, coalition building, and other organizing efforts which are indispensable for any attempt of working with other people towards structural or systemic goals.
• On the group level, using NVC for facilitation and decision making can contribute to effective functioning for groups and organizations working for social change.
• On an organizational level, NVC provides a framework and offers concrete steps for transforming use of power in ways that attend to everyone’s needs.
• Finally, on the systemic level, an NVC perspective allows for envisioning and creating structures, policies, procedures, and hopefully some day even laws that make for a world that works for all.

The Inner Work of Nonviolence
Embodying nonviolence in a world that for several millennia has been structured around separation, scarcity, and mistrust requires considerable commitment, courage, and love. As it applies to being part of groups and organizations of human beings attempting to create change, accepting the call to principled nonviolence entails at least the following aspects of consciousness transformation:

• Working towards vision rather than against “what’s wrong.” Even when the actions themselves are obstructive in nature, such as acts of civil disobedience, Gandhi’s and Milk’s examples suggest a focus on civil disobedience that models the world being created rather than being entirely an act of protest.
• Seeing the humanity of everyone, including people engaging in behaviors that appear harmful. Jesus was talking about loving one’s enemies, and Gandhi was talking about finding love for those who hate us. In either case, the fundamental principle is of sufficiency inclusivity that even working to stop people from inflicting harm is done with love and respect for the person.
• Engaging in the ongoing and demanding work of opening fully to despair, dread, and other emotional responses that arise in response to what is happening in the world. In the absence of doing this work, many people, including those working for social change, tend to numb out or suppress the depth of their feelings and find it hard to operate based on passion rather than anger and urgency.

Interpersonal Practices for Change Agents
Every attempt to create structural change entails being in relationship and dialogue with other people. Working with others to create change means learning to collaborate across different understandings of how to create change; across differences of working styles and personalities; and across differences such as class and race. Beyond the immediate group of people working together, becoming visible and effective when working for change also involves building alliances with other groups and organizations, as well as connecting with people who may be skeptical about or not already in alignment with the goals or strategies of the group. Lastly, creating change ultimately necessitates supporting people, especially those with power, in shifting their views and making different choices than the ones they are used to. Once again, NVC practice supports connection in these various different situations. Here are some of the principles and practices that can support conflict resolution and even prevention:

• Willingness to listen to people deeply and with empathic presence even when in significant disagreement. This focus can immediately contribute to connection, trust, and mutual respect. The experience of being heard often results in emotional settling, inner peace, and curiosity about the other person.
• Speaking authentically based on what is wanted rather than based on what is “right” or “fair” or “just.” Speaking from the heart of personal experience and need tends to de-polarize difficult situations and opens up a process of shared exploration of strategies rather than argument about what should be done.
• Expressing care for everyone’s needs, perspectives, and opinions regardless of disagreement. Actively focusing on transcending separation, scarcity, and mistrust and seeking solutions, strategies, policies, and processes that work for both parties to a dialogue.

In my next post I address the remaining three levels (or it may take more than one more post). For now, I want to extend an invitation to anyone who is particularly attracted to work systematically towards embodying nonviolence more and more fully. A few months ago I launched the Consciousness Transformation Community which is dedicated to learning about, living, and sharing the consciousness of nonviolence in daily life and in social change work. Once a quarter we hold an open teleconference call for anyone who is interested in exploring the community, and the next one is this coming Sunday, August 15th, 5 – 6:30pm Pacific time. Click here for more information about the community and about the call.

by Miki Kashtan

Personal Growth and Social Change (Part 1)

by Miki Kashtan

From Tikkun Daily's Art Gallery

Many of us who practice nonviolence carry a vision of a world that works for all, where everyone’s needs matter and people and the planet are cared for. None of us know what will or could bring about our vision. Will it be a miracle of a single leader transforming the cultural assumptions and practices? Will it be a world collapse which will create a void and an opportunity to restructure society? Will it be a critical mass of people who inhabit different forms of human relationship? Will it be a nonviolent revolution? Will it be alternative structures that gradually attract more and more resources and people to them? Or will it be something else none of us can imagine?

Is “Being the Change” Enough?
Not knowing, how can we predict what actions that we engage in could potentially lead to social change? Here’s how one reader has expressed this challenge: “I don't have the clarity I would like about your distinction between personal growth and social change work. Particularly within the NVC framework, where we intend to create change without coercion. We can model the values we want to see; we can invite, request, even try to persuade or instruct when the occasion seems appropriate, but we're not forcing change on anyone. And so a big part of the force for social change that I am imagining comes from being the change that you want to see in the world, which to me sounds like personal development.”

Not knowing what leads to change, I am holding great humility regarding what I am about to say. I really don’t know.

Understanding Structures
Although I can imagine the possibility that if enough individuals undergo a personal transformation the result will be structural and systemic transformation, I have serious concerns about this approach. I do hold that organizations, governments, and other social structures are fundamentally based on a set of agreements, usually implicit, to which individuals give their consent, usually unconscious of having done so. Nonetheless, I also believe in the essential necessity of thinking and acting on the systemic/structural level, not just the personal level. What does it all mean?

Here are four examples of what structural change can mean:

• Changing the way the economy functions. Our current economy is based on exchange and profit. Other models exist. For one example, an alternative economy could be based on gifting and needs.
• Changing the way governments run. Current governments have executive power resting in one or few individuals. One other example could be a government based on citizen deliberative councils for policy decisions (see the Tao of Democracy, especially chapters 12 and 13).
• Changing the way the justice system operates. Most current justice systems are based on a retributive model of punishing people for what they have done. Instead, more and more experiments with restorative justice systems are taking place in the world. I am personally familiar with one such approach, called Restorative Circles, which was initiated by Dominic Barter in Brazil and has been operating with remarkable success since 2003.
• Currently, more often than not, international disputes lead to war. Instead, methods of international mediation can be employed to de-escalate and resolve conflicts and create robust agreements.

Beyond Personal Growth
On the personal level, the practice of NVC supports the inner work necessary to maintain a stance of nonviolence even in difficult circumstances. However, personal growth, “being the change,” is only one aspect of the work. How do we work towards creating change at the structural level? However we conceive of leverage points for structural change, we would need to organize and act with others to create shifts. For that, we need concrete practices to bring our consciousness and practice of nonviolence to beyond the personal, inner work. Their absence results in at least three interrelated phenomena:

• Organizations made up of people with a high degree of personal capacity are nonetheless mired in conflict, mistrust, and inefficiency.
• People with an understanding of and a commitment to interdependence are nonetheless operating as collections of individuals instead of a community of mutual support and effective feedback loops.
• Individuals committed to a vision of care, inclusion, and distributed power form and run organizations based on command and control practices, and others are unable to stand up to their leaders with love and clarity.

In my next post I address how the practice of NVC can address all of the above phenomena as well as offer a perspective that allows for envisioning, and eventually designing, social systems based on attention to human needs, care for nature, stewardship of resources, and respect for the interconnected web of all life on this one planet we all share.

Making Room for Being Different

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel different, even when I was very young. Being different is as familiar to me as breathing and eating. Last week, as part of the Institute for Sacred Activism I attended, I experienced a major shift in relating to being different. Because the path I am walking is the path of vulnerability, and because I have some hope that what I experienced may be of use to others, I decided to write in some detail about the opening that happened and about what I learned as a result.


Let me start from the end. I have had a storyline for most of my conscious life that says there is no room for me in the world. What I came to see this past week is that I can be different and there can still be room for me. I also had a shocking realization that the idea that there is no room for me leads to feeling separate, and has been hampering my effectiveness in the world.

Being different is not something I can or want to change. My responses to many things are different; what I like and dislike tends to be different; I often want different things from what others around me want; my sensitivities are generally far more pronounced than those of people around me; I see things others don’t see (and don’t notice things that others do); I articulate things differently from how others do. I have complete acceptance of all of that in me, almost all the time. It took years of work to get to where I like who I am and feel at peace with myself about where I am.

The difficulty has always been what to do with my difference. In my habitual way of being, whenever I have had a response that’s different from another person’s I could only see two options. One was to hide my response, suppress my difference, not ask for what I want, and endure the pain of inauthenticity, which is for me pretty excruciating and vivid. The other was to express my response, share my difference, or ask for what I want, and risk (and often experience) the pain of disconnection or conflict.

I already wrote in my previous entry about how I came forward and shared with the group at a time that I felt very separate. When I was writing about it I hadn’t taken in that I was breaking a longstanding pattern. Now I see it: I found a way of being fully authentic that created more connection instead of less.

Then I did it again towards the end of the week. I let people know, again, that I was in a different place from where most were, and that I was speaking in order to make room for myself at the table. Once again the discomfort of feeling so separate and inauthentic melted into tears, and I was back in the flow of life. And once again I heard back from people that they appreciated my doing it.

In this moment I can see the possibility that there can be room for me to express my response, what I want, what I like, what I feel sensitive about alongside the other person with their responses, likes and dislikes, and what they want, however different the two are. Neither of them negates the other. There need not be separation between us just because we are different.

Since then I have also learned how my inner experience of separation reduces my effectiveness. Because I have lived in an either/or consciousness about being different, and specifically assuming that my responses would not be welcome, I have been holding a layer of protection around myself that was invisible to me. When I have chosen to hide, I would become stiff and less flowing. It’s easy to see why that would result in less receptivity to me. Even when I have chosen to express, and despite all the years of working on vulnerability, I know that I have been expressing myself with edges because of the protection. The result is that often people experienced themselves being judged by me, whether or not that was true. It’s my separation, my protection, that came across as judgment. Once again, the result would be less receptivity to me. In both cases my lack of trust acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If I can learn and master the possibility I now see for bringing myself forward with much more openness and humility, making room for myself and thereby allowing room for others, I imagine something fundamental can shift in my experience of being alive. I can, perhaps, finally come to a place of true belonging, and thereby reach and connect with more people without separation between or within.