 Themes |
| Themes |
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| Our stories led to several common themes, and sparked new questions... | ||||||
| Joy and Sorrow: The joy is as deep as the sorrow. There is light in the midst of darkness. | ||
| Dedication and Connection: Meaningful work comes from stepping out and doing, teaching, but not necessarily taking charge - being in relation to others. What we love can be so all-consuming, it pushes everything else out. We are drawn to connections with people and the earth; there is a hunger to connect with other people specifically around the earth. There is a sense of wonder, of being challenged in meaningful work. This is a profound connectivity, not just at the level of words. | ||
| The Body and Balance: The body and physical world are core elements of what we love. We long for integration of our work and our lives. If there is no separation between our work and our lives, what are the dimensions of balance? What is the nature of our energy - what restores it, what uses it? | ||
| Serving Others: We are all so interested in serving others; who is to receive? That is difficult. Maybe the biggest gift is to receive. Am I really as compassionate as I thought? I can think of ways to serve, but they are also around having my own needs met. Are we really selfless? It's difficult to think of it as a transaction, because then it's either/or - I'm serving you or you're serving me. Yes, like my friend who volunteered at the Red Cross shelters after the Oakland hills fire told me - all the thanks you receive is so rewarding that you're doing it for yourself, too. When it's mutual, it's working, it's inter-dependence - not co-dependence. At St. Anthony's they dramatized this: they showed an empty shopping bag and asked, what are you supposed to fill it up with? And then they showed two full bags, and we asked, what gifts are inside? The lesson was that if you see those you serve as empty bags, you are doing them a great disservice. It is challenging to listen and not want to help, to make all this connections for people, but I think that would be trying to fix. | ||
| Storytelling: There is a tie between stories and work - I remember lying on the grass listening to my father tell me stories about work. Gertrude Stein said that by telling our personal stories, we reclaim our wisdom. We're less dependent on what the world tells us is true. That's why I went into theater - we were story-shamans there to create healing in community. But it gets away from that sometimes - so I like this basic approach. | ||
| Work We Do For Money: It may be a form of prostitution to do work we don't like because we need to earn money. Yet, when we don't see any options - we have to tell ourselves we like what we do, that we're happy. There isn't enough time; the job often seems to crowd out the time we would spend doing things like community service. | ||
| Finding Purpose: It's hard to feel we're called to do something and not know what it is. But life changing events leave us with the sense that we're alive for a purpose. Doing what we love doesn't mean we're free of politics or conflict... and digging deeper brings us face to face with personal dragons, such as perfectionism. | ||
| If we enjoy what we can focus deeply on, what determines where we focus? Is it up to us? | ||
| What is needed from us, if we are looking to serve? What are our needs? | ||
| If there is no separation between our work and our lives, what are the dimensions of balance? What is the nature of our energy - what restores it, what uses it? | ||
| Envy: Maybe the envy is the cue that we need to move in a different direction. --I sometimes feel arrogance in there, too, like - I'm a good writer, they should come to ME. But really I need to get myself out there. But there's a voice in me that says "I can't do it." --Or if it's not coming to me, then what I'm offering isn't good enough, isn't authentic. --What calms me around this is the support and admiration of the people who write to me. --Marketing and sales are easy - you just have to tell people you exist. --In my work, I expect criticism, but I put myself out there anyway. I know what I want to have happen, and that I can't do it without the superintendent in our district. --What keeps you going? --My passion for kids, which ties back to my own passion for learning. If I'm not learning, I'm dead. That's why I need support from people like around Organizational Learning, support from people who want to contribute. --But we need to work with the whole system, and we don't know reality until all the voices are in the room. That's why white kids need to know black kids, because that's not part of their reality otherwise. --There are people all over who are working this way, but they don't know about each other. And then we get caught up in who the "real" people are. | ||
The "real"
people as we grew up...
Thinking about this makes me want to change how I think about boundaries. I used to set boundaries by saying "no" to certain things. Now I want to say "yes" more, say "yes" to life. |
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| Saving Time (Based on
the excerpt from Momo, by Michael Ende): See, I thought
business was like that, all the gray men trying to save
time. But it's not. --What does it mean to save time? Do
you deposit it? We try to speed up so we can enjoy it
later, but we don't, we just keep speeding up. --So the barber in the story didn't really WANT a different life; he just made a bad decision on a bad day. He started thinking he didn't make a difference, so he had to save time so he could live the "right" kind of life. --It happens when people start worrying about their legacy - like you see Clinton rushing around now. --So when we feel unhappiness, the answer might not be to change or abandon our lives but to just listen to that feeling. --The barber in the story could have noticed his bad day and either realized he had enough in life, or he could have recognized the unhappiness as a calling to something he was meant to do. --We don't really want someone at that moment to help us jump out of our lives - we want to be able to hold the conflict. --Then we can either pursue the calling or let go. When I realized I wasn't a failed dot-com, as so many people seemed to see my company, but rather that I CHOSE this path, I saw the difficulties as worth living through, and I found myself less disturbed by others' apparent success. --It really matters what story we tell ourselves. I heard a story about how twin babies would experience birth. Here are these two babies and all they know is that they're there together in this warm place. Then one of them is born, and the other one just feels the loss, goes into mourning. He or she doesn't know that the others' life just began. |
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| What is our jealousy and envy pointing to? What calling? What loss? What need? | ||
| Where have we made deals with ourselves to save time? What was the payoff supposed to be? | ||
| What choices have we made that make our lives different from others? | ||
| Getting clear about
what I want seems to draw attention and opportunities.
There's a struggle even after we've committed to work
toward something transcendant. It's energizing to risk
being visible, but it can also trigger old
self-criticisms. There was a time when staying with a difficult job was seen as building character. It's hard to see growth, except when we see ourselves responding to familiar situations differently. Sometimes we feel a need for the "instant pudding" solution, to have some progress to report to others. |
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| Many of us enjoy work when there's a powerful sense of collaboration with a team. A challenging goal, success, and even skeptics can motivate us. There's a sense of energy, positive reinforcement, movement, building something, in these teams. Risking being honest about personal fears can help solidify a sense of belonging in a team. | ||
| For some, it's worthy work that's most important; for others, it's the team. But we'd all like both. The teamwork seems to relate to chemistry, and can't be forced. Sometimes, teamwork can emerge over a long period of time. | ||
| Joy at work seems to be about connecting with something larger. Expressing the self can take you only so far, although it's still important. So, sometimes, we may let go of our own needs or voice in service of the larger group. This is much easier when we see it as a choice. And then sometimes, you need to exercise your voice to create space for yourself, although it's still about the larger. | ||
| When people leave after a close team has been built, there's a sense of betrayal and very little support with that feeling. Organizations are asking for deeper personal commitment and creativity, but they/we don't know how to handle the shadow that comes with that. There are places for "polite" conversations (social events, some kinds of work), but real teamwork requires the commitment to be authentic. So, when we have so-called negative feelings, we feel the torment of not being free to be authentic. But some of us can be authentic even when it is not seen or acknowledged by others. And yet, it seems that people tend to leave after a particular high at work. Or perform at their peak because they know they're leaving. So the damage from teams breaking up seems to be part of a pattern. | ||
| Enjoying work is not about cash, although we sometimes feel willing to give up on worthwhile work and accept cash, if there's enough of it. | ||
| Is there really a pattern around enjoying work and people leaving? How does it work? | ||
| How might we foster situations where there's both valuable work and a powerful team? | ||
| What can we do to support our own needs when others leave? |
| © 2002 Bridge Interactive, Inc. - All rights reserved. |
