Category Archives: leadership

Holding the Questions

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“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
–Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to Franz Xaver Kappus, July 1903, from Letters to a Young Poet translated by MD Herter Norton, 1934

“Live the questions now.”

How would life be if we could tolerate uncertainty and lack of control much better than we do? If we could embrace the present moment of unknowing? If we could find peace in the way things are? What if we could ground in patience, confident that we can meet whatever lies ahead with all the experience, resourcefulness, and creativity we can muster?

And what if we actually ask better questions? Instead of stopping at “I don’t understand,” what if we get honest, curious, and deep? Finding out what we didn’t know we didn’t know is a special kind of epiphany. How often does this happen to us? If we ask a lot of open and honest questions to people of all different backgrounds and experiences, it can be a common occurrence.

What question(s) recur for you lately? Why? How do they feel as they occupy you? Light or heavy? Agitating? Stimulating? …Fascinating?

It’s late and I procrastinated again tonight, thinking I would write about something else. Funny how that pattern emerges, three weeks into this 30 day project this time. So instead of offering much more of my own analysis, I’ll share resources that help me to live the questions peacefully, joyfully, and in a perpetual state of fascination.

If you do not already follow Maria Popova’s blog The Marginalian, I highly recommend it. On the topic of living the question, she highlights Jacqueline Novogratz’s 2012 commencement address at Gettysburg College, in which she quotes Rilke and admonishes graduates, “We’ve become a society seeking instant gratification. We want simple answers, clear pathways to success… Life does not work that way. And instead of looking for answers all the time, my wish for you is that you get comfortable living the questions… Focus on being interested, not on being interesting.”

In her post “How Ignorance Fuels Science and the Evolution of Knowledge,” Popova introduces readers to Stuart Firestein’s book Ignorance: How It Drives Science, which is now in my audiobook queue. Science is driven by curiosity, which starts with the awareness of ignorance (see also Ian Leslie’s book Curious). She quotes Firestein:

“There are a lot of facts to be known in order to be a professional anything — lawyer, doctor, engineer, accountant, teacher. But with science there is one important difference. The facts serve mainly to access the ignorance… Scientists don’t concentrate on what they know, which is considerable but minuscule, but rather on what they don’t know…. Science traffics in ignorance, cultivates it, and is driven by it. Mucking about in the unknown is an adventure; doing it for a living is something most scientists consider a privilege. […] Working scientists don’t get bogged down in the factual swamp because they don’t care all that much for facts. It’s not that they discount or ignore them, but rather that they don’t see them as an end in themselves. They don’t stop at the facts; they begin there, right beyond the facts, where the facts run out. Facts are selected, by a process that is a kind of controlled neglect, for the questions they create, for the ignorance they point to.”

In this season of severe political polarization and tenuous relationships, I lean heavily on my strong question asking skills–they are tested and trained. I reference this skill often on this blog, and it still bears repeating. What do we not know? What assumptions do we make and how do they keep us from true understanding and connection? See below for the text of the tip sheet I keep bookmarked and share often. May we practice and strengthen this skill starting now, for all our sakes.

I Hold the Questions for Us because life is uncertain and we must still act. The more we can embrace and live the most meaningful, stimulating, and fascinating questions, the more likely we are to discover and cultivate true connection and healing.

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Asking Open & Honest Questions
by Jeanne Strong

Learning to respond to others with honest, open questions instead of counsel, corrections, advice, etc. can be a life-altering practice. With such questions, as Parker Palmer says, we help “hear each other into deeper speech”—a speech that might reveal a turning point in a life, an intuition about one’s health, or an insight into life’s purpose. For ourselves, the practice frees us from having to know “the answer” or solve “the problem.” It allows us to relax into our own humanity and the pleasure that comes from being connected to another.

But what is an open and honest question? The best definition is that the asker could not possibly anticipate the answer to it. So give it a try in your circles, in your marriage, with your friends and family and comment below on what you’ve discovered.

(Adapted from the Center for Courage and Renewal – www.couragerenewal.org)

10 tips for asking open and honest questions

  1. Ask yourself what assumptions you are making.
  2. The best questions are simple questions.
  3. Avoid questions with right/wrong, yes/no answers.
  4. Ask questions aimed at opening doors for the other person rather than satisfying your own curiosity.
  5. Ask questions that go to the person as well as the problem – questions about feelings as well as facts.
  6. Questions that invite imagery or metaphor are often helpful.
  7. Trust your intuition in asking questions, even if your instinct seems off the wall.
  8. If you aren’t sure about the question, be quiet, wait, and if it keeps surfacing, ask it.
  9. Watch the pacing of your questions. Questions coming too fast can feel aggressive.
  10. Avoid any storytelling, or behaviors that call attention to yourself.

Holding the Activist Heart

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What are you an activist for?

What does it cost you? What does it cost others?
How does it affect your relationships with them?

At the end of your life, how do you want your activism to be remembered? What are you willing to give up for that legacy? What do you need to do to make it more likely?

Crusader
Warrior
Champion
Advocate

How do you describe your role, your leadership, and the work?

I recommended Simon Sinek’s Start With Why to someone again today.
Meaning. Purpose. Mission. Vision.
Once we find these for ourselves, we settle. We sense direction and movement, that low rumbling purr of motivated inspiration.
Optimism. Patience. Inspiration. Perseverance. Faith.
These energies flow and propel, provide momentum to overcome obstacles and setbacks. We commit. Through persistence we gain confidence, flexibility, agility, resilience. We become veteran master players of The Infinite Game. The work is endless; there will always be more to do; the ultimate goal will not be achieved in our lifetime.
And still, “That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”

I know my Why, have for a while now. I root down deeply in it. I feel stable and strong, grounded and powerful. I also feel light and supple, mobile and elastic. As Sinek says, when we know our Why, we can be flexible with the How and the What. Starting with Why gives rise to creativity, connection, synergy, and possibility. To be an activist with an unassailable and still limber Why makes me more effective.

Tonight I wonder how to do activist work without an adversarial approach, without burning out, and without burning bridges. My Why is that our relationships save us. The best relationships elevate us, integrate divergence and even conflict into a fluid, complementary movement of tension and slackness, push and pull, give and take–yin and yang. What happens when my yin activism meets your yang?

I wish for all activists to express what they are For more than what they are against. I know that’s not always feasible or realistic to expect from emotional and empassioned humans. Conflict is inevitable and not inherently bad. Yet, I know we can do it better. I know activists who vehemently, even spitefully oppose others. It makes me sad and a little desperate. I know it’s not my work to oppose the adversarial activist. I must find that way of integrative flow, that relationship that allows us all to do our work side by side, respectful of one another’s humanity, holding and sharing space.

We may advocate for divergent, opposing, and conflicting causes. That is nature, and human nature risks mortal sacrifices for the ideals and values we hold most dearly. Energy, power, and forces collide. We get to decide how and whether the results are destructive or constructive. It’s never too late to change course.

Tonight I Hold Our Activist Hearts–all of them. May we choose our words, actions, and relationships from a place of humane love and connection more than anything else, and may we be at peace with our choices at the ends of our lives.

Holding Understanding

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Friends, when we can muster it, I have an invitation:

The next time we have a thought that starts with, “I don’t understand…” let us take a deep breath, get quiet, and actually try to understand. I think most of us stop well short of this effort, especially in conflict. If we all did it just a little more, though, some of our most severe divisions could lessen by a lot.

In 2021 I wrote in The Intention-Impact Gap:

“Years ago I had a hard conversation with a Black classmate.  He explained to me the experience of being Black in America—what it was like to worry about his own safety and that of his loved ones every day, of seeing innocent Black men killed at the hands of police, the history and ongoing oppression of racism, both overt and implicit…  It was overwhelming.  I said, ‘I can’t imagine what that must be like…’  At the time I honestly meant it as an expression of humility.  In retrospect, I could (should?) have said, ‘I know I will never experience what you experience, AND as I think about what you have shared with me, I AM imagining what that must be like, and it’s overwhelming.’

“Though I had intended my words to be connecting, he told me in no uncertain terms that they had the opposite impact.  Really, he asked?  You really can’t imagine what it would be like to send your son out every morning knowing he could be profiled by police?  You can’t imagine your family being captured and sold into slavery, separated mercilessly on an auction block, or hunted, mutilated and murdered for simply being different?  How can you not imagine it?  Where was my sense of shared humanity, he demanded? My declaration of ‘I can’t imagine,’ far from showing caring or understanding, signaled to him my unwillingness to relate.”

“I don’t understand how whole swaths of people could vote against their own interests.”
“I don’t understand how half the country voted for hate.”
“I don’t understand why ____ people get so offended at _____ words.”
“I don’t understand why (they/you) get so emotional about _____ .”

I can’t imagine, I don’t understand–both expressions signal a separation, a disconnect. They come across as insensitive, unempathetic to those who seek to be understood (“I did not vote for hate–that is your projection on me.”) At worst, they convey condescension and disdain. Expressed among those who similarly cannot imagine and do not understand, these phrases further solidify our us-them tribalist sentiments. Dissenting in this context, suggesting how we might imagine or understand, can feel extremely unsafe.

Here’s what we know about humans: We are emotional first, especially under stress. We reason and rationalize second. We all do it. Not that the rationalizations don’t make sense or are not valid. Disconnect arises when we assume ourselves to be totally rational (delusion #1) and others to be totally irrational (delusion #2). We think our own beliefs, positions, and behaviors ‘make total sense’ and others’ do not because they are inconsistent or, well, rationalized. We fail to recognize the inconsistencies in our own ‘reasoning’. The truth is, all of our beliefs and conclusions make sense to ourselves.

If you think you do understand someone else’s distress, check and see if it’s only in your thinking brain. If you can imagine in cognitive and practical terms but cannot imagine how it feels when somebody describes their fear, hopelessness or other emotions in a specific context, then there’s likely more work to do.

More from 2021:

“At first I felt defensive and misunderstood.  Why was he rejecting me when I honestly thought I was being supportive?  I had to think about it a while, and really listen for what he was saying.  It was painful and humbling to realize that he was right, at least partially.  I could imagine all of those things, but maybe I didn’t want to.  Maybe it was too uncomfortable, and I exercised my privilege of not having to think about it, because it didn’t affect me personally?  Maybe it made me feel helpless?  Maybe I knew on some level that I harbor racist and prejudiced biases and ideas?  My classmate was teaching me the difference between empathy and sympathy.  Brené Brown makes the distinction thusly:  “Empathy fuels connection, while sympathy drives disconnection.”  I had intended the former; my impact was the latter.”

My point about imagining and understanding is empathy–the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Sympathy is feeling for someone in distress–it keeps a distance that is palpable. We have to look into one another’s emotional minds with our own to find a deeper level of understanding and connection. It’s incredibly vulnerable and uncomfortable, hence the avoidance.

I Hold Understanding for Us. It’s a lot of work. It requires us to get both humble and vulnerable, which our culture shuns. If we are ever to heal our political divisions and reclaim a high-functioning democracy, however, we must practice.