Category Archives: politics

Insight While Driving to Work

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Training for Better Angels, it occurs to me:
Confidence in excellent communication skills in order to enter difficult conversations without bailing or lashing out… is akin to the core stability required to get into and out of a deep squat.
It’s the bending down, feet flat, head up, in control and not falling over, that is the challenge—not the forcing up in a quick, mindless burst of brute strength. Bearing the load all the way down and standing back up gracefully, without causing or suffering injury: that is where our real power lies, in the gym and in conversation.

Training My Better Angels

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First, Happy Mother’s Day to all!

So friends, what do the Better Angels of your nature feel like?  What do they do, how do they speak and act, especially when encountering those with opposing political views to yours?

A New Tribe

Yesterday I attended a skills workshop run by Better Angels, an organization I have admired for a while.  Their stated mission:

Better Angels is a citizens’ organization uniting red and blue Americans in a working alliance to depolarize America

  • We try to understand the other side’s point of view, even if we don’t agree with it
  • We engage those we disagree with, looking for common ground and ways to work together
  • We support principles that bring us together rather than divide us

On the garden level of a Lutheran church on a drizzly afternoon, we sat quietly in a big circle of folding chairs.  I noticed one black woman, one other Asian woman, and everybody else was white.  Most of us were at least Gen Xers; I estimated maybe one third were Baby Boomers.  It seemed about equal numbers of men and women.  Among the 30 or so participants, 6 of us identified as ‘red-leaning.’  The moderators set a clear and firm expectation that we all respect one another, and especially attended to those in the political minority.  As the facilitator explained the objectives and skills, people listened attentively.  Expressions and postures demonstrated eager engagement.  A sincere and almost sad, desperate longing for bipartisan connection permeated the air.

We were all there to practice listening skills to help one another feel heard.  Speaking skills would also be taught, to facilitate ourselves being heard by our counterparts.  Though I felt confident in these skills already, I looked forward to strengthening them in a new group setting.  When I saw we would do role plays I got super excited!  The method, designed by family therapist Bill Doherty, was brilliant—we paired with a same-color partner, and took turns playing blue and red, challenging ourselves to resist judgment, stay open, tune in to our own and each other’s whole presence, and imagine the minds of ‘the other side,’ inviting all of our whole selves to connect.  The central objective was to create an atmosphere of openness, non-judgment, and balanced, mutual engagement.

The Spark

Even before the activities started I thought, “I want to learn how to lead this.  I want to participate, to contribute in a bigger way.”  So when they invited us to stay afterward if we were interested in moderator training, I practically leapt out of my seat.  Turns out you have to apply—no problem—and good, they have standards, yay!  Once accepted, you complete about 15 hours of online training and a Zoom call with established moderators.  Then you commit to moderating three workshops in the coming year.  Woo hoooooooooo!  There are only 8 moderators in all of Illinois, all from north of I-80.  Better Angels holds firm a 50/50 ratio between red and blue volunteers, and disproportionally more blue folks apply, so I may have ‘competition.’  That’s okay—we’re truly all on the same team here!

Ready, Set, Wait–I’ Got This.

When I got home and opened the application, I hesitated a moment.  They seek, first and foremost, volunteers experienced in group facilitation.  Yikes, I don’t have that, I thought.  And yet I felt intrinsically comfortable in that group setting, imagining myself co-leading with relaxed confidence and grace.  Huh, interesting.  I own this communication skill set, as well as the ability to teach it—I feel eminently qualified for this role.  Where did I get that?

Part of the application required a condensed resume, so I pulled up my CV.  Maybe I’ll find something in here to make the case that despite my lack of group facilitation experience, I’m still qualified, I hoped.  I laughed out loud when I realized, I have been facilitating groups for ten years now—every month with my medical students, discussing topics like professionalism, medical errors, burnout, difficult patients, and interacting with industry, among others.  I’ve also conducted workshops teaching motivational interviewing, the quintessential skill set in open and honest dialogue!  In all of these settings it’s my job to make the environment safe for candid discussion, to model non-judgment and open, honest questions.  I lead role plays in which people take on both patient and provider roles to practice empathy for their counterparts.  I have written on this blog multiple times about how much I learn every time I meet with these groups.  No wonder I felt so at ease in the workshop yesterday, I’ve been doing this—training my and others’ Better Angels—for a decade already, and I did not even realize it.  How cosmic.

So my application is submitted!  I should hear in 15 days.

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Friends, would you consider joining this group?  What are you curious about?  What makes you hesitate?  Who in your circles would be great at this work, and will you share this information with them?

Thank you for reading, and wish me luck!

The Optimist and the Cynic

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Are you an optimist or a cynic?

I consider myself to be, wholly and without question, an Optimist—with a Big O.

In The Art of Possibility, Ben and Roz Zander describe a cynic as a passionate person who doesn’t want to be disappointed again.

By this definition, cynics are not altogether hopeless and negative; they are simply wary and cautious based on past experience.  Still, I judge cynics and find them tiresome.  I reject their gloom and doom outlook.  Sometimes I really just want to throttle them.  In their presence I turn up my outward optimism to happy headbanger volume.  I can tell this makes them a little crazed—they see me as Pollyannish, idealistic, and naïve—and likely wish to strangle me, too.

And here’s the thing:  I also possess a deep cynical streak; one that can really overtake my consciousness sometimes.

Every day I campaign ardently to empower myself and those around me, pointing to all the ways we can claim our agency and effect positive change.  I advocate for using all of our kindness, empathy, compassion, and connecting communication skills, in every situation—take the high road!  Be our Best Selves!  And yet at the same time, a darker part of me, my shadow side, silently tells a contemptuous story of the forces we fight against.  I paint a sinister picture in my mind of impediments made of ‘the other’ people—the small minded, the pessimistic, the underestimating, unbelieving, rigid, unimaginative, distrustful, conventional, supercilious, and condescending them.  They are not like us.  They are the problem.

Of course this is not true.  It’s just a story I tell—a counterproductive and self-sabotaging story.  How fascinating.

Sometimes I tell this unsympathetic story aloud, out of frustration, impatience, and exasperation.  Sometimes I actually name people and label them all those negative things I listed.  It feels justified and righteous.  But then I feel guilty, as if my worse self kidnapped the better me and held my optimism hostage until I vented against my better judgment.  I wonder when my words will come back and bite me in the butt?  What will I do then?

I suppose I can only claim passion and disappointment.  Sometimes I let the latter get the best of me and allow shadow to overtake the light.  It happens to the best of us; I can own it.  There is no need to disavow the disappointment and disillusionment, the dissatisfaction with what is.  If I didn’t care so much—about patient care, public policy, physician burnout, patient-physician relationship, and relationships in general—I would not suffer such vexations.  And it’s because I care so much that I fight on, to do my part to make it better.  I stay engaged in the important conversations, even if I have to take breaks and change forums at times.

Yes, I, the eternal optimist, harbor an inner, insubordinate cynic.  While most of me exclaims, “Humanity is so full of love and potential!” another part of me mutters subversively, “Also people suck.”  Some days (some weeks) the dark side wins, but it’s always temporary.  The Yin and the Yang, the shadow and the light, the tension of opposite energies—that’s what makes life so interesting, no?  We require both for contrast and context, to orient to what is in order to see what could be. 

The struggle for balance is real and at times exhausting.  And it’s always worth the effort.