What Was Valuable to Me
Dear Harvey,
I just came home from the Northern California and Nevada, USA Teachers' and Leaders' Workshop. I want to expand on what was of value to me.
1. Your insistence, when asked for your opinion, that the questioners think for themselves and then your usually giving them a hand with whatever got in the way of their doing that. It was an elegant example of "assisting each other to recover our intelligence." Direct, simple, basic RC theory, and such an effective way to grow leaders. Your gift is that you have found a way to make other people more effective in bringing about change, so the work can continue when you are not present. This is a lesson worth learning, as a gift to ourselves, if we really care about the work we are doing having far-reaching results.
2. Evidence that you have created an organization around you that helps to make you more effective and apparently, more recently, better rested and fed. It's an enormous contradiction to see a world changer actually be well rested, well fed, and well supported enough that he or she is not obviously working on top of those distresses. Relaxed leadership is much more inviting to emulate.
3. Evidence that you are very well loved, despite any difficulty you might have in feeling loved. (I suspect the love that you could feel might be someone being willing and able to take over your job, or more likely, walk beside you.)
4. Your repeated demonstrations that you care enormously about human beings and are willing to go a long way in giving individual human beings a hand. I remember you walking on your knees half-way around that big room where the support group leaders met because you wanted to hear what people said.
5. Your ability to "not take the client's patterns personally." Perhaps experience with many patterns over and over again has given you perspective, but I could tell by your comments afterward that you had also decided not to be restimulated and to keep thinking about the client.
6. That you still have patterns, talk about them openly, and yet have accomplished so much. What better way could there be of demonstrating that we don't have to wait to discharge all our distresses around an issue in order to lead effectively. I think the most effective way I could appreciate you is to do my own work and lead my own constituencies.
Carolyne Singer
Cazadero, California, USA