Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity

by Margaret J. Wheatley

It is the unshakable faith in people’s capacity to be generous, creative and kind.

Dancing in the Space of Sanity

1. Recall those leaders you’ve most admired, those you were happy to serve under. What were their behaviors? How did you feel working for them? What kind of worker were you, including the quality of what you produced? How do you feel about them now? 2. Recall your own moments when you were proud of the leadership (either formal or informal) you provided to your organization, family, friends, community. What did you do? How did you behave toward others? What were the results of your leadership? Are you still in a relationship with any of these people?

Quality of

relationships: If you were to create a trend line from a few years ago to now and a few years ahead, how are people relating to each other? Has trust increased or declined? Are people more self-protective or less so? Are they more willing to be there for one another, to go the extra mile, or not? What’s your evidence for any of your conclusions?

Many biologists and philosophers now understand life as an energy process for transforming information into physical form.

A movement is defined by the people willing to stay dedicated to their cause for a long time, those who take risks, work hard, expect defeat, and still keep going.

Motivation People are motivated by devotion, not passion or a short-lived desire to contribute. Devotion means that, once engaged, you do not leave.

They don’t quite trust the power of identity to ensure coherence and continuity.

Someone has to be responsible for creating coherence at the core, a dependable and trustworthy identity that people can rely on not to change too quickly.

That it is possible to live with integrity.

It’s better to learn than be dead.

They all require that we take time: to think, to settle in, to calm down, to sit still, to listen quietly, to not react instantly, to not pull out our phones, to not get distracted, to not get impatient, to

consciously choosing the one they want to live into.

We need to see clearly the narrative we are blindly following and consciously choose the storyline of who we want to become.30

Are we acting from Firestorm or Gift? They knew which story they wanted to make true.

In each of these stories, the role of shared perception is clearly evident. If we are grounded in a common story, one that we choose together, and if we trust one another, then we each are free to use this shared story to make individual decisions.

Whatever the particular story might be, it will have resonance only if it is grounded in a shared identity that includes our history and aspirations for who we want to be. Within that identity, a story serves to create a sharper focus to our perceptions; collectively, we interpret the present situation in the same way.

through crises and even in calm times (if these even exist now). It is the leader’s role to make visible the stories, usually unconscious, that people are acting from. And then to consciously name a more empowering story linked to the identity. There are many images for the role that a shared story plays in self-organizing: it is a shared perceptual filter; it creates coherence at the core; it is the reference point for individual actions; it is an aspiration of who we choose to be.

But the EPR thought experiment proved just the opposite.7 There is no objective, independently existing reality that can be observed.

Seventy percent of our economy runs on quantum technologies.

This is a time of growing uncertainty.

I can never comprehend what it feels like to live as a settled community in trusted communion with the Earth.

Life changes through emergence,

Emergence always presents us with a surprise.

we embed ecological values, if we focus on relationships, if we position learning as a core value, if we seek to behave as partners with life, then we have a strong chance to manifest, to self-organize as individuals living and working purposefully together in healthy community.

No, he said, the cause of suffering is when good people begin their work together and then fail to notice what is arising between them. INTERCONNECTEDNESS: RESTORING SANITY The Joy of Interbeing20

Developing a stable mind is the core work of training oneself to be a warrior.

We can’t change this world, but we can change ourselves so that we can be of service to this world.

The Faith and Confidence of Warriors We have unshakable confidence that people can be kinder, gentler, and wiser than our current society tells us we are. We rely on human goodness and offer this faith as a gift to others. We offer ourselves not as activists to change the world, but as compassionate presences and trustworthy companions to those suffering in this world. We embody compassion without ambition. Our confidence, dignity, and wakefulness radiate out to others as a beacon of who we humans are. Our confidence is not conditioned by success or failure, by praise or blame. It arises naturally as we see clearly into the nature of things. We create an atmosphere of compassion, confidence, and upliftedness with our very presence. We create a good human society wherever we are, whenever we can, with the people and resources that are available to us now. We rely on joy arising, knowing it is never dependent on external circumstances but comes from working together as good human beings. We encounter life’s challenges with a sense of humor, knowing that lightness and play increase our capacity to deal with suffering.