Most of my quasi-sabbatical time has been spent exploring what I have been calling a “Continuum of Becoming” – a placeholder name, but a descriptor nonetheless.

The “continuum” is a critical component to the work we are doing at Creating the Future. If we are seeking to engage everyone doing social change work in the very highest potential of that work, that requires asking questions such as, “How do we help bring out that potential in board members? In EDs? In consultants? In funders?”

The answer lies, in part, with meeting people where they are, and then extending a hand to encourage and inspire them to reach for the potential they have had all along and simply have not known was there.

Clearly if we are going to meet people where they are, we need to understand where they are (duh!), hence my living inside these continuums (continua?) for the past month. Wherever people are along the path, we want to be able to meet them and extend that hand.

All of which leads me to a question:
What conditions do you think need to be in place for a professional in any area (ED, funder, consultant, university professor…) to seek the next level of their potential?

I’m not talking about seeking a promotion or other external validation. I’m talking about seeking something inside ourselves. Stretching, reaching, transforming. What makes someone want to take first a baby step into a new way of thinking and being? What conditions need to be in place for them to move from “thinking about it” to “trying it” to “deciding to dive in?”

If you have ever made a conscious choice to reach for the next level of what is possible inside yourself – reaching for your own next level of potential – what conditions led to that choice?

For those who have been through our classes, what conditions led first to your wanting to be there, and then to your choosing to do so? Most people who come through our classes are already doing well in their work – what conditions led to your being ok with shaking that up?

And if you have never sought the next level of your own potential (or do not think you have done so), I am curious about that as well.

As I am considering what it takes for someone to buck the trends and reach for what is lying dormant within them, waiting to be born, I would love your thoughts about what conditions need to be in place for someone to be ready to look inside and go for it.

Thanks, one and all!

Last week, an incident involving Rush Limbaugh, Robert Egger, a YouTube video and a small hew and cry led to my blog question asking, “Where, if at all, is the place for anger in social change?”

The responses were so rich – I encourage you to read them in their entirety here.

Several things became clear in that discussion:

1. The belief that anger comes from fear, from pain, from both. The experience that “suppressing anger can be debilitating,” as Martin indicated in his comment.
2. The belief that we have the capacity to move beyond that fear and pain, acting in ways that do not give in to the anger.
3. The desire for a different / more effective way of being with each other. Jeff Mowatt talked about it as a “mandate for acting with compassion.” Kesha talked about “a shifting concern for one’s community over one’s self.” Marcia White talked about our ability to make “choices that create growth and happiness.” Others responded similarly – the wish and the determination that a different way of being become the norm.

Individuals Go Where Systems Lead Them
As I discuss in the opening chapters of The Pollyanna Principles, our assumptions and expectations of “reality” are rooted in thousands of years of culture that tell us that “living joyfully together” is impossible. (You can read those chapters for free online here.)

Our history tells us that we will likely find reasons to do battle – by words or by swords – and that true “peace” (i.e. not just the absence of war) is a pipe dream. Across generations, we then hand down those assumptions about how people can be counted on to act.

• Assumptions about what we admire and celebrate – the warrior, the savior, the hero, the individual beating the odds
• Assumptions about winners and losers, about weakness and strength
• Assumptions about scarcity vs. abundance, about possibility vs. inevitability

All those assumptions, and the expectations that arise from those assumptions – including and especially those related to anger, frustration, fear, pain – are rooted in stories we have told for millennia.

From those assumptions and expectations, we also hand down ways for dealing with the inevitable conflict we assume will come our way.  While we are encouraged to hope for the best (all the dreams you noted in #3 above), our conflict-driven culture gives us systems and tools and approaches for responding when (not if) the worst happens.

As a result, our everyday responses – as individuals, as communities, as nations – are rooted in those thousand-year-old assumptions. How we respond when an Al Qaida attacks. How we respond when a BP floods the gulf with oil.

And yes, how we respond when a blowhard-for-hire calls us lazy idiots.

Social Change?
I confess that my own questions about the place for anger in social change are rooted in all those cultural assumptions as well.  And yet I also know that deep in my questions was my own mind trying to wrap itself around the why’s and how’s.

I know in my bones that every action we take is creating the future. I know in my bones that we can aim our work at proactively creating the world we want vs. living and working in response to what we don’t like about the world.

And yet my experience of the world, as seen through the lens of my culture, simultaneously tells me that social change and anger go hand in hand.

And that’s when it hit me. Re-reading the discussion and then re-reading my own question, I realized that social change is indeed about anger, because social change is about reacting to what we don’t like about the world.  Just look at the words themselves:

Social Change.
Changing the World.

What is change if not reaction – change FROM something?  The words to which we aspire and bring our best work – changing the world – they are a statement of reaction to what we can no longer tolerate.  Social change is a reaction to pain and frustration, to inequity, injustice.  No wonder we see anger as a force for such change!

Talk about an “aha!”

So where does that leave us? It leaves us with infinite choices and infinite possibilities to create the future we want. Our work doesn’t have to be solely about reacting to circumstances – poverty, war, social ills. We can aim at the world we want, the culture we want. We can work to create a world that is humane and joyful and healthy and vibrant.

It is possible, simply because it is not impossible.

As you watch the video below, consider that maybe that’s the answer (I am thinking as I’m typing – always dangerous, the keyboard equivalent of thinking aloud…). Maybe social change IS about anger, frustration, rebellion against the status quo.

And maybe the thing that is more powerful is the thing that moves beyond that anger – work and words that are not about what we are changing FROM but – as the video notes – what we are moving TOWARDS.

Social Aspiration
Social Dreaming
Social Vision
Social Possibility

And wow does that ever raise more questions to explore!

If you are viewing this in your email or a reader that doesn’t show video, this link will take you to the website where you can watch the video. Link to site here.

The video I posted yesterday, wherein Robert Egger hands Rush Limbaugh his head on a plate, has drawn two very different responses. (Update: The original video is here – video at yesterday’s site has been updated to exclude the “offensive” portions.)

One response is, “Yes, right on! And I love the ending!”

The other, diametrically opposed, is, “You had me until the end. Hold your anger, Robert. Take the high road.”

Those of you who are regular readers here have watched me walk that same line – the line between gentle encouragement and downright indignation.  Like Robert, I have received the same comments when my normally understanding side is overpowered by my “righteous indignation” side.

Watching the response to Robert’s video, both here at the blog and especially in social media circles, I cannot help but wonder:

• What is the place for anger in creating social change?
• Does social change require a bit of poking and prodding around the edges? Is it inherently about the balance and blend of anger and higher ground?
• Isn’t anger part of who we are as humans?  Isn’t it something we all feel at times? Would that not make it ok to express that?  Or is it always about reaching  for the high road?
• If our highest potential for compassionate, joyful living is reached by walking the talk of that potential, what is the highest potential for what we do with our anger?
• Is there a place for periodic explosion, for someone to express what we are all feeling, and then, as Robert does every day, get on with the very real work of making change from the higher ground?  Does social change need a provocateur to balance what my friend Renata Rafferty calls “The Tyranny of the Nice”?

In the U.S. over the past 2 years, we have seen the result of anger from a place of fear.  What of anger from a place of aspiration? Is such a thing even possible?

Because I myself am a provocateur, I wrestle with this in my own writing and speaking.  I know that my own anger tends to arise not from fear, but from my own personal intolerance for the intolerance of others. (Yes, I know, I’m working on that. Just ‘fessing up to my own demons here!)

And so I cannot help but wonder:
What place does anger have in creating social change?