The Spaces Where We Come Together, with Beth Tener and Nancy Gabriel

Transcript (lightly edited for clarity)

Beth Tener 

Welcome to the living love podcast, a home for conversation with good people doing good work who are not famous yet. My name is Beth Tener. I’m a facilitator. And over several decades I’ve worked with incredible people in nonprofits, business, government and communities as they collaborate to navigate challenges. We need stories of how to create relationships, workplaces and communities that bring out the best in people and change destructive patterns. Here we shine a light on the people who illustrate what is possible. We draw out what they have learned from experience. This podcast is part of Kinship, a hub for people committed to amplifying the power of healthy community. For those ready to live in a way that generates more love and connection, rather than more fear and separation, welcome to the conversation. I’m so glad you’re here.

Hello, this is Beth Tener. Welcome to the Living Love podcast. In each podcast episode, we’re going to start with a story and some storytelling on a theme. And then in the second half, I’ll be having conversations with people working in the fields of social change and personal change. And that’ll be a chance to kind of riff on the themes of the stories and make sense of it together. So to the first story, a little bit about me. I live in the northeast of the US and I, in most of my adult life, had been working in one way or another on environmental change, looking at what’s happening to our planet, and how do we as people, as societies evolve, create better societies while also working within the bounds of what the earth needs. And that work has involved a lot of facilitation of groups. And I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how teams work. And working with big collaborations and networks of people on complex challenges, like looking at community development and race, you know, overcoming historic racism. How do we rebuild local thriving food systems? Looking at how we adjust energy and address climate change challenges ahead.

So, one time I was doing a project for a client as a consultant, and in this situation, we had gathered a group of different people working on change for a couple of days, what we call a “community of practice,” it’s one of my favorite spaces, a time to come together for a couple of days and learn together and talk about what we’re seeing in the work and innovations we’re trying to do. In this case, we’re all working with trying to find ways to get people working in collaboration and networks across organizations and sectors. And we’d had a day full of really nice conversations and then had dinner. And I was facilitating and so I invited a friend of mine, Nancy, who you’re going to meet in the second half of our time today, to host a listening circle.

We just pulled chairs together in a circle, there are about 15 of us. And Nancy has learned this practice from a friend and colleague, a Native American woman. And it’s a simple process where you just ask the question, and then each person holds a talking piece, take some time to share their response. And you really try to be present in the moment and say what you feel is coming to you then. And then slowly, the piece goes around the circle, and you just keep listening, kind of listening to the center. And so on this particular evening went through several people. And then one of the men who got the, I think it was a rock, whatever we’re holding, who’s holding it for a while. And the question we had asked was: What is the emerging edge of your work and what is in your heart? And at a certain point, he said, “we are in such intense times, and it does feel like we’re heading towards a cliff when you look at what the predictions are with climate.” And he said, “if we are in a time and a place of heading towards a cliff, I want to be doing that holding hands.” And that moment, it really kind of brought us all into our hearts. He was so open, and it shifted the quality of the conversation. And every person after that spoke more from their heart in a more open way.

Sometimes in these work situations, we kind of show up in our professional mode. But it really integrated us all into showing up as full people. And what happened is it moved around the circle. When it was my turn, I really didn’t know what I was going to say. And in that moment, I really was feeling this vision. I could feel it have a very different time/place where it felt like love had broken through. And that we had found a way to orient our society towards caring for each other. And that so many of the problems that we were so busy running around trying to solve with nonprofits and strategies and plans, that a lot of those problems would have gone away, because we would just structure our communities in ways where everyone was cared for. And that would somehow evolve beyond the whole way we were doing things right now. And I could feel it, I could really feel it. And other people in that circle, were also sensing this kind of greater quality of love that was possible.

And I’ve never forgotten that moment. And sort of that framing of, if we’re in this time of crisis, what time is it? What do we need to stop running around doing? And where do we really need to focus our time and attention? And particularly, how do we want to be together? The way we were together in that circle is really part of my answer: open; vulnerable; speaking truth; listening out loud; not always saying we know the answer, but really listening. And in the presence of multiple people, when we could all be present and open in this idea of collective presence, we access something beyond us, some new vision, and knowing came in beyond my busy mind shaped by my culture, and the norms around me.

So in these times when we need vision, and we need courage, where do we look for that? There’s a story from the Sufi tradition of a man walking home from a party and it’s at night and he comes upon a friend who’s under the streetlight on his knees looking for something and he says, “Hey, what are you looking for?” And he said, “Well, I lost my keys.” And he said, “Do you want help?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” and so they both get down on their knees, and they’re kind of like searching all over around the pavement in that area, you know, where they can see. And it’s just taking forever, and he’s not finding them. So finally, he asked his friend, he’s like, “so are you sure you dropped him here?” And his friend said, “Oh, no, I actually think I dropped them like a block back there. But this is where the light is.”

So I feel sometimes that’s what we do in the way we go about working for change or trying to make a better world. It’s like, we stay within the light of the lampposts of the way we always have done it, and what everyone else is focused on. But what we need is to really start to say, wait a minute, maybe the key is beyond this place we’re all focused and looking.

Beth Tener 

In my work, over the last 10 years, I’ve been introduced to just incredible people in different cultures and places around the world who are trying to find other ways that we can heal our societies, and how we can work together to create a much healthier way of living. I don’t want to act like this is all new, like a lot of, I think, what is happening now is trying to go back to say, wait a minute, indigenous cultures, cultures outside Western industrialized, modern ways of life. There may have been whole ways of being and living in community living in the village that we lost in this rush to progress. You know, maybe we actually need to do a bit of a U turn, and go pick up some of the roads that we got off. I’ve come to see culture as like that. The streetlight, you know, there’s all this bright light on certain places that we look in focus, and put our attention. And then other things are kind of invisible, they’re outside that they’re not valued. And if no one around you is focused on or seeing those things, it’s hard to see them too. So they’re invisible. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, and they’re not there.

So, one of the most important things in this way is that we focus a lot on the individual, on the personal, yourself and your progress, and then also at the organizational level, and on politics and us/them of politics. But there’s a lot more if we look at the relationships and the context and how you are related to other people. How do you fit into the larger whole? How do each of us fit into the bigger, longer stories? How do we connect to the land and nature? So, when I thought of naming this podcast, Living Love, love actually comes out of relationship. It arises in the flow between two people, among a group, between us and the earth or an animal. And when we focus just on ourselves or just on problems, it’s really hard to see the love or to really help it grow.

So I, in my own life, have really tried to understand how nature works. You know, this idea that in nature, the planet we’re on is four and a half billion years old. And life has been evolving towards more biodiversity, an incredible amount of diverse species, and ecosystems that all work together self organizing, and ever growing and flourishing. And nature doesn’t have strategic plans, nature doesn’t set goals. Life evolves when the conditions are right. And there’s a nourishing context and resources of rain and water and whether it’s in our body, blood flow, like the conditions are right, and things grow and develop. And that’s a different movement than problem solving.

So one of my questions is: How do we create the context and the flow of resources, so that our relationships can thrive so that our families can thrive? What is the flow of resources in the rich context for people to feel they belong and are supported in a school system, in a hospital? So as we look at these structures, we really have to think about where are the spaces that we can come together like in that gathering, where we maybe can come out of the busy crisis-driven work and activism that so many people are in and really be supported; as people feel resourced, have the space to be what I think of as accompaniment, to have a friend, a colleague, a coach and mentor, accompanying us, and doing that for each other as groups, as we sit in the questions and evolve a smarter way to do things.

So for the listeners to the podcast, I know a lot of us are exhausted. And so we’ve all been working so hard trying to change these big systems that we’ve inherited, and politics and structures. And there’s so much amazing work being done to analyze what’s not working, and to invent new things. And it’s exhausting. You know, especially when these institutions and structures take so much work to navigate or to prop up. Or as we start to grow new ones, as I’ve done in starting a new nonprofit, that’s hard to do. One of the biggest challenges is so much of the way that the culture in the US and Western culture works is we often end up feeling pretty alone in the work. And we know there’s a lot with addiction and mental health challenges now, as well as, you know, the isolation of COVID that we’re still coming out of. So this is a moment. I feel like we really need to find new resources. And we really need to draw on the resources, of relationship of community of accompaniment, of friendship, and find this new way of being together. As I said, it’s not just new, it’s old. What sustained people and cultures over generations is Kinship is community and just learning from indigenous teachers like Robin Wall Kimmerer and Diana Longboat, this idea of Kinship is central to so many of our longer ancestral traditions. So how do we reestablish that flow of care and resources and connect to nature, and find all the ways to come out of fragmented, isolated ways of being into ways that things can flow.

So I think of another story: As I was working as a consultant, I used to go into corporations ,and a team of us would come in and interview lots of different managers at different levels, and people working on the shop floor and driving trucks and talking to the CEO. And one of my colleagues, we’d come together at the end of the day after interviewing a whole lot of people about how the organization worked. And my colleagues share the story of one interview with a senior manager. And they were talking about how do you make sure people follow procedures. So the environmental laws get followed? And this man gave him his philosophy. And he said, “Well, basically, you know, the way I see it is human nature. People are motivated by either fear or greed. And so you have to have, you know, sticks and carrots, carrots and sticks, and you have to have consequences and punishments, and then also incentives. So they do the right thing.” And my colleague who’s a bit idiosyncratic, said, “Well, but wait a minute, isn’t there love? Aren’t people motivated by love?” And this was, you know, at a corporate workplace, and he said the man just laughed his head off. Like that was the most ridiculous idea to consider.

I’ve always thought about that, because we’re so embedded in this idea of control and domination and manipulate and selling each other on things and messaging people. And yet, there’s another way: the power of community. That power of having the loving, caring presence, someone seeing your potential, the power of a group motivated to really act in concert on some bigger goal, that feeling part of something bigger and being in a flow of support and resources. So instead of focusing so much on running around fixing the problems, how do we build more of that in at every level from our relationships, families, workplaces, communities, political processes? How do we bake in a world based in love, and care and group learning. So as I like to say, let’s see what love can do.

And this podcast Living Love is an exploration of that, we get lots of experience seeing what fear and greed do. But what can love do? And the word “Living” is intentional. It’s, I think, we spend a lot of time analyzing problems and reading about problems. And this is about living it, making it a practice and reflecting on that together. And I envision this as being like a campfire. So the first part is like listening to stories and some reflections and considerations. And then the second half of the podcast will be kind of like a cafe, like meeting a friend or two for coffee, in conversations around the stories that I talked about in the first part. And one of the joys of being human is making meaning together. So when we can listen and build on ideas and see what happens in unscripted conversation, I hope it’ll invite you to have similar conversations on the themes and the stories in your own life. And I think of the movie with Jodie Foster called Contact, where she plays a scientist who’s searching for extraterrestrial life, and the movie begins, it’s so great at the start, the camera is kind of on the earth, and then it slowly pulls back and you hear this huge babble of voices. And then the camera keeps pulling back further away from the earth, and the din gets quieter and quieter till you’re in silence. And I think of that scene, because I recognize with humility, I am starting a podcast and adding one more stream into that big global babble of words. And what will make this one different? For me, one of my pet peeves is that so much of our media and dialogue is focused on that analyzing problems. And looking at everything not working and the conflicts and the politics. And so what I want to do in this podcast is really look at the patterns underneath with a spirit of, okay, if these are all the problems, how do we go beyond those and change the patterns and be the generation that says enough? I’m going to grow something different and more beautiful. And I feel like we need a space for the stories of how we do that. How do we heal? How do we learn from each other? What does it look like to live, love and build new ways of living and being together, restoring community bonds, seeing human dignity? Just how many different embodiments of living love and growing more love in the world can we come up with? So I imagine this like we’re cooks in the kitchen, talking about ingredients and recipes and you can go home and cook these in your own kitchen, or like seeds you can plant in your garden. So I invite you to the conversation. And we’ll look forward to more podcasts to come and thank you again for listening.

Beth Tener 

Welcome, Nancy. And Nancy has been one of my good friends and collaborators. We both do a lot of facilitation work together. And so I’m very pleased to welcome you to this first edition of The Living love podcast, Nancy.

Nancy Gabriel

Thanks, Beth. It’s wonderful to be here.

Beth Tener 

Okay, so as I said earlier, we’re imagining that we’re sitting here in a little cafe, having a coffee together and chatting about the podcast you just listened to. I thought we would start today with the story that you were part of. I started the podcast with the story of sitting with a bunch of colleagues and going around the circle. And that quote about, you know, we’re gonna go over the cliff, I want to go over holding hands and you were there that evening. So I thought maybe let’s start with what was your experience of that and what made that experience special for you?

Nancy Gabriel

Well, I always love having an opportunity to bring circle into a meeting like that, as I recall, we had come together to kind of share things we were learning across collective impact experiences. And that can end up being pretty heady. A lot of drawing on flip charts and things like that. Circle can get us out of our head and into our body and heart and more into what we are sensing. What I remember is that shift happening, and how powerful and productive that was. It changes the course of any meeting after you share an experience with colleagues in that way.

Beth Tener 

Yeah, that’s so true. So many of us in workplaces and faith communities, and communities of all kinds have to do a lot of meetings and a lot of times where we come together, meet and talk. And you and I both found that this alternative way, instead of all those other typical methods of sitting in circle, which is an ancient human form, can be really powerful. So maybe you could just give us a taste of ,how did you introduce it that evening, and what do you feel is important to understand, of where this process come from, and how to make it work well.

Nancy Gabriel

I use a particular version of circle that I learned it from a colleague, Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees.  She learned it from her elders and the Lakota people learned it from the earth. The piece that stands out for me in the way she taught it, and that I’ve applied, is the idea that it is a listening circle, not a talking circle. The idea is that you are listening out loud. When you are holding the circle you are creating the conditions for people to listen out loud. And like what does that mean? Well, it’s the idea that often when we’re in a group, and we’re sharing, we’re scripting, right? We’re thinking ahead, like, “Oh, I’m going to say this…”

Beth Tener 

You’re not really listening, you’re scripting,

Nancy Gabriel

Exactly. How do we sit in this circle and really be present and listen? First we don’t script.  We also don’t connect or compare. A lot of times, what we’ll do is, you know, you’ll say something happened to you. And I’ll be like, oh, yeah, that same thing happened to me. And then I’ll go off into my similar experience. And again, I’ve stopped listening to your experience. We call this noncomparative perception. And we ask people to try not to script and connect to their experience. And when we find ourselves doing that, because that’s natural, go back to the breath. Take a breath and get present and be back in the moment. Another aspect of how listening comes into this form of circle is that you put the talking piece on the ground when you finished speaking, you don’t hand it to the next person.

That gives space for the unseen to come through. It gives space for some creativity, or a new thought, or perception, or way of thinking, to come into our mind. And then when we pick that talking piece up we are listening out loud. We share what’s just true for us at that moment and that wasn’t true for us three minutes ago when we were working on scripting. That is part of what can make this form of circle really powerful. I’ve had experience where I really didn’t know what was going to come out of my mouth until I opened it.

Beth Tener 

Yeah, and that was certainly true for me in the circle. As I describe, I got this whole vision that landed that I certainly hadn’t had in mind before I had my turn in that experience. Yeah, no,

Nancy Gabriel

When we’re not only in our head but also in our body, connected to our heart and to all of our knowing, wisdom can come through in incredibly beautiful and powerful ways. I love that.

Beth Tener 

And these are times where we need to get beyond the same old ideas we’ve had. So that’s a beautiful example. We often talk in our work about emergence and this idea that different parts can come together and something new comes forward that wasn’t there before. Chris Corrigan is a facilitator who’s who I’ve learned a lot from. He described emergences as “everyone comes to the party, and you all go home with something nobody brought.” Something new comes out. And I feel like that’s part of the power of a circle, right?

Nancy Gabriel

Absolutely. And I think another key component to that is why it’s so important to have different experiences and diversity around the circle so that different ideas and experiences are coming out in circle. Magic happens when two things that aren’t normally in contact with each other, come into contact. That’s when something magical can happen.

Beth Tener 

That’s a good segue for a story I wanted to invite you to share here, because in these times right now, we’re certainly struggling with how difference tends to polarize. And there’s certainly a dearth of listening at times, it feels like, in the public sphere. And you have a story of how you were on a school board in a small town, and there was some difficult situation that you were able to use circle in a way that was healing for the community. Could you share that story?

Nancy Gabriel

I was on the school board. And we had hired an administrator, and it wasn’t working. The teachers were really struggling with this person’s approach to management and even misuse of power. So as a school board, we were figuring out how to address this.  We made some personnel changes but that wasn’t enough. The community was feeling really bruised and battered, and not necessarily like they were heard or respected. And by community, I mean, mostly the teachers and staff at the school. We wanted to think of a way to come together.

I was in a planning meeting and asked to facilitate it. One of the people in the meeting said, “So Nancy, what you can do is every time somebody says something negative, you can write on the flip chart a positive way of saying it.” I’m like no, that isn’t going to help. It would send the message that you’re not feeling something hard, you’re really feeling something positive.

I said, “No, I will not facilitate that way, the only way I will facilitate is if we use circle.” We invited the teachers, staff and school board to come together. We shared all those conditions of circle that I described earler. We acknowledged how hard the situation was and asked them to share what they learned. Instead of going into venting or blaming we asked them to share what they personally learned, maybe about themselves, maybe about how they interacted, and also what they learned about the system. And with the thinking of, if something happened in the future, how could we take these learnings and respond in a different way?

I’m getting chills right now thinking about it, because people were so wonderfully willing to share. And it got a lot deeper than expected. One of the teachers said to me afterwards, we need a lot fewer post it notes, and a lot more time together like this.

Beth Tener 

And there’s a quality of slowing down and hearing each other. And I think you said it kind of quickly. But it’s the teachers and the administration, like you had a lot of parts of, and we’re using the word system, but you can also think of that as the whole school – including all the elements that are affecting the situation. And schools in particular are often so siloed, right, that the teachers are feeling something but they can’t communicate very well to the school board. Because the principal’s in the middle, right, all those dynamics. It sounded to me like part of the power of it was that the whole could hear itself reflected back and people could hear what, what it was like for other parts of the community that they don’t usually interact with, right?

Nancy Gabriel

Yes, now, of course, we didn’t have parents and students there. So, we had just one piece of the system. But I think you’re right, and that schools can be very hierarchical. And, you know, the administrators are the go between. And I think the fact that the school board cared about the teachers’ experience and validated it made a big difference.

I had school board members say to me afterwards, “I didn’t realize how bad it was, how hard it was for the teachers until we sat in the circle.” It was not only healing for the teachers to be able to express what they’ve been experiencing. It also made a big difference for the school board members who could be dismissive or a little frustrated with the teachers for when they thought they were overreacting or making a big deal about something. It was a flow for this group, this part of the school that didn’t typically listen to each other and have that kind of interaction. I mean, it changed things.

Beth Tener 

That’s beautiful and relates the theme of Living Love: how do we create cultures, in our workplaces, in our relationships in our families and our larger communities where this quality of just taking the time to slow down and truly listen to each other without judging and without jumping in and having to argue?  That is also part of what happens in circle, right? It is just one after another, you can pass, you’re just hearing and it might go round the circle several times. Is that right?

Nancy Gabriel

That’s right, there’s no crosstalk. The talking piece goes around the circle, until there’s nothing left to say. For the teachers it was an experience of feeling cared for and valued. The message that we care about what you experienced, and we want to hear about it. We want to take what we’re hearing and learn from it so that this same situation isn’t replicated in the future.

Beth Tener 

I want to just quote you right there, because that is so fundamental to so many of the ways we’re handling things right now, if we could just bring that spirit to many more places, and more dialogues and more issues there. So often, we just resist caring hearing validating, it’s not that hard. I think maybe the when the lawyers get involved, that also makes it hard. It’s human response, right.

Nancy Gabriel

It’s the human response. There’s a situation at an institution that I work with happening right now. And what you just said is what is needed, but instead, they’ve hired consultants. And they’re putting together a plan. There is a whole thing happening. And the students feel pretty disenfranchised by that whole process. One of them said to me the other day, “I just want to feel like I belong here.”

Beth Tener 

Yeah. And I’m heard, and we care.

Nancy Gabriel

Yes. And validated. Not that hard. But it seems like it’s hard.

Beth Tener 

I know. Okay, so I want to change gears and bring in a new thread, back to this idea of how do we, in the workplace, in other parts of our lives, create structures that allow us to connect more in this human way that brings more of this quality of validation, of seeing each other in? You and I have worked together for over 20 years, we’ve either been friends or colleagues working together. And there’s a some of your formative stories from the first nonprofit, or early one that you worked at, that you often would tell. And I as your friend would often, they inspired me. I wondered if you would share how your team worked together at that nonprofit, Second Nature?

Nancy Gabriel

I worked at a nonprofit called Second Nature. I was leading the education and training component of the work that we did. We had had some challenges with how we were doing it. I had a team and our charge was to make some changes to how we were approaching the work. And we had hired a consultant, Bert Cohen, who is an amazing man, and is an important part of this story.

I had a couple of younger staff, people working with me fairly new to the work world. One of the things that we did when we got together for our planning meetings, is we agreed to what we call the full value contract. I think maybe that originated at Outward Bound. The key component of that was that we made this agreement with each other that we would provide feedback, both positive and challenging, as we work together, and in particular, we put a structure in place at the end of every meeting to have that check in. We made a commitment to each other to be honest and communicate. The evaluation at the end of the meeting created the structure for it.

Whenever we got together for meetings, we always started with an “Us Moment.” And the idea wasn’t so much of a check in, it was just like, where are you right now. Whatever you needed to say, whatever was on your mind could come out. It could be, I just was reading this great book, and I have to share this thing I read, or I’m exhausted, I didn’t sleep well, last night, or my mother fell yesterday, and I’m worried about her. Whatever it was, and for however long you needed to speak, was how we started every meeting. And it could be that in an hour and a half meeting, we’d spend a huge portion on the Us Moment and think, oh, no, we’re not going to get to our agenda. But we always did.

Because once we got through that, we were really present. And we also really saw the complete human side of each other. And then we did our work together. We always closed with an evaluation when we gave feedback on content and process. If someone said something that upset you in the meeting, you didn’t quite have the wherewithal to say something, you had opportunity there to say it. We worked together in that way.

We had a lot of fun. I mean, people always want to be at our meetings, and we were really effective. The training program got much better and we could support each other really well. For me there were a couple times when that was such a gift. Once was when we were going off to do a workshop and I had a big role in facilitating it. But I had a medical emergency and couldn’t make it to the workshop. I didn’t worry about it, I knew that because we worked so closely together, that they would be able to step in and do the pieces that I was set up to do. And they did. And it went beautifully.

Beth Tener 

We talked sometimes about, you could work at the Speed of Trust, rather, like you had enough trust that things could easily be picked up by someone else, right?

Nancy Gabriel

Absolutely.

Beth Tener 

It reminds me of a story of, I was with a friend who was a kindergarten teacher who was had gotten so fed up with how much the structured testing had taken over the kindergarten social experience. And she’d been a teacher for many years and was told “we don’t have time for doing an opening circle with the kids in the morning, you got to get on right on to learning,” and it was breaking her heart because she always loved that part of the morning. She could check in with each kid and get a sense of where they were and if they’re okay. And all these things would set it up well for the day. She had ended up deciding it was time to retire because she was so tired of the direction of this.

And that same day, right after that, I went and visited some friends who work in the software corporate world. And he was saying, you know, what we found is the best way to start a meeting is to do a circle check in where everybody reports in on how they’re doing and what their work is. You know how we take the lessons from the business world and then tell schools what to do. And I’m like, could you go tell the kindergarteners? If they didn’t have that process back because it’s now rolled out to them as this whole productivity thing? And now companies are discovering again, oh, that actually makes sense to start with a check in. I think you had also mentioned something about the quality of the human relationships that really got established, that kind of went far beyond work with that team…

Nancy Gabriel

I think it connects into some of what you’re talking about in the podcast about bringing love into work environments, and how to create those conditions for deep connection and belonging in the workplace. And so again, it’s like circle, it doesn’t have to be that complicated, really. It’s making space for us to bring all of who we are into the situation.

This team that I was just describing, we were working really well together. I was pregnant, and there was a lot of excitement about me and the baby. And then I had a stillbirth. That was a devastating loss, as you can imagine and I felt so supported by the people I worked with, in part because of those relationships we formed.

That child, Ned, would have been 21, a few weeks ago. And I went back and was looking through the cards and notes that I received from people during that time. And there are so many from the two women that I worked closely with at Second Nature; offers of help and support and love and checking in. When I read the cards from them I felt so held and loved and cared for from my “work colleagues”. And as I was going through the cards, I found another letter from someone whose name I didn’t recognize at first. And then I realized it was the mother of one of my co-workers, who I had never met. She wrote me a beautiful letter. I actually have it here. And one of the things she said was, and I’ll just read this sentence from it. “Your support, friendship and modeling on both professional and personal levels have been pivotal to her growth.” This is referencing her daughter’s growth and sense of well-being.

It’s a truly beautiful letter, and I thought, wow, here is example of how the way we should up ripples out. Her mother was appreciative of the way we were working and being together because her daughter was growing both personally and professionally.

Beth Tener 

It’s so moving, and it really speaks I think to that there’s ways that when people are rude or you’re in a toxic work culture, we know that spins out and certainly I was you know, I grew up with some of that at home like you could feel when dad walked in the door with all the stress and the criticalness and that they bring home, but we can run it the other way. When there’s a healthy culture of dignity and care and commitment – you clearly were doing really excellent work together. And you had this really caring culture for each other. And here that rippled out to her mother, watching her daughter blossom through your friendship and your professional you know, mentorship and colleagueship, whatever you call it, but you know, I think that’s such a beautiful example of that.

Nancy Gabriel

Right, and of what is possible. There was some magic in that team, you know, and that magic might not happen in other situations or again, quite in that same way. But that idea of dignity and honoring the whole person and caring about them; acknowledging that we’re so much more, than our productivity and what we produce. And I think that too often, there isn’t space for those other parts of us, and that furthers that sense of fragmentation and not belonging.

Beth Tener 

And to speak to your acknowledgement or caveat there, certainly, if you are in a workplace where you have unhealthy power dynamics, and bullying, and some of these more disturbing personal qualities than there’s not enough space or room or safety for that openness ad care to come in. There’s quite a movement now to recognize certainly some of the work that Google and their research on teams is recognizing how critical a sense of psychological safety is to what allows teams to work well together. I believe this is all in that spirit, and will only become more and more important, because the evidence is so clear, what a difference that makes to whether teams function well or not.

Nancy Gabriel

And we’re seeing so many people leaving their jobs. What’s the percentage you just told me?

Beth Tener 

Like a third of people are leaving their jobs and looking for new jobs, and this is part of it, how you’re going to be treated. I just was able to be home for a while and break the cycle of this workplace dynamics, and where do I want to be? What kind of way do I want to be treated? Certainly when we have questions of people’s health and well-being, being cared about or not, when you’re looking just at numbers or profits? No, it’s I think things are shifting along these lines.

Well, Nancy, this has been a wonderful conversation. I wonder if there’s any, as we come to a close, are there any other final thoughts you have, from the first part of the podcast are there things we’ve talked about today that feel important to share?

Nancy Gabriel

First of all, thank you for inviting me to speak with you today, this was a lot of fun, and I really appreciated it. I really love the way you think about things. And weave so many different strands and parts together to create a beautiful whole wherever you go. That is really a gift that you bring, and I’m grateful that sometimes I get to be a part of that weaving.

I think the other thing I would say is that I’m sort of struck by my own hesitation to use the word “unseen” when we were talking about circle and wanting to be more explicit and vocal about wisdom and where wisdom and ideas come from. We’re not going to think our way out of the challenges we’re in today.  We need as many ways of accessing knowing as we can muster. I hope that we get to a time where it doesn’t feel awkward or there isn’t a hesitation to use some of that language. Rather, that it’s an integrated part of the way we do work and are together. As a part of the way we live, the choices that we make, and how we think about things as a part of that greater whole. Part of belonging is falling back into remembering that we’re all interconnected, and interdependent, and until we are thinking in that way, the challenges we face aren’t going to go away.

Beth Tener 

Yeah, beautifully said. And I hope what’s come through today in your stories, and as we reflected on some of the shared experiences we’ve had, is this fundamental idea that the current way, it is not the way it has to be. I think we can critique a lot of how workplaces are toxic, or the current dialogue is so broken, or we can really take these practices and say, let’s live something different. And you and I in our work and our lives have lived alternatives like your school board story. We can do this differently. We can, we will be sharing in the show notes, some of the links to practices and ways to think about this, of how to learn these methods because it’s possible to do it in a different way. And you being on the school board with some skills, were able to bring a new possibility into that community that was much more based in everyone having a seat in the circle and belonging and that we care about everybody’s experience. And we’re all part of making this whole thing work for everybody. And we can just start living that from here forward rather than just complaining about what’s not working.

Nancy Gabriel

Right. Here, here.

Beth Tener 

Here here may it be so.

Beth Tener 

I will explore more on this theme in the next episode with Reverend Charles Gibbs, who will share with us a story about a global grassroots initiative, bringing together people from different religions all over the world.

“We wanted to work in a positive way we wanted to work from visions of what was possible, not from what are all the problems and how do we solve them. And so our gatherings were in the charter in time were all structured as to use the term large appreciative future searches. And we would bring people together to get to know each other on an individual basis and on that build a shared vision dream of what might be possible if we can work together.”

This transcript has been edited for clarity.