The U-shaped hole in Injustice by Karen Blakeley

This week we have been ranging over a number of topics, justice, patience and courage. And, although not planned as such, it seems to me that the three are very closely connected.  Try this exercise:  time yourself for 1 minute and see how many examples of injustice in the world you are able to write down.  I came up with 15.  When I gave myself 2 minutes I typed out 30 issues and could have gone on for longer.  My issues ranged from the injustices in this country’s education system, to inherited diseases, to poverty in Africa, to the lack of human rights in a number of regimes all over the world and to human trafficking.

So what do you do in response to all of these issues? 

• You can get angry
• You can do something small e.g. write a letter to your MP
• You can do something big e.g. protest, march, organise a fund-raising event
• You can do something that involves some personal sacrifice e.g. give up a holiday and volunteer instead
• You can be fatalistic and resign yourself to the inevitable injustice of life
• You can avoid it – bury your head in the sand, get on with your own life
• You can ‘care’.

Of course, there are pros and cons with all of these.  Even just ‘caring’ is emotionally exhausting – there is just too much to care about.  Since we cannot do anything about most of the injustices in the world it is tempting to bury one’s head in the sand and get on with one’s own life.   And we probably all do all of these things at various times.

The trick, it seems to me, is to know when one is required to be patient and when one is required to be courageous.

I am currently in my ‘angry’ phase – this often happens when I have space to think about issues of injustice.  I am at the phase where “something must be DONE”.  So recently I looked to join some kind of organisation that was active in the political arena without being an actual political party, as I am disillusioned and cynical about such institutions.  As a result of my search I came across an organisation called Compass and, having chatted with the remarkably energetic young lady at the end of the phone, I was invited to attend an Inquiry into ‘a new model for education’ in Portcullis House where much of the business of Parliament gets transacted.  About 50 people filled the room which included an MP, the head of the N.U.T. and two ex-headmasters, one of whom was a member of the House of Lords.  A vigorous debate ensued amongst all the participants many of whom came from the world of secondary education.  Talk about injustice – it burst forth from every person’s story or plea, our education system is positively brimming over with it!.  And you can always tell when people have experienced injustice because they get angry and upset and passionate.  What was interesting to me was that the MP and the other speakers kept saying “I agree with everything that has been said so far”.  Apart from being ‘politician-speak’, they were right – we all knew the injustices and the problems in education, it’s just that different people have different views as to how to put them right.  And, what was also apparent was that fixing those injustices involved a highly complex process of harnessing different energies, opposing ideas, conflicting needs and competing interests.  I heard nothing original that evening and left thinking, ‘well that issue is best left in the hands of people who know what they are talking about and who know a lot more about the issue than I do’.   And I often come to that place nowadays – what do I know about the Palestinian issue;  what qualifies me to get angry on behalf of the protestors in Turkey or Brazil; what can I do about the companies that are avoiding tax?

This is where patience steps in – these are the words from the serenity prayer:

Lord give me the serenity to accept things I cannot change

             The courage to change the things I can
             And the wisdom to know the difference.

I am not sure I have displayed much courage in changing the things I can but I suppose it does take a degree of courage to care about things you can change.  Because once you decide you are going to care about something, well, you have to actually DO something about it.  And in our over-worked, pressured and yet highly stimulating, entertainment-rich environments giving up time to DO something is a sacrifice.   Furthermore, you never know what you may end up doing – a marathon, a sky-dive, a talk, something that makes you look ridiculous – all for charity or to address an injustice of some sort.

As far as injustice is concerned, I think we can afford to give ourselves a little break – we all know the problems in our world and there are others out there who are focusing their energies and talents on resolving those problems.  But there is one problem in the world – it may be in the family, in the community, at work or even a national or global issue – but there is one problem that has a ‘U’ shaped hole in it.  It is just waiting for ‘you’ to focus your energies and talents on it and for ‘you’ to believe in yourself enough to step up to the plate and ‘just DO it!’.

Good luck!

Courage, by Juliet Hancock

“Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go”   T S Eliot

 Juliet is an independent Organisation Development Consultant and Coach with a particular interest in the role of values in the choices we make as individuals and how we engage with others.

When asked last August if I would be interested in writing some blogs for the Good Project, saying ‘yes’ felt quite courageous (or mad!) as I had never written a blog before.  And I am curious that I chose to write about courage – what do I know about that? At the time I was getting over an accident and feeling rather vulnerable and fearful about the future. Maybe I was looking for some courage myself, and because I also knew the situation I found myself in was also an opportunity –to grow and to risk doing something different in the future.

And then I realised that courage was at the heart of my work on organisation and personal values, including my own. The Latin root of the word values is ‘valor’, meaning strength and bravery. “In understanding our values we equip ourselves with a perennial source of motivation, focus and strength to achieve those things that matter most to us” says Michael Henderson in Finding True North.

Our values sit at the intersection of our experience of the outer world and our inner world. We need head, heart and bravery to defeat our fears and achieve what we are truly capable of. In the Wizard of Oz the Scarecrow, Tin man and Lion found all three to defeat the Wicked Witch of the West, and discovered that they already had these resources within themselves. What is it that prevents us all, and our organisations achieving their full potential to be the ‘best we can be’?

Our values drive our behaviour and paradoxically, because they are largely unconscious, may limit our choices and our potential. They inform our decision making and where we put our energy. Our values determine the choices e make about what we ‘have’; what we ‘do’ and ‘who we are’. As Maslow said, our values determine our ‘needs’ (food, shelter, physical health) and also for belonging and self-esteem. It may be the fear of losing these that hold us back:  ‘will I have enough money for the future?’; ‘will I make fool of myself? ‘will they like me?’; ‘will I fit in?’; ‘what if I fail?’ How many of us postpone or trade off what we really want in life to be ‘safe’?

But our values can also drive us forward. By having the courage to look at our fears and our aspirations ‘in the eye’ we can begin to address that potential gap referred to in Chandra McGowan’s excellent blog ‘the courage to be amazing’. Try Jackie Le Fevre’s ‘braveometer’ to see how brave you are now and want to be http://braverthanyouthink.co.uk/start.php.  Chris Johnston has some good tips for finding the courage we need in his book ‘Find your power’, to move from our comfort zone, through resistance to the ‘world of our dreams’.

By limiting our own courage and potential we also limit the courage and potential of others. The behaviour of leaders and managers becomes the culture of organisations. How often do we see people protecting themselves in case of blame; reinforcing practises they know need to change and saying why things can’t be done. Staffordshire Hospital and Barclays Bank and so many others. How long did it take for anyone to say ‘I got it wrong’ or to blow the whistle on others, and with what awful consequences on people’s lives.

Instead, how would it be to be the ‘best possible organisation on earth to work for?’ For three years Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones of London Business School have been investigating this question by asking hundreds of executives in surveys and in seminars all over the world to describe their ideal organisation. They found six common imperatives. Together they describe an organisation that operates at its fullest potential by allowing people to do their ‘best work’.

” In a nutshell, it’s a company where individual differences are nurtured; information is not suppressed or spun; the company adds value to employees, rather than merely extracting it from them; the organization stands for something meaningful; the work itself is intrinsically rewarding; and there are no stupid rules.  We call this “the organization of your dreams” (Harvard Business Review).    http://hbr.org/2013/05/creating-the-best-workplace-on-earth/ar/pr

At the heart of this dream organisation are some principles including ‘let me be myself’ ‘discover and magnify my strengths’ and ‘make my work meaningful’.

This to me feels like a yellow brick road worth following – personally and for those people and organisations we work with who are all striving to be the best they can be. I used to have a sticker in the back of my car – ‘dare to dream’. Now there is a challenge……….    

 

 

 

Justice

John Cullen lectures in the School of Business at the National University of Ireland Maynooth.  He researches the relationship between work, spirituality & management learning (particularly their impact on our relationship with the natural world and society).

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Justice
My aunt died this week.   She was the most soulful person you could meet.  Engaging, beautiful, compassionate and funny; the world seems quieter without her.  Her cancer came quickly and robbed everyone who knew her of somebody who made them feel vigorously loved.  That someone so young as her should be taken at such a young age is unjust.  All feelings of injustice derive from a sense of loss – of no longer having someone who reminds us of the importance of connecting to other people.  Someone who tells us that there is always something we can do to help people who have lost something. 

Last Palm Sunday Pope Francis tweeted: ‘We must not believe the Evil One when he tells us that there is nothing we can do in the face of violence, injustice and sin’.  Since then a clearer picture of what he means by ‘injustice’, and who he means as ‘perpetrators’ has emerged.  He has been increasingly outspoken in his comments against the ‘tyranny’ of the world of international finance who would have us believe that we all have to take the poisonous medicine of Austerity that has devastated families, ruined wellbeing and even led to the resurgence of far-right xenophobic groups.  The appeal that this latter group wield is doubtlessly grounded in the way that they appeal to a sense of justice that has been denied to working people by mainstream democratic parties.  We are all in a dangerous place because of a perceived lack of justice. 

In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker wrote that all human beings sooner or later have to engage with the most difficult fact of their existence: the fact that they will die.  People do this by becoming involved in an ‘immortality project’ which is a way of reminding ourselves that our existence is significant.  The social construction of these projects leads to conflicts between these systems over time.  Herein is the difficulty with harmful social and political movements: the people who run them ultimately believe that they are doing the right thing for themselves, their community, and even the world.  At the core of the injustice that they inflict on other people, they believe that they are being just. 

A Muslim friend of mine speaks of his faith in terms of justice.  He believes in afterlife where everything will be set right; where the people he loves who have suffered will be allowed to live the fullest possible life, and the indignities and illnesses they have endured will be forgotten.

Even the most atheistic amongst us want the same thing.  Marx recognised this desire to be one that religions could accommodate.  Religion is ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions’.  His language is apt, because he speaks of a world without a heart and soul.  Our desire for justice is based on the need for recognising that people are not consumers, market segments or human capital.  We are not whatever economists imagine us to be; we are contributors to long emergent cultural processes. 

Becker proposed that people became mentally ill and depressed because they are denied access to resources which could enable them to complete their immortality project.  Boring work, poverty, evidence of a lack of compassion make people believe that the concept of a soul – our sense of self which is rooted in the various groups we are members of – has ceased to exist.  Without souls we are only intelligent animals who do not owe each other anything and only have a duty to satisfying our own self-interest.  Like the demon in The Exorcist who tries to convince the priests that humans are animals who are not worthy of God’s love, the concept of behaving justly is integral to the idea of living a life that is soulful.  Whereas markets have a strong utility in helping people develop their skills in a meritocratic way, innovating and satisfying needs, when they become an overall orthodox ideology on whose terms solely is society governed, then we have found a rationale for treat people as if they had no souls - a rationale for treating them unjustly.

The easy thing to do is to find someone to blame for our losses – extremism always fills the gap of hurt easily.  But there is something more productive we can do when we feel like a victim of injustice.  The cultural psychologist Rick Shweder has demonstrated that depressed states are associated with the concept of ‘soul loss’ in many societies.  In Thinking Through Cultures (1991) he writes: ‘To feel depressed one must have had experience with the soul’(p.255).  In short, experiencing intense pain is the first step that we take to find more soulful ways of living.  Facing the pain of injustice and the reality of loss in a mature way leads us to new ways of creating justice for others. 

In Memory of Nuala Joyce.

Patience by Gill How

Patience is the state of endurance in difficult situations

By Gill How

“Patience is the state of endurance in difficult situations, persevering in the face of delay or provocation. It is the level of endurance before negativity.”

“Virtue is moral excellence, a positive trait or quality deemed to be morally good.”

Both these descriptions come from Wikipedia.

The topic here is patience as a virtue. I have journeyed with patience over the last few years and felt drawn to write about it here.

My relationship with patience became explicit with feedback from the external assessor at the end of my coaching supervision viva, the final, observed, point of my coaching supervision qualification. She reflected back how patient I had been with my client, and how that patience had showed in the time I gave the client in finding her own thinking. Giving a client this time would feel a respectful thing for me to do anyway, but the language in the feedback was patience. This reminded me of two things – one how I had learnt to be patient with my middle child, who has learning difficulties (Down’s Syndrome), where every stage of his progress has been hard won, recognised and celebrated. It also reminded me of when, as a child myself, I taught another child to dive (we were in the same swimming club). I was able to sit on the side of the pool with him and wait until he decided he could do it.  And now as a grown up, I am often complimented on how much I believe people can do things, and how I give them the time, space and belief to go and do the things they initially believe they cannot. Maybe patience with others is not so much a virtue of mine, but a strength – something I cannot not do. However, there are boundaries – I can only do it for about three hours maximum at a time! And then I need to do something different.

The second area of thought about patience is about patience with oneself, particularly when things do not go at the speed that one would wish. I am, of course, talking about the “slower than we would like” speed. After eighteen years of working for myself I have decided the time has come to join an organisation again. My patience has been remarkably tested, finding my direction and place to fit where all of my experience is valued, appreciated and welcomed, particularly in time of recession. There have been clear moments of despair, amidst all the learning and opportunity to connect in a heartfelt way with others about the dilemmas we face choosing our career at the current time. Not so good on the level of endurance before negativity occurs then, a clear case of good and bad inter-twined! However, in one of my more despairing moments of reflection, I wrote myself a note which began... “I got this job because...” and I was surprised to find myself answering the question in the following way: “I got this job because I was patient. I took the journey as work itself, a learning adventure in its own right, and when the inner work was done and the learning complete, I got the job.” And certainly, as I have become more open to feedback about how I am seen, and where my best contribution would be next, things have flowed more easily.

So where does this lead? What are your thoughts on this quote:

Patience with others is Love,

Patience with self is Hope,

Patience with God is Faith.

Adel Bestravos, 1924 – 2005, who was a Deacon in the Christian Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt.

 

I found his quote quite inspiring and a different, more positive take on the topic. I can see that my stories about patience with others align well with Love. My stories about patience with myself vary on or with Hope, although do link very strongly with the concept of my own purpose and meaning, and they seem to represent some strange combination of what Adel says about self and God and maybe even Faith for me. I do like his three dimensions, (the number three always is good!) and the linkages he offers, even if it is not entirely consistent with my own thoughts and beliefs, not  at the moment anyway.

What then are the take-aways about my thoughts about patience? The things which stand out for me are:

·         Patience can clearly be an act of love, perhaps this can be seen and felt more easily with others, however perhaps it could be targeted in the same way for self too

·         When patience is required, and I take it as a positive reaction to a situation, it is an opportunity for reflection, inner work and growth as well as feedback and engagement with others

·         At its best patience is therefore an active response, a place where I am present, alive and connected with the needs of the moment, in direct contrast with some of the better known qualities of passivity, denial and avoidance, strategies with which I have been far too familiar in the past.

 What a surprise – I wonder if I have transformed “endurance” to “engagement” ...

Patience is the state of engagement with difficult situations...a positive trait or quality deemed to be (morally) good.

I have enjoyed writing this – it would please me if you would share your own response and thoughts about patience as a virtue here too...

 

Gill is a leadership development consultant and executive coach, particularly interested in helping people in organisations to lead change in an effective, results oriented and meaningful way which exceeds expectations of stakeholders.