To honor them, I offer my own viewpoint.  Read all the way through.  If you are not religious, do not stop at the sentence that notices how irreligious we are.  There is room in this discussion for all beliefs.  If you are religious, do not smugly read on until you get to the part about materialism being the source of our current evil. Read it to the end, reflect on our current level of materialism and our impoverished spiritual state. Until our polarizing discussions come to an end and we look inside ourselves and then “upward” who wins our election is akin to a band-aid on a gunshot wound.

If I offend anyone, I sincerely apologize upfront and immediately. I simply express that this is a viewpoint I embrace.  You may find this surprising, it was expressed by someone else in a speech in 1978!  

“As long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we have to lead an everyday life. There is a disaster, however, which has already been under way for quite some time. I am referring to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.

To such consciousness, man is the touchstone in judging and evaluating everything on earth. Imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now experiencing the consequences of mistakes which had not been noticed at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis. The split in the world (East vs. West) is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections.

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.

It would be retrogression to attach oneself today to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man's life and society's activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?

If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.

This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but -- upward.

Harvard commencement speech, Alexander Sozhenitsyn, 1978.

I've grappled with the subject of skeptics my whole life and it suddenly dawned on me, I'm not the only one.

If you've read my blogs, you know there was one where I told you the story of doing a cartwheel. I desparately wanted to be a cheerleader, I was still in grade school and it was a big deal. To be on the squad, though, you had to do a cartwheel, minimum requirement.

The gist of that story was the remembered taunting of the other kids, the shouts of 'kelly belly' on the schoolyard, as I tried and fell, tried and fell. And the ultimate victory that persistence brings, doing a cartwheel and making it on the team.

I had alot of skeptics back then, even my parents tried to dissuade me, perhaps thinking an overweight kid is just going to embarass herself.

Here's the thing:  the skepticism never eased up. In fact, it got more intense as I grew up.  The numbers are in the hundreds and now thousands of people I would encounter who would ask me something about myself and I would answer and receive a barrage of naysaying, doubting, challenging, sometimes angry, skeptical retorts. Even close friends, family.

We've heard about this before, right?  Michael Jordan not making it on his high school's basketball team, most famous example.  Somehow those stories seem far removed from my little coffee shop, and my morning cuppa joe and that one person who seems interested and curious, and then wham, before your caffeine has kicked in, your told five ways your story/dream/idea/purpose doesn't work.

Does dreaming a really big dream scare that many people?

I'm dreaming a really big dream right now.  I'm in California, and I'm going back to school for a Ph.D. Here's the big hairy audacious goal: how can we shift our corporate/business models so their focus is on human growth and development and secondarily on commerce?

I have an idea how to do that. (And a ton of people who are skeptical!)

Even so, I have an idea.....and I'm going for it.

I wrote this for my current and future clients.  Here's the takeaway: Skeptics are there to hone our choices, to make us better, to shape and mold our ideas. Thank them, honor them, stay the course, tweak it, and carry on!

Music executive, 1962, after turning down the Beatles.

I have a hundred of these.  The pundits, the naysayers, the opinionated, the certain. Kinda funny when you read it now.  I'm sure at the time, though, it carried some weight, maybe it felt heavy, ominous.  What did John or Paul think?  Did they know this was said?  Doesn't seem to have made a hoot of difference. And yet, could it have stopped the Beatles before they became "THE BEATLES"?

Statements made by other people tearing down our idea, our value add, our creation, are a dime a dozen. Most of us have a thick enough skin that we can slough these off.  What about the statements, the critiques, we make about ourselves?

"By the time I am 33, I will have to do something else."  Mick Jagger

He's in his late 60's now, right? Point is, we don't know where we are going or where our choices will take us.  We can limit or expand our experience.  We can take to heart the negative or take apart our dream. Listening to criticism, or as one of my former employers liked to call it, 'running to criticism,' only reinforces... criticism.  The critic, the judge, a very popular archetype in our society, drives us hard.

Are you aware of your voice of judgment, the harsh critic that calls the shots from the dark cave of your ego? Yeah, I know, that sounded a bit Edgar Allen Poe-ish, all noir and dense. But think about it? Who really makes your decisions?

This week take extra minutes to focus.  Really concentrate on what you are doing, and what you are thinking about what you are doing? As you read an email, what thoughts pop into your mind?  As you wait for a reply to an email, what thoughts are creating meaning about why you haven't heard back from the person?

The inner dialogue is fascinating, it can create and it can destroy.  Pay attention. Be full of care, listen deeply to yourself and others. And, here's a reframe on criticism: run to discernment, instead. 

If you've read my posts, you already know that wisdom is required for discerning, wisdom requires heart, as well as head. 

No matter how many times I read that I seem to forget it. Usually when I need it the most, in the face of adversity, the daily challenges, the ups and downs of life, I go mental.  

We all do it.

Going mental is the safe route.  That's what the mind is there to do, sift through our experiences, our thoughts, make sense of the environment, analyze, compare, and conclude. It throws up solutions at an extraordinary pace, leaving us blinded by our mental superhighway.

And all the while, the heart remains still. It waits, sometimes a really long time. It doesn't speak in words; the language of the heart is more subtle and nuanced. The heart is like the blade of grass that pushes up and cracks the concrete sidewalk. It's insistent, patient, and ever present.

If there was a theme this week in my coaching practice it would be resisting the whisper of the heart. I would ask a client, how does that feel? "Um, well, I think ..."

Deep breathe, how does it feel?

That breathe is the distance between the mind and the heart. It can be a second or a million seconds. If you are patient, if you stalk your feelings, your mind will calm down, enough, for you to hear a soft whisper.

Don't miss it.  The whisperings of the heart tell us what is true, and good, and beautiful in our lives.

And yet, the mind is our ally if only we would make it so.  Everyday is a choice to dedicate our thoughts and our energy to something that produces a quality of joy or hope. That's not the easy route.  The easy route would have us building walls, setting up barricades in a fruitless attempt to shut out, protect, and disconnect. If you're shaking your head right now, then you don't recognize that judgment, criticism, blame, and gossip, are some of the greatest and strongest walls we can create. That's the easy route.

Having read my posts before, you know already that feeding our thoughts is the most conscious and awake action we can take.  What thought fuels us in the moment of challenge? When we're cut off on the highway. When we get the results of some medical tests. When we watch the news. When someone treats us cruelly.

It's all there for all of us to shift inside of ourselves in any one moment.  We don't need to go up on a mountain and meditate until 2025. We don't need an ashram to pray, eat or love. All we need is the next moment, the one that triggers us, and then we consciously choose.

And the choice is not about the opposite of how we feel, it is about the twin of our thought. If we observe ignorance, can we shift to see innocence?  If we experience the arrogance of someone's certainty, how much farther do we have to think to find wisdom? Same goes for the rampant superficiality in relationships - in the loneliness and isolation of the superficial, do we discover clarity?

In a world of positionality, it works in our favor and to the collective benefit when the roar of our mind produces the twin of our thoughts.  In this way, lions become lambs, once again.

It dawned on me after giving a speech at Bainbridge Graduate Institute's MBA program that perhaps the emptiness had to do with empowerment, or lack of empowerment.  I got lots of questions about being heard in a corporate setting and I heard huge amounts of frustration and disappointment around this feeling of 'holding back' and 'not saying what is so.' 

That brought me to the understanding that people want to know HOW to speak up. That floored me.  HOW to speak up is obvious, right?  We just load our brains, and shoot off our mouths.  Oh no, this was not what the real question was.  The real question had a twist. 

How do I speak up AND avoid risking my career and paycheck?

Whoa, and there it is, the fear.  Let's call it what it is, and maybe we can shift it. The very foundation of who we are as a society requires us to speak up, ask difficult questions, and know that we are safe to do so. When did it become so unsafe? Where are the pockets of openness, honesty, and genuine dialogue that honor our contributions and support our accountability? 

What I find right now is a genuine knowledge and wisdom just waiting to burst forth into open exchange.  There is a strong desire for change, and a passionate awareness of the need, no the urgency, to change.  And, there is silence. 

This silence is a gaping hole; we appease others, and go along, and don't rock the boat.  I've been there myself.  Not wanting to risk being seen as the one who spoils dinner, who stirs the simmering pot of conflict, I remained silent.  And I watched as the cultures of those companies I worked for and where I witnessed this pattern, diminished, slowly at first, and then rapidly.

The way forward is in cultures of openness, thoughtful patient dialogue, connectedness, and engagement.  Cultures that embrace discomforting discussion, and allow the full range of self expression within the boundaries of respect and integrity

Ask yourself today: where are you in appeasement?  Where do you choose to remain silent when your inner voice would have you speak up to shift a discussion or a decision? Do you work in a place that honors your voice and your wisdom?  And if not, how come you work there?

The Truth stands on its own, is heard for itself, and withstands even the harshest of critiques. Speak the Truth, say what is so, and be known as a person of high integrity. We need your leadership, NOW.

Nah, not just the weather.  The feeling that's floating around me is hard to shake.  It's been a tough week.  The weekend's events shadowed the week.  Monday, I said good-bye to a fabulous client as she finished her work and is off to Africa!  I am thrilled for her and will miss her.  I gave a presentation at the University of Washington this week.  I usually love doing that, working with the students, offering them insights into their personalities, as we discuss the ways that humans affect the outcome of any enterprise.  Sigh.  Presentation fell flat.  Energy kept shifting. 

Rest of the week, more of the same.

Now I'm sitting here trying to figure out what's up.  Is this just me? Or are others feeling the same way?  My mind wanders back to Arizona.  Am I more affected by the shootings in Arizona than I have acknowledged? Are others?

I read an article this week that is rolling around in my head.  George Freidman wrote the article and in it he suggested that America is a Republic that accidently became an Empire.  We created this country to be one thing, and it became another.  Now it fights itself, Republic vs Empire, like the Black and White Wolf, a never-ending battle.  ( See below, Right Leadership:  A Story of Two Wolves.)

I realize I am more like the black wolf tonight: edgy, a bit frustrated, and itching for an argument. I set an intention for this week to be productive and full, energetic and prosperous.  Despite my best efforts, didn't happen.  My intention devolved to attachment, and now I feel disappointed and crappy. 

I am searching my knowledge for the nugget that applies here, for the wisdom that my teachers have shared with me and that I can pass along. 

At first nothing comes, and the edginess takes a firmer grip.  Slowly, though, like a wafting feather, something tickles me at the very back of my mind.  Tugging at this resisting thought, I finally yank it free.

"All energy is neutral, Kelleen."

I expel my breathe, the shoulders come down, I allow my head to hang for just a second. All energy is neutral, neither positive nor negative.  We transmute it, make it into something, and this alchemy touches the inner core of who we are and reflects back to us through the lens of our outer world. 

This discernment, wisdom's ancestor, is what went lacking this week.   I lost touch with my ability to discern truth and hold a vision.  It is a good lesson.

All energy is neutral. We make it otherwise. 

And that could be why Power came looking for me this weekend. 

Somewhere back in the annals of history someone made the connection between the word 'power' and the word 'manipulation.' This became the origin of my logic, my knowing, of the word power.  My thinking went like this:  If you were powerful, you were likely to be someone who got things done, at any cost.  Power therefore equated to manipulation, the ability to control, force, demand, even change the natural course of a thing.  It is the antithesis of everything I stand for. 

This weekend someone mentioned that the work I'm doing, the research and the mentorships, "are very powerful." Oh my!  I was thrown into the deep end, no lifejacket.  We spent an hour discussing power and I emerged with my confidantes' beliefs ringing in my ear:  "Everything we do, say, or think, must always be viewed at the very least as a ploy for more power. To deny this, is to be dangerous to ourself and others."

I've spent the better part of my life, denying power its due. Rejecting it, resisting its presence, I see now how I forfeited many opportunities to express myself effectively, to listen actively, and to show up.  With new appreciation, I accept that Power IS the ability to manipulate AND it can both force an outcome and/or illuminate one.

With integrity, wisdom, and humility, we can step into our personal power, be impeccable with our words and actions, and illuminate and expand possibilities.  It is when we aren't in right relationship - when we lack respect for all things and deny service to a common good - that we fall prey to the dark side: control.

The Native People have a saying, "How do you corrupt a righteous man?  Give him one follower." In many tribes there is no word in the language for leader; each is a leader, by the fact of their existence, by original design. And that is the genesis of a deep sincere compliment expressed this way, "She is a leader without followers."

Now, today, when we are demanding accountability from our institutions, our governments, and our communities, take a moment to look to your own right use of power, to the moments when you sought first to clarify and illuminate, and, to those moments when you were impatient, 'certain' of the 'right' outcome, and determined to get it.

Notice the difference.  Be a leader without followers.

Choose to illuminate. 

This line of thinking sparked a memory of an old story and I credit Ken Cohen for bringing the story to my attention in his book, Honoring the Medicine.  Here it is:

An elder and chief from Vancouver Island, British Columbia, was invited by the Pope to visit the Vatican as a representative of her nation.  Grandmother was pleased with this recognition.  The Pope took Grandmother on a tour of the magnificent buildings, art, and archives.  Later, when it was just the two of them and they were in the basement of the Basilica, the Pope pointed to a closed red door that was barely visible among the rows of sacred texts.

He explained in a hushed whisper, "Only a few great leaders have seen what lies beyond that door.  I escorted the Dalai Lama into that room, and now I am going to show you."  The Pope opened the door.

The splendor of the Vatican contrasted sharply with the simple view that greeted Grandmother: 15-foot square chamber in the center of which were a wood chair and a small table.  An antique looking gold colored telephone was on the table. 

The Pope pointed, and said, "Ever wonder how I speak to God?"  Knowing that Grandmother would welcome a chance to speak with the Almighty, the Pope continued, "It's a long distance call, but it reaches.  You only need a credit card," he smiled.

Grandmother shook her head with regret and explained, "I am poor, so I must decline the honor."  Yet, she was filled with gratitude for the offer.

A year later, while the Pope was visiting Western Canada, he received an invitation to attend a longhouse welcoming feast in his honor at a small village on Vancouver Island.  The Pope accepted and was pleased to see his friend.  After the nightlong festivities, as dawn was breaking, Grandmother invited the Pope for a walk around the village.  The cool fog was just beginning to lift and he could see the cedars and the sea.

To his surprise, he noticed a small simple cedarwood shack with a red door.  The Pope was incredulous. "You don't mean to tell me....?"  "Yes," replied Grandmother, calmly.  They went inside, and the room was barren, except for a red telephone sitting in the dirt. The Pope smiled and Grandmother said, "You won't need a credit card though. From here, it's a local call."

The stories told by indigenous people do such a wonderful job of teaching us to remember place, with each other, in our community, our nation, on Earth, and in the cosmos.   Wherever we are, we are there.

It is for the warrior/leader in all of us.  The best I can determine in research is that this is a Cherokee story, although the exact origin, time and location, is unknown.  Many take credit for it.  I will leave credit where it is due, to the wisdom teachers of all time.

Grandfather sat outside as he was wont to do every day.  He noticed that his Grandson was walking toward him, but seemed angry.  He was kicking the dirt, and Grandfather could see there were streaks of tears running down his face. Grandson did not pay any attention to where he was, he was lost in his own thoughts.  He threw a rock as hard as he could, and with a yelling shout, he continued walking.

Grandfather called out and finally got the attention of his grandson, who walked over toward him.  Grandfather said, "Sit down and tell me what has happened."

Grandson began to tell the story.  On this day it was his birthday and he received as a present from his parents, a knife.  He was very happy with his present and showed it to the other kids.  Some boys thought this present should not have been given, they thought him too young, they envied his present, and they started to taunt the boy.  Soon, a shoving match started, and then a full on fight.  Punches were thrown, the knife was taken.  "Grandfather, I hate them!" said Grandson.

"Mmm," Grandfather pondered this.  Then he said, "I too have had this inside of me. Let me tell you a story." Grandson was in no mood for one these stories, they were always long and Grandfather always wanted to teach something.  Grandson wanted to fight, he wanted to be angry, and he wanted to find an outlet for this anger.

Grandfather insisted, "Sit.  This story won't take long and it is a story about me when I was your age and felt these same things."

This was something the boy did not hear often, stories about when his Granddfather was a boy.  So he sat.

"I have had something living inside of me my whole life," Grandfather began. "I discovered them when I was your age and went to speak with my father and his father. You see, I know I have two wolves that live in my heart and in my head.  They live inside of me in my soul.  One of these wolves is a white wolf, and he is a seeker of beauty and harmony, he loves balance and peaceful contentness, and he will fight if it is the only way, but he often knows there are many ways, many solutions to problems.  Next to him is a black wolf, and he is angry most of the time, he seeks vengence, and will look first to fight.  He lives with jealousy and envy inside of him, he judges everything and has little respect."

Grandson was captivated by this story, and asked, "why doesn't the black wolf kill the white wolf?"

"This, is a good question," Grandfather smiled. "The two wolves live inside of me and are chained at the neck together, not too close, but close enough, they can circle each other and keep their distance.  They must be very vigilant and so must I."

Grandson reflected on this, and how he felt when his knife was taken and he got into a fight.  He could feel his anger disappearing, but he was still puzzled by something. "Grandfather, I don't understand.  If these two wolves live inside of you, and you are saying they are inside of me too, which one wins?"

Grandfather smiled, "This, is a good question."

Looking directly into his grandson's eyes, he said, "The one you feed."

In order for our spirits to truly be free, we must look inside of ourselves and discover who we really are, every little awful wonderful thing. We must accept ourselves in this wholeness, and then, and only then, can we step into right leadership, and be wise men and women, right leaders of our time.

In deep gratitude to those who have passed down this story....