17. LESSONS: ENCOUNTERING THE TRAPS
Where you stumble, there your treasure lies.
—Joseph Campbell
One day in 1987 I was with a class of Forum fellows in Portland, Oregon, telling them about the journey I had taken in the creation of the Forum—the good times, and the trials and tribulations as well. Afterwards the executive director of the Oregon chapter, Mary Ann Buchannan, came up and said, “Joe, what you just told us seemed like it was straight out of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.” I told her I didn’t know who Joseph Campbell was and had never read any of his books. She was very surprised because his most recent book, The Power of Myth, had been widely read. She explained that Campbell, who had recently died, was an authority on mythology and a preeminent scholar. She sent me his books, and I was absolutely struck by what I read. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces Campbell presents a composite picture of the heroic quest, which is an archetype of the change process humans and organizations alike can go through. Not only did this picture look startlingly like the journey I had taken through the past fifteen years, but it tracked precisely the fundamental ideas expressed by Robert Greenleaf in Servant Leadership: The ultimate aim of the servant leader’s quest is to find the resources of character to meet his or her destiny—to find the wisdom and power to serve others.
Upon reading this, a great peacefulness came over me. For the first time since I started down this path, I felt affirmed and understood. I had felt so alone throughout this whole affair, I had actually felt half-crazy sometimes. It was only upon reading Campbell that I started integrating what had happened within myself and really understanding some of it.
Campbell’s picture begins with the “wasteland,” the inauthentic life. Old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; a time for passing the threshold is at hand. The call to adventure comes in many ways both subtle and explicit over the years. It is the call to service, giving our life over to something larger than ourselves, the call to become what we were meant to become—the call to achieve our “vital design.”
Some who are called to the adventure choose to go. Others may wrestle for years with fearfulness and denial before they are able to transcend that fear. We tend to deny our destiny because of our insecurity, our dread of ostracism, our anxiety, and our lack of courage to risk what we have. Down deep we know that to cooperate with fate brings great personal power and responsibility. If we engage our destiny, we are yielding to the design of the universe, which is speaking through the design of our own person. In the face of refusal, we continue our restlessness, and then, as if from nowhere, comes the guide: something or someone to help us toward the threshold of adventure. This may take the form of voices within or people who guide us to see the way.
When we say yes to the call, we cross the threshold of adventure. At this moment of decision, Buber says “And even this is not what we ‘ought to’ do: rather … we cannot do otherwise.” This is the point where our freedom and destiny merge. “Here I stand. I can do no other,” said Martin Luther.
We pass through the gates of the known into the void, a domain without maps. The perilous journey begins, and we encounter a series of tests, trials, and ordeals. It is a place of both terror and opportunity.
If we have truly committed to follow our dream, there exists beyond ourselves and our conscious will a powerful force that helps us along the way and nurtures our growth and transformation. Our journey is guided by invisible hands with infinitely greater accuracy than is possible through our unaided conscious will. Campbell says it is the “supernatural assisting force” that attends “the elect through the whole course of his ordeal.”
On the journey, inevitably, we will meet with one or more supreme ordeals. These are the tests of our commitment to the direction we have taken, and they provide opportunities to learn from failure. In the later stages of our journey, we cross threshold after threshold, enduring the agony of spiritual growth and breaking through personal limitations. We emerge from the supreme encounter no longer the same person; we “have something more that has grown” in us, says Buber.
Finally, the quest accomplished, we return with the elixir for the restoration of society. It is difficult to leave the bliss of the final stages of the journey, a state of high adventure, to return to the long forgotten place from which we first came, where people who are fractions of themselves imagine themselves to be complete. Upon returning, it is hard to take the return blow of reasonable queries, hard resentment, and good people at a loss to comprehend. And we are returning only to prepare to journey forth once more. But we have returned as a potent new being, prepared to go forth again in service of the community.
Of course, no two adventures are ever the same, and no one can ever seek to replicate another’s journey. Nevertheless, the overall cyclic pattern and the stages Campbell presents were startling to me. I found them of absorbing interest, not only for me personally, but for the Leadership Forum itself. This writing expressed the shift I had gone through, and it was very much alive in me. I shared all of this with my colleagues, and eventually we used this material as a metaphor for the odyssey the fellows were taking in ALF.
It’s great fun to think of the early part of my journey: the call to adventure that came as an inward tug from the experience of Watergate, when the Colonel and I spent time at the ranch; the pain of my divorce; the reading of many books while on my trip to Europe; the illumination in the Tetons; the gentle nudge that Tom Fatjo gave me with the admonition that I must give my dream my complete attention. I refused the call then and went to London, where eventually my Guide appeared in the experiences in Cairo, those surrounding the death of my nephew, and subsequently in my meeting with David Bohm. Thinking about what occurred just after crossing the threshold—the unseen helping hands—is immensely important to me, and I love to tell that part of the story also.
But as it turns out, in the long run, the most useful part of the journey lay in the lessons I learned during the down times—the inevitable ordeals encountered along the way. Campbell called this the “Road of Trials.” “In the vocabulary of the mystics,” he said “this is the Second Stage of the Way, that of the ‘purification of the self,’ when the senses are ‘cleaned and humbled.’” In this process we see “not only the whole picture of our present case, but also the clue to what we must do to be saved.”
I fell into three traps and in the process almost cost the Forum its very existence. I came face to face with my own shortcomings, and it was only by the grace of God and the dedication and hard work of all my partners that the whole enterprise ultimately survived.
I’m using the term “traps” to refer to anything that causes a regression to old ways of thinking and acting, and thus hinders our becoming a part of the unfolding generative process. The traps are very powerful; paradoxically, at a deep level there is very little substance to them. But when we fall into one of those traps, the consequences are immediate and very unpleasant. It’s a devastating experience to be in the state of high flow and to lose it. All the creativity shuts down; all the synchronicity suddenly disappears.
We fall into traps principally when the stakes are really high—when the energy is high, lots is happening, things are going beautifully, and a lot of money is involved. That’s when these powerful illusions or habits of thought tend to come into play. When we fall into a trap, a vicious circle can begin to operate, and our situation can go from bad to worse very quickly. But if we are aware of traps and remain alert to their danger, we can largely avoid their consequences.
The traps I fell into were particularly my own, and grew out of my own old habits of thought. Similarly, others on the journey to follow their dreams will confront traps particular to their own old ways of being. I offer the following only as examples of the traps we might confront deep into our journeys, when we are in the highest state of flow and when we feel most connected to the unfolding generative order. As you will see, these traps are closely interconnected—one often grows out of another.
THE TRAP OF RESPONSIBILITY
The trap of responsibility was the most vicious trap for me. I encountered it early in the game, and it plagued me for a number of years. In the early stages of founding the Forum, things were falling into place as if by magic: we put together a world-class board of trustees; we designed a curriculum that met with enormous initial success and acceptance in the pilot run; we raised a significant amount of seed money; and our headquarters and chapter staffs grew rapidly. After the initial success, I began thinking in the deeper recesses of my mind: “Hey, this isn’t a dream anymore, it’s reality. I’ve got all these people depending on me. They’ve bought into the dream. Trustees and founders and fellows have stuck their necks out. There’s all this media interest. It’s too much—the enormity of it. It’s too much.”
I began to feel I was indispensable to the whole process, that I was responsible for all the people involved, and that everyone was depending on me. The focus was on me instead of on the larger calling.
In this state, the fear factor began multiplying. I reverted to the “old” Joe—clamping down, working twelve-, fifteen-, and eighteen-hour days all week, and eventually on weekends as well. I would wake up in the middle of the night dripping with sweat, thinking of all the people whose jobs depended on me, and worrying about where the necessary operating capital would come from. I felt overwhelmed, overworked, and overstressed, and eventually, my obsessive worry led to panic and anxiety attacks. This is a trap I had often encountered as a trial lawyer, particularly in the earlier days as we were building our practice and I was struggling to make my own mark, apart from being Colonel Jaworski’s son.
During these days at ALF, the load seemed unbearable. The longer I stayed in this trap, the worse my situation seemed to get. My productivity and effectiveness went down the drain. I began to experience feelings of inadequacy and loss of confidence. Instead of that effortless feeling, we seemed now to be scrambling all the time, putting out fires. Everything seemed to be more difficult. In this whole process, we failed to use our trustees, our founders, our fellows, and our staff effectively. My passion seemed to be locked up. The spirit that had been so much a part of me in those early days couldn’t get through. I wasn’t open to the possibility any longer, no longer open to risk and creativity.
Other people might tend to fall into different kinds of traps, but for me, responsibility was the big one. I had to learn to distinguish between concern and obsessive worry. I could be concerned about my partners and colleagues without worrying about their well-being.
I began to get out of this trap by seeing things the way they really are: I am operating in the flow of the universe. There’s nothing special about me that allows me to do this; it’s a way of operating that is available for everyone. When you are on this path, a natural sorting process is at work. The people who join you are, in their own way, moving along this same path. You have your love and concern for those operating in this sphere with you, but you don’t feel responsible for them.
It’s all in the way we think about it because the cause of the obsessive worry is a powerful illusion that melts in the face of reality. This trap is really a habit of thought. Once we recognize it as such, it tends to lose its power, and we don’t really have to fight it. That’s the very nature of these traps: they are habits of thought, and once we recognize them, they tend to disappear. This is not to imply you shouldn’t think through the consequences of the worst-case scenarios. But scenario planning is a far cry from obsessive worry, which can sap energy and kill the spirit.
THE TRAP OF DEPENDENCY
The trap of dependency is the flip side of feeling responsible for those on the team. In this trap we feel so dependent upon key staff, or key funders, or key trustee support that we feel the enterprise will fail without that element. This fear leads us to compromise the stand we take for the dream. We don’t call things as they really are. We’re not really straightforward with people for fear that we will offend them, and they will leave the team. We pussyfoot around instead of speaking from our center. We forget that these key people enrolled in our project in response to the flow and that call from our center. That’s why they were attracted in the first place. But in the midst of the trap, we fail to recognize that.
It’s not that we don’t need others around us. Nothing of real substance will occur unless communities of people start to form around the different kind of commitment we evidence. Rather, it’s that we become stuck in believing we need some person in particular for the enterprise to succeed.
This trap of dependency stems from our feelings of inadequacy and unworthiness. For me, this trap operated below the surface all across the board. I felt a real dependency on certain key staff, on a number of key trustees, and upon several key funders, and this dependency came close to sinking our enterprise.
The most dangerous point occurred around 1983. When I started the Forum, I had been introduced to Jack Warren, one of the most successful oilmen in Texas in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Jack was a deep believer in the ALF dream and had dedicated himself to helping out in any way possible. He introduced me to his friends, he gave me moral support, and in late 1982, after our pilot program was so successful, he pledged an extremely large gift to be paid in one lump sum. I felt Jack was an absolute treasure, and he became a board trustee. I deeply valued his business judgment, his spirit, and his innate sense of servant leadership. His pledge became a focal point in our action plan. It gave us the staying power to develop the curriculum and test it in one or two regions. With positive results in those chapters, we could then tap into the national foundations. That became the overall strategic plan, which we began executing.
When the oil crisis hit Houston, it crept up on us. In the early stages, everyone thought things would straighten out soon. Jack came to me and said he would have to delay his pledge, but as soon as things turned around, he would meet it. Instead of being flexible and immediately looking for new funding avenues, I remained fixated on the original plan, which revolved around Jack’s pledge. Ultimately, the oil crisis deepened. Houston and the state of Texas went into a deep recession, which finally resulted in the collapse of the real estate market, which in turn led to the collapse of most major Texas financial institutions.
As each week and month passed, I remained dependent on the original plan. We had planned to use Jack’s gift as an example to other prominent members of the community, so we kept delaying changing the plan, hoping that the crisis would pass.
As I look back on it, I realize that not only was I overly dependent on Jack and a few other key trustees, I also became dependent on our original strategic plan. I had to stick to the plan. To change direction was almost a sign of weakness to me; I would tough it out. I relied on the traditional kind of commitment—to stick with something I’ve started—and it got us into real trouble. I became obsessively anxious about being behind on “the plan.”
I was focusing on the process instead of on the result we were trying to create. One of the cornerstones of the Leadership and Mastery course we had included in the wilderness experience is this understanding of the creative orientation. It’s critical that you focus on the result and not get attached to any particular process for achieving the result. When we are in the process of creating something, we must have the flexibility of mind to move with what needs to be done. What allows this to happen is precisely the fact that we’re not attached to how things should be done. It’s a little bit like sailing. If you’re focused on your course rather than your destination, you’re in big trouble. If you were to be blown off course, you would never simply return to the course you were on. No one would sail that way. Rather, you would focus on the destination and set a new course. But that’s the way we live our lives. We get attached to our assumptions about how things should get done, and we lose sight of what we’re trying to create. This notion of focusing on the results is a fundamental premise of the Leadership and Mastery course.
There are actually two aspects to this cornerstone idea. The first part is the distinction between focusing on the intrinsic result we care about versus focusing on our assumptions about how we need to get there. And the second is the orientation toward the result itself. Most people think of achieving a result in order to get something for ourselves. If we have a dream or a vision we are committed to, and if we look deeply into why we want this vision, we may answer: “Well, if I have that vision, I’ll be happy.” Or “If I build this enterprise, I will be well respected. … I will have made it as a manager. … We will make a lot of money.” These are the ordinary responses to why we have a dream we want to fulfill. It’s actually very rare that people focus on what they want to create for its own sake. That’s the deeper territory around this principle of focusing on the result. Are we deeply committed to creating what we truly want for its own sake? Robert Frost once said “All great things are done for their own sake.” When we see our visions and our dreams in this way, it’s a subtle but most profound shift. And it’s under these circumstances that the “hidden hands” phenomenon begins to occur, and doors open for us that are beyond our imagination.
So at this stage of building ALF, I had reverted to focusing rigidly on the business plan we had devised, instead of focusing on the result, the vision we had intended. This was the exact opposite of what I had done during our most successful earlier phase. At that earlier time, I kept focusing on the dream and had remained highly flexible, going with the flow of things, taking one day at a time, and listening for guidance about the next step. But in this crisis, I clamped down and let my traditional way of operating take over.
In this process, a lot of fear was generated. The further we fell behind in the original game plan, the more fearful I got. Being stuck in the process, the fear of no alternative loomed larger and larger. And a subtle shift took place in me. I began having concerns about how this would reflect on me. I began worrying about my reputation and the personal implications if the enterprise failed; I would be embarrassed. This again was exactly 180 degrees opposite from my original way of going. Before, I had had no fear of failure, and had cared deeply about the dream for its own sake. I was willing to risk everything—my reputation, my position, and even my relationships. I was serving the dream itself because I felt deep down that this was what was intended to happen. I was so intent on the vision that I operated with complete spontaneity and freedom. That’s when the doors opened and the upward spiral occurred.
Eventually, I came to realize what I was doing to myself and how I was affecting the whole enterprise. I spent some time with Peter Senge, Charlie Kiefer, and their partner Bob Fritz up in Boston. They helped me to get a grip on the subtle shift that had occurred in my orientation. I did a lot of reflecting and began to get back in touch with that earlier way of operating. Over time I made the necessary adjustment, and we began to focus on the result we intended—a national program to develop servant leadership. We accelerated our original game plan and went after national funding sources: the Hewlett Foundation, the Luce Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and others. We were ultimately successful at these following a significant time delay necessary to crank up a national funding drive.
My habit of thought—dependency on the original action plan calling for Texas funding for the first three years of operations—had almost sent us under. That habit of thought was reinforced by my sense that we were not worthy of national funding unless we had established chapters in other regions.
When we began to focus once more on the real result we intended, my old habit of thought lost much of its energy. This was a major learning experience for me. The traps of responsibility and dependency generate a lot of their energy from the fear of no alternative. But there are always alternatives. It’s just that we often are unable to see them. Once we realize there is an alternative path, a lot of fear disappears. We start to look at the traps a little more objectively. “There I am again, thinking I’m indispensable. … There I am again, overly dependent on a particular person or persons in the organization or on the business plan.” It is amazing to me how simple this solution is in the face of such powerful illusions.
One of the most important lessons I learned about the traps was how simple it can be to regain balance when we’ve lost the flow. Consider the act of walking—a wonderful and powerful metaphor for thinking about this issue. When we’re walking or running, we’re always in the process of literally falling down. When we move our body forward, we are actually “falling.” But we have learned to move quickly and deftly, and so we are “falling” into our next step. If we don’t move instantly and with great dexterity, we will fall on our face. As children, we learned our lesson well about the phenomenon of walking and running so that when we’re off balance, we can almost effortlessly correct ourselves, regain our balance, and continue on our way.
In ordinary life it’s the same way. We lose our balance, as I did for months on end, because we don’t understand enough—we don’t see we have simple ways to regain it. Most of the martial arts like aikido are oriented around this principle. Simple physical acts like deep breathing can quickly help reestablish our center, our balance, so we can listen to our inner voice once again. It’s then that we can see our way more clearly and find our natural path, our natural way of going again.
THE TRAP OF OVERACTIVITY
The third major trap I encountered was one I call overactivity. This trap can manifest most painfully in having people in the organization who are not aligned with the dream, resulting in deep incoherence in the organization.
In the early stages of establishing the Leadership Forum—gathering the team, designing the curriculum, and testing it with early Houston classes—I was operating on all cylinders, and the progress was all that we could have hoped for. But as the organization grew, I became more and more bogged down in detail. Prior to 1983, we were in the creative stage, enrolling people in the project and creating the program. It was more fun than anything else and acted as a counterpoint to the difficult job of fundraising. But when we started delivering programs, selecting fellows, and learning how to open up new chapters, it became different for me. There were more and more management decisions—logistics, hiring people, terminating people, meeting payroll, juggling all the little details, and on and on.
About that time, I also began to realize that I was in the midst of something bigger than I was. All during the formative stages, the journey had seemed almost easy. I was swept up in the vision and the aesthetic beauty of creating the Leadership Forum. At some point, however, when all of the people were assembled and the work was being done, I “woke up” and realized what was happening. I had gathered all of these people—the trustees, the founders, the consultants, the funders, and my partners in the American Leadership Forum and the Executive Ventures Group, the division we had created to deliver the part of the program that took place in the wilderness. To me, the payroll was huge, the expectations were huge, and the task seemed almost overwhelming. The pressure was on to produce. Who did I think I was? What was I doing here in the midst of all of this? I felt a great deal of anxiety, and I began questioning my ability to carry the whole thing off. It was like the time I almost made a perfect score skeet shooting and “woke up” only to miss the last target.
The sense of true freedom and clarity of purpose I had experienced in the early days after returning from London began to erode. I was being forced to operate at a pace I found uncomfortable. I do best when I have plenty of time to reflect on things, and “process” what’s going on. That’s the way I stay anchored in the midst of the necessary chaos. That was fine in the early days, when the pace was less frenetic. But now I wasn’t able to control the pace, and the more I operated at the others’ pace, the less clear and coherent I could be about my internal direction.
In this process, I failed to follow through on some of the really important opportunities presented to me. For example, David Bohm wrote a note to me early in 1983 saying how much he had enjoyed our meeting a couple of years earlier. He hoped we could get together again for further dialogue. It’s indescribably painful for me to look back on this missed opportunity, but at that time I felt there were too many obligations and responsibilities at home. So I put it on the back burner and later failed to follow up. As I look back now, this was a manifestation of an incompleteness in me. Of all things, the most important for me was to continue to understand the principles that Bohm and I had talked about in London—to be able to begin to apply them in the real situations that I was encountering. I needed the spiritual nourishment and direction Bohm could have provided, but I was too blinded by the day-to-day responsibilities to see the opportunity being handed to me.
This incompleteness in me also resulted in my attracting some key people around me on whom I ultimately couldn’t rely—people whose deepest interest was not in the Forum, but in their own agendas.
In one extreme case, a key player undermined the entire process we had under way for opening a chapter in a large metropolitan community in the Northeast. She and the potential executive director for the new chapter devised an alternative program, which they planned to deliver under the auspices of a different organization at a substantial personal gain to themselves. This program was in direct conflict with her responsibility at the Forum, and although the problem was eventually solved, the whole affair resulted in substantial loss of time, energy, and momentum at a critical period.
This was an unusual case. But there were others that in their own ways caused equally significant degrees of incoherence in the organization. These included senior headquarters staff, and some who had critical roles at the community level. They were hard-working, well-intentioned people who felt they were contributing something important to the effort. Yet there was this underlying incoherence, and there seemed to be no way to deal with it. We struggled and struggled with it, but under these circumstances, the flow never continues. The effortless nature of the enterprise disappears, and everything becomes struggle and strain and hard work. The incoherence was so deep at one point that it ultimately resulted in our dissolving the division that delivered our wilderness program. Thinking back on this kind of incoherence, I can only say that it was like waking up behind enemy lines. I felt deeply uncomfortable, as if I was not a true member of my own community. It was a highly distressing experience for me.
It’s so easy under these circumstances to blame the situation on others: “They simply don’t get it. … They’re not committed,” or such. There’s always a “they.” But that’s where the confusion lies. In these situations, it’s not “they” who are responsible. It’s us. It has to do with our own history being evoked. Our history of separation, isolation, low self-esteem, and unworthiness interacts with our new awareness of incoherence and creates a movie in our head that points to “them” and the problem.
What’s the way out of this trap? Leaving doesn’t solve anything, because usually we will end up with other people who “just don’t get it.” It means recognizing that if we’re working with people who don’t get it, it’s because part of our own history is being evoked, and there’s real inner work to do in addition to outer work.
The key to overcoming the trap of overactivity is in doing the inner, reflective work, individually and collectively, necessary to regain our balance. In the heat of the creative process, we end up having so much to do that we lose the necessary orientation to stay in the flow. Unless we have the individual and collective discipline to continually stay anchored, we will eventually lose the flow.
That’s why the discipline of dialogue seems to be so important for everyone in such an enterprise. Taking the time to come together on a regular basis in true dialogue gives everyone a chance to maintain a reflective space at the heart of the activity—a space where all people can continue to be re-nurtured together by what is wanting to happen, to unfold. It must be a regular discipline, and it must continue throughout the life of the undertaking, because the purpose of the enterprise will continue to evolve. The re-nurturing must take place in the midst of and as a part of that evolution. It is an essential element of the unfolding.
Looking back at this aspect of my experience with the Forum is painful for me. I see the people I hurt and might have served better but for my ignorance. I made so many mistakes, and I’m ashamed that I was not more aware, more capable. It’s difficult to come to grips with this, yet I know this was all an essential part of my development, my own unfolding. A crucial part of our life’s journey is the struggle to overcome our accumulated baggage in order to ultimately operate in the flow of the unfolding generative order. The only way to accomplish this is to literally go through it—to encounter the traps and learn from them. That experience is priceless.