5

Dare to Share

Moving past the talking points

Why do we care enough about issues and problems in the world to dive into polarization and gridlock? Usually at the root of our advocacy is something that inspires us, such as our love for our family, community, or physical place in the world. That love and inspiration might extend more broadly to our country or to human and other life. We might draw inspiration from a dream or vision for how those things could be in the future. When it feels like our people, places, and dreams are under threat, we mobilize and advocate.

A funny thing happens, however, when conversations get stuck. In an argument or debate, sharing what we love can make us feel too vulnerable. We may also fear it wouldn’t be effective if the other person doesn’t share our priorities. Instead, we talk about what is wrong with the world in a more objective way. We describe problems and solutions in terms we think will persuade others. We focus on what is wrong with others, their behavior or ideas. We attach ourselves to the bait we described in chapter 4: getting to feel right, righteous, certain, and safe.

To shift the conversation, we can begin by reconnecting with ourselves and what matters most. Bringing that forward, along with a new way of being, creates a completely new context for conversation.

Here’s a short story from Gabriel that we’ll use as an example for this exploration:

Our yogurt containers were number 5 plastic, and we couldn’t recycle number 5. So for a while I’d pick them out of our blue bin and put them in a reusable grocery bag so I could deposit them in the “Gimme 5” container at Whole Foods. Several months went by and my wife, Sarah, hadn’t caught on to the practice, so I reminded her that number 5 needed to go into the bag.

The odds were in my favor. She shares my values around this, she loves me, and she knows I’m committed to making the world better and she married me for it. And yet that first conversation had zero effect. After a second, third, and fourth reminder, she started sorting out number 5, but she would only catch maybe one out of three number 5 containers. For a few more months I picked number 5 out of the bin, but each time I grew a little more resentful. Eventually, I asked her again, “Please put the number 5 in the bag.”

Then I got this look and I could tell we weren’t on the same page. I thought maybe if she had my context, my education about the situation, my rationale, it would help. I started sharing my reasons for putting the right thing in the right bin:

• It’s the right thing to do.

•  It’s simple. You just need to find the number and if it says five, put it in the Whole Foods bag.

•  If we put nonrecyclables in the recycling bin, it’s called “contamination,” and if there’s too much contamination, the whole load might get dumped. Thus, putting the wrong thing in the bin not only threatens our recycling but threatens our entire neighborhood’s recycling.

At this point, Sarah’s look was shifting—but not in a good way. For the next few weeks, she quit sorting number 5 entirely. I think she even took a few containers out of my bag and tossed them in the blue bin for me to find. Finally, I came back with a system: “You put all the potentially recyclable things at the end of the kitchen counter, and each day I’ll sort them into the appropriate place.”

This seemed to be working. But after several months, Sarah said to me, “You know, I taught my parents how to recycle. I taught my grandparents how to recycle. And I taught my friends’ parents to recycle. I used to love recycling. Now, living with you, I no longer want to recycle.”

So here I am, months into this supposed solution, and the result is that my wife’s upset, I seem to have depleted rather than supported her motivation to recycle, and we’ve allocated a considerable portion of our scarce counter space to my recycling sorting operation.

In reflecting on this situation, Gabriel could see that he was in a pitfall. He was attached to the bait of being right and righteous about recycling correctly. He suffered the costs of not moving forward on recycling and creating some collateral damage in the relationship. But seeing that was not quite enough to get him out of the trap.

Connect with internal motivations

To move forward, Gabriel had to confront another layer of inauthenticity. The reasons he gave Sarah for correctly recycling were not why he himself recycled nor why he wanted to share his commitment to recycling with her—they were reasons designed to sound right and righteous to persuade her. Getting honest with himself, he realized that he is indifferent about sorting recyclables correctly. He’d much prefer that there was a single bin and that either there was a single-stream system that didn’t rely on his sorting at home or that everything was recyclable. What he really wants, what inspired him to recycle in the first place, is a beautiful world free of waste as we know it. In that world, people easily recycle, lovingly imitating nature’s ingenious use of each creature’s by-products.

And in fact, through the whole ongoing conflict over recycling, he was distracting himself from something he wanted even more—a certain quality of relationship with his wife, Sarah. When he set aside being a pretentious know-it-all jerk and took on being love and abundance, he saw that what he really wanted was to be “Sarah’s partner on a journey, exploring together how we can best contribute to the world.” Instead of sharing a vulnerable expression that touched his heart, he had gotten caught up in playing a smaller, safer game called “put the right thing in the right bin,” something he could rationalize with impersonal facts.

We will come back to Gabriel’s story and share the conclusion later in this chapter. For now, let us ask you, Why is your issue so important? Why should people vote? Why should people care about global warming? Why should you be concerned about human trafficking? Take a moment to reflect on your own issue of choice.

Notice if your list includes some of the patterns we have noticed in ourselves and among our workshop participants:

• We frame causes as being about abstract issues and problems that are not about our experiences, values, or feelings.

• We translate our personal values, aspirations, and dreams into “external motivations,” like danger and dollars. We communicate those external motivations—the costs and benefits of taking a particular course of action—and we withhold what originally inspired us.

• We do the above because we are told that other people don’t value what we value.

Notice if, in this context, you have had the following experience:

• By not sharing ourselves, our heart, and our love, by only sharing “facts,” we avoid the risk of being judged. We hold onto the bait of being safe and avoid being vulnerable.

• We try to engage other people, but they don’t recreate for themselves the inspired, internally driven experience we say we want to share. In the process, our own internally driven experience slips away from us.

• We grow frustrated and resigned and rely even more heavily on external justification and motivation for both ourselves and others.

The core inauthenticity is that I care, I love, I have a vision of the future I want, but these aren’t the focus of my advocacy. My heart is moved by something, but that’s not what I’m sharing. What’s more, even though I won’t share it with you, I am upset that what moves me doesn’t move you.

How do we break this cycle? How do we share what really matters to us?

We can start by applying what we call “the football test” to our motivations, reasons, and justifications. As activists, we sometimes wonder why it is so much easier to mobilize millions of people behind a football game than behind a social cause. But in a way, the answer is simple. If you were to ask people on the street headed to a football game, “Why are you going to the game?” they’d probably say something like

• “Because it’s awesome!”

• “My team rocks!”

• “I love going!”

• “I’m a big fan.”

If you pushed them and asked, “Why?” they might struggle to articulate some facts or reasons why it’s awesome, why they love it, or why their team rocks. But they’d probably lean back on their most basic answer, “Because I love it.”

“Because I love it” or “I’m a fan” are examples of internal or self-determined motivations. They are not dependent on any outside circumstance or rationale. They are expressions of one’s interest or one’s self or an end in and of itself. No rationale or justification is required for why I love football. I just do. The football test is this: can you boil down the issue you care about into this kind of simple, self-evident statement?

For example, Jason describes his motivation for tackling climate change this way:

I am in awe of snowy mountains and I love coastal cities. I want to make sure those places are around for my children and grandchildren to enjoy. I love getting my brain working on complex problems. I am inspired working together with other people who share dreams for a better world.

Now reflect for a moment on how we share what’s most important to us, including the reasons you created in exercise 13. Are any of those reasons selfdetermined? Do they point toward outside circumstances or rely on shared cultural values to justify the importance? Consider this example: Ending human trafficking is important to me because

• “People are suffering.”

• “ There are more than half a million victims each year.”

• “It’s the right thing to do.”

• “Children should not be bought and sold.”

These are all important and valid reasons why we should take action to end human trafficking. They aren’t bad or wrong. However, like Gabriel’s reasons for recycling correctly, these don’t share our internal (or self-determined) motivations.

You may be thinking, “Hold on. Ending human trafficking [or substitute your cause here] is of personal importance to me and I am consciously valuing it.” “I personally value having the right material in the right bin.” “I’m internally motivated by [my cause].” If that’s true, we’re going to help you embody and express that motivation in your communication. That way you can benefit from the experience of internal motivation yourself and might possibly make it available to others. This shift can begin with our language.

Reflecting back on Gabriel’s recycling story, he was sharing external motivations. Instead of sharing something he loved, he tried to shame his wife into recycling correctly with facts and rationale. We all have a tendency to experience our own internal motivations while projecting external motivations onto others.¹ Not only does this fall short of sharing internal motivations, but external motivations have a tendency to displace or crowd out internal motivations. In the process, both Gabriel’s and his wife’s internal motivations for recycling became diminished.

If you are already clear about your internal motivations and you are comfortable sharing them in potentially polarized conversations, that is great. However, you may still find yourself getting stuck when other people just don’t seem to care. If so, then the work for you may be in listening and drawing out the other person’s internal motivations and embracing the tension between your motivations in a productive way. We support that work in chapter 7, but your work with a buddy in this chapter will help you prepare. It is also worth carefully reflecting on whether that internal motivation is the only motivation for how you are showing up or you also have a commitment to being right, righteous, or certain that may be interfering with your message. That is the work of chapters 4 and 6.

We are guessing, however, that the majority of responses you wrote in exercise 13 refer to external circumstances like Gabriel’s justifications for recycling correctly. These include problems, symptoms, and consequences; cultural valuations of right and wrong; and other facts, reasons, and justifications that are external to you. And you may have a tendency to hide from yourself how externally justified your motivations are.

You, like us, want to live a self-determined life. For example, Gabriel would prefer to think “it’s the right thing to do” is an internally motivated expression. However, it references a shared notion of what’s right; it’s not his personal expression of what he loves. The expression is insufficient for sharing his internally motivated experience with others. It’s possible that underneath the expression is a self-determined motivation. However, when you share “do the right thing” with people who are doing the wrong thing, how do you think that will get heard? Will they be internally lit up and inspired, or are they going to experience guilt, shame, or a social pressure to change?

Apply the football test. If you asked truly passionate football fans why football is important to them, can you imagine them responding “because it’s the right thing to do”? Can you imagine them using responses that are analogous to what you listed in exercise 13?

Jason’s inspiration for working on climate change that we shared earlier did not come from a statement that began with “I work on climate change because.” Instead, climate change is a context, inside which he gets to make a contribution and do what he loves.

Here’s another test. Do you experience an inner pressure to behave in accord with what’s right? For yourself or others in your crowd, can advocating for your cause be challenging, tiring, or frustrating, even to the point of being psychologically exhausting or causing burnout? Can it create tension in your relationships or prevent you from fully sharing yourself with others? Do you avoid certain people entirely? These descriptions are all consistent with experiencing motivations that are not internal. The need to continually justify your cause to yourself and others is tiring; it zaps vitality. It’s not self-determined.

Now take a moment to see if you can classify the motivations you articulated in exercise 13.

Consider that the reason we find it so challenging to get others to internalize what’s important to us is that we haven’t internalized what’s important to us. In fact, we tend toward the opposite. We fall in love with something—an idea, a place, a person, a group of people—but instead of sharing our heart, sharing our internal motivation, we translate our internal motivations into external motivations that we believe will speak to others. Or we borrow other people’s external motivations to justify what we love.

You may have already noticed that simply changing your rationale may not seem to cut it. “I love to put the right thing in the right bin because I love to put the right thing in the right bin” could sound a bit silly. It might not sound authentic to you. Although it could, and that may be a much more pleasant way to experience your personal recycling practice. Try it out.

If putting the right thing in the right bin (or whatever your cause is) doesn’t involve a sense of purpose or satisfaction in and of itself, it may not be what you want most.

At this point, you may think, “It doesn’t matter whether my motivation or theirs is internal or not. We need to save the planet or we’ll all be dead” or “Basic human rights are too important an issue for us to waste time with how people feel about it.” In this case, the power and influence strategies we mentioned in chapter 1 may work for you, and you should try them. However, you may be in a situation (like Gabriel’s marriage) where the other person’s flourishing really matters to you. You may need to build long-term, sustained engagement with the person to achieve your goals. In that context, communicating external motivations (as Gabriel did) may inadvertently turn the person away from the behaviors and values you are seeking to inspire. They may sacrifice the quality of your relationship and even, eventually, contribute to your own burnout.

In fact, many research studies in positive psychology and organization studies suggest that internal motivations support behaviors and outcomes that are keys to success. These include creativity, persistence in the face of challenging tasks, psychological well-being, cognitive flexibility and deep learning, work involving complexity, positive emotions, and engagement.² Internal motivations correlate with inner peace, deep acceptance of oneself and others, trust, and practical behavior.

In highly effective companies built around a social or environmental mission, employees are more likely to be experiencing internal motivations. These correlate with their experience of meaning and purpose; a sense of fulfillment, accomplishment, or satisfaction; positive relationships; and engagement. External motivations like “it’s the right thing to do” are insufficient for creating those outcomes.

Express what you really want

Consider for a moment that your cause, the issue you have been saying is really important to you, doesn’t really begin to express what you really want. At best it’s merely one small piece inside a much larger possibility or idea for the world. That larger possibility, that dream, is an internal expression—an expression of your heart and an expression of who you are for the world. If that possibility were widely shared, the issue you’re now focused on might get resolved as a side effect or spillover benefit.

Whatever future you really want, it will ring true to your heart as a purpose worth pursuing in and of itself. “I want inspired and purposeful people because that is what I want.” No secondary reason is necessary. “I want a loving partnership with my wife.” “I want whole people and whole families.” When you can articulate the greater possible future for yourself, you’ll be able to experience your internal motivation for yourself and share it with others. It will move you. You may tear up just thinking about it.

Once you’ve landed on what really inspires you, share it. Give other people the opportunity to be inspired by what you are up to and the choice to contribute (or not). Give them the opportunity simply to be inspired about your being inspired. You’ll be surprised who may love to “play football” [insert your dream here] with you—perhaps someone who you never could have believed would play with you.

Being able to declare what you really want is one aspect of daring to share. The other aspect is how you show up as you declare it. What is your way of being? In chapter 3 we helped you “know what you bring.” Now you get to determine what you want to bring. Let go of the bait. Let go of your old way of being. Focus your attention on what you really want to create. What becomes available to you as a way of being?

Otto Scharmer, a leadership scholar and lecturer at MIT, describes an experience of “presence.” It is a special quality of attention and listening. It arises when we set aside our background conversation and quiet our minds. We bring an open mind, open heart, and open will to the conversation. He describes “presencing” as the ability to release the habits of the past and participate in an emerging new future.³ This can be that moment for you.

In our workshops, when we ask people to do this meditation and to create new ways of being, we ask them to say their ways of being out loud. We type them onto a slide so that everyone can see. Then after the workshops, we collect those words from the slides as data. Figure 3 shows what we have heard.

Figure 3  New ways of being created by our workshop participants⁵

Be inspired by this picture, latch onto a word that captures your imagination, and make it your own. The point is, there is no right way of being. Try them out. Find one that inspires you and is appropriate to your situation and what you want to accomplish. Create a way of being that’s authentically aligned with the future you want.

Alice, from chapter 3, noticed that she was being righteous and judgmental in reaction to her mother’s righteousness and judgment about gay people. When she let go of this way of being, she saw that the world she wanted was one filled with compassion and love. She could be compassionate and loving and create the world she wanted now, starting with her mother.

Once you’ve identified a possible new way of being that excites you, that is authentic to who you want to be and the future you want to create, consider the conversation you have been reflecting on through chapters 3 and 4. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes for a moment. Take on that person’s experience of the world. Ask yourself, would this way of being make a difference for me? Would it engage and inspire me to see you take this on? This kind of empathic inquiry is very important. It gets at what Scharmer calls “open heart.”⁶

Gabriel saw he wanted a partnership with Sarah where they were exploring how to best contribute to the world together. His fixation on the number 5 plastic recycling was destroying something he cared much more about.

When Sarah said to me, “I used to love recycling. Now, living with you, I no longer want to recycle,” it left me speechless.

That day I took on reflecting on how this had come to be. I got clear on what I really wanted and the way of being I wanted to bring to our interaction. I said the following: “In relation to number 5 in the recycling, I have been a condescending, know-it-all jerk. While I was saying I want the right thing in the right bin, really I wanted to be right and make you wrong and perhaps shame you into recycling correctly. I recognize I diminished you and the quality of our relationship and I am sorry. In the future you can count on me to be loving. What I really want is a profound partnership where we’re exploring how we can best contribute to the world together.”

She was shocked, inspired, and hesitant. I could tell she wanted to believe me, she was moved by what I said, and she was skeptical. That didn’t matter. I was committed. I abandoned the sorting pile and for the next few weeks, I pulled number 5 out of the recycling bin and put it in the Whole Foods bag. I had the feeling she was still putting number 5 in the recycling bin just to test me, yet each number 5 container in the blue bin was an opportunity to be loving. I kept on being loving and eventually the number 5 quit showing up in the wrong bin. But that wasn’t the real win. The real win was who I got to be for my wife, and today it’s who I get to be in front of my daughters.

Before moving forward, we want you to think deeply about this opportunity to create a new way of being in a conversation that matters to you, where you have a goal for improving the world in some way, however small or big.

Embody your new way of being

Once you write down a word or short phrase that captures your new way of being, really dwell in that way of being. Don’t just say, “I will be more understanding now” or “I’ll try to be more courageous.” Let understanding or courage arise in your body. Feel it in your heart and in your mind. Let that feeling flow into how you see, how you listen, and what you say to yourself.

Your response at this moment may be “But I don’t know how.” That’s actually fantastic. It’s a sign that you are genuinely creating a way of being that is new for you.

Some Christians wear a bracelet engraved with the letters “WWJD” for “What would Jesus do?” A useful technique for anyone is to imagine someone in your life, or in your favorite story, who already exemplifies the way of being you want to create. Imagine that role model with your new way of being in your situation. How would they see the scene? How would they listen? What would they be saying to themselves, and to the other person? Inside that new way of being, what occurs to you to think, say, and do?

Reflect back on the conversation you explored in chapters 3 and 4. If you were to take on this new way of being, what would you find yourself saying about the conversation and situation?

One possible outcome is a shift in perspective. How does your sense of the problem shift? Inside that new way of being, what would you really like to make available in the world? Gabriel’s objective changed from “the right thing in the right bin” to “a profound partnership where we’re exploring how we can best contribute to the world together.” A beautiful coemergence is possible as you go back and forth between creating a way of being and articulating a vision of what you want. The two are interrelated. Standing in a new way of being allows you to see a new possible future. Seeing a new possible future allows you to envision more possible ways of being that are consistent with that future.

Take a moment for another iteration of envisioning the future you want for the world and how you would be in it.

Another possible outcome is that your problem simply disappears. In Jason’s MIT example from chapter 4, the new way of being “helpful” brought a shift in focus from the problem called “The administration isn’t taking enough action” to the question “How could I support fellow students?”

You may find that your whole perspective on problems can shift. A problem-solving orientation often focuses on the immediate barriers we face and has us fixated on a limited set of possible reactions to the past and present. From your new way of being, you may step back from the problem, focus on the future you want to create, and start working backward from there. That perspective makes available a much larger space of possibilities for you and others to contribute toward the future you want.

Often when people get to this point in the inquiry, they start to notice a tricky issue. You may find that you have articulated what you want and a new way of being. You have recognized how your old way of being and bait have gotten in your way. You are feeling a shift inside yourself. But you may anticipate that the other person won’t be ready to hear all of this from you. They may continue to expect and respond to your old way of being. That brings us to the next step in our journey.