Discover how your daily experiences can fuel personal growth in our upcoming session. We’ll explore turning everyday events into opportunities for development, based on decades of insights. Are you a finished product or a work in progress? Learn how roles in your life—parent, partner, executive—can serve as grist for growth. Dive into the concept of ‘Wiser at Work’ and find out how to transform your workplace into a dojo for self-improvement. Join us to unlock new perspectives and lifelong learning.
Transcript
So here’s the concept. The idea is that we can use what happens to us when we wake up in the morning, all day long, as grist for our personal development. This has been going on my whole life, and I’m finally pulling it together, either in the last chapter or the next to last chapter of my life. Who knows? Let’s get started. I’ll tell you all the details as we go forward here.
So, when you think about yourself, the roles you have, and the positions you hold—parent, partner, friend, executive team leader, or even the bottom of the pecking order—are you a finished product or a work in progress? This is an absolutely fundamental question. I remember asking this about 50 years ago. What if we’re all under construction? What if we’re all in development?
Okay, I was told by somebody, and I forgot, that maybe the protocol here is to put your audio on mute and then put questions in the chat box. I think Magda and Edith are going to be monitoring the chat box for me. So, let’s say you’re in development. I mean, just for fun, raise your hand either this way or using one of the indicators if you are in development. Yeah, like that. Cool. Great. Is there anybody here who is a finished product? If you are, raise your hand. Okay, I’ve been asking this question for, like I said, 50 years, and no one has yet said they’re a finished product. If they do, I’m going to hand them the magic marker.
So, let’s say we’re all in development. What does it mean to be in development? Being in development is a moment-by-moment choice. It’s a lifetime commitment. It involves conscious stretching and risking. It’s a journey, not a destination. You’re not trying to get somewhere. It requires asking, “What is the lesson here right now for me?” and “Why is this happening for me?” instead of “to me.” And it’s probably going to mean not looking good. Is it worth it? Yeah, I think so. I mean, what’s the alternative?
So let me back up and say my intention for this 30 minutes with you, and then we’ll have a Q&A for 10 or 15 minutes after, to get your responses. My intention is that you will learn something in this 30 minutes, that this 30 minutes will be valuable for you, whether you ever do anything in response to this or not. So this is where we’re headed. But I want you to know what I’m into and if you want to play going forward, how to do that.
So, Ellen introduced me to Aikido, God knows, 30, 40 years ago, and the concept of the dojo. Aikido is a way of blending energy. It’s a path. The “do” means path. So the dojo is the place where you go to practice your path, where you practice raising your game, where you practice your art like a dance studio, classroom, or music studio. So what if you turned your workplace, meaning what you do when you wake up in the morning, whatever that is, and your home life into a dojo or classroom for developing yourself and maximizing your contribution to your family, your team, your organization, community, maybe even the larger world? That’s the fundamental concept behind the work thing that I’m starting here: how to take what happens at work and turn it into grist for your personal development.
So what does it mean to develop? It comes from the old French “développer,” which means to unwrap. Like at the holiday season, when you get a gift, you develop it, you unwrap it, you discover it, you unfold it, you reveal it, you ripen it. It’s like in the old days we took our film to be developed. You look at the film, there’s nothing on it. It just looks like a bunch of nothing. But as soon as you put it in the solution, with the right time and temperature, the images emerge. They were there, but you couldn’t see them. This has been my concept. I remember years ago, Jack Sherwood said, “John, don’t do training. Do development. Training is like you train a dog or a horse, or you train an animal. You’re just trying to do mechanical skill, reaction-response things. Development comes from the inside out.” So, as I’ve said in the book, you don’t have to change yourself. You need to come home to yourself. And this changes everything. So this is what we’re after here: how to do that based on what happens at work.
So, being in development means, as my personal growth coach Jan Smith, who might be on the call here, says, being radically open to learning, especially about what you don’t know, or even more especially about what you don’t think you need to be in development about. So here’s a question for you: What is it that you don’t know that you don’t know that you need to be in development about? That question, I think, is life-changing and a lifetime search. Like, what is it that I’m not aware of that I need to be in development about? Or even more powerful, what is it that I think I’ve mastered that I don’t need help with, that I really, really need help with? Boy, that’s a killer. I hope you’re asking yourself these questions as I go through here.
I love this from Julia Cameron, the Artist’s Way: “It’s impossible to learn and look good at the same time.” I remember trying to learn how to dive when I was in my senior year in college, on the diving board. We needed a diver, so the coach taught me all these dives, and I looked terrible. It was one of the most embarrassing things in my life, learning to dive. You never see anybody learning to dive; you only see them doing it.
I love this from coach John Wooden: “It’s what you learn after you know it all that really matters.” In times of dramatic change, the future belongs to the learners, not the knowers. This is Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock, one of the people that started this whole movement about the future and change. We need to be learners, not knowers. In the world, from the first grade, from kindergarten, we’re rewarded not for learning, but for knowing. Theoretically, an exam should be a learning experience, not a showing-off experience. But we’ve somehow lost that along the way. So, every day is a learning experience, rather than a knowing experience. What a huge breakthrough that would be if we could begin to shift that. When I wake up in the morning, part of my mission is not to know. We know a lot of stuff, but it’s to learn today. It’s never too late to become who you might have been or what you might have been. I love this quote from George Eliot. And then my all-time favorite, as some of you know, is: “Everyone gets the experience; some get the lesson.” Thank you, T.S. Eliot.
Alright, one more input here from my friends Gay and Katie Hendricks. I went to a workshop with them 30 or 40 years ago and discovered this from them. There are three folders in life, and we mess it up all the time. One folder is things I can control, things I cannot control, and things I might be able to influence. So I say, well, what are some things that we can control? Like, what about losing weight? Where would you put losing weight? Most people put it in the folder called things I can’t control. Okay. Let’s put it to the test. Are you ready? Can we count to three? When I count to three, I want you to lose some weight. Are you ready? One. Two. Three. Yeah. No, you can’t control your weight. You can control what you eat, how much you exercise, but you can’t control your weight. You can control what we say, what we do, and what we intend. As far as I know, those are the only three things under our direct control. There are some other things, but that’s the advanced class. Things we cannot control are pretty much everything else. We can’t control the circumstances. We can’t control the people around us, especially at work. The family we don’t get to vote on, but people at work are around us. People we wake up and have to deal with, and everything in the circumstances is stuff we cannot control. But virtually everything, including ourselves, is in a folder called things I might be able to influence, which includes what I say, what I do, and what I intend. That’s the hope.
The hope for humanity is in that folder: things we might be able to influence. Now we get about, okay, now how might I influence? I think my whole life has been about that. When I look back at my childhood and realize that my mom and pop—my pop was a full-blown alcoholic, and both parents were beautiful, incredible, genius people. My pop’s alcoholism and the struggle in their marriage, I think, my inability to influence that, has driven me to try to be a transformational presence in every life I can get my hands on, including my own. So this is why we are doing what we’re doing. That’s why you’re on this call here. The hope that you might be able to influence something in your life. So this is why I created, with some colleagues, a thing called Wiser at Work.
We’ll take a second here to just talk about the logo. I love this little logo. And if any of you have tried to create a logo for your operation, you know what goes into it. There’s a lot behind this. That “at” sign, we wanted it to look kind of like a light bulb, but not too cartoonish. The light in the center is what connects work with wisdom. So you can take that light bulb and shine it on what happens during the day. Your work will get to that. What that means in a minute. And then shine that on you. Take that wisdom, and the light that we can shine on what’s happening connects what we do every day with the wisdom that we desperately need for ourselves and for those around us. So that’s the logo. That’s what Wiser at Work is all about. Now let’s get into it.
So here’s the idea: the workplace is a classroom. We wake up every day, whether you’re a stay-at-home mom or dad, whether you clean the streets, or go to work as an executive with thousands of people, or in government, arts, or whatever. It doesn’t matter. When you wake up in the morning, whatever you do during the day is a tuition-free classroom. You don’t have to pay for it. There is a cost. The cost is in surrendering certain things, letting go of things, letting go of knowing, being open to learning, that kind of thing. But there’s no monetary cost. You don’t have to pay for this except out of your own consciousness. And your colleagues, everyone around you, is a perfect faculty, especially the people that we don’t like and the people that are difficult for us because they represent some kind of a learning edge. You know, there’s something we need there. They become our most important teachers—the people and the incidents in our lives that create the most pain.
I mean, over the years, those of you that have known me know that in the early days, 1987 was the first EDI, the solo personal growth program that we did, especially for the people from Aetna who sent hundreds of their executives from all around the world, one at a time with their spouse or partner quite often for that work. And we would ask them, what is something that happened to you earlier in your life that you wish you could have changed? And of course, you can imagine some of the really terrible, horrific things that have happened to us human beings early in our lives. Well, the question then is, how are you a better person now because of that? What did you get from that? And I remember a woman who had really awful things happen to her, and she said, with tears in her eyes, “I’m more resilient. I’m braver. I’m more courageous. I’m stronger. I’m more empathetic with other people.” She had a list of dozens of qualities. I mean, if my pop had stopped drinking when I was 9 or 10 years old, I would have been the happiest kid in Richmond, Virginia, and I would not be on this call with you. It was my failure, as I said, to help him that, I think, is what moves me to be here.
I remember sitting at the breakfast table and sensing the energy, and on my bicycle, going to work, thinking, “It’s going to be rough tonight.” So those gifts of being able to sense things without them being spoken, those are all gifts that have served me for my entire life. And they came precisely out of that classroom that I had when I was little. So there are no grades. There’s just continuous feedback and real-time learning. The only grades we have are the ones that end up here. Even at school, when you have a letter in the upper right-hand corner of a piece of paper, that’s not the grade that has impact. The grade that has impact is what it means to you, what happens when you see that number or that letter. But there are no grades in this particular classroom. There’s just ongoing feedback. It’s available to us every day. We walk out of every room, hang up every phone call, every Zoom call, everything we do. At that moment, there is a learning experience available for us, and there’s feedback to be had if we’re open to it.
I remember my first trip to the ashram. Some of you know that I’m kind of a Zen Lutheran or a yogic Lutheran here. And I remember seeing this phrase, “Seva can be sadhana.” It’s a Sanskrit phrase, and seva is your work, basically what you do during the day, your service. And sadhana is the spiritual path. And here it is right here. This is Wiser at Work: what happens during the day can become grist for the mill, for our deep development. Or I would even say spiritual development. It’s not about religion. It’s about being someone who’s capable of having a sense of mission and purpose and something bigger than we are. What we do every day can be our path.
Now, there will be homework in this school. It’s work that takes us home. I love it. I just feel emotional when I say that. This is work that we do on ourselves, in ourselves, with other people, that takes us home to be more fully who we are. This is about what we do with what happened. You’ve seen this over and over again. It’s not what happens. It’s what happens next. That’s the key thing.
Now, a model that some of you have seen before, but I’m going to reframe it here. Look back at some moment in the last few days that either went really well or didn’t go well for you. Let’s take one that didn’t go exactly the way you were hoping. What did you do? This is reflecting on something from the recent past. What you chose to do. Where did that come from? Well, that came from alternatives that occurred to you. I could do this or this or this. Maybe you didn’t think of them in the moment, but you had some alternatives available. And those came from what your intention was. This is what you wanted, and that came from your interpretation, what you saw and what it meant. Something was happening to you, and it meant something. And this is conscious. And then there was what you noticed that was happening to you, how the world occurred for you. Those of you that know the three worlds know this one really well. And then, of course, upstream from that is our operating system that told you what was out there, the deep programming that told you what was out there and what it meant. And of course, if you’ve done the EDI or the LDI, you realize that this results in a kind of automatic way of operating, which is a kind of funnel that we’re going around every day doing what’s familiar and relatively easy for us. And if we’re facing something like that moment that didn’t go well, what you need is this: it’s not about changing but expanding yourself. It’s developing more options.
So what are some things that would be stretches for you that wouldn’t feel right, wouldn’t feel normal, but actually are available to you? This is what all my material—basically Wiser at Work, as you’re going to hear in a minute—is a library of all the videos and articles and stuff that I’ve written and soon to be with other colleagues as well. It’s going to be a curated library of my body of work, along with input from other people. So what are some options? What could you have done differently? This is where you start. You start with what your interpretation is. This is how we can break the circle. And I like to go to the awareness wheel, which I did during the Leos program many, many years ago. It works like this: something happens. I’m sensing, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting—whatever the senses are. Instantly, I have a thought about it. I have an interpretation. I know what it means. That quite often comes together, and then I have feelings about that. Interestingly enough, feelings come from interpretation. The same thing can happen, and you can learn that it doesn’t mean a bad thing. And then you want something, and then you act. You do something. Now, this happens in a nanosecond, all day long, every day.
So what I want the Wiser at Work world of resources to do is to help us slow this process down when we need to—not go crazy trying to do this all the time—but when there’s a moment that’s a trigger of some kind. If you can go back and look at these, and this is the place to start: what was my first reaction? And, oh, that’s interesting. I wonder, and begin to learn your patterns, your defaults. Because the first step in creating newness for yourself, new life, is to become aware of the old life and how habitual it is, how automatic it is. That’s the first step in creating transformation.
And I’m going to wrap up my 30 minutes or so with you with this amazing story. Many of you have heard this before. Dave Wondra from Minneapolis. He’s a friend and a coach, especially to nonprofit executives, and he’s a jazz musician. This is Dave playing his trumpet. We’re trying to find a better photo with better pixel density, but this is it. This is Dave.
Dave was playing his trumpet one day for his teacher, Bobby Shew, one of the greatest American jazz trumpet players. Jack, if you’re watching this, I’m sure you know his music and maybe you too, David Galloway. And he’s also Dave’s teacher. So the way Dave was telling me, he said, one day, Bobby said to me, “Dave, you’ve got to decide why you’re playing for me. Basically, what’s your purpose? Like, when you’re playing, are you trying to impress me? Are you trying to impress people or to move me? To move us?” Isn’t that fabulous? That one hit me.
Like, what percentage? It’s not an either-or. Like right now, what percentage in me, of my intention in the way I’m operating with you and being with you, how much of it is to impress you? Oh, John is still alive. He looks lively. Or is it to move you? What’s the percentage there? And I’ve learned after getting this lesson from Dave to consciously shift as best I can all my energy from impressing you to just moving you and giving you information. If you’re impressed when it’s over, right now in my life, it almost doesn’t matter. You know, it’s lovely. But if what I say moves you now, then it was worthwhile. He said, “Dave, both are okay. But here’s what you don’t know: People can tell the difference.”
People can tell the difference when we’re trying to impress them or when we’re just being fully who we are in a way that moves people. So, just in case you’re in an organization and still wonder about this, here’s an amazing piece of research from about 15 years ago in Canada. This group researched 326 organizations—some non-profits, some for-profits, government entities, and so on—and they were looking for organizations that were successful by the standards of their industry or group. They looked at profit, number of participants, and other metrics. If it was a ballet school, for example, they looked at what made it successful and what made others struggle. They found that there was only one variable always present in the successful systems and missing in the struggling ones. And guess what it was? It was when the boss or the owner, the person at the top, was seriously committed to their own personal growth and development. Their organization was growing and developing.
I just think that’s fascinating. You could say, “Well, duh,” but not really. Inside your circle of influence—whether it’s a relationship, a family, a team, a company, or a country—your commitment to your own development apparently has an impact on the system around you, far beyond what you might think is possible.
So, this is what I’m launching here. I’m going to give it one more brief description, then I’ll open it up for a conversation with some of you. I think the protocol is maybe to raise your hand if you know how to raise your hand in the virtual setting. We have 67 people, so I’m not sure how to find everybody here. Chris, maybe some of you have had more experience with lots of people on a screen like this, but I’ll do my best to call on you.
The concept is that wiser@work.com—go to wiseratwork.com. It’s in development, but I have over 100 videos, hundreds of articles, audios. Everything that I’ve created is now being shot, videoed, recorded, transcribed. All the videos have transcriptions. This is really fascinating. My colleague in this work, I’m going to have a small team, has tracked down a piece of software that listens to my video and creates a transcript. As frightening as it is, it’s proving to be helpful, at least to us at this point.
So, Wiser at Work is essentially a comprehensive library of resources aimed at helping you turn your everyday work experiences into opportunities for personal and professional development. The idea is that your workplace is a dojo, a classroom where you can practice and refine your skills, develop new ones, and ultimately become a better version of yourself.
I’ll stop here and take any questions or comments you might have. Please raise your hand or type your question into the chat box, and Magda and Edith will help me keep track of everything. Thank you so much for your time and attention. I hope you found this session valuable and that it gives you some new perspectives to take back to your own work and life. Let’s open it up for discussion.
