Episode 25: Gordon White – Being Not You

In this episode, Julia interviews co-host Gordon White! Gordon discusses:

• How high-functioning groups can help us rise above individual limitations
• How mediators and facilitators can help parties be the people they aspire to be
• Creativity, change, and conflict being intertwined
• Being more psychologically protean
• Conscious connection and overcoming the chasms between us all
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MORE ABOUT OUR GUEST

Gordon White works with leaders to develop conflict-competent teams and organizations. He’s led a general mediation practice for 20+ years, and his practice also includes coaching, facilitating, training, and consulting. Gordon also teaches a graduate course in conflict management at Royal Roads University and provides training for the Justice Institute at both the Centre for Leadership and Centre for Conflict Resolution. Periodically, he’s asked to assist Canadian Indigenous groups in their efforts to regain their vitality through both Western and traditional means. Gordon has blogged for several years at TheConflictJourney.com, where he provides both in-depth perspectives and practical advice on effective conflict engagement. As an undergraduate, Gordon studied biology, but his extra-curricular interests and greater motivations became related to consciousness and human potential. He completed an MBA in 1990 and began learning about managing people and developing organizations. Through assisting former members of coercive groups, he became more broadly intrigued by working with people in challenging circumstances. Gordon is deeply interested in the meaning of the conflict experience and what it has to offer individual, organizational, and political growth.

 

GUEST RESOURCES

• Gordon’s website
• Gordon’s blog
• LinkedIn
• Twitter

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

• Robert Kegan’s quote “Conflict is a challenge to our pretense of completeness”
• David Logan’s book Tribal Leadership
• William (Bill) Ury’s advice re: the greatest strength of a negotiator is being able to put yourself in the other party’s shoes
• Difficult Conversations by Stone, Patton, and Heen
• The Harvard Negotiation Project
• Robert Lifton’s book The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation
• Poet Rainer Maria Rilke and Gordon’s blog that mentions the line “All of you undisturbed cities, haven’t you ever longed for the enemy”
• Erwin Schrödinger
• The HeartMath Institute
• Mark Wedge’s book on peacemaking circles
• Name of person at conference who Gordon couldn’t remember: Wyatt Woodsmall

QUOTES FROM THIS EPISODE

(Anything uncertain is either replaced by ellipses or put in square brackets, and some quotes are shortened using ellipses.)

• In response to Julia asking what Gordon sees as the central challenge facing humanity in the area of conflict engagement: [3:39] “Collectively, more of us need to be further along that developmental pathway, and it’s being not far enough along that really contributes to the inability, or the challenges that we get confronted with in conflict…Because that’s the case, I view conflict as an opportunity to grow. It’s an opportunity to grow along those different continua [e.g. empathy, expanding our identities, connectedness, etc.]”
• [6:53] Julia says “In the sense of the last piece around this first question, ‘What do you see as the central challenge currently facing humanity,’ is your sense this has always been our challenge?” and Gordon responds with “That’s a great question. I haven’t ever thought about that before, but I guess my answer would be yes.” They continue discussing this and the approach Gordon takes to the challenge he named
• [7:25] “I think well-functioning groups can transcend the individual limitations…the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, so that the wholeness is able to rise up in its development”
• [8:49] Gordon discusses the strength of peacemaking circles, which have Indigenous origins
• [9:42] “Perhaps we are individually responsible to other people to grow ourselves. We usually think of our personal growth as a personal choice and personal responsibility, but I am implying that perhaps there’s a greater responsibility there, that we are responsible to grow and develop based on our responsibility to humanity, our species, or others around us”
• In response to Julia asking what Gordon believes is the key to motivating people to be willing to engage conflict in a constructive way, Gordon says [14:32] “Helping people or someone to be the person they aspire to be. If I can connect to what they would like to be ideally, then we could maybe talk about how this situation relates to that and how this situation would enable them to move into what they aspire to be…help them rise to the occasion”
• In response to Julia asking what he thinks conflict would look like in a peaceful world, he says [18:43] “I think people would engage consciously with an intention to be constructive. And that would involve also a different kind of respect for conflict. Seeing it, respecting its potential.” Gordon shares a metaphor he created that includes the origin story, multiplicity, and creativity
• [20:59] “Whenever we’re talking about conflict, we’re also talking about a potential for creativity that’s inherent somewhere within it”
• [21:15] “[Conflict] is a quality that’s inherent in the universe whether human beings exist or not, and it has always this positive side to it, always this creative possibility there, or element to it”
• [21:40] “Creativity can’t occur without change”
• [23:08] Gordon lists four constructive (versus destructive) ways of engaging in conflict
• Julia asks Gordon what aspects of his proposed solution or approach to conflict could be applied by the listeners starting tomorrow, and Gordon says [28:19] “Well if it isn’t already somewhat obvious, I tend to be somewhat of an abstract thinking, and there’s lots of people that have very concrete things to say about how to engage differently, so I think I’ll stick with my nature a bit here and make an abstract suggestion, which is, as well as thinking about what you might do differently – because if you show up differently you’re going to get a different result, and if you show up the same way you’re likely to get the same result – the side of it is how to be different, not just how to do something different, but how could I actually be different in how I relate to myself before I encounter the other person”
• [29:20] Gordon shares a teaching he heard at a conference by a speaker whose name he forgets in the moment [the speaker’s name is Wyatt Woodsmall]: “…he mentioned that you’ll hear people saying, when you make suggestions or you help lead them to a different action maybe, they’ll say, ‘That’s not me, I couldn’t do that.’ And what he pointed out was, ‘Well, if you want to grow, you have to be not you. Growing means being not you’”
• [31:33] “Often in conflict, people are characterizing us [as a party] negatively, right? Like a typical one would be, ‘You’re a liar’ […] or ‘You were unreliable,’ or ‘You’ve been inconsiderate/rude/disrespectful’ [etc.] So you’re hearing something negative about yourself, right? So what we tend to do is either we reject that […], or occasionally what people might do is wear it completely and then just blame themselves – and maybe only blame themselves in private, not in the presence of the other person – or maybe even deny, maybe not even be fully conscious that they’re doing that. What I’m going to suggest is that in most situations when we’re accused of something, there’s usually some truth to it. It may not be very much, but that’s what I would suggest – think of the negative perspectives that the other party has of you, and think about, ‘Well what aspect of that might be true? Or at least, how could they perceive me that way? How could someone in this situation come to perceive me that way, even if I’m not that way?’ And that can lead to a suggestion for how you could be different.” Julia then says she just got a huge insight, which she shares
• [38:15] “I think we’re faced with two contradictory perspectives about our togetherness – I mean as human beings we are. One of them is, I believe that we connect, but I don’t know how that really happens. And I mean connection in absolute terms, in other words, there is some actual thing between us somehow, either our being overlap in some way or that there’s something kind of alive between us. Not that we’re only creating the experience with our brains, if you know what I mean. […] But also, if you look at a basic scientific view of how we create our experience, it looks like there’s a chasm between us. So what I mean by this is that what we experience the world is through data or information that we take in, like the photons come flying through the pupil of our eyes […] then our brain creates what we see. So it isn’t like we see what’s there – we get these photons and then we create what we see. […] So then if you think of that, the conclusion is that each of us are creating our own worlds, and we’re walking around in those worlds, and we’re – like you [Julia] say, I thought your analogy was good last time we talked about it – like in our own hologram, walking around in our own holograms, which sort of bump against each other but never really connect because there isn’t any way to connect. So the notion of connection is just a construction in our own brains; we just make it up from the data we take in. So even though that’s the way it looks, if you look at it from a common scientific point of view, I don’t think that’s the reality. I think there is some absolute connection even though I don’t know what the explanation for it is, really.” [40:53] Julia refers to the HeartMath Institute, which she says “is attempting to map out with electrocardiograms etc. how each of our hearts are giving off signals so that there is this inter-, well, let’s call it connection”
• [42:17] “There’s this chasm between us all. From this angle of looking at it, and I think certainly in significant respects it’s true, and what that means is that it really shouldn’t be at all surprising when people misunderstand each other. The fact that we understand each other at all is somewhat of a miracle. So you really do have to work to bridge that chasm and find understanding and connection sometimes, and I think we underestimate the amount of effort and intention it takes in challenging situations to connect with the other people”