• How Season 1 guests have shaped their perspectives, practices, and relationships
• The lines between humility, approachability, and self-degradation
• A surprise and a communication magic trick!
• Co-host conflict, introversion, and extroversion
• What’s coming up for our Summer Season
• Plans for Season 2, launching this fall

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

• 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”

The post Episode 25: Gordon White – Being Not You appeared first on On Conflict.

• • How conversations with Season 1 guests have influenced her views on the world
  • The importance of managing our reptilian nature regarding fear
  • Learning important skills in conflict from the squirrels in urban Montreal
  • The etymology of conflict and Julia’s analogy of fire
  • The importance of being courageous and having conversations that need to be had
  • Joining your community and think about what’s required of you as a citizen

More about Our Guest

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST

• Leonard Cohen and the End of the World
• Catherine Ingram’s article Facing Extinction
• Bruce Lipton’s The Biology of Belief
• The Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi
• Barbara Coloroso’s book Extraordinary Evil: A Short Walk into Genocide
• Robert Kegan
• E. M. Forster and his quote, “Only connect”
• Brené Brown quote: “Strong back, soft front, wild heart” (Source 1; source 2)
• Linda Hill
• Gary Harper
• Landmark
• Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Strategy by Jem Bendell
• Quote by George Bernard Shaw: “I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live.” (Secondary source for the quote)
• Zen Buddhist Roshi Joan Halifax quote: “All too often our so-called strength comes from fear, not love; instead of having a strong back, many of us have a defended front shielding a weak spine. In other words, we walk around brittle and defensive, trying to conceal our lack of confidence. If we strengthen our backs, metaphorically speaking, and develop a spine that’s flexible but sturdy, then we can risk having a front that’s soft and open…How can we give and accept care with strong-back, soft front compassion, moving past fear into a place of genuine tenderness? I believe it comes about when we can be truly transparent, seeing the world clearly — and letting the world see into us.” (Secondary source for the quote; Roshi’s book that it’s actually from)
• More information about the reptilian brain, mammalian brain, and prefrontal cortex
• Brené Brown’s Braving the Wilderness
• Mary Oliver
• Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Quotes From The Episode

• [6:06] “I think a central challenge [currently facing humanity] is managing our own fear as a species, and the reflex action that we have when we’re fearful, which is to make enemies of each other, and an overall managing our reptilian brain, our survival aspect of our personality. […] We have a perfect storm that’s facing humanity at this time, and it’s causing and continuing to cause increased conflict across our species.” Julia gives credit to Gord as being the one from whom she heard “the perfect storm” phrase.
• [8:07] “There are certain markers we notice – and you used the phrase the perfect storm, that conflict can happen when there’s a perfect storm of characteristics that are coming together that has caused that particular conflict, and most people don’t realize the signs that are mounting tensions that are going to result in conflict. So I applied that to humanity and I thought yes, there are signs, there are mounting signs that are happening that we know from our experiences dealing with didactic conflict or group conflict or organizational conflict.”
• [11:22] Gord asks Julia what she thinks about the relationship between fear and the perception of threat.
• [14:33] Julia talks about various perspectives on genocide and discusses a particular author’s thoughts around schoolyard bullying and genocide practices of “othering” and thinking of others as sub-human.
• [17:28] “When we’re in crisis, whether it’s real crisis or fabricated because I’ve decided I’m in crisis with you, it’s very difficult to override that [turning others into enemies].”
• [19:19] Julia talks about being drawn to the field of conflict engagement because of how war has personally impacted her life. She shares that she’s a child of a government-sponsored war-displaced refugee, and that her grandfather was murdered in the war in the Ukraine. [22:02] “I did want to note, the friendship program [supporting refugees] that I was part of [in Edmonton] was federally funded, and I do think governments have an important role to play in terms of supporting civility in society.”
• [23:25] In response to a question from Gord about managing fear of the enemy, Julia says “If I can see you as somebody that’s like me, I will not want to hurt you.”
• [27:27] “Part of what I’m exploring in this last year or less is how can we look to artists and how can we look to Indigenous populations to be some of our touchstone and some of our guides in these very scary times.”
• [29:50] “In my work there’s a phrase I’ve come up with that I talk about a lot: go slow to go fast. I think it does connect to managing our reptilian brain. I think if we can be mindful that we have this tripwire functioning in all of us, that we can start to encourage the capacity to continue to go forward. If we go, it might be two steps forward, one and a half back, and slow, and wait.” Julia talks about a memory from her childhood in urban Montreal in which she waited with a peanut for a squirrel who would eventually take it out of her hand, and she says she learned patience and the “go slow to go fast” from the squirrels. Gord expands the analogy by pointing out that Julia used a peanut to coax the squirrels; he says, “There needs to be something that maybe the person can see as a benefit or possibility for engaging.”
• [34:47] In response to Gord’s question about what conflict looks like in a peaceful world, Julia says “I think conflict looks like how I view it […]. I think conflict looks like opportunity. It looks like opportunity for innovation and creativity.” Julia talks about Linda Hill, who found in her research that “creative abrasion” is the necessary ingredient for spawning creativity and innovation.
• [35:31] “This world would be awfully boring without conflict.”
• [35:34] Julia talks about how she was married to a screenplay writer who’d often say that Julia’s work with conflict informed his work as a dramaturg, and that he was all for conflict because it inhabits all great stories. Julia says, “As I thought about it, I thought, we’d have no stories without conflict.”
• [37:20] “I’ve looked up the etymology of conflict, which is con, meaning with, and flict is literally a flick, like a flick of your hand or a strike. And it would never make sense to me really how conflict would fit for me as somebody who thinks that conflict is okay, until this very minute. Right here, right now, you’re witnessing it, you’re listening to it! And the insight I just got is that conflict is an opportunity because it’s a spark of energy. It’s a call to opportunity. It’s that creative abrasion – I think Linda Hill’s phrase is really what’s enabled me to see this. It’s like the striking of a match. And what do we do with that? We could let the fire just take over the whole forest and burn the house down, or whatever, right, which is the destructive component of conflict. Or we can blow it out, avoid it, squash it, let it stop. Or we can tend to that fire in ways that we know can help make it into this thing that gives life, the thing that cooks food, the thing that allows us to stay warm. It has so much opportunity for transformation.”
• [39:19] In response to Gord asking what people can start doing tomorrow to make the world a better and more peaceful place, Julia says “Courage and calm.”
  • “Courage would be the courage to have the conversations that I’ve been avoiding, the conversations that you’ve been avoiding.” She discusses a personal and professional development organization called Landmark, which is very encouraging of people having conversations imminently and not putting them off. Julia then shares an incredible story she heard from a fellow Landmark participant that illustrates the importance of initiating a conversation when we feel something needs to be discussed.
  • “Calm is required because if we can remain calm, our hearts can stay open – those soft fronts – keeping our hearts open means that we have a better chance of listening to the other person on the other end of the line or across the table or street from us, because deep listening is definitely going to be required. […] And calm is required to sit with the incredible sadness of our dying species and other species, and other lifeforms, because it’s so easy to collapse. I’ve been inspired […] by Phil Lancaster’s comment [on our last episode, about his work in the response to the Rwandan genocide] that he just kept going. I think I remember him saying to do anything else would be suicide.” [48:00] “Calm is required to balance our day-to-day demands and the minutiae of the day-to-day living that we have that tells us that we have no time to be involved in our community. We need calm to expand that sense of time that is it’s so urgently required of all of us.”
• [51:29] Gord says “One of the things I find interesting about this conversation, and in a way, about quite a few things that we’ve talked about during the podcast is that it doesn’t seem to be about conflict, right? And the way I make sense of that is that conflict, when you explore it deeply, is so embedded in life, that it becomes a doorway. The conversations around conflict become a doorway to almost every significant, for example existential experience that human beings have.”
• [52:18] “I love quotes. I may not be able to remember them with specific accuracy, as we have seen, and yet I still love them. I stumbled upon a quote when I was reflecting on the podcast for today, and so I brought that quote. I could have brought a million quotes, because I really love quotes. So this is the way that I want to leave it. […] It’s a quote from a Buddhist, a Zen Buddhist, Roshi Joan Halifax. ‘All too often our so-called strength comes from fear, not love; instead of having a strong back, many of us have a defended front shielding a weak spine. In other words, we walk around brittle and defensive, trying to conceal our lack of confidence. If we strengthen our backs, metaphorically speaking, and develop a spine that’s flexible but sturdy, then we can risk having a front that’s soft and open…How can we give and accept care with strong-back, soft front compassion, moving past fear into a place of genuine tenderness? I believe it comes about when we can be truly transparent, seeing the world clearly — and letting the world see into us.’”
• [54:11] Gord asks Julia “What do you think she [Brené Brown] means by ‘wild heart?’ Or what does it mean to you?” Julia says “What it means to me is, the notion of a wild heart opens up so many possibilities. It’s that connecting with the animal part in us, I think. With the reptilian, with the mammalian, with the prefrontal cortex, and with the spirit. And the possibility that conflict offers us. As I said earlier, the world would be pretty boring without conflict, and we wouldn’t have our stories, like that spark is there in the wild heart, to open to that, the beauty of life even though it can be so painful.”
• [56:44] “I’ve had an image for a long time of one’s relationship to conflict being like being in a kayak going down a rushing river, and you know, yes we can have the helmet, we can have the safety jacket, but really, get in the water.”

The post Episode 24: Julia Menard – Going Reptile appeared first on On Conflict.

The post Episode 23: Dr. Philip Lancaster Riffcast appeared first on On Conflict.

• Economic feudalism
• Public discourse about the corruption in our political system not getting the traction that it needs
• Dramatic environmental changes that have happened over his lifetime
• Themes in genocides across the globe
• How to counteract corporate interests in politics
• The power of a well-made film, plus free Coca-Cola, in shifting people’s beliefs
• The obligations of being a citizen
• How hope is found in resistance

More about Our Guest

Dr. Philip Lancaster had a distinguished career as an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces. His career spanned a wide variety of posts, from lecturing at the Royal Military College of Canada to serving as General Romeo Dallaire’s military assistant during the Rwandan Genocide. Philip has conducted extensive research into the use of child soldiers and helped launch the Child Soldier Initiative. He has engaged as a consultant to several leading international non-governmental organizations involved in counter child soldier initiatives. In Mali, he was the lead International Humanitarian Law instructor for the European Union Training Mission. He has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Ottawa and holds an appointment as adjunct professor at the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria.

GUEST Resources

• Academic website
• The Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, which Phil helped launch
• An article he wrote, published in the Globe and Mail
• A video of Philip giving a speech at the Commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide against the Tutsi

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST

• Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined
• Quote by Aristotle: “For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all…”
• The Belgian Congo
• David Suzuki
• Buffy Sainte-Marie’s song lyric “And virgin places don’t mean a thing to people who never bring their hearts along”
• “Bread and circuses”
• Eleanor Gordon-Smith
• Simon and Garfunkel lyric “Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest”
• Book: Gilles Lipovetsky’s L’Ere de l’éphémère

Quotes From The Episode

• [9:12] “Once the legal system that preserves the order that we have today, that preserves Steven Pinker’s world and keeps his statistics pure, once that breaks, we’re liable to see a period of considerable chaos. And that’s what I fear.” Gord says, “And you think it could be breaking?” Phil says, “I think the tension is certainly building up. You’ve got this collision between growing concern, almost paranoia, about the environment and environmental collapse – all of us can see what’s happening – and a rigidity, an impossibility of getting our political processes to adapt to cope with it.”
• [10:17] “Our own survival imperatives drive us to collude with this corrupt system, and I see it building to a crescendo. I think the first sign of it will be a collapse in the U.S.”
• [12:00] “There were many people, if you go way back to early Suzuki, being a voice in the wilderness to where we are today, it took a long time to get the public narrative, the public discourse, shifted. And I think that has never actually happened in this case, in this particular context, the idea that we need to be concerned about the corruption about our political system just did not get the traction that it needed to get.”
• [13:16]: “The notion of property rights and fundamental libertarianism still garners a lot of support, the core idea being that if the state steps in, then it undermines people’s capacity to achieve a virtuous life on their own. […] But in a time when we know we need collective action and we can see that the lack of intervention from the state has just completely undone any notion of distributive justice – which is another term that’s gone out of use, and needs to come back; we need to recapture it…”
• [15:39] In response to a story shared by Phil, Gord says “I’m wondering if there’s a generalist lesson here or principle that if you’re in a situation – it could be family, it could be organizational, and it could be the larger political system – that when the power balance begins to shift, if you don’t act, if you don’t stand up to it in some sense or speak about it, that it will tend to continue and even maybe gain momentum.” Phil says “Yup. I’m glad you brought that up. That is something that I would love to talk about, is the passivity of today’s electorate. That is another worrying sign. The notion of conflict, in some cases…in order for political space to be preserved at the bottom, people – the voters the electors, the common man, the common woman has to be ready to take a stand and to insist on their rights. And that may take them into a position of conflict, but arguably, unless you can achieve some sort of sub-violent political evolution through conflict, through a conflicting political process, then it’s liable to just result in a buildup of tension that eventually explodes.”
• In response to Julia asking about his approach to the big-picture issue he mentioned earlier, Phil says:
  • [18:15] “In my case, I refuse the notion of despair. I just won’t go there. Perhaps this goes back to my experience in Rwanda where at certain points we were overwhelmed. Just could not begin to answer all the requirements, all the needs. But we kept going. And the only thing we could do was to do what we could do. And we made sure that we did that everyday. Everyday.”
  • [18:51] “I’ve turned my attention to local affairs. I’m deeply involved in my local community association, in municipal affairs. I’m trying to find some way to get a more meaningful conversation about the environment, about what we can do, taking action on my own, doing everything I can to eliminate my own footprint, and using that as a kind of springboard into talking to neighbours and other people about what they can do. Needless to say, this carries over into political engagement, political involvement. I think it is absolutely essential that every citizen understands that the duty of citizenship is not to sit passively by and wait for things to happen, but to make clear what we want to happen. To think about politics seriously and to take our engagement seriously, in whatever way we hope to do this, and through whatever political party we hope to support. We just have to take it more seriously.”
• [20:39] In replying to a question from Julia about how to motivate people to mobilize and organize, Phil acknowledges that his following statement is a rather jaded view of human nature: “We are a suspiciously trivial species, easily distracted by things that shine and make us feel good, and in a middle-class society where we have a high level of personal comfort, it takes a lot to get people to engage seriously. It’s much easier when people are facing threat and see the threat. It’s much easier when people are cold and dark and hungry to get them engaged. When survival issues are apparent. The problem we have today is that the emergency we’re facing is a slow one. It’s unfolding at a speed that allows us to deny it, to put off action, to just look the other way. And we can’t, we really cannot do that.” Julia clarifies, “And you’re referring to the environment when you say that?” Phil confirms that he is.
• [22:45] “I’d like to take people out to look at any city from the air, as you come in, particularly at dawn or dusk, and you see this pall of smoke. I’d like to take people back in my own life to when you could look up at the sky at night and you could see stars. And now, in the same places where that once was possible, you can’t. You see this blur through a haze. I’d like to take people out to camp in a snow-filled wood in Quebec where the snow is dry and clean and cold, and now it isn’t. It might be for a week, but then the weather changes because we’ve got these dramatic shifts in weather patterns.”
• [24:18] “I think that the debate will eventually be won by nature. As things dry, as water levels rise, as we start to see more and more forest fires and droughts and heavy rains where normally there weren’t, and, you know, it’s going to be so obvious to anyone who lives in an area where nature is apparent. This gets more difficult because of the urbanization of our society. But I have hope that the young people see it; they don’t need to be shown, they seem to be able to watch it on TV and get it.”
• [25:23] Julia says to Phil, “You’ve seen so much of the world, and I just wonder, what keeps you hopeful?” Phil says, “You know, you give up hope, you collapse in despair, you become unable to do anything. Even when the water rises, it’s always possible to look around for a log to hang onto. You’ve just got to keep going. Giving up is, I’m sorry, it’s suicidal. It’s just not worth doing.” Phil then discusses the historical role of rationality in political and collective decision-making. [27:12]“As soon as reason gives way to fear, you’re hooped.” He also speaks about the Rwandan genocide and the Jewish Holocaust.
• [27:59] “I don’t know what it is in humanity, but as soon as we have this righteous feeling of self-defense, it seems to open the doors to all sorts of depravity.” Julia comments on how easily manipulated the reptilian brain is.
• [30:18] “I just think hope is to be found in resistance.”
• [32:11] “There are many people who think that our political system is itself the problem, but I don’t see that. The problem with proportional representation in a mass democracy like Canada is that it will inevitably lead to the rise of a more fractured political landscape because we have so many local interests. We’ll end up with parties forming around those specific local interests that are unable to find a common good, a common thread. The first-past-the-post system that we have now, at least allows us to build consensus around a core set of ideas that form the platforms of major political parties leading up to an election. A lot of us vote holding our noses because we don’t like the whole platform but we like part of it. But if you go to the other system, any form of proportional representation, you’re not going to get that. What you’re going to get is a whole bunch of discrete interest parties, and I see that as a much bigger threat to a political consensus around important issues like the environment than first-past-the-post.” Phil discusses the Australian political system’s structure and the resulting lack of transparency.
• [35:15] “Perhaps I’m perverse. I like a good fight. And I don’t like it if I’m winning. It’s much more fun if you’re in a losing position. It allows you to be much more devious and creative and inventive in the way you go at your resistance. Now we are in a much more powerful position than we think. It is just a matter of deciding that we have power to do something. That’s all we need to decide in order to do it, and I just don’t think despair is much help. If anything else, it facilitates corporate interests.”
• [35:59] “On an individual basis, what could we do? Well, we could stop shopping at Costco. We could stop buying packaged meat knowing how meat is produced. We could stop buying food that is produced through ways and means that are unsustainable. We could reject the use of gasoline-driven vehicles. We could switch over to hanging our clothes out on clotheslines and growing as much of our own food as possible. There are so many small ways you can resist. You put these together and voila, you’ve got a drop in the marketing system that feeds corporate takeover and corporate control. We could patronize local industries. […] Get away from hockey games and professional sports, all these things that focus our attention, they’re like bread and circuses back in the Roman times. They take our attention away from what matters. I’m not saying we all have to be serious and dower and sit around like a bunch of middle-aged puritans, but for God’s sakes, let’s stop being distracted by such fluff. Find something important to get worried about.”
• [39:51] Gord mentions research being done by Princeton philosopher Eleanor Gordon-Smith and asks Phil, “I’m wondering if you’ve encountered that challenge of providing objective evidence to belief and not having it move, and what you’ve found can help people shift their beliefs, because that’s certainly one of the things that keeps people entrenched in conflict.” Phil says, “I almost want to suggest that if you’re interested in that, you don’t really need to look at any PhD research – just go and look at how marketing works, because that’s exactly what they do. Move people from wherever they are to believing that they need or want this product.” Phil says he’s had direct experience with this and shares a story about his time with the United Nations. Julia notes, “It sounds to me you’re saying one of the keys to influence is emotion.” Phil agrees, and Gord points out that emotion can be used manipulatively or sincerely. Phil says “I’m saying that emotion trumps reason under certain contexts. So under conditions of threat where fear is prevalent, fear will almost always trump reason. But, at the end of the day, without reason, we end up afraid of our own shadows, imprisoned by our own fear, locked inside our castle walls and unable to live.”
• [47:13] “The violence, the potential is always there when people lose faith in the political process to find the common good.”
• [50:06] “Democracy cannot work if its citizens don’t play their part.”
• [56:40] “Just one other notion which I think is key and something to watch for going forward. If the projections of environmental collapse are correct, we’re going to see uneven distribution of the effect. We’re going to see some areas that are hit harder than others. So the key thing to watch for will be whether those areas are considered zones of sacrifice, much as New Orleans was during the flood. And one of the key indicators of that is whether the elites dominating the political processes in question start to blame the victims and use that as a reason for not acting, and for writing off the areas. Now we’ve already seen that happen to some extent in Puerto Rico with the U.S. president. It’s an indication of the level of corruption and the level of elite indifference to the problem, which should worry us. Now as this starts to happen, as the environment starts to bite back, we need to watch very carefully how our own political processes react. What happens in this next year’s fire season? How do we control it, how do we respond to it, how do we deal with the inevitable climate refugees that we’re going to have? This is going to be one of the key areas that I really think we need to pay attention to. […] For me, the buzzword that I’d be looking at is ‘the zone of sacrifice.’ If we sacrifice each other, sacrifice bits of our land, we’re on the wrong road. It’s a test of cohesion and social and political solidarity.”

The post Episode 22: Dr. Philip Lancaster – Philosopher Soldier appeared first on On Conflict.

The post Episode 21: Michelle LeBaron Riffcast appeared first on On Conflict.

• Why she believes that artists will be the ones to save the world
• How conflict lives in the body
• Increasing our proprioception (our awareness of our bodies in space)
• How to calm the constant commentary that goes on in all of our heads
• The need for more dialogue and engagement around deep worldview differences with creativity
• “Aestheticizing negotiation” through the four philosophical elements
• The symbolic domain

More about Our Guest

Michelle LeBaron is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary scholar on conflict transformation, arts, and resilience. She directed the UBC Program on Dispute Resolution from 2003-2012, and as an Associate Professor at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution and the Women’s Studies program at George Mason University from 1993-2003, she did seminal work on intercultural conflict engagement. This work built on community-based research she conducted as director of the Multiculturalism and Dispute Resolution Project at the University of Victoria in the early 1990s. Michelle was called to the Bar of British Columbia in 1982 and practised for ten years. She gives keynotes and consultations around the world on intercultural conflict resolution, the role of arts in fostering resilient leadership, and creative ways of engaging religious and political conflicts.

GUEST Resources

• Academic website
• Books:
  • Her newest book – AVAILABLE FOR FREE! – is Changing Our Worlds: Art as Transformative Practice → “This book is published by Sun MeDIA in Stellenbosch, South Africa. We felt it important to publish it in the global south as a way of decentering the tendency for scholarly publications to come from the global north. The book can be downloaded for free from one of two platforms, and the steps to the App required for free download are attached here.”
  • The Choreography of Resolution: Conflict, Movement and Neuroscience
• A copy of her chapter The Alchemy of Change: Cultural Fluency in Conflict Resolution from the Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice, 3rd Ed. (2014), Peter Coleman, Morton Deutsch and Eric Marcus, eds.
• Copies of her two co-authored contributions to the Negotiator’s Desk Reference (2017, Honeyman and Schneider, eds.):
  • Aesthetics in Negotiation: Part One—Four Elements , and
  • Aesthetics in Negotiation: Part Two—The Uses of Alchemy Aesthetics in Negotiation: Part Two—The Uses of Alchemy

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST

• Margie Gillis
• Carlo Aldrovandi
• Dancing at the Crossroads (a radio broadcast about it)
• Jean Houston and Margaret Mead
• Rena Sharon
• Kim Berman
• Picasso quote: “We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.”
• Herb Kelman
• Jim Lowery
• Nadja Alexander
• Freedom Writers (movie)
• Follow your bliss – Joseph Cambell
• Mary Clark
• Ian Goldin
• David, by Michelangelo
• Robert Fritz’ The Path of Least Resistance
• Quote by Albie Sachs about how art and human rights overlap and reinforce each other
• Dan Bruiger’s The Found and the Made (book)
• Quote by Seamus Heaney: “So hope for a great sea-change / On the far side of revenge. / Believe that further shore / Is reachable from here. / Believe in miracle / And cures and healing wells.
• Burning Man

Quotes From The Episode

• [2:26] “I’ve read quite a number of things where conflict engagers are saying, ‘Oh gosh, we can’t touch that, it’s too complicated, it’s too charged, it’s too difficult, it’s too complex, it’s too political,’ and in fact, the vast majority of people in the world profess a religious faith, so I think it’s really important for those of us in the field, whatever our own convictions might be, to think about how we engage people from a variety of different worldviews and cosmologies, even those vastly different from our own.”
• [3:23] “I and others, as you know, are very suspicious about the concept of neutrality, and I think that the idea that we’re a secular field is actually quite repressive to those people who may not see themselves as having a secular worldview, so I think that calls our neutrality into question in a different way.”
• [5:02] “In fact, we in our world have created such a mess that we need really concerted efforts of people from many different standpoints and many different places to try to address the many issues that surround us, whether they’re political or about climate change, and so forth. And I became convinced that if anyone could save us, it would be the artists.”
• [5:52] “I think the central challenge for us as conflict engagers is that we’re way too much in our heads, and we need to get into our bodies and we need to help parties get into their bodies, and of course artists know how to do that.”
• [6:30] “When worldviews or religious differences are part of a conflict, it turns out we don’t have very good tools to actually acknowledge and work with those very different worldviews, which cannot be negotiated. You can’t imagine that you can negotiate away some aspect of someone’s deep conviction about their relation with the divine.”
• [7:25] “We have a lot of conflicts which are intractable, which are quite chronic, if you will, if we look internationally, but not only. If we look here in Canada or here in British Columbia, we see a lot of intractability in relation to conflicts between Indigenous people and others in Canada, and we seem to move at snails’ paces – I wouldn’t say glacial paces, because glacial changes quite rapidly these days, and we’re not even doing that! We’re moving in a very slow and often regressive way to address issues, for example between Indigenous and other people in Canada, and part of it, I’m quite convinced, has to do with a lack of really acknowledging, understanding, and then acting from an awareness of deep cosmological and worldview differences.”
• [10:25] Julia asks Michelle to elaborate on how Michelle sees differences between ‘bridging’ and ‘engagement.’
• [11:26] Gord asks Michelle to elaborate on what happens to the head after we get out of our head. In her response, Michelle laughs and says “I wasn’t suggesting that we should chop ours off, but rather that I think the conflict field has been far too cognitively centred,” and “If we actually are whole bodies and our entire self is our resource, then how can we engage our whole selves?” Michelle then speaks about what she’s read about intuition and how people describe it in a physical way, yet we’re often not training ourselves and each other to attune to our bodies. Later, Michelle discusses proprioception – the awareness of our bodies in space
• [13:26] “Conflict lives in the body. I find it very curious sometimes working with people who work in our field who are actually unaware of how much conflict, or how much very latent emotion, they carry, whether in relation to their own unresolved issues or in relation to things they’re picking up from the parties and not setting down.”
• [15:05] “If you’re triggered by something, and that means your emotions suddenly get activated, the way to diffuse triggering is through the body. It isn’t by thinking, ‘Oh gosh, I don’t need to be worried about this.’ That actually doesn’t shift it. We need to use breathing, we need to use body-centred awareness approaches whether mindfulness or other things to actually bring ourselves back from a kind of neural hijacking, if you will. […] It also can really help calm, when we can move out of that constant commentary that goes on in all of our heads.”
• [17:00] Julia asks Michelle to elaborate on what she meant about creativity when she talked about the need for more dialogue and engagement around deep worldview differences with creativity.
• [19:10] Michelle talks about the complexity of communication among chamber musicians in the moment and compares it to conflict. She says, “That’s been very inspiring to me, because it has led me to wonder, “What is it that’s going on in a conflict engagement process that is outside the verbal?” Julia shares how meaningful music is to her and shares that she took up the bass. Julia points out, “It’s the perfect instrument for conflict engagement because rhythm and bass and heartbeat are so central.”
• [21:35] Michelle discusses a colleague of hers in South Africa, Kim Berman, who is a professor of visual art at the University of Johannesburg. “Kim is anything but a conflict engagement specialist, and yet she knows more about how to address conflict because of her aesthetic education than many others know.” Michelle then shares a story from 2005 about Kim addressing conflict around HIV/AIDS in South Africa, when South Africans were dying at a rate of about 900 a day from HIV/AIDS.
• [25:07] Gord brings up a quote by Picasso that Michelle included in one of her writings and asks her to elaborate on what that quotes means to her. (The quote is “We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.”)
• [28:17] Julia asks Michelle to elaborate on how Michelle suggests we can, starting tomorrow, deepen our creativity and learn from artists. In her response, Michelle says, “I think, yes, we befriend artists, but we also befriend the artist in ourselves. We also say, ‘When have I had moments when I’ve felt very creative, and how can I bring that into my leadership? How can I bring that into my management of other people? How can I bring that awareness of the importance of that quickening that creativity brings into whatever context I’m working in?’”
• [32:09] Gord asks Michelle to tell the story about a three-day conflict engagement workshop in Dublin with Israeli and Palestinian diplomats. Michelle shares how this conference – which was “the worst thing you’ve ever been at” – went from a very diplomatic and surface-y stalemate to authentic, nuanced interactions and meaningful conversations between participants thanks to a spontaneous bus trip to Belfast on the third day. Michelle says this experience helped them learn “to simply focus not just on doing and on problem-solving, but on being, and that when you’re able to do that, then something new can finally arise.”
• [35:43] Gord asks Michelle to elaborate on the phrase “aestheticizing negotiation” through the four elements (earth, water, air, fire). Julia expands on the use of aesthetics to stimulate dialogue and mentions the thought of a weaving of the aesthetic into whatever we do. Michelle responds by saying “I think both of you know, and certainly I would know, that if I want to address an issue with some people, perhaps at my workplace, then what’s really important is being in a beautiful room.”
• [43:39] “The most powerful motivator I have found over the last several years of wanting to integrate more and more of the aesthetic and ideas about the four elements into my work with groups and communities – the most powerful motivator I have found is neuroscience, because in fact, people trust science, and now we know, from neuroscientists, that in fact, these activities, for example, engaging in some sort of physical activity with each other before sitting down and talking, whether it’s simply going for a walk or something more programmed, more patterned – that actually changes the state that we’re in when we sit down and talk about whatever our issue is. And so that, for me, has been the thing that has worked with groups of people in suits who otherwise come into the room with lots and lots of apprehension, making lots and lots of jokes about whether they need to bring their tutus with them, wondering at the terrible prospect that they might be asked to remove their shoes in order to engage in movement with each other. […] The ‘B’ word – body – had not been part of their education or experience for a long time. I found that through framing what we were doing in terms of what neuroscientists have learned and have shared with the world about why engaging our whole selves is important and how engaging our whole selves can be important, that created more permission.”
• [46:32] In response to the hosts’ question of what conflict looks like in a peaceful world:
  • “Conflict in a peaceful world is present because there’s always difference and difference is essential, and so it’s present, omnipresent even, and engaged in respectful and constructive and open ways.”
  • “I believe we have all the wisdom we need in the world to be able to have that peaceful society where conflict is amongst us and yet we manage it. I think we have what we need and we don’t always implement it, partly because our political systems are exploited by people who actually want to escalate conflict.”
  • Gord points out the similarity of her answer to our other guests’ responses, highlighting the universality of conflict being an unavoidable part of society.
• [48:23] Gord ponders existentially with Michelle about what she’s wrote about origin stories, change, and conflict. All three of them discuss how conflict is seen by some as an immense danger and scary thing, and by others as an immense opportunity and positive experience. Michelle says, “I’ve learned, sometimes through hard experiences, pretending it’s not there doesn’t work. And therefore, we have to find some way to engage. Indirect, as it may be, because I’ve also learned through hard experience that simply naming things and imagining that we, where we is, can have a direct exchange about the issues, isn’t often how things are addressed. Isn’t often how problems are solved.” Gord shares a story he heard from a Maori man who spoke of how in his culture, they dealt with conflict by sitting in a circle and talk about anything but the conflict, and then they would get up and through that changed connection, they would behave differently and conflicts would get worked out in that manner.
• [53:58] “I think that what we need to be able to do when addressing conflict is not focus so much on the material, on whatever issues we identify, or even on the relationship. We have this tendency to say ‘Let’s work on our relationship,’ which is also very earnest and a bit harsh, and instead we need to drop to what I talk about as the symbolic domain, where in fact, we’re engaged in rituals, we’re sharing experiences, we’re basking in something aesthetic. And that changes everything.”
• [54:45] Julia brings up high-and low-context cultures and asks Michelle if there’s more of a tendency to be indirect and aesthetic in a collectivist culture, or if the aesthetic is missing from both orientations of cultures. Michelle clarifies and says that the aesthetic is often more involved in everyday life in traditional cultures.
• [57:28] Julia asks what listeners can start doing tomorrow, and Michelle says “As soon as you have on your map of what’s important the aesthetic, then you notice it more. […] Then you think about, ‘Maybe we won’t have styrofoam cups. Maybe I will bring my teacups from home. And then you think about, ‘Well let’s not just take a break in this windowless room, let’s go for a walk.’ And then you think about, ‘Oh wow, I’ve talked with people in this organization who are all very upset with each other, and yet they aren’t comfortable telling each other about that. How can I help them create an experience where the skeleton of those interactions becomes more clear, becomes more obvious.’” Michelle also shared a story about a workplace conflict, and how once the group was asked to work silently and was given various physical objects to communicate with, they were able to communicate and connect with each other on levels they hadn’t been able to with words
• [1:01:52] Michelle talks about Ian Goldin’s book in which he compares our current times to the Renaissance. He said that in the Renaissance, “all sorts of pieces got thrown up in the air and certain things changed. Paradigms changed. Ways of looking at who we are as humans changed. And he gives the example of Michelangelo’s David. […] That David marked a complete departure from other depictions of David and Goliath before, because that David is focused and poised for action with uncertain results, and previous depictions of David had been triumphant and victorious. And so the Renaissance, Goldin says, was a time when people realized, ‘Oh wow. Life is more uncertain than we thought. There’s more complexity than we knew. And the results of any action I might engage in are uncertain.’ And he says that we moved then from a triumphant gaze to one which is more human-centred and nuanced. And if this time, as Goldin says, is like the Renaissance, again when many things are being thrown up in the air and the things we thought were givens are not necessarily givens, then we have the question, ‘How do we navigate through this time of complexity and mystery?’ Because there’s much we don’t know. I think our best answer to that comes from the arts.”

The post Episode 20: Michelle LeBaron – The Art of Conflict appeared first on On Conflict.

The post Episode 19: Mark Gerzon Riffcast appeared first on On Conflict.

• The role of identity in conflict and the benefits of widening our identities
• A three day conference of “systems therapy” regarding climate change, Al Gore, attack ads, and An Inconvenient Truth
• Facilitating a system to become more aware of itself
• Individual, collective, and intergenerational trauma
• The temperature zones of conflict, and how to warm up or cool down a conflict

More about Our Guest

Mark Gerzon is the President of Mediators Foundation, as well as a leadership coach, mediator, and author. His most recent book is The Reunited States of America: How We Can Bridge the Partisan Divide, and his previous books include Leading Through Conflict and Global Citizens. Mark is best known in the US for his design and facilitation of the Bipartisan Congressional Retreats, and over the years, he’s organized a variety of conferences designed to bring diverse groups together into genuine dialogue. He’s also conducted trainings for a wide variety of organizations including the US Congress and United Nations Development Programme.

GUEST Resources

• Website: Mediators Foundation
• Twitter
• Books:
  • The Reunited States of America: How We Can Bridge The Partisan Divide
  • Leading Through Conflict: How Successful Leaders Transform Differences into Opportunities
  • Global Citizens: How our Vision of the World is Outdated, and What We can do About It

• TEDx talk: Loving Your Country, Loving Yourself
• Essay: Democracy in Danger

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST

• • • Ken Wilber
    • Robert Kegan:
      • Wikipedia
      • Gord’s blog post that mentions Robert
      • Julia’s article that mentions Robert
• An Inconvenient Truth
• Robert Lifton’s book The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation
• Erik Erikson
• Richard McGuigan
• David Schnarch
• Blind men and the elephant metaphor
• Bob Dylan lyric

Quotes From The Episode

• [1:47] Gord asks Mark what he sees as the central challenge currently facing humanity in the area of conflict engagement, and Mark says, “An excellent question, and for me, the word that comes up, if I had to summarize my answer in one word, it would be identity. […] To quote […] Ken Wilber, ‘When you choose the boundaries of your soul, you choose the conflicts of your life.’ […] Identity is both extremely personal and political. […] For me, the way a person enters the civic space, they enter it with their identity. Then we call them a citizen and we call them engaged, but what is their identity? How big is it, how wide is it, how porous is it, how flexible is it? Where are the boundaries of it? Who is the us and them in their identity? And I find that to be the root of conflict all over the world, in every culture that I’ve worked in and every setting that I’ve worked in. That identity is strongly at play.”
• [3:35] Julia asks Mark to elaborate on how identity is the central challenge currently facing humanity, and Mark says, “It’s central to our times because we’re constructed as human beings to grow up in local, small clans and overall, homogeneous settings. Culturally, we were members of tribes, and there was our tribe and there was some other tribe, and there was some ritualized, sometimes conflict sometimes not conflict interactions with the other, but we were basically with our tribe, and that wiring is still in us. And our identity was, ‘I am a member of this tribe or this clan or this group,’ and now suddenly […] we’re in these situation where we’re dealing with multiple tribes everyday […] and every system we’re in, we’re dealing with complexity and diversity. That’s why I think that identity is critical to the conflicts of our time, because in every culture I’ve worked […], can you hold the whole system you’re a part of? Can you identify with the whole system, or are you in a narrow identity left over from this earlier wiring? We’re being challenged to grow and widen our identities at an extraordinary rate of speed. […] We’re being asked to be global citizens when we’re wired like tribal members.”
• [6:36] Gord shares that what Mark said reminded him of a quote by Robert Kegan: “Conflict is a challenge to our pretense of completeness.” Mark comments that he tends to use the word “wholeness,” and says Gord captured it well.
• [7:15] Mark discusses his work with U.S. Congress, including its dysfunction relating to the rigidifying of identity and political parties. He compares this to being asked in college if he wants to be in an interdisciplinary major. Mark says, “We created disciplines, and then we make a big deal out of being interdisciplinary. The idea of being bipartisan, to me, is just being human.”
• [9:41] “When I coach people, I say, ‘I have a right hand and a left hand. You’re listening to me with your right hemisphere and your left hemisphere. We are walking examples of right and left working in harmony to maximize our performance, to maximize our capacity to live full lives. So why would we then suddenly say, ‘Oh I’m on the left.’ ‘I’m on the right.’ It’s all acculturation into an identity.”
• [10:14] “[Identity] creates a potentially useful institution (the United States Congress) and turns it into a dysfunctional, polarized, gridlocked system.”
• [10:23] Julia brings up the topic of structural limitations in politics that a previous guest – Elizabeth May, leader of Canada’s Green Party – discussed, and asks Mark about his thought. Mark agrees and says there are indeed many fundamental structural limitations in political systems all over the world.
• [12:18] Julia asks Mark to speak to his approaches, personally and politically, regarding identity challenges, and Mark says “Personally, what I found most important is that I listen to all the parts of myself, that if I try to repress or suppress a part of myself, it comes up and bites me one way or the other. So in that sense, there’s a whole system inside me of sub-cells, and I want to know all the – you know, little Mark who’s three years old and still hurt, or the seven-year-old who’s wondering if the other boys will play with him, or the fifteen-year-old who wonders if girls will find him attractive. All those parts of me are in me, and so I’ve found it most useful to try to think of, ‘Can I bring my whole self? Can I be in touch with my whole self?’” Mark talks about how the systems approach that goes back to some of his initial training in family therapy still really shapes him.
• [14:48] “I try to bring the whole system together so that we can take our fragmented, or our pretense of completeness that we’ve entered the room with […] and say, ‘How do I become actually not the pretense of completeness, but how do I see the complete picture?’” [15:28] “Bring the whole system into the room, whatever that system is, and create a set of ground rules so that the system has to become aware of itself, and all of the people in the system develop a system awareness that makes them more constructive, creative problem-solvers inside that system. They don’t stop being an environmentalist, they don’t stop being pro-business, they don’t stop being an oil and gas executive, but they start to see, ‘Oh I’m part of a larger system,’ and their system awarenesses strike them.”
• [15:58] Gord acknowledges the sophistication and complexity of the concept of systems becoming more aware of themselves, and Mark says, “To make a group feel like a group, it has to have a boundary.” Mark then goes over examples of past conflicts he’s worked on and how everyone identifies as being between the two extreme poles (e.g., left and right wings) of whatever matter they’re working on. He says “If we can get the poles to feel like they belong in the room, and if we can get the poles to start feeling like, ‘Okay, we’re a part of this group,’ then everything that’s between the poles is also part of the group.’”
• [18:44] Julia refers to a previous response that Mark gave about all the parts of himself, and brings up a talk with Thomas Hubble and Peter Levine that involves impacts individual and collective trauma preventing parts of us from showing up. She asks for his thoughts about working with trauma in these contexts. Mark says, “The most important thing I want to say about this is that trauma is both a personal and collective word, and that’s why I work with the concept of identity, because identity is also personal and collective.” He goes over an example of Jewish trauma, both individually and collectively, and talks about the importance of working with one’s own personal trauma in order to ethically help others deal with collective trauma.
• [23:42] In response to the question of how to motivate people to come to the table, Mark says he needs to think about what motivates him, and that “No matter how conceptual or how big or how political the issue is, even if it’s nuclear war or peace between the United States and Korea, [it’s important to] remember, why are we doing this? Well we’re doing it because it’s not just our job, but it makes our lives better, it makes us feel more meaningful. More meaning, more love, more connection in our lives. I think most people, when they go to a narrow identity, they’re going to a narrow identity because they’re trying to get love and connection and peace and safety and security and all those things, and I’ve got to present them with another alternative […] that will actually give [them] what [they’re] looking for.”
• [26:46] “All of these great teachers [Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King] and change agents have led us on the path of the smaller, narrower, tighter, exclusive identity to a wider, more inclusive, more embracing identity, and that’s the journey of the human heart.”
• [27:00] Gord talks about an author he likes named Robert Lifton, who wrote The Protean Self, and the threat of fragmentation to identity. [27:32] Julia adds that a definition of trauma she heard recently is that “Trauma is the disconnection to relationship – fragmentation, actually.” Mark talks about how Robert Lifton was a mentor of his, and how he (Mark) worked with Erik Erikson at Harvard. Mark says, “What I loved about Erikson’s work was that he didn’t think we were finished at 21 with our identity, and I think that’s the key to, I think Robert Lifton put his finger on it, which is, if we’re going to keep up with change in our lives, we have to change throughout our lives, and that to me is one of the greatest challenges for the conflict resolution field is, whoever we’re working with, can we inspire lifelong change and growth? And that’s key.”
• [31:54] Mark discusses a metaphor he came up with that he’s found extremely helpful to use with a variety of people: “When I’m working with people trying to teach them about conflict, I’ll often say, ‘What did you have for breakfast?’ and they’ll tell me what they had for breakfast, and I’ll say ‘Well the key to that was the temperature, wasn’t it? That if that was too hot, you would have burned your food. And if it wasn’t hot enough, it would have been raw and cold. So those eggs, or whatever it was that you ate, that quiche, there’s a temperature zone that you cook in. And conflict is the same thing. Conflict works well in a temperature zone. There’s certain temperature zones that conflict can cook things, that make life nourishing and make life move forward.”
• [38:46] Julia asks Mark, “What do you see as the deeper purpose of this right-left divide, and why does it seem so intractable, no matter what the societal context?” [40:50] Mark says, “I think we’re born whole. I think we’re born complete. And then as we get acculturated, various experiences – sometimes traumatic, sometimes not traumatic – but various experiences shape us and then we’re very clearly given these choices in adolescence, like in America, often, am I white or black? Well, there’s a lot of people who aren’t white or black, but the country thinks in terms of white or black. Right and left, am I conservative or liberal, am I straight or gay? And all of these categories are narrow identities that we need to grow beyond.” Mark then discusses asking progressives “Why do you think conservatives exist? Would you like them all to disappear off the face of the earth?” To those who say yes, Mark says, “Well that would be really dangerous, because a car needs an accelerator and a brake. Would you buy a car with only an accelerator or only a brake?”
• [47:18] Julia shares a situation with two dear friends of hers who have gone to the other end of the political spectrum from her, and talks about how difficult it is to be empathetic to their views when they don’t reciprocate. Mark brings up a Bob Dylan lyric and says “If there are people who don’t want to hold your perspective in their heart when you’re holding their perspective in your heart, that’s a crisis in a friendship, and you have to ask yourself ‘Why am I continuing […] to be friends if they can’t hold [me] in their heart?’” Mark suggests having a conversation with them about the pain of not being held in their hearts and seeing how they react. Julia points out the courage involved in such a conversation and situation. Mark talks about how he reframes such situations into deep learning experiences for himself.
• [51:41] “I think the most important thing I want to share with your listeners is that if they decide they want to learn more about this field and dive in deeper, it shouldn’t be just to make a better world. It should really be for their own deepest self-interest, that it’s really about, ‘I want to do this to have a better life, the same way I’d go to a yoga class, the same way I’d see a great movie. I’m going to do this because this is on the growth path of my soul, and taking this next step around this, whatever conflict [I’m] engaged in, is going to really deepen and enrich my life. And when I come to the end of my life, I’m going to feel better about my life because I took this step.’ So I really want to underscore this self-interest piece, because for one thing, it will make them a more honest participant in whatever they do in conflict, and secondly, I think it will give them more endurance because if you’re just doing this to make a better world, you’ll wear out in a year or two. But if you’re doing it because it’s your life and your soul, you’ll do it forever.”

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