Grow and lead for all of us

Adult development

Episode 80: White Nationalism And Male Identity with Elizabeth Debold [The Amiel Show]

Episode 80: White Nationalism And Male Identity with Elizabeth Debold [The Amiel Show]

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A year ago Sunday, white nationalists marched on Charlottesville, Virginia carrying torches and chanting “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.” It was not a pretty sight. Most people I know found it abhorrent. The author Ta-Nehisi Coates did, too, but he wasn’t surprised. In an earlier episode Diane Woods explained why.

The media, for the most part, has highlighted the ethnocentric dimensions of this tale: racial grievance, hatred, and the specious theories underlying them.

Yet an important element has remained beneath the surface: gender. White nationalism is also a story of a certain group of men coming to terms with a world they find unfamiliar and threatening, one where women have economic power, men have lost their traditional identities, and the worlds of work, dating, and marriage have turned upside down. Many of us would call these advances of modernity and postmodernity. White nationalists see them as epic disasters.

This week, Elizabeth Debold, a developmental psychologist and gender futurist, explains why.

It’s a story of some human minds growing into greater degrees of complexity and others’ growth halting at age 12. It’s a story of wage labor, two-income households, and the demands of being a “super mom” and, increasingly, a “super dad.” It’s also a story of men confused about what is expected of them and frustrated that society often criticizes them for doing their “jobs” of working long hours and bringing home the bacon.

Debold also reframes the debate about so-called “social justice warriors” on college campuses. Everyone from Fox News to white nationalists to Jordan Peterson cite this group as the epitome of postmodern excess. Debold says: not so fast. The ideas may be postmodern, but the minds unpacking them are operating from a much earlier stage of development.

We live in a complex age, and it takes wisdom and a multi perspectival approach to even begin to understand it. Debold brings both and more.

In some ways, this interview represents a bridge in this podcast. As my interest turns toward global challenges and the health of our politics, Debold helps connect these concerns with my longstanding series on women in leadership, the newly launched series on the American experience of race, and the ever-present influence of constructivist developmental theory.

Highlights

  • 5:00 White nationalists, incels, and the loss of traditional male identity
  • 12:00 Richard Spencer is developmentally a teenager
  • 25:00 The flaw in pluralists’ views of white nationalists
  • 31:30 The wild card: when goodness appears
  • 48:00 The modern convention of dividing work and home life
  • 59:00 Teaching sophisticated postmodern ideas to 19-year-olds with less complex minds
  • 1:10:00 Step on my head, and I’ll step on yours back!

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Episode 79: Integral Mashup On Managing Promises [The Amiel Show]

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Introducing… the first integral mashup on managing promises.

I’ve pulled short audio clips from five past interviews and added my own commentary—all on the topic of how we get things done in life through conversation.

This is my favorite topic in leadership development, particularly when meshed with other valuable frames, like the idea that we are all in over our heads in complexity, so why not grow a little bit?

Joining us on this journey are Bob Dunham, Lisa Marshall, Chris Chittenden, Elizabeth Doty, and Susanne Cook-Greuter.

All together in one place for the first time…sort of!

This episode is an experiment. It was both fun and challenging to unpack different guests’ ideas and then place them in a slightly larger context. This stretched my brain!

I’d love your help. Please shoot me a 1-2 line email and let me know what you think.

  • What worked for you?
  • What was missing?
  • Any topics you suggest for future Integral Mashups? Looking at the podcast archives gives me ideas…

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Episode 78: Rising Path With Ruben Rodriguez [The Amiel Show]

Episode 78: Rising Path With Ruben Rodriguez [The Amiel Show]

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This week’s guest, Ruben Rodriguez, is one of the most brilliant designers of learning experiences for leaders.

He’s also an old friend and trusted colleague.

Ruben is super funny. Yet he claims that I once advised him to tone down his humor.

Ruben is also smart and accomplished. But he’s so humble that I bought a special air pump to inflate his ego.

And although he doesn’t write books, he invents much better book titles than yours truly.

For these reasons and more, I hope you enjoy listening.

Highlights

  • 9:15 From apples to Apple
  • 19:00 I get to the essence of things
  • 35:30 Heart conversation: why are you here?
  • 42:45 Head conversation: what do you really think?
  • 49:00 Body conversation: what will do you and when?
  • 58:45 Growth conversation: what’s your next challenge?

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Episode 77: Presence-Based Leadership With Doug Silsbee, Part 2 [The Amiel Show]

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Doug Silsbee

This is part two of my interview with Doug Silsbee about his important new book: Presence-Based Leadership: Complexity Practices for Clarity, Resilience, and Results That Matter. Part one is here.

In this portion of the interview, Doug walks us through the core of his book: the nine window panes through which you can view leadership. It is a complex model and therefore eminently practical, because it matches the complexity in which we live.

It is also a serious and illuminating synthesis, one that invites all of us into a rich experience of what is right there before us.

Please take your time over the next sixty seconds to start listening—and then share with your peeps.

Highlights

  • 6:30 We are highly trained to look outside us, but not within us
  • 9:00 The meaning and limitation of legacy
  • 14:00 What identity am I unconsciously seeking to perpetuate
  • 20:00 Doug guides you to draw the nine panes (not while driving, of course!)
  • 24:00 A business example that brings it alive
  • 37:00 Regulating your inner state
  • 42:00 Embodying what matters to us

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Episode 76: Presence-Based Leadership With Doug Silsbee, Part 1 [The Amiel Show]

Episode 76: Presence-Based Leadership With Doug Silsbee, Part 1 [The Amiel Show]

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Doug Silsbee

Doug Silsbee joins me this week to discuss his remarkable new book: Presence-Based Leadership: Complexity Practices for Clarity, Resilience, and Results That Matter.

The book, like Doug himself, is a grounding presence, a heart-felt invitation, and a wise synthesis. He meets you where you are—offering practical insights and clever experiments to try—and calls you to sink a bit deeper into the place from which your life-force arises.

I was honored to speak with Doug. Within the first few minutes of the interview, you will learn why.

This is the first of two interviews with Doug. The next will appear a week from today.

Please listen and share widely.

Highlights

  • 9:00 Art is creating what you don’t yet know
  • 21:30 Today’s practicalities and why we are here both matter
  • 29:00 It is audacious to be an offer in the world
  • 31:00 What shapes our identity
  • 36:00 In meetings, everyone lives in their own bell jar
  • 39:00 Three levels of scale: context, identity, and soma
  • 44:00 Three meta-competencies: sensing, being, and acting

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Episode 75: Stomping the Blues, Reimagining American Identity with Greg Thomas [The Amiel Show]

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Fasten your seatbelts. This week, we’re going on a rollicking, rhythmic, high-minded, and heartfelt ride through the core of the American experience.

Greg Thomas, our guide through the True but Partial Challenge on race and, more recently The Jazz Leadership Project with Jewel Kinch-Thomas, joins me again to steer us through this week’s journey.

Or should I say: journeys?

That’s how much territory we cover. Greg even coaxes me to steer out of my “interviewer lane” and riff on my own experience stomping the blues.

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The focus of our conversation is Albert Murray, the great 20th century American writer and close colleague of Ralph Ellison.

Haven’t heard of him? Neither had I until a few months ago.

But since when did lack of fame mean anything about a person’s wisdom?

Like me, you will learn to take Albert Murray seriously. Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison does. She wrote, “Murray’s perceptions are firmly based in the blues idiom, and it is black music no less than literary criticism and historical analysis that gives his work its authenticity, its emotional vigor, and its tenacious hold on the intellect.”

Like me, you will get mesmerized by the ideas in Murray’s first book, The Omni-Americans. Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates wrote in his New Yorker profile of Murray (“The King of Cats”) that the book was “so pissed-off, jaw-jutting, and unapologetic that it demanded to be taken seriously.”

Highlights

  • 6:00 Albert Murray’s influence on American culture and art
  • 13:30 American identity synthesizes multiple roots
  • 20:00 Murray’s devastating critique of “ghettoologists” and “safari technicians”
  • 35:00 Decoding ancient fairy tales and applying them to life today
  • 39:00 The blues idiom as life compass
  • 43:00 The hero’s journey in American cultures, e.g. Harriet Tubman
  • 46:00 Hero’s journey is an alternative orientation from Ta-Nehisi Coates and James Baldwin
  • 55:30 We fear difference and are attracted to it. Can we integrate this into ourselves?
  • 59:00 The Jazz Leadership Project
  • 1:10:00 Apprentice, journeyman, and master

 

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Episode 74: Whites’ Self-Interest In Opposing Racism With Diane Woods [The Amiel Show]

Episode 74: Whites’ Self-Interest In Opposing Racism With Diane Woods [The Amiel Show]

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You support Black Lives Matter and oppose racial discrimination because you want to help black people. If you have light skin, you can’t get much more noble than that, right?

Not quite. According to this week’s guest, leadership coach and retired executive Diane Woods, the idea that white people need to be altruistic toward blacks is itself a racist idea.

Huh?

Yes, you read that correctly.

In fact, as Diane explains, white folks have an intelligent self-interest in opposing racist ideas and embracing all of us as equally capable and worthy human beings.

I’ve known Diane for almost two decades. She hosted a book club I joined. Back then, I saw her as a fountain of wisdom and curiosity, and over time, those qualities have only grown.

Please join me in this second episode in my new series on the American experience with race. If you enjoyed my conversation last week with Greg Thomas—or, heck, even if you haven’t yet—you’ll want to tune into this one.

Please share with friends and colleagues so we can carry Diane’s voice far into the conversation around race and culture.

Highlights

  • 5:00 Why Ta-Nehisi Coates and Diane weren’t surprised by white supremacists marching
  • 9:00 Diane’s spiritual teacher’s blind spot around race
  • 15:00 Evolution of race work over 50 years
  • 20:00 Crafting herself to look good for white corporate America
  • 31:00 Despite injustice, my inner life is mine and I will defend it
  • 35:00 “They just don’t want us here”
  • 41:00 “I may say racist things but I’m pure on the inside”
  • 49:00 Racism is corrosive for white people
  • 1:02:00 Whites freeing themselves from the burden of racism
  • 1:05:00 Countering racism is in whites’ intelligent self-interest

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