BooksChangeCurrent AffairsUncategorizedNovember 23, 20210The Confluence of Passions

I love it when dif­fer­ent parts of my life inter­sect. It’s like a dou­ble help­ing of goodness.

Those of you who have been with me on this jour­ney for awhile know that I am pas­sion­ate about help­ing peo­ple to cre­ate the lives, the teams and the orga­ni­za­tions they want — and to become who they want to become. That’s why I write books, and that’s why I’m build­ing Pro­teus with all my colleagues.

Many of you also know — espe­cial­ly if you read this blog or fol­low my twit­ter feed — that I am pas­sion­ate about help­ing the US have a future where every­one is sup­port­ed to be able to build safe, healthy, pros­per­ous lives for them­selves and their children.

Change in Amer­i­ca — ZevShalev’s Narativ

Recent­ly I had the chance to bring those two pas­sions togeth­er.  My friend Zev Shalev, a huge­ly tal­ent­ed and thought­ful vet­er­an media pro­fes­sion­al, has an online show called Nar­a­tiv. He had read my new book, Change From the Inside Out, and asked if I would be on his show to talk about apply­ing some of the ideas from the book to the top­ic of heal­ing polar­iza­tion in the the US.

We had an amaz­ing con­ver­sa­tion; we talked about let­ting go of our fear and hatred of those with deeply dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives than our own by shift­ing our mind­set to be neu­tral and curi­ous — the best way to approach any change.

Many of Zev’s lis­ten­ers (we were tak­ing com­ments the whole time we talked), agreed and sup­port­ed the idea of more dia­logue across the polit­i­cal spec­trum, with peo­ple on both sides open to hav­ing their minds changed.  Some, iron­i­cal­ly, sim­ply shared their belief that every­one on the oth­er side is evil and stu­pid, and that a dia­logue isn’t possible.

The Bot­tom Line

My point of view: there are evil, stu­pid peo­ple on both sides of every impor­tant polit­i­cal ques­tion. But most peo­ple are well-intend­ed, and think that their approach is best for the coun­try.  And we need to have more open, curi­ous con­ver­sa­tions with peo­ple who see things very dif­fer­ent­ly than we do, or our nation­al sit­u­a­tion will con­tin­ue to deteriorate.

You can watch the show on twit­ter, or at Ama­zon (just scroll down to “Change in America”).