The Cycle of Transformation - Spirit
/by Ben Tanzer
What is your Why? Ruminations on Nurturing Spirit and The Cycle of Transformation.
What's important to you and what is your why?
This is what I think about when I think about Spirit.
But first a story.
I was co-presenting a workshop on messaging around child abuse prevention. The energy was good, the flow was good and my co-presenter and I were on. A participant raised her hand. I stopped talking, I asked her what her question was, she responded, I started to respond, she became overwhelmed and I had an AH-hah moment: the participant’s Spirit was not being tended to or nurtured, not on her job, and definitely not by me or my co-presenter.
At the time, I was still new to the work of The Montana Institute. But if I knew more, we might have structured the session with a focus on the cycle of transformation: Spirit First…Then Science…To Lead Action...For Desire Returns.
I would have also known (to quote TMI) that the:
"Four essential stages – Spirit, Science, Action, and Return – make up the transformational process of the Science of the Positive. These stages, when fully engaged, work together to create a synergistic cycle of positive transformation."
But I didn’t yet know much about this.
What I knew, was that there was a better way to message about child abuse prevention, we finally had the data to support that and we had developed a workshop that would highlight the Science behind this new messaging. I also knew that as a field, we could now achieve the Desired Returns we sought, a more engaged public, changes in behavior and policy, innovative programming and greater attention to healthy child development.
The participant's question was focused on Action though.
How should her organization speak about incidents of abuse in the community that had to be addressed publicly? I spoke about crafting press releases and statements, how to frame them, the creation of talking points and the use of social media, and I felt that I was both smart and supportive. I felt like I was nailing it and the participant was taking copious notes, but as she did, she slowly collapsed into her seat and into herself. I asked what she was feeling. She replied that there was no one in her office who was responsible for doing what I was suggesting. She had been sent to our workshop because someone had to learn more about our work and someone had to bring the knowledge home and execute it. That someone would be her and she would be doing so on top of her normal job. She said she was inspired by the workshop, but exhausted by the idea of translating what she was learning for her co-workers and the community stakeholders they worked with.
What's important to you and what is your why?
I'm currently co-crafting a workshop for TMI titled, Crafting Your Transformational Leadership Narrative, and when I asked my co-creator and presenter Stephanie Patton how she thinks about
Spirit when she's talking about it at the community level, she said, I focus on making connections with people and what's important to them.
If I knew more about the cycle of positive transformation when I developed that other workshop all those years ago I would have focused more on modeling the cycle itself when we presented the Science, spoke to the Desired Returns and delved into the action participants might take.
We also could have opened the workshop by asking what's important to you, why are you here and how do you connect with people in your community around this work? Which is to say that from the beginning, we could have integrated Spirit and addressed how we re-ignite hope.
Instead, I had to react to the participant’s questions and duress. I asked her if she had connections in the community, she did, could they work together on the communications that were being discussed so she didn’t have to tackle the work alone, they could, and might doing so enhance her Spirit, it would.
I was able to find my way to addressing Spirit, but I didn’t proactively plan for it, think about it or even start there.
We like to stress that the POSITIVE exists, and it does, but we have to seek it out, nurture it, and embrace the cycle of transformation as a whole:
Spirit First...Then Science...To Lead Action...For Desire Returns.
We also have to do so in order.
Order matters.
For our Crafting Your Transformational Leadership Narrative workshop Stephanie and I open both halves of the agenda with a focus on Spirit and then work our way through the cycle.
We also ask these questions:
What's important to you and what is your why?
And we do so because the positive starts there.
