In this session, I'll be talking about authority, both how we exercise authority, and how we experience it, and how certain institutions are set up to give us certain qualities of authority. Nonviolent communication suggest that we get certain things clear when we're in a position of authority, or when we're dealing with people in positions of authority. Some very important differentiations.
NVC Training Course Session 6 Marshall Rosenberg CNVC org
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- Introduction
- The person behind the title
- Seeing children as human beings
- Losing connection with our humaneness in positions of authority
- Not giving our power away to authorities
- The Importance of Wondering
- Resources
In this session, I'll be talking about authority, both how we exercise authority, and how we experience it, and how certain institutions are set up to give us certain qualities of authority. Nonviolent communication suggest that we get certain things clear when we're in a position of authority, or when we're dealing with people in positions of authority. Some very important differentiations.
One of these is the difference between respect for authority and fear of authority. Getting these mixed up creates a great deal of pain for people as I would use these terms.
When we're in a position of authority, we get respect for our authority.
One, when we know some things, or can do some things, that the people we're working with, or living with, do not have.
Second thing is, people see these things that we know or can do, they see them as valuable. They see how these things will enrich their lives.
And third, they see us as offering these things which we know that are valuable. We offer we don't impose them.
Respect for authority, as I use the term, is manifest when we know things that people don't know, or can do things that they don't know how to do. They see that these things are very valuable and they see that these things are being offered to them and not imposed upon them, then they would have what I call respect for authority.
Fear of authority is quite a different thing that is usually built into the structure of either the family, the school, the business, the government.
This structure gives us the right to impose things on people, that we can reward or punish, to get people to do what we want.
Respect for authority needs to be earned. We need to clearly communicate with people so they can see the value of what we're offering.
Another important difference in authority is to know the difference between obedience and willing cooperation.
Obedience is maintained when people submit, because we have the power to either reward or punish. But willing cooperation only can be received when people feel free from this kind of coercion. And they trust that their needs as human beings are valued. When they feel that then they are open to whatever authority we have that might be valuable.
I was in the airport, once, in Dallas, Texas, waiting for a plane and I saw a woman sitting with her three year old child. He was sitting very quietly right next to her for quite a while. A grandmother aged woman seeing how the child just sat there and Move, said to the mother, I have never seen such a well behaved young man before. He just sits there.
The mother had on her lap, a ping pong paddle and a box of crackers. She said, I've learned that to get children to do what we would like them to do. You have to have a cracker and a smacker.
This mother was very clear, saying that she was using the kind of authority that I would call fear of authority. She was trying to control through rewards and punishment. If that's what we want, when we are in the position of authority, probably the best way we could get training to do that would be to go to a dog obedience school, and see how they train dogs.
Working with human beings, when we're in positions of authority, we want people to do things because they choose to do it, because they see how it will enrich their lives and the lives of others to do it. That requires a radically different exercise of authority than many of us know how to do.
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For example, in the family, people often believe that because they are the parent, that it gives them the right to impose their learning on their children. It's their job to make them behave. They haven't learned the lesson and my children taught me that you can't make anybody do anything. All you can do is make them wish they had. Whenever we do that, they'll make us wish we hadn't made them wish they had.
To use punishment and reward to get people to do things is very costly for the organization and for the relationships of people within the organization.
One of the ways that Nonviolent Communication helps people to exercise the quality of authority that gets people to do things willingly, because they see how it's going to enrich their own life and the lives of others to do it.
One way is not to see people as titles, but to see people for their humaneness, even if they have titles. For example, when I used to teach at a university, I used to find that it was hard to create the quality of connection that I like to have when I'm in a learning or teaching situation. I like to have people connecting with me as a person and sharing with them what's valuable to me. I don't like to be in this position where they see me as this person who's imposing knowledge upon them.
I used to try to figure out what can I do so that the students will see me as a human being offering them something that's valuable to me, that I hope will be valuable to them. How can we create that quality of connection?, even though the institution the university makes it a challenge to do so?
After working on this for a couple of years, trying different things early in the semester to try to figure out what can I do, so that we can get over this culturally learned view of authority, as people who sit in judgment, it makes it hard to see them as real people.
How do I get the students to see my humaneness? I came up with a playful little exercise the very first day that helped a lot.
I would come into the class the first day and say, Hello, my name is Marshall Rosenberg. Before we get started in the course, I'd like to tell you a few things about myself that just might be interesting for you to know. I noticed that as I came in that several of you are sitting with your legs crossed. This is embarrassing for me to say this, but, in my culture, you show respect for authority by sitting with both feet firmly on the ground. I wonder, if knowing that you would be willing to sit with both feet on the ground this semester, and not cross your legs.
The students looked at me a little strangely, they apparently never heard something like this coming from a teacher before. Almost all of them uncross their legs. And then I said, Now quick, before you forget. Please write down, word for word, what you heard me say.
A scary percentage of these students heard nothing but an order or a demand.
They said you said that we had to uncross our legs.
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They could hear nothing but an order they had been in schools, have been in families, or work situations where the authorities made orders.
Other students said No, he didn't make a demand. He said it was wrong to have our legs crossed. It was disrespectful. So others heard criticism or judgments coming from me.
I wasn't surprised because these were graduate students. They had been trained to hear coming from authority, demands and criticisms, and hadn't been educated in a way that would help them see the humaneness of people with these titles.
My favorite student still sat with his legs crossed. I said to him, sir, what did you write down? He said, I just wrote down you are nuts. I knew he and I were gonna get along real well. Because for learning to take place, I believe it takes place through dialogue through sharing, not by imposing by authority. And I think that this is the same in the workplace where effective work is done, not by orders being imposed, but by people who joined together with a common purpose, and who see their needs being met by what is being done.
When they hear, coming from authority, requests, they see how it's in everybody's advantage to do this. When there is this connection, where people connect with each other's humaneness and don't let the titles get in the way, whether it's in a family in a school In a workplace or in a government, I believe the people will relate in a way that is much better for all, and better for the organization.
Now, in that example, I was trying to show how by people labeling me as a professor, how that got in the way of the human connection that I wanted to have for teaching to take place.
There's another label that I think gets in the way of quality of connection in the family. That's when we see people as children, rather than as human beings.
Let me show you what I mean by this. When I work with parents, I have done this exercise I put one half of the parents in one room and the other half in a different room, and within each room, I further break them up into groups of five and get each group a large sheet of paper and ask them to write out a role play between themselves and another person.
In this role play, I tell each group in both rooms, the other person has borrowed something from you. Right what you would say to this person, then write down what you predict they would say back and keep this dialogue going.
So both groups in both areas have the same situation. How do you communicate with somebody who borrows something but doesn't return? The only difference is in one of the groups I tell them that the other person is one of their neighbors. In the other group, I tell them it's one of their children. When the group's finished with this dialogue, they come in and put it up on the wall so that everybody can see what each of the groups in the different rooms did.
I asked the whole group then which group showed the most compassion. Now, they still didn't know they were dealing with a different person, they both thought they had the same situation.
Every time I have done this exercise, everybody agreed that the person who was labeled the neighbor got far more respect in the communication than did the child.
So when we are in this position of authority called parent, if we don't watch out, we allow our cultural training to lead us to treat this person we label as our child in a way that's far less respectful and caring than people we would label as our neighbors.
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So when I work with parents, we work at how to see this person that we might see as our child, but when we're talking with them, we want to be sure that the quality of the connection is the same as one would see in our relationship with an adult, for whom we had great esteem.
Of course, our vocabulary may be different. We may have to use different words with somebody who's three years old, then with 33 years old. But I would hope that we would see the same empathy for this person as we would for an older person. I would hope that we would show the quality of honesty where we revealed our own feelings and needs and request, not criticism and demands. Whether this person is three or 53.
An experience I had with my children that relates to this occurred once when I was doing a mediation between a street gang and the police department. In this conflict, three people had been killed, two gang members and one member of the police department. The members of the police department that I was working with were white and members of the street gang were black.
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It was a very tense encounter. There was great stereotypes in the group that made it hard for them to relate as human beings. Instead of being able to see each other as humans, they saw each other by their labels, gang members or police. It was hard to get them to see each other's humaneness.
I went home from this work, kind of exhausted, and when I got in my back door, my three children were fighting.
I said, hey, I'm really in tense mood right now I really have a need for some relaxation. Could you postpone this war for about another hour?
My oldest son looked at me and said, Do you want to talk about it?
I was very touched by his offering, and what went on in my head is how cute, but I didn't take his offer seriously because I had him labeled as a child, my child.
All of a sudden it dawned on me, I was doing the same thing to him that I saw going on between the police and the street gang. Because of the labels they had of each other. They couldn't see each other's humaneness. And here I am, the same way of thinking.
It's called in the technical language "objectified". Instead of seeing a human being in front of me, I'm seeing a title my child. I was so glad this came to me so quickly because when I said yes, I would like to talk about it, he and my other two children followed me into the living room, and I poured out the pain that I was feeling to see people treating each other this way that they couldn't see each other's humaneness.
I think I talked for 45 minutes and the three children, then aged four, or five and eight, or nine, they all just listened very empathically. After that time, I just felt wonderful. I recall we turned on the stereo and we danced together.
When we are in these positions labeled authority, within families, within schools, within the business place. It's very easy, if we don't watch out, to lose connection with our own humaneness and the humaneness of others, and we see people as titles.
I had a neighbor who was an executive of a brewery, and when I would usually see him, it would be over the backyard fence. I would greet him and say, hi, an he would speak to me, Hey, what's going on, man, something like that. He was usually dressed, in the summer, in a pair of shorts and a T shirt and very easy person to connect with to enjoy.
Over time, we started the talk, and he found out the kind of work that I did. He said, you know, I think our brewery could use this kind of training. How about coming down to my office, and we'll talk further about you doing some training. I went down to his office, it was a large office because he had a high position.
Rather quickly, when I went into his office, it was though he was a different person instead of greeting me and the way he usually did. He was very formal. And I really had trouble believing this was the same person I had known for about a year. He looked different. He talked different, he was a whole different person.
Institutions can have this effect on us if we don't watch out. When we are in these institutions, and we have these titles, if we don't watch out, we give the institution the power to turn us into something other than what we are as a human being, we become the label.
There's research showing the scary consequences that can happen when we give away our power to our titles and our institutions within which we work. Very scary things can happen.
For example, Stanley Milgram did some research. He had people come into this research and they were told that, in this research, they were going to play the role of teachers in the sense that someone in another room that they could see through a one way vision room, they were told is going to be a student learning something. And whenever they give a wrong answer to this, you are to be the teacher, and you will give him a punishment by pushing one of these 10 buttons on the control panel in front of you. Each button will give him a certain degree of electricity, a shock as punishment when he gets the wrong answer.
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You are to push the next button each time he makes a mistake. And that will give him a greater shock each time. We're studying the effects of punishment on learning. So that's why we're asking you to do this.
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What the participants in this research were not told is that the man in the other room wasn't getting any electricity. He was an actor. They were also told he was locked into the chair and couldn't get out. So the person in the other room, in answer to a question, makes a mistake and they push button one.
The person in the other room, the actor jumps and says, Ouch, that hurt. I didn't know this was going to hurt so much. And another question came and then he gave another wrong answer. And then people who are participants in the research pushed the Next button. By the third or fourth button, the man in the other room was crying. Later he was begging please don't push anymore. This hurts so terribly. The last button was underneath a clearly marked possibly lethal. And still more than half of the people in the research pushed this button.
Milgram's research showed that when people are in this role of teacher and they see themselves as told within this institution called a university that this is their job. Push the button. Even though some of the people were crying, they would felt so terrible about what they were doing.
They continue to do it because in this research experiment, they had the labeled teacher and the institution told them to give punishment to people who made mistakes. How scary.
There's other research that shows that college students brought into a situation where they are told they're prison guards and other students are in the role of prisoners, locked in rooms. University students behaved in a quite brutal way toward these other people, when they saw themselves as guards within a prison setting and told they were to keep order.
And that can be scary because very Often the institutions that we might be within might not be set up to maintain the kind of values that we hold within ourselves.
As Walter wink, the Christian theologian says in some of his writings, it's very important to be conscious that institutions have their own spirituality. Tragically, very often the spirituality of the institutions that are guiding us, the corporate institutions, the government institutions, the school institutions, are not institutions having values that I believe we want to support.
It's extremely important that we learn how, even when we are in these contexts, not to give away our power to authority. That no matter how people might make demands of us when they are in positions of authority, we hear it as a request and never as a demand. We don't give our power away to the authority to tell us what we are, we hear their humaneness behind their message.
This can be quite a challenge when they are speaking a language of domination, and when they are in an institution that supports authorities dominating and controlling, rather than relating in an empathic way with the people that are labeled their inferiors.
One of the things that I find very important to prepare our children with is to show them how to maintain their own integrity, their own value system, even if they are going to be in structures that have different values than they have.
I wanted my children to learn this because I realized that when I was a child, I had been educated to believe that teachers know what's right, and so within the school setting, I was giving away power to the authority. That wasn't good for me.
For example, I could give many, but one of the ones that stayed with me over the years, when I was in the third grade, I was taking a music class. The music teacher told me and two other boys in tone of voice that I took as I had a terrible voice, she said, you three can bring comic books, but don't sing.
I gave away my power to this teacher. I read into the tone of her voice and her telling us that we could bring comic books but don't sing that I had a terrible voice and that I shouldn't sing. For over 20 years following that point, I didn't sing. Even when I would be in a group situation where they would be singing together, I would never sing.
I took her message as a judgment that I had a terrible voice, and that I had no right to sing.
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Years later, a woman wrote some songs being stimulated by our workshop and when she played them for me, I saw how much music added to the work. I invited her in to sing the songs and some of my workshops, and it added a lot.
After a while, we were sitting in my office one day and I said to her, you know that music you bring to our workshops periodically really adds a lot. I really miss it when you're not there.
She said, Well, why don't you get a guitar and learn how to sing?
I said, Oh, I can't.
How even though I teach people the danger of this word can't is that it denies choice, I used it.
She looked at me and said, I thought you said the word can't limits us as human beings.
I said, "But I'm not a musician".
She says, Now you're telling me what you think you are. You tell people in your workshops, how dangerous it is to label yourself.
Then I laughed and said, Okay, I see what's going on. I'm still giving away power to that teacher of about 30 years ago. I'm still giving her power to define what I can do.
So that afternoon, I bought a guitar and started to use music in my work. But before I could do so I had to give myself permission to sing.
And so I wrote this song called the crow with a crippled wing:
Though I play guitar Like my fingers were stoned And my voice is miles off key I remind myself Its OK to play whatever song is stirring in me.
Cause I believe everyone has the right to dance and sing even if they move and sound like a crow with a crippled wing.
OK crows: Caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw
Though an ox may not move like Michael Jackson when it starts to do its dance. As far as I'm concerned if an ox wants to boogie I like to see it get a chance
Cause I believe everyone has a right to dance and sing even if they move and sound like a crow with a crippled wing.
OK crows: Caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw
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Having learned that experience of how I had given up my authority to teachers to define what I can do and what I am, I certainly was conscious then, that every chance I got, whenever I was in an institutional structure, I certainly didn't want to give away my power to the authorities.
I wanted to be respectful to what they had to offer. But I wanted to be sure that I never gave up what I can be, or can do, or what I am, to the people in authority diagnosing me.
I wanted to be sure my children learn this to not to give up their power, not to give up who they are no matter what institutions they were in.
This was particularly difficult for me to get across to my daughter because she was very caring toward everybody. And she had this idea that she needed to make everybody happy, and she needed to be a good girl. And I saw this happening, how she was giving up her power in so many situations, and I particularly wanted to work with her on this.
So I started to talk to her when she was about nine years old. I said, I'd really like you to be able to express yourself more than I see you doing. I'd like you to do it at home, I'd like you to do it at school, I'd like you to develop yourself, so you can be free to express your own values, no matter where you are. And I gave her a lot of empathy for how scary this was for her.
I felt real good one day when I got a call from her school administrator. And the school administrator called me on the phone and said, Dr. Rosenberg, would you come in here please? I am afraid we have an unhappy girl here today.
And I thought to myself, Oh my goodness. What could it be that my perfect little girl is in trouble in school. So I went to the school and I'm sitting in the principal's office and the principal was obviously very upset.
She said Marla came to school today dressed in blue jeans. I told her that isn't how a young lady dresses, and she said, Go to hell.
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Well, I felt like celebrating. Marla has graduated from being a perfect little subservient girl, to a real human being. I could see she was going through a middle ground that people often have to go through before they become a human being. They go through rebellion, before getting to fully being free in their own rights to choose for themselves.
It's important that we not be obedient to authority, that we always recognize our choice. It's also important to recognize that rebellion is only halfway to being fully free. If we're rebelling against authority, we're still recognizing its power over us.
When we're really conscious that we are free to choose, at any situation, in any environment.
I keep a picture in my office. It's actually a cartoon that helps me remember, no matter what structure we're within, we're free. It shows two prisoners in a prison cell strapped to the wall. It's obvious they've been in there a long time because they're both very thin. They both have long beards. And one turns to the other and says, Now, here's my plan.
I like that cartoon to remind myself that no matter what structure I'm in, they may control the environment, but they can't control me. I'm free within any structure, to choose what I want to do, and why I want to do it.
I want to be open to what the authorities have to say, but I want to be sure that I never give power to authority To limit my choices.
Now, of course, when we are within those institutions and we exercise our freedom, we need to be aware that especially if it is an institution that uses punishment and rewards, that exercising our autonomy can be scary at times.
I remembered that in an institution that I work that had punishments and rewards called a university.
One day I was in my office, and my superior came to my office and said, Dr. Rosenberg, your grades have not been handed in. This administrator at the university was bringing to my attention that there was a rule that said grades must be given and they were must be given at a certain date and hand it in I hadn't done that. When he said your grades haven't been handed in, I thought I'd bring a little light to it.
I said, You're very perceptive.
He didn't like my sense of humor. And he got even more annoyed. He said, I'm repeating myself, your grades have not been handed in.
I said, I'm choosing not to give grades.
He said, you have to give grades.
I said, I'm choosing not to give grades.
It wasn't easy for him to be conscious that just because there are rules that say you have to do things, he was stuck thinking you have to do it. And I'm trying to tell him that for various reasons, I'm choosing to do something else.
He said, Why aren't you handing in your grades?
I said, I did write the second day of the semester, a letter to the dean, telling the dean why I would choose another form of event valuation, other than grades. In that letter that I sent to him, I told him that I've noticed from past research here at the college that minority students get 80% of failing grades 50% of the population, I would not want to participate in any evaluation system that discriminates on the basis of race, culture, level of income of parents. So that's one of the reasons.
Another reason is I'm aware of research that shows that grades contain almost no reliability about what this person really knows. Two students can get the same grade from two different teachers in the same subject. You don't know that those students have learned the same thing, or can do the same things. And also grades lead students to learn get rewards the reward of grades, I only want my students to do things they see how it's going to enrich their life.
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What I will do is give a very clear statement, measurable statement of what the students can do at the end of this semester that they weren't able to do at the beginning. I put all of that in a letter to the dean and said, I'd be glad to talk about this if he had some concerns, but I haven't heard from him. Does that answer your question, why I'm choosing to do something else other than give grades?
Of course, they could have fired me at that institution, which they did later, but not for that. It was another rule that I didn't follow to their satisfaction and they chose to fire me.
So you do have to be aware, within those institutions, of the consequences of living in harmony with your own values. What I'm saying now I would hope that we help ourselves and others develop is a consciousness, no matter what the structure, that we not give away our values and succumb to what the structure tells us to do. That we have our own spirituality clear enough defined and we know how to manifest, so we can sustain it, regardless of what institution we are working in, or what government is controlling us.
For example, I work with the military in a few countries. Military officers often react rather strongly, when I suggest that people are always free to choose, and that in a position of authority, I would want to respect that right of people to choose.
My experience has been that when they see that I respect their right, they are far more open to whatever I have to say that might be of value, than if I use a language that implies may have no choice but to do what I tell them to do. Very often this is strongly disagreed with. They tell me that these people have no choice, they have to do what I tell them. Yet the same people will also ask me a while later, "what do you do when you tell somebody to do things and they don't do it".
It's time for people in those positions to become conscious that you can't control people you can control the environment, but you cannot control people. When we are in a position of authority, it is not the objective to control people. It is to offer people what we have to offer, from my position of authority, but not to impose it.
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In many of the institutions in which I work, when people do have themselves labeled as boss or as director or manager, they really have an image that such people have to be beyond having any feelings.
They have a real fear in many of the institutions, in which I work, that you can't express feelings.
People don't care for your feelings within these institutions. It's all about profit. They don't care what you feel, it's what you produce. Of course, when people live within those structures, working eight hours a day, that really has an impact. Sadly, when they go home, they often carry that same consciousness from the institution to their home. So they're not able to really share [their emotions], with the people they're the closest.
One corporation in the United States asked me to do a special training, where I would first work with the wives of top executives. Then I would work with the top executives. When I worked with the wives, a constant theme was, how sad they were that they didn't have more emotional contact with their husbands. Their husbands would come home and didn't shift from the energy of the workplace, that said, Who cares what you feel, who cares what's alive in you, it's all about production. They didn't shift from that, to revealing themselves openly and honestly, to maintain a loving intimate connection. They maintain the same level of communication, not able to get in touch with their emotions and share them.
I first worked with the wives and heard their sadness, how hard it was for them to establish emotional connection with people who work in that other environment each day.
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Then I worked with the men. I could see, very quickly, what the women were putting up with. They sat there, and it was very hard to get emotional contact with them.
At one point, I got very emotional thinking of what these wives must go through, to live with people who are in this environment, and I got so emotional that I started to cry.
I couldn't believe that I would cry in front of a group of top executives in a corporation and when I looked up, I was expecting everybody to be contempt. And they were, I saw in everybody's eyes, you know. "What is wrong with this guy?" Especially the boss of the group, he just looked like, you know, how could any man cry in a setting like this?
I was glad that I had my Nonviolent Communication skills because from the look on all of their faces, if I hadn't tried to empathize with what was going on in them, I could have easily taken it that I'm not a real human male, that I'm disgusting.
It wasn't easy, but I got up my courage and I tried to check out what was going on in them.
I said to the boss, you look disgusted. Are you feeling that way? Would you like someone working with your group here today to be better in control of his emotions?
And I was shocked by his response. He said, No, no, I wasn't disgusted. I was just thinking about how my wife wishes I could cry. I'm going through a divorce right now. This is the reason, my wife says that living with me is like living with a rock.
This gave others in the group an opportunity to open up and start to express their pain.
They could sense that their partners wanted more emotional expression, but they could see that being in an environment, all day long, that operated on the idea that profit comes first, profit above all, they could see what price they were paying for it, in their relationships.
People get so caught up in the mechanics of what needs to be done. But they forget about how important it is to maintain human connection while we're providing any kind of service for somebody.
This was brought to my attention very powerfully one evening in Paris, France. One of my colleagues is a physician who was the head of a department there in a hospital. She was attending a workshop with me. And we were going to go from that workshop to a different workshop in another part of town.
She said Marshall on the way to the other workshop, we're going to go by the hospital. Let's stop because I want to talk to a patient that's in one of my programs there.
We stopped at the hospital and I accompany her up to the room. And I stood out in the hall while she went in to talk to this patient who was hooked up to all kinds of machinery and wires because she was having a serious problem that required a lot of medical care.
My colleague sat and held the hand of this patient and talked with her for 20 minutes. Meanwhile, I was getting nervous because we had another workshop to do.
After this time, my colleague came out very annoyed, and she said, you see the women in that room? Did you see all that equipment she was hooked up to? Yes, yes. She said, you know, that woman has been in there for six hours and nobody has talked to her in that time. Can you imagine it? A place that can be so skilled at knowing what equipment is necessary, but they don't know that people need human contact.
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So many institutions that I work in, have a value system that dis-connects people from the humaneness of themselves and of the people with whom they work. They'd get so caught up in productivity, which is important, but they get so caught up in the productivity, that they lose connection with human relationships. Especially when they have titles that imply that they are superior, then especially it's hard for these people to relate in a human way.
That is when authority is exercised in such a way that it destroys the creativity of people. Where the authority is exercised in a way in which it implies that knowledge of how to do things can only come from above, that those below have nothing to offer but to follow what those more superior know is good for them, or for the company, or both.
I learned a lesson about this from the psychologist Carl Rogers. I took a class with him while I was in graduate school, and how he started the class was different than any class I had ever been in. Instead of starting with telling us what we were to do, he introduced himself and said he was glad to be able to be there with us, and to offer him whatever was valuable, and then he stopped talking.
One of my classmates nervously said, well, aren't you going to teach us about the subject matter?
And he said, so you have in mind that I have an idea of what you need to learn about this subject.
He said, Well, yes, of course, you're the teacher.
Then Carl Rogers said, I have the belief that the most important part of learning is to wonder, what's worth learning. If I come in and pretend like I know what you have to learn, I'll have this opportunity to wonder what's worth learning and to decide and to offer it to you. But to me, that would be my doing the most valuable part of learning. I would hope that you would all want to do that, that you would all want to begin by wondering, what's worth learning.
Wow, that lesson really stayed with me really stayed with me. How important it is when I'm in a position of authority to never imply that the people below me haven't got the same opportunity for creativity that I do, because of my title, that I know what should be done and their job is to comply.
When I work with children in school, I like to start with a song. I'll tell you how this song came to be. Whenever I work with children in schools, I like to start by asking them, "I wonder what you wonder about?" And when I ask this to children aged six, in the schools, their creativity is very alive and it's clear they've been doing a lot of wondering. They will tell me what they're wondering about very quickly.
And then, after school, I go over what I did with the students with the teachers. And I begin with the teachers the same way I did with the students. I say, I wonder what you wonder about. But what a different reaction I get from the teachers than from the students, instead of the immediate expression of the creativity that was going on in them, that I got with the students, with the teachers, I get silence.
Then I say I wonder what happens to us between the time when we're six years old, and now. You saw how the students reacted today when I asked them what they wonder about. I wonder what happens to us.
Typically, one of the teachers might say, I was afraid what I was wondering about might sound stupid.
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Another might say I was afraid what I was wondering about was abnormal.
I said, so that's what happens to us. We work and get educated in institutions where our capacity to wonder to be creative is dulled, because the institution is structured in such a way that the authority knows what's right, what we have to do, and our creativity and wondering gets lost.
One day when I asked this of six year olds, I was accompanied by a woman who writes music. She used to love to go with me to schools, when I would ask children this question, what do you wonder about?
She kept a little book, where she wrote it all down because she decided she'd like to write a song about what these children answered when I asked them what do you wonder about?
One day she was with me and I said to the students, I wonder what you wonder about, and it was very clear that one six year old young man had been wondering about something for quite some time, because he immediately said, I wonder why my puppy won't eat green jello with grapefruit? My friend used that as the stimulus for her to write the song she wanted to write, and she went home and she wrote the following song. All of the lines in this song came directly from the children, except for about four lines, which she added for purposes of rhyme.
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I wonder
I wonder why my dog won't eat green jello. I like the wiggly way it melts inside.
I wonder when a turtle pulls its head in Is it so dark it's scared to be inside.
Wonder if a rock likes being hard. Wonder if the sky likes being blue.
I wonder if butterflies like butter. I wonder if you like being you
I wonder why I don't feel myself stretching. People say I'm growing every day.
I Wonder why I always have to listen to more words than I ever get to say.
I Wonder if the grass cries when it's cut. I Wonder if the rain hurts when it falls
I wonder if the earth gets dizzy turning. I Wonder if the little worms feel small.
I Wonder why I see so many people do things they don't really want to do.
I Wonder if the music goes away somewhere After I sing my song to you
I Wonder if it feels sad to be old? I Wonder if the moon likes company.
I wonder why it's fun to view a little scared. I wonder if you wonder like me.
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...and on the basis of this wondering, take actions that free us from authority and institutions that function in ways that are not conducive to our living the lives we choose to live.
I'd like us to wonder whether we have fully developed our ability to stay human, even when we're in the institutions that make it a challenge to stay human.
I'd like us to wonder whether we have learned to express our humanity, even when we are labeled in a way as superior or inferior.
I hope that we are wondering whether we have fully developed our ability to see the humaneness of people in positions of authority, who aren't able to stay connected to their humaneness and who speak a language of domination and who use punitive tactics.
I'd like us to wonder whether we have fully developed our ability to see that person's humaneness, and that we can communicate with them and show them other ways of getting all needs met, beside the ways that we have been trained to use power within domination systems.