Long ago, I participated in and later staffed a series of workshops that profoundly affected my life. They led me to create a contract with myself that is still important to me.
Creating a contract with oneself is a common way to motivate yourself toward achieving desired goals. There are plenty of resources available for writing such contracts. (Here’s one that’s slanted toward event professionals.)
Toward the end of one of these guided visualizations, the workshop leader invited us to meet our magical child. I “saw” a large glowing black rock floating in space, sparkling with veins of fire. The rock embodied power, my power.
Later in the workshop, this experience helped me develop my contract with myself. In the workshop context, such contracts emphasize fundamental positive aspects of oneself with which we’ve struggled, for a variety of reasons.
Though the workshop process of creating a contract is unique for each person, mine evolved directly from my visualization experience. It seems obvious in retrospect, but it involved some hard work!
“I am a glowing, powerful, and complex man.”
That is the contract I wrote for myself in August 2005. Reminding myself of it helps me to stay in touch with these important aspects of who I am, which I sometimes lose sight of.
My contract with myself remains vibrant and relevant to me to this day.
I have little memory of my earliest formal education though I suspect it has informed my entire life.
My mother decided that I should attend London’s Chelsea Froebel School. For a couple of years, she valiantly brought me to school via two buses and a train, went to work, and then picked me up to return home via the same interminable route.
The school’s philosophy was developed in the early nineteenth century by Friedrich Fröbel, the remarkable German pedagogue who created the concept of kindergarten and espoused the importance of children’s games, singing, dancing, and self-directed play. I remember singing, writing poetry, and spending hours at water and sand play tables.
At the age of seven, my school environment changed drastically. I was lucky enough to win a scholarship to Dulwich College, a British “Public” (in actuality private) all-boys school founded in 1619. I say “lucky” because, as a child of working-class parents who were forced to leave school at thirteen due to the outbreak of the Second World War, my options for educational advancement were severely limited. By a twist of fate, the school had recently implemented what eventually became known as the “Dulwich College Experiment”. Local councils paid the fees for the majority of boys selected to attend.Attending a private independent school with experienced teachers and small class sizes greatly increased my likelihood of access to higher education. On graduation, I won a second scholarship to Oxford University.
Education
I’ll always be grateful for the opportunities Dulwich College gave me. But I had no awareness at the time of the poor learning environment it offered.
I sat at ancient wooden desks, complete with inkwells and carved with the initials of generations of earlier schoolboys. I listened to teachers sharing knowledge that the best minds had taken hundreds or thousands of years to figure out. A condensed précis poured unceasingly into my ears. Somehow, I was expected to absorb, understand, regurgitate, and use this information to do well at frequent tests and nerve-wracking national exams that determined my educational and vocational future.
Apart from the tests, I found this torrent of knowledge exhilarating. Apparently, as judged by tests and exams, I was capable of absorbing it better than the majority of my peers. It was only much later that I realized that for most people, immersion in a high-volume flood of information is a terrible way to learn and provides minimal opportunities to connect with others.
It had a cost for me. The school environment emphasized my intellectual side and provided almost no time for personal or social development. I made no close enduring connections at school, becoming a nerd, and concentrating on my studies. Luckily, I never completely lost touch with the Froebel-nurtured, playful, and curious child buried inside me.
How I got here
After school, I began a thirty-year journey. It wasn’t until my fifties, after careers as a high-energy physics researcher, owner of a solar manufacturing business, college professor teaching computer science, and independent information technology consultant that I reconnected with the six-year-old who loved to sing and dance.
Throughout this period, convening conferences on my current professional interests fascinated me. I organized academic, solar, non-profit, and information technology conferences. In retrospect, it was an advantage to be an amateur. I hated the formal academic conferences I had to attend. So, I tried new approaches.
People started asking for my help with conferences on topics I knew little about. I realized how much I loved to bring people together around common interests and needs. I became fascinated with the remarkable improvements that good processes can have on the individual and collective experience and satisfaction when people meet. Eventually, I decided to make inventing and proselytizing this work my mission.
Today, I’m happy that thousands of people and organizations have realized the value of what I’ve been learning and sharing. Over the last twenty-plus years I’ve worked all over the world, facilitating connection between people face-to-face. The coronavirus pandemic temporarily reduced this work. Yet I feel confident the value of well-designed and facilitated face-to-face meetings has only become more apparent during the period we could hold them.
In 2005, I joined a men’s group. Eight of us get together for two hours every fortnight. One man chooses a topic and leads the meeting. A couple of months ago, Brent offered the following life story exercise via a preparatory email sent in advance.
The life story exercise
Please read this short bit about Nabokov from the New Yorker:
‘Butterflies have extraordinarily short life spans, and Nabokov seems particularly intrigued by this quality of ephemeral metamorphosis. As he considers the frailty of the natural world, Nabokov also delves into the brittle nature of memory—how some paths remain vivid in our minds and others are lost or hidden. Memory, he notes, can be elusive, like the fragile creatures he pursues. Often, the stories we tell ourselves about the past happen to be superficial ones—and there is another central story that lies underneath, waiting to emerge.’
—Vladimir Nabokov’s “Butterflies”, The New Yorker, June 12, 1948
Can you tie together any memories of summer with this idea of Nabokov’s that “the stories we tell ourselves about the past happen to be superficial ones—and there is another central story that lies underneath, waiting to emerge?”
On reading the life story exercise, I immediately thought of my story “It Wasn’t the Lobster“. Though it took place twenty-five years ago, it seemed a perfect fit for Brent’s request. So that’s what I shared at the meeting.
What happened
To my surprise, other members also shared older stories. All the men in our group are over sixty years old, but we heard several childhood stories on a wide variety of topics. The exercise turned out to be unexpectedly and delightfully revealing.
If you meet in some kind of small peer group, try Brent’s exercise. Consider expanding it to any memories or stories of the past rather than a specific time period. Brent won’t mind…
From one perspective: millions. The step you attempted at eleven months but fell and skinned your knee. Your shame on hearing the gasps in class on announcing a sixty percent pop-quiz test score because you were supposed to be smarter than that. The time when you were so nervous at the interview that IBM turned you down for an internship. Girlfriends you fell for who dumped you. The partner who kicked you out of your solar energy business after five years of hard work. The decision to adopt infant twins that led to so much heartache during their adolescence.
From another perspective: none. How else could you find out how to walk without all the attempts and resulting falls? Would you have ever dealt with false shame if you’d never become aware of it? How long would it have taken to discover your dislike for working in large organizations? If your first girlfriend had been the woman who has now been your wife for 48 years, how would that have turned out? What other way could you have learned so much about running a business and managing employees in such a short time? Would you have absorbed so many vital liberating lessons about yourself without the hard truths you were forced to confront during the painful process of being a better parent?
All the learning that grows out of every single mistake.
How many mistakes have you made? Millions or none? It all depends on your perspective.
How I got here?
Attending a private independent school with experienced teachers and small class sizes greatly increased my likelihood of access to higher education. On graduation, I won a second scholarship to Oxford University.
In 2005, I joined a men’s group. Eight of us get together for two hours every fortnight. One man chooses a topic and leads the meeting. A couple of months ago, Brent offered the following life story exercise via a preparatory email sent in advance.
