TYE50 Restoring Sanity with Margaret Wheatley
Meg Wheatley: So our training, I mean, it's continuous. We want to first develop a stable mind and we do that through meditation. There's no other substitute for becoming familiar with how I am, what triggers me, what thoughts grab me, what role do these strong emotions play in me? And there are ways to just learn to watch the mind and not be seduced off into the dramas we create.
My teacher now has characterized us as misery manufacturing machines. We spend all this time just focused on little me without realizing that we have created this personality, this identity. You know, then people say, well, that's just how I am. Well, that's resigning yourself to a fate of what you created. I create the meaning, I create the identity.
So the good news is we can change that.
Liz Wiltzen: INTRO: Hey, hey, hey, so glad you're here. This is Tracking Yes, and you are exactly where you're meant to be. I'm your host, Liz Wiltzen, coach, creator, and round the clock philosopher. And this, my friends, is where the magic happens. Join me and my guests for stories that will inspire you to dial up your curiosity, fine tune your courage and wisdom, and create an empowered relationship with whatever's happening now.
If you're curious about coaching or have been thinking that you might want to work with me, now's a really great time. You can find out more at my website, https://www.lizwiltzen.com/.
Margaret Wheatley is the author of 12 books, a social activist, a global leadership and organizational consultant, a Buddhist practitioner and a guide and trainer for warriors of the human spirit. After a lifetime of activism and a deep understanding of how living systems work, she's come to realize that life is no longer subject to the kind of interventions that used to be effective.
In today's conversation, we explore her newest book, “Restoring Sanity: Practices to Awaken Generosity, Creativity and Kindness in Ourselves and Our Organizations”. We also talk about what's possible when we follow the threads of curiosity and the mystical in our relationships and work. END INTRO
Thank you, Margaret Wheatley, so much for coming on the podcast today.
Meg Wheatley: I'm grateful we have time together.
Liz Wiltzen: I first discovered your work in a 10 month long leadership program that I was taking about 13 years ago. And one of the recommended readings was your book, “Leadership and the New Science”, which you wrote, I think over 30 years ago, 1992.
[00:03:07] Liz Wiltzen: I've heard you say that your thinking has changed considerably since the time of writing that book. So of course, that's what we're going to launch into. And and on that note, in 2023, you released a second edition of “Who Do We Choose to Be? Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership and Restoring Sanity” and that book you said is 80 percent new material?
[00:03:32] Meg Wheatley: At least, at least. It's really a new book.
[00:03:35] Liz Wiltzen: Okay. And I've spent the last month with that book, really diving into it. I want to say what you, what you hold to be your motivation for that book.
You say, “My intention, my goal is to bring current reality into sharp focus so that we may find our path of contribution for this time. My aspiration is for you to see clearly so that you may act wisely. Because if we don't know where we are, if we don't know what to prepare for, we stay lost, wandering in the frightening wilderness. Only when we know where we are can we choose a meaningful path forward.”
And the book itself is such a fascinating read because it's comprehensive in gathering together science and ancient wisdom and a sober look at current reality.
And you really are laying out exactly where it is you see us to be and what you propose as the way to respond and to move in this time. And I also want to say it was so challenging to prepare for this…
[00:04:43] Meg Wheatley: It is very challenging. It's a challenging book to write.
Liz Wiltzen: How come it was challenging?
[00:04:49] Meg Wheatley: You know because the message is so clear. But it's so important.
And we are also going to talk about this book, right?
[00:04:56] Liz Wiltzen: Yes. “Restoring Sanity”. We absolutely are. Yes, we are. But, but you hold that, that “Who Do We Choose to Be” is the parent book.
[00:05:06] Meg Wheatley: It's the reason I wrote a practice manual. Yes.
[00:05:09] Liz Wiltzen: Yes. And so I want to get a little of the foundation and then definitely talk about your new book, which I just finished.
It's also fabulous because it is a practice manual and because it lays out such a variety of practices for how do we be together in sane ways and, and manage our own egos and our own agendas and, and resolve those so that they're not contaminating the space is kind of how I hold it. And you give…
[00:05:40] Meg Wheatley: No, that's a great description.Thank you.
[00:05:42] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. And you give many, many practical practices that support that end in the new book, “Restoring Sanity”. What's the tagline of it?
[00:05:53] Meg Wheatley: Practices to Awaken Generosity, Creativity, and Kindness. in Ourselves and Our Organizations.
[00:06:02] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So…
[00:06:06] Meg Wheatley: we have a lot to talk about.
[00:06:08] Liz Wiltzen: Yes, because what I was going to say is it was really challenging to prepare for this interview because the more that I explored your body of work, the more there was, like it just kept blossoming and blossoming and it's like “I need like a half a day to interview Meg Wheatley, not an hour”.
[00:06:28] Meg Wheatley: Well, fortunately, I can make sense of it rather easily now, so.
[00:06:31] Liz Wiltzen: Okay, good, good, good, good. So, so I kind of pulled on some different threads and I went in other places too, like I love your book, How Does Raven Know? I want to touch on that, and the Warrior Song Line, like there are different things. So I've, I guess what I have now is my wish list and we'll go where we go and we'll hit what we hit.
And I trust that you're going to take us in the place that you feel like here is what I most want people to hear and know right now. Yeah. Okay. So can we just start with, can you share a bit of the arc of your journey from way back when you wrote Leadership in the New Science to now?
[00:07:10] Meg Wheatley: Yes, and I know you focus your audience on curiosity.
Liz Wiltzen: Yes.
Meg Wheatley: And that has been the hallmark of, of my life, that I've always stayed curious and open. And I've had, you know, great support along the way from my spiritual teachers, my family, and just my general personality. Um, And I, so I get a lot of appreciation when I'm curious, and I just want to underline that because I started out.
Now it's very trendy to talk about wonder and awe. I love that. It always happens at the last stages of collapse, though it's it's further negative evidence. It's necessary to approach the world with a sense of wonder and awe. I first encountered that as a leadership person, as a consultant to leaders and organizations in the 80s and 90s.
And then I was turned on to chaos theory and quantum theory. And I still remember the moment, it was a true aha moment, in writing Leadership and the New Science, when I discovered in writing the science piece, that you can get order for free. Order and control are almost opposites at this point. But in that moment, it was such a gift.
Oh, we don't need to control life. We need to participate with life. And life has all these simple, natural processes for creating order, for creating healthy community, for growing systems. That was such a gift to see that and to express it. Now, what I learned from Leadership in the New Science is that good evidence and actual case studies and data on efficiency, well, happy employees, all of that evidence, which was so obvious looking through the lens of new science and the lens, especially of self organization where you don't need control.
I thought that would be a simple cell. And in fact, what I learned from years of working with the new sciences from a very scientific basis is that good ideas and evidence are not what change minds. The greater dynamics are power and in this culture domination, patriarchy, power over and getting what I want.
So gradually my books turn away from what leaders do to what people do. So when I wrote Turning to One Another, this was a book about conversations that had the capacity to bring people together in deeply meaningful ways so that we could be the agents of change in the world. I was very hopeful then.
That book came out right after 9-11. My books have a way of being very prescient in that I write them before the world events that require them and it's always been. So I had already had the book done and 9-11 happened and we really needed to come together in good conversations, respectful conversations to explore what's going on in this world.
Well, that book still has a lot of power. for people who want to be in conversations. But the other part of my awareness always is to see how the world is changing. What does it need from us now? Which is why I'm up to restoring sanity as a title and a practice now. But conversation still is the most powerful mode for bringing us together to do good work and to understand who we each are.
The great dilemma we're facing now is we live in a time of such fear and fracturing that people don't want to be together with people who disagree with them. I'm putting myself right there.
I just walk away from these moments when I realize I'm in the presence of a conspiracy theorist.I'm sorry, I'm not going to go, or a climate denier. I'm not going to spend any time trying to convince you because we're past that.
Where we are now, which I will speak about in a minute, I have a few other books to cover, but after Turning to One Another, I really started to look around and see one… of my favorite books is co-written with Debra Fries, Walk Out, Walk On, where we were looking at communities that were daring to live the future now who knew that no one was coming to help.
And that's when I really started to go more deeply into the power of community and that humans can get through anything as long as we're together. And then as the world kept getting more brutal and more destructive, I turned to other means of introducing us to this beautiful world, this world where relationships are all there is, things I had expressed through science.
I mean, I really got called to task and labeled as just a woman in Leadership and the New Science because it had everything to say that relationships are all there is. That's the science. This is a universe where nothing is visible until it's in relationship with another packet of energy. If you're a subatomic particle, or if you're a human being, you know, who brings out what in us?
So it didn't work to explain it scientifically. And I still rely on this science for me as bedrock, but gradually my work is: how do we strengthen community? How do we build community? Because I was working in South Africa, I was working in Zimbabwe, I was working in with Aboriginal communities in Australia, and I saw firsthand that people get through anything as long as we're together.
And our great curse in this Western culture is to say, we make it on our own. And if you fail, it's your fault. A lot of us still have that programming, by the way, I'm seeing it over and over as we face these unsolvable problems and continuing escalating catastrophes, too many of us still blame ourselves.And of course, our bosses or our partners or the opposition is quite happy to put all the blame on us.
But where we are now, I started seeing where we are now with my 2012 book, So Far From Home, Lost and Found in Our Brave New World. And that was was the hardest book to write because what was becoming so clear was that we couldn't change these large systems.
We weren't going to save the world. I wasn't going to save the world. None of us were going to save the world. We're in these systems that have their own dynamics, their own power, and they actually control behavior. You know, how many of us want to be these as consumer oriented or using shopping as an escape when we're really upset?
That's the culture we're in. Even if you didn't start out that way, it's almost impossible not to participate in that way. And that's true of the rise of hate, the rise of slander, the rise of blaming one another. These are all dynamics that are out there. And it takes awareness, consciousness, and a commitment to not be part of it, to not allow these very negative life destroying dynamics to, to be how we are with people.
So I then went into Warrior Training. Training Warriors for the Human Spirit. Spiritual warriors, warriors of peace, non violent warriors. I have to put all those adjectives in, because still too many people get upset that the word warrior, of course, it has such strong connotations for violent behavior, but warriors are a particular small group, always a fraction of the population who realize that it's only through their own dedication and their own training so they have a stable mind, so they don't get so triggered so easily, so they want to be a place of compassion and insight. This takes training, and it takes community support, and it also, um, is only, I want to say only always, because I think that's kind of an interesting word, juxtaposition, only always, are there a few people who understand, and here I can quote from the historian who so informed me about the cycles of collapse of civilizations, Sir John Glubb said, “There are always, predictably, but only a small group of people who understand that it is through their self sacrifice”, that's a word nobody liked hearing until recently, “through their self sacrifice can community be preserved. And these folks, these warriors, raise the banner of duty and service. against the depravity and despair of their time."
So I started training Warriors for the Human Spirit in 2015 and continue to this day. We've done it in many different forms right now we have a self paced forum with monthly meetings with me.
You can find out all about this on my website, but that is using what you mentioned, the Warrior Song Line, which is using music and artistry and a very different form of narrative for me plus the music of my dear colleague, Jerry Granelli, who died almost three years ago now, but he was a fabulous and famous jazz musician.
We took his music and my narrative and created what is truly the most impactful experience of anything I've written. It just takes you into a very deep place.
[00:19:04] Liz Wiltzen: I want to say something that you said about the Warrior Songline, that it is the recognition that memories and history and information that we need are in the land. So you're drawing on the land.
[00:19:17] Meg Wheatley: Yes, that's the Australian Aboriginal sense of a song line. And I played with the form, but for us, these things that are evoked by the land, Western mind here, the landscape that I used was my own landscape living in beautiful Utah. The memories, the experiences are in us and in certain landscapes here.
I'm not using it literally the way Australian Aboriginals do, and I've walked song line with them for a 10 day period, but there are place-based memories and there are memories in us that need to be evoked so we understand. But mainly, you also speak about magic, that, I believe, is a magical piece.
I think it's so evocative. I can't listen to it for too long. I get overwhelmed by it.
[00:20:14] Liz Wiltzen: Overwhelmed in what way?
[00:20:17] Meg Wheatley: It's just the messages come through at a gut level, at a spiritual level, with the music. And the pacing of it, it just enters into my very being. And I know it does that now for other people as well, but the, you know, the first messages are quite harsh.
And this is actually now everything I do. We have to face reality as you read my piece on that. We have to face reality, not because we have to face reality, but because we still want to contribute. And that's an essential part here.
Lots of people are being taught how to face reality, how to deal with grief and loss, overwhelming sadness and anger, rage and powerlessness. These are the emotions of our time, if we are people who have already cared for others and wanted our work to be meaningful to others, not just to ourselves. And now what I offer is yes, we have these strong emotions and we can work beyond them to identify, “What is my meaningful contribution?”
But the first gate is, do I want to stay? Do I want to wake up to this world? And if I can't pass that gate, then I'll become like the majority of people on the planet. I'll just withdraw. Or the majority of people in developed countries. Others have no choice to withdraw. But we have the choice and a lot of us are just cocooning, withdrawing into fear and self protection.
That's not human beingness, that's human animalness, that's just fight, flight, freeze. So starting with Leadership and the New Science, I've always wanted to connect people to other ways of seeing so they could act differently in ways that were more productive, more joyful, more healthy, and created better relationships.
And now I'm down to: what is the level of community that is still possible in this very fracturing world? And I've called those islands of sanity. We need to not only understand the level of commitment that's needed from us, but also that we are participating with life, not just with people, but with life.
And so you referred to, How Does Raven Know?, which was the book I wrote in celebration of my 70th birthday. And it's all about my mystic self, and what support, comfort, and Everything I find with other beings and with the living world, which has now become almost a prescription for people.
Not my prescription, but you need to get outside folks.You need to be in nature. You need to just find a place where you can feel held by life, held by all these partners. It's a very indigenous perspective, but I've recently learned, it’s also the goddess perspective of 35, 000 years of the divine feminine at work, which was completely about relationships, not hierarchy, but relationships with everything. Rocks, water, fire, all the elements and living with everything, not as separate selves.
[00:24:27] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, I, I want to bring in right there because I watched your video with the Slovenian violinist.
[00:24:37] Meg Wheatley: Miha Pogacnik.
[00:24:38] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. And you two were talking about polyphony, the quality of things coming together where the unique individual contributions are—they don't disappear into the whole, they're distinct and clear. But as the voices are coming together, there is an inner space of transformation that's created.
And you said to him, which I love so much, because you were talking about, to you, these are moments of communion and we feel them when we're children in nature we feel them, but even now if you go walk in nature or you're listening to music or touched by a piece of art and you had heard the term from somebody, I don't know who, that this is an experience beyond the self that's called original participation, where you are engaged with what was always there.
[00:25:38] Meg Wheatley: I love what you're picking up to quote back to me because I don't actually remember that phrase original participation, but that is what it is. And I just want to emphasize, I think I learned from Richard Rohr that these moments of communion are joyful and joy is a consequence, in my lingo now, of being together in ways where I'm not self protective. I'm not even thinking about myself.
There's a third presence or, and we've all had that experience when we're deeply in love, there’s no sense of self. There's just this third beingness and you can find that in nature. You can find that in love with a human. You can find that with any kind of human or you can find that with your dog or your pets.
These moments when you're just fully present and you don't need anything from the other.
[00:26:46] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. And there's another feeling that—I was deeply in love once—and the feeling was the whole universe exists to bring us together.
Meg Wheatley: Yes.
Liz Wiltzen: Which if you really reverse it, I exist to know the whole universe, right? Feel the wholeness of it.
[00:27:06] Meg Wheatley: But that's an experience, I mean, when you have these experiences of communion or oneness, there isn't a way to describe it, right? And I have had that experience also, a feeling that everything was perfectly organized to bring me together with my partner. And it didn't last, by the way.
[00:27:30] Liz Wiltzen: Mine neither. But in the moment, it's true.
Meg Wheatley: Yes.
Liz Wiltzen: Like it's all, it's actually always true. Right?
Meg Wheatley: Yes.
Liz Wiltzen: It doesn't, it's just, I can sit with a tree and have that feeling. A raven can—I have a deep love affair with ravens as well, so I understand as you do: when a raven is near, something’s happening. Stay present, pay attention.
Meg Wheatley: Yeah. Yes.
Liz Wiltzen: Can I, I want to I did a little mash up. I want to read, you had in your book, How Does Raven Know?
Um, let me just find it here…because I pulled a little piece of prose from that book and from something else I found and I want to read it because I love it so much. So if I have permission to mash up your writing, is that okay?
[00:28:22] Meg Wheatley: Absolutely. I mean, I'm so appreciative, Liz, of how much thoughtfulness and, and study you've put into this. It's very meaningful to me that you've done this. So thank you.
[00:28:33] Liz Wiltzen: You're so welcome. Okay, here we go.
“How do you know to fly so near, arching your back to the wind, just for a moment, so that I learn, strong back, facing gale, gives power to my heart.
Perch where the wind comes at you full force. Let it blow you apart till your feathers fly off and you look like hell. Then abandon yourself. The wind is not your enemy. Nothing in life is."
[00:29:07] Meg Wheatley: Yes. That whole book is one long prose poem with no punctuation. Hopefully you didn't notice that because it worked, you know, in terms of cadence and rhythm, but…
[00:29:25] Liz Wiltzen: It did work, and to bring us back to, I'm going to read one more piece from your chapter on magic in that book, just to get us back into, like, where the hell are we now?
[00:29:37] Meg Wheatley: And I'm going to read you my favorite piece too.
[00:29:39] Liz Wiltzen: Okay, excellent. Okay, so here you go on magic. And I'm loving that you're saying there's no punctuation because it allows me to pull these chunks out and not feel like I didn't start or stop at the right place. Okay.
“Most peoples throughout time have seen beyond the visible world. They, and still we, rely on symbols, objects, rituals to summon forces of protection and plenty, knowing to respect and evoke the unseen world with offerings.
Modern culture is an anomaly to the pattern of human cultures, withdrawing from everything except our five material senses, arrogant with vision that sees about 1 percent of what the light spectrum reveals.
Seeing so little, we grow more frantic to know what is out there, yet push aside those who see.”
[00:30:33] Meg Wheatley: That's right. Yeah. Amen. Yeah. I mean one of the things that truly infuriates me still is the arrogance of Western materialistic scientists who believe these absurd things, like there's no such thing as consciousness. It's only created by the human brain. Oh, really? Well, that's demeaning.
And they ridicule those ancient ones who are now still present with us in the form of mystics and yogis and great enlightened beings who know how this universe works. And yet they just, the scientists who are so stuck in their materialism, like if it doesn't exist in matter, it doesn't exist.
So it is only the five senses, whereas anything spiritual, mystic realm, is because you know you can access things beyond the five senses, as you and I described in our experience with communion. So the arrogance of Western science is one of my current, like, just stop, realize this wisdom is still here.
And you just deny it and you say it's magic. My Tibetan Buddhist teacher said, what you call magic is just someone who knows how to work with the elements, with the universe. But we dismiss it so easily.
But here.…
[00:32:11] Liz Wiltzen: Are you going to read?
Meg Wheatley: I am.
Liz Wiltzen: Yay.
[00:32:13] Meg Wheatley: This is the reason I wrote this book.
“I'm not interested in being hopeful or optimistic or working diligently to reverse the pattern path of history we tread so reliably toward collapse.
I am interested in being able to stay in the midst of this terrible travesty that degrades the human spirit or denies we have one.
Caught on the balance beam of meaningful work and terrifying times, I want to walk steady in the world, learning what balance feels like, blessed by the active presence of companions in sacred world.”
[00:33:04] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, now you're really talking about community.
[00:33:08] Meg Wheatley: That's right. Yeah. And non-egoic participation.
[00:33:14] Liz Wiltzen: And this beautiful, I believe it is the mantra or the whatever we want to say for the Berkana Institute, which is your Institute that trains Warriors for the Human Spirit, and I might say it backwards, but, “Whatever the problem, community is the answer.”
Meg Wheatley: That's it. Yeah.
Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. And, and if we can include, like, if we understand that that means community, like the whole cosmos, that's where the answers are. In our relationship and our conversations with the humans and the more than humans.
[00:33:48] Meg Wheatley: That's right.
[00:33:49] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah.
[00:33:51] Meg Wheatley: That's right. Absolutely true. Absolutely true. And that's what indigenous peoples, who I believe are the last vestiges of the goddess culture, have been trying to teach us. And then warn us. And now help us get through this time.
[00:34:10] Liz Wiltzen: So in your training of Warriors for the Human Spirit, do you want to just say a little about kind of what the elements of that training are?
What are the key things…
[00:34:25] Meg Wheatley: Well, the outcome that we are seeking and that we do achieve is to be the presence of insight and compassion, both.
Really being able to see what's needed and not just go through the world with our hearts wide open, which ultimately we've all been there ends in enormous fatigue, depression, even suicidal thoughts.
So we have to discern what's needed and then whether we're the right person to serve that need. So our training, I mean, it's continuous… We want to first develop a stable mind and we do that through meditation. There's no other substitute for becoming familiar with how I am, what triggers me. What thoughts grab me? What role do these strong emotions play in me? And there are ways to just learn to watch the mind and not be seduced off into the dramas we create.
My teacher now has characterized us as ‘misery manufacturing machines’, we spend all this time just focused on little me without realizing that we have created this personality, this identity.
You know, when people say, “well, that's just how I am”, well that's resigning yourself to a fate of what you created. There is no such thing as ‘Meg Wheatley out there in the universe’, just waiting for me to notice what she means. I create the meaning, I create the identity.
So the good news is we can change that.
But the way we change that is by becoming more and more aware. Meditation as a practice, as a daily practice, is a necessity, I would say, for all of us. Not guided meditation, but meditations where you're just watching what your mind wants of you. And then noticing it and rejecting it. Or coming back to presence when you can, you know, as soon as you notice.
We also work with mind, body…
[00:36:41] Liz Wiltzen: Wait, before you move on, I just want to say one thing about meditation. I've been practicing meditation for about 15 years and I know you have forever. And I just want to talk briefly to people who don't meditate a lot because there is a misconception about what it is.
Meg Wheatley: Yes.
Liz Wiltzen: That I am meant to sit and quiet my mind. And in fact, it's the dead opposite of that.
[00:37:06] Meg Wheatley: Thank you so much, Liz, for bringing that in. Most people say, well, I can't meditate because my mind is just going crazy on me. And so what you've just said, I'm just going to underline it. That's how it is for all of us, even the very advanced meditators.
But you know what to do with it. You're not trying to achieve a quiet mind. It is possible after long dedication to meditation to just open to the world, but the practice serves you so well, even though you're thinking all the time. I give meditation instructions on my website, and the core practice is: Whenever you notice you're having a thought, an emotion, you're listening, a song is playing, you're in a fantasy, you just label it.
Very innocently, you say “thinking”, and then you come back to just trying to watch it. And sometimes you're saying “thinking” continuously for the length of time in that expression. What meditation gives us, you do develop a sense of peace, calm. and presence, but it just arises out of the practice of noticing how often you're thinking, how frequently you’re just caught, seduced by your thoughts.
But over time, I think one of the greatest benefits of meditation is you get more done in less time. Completely predictable amongst us. Things just, the idea of flow, the idea of things coming together for you and getting a lot of stuff done. It's, it's an incredible blessing.
[00:39:08] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, because we consume so much energy chasing things in our mind unconsciously, not even knowing that we're doing it.
I also just want to add that the other thing that I really notice you get from meditation that you speak to the importance of is: you're training yourself to stay with all of it, no matter how weird or twisty or uncomfortable it is. You're just sitting there going, okay. Okay, I don't need to leave from this experience.
[00:39:40] Meg Wheatley: Yes, and that staying power is a gift we bring to others, that we're willing to stay. We're not going to flee into self protection.
But the other aspect of warrior training that is very essential is we learn to open our eyes and to take in more information, and to see beyond our filters, our biases, our judgments. What's right and what's wrong, what's good and what's bad. I don't trust that person, you know, just by appearance.
So so much of the work now in which we're trying to overcome biases and judgments is actually in my experience, much easier to do if we just develop an increased sense of curiosity.
I teach a lot of practices of when you go for a walk, just notice something that stops you because it's so interesting. Don't say anything about it. Don't judge it. “I like that. I don't like that.” But just keep opening your perception more and more. And that's such a rich gift.
[00:40:50] Liz Wiltzen: That's one of the practices in the book. We're going to ping pong around, but that's okay because I know we can, we can hold the track…
[00:40:55] Meg Wheatley: Yes this is in the book.
This one is called “Seeing the familiar with new eyes”, and I use it all the time. I use it personally all the time, but now I'm really trying to wake up people's perception.
When you're with someone that you don't want to be around, one thing you can do is just stop your mind and just notice something new that you've never noticed about them before.
[00:41:22] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, this person you've been married to for 30 years. What's something I've never noticed about them before?
[00:41:29] Meg Wheatley: Yes, I mean, that's fascinating and really good for relationships. But I use it, since I'm oriented towards the workplace now, for the people who are bugging you. If you’re in a conversation with someone, just notice something new about them. That creates a relationship. And then you start to be, maybe a little less judgmental of them or a little less defensive of them.
But the other thing that I have done a lot is, especially when I'm with a corporate man who is just driving me crazy, or I just think is really obnoxious, even dangerous, to what's going on—I just flash for a moment to: I wonder how much people loved this person when he was like a darling two year old.
Liz Wiltzen: Yep.
Meg Wheatley: That helps too. We're just trying to, there's a word here of, we're just trying to ventilate or create more space in our perceptions of one another in our judgments. of one another. And it really helps to develop much easier relationships with people.
You don't end up liking them, but I feel so much more compassion now for people when I really tune into something new about them and maybe the nature of what they're struggling with, now, is very easy for me to identify and then it's not about me and you, it's about oh, I think I could feel compassion for you. I'm still not going to take what you just said, but I don't have aggression in me now.
[00:43:15] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. And that's like, what a gift to self to not get yourself worked up. And I'm certain you're going to agree with this,
I find that you cannot be curious and judgmental at the same time.
Meg Wheatley: Excellent.
Liz Wiltzen: They can't coexist.
[00:43:33] Meg Wheatley: That's wonderful. In its simplicity, Liz, that's a really wonderful statement. It's just impossible. Yeah.
[00:43:41] Liz Wiltzen: And do you know who Wendy Palmer is?
[00:43:44] Meg Wheatley: I loved Wendy. We worked together in Shambhala Leadership Institute for years.
[00:43:49] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, I interviewed her a while back on the podcast and I'm so grateful, just in the year before she died.
Meg Wheatley: Yeah, wonderful that you had that.
Liz Wiltzen: And I want to say, as you're speaking about this kind of aerating of the space, she speaks to the porousness, to being porous in your own being so that when aggressive energy is coming at you, you're not solid. It has nothing to hit.
[00:44:15] Meg Wheatley: Hit up against. Yes.
[00:44:16] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah.
[00:44:17] Meg Wheatley: That's her great martial arts training right there. Yeah.
[00:44:20] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah.
[00:44:21] Meg Wheatley: I think that's very challenging for us as women. Because we do need defenses and we need boundaries, but it's how to have them without feeling threatened, fearful, or aggressive in response. That's the challenge.
[00:44:39] Liz Wiltzen: And you, in particular, spend a lot of time traveling in those worlds of white, corporate, you know, the whole patriarchy, all of it.
So I'm guessing this is, we're, we're just continuing on toward What is it to be a Warrior for the Human Spirit and what is the training that is required and what are the qualities of being that are required? Like if you could just say, and maybe I'm asking way too simple of a question, but how have you come to a place where you don't lose yourself when you’re in the presence of people coming at you saying…
[00:45:23] Meg Wheatley: Well, I still lose it, but I recover very quickly.
[00:45:27] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah.
[00:45:28] Meg Wheatley: And that's the role of training. I still notice it, need to leave the scene, but then I can move into this place of understanding and compassion that then allows me to choose. Do I want to be with that person? Or do I just hold them in compassion, but I'm sorry, you can't get near me again.
And the way we develop that is just through the discipline of practice and not beating ourselves up when we lose it. You know, it's how quickly we regain, I mean, I'm remembering the teaching I received a long, long time ago from one of the founders, a small little Japanese man who, I don't know which martial art, it may have been Wendy's, that he developed.
And he would just stand there while a huge force, a huge man, came at him and he could not lose his ground at all, and he could just put out a finger and stop him. I have seen this.
So it's remarkable levels of control. But when someone asked him, how do you do that? How do you not get pushed away or ungrounded? He said, Oh no, no, I get ungrounded. I just recover much faster than you do.
[00:47:06] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah,
[00:47:07] Meg Wheatley: And so part of my teaching is also always when we have these moments of, we just lose it, I mean, one of my key staff people has gone through two days where she hates who she's becoming, like she's mad at everything. So she's beating herself up for that. And I said, no, you noticed it. How good is that?
So we never become perfect, but we notice our bad behaviors faster. And that's what we need to thank ourselves for. I noticed it. I have a commitment to not get triggered. And when I get triggered, it's just how quickly I can come back.
[00:47:55] Liz Wiltzen: Okay, I want to say something about this because I'm just putting something together right now. So you notice it, but then when you notice it, you have that whole aversion in yourself to that quality of you…
[00:48:09] Meg Wheatley: You've already committed not to be that way.
[00:48:12] Liz Wiltzen: Okay, but let's say that you are feeling that, right? So you get triggered, you lash out in rage or whatever, then you notice it, then you're like, ah, I have rage in me, I don't like it.
This is where the training to stay comes. I can stay with this feeling of I don't like how I just was, if I can stay with the feeling, then I don't have to judge the feeling, then I don't have to get…’cause the whole time that I’m beating myself up for how I was is time I'm not recovering to self. Because I'm over here beating myself up.
But if I can stay with, I don't like how I just was there, without beating myself up, it’s a faster through line.
[00:49:03] Meg Wheatley: That's true. Very true.
And one of the practices I would add to that is the first noticing of very strong emotions like anger or grief or rage, I learned this from a Buddhist teacher, is to externalize it and say, there is rage, not I am rageful.
There is loneliness, not I am lonely. And when you externalize it, which a lot of Western psychology would say is disassociation, but you're, you're not letting it define you, and very often,—I use this practice all the time—I mean, I'm saying over and over again, there is powerlessness, there is powerlessness and it neutralizes it. So then I can act with sanity. Then I can see more clearly.
[00:50:05] Liz Wiltzen: Well, I, because you just said sanity again, I want to bring in your one way that you frame sanity is that—I could find it and read it, I’m just going to paraphrase and you can correct. “Sanity is moving in a way that is life affirming and insanity is moving in a way that is life destroying.”
[00:50:29] Meg Wheatley: That's right. Simple as that.
[00:50:30] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. And so when you're wanting to create islands of sanity that require sane leaders on the island, that's like a hallmark. That's a thing—check in, is the way we're moving life affirming or life destroying. Would you say it that way or?
[00:50:47] Meg Wheatley: Yes. I would, I would add to it that role of the leader or the convener is that we start with our unshakable faith in people's capacity, possibility to be generous, creative, and kind. You could add other qualities if you want. Because the leader must have this faith. Otherwise they will lose their way very quickly when they meet bad behaviors or people turn on them or slander them. They'll give up. They won't stay.
So we have to have this unshakable faith that people can be generous, creative, and kind, but the ‘can be’ is the leader's work. How do I create the conditions so that these qualities can blossom? Now that's life affirming, but it's much more nuanced than that to say that my role is: You don't believe in yourself.
You don't think you're creative. I'm going to do my best, against all odds these days, to create the conditions for you to work well together with colleagues so that you notice you made a creative contribution. So you notice that people actually valued what you just said. This is going now to the practices of working well together.
So it's the leader's commitment to keep creating those conditions so that people can wake up to who they really are. Because most of us feel terrible about ourselves these days. And we're told we're terrible. We're told we're inferior, second rate, worthless.
[00:52:39] Liz Wiltzen: And so you may be giving me the answer in reverse there, but how do you create those conditions?
[00:52:46] Meg Wheatley: That's the whole book. That's the whole book.
[00:52:49] Liz Wiltzen: Yes.
[00:52:50] Meg Wheatley: I give a pattern language, design principles for creating any process you want. If it follows those design principles, people will show up and people will display these, what's all inherent in all of us but it can be so distorted and buried at this point where people are too tired to want to participate, so everything is participative.
But everything starts with the work that we have to do together. No other choice, no other coming up with a recipe for the perfect team that's diverse and inclusive, none of that.
Put the work in the center and get everyone involved who should be involved in solving that problem or making that function better and then you'll see the value of diverse perspectives, but then it's no longer a label or a judgment.
I've done this now, I think, how many decades, at least 40 years, been knowing that if you put work at the center, then people get to know each other and then you develop respect and then you develop an appreciation for their story.
But it's in the context of we're going to get work done here. We're going to solve problems that affect us. There's no other way to go forward with this. I think we've got things so ass backwards, and I'm using that term so deliberately now, because we think we have to respect each other before we can work together.
No, it doesn't work that way. We do the work and then I kind of wake up to, Oh wow, you just said that. Wow. That, that's interesting. I never thought you thought that way.
You know, I have so many years. of experience with this, and I'm increasingly, how would I describe myself now? I'm no longer frustrated that we start at the wrong place.
We start at the end with, We need to be respectful. We need to learn how to listen to each other. We need these skills. We need inclusion, diversity, and coming to terms with our own judgments and microaggressions.
Put me in with a group of people with a challenging task and the right process, where we do have to listen to each other, and you'll just see what happens.
I mean, it all works well when we can be fully human together doing work that matters to us. There's nothing artificial about it.
[00:55:48] Liz Wiltzen: It's interesting, I'm really feeling as you're saying, what is the work that we're doing together? it feels like you're speaking to the ultimate work is: What serves the good of the community.
[00:56:03] Meg Wheatley: That's it. That's it. But people want to serve their communities. People want to be in a healthy relationship. People want to contribute. They want to learn. These are just basic needs and that's why we're suffering so horribly now. It's why our children are going crazy.
[00:56:27] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, because we've come into such an independent way of being in the world…
[00:56:31] Meg Wheatley: In a meaningless world, in a frightening world. Where we cannot solve the problems that needed to be solved.
It's a desperate time for teenagers and 20 somethings. We have a number of projects going with educators now that get kids involved in their community in one way or another to do good work and to form relationships. Really meaningful work, you know, for kids who are lost or suicidal.
[00:57:07] Liz Wiltzen: When you say really meaningful work, can you give a couple of examples for kids?
[00:57:11] Meg Wheatley: Well, it's doing community work. It's visiting with a homeless person. It's doing gardens, regenerative agriculture, working with the land. It's deciding, I mean, we have a lot of experience with this through one of our Warriors in Europe, he had the children and he was giving them warrior training, it blew my mind that he trusted them with these adult concepts, but they responded.
And so he asked them to choose a project. What was something going on in their community that they wanted to help work on? So in the Netherlands, it was homelessness. But in Nepal, the children needed work on alcoholism because their parents had become so abusive. That was a shock to us.
But kids can easily identify problems and then you give them a chance to work on it and to work with adults on it. It's transforming for them.
[00:58:21] Liz Wiltzen: Wow.
Meg Wheatley: Yeah.
Liz Wiltzen: Wow. I mean, it's so obvious when you say it.
Meg Wheatley: Isn't it? Isn't it? Yeah.
Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. And I want to tie in something you say that, it sounds like you say young people are just tuned into this and then as adults we get into, What's my meaning and what's my purpose?
But you said, “The world offers innumerable opportunities for meaningful contribution if we allow the world to define what is meaningful.”
[00:58:54] Meg Wheatley: That's right. That's exactly right. You know, we are, um, I used to do this work, I used to lead work in discovering your purpose, defining your values, understanding what you wanted, I don't even want to say, what your contribution was, because it wasn't that, that selfless. It was what I want the world to give me so I will feel satisfied. So I define meaning.
And now with the great switch, the 180 degree switch is: The world has so much, and you need to tune in to define what does this world, the world around me, the group I'm with, my family, my community, my organization, what do they need? What's needed here? And am I the one to contribute to that need?
And you'll be overwhelmed with possibilities for service. But it's not going into the world demanding I find opportunities that serve my purpose. We’re way past that. That was a great period of time. I think it was very possible, I certainly experienced that firsthand.
Now this world has so much need for us, and if we still want to serve it, we need to ask the world. And the world is too big a term. It's our world, our sphere, where we are with what we're doing and the people we're engaged in. What's needed here?
[01:00:34] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, what's needed here, and I love your question of, Am I the one, do I have something that would be of service here and am I resourced? Do I have the support that I need? Because you talk about burnout of activism.
[01:00:54] Meg Wheatley: That's right. Exactly. Exactly.
[01:00:54] Liz Wiltzen: And that they're not actually helping if they go into the fray in a burnt out state.
[01:01:00] Meg Wheatley: That's right. In the song line I identify one of the places as The Swamp of compassion.
[01:01:09] Meg Wheatley: We just, you know, with our hearts open and such a strong desire to help, we just get enmeshed or trapped or even drowned in, there's so much need. And especially when you see it so clearly. If all you're trying to do is respond to everything with no discernment…
Discernment is, am I in the right place? As you spoke about, am I resourced? Am I stable? Do I have a stable life? What are my skills? And then in that way you select down, you still end up with far too many things where you would like to contribute and you can't. And the other thing I want to add here is that it's possible to become the presence of insight and compassion, but we will always feel that we haven't done enough.
It's impossible to relieve suffering the way we want to or to support one another the way we want to. So disciplined practice and strong community are more and more essential for them.
And that's why I'm going to go back to Islands of Sanity, why I'm now, as a systems thinker, focusing us on how do we create both a place of sanctuary and possibility?
We have to protect ourselves from these negative dynamics. So, we have to close out that. We certainly stay open to what's happening, but it's the power of our relationships of our community that makes it possible to be sane and to create good work together. It won't change the greater world, but it will certainly give us meaningful lives in the midst of intensifying insanity.
[01:03:16] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, back to “Joy is a consequence of working together in difficult times.”
Meg Wheatley: Yes.
Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. It will give us joyful, meaningful lives.
I have two or three more questions I'd like to ask you. Give me a minute here. I did get through four of my six pages though, so that's good.
Okay, I want to bring in a practice in the new book, “Restoring Sanity”, but before we do, I want to come back to Warriors for the Human Spirit. You said something that I love so much, that a fundamental teaching of the Shambhala Warrior—and Shambhala warrior, do you want to say a little bit about the prophecy of the Shambhala warrior just to nod to Joanna Macy?
[01:04:04] Meg Wheatley: Well, I want to honor Joanna Macy for her decades of work of bringing us this prophecy that comes from a kingdom of conscious people, Shambhala, somewhere probably in what's now Afghanistan, according to my Tibetan teacher.
And the prophecy stated there would come a time when all of life is threatened and great barbaric powers have arisen that threaten one another with weapons of mass destruction. And at that time, the Shambhala warriors come back, they come forth. This is Tibetan Buddhism. They come again, armed with only the weapons of compassion, insight, and they serve this time.
That was well prophesied in just about every culture that I've looked at. There is the prophecy of this very dark time when human nobility is needed. I really love naming it noble action, that we're willing to serve others and to sacrifice some of what we thought we could still hold on to because we understand the times. And so that's the prophecy. And it's this time now, I mean, every Tibetan teacher is saying, yeah, this is the time for the Shambhala warriors to come forth.
[01:05:38] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. And I, I can't let this interview end without nodding to Pema Chodron, who is a dear friend of yours. And…
[01:05:47] Meg Wheatley: And was my devoted teacher for 10 years.
[01:05:48] Liz Wiltzen: For 10 years. I found her work years ago and, I mean, oh my God, she's just such a remarkable being.
[01:05:57] Meg Wheatley: And remaining so. Yes.
[01:05:59] Liz Wiltzen: How old is she now?
[01:05:59] Meg Wheatley: She is going to be 88 in July.
[01:06:04] Liz Wiltzen: Wow.
[01:06:05] Meg Wheatley: But she's in very fine form. Very fine form.
[01:06:08] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. Yeah. So how blessed for you to have a friendship and have her as a teacher, and it so emanates from you as one of your influences, you can just tell in how you hold the world and how you bring things.
Okay. So, with this fundamental teaching of the Shambhala Warrior: Because they trust themselves, they have no need to convince others through deception.
Oh my God. I love that line so much because they're not motivated by fear. They have confidence. Can you please say something about this.
[01:06:46] Meg Wheatley: I have it sitting right here. It's the foundational quote for warrior training.
So because they trust themselves, they have no need to deceive others, to manipulate situations. So we have the possibility, the more we trust ourselves, which means we trust ourselves to know when we're going to go off on somebody or when we're in a situation…Be careful here, Meg. You're going to get triggered. And if you're prepared, then you're not triggered.
But we have to have confidence that we are doing our right work.And then we don't try and deceive others. We don't try and manipulate situations. And it leads in the second part of the quote, “but since their confidence has never deteriorated, they are not fearful of anyone.”
This is the elemental strength of setting out on a warrior path, knowing what I'm here for and then being with other warriors who also strengthen me and give me solace and a good time, dark humor, when I need it most.
[01:08:06] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. So confidence in that. And the confidence that comes from self responsibility for your triggers. For your hooks, for your behaviors.
Meg Wheatley: That I'm awake to myself, yes.
Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, yeah. Okay, I'm so glad we went there, that was awesome.
Meg Wheatley: I'm so glad that speaks to you so much.
Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, it really does. I shared it with my three best friends yesterday, telling them I was preparing for the interview, and shared that thought, and we just dug into it. What does this mean for us? It was a great conversation.
Okay. Coming back to, let's come back to, I want to name one of your practices in Restoring Sanity because what I love about this particular one is it translates anywhere, even just in a one on one relationship. And that's the practice of When You Can't Let Go. Do you want to speak to it?Do you know what it is with no more prompting from me?
Meg Wheatley: Give me more of the details.
Liz Wiltzen: Okay. Okay. Yeah. So it's like when you're hooked and you’re in the story and and you're going around and around and you're judging the other person. And then you just remove yourself, find a place and say, what do I seem to need in this situation? And then what does the other seem to need?
[01:09:29] Meg Wheatley: I invented this practice probably 10 years ago when I was really struggling with my adult children. I was just beside myself with their, their ignoring me, I think was the issue then. And I finally just said, okay, what do you really need here, Meg?
What do you need from your adult children and what do they need from you? At this moment, that just opened everything. I mean, I got down to some very basic needs. I needed respect. I needed appreciation. But when I got into their needs for me, it was the same thing. So they needed more time where I was just offering my respect and appreciation for them.
Boy, did that change the relationship.
Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. No kidding.
Meg Wheatley: Because I could just be fully present for them and realize. This is who I want to be as a mother. I want them to feel appreciated and respected. And then my own needs just faded away.
But what's so good about this practice is what you discover about the other person, but because you are turning toward them. It's not all about me. It's not what I need and what I'm not getting and what they're doing wrong to me or what, you know, that that's our basic focus, right? What I'm not getting.
And then when you turn to the person, I've used this in an organizational setting where there's conflict also, you develop a greater appreciation of them and greater opening of possibilities.
And then you get down to the essence. So I do need respect, but the way I achieve that in the case with my older children was by how I was with them.
If I was in a work setting and I realize I need respect, but what they need from me is blah, blah, blah, then I'm going to present myself in a way that demands respect.
[01:11:52] Liz Wiltzen: I want to say that what felt so potent about this inquiry in this practice is the, what do I seem to need? So I may need it. And I may discover I don't actually need it. And either way is fine. Either way is fine. But the saying seem to need is, that's the opening. That's the curiosity. What do I seem to need here?
Because once you locate it, because you ask, what do I seem to need? Once you locate it, then you can say, Is it true? Like, do I actually need this?
[01:12:27] Meg Wheatley: It's usually startling that you really didn't need all that stuff. But there is an essential need here. And it's a need that serves the other, not just yourself as well.
[01:12:43] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. Because then when you say, what did they seem to need? you've already opened up as you've gotten curious, we've turned off the judgment switch and turned on the curiosity switch. So now we're in creative land. Now we're in the world of creativity.
[01:12:58] Meg Wheatley: Exactly. But what that takes is a very big switch to not approach this from an egocentric force. And the reason I said that, you know, if I want respect from my kids now, I know what to do with them. If I'm looking for respect in a conversation, in a corporate setting or an organizational setting, I’m going to structure it so that I'm worthy of respect and I'm very clear that I deserve this, you know, so,
[01:13:36] Liz Wiltzen: yeah, it's non negotiable.
[01:13:38] Meg Wheatley: That's right. But it's dependent on the situation, right?
[01:13:41] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. Okay. I'm going to, I'm going to say a teaching that you gave from Chögyam Trungpa. And is this a personal Tibetan teacher of yours, or?
[01:14:00] Meg Wheatley: No, this is the founding teacher of Shambhala. He was Pema's primary teacher, was also my source for teaching warriorship. I was given that by him.
[01:14:12] Liz Wiltzen: Okay, beautiful. So here, here's what he says, “Everything gets clear when you're cornered.”
Meg Wheatley: Yes.
Liz Wiltzen: “Dead ends, unsolvable problems, desperate situations. When we're about to give up, a spark lights in a person or group and a way opens. This is miraculous and predictable. We are naturally creative, especially in the most difficult circumstances.
[01:14:40] Meg Wheatley: Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, we all know this, Liz.
We all know this. We have this in our direct experience of at a point when you were about to give up or you just couldn't think your way through it, you just relax a little bit and insight and answers come to you.
[01:15:02] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. And I love, because you're such a proponent of you need the community, you need the allies, you need the support systems, that's what helps you relax enough.
[01:15:13] Meg Wheatley: Well, no, actually I relax into my confidence. I relax into my clear seeing, my clarity. And I relax into that I can be trustworthy in whatever the situation is. But I have to say, quite wonderfully, I relax into guidance. I relax into insight coming from elsewhere. And I've never been disappointed by that either.
Community may give me stability, but it doesn't, it's not my source of insight.
[01:15:50] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. “Thank you, Raven.”
[01:15:53] Meg Wheatley: Yeah, that's right.
[01:15:54] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. Okay. Let's just point people, shall we? I know you've got a new course coming up starting April 18th. Can you, you want to share a little bit about that? Yes.
[01:16:04] Meg Wheatley: Yes. I offer two courses a year, and this course is based on using Restoring Sanity and getting clear about what these practices are, but it's in the context of my other wonderful little guidebook, Perseverance. So it’s, What are the skills we need to persevere as we do this very difficult, challenging, joyful work of restoring sanity.
It's very deeply personal and grounded and also brings in the practices from Restoring Sanity. And it's only six weeks, it’s a short course for me. 90 minutes on a Thursday, if you can’t attend live, it's all recorded. I’m just trying to support us because I know this work is difficult.
We're up against fragmentation, fear, deliberate destruction of the human spirit, so those of us who are committed to restoring sanity, which is relying on the human spirit, we need a lot more grounding and a lot more skills. And so this is very skill oriented.
[01:17:17] Liz Wiltzen: And, and so I'm going to definitely get this episode live in time for people to know of this course and sign up April 18th, 2024.
Also your website is, you’ve set it up you said to be a library. It is a wealth of resources, both of your own thinking and knowing and understanding and collaborations with others.
[01:17:40] Meg Wheatley: Absolutely. And we keep strengthening it as a resource for all of us.
[01:17:47] Liz Wiltzen: And all your books are available there.You have 12 books. But the newest book, which just came out March19th, Restoring Sanity, the practices in that book are just so like, try them on and you're going to see something.
[01:18:04] Meg Wheatley: Yes. They do sell themselves when you do them.
[01:18:07] Liz Wiltzen: Meg, thank you so very much for coming.
[01:18:11] Meg Wheatley: This has been very wonderful for me, Liz, because of your own curiosity and your own homework that you did. I mean, I've heard things in my writing that I'd kind of forgotten about, or, I mean, some of the things, truthfully, some of the things you were reading, I thought, damn, that's good.
That's what you want as a creative person. You can look at your work and it's not ego that says it. It's just like, yeah, that got, I got it there. So thank you for that experience as well.
[01:18:47] Liz Wiltzen: You're so welcome. And it's just been such a privilege and an honor truly to have you spend this time with me. So thank you so much.
[01:18:55] Meg Wheatley: And you offer so much to your listeners. And I just want to thank you for that.
[01:19:01] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah.
[01:19:02] Meg Wheatley: You're doing great work here.
[01:19:04] Liz Wiltzen: Thank you very much. Such a blessing to be with you. Thanks, Meg.
OUTRO: Thanks for joining us today, everyone. If you like the show, I'd so appreciate it if you'd follow and share it with people you think would love it.
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Talk to you next time, and in the meantime, have a great week and keep your compass lined up with yes.
Meg Wheatley: So our training, I mean, it's continuous. We want to first develop a stable mind and we do that through meditation. There's no other substitute for becoming familiar with how I am, what triggers me, what thoughts grab me, what role do these strong emotions play in me? And there are ways to just learn to watch the mind and not be seduced off into the dramas we create.
My teacher now has characterized us as misery manufacturing machines. We spend all this time just focused on little me without realizing that we have created this personality, this identity. You know, then people say, well, that's just how I am. Well, that's resigning yourself to a fate of what you created. I create the meaning, I create the identity.
So the good news is we can change that.
Liz Wiltzen: INTRO: Hey, hey, hey, so glad you're here. This is Tracking Yes, and you are exactly where you're meant to be. I'm your host, Liz Wiltzen, coach, creator, and round the clock philosopher. And this, my friends, is where the magic happens. Join me and my guests for stories that will inspire you to dial up your curiosity, fine tune your courage and wisdom, and create an empowered relationship with whatever's happening now.
If you're curious about coaching or have been thinking that you might want to work with me, now's a really great time. You can find out more at my website, https://www.lizwiltzen.com/.
Margaret Wheatley is the author of 12 books, a social activist, a global leadership and organizational consultant, a Buddhist practitioner and a guide and trainer for warriors of the human spirit. After a lifetime of activism and a deep understanding of how living systems work, she's come to realize that life is no longer subject to the kind of interventions that used to be effective.
In today's conversation, we explore her newest book, “Restoring Sanity: Practices to Awaken Generosity, Creativity and Kindness in Ourselves and Our Organizations”. We also talk about what's possible when we follow the threads of curiosity and the mystical in our relationships and work. END INTRO
Thank you, Margaret Wheatley, so much for coming on the podcast today.
Meg Wheatley: I'm grateful we have time together.
Liz Wiltzen: I first discovered your work in a 10 month long leadership program that I was taking about 13 years ago. And one of the recommended readings was your book, “Leadership and the New Science”, which you wrote, I think over 30 years ago, 1992.
[00:03:07] Liz Wiltzen: I've heard you say that your thinking has changed considerably since the time of writing that book. So of course, that's what we're going to launch into. And and on that note, in 2023, you released a second edition of “Who Do We Choose to Be? Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership and Restoring Sanity” and that book you said is 80 percent new material?
[00:03:32] Meg Wheatley: At least, at least. It's really a new book.
[00:03:35] Liz Wiltzen: Okay. And I've spent the last month with that book, really diving into it. I want to say what you, what you hold to be your motivation for that book.
You say, “My intention, my goal is to bring current reality into sharp focus so that we may find our path of contribution for this time. My aspiration is for you to see clearly so that you may act wisely. Because if we don't know where we are, if we don't know what to prepare for, we stay lost, wandering in the frightening wilderness. Only when we know where we are can we choose a meaningful path forward.”
And the book itself is such a fascinating read because it's comprehensive in gathering together science and ancient wisdom and a sober look at current reality.
And you really are laying out exactly where it is you see us to be and what you propose as the way to respond and to move in this time. And I also want to say it was so challenging to prepare for this…
[00:04:43] Meg Wheatley: It is very challenging. It's a challenging book to write.
Liz Wiltzen: How come it was challenging?
[00:04:49] Meg Wheatley: You know because the message is so clear. But it's so important.
And we are also going to talk about this book, right?
[00:04:56] Liz Wiltzen: Yes. “Restoring Sanity”. We absolutely are. Yes, we are. But, but you hold that, that “Who Do We Choose to Be” is the parent book.
[00:05:06] Meg Wheatley: It's the reason I wrote a practice manual. Yes.
[00:05:09] Liz Wiltzen: Yes. And so I want to get a little of the foundation and then definitely talk about your new book, which I just finished.
It's also fabulous because it is a practice manual and because it lays out such a variety of practices for how do we be together in sane ways and, and manage our own egos and our own agendas and, and resolve those so that they're not contaminating the space is kind of how I hold it. And you give…
[00:05:40] Meg Wheatley: No, that's a great description.Thank you.
[00:05:42] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. And you give many, many practical practices that support that end in the new book, “Restoring Sanity”. What's the tagline of it?
[00:05:53] Meg Wheatley: Practices to Awaken Generosity, Creativity, and Kindness. in Ourselves and Our Organizations.
[00:06:02] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So…
[00:06:06] Meg Wheatley: we have a lot to talk about.
[00:06:08] Liz Wiltzen: Yes, because what I was going to say is it was really challenging to prepare for this interview because the more that I explored your body of work, the more there was, like it just kept blossoming and blossoming and it's like “I need like a half a day to interview Meg Wheatley, not an hour”.
[00:06:28] Meg Wheatley: Well, fortunately, I can make sense of it rather easily now, so.
[00:06:31] Liz Wiltzen: Okay, good, good, good, good. So, so I kind of pulled on some different threads and I went in other places too, like I love your book, How Does Raven Know? I want to touch on that, and the Warrior Song Line, like there are different things. So I've, I guess what I have now is my wish list and we'll go where we go and we'll hit what we hit.
And I trust that you're going to take us in the place that you feel like here is what I most want people to hear and know right now. Yeah. Okay. So can we just start with, can you share a bit of the arc of your journey from way back when you wrote Leadership in the New Science to now?
[00:07:10] Meg Wheatley: Yes, and I know you focus your audience on curiosity.
Liz Wiltzen: Yes.
Meg Wheatley: And that has been the hallmark of, of my life, that I've always stayed curious and open. And I've had, you know, great support along the way from my spiritual teachers, my family, and just my general personality. Um, And I, so I get a lot of appreciation when I'm curious, and I just want to underline that because I started out.
Now it's very trendy to talk about wonder and awe. I love that. It always happens at the last stages of collapse, though it's it's further negative evidence. It's necessary to approach the world with a sense of wonder and awe. I first encountered that as a leadership person, as a consultant to leaders and organizations in the 80s and 90s.
And then I was turned on to chaos theory and quantum theory. And I still remember the moment, it was a true aha moment, in writing Leadership and the New Science, when I discovered in writing the science piece, that you can get order for free. Order and control are almost opposites at this point. But in that moment, it was such a gift.
Oh, we don't need to control life. We need to participate with life. And life has all these simple, natural processes for creating order, for creating healthy community, for growing systems. That was such a gift to see that and to express it. Now, what I learned from Leadership in the New Science is that good evidence and actual case studies and data on efficiency, well, happy employees, all of that evidence, which was so obvious looking through the lens of new science and the lens, especially of self organization where you don't need control.
I thought that would be a simple cell. And in fact, what I learned from years of working with the new sciences from a very scientific basis is that good ideas and evidence are not what change minds. The greater dynamics are power and in this culture domination, patriarchy, power over and getting what I want.
So gradually my books turn away from what leaders do to what people do. So when I wrote Turning to One Another, this was a book about conversations that had the capacity to bring people together in deeply meaningful ways so that we could be the agents of change in the world. I was very hopeful then.
That book came out right after 9-11. My books have a way of being very prescient in that I write them before the world events that require them and it's always been. So I had already had the book done and 9-11 happened and we really needed to come together in good conversations, respectful conversations to explore what's going on in this world.
Well, that book still has a lot of power. for people who want to be in conversations. But the other part of my awareness always is to see how the world is changing. What does it need from us now? Which is why I'm up to restoring sanity as a title and a practice now. But conversation still is the most powerful mode for bringing us together to do good work and to understand who we each are.
The great dilemma we're facing now is we live in a time of such fear and fracturing that people don't want to be together with people who disagree with them. I'm putting myself right there.
I just walk away from these moments when I realize I'm in the presence of a conspiracy theorist.I'm sorry, I'm not going to go, or a climate denier. I'm not going to spend any time trying to convince you because we're past that.
Where we are now, which I will speak about in a minute, I have a few other books to cover, but after Turning to One Another, I really started to look around and see one… of my favorite books is co-written with Debra Fries, Walk Out, Walk On, where we were looking at communities that were daring to live the future now who knew that no one was coming to help.
And that's when I really started to go more deeply into the power of community and that humans can get through anything as long as we're together. And then as the world kept getting more brutal and more destructive, I turned to other means of introducing us to this beautiful world, this world where relationships are all there is, things I had expressed through science.
I mean, I really got called to task and labeled as just a woman in Leadership and the New Science because it had everything to say that relationships are all there is. That's the science. This is a universe where nothing is visible until it's in relationship with another packet of energy. If you're a subatomic particle, or if you're a human being, you know, who brings out what in us?
So it didn't work to explain it scientifically. And I still rely on this science for me as bedrock, but gradually my work is: how do we strengthen community? How do we build community? Because I was working in South Africa, I was working in Zimbabwe, I was working in with Aboriginal communities in Australia, and I saw firsthand that people get through anything as long as we're together.
And our great curse in this Western culture is to say, we make it on our own. And if you fail, it's your fault. A lot of us still have that programming, by the way, I'm seeing it over and over as we face these unsolvable problems and continuing escalating catastrophes, too many of us still blame ourselves.And of course, our bosses or our partners or the opposition is quite happy to put all the blame on us.
But where we are now, I started seeing where we are now with my 2012 book, So Far From Home, Lost and Found in Our Brave New World. And that was was the hardest book to write because what was becoming so clear was that we couldn't change these large systems.
We weren't going to save the world. I wasn't going to save the world. None of us were going to save the world. We're in these systems that have their own dynamics, their own power, and they actually control behavior. You know, how many of us want to be these as consumer oriented or using shopping as an escape when we're really upset?
That's the culture we're in. Even if you didn't start out that way, it's almost impossible not to participate in that way. And that's true of the rise of hate, the rise of slander, the rise of blaming one another. These are all dynamics that are out there. And it takes awareness, consciousness, and a commitment to not be part of it, to not allow these very negative life destroying dynamics to, to be how we are with people.
So I then went into Warrior Training. Training Warriors for the Human Spirit. Spiritual warriors, warriors of peace, non violent warriors. I have to put all those adjectives in, because still too many people get upset that the word warrior, of course, it has such strong connotations for violent behavior, but warriors are a particular small group, always a fraction of the population who realize that it's only through their own dedication and their own training so they have a stable mind, so they don't get so triggered so easily, so they want to be a place of compassion and insight. This takes training, and it takes community support, and it also, um, is only, I want to say only always, because I think that's kind of an interesting word, juxtaposition, only always, are there a few people who understand, and here I can quote from the historian who so informed me about the cycles of collapse of civilizations, Sir John Glubb said, “There are always, predictably, but only a small group of people who understand that it is through their self sacrifice”, that's a word nobody liked hearing until recently, “through their self sacrifice can community be preserved. And these folks, these warriors, raise the banner of duty and service. against the depravity and despair of their time."
So I started training Warriors for the Human Spirit in 2015 and continue to this day. We've done it in many different forms right now we have a self paced forum with monthly meetings with me.
You can find out all about this on my website, but that is using what you mentioned, the Warrior Song Line, which is using music and artistry and a very different form of narrative for me plus the music of my dear colleague, Jerry Granelli, who died almost three years ago now, but he was a fabulous and famous jazz musician.
We took his music and my narrative and created what is truly the most impactful experience of anything I've written. It just takes you into a very deep place.
[00:19:04] Liz Wiltzen: I want to say something that you said about the Warrior Songline, that it is the recognition that memories and history and information that we need are in the land. So you're drawing on the land.
[00:19:17] Meg Wheatley: Yes, that's the Australian Aboriginal sense of a song line. And I played with the form, but for us, these things that are evoked by the land, Western mind here, the landscape that I used was my own landscape living in beautiful Utah. The memories, the experiences are in us and in certain landscapes here.
I'm not using it literally the way Australian Aboriginals do, and I've walked song line with them for a 10 day period, but there are place-based memories and there are memories in us that need to be evoked so we understand. But mainly, you also speak about magic, that, I believe, is a magical piece.
I think it's so evocative. I can't listen to it for too long. I get overwhelmed by it.
[00:20:14] Liz Wiltzen: Overwhelmed in what way?
[00:20:17] Meg Wheatley: It's just the messages come through at a gut level, at a spiritual level, with the music. And the pacing of it, it just enters into my very being. And I know it does that now for other people as well, but the, you know, the first messages are quite harsh.
And this is actually now everything I do. We have to face reality as you read my piece on that. We have to face reality, not because we have to face reality, but because we still want to contribute. And that's an essential part here.
Lots of people are being taught how to face reality, how to deal with grief and loss, overwhelming sadness and anger, rage and powerlessness. These are the emotions of our time, if we are people who have already cared for others and wanted our work to be meaningful to others, not just to ourselves. And now what I offer is yes, we have these strong emotions and we can work beyond them to identify, “What is my meaningful contribution?”
But the first gate is, do I want to stay? Do I want to wake up to this world? And if I can't pass that gate, then I'll become like the majority of people on the planet. I'll just withdraw. Or the majority of people in developed countries. Others have no choice to withdraw. But we have the choice and a lot of us are just cocooning, withdrawing into fear and self protection.
That's not human beingness, that's human animalness, that's just fight, flight, freeze. So starting with Leadership and the New Science, I've always wanted to connect people to other ways of seeing so they could act differently in ways that were more productive, more joyful, more healthy, and created better relationships.
And now I'm down to: what is the level of community that is still possible in this very fracturing world? And I've called those islands of sanity. We need to not only understand the level of commitment that's needed from us, but also that we are participating with life, not just with people, but with life.
And so you referred to, How Does Raven Know?, which was the book I wrote in celebration of my 70th birthday. And it's all about my mystic self, and what support, comfort, and Everything I find with other beings and with the living world, which has now become almost a prescription for people.
Not my prescription, but you need to get outside folks.You need to be in nature. You need to just find a place where you can feel held by life, held by all these partners. It's a very indigenous perspective, but I've recently learned, it’s also the goddess perspective of 35, 000 years of the divine feminine at work, which was completely about relationships, not hierarchy, but relationships with everything. Rocks, water, fire, all the elements and living with everything, not as separate selves.
[00:24:27] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, I, I want to bring in right there because I watched your video with the Slovenian violinist.
[00:24:37] Meg Wheatley: Miha Pogacnik.
[00:24:38] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. And you two were talking about polyphony, the quality of things coming together where the unique individual contributions are—they don't disappear into the whole, they're distinct and clear. But as the voices are coming together, there is an inner space of transformation that's created.
And you said to him, which I love so much, because you were talking about, to you, these are moments of communion and we feel them when we're children in nature we feel them, but even now if you go walk in nature or you're listening to music or touched by a piece of art and you had heard the term from somebody, I don't know who, that this is an experience beyond the self that's called original participation, where you are engaged with what was always there.
[00:25:38] Meg Wheatley: I love what you're picking up to quote back to me because I don't actually remember that phrase original participation, but that is what it is. And I just want to emphasize, I think I learned from Richard Rohr that these moments of communion are joyful and joy is a consequence, in my lingo now, of being together in ways where I'm not self protective. I'm not even thinking about myself.
There's a third presence or, and we've all had that experience when we're deeply in love, there’s no sense of self. There's just this third beingness and you can find that in nature. You can find that in love with a human. You can find that with any kind of human or you can find that with your dog or your pets.
These moments when you're just fully present and you don't need anything from the other.
[00:26:46] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. And there's another feeling that—I was deeply in love once—and the feeling was the whole universe exists to bring us together.
Meg Wheatley: Yes.
Liz Wiltzen: Which if you really reverse it, I exist to know the whole universe, right? Feel the wholeness of it.
[00:27:06] Meg Wheatley: But that's an experience, I mean, when you have these experiences of communion or oneness, there isn't a way to describe it, right? And I have had that experience also, a feeling that everything was perfectly organized to bring me together with my partner. And it didn't last, by the way.
[00:27:30] Liz Wiltzen: Mine neither. But in the moment, it's true.
Meg Wheatley: Yes.
Liz Wiltzen: Like it's all, it's actually always true. Right?
Meg Wheatley: Yes.
Liz Wiltzen: It doesn't, it's just, I can sit with a tree and have that feeling. A raven can—I have a deep love affair with ravens as well, so I understand as you do: when a raven is near, something’s happening. Stay present, pay attention.
Meg Wheatley: Yeah. Yes.
Liz Wiltzen: Can I, I want to I did a little mash up. I want to read, you had in your book, How Does Raven Know?
Um, let me just find it here…because I pulled a little piece of prose from that book and from something else I found and I want to read it because I love it so much. So if I have permission to mash up your writing, is that okay?
[00:28:22] Meg Wheatley: Absolutely. I mean, I'm so appreciative, Liz, of how much thoughtfulness and, and study you've put into this. It's very meaningful to me that you've done this. So thank you.
[00:28:33] Liz Wiltzen: You're so welcome. Okay, here we go.
“How do you know to fly so near, arching your back to the wind, just for a moment, so that I learn, strong back, facing gale, gives power to my heart.
Perch where the wind comes at you full force. Let it blow you apart till your feathers fly off and you look like hell. Then abandon yourself. The wind is not your enemy. Nothing in life is."
[00:29:07] Meg Wheatley: Yes. That whole book is one long prose poem with no punctuation. Hopefully you didn't notice that because it worked, you know, in terms of cadence and rhythm, but…
[00:29:25] Liz Wiltzen: It did work, and to bring us back to, I'm going to read one more piece from your chapter on magic in that book, just to get us back into, like, where the hell are we now?
[00:29:37] Meg Wheatley: And I'm going to read you my favorite piece too.
[00:29:39] Liz Wiltzen: Okay, excellent. Okay, so here you go on magic. And I'm loving that you're saying there's no punctuation because it allows me to pull these chunks out and not feel like I didn't start or stop at the right place. Okay.
“Most peoples throughout time have seen beyond the visible world. They, and still we, rely on symbols, objects, rituals to summon forces of protection and plenty, knowing to respect and evoke the unseen world with offerings.
Modern culture is an anomaly to the pattern of human cultures, withdrawing from everything except our five material senses, arrogant with vision that sees about 1 percent of what the light spectrum reveals.
Seeing so little, we grow more frantic to know what is out there, yet push aside those who see.”
[00:30:33] Meg Wheatley: That's right. Yeah. Amen. Yeah. I mean one of the things that truly infuriates me still is the arrogance of Western materialistic scientists who believe these absurd things, like there's no such thing as consciousness. It's only created by the human brain. Oh, really? Well, that's demeaning.
And they ridicule those ancient ones who are now still present with us in the form of mystics and yogis and great enlightened beings who know how this universe works. And yet they just, the scientists who are so stuck in their materialism, like if it doesn't exist in matter, it doesn't exist.
So it is only the five senses, whereas anything spiritual, mystic realm, is because you know you can access things beyond the five senses, as you and I described in our experience with communion. So the arrogance of Western science is one of my current, like, just stop, realize this wisdom is still here.
And you just deny it and you say it's magic. My Tibetan Buddhist teacher said, what you call magic is just someone who knows how to work with the elements, with the universe. But we dismiss it so easily.
But here.…
[00:32:11] Liz Wiltzen: Are you going to read?
Meg Wheatley: I am.
Liz Wiltzen: Yay.
[00:32:13] Meg Wheatley: This is the reason I wrote this book.
“I'm not interested in being hopeful or optimistic or working diligently to reverse the pattern path of history we tread so reliably toward collapse.
I am interested in being able to stay in the midst of this terrible travesty that degrades the human spirit or denies we have one.
Caught on the balance beam of meaningful work and terrifying times, I want to walk steady in the world, learning what balance feels like, blessed by the active presence of companions in sacred world.”
[00:33:04] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, now you're really talking about community.
[00:33:08] Meg Wheatley: That's right. Yeah. And non-egoic participation.
[00:33:14] Liz Wiltzen: And this beautiful, I believe it is the mantra or the whatever we want to say for the Berkana Institute, which is your Institute that trains Warriors for the Human Spirit, and I might say it backwards, but, “Whatever the problem, community is the answer.”
Meg Wheatley: That's it. Yeah.
Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. And, and if we can include, like, if we understand that that means community, like the whole cosmos, that's where the answers are. In our relationship and our conversations with the humans and the more than humans.
[00:33:48] Meg Wheatley: That's right.
[00:33:49] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah.
[00:33:51] Meg Wheatley: That's right. Absolutely true. Absolutely true. And that's what indigenous peoples, who I believe are the last vestiges of the goddess culture, have been trying to teach us. And then warn us. And now help us get through this time.
[00:34:10] Liz Wiltzen: So in your training of Warriors for the Human Spirit, do you want to just say a little about kind of what the elements of that training are?
What are the key things…
[00:34:25] Meg Wheatley: Well, the outcome that we are seeking and that we do achieve is to be the presence of insight and compassion, both.
Really being able to see what's needed and not just go through the world with our hearts wide open, which ultimately we've all been there ends in enormous fatigue, depression, even suicidal thoughts.
So we have to discern what's needed and then whether we're the right person to serve that need. So our training, I mean, it's continuous… We want to first develop a stable mind and we do that through meditation. There's no other substitute for becoming familiar with how I am, what triggers me. What thoughts grab me? What role do these strong emotions play in me? And there are ways to just learn to watch the mind and not be seduced off into the dramas we create.
My teacher now has characterized us as ‘misery manufacturing machines’, we spend all this time just focused on little me without realizing that we have created this personality, this identity.
You know, when people say, “well, that's just how I am”, well that's resigning yourself to a fate of what you created. There is no such thing as ‘Meg Wheatley out there in the universe’, just waiting for me to notice what she means. I create the meaning, I create the identity.
So the good news is we can change that.
But the way we change that is by becoming more and more aware. Meditation as a practice, as a daily practice, is a necessity, I would say, for all of us. Not guided meditation, but meditations where you're just watching what your mind wants of you. And then noticing it and rejecting it. Or coming back to presence when you can, you know, as soon as you notice.
We also work with mind, body…
[00:36:41] Liz Wiltzen: Wait, before you move on, I just want to say one thing about meditation. I've been practicing meditation for about 15 years and I know you have forever. And I just want to talk briefly to people who don't meditate a lot because there is a misconception about what it is.
Meg Wheatley: Yes.
Liz Wiltzen: That I am meant to sit and quiet my mind. And in fact, it's the dead opposite of that.
[00:37:06] Meg Wheatley: Thank you so much, Liz, for bringing that in. Most people say, well, I can't meditate because my mind is just going crazy on me. And so what you've just said, I'm just going to underline it. That's how it is for all of us, even the very advanced meditators.
But you know what to do with it. You're not trying to achieve a quiet mind. It is possible after long dedication to meditation to just open to the world, but the practice serves you so well, even though you're thinking all the time. I give meditation instructions on my website, and the core practice is: Whenever you notice you're having a thought, an emotion, you're listening, a song is playing, you're in a fantasy, you just label it.
Very innocently, you say “thinking”, and then you come back to just trying to watch it. And sometimes you're saying “thinking” continuously for the length of time in that expression. What meditation gives us, you do develop a sense of peace, calm. and presence, but it just arises out of the practice of noticing how often you're thinking, how frequently you’re just caught, seduced by your thoughts.
But over time, I think one of the greatest benefits of meditation is you get more done in less time. Completely predictable amongst us. Things just, the idea of flow, the idea of things coming together for you and getting a lot of stuff done. It's, it's an incredible blessing.
[00:39:08] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, because we consume so much energy chasing things in our mind unconsciously, not even knowing that we're doing it.
I also just want to add that the other thing that I really notice you get from meditation that you speak to the importance of is: you're training yourself to stay with all of it, no matter how weird or twisty or uncomfortable it is. You're just sitting there going, okay. Okay, I don't need to leave from this experience.
[00:39:40] Meg Wheatley: Yes, and that staying power is a gift we bring to others, that we're willing to stay. We're not going to flee into self protection.
But the other aspect of warrior training that is very essential is we learn to open our eyes and to take in more information, and to see beyond our filters, our biases, our judgments. What's right and what's wrong, what's good and what's bad. I don't trust that person, you know, just by appearance.
So so much of the work now in which we're trying to overcome biases and judgments is actually in my experience, much easier to do if we just develop an increased sense of curiosity.
I teach a lot of practices of when you go for a walk, just notice something that stops you because it's so interesting. Don't say anything about it. Don't judge it. “I like that. I don't like that.” But just keep opening your perception more and more. And that's such a rich gift.
[00:40:50] Liz Wiltzen: That's one of the practices in the book. We're going to ping pong around, but that's okay because I know we can, we can hold the track…
[00:40:55] Meg Wheatley: Yes this is in the book.
This one is called “Seeing the familiar with new eyes”, and I use it all the time. I use it personally all the time, but now I'm really trying to wake up people's perception.
When you're with someone that you don't want to be around, one thing you can do is just stop your mind and just notice something new that you've never noticed about them before.
[00:41:22] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, this person you've been married to for 30 years. What's something I've never noticed about them before?
[00:41:29] Meg Wheatley: Yes, I mean, that's fascinating and really good for relationships. But I use it, since I'm oriented towards the workplace now, for the people who are bugging you. If you’re in a conversation with someone, just notice something new about them. That creates a relationship. And then you start to be, maybe a little less judgmental of them or a little less defensive of them.
But the other thing that I have done a lot is, especially when I'm with a corporate man who is just driving me crazy, or I just think is really obnoxious, even dangerous, to what's going on—I just flash for a moment to: I wonder how much people loved this person when he was like a darling two year old.
Liz Wiltzen: Yep.
Meg Wheatley: That helps too. We're just trying to, there's a word here of, we're just trying to ventilate or create more space in our perceptions of one another in our judgments. of one another. And it really helps to develop much easier relationships with people.
You don't end up liking them, but I feel so much more compassion now for people when I really tune into something new about them and maybe the nature of what they're struggling with, now, is very easy for me to identify and then it's not about me and you, it's about oh, I think I could feel compassion for you. I'm still not going to take what you just said, but I don't have aggression in me now.
[00:43:15] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. And that's like, what a gift to self to not get yourself worked up. And I'm certain you're going to agree with this,
I find that you cannot be curious and judgmental at the same time.
Meg Wheatley: Excellent.
Liz Wiltzen: They can't coexist.
[00:43:33] Meg Wheatley: That's wonderful. In its simplicity, Liz, that's a really wonderful statement. It's just impossible. Yeah.
[00:43:41] Liz Wiltzen: And do you know who Wendy Palmer is?
[00:43:44] Meg Wheatley: I loved Wendy. We worked together in Shambhala Leadership Institute for years.
[00:43:49] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, I interviewed her a while back on the podcast and I'm so grateful, just in the year before she died.
Meg Wheatley: Yeah, wonderful that you had that.
Liz Wiltzen: And I want to say, as you're speaking about this kind of aerating of the space, she speaks to the porousness, to being porous in your own being so that when aggressive energy is coming at you, you're not solid. It has nothing to hit.
[00:44:15] Meg Wheatley: Hit up against. Yes.
[00:44:16] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah.
[00:44:17] Meg Wheatley: That's her great martial arts training right there. Yeah.
[00:44:20] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah.
[00:44:21] Meg Wheatley: I think that's very challenging for us as women. Because we do need defenses and we need boundaries, but it's how to have them without feeling threatened, fearful, or aggressive in response. That's the challenge.
[00:44:39] Liz Wiltzen: And you, in particular, spend a lot of time traveling in those worlds of white, corporate, you know, the whole patriarchy, all of it.
So I'm guessing this is, we're, we're just continuing on toward What is it to be a Warrior for the Human Spirit and what is the training that is required and what are the qualities of being that are required? Like if you could just say, and maybe I'm asking way too simple of a question, but how have you come to a place where you don't lose yourself when you’re in the presence of people coming at you saying…
[00:45:23] Meg Wheatley: Well, I still lose it, but I recover very quickly.
[00:45:27] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah.
[00:45:28] Meg Wheatley: And that's the role of training. I still notice it, need to leave the scene, but then I can move into this place of understanding and compassion that then allows me to choose. Do I want to be with that person? Or do I just hold them in compassion, but I'm sorry, you can't get near me again.
And the way we develop that is just through the discipline of practice and not beating ourselves up when we lose it. You know, it's how quickly we regain, I mean, I'm remembering the teaching I received a long, long time ago from one of the founders, a small little Japanese man who, I don't know which martial art, it may have been Wendy's, that he developed.
And he would just stand there while a huge force, a huge man, came at him and he could not lose his ground at all, and he could just put out a finger and stop him. I have seen this.
So it's remarkable levels of control. But when someone asked him, how do you do that? How do you not get pushed away or ungrounded? He said, Oh no, no, I get ungrounded. I just recover much faster than you do.
[00:47:06] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah,
[00:47:07] Meg Wheatley: And so part of my teaching is also always when we have these moments of, we just lose it, I mean, one of my key staff people has gone through two days where she hates who she's becoming, like she's mad at everything. So she's beating herself up for that. And I said, no, you noticed it. How good is that?
So we never become perfect, but we notice our bad behaviors faster. And that's what we need to thank ourselves for. I noticed it. I have a commitment to not get triggered. And when I get triggered, it's just how quickly I can come back.
[00:47:55] Liz Wiltzen: Okay, I want to say something about this because I'm just putting something together right now. So you notice it, but then when you notice it, you have that whole aversion in yourself to that quality of you…
[00:48:09] Meg Wheatley: You've already committed not to be that way.
[00:48:12] Liz Wiltzen: Okay, but let's say that you are feeling that, right? So you get triggered, you lash out in rage or whatever, then you notice it, then you're like, ah, I have rage in me, I don't like it.
This is where the training to stay comes. I can stay with this feeling of I don't like how I just was, if I can stay with the feeling, then I don't have to judge the feeling, then I don't have to get…’cause the whole time that I’m beating myself up for how I was is time I'm not recovering to self. Because I'm over here beating myself up.
But if I can stay with, I don't like how I just was there, without beating myself up, it’s a faster through line.
[00:49:03] Meg Wheatley: That's true. Very true.
And one of the practices I would add to that is the first noticing of very strong emotions like anger or grief or rage, I learned this from a Buddhist teacher, is to externalize it and say, there is rage, not I am rageful.
There is loneliness, not I am lonely. And when you externalize it, which a lot of Western psychology would say is disassociation, but you're, you're not letting it define you, and very often,—I use this practice all the time—I mean, I'm saying over and over again, there is powerlessness, there is powerlessness and it neutralizes it. So then I can act with sanity. Then I can see more clearly.
[00:50:05] Liz Wiltzen: Well, I, because you just said sanity again, I want to bring in your one way that you frame sanity is that—I could find it and read it, I’m just going to paraphrase and you can correct. “Sanity is moving in a way that is life affirming and insanity is moving in a way that is life destroying.”
[00:50:29] Meg Wheatley: That's right. Simple as that.
[00:50:30] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. And so when you're wanting to create islands of sanity that require sane leaders on the island, that's like a hallmark. That's a thing—check in, is the way we're moving life affirming or life destroying. Would you say it that way or?
[00:50:47] Meg Wheatley: Yes. I would, I would add to it that role of the leader or the convener is that we start with our unshakable faith in people's capacity, possibility to be generous, creative, and kind. You could add other qualities if you want. Because the leader must have this faith. Otherwise they will lose their way very quickly when they meet bad behaviors or people turn on them or slander them. They'll give up. They won't stay.
So we have to have this unshakable faith that people can be generous, creative, and kind, but the ‘can be’ is the leader's work. How do I create the conditions so that these qualities can blossom? Now that's life affirming, but it's much more nuanced than that to say that my role is: You don't believe in yourself.
You don't think you're creative. I'm going to do my best, against all odds these days, to create the conditions for you to work well together with colleagues so that you notice you made a creative contribution. So you notice that people actually valued what you just said. This is going now to the practices of working well together.
So it's the leader's commitment to keep creating those conditions so that people can wake up to who they really are. Because most of us feel terrible about ourselves these days. And we're told we're terrible. We're told we're inferior, second rate, worthless.
[00:52:39] Liz Wiltzen: And so you may be giving me the answer in reverse there, but how do you create those conditions?
[00:52:46] Meg Wheatley: That's the whole book. That's the whole book.
[00:52:49] Liz Wiltzen: Yes.
[00:52:50] Meg Wheatley: I give a pattern language, design principles for creating any process you want. If it follows those design principles, people will show up and people will display these, what's all inherent in all of us but it can be so distorted and buried at this point where people are too tired to want to participate, so everything is participative.
But everything starts with the work that we have to do together. No other choice, no other coming up with a recipe for the perfect team that's diverse and inclusive, none of that.
Put the work in the center and get everyone involved who should be involved in solving that problem or making that function better and then you'll see the value of diverse perspectives, but then it's no longer a label or a judgment.
I've done this now, I think, how many decades, at least 40 years, been knowing that if you put work at the center, then people get to know each other and then you develop respect and then you develop an appreciation for their story.
But it's in the context of we're going to get work done here. We're going to solve problems that affect us. There's no other way to go forward with this. I think we've got things so ass backwards, and I'm using that term so deliberately now, because we think we have to respect each other before we can work together.
No, it doesn't work that way. We do the work and then I kind of wake up to, Oh wow, you just said that. Wow. That, that's interesting. I never thought you thought that way.
You know, I have so many years. of experience with this, and I'm increasingly, how would I describe myself now? I'm no longer frustrated that we start at the wrong place.
We start at the end with, We need to be respectful. We need to learn how to listen to each other. We need these skills. We need inclusion, diversity, and coming to terms with our own judgments and microaggressions.
Put me in with a group of people with a challenging task and the right process, where we do have to listen to each other, and you'll just see what happens.
I mean, it all works well when we can be fully human together doing work that matters to us. There's nothing artificial about it.
[00:55:48] Liz Wiltzen: It's interesting, I'm really feeling as you're saying, what is the work that we're doing together? it feels like you're speaking to the ultimate work is: What serves the good of the community.
[00:56:03] Meg Wheatley: That's it. That's it. But people want to serve their communities. People want to be in a healthy relationship. People want to contribute. They want to learn. These are just basic needs and that's why we're suffering so horribly now. It's why our children are going crazy.
[00:56:27] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, because we've come into such an independent way of being in the world…
[00:56:31] Meg Wheatley: In a meaningless world, in a frightening world. Where we cannot solve the problems that needed to be solved.
It's a desperate time for teenagers and 20 somethings. We have a number of projects going with educators now that get kids involved in their community in one way or another to do good work and to form relationships. Really meaningful work, you know, for kids who are lost or suicidal.
[00:57:07] Liz Wiltzen: When you say really meaningful work, can you give a couple of examples for kids?
[00:57:11] Meg Wheatley: Well, it's doing community work. It's visiting with a homeless person. It's doing gardens, regenerative agriculture, working with the land. It's deciding, I mean, we have a lot of experience with this through one of our Warriors in Europe, he had the children and he was giving them warrior training, it blew my mind that he trusted them with these adult concepts, but they responded.
And so he asked them to choose a project. What was something going on in their community that they wanted to help work on? So in the Netherlands, it was homelessness. But in Nepal, the children needed work on alcoholism because their parents had become so abusive. That was a shock to us.
But kids can easily identify problems and then you give them a chance to work on it and to work with adults on it. It's transforming for them.
[00:58:21] Liz Wiltzen: Wow.
Meg Wheatley: Yeah.
Liz Wiltzen: Wow. I mean, it's so obvious when you say it.
Meg Wheatley: Isn't it? Isn't it? Yeah.
Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. And I want to tie in something you say that, it sounds like you say young people are just tuned into this and then as adults we get into, What's my meaning and what's my purpose?
But you said, “The world offers innumerable opportunities for meaningful contribution if we allow the world to define what is meaningful.”
[00:58:54] Meg Wheatley: That's right. That's exactly right. You know, we are, um, I used to do this work, I used to lead work in discovering your purpose, defining your values, understanding what you wanted, I don't even want to say, what your contribution was, because it wasn't that, that selfless. It was what I want the world to give me so I will feel satisfied. So I define meaning.
And now with the great switch, the 180 degree switch is: The world has so much, and you need to tune in to define what does this world, the world around me, the group I'm with, my family, my community, my organization, what do they need? What's needed here? And am I the one to contribute to that need?
And you'll be overwhelmed with possibilities for service. But it's not going into the world demanding I find opportunities that serve my purpose. We’re way past that. That was a great period of time. I think it was very possible, I certainly experienced that firsthand.
Now this world has so much need for us, and if we still want to serve it, we need to ask the world. And the world is too big a term. It's our world, our sphere, where we are with what we're doing and the people we're engaged in. What's needed here?
[01:00:34] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, what's needed here, and I love your question of, Am I the one, do I have something that would be of service here and am I resourced? Do I have the support that I need? Because you talk about burnout of activism.
[01:00:54] Meg Wheatley: That's right. Exactly. Exactly.
[01:00:54] Liz Wiltzen: And that they're not actually helping if they go into the fray in a burnt out state.
[01:01:00] Meg Wheatley: That's right. In the song line I identify one of the places as The Swamp of compassion.
[01:01:09] Meg Wheatley: We just, you know, with our hearts open and such a strong desire to help, we just get enmeshed or trapped or even drowned in, there's so much need. And especially when you see it so clearly. If all you're trying to do is respond to everything with no discernment…
Discernment is, am I in the right place? As you spoke about, am I resourced? Am I stable? Do I have a stable life? What are my skills? And then in that way you select down, you still end up with far too many things where you would like to contribute and you can't. And the other thing I want to add here is that it's possible to become the presence of insight and compassion, but we will always feel that we haven't done enough.
It's impossible to relieve suffering the way we want to or to support one another the way we want to. So disciplined practice and strong community are more and more essential for them.
And that's why I'm going to go back to Islands of Sanity, why I'm now, as a systems thinker, focusing us on how do we create both a place of sanctuary and possibility?
We have to protect ourselves from these negative dynamics. So, we have to close out that. We certainly stay open to what's happening, but it's the power of our relationships of our community that makes it possible to be sane and to create good work together. It won't change the greater world, but it will certainly give us meaningful lives in the midst of intensifying insanity.
[01:03:16] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, back to “Joy is a consequence of working together in difficult times.”
Meg Wheatley: Yes.
Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. It will give us joyful, meaningful lives.
I have two or three more questions I'd like to ask you. Give me a minute here. I did get through four of my six pages though, so that's good.
Okay, I want to bring in a practice in the new book, “Restoring Sanity”, but before we do, I want to come back to Warriors for the Human Spirit. You said something that I love so much, that a fundamental teaching of the Shambhala Warrior—and Shambhala warrior, do you want to say a little bit about the prophecy of the Shambhala warrior just to nod to Joanna Macy?
[01:04:04] Meg Wheatley: Well, I want to honor Joanna Macy for her decades of work of bringing us this prophecy that comes from a kingdom of conscious people, Shambhala, somewhere probably in what's now Afghanistan, according to my Tibetan teacher.
And the prophecy stated there would come a time when all of life is threatened and great barbaric powers have arisen that threaten one another with weapons of mass destruction. And at that time, the Shambhala warriors come back, they come forth. This is Tibetan Buddhism. They come again, armed with only the weapons of compassion, insight, and they serve this time.
That was well prophesied in just about every culture that I've looked at. There is the prophecy of this very dark time when human nobility is needed. I really love naming it noble action, that we're willing to serve others and to sacrifice some of what we thought we could still hold on to because we understand the times. And so that's the prophecy. And it's this time now, I mean, every Tibetan teacher is saying, yeah, this is the time for the Shambhala warriors to come forth.
[01:05:38] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. And I, I can't let this interview end without nodding to Pema Chodron, who is a dear friend of yours. And…
[01:05:47] Meg Wheatley: And was my devoted teacher for 10 years.
[01:05:48] Liz Wiltzen: For 10 years. I found her work years ago and, I mean, oh my God, she's just such a remarkable being.
[01:05:57] Meg Wheatley: And remaining so. Yes.
[01:05:59] Liz Wiltzen: How old is she now?
[01:05:59] Meg Wheatley: She is going to be 88 in July.
[01:06:04] Liz Wiltzen: Wow.
[01:06:05] Meg Wheatley: But she's in very fine form. Very fine form.
[01:06:08] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. Yeah. So how blessed for you to have a friendship and have her as a teacher, and it so emanates from you as one of your influences, you can just tell in how you hold the world and how you bring things.
Okay. So, with this fundamental teaching of the Shambhala Warrior: Because they trust themselves, they have no need to convince others through deception.
Oh my God. I love that line so much because they're not motivated by fear. They have confidence. Can you please say something about this.
[01:06:46] Meg Wheatley: I have it sitting right here. It's the foundational quote for warrior training.
So because they trust themselves, they have no need to deceive others, to manipulate situations. So we have the possibility, the more we trust ourselves, which means we trust ourselves to know when we're going to go off on somebody or when we're in a situation…Be careful here, Meg. You're going to get triggered. And if you're prepared, then you're not triggered.
But we have to have confidence that we are doing our right work.And then we don't try and deceive others. We don't try and manipulate situations. And it leads in the second part of the quote, “but since their confidence has never deteriorated, they are not fearful of anyone.”
This is the elemental strength of setting out on a warrior path, knowing what I'm here for and then being with other warriors who also strengthen me and give me solace and a good time, dark humor, when I need it most.
[01:08:06] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. So confidence in that. And the confidence that comes from self responsibility for your triggers. For your hooks, for your behaviors.
Meg Wheatley: That I'm awake to myself, yes.
Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, yeah. Okay, I'm so glad we went there, that was awesome.
Meg Wheatley: I'm so glad that speaks to you so much.
Liz Wiltzen: Yeah, it really does. I shared it with my three best friends yesterday, telling them I was preparing for the interview, and shared that thought, and we just dug into it. What does this mean for us? It was a great conversation.
Okay. Coming back to, let's come back to, I want to name one of your practices in Restoring Sanity because what I love about this particular one is it translates anywhere, even just in a one on one relationship. And that's the practice of When You Can't Let Go. Do you want to speak to it?Do you know what it is with no more prompting from me?
Meg Wheatley: Give me more of the details.
Liz Wiltzen: Okay. Okay. Yeah. So it's like when you're hooked and you’re in the story and and you're going around and around and you're judging the other person. And then you just remove yourself, find a place and say, what do I seem to need in this situation? And then what does the other seem to need?
[01:09:29] Meg Wheatley: I invented this practice probably 10 years ago when I was really struggling with my adult children. I was just beside myself with their, their ignoring me, I think was the issue then. And I finally just said, okay, what do you really need here, Meg?
What do you need from your adult children and what do they need from you? At this moment, that just opened everything. I mean, I got down to some very basic needs. I needed respect. I needed appreciation. But when I got into their needs for me, it was the same thing. So they needed more time where I was just offering my respect and appreciation for them.
Boy, did that change the relationship.
Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. No kidding.
Meg Wheatley: Because I could just be fully present for them and realize. This is who I want to be as a mother. I want them to feel appreciated and respected. And then my own needs just faded away.
But what's so good about this practice is what you discover about the other person, but because you are turning toward them. It's not all about me. It's not what I need and what I'm not getting and what they're doing wrong to me or what, you know, that that's our basic focus, right? What I'm not getting.
And then when you turn to the person, I've used this in an organizational setting where there's conflict also, you develop a greater appreciation of them and greater opening of possibilities.
And then you get down to the essence. So I do need respect, but the way I achieve that in the case with my older children was by how I was with them.
If I was in a work setting and I realize I need respect, but what they need from me is blah, blah, blah, then I'm going to present myself in a way that demands respect.
[01:11:52] Liz Wiltzen: I want to say that what felt so potent about this inquiry in this practice is the, what do I seem to need? So I may need it. And I may discover I don't actually need it. And either way is fine. Either way is fine. But the saying seem to need is, that's the opening. That's the curiosity. What do I seem to need here?
Because once you locate it, because you ask, what do I seem to need? Once you locate it, then you can say, Is it true? Like, do I actually need this?
[01:12:27] Meg Wheatley: It's usually startling that you really didn't need all that stuff. But there is an essential need here. And it's a need that serves the other, not just yourself as well.
[01:12:43] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. Because then when you say, what did they seem to need? you've already opened up as you've gotten curious, we've turned off the judgment switch and turned on the curiosity switch. So now we're in creative land. Now we're in the world of creativity.
[01:12:58] Meg Wheatley: Exactly. But what that takes is a very big switch to not approach this from an egocentric force. And the reason I said that, you know, if I want respect from my kids now, I know what to do with them. If I'm looking for respect in a conversation, in a corporate setting or an organizational setting, I’m going to structure it so that I'm worthy of respect and I'm very clear that I deserve this, you know, so,
[01:13:36] Liz Wiltzen: yeah, it's non negotiable.
[01:13:38] Meg Wheatley: That's right. But it's dependent on the situation, right?
[01:13:41] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. Okay. I'm going to, I'm going to say a teaching that you gave from Chögyam Trungpa. And is this a personal Tibetan teacher of yours, or?
[01:14:00] Meg Wheatley: No, this is the founding teacher of Shambhala. He was Pema's primary teacher, was also my source for teaching warriorship. I was given that by him.
[01:14:12] Liz Wiltzen: Okay, beautiful. So here, here's what he says, “Everything gets clear when you're cornered.”
Meg Wheatley: Yes.
Liz Wiltzen: “Dead ends, unsolvable problems, desperate situations. When we're about to give up, a spark lights in a person or group and a way opens. This is miraculous and predictable. We are naturally creative, especially in the most difficult circumstances.
[01:14:40] Meg Wheatley: Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, we all know this, Liz.
We all know this. We have this in our direct experience of at a point when you were about to give up or you just couldn't think your way through it, you just relax a little bit and insight and answers come to you.
[01:15:02] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. And I love, because you're such a proponent of you need the community, you need the allies, you need the support systems, that's what helps you relax enough.
[01:15:13] Meg Wheatley: Well, no, actually I relax into my confidence. I relax into my clear seeing, my clarity. And I relax into that I can be trustworthy in whatever the situation is. But I have to say, quite wonderfully, I relax into guidance. I relax into insight coming from elsewhere. And I've never been disappointed by that either.
Community may give me stability, but it doesn't, it's not my source of insight.
[01:15:50] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. “Thank you, Raven.”
[01:15:53] Meg Wheatley: Yeah, that's right.
[01:15:54] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah. Okay. Let's just point people, shall we? I know you've got a new course coming up starting April 18th. Can you, you want to share a little bit about that? Yes.
[01:16:04] Meg Wheatley: Yes. I offer two courses a year, and this course is based on using Restoring Sanity and getting clear about what these practices are, but it's in the context of my other wonderful little guidebook, Perseverance. So it’s, What are the skills we need to persevere as we do this very difficult, challenging, joyful work of restoring sanity.
It's very deeply personal and grounded and also brings in the practices from Restoring Sanity. And it's only six weeks, it’s a short course for me. 90 minutes on a Thursday, if you can’t attend live, it's all recorded. I’m just trying to support us because I know this work is difficult.
We're up against fragmentation, fear, deliberate destruction of the human spirit, so those of us who are committed to restoring sanity, which is relying on the human spirit, we need a lot more grounding and a lot more skills. And so this is very skill oriented.
[01:17:17] Liz Wiltzen: And, and so I'm going to definitely get this episode live in time for people to know of this course and sign up April 18th, 2024.
Also your website is, you’ve set it up you said to be a library. It is a wealth of resources, both of your own thinking and knowing and understanding and collaborations with others.
[01:17:40] Meg Wheatley: Absolutely. And we keep strengthening it as a resource for all of us.
[01:17:47] Liz Wiltzen: And all your books are available there.You have 12 books. But the newest book, which just came out March19th, Restoring Sanity, the practices in that book are just so like, try them on and you're going to see something.
[01:18:04] Meg Wheatley: Yes. They do sell themselves when you do them.
[01:18:07] Liz Wiltzen: Meg, thank you so very much for coming.
[01:18:11] Meg Wheatley: This has been very wonderful for me, Liz, because of your own curiosity and your own homework that you did. I mean, I've heard things in my writing that I'd kind of forgotten about, or, I mean, some of the things, truthfully, some of the things you were reading, I thought, damn, that's good.
That's what you want as a creative person. You can look at your work and it's not ego that says it. It's just like, yeah, that got, I got it there. So thank you for that experience as well.
[01:18:47] Liz Wiltzen: You're so welcome. And it's just been such a privilege and an honor truly to have you spend this time with me. So thank you so much.
[01:18:55] Meg Wheatley: And you offer so much to your listeners. And I just want to thank you for that.
[01:19:01] Liz Wiltzen: Yeah.
[01:19:02] Meg Wheatley: You're doing great work here.
[01:19:04] Liz Wiltzen: Thank you very much. Such a blessing to be with you. Thanks, Meg.
OUTRO: Thanks for joining us today, everyone. If you like the show, I'd so appreciate it if you'd follow and share it with people you think would love it.
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Talk to you next time, and in the meantime, have a great week and keep your compass lined up with yes.
