What is the gift you have received from being part of the Occupy conversation?
Please help us start this dialogue now and then join the Cafe Call on Monday, 11/5 as well:
8-10a PDT | 11a-1p EDT | 3-5p GMT
Click here to register for all our Monday Vital Conversations
This theme will also inform our Tuesday "Connect2012" and Thursday "Occupy Heart" calls.
"Gifts" completes our cycle of the Six Conversations based on the model developed by Peter Block in Community: The Structure of Belonging, building on the "Dissent", "Possibility", "Ownership," "Invitation" and "Commitment" conversations we hosted from May through October.
Once again, we are delighted to welcome back co-hosts Eric and Elaine Hansen, who have worked extensively with Block, and are masters of this form. Our deep thanks and appreciation goes out to them for collaborating with us over these months to bring forth some amazing conversations. What a gift that has been! Thanks also to Peter, for his wisdom, insight and humor in designing and sharing this "way of being."
Here is Block's take on the essence of the Gifts conversation:
In our attraction to problems, deficiencies, disabilities, and needs, the missing community conversation is about gifts. The only cultural practices that focus on gifts are retirement parties and funerals. We only express gratitude for your gifts when you are on your way out or gone. If we really want to know what gifts others see in us, we have to wait for our own eulogy, and even then, as the story goes, we will miss it by a few days.
In community building, rather than focusing on our deficiencies and weaknesses, which will most likely not go away, we gain more leverage when we focus on the gifts we bring and seek ways to capitalize on them. Instead of problematizing people and work, the conversation that searches for the mystery of our gifts brings the greatest change and results.
The focus on gifts confronts people with their essential core, that which has the potential to make the difference and change lives for good. This resolves the unnatural separation between work and life. Who we are at work is our life. Who we are in life is our work. The leadership task––indeed the task of every citizen––is to bring the gifts of those on the margin into the center. This applies to each of us as an individual, for our life work is to bring our gifts into the world. This is a core quality of a hospitable community, whose work is to bring into play the gifts of all its members, especially strangers....
This means we enforce a complete ban on denying gifts and discussing weaknesses and what is missing. No human problem solving allowed. Often, people, so conditioned by the retributive culture that we have experienced, want negative feedback. This is packaged in the name of learning and growth.
Don’t buy the packaging. The longing for feedback that we can “work on” is really a defense against the terrible burden of acknowledging our gifts and getting about the work of living into them, which we can call “fulfilling our destiny”––language so demanding and imposing, no wonder I would rather keep swimming in the morass of my needs and incompleteness.
Community: The Structure of Belonging, pp. 139-141
Image courtesy Sindrome Feliz via the Group Works Deck
