Slowly Moving Rivers

Slowly Moving Rivers

I walked by the mill-race today, and the water moved lazily past me. It was almost as if the river said to me “I have nowhere to go in particular, but something magnetic compels me into motion.”

I, too, was stuck. I had nowhere in particular to go, insofar as I had all afternoon to write, and only wanted a few good words, maybe just 450 when I can easily write 4500 in that amount of time. 450 well-placed words, rather than 4500 aimless ones, is better. I felt that I wasn’t moving much, so I went for a walk instead.

Sometimes peoples’ progress is imperceptible, or so slow it almost drives you crazy. Like a slowly moving river, their approach is wide rather than narrow, they aren’t shooting through the rapids.

They wind around, rather than going in a straight line.

Their path is full of algae, even fallen branches, sometimes trash – shiny, empty skins of old Doritos bags, Pepsi cans sitting sideways, their mouths half-filled with muck. They aren’t moving fast enough to sweep the debris.

Are they getting anywhere at all? Does it even matter to them when the world around cries out with urgency?

I thought the river was in a conversation and it would turn out that the river was the listener today, but this is not the case. Today, the river was the one being listened to. Nearly stuck, almost a pond.

But not quite. Gravity continued to gently play her part, softly drawing the river north, never screaming or begging for much motion; just a little, continuing the flow, and it would be enough.

When we’re listening, and hoping for progress, and inviting people to move, we must remember that an aqueduct such as the Pont du Gard has a drop of 34 cm over a kilometer; that the river in my town is only 801 feet above sea level and has plenty of time to get there with very little gradient.

Vitruvius, a first century civil engineer, recommended no more than a drop of 1:4800 for an aqueduct. That’s because too much drop puts undue pressure on the system and causes more rapid deterioration of the entire system.

It’s easy to panic when we think that there isn’t time.

But there is time. Be like gravity, a slow steady pull. Even those who don’t seem to be moving very fast will one day get to the ocean. Your 375 words will be like 375 cm of drop in an aqueduct. Don’t try to use gravity too fast; the system may degrade from pressure and erosion.

When things move slowly (and you move beside them slowly) you’ll see things a rushing river or a dead sprint might not give you: two turtles sunning on a log. Four ripe blackberries you can eat. A robin with a worm. Slowly, you have the ability to avoid getting goose crap on your shoes. Slowly, you’ll see a duck kicking her way upstream. Slowly, the river gets where it’s going and you don’t miss the scenery, either. It’s two for the price of one.

Kinshasa Symphony

I got my yellow fever vaccination boosted on July 6, and have been preparing documentation to apply for a Visa. There are five or six Congo Reflections posts in the archives now, and you may want to take a look at those.

I went to my local public library where I like to pick up films out of the foreign section, and as I was on my way to look for a movie, perhaps in French to brush up on listening to that language, I was walking past the documentary section, glanced down, and this title jumped off the shelf at me. “Kinshasa Symphony.”

So I watched it. Twice. This 2010 film follows a group of Congolese through the slums as they perform everyday duties; one woman works as a wedding decorator (can that be a steady job?) while some of the men run pharmacies and barbershops; then, in the evening they gather to rehearse for the biggest symphonic performance that the Congo has perhaps ever seen.

Sometimes my friends ask “what is the purpose of art?” Why not do something productive?

The people in this documentary answer that question in the simplest of language. Find a copy of it. I highly recommend it.

A Listening Posture and the Knuckleball

What is a ‘listening posture’? We know that it refers to a mental or spiritual attitude, but what is it like: Standing, sitting, lying prone? A baseball catcher spends much of his career in a crouch or squat. Many of the greatest baseball coaches were former catchers, because of way their role on the field prepares them for the coaching job. They are often said to be the on-field coach. The catcher has several jobs. The first is to call for a pitch, so they set things in motion. (the coaching question) The second is to catch the pitch. (hear the answer) If they fail to catch the pitch, it can mean disaster. So the alternative is to knock the ball down. It’s not ideal, but it can keep a runner from scoring. If the catcher misses the ball and a runner scores, the team may even lose the game. Ironically, the pitcher is the one who is said to have “won” or “lost” the game. But much credit is often due this on-field coach. The hardest pitch to catch is the knuckleball. This throw involves putting no spin on the ball so that the ambient air may direct the ball, herky-jerky, up, down or to the side. It can be nearly impossible to hit, but is also very difficult to catch, because the catcher can’t anticipate its direction; it doesn’t go fast, but it doesn’t go straight. The pitcher can’t spend his time worrying about whether or not the ball will be caught. A knuckleballer puts a great deal of concentration into the pitch. It can be impossible to hit, yes, but when thrown incorrectly it can also be the easiest pitch for a batter to hit. A listening posture is that crouch: ready to catch the expected or knock down the unexpected so that you can pick it up and toss it back to the speaker. A really good listener, like a confident catcher, is always calling for the knuckleball. Give me the unexpected, and I’ll knock it down, toss it back to you … and help you turn it into a win.

Congo Trip Funding Tracker

You may realize from reading my Congo blogs that I’m preparing to go to Kinshasa in September for two weeks. I’ve been invited by Charles Buller at AIMM to help lead a coach training for pastors there, and while my North American trainees are able to pay for training, it’s obvious our Congolese friends living hand-to-mouth cannot afford to pay for our training. It will be my first visit to Congo for 27 years, and I’m very excited about sharing leadership principles; the big, hairy audacious dream is that Congolese leadership culture would be impacted for more authenticity and transparency among leaders; for more fruitful leadership on a church-wide level, and ultimately even at a political level, nation-wide, for the sake of all Congolese to be elevated out of the grind of oppression and poverty. We also recognize that there’s a good chance the Congolese we visit will take away something completely different from the experience than what we expect, and that’s okay! This rest of this post is just a simple report I will update as donations come in. If you are considering a donation but have questions about the trip, please do email me.

Here is the budget breakdown:

Airfare: $1698. Immunization and Visa: $265. Food, lodging and in-country travel: $500. Salary: $1700 (this has to cover about 3 weeks for our family). Admin: $314.

Donated or Pledged to date: $4300 as of 8/26.

Remaining need: $190 by ASAP. Email me (adam.fleming.lifecoach@gmail.com) to pledge, or make a tax-deductible donation via Paypal to my non-profit (Evergreen Leaders) here. I will update this post on a daily basis as donations come in.

Thanks! –Adam

Eliminate unplanned transitions for greater focus in your day

This morning I got ready for a client scheduled at 11 AM. Around 10:45 I gathered the client’s folder and some paper to take notes, my phone, my laptop, and moved to a location where I could work in private (the home office during the summer has become a high traffic zone. My wife is in and out, and my kids are watching a PBS show on the TV just outside the office door.)

The client didn’t call or connect on Skype, and by the time I decided to use this hour to blog on the subject it was 11:15. I did a few little things in between 10:45 and 11:15, confirmed evening plans with my wife and so on, but really I lost my focus and drifted for all of 30 minutes. In other words, I can’t tell you what I accomplished in that half hour.

If you’re like me, a real workday is about 10 hours. Losing 30 minutes of productivity during that day (and having to reschedule a meeting for another day) means I lost 5% of my day today and 10% of another day (this meeting has to happen, I can’t just cancel with the client). Part of my progress to stay on focus is to shut it off at 5 or 5:30 and very rarely do I let my workday dribble into the evening hours. It isn’t healthy.

I have heard it said that 90 minutes is a good block of time before you take a break. Granted, you need those short breaks – they help you focus too, once you get back to work. If they’re short, you’re more productive overall. The key here is that a break is a planned transition. The unplanned ones are the time-suckers.

Control what you can of your day. Plan your transitions well, and maybe you can get as much done in six hours as you used to in ten. Parkinson’s Law states that the time to complete a task will fill the time allotted. That’s like a turtle in a 20 gallon tank. The same turtle will grow much larger in the wild – in a pond or river. But you can break the law.

I would normally be happy with getting one good blog done in an hour, but this one is complete in 15 minutes, so I’m going to stop and move on again. Maybe I can salvage the rest of the hour this client left me with and accomplish a few other tasks before noon.

A final suggestion: plan ahead for unplanned transitions. For me, today, it was helpful to have a list of blog ideas I wanted to execute so I could just grab one and go. The reality is that you’ll have miscommunications or no call- no shows. Know what you’re going to do if something throws you off your focus. Have a “Plan B;” something small you can shift to quickly, ready at a moment’s notice.

Post script – the client ended up contacting me 30 minutes late – just as I finished this blog. I was glad to be able to squeeze her in. It saves me from doing that hour another day.

 

Congo Reflections Part 5: Liberty

The end game of leadership training in Congo is freedom.

This idea of “liberty and justice for all” we speak of in our pledge of allegiance hasn’t included people in our own country at all times, and it certainly hasn’t included Congo. I’ve addressed in earlier Congo Reflections posts the CIA meddling and even attempting assassinations in Congo. The arrogance of the idea that our military and covert ops ought to “protect our national interest” within the boundaries of other sovereign states is despicable to say the least.

But to focus on the positive: how does leadership training invite freedom in Congo?

Freedom, bravery and heroism are nebulous terms and the US Government, like most governments, control the message of those words. Facebook blew up in the past months with juxtapositions of (nee) Bruce Jenner against images of wounded warriors as examples of bravery. Jenner went through national criticism for the sake of his own comfort. But warriors themselves recognize that they serve a “national” interest driven by big government and (if possible, whenever possible) even bigger corporations.

This government, and these corporations, attract top level leaders, for whom money isn’t even the biggest attraction. It’s power. Power corrupts.

What is it to have a leadership style that lays down power and washes others’ feet instead? It is a leadership style that ultimately results in martyrdom, but its power ends up lasting much longer. Lumumba may have been, as I’ve mentioned, on his way to an absolute power, and who knows if it may have corrupted him? But I believe he was attempting to lead collaboratively – Congo for the Congolese, truly free from imperial influence. The cost was death. The Congo had a chance. The Congo deserves more chances at Liberty. The Congo needs leaders trained to give themselves up. An army of them. A horde. Not so that we invite them to die physically, though that may happen for some. But we invite a view of leadership that carries a vision of death to self. Death to self for a brother’s sake, Jesus said, was the greatest love a man could bear. That’s great leadership, and that frees the people. It is one of the greatest truths known to humanity.

This is truth that sets us free.

Help reverse the trend of imperialism and partner with my trip to Congo to train leaders here!

June 30 is the Last Day of my Kickstarter Campaign

I raise money for lots of projects, but I don’t use crowdfunding campaigns too often (the last one was in 2012). Today’s the last day of my campaign so I’m pulling out all the stops. I only need $412 now to complete it, so I’m 100% certain it will happen.

This project, a non-fiction book titled “The Art of Motivational Listening” is exciting because I get to bring what I have to share with the world, and it’s not a how-to book. It’s not listening-for-dummies. The essays I’ve been writing expound upon the art of listening as an art form — that means rather than talk directly about it, I’m using lots of metaphor to describe what I’ve learned in the last eight years. You don’t explain a poem or a joke directly or it loses its punch. To explain the art of listening requires the same finesse.

If you want a preview of the book, just peruse the archives on my blog. Some of the blog posts will be edited and others will be eliminated. Some of the content won’t see the light of day on my blog.

The campaign, which you can find here, ends at midnight, Eastern time, on June 30. Everyone who contributes will get at least one copy of the book.

Many thanks to those who’ve already pledged!

Being Fish in an Estuary

Walked into my local coffee shop. My friend was waiting, smiled at me through the window.

After we talked, I sat to write blogs. The internet makes almost everyone a tiny fish in a huge ocean. It’s easy to fit, just find the shoal where your kind hang out and join the school of thought as an equal.

The coffee shop (MY coffee shop, as I think of it) makes me a known fish in a pond where it doesn’t matter how big you are. In Goshen, you are an equal. You drink from the same pot of coffee at this shoal, where the common thoughts include “it’s raining here and now” or “it’s sunny here and now” and especially “it’s really good to see your smile, here and now.”

Later on, a guy walked in. Used to coach him years ago. He said his daughter will give birth any day. Wasn’t that the case last time we talked? Yes, it was! Good to see you. I’ll drop by your business next week, see what you’ve been up to.

Surfing the shoals of the internet from the estuary of my local coffee shop is the best of both worlds for a little fish. You get to be in a big ocean, surrounded by and impacting schools of thought where you’re wanted and appreciated. And you get to be in a smaller part of that ocean as well, where you’re appreciated for your smile and nobody cares if you’re big-time. Blogging from the coffee shop allows me to be an individual and a part of the crowd at the same time.  Neither are bad, both are needed for good balance.

Congo Reflections Part 4: Coasting In Silence

David Law flew me back to Wembo Nyama. I was 14 and had spent four weeks away from my family. I needed a break from them, and everyone knew it.

The last straw was the night I smacked my little sister with a steel bowl, right on top of her head. At five, she was prone to running about naked, which embarrassed me, especially since we lived in a fish bowl. I mean that, at night, in one of the few houses with electric lights, it was not unusual to realize that neighborhood children’s eyes were peering in the windows. They were only naturally curious, wondering what these whites did at night in their closed-door, brick and tin-roof house, without a grasp of any social taboo of going to see for themselves. Seeing my sister, the nudist, in all her blonde Caucasian glory. As if we needed more reason for people to gawk. I was angry, peerless and alone, culture-shocked, stressed, dealing with my sister’s exhibitionism so my concern about the “paparazzi” was too much to bear, and I thumped her with a bowl and it sounded like a gong. And of course she cried quite a bit.

So they sent me to stay with the Laws for a while. A half-hour flight or so, in a single-prop Cessna to a different mission station. Take a break. Grow up a bit. Get some perspective. Stop fighting with dad. Socialize with some other Westerners.  Go for hour-long runs on the savanna where I could focus on my breathing and watch the occasional dung-beetle who also had to deal with his crap every day as he rolled his treasures across the same dry plateau; it was a chance to think only about as much as the beetle was thinking. I fell in love with running. It was one foot in front of the other, thoughtfulness without the need for a specific idea. You got your second wind, found your pace, and coasted along the dirt track in silence and slid back into the house unnoticed, sweating out my toxic anxieties in the process.

Before I went to stay with the Laws, I was going a little bit crazy, maybe a bit beyond the tolerances of normal adolescence. ‘Maybe’, I say, because even in retrospect, I realize that I only grew up once, and it happened to be in the middle of Zaire. So how would I know for sure if I was beyond my own ability to cope with being 14 in any way worse than it might have been in Illinois, on a strawberry farm where I knew the difference between fruit and weeds? But I’m pretty sure the added stress meant I was not coping as well as I might have in the States.

At the end of my retreat, as we flew back into Wembo, David said over the noise of the engine, “Check this out. I can cut the engine and we can glide the last two miles to the strip. Nobody will hear us coming.” Usually the arrival of an airplane was a major deal. Hundreds of people would show up at the strip to gawk at the plane, welcome strangers or say goodbye, help out with luggage somehow, hoping for a tip. To surprise my parents by walking in the door without anyone in town noticing, I liked this idea very much.

He cut the engine and turned the Cessna into a hang glider. The wings would bear us up just long enough to reach the strip and coast to the end. We began to lose altitude. I might have been afraid we’d crash, but my pilot was confident. The air rushed by, our velocity kept us moving forward, and all was still. A half-dozen noticed us coming, but there wasn’t the usual dozen-times-a-dozen spectators as we rolled down the last bit of clay airstrip, touching down like an ace at Wimbledon in that hush of the serve, just before the audience erupts in applause.

It’s significant for a person like me, who likes the bright lights of a stage, to have that desire to walk unnoticed. Coasting in silence on the outskirts of Wembo taught me that the ability to be at peace, and, at the same time, to be unnoticed while falling out of the sky, is a valuable art. That’s what I like about the riskiness of coaching someone – I can turn off the engine that drives my own decision-making process and let the wings of listening interact with the air of my client’s living and breathing and let them land on their own runway — or take off for jungles and oceans, all successes unknown.