Thoughts on the universe

Diversity is a term that is commonly used throughout business these days.  Much of my work is in Europe and further afield such as Dubai and Hong Kong and I regularly coach people from all across the world as part of the programmes I run and follow up coaching that I do.  Many people are passionate about diversity as an issue or a value.  Yet something troubles me about diversity.  What I notice is that in identifying diversity with ethnic background, gender etc. we have fallen into the trap of re-inforcing people’s identification with their gender, ethnic background etc.  The assumption is that one woman speaks for all women, or one Chinese, Italian, Black, Indian, English person speaks for all.  It makes someone’s viewpoint synonymous with their gender, ethnic background, race.  We are defining people by these elements.  Surely, paradoxically, this is the very thing that we are trying to get away from?  If we identify people with these things then it does divide us completely into separate beings with nothing in common, it divides us into us and them rather than just “us”.

I do not think that diversity of viewpoint is synonymous with these things; I have met Chinese people who are very similar in their viewpoint to English people; I have met men and women who share very similar prejudices and views about the world.  This is not diversity.  The aim behind the focus on diversity is that it is the antidote to closed mindedness; that it fosters an open mind.  Yet my experience has been that this is not the case, I have noticed instead that what fosters open-mindedness is open-mindedness.  If we become fixed and rigid about what constitutes open-mindedness then we are being closed-minded.  At the moment, if a group is composed of mostly men it is immediately seen as closed minded or lacking breadth of perspective.  If a group is composed entirely of women, or one ethnic background the same is assumed.  Yet my experience is that it is not about the background or gender of these groups but rather the open-mindedness of the individuals within them.

This paradox seems to lie at the heart of many issues.  Those who are most fanatical about racism are often full of prejudices; those who are anti-war are often some of the most aggressive people, prepared to fight warmongers to the death!  I am not against diversity; the fact that we are all different is paradoxically what we all share in common, it is a point of unity not of division.  At a recent lecture by Edward De Bono, someone asked him what wisdom was and Edward De Bono replied that it was the ability to have multiple perspectives through which to look at the world.  This strikes me as the real heart of diversity; the ability to hold multiple perspectives.  It has always saddened my heart to be with men when they talk about women as if they are a foreign species, similarly being with women when they describe men as a foreign species is equally sad for my heart; it diminishes us all when we are identified only with the superficial level of our skin, gender, cultural background.  I am not suggesting that these differences do not exist, indeed I notice that when people are not identified with them then they assume their proper place and we can laugh and play with them and be interested in them in a way which re-inforces our common sense of humanity.  I listen to colleagues tease each other about their nationality, background etc. I also hear people ask each other about how things are seen by others in different parts of the world, but behind these questions there is a warmth and interest which says – we know that we are fellow human beings beyond all these superficialities and this warmth of the common heart melts away the barriers or divisions.

When I worked at Islington Local Education Authority I was intrigued by the perspective of a woman on the senior management team; what drew me to her was her open-heartedness and open-mindedness.  She was wonderfully insightful.  She would tell me that I needed to be more Nigerian (she was from a Nigerian background), more assertive and less concerned about being tactful and diplomatic and she was in many ways right.  What intrigued me was that she told me that the private sector would be much quicker in getting past prejudice than the public sector because the public sector was too concerned with race.  In the private sector she noticed, companies were so obsessed with making money that they tended to pick people on the basis of their competence rather than their race.  She felt the public sector in its focus on equality and race re-inforced the emphasis on race as being the determining factor.  My own experience was that I noticed that the emphasis on being politically correct encouraged people to be more offended and take their nationalities, race and gender more seriously to be more stuck in identifying with it.  The result was that everyone played a game of competing to be the most politically correct and scapegoating anyone who made a mistake.  There was a wonderful man who came to speak about working creatively with children and addressed the whole conference of Islington staff.  He started by relaying his fears about coming to address Islington people and how scared he was about being politically incorrect and what would happen if something politically incorrect popped out of his mouth from his unconscious without him being able to stop it.  I looked around at everyone laughing and smiling at each other; in one brilliant stroke he had burst this awful bubble of fear which separated everyone.

As we become more global, companies are having to grapple with becoming international.  Life has set the game up very cleverly so that their ambition to be successful means that companies have to embrace other nationalities and break down barriers to be successful.  It makes me wonder how Life is going to cope and motivate us to evolve if we lose our greed?  Yet on a very regular basis the question I get asked by participants is, yes but how do you coach or lead someone who is from a different culture?  The Russians, the Chinese, the Malaysians, the Italians, the English, the Americans are different you can’t coach them in the same way!  Ironically I am often being asked this by each of these nationalities about each other.  People are adamant that in these cultures people really are very different and alien, yet it is a nonsense.  Businesses’ perpetuate the same myths – that only someone with industry expertise can understand their culture and the issues that people face but it is complete bunkum.  It is a myth perpetuated because people want to identify with being special or different in some way; they want a clique or club to belong to – the club of men, women, city traders, lawyers, Chinese, Italian etc.  It makes us feel insecure not to belong yet I think we are in the process of learning that we do belong.  We belong to the human race, to Life, to the Universe.  If we know we are part of the Universe we don’t make the mistake of settling for anything less or creating barriers against others.  It is hard for us clear away the illusions that get in the way but I think it is our work so that the universal flow of our hearts (love) can freely flow out to everyone.

Perhaps I have got to work on my prejudices about people who are prejudiced?!

When in Warsaw recently I was talking to one of my clients about what the organisational model of the future might look like.  It is clear that we are becoming more interconnected economically, something the current financial crisis is highlighting, and that we are learning how to manage this local and global world that we live in.  The internet has allowed us to conduct business in a more connected or networked way and there seems to be an increase in people working in a more independent relationship to organisations.  People no longer have the loyalty to organisations that used to prevail.  Instead they are loyal to their own development and to their particular skills, talents or needs and this journey is central rather than the job or organisation as used to be the case.  Indeed organisations are less loyal to individuals if they no longer require their skills or talents.  Organisations are also increasingly shedding the need to be master of all skills and instead hiring other firms to provide services that are not their core ability.  The large global law firms now have “best friend” relationships with local firms in jurisdictions where they cannot practice.  Out sourcing is a regular part of business life and my own experience is that free lance consultants form an increasing part of the marketplace.  Organisations are realising that they do not need such a tightly controlled relationship with individuals so there is an increase in interim working, flexible working etc.  Also individuals work often from home or across different countries.  This does not apply only to those in more privileged jobs but across the spectrum; for example Taxi drivers now regularly hire their car on a lease from a company which specialises in maintaining the car and will provide a new one if your current one needs work, thus even this is fragmented and specialised and taxi drivers are often part of federated syndicates which provide some independence but the value of a network.

Where is all this heading?  I am looking at the new age of Aquarius-Leo (cf. The Golden City by MC Philp) and realising it is about this very phenomenon of how we arrange the relationship between individual talent and the broader group or global society.  Europe is wrestling with this question; how do you network a group of individual countries together to the benefit of each of the individual countries?  Sadly, I’m not sure it is working because it is trying to go for the Aquarian end of the spectrum and Leo is popping up as the shadow, with each individual nation state secretly looking to its individual interests. 

What occurred to me when I thought about this new networked world of linking individual talents is that Life is already designed this way.  Each of us has a unique contribution that we are making as an individual to the collective society and its evolution.  Perhaps with the advent of the age of Aquarius-Leo this will stop operating unconsciously and we will become more conscious of it so we will actively look to work out how we bring out the talents of the individual and network them into the collective.

Reflecting on this, I realised it very much reflected what I am trying to do in terms of schooling.  How do we move away from the model of restrictive school institutions to a more virtual, networked relationship to schooling where each individual can flourish and develop their unique talents?  When I worked in Islington Local Education Authority, I ran into trouble because I was unhappy with the measurement system.  I was told that since I was on secondment from business I should be happy with measurement and that the point of the measurement was to help children from disadvantaged backgrounds.  I pointed out that I wasn’t against measurement but rather against narrow measurement which distorted things.  If they could measure the value for me of kindness, friendship, modesty etc. then I was very happy to measure but if it is was only a narrow set of criteria like academic subjects then the effect of measurement was not to help children but rather to cement their sense of failure and rejection.  I wanted everyone celebrated for who they uniquely were.

I wonder if this age of Leo-Aquarius is the seed point for a collective consciousness where we begin to see the workings of Life and how it is organising us and the world and we have the opportunity to work more consciously with this.  Certainly Chrissy Philp’s work on the model of the brain suggests so.  We are beginning to get a glimpse of the programme which is embedded in our brains.

I also wonder, as we move from a feminine age to a masculine age, whether we are beginning to shift away from the material to the intangible or creative.  It is like we have exhausted for now the possibilities of the tangible and its promise that we will understand the world and everything by breaking it down into its smallest components and now we need something more.  Business is shifting away from simply manufactuing goods to looking at brand, value, social networking, software as being the currency.  Indeed organisations like Wikipedia which is supported entirely by voluntary contributions have grown up.  I also notice that individuals are spending more and more of their personal money on those things which contribute to their individual growth – physical activities like yoga, self-development programmes and activities, education etc. in a way which is unprecedented.  I don’t suppose we will ever escape the need for physical resources but one could envisage a society of the future where our knowledge, wisdom and understanding represent our main currency and wealth.

At the moment the pursuit of money is dominant in society and even noble actions for our collective benefit need to be justified in the name of making money – “We should do charitable work, because it’s a good thing and it will raise our profile in the community, our market presence and revenue”.  In a conversation with my friend Steve, he pointed out that one of the UK’s biggest businesses he was working with was putting major pressure on suppliers to cut their rates because it was having such a bad year.  What came out was that the bad year was still going to be 2% better than last year which was 14% better than the year before.  The reason it was seen as such a bad year was that it was so far behind the budget.  My friend Steve wondered why nobody was questioning whether the budget was at fault rather than the performance of the business?  I think the current economic crisis is really a re-adjustment.  It is the exhaustion of money as the object – a disease which has been allowed to run its course.  We are all complicit in this, yet I wonder what is behind this disease?  It is taken for granted that money is the purpose of any business activity and we are all busy trying to manipulate and sell to each other.  We all recognise that we would not want others to treat us this way and would be horrified by it yet we all subscribe to the importance of marketing, selling and getting the best price we can.  If there is just us, then manipulating and selling and marketing is manipulating ourselves.  What if, we conducted business as if everyone we were interacting with was our best friend?  The current crisis is very much about this.  Everyone has been trying to make money out of everyone else and now the losers like Greece, Ireland and Italy are going to cause everyone to lo

The night before last I was reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel about Thomas Cromwell in the reign of Henry VIII and there was a passage describing the execution of monks by evisceration and burning.  It also described the crowd watching the events.  I caught myself reflecting on how we had moved on as a human race and feeling relieved that we could no longer contemplate public condonement of such cruelty.  As I traveled home, however, I was confronted with images of Gaddafi being beaten and shot in the stomach and head despite pleading for his life and my heart went out in pain to him.

On the one hand I have to appreciate the skill of Life for me personally, highlighting to me, “You think we have evolved and are no longer capable of such cruelty? – Try this!”.  I realised Life was saying: Careful! – no complacency, no expectations.  I recognise also the symmetry; Gaddafi who was responsible for the death and torture of many is “hoist by his own petard” and has to experience at a personal level the suffering he inflicted.  Perhaps, if we believe there is some continuation beyond death, this is part of the learning.  I am also struck by the elegant design of Life; those in the west who were left uncomfortable by the images were left without any moral ground to stand on because of the powerful symmetry with the assasination of Osama Bin Laden.  Even intelligent and compassionate friends of mine were able to justify the assasination of Bin Laden; in their view there were some people who were exceptions to the normal moral code, indeed in the USA, there was huge public celebration.

Many would say that it is progress that individuals like Bin Laden, Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein are no longer alive but I wonder instead if we have missed the point and squandered an opportunity for real progress.  When I was in my teenage years I began an interest in Nelson Mandela and his life. At the time, it was difficult to envisage how change in the apartheid regime could be brought about without violent revolution.  Yet South Africa made a peaceful transition.  It came about through Nelson Mandela’s willingness to take a different approach.  Which of us could have endured more than twenty-five years in prison without some instinct for revenge or retribution? Yet, from Life’s perspective you can see that the scale of the transformation he was going to make required a similar transformation at an individual level.  Twenty-seven years of imprisonment, looked at another way was twenty-seven years of meditation and personal development.  It was his crucible where he was confined in such a way that all he could work on was himself.  The result was that he came out of prison saying “peace, truth, reconcilliation, love” and meant it.  In one fell swoop he prevented anyone else being able to justify acting on feelings of retribution and revenge and he allowed the whole nation to take an evolutionary step.

Albert Einstein famously said that you cannot solve the problems of today at the level of thinking that created them.  We talk much about regime change in cases like Libya and Iraq, yet to replace a regime based on power and violence by using power and violence is no change.  Nelson Mandela’s approach and that of the Dalai Lama with China suggest a different way, to genuinely change regime by evolving beyond the “us and them” mentality which created these oppressive regimes.

The young teenager who killed Gaddafi was hoisted on shoulders brandishing his gun.  How sad that someone else now, will have to live with the responsibility of having murdered someone who was pleading for mercy and the rebels have founded a new regime whose seed point is violence and retribution.  As has been the case in Iraq and Afganhistan, the real work of evolution has not started yet and the West has responsibility for it’s complicit role in perpetuating the belief that power and violence are the ultimate currency in resolving difficulties.  We think there can be no compromise in dealing with people like Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein yet really there can be no compromise in dealing with our own capacity for violence and lack of compassion.  Imagine how all our hearts would have felt had they resisted the instinct for revenge.

In Greek tragedy, there was the concept of Miasma – that the sins perpetuated by heroes like Oedipus infected everyone.  The Greeks recognised in their tragedies that these miasma were not unavoidable, they sprung from the missed opportunities to stop negative chains of events.  Time and again, individuals had opportunities not to act but were not conscious enough or brave enough to resist their instincts or fears.  Thus the miasma was perpetuated.  It is easy to look back and think that such Greek tragedies belong to a different age yet they are just as real today and our opportunities to prevent the miasma of individuals like Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein being perpetuated is there to be seized as individuals like Nelson Mandela show us.  To see how strongly this miasma penetrates our culture, you only have to watch films such as Avatar (which was hailed as breaking the mould) or most Hollywood action films.  The plot is the same, there are the “good guys” who are victims of some more powerful oppressor (the “bad” guys).  The good guys then set about defeating the bad guys by becoming even more violent than they are and destroying them.  By the end, the reality is that the roles have switched and the oppressors have become the victims and the victims the oppressors.  They are indistinguishable yet we are expected to triumph in the violent success of the “good guys” and feel it is positive because they are the “good guys”.  It is really the triumph of the old adage that “might is right”.  If our modern myths (films) are reflecting this then is it any surprise we are still playing it out in society?

I think behind the scenes though the real evolution is taking place and individuals like Simon Baron-Cohen, who wants to change our concept of “evil” to “lack of empathy” and his book “Zero degrees of Empathy” do show how we might begin to evolve away from this black and white, us and them style of thinking about the world.  His aim is that instead of demonising regimes such as the Nazis in the second world war and feeling that we could never be like that, instead we would work on seeing the lack of empathy that caused it and recognising the potential for this in all of us.

The I-Ching teaches that we are “all one in our hearts”.  To watch a vulnerable and defenceless Gaddafi being beaten and shot is to watch ourselves.  Can we have compassion for a man who was so fearful and lacking in compassion that he could cause the deaths of thousands?  If not, then how are we any different and how can we hope to evolve?

Working in some of the major global organisations, I have noticed how highly confidentiality is prized.  The stated aim is to protect people so that they will not be hurt.  When I was working at Ernst & Young I was always uncomfortable with this approach to confidentiality.  My own background was that I had been trained by my teacher Chrissy in an environment where everyone’s most intimate problems and difficulties were actively shared with others as learning.  I noticed that while this was difficult at times, it created the opposite effect from that which the proponents of confidentiality suggested.  We were very open with each other because we had nothing to hide, since we already knew each others most intimate secrets.  Somehow this lack of confidentiality created more trust not less.  Since everyone knew everything there was little to mistrust each other over (it came up at times of course but then it was shared and resolved very openly with everyone knowing about it!).

I work as a coach in business and in this environment, most coaches put forward confidentiality as essential, and indeed something fundamentally critical to their role and to the relationships they build. Indeed they see it as a positive virtue.  When I worked at Ernst & Young as part of the Human Resources function, confidentiality was seen as very important for the HR function.  Yet a curious phenomenon took place.  Since HR people were by their nature very curious and interested in people, it was almost impossible for them not to share the fascinating information they were privy to.  I also began to notice that the more confidential things were kept (to protect people and prevent harmful gossip) the more gossip and harmful speculation there was.  Confidentiality was achieving the opposite of its stated aim.  My own approach in coaching people within the organisation was to be clear that I would not keep the conversations with them confidential since it was more valuable for me to discuss with other people and get their perspective on the challenges the individual faced.  I did, however, tell them that they could trust me completely to have their best interests at heart and to be sensitive.  When it came to 360 degree feedback I was expecting to score poorly for confidentiality but everyone had scored me 5 out of 5.  I knew I wasn’t at all confidential in my approach but everyone thought I was.

I started as a governor of Wynstones school some 13 years ago amid a regime of absolute confidentiality.  The reason given for this was that it was imperative in order for the staff to trust the governors.  Yet the odd thing was that this had been in place for some time and there was the opposite; a climate of mistrust.  The other major problem the school faced was the terrible car park gossip.  Various bans and prohibitions on gossip had been put out but with little impact, indeed it had been exacerbated.  Given this, I set about trying to eradicate the roots of gossip and to talk to everyone openly about the real issues and crises that were taking place in the school, particularly the sensitive issues.  What I noticed was that where people did not know something they naturally were intrigued and they naturally speculated to try to fill the gap.  Some people were horrified and I came in for some flack, but as we persevered the gossip cleared up and the level of trust between the governors and staff improved significantly to the point now where there is an atmosphere of phenomenal mutual trust.

I have noticed the same phenomenon in my coaching work.  I have come in for some flack at times but I realise that the confidential information people want to prevent others knowing, they generally know anyway and that often the judgements and speculation where it isn’t known are worse than the truth.  In my own circle, I am conscious that everyone, including the individual involved, is more comfortable when the truth is on the table, no matter how unpalatable.  What seems to be worse is the paranoia that we experience in trying to control and prevent this.  I have also noticed that this information is far less charged when you don’t try to prevent it being known.  On programmes, all good trainers/facilitators say that “Chatham House Rules” or “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” applies and no-one must share anything outside the programme.  Whenever I hear this, it strikes me that there is a trade off between confidentiality and learning.  The greater the confidentiality the lower the learning because nothing of any real depth or value can be shared with others.  On my programmes I start the other way round with the premise that everything is open but I give people the option to let others know if something is sensitive and they would like people to be careful in how they share it.  Having run progammes for eight years, I notice there has never been an issue and what’s more I can think of only a handful of examples where people have requested the sensitivity of others.

What is interesting for me here is that trust is really about openness.  Sadly you can’t get to trust through witholding information it only breeds further distrust.  What we all really want in our hearts is to be completely free and open (the relationships where we can be are the ones we value most).  We want to be accepted for who we really are, not having to keep up a front.  Yet we do not yet seem to realise that the way to do this is to be free and open.  I suspect that the real issue is power not trust.  I think coaches and psychologists love to focus on confidentiality as a great virtue because it is a front for power.  Only they know or can be trusted, but of course they trap the individual by re-inforcing the sense that the personal information they are sharing is dangerous and can only be shared carefully in certain circumstances with certain people thus fostering the very paranoia and mistrust which the individual is often caught by.  Once you hear that everyone else fears the same things as you; their inadequacies, their paranoia, their normal dysfunctional personalities, it loses all its power and people feel released and relieved and laugh together.  Of course, the other paradox is that if we are free and open and we know everyone will hear what we say, we have to choose our words much more carefully.  When people are gossiping (having held the other to secrecy) they are often unbelievably callous and judgemental.  Can we learn this one and apply it collectively?  I wonder what the media and MI6 would look like if we did?

In August I was at our favourite chalet in the Alps near Annecy.  For many years I have harboured a dream of owning a place in France.  My family take it in turns to drag me away from immobiliers and give short shrift to my musings and desire to go and explore and view beautiful old chalets.  Somehow, I never quite seemed to find the right place or the right time to buy.  I was lying in bed reflecting on this at the chalet and I said to Life, “what I would like is something like this, a beautiful old chalet in it’s own secluded spot, which is a bit difficult to access but which has been looked after and worked on so beautifully”.  As we left we were chatting to the french owner.  I thanked him for letting us stay in his beautiful chalet.
“If you like it so much, you can buy it” he informed me.  Assuming he was joking I laughed, but he assured me he was serious and that the chalet was for sale at a price which was a stretch but we might be able to afford.  This threw me into a black hole as I was faced with the reality of my beautiful mind picture; did I really want the reality of the responsibility and owning two places?  I consulted my heart and realised, reluctantly that I did not!  Good learning if somewhat disappointing.

This was not an unusual experience for me.  I realised in my twenties with a sense of wonder that the universe was listening to us and delivering on our casual mind chatter.  Often, the result was that people did not like the reality or life would deliver it with a twist.  Most people seemed to entirely forget or miss that they had asked for it.  I thought people would be amazed to discover that life was working this way; it felt like finding the keys to the universe.  I quickly realised this was an inaccurate picture! People did not necessarily want to hear that they were complicit in and indeed responsible for their fate.

However, I was struck again today by the precision of the universe.  I was on the train heading into London when I suddenly thought that my mother in law might not have insurance for our holiday on Friday; it was prompted by sorting out car insurance.  Within minutes my daughter was ringing me to say that my mother in law wanted to talk to me urgently about holiday insurance – something I have never spoken to my mother in law about in my life.  This got me thinking, who is playing whom?

On Friday I resigned from my position as Chair of the Steiner school that I have been chair of for ten years.  As I explained my decision at the meeting, I found myself thinking that I did still want to be involved with a charity and education and that I wondered what the next step in terms of the school of the future I wrote about would be.  I had begun to think there might not be one.  Tonight my wife rang and was describing the first running of an idea that she had had about a toddler group being run for children to come and be with the horses at our centre (www.heartshore-horses.com).  It was a great success and it turned out that the parents already had formed a group to self-educate, employing a teacher once a week.  They were intrigued by our idea of the school of the future and wanted to know more about it.  I saw that we needed to invest in our barn to make a venue for teaching.  This in turn had answered another question which I had been pondering.  I earn very well compared to most people but in watching the news the other evening I was concerned at the protests in America and across Europe about corporate wealth and greed.  Since I work in the corporate sector as a coach, I know I am complicit in this and I didn’t want to feel “I am alright jack” since I know it is all “us” and if some of us are suffering then it is all of our problem.  I have assuaged this by putting much of my money into the stables we run for adults, children and increasingly autistic children and this runs largely at a loss but provides something wonderful for those who would otherwise not be able to be involved with animals or have the space and help.  I was thinking that it was in my nature and my fate to earn well but I didn’t want to pour my money into money making schemes for my retirement.  I am not against making money, it is the flow of the universe, but I am increasingly asking myself, what for? (This is a whole topic I am going to think about and expand on in another blog).  My question this time is are we the creative force thinking these thoughts and programming the game of the universe or is it perhaps programming us?  Are we in fact puppets whose strings are being pulled or are we masters of our own virtual reality game, which we are unwittingly programming and creating.  Perhaps it is even a mixture of the two?  What is clear to me is that universe is alive and we are involved in an interactive dialogue with a phenomenal learning facilitator.

As further shock waves permeate the banking system and the Eurozone in particular, what should we be learning from the current economic crisis?  The I-Ching in the hexagram Shock says:

Prompted by my daughter’s recalcitrance, I have been considering what the school of the future might look like.  In his address to the RSA Sir Ken Robinson was pointing out that the current educational model was devised to satisfy the needs of the Industrial Revolution with a curriculum designed by age of enlightenment academic thinkers.  Indeed having read further on this, Seth Godin points out that the genesis for schools was to persuade factory workers to employ adults rather than child labour with the incentive that schools would turn out productive factory workers.  This is evident in the education of large classes of children of the same age (“batches”) in rooms set out in formal lines of desks with a great emphasis on discipline and conformity.  My wife who was a state school teacher for some years was advised in her first year of teaching not to smile before Easter.  The primary focus is control.  Thus, sadly, teachers are often those who are skilled at control and value conformity.

In our current environment where there is such a wide range of new technology and jobs and where factory style jobs are increasingly automated, this mode of education looks increasingly outmoded.  Our children have access to so many creative stimuli and it seems time to move away from this conformist model to an approach to education which is centred on the child.  As I reflect, my own job as a coach in business did not exist when I was at school and my wife’s as an equine therapist following natural horsemanship has only become a possibility in the last few years.  Having been the chairman of governors at a Steiner school for over ten years it is clear to me that, of schools, Steiner schools come closest to genuinely fostering an approach based on the child and believing in their potential.

Much of my own experience in career terms has been concerned with dispelling the myth, which is currently so dominant in education, that there is a boat and you can miss it.  This pervasive fear has created a system based on measuring achievement on a very narrow academic set of criteria and leaves the majority of children, who do not make it to the academic pinnacle of university professorships, feeling that they have in some way failed.  The Steiner schools seem to focus on loving children and on a belief in the inherent potential of children, everyone is special and valuable not just those few who get A grades.  The focus is not on finding a place in the world of work but rather on growing as a person with a belief this will allow the child to contribute most fully to the world and find their truest expression in it.  Critically, the Steiner schools also differentiate the children by the 4 humours or temperaments (Choleric, Phlegmatic, Sanguine and Melancholic) and so expect children to behave and learn differently.

All this is fine, but it nevertheless leaves the institution of school untouched and even the Steiner schools persist with a largely conformist model where adults know best and where discipline and the institution are both fundamental.  My daughter was a catalyst for me, because whilst my son had been blissfully happy at a Steiner school my daughter was not.  Indeed she had no desire to go to school and felt she was wasting her time.  As astrologers we had insight into her personality.  With the Sun conjunct Mars in Gemini on the descendant opposite Pluto in Sagittarius rising this was not a child who was going to tolerate having someone else having power over how she learnt.  With Chiron in the 11th house she did not like being part of a group either.  This was definitely a problem.  We had a child who was not motivated by school but was very motivated by being with horses (my wife runs an equine centre working with a wide range of autistic children and those with behavioural problems as well as adults and children who want to learn to ride).  We struggled for many years with every strategy we could think of but nothing seemed to work.  In the end my daughter said she wanted to move schools, we were open to this but warned it might not change anything.  Then my wife suggested the option of being home educated and my daughter leapt at it.  I was very nervous, I had some prejudices about home education and the social isolation.  However, since my daughter was now determined to do it, we decided to follow her and we agreed to do a half-term trial.  We knew of a tutor who could teach her French and on the advice of my friend Mario, who knew all about tutors, we decided to employ kids who had just finished school to cover other subjects.  Returning from our week’s half-term holiday my wife commented that she was going to have work hard on motivating our daughter.  I was nervous about this – I did not want to replicate the role her teachers had played in trying to make her learn so I asked my wife to give it to me and said I would take responsibility.  My wife was sceptical but she agreed.  I thought about it and said to my daughter that she could design her own curriculum.  I told her it could be whatever she wanted and suddenly I began to see something I had been wrestling with since listening to Ken Robinson’s talk.  At the time I had tried to envisage what a new school, a school of the future, would look like but I could not envisage it.  As I have learnt from the I-Ching, I had put it on hold to wait for further input and suddenly here it was.  As I described to my daughter that she could design her own curriculum, I suddenly saw the scope.  I realised she could do anything; dressage lessons with her horse, trips to equine centres, cooking, emotional intelligence, the I-Ching, Astrology etc. etc.  The scope was almost limitless.  My daughter went straight off and worked solidly for 45 mins, full of enthusiasm, only coming back to ask me the odd question and by the end of the time she had designed her own curriculum.  I told her to show it to her mum who was amazed that she could think of nothing to add or change.  It confirmed my belief that children are amazingly responsible if you give them responsibility.  Most of our systems assume that they are just children and we know what is best for them.

What I realised was that the obstacle to the school of the future was the institution of school itself.  If you took away school the whole thing shifted (what adult would agree to being incarcerated in an institution for at least 11 years of their life which they were legally obliged to attend, being put together in a large group of peers not of their choosing who could only be the same age and having adults who had complete power over them, capped off by having to learn what they were told to learn?).   You could allow children to build their own curriculum and share it with children across the region or country who shared their interest.  You could organise trips for kids who shared similar interests and lessons could be as long or short as you liked.  You could also have lessons with kids of different ages based on interest.  This would allow for enormous variation and creativity and could be organised on a regional basis (or whatever basis you chose – from very local to national or even international).  My friends challenged me – how would you pay for this, how would you organise it?  On the payment front, I realised that the cost of school buildings and infrastructure is a huge proportion of the cost for education.  If lessons instead took place in people’s homes and in community spaces you could be far more flexible and it made children and learning far less separated from the rest of the community.  You could also put the money you saved back into providing community spaces.  It also solved a particular problem that I saw in schools, namely that the needs of the institution dominated and they unwittingly began to serve the needs of teachers rather than children.  Also, teachers become institutionalised; this way teachers served children rather than dominating them.

Others started to contribute to the idea, my friend Chrissy suggested that people in the community who were brilliant in their area could give up some time to offer to teach others about their speciality.  I realised that farms, equine centres like my wife’s, cafes, businesses, community projects could become focal points.  For those children who loved to be with others in larger groups they could be with others who loved to do that, for those who wanted to dip in and out they could etc.  My friend Steve set me thinking about adults; what would be to stop there being a cross-over with adults learning together with children? I thought we could have brilliant facilitators with emotional intelligence who would help children design their curriculum and work with parents; they could also help resolve conflicts between the children and teachers and even between parents and children.

At the same time we discovered an astrology programme which gave scores against 25 headings for charts.  We all scored ourselves and the results were fascinating.  The average score was between 75 and 125 with scores 125 -150 being high and above 150 very high and scores between 50 and 75 being low and below 50 very low.  My son, who had loved his time at school scored just under 150 for his need to be part of an organisation, company or club or contribute to a group effort.  My daughter scored 1!  Not only that but she scored 138 on her need for solitude, quiet and retreat and 161 on intensity of bonding.  This was a child that did not want to be part of a large group but wanted a more intense relationship and some peace and quite.  This was great as it provided insight into what individual children might need.

This was all very exciting but how to start?  I met with my friend Mario to decide how to set this in motion.  Mario is brilliant at structuring and organisation and he questioned how we would organise it.  Thinking about this I realised that we couldn’t and also I realised that that was what was backwards about school.  People had creative ideas for schools and they created these institutions and then they tried to find and fit in the kids.  So I suggested we go the other way and start with the children and let it emerge (my training with the I-Ching and my friend Chrissy had taught me not to lead but to follow).  On this basis I decided to start with the one child I had and let it build child by child.  Over the summer, a friend of ours was telling me she did not know what to do with her daughter who was a close friend of our daughter.  She did not want to go to school and stayed at home whenever she could.  She was popular and bright but did not want to be at school.  I told her about my idea for a school of the future and the school doubled to two!  We have just finished our first week as a school of two.  They are being taught by teachers who are mostly eighteen years old and full of enthusiasm – they love this but the range goes through teachers in their 30s, 40s and 60s!  The two of them are like different children.  It is very early in the project and it may only be for the benefit of my daughter and her friend – who knows?  But it has already been worth it and we will see where it goes.

Recent developments in technology see us now getting to the point where we are enhancing the capability of the human body. We have stem cell therapy allowing us to improve on the body’s ability to heal itself and bionic hands allowing some improvements over “normal” function. With pacemakers we can extend the capability of the heart and so on. It is interesting to note what has brought all this about. Without pain and suffering would we have been prompted to be so creative? Indeed, for life in general, pain and suffering has played a key role in evolution. If something hurts sufficiently, either physically or mentally, it prompts us to creativity. The larger the discomfort the greater the motivation to change or adapt. So if this pain and suffering is leading us to evolve where is it taking us?

If we are to move beyond the confines of the earth, it seems clear that we will need enhancements to the human body to allow it to survive in new environments. This is laudable but would we devote huge resources and energy to it? The great value of pain, suffering and failure is it is universally motivating. Our history shows what a remarkable prompt it has been to the global development of life. But are we now starting to play a bigger game?

What if we are part of a large laboratory experiment or even field test (much as Douglas Adams in his prescient Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy described Earth as being). If this is true, then climate change takes on a different complexion. It becomes our beautifully motivated field experiment to develop our ability to learn how to adapt new environments for successful human habitation. We are going to need this if, or as, we move beyond the earth to colonise new worlds.

When you look through this lens we appear to be being orchestrated beautifully to play this game of evolution.  Since our personal neuroses and our collective ones seem to be the key (Chiron for astrologers) to evolution, perhaps we can now evolve away from blame and dividing the world into good and bad and instead play the game more consciously  This would allow us to be less scared of change (like climate change) and not seek to blame people and get stuck in cataclysmic negativity but rather recognise it as a prompt to evolve.

In mythological or astrological terms, it is interesting to note that as we move into the age of Aquarius the climate change concerns of the old age of Pisces (and it’s Virgo counterpart) with the body and the immediate environment are moving to more global concerns.  Perhaps with the age of Aquarius-Leo we are at the seed point of being able to play this game (Leo) with greater collective consciousness (Aquarius).

Keeping your heart and mind open seems to be key to spirituality.  This is paradoxical for me, since many think of spirituality as being about those moments we experience when our heart and mind are fully open and we experience that wonderful flow of life.  All the rest; the difficult people, situations, ugliness in the world feels to them like the things that are getting in the way of them being spiritual – the things they want to get away from.  My experience has been the reverse, that keeping my heart and mind open is hard work, that the real spiritual work is how to respond to the people and situations we find difficult.  These people and situations are our teachers, or “worthy opponents” as Don Juan would refer to them in the Carlos Castaneda books.  They are the very things that are going to frustrate and hurt us but they are also the key (Chiron for astrologers) to how we grow and learn.  If they did not exist, we would have to invent them in order to develop.  Mostly they are teaching us where we are attached to a fixed picture of how the world should be which has closed our heart down.  Since our brains are more receivers than generators, it is our role to keep them clean so they can be good receivers.  A closed mind or heart interferes with the universal flow – love.  I have to concede my indebtedness to Chrissy Philp (One Way of Looking at Man) for teaching me much of this and for those interested in enlightenment there can be few books as insightful.

This is a post to share thoughts and insights on life.  I am new to blogging so don’t know how this will work but I am currently doing distracting activities as a creative way to give my mind time to contemplate a piece of work on change that I should be getting on with!  I am assuming that my subconscious is not ready yet or at least needs time.  Since I am an advocate of wu wei (not doing) this is part of my not doing for today and I am going to do it with no expectations and see what transpires.

A short interlude as I received a text, one of which was from my bank and what has transpired is that we have spent a huge amount of money in just 2 weeks.  I can’t help noticing that Life seems to have it’s own agenda when it comes to money.  It always ensures it flows out and if you try too hard to accumulate or hoard it, it finds ways to ensure it is spent.  You never seem to have it as such, it is a flow.  This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take responsibility for your actions but like most other areas of life, it is not worth kidding yourself that you are in control of it.  It clearly belongs to the universe which is deciding how much you should have.