Everyday Miracles, by Jane Smith

On Tuesday Doug and I led the half day follow-up for one of the Transforming Leadership Intensives we have led this year to an operations team in the health sector. Many of the participants are hourly workers whose positions have them experience themselves as somewhat “less than.”

This group was lively, engaged and very much in the conversation to impact their own leadership and to contribute to the company. For example, one man in the group has definite opinions that he willingly expresses about their supervisor and he saw, in the two day, that there were different possible interpretations he could have, even in the face of a lot of agreement for their point of view.

On Tuesday he shared that he has been different with the supervisor, and he has seen a difference in how the supervisor is being with him. At one point during the afternoon he caught himself slipping back into his old way – he has an expressive face with includes a well-developed eye-roll – and said, “I really have to watch my face!”

We’re witnessing a miracle among members of the leadership team as well. Several of them come to all of the dinners after the first day of the program, and now to the lunches before the half-day, as well. Yesterday everyone, including Freida in her exquisite suit, helped arrange the tables for the lunch so we could sit together and not feel separate. There were six executives there all mixed in with people who don’t really know who they are.

Our work is very basic – know yourself as a human being and the particular self that you are, invent a new context in which to live, and do it well some times and not well others.

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