Margaret Wheatley on leadership and Warriors for the Human Spirit

Lisa: Margaret, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Maybe we could start by talking about your current work and where you’ve got to, because I know a few years ago you published your latest book “Who Do We Choose to Be,” which was on the 25th anniversary of your book “Leadership in the New Science.” So where are you currently in your thinking in the work that you’re doing?

Margaret: Well, one of my delights has been to be very open and attentive to what’s going on in the world now. When I first wrote Leadership in the New Science, it was published in 1992. I was as optimistic as anyone could be that all you have to do to create positive change in the world, especially around self-management, was to present a solid theory backed up by lots and lots of evidence, organizational evidence. And my belief, which is quite naive, was that people will just greet it with open arms and be very thankful for it.

Because the paradigm of the new science of self-organizing systems, which is another way of understanding self-managing systems—you can organize and get order without control—that was the fundamental “aha” moment for me when I was studying the new science. I mean, I still remember it vividly. It was like, “Oh my God, you don’t need to control everything to get a successful outcome, to get order, to get people really engaged.”

And the evidence was overwhelming. I mean, Marvin Weisbord had a statistic that I’ve used for many years—I’m sure it’s still very valid, if not increased—which was that in a self-managed organization, you will get a minimal productivity gain of 35 percent. And he said this in the late 80s, to which he then put the question: if this is true, that you’ll get minimum 35 percent increased productivity through self-management, then the question he asked was, “Why isn’t every organization working on a self-managed basis?” Because everyone says, “Well, we want productivity, we want increased efficiency.” I mean, they’re still on that ramp, you know, “How do we get more with less workers? How do we drive workers for higher productivity?” I still get asked to speak on that, and I refuse to. There are more important things to talk about, and I’ll get to that in a moment.

But my belief was all you had to do was present the evidence and this exciting new paradigm which promised increased levels of creativity, increased levels of wonder, which is a very important component as we do our work, as we live our lives. We could be in a state of wonder. Right now we’re in a state of fear and anxiety, for good reason, but what I learned from publishing that book, which was very well-received—it’s still now a classic, it’s still used in many college classes on leadership, many university programs use it—but it didn’t change the world.

And from that, I realize what it takes to change people, especially those in leadership, which was my interest. What it takes to change them is not good ideas. There’s much more going on, many more dynamics at play, most of them are called power and greed and lust and grasping after things. But just having a great idea, unfortunately, it’s the saddest thing I can say, does not affect change.

So I then wrote eight other books, each of them was quite different, and the last ones were about perseverance, about developing of wonder for this beautiful, beautiful planet and cosmos we live in. And most recent one, “Who Do We Choose to Be” asked the question of leaders, not whether you’re going to adopt a new theory, but whether you’re going to wake up to the reality of what’s going on, to the complete dismissal or attack, I would say now, on life, including people.

So we’re dealing with organizations, so people is the focus. My own work now is to train leaders to be warriors for the human spirit, and I’ll go into detail later. But the trajectory, the arc of my work has been initially to wake people up and to realize we had choice in how we could organize. And so if organization was alternative, and I found many people were so excited to have choice.

So my most recent book, “Who Do We Choose to Be,” is all about choice. It’s about consciously using our leadership, not to create change at the level we all aspire to—and we all wanted so desperately—but to choose how we are going to stand up for people, how we’re going to stand up against this highly destructive tide of events and policies that are so life-destroying, and how we’re going to protect people and try and lead as best we can in an environment in which you have to be revolutionary. You have to be counter to the culture of greed and efficiency and numbers and artificial intelligence and standardized processes. You have to take a stand now.

So it’s different. It was much more fun to present the choice of choosing a new paradigm of leadership which would give great results and engage people. Now the choices are: how are we going to stand up against these times?

So I just want to give the subtitles of the book, and then we can talk more. But the subtitles are the path theme, which is first, we have to—the first subtitle is “Facing Reality.” We do have to face reality. The second is “Claiming Leadership.” So it’s an act, it’s a conscious decision: I’m going to be a leader for this time. And then the third is “Restoring Sanity” because truly, this is a devastatingly crazy, insane time.

So that’s a long answer to your question, but that gives us a lot to talk about.

Lisa: I really like in one of your books, you talk about paradigm blindness, and I think that’s so powerful. So I guess a follow-up question is: how then do you wake people up to, you know, that we’re in this paradigm and to the possibility of choice?

Margaret: I think I’ve changed my focus from paradigm blindness to—this is fun, I’m glad you asked this question early on—so this is a fundamental shift. I used to think you could wake people up by introducing a new paradigm. I now know that is not true. There are many other influences and forces and dynamics at play. So even though people may be intrigued by a new paradigm, a new way of being, a new way of thinking, they might be intrigued by order without control as a basic opportunity, but they’re in these organizations, in leadership positions where they’re being driven to increased efficiencies, shortened time spans, incredible levels of distraction, and work becoming more and more meaningless.

They are not in a position to—even if they recognize this is devastating, it’s life-destroying in most organizations these days—even if they recognize the possibility that a new paradigm presents, they most often cannot change except by leaving. And of course, that is a trend. It has been a trend for decades in this country, where women are leaving corporate positions. But the devastation is not just in corporate organizations. It’s among teachers, it’s among doctors. In this country, in the U.S., 65 percent of doctors don’t want to be doctors any longer.

So we’ve crushed these professions by this economic, greed-infused paradigm, and it is really destroying leaders as well as all possibilities. So I’m not interested in—I no longer hold the possibility that we can create change at that level of organizations or systems. I know we can wake people up at the individual level, and that’s where all evolution occurs. And that requires dedication, it requires commitment, it requires community. And that’s why I created Warriors for the Human Spirit as a training program.

It requires real dedication and diligence and a strong community because being a leader these days is quite terrible. Even if—I mean, what I keep saying is the leaders who knew what to do and had great results with high participation, community engagement, self-organized organization—they knew what works. Even they can no longer do this within the current mainstream of organizational life.

So I feel very strongly, we need all of us to shift our gaze to what is possible to change. And of course, many people are saying this. I think I mean it a little bit differently. We have to change ourselves, but we have to change ourselves in order to serve more effectively as leaders. And a lot of people are just focused on, “Well, I’m just going to change myself.”

My whole purpose of being right now is to create leaders who can stay, leaders who can stay present, leaders who are not overwhelmed by anger and aggression and frustration, leaders who won’t get ill and just withdraw, leaders who will not become cynical and just disappear on us. So I’m really working with leaders. And the whole concept of leadership is: are you willing to commit to staying? Not necessarily in the same job, but staying available for what’s coming, what’s needed already—the large numbers of people who are beside themselves with anxiety and fear, who are suffering terribly. Those are the leaders that I’m working with, and that’s the level of change that’s possible.

Lisa: It strikes me that it’s almost about, at an individual level, choosing activism almost rather than victimhood or just survival.

Margaret: Oh yes. Oh yes. I mean, that’s the choice point. Who do I choose to be? Am I just gonna get along? Am I going to keep my wage? Am I going to try and just cocoon myself and get absorbed in personal interests, or Netflix, or other entertainment? Am I going to just focus on my family and basically withdraw, which I would say the majority of people are making that choice?

But you know, when times get hard and devastatingly hard, as we’re now encountering and will continue to encounter, there are always a few people who stand up and are incredibly brave, focused, disciplined, self-sacrificing, knowing that whatever the hardships of the times, they want to serve. So that’s the quality of shifting one’s leadership opportunities from self-interest to service. It’s just that clear to me.

And not most people won’t do it. So I’m not interested in masses. I haven’t been interested in masses in a long time because that’s not how things change, except through violent revolution, and I don’t want any part of that. But it’s always a few dedicated people, it’s always a minority that stands up, takes action, releases themselves from expectations, and just does what needs to be done. And those are the people that I’m supporting now, and they’re growing in numbers.

I must say, I speak to many people about restoring leadership as a noble profession, and I’m finding great resonance with people to think, “Oh, I could use my position, my influence, my power to do meaningful work again.” It’s just different work. It’s not about changing large systems. It’s about being present for what needs to be done, having higher levels of consciousness, higher levels of awareness, and not doing it for self-aggrandizement, not doing it for applause, not doing it even for positive results—just doing it because this is the work that needs doing.

And I’m really heartened by the numbers of people who respond to this, this call now, this summons: how are you going to use your leadership? The old ways, the old aspirations are no longer valid. We cannot change these large systems, even though we know how to do it, what the methods and tools are. We have all of those, but it’s not happening because of the other dynamics here of self-interest, greed, fear, wealth going to the very few, and this turn that is always present in any civilization at the end of its lifecycle. So that’s where we are.

Lisa: Could you say something for the benefit of the listeners about Warriors for the Human Spirit? What does that mean, and what is that like?

Margaret: Yes, well, it’s the people that I just described, the people who are willing to, who have a great desire to stay, who’ve already been activists. These are not people who are suddenly getting religion about, “Oh, I should do something.” These are experienced leaders of all ages, but with a predominance so far of older people, and older women ought to continue to make a contribution. It’s now—we’re attracting more people in their 30s and 40s, but I actually loved the fact that we have a majority of older women who want to bring their presence and their wisdom of all these years of experience in service to this time.

So to be a warrior for the human spirit means that you’re willing to train, and you’re willing to train in a serious way, just as you would if you were training on a musical instrument, if you were training at the gym. But you’re training your mind and your heart—your heart-mind. So, you know, in Sanskrit, in Hinduism and Buddhism, the word for mind is the same word as heart. So I’ll just call it heart-mind from here on.

But we’re training our heart-minds to be aware of how we act in the world, to be aware that we personally create all of our emotional states. They’re not flying out there and then landing on us. You know, that if we get angry, it’s because something in us, in us—me personally—was triggered. It’s not that anger exists in the situation.

So we do a lot of work on meditation and learning to know our triggers so that we can go into these places of conflict and heartbreak and not be undone by them, not fall apart. This was my initial path. I wanted to be able to stay, and I knew I was so easily angered, outraged, frustrated, grief-stricken. And I needed to learn how to not get away from those emotional responses, but not act from them.

And I think this is increasingly true in the warrior community. It’s true of all of us. How do we deal with these levels of grief, rage now, frustration? Like, why don’t people—why don’t our leaders do what needs to be done? Well, they’re not going to. And so why are so many people suffering at the hands of the greedy and powerful? Why do so many people—why is the planet pushing back, and nobody is—no politicians are really willing to understand the enormity of the changes required?

So that creates an environment for us, if we’re paying any attention—we’re not in our cocoons—it creates an environment where we have to know how to deal with these very deep, complex emotions so that’s part of the training. Not to ignore them or disallow them, but not to act from them.

And another component of the training is we want to be able to see. We want direct perception. We want to go into a situation, into an organization, into a room full of people and pick up more information of what’s going on that’s not filtered as much as we do filter it through our own biases. Or “Oh, I don’t like that person over there” or “I know I have to watch out for him” or “I don’t want to be here.” But you know, we have all of these filters. And so we work to really just take in more of the world, all the information that’s out there that we just exclude, or we don’t even know we’re filtering.

And then we work with mind-body awareness through Qigong. In other settings, we’ll do yoga, but we’ve done Qigong in the long trainings, very gentle practice for really feeling the energy between mind, body, and earth and sky.

And then we have a very strong community which is sustaining itself through self-organized efforts, small groups of people, cohorts, occasionally interacting in some way. And so that’s the components: developing a stable mind, creating direct perception, learning how to perceive more fully, mind-body awareness, and learning to work with these very strong emotions so that we can be in these places that provoke and trigger us and be observers.

So the whole meaning of being a warrior, which is historically in every culture, there are warriors—a few people who trained, who are incredibly disciplined, and who are there. In some cases, they’re protecting a king or protecting the church, they’re protecting the people. In our case, we are protecting people. And we’re nonviolent warriors who have a deep commitment to not add to the fear and aggression of this time.

That requires—that’s tricky. How is it possible not to feel afraid? How is it possible not to get reactive when somebody attacks you? You know, in a meeting, you’re in a public space, or whatever. I’m talking about verbal attacks, not physical. But with so much aggression out there and so much fear, we take a vow we will not add to that as much as possible. But that’s why we require training.

So it’s wonderful work. I am deeply, deeply grateful that at the end of my—a very long career now—to find the people who really want to serve this time, not some illusory time when we thought we could change everything, but this time, which requires enormous perseverance. That’s the title of one of my books. And it requires enormous capabilities that we didn’t know we needed in the past.

Lisa: Margaret, I’m wondering what you make of—because I mean, you mentioned at the start of our conversation this quote about self-organizing teams and the productivity benefits of that, and that was in the 80s. And yet here we are in 2019, and self-organizing teams or self-organizing organizations are nothing new, but it seems like there’s—they’re sort of trendy at the moment. And there are books like “Reinventing Organizations,” and then there are sort of systems like holacracy out there. But I speak to people who feel like there’s something missing, the kind of human part and the mindset—I guess the heart-mind part that you were talking about—that not many people are talking about that or how we can train that. So what are your thoughts about that?

Margaret: Well, no, thank you. I don’t see it as a trend at all. I see these as little blips in an increasingly avaricious, overbearing, overpowering machinery of organization. If you look at everything that’s being done under AI, artificial intelligence, that is a dehumanization, a profound dehumanization of work. And that is only the most recent example.

I think in general, we have—we are in the grips of and the momentum of a period of time which historically always happens at the end of a civilization, when the elites take power to themselves, they destroy the common people. These large bureaucracies—it was really interesting for me in studying anthropology and history that we always move—wherever humans have been, we first start as self-organized communities where power is distributed. Women are, you know, in power, but there’s no sense that it’s a matriarchy because power is so distributed.

And the moment—well, after some time when we shift, when there’s more of us, we’re more static, so we’re not nomadic any longer, hierarchy develops. And the hierarchy always takes the same form. So one of the things I quoted in my book from a wonderful Canadian writer is that every civilization takes the same forms. This is from—it’s mind-blowing, truly.

So he gave the incident of when the Spanish conquistadors first landed in the New World, in Mexico with the Aztecs. It was the only time in history when two advanced civilizations met, and they saw the same things—different expressions, but they saw roads, infrastructure, irrigation, courts, universities, cultural institutions, and temples, you know, religious organizations. And they saw kings. So I have been really fascinated by how, when we talk about—whatever is in our DNA, hierarchy is in our DNA, not necessarily the people’s DNA, but the progress of a civilization always leads to increased hierarchy, increased bureaucracy, and then power going more and more into fewer and fewer hands. And then periods of destruction follow that, and a rising fundamentalism is part of that also. So all power is given to the gods, who are whatever they are, and then they’re petitioned to save us with enormous levels of sacrifice of people, usually.

So I think this all works to describe Western civilization. We are sacrificing at egregious, terrible levels right now. And so these little blips of holacracy—I mean, that’s all they are. They are little moments which, for some people now, “Oh, that’s a sign of hope. You know, we’re going to convert—we’re going to convert all corporations to self-management because this works so well.” Yes, it works so well. We’ve been doing that since the 70s.

And I don’t want to sound like an old person, but I am, and I’ve had a lot of experiences. And so I can see where things that seemed so promising and so hopeful—and then what happened to them because we are in the grips of this overbearing, 1984 kind of machine of Big Brother.

So we all got excited when some corporation, some corporate leaders started learning to meditate. One of them was the CEO of Monsanto. And at the time, my colleague was in a meditation group in which he was part of. This is just when they were coming up with Roundup, which then destroyed ecosystems, people, butterflies, etc. Enormously destructive. And they know it is, they know it is.

So where I take the principle of self-organization, very fundamentally important to me, is when I’m working with leaders in the midst of all this destruction, you can create an island of sanity. Maybe at least you have to try. And what I mean by being an island is it is different, set apart from, and intentionally protected so that these overwhelming forces of darkness, of greed and lust and aggression, are kept at bay as much as possible.

I’ve seen this happen. It requires enormous strength, courage, and commitment on the part of leaders. But within that island of sanity, then everything I’ve ever believed, written about—self-organization, how to motivate people, how to use participation, high engagement strategies—yes, that’s where you do it.

And it is increasingly hard work because these other forces are so strong. I mean, they’re exponentially strong now. So it could be holacracy, it could be—bring up any of the old words we used to use for self-organizing systems. It’s our work, and that requires training, and it requires courage because no one’s going to sit up and say, “Oh, you’re the hope of the future.” No, they’re gonna say, “What are you doing? You’re revolting against the powers that be,” and they’ll try and destroy you. And I’m just speaking organizationally, even.

And yet we have the same wonderful effects on people’s motivation, engagement, creativity if we can create these islands of sanity. I am finding—let me just say one thing about sanity. I define sane leadership as the unshakable confidence that people can be creative, generous, and kind. And the operative phrase there is “can be.” That’s the work of leadership.

So we’re reintroducing, we’re recreating conditions—organization through everything the new science has taught us—but we’re creating the condition for people to rediscover and exercise their creativity, their generosity. And it is an island because it’s so different than what’s going on now in this greater tumultuous sea that we’re all engulfed in.

Lisa: I suppose it’s probably why so many of the inspiring examples that I hear of, where it seems like people are creating islands of sanity and they’re relating to each other in a totally different way, in a much more human way, tend to be small organizations or small teams. And it’s much harder to find large examples or large organizations.

Margaret: Yeah, that’s a very, very important point. Yes, it doesn’t happen in large organizations. It can happen within a team within a large organization. But, you know, years ago with my co-author Deborah Frieze, we wrote a book called “Walk Out Walk On,” in which we looked at seven communities daring to live the future now. But they’re islands of sanity, and they’re connected to one another.

And we had a well-developed, it’s well-used, well-known model called the two loops, or the double loops, of how the new is born in the midst of the destruction of the old. And one of the important components is connecting to other—now I would say other islands. At the time, we thought if we connected well enough, we could create the emergence of a new culture, a new society at another level. I no longer believe that’s possible. We have to get through this period of destruction, and then perhaps, but who knows?

I was talking with Peter Senge just two years ago, and his timeline is, “Well, maybe it’s three or four hundred years from now.” This is shocking to us, right? We think, “Well, we’ll just wait this out, and then we’ll be able to—all these new—the golden age will arise, and we’ll have all these beautiful ways of organizing and valuing people and higher levels of consciousness.” Well, that will happen as part of a cycle.

But when a number of my colleagues were with the Dalai Lama many years ago now, they were talking about their levels of despair for their work. And he just said, “Don’t worry, your work will bear fruit in about 700 years.” So this leads me to—instead of thinking, which so many people around me are doing, “We just have to wait out this period. It’s going to be bad, but we’re gonna wait it out. We have these new models, those new capacities, higher levels of consciousness, and it’s all gonna work out wonderfully well, because this current form of civilization,” you can almost not call it “civilized” anymore, “but this has to go because it’s so destructive.” And I agree with that. It has to go. It is going. It’s imploding under its own weight.

However, we have to get through this period of implosion and collapse and destruction of more and more people. And so that’s why I’m focused not on some halcyon, beautiful future, which will happen because it’s all cyclical, it always arises. But for us to think it’s going to happen within any reasonable time period, I think it’s just foolish. And it gives us a false sense of hope.

I spend a fair amount of my time now bringing forward the realism to people: that you do your work—not for results—you do your work because it’s the right work to do. This is what Václav Havel of the Czech Republic said, that hope is not the certainty that something will turn out well, but the conviction that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out. That’s where we need to be—to do our right work, do it because it’s the right work for us to be doing, not because we expect great change or little change even.

Now, of course, we want that. And we never give up wanting change. We never give up wanting things to be better. That’s a great aspiration to hold. That’s like the motivating energy for conscious human beings. We want things to be better for more people. But as we do our work, we just need to focus on, “This work feels important right now.” And if there’s no gain, if there’s no benefit to it, personal benefit, if there’s no reaping of rewards, it doesn’t matter. I’m doing my right work for the right reasons because it serves other people, it serves a planet, it serves life.

I find this to be enormously liberating when we can finally get there. By getting there, I do several things in my work right now that I feel are asking people for huge leaps. So the first is understanding where we are in the cycle of the civilization and giving up all of our dreams that we can change the world. And this third one is understanding that we’re doing the work for its rightness, not for certain outcomes, certain expectations. When we can get there, giving up hope is also giving up fear. There are two sides of the exact same coin.

So when we can get there, there’s a kind of liberation, there’s a kind of—“I’m just gonna go for it, you know, I’m just gonna do it.” And there’s a lot more energy and a lot more creativity. But it’s a hard sell, you know. We’re so driven by hope. Our own culture is driven by goals and hopes and expectations. So that’s—I would say those three things are what I find most significantly difficult for people to embrace. And then once they do, the work becomes really wonderful, wonderful in a whole different way.

Lisa: I think it’s kind of both bleak and inspiring at the same time. What advice then would you give to listeners, wherever they are in their journey? I suppose I was going to say, “What words of inspiration or hope?” But it’s not necessarily that, but where would you say that they should start? Or what is—how can they tap into “What’s the most meaningful work for me to do right now?” for example.

Margaret: Yes, well, first I would encourage everyone to go to my website because there’s a host of resources, not just mine, but of other people who have inspired me, especially around videos. But it is bleak and dark and depressing until you realize—you accept what is. And once you accept what is, you find enormous opportunities to serve. And those in and of themselves are motivating, inspiring, heart-opening.

This is good work. It’s just completely different than what I would have defined as good work. So we have to work through the depression. You know, I still get—I’m an American—about four times a week, I find myself just weeping for what’s going on. Yesterday was one of those days, weeping for the world, weeping for all the suffering that is so needless but so increasingly common.

And what I know now is that I will not succumb to that despair, but instead, I will just notice it. There is despair here. There is despair. And I know now, because I’ve been doing this for years, that this will increase my motivation and dedication to work with leaders in the way I’m doing, but pushing away the despair or getting seduced—I hope—getting ambushed by hope—so you see something that inspires you, and you think—or I often hear people who have just come from a university or a school where they’re so inspired by the students there, the hope of the future, they’ll make things right—that is an incredibly naive statement.

I was a child of the 60s. I served rather than protest. I was in the Peace Corps in Korea in the 60s. We were committed to changing the system, stopping the wars. We were as energized and hope-inducing as any youth I meet these days. And here we are. We need to get a lot smarter about noticing—any of you who are interested in systems perspectives, look at the whole system, look at the dynamics there, look at the conditions, and then you ask, “What’s possible?”

That can be overwhelming because what’s possible is more immediate, more intimate. But you know, that kind of work is the most satisfying, truly. So we’re diminishing our expectations for greatness, for great change, and we’re getting much more in touch with being humans working together on behalf of the human spirit, on behalf of our realization that everyone possesses talents and creativity, everyone wants to belong, everyone wants to learn at some level. But it becomes much smaller, much more immediate and direct.

So my website has a lot of things on it because this is my work now—creating leadership, this spiritual warriorship. So it suggests—it may provide some antidotes to your despair. It may increase your despair, but keep going, keep going, and then you’ll find good work.

Lisa: I wonder if you could share something about what you’ve learned about community and how to foster a sense of community. As you said, that that was the importance—what have you learned there?

Margaret: Critical. Well, you know, all of the dynamics at play right now are destructive of community—fighting over fewer resources, working under such stress and distraction that you don’t have time to cultivate relationships. How often do we just pick up a phone and call someone? I don’t know, we make an appointment. Or do you even use the phone anymore?

So technology, which was meant to connect, is partly responsible for us feeling more and more overwhelmed, distracted, and lonely. And then the groupings we find on technology lend themselves to increased withdrawal, increased aggression, increased conspiracy theories. This has been well-documented now in social media groups. Or superficial relationships in which we don’t really know what it means to be there for one another.

So community has been at risk for quite a while through social media and this false sense of connectedness. But the other dynamic here is identity politics, and it’s very strong in the States. I don’t really see it nearly as destructive in Europe, but it’s there. And it’s the way we think we have to enter a group is being very visible and respected for our identity. I think gender, I think race, I think ethnicity.

What that’s doing—while it’s important, it’s essential—but what it’s doing, where it’s gone here, is complete divisiveness. Like, attack—somebody says something, and it seems to be a slander against a certain group. That person gets attacked. Nothing is taken in the richness of, like, a full statement or the context of a statement. It’s just people are just at the attack. And social media allows that. It facilitates it in ways no one comprehended at the start.

And so building community now requires a commitment to transcend. We individually transcend our identities as the basis for coming into relationship and instead realize that we’re in good work together. So it’s common cause. It’s all these things—many people, myself included, used to talk about: just establish common ground, and then people who work together, it still works. It’s just getting there. You have to go through this briar patch of identities.

But more and more people—I mean, you know, we’re committed to environmental movements, food justice, good soils. All of those issues, which would seem to create common ground, need to create common ground, and yet people are still dividing themselves. I mean, the other thing besides identity politics is organizational identities, which people still want to hold on to the power and status of their own organization rather than just work together.

But those are all the negative dynamics. But the positive dynamics are that as we see the world more clearly and we feel more sorrow for all the suffering that’s happening, we do want—we feel intense loneliness, and we need other people who understand things as we do, who share a worldview about what’s going on, who won’t try and cheer us up or make us feel hopeful with one or two examples, who actually—we need people who are already truly like-minded, who share a common worldview.

And we—and this I see so powerfully in the warrior community—people just get in touch with one another to console, to laugh together, to problem-solve together, to cry together. That’s real community. But it’s based on not who I am, but who we need to be for this time now.

Lisa: I really like that. I think that’s—I think community is, yes, you said, kind of increasingly important because it’s kind of under attack. What were sort of final words would you like to share on this podcast? We’ve covered so many listing topics.

Margaret: I would ask people to contemplate a few things. First is to be aware of what has—what you’ve reacted to in these comments and stay with that, not as your level of certainty, but just realizing if you reacted strongly to something, that’s worth inquiring about. And look at it from multiple perspectives because that will show you how your mind works, what you reacted to, and what surprised you.

The second thing I would say is you just have to inform yourself. You have to look at the world with not with fantasies, not with imagination, not with hope—just take in as much of as you can of what’s going on in the world because that will actually give you the capacity to serve well.

And the third thing is, when I talk about being a warrior for the human spirit or a champion for the human spirit, this is not a role I invented. It always is there. And I’m quite sure you have been that already. So I would say, when you have stepped forward with courage with no thought of yourself to help someone, to stand up for someone, you were in a situation, and there was no thought of yourself. You just acted on behalf of somebody or something that needed help in that moment. Just find those experiences in yourself because that’s something you can now rely on. You can build, you can strengthen, and it’s an example, it’s an insight into your good spirit and your good heart-mind and your courage.

So we all have done this before, and now it’s just a question of our level of commitment to serve other people in this time of increased suffering, and getting past our own despair, our own sorrow, our own longing, our own hopefulness. And really, the qualities we need to serve this time, the reliable qualities we need are not found in hope. They’re found in clarity, clear seeing. And then when you know what to do, and you try it, it works, or it doesn’t work, but you stay open. You have the possibility of making a real contribution. And after all, what is our work for if not to make contributions that serve others?

Lisa: Margaret, thank you so much for sharing all of these insights. You’ve been someone who’s really inspired me and challenged my thinking, and I think this conversation will do the same for others. So I’m really grateful for you sharing your time with us. Thank you.

Margaret: Well, thank you very much, Lisa. You have very good questions.