A Human Meeting

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got meetings?

Headnote: Toastmasters International is a worldwide organization of clubs where people “learn by doing” to do leadership and public speaking. And yes, this may include raising our glasses for a toast!

Michael Cody, DTM, was dead. (Distinguished Toastmaster)

He had his heart attack during our meeting, in early March. We did CPR, held his hand, and after the 9-1-1 guys left we held hands in a circle. He never did regain consciousness—it took 75 minutes to restart his heart. At next week’s meeting we held a memorial, and we taped it for Michael’s mother. (And put it on Youtube, something I essayed about it in After the Memorial, archived in April) But it wasn’t enough.

In early May, at the end of our meeting, at the part when we take a minute or two to ask “Any announcements?” Lera looked disturbed. She speculated that members were avoiding our club because of the shock of that night: We might need further healing, and this just couldn’t wait until our retreat (for teaching and workshops) in late June. As a few people tried to comment on the speculation, like trying to talk while standing on a shifting empty oil drum, I thought to myself: This can’t be addressed in a couple minutes during announcements, and it must be addressed. As a group. Well before June.

I spoke from my deep center, “Next week in place of a speech I could facilitate us to plan for further healing.” People agreed. A man with much experience in the business world, that is to say, quite experienced in meetings, immediately volunteered to be my “speech” evaluator. By the way, according to the Calgary Herald, members of Toastmasters progress so fast because every thing is evaluated. This means all speeches, all help-the-meeting roles, and even the entire meeting.

I used the term '“facilitate” a discussion' because, while not everyone knows this, there is a huge difference between a teacher, chairman, workshop leader… and a facilitator. The former all show up with their own desires and wants for “their” group. You might imagine a yoga teacher arriving with her plans to stretch people’s ligaments, a chairman wanting a team to reach a decision, a workshop leader wanting “his” workshop participants to master “performance objectives.” To a facilitator, though, the group belongs to the group: I leave my ego at the door.

The “group” might want to do yoga or make a decision; contrawise, they might want to spend the whole hour sitting in yoga clothes discussing the river flood. My pet peeve, then, is an expert claiming to be a class “facilitator.” Forget that noise. I say: teach, lead or get out of the way. (Incidentally, there are proven ways to facilitate an anxious group to face making a decision)

My club meets at Unity Church. The windows are colored glass; the floor is linoleum. We put tables, with white tablecloths, in a horseshoe, with people speaking on a carpeted six inch podium, we call “the stage,” at one end. (Behind it is a big proper stage, but we leave that for the church) I like how modern folding chairs have seats that are padded, not steel. Before our regular meeting started I had first prepared a flipchart (Note: After graduation, out in the “real world,” flipcharts are preferred over blackboards, partly because they can be prepared in advance)

So there I was, standing in front of my peers, ready to facilitate. What could I do? Besides saying, first off, that as facilitator my role was to be neutral and not sway the group.

My first consideration was that this was an ambiguous situation—we had never done this before. So I showed them my flip chart, with the entire discussion agenda all on one page. I was secretly reminded how some folks at the movie theatres find it soothing if the trailers have given away the entire plot before they see the film. So I displayed the entire meeting, very clearly. I wrote in some timings, while saying I was only doing so to give us a sense of structure, as I had no idea how our times would work out, “We’ve never done this before.” I promised to keep them informed about time, and would ask the group if we needed more time. We sure did! Instead of a usual 7 – 9 minute speech, we took 25 minutes. It was OK; everyone said the time just flew by.

On the chart I wrote topic one, “do we need further healing?” and topic two, “what can we do?” As facilitator, I did NOT write decide or plan, not until the group decided to “write” that. Above the two topics, I wrote the two groups involved: we who are “present,” which we can be “clear” about, and those “not present,” that we are “less clear” about. Of course we needed to do both “groups”, and I promised to facilitate us to do one group at a time, as well as one topic at a time. I kept my promise.

Under topic two, I wrote two things: ‘share with the group anyone’s death-healing experience verbally,’ (which we never did) and ‘chart possible ideas.’ I showed them the second chart page, labeled, “ideas,” and under that, “NOT a commitment.”

I knew from meetings in the working world that many people “don’t get” the concept of brainstorming, and they don’t realize that for any ideas that get printed onto the chart, you needn’t say, “It must be true (truly important) or they wouldn’t have printed it.” To emphasize that we are not committed, during our “kick ideas around” phase, to anything we write, I printed an idea at the top, one we could all laughingly agree we wouldn’t do, even though it “seemed” sensible. (Our prime minister had suffered the death of his father, nevertheless, “telephone Justin Trudeau” was not something to commit to doing) Later I ended up squiggling in amendments to our ideas… which we could all see and ponder, as our ideas were happening, in real time.

At last a third page became our Action Page, with what we would do, and when, and who would do what to implement our plan. And by this time we felt confident in our plans; we wouldn’t get cold feet later. Call such visible concrete actions the product of the meeting, a product that would not be possible, or at least not be optimum, without the process of invisible emotions and opinions.

To me the “process part” is way more challenging, more fun. At one point heads were nodding in agreement as it sadly made sense that we should have our healing outside of the church, and also outside of our regular meeting time… then one individual pointed out, in effect, that when you fall off a horse you have to get back on, therefore our healing should be right here. Because the individuals were deep in the process of being open to new ideas, and not stuck on what we had already said, the man’s idea instantly crystalized the group. Heads began nodding that yes, we should meet right here… I can assure you that made the planning much easier!

It all began with me standing there, facing a collection of still eyeballs: My peers. I had once heard that the success or failure of a meeting is set up in the first ten minutes. So I tried to be light hearted and inclusive as I showed the flipchart. Next? Imagine the silence that might follow if I simply said, “Now, does anyone want to share?”… As it happens, we are a strong group, used to yoga and spiritual things. I was suddenly inspired: “Hey, do you guys want to do 30 seconds of silent meditation?” I asked, while holding up my wristwatch. They said, “Yes!” I timed it for us. “Time’s up.” I’m sure it helped. To me, it’s all part of the process.

The first speaker was a white haired old soldier, complete with tattoo. He was surprised to find emotions coming up as he talked to us. Someone said that as she drives by the church every day, she doesn’t say to herself, “Toastmasters.” She says, “Michael.” Yes, we needed more healing.

I had to be a taskmaster, allowing people to vent a little, but not to get into healing. To cut people off if needed, so we could keep moving forward on our planning. To acknowledge sadness, to respect emotion, to show humor— and all the while, to keep us moving. No indulging in too-long personal stories, no running away from our task into digressions. A facilitator is like an orchestra conductor, keeping us all at the same pace. On the same page. In control of ourselves.

On the flipchart, you may recall, I had included “people not present.” Well. We found we didn’t need to share what anyone had specifically said, not after we who were present had already agreed we had a need to heal. Lera had previously scanned down a list of members. She pulled out her list and peered at it. We used a minute to consider which absent members needed personal calls—to merely announce the healing meeting, not getting too personal, we said. We used a minute to decide who would call whom. A minute well spent. By the way, during the meeting I saw no need to rigidly have every person speak, or have every person speak for a rigid amount of time. Those of us who were silent participated well by listening intently.

During our club evaluation phase, that night, my evaluator told the club, “This discussion was a great credit to him.”

Like all clubs, we have mini evaluation slip everyone fills out. We call them “love notes.” Someone wrote to me, “…We got results! and that is success!” Now we have a plan, and we will carry it out in two weeks.

Many people wrote something like, “Thank you for taking this on.”

Sean Crawford

May

Calgary

2017

Footnotes:

~In my essay Getting a Sense of Humor, archived April 2017, I compared myself to Science Officer Spock, complete with blue shirt. Not very emotional. As it happens, when I was a young “man among men,” certain emotions, such as fear, were just not relevant.

Talk about denial: I have been told that football players in the locker room will lie to each other, avoiding eye contact, saying, “I want to get out there and hit!” Sure, I think sarcastically, and be hit, too! Now that I am an old bald guy, denial of emotion does not serve me. And it truly does not serve while I am chairing a group. Like an artist, I need to see things, see certain emotions the group is not yet ready to face.

~About my own ego: You know how you keep having to make mini corrections to your steering wheel as you drive? Of course I would have to mini correct the group. Well, I would have to correct myself too, as sometimes I would misjudge the corrections needed for my peers. In a mini way. Luckily folks would just ignore me when that happened, as we kept rolling along. It’s so nice to have left my ego at the door. Supposedly.

~One of my regular readers once wanted to know what I look like: During the memorial on Youtube, during the initial everybody shares go-around, I was one of the last to speak. During the part where individuals go up on stage to share, I was one of the last ones (fondly acting out how Michael wore his belt, as people laughed) I haven’t viewed the whole tape yet, simply because I was there, in real life.

~I wrote of our group listening intently, and being in control of ourselves. If on the World Wide Web you read that so many bloggers “hate meetings,” then maybe it’s because their peers and managers lack self-discipline. My theory is: Managers know they should keep their egos in check and do the right thing, while everyone knows what a functional meeting looks like, but folks just can’t bring themselves to be functional. Such a dreadful pity.

Heinlein and Me

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello reader,

May I write about myself today? And Heinlein too?

Here’s a quote, with documentation, from the blog

of science fiction writer John Scalzi:

MarkO: What do you make of Robert A. Heinlein?

John Scalzi: I’m a fan! Will be all the rest of my life, too. I also recognize he’s in the process of slipping out of the day-to-day conversation of the genre, and becoming someone we discuss like we discuss Jules Verne and H.G. Welles. All things considered, this is not a bad thing for Heinlein, although I suspect it distresses some of his fans.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2016/03/26/reader-request-week-2016-9-short-bits-on-writing/

• Ah, Heinlein. My favorite sf writer, the fellow some folks despise and love to label a fascist. Maybe that’s because his characters are too intimidating for them, characters that, as role models, changed my life. ...maybe for the worst.

Critics and readers alike assumed that Heinlein’s left-brain practical characters reflected Heinlein the man. Hence the oft-repeated scenario that Heinlein was a fascist. Maybe he was, in his private life—how would I know?

But maybe, in his commercial life, he was secretly trying for a brand, a trademark, a marketing schtick. He was well known to be a graduate of Annapolis naval college who had left the navy as a young man only after being invalided out for tuberculosis—Sounds so prim and practical. People forget that in my parent’s day, before the G.I. Bill, (and later, student loans) the service colleges were about the only way for a poor boy to get a university education… (Note for Canadians: Of course the bill applied to the navy and air force too; G.I. is a an informal word for U.S. soldiers, rumored to mean Government Issue. The G.I. Bill, from WWII, means a wartime or peacetime veteran can go to college on the public’s dime) 

Heinlein’s fictional characters were likely to be unafraid to handle a gun; they were unlikely to be social workers. Back when I was as old as those returning G.I.s I considered going to university. My brother, on the phone long distance, guessed, “To be a teacher, or to be a social worker?”  (Neither) I felt foolish, because I had heard so many bad things about both professions from my relatives and other people. Once, when I read that certain evening seminars were mainly attended by those two sorts, I felt uneasy, since I like such classes too. I can laugh at my old discomfort, because now I attend a Free Fall Friday writing class where many of us are retired teachers, and all of us have a keen interest in people, just like a social worker. Ha-ha! Maybe I took the wrong major, way back when.

Ah Heinlein, a name evoking nostalgia. I will always treasure his rip-roaring space adventures for boys, published yearly in the late 140’s and through the 1950’s, timed for the Christmas market.

I remember walking past the shelves of my junior high (middle) school English class and going “Wow!” For there on the shelf was a stack of paperback copies of Robert A. Heinlein’s Have Space Suit, Will Travel, the last YA book he wrote. Cool! —That’s the one where a boy from a mediocre mid-west high school, a not-good-enough school, voluntarily seeks extra learning to upgrade himself, to be able to get into an engineering faculty, to have a chance of following his dream of going to the moon some day—

Hey, if only my English class could take that book too! How lucky that other class was, how excited they would be—and then I remembered… how sadly dull my peers would be. No, they wouldn’t like the novel—not at all. As a grown up, in the 21^st century, I was to read how fortunate children are: The Harry Potter books have “witchcraft,” meaning they would never be allowed in the schoolroom, meaning the kids would never “have to” take Harry Potter and thereby end up hating the lively young lad.

In contrast to the dull kids I knew in my everyday life, the juveniles in Heinlein’s stories were not afraid to show enthusiasm and be involved. Various heroes were in Boy Scouts, attended a serious town hall meeting, learned school subjects they didn’t “have to” take, learned an alien language, tried their luck at being an entrepreneur, conducted rigorous rocket experiments with proper notes, had a demanding hobby…

How alien, because during my youth, back when boys had long hair, the shaggy protagonists in the YA novels were rebels, anti-heroes, anti-establishment, slouched around street corners, did everything except become competent at anything. To be fair, one writer had his hero on a school wrestling team and competing for good school marks but, as that same writer noted in his forward, his novel was written as a protest against all the non-accomplished heroes of the era. (It’s as if the 1960’s value of “freedom” meant “freedom from self-discipline”)

Even Heinlein’s female supporting characters were strong and competent, even the ones in the stories written decades before certain feisty elements of society taught the rest of us about “women’s liberation.” A critic once pointed out we don’t know what sort of females Heinlein valued in easy everyday life (limp wristed trophy wives?) because the stories were always about a society, or a family, under stress.

As for Heinlein’s characters in general, his stories set a hard example to live up to. Fine by me. His boys and men? Often they learned algebra and enjoyed it for it’s own sake—in one novel a crippled beggar tutors his ragged son in quadratic equations. Heinlein’s characters would casually mention using their slide rule (calculator) to solve a curious problem they had set for themselves. Sometimes they were involved in politics—“the only game for adults.” Often they were engineers or wore a uniform. We are talking practical left-brain people. Heinlein’s novels seldom featured a writer, an artist, or anyone being part of a thriving artistic community. Once, in an adult novel, an English teacher was briefly onstage—as a pathetic villain.

I took Heinlein’s stories to heart. I can remember, in junior high, smelling fresh cookies from boys in cooking. This while other boys were taking chorus. Not me, I took serious courses like chemistry and physics. Not mere biology. Never art. Had we a junior reserve officer training corps (JROTC) with a firing range in the school basement, I would surely have been involved. But alas, I lived in Surrey Canada, not Kent Washington.

What if Heinlein’s authorial public image, as seen through his characters, was all a mask?

I first absorbed the word “mask” after I heard a radio interview of an ex-girlfriend of singer Bob Dylan. She suggested Dylan’s singing style was a put-on. She even imitated him for the listening audience. And here I’d been so angry at Bob Dylan, angry because he had bales of money and yet, while other poor artists were busting their guts to work on their craft, he seemed too blanket-blank lazy to take lessons in proper speaking and singing. As it happens, my college offered speaking lessons for a full semester, but you had to major in theatre or broadcasting to get in: That’s why today people ask me where my accent is from—I never did get to “polish my articulators.”

Heinlein’s image is that he is brilliant and Knowledgeable. Creative too, yet mainly a practical guy to have on your naval ship or space station. How brilliant? Besides doing algebra for fun? The legend goes that after the navy he tried various jobs. One day he saw a short story contest with a cash prize, so he wrote his first short story. But then he ended up submitting his story to a science fiction magazine instead, as it offered more money. It sold, and he continued to sell each new story he wrote. He even had to use a pseudonym sometimes, so his name would not be in too many issues. The rest of us? We average ten years, writing around our day job, before we break into print. I doubt the legend.

My doubts arose from a young student I volunteered with at university who claimed he had a collection of Heinlein stories from before the “first” one. No way would he sell his collection to me! I believed him. Common sense tells me “no artist paints just one picture.” There is surely a trail, a learning curve. If Heinlein suppressed or failed to submit his earlier manuscripts right up until the legendary first one, entitled Lifeline, then maybe that was part of building a brand. (I too have been a “dark horse” at times, beginning with surprising my school cross-country team: I’m never in a hurry for fame)

During university, in a lecture theatre class, we took a lengthy aptitude test. The purpose was to find our dominant vocational “scheme.” I’m not positive what the schemes were, but let me guess a few: A person could be Realistic, such as a mechanic or naval officer, Enterprising, such a businessman, Investigative like a scientist, or be Social or Artistic, and at least one more. 

Our teacher no doubt thought we would be distracted if she handed us our lengthy results right away. So before she did so, she had us leave our seats to congregate in on the floor at the front, in our scheme groups, to discuss. Well, I’m in the human services, so I went to be with the “social” ones, to compare how our lives were social. Bad idea. Because when I returned to my seat I discovered I was artistic… Me? Artistic? Suddenly a lot of my embarrassing life made sense. Too bad, to quote the oracle at Delphi, that I didn’t “know thyself” until that very day.

A year later, at a staff meeting, my peers were to label me as being the creative one on the team—the only reason I didn’t dismiss my creative contributions as “coincidence” or “from having knowledge” was from my awakening after that test. Now I would ask: What if Heinlein’s dominant scheme was “artistic” too? What if he was faking his carefully crafted brand of merely writing “for groceries” and knowing what a slide rule is for?

Being artistic would fit with how he could “invent” things like Waldos, waterbeds, and army armored power suits. It would explain how he was, like Shakespeare’s group of players staging Merchant of Venice, without prejudice against people of another other race, religion or creed. In his Tunnel In the Sky the student hero is Black! In the 1950’s! But ver-r-r-y few readers ever noticed. I never did, I only learned from a Black English teacher. 

As an artist, Heinlein could step outside the ethos of his day, and see that, say, brawny football players didn’t have to be C-minus students and women, well, they didn’t have to be less-than-male, trapped by a Feminine Mystique, dependent on their intuition. (Yes, I’ve read ½ of Germaine Greer) His keen perception, I think, was not from his brilliant I.Q. but from his artistic eye. Artists always stand apart from their society; that’s why they’re able to reflect it back to us… I’m still learning to say “we,” not “they,” as in “we artists.”

Like other great artists, he was devoted to his craft. A secret (secret to prevent him from being inundated with requests for help) has been revealed: He helped two already successful authors, Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven, with their thick novel The Mote in God’s Eye. If he was going to blurb their novel as being “possibly the best science fiction novel I have ever read,” then he was going to make sure it was: He gifted them with a line by line rewrite. How could he do that unless, regardless of any inborn talent, he had taught himself, after many, many self-disciplined lonely man-hours of painful revisions, what a classic sentence looks like?

I do believe the legend that he would write only one draft. (Isaac Asimov recalls Bob shaking his head saying, “Isaac, Isaac, why do you write two drafts?”) Sure, one draft, but only because he had previously labored for years to learn to craft his words. That’s art.

I once did a line-by-line study of his unrevised edition of the Puppet Masters, now in paperback as “the original uncut version.” I compared it to my old hardcover. My findings? I think he would quickly write his “one draft,” then cut it down, and then submit the manuscript. This would be an efficient use of his man-hours. Somebody once told me, while explaining income taxes on fiction, that a fiction writer has to write two pages per hour in order not to lose money. “You need to be efficient.” 

Ah Heinlein... like him I too have tried to be devoted to my craft. I used to revise in pencil until my pages were so cluttered I could no longer make out my manuscript. Then I’d re-type it. Then I’d start revising again… I’m as lazy as the next person, honestly I am, but in my writing I would hope to one day be as excellent as one of Heinlein’s characters. I’m still learning, from the writer and the man.

Sean Crawford

(still lazy at writing)

May

Calgary

2017

Footnotes:

~My favorite line (from memory) from The Puppet Masters was the spy chief rebuking his agent who had expressed ignorance about recent events in Russia, “If you would take a grown up interest in the newspapers you would know.” A citizen should be informed.

~Heinlein’s belief the common people can handle their own affairs is expressed in the book Red Planet, where colonists have a town hall meeting. His belief that democracy is, as Churchill noted, the best alternative to all other forms of government, is expressed in the Hugo Award winning book Double Star about the greatest statesman in the solar system. Heinlein himself, in the days before the distraction of television, was a hard-working volunteer for a political party.

~In Double Star, I liked how a character observed you may judge a party leader by the folks around him.

A certain female provincial premier had folks around her who would give the “go-ahead” to secretly build her a big fancy penthouse atop the legislative buildings, folks who would lie to people that her government plane was full so she could travel almost alone. For pleasure. With her daughter. Now the word about her people is out: Her Progressive Conservative party can’t get back into power in Alberta, even though we are traditionally Canada’s most conservative province, not unless the party merges with a party still further to the right. The crazy party we elected as our protest might not be a one-term wonder after all… even though they’re socialists! (Ah, the only game for adults)  

For my fellow writer-nerds:

~Other authorial “trademarks,” or schtick, would include Canadians such as Farley Mowat and Leonard Cohen, one wearing a kilt, the other wearing a fedora indoors. A published writer I know tried wearing Hawaiian shirts but then he gave it up after nobody noticed.

~My favorite lesson of my line study was when Heinlein cut out the comma after said, and before creatures in a bite of dialogue, to show urgency. The published uncut version, although grammatically correct, was wrong to put the comma back in. The following is mostly in my own words, but not the words in italics:  

The agency chief is repeating word for word an agent’s report by radio, about a landed flying saucer, that was cut off: “They’re coming out now, little creatures—”

Excited: “Little men?”

Sharply: “He said “creatures!” 
The chief was a stickler for accuracy, just like Winston Churchill, and the fictional chief of secret agent Matt Helm.