The Bread: Remembering George Floyd The Roses: Powerful Conversations
Remembering George Floyd
When I watched the video of Derick Chauvin lynching George Floyd, I kept getting flashbacks to Rodney King lying in the street with cops surrounding him, beating him, trying to kill him. Given last summer we were in the middle of a pandemic, I didn’t expect the reaction of the country and the world, the massive (mostly) peaceful protests. I expected things to burn.
Naturally, the cops in the Rodney King incident were ruled “innocent.” What we saw with our own eyes was not a problem. Business as usual. Nothing to see here. It was a standard practice that had worked for 150 years.
150 years ago, the custom of beating black men to death on the slightest pretext was passed from slave owners to police and there the custom has been carried on to the present day. The problem is, they didn’t have video 150 years ago. All that carnage was tucked away out of sight.
The country burned in 1992. It burned in the 1960s for the same reason and the 1940s and the 1920s.
It’s a nice way to distract your attention from the fact that Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, murdered a man in cold blood in front of a dozen rolling cameras and made himself a YouTube sensation.
This time the murderer was convicted. This time we were allowed to believe our own eyes.
And this time, like the times in 1992 and the 1960s and the 1940s and the 1920s. Everyone from the media to the taco truck driver was claiming the protesters were rioters, thugs, and vandals. Trump & Co. treated it like a slave rebellion which is the standard reaction.
I have a question
The country has been on fire many times over police misconduct. But why isn’t it on fire every night?
I like to think it’s because civilized people don’t like to break the law. They understand why laws exist. But for several minutes, as a nation, we watched a man slowly die pleading for his life while everyone stood around like this is just normal — which it is.
Even I was thinking “Burn it all down!”
And I’m a Buddhist.
We can ignore a lot
Anyone who has contact with the police is a criminal, right? The officer was just doing his job. That guy was a drug addict, who cares? And he was black which means it matters even less.
Look! They burned down Target! Ignore why.
If you believe that racism is not a problem, you are a white supremacist. Fox News, etc. tell each other that the radical left just loves to see things in flames. The George Soros lunatics just want to destroy “our” country. There aren’t any problems here! There is no racism, let alone systemic racism!
Therefore everything is fine, and nothing needs to change. Snowflakes overreact. You know how they are.
Systemic Racism
These systems were built in older, more racist times. They need to be dismantled. For example, financing school districts locally is just another form of red-lining. It guarantees that the poorest neighborhoods have the poorest schools and therefore the most disadvantaged students. The poorest schools are rarely majority-white. Another example is zoning. You can’t build affordable housing across a city. You are confined to certain areas. If that sounds even more like red-lining to you, it sounds like it to me, too.
Some of these practices originally had the deliberate goal of preventing black people from flourishing and others just had oppression as an unintended consequence.
We need to remember that we are not Black America and White America. We are the United States of America. (Catchy phrase. I’m sure I’ve heard it somewhere.)
Treason
The United States of America won the Civil War. The slaveholders lost. And yet the poison of their racism still sickens the American body. For the last 40 years or so, their poison has been weaponized by a political party that has little else to offer.
I admit in my perfect world I would not have allowed the Confederate states to rejoin the union. They would have had to be content with being a territory like Samoa or Puerto Rico. All former slaves would have been invited to migrate to the United States at the expense of the former Confederacy. When you rewrite history you can have it any way you want!
Most of the former Confederate States are a bunch of dirt-poor hellholes that mooch off the USA’s federal funds in order to keep their feudal system alive into the modern world while pretending to be rebellious and independent. And they certainly don’t mind in the least making white people suffer as long as black people don’t get anything good in their lives.
And before if you brand me with “#notallSoutherners” those Southerners are happy to keep their states dirt poor and feudal-lite®. They are only worried that somebody might torch the Walmart (an actual conversion I had this week) and don’t seem to remember the man who was slowly, brutally murdered in front of us.
Burn, Baby, Burn
To the people who are deeply concerned about Antifa thugs burning down Target and Walmart: You don’t deserve it or us or the benefits of living in a free country.
To anybody who can’t remember a man crushed under the knee of a sadist and are worried about a brick through the window — get out. You don’t care about George Floyd because he was black and “it happens all the time.” I say to you that you don’t deserve my country.
To anybody who weeps about the Glorious South and the destruction of monuments to traitors, to anybody who displays the battle flag of the slavers and the losers in the civil war — get out. You are a cancer on the American body and I would cut you out if I could.
Go live in Mississippi or Alabama (if they’ll have you) and never set foot in the United States of America ever again.
Powerful conversations:
Self-management and the Coaching Mindset
The life coaching mindset starts out in self-consciousness and ends in self-awareness. Getting from one state to the other takes some time and isn’t ever complete.
Most people who learn life coaching start out self-conscious. While we are usually comfortable having conversations with people, a life coaching conversation has a different technique. A lucky few get it naturally and the rest of us learn it over time. Self-management is how we do that.
Get curious
What you work for is self-awareness. Your presence is requested. Acknowledge your nerves, and your stage fright and consciously allow it to relax. Then the next step is to become curious about the person you’re talking to. What are they like? What is their perspective? The spotlight you felt begins to fade away.
This sounds like awareness of the other person in the conversation and not self-awareness. The two things happen at the same time. You acknowledge how you are feeling in the moment and then turn that awareness to the other person.
And then ask
Empowering yourself and others to be self-aware starts with powerful questions.
For example, you are asked to avoid “why” questions like “why did you do that?” Asking “why” isn’t really bad, but there are more skillful questions. “Why” could have a dozen answers that would be interesting but not helpful. Most often the only answer to “why” is a shrug.
More powerful would be to ask a “what” question. “What” is more concrete. “What happened? … What happened after that? … What was that like?”
And then listen
W.A.I.T. stands for “Why Am I Talking?” Be aware of how much you are talking and how much they are talking. I mean actual minutes of air time. In a regular conversation, people bounce ideas and anecdotes back and forth.
In a coaching conversation, the coach should do very little talking. Even tolerate some silence without rushing to fill with another question. This bit of self-management allows good questions to come to you and ideas to come to the other person. You start noticing when you need to hush up and let the other person think.
Being present and being curious makes you a good listener in regular conversations and even a better conversationalist!
Your job (if you choose to accept it) is to be present and to be curious. Certainly, those things are vital to being a good life coach but they also grow a good life.
And then let it grow
When you learn life coaching you get coached dozens of times (maybe hundreds!). You learn to explore your own values and goals. That leads to a more peaceful and happy life. You learn a lot. You’ve got it going on! And you want to pass it on.
We know how great personal growth is and we want everybody to be well and happy. (I know there are some people we wish were well and happy way, way over there. But generally…that’s the goal.)
Therefore when someone has a problem we want to jump in and help them fix it. We say “helpful” things with the warmest of hearts. But often it lands like this:
“Here’s the solution. Now get over it.”
I heard recently that telling people the answers to their problems is “cheating.” The word startled me at first.
Then I remembered that each person is naturally creative, resourceful, and whole. As a person becomes more self-aware, their own natural creativity starts to lead them to where they need to go.
Coaching a “learning experience”
Part of self-management is learning to evaluate yourself. After a conversation, think about how you did. Did you let them lead? Did you acknowledge them? Did you stay curious? What would you do differently next time?
What did you learn? Yep. You learn stuff from the other person and you learn from your own mistakes. The world is full of surprises!
Being kind to your own mind does not come naturally to most people, me definitely included. When you mess something up that conflicts with your values it feels bad, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. It distracts from the questions. The powerful questions. What was that like? It was like that. Ouch, ouch, ouch! Okay, so what did you learn?
What do you do when you stub your toe? It hurts. A lot. You wait for the pain to subside (because you know it will in a sec). Then you ask: What did I learn? I learned the coffee table needs to be six inches to the left.
When you learn that thing, you’re done. When the toe stops hurting and the coffee table is moved over, all receipts are paid in full and life moves on to the next thing.
When you mess something up, make a mistake big or small, it often hurts way more than a stubbed toe. That pain will revisit again and again until you acknowledge the mistake and fix what you can fix. The healing comes when all the receipts are paid as much as you can and life moves on to the next thing.
Kind to your mind
Being kind to your mind also means accepting when you do something well. Let it land. Take it in and accept it like a little gift from the universe.
For some reason, it’s easier to say “good job” a child or a friend or even someone you aren’t that close to. But it’s weird to think about saying it to yourself. It’s easy to praise others, but yourself? Not so much.
And stay curious
The things that make you the happiest, align the closest to your values. Life coaching helps you find those values and begin to live according to them. When that happens coaching becomes a way of looking at the world. Coaching becomes a frame of mind. “Be present” and “be curious” become habits.
The more self-aware you become the more empowered you are. The more personal power you have, the more choices you have and the freer you are regardless of your circumstances.
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