Christopher Avery's Agility narrative on living a life at choice

For more about Christopher Avery. Click here for The Responsibility Process®
A good place to connect with us is LinkedIn with Janet, and Martin
Thanks 
Please see chapter headings;
00:01:27 Driving question, why so many smart people are unhappy at work?
00:04:25 Back to studying, then working in consulting firm - creativity, entrepreneurship, culture building and worked working with IBM to build a team building program
00:06:17 The search for integrity
00:07:44 Christopher settled on shared responsibility as the space where individuals make this organic shift and come together as a team
00:09:38 The search for personal responsibility started... found research project with Christopher's mentor, Bill McCauley, and his mentor, Marshall Thurber.
00:10:37 Listening to narratives on why they were stuck and why they couldn't have what they wanted - They created the responsibility process
00:11:04 Team work is an individual skill
00:12:18 Many responsibility definitions - Capital R - Responsibility and its meaning - is owning your ability and power to create, choose and attract.
00:13:50 Agility's definition from responsibility is the "ability to change (adapt) without changing" (your identity)
00:15:33 The protagonist is the 3 or 5 year Christopher who wants to feel good and to be loved
00:16:29 Aspects of of the protagonist - a proposal of living life in reverse
00:18:25 Teaching on how fast can you get past good, bad, right, wrong as learned position abilities
00:20:15 Practical responsibility or extreme responsibility - levels of owning your ability and power to create, choose and attract
00:21:21 Profound role of the Law of Attraction and attraction patterns
00:23:06 Various thoughts have different vibrational frequencies, meta physical (beyond the physical) and biocentric design
00:24:59 The villain of ego, the upper and lower mind, Being anxiety driven versus freedom driven 
00:26:54 The three keys to responsibility are intention, awareness and confront, which are all big aspects of consciousness
00:27:49 Letting go - identify the fear, blockage, even the pain, the symptom, and you can work to release it
00:29:05 The Sedona method - Can you welcome it? The frustration, the pain.... Could you let it go? Would you let it go? When
00:30:36 The responsibility process
https://responsibility.com/the-responsibility-process-poster/
00:33:52 What is at stake for people to not take any action - For people to live at cause rather than at affect in their lives
00:34:18 Coping is overrated - I'd rather grow than cope
00:34:51 We learned to reward intellectualism and not how to put the human psyche and consciousness first
00:35:10 COVID 19 experience - free mentoring with people who had high anxiety - the reason I can't have what I want is because of this pandemic
00:37:20 Covid had me in fear for 36 hours
00:39:09 People are stuck, what would be your call to action
00:39:42 Dealing with the real problem is rare, we generally solve to treat our anxiety
00:40:27 I love best practices are great as ideas, I don't love them as solutions.
00:41:39 The angst cause by should, good, right or wrong... It is your responsibility on whether you want to adopt this advice or not.
00:42:42 Solve problems by sitting in our anxiety and use curiosity to look at how we got here, at our thinking, at our assumptions, at our beliefs
00:45:47 Thank you, Socrates, practical program, at effect in our life and are stuck or are in charge of our life and we're moving forward in responsibility.

Transcript

Note: This is a AI transcript... please note - this is not formatted. Ignore strange punctuation..

martin: [00:00:00] 
Welcome to the Agility Narratives podcast series. We hold the space, so as a community we can listen to leading change makers and enterprise agile leaders talk about their agility narratives. Each narrative we hypothesize gives us insight into part of the whole. Christopher Avery is the CEO and founder of Responsibility.com and is known as The Responsibility Process® Guy and is its originator. This framework is a how to approach for understanding, teaching and taking personal responsibility. Christopher, a master at living in freedom, choice and power, is humble and vulnerable. As a teacher, he believes coping skills are overrated. He's on a personal journey towards these goals of living a life that is free from patterns. A life where we choose our response and are empowered to do so. We're very fortunate that as a teacher, he shares with us his journey towards the change. He, with many others all around the world, wants to see in the world. We're very pleased to welcome Christopher to the agility narrative to talk about his personal journey as an advocate of the responsibility process, as a transformation tool for personal team and organizational change. To know more about Christopher, Janet or myself, please see the show notes by Christopher.

Christopher: [00:01:23] 
Hi, Martin. That was a lovely introduction. Thank you. I'm honored to be here.

martin: [00:01:27] 
I'm curious, when you were a management consultant, now reformed as per your website, your driving question was, why are so many smart people unhappy at work? My question is similar circumstances as a management consultant was how could so many smart people drive or create outcomes that nobody wanted? Can you tell us how your driving question came up for you? And if you like, can you correlate driving questions?

Christopher: [00:01:57]
 So for me, it comes from an existential experience. And that was I started my first job after college, after my bachelor's degree as a sales guy. So I had learned that I had good rapport building skills, good sales skills. So I took a job in personal sales. Insurance sales with a very highly respected company was going to be my career choice in my early twenties, and I saw opportunity to develop an area, the high desert area of Southern California, north of San Bernardino, California. And I kept having a recurring vision of my father in his career. So I grew up in a middle class, upper middle class home. My dad was a corporate executive. I was born in a suburb of New York City. He worked in headquarters in Manhattan, and he got shipped out of headquarters, out to a plant in Ashtabula, Ohio, about ten years before his retirement, ten, 12 years before his retirement. So in his early fifties, he got shipped out of headquarters to a plant, kind of a turnover to make room for new blood in that headquarters. And my memory of my dad was that he outwardly very successful, you know, the suit and tie and the overcoat and the felt fedora and the leather briefcase off to catch the train in the morning. We lived comfortably, but he came home from work every day, tired and sore and frustrated and pissed off.

Christopher: [00:03:28]
 And we won't get deep into it. But he was in quality control, had met Edwards Deming years earlier, tried to bring statistical quality control and Deming esque thinking into the company, and they said none of that. And so he spent his life inspecting quality out of their product as opposed to building it in. So he eventually he did retire. He had about 11 years after retirement vibrancy. And then he fell dead of an aortic aneurysm, which was from lifelong high blood pressure. And I kept seeing this here I was in my early twenties looking at this arc of going into insurance sales for a 25, 35, 45 year career. And I thought to myself, What the heck am I doing? I only real role model for going to work with my dad. And I didn't want to replicate the coming home tired and sore and frustrated and pissed off and having whatever diseases come from that stress then got back into college and worked through the graduate program and did a lot of work in a consulting firm around creativity and entrepreneurship and culture building. And I was finally asked to build a team building program for IBM to teach software project leaders how to build teams. In doing that work, I took that so seriously that at a deep level I realized that a lot of work that I was doing in training at that time was helping people cope, helping people get a day off from their real job and coming to a classroom and having some laughs and blowing off some steam.

Christopher: [00:05:05]
 And the feedback would even say that I don't know if I can use this in my real job, but it sure was a fun day and I challenged myself to move from just helping people cope with their existence at work, to actually figuring out how to help them see something new or different, some new or different possibilities for them, which might be to make a choice to get the heck out of this job or this company and make a different choice. And so that was it. Martin That's that's where that question came from. How could I be participating in a civilized nation that has so many smart, caring, motivated, ambitious people who get into lives that they don't know how they got there and they don't know how to change? And the connection to your question, I think it's pretty similar. It's pretty well related. We co-create these messes together without realizing that we're creating them because we're in pursuit of our goals, have to do with recognition and title and pay and reward and safety. And we don't know that we're trading off so much more important stuff in order to have those.

martin: [00:06:16] 
So great answer.

janet: [00:06:17] 
Thank you. Given your introduction, Chris, you describe the journey to the. Having the responsibility process try what else might have been going on for you at this time?

Christopher: [00:06:29] 
There's the very rational career type answer for that, but there's also the the personal journey answer. Janet, I'll start with the personal journey. The personal journey was that I realized during my college years, on my 2019, 20, 21, I felt broken. I felt that I had some fundamental flaws that I didn't know how to correct, even though I had by that time learned to be a great dog trainer. So I understood behavioral conditioning, and I figured that all I had to do was recondition my behaviors and I could fix that. Well, it didn't work, so it was something deeper. And the back story on that in terms of this lifetime is that I grew up in a home with one very explosive, unhappy, demeaning, argumentative. Defensive parent and the behaviors in myself that I didn't like were very similar. So I was very demeaning and very judgmental. And at one level I didn't like it and I didn't want to be that way. And in another level I couldn't find the buttons, the pressure points, the leverage points to change that. So I started a search for what I called integrity. At that time, the more rational career type of answer was, as we had this opportunity to build this three day workshop for IBM to help software project leaders learn how to build teams. I worked with one partner who was an amazing professor and knew the literature in groups and sociology and communication, postmodernism and blah, blah, blah, backwards and forwards.

Christopher: [00:08:09] 
And then my other partner was an advanced expert in neuro linguistic programming and really great with adult education. And so we were working together to build this three day workshop, and I was looking for the very essence of teamwork to try and teach people that didn't care as much about the science as I cared about. And the essence I settled on was shared responsibility. I noticed that when teams really come together and individuals make this organic shift to where they feel a sense of complete ownership for the project or mission, and also a sense of ownership for their relationships with each other that I decided to to call that shared responsibility. And the thing that I wanted to teach and today we call it safety or trust or transparency or honesty or whatever. So that was my thing. So I went in search of trying to understand what is personal responsibility and where does it come from. And society taught me that some people have it and some people don't. If you want to get something done, you got to go find the people that have it and ask them to get this thing done for you. But I saw it emerging right in front of me from people who were disengaged and lackluster that when I went through the team building processes that I understood and it actually worked, I saw people enter and show up and start to engage and take ownership.

Christopher: [00:09:37] 
So I was in a search for understanding, personal responsibility and the success gurus throughout the ages wrote lots about how you should take it, and it's the number one principle of success. But they didn't say how. And I found the academic literature about personal responsibility was more about morality and judgment and discernment. It wasn't the internal. It wasn't whatever was going on in the mind that someone switched from non responsibility to taking responsibility. And then I ran into a little research program that was going on right here in Austin, Texas, and it was a couple of guys. The other guy was not from Austin, but one guy was my mentor, Bill McCauley, and the other guy was his mentor, Marshall Thurber, who's very well known among seminar leaders. And all the great seminar leaders of the last few decades have studied with Marshall. So Jack Canfield and Robert Kiyosaki and all these people studied with Marshall Thurber, and they were independently listening to their clients tell them stories, narratives about why they were stuck, why they couldn't have what they want, why they couldn't get success. And they simply started coding those stories, those narratives that their clients were giving them. And they created this chart that we now call the responsibility process. And so that's that's how this came to be.

janet: [00:11:03] 
So in about 2001, was it around this time that you wrote Teamwork is an individual skill?

Christopher: [00:11:13] 
Yes, it is. And I absolutely.

janet: [00:11:17]
 That looks like a well-worn copy.

Christopher: [00:11:20] 
So the copy I'm showing you, I have this is the copy that I took from the first delivery, and I have been carrying it for 20 years. So I actually wrote the content of teamwork as an individual skill early newsletter during 9899. And a little side story around that is there were not a lot of email newsletters at that time. I had to use some funky email distribution newsletter service, but it grew rapidly. I'd like 5000 followers in no time. And then I was approached by Barrett Koehler to turn it into a book, and the newsletter kind of just fell apart at that time. And looking back on it, I had no idea of what I had and didn't even have the concept of trying to turn that into business or monetize it in any way.

janet: [00:12:18]
 Christopher Personal responsibility. I can't help but look at the word responsible and responsible when broken into syllables. Is response able, which means basically the ability to respond. Can you talk to us about the Capital R responsibility and its meaning?

Christopher: [00:12:40] 
Word responsibility has more meanings there are than there are people on the planet. So it implies cause and effect in all kinds of ways, whether you're a victim or a cause or whatever else. It implies that you're accountable for a task. It implies that you did something. It implies that you're good character. There's lots of lots of different meanings, and the meaning always gets to be taken from context. So we separate small our responsibility of the thousand definitions with capital our responsibility which the shorthand of that would be just what you said, Janet. Right. The ability to respond. Our definition a little bit more expensive definition. Our definition is owning your ability and power to create, choose and attract period. And some people aren't comfortable with that ending with the period. So then we would say owning your power and ability to create, choose and attract your reality or everything or all of it or your experience.

janet: [00:13:50] 
So here we are on a podcast about agility narrative. So let's start talking about your agility narrative today. What are the core tenets and how do you define agility?

Christopher: [00:14:03]
I define agility from the perspective of responsibility, and that is I find agility then as the ability to change without changing. And what I mean by that is agility. It's the ability to change direction, change priority, change toolset. Without changing my identity. Right. So it's the identity and the ego that gets in the way of change, right? You get a title and a role and a job description and a relationship in the workplace or whatever, and what happens behind the scenes. And I'm sure you guys have your perspective on this and know more deeper than I do about it, but that becomes pretty rigid in the mind and the ego and our our position in life. And when we're asked to change something, then all this need for safety and control and approval and resistance and defensiveness comes up. So that's why I believe that agility is the ability to change direction or priority, what we're doing without changing who we are. And for me, the tenants of that are practicing personal responsibility. Responsibility is the essence of agility. It's the essence of lots of things. But the ability to respond, as Janet said, seems to me to be one of the core tenets of agility.

martin: [00:15:33] 
So we have a conversation, define agility as that ability to adapt and respond, which seems very close to being able to feel responsible and that choice. Who in your narrative is the protagonist? That main character or characteristic that is the feature of the narrative and hopefully the one that wins out in the end.

Christopher: [00:15:54] 
The protagonist would be the three or five year old Christopher that just wants to play and have fun and be loved, feel good. So my mantra is I'm free, powerful in that choice. So I remind myself of that even when I don't think it's true that I know it's true. And so that's the that's the part of me that doesn't agree with constraints and victimhood and oppression. I'm thinking that work is hard and life's a jungle and you've got to put your bowie knife in your teeth when you go to work and fight all day to make a living.

martin: [00:16:29]
 Can we explore aspects of of the protagonist in terms of how the three, four, five year old Christopher is at freedom today and then maybe go through the freedom, choice and power of parents?

Christopher: [00:16:47]
 I used to have a a proposal that we ought to live our career life in reverse, and that is that we ought to have the kind of freedom, choice and power that we have as a child. Throughout our career. I don't really remember all the elements of it. I haven't visited that in a long time, but you just reminded me of it. Really, what I'm thinking of is that when you're doing your work, often a coach or a counselor or or a psychologist will ask you to get in touch with your three year old self or or ask you what the five year old in you is thinking. And they tend to be much more honest than the sophisticated adult. So I'm not so much talking about the chronic chronological age as I'm talking about the child in me that just wants to be able to continue to be a child in terms of freedom. We start getting corrected and we start being told that we're wrong at a very, very early age. Very early. I found two theories about this. One was from Freudian psychology and the other was from developmental educational psychology. And the Freudian psychology says it starts at four year olds, two years old, when we have toilet training and we start being told, no, you can't do that there. You have to do that here. There's a right way and a wrong way. Get it right. The other one, the other theory at five years old was very similar, except it had to do with being put into a constraint of kindergarten and onto classroom and the right and wrong way of everything. So before that there was a lot of freedom.

Christopher: [00:18:25] 
So one of our serious responsibility teachings is how quickly can you get past good, bad, right, wrong as learned position abilities? And that's a serious teaching and spirituality as well as to ego is just chock full of position, abilities and opinions of good or bad, right? Wrong. And just because we have them, it doesn't make them true. You do that, then you free up choices. If I'm 35 years old and I'm constrained with hundreds of thousands of good, bad, right, wrong rules that I've put in place throughout my life, then my choices are constrained and every decision is hard because I know that deciding means to cut off alternatives. So when we practice responsibility and realize that we're authoring our life and we're free to do whatever we choose, then what happens is we start realizing that we have tons and tons of choices. When we put all that together, we say, Well, gosh, I really want to be free, and I'd kind of like to make a living. And gosh, I really don't like working for other people. So in my own case, I've been my own boss for 30 some years and I'm probably a far worse boss than anybody I could have worked for. But it's my choice to be my own boss. So when we get clarity around really important stuff to us like that, that clarity brings us to trust our own ability to function at a higher level. And that's the basis of personal power. Personal power comes from our trust of our ability to function as a human being, though I hope that answers your question about relating it to freedom, choice and power.

martin: [00:20:14] 
Thank you.

janet: [00:20:15] 
Sir Christopher. What would you say? Your theme. And I'll bring in again your agility narrative, which is your responsibility for our narrative. And why has this theme come to be?

Christopher: [00:20:29]
 I'm going to quote my mentor, Bill McCarley, around what he calls extreme responsibility. So I teach both practical responsibility and extreme responsibility. The difference is practical responsibility is simply it doesn't matter who caused it. If it bugs you, then you get to own it. Extreme responsibility says it's all me. Only me all the time. Which means whatever I'm experiencing in my life fun, joy, hardship, illness, disease, loss. At some level, I'm creating, choosing or attracting it. So it gets back to the definition of owning your ability and power to create, choose and attract. And the more I practice that, the more I uncover limiting beliefs. And falsehoods and false assumptions and blocks and stuck points in my life and I get to face them and work my way through them.

janet: [00:21:20] 
You mention the word attract, which I can't help but think of the Law of Attraction. What role does the Law of Attraction play in moving towards responsibility? Personal responsibility?

Christopher: [00:21:34] 
It plays a profound role. And and I'm not talking about the way the Law of Attraction was portrayed in the movie The Secret. So I'll let me talk about it at a very practical level, and then I'll talk about it a little bit more deeply in terms of quantum physics at a very practical level. The Law of Attraction operates like this. I have some kind of unconscious story going on or many stories. Call it baggage, drama, whatever. And I attract people to me who can help me reinforce that. So the story that Esther Hicks tells that I like is that there's a fellow who likes to go out to honky tonks many times a week, and almost every time he gets into a fight and it's never his fault. So the questioning is right. How is he attracting getting into a fight at honky tonks many times a week and then being a victim saying it's the other guy started it. So our lives are very much like that, right? The patterns in our lives are very much like that. We have some subconscious patterns going on and we keep attracting the same stuff, whether it's attracting the loser lover over and over again, or attracting automobile accidents or. My understanding of this is that what's happening is that a vibrational level, which today is being explained by quantum physics that says that all thoughts are energy.

Christopher: [00:23:06]
 And so various thoughts have different vibrational frequencies. And what's really going on in the world is metaphysical. That means beyond the physical that we usually see, and it has our attention and it has us captivated by the physical and addicted to the physical. But what's really going on is beyond the physical, and our thoughts act like magnets and we attract like thoughts somehow. Some of my favorite writings and authors around this are the book Power versus Force by Dr. David Hawkins. But then I've also recently been reading a series of books and the name of the guys. Getting past me, but he's an extremely accomplished doctor and physics researcher. And the most recent book is has to do with bio centrism, the grand bio centric design. And in a series of books, he's been laying out the principles that are being uncovered by quantum physics of bio centrism. And the idea of bio centrism is the 180 degree counter to realism. So realism is what physics has been advancing for decades, and realism is the idea that there is an objective universe and an objective earth and an objective tree and an objective sidewalk and objective house, and that it exists. Whether or not you're consciousness, it exists. Bio centrism says the opposite. Bio centrism says none of that can exist without consciousness, and the consciousness is creating it. And that's mind blowing.

martin: [00:24:59] 
You often refer to the work of David Hawkins and power and force and letting go, and I know that's been a big influence on my life in your agility narrative. Who or what are the villains, the constraints? And maybe in reference to those, maybe you could talk a little bit about letting go of that and maybe confront.

Christopher: [00:25:21]
 Sure. Thank you, Martin. The villain is certainly ego. Sometimes I talk about kind of an upper mind in the lower mind and think of the lower mind more as ego. And the upper mind is where the responsibility of mindset resides in the upper mind. The drivers in the upper mind are our unique expression of self, our unique genius, and our unique inspiration. So when I talk about freedom, choice and power, it's I want to be free and make choices and exhibit power around my authentic expression of self using my unique genius and my unique inspiration. The Lower Mind. What we often think of the ego mind, the drivers. There are approval, safety and control. So approval, safety and control are the villains. And with every responsibility student that I work with, those are the rudimentary lessons. How do we get past this, this unconscious driven need for approval, safety and control so that we can get to accessing our unique expression of self? We, in shorthand, we refer to it as being anxiety driven versus being freedom driven. And 99.9% of the world, I estimate, is anxiety driven. And I want to help everyday people free themselves of that and find the place where they can be driven by freedom, driven by clear intention rather than fear and anxiety.

Christopher: [00:26:53] 
The three keys to responsibility are intention, awareness and confront, which are all big aspects of consciousness. Big aspects of mind. And intention and awareness are clear enough. Confront is the one that's challenging to understand and use, but confront is simply my ability to face and specifically my ability to face my anxiety so that I can. Come to understand it and and reach some clarity around it and maybe undo the false programming there and insert some new truths and awareness. So this is what's in the way of most people starting and maintaining a responsibility practices that they have such a high need for safety that they're not willing to look in the mirror and face their own anxiety. So we're letting go comes in is that you can also simply identify the fear, blockage, even the pain, the symptom, and you can work to release it. And so David Hopkins book, which you mentioned, Letting Go The Power of Surrender, is a beautiful book about this. But it's it's also a practice in every major spiritual path. It's a practice in Buddhism. And that is learning, learning how to find the part of the mind that has attached itself to some outcome or some experience and learn how to let go of that attachment.

Christopher: [00:28:32] 
And once you learn how to do it, it's as simple as picking up a pencil and holding it in front of you and turning your hand over and opening your fingers so that the pencil drops right. Releasing or letting go. And there's a practical tool around. This is from a gentleman named Lester Levinson who developed it. And then it's been made more famous since his death by two men, Larry Crane and the other Haled Dwoskin and Hill Dwoskin, you can probably find this in a search, has something called the Sedona method. And the Sedona method just says, think of something bugging you. Think of something that you know is frustrating you. The example I like to use is think of a time when you've run into the grocery store to pick up just two things you need for dinner and you get to the front of the grocery store and there's five people in each checkout line with full baskets. Right at that moment you're like, Oh man, I have to sit here for 20 minutes to buy these two cans of soup.

martin: [00:29:43] 
Right.

Christopher: [00:29:45]
So we've all had the experience probably of being in that situation or being upset in traffic or something, and then we just decided being upset wasn't worth it and we let it go and then we were joyous in the next moment. So in the Sedona method, there's four steps. The first step is says, Can you welcome it? The frustration, the pain, whatever it is, can you welcome it as best you can? And in our language, what that means is, well, if you attracted it, then you might as well go and confess that it's yours. So go ahead and welcome it as opposed to resist it. So can you welcome your pissed off ness as best you can? Could you let it go? Would you let it go? When and what they claim is you just keep asking yourself those questions over and over and over and it resolves.

martin: [00:30:36] 
You've been talking about when things go wrong and how to respond to it. Teaching is about that. We're hardwired to lay blame or shame. Can you describe a little bit what's happening there and how that involves the ego and what is needed to move to the next step?

Christopher: [00:30:54] 
Thank you for that question. So I also realize that we haven't really talked about the responsibility process itself, so I hope you'll include a link to the Responsibility Process graphic or the poster in the show notes. What I believe is the differentiator a unique thing about my work versus all the thousands of people that come before me that say personal responsibility is the first principle of success in anything is that we've identified the cognitive processing in the mind about how people process thoughts about taking or avoiding responsibility. And the interesting thing there is that we're hardwired not only to avoid it, but we're hardwired to take it. And avoiding it and taking it are like at opposite ends of a continuum, and there are phases along that continuum. So the continuum includes the mental states of lay blame at the far end of avoiding it. We could actually add others at the far end denial, unconsciousness, etc. death. But what we found is we enter this model at blame when something goes wrong. We get anxiety in our mind and it triggers the responsibility process. And our first thought is a thought of blame, and we can stay there for a second or forever. So it's just a mental state with its own cause effect logic. If we get off of it, we graduate to justify which is a story or excuse.

Christopher: [00:32:29]
 If we get off of Justified, we graduate to blaming ourselves, which is shame, guilt. If we get off of that, we graduate to obligation, which is being trapped or burdened in some kind of a promise or a pattern, like, I have to go to my boss's stupid meeting or I have to go to work, or I wouldn't get a paycheck. And it's only when we refuse to participate with our minds answer to all of those things that we can get to the place in our mind of the ability to respond, which is also just a mental state that's always available to us. I'm often asked why? Why are we designed this way? And I don't really know. My interest has more to do with, Well, now that we know about this pattern, how do we use it to be happier and more joyful and free, powerful and that choice and produce results that matter because in blame and justify we produce no results and in shame and obligation we produce unsatisfying results. So psychologists have suggested that these mental states are ordered in the order of computational effort. Why do we blame first? Why is that our first thought every time something goes wrong? It's because it's easiest.

janet: [00:33:52]
 Thanks, Christopher. So define the stakes. What's at stake here for your clients? For the industry. For others to not take any action?

Christopher: [00:34:04] 
What's at stake? For people to not take any action? At the risk of offending some people that they get to continue to be at effect of their environment as opposed to at cause of their life. And our societies and cultures and work cultures are very, very, very, very, very good at reinforcing that their coping, for instance, coping is a huge market. We could probably make a lot more money writing the next great book about how to cope than doing agile narratives or responsibility. So my belief is that coping is overrated, and I'd much rather grow than cope. I don't cope with anything because coping with it would mean that I'm at effect, I'm a victim. That's what's at stake here. We've learned to acknowledge and reward and accelerate intelligence and intellectualism and the production of technologies and economies around that. We haven't yet learned how to put the human psyche and consciousness first.

janet: [00:35:10]
 I'm curious, Christopher. We've lived a different kind of life collectively in this world for the last few years. In some places, such as China, it continues with COVID 19. Do you have any observations or thoughts about what this experience has brought to bear on individuals and how? The responsibility process. It may be the time for it, or there's an opening around that so that the human psyche will be better placed first.

Christopher: [00:35:44] 
I wish I did. I don't know that I do. I mean, for for me and my clan, my tribe, it's been an exercise getting off of Justify. That's it. So we did a series of webinars early in COVID that were labeled Stop the Freak Out, which we they were all free webinars streamed to Facebook and wherever. And we invited people who were having high anxiety about COVID to come on and we would do free mentoring, maybe a big, big, big thing. But it's still it's a justify, though. We're saying that the reason that I can't be happy, the reason I can't have what I want is because of this pandemic. And I don't have anything more profound to say about what we've learned from it as a society or as a world than that. I'm thrilled when I've run into people who said, you know, I learned a lot about myself. I made some choices about my career or family or something else. But as a whole society, I don't know that we learned that.

janet: [00:36:43] 
Thank you.

Christopher: [00:36:44] 
Thank you. What about you? Which what's your narrative about what we learned from COVID?

janet: [00:36:49] 
A tuned a podcast is planning is in the works.

Christopher: [00:36:55] 
Good.

martin: [00:36:58]
 I think it was all a moment for us when we heard the fear that was being transmitted. How did we choose to respond to that? Did we choose to just be fearful or did we choose to take responsibility for where we are at and live our life according to what we think is is the best? A choice to make the right decisions, be safe and in precaution, but not be fearful.

Christopher: [00:37:27]
Yeah, I make my own story about that is the day it all went down. I was in my vehicle driving home from meeting with a marketing consultant 70 miles away, and we were having a team meeting. While I'm driving on Zoom and that's when the news hit and what flashed through my mind. And I talked to him immediately, then talked to my finance leader about this. What flashed through my mind was all of the what I call stand up business that was forecast for the year 2020 just disappearing. And we realized like that we were underwater because that stand up business is very lucrative and supported so much of what we do here. And I admit that I was. Very. Afraid for about. 36 hours. Usually I tell people I get from blame to responsibility in about a microsecond. Well, COVID had me for 36 hours, and the way I transformed it transform it by saying, Well, what do I want about this and what's true about this? That I can take responsibility for? The way I transformed it was that, wow, our mission is needed by the world more than ever right now. Geez, we got to figure out how we can be of service around this. And that's when our team started pivoting. So a day and a half after the news broke that everything was going to hell in a handbasket.

martin: [00:39:06]
 What was this conversation? You're talking to a group of key stakeholders wanting to move their organization forward, and honestly, they feel stuck. You understand the difficult position. You empathize what's going on and what would be your call to action to that?

Christopher: [00:39:23] 
Well, if they realize they're stuck, then what that means is there's some blockage that they're not seeing. So my work for them would be to offer to do a deep dive if they're willing to take 100% responsibility for the entire system where it is and what to do to move it forward. Then I would do a deep dive with them and we would break through and we would find where the real problem is and what to do about it. So usually we in problem solving, we never get to the real problem. Usually we because we're not willing to confront our own anxiety. Usually we treat our anxiety, which means we find some satisfying solution, advice, best practice, whatever that makes us feel better momentarily. And that's how we end up creating systems and organizations. When we solve a problem, we create a problem instead of actually solving it completely. And the reason we create another problem and another problem and another problem because we never actually get to the real problem. So that's the basic of responsibility. Thinking is to know how to get to the the real problem.

martin: [00:40:33] 
You said a really important word to me and it's been a bit of a theme across a number of different agility narratives that we've heard is, is this whole concept of just applying the best practice and not necessarily doing the work that's required of the change to understand the problem, understand what needs to come forward and what needs to be let go. Can you talk a little bit about that and in context of the responsibility process?

Christopher: [00:41:02] 
Sure. So I love the idea of best practices as ideas. I don't love them as solutions to adopt. But there's two ways that human beings address problems. One way is knee jerk, and it starts with seeing something as good, bad, right or wrong, which is done unconsciously. And once we see something as good, bad, right or wrong, then the very next step that happens in the mind is searching for advice. And if we can't find a piece of satisfactory advice in our own head for dealing with this, then we call a friend and invite them to happy hour and access their database of advice in their head and see if we can find something satisfactory. So this is how we get all of the shifting in the world. You should this, you should that. They should they should they need to react to. All right. That's all from the angst caused by good, bad, right or wrong. Moving right into searching the database of advice and best practices are advice, and I don't have anything wrong with reviewing best practices. As long as you realize that it's your responsibility to look at whether or not you want to adopt this advice. Because advice is always about the past and somebody else's life and context.

Christopher: [00:42:22]
 So that's one way that we address problems and that's the way that we never actually solve the real problem. We only find a way to squelch our anxiety for a moment by plugging some advice into place and creating a rule about it. That's how we got. All the 500 page employee manuals with a rule for everything that ever went wrong. Somebody needed to create some advice around that and turn it into policy and have an expanding manual. The other way that we solve problems is that we actually sit in our anxiety. Being willing to sit in our anxiety. And we use curiosity. We call it looking. We look at how we got ourselves here. We look at our thinking, we look at our assumptions. We look at our beliefs. We ask lots of questions in groups. We would be asking lots of questions and be willing to sit in that place. And I think that's why safety, psychological safety today is so such a big deal, is we want to create safety for people to be able to feel problems and feel their anxiousness around it and speak up and do something about it.

martin: [00:43:35] 
That's very insightful. What is your hope for the future? It really feels like there's great advantages in the practice of responsibility process and you've identified critical skills and needs. How do you see the threats and opportunities that we're facing today about our future.

Christopher: [00:43:55] 
From the, quote, objective reality I set out years ago to simply bring the responsibility process to the attention of people all over the world so that they could choose to change how they think about their world. They could choose to operate with greater levels of freedom, choice and power. I didn't realize that most people don't want to do that. I only learned since then that most people aren't really candidates for this until their consciousness evolves in some other way and they're able to get past a deep, deep, deep, deep attachment to safety. So in terms of my immediate future in the physical world, I'm doing everything I can to figure out how to help people around me start a responsibility practice and spread it to others. For me, success would be that I get put out of business because everybody around me is teaching responsibility and everybody is learning it and I don't have a market anymore. That's awesome. That'll be great for myself. I don't live in the physical world as much as I did most of my life. Today I live more in the metaphysical world, and that means that I'm working at the level of consciousness or universe or spirit. I just call it metaphysics. What that means is, for me, what's most real is beyond the physical. It's beyond linear cause effect thinking. In Hawkins scale of consciousness, it would be 500 and above, right? So the four hundreds are where our our audience lives, right? The 400 is science and technology and rationality and cause effect thinking and and linear causality. And the 500 starts the realm of love and spirit. And so gratefully in recent years, I've found myself more next realm, which is very cool.

janet: [00:45:53]
 Very cool. Thank you, Christopher, for sharing your agility and responsibility narrative today. This conversation follows a lineage of experts that say, since Socrates has said that taking 100% personal responsibility is the first principle of success, he sketched for us a very practical program the threat we are either at effect of our environment and our step, or we are in charge of our life and we're moving forward in agility. As you offered to us. Think of something that bugs you. Each of us like going to the grocery store. Buy two things. There's long lineups of the cash. Oof! There's a moment of frustration and acceptance and we feel stuck. Can you welcome this moment? Is it worth it? Let it go and smile. And in that moment, the feeling of stuckness is gone.

martin: [00:47:04]
 thank you Christopher, very, very much, really. It was amazing conversation. Really, really enjoyed it. Thank you.

Christopher: [00:47:12]
 Thank you. Two. I loved the structure. I loved your questions. Thank you so much. Janet, it's so nice to get to know you.