Dr. Robyn Short on Building Peace Through Dignity and Belonging
Dr. Robyn Short (she/her) is the Founder and CEO of the Workplace Peace Institute. Dr. Short helps individuals, teams and organizations resolve conflicts and build sustainable, purpose-driven environments. With a doctor of liberal studies and multiple master’s degrees, she is an expert in organization systems design, peacebuilding, and transformative mediation, and she's worked internationally with community and political leaders to foster peace in areas of conflict.
Robyn Short has high dignity intelligence—the ability to help people experience a sense that their experiences matter. We’re often so limited by existing levels of development that we forget that our more infinite capacities and longings are actually fundamental needs and that by inverting the paradigm, we can actually actualize the things that current levels of development or popular paradigms say they want (e.g., creativity, productivity).
Robyn also has several interesting ideas that have given me language for things I knew I was doing in my work but didn’t have words for. For example, she talks about homeostasis mind, among other ideas, in her webinar series on New Paradigm Leadership at the Workplace Peace Institute.
While we have different perspectives and approaches, the fact that we landed on almost the same name should tell you a lot about her worldview. Whereas I’ve always focused on intuition and interdisciplinary connections around life purpose, whole-life transformation, integration, and social innovation more generally, I really appreciate Robyn’s emphasis on safety, belonging, and these things that are foundational for high levels of performance as well as larger social transformations.
Key Topics
00:00 - Introduction
01:22 - Start of Conversation
03:53 - Robyn’s Origin Story
09:40 - Newtonian Workplaces
12:48 - Maslow’s Hierarchy
15:47 - The Tent Encampment
19:08 - Working with Organizations
23:41 - Where Conflict Comes From
24:56 - Hierarchical Systems and Power
27:09 - The Intersection of Peace and Systems
28:20 - The United States as a System
31:00 - Anti-Authoritarian and Authoritarian
33:51 - Robyn’s Definition of Peace
34:50 - The Problems of Hierarchy and Scarcity
35:30 - Understanding the Vagus Nerve & Peace
41:40 - Changing Others vs. Changing Ourselves
47:30 - Who Profits From Division?
48:50 - Our Sphere of Influence
49:42 - Conclusion and Links
50:11 - Outro
Resources & Affiliate Links
Peace in the Workplace: Transforming Conflict Into Collaboration by Robyn Short
Communicating with Dignity and Curiosity: The Peacemaker's Handbook for Creating and Sustaining Peace by Robyn Short
Dignity: Its Essential Role in Resolving Conflict by Donna Hicks
Leading with Dignity: How to Create a Culture That Brings the Best by Donna Hicks
Reinventing Organizations: The Next Stage of Human Consciousness by Frederic Laloux
Reinventing Organizations: An Illustrated Invitation by Frederic Laloux
Transcript
Welcome to the New Paradigm Leadership Podcast, a podcast for a time between worlds where we use healing and integration methods to explore business, leadership, and where we're going. Today, I'm thrilled to introduce Dr. Robyn Short, CEO of the Workplace Peace Institute. Dr. Short helps individuals, teams, and organizations resolve conflicts and build sustainable, purpose-driven environments. With a Doctor of Liberal Studies and multiple master's degrees, she is an expert in organization systems design, peacebuilding, and transformative mediation. And she's worked internationally with community and political leaders to foster peace in areas of historic conflict.
In this episode, Robyn and I talk about what systems are, our needs for dignity and belonging, and where conflict comes from. Our conversation touches on the dignity and liberation she experienced outside the traditional public school system, the psychology of the United States as a system, why over-reliance on Maslow's hierarchy of needs keeps people powerless, and why we don't change when people walk in with an agenda to change us. Robyn brings a thoughtfulness and empathic attunement that has the ability to help leaders and organizations everywhere think anew and act anew. I hope you enjoy the conversation.
RJL: Robyn, it's such a pleasure to have you. Thank you for being here.
RS: Thank you for having me. And I'm so excited to be here on the inaugural podcast.
RJL: I thought it was perfect because when I met you and you were giving, I think it was your very first introductory webinar on new paradigm leadership. I'd been brewing this idea for at least a year, maybe 2 or 3 years. And I was thinking. Thinking for a long time, what am I going to call this thing that I want to record? I've kept it under wraps for such a long time. But even at the time I knew that I wanted to call it the new paradigm leadership podcast. And so when I heard you speak about this, I was like, Well, aren't we on a very similar page about certain things, so super glad to have you.
RS: I remember meeting you and thinking, wow, you and I have been hanging out in the quantum field for a long time together, and we're finally meeting here on this earthly plane,
RJL: How long do you feel like you've been like hanging out back there?
RS: At least 10 years, probably. Yeah.
RJL: What do you mean by that when you say hanging out in the quantum field?
RS: Well, like when you have these ideas and other people have these ideas and you've put them out there like in the collective conscious and in my mind, And we're hanging out in this quantum space together before we ever land me and you having this conversation, you know, at that first webinar, but I'd been thinking about these things and you had been thinking about these things. And then we finally came together and landed it.
RJL: It was very obvious to me when I came to your webinar, I was like, it wasn't just the things that you were pulling from. And I honestly couldn't tell if you were pulling from Claire Graves, who's one of the people behind the spiral dynamic system, or if you were pulling more from Frederick Leloux, whose book I only started opening . I just remember you mentioning these colors in terms of how organizational cultures work. And then the way that you were describing each one, too, there was something in me. That was like. I've been out here in the universe. She's been out here in the universe and this is great. I'm so curious. I'm always interested in trying to tell the stories of, where each of these people who is trying to do this greater work, right?
For lack of better words, the worlds they come from, and how this got started. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you're from, maybe how you got into this work and anything you want to share around that?
RS: I don't know if you and I have ever had this conversation before or not, but I think for today where my story starts is in the third grade, my parents took us out of public school to teach us at home and this was in 1981. It was a super radical thing to do. Neither of my parents were college-educated. But they were really passionate about their children. So when I think about this from the perspective of leadership. They were subject matter experts in leading their team. They weren't subject matter experts on really the content of education, but the way that my mom did the homeschooling situation was she had some curriculum, she enrolled us privately in a school and then we did correspondence work.
And at the start of every week, I had a weekly planner of all of the, all the school work that I had to complete by the end of the week. And the only, really the only rules that we had was you have to exercise an hour a day and you cannot roll anything over to the next week. So Sunday night you had to finish your work.
You couldn't roll it over to Monday. So I had an enormous amount of freedom, of autonomy, of the ability to pursue my interest, to really lean into self-fulfillment and exploring all the different things that I wanted to learn. If I woke up one day and decided I needed to be in nature and go to the park, we went to nature and we were in the park.
And so I was able to experience an enormous amount of agency for an eight-year-old. So I was homeschooled for quite a few years and I absolutely thrived in that environment and my teacher, my mother, she trusted me. If I failed, she supported me, she was always there to coach, mentor, and support.
She wasn't delegating and teaching and I loved it. And so when I went back to public school, I was in shock. All of the rules were for the benefit of the hierarchy.
The people who were sitting at the top of the hierarchy were the people that the rules were there to support and benefit and I didn't do well as a learner. What I mean by that is I got good grades and I passed all my classes. and I was social, but I didn't love school.
I loved learning, but all my learning was taking place out of school. So as I got older and moved into the workplace, that whole system just came with it. And I couldn't function in it. The way that leaders operated made no sense to me and it felt harmful. It felt suppressing, it felt oppressive and I couldn't understand why I had all these gifts, but I was only allowed to bring three, right?
That we weren't really able to contribute at our highest level and we always had to stay in our lane. And so. Early in my career, I left the corporate world and started my own business because I just couldn't function in that kind of hierarchical bureaucracy. I started a marketing communications company.
And as I grew in my career and grew in my leadership, I needed to do some development there to really understand the real theories that were shaping my intuitive way of being. So I went and got a master's in conflict management dispute resolution, and it was through that pathway, which then led to me getting my, doctorate in liberal studies looking at organization development was through that pathway that I began to understand that my parents could never have articulated that this is what they were doing, but very intuitively were honoring my dignity and really seeking to fulfill my core basic human needs in my human development. Not in the way that we think about Maslow's hierarchy of like shelter and nutrition and that sort of thing, but all of the things that go into making a human thrive.
They were doing it intuitively and it shaped who I became as a leader. So I began really looking for frameworks and theories to support leaders in doing what I just think of as being more human humans in the workplace. And these are skills none of us do well when we are delegated down to, when people are hoarding power over us, none of us do well.
What I have found in recent years is that the human condition, we are being asked by society to deal with too much: climate change, political division, the global pandemic, the severe income wealth gap, like there's too much that we're having to hold on a daily basis. And so it's beginning to implode in the workplace because we will make changes where we are able to, we're going to exercise control where we have control. And for most of us, the only place that we can find any degree of exercising that kind of agency is in the workplace. So our workplaces are starting to become very disruptive as humans are beginning to really begin to claim their power.
RJL: What I'm really appreciating is your parents intuitively, based on what you're saying, they put you in a quantum space as a kid. They took all of the imposed constraints of the first tier and they said, we're not gonna do that. We're gonna do it this way. And then for you to go from there and then back into the public school system, which I grew up in, in which there were all of these hierarchical constraints. It sounds like for you, there was almost this felt sense of, wait, I went from this, and this was my experience for years, to this is how people are doing things? What is that about? And it sounds like at some point, whether it was the graduate degrees, whether it was you're being in the workplace or starting a business, it was this thing that kept coming back that Never quite went away, this question. Does that feel fair to say?
RS: It was very much a felt sense. Being an entrepreneur is hard and in a lot of times it can be really scary and you're always wondering when this contract is up, is there another contract coming with it? It can be a scary thing. It can be a stressful thing.
There were these handful of times where I would go back. I did this once I went back to the workplace. I sold my agency and then merged with the company that bought it. And very quickly I was like, oh God, the trade off is not there. The worry that comes with, is the next contract coming, is this person going to pay the invoice?
The worry that comes with that is nothing like the stress and the oppression of working under a Newtonian leader, which is the leadership that is traditional leadership. It is what the vast majority of us are experiencing, and it suppresses the human condition. People who thrive in those spaces thrive in spite of it, not because of it.
RJL: That resonates a lot. I'm trying to come back to one of the things that you were saying earlier around need and dignity, those have been big emphases in your work, but kind of giving me the gestalt or the whole picture of how it fits into your story and how you view things. You made a very brief comment on Maslow's hierarchy, and I feel like for the typical Westerner who has any familiarity with Needs or human psychology that is one of the first paradigms that they go to . Anything to say on that in terms of what does that? paradigm uphold from your experience and perspective and are there other ways of looking at how needs work based on your experience?
RS: Yes. Maslow's hierarchy of needs posits that our needs are hierarchical, that we seek these basic human needs. And then as we acquire these basic human needs, we seek higher levels of needs, and one must be met for the next need to be met . So only by actualizing every level of these hierarchies can you achieve actualization. You're absolutely right—that is the predominant theory that people know and understand.
When I was getting my doctorate, I came across the work of John Burton. John Burton comes to this work through the lens of conflict versus psychology and his theory, many people have contributed to it, is that we have a core set of needs that we are perpetually seeking all the time and they're not hierarchical.
We need each and every one of these and we're perpetually seeking it. He says, in the conflict management dispute resolution world, it's those two things, conflict management, dispute resolution, and he says that disputes are tangible things that we can negotiate.
So I can negotiate my salary and the core set of benefits that come with that, but I can't negotiate my basic human needs. So we get into conflict when. My attempt at achieving my basic human needs bumps up against your attempt of achieving your basic human needs. Donna Hicks was a student of John Burton's and she worked in the conflict resolution world.
And what she found in her work was that really core to every conflict was a violation of a person's ability to experience their inherent worth and value. And she determined there were about 10 essential elements of dignity. What I have found in my work is that there is a correlation that at its core, our need for dignity to be honored is our most essential need. And that when our dignity is honored, there's a correlation to our ability to actualize our basic human needs.
So I'll give you a really short example of how basic human needs aren't hierarchical. My husband and I used to live in Dallas and we were walking to a restaurant. And there was a woman who approached us and asked us for money. I think she said, I need the money to buy dinner. And we said, we're happy to give you some money, but we're on our way to dinner. Why don't you join us? And so she joined us for dinner and we're having a conversation and I wanted to understand her journey to becoming an unhoused person in Dallas. How did she arrive at this place, if she wanted to share the story?
So she tells us this story and she said, if I only had a bus ticket, I could get back home, but I don't have work and I don't have a bus ticket, etc. I said, is that really the only barrier is a bus ticket? And she said, well, it really is. And I said, so your family would let you come home. It's just the bus ticket. And she said, yes. And I said, well, we will take you to get a bus ticket. And so she contemplated it for a little while and then said, well, I really can't leave my community in the tent encampment, and she started talking about the community and the experience of belonging and the way they rely on each other and how they support each other and she chose not to go home. Maslow would say that need for shelter trumps that need for belonging in this hierarchical level. And it was this incredible example of how our need for belonging and for community that must not have been met at home. That experience of being with these people was more important to her than having an actual roof and running water.
RJL: My sense is that Maslow's entire paradigm is very, we would call it Yang, right? It's very archetypally masculine in nature. It's literally a pyramid, right? It feels like the dignity paradigm or that approach is much more of a yin approach. It's much more of a togetherness approach. It's much more circular in the sense of what is the thing at the middle, which is this core need to belong.
RS: Yeah, and when you think about the intensity of that need for belonging, and how rare it is to experience that in our workplace and what is possible when that becomes our lived reality where we really, truly—and for most of us, we can only imagine it because we've never actually experienced it—all the layers that become liberated when we experience that level of community and belonging in the workplace and how that frees us physiologically to do creative work, to do the innovative work that's going to be necessary to address all of the challenges that are making the oppression in the workplace so incredibly impossible to deal with, right? Mm hmm. Mm
RJL: Tell me a little bit about your work with executives and organizations. I'm picturing you talking about these ideas with these executives who are in these organizations where they operate under a largely Newtonian structure, and you're coming in with these insights, these possibilities conversations feel like?
RS: In my perfect world, I would be working with executives who get it. And, we say that at Workplace Peace Institute, our ideal customer is a progressive-minded CEO in a privately held company who understands that what got us here isn't going to get us there and who intends to stay around long enough to see that journey through.
That's a small group of people. I say privately held because there's a power structure that's baked into a publicly traded company that I think makes this almost impossible. And in publicly treated companies, very often CEOs are on their own climbing the corporate ladder journey, and they have no intentions of sticking around longer than 18 months to begin with.
So they're not going to bite off some big change initiative. So that's a small group of people. I love working with them and when I have the opportunity, those conversations are really exciting because they're coming to the conversation with this humility of, the world has changed, and I don't see clearly what the path forward is, and I really want to get this right. So it's really joyful getting to work with those people. The vast majority of people that we work with are the people working for the traditional leader, the CEO who's not having those conversations.
And what that work is really about is how do you build little microcosms inside the bigger system? How do you build healthy cells inside of a larger body that's not healthy? And that is also possible, but it puts a lot of burden on the leader of that smaller cell because they become the buffer system.
It is the role of the leader to do that. But it's really hard work. And so we offer a lot of services that are around developing emerging leaders into new paradigm leaders but also supporting existing leaders that are trying to build quantum teams inside of Newtonian structures, supporting them with the wellness work that they need to actually stay healthy and well and resilient to that outer container.
RJL: Yeah, it's remarkable. I'm already feeling like the aikido-jujitsu type in me, going up against whatever, new decision or new changes happening in the organization, and then here's our smaller team's operating system, and then here's everyone else's operating system. It takes a tremendous amount of development and even with the development, it still takes a tremendous amount of energy to make the change.
I don't have a working theory of change yet besides you do enough of this, and then there's an inflection point and things turn over. But you're in the trenches essentially with these leaders and supplying them with tools essentially that can help them experience some of the things that I've been lucky to experience. The leader I just worked for—she was absolutely remarkable. She impressed me at every turn and it wasn't long before I would find out things like, oh, this person meditates. What do you know? And here I thought I might be the only one. No. Clearly, our leader does that, and it's part of why our team was so able to hold together. We were probably anywhere between what you or Laloux would call a green team all the way to a teal or a quantum level team.
RS: Yeah, that's amazing.
RJL: I would love to shift gears just a little bit to another area of your work. You've been in the field of conflict resolution for quite a while. You've read the literature, you've operated in various settings, where conflict arises and, you and I have had other conversations around the state of conflict in the world in general, not just conflict in the workplace.
One of the things that often comes up for me when I watch conflicts, in any context is that I'm not sure that people who are engaged in these conflicts ever really understand why or how conflicts emerge. I feel like for a lot of people, they get into a conflict and most of the time it's. I'm already so frustrated that I can't even feel down to how this started and find a way through it. It's, I don't like this, this person's the problem, and you can already see me going into something that is either, close to projection or already projection. Where do conflicts come from?
RS: So there's two things that come to mind for me. The answer that I always give is that conflict surfaces when we have A real or perceived violation of a basic human need and a dignity need. So at its root, that is what is happening. Put an extra layer on top of that, that the vast majority of us have been conditioned throughout our entire human development in a hierarchical system.
Hierarchies tell us Someone more powerful than you is going to resolve this situation. So this other layer of where conflict comes from is believing what the system has told us, which is you don't have the power to fix this.
So we don't embody the inherent personal power that we actually have as a birthright because the system has told us that it doesn't really exist. And so we don't know how to act on it. And we haven't built skill around that. So we constantly look to someone else to fix our problem and they're not invested in it, interested in it.
And maybe the conflict serves the system. It's really those two things. The perception of a violation of a human need, and then the belief that I don't have the power to do anything about it.
RJL: Violation of need and then the outsourcing of one's personal power and agency to conditioning, due to the fear that comes with the conditioning, due to sometimes probably the trauma that comes with the conditioning or . And this, for me, it starts to link up with this other thing that I feel like is at the cross-section of what you do, but it's not something that everybody, I think, understands on the surface and I'm wondering if we can unpack it a little more. I feel like for your new paradigm, quantum or quantum aspiring leaders, they would see this and they'd be like, oh, yes, of course. I want to talk to Robyn, right? Of course, peacebuilding or peace studies and systems design that makes complete sense.
My sense, though, is for a lot of people who are stuck within their system, whatever that is, and the set of behaviors that might come along with it, when you use the word system, they probably won't even know what that means, They'll be like, what system? It's like the fish that goes, what water, right?
So I guess my question to you here is what is a system and second, I'll ask this now. do systems relate to people's ability to experience peace or not and get their needs met or not? What's the intersection of peace and systems?
RS: So a system is a collection of entities, right? My body is a system that's made up of molecules and genes and all of that stuff. An organization is a system that's made up of an idea. And then behaviors that orient around that idea to make that idea come into being. All systems have an identity that has given birth to that system.
And then the system functions to preserve that identity. So systems, therefore, are self-sustaining, self-perpetuating and self-correcting. I think that for people who are in the United States or familiar with the United States, using the United States as a system is an easy explanation because it's the water that many fish are swimming in, or it's the water that many people are watching the fish swim in.
The original idea of the United States was not really freedom. It was freedom for some of us, and that some of us was white male property-owning humans. So this idea came into being that these male white property-owning human beings wanted the ability to pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of justice.
So they put together a document that put that system in place that codified that system, right? And now you can look throughout the arc of American history and see how that system has continuously self-maintained, self-perpetuated, self-corrected. So when you see. a progressive leader rise up and that system starts to look fragile.
You see another leader rise up that puts a correction in place on that system. So therefore the only way that systems change is through what I think of as a re-founding. You give birth to a new idea that puts in motion a new set of behaviors to protect that new idea. So this system in the United States is going to continue. It's going to continue to do the thing it's going to do. The pendulum is going to swing a little bit left, a little bit right, but every time it goes too far left, it's going to swing too far right, always looking to come back to some kind of center that protects it. The only way that it changes is through enough collective power, enough human beings embodying their personal power to build enough collective power to say we're going to give birth to a new identity, which means we are re-imagining something. We're not perfecting what is existing, right?
RJL: I'm thinking about the reimagining and the masses of people—I don't think we can go there yet, but the masses of people who are, still, they feel afraid, they're in their political tribe, they feel anger or hatred toward this other group of people. That's a whole thing. At what point can there be a collective imagining of a new system and what that could even look like? That's both a beautiful thing and the way there is probably gonna be—happy to take anyone who wants to go on that journey—but that is gonna be a harrowing journey for a lot of people.
There's one point that you made about the founders of America that I would love to add to, and I want to see what you think about it. It was freedom for their particular group, but I think it was also, the way that I interpret it, they were also seeking freedom from a certain thing. Under the paradigms that they were in Europe at the time, they were like, no, we don't want someone telling us what to do or what to think, so we're going to go off and do our own thing.
If you separate this from, them codifying stuff for them specifically, and if we could separate those, I think that during its time was probably a needed impulse. Although, what I see now is, it's almost like there's two layers where, for themselves, the Founding Fathers were extremely anti-authoritarian. But then for everyone else, because the freedom wasn't necessarily built for them, they actually were quite authoritarian. So what I find interesting about the American psyche to date is it has this anti-authoritarian streak for that group of people, but it has a more authoritarian streak for everyone else.
For me, that same pattern is still reverberating right now, and I think it's still being asked to be dealt with and examined and investigated. Why is this freedom so important? Can I understand freedom differently? Is there a higher interpretation of what freedom can mean so that I'm not unconsciously throwing certain groups of people under the bus to assuage my own comfort? And then there, there's that whole emotional world around—I feel like this is almost coming back to how do systems give peace to some and not give peace to those same people. We built this system, and by definition, functionally, this system is not going to allow certain people especially to thrive.
Therefore, the mass inequities, right? And then, with the question of peace, my sense is the self-reinforcing notion of peace is the old 1700s of peace was probably, just getting away from someone else telling us what to do.
RS: So the definition of peace that I work with is that peace is human security and the ability to live a life of dignity, free of fear. So human security is my ability to access my basic human needs. Dignity is my ability to experience my inherent worth and value, and that I don't have to live with conditions around that, that it could get snatched from me at any moment. Right? So peace is human security and the ability to live a life of dignity, free of fear.
When you think about that from a systems perspective, that is what the framers of the Constitution created for themselves, right? And as people embody their personal power and build a movement around that so that we have collective power that's seeking to create a new system, the people who are the authoritarians that created that for themselves are no longer feeling their basic human needs and their dignity and being free of fear because if you've built it in a hierarchy, you have built it like pie. There are only so many slices of it to go around. It isn't pie. It doesn't have to be designed as pie. But if you build it as pie, you have created scarcity in the system. So peace inside of the system has to address the illusion of scarcity.
RJL: Suppose you're talking to somebody who is feeling very wary of a lot of the changes that are happening, right? Hey, we thought the system was supposed to do this. Now suddenly, we perceive that these needs aren't getting met. And I think at this point, That level from that paradigm, according to how you're defining it, certainly, that is not a free-of-fear situation, and I think there's validity within that.
At the same time, oftentimes in the dialogue, the response has been, well, so let me just reinforce the system again, reify everything, and not be able to consider how else I can get the same needs met. So rather than centering on the needs, people almost regress psychologically and say, "This is how it is. I can't see another way. This is the only way, and then now everyone else has to get with my particular program."
How do you speak to somebody and say, "Hey, your needs are undeniable, and let's figure out what those needs are and figure out how else they can get met beyond using this same old oppressive system that, in the immediate term, feels comfortable, but in the long term actually doesn't serve that person either? How do you go about having that conversation or redefining what peace can feel like when often a person says a word like that and they're like, so nothing needs to change, right? I don't need to change. Why are you telling me this?
RS: So I've been reading a lot and studying a lot lately about the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve runs throughout your whole entire body, but it's a critical part of your nervous system, and it is the part of your body that is telling you all the information you need about safety—if you're safe, if you're not safe. What's interesting about the vagus nerve is that the only thing it cares about, and the only thing your nervous system cares about, is if you feel safe, the reality of safe is not important. Its number one job is do you feel safe? And if you do not feel safe, then I'm going to give you all the resources that you need to get safe.
That shift in thinking about, does this person feel safe and how do I communicate with them in a way to support them being safe, is what's really critically important and maddening as hell, because if you're the person that this system has been designed for, and now you feel some instability in the system and your actual physiology is communicating to you that you're not safe, you're gonna respond in threat mode.
I think that this is where the whole conversation around allyship comes up, allyship to whatever kind of system we're talking about because you need an ambassador. I need someone who is either a total insider or more of an insider, right? So the system wasn't built for women, but it certainly benefited white women. You need insiders who can do that work of supporting people's physiology so that they actually have the brain space and the openness, like the physiological openness to do the work. Because if your body is experiencing a threat, real or not real, then you are in fight mode. And coming at a fight with a fight escalates the fight.
RJL: I'm thinking a lot about threat perception and homeostasis. One of the things that's coming up for me is the importance of the settledness of the bodies of folks in any particular group and how much investment there is in that. Whether people want to actually feel safe or whether they would prefer to feel the illusion of safety through being more defensive or going to social media war right which is one of the new these days. It's not even only physical wars, right?
A lot of them are spiritual or mental or psychic in nature. I'm thinking about those people again who are like, I will not do this, they cannot or will not currently get out of their current perception of things.
Does it just take time and an event that kind of cracks them open where they're like, okay, I'm finally willing? Or do you actually see a little bit more of movement toward, I can't, I don't know what to do about this, but Hey, at least I think I can go to this person who is similar to me in these ways. So even if they challenge me, like maybe I can figure this out. Do you think the, for lack of better words, breadcrumb theory, you have an insider go to another person who is especially externally, but in certain ways similar, but has a different mindset or a deeper level of development? Do you see that as a viable strategy?
RS: I can't give a definitive answer, but what I have been reflecting a lot around lately. Is, and this really goes back to what we were talking about around conflict too, is we want others to change, and the only thing we can really do is change ourselves. If I change how I'm in relationship with the other, then the other probably will change.
Partly because of what we just talked about, the way that I'm coming to them, right? The way that I'm engaging isn't activating their nervous system. So partly it's that I'm not bringing them a fight, but then the other thing too, is we co-regulate, and so if I am doing the deep, deep work of mindfulness and, staying really grounded in my values, that is what I am bringing to the relationship.
That is who they're developing relationship with. We are highly aware as human beings when someone is attempting to change us. Even if they're doing it nicely, politely, slowly, kindly, we know it. I know what's happening here.
I'll give this example. I am not a religious person. I don't prescribe to a religious faith. I was raised as a Christian. My mother sends me Bible scriptures every single morning. This is what she's doing because she loves me. But the flip side of that coin is you refuse to accept me. Every single day of my life begins with an invitation for me to change, to be like her. Instead of every single morning of my life opening with an invitation to be loved for who I am. Um, one creates a barrier to the relationship.
The other would be an invitation to relationship. So I think the real, real work is always internal. Am I being a person that someone who's doing harm in the world, right? Who's not creating security and dignity for others. Am I being a person that they would have the capacity to be in relationship with, so they have proximity to something different?
RJL: In the field of social equity and social justice, we talk so much about proximity bias as a negative thing. Having to think of is proximity bias as. A positive bias, when the 2 things that are. Proximate to 1 another are actually different, but within that relationship and here's the other idea that comes up for me is loving without an agenda , actually accepting the person you're with completely in this moment for who and what they are right now, you may not like their stuff. But that's the deep work .
This makes complete sense, because for me, this is why you were talking about essentially canceling cancel culture because of these felt connections and this proximity that may actually have the ability to foster change. That's big.
RS: Yeah, it is big and it's hard.
RJL: Hard to be in a relationship with someone who you think hates you and who at some level in thought or action, you may actually hate , and then almost needing by necessity to dissolve that. This makes me think of Marianne Williamson's work, where actually, in a way, the hate was an illusion that was constructed by us and our nervous systems to give us the illusion of safety. When actually, we weren't necessarily safe by staying separate.
RS: Right.
RJL: So whether it is, the far left activist who thinks they're safe because we just cancel, in our presence. And I'm not saying there's nothing to boycotting or especially boycott, especially call people out. But cancellation as a whole as a violation of the other person's dignity, does it keep us safe? And it sounds like based on what you're saying, the answer is no. And same to a very racist or sexist or homophobic person who says, if we just keep all of these things at bay, then we are safe from it. as well as the people to whom those things may apply. What I think I'm taking away from this is that kind of so called safety is an illusion of safety, but the real safety is when we can actually be in relationship and not feel wholly dysregulated. So that's a lot of work.
RS: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. It is a lot of work, and I think Okay. Often about who benefits, who or what benefits from our, inability to be in relationship with each other. And I can name a bunch of who's and what's, but it's never actually me. I don't benefit.
RJL: It's the people who profit from division. So these would be, I would call these politicians who, these days, I see a lot of politicians , for lack of better words, speaking to the shadows of people, or really stoking the fires of, I call it the not self, is, all about profiting from the division. Even as they say, we want unity, but then they'll say, then they'll throw a sentence that's very clearly intended to capture your loyalty by stoking division. Remarkable and a little bit upsetting, but also, understandable because that's how the mechanics work until we decide to do something different.
Thank you for those insights and the conversation and the beginning of some of the work, some of the ideas, some of the ways that we can be thinking, imagining, growing, and changing to allow these new paradigms to emerge. Is there anything else that you would want to share with us?
RS: I have really come to believe that our sphere of influence is about as wide as our arms. I just want to invite people to stop focusing on the thing that's so big that it causes us to do nothing and focus really intensely on yourself and the immediate people around you. And that has an enormous ripple effect.
RJL: Thank you so much for spending time with me. Where can people learn more about you or find you if they'd like to speak with you?
RS: I would love for people to check out our website, workplacepeaceinstitute.com. We have monthly webinars that are free, so people can click on the resources tab on the website and find those and, LinkedIn. That would be great.
RJL: Thank you so much for being with me and, we look forward to talking again soon.
RS: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
