Whenever a business cycle starts to falter, the media start wringing their hands.  Then big businesses do, freelancers, entrepreneurs and soon everyone is keening.

People and organizations that have no real financial stress start to pull back, “because it’s prudent.” Now is not the time, they say. They cut budgets and put off investments. It’s almost as if everyone is just waiting for an excuse to do less.

In fact, they are.

Growth is frightening for a lot of people. It brings change and the opportunity for public failure. So if the astrological signs aren’t right or the water is too cold or we’ve got a twinge in our elbow, we find an excuse. We decide to do it later, or not at all.

What a shame. What a waste.

Inc. magazine reports that a huge percentage of companies in this year’s Inc. 500 were founded within months of 9/11. Talk about uncertain times.

But uncertain times, frozen liquidity, political change and poor astrological forecasts (not to mention chicken entrails) all lead to less competition, more available talent and a do-or-die attitude that causes real change to happen.

Now is the perfect time for bold political leadership.  Now is the time to think consciously about political leadership.

In the early 1980s I was a volunteer firefighter for a tiny community in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Northern California. We all lived in a beautiful redwood forest and our task was to keep that forest from burning down in a huge conflagration, taking us all with it. The job was made all the harder because our little part of paradise hadn’t burned since the 1920s, so there was 60+ years of flammable undergrowth just waiting to light off. The current financial crisis facing the United States and the world really isn’t much different from that.

An unmanaged forest, one without the sort of fire control we attempted to provide, would naturally burn every few years. The undergrowth would build up, reach a critical mass, some source of ignition would come along — usually lightning — and all that undergrowth would burn. The redwoods themselves would be scarred but not really threatened, as we could see from the charring that marked them from countless such fires over centuries. Of course burning undergrowth threatened homes and property, too, so there was a natural desire on the part of that community to want the next burn to not come this year, please not this year. So there came a policy of aggressively fighting fires with the result that we eventually faced 60 (now 90!) years of flammable material growth rather than six or eight years. And the probable fire fueled by 60 years of undergrowth would have been so bad that our job changed to one of trying to prevent fires from happening, well, ever. This was an impossible task, of course. Eventually the stars would align the wrong way and the whole place would burn down, we all knew it. Just let it not happen on our watch.

Does this sound familiar?

Part of what makes up this term “conscious politics” that I am fleshing out here in this blog is the courage to be willing to name the problems rather than just hope they won’t happen on our watch.  I’m not sure our country has a lot of practice with our political leaders “being real” with us.  I’m not sure citizens know how to respond to that, but I also think that part of the uproar from citizens about politics does center around the desire to hear the truth and to have some leadership around what they and government can do.  

I urge you to continue reading Cringely’s post and his exploration of the role government can play to positively impact climate change by doing one simple thing.

Lesson One.  There is no plan.

At the 2000 convention, Obama couldn’t even get onto the floor. Eight years later, he’s the nominee. 
Lesson Two. Think strengths, not weaknesses.

Obama has always exemplified John McPhee’s “sense of where you are.” He focused on what he did well. And he brought in others — think Joe Biden — to compensate for his weaknesses.  
Lesson Three. It’s not about you.

In his speech last night, Obama said: “This election has never been about me. It’s been about you.” Diana would be proud.
Lesson Four. Persistence trumps talent.

Obama is an insanely talented guy. But that’s not why he won. The dirty little secret is that he outworked (and, as a consequence, outsmarted) Senator Clinton.
Lesson Five. Make excellent mistakes.

Obama quickly gave up bowling and other lame attempts to pretend he’s a pudgy white guy from Ohio. (Full disclosure: I’m a pudgy white guy from Ohio.) But that helped him realize he had a problem with working class voters — which he quickly addressed with policy prescriptions rather than photo ops. 
Lesson Six. Leave an imprint.

Despite all the b.s. that pervades politics, leaving an imprint is ultimately what Obama — and John McCain — are trying to do.

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At the same time there is a call in the electorate for political leaders to be less partisan and to work together more effectively. There’s a role voters can play in helping to make that happen - to think about the perspectives that need to be in those bi-partisan conversations over the years to come and be sure to vote into office the people who will best represent those voices. This may mean voting in people who do not represent our own opinion.

This can feel like a risky proposition. We won’t always get our way. What if the leader we are voting for will predictably vote their own way every time without much consultation with others.

It is a risk as a voter that we need to weigh. There are things that we can do, like writing such a candidate a letter or to have lunch with the leader and talk about why we want to vote for them and the kind of dialogue that we’d like to see.

In my community the issue of land use is a big one. I live out in an old subdivision amidst an area that used to be old farms. The developers would love to build subdivisions. Folks like me would like to see our beautiful drives home remain the same. And yet others have made an investment in this property or are farmers for whom their land is their retirement and would like to see a financial return.

This election will likely have a huge impact on land use policy. The general thinking is about who we want to vote in, the developer types or the environmental-types (notice the generalities). Yet if we step into a new paradigm, the question would be a different one, whose voices will be most effective in talking together about this tough issue? And, how can I best vote to ensure all voices are represented?

There is a tide changing in this country that is allowing for more vulnerability and openness about who we are and how we feel.  Increasingly pockets of our society are moving away from the smooth, slick veneer that I know that I felt coming of age in the 80’s was required in order to be taken seriously.

To show ourselves, to not have the most perfectly polished answer, to show real emotion, to admit when we’re wrong takes a tremendous amount of courage when we’ve been cultivated to always have it together and when we are all engaged in a political system that appears to have high stakes for perfectionism.

So I love observing where this veneer is breaking down in this country.  This fun, light video about the Hug Campaign shows an example of this.  From the website:

Free hugs is a real life controversial story of Juan Mann, A man whos sole mission was to reach out and hug a stranger to brighten up their lives.

In this age of social disconnectivity and lack of human contact, the effects of the Free Hugs campaign became phenomenal.

As this symbol of human hope spread accross the city, police and officials ordered the Free Hugs campaign BANNED. What we then witness is the true spirit of humanity come together in what can only be described as awe inspiring.

Close to 2.5 million people have viewed this video.

This hunger for human connection is real.  So not only is there this huge opportunity to address public ills like child abuse through first recgonizing one another’s humanity (see previous post) but there is also the opportunity in public life to even more deeply be who we are, not for votes, but for the sake of engaging and connecting with people to better serve them.

Citizens are often so critical that it can be scary to not look like everybody else.  But I contend that when we as leaders let go of looking the way we “should” that we give more room for the uniqueness of who we are and our emotions to show through and that we are actually more trustworthy because we’re being who we truly are.

I came across a situation that I struggle with handling. I witnessed a woman abusing her children.

Earlier in the week I had been wearing my Prevent Child Abuse blue ribbon pin on my lapel and had renewed my commitment to address child abuse when I see it. So I felt I had to do something.

I was preparing myself for how to address this situation and feeling terrified when I heard her say, “If I am too strict, people give me a hard time. If I let them do whatever, I hear about it, too.”

Her statement fascinated me. Others had mustered their courage to say something to her before, but it had not had the impact of stopping her mean behavior. What it did do was make her feel wrong, like a bad parent, judged, and alone - I’m guessing.

While it would have been tremendously uncomfortable for me to step in and speak up for these children, it also would not have worked.

I wonder how many times in public service we think that we have an obligation, even a deeply held moral obligation, to “do the right thing”. We take the action thinking it will accomplish something but nothing changes. All that effort but no result.

What if the answer is that we take the time to connect with the humanness of the person involved? In this case, the first step for me was to recognize the humanity of this woman rather than just fear and or hate her for her actions and the discomfort she was creating for me as I struggled to “do the right thing”!

Frankly, this was all that I did in this interaction - stop to see her humanity. I was a little too stunned by what I was learning and didn’t yet have the courage with 30 people watching to have a conversation with her that would have respected the beautiful human being she is. In those minutes I was still a little too attached to my “moral obligation” to tell her she was wrong.

But what I do hope is that next time I’ll be able to recognize a person’s humanness in these public siuations and be able to have a conversation with them that both honors them, gives them empathy, and gives me a chance to express the impact their treatment of their children is having on me and my hopes for all children.

This “seeing the human being first” point of view could be applied in so many political contexts, especially those where we feel moral obligation to act, becuase what we’re doing now is not working.

But the words that Paul Ray, the demographer who identified the 50 million Americans who are “Cultural Creatives“, said at the tenth Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS) conference reminded me of my own convictions.  Together with his partner Dixon de Lena, Ray said, “The world is getting better and better, worse and worse, faster and faster.”  This is because we are at the end of paradigm and at the beginning of a new.

So while our international politics feel shameful, horrific, and totally out of American integrity, what I also know to be true is that there are millions of people hungering for political leadership that can take this country in a new direction.

In the next few blog entries it’s my intent to give a little more background on the intent of this blog and to define my premises.

At the core of my work is the idea that we are at a time in history where things are changing so quickly that we can’t simply just respond to events as they happen even thought that would be our natural inclination.

I hear from so many political leaders that they don’t have time to be proactive that their days are spent to such a degree just responding to the masses amount of work that is in front of them.

Yet, I hear in them the desire to be leaders and not just responders.

It is also true that at this time in history the old reflexes, those natural ways of responding that we have practiced so well over and over, are no longer serving us.  New reflexes are needed.

One of the ways to develop these new reflexes is through reflection that allows us to be conscious of the choices we make and that calls us forth naturally to our leadership not just our “responsehip”.

I believe that political leaders need a safe environment where they can reflect on the issues that face them and someone to challenge them to think in new ways. That’s why I think coaching is so useful as our old world views shift into new ones.

So it was a natural thing for me to then consider how “conscious politics” put into words a concept I had been thinking about for the last several years as a professional coach.

In coaching one of the things that we offer our clients is the chance to be aware of the wide range of choices that we as human beings always have at our fingertips. For new clients it is often really challenging to see that there are other options for us other than the path we have always followed. What’s fun as coach is when my clients and I explore not just the opposite of the obvious choice they could make but even alternatives that would never have been considered before.

That’s bringing consciousness to our choices.

I believe that political leaders are hungry to lead their constituents in new ways but that sometimes “the way things are” is so systemic that it can feel impossible to do things differently other than play the game the way it has always been played.

This blog is dedicated to exploring the possibilities that “conscious politics” could offer and to offering tools for public leaders to use in their daily work that will help them to serve their constitutents with greater satisfaction and effectiveness.