Find The Outside

In episode fifteen, Tim & Tuesday share insights on their many rapid-pace leaps and lessons over the last year. The Outside’s team, delivery, story, and facilitation is a constant iteration.

• Tues: We are one year into The Outside as a business.
• Tim: We started this [The Outside] saying, ‘We’ll give it two years and see how it goes and run some little experiments…’ We have landed four really significant, major, long-term pieces of work. Two in Europe, one in Canada and one in the United States.
• At the end of this calendar year, I hope our calendars give us just enough of a breather to stop and be like: Where are we at? Where did we come from? and Where are we going?
• Tues: Okay, questions for us on our one year:

1. What are one or two highlights from the first year of The Outside?
2. How has this launch year felt?
3. What are you most looking forward to or trembling about?
4. Favourite podcast from the year?
5. What advice would you give yourself on this date last year?

• Tim: Genuinely wake up everyday with a feeling of tiredness and excitement.
• Tues: I feel like I am changing shape - getting bigger, wider and deeper.
• Tim: How do we structure the business? How do we not become a big studio? How do we really stay nimble, adaptive and network-based? Pulling together teams of outrageously competent and brilliant people. What’s just enough structure to hold that?
• Getting a sense of what it means to be “Outsiders” beyond just you and me. Trembling at the scale and speed at which we are growing. Looking forward to determining our organizational structure. Excited for the building of this thing.
• Tues: Trembling at the pace and travel of this work but the work is exciting. 
• Tim: A core principal of The Outside was around family. We’re having to figure this out and continue to make part of our organizational design.
• Tues: We have to hold each other in the overwhelm of things to do and share that but we also have a tendency towards excitement. Then we have to be like “wait a second; hold on.” Both of us have to do that for each other. 
• My favourite thing about this podcast is that it gives us time to reflect together out loud. Time to understand my own knowing about what’s happening and to share that with you in a really ongoing way. 
• Tim: Eat well! Sleep well! Enjoy your children!
• Tues: Relax. You won’t have it all figured out but you will have just enough figured out to go forward.

Poem of the day: Won’t You Celebrate With Me by Lucille Clifton

Won’t You Celebrate With Me

won't you celebrate with me

what i have shaped into

a kind of life? i had no model.

born in babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did i see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge between

starshine and clay,

my one hand holding tight

my other hand; come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.

Song: “Functions On The Low” by Rough Sqwad

Subscribe to the podcast now—in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or anywhere else you find podcasts. New episodes will be available every second Tuesday. If you’d like to get in touch with us about something you heard on the show, reach us at [email protected].

Find the song we played in today’s show—and every song we’ve played in previous shows—on the playlist. Just search ‘Find the Outside’ on Spotify.

Duration: 32:17

Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good Studios

Theme music: Gary Blakemore

Episode cover image: source

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When we intentionally practice what it means to be together, we increase the possibility of levelling-up. In episode fourteen, Gibrán Rivera joins us for a conversation about how to co-create the space to tackle insurmountable problems.

• Tues: Today we’re talking to one of my favourite people in the world, Gibrán Rivera, a facilitator also working in systems change. Gibrán is an internationally renowned master facilitator who has devoted his life to the development of leaders and organizational transformation.
• Gibrán: My great friend (RIP), Jake Brewer, said to me “our only known response to increasing complexity is exhilaration.” All we know how to do is go faster. As we go faster, we do less of what matters. I’m interested in a different response because complexity will keep increasing regardless. We’ve reached the upper threshold of exhilaration. What I’m interested in is what is an evolutionary response to this moment. How do we learn to be in this together better? 
• Tues: Can you talk about this ‘leap’ that you can see us making?
• Gibrán: Is this going to be our evolutionary crash or our evolutionary leap? The only way to meet this moment is a leap. Linear action is doomed. We need to literally leap. I want to orient my work, my life and my spirit around that possibility. That’s what I am talking about.
• Tim: There is some undefinable confidence in the face of what looks like catastrophe. We’ve defined this at the heart of The Outside - there is always a way.
• Gibrán: If we can make order out of VUCA—volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity— we may make things feel more “normal” or stable, but we will be projecting a confidence not based on truth.
• Gibrán: I feel like there is a wakefulness, a part of us that knows what is true in each of us. I think looking at someone like that’s true. Interacting with someone like they know what they know, they are capable of what they are capable of. It’s integral. See people’s greatness.
• Tues: That brings up two things for me: 1) the charismatic facilitator and how we’re often made the maker of miracles; and 2) the quality of courage.
• Gibrán: Important for all of us to become aware of how much we bring to the spaces we’re in by cultivating that in ourselves - wellness or steadiness. It impacts our space. 
• Tim: What happens when facilitators are not in the room anymore? When it’s back to work? There’s an attachment that facilitators have to epiphany.
• Gibrán: I am familiar with a discourse that warns against charisma because we know it can lead people astray. I think about my work as helping nurture a state experience of being together. I believe that as we become familiar with what it feels like to be together, then we can become more masterful, we can create more ease in entering those states of being together.
• Tim: We often talk about referential experiences—we know we can do it because we’ve did this. They illuminate possible futures.
• Gibrán: When we talk about the evolutionary leap, two things are integral: 1) Pattern of a web or network - connection is alive as any of us are. 2) Sense of self is decentralized. We need to ask: “What is the thing that I am cultivating?” “What is the seed that I am holding?” “What is the wisdom and the prayer I will transmit to my descendants, to my next generation?” Human-to-human in a world that we know is coming up against some real serious suffering. That is my orientation.

Poem of the day: Everywhere by Hafiz

Everywhere

Running

Through the streets

Screaming,

Throwing rocks through windows,

Using my own head to ring

Great bells,

Pulling out my hair,

Tearing off my clothes,

Tying everything I own

To a stick,

And setting it on

Fire.

What else can Hafiz do tonight

To celebrate the madness,

The joy,

Of seeing God

Everywhere!

Song of the day: El Farsante (Remix) by Ozuna · Romeo Santos

Subscribe to the podcast now—in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or anywhere else you find podcasts. New episodes will be available every second Tuesday. If you’d like to get in touch with us about something you heard on the show, reach us at [email protected].

Find the song we played in today’s show—and every song we’ve played in previous shows—on the playlist. Just search ‘Find the Outside’ on Spotify.

Duration: 45: 28

Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good Studios

Theme music: Gary Blakemore

Episode cover image: source

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode thirteen, Tim and Tuesday continue their conversation around history, impact, and our world — since context fundamentally alters how we relate to each other in the work of change, we delve in.

Tim: Vulnerability is about revealing something of yourself, which invites others to do the same. 

Tues: Vulnerability feels like something we, as a people, are seeking and need to search out. This podcast is on-air vulnerability; it’s a way of walking our talk. Brené Brown does incredible work around vulnerability for those listening who are interested.

Tues: On both sides of my family, not one of us had wealth or resources or access to power. That’s why, in some ways, I can look back on my lineage and feel unafraid and only pride.

Tim: When I think of my ancestors, it’s coming from a place of “Who bares the blame?”

Questions from Tim:

1. What is the source of pride and awe?

2. What do you mean by the legacy of brutality?

3. What is it like to have no written history/context?

Tues: Pride and awe comes from understanding our survivorship and the enslavement of my people—what it took to physically survive being taken from our lands and stacked like wood in the bottom of ships. That legacy of treatment and building the economy of North America on our backs continues today.

Tues: You can look up forever the impact of generational trauma and enslavement on Black parenting. When you are brutalized, you in turn, brutalize others. Then there’s also the brilliance of a diamond being crushed so hard which can also make you shine, at least in my experience.

Tues: A lot of black folks in this country have done a lot of work to refine and reclaim their roots. I have not done that work. It’s a big, gaping wound. A big part of my practice is actively reclaiming the land I am on. My only ancestry are enslaved people. There’s a huge loss in not knowing what came before.

Tim: Do you ever feel your ancestors? 

Tues: Yes, 100%. That pride, awe and understanding is automatically accessible to me. That is something about feeing it in my blood. I think about myself as the culmination and not an obligation to them. I am in this life to dance and be joyful, and make change.

Tues: I want to leave listeners aware of my huge amounts of gratitude and I hope that that infuses my work and our work. And I hope I can stand strong in that.

Poem: W.S. Merwin, "Thanks" from Migration: New and Selected Poems

Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms

with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you

we are standing by the water thanking it

standing by the windows looking out

in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging

after funerals we are saying thank you

after the news of the dead

whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you

in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators

remembering wars and the police at the door

and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you

in the banks we are saying thank you

in the faces of the officials and the rich

and of all who will never change

we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us

taking our feelings we are saying thank you

with the forests falling faster than the minutes

of our lives we are saying thank you

with the words going out like cells of a brain

with the cities growing over us

we are saying thank you faster and faster

with nobody listening we are saying thank you

thank you we are saying and waving

dark though it is

Song: “Family of Aliens” by Teleman

Subscribe to the podcast now—in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or anywhere else you find podcasts. New episodes will be available every second Tuesday. If you’d like to get in touch with us about something you heard on the show, reach us at [email protected].

Find the song we played in today’s show—and every song we’ve played in previous shows—on the playlist. Just search ‘Find the Outside’ on Spotify.

Duration: 39:53

Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good Studios

Theme music: Gary Blakemore

Episode cover image: source

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode twelve, Tim and Tuesday talk about how we honour and interpret our ancestors’ actions, roles, and impacts — think reverberations of colonialism and class — to grasp the underpinnings of our current world.

• Tim: I’ve been doing a lot of work around what it means to have been raised and educated within my class. I realized the need to own the impacts of my ancestry on me and my life, my brother, my sister, parents and friends. This provided a new invitation to see it and take it in—not only how I’m often approached which is colonizer-based. 
• Tues: We are talking about ancestors on two levels: our direct ancestors and their impact on our families and ancestors at large (our people and their impacts). That’s not always a straight line. 
• Tim: We are already ancestors by virtue of being alive. We need to begin to think of ourselves as ancestors.
• Tues: For me it’s the whole view that says, ‘can I soften my heart to let in that whole view; while very much holding that right now our pasts, our presents and our future is absolutely impacted by our positioning related to that colonialism.’
• Tim: This is about analyzing our own society with the same rigor we apply to other areas of our society. What is the emotional and psychological state of the people in senior leadership positions? How is that playing out?
• Tues: The systems aren’t broken. They are doing what they were designed to do.
• Tim: This ends with how I raise my own children. The power to change is in my house. And something else also starts here, which is what so much of our work and friendship is—the ability to be in whatever happens next and knowing what has come before.

POEM: ‘The Boxer’ by Tim Merry

They abandoned me

They should have been there

I was left

Bereft

Alone

Curled up under a duvet cover from home

Wishing to not be seen

Heart beating, scared

“Why did you leave me here?”

Fear 

Pulsing

Red, jagged and spiralling 

From solar plexus out

Running frantic energy through my body

All the way to my fingers and toes

But nowhere to run, nobody I know

To run to

“Where were you?”

This was meant to be grand adventure

Not trauma

Not weeping at 43

Only feeling me

When the tears flow

Hand on heart

We never should have been apart

Our family

You and me

In the empty space

Stepped the boxer, braced

For any attack

Come one, come all

I am ready, poised, watchful

Weaving

Fists up, back to the wall, there is no leaving

Sadness turned to anger

Reading to explode

Unload

When things get beyond control

Protecting my soul

When you did not

I surrounded myself with a team of defenders

Boxer

Charmer

Actor

Fixer

Worker

Joker

Lover

Anger

Server

Connector

All to keep the world at bay

Because it was not safe 

To come out and play

Now slowly I am peeping out

My blurry eyed head

Over parapet walls

There is me 

Looking in

To the place I protected

Where I am not longer connected 

Meeting eye to eye

Starting to cry

More tears to flow

More of myself to know

If I dare go slow

With the flow

Of what the wisdom of my psyche

Is unveiling to me now

At 43

I am coming back home, to me

Song of the day: Oppression, Ben Harper

Subscribe to the podcast now—in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or anywhere else you find podcasts. New episodes will be available every second Tuesday. If you’d like to get in touch with us about something you heard on the show, reach us at [email protected].

Find the song we played in today’s show—and every song we’ve played in previous shows—on the playlist. Just search ‘Find the Outside’ on Spotify.

Duration: 38:24

Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good Studios

Theme music: Gary Blakemore

Episode cover image: source

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode eleven, Tim and Tuesday deconstruct the change journey of a piece of work that rings bells across the spectrum. Using sport as a container, what can the rest of us learn about breaking through to ‘win’?

• Tues: This piece of work represents an intersection between our growing up, our current physical activity, and our work.
• Tim and Tues reflect on their own connection to sport as a coping and processing mechanism, identity, and pathway out of poverty for many young people.
• Tues: In this piece of work with Sport Nova Scotia (‘sport for social change’), we share the desire of helping more people experience the gift of sport—confidence and courage. In this collaboration, we’re figuring out how to re-engineer the system so more people can experience this.
• Tim: How can the culture of sport be more accessible? How can we shift the economy and structure of it in terms of who it prioritizes (colour, race, ethnicity, how long your family has been in the province, who they know)? Accessibility is huge.
• Tues: It’s a question common to all people seeking to collaborate for all kinds of change, beyond just sport: how much of our efforts simply make tweaks within a broken system? What’s stopping us from creating a completely new and equitable system from the ground up? As change facilitators, we work inside this tension all the time.
• Tim: Keeping the doors open on the dominant system buys us time to create the new. Part of our hypothesis is that we need people who are helping the old system stay open, and help it die and help to detoxify it as much as we need people meeting the new. These are all change leadership roles.
• Tues: Let’s be intentional because some of our efforts will be towards the old system. Our children, adults and seniors are in that old system now. Also, only choosing to look toward the new can leave a lot of people behind.

POEM: “Dark Testament: Verse 8” by Pauli Murray

Hope is a crushed stalk

Between clenched fingers

Hope is a bird’s wing

Broken by a stone.

Hope is a word in a tuneless ditty —

A word whispered with the wind,

A dream of forty acres and a mule,

A cabin of one’s own and a moment to rest,

A name and place for one’s children

And children’s children at last . . .

Hope is a song in a weary throat.

Give me a song of hope

And a world where I can sing it.

Give me a song of faith

And a people to believe in it.

Give me a song of kindliness

And a country where I can live it.

Give me a song of hope and love

And a brown girl’s heart to hear it.

SONG: “In My View” by Young Fathers

Subscribe to the podcast now—in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or anywhere else you find podcasts. New episodes will be available every second Tuesday. If you’d like to get in touch with us about something you heard on the show, reach us at [email protected]. 

Find the song we played in today’s show—and every song we’ve played in previous shows—on the playlist. Just search ‘Find the Outside’ on Spotify.

Duration: 30:36

Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good Studios

Theme music: Gary Blakemore

Episode cover image: Source

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode ten, Tim and Tuesday talk to author and collaborator Kate Inglis on the parallels of how we can be light-keepers despite impossible loss as human beings, and impossible odds as change leaders.

• Author and collaborator Kate Inglis reads a short excerpt from her new book Notes for the Everlost, reflecting on the randomness we confront when trauma or loss occurs in our lives. How does the shock of it all translate into wisdom for living?
• The green light of finding meaning exactly where we are, as we are. How this drives change and banishes cynicism. When problems—grief, trauma, challenges—feel too big, we can feel too small to have an effect. All we can do is recognize how precious all our efforts are—even in small ways. The inherent value of life is in the trying.
• Tim paraphrases a quote by Thomas Merton - ‘forgo all hope of results.’ Surrender and get to the real work, and build relationships that sustain your ability to be in the work. The arc of change is long, flowing over multiple generations—and we stand on the shoulders of multiple generations of change leaders.
• Tuesday: The future we won’t realize, but that we work towards. Very present in the indigenous and black community: We may not bear the fruits now, but we plant them now.
• “I am the hope and the dream of the slave.” — Maya Angelou
• ”The arc of history is long but it bends towards justice.” —MLK
• Kate reflects on nihilism as a freeing mindset, especially in regards to systems change work: “We think we know what the results need to be, but we don’t. My take on nihilism isn’t so much ‘nothing matters’, but ‘so what’—how do we move forward if everything is dust? How do we want to conduct ourselves in our lives to drop seeds? We make a difference by trying.”
• Tuesday: Our structures say, What did you get done in six months? We constantly need to quantify our results. We are in structures that do not tolerate anything other than immediate impact. We can shift our mindset, but we are in structures that will not support that mindset.
• Kate: In my writing about grief, I talk a lot about normalizing where you are—even in despair, we are where we need to be. The same goes for those moments of despair in our work. It’s normal to feel blocked. The trick is, how do we keep trying when we are in that despairing space?
• Tim: The role of faith—not religious faith, but the faith to leap despite uncertainty, dysfunction of dominant systems, persistent failures, or the collapse of relationships. In that moment, do we retreat, to protect what matters (turf protection), or when everything’s gone crazy, is it faith that helps us muster up a more movement-enabling response? Leaping into the void is our job. How can we better sell that leap to the dominant system? And how do we evaluate the success of that leap?
• Tuesday: I just realized why we like working with Kate—you work in the emergent at a cellular level. You speak to it and language it in a really unique way.
• Tim recommends checking out the seminal piece that Kate helped us write: The Big Bang of Equity + Systems Change. Representing a collaborative effort to find new language to put down the root system of The Outside. This new language we have found positions us differently. Global organizations have reached out to us now because of how we show up, and we’re only six months old. And we’ve been doing this work for many years.
• Kate: I was the Outsider. I am an ally and a cheerleader, but I am not in the work you’re doing. I am not connected to what you are connected to. I’m an island. In other organizations I’ve worked with, I’ve seen a paralysis of enthusiasm—everyone echoing each other but ultimately saying nothing meaningful to anyone outside that circle. But you’re so immersed, you can’t understand anyone being deaf to it. My job, as a writer, is to be an outsider. I don’t want to be immersed. I need the words I surface to bring in people who aren’t already bought-in. You’ve got to resonate to someone who really doesn’t get it. The words that feel comfortable to you, as the organization, are not enough.
• Tuesday: Our field is known for being a bit woo-woo. How do we bridge between what is deeply emergent, evocative, experiential work and make it possible for people who haven’t yet been in the work with us get it?
• Kate: Question the pull towards what feels like ‘authoritative’ language. What you think you need to sound like. What you think ‘success’ sounds like. When you get go of the façade of knowing everything as a brand or organization, you start edging towards your team’s human voice.
• Tim: A professional presentation and story imbues what you’re doing with trust. They need to see the humanity behind your work, and only presenting well can deliver the clarity that sets up that humanity.
• Kate: We need to balance the presentation of radical competence with the presence of heart.
• Kate reads another short book excerpt on the metaphor of photographic composition—how white space makes room for clarity in our personal life stories as much as our movements.
• Song of the day: Get Up, Stand Up by Bob Marley

Subscribe to the podcast now—in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or anywhere else you find podcasts. New episodes will be available every second Tuesday. If you’d like to get in touch with us about something you heard on the show, reach us at [email protected]. 

Find the song we played in today’s show—and every song we’ve played in previous shows—on the playlist. Just search ‘Find the Outside’ on Spotify.

Duration: 45:41

Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good Studios

Theme music: Gary Blakemore

Episode cover image: Kate Inglis

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode nine, Tim and Tuesday dig into the reflex to act without pausing to consider the schisms at-play — and illuminate how and why we retreat from difficulty (and from each other).

1.09 —— SHOW NOTES

• Tues: Tend to be a person who really likes “this” and “that” even when they are seemingly opposites and it’s very true around my whole personality. Attribute to being a bi-racial person. If you are a black and white person you live inside that polarity.
• Tim: The world is becoming more unpredictable and uncertain, the speed of change is incredibly rapid, information saturation, economic/social/environmental uncertainty… in that context, it’s quite easy to duck for cover and want simple answers.
• Tim: The polarization of our societies and communities is a highly ineffectual way to actually deal with our reality. The only way we’re going to be able to navigate these problems that are so pervasive is by reaching out to one another to figure it out together.
• Tues: What can experts (neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, behaviourists, facilitators, marketers, politicians) bring—what they know about human beings and human behaviours—to bear into something bigger?
• Tim: When I look at leadership on a national and international level, feel there is a real lack of statespeople. Where is the compelling, unifying voice? Where is the person who can stand up in the face of so much insanity and create some level of rallying cry for people to gather around that has some sanity around it?
• Tim: Polarization points me to the fact that we are just not listening to one another. If we were listing to one another we’d become less polarized. My desire is to act—how do we do something? What is the intervention we need to make? How do we build bridges?
• Tues: Bringing us back to our work—that is why listening exercises are so important. Listening to understand the other person / see the other person is a real skill. It takes intention. It shifts everything.

SONG: ‘Come Together’ by Michael Jackson

POEM: 'The Listeners' by Walter de la Mare

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller’s call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

’Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:—

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word,’ he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Source: The Collected Poems of Walter de la Mare (1979)

Subscribe to the podcast now—in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or anywhere else you find podcasts. New episodes will be available every second Tuesday. If you’d like to get in touch with us about something you heard on the show, reach us at [email protected]. 

Find the song we played in today’s show—and every song we’ve played in previous shows—on the playlist. Just search ‘Find the Outside’ on Spotify.

Duration: 29:35

Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good Studios

Theme music: Gary Blakemore

Episode cover image: source

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode eight, Tim and Tuesday empathize with facilitators and collaborators separated by organizational difference or mandates — and explore how to go deep and draw out the greatest value.

1.08 —— SHOW NOTES

• Recent favourite binge-worthy shows: The Good Place and Occupied.
• When we set up people in a circle, we invariably wind up having it feel like therapy. This can make some of us feel open, and others feel resistant. As facilitators, what can we do to position depth as a path to the outcomes we want?
• Question: Where does this fear of depth come from? What’s the narrative that makes staying out of depth and treating people as sub-human permissable?
• Some people feel compelled to protect the patriarchy / white supremacy—especially those who have wealth, or who generate wealth for other people. —Tuesday
• In change, people often struggle with leadership because they fear the work will cause a loss of relationships. This has a lot to do with the mechanistic worldview that is responsible for setting up our organizations, when we didn’t realize the interconnectedness of things, and when we treat human organizations as machines, striving for efficiency.
• This organizational structure not only fails to acknowledge people’s humanity, but is fundamentally oppressive. It’s not like these organizations set free people’s potential.
• Question: What allows or justifies the perpetuation of systems that are so unkind?
• If you can make non-emotional judgement calls, you’re successful. That’s part of the programming I received from my parents: that you actually can’t lead if you’re empathetically or emotionally engaged with people. — Tim
• Song of the day: Frank Turner’s Be More Kind
• Poem of the day: Self Portrait by David Whyte

It doesn't interest me if there is one God

or many gods.

I want to know if you belong or feel

abandoned.

If you know despair or can see it in others.

I want to know

if you are prepared to live in the world

with its harsh need

to change you. If you can look back

with firm eyes

saying this is where I stand. I want to know

if you know

how to melt into that fierce heat of living

falling toward

the center of your longing. I want to know

if you are willing

to live, day by day, with the consequence of love

and the bitter

unwanted passion of your sure defeat.

I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even

the gods speak of God.

 -- David Whyte from Fire in the Earth

 ©1992 Many Rivers Press

Subscribe to the podcast now—in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or anywhere else you find podcasts. New episodes will be available every second Tuesday. If you’d like to get in touch with us about something you heard on the show, reach us at [email protected]. 

Find the song we played in today’s show—and every song we’ve played in previous shows—on the playlist. Just search ‘Find the Outside’ on Spotify.

Duration: 45:45

Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good Studios

Theme music: Gary Blakemore

Episode cover image: source

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode seven, Tim and Tuesday invite us ‘backstage’ to share revelations and lessons along the path of making their work of systems change into a repeatable, bankable business.

1.07 —SHOW NOTES

• Tim talks about his first entry into the working world, wanting to find a job that could make a difference. Tuesday notes that she never wanted to work for herself.
• Many of us have that moment of taking on a massive amount of debt when we’re young—as soon as the bank notices us as a new source of interest—and we then spend the next several years working to pay it off. For some of us, that’s a wake-up call. —Tim
• Tim describes ‘going feral’ and getting approved for a £10,000 credit card, and borrowing from mom and dad to pay it off to the tune of 35% of his income every month.
• Tuesday took a course around limiting beliefs around money. She was asked to write down all of her beliefs about poor people, then about rich people—and the contrast in these thoughts was shocking.
• Tim and Tuesday explore the friction of negotiating in systems change work. Even though we want to use our talents and skills to make positive change, we still have to pay the bills—so we have to push through that uncomfortable point of attaching money to our contribution.
• How does growing up in poverty—or in abundance—influence us as entrepreneurs
• How does a global network of contacts come into play when work is thin? How do we make the ask, and how can we make ourselves invaluable?
• What other moments and windfalls helped propel us early on? Tim and Tuesday talk about managing the ebb and flow of inheritances, debt, grants, internships, and volunteering.
• At what point does systems change work become ‘a real job’? What does that even mean? What does that transition look and feel like, and how can we manage it well?
• The field of systems change facilitation didn’t exist until the early 2000s, when Art of Hosting began developing an architecture under all of these different processes.
• Tim and Tuesday explore how saying NO to some work helps build your business.
• Poem of the day: Mary Oliver's Work, Sometimes

Work, Sometimes

I was sad all day, and why not. There I was, books piled

on both sides of the table, paper stacked up, words

falling off my tongue.

The robins had been a long time singing, and now it

was beginning to rain.

What are we sure of? Happiness isn’t a town on a map,

or an early arrival, or a job well done, but good work

ongoing. Which is not likely to be the trifling around

with a poem.

Then it began raining hard, and the flowers in the yard

were full of lively fragrance.

You have had days like this, no doubt. And wasn’t it

wonderful, finally, to leave the room? Ah, what a

moment!

As for myself, I swung the door open. And there was

the wordless, singing world. And I ran for my life.

Mary Oliver

New and Selected Poems, Vol. II

• Song of the day: Chaka Khan, Like Sugar

Subscribe to the podcast now—in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or anywhere else you find podcasts. New episodes will be available every second Tuesday. If you’d like to get in touch with us about something you heard on the show, reach us at [email protected].

Find the song we played in today’s show—and every song we’ve played in previous shows—on the playlist. Just search ‘Find the Outside’ on Spotify.

Duration: 42:55

Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good Studios

Theme music: Gary Blakemore

Episode cover image: source

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode six, Tim and Tuesday explore the role played by limiting beliefs in their work on systems change, equity and leadership—and the practice of letting them go.

• Can working with our limiting beliefs be liberating? Is it possible (or even advisable) to eliminate our limiting beliefs?
• What kind of limiting beliefs show up most frequently in your work?
• Can you remember something you once believed that you no longer believe?
• We talk about our beliefs as limiting, because we spend a lot of our time loosening them up.
• Culture eats strategy for lunch. This is part of what sets us free.
• The level of change that you’re willing to go through yourself is directly relative to the level of change we’re going to see around this…
• The linearity of it is hard for me to graph… ‘All the levels all the time’
• They don’t care about it like we do. People can feel their own care and commitment, but can really be suspect of other folks care and commitment.
• I’m not powerful enough is as dangerous as I’m important, this work is important, the most important work. —Tim
• There’s a large attachment in the world of hiring consultants to the idea of epiphany.
• Limiting beliefs are conversations to come back to again and again and again. It’s not about eliminating them, it’s about being in relationship with them.
• One of my core limiting beliefs is ‘I don’t deserve to take up space’, so one of my biggest pet peeves is other people taking up space. —Tuesday
• Poem: Elephant in the room by Lemn Sissay
• Song: Little Red Corvette by Prince

Subscribe to the podcast now—in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or anywhere else you find podcasts. New episodes will be available every second Tuesday. If you’d like to get in touch with us about something you heard on the show, reach us at [email protected].

Find the song we played in today’s show—and every song we’ve played in previous shows—on the playlist. Just search ‘Find the Outside’ on Spotify.

Duration: 36:39

Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good Studios

Theme music: Gary Blakemore

Episode cover image: source

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.