If you want to grow as a person or a professional, one of the best methods is through mentoring and coaching. The medium of of both metoring and coaching is feedback.

Feedback is communication that supports another person or a group to continuously improve their performance and to correct impediments to development.

A mentor or coach is someone who has demonstrated mastery in a particular field or endeavor and has the ability to transmit that mastery to another person through expert observation and feedback.

You would approach a mentor if you wanted to develop wisdom, strength of character and general effectiveness as a person. You would engage a coach when you are committed to skilling-up or being more effective in a particular discipline.

If you do engage a mentor or coach be sure you’re prepared mentally and emotionally for accelerated growth. Many people think they want to grow but find themselves irritated and angry when they are forced to step outside of their comfort zone. That’s where true growth takes place, in a zone beyond the status quo.

Constructive feedback educates the person being assessed about performance strengths, weaknesses and opportunities. It helps the recipient understand the difference between their intention and their impact. When that feedback comes from an objective and compassionate place, we are forced to take it in and look at it for what it is.

However, the comfort zone can be breached by constructive feedback. Many people bristle when they hear things that they don’t like. They quickly defend against the feedback, dismiss it or try and deflect it through anger, humor or outright denial.

That kind of defensive behavior is usually an announcement that we lack the maturity to receive feedback as a gift. It may also indicate we have come to a mentor and coach for acceptance and approval rather than personal and professional growth.

Steve Podborsky, a world-class downhill skier and former “Crazy Canuck” taught me a lot about the proper use of feedback. I worked with Steve on several projects back in the eighties. His attitude to feedback was very healthy-he couldn’t advance as an athlete or a person without it.

What is your relationship to feedback that you have solicited? Do you see it as a gift or a burden?

© Patrick O’Neill 2011. All rights reserved.

We pick berries
and watch for bears.
Black flies
gone
finally.
The sun and rain
have done their
work.

Everywhere,
purple, red, and black fruit
hang from the bushes,
barely able to contain
juice;
dripping
like blood
as we gorge.

Then, we smell her
old black bear.
She must have rolled
on a dead fish.
Shriveled and toothless
she ambles
through the bushes
our Dowager Queen.

Loyal subjects
we yield the patch to her.
God, she was ferocious
in her prime.
She has no taste
for praise songs now.
The Queen snorts and eats.
The berries come first.

© Patrick O’Neill 2011. All rights reserved.

Yesterday, I spent the morning with the new staff of The Kensington Hospice Home. It was their third day of orientation.

The Hospice is a ten bed facility housed in a restored church building on the Kensington campus. I toured the facility in the morning with Bill O’Neill. Bill is the General Manager of the Kensington Health Center, a long-term care home in the heart of Toronto’s downtown.

The new building is a beauty. Great care has gone into designing a space that is esthetically pleasing and highly functional.

The Kensington Hospice is a joint effort with the Princess Margaret Hospital’s Paliative Care Unit. Twenty staff have been hired to provide end-of-life care to residents. They are a delightful group of RN’s, RPN’s and Social Workers.

Our theme for the morning session was “Beginning Well, Ending Well,” cross cultural practices of respect that support dignity and grace in relationships. Respect is the experience of being valued. That quality is important in delivering services where care is focused on comfort versus curing. It’s also important to organizational culture and team effectiveness.

Our morning session was also an opportunity for the staff to get to know their co-workers, an opportunity that they embraced with enthusiasm.

It was an honor to be a part of the launch of such an important community resource. It was also gratifying to know the level of care that will be provided, evidenced by the able staff that has been assembled by Kensington Hospice.

End-of-life services in Toronto have gone to another level of compassonate care through the introduction of the Kensington Hospice Home.

© Patrick O’Neill 2011. All rights reserved.

Last night I was in San Francisco at a special screening of a wonderful new film called The Help. I was honored to be the guest of Stephen and Deborah Goldblatt.

Stephen is the film’s Director of Photography. He is a world-class cinematographer whose credits include Charlie Wilson’s War, Angels in America, Closer, The Cotton Club, Prince of Tides and Julie and Julia.

Stephen is also my collaborator on A Hundred Chances: Short Meditations of Opportunity, Risk and Probability (publication forthcoming).

Set in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960’s, The Help is based on Kathryn Stockett’s bestselling novel. It is the story of a group of black maids, and the white families that they work for. It is a gripping indictment of American apartheid.

The Help is funny, poignant and inspiring. The cast is uniformly solid and features Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Bryce Dallas Howard and Sissy Spacek.

At the film’s end, Director Tate Taylor, Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer and Stephen discussed the film. Taylor, a childhood friend of author Kathryn Stockett, recounted the difficulty of getting both the book and the film into the world. Sixty publishers rejected The Help. And no one seemed to want to take a chance on a young, inexperienced director.

They persisted until the book was published and the movie made. You’ll be glad they did.

This is a movie for the ages; perhaps the best I’ve seen on relations between the white and black communities in the South. There is nothing out there in the theatres this summer that is quite like it.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy boy wizards and exploding movies as much as the next guy. But The Help’s aim is deeper. The film will be released in August. I am certain is will be a favorite during award season.

Go see it…and take your family.

© Patrick O’Neill 2011. All rights reserved.

Our first weekend of The Mystery of Relationship begins Friday night in San Francisco. We have an almost full house for the four-weekend series.

Weekend One will focus on The Power of Engagement, an exploration of the elements of full-heartedness. Being full hearted, engaged, means that we trust ourselves in relationship and hold nothing in reserve. We recognize that vulnerability is a doorwar to intimacy.

The opposite of full-heartedness is half-heartedness. When we are half-hearted, we struggle with issues of commitment. Probably never happens to you.

Full-heartedness allows mature relationships to deepen and announces that we trust our romantic partner, family members, and close friends. It’s the experience of being present, not distracted or preoccupied by other matters.

I am excited to discover what our group will co-create this week-end. Still time to register if this topic appeals to you…or scares you to death.

You can come to the work any way you want.

© Patrick O’Neill 2011. All rights reserved.

My cab driver from LaGuardia looked worried when I told him the address I was going to in the Village. “Bad” was all I could make out from behind the plexiglass screen.

I didn’t realize that it was Parade Day in New York. Parade Day coming on the heels of the historic passage of same-sex marriage legislation in the New York State Senate. Thousands and thousands of people were celebrating in the streets of Greenwich Village.

It finally dawned on me what my cab driver was muttering about up front. He could only get me “close” to my destination.

I got out at the barricade and walked a dozen blocks. There were people everywhere, gay, straight, transgendered, all celebrating a breakthrough that was hard-won and too long in coming: equal rights.

Everyone I passed was joyous. Even the cops were friendly, wishing me a hello as I passed. That seldom happens in Toronto, I thought to myself. I make it a practice to say hello to police officers at home and am usually met with stony silence.

As I walked, I recalled a conversation I had with a participant in one of my workshops in San Framcisco. He was devastated by the repeal of gay marriage in California after San Francisco was overruled in granting marriage rights to same sex couples.

I said at the time that the war was over, depite the disappointing turn of events. The opposition forces were fighting a last gasp campaign for discrimination. They had lost the war even though they had won a battle.

The scene in New York City was vindication. The equal rights battles are not over, but the war has been won in my view.

I also got to thinking about Mayor Rob Ford’s decision to go to the cottage rather than attend the Pride Parade in Toronto. It betrays a small-mindedness that most liberals were convinced of during Ford’s election campaign. Small mindeness and provincialism.

Every Toronto Mayor with the exception of Art Eggleton in the ’80’s has attended the Parade. Not Ford. He’s going to the cottage. Seems more important than a major celebration of Toronto’s diversity.

Why am I suprised?

This guy hasn’t exactly demonstrated any sign of growing into a world-class mayor.

Anyway, I am happy for the human rights breakthrough in New York. And I enjoyed wandering through the celebratory streets of Greenwich Village.

Justice done.

© Patrick O’Neill 2011. All rights reserved.

Something that is usually forgotten is that Father’s Day is an opportunity to celebrate the archteype of the Healthy Masculine. That archetype lives in every man and woman and is the dynamic energy in our nature.

The Healthy Masculine is associated with productivity that springs from living a values-driven life. It is the builder, protector and author of right action. This energy seeks to provide sustenance through hard work, honest means and generosity to family, friends and community.

When we use our dynamic nature in a healthy way, we pay attention to our responsibilites as an means of honoring the great gift of life. We are creative and engaged fully, recognizing that this is a path of honor in the world.

The Healthy Masculine is partnered with The Healthy Feminine, the receptive and nurturing aspect of human beings. The Masculine treats the Feminine as an equal partner in relationship, recognizing that the Feminine carries a fluency in the inner world that matches the Masculine’s fluency in the outer world.

Father’s Day reminds us that we must ensure that we take care of our dynamic nature and root out the behaviours that undermine integrity. These include acting from our circumstances rather than our principles and values; the failure to attend to our responsibilities; the misuse of power and authority; laziness; greed; and the failure to recognize and develop our creative gifts and talents. The Healthy Masculine always attends to the needs of the family as a primary commitment.

To all of us striving to be do our best and honor the Healthy Masculine, Happy Father’s Day. A special thank you to my own father, John D’arcy O’Neill. Much love, gratitude and respect to you for your modeling and lessons. You are remembered and appreciated. Rest in peace.

© Patrick O’Neill 2011. All rights reserved.

Ok, so it’s true. I got another one, a tattoo on my left arm.

Glen, my new friend and tattoo artist extraordinaire, wondered alllowed: “Isn’t your wife going to kill you?”

“What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” I said in my sneakiest voice. “Besides, she’s in Ireland. I can’t tell her if she isn’t here.”

Glen didn’t look convinced. Neither did my wife on her return. My third daughter, the rat, had already briefed her on my latest addition.

“Patrick O’Neill…You’ve lost your mind,” she informed me!

True as that may be, I did it for good reasons. There was the whole balance thing to consider, given my first tattoo was on my right arm. Only natural to get a second.

There’s also The True Snake Story.

You see, I had an encounter a few years ago in the Arizona desert with a green Mojave rattlesnake. They are the most lethal rattler in North America. Thirty seconds to Jesus. So lethal that your chances of surviving a bite are iffy.

I met my Mojave at the foot of a small footbridge that I was going to cross to get to the dining hall of the Conference facility where I was staying. I was minding my own business when out of the corner of my eye I saw something green and coiled.

I stopped. That’s good snake protocol.

Yup, it was a snake alright, a green Mojave kind. It remained still, coiled and non-rattling.

I had never seen a green Mojave before but I wasn’t about to get any closer. I backed away slowly observing it out of the corner of my eye and went to find the caretaker.

“There’s a snake,” I said when I found the caretaker. “A green Mojave kind. I think”.

“Not good,” he said. He went into his trailer and returned with a pistol. Together we went back to the bridge.

“They’re very shy”, the caretaker said. “And impossible to handle. Way too lethal. We have to shoot him.”

“We,” I said?

The caretaker approached the snake until he was virtually standing over it. The snake was rattling big time by now.

He fired the pistol at point blank range.

The snake dodged the first bullet. Really.

The caretaker got him on the second shot. He pulled out his knife and cut off the rattle, depositing it in my palm. “That’s for you,” he said. “Good job spotting him. He could have hurt somebody.”

I looked at the amputation, four distinct rattles still twitching in my outstretched hand. He picked up the snake. “The meat is good eating,” he said.

So that’s the reason for the second tattoo. That rattler gave me it’s rattle. I gave it my left forearm. It’s only fair.

“It’s a true snake story,” I said to my wife explaining the new ink. “I wouldn’t lie to you about something like that.”

© Patrick O’Neill 2011. All rights reserved.

As many of you know, I have been teaching with Angeles Arrien for the past 16 years. So far we have collaborated on three programs: Thresholds of Collective Wisdom, Triumph of the Imagination, and The Challenge of Uncertainty.

Over the years, we have been asked repeatedly for a program that focuses on healthy relationships. I am pleased to announce that our new program, The Mystery of Relationships, does just that. Over four weekends, beginning this July, Angeles and I will lead an inquiry into what many religious traditions consider to be the most rigorous spiritual practice.

Relationship, in all its forms, is rigorous work. It demands that we shed our expectations, assumptions and illusions about ourselves and others.

Through relationship, we accelerate our learning about love, friendship, forgiveness, trust, honesty and generosity of spirit. It is a crucible that fosters mutuality, character and maturity.

Relationship work is truly transformational. The heart is the primary teacher about how to grow in love.

This program will take place at Angeles Arrien’s office in Sausalito, California. Each weekend will bring a different focus to bear on the relationship with self, others and community.

July 8-10, 2011 The Power of the Heart

Relationships are the great teachers of the heart. In our first weekend, we will be exploring how the heart is initiated and developed by relationship. We will explore the archetypal distinctions of Four-Chambered Heart and who have been our greatest teachers of love and companionship? We will also identify the ways in which love can be opened, strengthened. softened and deepened.

Sept. 23-25, 2011 The Healthy Masculine and Healthy Feminine

What constitutes the healthy masculine and feminine? Healthy behaviors are:
Unhealthy behaviors include: control and appeasement; strategy and seduction; unhealthy pride and attention/entitlement needs, to name a few. We will explore ways to recognize, support and strengthen healthy behaviors that are universal and archetypal within all relationships.

Nov. 18-20, 2011 Intimacy in Relationship

Intimacy in relationship cannot occur without the consistent presence of trust, honesty, respect, openness and vulnerability. We will identify and strengthen where these qualities are present or not in all our relationships.

Jan 20-22, 2012 Co-Creation

Every relationship is co-created. No relationship can flourish with out shared mutuality, connection or reciprocity. We will take a look at effective communication tools and ways to creatively problem solve conflict; and practice how to appreciate and see differences in relationships as an opportunity rather than a problem.

For information or to sign up, call Angeles Arrien’s office at 415-331-5050. Hope you can join us.

© Patrick O’Neill 2011. All rights reserved.

This information comes from Angeles Arrien on the importance of Intergenerational Bridging Work. Angeles writes:

“For the first time in history we have some very important research that cannot be ignored surrounding the necessity and sustainability of building bridges between the generations–especially the elemental and essential human need to transmit values and perennial wisdoms from generation to generation.

 

1. A global population survey in 2009 revealed that 44% of the world’s population is currently 25 years old and younger. How can we begin to build an intergenerational bridge to this population?

 

2. A global survey on suicide in 2004 revealed that the United States held the highest suicide rate between its youth and elders in the world (graphically indicating that we are not calling upon the creativity and gifts of our youth, or the wisdom and experience of our elders). Both generations suffer–the youth are under-utilized and the elders are under-valued.

 

3. In 2009, a Pew Research report revealed that for the first time, two opposing generations shared strong similar values. These generations are known today as the Milleniums (ages 18-34), and the Boomers (ages 56-75). The values shared between these two generations are: a desire for environmental sustainability; to reduce poverty and economic inequity; global networking and helping those in need; fostering civil rights; low tolerance for corruption; and high networking and collaboration in order to make a greater impact of good on the whole. The Milleniums are high tech, they know how to network on line; the Boomers have face-to-face skills and content for the networks that Milleniums have set up and provided. Both have much to exchange between each other.”

 

Angeles Arrien also provides a definition of Generation from the work of Simona Beretta, an Italian philosopher:

 

“Generation comes from genos,origin–as gender (male-female); as geneology (the individual I, and his or her personal history)…Generation is a dynamic concept defined as taking care of relations over time. Generation is about relations; it is not an individualistic endeavor. Generation is a powerful metaphor to capture the essence of development and progress, as between the generations…”

There is much reconciliation work required between the generations…and much to be gained by such work.

Our society is increasingly fragmented. Bridging work can help mend the gaps between us so that the whole of society benefits from the significant gifts each generation brings to the world.

© Patrick O’Neill 2011. All rights reserved.