This week:

Mister Rogers Delivers POWER Speech to Senators:
In 1969, Mr. Rogers gave the following emotional plea to a Senate Subcommittee and demonstrated his empathy, mastery and humanity!
It is still relevant nearly 50 years later…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKy7ljRr0AA

Maybe We’re the Ones Who Put Youth ‘At Risk’:
“ … a better definition (of ‘at-risk youths’) is youth who are at risk of being failed by one or more adults or the adult-driven system or institution.”

As I walked to my bus after work, I noticed a man in a wheelchair struggling to cross Third Avenue. It was rush hour, the light had turned green, and he was clearly caught between the proverbial rock and hard spot. As my middle-aged mind moved into help mode, a teenager swooped into the middle of traffic and quickly steered the man to safety.

The young hero was dressed in black, head wrapped in a bandana, cap askew, and trousers hanging low. As circumstances would have it, this youth and I boarded the same bus bound for our homes in Southeast Seattle. Once seated, I expressed appreciation to him for his act of kindness. He was cordial in his response, but seemed a bit startled by my approach to him. We talked awhile. He was indeed surprised. Surprised that I had noticed. Surprised that I had mentioned anything about what to him was simply the right thing to do. Surprised in fact that I, an unknown adult, spoke to him at all…

http://www.cyc-net.org/today2001/today010824.html

Orchid Children: The Science of Success Raising Dandelions and Orchids

Whether you call it the orchid hypothesis, the plasticity hypothesis, the sensitivity hypothesis, or the differential-susceptibility hypothesis, here is a completely new way to think about genetics and human behavior.

Risk becomes possibility; vulnerability becomes plasticity and responsiveness. It’s one of those simple ideas with big, spreading implications. Gene variants generally considered misfortunes (poor Jim, he got the “bad” gene) can instead now be understood as highly leveraged evolutionary bets, with both high risks and high potential rewards: gambles that help create a diversified-portfolio approach to survival, with selection favoring parents who happen to invest in both dandelions and orchids…

 Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people.

IN 2004, MARIAN Bakermans-Kranenburg, a professor of child and family studies at Leiden University, started carrying a video camera into homes of families whose 1-to-3-year-olds indulged heavily in the oppositional, aggressive, uncooperative, and aggravating behavior that psychologists call “externalizing”: whining, screaming, whacking, throwing tantrums and objects, and willfully refusing reasonable requests. Staple behaviors in toddlers, perhaps. But research has shown that toddlers with especially high rates of these behaviors are likely to become stressed, confused children who fail academically and socially in school, and become antisocial and unusually aggressive adults.

At the outset of their study, Bakermans-Kranenburg and her colleagues had screened 2,408 children via parental questionnaire, and they were now focusing on the 25 percent rated highest by their parents in externalizing behaviors. Lab observations had confirmed these parental ratings.

Bakermans-Kranenburg meant to change the kids’ behavior. In an intervention her lab had developed, she or another researcher visited each of 120 families six times over eight months; filmed the mother and child in everyday activities, including some requiring obedience or cooperation; and then edited the film into teachable moments to show to the mothers. A similar group of high-externalizing children received no intervention.

To the researchers’ delight, the intervention worked. The moms, watching the videos, learned to spot cues they’d missed before, or to respond differently to cues they’d seen but had reacted to poorly. Quite a few mothers, for instance, had agreed only reluctantly to read picture books to their fidgety, difficult kids, saying they wouldn’t sit still for it. But according to Bakermans-Kranenburg, when these mothers viewed the playback they were “surprised to see how much pleasure it was for the child—and for them.” Most mothers began reading to their children regularly, producing what Bakermans-Kranenburg describes as “a peaceful time that they had dismissed as impossible.”

And the bad behaviors dropped. A year after the intervention ended, the toddlers who’d received it had reduced their externalizing scores by more than 16 percent, while a nonintervention control group improved only about 10 percent (as expected, due to modest gains in self-control with age). And the mothers’ responses to their children became more positive and constructive.

Few programs change parent-child dynamics so successfully. But gauging the efficacy of the intervention wasn’t the Leiden team’s only goal, or even its main one. The team was also testing a radical new hypothesis about how genes shape behavior—a hypothesis that stands to revise our view of not only mental illness and behavioral dysfunction but also human evolution.

Of special interest to the team was a new interpretation of one of the most important and influential ideas in recent psychiatric and personality research: that certain variants of key behavioral genes (most of which affect either brain development or the processing of the brain’s chemical messengers) make people more vulnerable to certain mood, psychiatric, or personality disorders. Bolstered over the past 15 years by numerous studies, this hypothesis, often called the “stress diathesis” or “genetic vulnerability” model, has come to saturate psychiatry and behavioral science. During that time, researchers have identified a dozen-odd gene variants that can increase a person’s susceptibility to depression, anxiety, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, heightened risk-taking, and antisocial, sociopathic, or violent behaviors, and other problems—if, and only if, the person carrying the variant suffers a traumatic or stressful childhood or faces particularly trying experiences later in life.

This vulnerability hypothesis, as we can call it, has already changed our conception of many psychic and behavioral problems. It casts them as products not of nature or nurture but of complex “gene-environment interactions.” Your genes don’t doom you to these disorders. But if you have “bad” versions of certain genes and life treats you ill, you’re more prone to them.

Recently, however, an alternate hypothesis has emerged from this one and is turning it inside out. This new model suggests that it’s a mistake to understand these “risk” genes only as liabilities. Yes, this new thinking goes, these bad genes can create dysfunction in unfavorable contexts—but they can also enhance function in favorable contexts. The genetic sensitivities to negative experience that the vulnerability hypothesis has identified, it follows, are just the downside of a bigger phenomenon: a heightened genetic sensitivity to all experience.

The evidence for this view is mounting. Much of it has existed for years, in fact, but the focus on dysfunction in behavioral genetics has led most researchers to overlook it. This tunnel vision is easy to explain, according to Jay Belsky, a child-development psychologist at Birkbeck, University of London. “Most work in behavioral genetics has been done by mental-illness researchers who focus on vulnerability,” he told me recently. “They don’t see the upside, because they don’t look for it. It’s like dropping a dollar bill beneath a table. You look under the table, you see the dollar bill, and you grab it. But you completely miss the five that’s just beyond your feet.”

Though this hypothesis is new to modern biological psychiatry, it can be found in folk wisdom, as the University of Arizona developmental psychologist Bruce Ellis and the University of British Columbia developmental pediatrician W. Thomas Boyce pointed out last year in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. The Swedes, Ellis and Boyce noted in an essay titled “Biological Sensitivity to Context,” have long spoken of “dandelion” children. These dandelion children—equivalent to our “normal” or “healthy” children, with “resilient” genes—do pretty well almost anywhere, whether raised in the equivalent of a sidewalk crack or a well-tended garden. Ellis and Boyce offer that there are also “orchid” children, who will wilt if ignored or maltreated but bloom spectacularly with greenhouse care.

At first glance, this idea, which I’ll call the orchid hypothesis, may seem a simple amendment to the vulnerability hypothesis. It merely adds that environment and experience can steer a person up instead of down. Yet it’s actually a completely new way to think about genetics and human behavior. Risk becomes possibility; vulnerability becomes plasticity and responsiveness. It’s one of those simple ideas with big, spreading implications. Gene variants generally considered misfortunes (poor Jim, he got the “bad” gene) can instead now be understood as highly leveraged evolutionary bets, with both high risks and high potential rewards: gambles that help create a diversified-portfolio approach to survival, with selection favoring parents who happen to invest in both dandelions and orchids.

In this view, having both dandelion and orchid kids greatly raises a family’s (and a species’) chance of succeeding, over time and in any given environment. The behavioral diversity provided by these two different types of temperament also supplies precisely what a smart, strong species needs if it is to spread across and dominate a changing world. The many dandelions in a population provide an underlying stability. The less-numerous orchids, meanwhile, may falter in some environments but can excel in those that suit them. And even when they lead troubled early lives, some of the resulting heightened responses to adversity that can be problematic in everyday life—increased novelty-seeking, restlessness of attention, elevated risk-taking, or aggression—can prove advantageous in certain challenging situations: wars, tribal or modern; social strife of many kinds; and migrations to new environments. Together, the steady dandelions and the mercurial orchids offer an adaptive flexibility that neither can provide alone. Together, they open a path to otherwise unreachable individual and collective achievements.

This orchid hypothesis also answers a fundamental evolutionary question that the vulnerability hypothesis cannot. If variants of certain genes create mainly dysfunction and trouble, how have they survived natural selection? Genes so maladaptive should have been selected out. Yet about a quarter of all human beings carry the best-documented gene variant for depression, while more than a fifth carry the variant that Bakermans-Kranenburg studied, which is associated with externalizing, antisocial, and violent behaviors, as well as ADHD, anxiety, and depression. The vulnerability hypothesis can’t account for this. The orchid hypothesis can.

This is a transformative, even startling view of human frailty and strength. For more than a decade, proponents of the vulnerability hypothesis have argued that certain gene variants underlie some of humankind’s most grievous problems: despair, alienation, cruelties both petty and epic. The orchid hypothesis accepts that proposition. But it adds, tantalizingly, that these same troublesome genes play a critical role in our species’ astounding success.

The orchid hypothesis—sometimes called the plasticity hypothesis, the sensitivity hypothesis, or the differential-susceptibility hypothesis—is too new to have been tested widely. Many researchers, even those in behavioral science, know little or nothing of the idea. A few—chiefly those with broad reservations about ever tying specific genes to specific behaviors—express concerns. But as more supporting evidence emerges, the most common reaction to the idea among researchers and clinicians is excitement. A growing number of psychologists, psychiatrists, child-development experts, geneticists, ethologists, and others are beginning to believe that, as Karlen Lyons-Ruth, a developmental psychologist at Harvard Medical School, puts it, “It’s time to take this seriously.”

With the data gathered in the video intervention, the Leiden team began to test the orchid hypothesis. Could it be, they wondered, that the children who suffer most from bad environments also profit the most from good ones? To find out, Bakermans-Kranenburg and her colleague Marinus van Ijzendoorn began to study the genetic makeup of the children in their experiment. Specifically, they focused on one particular “risk allele” associated with ADHD and externalizing behavior. (An allele is any of the variants of a gene that takes more than one form; such genes are known as polymorphisms. A risk allele, then, is simply a gene variant that increases your likelihood of developing a problem.)

Bakermans-Kranenburg and van Ijzendoorn wanted to see whether kids with a risk allele for ADHD and externalizing behaviors (a variant of a dopamine-processing gene known as DRD4) would respond as much to positive environments as to negative. A third of the kids in the study had this risk allele; the other two-thirds had a version considered a “protective allele,” meaning it made them less vulnerable to bad environments. The control group, who did not receive the intervention, had a similar distribution.

Both the vulnerability hypothesis and the orchid hypothesis predict that in the control group the kids with a risk allele should do worse than those with a protective one. And so they did—though only slightly. Over the course of 18 months, the genetically “protected” kids reduced their externalizing scores by 11 percent, while the “at-risk” kids cut theirs by 7 percent. Both gains were modest ones that the researchers expected would come with increasing age. Although statistically significant, the difference between the two groups was probably unnoticeable otherwise.

The real test, of course, came in the group that got the intervention. How would the kids with the risk allele respond? According to the vulnerability model, they should improve less than their counterparts with the protective allele; the modest upgrade that the video intervention created in their environment wouldn’t offset their general vulnerability.

As it turned out, the toddlers with the risk allele blew right by their counterparts. They cut their externalizing scores by almost 27 percent, while the protective-allele kids cut theirs by just 12 percent (improving only slightly on the 11 percent managed by the protective-allele population in the control group). The upside effect in the intervention group, in other words, was far larger than the downside effect in the control group. Risk alleles, the Leiden team concluded, really can create not just risk but possibility.

Can liability really be so easily turned to gain? The pediatrician W. Thomas Boyce, who has worked with many a troubled child in more than three decades of child-development research, says the orchid hypothesis “profoundly recasts the way we think about human frailty.” He adds, “We see that when kids with this kind of vulnerability are put in the right setting, they don’t merely do better than before, they do the best—even better, that is, than their protective-allele peers. “Are there any enduring human frailties that don’t have this other, redemptive side to them?”

As I researched this story, I thought about such questions a lot, including how they pertained to my own temperament and genetic makeup. Having felt the black dog’s teeth a few times over the years, I’d considered many times having one of my own genes assayed—specifically, the serotonin-transporter gene, also called the SERT gene, or 5-HTTLPR. This gene helps regulate the processing of serotonin, a chemical messenger crucial to mood, among other things. The two shorter, less efficient versions of the gene’s three forms, known as short/short and short/long (or S/S and S/L), greatly magnify your risk of serious depression—if you hit enough rough road. The gene’s long/long form, on the other hand, appears to be protective.

In the end, I’d always backed away from having my SERT gene assayed. Who wants to know his risk of collapsing under pressure? Given my family and personal history, I figured I probably carried the short/long allele, which would make me at least moderately depression-prone. If I had it tested I might get the encouraging news that I had the long/long allele. Then again, I might find I had the dreaded, riskier short/short allele. This was something I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out.

But as I looked into the orchid hypothesis and began to think in terms of plasticity rather than risk, I decided maybe I did want to find out. So I called a researcher I know in New York who does depression research involving the serotonin-transporter gene. The next day, FedEx left a package on my front porch containing a specimen cup. I spat into it, examined what I’d produced, and spat again. Then I screwed the cap tight, slid the vial into its little shipping tube, and put it back on the porch. An hour later, the FedEx guy took it away.

Of all the evidence supporting the orchid-gene hypothesis, perhaps the most compelling comes from the work of Stephen Suomi, a rhesus-monkey researcher who heads a sprawling complex of labs and monkey habitats in the Maryland countryside—the National Institutes of Health’s Laboratory of Comparative Ethology. For 41 years, first at the University of Wisconsin and then, beginning in 1983, in the Maryland lab the NIH built specifically for him, Suomi has been studying the roots of temperament and behavior in rhesus monkeys—which share about 95 percent of our DNA, a number exceeded only in apes. Rhesus monkeys differ from humans in obvious and fundamental ways. But their close resemblance to us in crucial social and genetic respects reveals much about the roots of our own behavior—and has helped give rise to the orchid hypothesis.

Suomi learned his trade as a student and protégé of, and then a direct successor to, Harry Harlow, one of the 20th century’s most influential and problematic behavioral scientists. When Harlow started his work, in the 1930s, the study of childhood development was dominated by a ruthlessly mechanistic behavioralism. The movement’s leading figure in the United States, John Watson, considered mother love “a dangerous instrument.” He urged parents to leave crying babies alone; to never hold them to give pleasure or comfort; and to kiss them only occasionally, on the forehead. Mothers were important less for their affection than as conditioners of behavior.

With a series of ingenious but sometimes disturbingly cruel experiments on monkeys, Harlow broke with this cool behavioralism. His most famous experiment showed that baby rhesus monkeys, raised alone or with same-age peers, preferred a foodless but fuzzy terrycloth surrogate “mother” over a wire-mesh version that freely dispensed meals. He showed that these infants desperately wanted to bond, and that depriving them of physical, emotional, and social attachment could create a near-paralyzing dysfunction. In the 1950s this work provided critical evidence for the emerging theory of infant attachment: a theory that, with its emphasis on rich, warm parent-child bonds and happy early experiences, still dominates child-development theory (and parenting books) today.

In the years since Suomi took over Harlow’s Wisconsin lab as a 28-year-old wunderkind, he has both broadened and sharpened the inquiry Harlow started. New tools now let Suomi examine not just his monkeys’ temperaments but also the physiological and genetic underpinnings of their behavior. His lab’s naturalistic environment allows him to focus not just on mother-child interactions but also on the family and social environments that shape and respond to the monkeys’ behavior. “Life in a rhesus-monkey colony is very, very complicated,” Suomi says. The monkeys must learn to navigate a social system that is highly nuanced and hierarchical. “Those who can manage this, do well,” Suomi told me. “Those who don’t, don’t.”

Rhesus monkeys typically mature at about four or five years and live to about 20 in the wild. Their development parallels our own at a fairly neat 1-to-4 ratio: a 1-year-old monkey is much like a 4-year-old human being, a 4-year-old monkey is like a 16-year-old human being, and so on. A mother typically gives birth annually, starting at around age 4. Though the monkeys copulate all year, the females’ fertility seasons are only a couple of months long. Since they tend to occur together, a troop usually produces crops of babies that have same-age peers.

For the first month, the mother keeps the baby attached to her or within arm’s reach. At about two weeks, the baby starts to explore, at first within only a few feet of its mother. These forays grow in frequency, duration, and distance over the next six to seven months, but rarely do the babies pass out of the mother’s sight line or earshot. If the young monkey gets frightened, it scampers back to the mother. Often she’ll see trouble coming and pull the infant close.

When the monkey is about eight months old—a rhesus preschooler—its mother’s mating time arrives. Anticipating another child, the mother allows the youngster to spend more and more time with its cousins, with older siblings in the maternal line, and with occasional visitors from other families or troops. The youngster’s family group, friends, and allies still provide protection when necessary.

A maturing female will stay with this group all her life. A male, however, will leave—often under pressure from the females as he gets rowdier and rougher—when he’s 4 or 5, or roughly the equivalent of a 16-to-20-year-old person. At first he’ll join an all-male gang that lives more or less separately. After a few months to a year, he’ll leave the gang and try to charm, push, or sidle his way into a new family or troop. If he succeeds, he becomes one of several adult males to serve as mate, companion, and muscle for the several females. But only about half the males make it that far. Their transition period exposes them to attacks from other young males, attacks from rival gangs, attacks from new troop members if they play their cards wrong, and predation during any time they lack a gang’s or troop’s protection. Many die in the transition.

Very early in his work, Suomi identified two types of monkeys that had trouble managing these relations. One type, which Suomi calls a “depressed” or “neurotic” monkey, accounted for about 20 percent of each generation. These monkeys are slow to leave their mothers’ sides when young. As adults they remain tentative, withdrawn, and anxious. They form fewer bonds and alliances than other monkeys do.

The other type, generally male, is what Suomi calls a “bully”: an unusually and indiscriminately aggressive monkey. These monkeys accounted for 5 to 10 percent of each generation. “Rhesus monkeys are fairly aggressive in general, even when young,” Suomi says, “and their play involves a lot of rough-and-tumble. But usually no one gets hurt—except with these guys. They do stupid things most other monkeys know not to. They repeatedly confront dominant monkeys. They get between moms and their kids. They don’t know how to calibrate their aggression, and they don’t know how to read signs they should back off. Their conflicts tend to always escalate.” These bullies also score poorly in tests of monkey self-control. For instance, in a “cocktail hour” test that Suomi sometimes uses, monkeys get unrestricted access to a neutral-tasting alcoholic drink for an hour. Most monkeys have three or four drinks and then stop. The bullies, Suomi says, “drink until they drop.”

The neurotics and the bullies meet quite different fates. The neurotics mature late but do okay. The females become jumpy mothers, but how their children turn out depends on the environment in which the mothers raise them. If it’s secure, they become more or less normal; if it’s insecure, they become jumpy too. The males, meanwhile, stay within their mothers’ family circles an unusually long time—up to eight years. They’re allowed to do so because they don’t make trouble. And their longer stay lets them acquire enough social savvy and diplomatic deference so that when they leave, they usually work their way into new troops more successfully than do males who break away younger. They don’t get to mate as prolifically as more confident, more assertive males do; they seldom rise high in their new troops; and their low status can put them at risk in conflicts. But they’re less likely to die trying to get in the door. They usually survive and pass on their genes.

The bullies fare much worse. Even as babies and youths, they seldom make friends. And by the time they’re 2 or 3, their extreme aggression leads the troop’s females to simply run them out, by group force if necessary. Then the male gangs reject them, as do other troops. Isolated, most of them die before reaching adulthood. Few mate.

Suomi saw early on that each of these monkey types tended to come from a particular type of mother. Bullies came from harsh, censorious mothers who restrained their children from socializing. Anxious monkeys came from anxious, withdrawn, distracted mothers. The heritages were pretty clear-cut. But how much of these different personality types passed through genes, and how much derived from the manner in which the monkeys were raised?

To find out, Suomi split the variables. He took nervous infants of nervous mothers—babies who in standardized newborn testing were already jumpy themselves—and gave them to especially nurturing “supermoms.” These babies turned out very close to normal. Meanwhile, Dario Maestripieri of the University of Chicago took secure, high-scoring infants from secure, nurturing mothers and had them raised by abusive mothers. This setting produced nervous monkeys.

The lesson seemed clear. Genes played a role—but environment played an equally important one.

When tools for the study of genes first became available, in the late 1990s, Suomi was quick to use them to more directly examine the balance between genes and environment in shaping his monkeys’ development. He almost immediately struck gold, with a project he started in 1997 with Klaus-Peter Lesch, a psychiatrist from the University of Würzburg. The year before, Lesch had published data revealing, for the first time, that the human serotonin-transporter gene had three variants (the previously mentioned short/short, short/long, and long/long alleles) and that the two shorter versions magnified risk for depression, anxiety, and other problems. Asked to genotype Suomi’s monkeys, Lesch did so. He found that they had the same three variants, though the short/short form was rare.

Suomi, Lesch, and NIH colleague J. Dee Higley set about doing a type of study now recognized as a classic “gene-by-environment” study. First they took cerebral spinal fluid from 132 juvenile rhesus monkeys and analyzed it for a serotonin metabolite, called 5-HIAA, that’s considered a reliable indicator of how much serotonin the nervous system is processing. Lesch’s studies had already shown that depressed people with the short/long serotonin-transporter allele had lower 5-HIAA levels, reflecting less-efficient serotonin processing. He and Suomi wanted to see if the finding would hold true in monkeys. If it did, it would provide more evidence for the genetic dynamic shown in Lesch’s studies. And finding such a dynamic in rhesus monkeys would confirm their value as genetic and behavioral models for studying human behavior.

After Suomi, Lesch, and Higley had grouped the monkeys’ 5-HIAA levels according to their serotonin genotype (short/long or long/long, but not short/short, which was too rare to be of use), they also sorted the results by whether the monkeys had been raised by their mothers or as orphans with only same-aged peers. When their colleague Allison Bennett charted the results on a bar graph showing 5-HIAA levels, all of the mother-reared monkeys, no matter which allele they had, showed serotonin processing in the normal range. The metabolite levels of the peer-raised monkeys, however, diverged sharply by genotype: the short/long monkeys in that group processed serotonin highly inefficiently (a risk factor for depression and anxiety), whereas the long/long monkeys processed it robustly. When Suomi saw the results, he realized that he finally had proof of a behaviorally relevant gene-by-environment interaction in his monkeys. “I took one look at that graph,” he told me, “and said, ‘Let’s go pop some champagne.’”

Suomi and Lesch published their results in 2002 in Molecular Psychiatry, a relatively new journal about behavioral genetics. The paper formed part of a surge of gene-by-environment studies of mood and behavioral disorders. That same year, two psychologists at King’s College, London, Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt, published the first of two large longitudinal studies (both drawing on life histories of hundreds of New Zealanders) that would prove particularly influential. The first, published in Science, showed that the short allele of another major neurotransmitter-processing gene (known as the MAOA gene) sharply increased the chance of antisocial behavior in human adults who’d been abused as children. The second, in 2003 and also in Science, showed that people with short/short or short/long serotonin-transporter alleles, if exposed to stress, faced a higher-than-normal risk of depression.

These and dozens of similar studies were critical to establishing the vulnerability hypothesis over the last few years. Yet many of these studies also contained data that supported the orchid hypothesis—but went unnoticed or unremarked at the time. (Jay Belsky, the child-development psychologist, has recently documented more than two dozen such studies.) Both of Caspi and Moffitt’s seminal papers in Science, for example, contain raw data and graphs showing that for people who did not face severe or repeated stress, the risk alleles in question heightened resistance to aggression or depression. And the data in Suomi and Lesch’s 2002 Molecular Psychiatry paper, in which peer-reared monkeys with the risky serotonin-transporter allele appeared to process serotonin inefficiently, also showed that mother-reared infants with that same allele processed serotonin 10 percent more efficiently than even mother-raised infants who had the supposedly protective allele.

It’s fascinating to examine these studies with the orchid hypothesis in mind. Focus on just the bad-environment results, and you see only vulnerability. Focus on the good-environment results, and you see that the risk alleles usually produce better results than the protective ones. Securely raised 7-year-old boys with the DRD4 risk allele for ADHD, for instance, show fewer symptoms than their securely raised protective-allele peers. Non-abused teenagers with that same risk allele show lower rates of conduct disorder. Non-abused teens with the risky serotonin-transporter allele suffer less depression than do non-abused teens with the protective allele. Other examples abound—even though, as Jay Belsky points out, the studies were designed and analyzed primarily to spot negative vulnerabilities. Belsky suspects that as researchers start to design studies that test for gene sensitivity rather than just risk amplification, and as they increasingly train their sights on positive environments and traits, the evidence for the orchid hypothesis will only grow.

Suomi gathered plenty of that evidence himself in the years after his 2002 study. He found, for example, that monkeys who carried the supposedly risky serotonin-transporter allele, and who had nurturing mothers and secure social positions, did better at many key tasks—creating playmates as youths, making and drawing on alliances later on, and sensing and responding to conflicts and other dangerous situations—than similarly blessed monkeys who held the supposedly protective allele. They also rose higher in their respective dominance hierarchies. They were more successful.

Suomi made another remarkable discovery. He and others assayed the serotonin-transporter genes of seven of the 22 species of macaque, the primate genus to which the rhesus monkey belongs. None of these species had the serotonin-transporter polymorphism that Suomi was beginning to see as a key to rhesus monkeys’ flexibility. Studies of other key behavioral genes in primates produced similar results; according to Suomi, assays of the SERT gene in other primates studied to date, including chimps, baboons, and gorillas, turned up “nothing, nothing, nothing.” The science is young, and not all the data is in. But so far, among all primates, only rhesus monkeys and human beings seem to have multiple polymorphisms in genes heavily associated with behavior. “It’s just us and the rhesus,” Suomi says.

This discovery got Suomi thinking about another distinction we share with rhesus monkeys. Most primates can thrive only in their specific environments. Move them and they perish. But two kinds, often called “weed” species, are able to live almost anywhere and to readily adapt to new, changing, or disturbed environments: human beings and rhesus monkeys. The key to our success may be our weediness. And the key to our weediness may be the many ways in which our behavioral genes can vary.

One morning this past May, Elizabeth Mallott, a researcher working at Suomi’s lab, arrived to start her day at the main rhesus enclosure and found a half-dozen monkeys in her parking spot. They were huddling close together, bedraggled and nervous. As Mallott got out of her car and moved closer, she saw that some had bite wounds and scratches. Most monkeys who jump the enclosure’s double electrified fences (it happens now and then) soon want to get back in. These monkeys did not. Neither did several others that Mallott found between the two fences.

After caging the escapees in an adjacent building, Mallott, now joined by Matthew Novak, another researcher who knew the colony well, entered through the double gates. The colony, numbering about 100-odd monkeys, had been together for about 30 years. Changes in its hierarchy usually came slowly and subtly. But when Novak and Mallott started looking around, they realized that something big had happened. “Animals were in places they weren’t supposed to be,” Novak would later tell me. “Animals who don’t hang out together were sitting together. Social rules were suspended.”

It soon became apparent that the family group called Family 3, which for decades had ranked second to a group called Family 1, had staged a coup. Family 3 had grown larger than Family 1 several years before. But Family 1, headed by a savvy matriarch named Cocobean, had retained incumbency through authority, diplomacy, and momentum. A week or so before the coup, however, one of Cocobean’s daughters, Pearl, had been moved from the enclosure to the veterinary facility because her kidneys seemed to be failing. Family 1’s most formidable male, meanwhile, had grown old and arthritic. Pearl was especially close to Cocobean and, as the only daughter without children of her own, was particularly likely to defend her. Her absence, along with the male’s infirmity, created a vulnerable moment for Family 1.

“This may have been in the works for a couple weeks,” Novak says. “But as far as we can reconstruct, the actual event, the night before we found the monkeys in the parking lot, started when a young female named Fiona”—a 3-year-old Family 1 member, a borderline bully known to have initiated many a scuffle—“started something with someone in Family 3. It escalated. Family 3 saw its chance. And they just started to take Family 1 out. You could see it from who was wounded and who wasn’t, and who was sitting in preferred places, and who was run out of the colony, and who was suddenly extremely deferential. One other female in Family 1, Quark, was killed; another, Josie, was hurt so badly we had to put her down. They’d gone after all of Cocobean’s other daughters, too. Somebody had bitten the big male in Family 1 so badly he couldn’t use his arm. Fiona got roughed up pretty bad. It was a very systematic scuffle. They went right at the head of the group and worked their way down.”

Soon after Novak described all this to me, he and I walked around the enclosure. Though it was the middle of a broiling July day, downtime for the monkeys, you could see hints of the new order. Family 3 calmly occupied what seemed to be the new center of power, a corncrib near the pond (one of several corncribs set out for shelter). They groomed one another, napped, and evenly stared at us as we stared at them. A more nervous bunch clustered in another crib down the hill. When we got within 30 feet, the largest monkey in the group shot up onto the cage bars. From 10 feet up it screamed at me, rattled the bars, and showed some nasty teeth.

From there I went to Suomi’s office and asked him what he thought had happened. Suomi has thought a lot about this coup, and it’s easy to see why. All of the important threads he’d been weaving together in his research were on display in this revolt: the importance of early experience; the interplay of environment, parenting, and genetic inheritance; the maddening primacy of family and social bonds; the repercussions of different traits in different circumstances. And now, in light of the orchid hypothesis, he was beginning to see that the threads might be woven together in a new way.

“About 15 years ago,” he said, “Carol Berman, a monkey researcher at SUNY-Buffalo, spent a lot of time watching a large rhesus-monkey colony that lives on an island in Puerto Rico. She wanted to see what happened as the groups changed size over time. They’d start at about 30 or 40 individuals—a group that had split off from another—and then expand. At a certain point, often somewhere near a hundred, the group would reach its limit, and it, too, would split into smaller troops.”

Such size limits, which vary among social species, are sometimes called “Dunbar numbers,” after Robin Dunbar, a British evolutionary psychologist who argues that a species’ group limit reflects how many social relationships its individuals can manage cognitively. Berman’s observations suggested that the Dunbar number of a species reflects not just its cognitive powers but its temperamental and behavioral range as well.

Berman saw that when rhesus troops are small, the mothers can let their young play freely, because strangers rarely approach. But as a troop grows and the number of family groups rises, strangers or semi-strangers more often come near. The adult females become more vigilant, defensive, and aggressive. The kids and adult males follow suit. More and more monkeys receive upbringings that draw out the less sociable sides of their behavioral potentials; fights grow more common; rivalries grow more tense. Things finally get so bad that the troop must split. “And that’s what happened here,” Suomi said. “It’s a very extensive feedback system. What happens at the dyadic level, between mother and infant, ultimately affects the very nature and survival of the larger social group.”

Studies by Suomi and others show that such differences in early experience can wildly alter how genes express themselves—that is, whether, when, and how strongly the genes switch themselves on and off. Suomi suspects that early experiences may affect later patterns of gene expression and behavior as well, including how flexible and reactive an animal is, by helping to set the sensitivity level of key alleles. A tense upbringing, he says, will produce watchful caution or vigilant aggression in any monkey (the parents’ way of preparing the offspring for tough times)—but this effect may be especially pronounced in monkeys with particularly plastic behavioral alleles.

That’s what Suomi thinks may have happened in the run-up to what he calls the Palace Revolt. Fiona’s injudicious aggression proved disastrous for her and Family 1. But Family 3, a group that had been diplomatically deferring to Family 1 for years, dramatically improved its fortunes by mounting an uncharacteristically aggressive and sustained counterattack. Suomi speculates that in the tenser, more crowded conditions of the large colony, gene-environment interactions had made some of the monkeys in Family 3, particularly those with more-reactive “orchid” alleles, not more aggressive but more potentially aggressive. During the period when they could not afford to challenge the hierarchy—the period before Pearl’s departure—aggressiveness would have led them into unwinnable, possibly fatal conflicts. But in Pearl’s absence the odds changed—and the Family 3 monkeys exploited a rare and decisive opportunity by unleashing their aggressive potential.

The coup also showed something more straightforward: that a genetic trait tremendously maladaptive in one situation can prove highly adaptive in another. We needn’t look far to see this in human behavior. To survive and evolve, every society needs some individuals who are more aggressive, restless, stubborn, submissive, social, hyperactive, flexible, solitary, anxious, introspective, vigilant—and even more morose, irritable, or outright violent—than the norm.

All of this helps answer that fundamental evolutionary question about how risk alleles have endured. We have survived not despite these alleles but becauseofthem. And those alleles haven’t merely managed to slip through the selection process; they have been actively selected for. Recent analyses, in fact, suggest that many orchid-gene alleles, including those mentioned in this story, have emerged in humans only during the past 50,000 or so years. Each of these alleles, it seems, arose via chance mutation in one person or a few people, and began rapidly proliferating. Rhesus monkeys and human beings split from their common lineage about 25 million to 30 million years ago, so these polymorphisms must have mutated and spread on separate tracks in the two species. Yet in both species, these new alleles proved so valuable that they spread far and wide.

As the evolutionary anthropologists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending have pointed out, in The 10,000 Year Explosion (2009), the past 50,000 years—the period in which orchid genes seem to have emerged and expanded—is also the period during which Homo sapiens started to get seriously human, and during which sparse populations in Africa expanded to cover the globe in great numbers. Though Cochran and Harpending don’t explicitly incorporate the orchid-gene hypothesis into their argument, they make the case that human beings have come to dominate the planet because certain key mutations allowed human evolution to accelerate—a process that the orchid-dandelion hypothesis certainly helps explain.

How this happened must have varied from context to context. If you have too many aggressive people, for example, conflict runs rampant, and aggression is selected out, because it becomes costly; when aggression decreases enough to be less risky, it becomes more valuable, and its prevalence again rises. Changes in environment or culture would likewise affect an allele’s prevalence. The orchid variant of the DRD4 gene, for instance, increases risk of ADHD (a syndrome best characterized, Cochran and Harpending write, “by actions that annoy elementary-school teachers”). Yet attentional restlessness can serve people well in environments that reward sensitivity to new stimuli. The current growth of multitasking, for instance, may help select for just such attentional agility. Complain all you want that it’s an increasingly ADHD world these days—but to judge by the spread of DRD4’s risk allele, it’s been an increasingly ADHD world for about 50,000 years.

Even if you accept that orchid genes may grant us flexibility crucial to our success, it can be startling to ponder their dynamics up close and personal. After I FedExed away my vial of saliva for genotyping, I told myself more or less to forget it. To my surprise, I managed to. The e-mail that eventually arrived with the results, promised for a Monday, turned up three days early, during a Friday evening when I was simultaneously half-watching Monsters, Inc. with my kids and distractedly scanning the messages on my iPhone. At first I didn’t really register what I was reading.

“David,” the message began. “I ran the assay on the DNA from your saliva sample today. The assay ran well and your genotype is S/S. Good thing neither of us think of these things as deterministic or even having a fixed valence. Let me know if you want to talk about your result or genetic issues.”

When I finished reading the message, the house seemed quieter, though it was not. As I looked out the window at our pear tree, its blossoms fallen but its fruit only nubbins, I felt a chill spread through my torso.

I hadn’t thought it would matter.

Yet as I sat absorbing this information, the chill came to seem less the coldness of fear than a shiver of abrupt and inverted self-knowledge—of suddenly knowing with certainty something I had long suspected, and finding that it meant something other than I thought it would. The orchid hypothesis suggested that this particular allele, the rarest and riskiest of the serotonin-transporter gene’s three variants, made me not just more vulnerable but more plastic. And that new way of thinking changed things. I felt no sense that I carried a handicap that would render my efforts futile should I again face deep trouble. In fact, I felt a heightened sense of agency. Anything and everything I did to improve my own environment and experience—every intervention I ran on myself, as it were—would have a magnified effect. In that light, my short/short allele now seems to me less like a trapdoor through which I might fall than like a springboard—slippery and somewhat fragile, perhaps, but a springboard all the same.

I don’t plan to have any of my other key behavioral genes assayed. I don’t plan on having my kids’ genes done, either. What would it tell me? That I shape them in every encounter? I know this. Yet I do like thinking that when I take my son trolling for salmon, or listen to his younger brother’s labyrinthine elaborations of his dreams, or sing “Sweet Betsy of Pike” with my 5-year-old daughter as we drive home from the lake, I’m flipping little switches that can help light them up. I don’t know what all those switches are—and I don’t need to. It’s enough to know that together we can turn them on.

Thanks this week go to Mama Marlaine and the Parenting 2.0 group, fellow Board members of the Ackerman Foundation for their courage and compassion, Dr. Pradeep G who never fails to inspire with his depth of knowledge and care for kids, and orchid parents and kids everywhere!

Please pay it forward!
Love,
Neville

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“If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow”
–John Dewey 1859-1952

This week:

Happy International Women’s Day 2018!
In the year of #MeToo and Time’s Up, March 8 keeps the spotlight on women calling for progress.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/mar/08/international-womens-day-2018-live-protests-press-for-progress-live

Now, more than ever, there’s a strong call-to-action to press forward and progress gender parity.
#PressforProgress is motivating and uniting friends, colleagues and whole communities to think, act and be gender inclusive.
Learn more at https://www.internationalwomensday.com/ and celebrate the women in your life!

Jimmy K’s Opening Monologue at the ’18 Oscar’s:
Whether you prefer that your main dish and your veggies never touch i.e. Entertainment and Politics should not be mingled, or see all venues as an opportunity to serve as a voice and viewpoint for matters of equity and social justice, all the entertainment awards this year have been unapologetic about amplifying the voice of women, immigrants, under-represented minorities, LGBTQ and other marginalized groups, and this past week’s 90^th Oscars Celebration was no exception.
Enjoy Jimmy Kimmel’s Opening Monologue at the ’18 Oscars. I thought it was poignant and fantastic but you be the judge if it is award-winning!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bxw_1Un9S4

Speak to Inspire:

Here is an event where I was privileged to speak on Purpose-Driven Leadership to the next generation of game changers…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eh4QmIYOz9o

Are You A Maniac?
It is so easy to blame others for not keeping you in the loop.
It is another thing to take ownership for your role and when you need information going out and getting it.
Here is the Maniac Pledge from my friends at WD-40…

If you are local…
In the spirit of think Global, act Local, this program can do what entrenched leaders on the national stage cannot…

Hands of Peace Summer Program:
As many of you know, I live in a small community in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, and my neighbor Diana Kutlow recently dropped by with a flyer announcing the opportunity for North County families to host an Israeli or Palestinian teenager while they are here for three weeks of dialogue as part of the Hands of Peace Summer Program. In speaking with Diana, I learned that the Summer Program is only the beginning of years of ongoing dialogue, mentoring and connection with “the other,” and was compelled to amplify  how much we can learn from young people about empathy, understanding and civil discourse.

In spite of the divides between their communities — cultural, physical, political, religious, ethnic and socioeconomic — these courageous young people are willing to meet  and connect with someone they may have regarded as “the enemy.” They are willing to face their own fears and biases in deep and often painful conversations. And they are willing to overcome resistance from their own families and societies in order to search for nonviolent paths to peace.

Hands of Peace is a non-profit organization that was created in 2002 by three women—one Christian, one Jewish, and one Muslim—who shared the conviction that peace could be nurtured, one person at a time.  The Summer Program takes place in Chicago and San Diego simultaneously during the month of July, serving approximately 50 teens at each location. The Chicago program has been taking place since 2003 and the San Diego program has been taking place since 2014.

Hands of Peace has more than 500 alumni living and working across the United States and throughout Israel and the Palestinian West Bank. Many alumni serve in government, non-government organizations, non-profits and as community leaders throughout the world.

If you would like to learn more about Hands of Peace or get involved as a host family or volunteer, or have your company or group provide a lunch and break bread with the Hands of Peace Israeli, Palestinian and American participants, visit http://www.handsofpeace.org/ and sign up for their newsletter. Or learn first-hand what Hands of Peace is all about at their upcoming San Diego Benefit (link is https://www.handsofpeace.org/2018-san%20diego-benefit/) on Sunday, April 29 at the Crossings in Carlsbad.

Tough conversations? Yes. Easy answers? No. Empowering youth as leaders for change? Find out more and see for yourself.

Thanks this week go to creatives willing to use their art form to transform societal norms, Stan S and the team at WD-40 making their own quiet dent in the universe right here in San Diego, and Hands of Peace, willing to take on long-term seemingly intractable problems with the greatest love of all- a belief in ourselves and our children!

Please be purposeful and pay it forward
Love,
Neville

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NevilleB108
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“The meaning of your life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”- Pablo Picasso

 

 

This week:

5 Hacks to Activate Purpose in the Workplace:

According to a Harvard Business Review survey entitled “The Business Case for Purpose”, companies that “harness the power of purpose to drive performance and profitability enjoy a distinct competitive advantage.” While there are plenty of articles that show the statistics on how embedding purpose leads to better business, there are not as many that explain the how. Here are some easy “hacks” on how you can integrate purpose to start heading in the right direction. http://bit.ly/2FBu1AL

In Celebration of the Life of Will Marré: My Irrational Positive Opinion (IPO) of You Will Never Wane!

In the past week, the world lost an inspired leader, visionary and friend. Will was a dear friend and will be missed terribly. Here is more on his life, work and celebration on Saturday March 3^rd in La Jolla…

Dear Friends,

It is with broken hearts that we announce the death of our beloved husband, father and brother, Will Marré (Founder and Women’s Activist, A Million SMART Women.) He passed away with devastating suddenness from cardiac arrest while engaged in one of the great passions of his life, surfing. Although absolutely robust in body, mind, and spirit, he suffered from a minor congenital heart defect to which he seemed to have finally succumbed. His expansive love, voice, energy, mind, affirmative presence, optimism, joy has left a hole in our hearts and lives that cannot be filled, even as the pain will eventually ease into gratefulness for having known him, been known by him, loved him, and been loved by him. We remember him with full hearts and savor the time we had together. –The family of Will Marré

Learn more about Will’s rich contribution to leadership here:
http://willmarre.com/about/my-bio/

“Wednesdays with Will” was a Blog I Enjoyed and Referenced Often:
http://willmarre.com/blog-wednesdays-with-will/

Here is a recent post:

4 Proven Ways to Improve Your LOVE Relationships in a Work-Centered Life

Let’s face it our world is going crazy. Over the past two years with almost every male executive I coach and every audience I speak to I hear that the aspiration for work-life balance is dead. It was killed by technology.

What’s weird is that this fact is often presented with some chest beating… as if to say… work-life balance was for wimps all along… people with a serious work ethic never worry about work-life balance.

Really?

I guess so. Sheryl Sandberg the guru of “Leaning In” to work writes, “The days of unplugging for a weekend or vacation are long gone.” Way to go Sheryl… sounds awesome.

Yet, sadly I find she is not kidding. 15 years ago, even the CEO’s I coached had most weekends and evenings free of direct work, such as conference calls and decision-making meetings. That’s certainly not true today. Today leaders are lucky to get a half of a Saturday or a half of a Sunday free of stressful meetings or real-time e-mails where decisions are being made.

And free evenings… yeah that’s a relic from an earlier age. Today most people go home and spend at least two more hours on the computer working. This new work routine is not confined to leaders. The combination of technology and massive projects is increasingly engaging managers and individual contributors in a trail of work that slithers through our lives like a hungry python night and day.

Is this it? Is this the best we can do? Is this the crowning achievement of our economy… that we all live work-centered lives?

If so, what is the cost?

Well, according to marriage experts at the University of Washington and the University of Virginia what we are sacrificing is our love lives.

I don’t mean just less sex, although research confirms that super busy, stressed out couples enjoy sex together less frequently and do so much more quickly. For many couples, sex is something they only do on vacation. Yet working Americans take less vacation every year. Hmmm.

But again, I’m not just talking about the physical side of love. The biggest toll a work-centered life is having on us is increased feelings of social isolation and a lack of intrinsic connection with our loved ones.

When we get too busy, love devolves into a concept rather than a feeling.

In this state of mind, we recognize that we love our romantic partners and children but we just don’t feel that love. We could write down on a yellow pad all the reasons we love our loved ones but we just don’t feel it. All words but no music.

Having the emotions of love evaporate from our lives is a ridiculous price to pay for work. A recent survey of 1,500 people over the age of 78 asking them what their biggest life regret was overwhelmingly confirmed it was one thing… staying too long in a job that was unfulfilling.

We also know that the happiest and healthiest people on earth are actively in love. In the hundreds of studies done on the causes of human happiness we know there is no greater mood elevator than being “crazy in love.”

We all know how goony people get when people fall in love. The thrill of emotional intimacy with someone you find fascinating, attractive and admirable sets off a brain circus of dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin that gives you a feeling of optimism, well-being and invincible confidence that is simply the best brain buzz ever.

The problem is this love fog does not last without continuous investment in the relationship similar to the investment you were willing to make when you were falling in love. (Just ask Taylor Swift how short-lived love buzz is.)

So, just what are the investments you can make to increase the love in your life?

First, you have to develop an IPO!

Let me tell you about of about two of my favorite work colleagues Michael and Cheryl, who own a very successful media company. I have known them for nearly two decades. They’re married with two daughters and have always been crazy in love. What I mean by that is that they have an Irrational Positive Opinion (IPO) about each other. When I talk to them separately they’re constantly bombarding me with how great the other one is. They refer to each other as brilliant and amazing. They brag about each other’s accomplishments. Hell, it’s like being married to a cheerleader.

So, are they really that great? Well no. They’re like all the rest of us… full of good stuff and not such good stuff. But they’re living proof of the research by John Gottman at the University of Washington that confirms that the happiest couples are those who hold and an irrational positive opinion of each other. It turns out that when it comes to personal self-worth and interpersonal trust we don’t much value realists who point out our flaws and want us to change. That’s something a coach can do. What we want from our romantic partner is for them to be “crazy” about us… literally irrational about our wonderfulness.

If you want to be happy in life and happy in your primary love relationship, launch an IPO. And keep investing so the stock of your relationship continuously rises.

Here are four critical investments that research confirms will keep the flames and the feelings of love burning. These four love habits will produce big payoffs in any relationship, not just romantic ones.

1. Celebrate each other’s successes.

Research tells us that making a big deal of small successes creates more trust and intimacy than comforting people when they’re struggling. The reason we think this is true is that amplifying good feelings has a bigger positive payoff than trying to reduce bad feelings.

Here is a silly but true example. I am an old dude surfer and like all surfers I want to be admired for my surfing. I am quite sure that I am average for my age and experience, yet sometimes I get a good ride and some other surfer will give a hoot, or say “nice wave.” When I get home, I never fail to tell Debbie of my small success. She insists that I then tell her about the details of the wave, gives me a hug and a kiss and makes me feel like I’m the greatest surfer on earth. She clearly holds an irrational positive opinion about my surfing that jacks me up with enough dopamine and oxytocin that it makes me want to actually move the furniture around so she can see how the room would look with a new arrangement.

The key to celebrating each other’s success is to ask for the details of what your partner actually did. That’s what creates positive intimacy.

2. Help when it’s inconvenient.

Talk is cheap, even love talk. A willingness to drop whatever you’re doing to help your loved one communicates how important their agenda is to you. You don’t have to do this one hundred percent of the time because sometimes what you were doing may greatly suffer from an interruption. However, if you’re willing to instantly respond most of the time your love stock will certainly rise. (It’s also important to help with routine tasks to avoid causing simmering resentments. Only 20% of men are willing to do laundry and vacuuming regularly. So if you want to be in the top 20% of male partners you know what to do!)

3. Plan positive experiences.

Dating is all about planning positive experiences. We make careful choices about where we eat or what movies we see to make sure that our dating partner will be happy. We take great care in what we wear, how we smell and what we say. However, when our relationship ripens we often approach going out together with a question… “So, what do you want to do?” This means you did very little thinking about your time together… not good.

Planned positive experiences are critical to fanning the flames of love.

That’s because we associate the positive feelings we get from the experience, like going to a sensational concert, or visiting a breath-taking National Park or exotic tropical island with the person we are with. New experiences also make us more interesting to each other. These experiences also create shared memories, which are strong positive bonds that sustain loving feelings when things get a little stale, dull or frustrating.

4. Love with your full presence every day.

We know that the happiest couples spend at least 30 to 60 minutes a day in focused conversation with each other. I know…. that may seem like an impossibly high bar. But consider its possibilities. The greatest longing of the human heart is to be fully accepted by another. The most powerful way that we communicate this is to listen to a loved one without an agenda for them. This is difficult. When I am talking to Debbie I often have to remind myself that I just want her to be happy in the way she experiences happiness. It’s unnatural to listen without judgment. We justify having agendas for the people we love because we think we know how to help them… and sometimes we do. But remember our loved ones long for someone more than a coach. We all want to feel loved intrinsically. We want others to see our good and positive motives not just our less-than-perfect behavior.

The only way we can access the feelings of unconditional positive regard is to drop our agenda and just be present. Just listen with loving intention. All of this will be impossible unless you’re willing to unplug from both your job and the torrent of mostly irrelevant media that bombards us daily. (New research validates that peoples’ optimism and happiness rise when they quit Facebook.) The primary reason seems to be that Facebook incites envy and social comparison causing an epidemic of inner emotional drama among Facebook users. If you think this doesn’t apply to you try a week-long Facebook fast and ask yourself if you’re less stressed, and a little more happy.)

The bottom line.

Love and intimacy take a daily investment of personal time.

Nothing less will work.

A celebration of Life.

Please join us for the celebration of Will Marré’s inspirational life journey. We will celebrate in the building where he launched his greatest work to make the world a better, more inclusive place. In honor of his energy, we ask all to wear vibrant colors, casual clothes, and comfortable shoes as we will take a group walk down to the beach for a joyful oceanfront offering. It is not in sorrow, but in joy that we convene to reflect on the life and work of this brilliant, creative, loving man.
*Address correction: 11255 North Torrey Pines Rd, La Jolla, CA 92037

If You Are Local…

Join us March 7^th from 4-6pm at Alliant International University’s “Speak to Inspire”:

Thanks this week go to Jonathan H, the one and only Will M, Leila N, and Global Leaders and Lovers of Life Everywhere!

Please pay it forward.
Love,
Neville

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NevilleB108
Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nbillimoria

“The meaning of your life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”
– Pablo Picasso

This week:

What Can the Wisdom Traditions Teach Us About Winning and Losing?

If we look at what has become an all too common cultural norm- be it in politics, business or personal life- it seems that winning at all costs has replaced the more humane and wise notion of winning- but doing so following the rules of the game and a moral imperative.

When we look the other way, ignoring fouls and other ethical violations, are we tacitly endorsing these behaviors at best, or enabling at worst, behaviors that are antithetical to our own betterment and survival not just as individuals but as a species? In the wisdom traditions, using traditional martial arts as a proxy, we are trained to strive for personal excellence, and the contest- whether in the ring of competition on in the ring of life- provides a “proving ground” to test ourselves not just versus another player or contestant but against our own best potential.

Here there are 4 levels of winning and losing, not just the binary winning and losing we have become all too familiar with today.

The highest level of achievement is an honorable win. Your win is supported by right conduct and if you know you did not win cleanly you self-report the foul or incident rather than hide it under the rug or play to the chorus of “if it wasn’t seen, or can’t be proved, then it didn’t happen”.

One level down from this is an honorable loss. If you lost but did your best and were beaten fair and square, you honor both your opponent and yourself, and learn from the experience by being a gracious “loser”. Here winning still occurs through character development, investing in loss, and remaining focused on long term growth not just short term outcomes. Honorable losses build resiliency and forge a character of perseverance and grit.

Next comes a dishonorable win and obviously in last place comes the dishonorable loss where in spite of trying every dirty trick in the book you still get your clock cleaned!

Whether it is in Olympic competition against the best in the world, or a personal competition to better oneself, it would be useful to foster a climate/culture that underscores the importance of honor and humility in the “success calculus” or we find the win meaningless, transitory and ultimately not supportive of our individual or collective growth.

Daily Practice:
This can also play out in our day to day choices; doing the right thing for the right reason, the wrong thing for the right reason, the right thing for the wrong reason and the wrong thing for the wrong reason. I will leave it to you to discern the hierarchy and Faustian bargain this path takes us to when left to its ultimate conclusion.

Alpha Improperly Considered:
Much is made of Alpha animals – particularly humans- dominating their tribe and being willing to prevail over all contenders both inside and out.

Not as much is understood or appreciated about Alpha leaders, even in primates, modeling empathy and seeing their primary role as caring for and supporting their group not just terrorizing their peers and den members.
A real Alpha leader has the capacity to win at all costs but subordinates themselves.
I have heard altruism defined as “self-handicapping” for the greater good…
What kind of leader do you want to model, follow or create?
Let’s start now!

Enjoy Leonard Cohen’s Anthem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDTph7mer3I

Thanks to the honorable, the purposeful and the soulful!
Please pay it forward…
Love,
Neville

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‘Ring the bells (ring the bells) that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything) That’s how the light gets in”—Leonard Cohen

In the unlikely event that the world is perfect just the way it is,

Where we actually have exactly what we need because:

The opposite of love is not hate, it is fear

& the opposite of ‘scare-city’ is not abundance, it is enough,

Then with hearts filled with love and an unbridled belief in our own capacity,

the world is perfect just the way it is

and together we have just manifested:

A world without war, violence and greed

Where information is shared and symmetrical

Where all young people are valued for who they are and refuse to conform to counterfeit cultural conditioning

And where San Diego models the very best of Conscious Capitalism

And if this is not our experience of the world, in principle and practice

Let’s model and mentor

the change we want to see and be

To Elevate Humanity!

(Conscious Capitalism San Diego Gathering Shared Aspiration February 2018)

 

This week:
Business 1.0 = Profit First (Friedman Economics where the only thing that matters is drive profit to your shareholders. That is the only reason you exist)
Business 2.0 = Customer First (Take care of the customer and the profit will follow)
Business 3.0 = Employee/Culture First (the customer experience, rarely exceeds the employee experience, so take care of the employee (human and social capital) /culture (the people systems in which they exist, & they will take care of the customer and that will take care of profit)
Business 4.0 Purpose First (Connect with your “Why” for ALL the stakeholders namely; customer/members, employees, community, investors, public and by aligning their purpose to yours you can drive 10 to 14x better returns and is more gratifying and meaningful to boot!)

A Sea Change is Underway, Where Are YOU and Your Organization in this EVOLution?

A Demand For Change Backed Up By $6 Trillion- A Sense of Purpose:
This post is getting a great deal of attention, because of both the content and because of who it’s coming from, the CEO of BlackRock, a key investor which manages nearly $6 trillion in assets.
“Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose. “To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.”
https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/en-us/investor-relations/larry-fink-ceo-letter

The week  after BlackRock CEO Laurence Fink issued a letter to CEOs titled “A Sense of Purpose.” It was heralded by The New York Times DealBook columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin as what “could be a watershed moment on Wall Street, one that raises all sorts of questions about the very nature of capitalism.”

https://real-leaders.com/wall-street-finally-become-conscious/

The Call for Conscious Leadership with Eric K:

This call for Conscious Leadership is exciting and refreshing as Mr. Fink reminds leaders that companies have a duty for Purpose, Social Stewardship, and Responsibility. But we have to admit that companies don’t have duties, people do. And now is the time for people, for leaders, to understand and practice Conscious Leadership; it’s vital for leaders to commit and conduct themselves as Conscious Leaders.

Conscious Leaders commit to a quadruple bottom line:

1. Profit – financial well-being and achievement
2. People – beneficial impact to society and community
3. Planet – positive effect on the environment and Spaceship Earth
4. Purpose – contributing to the greater good for everyone

Conscious Leader’s conduct is shaped by three forces:

1. Wisdom – seeing below the surface and beyond the obvious
2. Courage – walking toward what you’d rather run away from
3. Love – wanting to do well for others

The call for Conscious Leadership has moved from interesting to imperative.

If you’re drawn to answer the call of evolution and be empowered to be a Purposeful Steward, then be on the lookout for articles, videos, and resources to awaken your Conscious Leader capacity.  Here’s to achieving our full potential – as people, organizations, and communities!

If you would like to deepen your Conscious Leadership practices now get a copy of my book here.

In the spirit of leading and learning,

Eric

 

Thanks this week go to Eric K, the Chamber of Purpose San Diego, Conscious Capitalists & Purpose Driven Leaders everywhere who are willing to challenge the status quo to elevate humanity!

Please pay it forward and love what you do!
Love,
Neville

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NevilleB108
Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nbillimoria

“The only truth you will find on the top of mountains is the truth you bring up there” – Robert Pirsig

This week:

Screen Addiction Among Teens: Is there Such A Thing?
“We have, as a society, gone all-in on tech,” “So we don’t want some buzz-killing truth-sayers telling us that the emperor has no clothes and that the devices that we’ve all so fallen in love with can be a problem”
http://kuer.org/post/screen-addiction-among-teens-there-such-thing#stream/0

 Simon Sinek on Millennials in the Workplace: (8MM views)
What is the missing piece in the happiness of millennials? How did we get so ‘good’ at showing people that “life is amazing!, even though we are depressed”?
https://youtu.be/hER0Qp6QJNU

How Smartphones Are Making Kids Unhappy:
For the first time, a generation of children is going through adolescence with smartphones ever-present. Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, has a name for these young people born between 1995 and 2012: “iGen.” She says members of this generation are physically safer than those who came before them. They drink less, they learn to drive later and they’re holding off on having sex. But psychologically, she argues, they are far more vulnerable.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/08/07/542016165/how-smartphones-are-making-kids-unhappy

The Psychological Effects of Signing Off Social Media:
https://the1a.org/audio/#/shows/2017-12-28/the-psychological-effects-of-signing-off-social-media/113120/@00:00

Child Experts Warn Parents To Avoid Facebook’s Messaging App For Kids:
A group letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg argues that younger children — the app is intended for those under 13 — aren’t ready to have social media accounts, navigate the complexities of online relationships or protect their own privacy
http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2018/01/30/parents-avoid-facebook-messaging-app-kids/

How to End Screen Time Without a Struggle:
The trick: build a bridge

Whenever you decide that screen-time should come to an end, take a moment to sit down next to your child and enter his world. Watch TV with him, or sit with him while he plays his game massacring aliens on the screen. This doesn’t have to be long, half a minute is enough. Just share his experience. Then, ask him a question about it.

“What are you watching?” might work for some kids.

Others might need more specific questions. “So what level are you on now?” or “That’s a funny figure there in the background. Who’s he?”

Generally, children love it when their parents take an interest in their world. If they are too absorbed still and don’t engage, don’t give up. Just sit with them a moment longer, then ask another question.

Once the child starts answering your questions or tells you something she has seen or done on screen, it means that she is coming out of the “cut-off” zone and back into the real world. She’s coming out of the state of flow and back into a zone where she is aware of your existence – but slowly. The dopamine doesn’t drop abruptly, because you’ve built a bridge – a bridge between where she is and where you are. You can start to communicate, and this is where the magic happens. 

https://www.parent.com/how-to-end-screen-time-without-a-struggle/

Thanks this week go to Peter D, Marlaine C, Amanda R and other members of Parenting 2.0, committed to prosocial options for our kids!

Pay it forward
Love,
Neville

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NevilleB108
Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nbillimoria

 

“From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of each other – above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.”
– Albert Einstein

This week:

The Most Spectacular Eclipse of 2018:

Once in a blue moon is only once every few years, but once in a super, blue, blood moon is just once every few decades.

Experience this rare alignment of three different lunar phenomena—a total lunar eclipse, a full moon at perigee, and a blue moon…

https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/moon-mars/a15875900/the-most-spectacular-eclipse-of-2018-is-in-less-than-a-week/

Go Red for Women: Come Together on National Wear Red Day February 2nd
Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women, causing 1 in 3 deaths each year. That’s approximately one woman every minute!
The Go Red campaign’s message is that when we all join together, we can touch hearts, save lives and make a real difference in the battle against heart disease and stroke. As our teammates join the fight against the number one health threat to women- heart disease- we’re proud of their efforts, our members’ support, and all of Mission Fed’s purpose-driven community initiatives.

Learn more at: https://www.goredforwomen.org/fight-heart-disease-women-go-red-women-official-site/about-heart-disease-in-women/facts-about-heart-disease/

 

5^th Annual Artie Awards:

ART Know No Fear!
You know about the Grammy’s but have you heard of the Arties? 

Last week, I was privileged to speak at the 5^th Annual Arties Awards where featured artists for the 2018 Mission Fed ArtWalk were announced and we recognized individuals who appreciate the power of art and use it to creatively connect communities.
Riffing on the theme of “Art has no Fear”, I reminded our audience that the opposite of love is not hate but FEAR, and that the opposite of scarcity is not abundance, it is ENOUGH!
Patronage, the support one bestows on another is something we can all do to support art in our community, for there is no great culture without great art.
In 15^th century Italy, there were more wood carvers than butchers, and art flourished because everyone understood its importance and value. Our bicameral brains work better when we connect both head and heart, rational and emotional, science and empathy, and recognize artists everywhere- whatever your canvas- as integral to this process of elevating humanity.
We want to compete in an Innovation economy yet seem to undervalue the role of creativity and the artist. Innovation is both a process and an outcome and we can do more to cultivate creativity in connected communities.
This year’s featured artists strengthened our social fabric with their diverse threads not just in art form but in their rich representation from around the world including; Kazakhstan, Bulgaria, Zimbabwe, Armenia, Mexico and of course the US.
Worrying is negative goal setting
Your Imagination is a preview of coming attractions.
Unbridle the artist in you to imagine a world that you wish to see, where artists of life build the canvas of tolerance, acceptance and love that is our only possible and sustainable future…
Please stand up for ART! 

Speaking of the Grammy’s
9 of the Most Talked-About Moments at the 2018 Grammys:
In the thick of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, on the heels of the Larry Nassar scandal, during ongoing conversations about immigration and race, and in between one inflammatory presidential tweet and the next, there was no WAY the Grammys wasn’t going to be a potpourri of political, emotional moments. Here are the biggest moments you may have missed from Sunday night’s Grammy awards…

https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/29/entertainment/grammys-2018-moments-trnd/index.html

 Thanks this week go to all artists who have no fear and speak truth to power!
Remember, the moon is ALWAYS full, it just looks otherwise because of our point of view…

Pay it forward
Love,
Neville

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NevilleB108
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“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood,
divide the work, and give orders.
Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
–Antoine de Saint- Exupery

Speaking Truth to Power…

 

“Any Goal Worth Achieving is Worth Changing For”

 

This week:

Something Light:

These commercials will put a big smile on your face!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ejf8lk9nYH4

 

The Power of Words:

Words have the power to shape the way we think and feel. In this stunning video, filmmakers Will Hoffman and Daniel Mercadante bandy visual wordplay into a moving exploration of language set to an original score by Keith Kenniff. http://www.radiolab.org/story/91974-bonus-video-words/

 

Something Heavy…

No More No More: Lessons for All of Us from a Human Trafficking Awareness Program:

From Awareness to Inspiration to Action

“It’s time to traffic love, compassion and empathy instead of sentient human beings!”
—Dr. Suresh Subramani, UC San Diego

Speaking Truth to Power:

Redefining free society requires conscious citizens to speak truth to power to address silent killers that run endemic in our society, and that often carry a social stigma that prevents us from airing critical societal issues with openness and transparency.

Sadly, a human being costs less today than at any other time in human history. Human life has become a commodity unto itself.

In your mind is human trafficking a law enforcement issue or is it better reframed as a public health epidemic which we can’t address until we start to talk about it?

An Underground Economy:

Victims of human trafficking globally, as well as, right here in San Diego fund an ‘underground economy’ that is estimated to be valued at $800MM locally and $150B business globally. There are geo-spatial connections between narcotics and trafficking, yet as far as market efficiencies go, humans are easier to transport, and unlike contraband can be resold over and over…

Economic theory reminds us that if there was no demand for a product or service, then there would be no market. In this regard, what can we creatively do to eliminate demand? Target Marketing is difficult. There is no profile for buyers and in most cases they look just like you and me…

In case you are thinking human trafficking is a poverty-related problem, you need to know this scourge is not just relegated to any one segment of our society and can be found in both poverty and privilege alike. Yes you and your family are as likely as any to be affected by this social ill.

The average age a person enters the world of sex traffic is the tender age of 12, the average age of a sex trafficked victim is 16, there average lifespan is 7 years if they don’t get out.

And in San Diego there are over 2,000 sex trafficking victims but only 32 beds to support them. (Here we clearly have a different supply problem)

Did you know, the Super bowl is the #1 human trafficking event in the US with over 10,000 women at risk!

“Your eyes cannot see, what your mind does not know”

We are only as sick as our secrets.

The good news, if there could be such a thing on a subject like this at the worst expression of humanity, includes:

Laws being changed to treat victims of trafficking the same way we treat victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse

The recent passage of AB27 which ensures teachers and educators are themselves educated about issues related to recognizing and preventing issues of trafficking

The growing collaboration between law enforcement agencies, recognizing that it will take a collaborated and concerted effort as they focus on; Prevention, Protection, Prosecution and Partnership to overcome this troubling societal ill.

It’s Not Just Where You Think It Is:

The bad news is that as you read this there are victims of trafficking in hotel rooms, truck stops and most troubling in their own homes. We have become so fixated on “stranger danger” yet 80% of victims are perpetrated upon from INSIDE their trust circle!

There is a pattern of Perpetration changing the role to move the victim through the system. These include but not limited to Profiler, Pretender, Provider and Punisher (Steps not unlike the behaviors the perpetrator exhibits in sexual violence; the 7T’s of Targeting, Testing, Threatening, Transporting, Transaction, Termination & Trauma)

We Can All Do Something:

It’s time to activate all of us in a civil society to use whatever they have in their proverbial toolbox to address this urgent issue. This could be anything from building a solid research base to inform future research, understanding gender inequality -women being exploited both sexually and economically- with downstream gender inequality implications that hurt all of us, using gamification to help destigmatize the issue and teach fundamentals, peer learning to help get the word out, all while empowering people armed with relevant facts and fostering a culture of renewed trust and spirit of self-efficacy.

See something, say something!

If Hollywood leading women sat in walled-in silence for, in some cases, as long as 30 years, imagine how many women not in places of power and privilege there are out there and how hard it is for them to speak out.

It’s time to break the silence. Silence weakens us but speaking out strengthens us!

It will take stronger families, stronger communities and strong communications if we are to bend the curve and eliminate this problem, now and forever. Is it time to make this conversation part of our life curriculum? Are you willing to lean into your discomfort zone to advance this crucial conversation?

And for those of our sisters and brothers, who are on the healing side of this journey, do remember:

  “You are precious, you are capable, you are smart and you are beautiful to behold…”

 

From The Frontlines Of A Sexual Assault Epidemic: 2 Therapists Share Stories:

Individuals with intellectual disabilities are 7x more likely to be abused! Nora Baladerian and Karyn Harvey are both psychologists with an unusual specialty — they are among a small number of therapists who treat people with intellectual disabilities who have been the victims of sexual violence. They’re friends, brought together by decades of shared experience. Baladerian, from Los Angeles, is a co-founder of the Disability and Abuse Project, which tracks violence against people with intellectual disabilities.

https://www.npr.org/2018/01/18/577065301/from-the-frontlines-of-a-sexual-assault-epidemic-two-therapists-share-stories

 

A Better Man- It Takes Courage to be Held Accountable:

“A Better Man documents a personal experiment— a step towards understanding and accountability. By getting closer to the truth of what survivors experience, and of why men choose to use violence, we can help stop the abuse. I hope that sharing my personal search for justice and healing will contribute to the struggle to end domestic violence.”

Critical conversations are an important part of the healing process. It’s a process known as restorative justice, when victims and offenders come together, with mediation, to repair the harm that’s been done. Watch the trailer at: https://abettermanfilm.com/

Thanks this week go to all of us committed to healing and restorative justice!

Please pay it forward with purpose
Love,
Neville

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NevilleB108
Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nbillimoria

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere!” – Dr. MLK Jr.

This week:

MLK & The Fierce Urgency of NOW- Evolution or Revolution Motivated by Great Feelings of Love:
On MLK Day this week, I was privileged to represent Mission Fed at Alliance San Diego’s 30^th All People’s Celebration in Balboa Park. This gathering of well over 1,000 people each committed to a better community featured a powerful keynote by Eva Paterson of the Equal Justice Society, who made an eloquent and compelling case for behaving into some of the key tenets of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and juxtaposed them with what we are seeing in American civil society and politics today.

Here are some of the highlights of MLK’s dream and lowlights of today’s America that resonated most deeply for me.

Spirituality Anchored in Love: Dr. MLK stood for a beloved community girthed by a spiritual underpinning expressed in love, not fear or hate.

 Racial Inclusivity: While the civil rights movement might cursorily be viewed as being about African/American issues, at its core it was about all respecting and affirming all people.

“If you wonder what you might have been doing in the early days of Nazi Germany, look at what you are doing now!”

The “knock of fear” on the doors of DACA families have striking similarities to what members of the Jewish faith experienced during World War II.
References to “$#!+hole countries” by our President, referring to Haiti and African countries reeks of racism and white supremacy.
Alternatively, fostering a culture of inclusivity invites us to learn more about each other’s cultural history and celebrate and affirm our differences not deride them.

 Economic Equality: The 3 evils we need to understand and address are poverty, racism and militarism/war.

Nobody wins in the “Oppression Olympics” and nobody survives circular firing squads!

Here are some tips from Eva to keep us strong and together:

• Be Hopeful
• Be Patient
• Be Resilient
• Resist the Chaos
• Remember our History (and learn from it)
• Stay Informed
• Act/Vote! (Including in the mid-term elections)
• Practice Self-Care

“We were put on this earth to do something, not everything”

A Demand For Change Backed Up By $6 Trillion- A Sense of Purpose:

This should get your attention, because of the content and because of who it’s coming from, the CEO of BlackRock, a key investor which manages nearly $6 trillion in assets.  “Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose. “To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.” 

https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/en-us/investor-relations/larry-fink-ceo-letter

If you are local…

The Most Profound Experiences are Found in the Least Likely of Places:
It has been said that sometimes the most profound experiences are found in the least likely of places.  Consider stepping behind the walls of prison.  And that’s exactly what I’m inviting you to do with this special ticket offer to TEDxDonovanCorrectional 2018.

Last year’s inaugural TEDxDonovanCorrectional was one of the highest ranked TEDx events in history and considered to be the most successful event ever put on inside a California prison.  It’s coming back on Sunday, March 11, 2018 and TEDxDonovanCorrectional extends a special invitation to you for the value it sees you bringing to this event with your community and business leadership and your vision for changing the conversation in today’s society.

The day-long event, organized by the inmates themselves in collaboration with outside volunteers, will feature 10 speakers – 5 currently incarcerated inmates and 5 outside speakers ranging from a 911 dispatcher, to a neuroscientist, to a radio hall of fame producer – all exploring the theme of “Reasoning with Reality.”  As the inmates say in their own words, “TEDxDonovanCorrectional invites you into an explosion of ideas, thoughts, and emotions that are unexpected, transformative and edifying to one’s soul.  Be prepared to look at reality from a whole new perspective.”  Click here to reserve your seats as soon as possible.

In the spirit of TED’s mission to create ideas worth spreading, we hope you join us to create new ideas worth spreading into your community.

Be brilliant,

Mariette

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TEDxDonovanCorrectional attendee reviews say a thousand words…

“The experience was once in a lifetime.  The stories shared by the men wrote on my heart forever.  Their vulnerability, their personal story of transformation, their wisdom and their passion were unimaginably real.”

“I’ve been to a few TEDx events before with truly inspiring speakers, but TEDxDonovanCorrectional was by far the most meaningful, intense, eye-opening event I have ever been to.  I will never forget this experience.”

“This was the most impactful, loving, expansive experience I’ve ever had in my life.  It truly drew me beyond the surface of prison and the inmates showed me the deep humanity we all share.”
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Thanks this week go to the Chamber of Purpose and Conscious Capitalism teams, Mariette FdS, and all people indivisible and willing to take a stand!

Pay it forward with purpose
Love,
Neville

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NevilleB108
Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nbillimoria

“You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.”
– Jim Rohn

This week:

Wherever you stand on the media is the problem v. the media is the solution debate, last Sunday night’s Golden Globes, the launch of Hollywood’s award season provided context and commentary for how to lead with purpose and soul, if not within the system then in spite of it!

 The entire evening provided artists with a global stage (bully pulpit) from which to express their views on social justice, and signal important changes they envision manifesting as a result of the power of creatives and their gift to connect, inspire and in some cases change mindsets and societal norms for the better.

 A highlight for me was Oprah Winfrey accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement and delivering a moving speech that brought men and women in the audience to their feet.

If you saw it, here it is for a moving revisit.
If you didn’t, here it is for your viewing experience…

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss6qQM054B0

From post-event commentary signaling potential Presidential interests to polarizing and plebian comments, Oprah, in my opinion, authentically holds the space for social justice for humanity with humility and has more sway, clout and moral authority than most.

That is my opinion. What is yours?

Do you turn a blind eye to corruption and injustice, to tyrants, secrets and lies?

Do you maintain the ability to maintain hope for a brighter morning, even during our darkest nights?

 

A full transcript of Oprah’s acceptance speech follows here:

http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/08/entertainment/oprah-globes-speech-transcript/index.html

Thanks to creatives everywhere who use their craft to move humanity forward!

Pay it forward with purpose and creativity.
Love,
Neville

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NevilleB108
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“Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve…
You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”
– Dr. Martin Luther King