The Way Out Is In / Wise Leadership (Episode #17)

00:00:00

Welcome to another episode of the podcast series The Way Out Is In.

00:00:21

I’m Jo Confino, working at the intersection of personal development and systems change.

00:00:27

And I am Brother Phap Huu, a Zen Buddhist monk under the guidance of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in the Plum Village community.

00:00:34

And today, brother, we are going to be talking about wise leadership. I think the reason we’re doing that is because the world is transforming. We’re facing many, many challenges, and for those people in positions of influence or power that the old ways of operating, which is ‘I am in charge and I know what to do’, doesn’t work anymore. We need to find new ways of creating change and harmony in these difficult times. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about.

00:01:16

The way out is in.

00:01:17

Hello, dear listeners, I am Jo Confino.

00:01:32

And I am Brother Phap Huu.

00:01:33

And today we have a very special guest because we have Lindsay Levin. And Lindsay is the founder of an organization, a social enterprise called Leaders’ Quest. And you, Lindsay, have pivoted your whole sort of direction of travel in Leaders’ Quest to develop wise leadership, so it’s absolutely right we should be talking about that today. And Lindsay is also the founder of an alliance called Future Stewards, which is really a group of organizations coming together to drive systemic change in order to create a regenerative world. So welcome, Lindsay.

00:02:08

Thank you so much. It’s very special to be with you and actually to be in the room together is beyond special, so I’m thrilled to be here.

00:02:16

Yeah, and we’re sitting in Thich Nhat Hanh’s hut in Upper Hamlet, The Sitting Still Hut, sitting around his kitchen table, which is very, very cozy. So, Lindsay, just tell us what’s brought you to Plum Village?

00:02:31

Well, friendship, actually. So friendship with you, Jo, friendship with the wonderful monastics here and the reputation of Plum Village. I have a lot of friends who’ve benefited from studying with you, from visiting in the past. And I’ve had, like many people, a busy, tiring, very intense year or two and was just thrilled to have the chance to come and spend time with you and be in a very, very beautiful place amongst these wonderful trees, vineyards, out in nature and also in community. So I’m really, really enjoying my time here, and it’s every bit as special as everybody told me.

00:03:11

Great. And Lindsay, what attracts you to the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh? So what have you learned, actually?

00:03:20

Well, I mean, I think the teachings are actually about the essence of life and beautifully simple and yet profound. So, you know, if I was going to pick out a few things, of course, his wonderful poem Call Me by My True Names is my favorite poem. I think it speaks to everything, actually, that we try to embed in our work. So, so meaningful. I just started reading Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet. Wonderful, wonderful book. And actually, there are many books, but you could just have that book, if I could simply have that book. So, yeah, some combination of simplicity, practicality and deep love and compassion.

00:04:11

Great. Brother Phap Huu, so I want to get on in a minute to talk about you as a leader of this community because you are the abbot of Upper Hamlet and have been since the age of 22, so for the last 10 years. But before we get into that, tell us about Thich Nhat Hanh as a leader. What allowed him to create this sort of worldwide group of monasteries and all these sort of sanghas, these communities in cities all over the world? What was it about him that allowed that to germinate and then grow into its fullness?

00:04:48

So our teacher, Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, which we call Thay – it means teacher in Vietnamese, so you’ll be hearing me call our teacher by Thay throughout this podcast. Thay became a monk at a very young age, when he was only 16, and it was during the French colonization. And then, as he was growing up as a young monk, he then had to witness also the Vietnam War. Or, in Vietnam, they call it the American War. As you may know, when there is war, there’s always suffering because there’s a lot of destruction, there’s a lot of hardship, discrimination and a lot of pain. And when you’re in a situation like that, if you are living a life to have direction of ethics and morals and it touches something deep inside of you, which is how can I help in this very moment? And what inspired our teacher was the history of the different times in Vietnam, where Buddhism played a very big role during chaos and during the Lý and Trần Dynasty. And Thay read many of the stories and many of the teachings during that time, and they saw that the Buddhist teaching of nonviolence can play a very important role to nourish compassion, love and give hope to people in that situation. So as a very young monk, Thay didn’t want to give up his monastic path and to take arms and to join the conflict, but he looked deep inside and he asked himself as a monk, ‘What can I do?’. And one of the fundamental teachings in Buddhism is that man is not our enemy and it is ignorance, it is hatred, it is discrimination. And as someone who is walking down the path of light, we have to also help bring light into people’s life. So in our teachings of Buddhism, we said that we are seeds of everything. We are seeds of goodness, but we are also seeds of evil. And what we have to do is we have to help people see the goodness inside of them. Wherever suffering that there is we have to be there because we can be the light of hope. So during that time, with a lot of energy and enthusiasm, our teacher started to create a new organization and it was maybe one of the first during that time, that was led by monks, to bring young people together who didn’t want to take part in the war and to go to destroy villages and to help rebuild, help bring life back where life is being destroyed everywhere. And through this, you start to see that in the country that not everyone wants to be a part of this war and that there are so many people that want to bring peace to this country. And so what our teacher did was not to teach by words, but is to go into action and to lead by example. So our teacher and at that time, along with sister Chan Khong, who was one of our most senior elder sisters in our community, but at that time she wasn’t yet a nun. And she, with many other young students, joined this movement and it was a grassroots community. So wherever they needed funding, they would go and ask, like, I remember Sister Chan Khong telling us she would go to house to house and ask, ‘Can you offer something even if it’s just a cup of rice? Or if you have even a box of Band-Aids, anything will help’. And this movement started to nourish the compassion in young people and to show that there is still humanity in this chaos. And that became one of a strong energy that Thay was able to show, and a lot of people were attracted to that. And a lot of young monks and nuns were very attracted to that because that time was also a time of change in Vietnam. The West was coming, so there was new technology, there was new education, and our teacher was also very interested to learn about the new things in life. And how can Buddhism adapt to the change of the world? And Thay, our teacher, he also recognized that Buddhism is a living tradition. And so it has to be able to adapt to the time. And so our teacher started to lead this new generation of young monks and nuns, as well as young laymen and laywomen who want to come and just to have a more awakened life. And our teacher started to teach Buddhist teachings, but in a very down-to-earth way that anybody can understand. And this was also where the birth of what we offer around the world – we call it a day of mindfulness – and this was during the time Thay shared with us that while you go and you do service – social service or peace activists or any kind of activism – we can also become a victim of our own burnout, of our own aspiration, and we also need nourishment. So our teacher created – I believe it was only once a week, but now, in our tradition, it is twice a week – and Thay calls it a day of mindfulness where we all come together as a community, we sit together, we listen to a teaching or we have a sharing and we sing songs, we cook for each other, we help each other to relax, and we can even say that in that day, for maybe six hours, we don’t talk about the work because there’s a side of us that we also have to nourish in order for us to keep our aspiration alive in order for us to continue the work that we aspire to do. And this is what we call taking care of our well-being. And this is very important in the teachings of Buddhism. And as we learn to take care of our own suffering, we also have to learn to take care of our well-being in order to recognize and embrace the suffering or else it is too overwhelming. So I would say through his action and through his daily life, it was just inspiring, just by… He was walking the talk and that became a huge movement, which later on, people recognize him as a person who engages the teaching in his daily life because he coined the tradition which we are recognized as Engaged Buddhism. And now he also shared that every time we practice and we learn the teachings we have to ask, how do we apply this in our life?

00:12:34

So, Lindsay, there were a number of elements that I just picked up in that, so, thank you, Phap Huu. One was about adapting to change, so when change happens, you adapt to it. One was about avoiding burnout. One was about walking the talk, and the other was about love and compassion. So you work with the CEOs and other leaders of a number of big companies and organizations. Are these sort of, in a sense, spiritual values relevant to the world of business. And are they particularly relevant to the times we now live in?

00:13:12

I mean, I think they’re hugely relevant and really essential. And I think one of the things perhaps as I listened to you, brother, that makes Thay’s work so relevant to today and so deeply valuable is that it came out of a time of conflict. So he experienced, you know, suffering that most of us would find difficult, frankly, to imagine, and most of us are blessed not to have literally experienced. So there’s a depth and there’s a reality to that compassion and a generosity to that compassion that is really exceptional because in the face of incredible violence, he responded the way he did, as did the community that he’s part of. So if I think about today, you know, we are in a time of great turbulence and real challenge and I suspect, you know, if we make it through this period we’ll look back on history and this will be a very turbulent time with a great deal of change. I hope and believe a lot of that will be very positive.,But it’s also very, very challenging. And so, you know, leaders… and we all have the capacity to lead, so I don’t define leader necessarily in any kind of hierarchical or status oriented way, although clearly there are people who have responsibility as leaders and who are in positions of leadership. You know, walking the talk… I mean, people believe what they experience of you and if you say one thing and do another, clearly people are only going to believe your actions. And so I think, you know, the business of how do you show up? You change the world by how you show up, even in the hardest of circumstances, the way in which you show up, even in a very conflicted situation, how you turn up to that conversation or that situation changes the outcome. And maybe you can’t change everything, but it changes the outcome. It’s a dynamic… that’s the nature of being interconnected, of living in this interconnected world. It’s the nature of interbeing. I think compassion, you know, often especially you mentioned me working with… I mean, I work with all kinds of leaders, but including with business leaders. And I think we tend to polarize a lot in how we perceive people to be. So if you’re not in business, you’ve probably got a vision of what a business leader is and maybe it’s not so attractive. And of course, we’re all only people. We’re just people doing our best to get by and navigate with whatever, you know, whatever challenges is that we’ve got to work through. So the ability to bring compassion to your work, whoever you are and whatever you do, is huge. And for me, that starts with self-awareness, so understanding who you are. A lot of the work that I do, including in and with my colleagues in companies, but all kinds of organizations, it starts by giving people the chance to think about who they are, what they care about, what they value, what’s important to them, and then how can you align that with whatever your work is? So how can you… You know, there’s you, there’s the organization, community, ecosystems that you’re part of, and then there’s this bigger, wider world and universe. And, you know, one is a reflection of the other. Things we see in the big wide world are a reflection, I think, of what’s going on inside of us. The same is true in our organizations, in the business I run or lead or am part of or in the town or village or community that I’m part of. So in the end, I think this work is about self-awareness, you know, learning ‘who am I?’, other awareness, appreciating, learning, engaging with ability to read, to stand in the shoes of somebody else, to see the world through their eyes. And then this balance between, you know, being part of something much, much bigger, something vast, and also the humility, especially leadership of seeing yourself as being very tiny. So, you know, one of the images for me is that we’re all – I am at least – a tiny grain of sand in this incredibly beautiful universe. But I want to kind of be a good grain of sand. So how do I make the most of that opportunity? So those are some of the things that that come to mind as I listen to you, brother. And I think there’s a beautiful simplicity to Thay’s teachings, remembering that it comes out of a deep, real practiced understanding of suffering makes it applicable to any situation, any of the challenges we may feel we’re facing today. You are not harder than what he went through, and there’s a great power to that, which is very exciting.

00:18:12

Thank you. And I wanted, in a sense, to talk a little bit about polarization because we’re living in a very polarized society where the common ground, actually people are leaving the common ground and going to the top of separate hills and firing either words or real bullets at each other. And Brother Phap Huu, you talk about Thay’s great insight about the fact that man is not our enemy, but it’s ignorance, et cetera. And also, Plum Village has traditionally brought together groups in conflict with each other, and you’ve brought together groups of Israelis and Palestinians to spend quality time here. What is your experience of how do we start to bring people who consider themselves to be enemies at some level? How do we start to bring them together?

00:19:06

First of all, we have to help them know how to come back to themselves, to bring them from this level of ideas, because the reason why we see each other as enemies, because we have a dualistic view, because I’m good and you’re bad, I’m better and you’re worse and et cetera, et cetera. So we call it a discriminative idea, a discriminative mindset. And to help us be free from that, first of all, we have to come back and recognize our self-worth and then see what is happening inside of us. Why do I have these thoughts? Why do I feel this way? And why do… why am I in pain? A lot of the times when we see someone as an enemy is because we’re in pain or we identify them as someone who is creating pain, and that therefore we have a view against them. So our practice in meditation, which is inclusiveness, and it doesn’t matter what side you are on, as long as you have the intention, we will guide you. And first of all is to come back and to recognize themselves, come back to the breath. That’s very basic, but in that moment of coming back to the breath, you bring your mind home to your body. And when you are in touch with your body, that gives you an opportunity to be in touch with all the wonders also inside of you. That’s very important. We like to help people see the beauty of life inside of them in order to also see the beauty inside of the other person. If I have suffering, that means you have suffering. If I have happiness, that means you also have happiness. If I want to be safe, I also have to recognize that you, as a human being, also want to be safe. So we start to help people get out of their own view, which is me, me, me and me. And to also help them listen to their own suffering. And in Buddhism, we talk about suffering as a noble truth, because when we see suffering, that gives us insight that if I suffer, there has to be a cause to the suffering and we have to look deeply into what is the cause of that suffering. And in our training, we also learn to listen. So we listened to ourselves, and then we also learn to listen to the other person. But to be able to listen to the other person, especially if is someone who we know it will become difficult, we also have to nourish compassion. And how do we nourish compassion? When you hear someone share about their suffering and you really see their suffering as a human being, you also know that because you have suffered, you have experienced suffering, that helps touch the nature of compassion in you. There’s a part of loving kindness that gets to be manifested inside of you. And by listening like that, you start to understand the other person. So like you schared, Jo, we’ve had groups of Israelis and Palestinians, and we would first guide them in just basic practice: relaxing the body, coming home, and then being in touch with nature. We see nature as very healing because nature is life itself, and we are just a part of this immense life. And then we would create this opportunity for one side to share with a support group who would help hold to space. And we have a facilitator and we have a bell that guides everybody to breathe. And whenever we recognize there’s any tension or a lot of emotion, we would ask everybody to come back to the breath, to connect. And sometimes we would even ask in their groups to hold hands because human touch is also very healing, it’s very soothing. And while this side share, we ask the other side just to listen. And you listen to see the pain, as well as the happiness, the joy and life in them. And then, after that, we would pause and we ask the side not to share because I’m sure they will have a lot… In their minds like, ‘Oh, I have the answer to why you’re suffering. Oh, that’s just a wrong perception’. But at that moment, you have just to allow someone to open their hearts, so they’re very vulnerable. So you also want to give space for that vulnerability to manifest. And then the next day, we would ask this side to listen and the other side to share. And the beauty of this practice is that both sides start to see each other as human beings, and that’s the core of it, because when we see each other as human beings there’s a nature inside of us, which is an element of love, which we don’t want to harm. And that is very important.

00:24:24

And, Lindsay, just picking up on that. I mean, you’re known as a bridge builder, so you tend to work with a number of organizations or individuals and try to bring them together into sort of harmony. And my experience is that a lot of people, whether it’s in the climate space or any other space, it doesn’t actually matter whether they are liberal or on the right, but tend to have large egos that, you know, ‘This is my idea, my idea’s better than your idea. I’m not going to do that if that person is engaged. And, you know, I don’t believe that person should be part of this debate. So, you know, exclude me’. It’s very complex. How do you deal with that complexity of lots of competing interests, lots of competing egos? Even when people actually recognize there’s something urgent to be done?

00:25:18

Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, some of the most powerful learning is in the conflicted situations and some of the fastest learning, things that you can, as I would put it, know that you can’t unknow can happen in a flash in situations where people feel themselves to be very polarized. So, you know, the ego, what I see, of course, we all have ego, I see always the small child. You know, it’s that vulnerable, it comes often from a place of vulnerability, a fear of ‘Am I enough? Do I count? Do I matter? Does my voice matter?’ And so there’s something about, you know, seeing past that, letting whatever noise needs to happen happen. I mean, to build on what you said, brother, so much of this work is about seeing the humanity in one another. So a lot of what… We do a lot of work where people who don’t agree with each other, you know. Take climate change. We may agree that climate change is a massive problem, there’s many different views on how to tackle it, and there’s deep suspicion between people as to whether or not, if we pursue your path, we’re not going to really tackle the deeper entrenched issues of justice and fairness and other things that we also should tackle. So, you know, we might even agree that this is a major problem, but have different views about how to solve it. Or politics, where if you go far enough out, we might have similar views about the big values, the things that we value, but it’s, you know, it’s become so polarized. And a lot of how we would approach that works, you know, similar to what you were describing, brother, is enabling people to see experience, step into, listen to the life of another, the life of this person that I might think is somehow different to me. And what happens in that moment is you, you discover what you have in common, and it’s like the walls come crumbling down. You know, whatever defenses you might have had up come crumbling down. That’s also quite scary because suddenly I care about you. You know, there’s all these other people as opposed to just worrying about my own immediate family or group or community or people with whom I feel I have an affinity. Once I really experience and feel the humanity in this other person who it might have been convenient for me to think was somehow different or my enemy, you know, an immigrant who might be take my job or whatever is the thing I’m frightened of. And once we’re all really at heart the same, and part of the same whole, and one way or another, you experience that – might be through the simplest of sharings – it’s incredibly liberating, but it’s also, it’s like, ‘I’m not in a pond, I’m in the ocean’. Right? I’m part of this great big ocean, and it asks something of me. There’s some way in which I need to step up. So there’s this beautiful duality, which of course isn’t, between, goodness me, you know, my circle of compassion got much bigger. It’s not just my family, it’s not just my country, it’s not just my team, it’s everybody. And then maybe it’s all of life. And that’s, you know, and I think amazingly liberating and full of joy, but also can feel a bit overwhelming in terms of responsibility and what that means. So there’s a kind of tenderness to that journey and that experience.

00:28:58

And, Lindsay, it would be good, we were talking the other day about Leaders’ Quest, and this is something you initiated, run what are called quests, where you take people outside of their normal frame of reference and normal experience into sometimes very difficult experiences for people to, in a sense, come away from their center and actually allow a space for something new to come in, a new insight. And we were talking about one of the quests you ran for climate leaders in West Virginia and meeting the sort of head of one of the coal mines. I think it would be lovely, actually. If you can just talk to us a bit about that because I think it brings out the nature of what you’re saying so beautifully.

00:29:45

Yes, yes. I mean, so we make experiences for people by bringing… Is very simple. You bring people together somewhere in the world. It might be in the other side of their own town or city or village, or it might be halfway around the world. It might be somewhere very different. You bring people together and we just engage. We meet, we go see, we go experience, we discover what life is like in this village or in this slum or in this informal settlement somewhere, or in this case, in this mining community in West Virginia. So we come together somewhere and we go and engage with people and meet with families and in a very mutual way, mutual listening, the people that we’re visiting and the people who are the visitors. It’s a very humbling, but also deeply heartwarming experience and those happen all over the world. To use the experience that, you know, the example you pulled upon, West Virginia, you know, shortly after Donald Trump was elected in the US, partly because I was working a lot in the climate space, I wanted to bring people from the climate world: activists, scientists, others who are working on climate and go and spend some time in communities who didn’t see it the same way as them, who felt deeply fearful – in this case, it was in the States, you could pick many other places, but in this case in the USA – who felt deeply fearful that they were going to lose their way of life, their opportunity to earn a living. And they already had had a very tough time in many cases, with huge social issues going on in those communities: opioid addiction, other kinds of problems, great fierce pride living in a beautiful part of the country, but a deep, deep fear for the future. And we did… we met with various different communities. For all of us – I now live in the States, although you can probably tell from my accent that I’m from the UK – it was a very moving time because I think, for example, people in that group who might have been folk that voted Democrat had a different… they came away with a new understanding. Maybe didn’t necessarily literally change their politics, but of why this community felt deeply threatened by many of the views of the kind of liberal cities. And, you know, one of the visits we went, we visited a coal mine. We went inside the coal mine, we experienced the life of the miners, we talked to them about their countryside, the nature around them, their way of life and about religion. So this particular gentleman who was the foreman of the mine was, you know, didn’t believe in evolution. He held his Bible kind of very literally, his sort of narrative, which of course, didn’t agree with but it was very different to most of the people, all the people that I brought to visit who were scientists and, you know, were really challenged by listening to this view. But at some point I asked him to tell us about his family. And he said, just in a very easy way, ‘Well, my wife and I have adopted five children from different parents, who lost their parents to the opioid addiction, five children who’d lost their parents to drug overdoses’. I think one was in prison. And in that moment, everything, the whole purpose of our visit was accomplished, to be honest, because here was a man who was doing something remarkable with incredible love and incredible compassion, telling a story that probably most of us in the room, when we looked in the mirror, were not sure that we would ever have perhaps the strength or the generosity to do what he’d done. And it just flipped right, you know? There’s much more to this person than might appear. And so that’s kind of at the heart of our work.

00:34:12

Brother Phap Huu, I just want to ask you about patience and urgency. So I’m aware that your community, Plum Village, works the way you work with the monastics, that in terms of dealing with conflict or disagreements, is very, very patient. And also sometimes you need to be decisive. And I think I’m going to come to you as well with this question, Lindsay, because I think there’s this thing about the importance of listening, but also the importance of not getting stuck and of taking action. So you are the abbot of Plum Village, so, in a sense, you have a responsibility to the community. How do you deal? You’ve got about 60 monks in Upper Hamlet, there are 120 nuns in two other hamlets, but everyone comes with their own perspective. Everyone has a view…. this way or that way. How do you start to really work from a leadership perspective with this level of complexity?

00:35:18

I identify myself as one of the leaders of the community because I am able to be people’s friend. And Lindsay shared one of the reason why she’s also here is because of friendship and, you know, that resonates with me because my dharma name – Brother Phap Huu – it means Brother True Dharma Friend. And so when I was ordained, when my teacher gave me that name and he told me, ‘Phap Huu, you have to learn to become everyone’s friend’. And at first I thought, ‘Oh, that’s easy’, because I think I’m really easygoing and I think I can get along with everyone. But the reality is everyone is different, and, of course, we see each other’s differences and sometimes it’s hard to accept. And so one of the things that I have trained in living in the community is to learn to see the harmony of the group, which is one of the most essential things to brotherhood, community building. Because if we all come with 60 different views and we’re not able to let go and to see the bigger picture, to see that what we are doing is more than me, then we can’t really contribute. And that’s one of the trainings that we all get when we become a monastic in our community. We, first of all, we learn to be open. One of the criteria that we look in anyone who wants to join a community, to live with us, either as a monastic or even as a lay friend, is your capacity of openness. Because if you’re not open, then you won’t be able to learn. You won’t also be able to contribute because you’re not generous. And the second training that we have is that we learn to see that the community is us and we are the community. So this is really interesting because what do you mean? If I say, but I am also the community, then don’t I want to make sure that I’m the biggest name or I’m the biggest person in this community? Actually, to be generous and to be compassionate you have to have the capacity to be vulnerable, as well as to be soft, as well as to be fresh. So this is the four elements that I really train myself, and I always look, if I have this element. Do I have freshness? Do I have openness? Do people want to be with me? If people don’t want to be with me, then that means then I won’t be able to hear the voices in my community. The second element that I grow in myself develop is solidity. Am I able to sit there and really listen, even if the suggestion is very hard to hear? Am I also being able to have solidity, to be there for someone when they’re suffering? Because it’s easy to be with people who are happy. It’s very pleasant. But when someone who is suffering, we don’t want to have an affiliation with because their energy can drag us down or something. But in our practice, we want to have the stability to be there with them. And then calmness, so not to be agitated by every comment, not to have a reaction to everything. And because in our meditation, we try to establish a stillness inside of us which is giving us the opportunity to reflect everything that manifests. And reflection, we need time. And with clarity, we normally will make a better decision rather than we are rushed. And then space. We have to have space inside of us. We have to have time for ourselves. We have to know ourselves more, we have to know our capacity, and we have to know our limits. And then we also, with that space and knowing our capacity and limit, we also have to learn to trust our community, to trust our colleagues, our brothers, our leaders, our friends, also our younger ones, because sometimes the young ones have a lot of wisdom also. So these four elements help me be there, be present. And when I facilitate, I create that space. And what is very interesting as we might think that we have to give a lot of theory to try to promote our idea, but at the core of it, if the idea represents the bigger picture, represents the happiness of everyone, everyone will want to be a part of that. And so what we look for consensus in, we look for harmony in, is what are we looking at? What is our direction? How is that going to contribute to the well-being of our community? And we do have criteria, we have directions in our community. And I think any business or any groups, you kind of have to have a direction to guide everyone. And so, for us, we have personal development. As monastic we all want to continue to grow. We all want to continue to understand our self more. We all want to also have a chance to serve because serving gives us an opportunity to feel like we are a part of the whole change, the whole transformation, also the well-being. And then we also want to look at the community’s growth. What are activities that we are creating? Does that give growth? Are we too tired this year? Do we need more breaks or are we too lazy? Do we need to push our community a little bit more? And of course, when I say that there’s always ways to encourage the community. We don’t use words like, ‘you guys are all slacking, you know, get in line’. Of course, you know, you can use that tone, but in my own experience, fear doesn’t work. I recognize that to speak the truth, there’s always a way to share it so that everyone can understand our weaknesses. And one of the beauty that our teacher has shared with us is that never look for perfection in our community. That really helped me. I am a perfectionist, I like to be perfect in my way of organization, in my own space. And to know that we are growing at every moment, you have so much space. And even today, if we don’t finish making a decision, we know there’s still tomorrow. And to not… Of course, there are times that we will have to make decisions, but the spirit of doing, of making a decision, is always in the harmony of consensus. That has been our foundation. And I’ve been through meetings where we have to meet about one topic at least four times, because one of the empowerment, I think, of leadership is to make sure everyone feels heard. You know, everyone feels a part of it. And when you have a chance to let everyone share it, even the ones who don’t fully agree or want to follow, but they see that is the direction of everyone and our training is ‘I will let go of my idea to flow with this river’. So one of the second seal, and this image really helps us, is that we learn to flow as a river. And the river is always going, is always going, is always moving. And this image really helped me because this helped me shed my ego because Thay teaches us that we all need to learn to be a drop of water in this river. And because we are part of the river, there are moments we can help lead at the front. And there are moments we are in the middle, that we can help hold the front and the back together, and sometimes we are at the back. The young energy can help push the elders going forward with their voice, with their aspiration, sharing with us, with the changes of the world. And so to listen is so important for, for leadership and for growth. And I think that is one of the essential elements in decision-making is making sure that everyone feels heard. And I would even ask like, ‘Brother, I know you didn’t agree, but hearing from everyone with everyone’s idea and intention of going in that direction, are you happy to support?’ And 95 percent of the time they said ‘Yes’. And also, when I say becoming everyone’s friend, that has a deep relationship and a deep power, because sometimes that friendship, they will trust you, they trust your wisdom also. And then because we are friends, you know that everything that I want to lead is for the good of the majority, it’s nothing personal, it’s not about me. I’m still doing it for the river, because I’m still this drop of water. And this helped me if one day I’m not here, Jo.

00:45:00

Perish the thought, Brother Phap Huu.

00:45:02

No, I’ve shared this in the dharma talk to my whole community. And I said, you know, ‘What has really helped me is that I’ve contemplated that even though if I’m not here, I know this river will continue’. But with that, it gives me so much aspiration, and gives me so much energy because I want to be part of this river though. And I feel and I see the beauty of the river. So, direction, space to listen, space to share, also, relationship. One of the things that I do before each meeting, I would make sure that everyone kind of knows the topic and because I have a sangha eye and a sangha ear, and sometimes I use the word I have the pulse on the community, I know who would be kind of emotional about a topic or would have particular views, I would want to check with them first. And our teacher calls it… He uses a Vietnamese word, he says ‘Bàn hành lang’. It means ‘to meet in the hallway before bringing it to the meeting room’. So you would communicate first, you would want to hear what the other person want to share, and sometimes it’s just… if that person is heard, they become so much more softer, they become so much more gentle. And that really helps.

00:46:17

Beautiful. And, you know, I’ve been in Plum Village when a particular issue came up a while ago and you gave, as a community, you gave it the time. Everyone was able to speak. And if another session was needed where people need to share, they were given that. And I thought it was an extraordinary way of dealing with a sensitive issue that actually no one felt rushed. But also there was the wish to resolve. So, you know, those two were very beautifully together. Lindsay, you know, just picking up on that theme. So we call… Many people calling this the decisive decade in terms of climate, they’re saying we’ve got a decade to really, really bring our emissions down if we’re going to have any hope of stopping runaway climate change, irreversible sort of destruction. So there is this enormous pressure on leaders in the climate space and even those who aren’t, you know, this pressure is building. And people are feeling very stressed and there’s this wish to rush. How do you, sort of, bring together the idea of urgency and patience?

00:47:35

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s really crucial. And I, as I was listening to you, there’s so much there for… you know, that’s so relevant in companies, in politics, in all manner of environments where there isn’t time invested in building trust or in listening and deeply listening. There’s not the patience, there’s not the thoughtfulness to include all voices. I mean, there’s very simple things, simple habits that people can do that that actually just are not generally employed. I mean, most organizations a meeting starts, there’s no sense of kind of checking in and seeing where everybody is or even hearing just a word from each person. There’s very often no discipline around making sure everybody has a chance to contribute. You know, loudest voices prevail and so on. And so in so many environments, certainly in climate, but in many other environments, there’s this tremendous sense of urgency and pressure. And it sort of reminds you of hurry up and wait, right? Because you can go at something very, very fast, and it doesn’t mean that you’re going to climb. It’s a good example, you know, we still got a very long way to go in resolving that issue. Many businesses, frankly, are still dealing with the same problems that they’ve been dealing with for a very long time, and they may have gone hard and fast and with great, you know, with all manner of deadlines. But actually getting there is tough. So, so you know, what is that balance? One of the ways I think about this is what we call the gap between being smart or clever and being wise, this gap between cleverness and wisdom. And I think part of the sense of urgency comes from the feeling, the experience that life is speeding up. So if we just think about that, imagine a graph where you’re seeing accelerating change. Well, you can apply that to many things about today’s world. You know, first of all, we’ve seen accelerating change over the last one, two hundred years in many positives about human well-being. It’s easy for us to get caught up in all the things that have gone wrong, but in terms of life expectancy, in terms of infant mortality, in terms of literacy, if you look at those things globally, we’ve doubled life expectancy in 100 years. You know, remarkable things. So human progress, in inverted commas, has been on this accelerating path. And one of the outcomes of that is that we have many more people on the planet. And that’s challenging because there’s a lot of us and there’s a lot of pressure. So all sorts of things you could plot as an accelerating graph of change for progress. Then you look at our footprint on the planet and, unfortunately, that is also an accelerating uphill graph. If you imagine that curve, you know, greenhouse gas emissions, CO2 in the atmosphere, but also loss of forest, loss of freshwater, you know, all sorts of planetary boundaries that we’re exceeding, you can literally plot, it’s called the Great… people call it ‘the Great Acceleration’. You can literally plot the acceleration of progress and the acceleration of all impact on the planet. And so we’ve got this sort of mixed blessings as it were. Then you take the impact of technology, you know, something called Moore’s law, which is about how quickly computing power increases. So in the last 50, 60 years, we’ve seen much faster change because of technology, and some of that has brought blessings, has brought, you know, enabled us to deal differently with health care and communication, all sorts of positives. But as we know, it’s also brought many ills that we have not thought through because things are happening so fast. So I think of that upward curve as the graph of cleverness. It’s come about because of our human ingenuity, you know, we’re a clever species. We invent stuff. We fix stuff. We figure things out. We’ve harnessed science in so many ways. And it’s easy then to fool yourself into thinking that we are somehow becoming ever, ever smarter. Well, we’re not, and we’re certainly not becoming ever wiser. So if you were to plot on that same piece of graph paper, wisdom or our own evolution as beings, our own development, our individual development or our collective development, it’s certainly not a graph that’s shooting up off the top of the page. It’s more of a slow incline, shall we say. And I think part of the urgency and pain and fear and uniqueness that we’re feeling right now is because there’s a gap between how fast the world is changing – in many ways as a result of our actions, some of which have come from all sorts of clever things that we figured out how to do, often with unintended consequences – and our own capacity, our inner wisdom, our ability to connect, to deeply appreciate our existence, what existence is, what it means to be alive, what it means to be to be part of life. So we have this gap and that is feeling very, very uncomfortable. Now what does it mean? Well, I often talked to business leaders about this: you’re not going to be able to keep up by running faster. So there is no way that running ever faster, you are ever going to catch the pace of change. So in response to that urgency, including urgency over dramatic issues that are deep, the importance around justice and around planetary well-being and so forth, we actually, perversely, have to slow down. We have to develop the capacity for reflection, for introspection, for developing our sense of connection, for all the things that you so beautifully teach here at Plum Village and others teach around the world. So, for me, that’s this balance between kind of urgency and patience, and there is a deep relief actually in kind of letting go and recognizing that if I want to play my own small part in these very big issues, because I’m not going to fix the world, and heaven forbid that I should try because I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know how to solve these problems. Somehow, collectively with our collective wisdom, we have got to navigate through. And the one other thing I would add on that is that when you think about these big systemic problems, we need everybody. We need everybody, we need every voice, we need every contribution, we need every type of skill. You know, we need the people whose brains are wired to be brilliant engineers, to be brilliant technologists. We shouldn’t dismiss that. And we need the people who are equipped to be teachers of mindfulness, to be spiritual teachers. We need all of that because, you know, if you take something like the climate, well, yes, we’ve learned how to harness the power of the Sun, and we need to shift to clean energy, but we’ve got to do that at scale. There’s still huge numbers of people in the world who don’t have access to electricity, even if we make our lives much simpler, and there’s very good arguments for doing that, we’ve still got many more people to include and we’ve got a huge transition to navigate. So we need all kinds of people. And one of the deep wishes, if you like, or desires that I have for our world right now – this comes back to the polarization point – is for us in the slowing down to actually trust one another more, you know, to trust that people with different skill sets are going to be part of how we collectively address these issues. I’m very hopeful. I’m really hopeful because I do think there is a waking up going. I think a lot of things are changing and I think we are individually and collectively waking up. Maybe not fast enough, I’m sure that’s true, but change is happening, and in that process, we need to extend to one another. We need to trust one another. We need to know that people who have skills that I absolutely do not have are going to need to be part of how we design the new systems that we’re moving to.