A Failure of Nerve
An examination of leadership and family systems theory, exploring how anxiety affects organizational and relational dynamics.
A leader must separate his or her own emotional being from that of his or her followers while still remaining connected.
The qualities of adventurous leadership that enabled Europe to escape its doldrums are exactly the leadership qualities necessary for breaking the imaginative gridlock of our civilization today.
Society itself can be on a treadmill when it becomes caught up in accumulating unending masses of data, because its models are inadequate to explain its processes.
Questions are always more important than answers, because the way one frames the question predetermines the range of answers one can conceive in response.
When troubled couples, for example, make a breakthrough, often the issues that they differed over have not gone away but the two sides have become less reactive to the differences.
Parents cannot possibly hope to insulate their children against all the pathogenic forces and ideas in the environment. That way of thinking has to lead to unending cycles of anxiety. Where does it end?
People rarely can rise above the level of the maturity of their leaders or mentors.
As with the maps used by Columbus and Magellan, everyone shows the evidence they want to believe or that increases the possibility that they will get funding for their “voyage.”
Self-regulation may be the context of all evolutionary advances; it goes back to the origins of life on this planet and is part of the ongoing natural processes of creation. A lack of self-regulation holds true for viruses, malignant cells, and abusers of substances or people, whether the latter are troublemaking members of families or make up an entire totalitarian nation.
it is not merely the presence of the pathogen that causes pathology, but also the response of the organism that “hosts” it.
There are always three factors involved in survival, no matter how toxic the environment. One is the physical reality; the second is dumb luck; and the third is the response of the organism, which can often modify the influence of the first two.
Trauma lies in the self-organizing quality of the system and the response of the organism rather than in the event. In other words, the trauma is in the experience and the response to it, not in the event itself.
There is no way out of a chronically painful condition except by being willing to go through a temporarily more acutely painful phase.