Mar 15, 2022
Parker J. Palmer is a celebrated author, activist, and Founder of the Center for Courage & Renewal. Parker created the Circle of Trust® approach after a decade of living and learning at Pendle Hill, a Quaker community and retreat center. The approach is a social technology of time-tested principles and practices to create a safe space to nurture personal and professional integrity. In this episode, Tyler and Parker examine the critical role that building trust and modeling vulnerability play in driving us to our best outcomes, as individuals and organizations.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or virtually anywhere podcasts are found!
For more insights and explorations, check out Parker Palmer and Carrie Newcomer’s podcast: The Growing Edge.
This show is produced by Global Learning Partners and Greg Tilton Jr. with theme music by Una Walkenhorst.
Read transcripts for the episode below.
MEG
[INTRO MUSIC] Hello, and welcome to Shift the Power: A Learning-Centered Podcast, where we talk about the revolutionary power of a learning-centered approach. Through this podcast, we hope to inspire creative thinking and provide practical tools and techniques to deepen learning through dialogue.
TYLER
Welcome, I’m your host for today’s episode, Tyler Phillips. Today we are joined by Parker Palmer, author, teacher and founder of the Center for Courage & Renewal, to talk about the Circle of Trust approach. Welcome, Parker.
PARKER
Thank you, Tyler. Great to be with you.
TYLER
So great to have you with us. To start us off, can you just tell us a bit more about yourself?
PARKER
Well, I’m about to turn 83, so that’s a long story, but I’ll try to make it as short as possible. So, born and raised in the Chicago area, grew up in suburban Chicago. Had the privilege of going off to Carleton College in Minnesota to study Philosophy and Sociology. Spent a year in New York City at Union Theological Seminary, to get a kind of general background in religious life in the United States and around the world. And then, in the early 60’s, went out to Berkeley to do a Ph.D. in Sociology. So, I spent a lot of the 60’s – about five years of the 60’s in Berkeley during that time of great social upheaval. I’ve learned a lot obviously, from the process in both New York and Berkeley was exposed to a diversity that was unknown and unheard of in suburban Chicago during my growing up. It was a rich and challenging education, by life during those years, and I’m ever grateful for it.
In 1969, when I finished my Ph.D. in Sociology, by that time, my heroes had been assassinated. The Vietnam War was raging and the cities were burning, because of racial injustice. The same reckoning we’re having or trying to have today, that really goes on forever in American life, because we got off to such a bad start in that regard. And, so, I decided that instead of taking my academic degree, my Ph.D. to the university and accepting a professorial job, which had been my intention, I would become a community organizer, which I did in Washington, D.C. We were working on fundamental issues of social justice, racial justice, including redlining and blockbusting, and all the social ills that come with it. I spent five years doing that work and learning a lot as you can imagine and at the end of that five years, I decided to take a sabbatical at a Quaker Adult Living Learning Community, Adult Studies Center rooted in Quaker convictions around non-violence and the importance of education, which was organized kind of like a commune or kind of like a kibbutz. A really deep reaching form of communal life, where about 80 people shared a daily round of doing everything together, and doing it on the basis of radical equality. Everybody who worked there got the same base salary. So, I thought I was just taking a year off in 1974-75, I ended up staying 11 years, as Dean of Studies. I found the way of life so compelling and of course, since it was an Adult Study Center that didn’t offer a degree or a credential, or any, anything other than your opportunity to pursue your own deepest questions as an adult, aged 18 to 85, I thought a lot about and practice, had an opportunity to practice, Adult Education, learning in its many forms. And since we didn’t offer a degree or a credential, there was no stick only a carrot, you know, and the carrot had to be that whatever we were teaching was deeply relevant- Right -to people’s lives and they stayed with it for their own interior reasons.
And I’ll just sum it up by saying, I think that the big takeaway for me during those years was learning a lot about how our inner and outer lives interact. The sort of principle of non-violent social change is that if you have a non-violent inner life, you can translate that into non-violent forms of social movement, and social transformation, but the two must be congruent. They go in and out, they co-create each other and whatever is inside of us, tends to impact heavily on what’s outside of us, which is a root of a lot of violence, but a lot of good stuff, too. After that, I started basically working independently. So, I’ve spent the last probably 35 years as a teacher, traveling teacher, writer, and founder of a non-profit called the Center for Courage & Renewal. We can talk about all that more as we get deeper into our conversation, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
TYLER
That’s great, so interesting. So, the approach that I would love to just hear a little bit more about the origins of is this Circle of Trust Approach and you define the Circle of Trust Approach as a social technology, of time tested principles and practices for helping people rejoin, soul and role. So, you just shared a little bit about your history and experience, learning how that inner and outer world really striving for that congruence between the two. And it sounds like that is another way of saying soul and role, the interior of the soul and then the role is the work that you’re doing in the world, but can you talk a little bit about how the Circle of Trust Approach originated?
PARKER
Sure, it’s a great question and a very fundamental question for me, Tyler. So, thanks for asking it. The first thing I want to say is that I’m very well aware that the word soul doesn’t work for everyone and it doesn’t work for me either, because it’s a word that simply points to something for which we have no name. The most important words are that way, and you don’t want to reify those words, you don’t want to concretize them. There are lots of words that are synonyms for soul and for Hasidic Jews, it’s, you know, the spark of the divine and every human being. For a great writer like Thomas Merton, its true self, for the Buddhist, it’s big self. For secular humanists, its identity and integrity and, so, all of that language sort of points to this mystery that within us is something that Quakers call an inner teacher and ultimately, it’s the best teacher that we’ve got.
So, one of the things I picked up during my 11 years with that Quaker Living Learning Community is that the emphasis was on helping people hear more clearly the voice of the inner teacher. Now, the challenge there is that we have a lot of voices within us. We have voices that don’t want to know anything. We have voices of greed, we have voices of anger, we have voices that will take us toward violence. We have jealousy, we have fear, we have doubt we have all kinds of – we’re a pretty complicated city within. Lots of people, lots of voices clamoring for attention and so the question became, well, how do you discern which voice you’re listening to at the moment? Which voice are you going to choose for guidance, and that’s where the equally important principle of community comes in.
So, the Quaker’s have two sort of poles, two – they hold a paradox, let’s put it that way. In everything they do. On the one hand, you’ve got listening for the inner teacher, you’re your best guidance, you’re your deepest truth. On the other hand, you’ve got a community that helps you sort and sift what it is you’re listening to, that sometimes challenges you, and that helps you make mid-course corrections when you’re not going toward true north, but what’s critical is that the community does not do that in a directive way. They don’t say, here’s the deal, you know, we’re smarter than you. We know you better than you do, so, here’s what you must do. There’s nothing – there’s none of that kind of communal dictatorship in this. Instead, it is literally sorting and sifting, and the sorting and sifting happens by people engaging in honest open dialogue around honest open questions. And trusting that with enough of that, each of us will find a way to kind of separate the wheat from the chaff. You know, in that inner blizzard of all those voices talking to us, which is the real stuff in which just needs to blow away.
So, I learned those general principles which Quakers put into practice. So, the Circle of Trust Approach borrows heavily on those ideas and we – we try to create in our circles of trust through the Center for Courage & Renewal, we try to create safe spaces where a cohort of let’s say 25 people, can gather, meeting not just one weekend, but a series of weekends, over time. And a lot of – very often in the work of the Center, this is a cohort of 25 teachers or 25 physicians or 25 philanthropists or attorneys, you know, people who share a common work, who are helping each other more deeply connect their identity and integrity with the work they do in the world, or, again, “soul and role” in order to sustain themselves in what is very challenging work. And in order to serve people better, the student, the patient, the client, whoever. That’s why we’re all there and this kind of work helps us be of deeper and more profound service to people in every conceivable profession. And, so, the safe space that we try to create is one which enables people to listen more deeply for their own truth. That the outcome of these Quaker insights and these Quaker practices. And I can give you a quick example. These are some of some of the touchstones that we used to create safe space, because just because you call it a “Circle of Trust” or a “Safe Space” doesn’t mean it’s trustworthy or safe.
TYLER
Right.
PARKER
But there are behavioral things that you can do that go a long way toward guaranteeing that – or securing, I shouldn’t say there aren’t any guarantees anywhere in life, but towards securing that safety and that trust. So, the first thing we say, is in the dialogues that we’re going to have here, over time, there shall be no fixing, no saving, no advising, and no correcting each other. And I have a vivid memory of the first time I announced that to a group that was actually going to be together through eight retreats over a two year period. It was a group of 25 K-12 teachers in Michigan, and when I announced that ground rule, a teacher across the circle from me, almost screamed and said, “Well, what in God’s name are we going to be doing for the next two years? You’ve just taken away the only things we know how to do or enjoy doing.” We all laughed the laugh of recognition, because it is true that in the normal conversation, we may listen to each other for 5, 6, 7 minutes, but pretty quickly, we start fixing, saving, advising or correcting each other. We started saying well, “hey, you may not know what to do about this issue or this problem. You may not know the answer to that question, but I do. That happened to me once and here’s what I did, why don’t you try it and let me move on to something else?” It’s a very different thing, to sit in a space where the first thing we must do with each other is learn to listen deeply, so deeply that other people doing the speaking, whoever it may be, at the moment, come to feel like, “okay, this is – nobody’s jumping here to fix me up. I guess I can go a little deeper and say the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.” And then what we also teach is the art of asking honest, open questions and this is a high art. One of my favorite sort of thumbnail or nutshell ways of teaching honest, open questions is to give examples. I’ll say, “have you thought about seeing a therapist,” is not an honest, open question. It’s a little speed.
TYLER
Right?
PARKER
Yeah and we’re very gifted, aren’t we? Many of us are even trained, I think at sort of slipping in advice in the form of questions, as if that would be less offensive to the person whose problem we can’t possibly understand, because we barely understand our own problems. But, if I ask a person who’s been speaking about a particular experience in a classroom, for example, and says, “I really felt wounded by what happened at that moment,” and then they move on to the rest of the story. If I can follow up later by saying, “you use the word wounded, could you say more about what that felt like at that moment? And how you’re holding that wound today?” Now, that’s an honest open question, because I can’t possibly sit here thinking I know the right answer to that question, and I sure hope you’ll give it to me. Which is exactly what I’m thinking if I ask, “have you – have you thought about seeing a therapist?” But I’ve now asked a question about the nature of the woundedness, that will help hear that person into deeper speech.
And, some of your listeners will know that I just quoted a philosopher, a feminist philosopher, educator named Nell Morton, who said “our great task in these times is to hear people into deeper and deeper speech.” And it seems to me that these days, as we look around and see so many quote, “conversations,” that are basically people screaming at each other, about how right they are and how wrong the other guy is. We understand more deeply what an honest, open question can do. I actually believe that if there were more of that kind of questioning of each other, we’d understand each other better, we’d build more bridges, we’d have less profound divisions in our world. So, that’s part of what a Circle of Trust looks like. There’s a lot of other stuff and I wrote about a lot of it, as you know, Tyler, in a book called “A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life.”
TYLER
Well you are speaking our language, certainly here at GLP, when you talk about open questions, you talk about the no one being in the center at the front of the room, moving away from that traditional teaching-centered model, into more of a learning-centered model, where there’s dialogue also between all of the participants and learners and everyone to sharing and hopefully, deeply, deeply listening to each other. But, I want to just ask a question for our listeners who are – work as professional facilitators, professional designers, and they’re in all different contexts, usually workplace settings, some in community organizations and activist groups. The folks who are there in those events aren’t necessarily there for you know, personal betterments, but rather, because they work there, and because they are participating, or they’re, you know, part of a training team or part of the movement. So, I guess I’m just wondering how really, this facilitating in the way tending to integrity, identity, deeply – this deep listening, how it shows up in workplace trainings, workplace learning events? And if there’s any wisdom that you might have, for those who are listening, who might be like, “well, we’re just here to do a training” or “we’re just here to do a learning event, I don’t know about, you know, all this deep listening,” what might you say to those folks?
PARKER
Yeah, great, great question and I think there’s a strong answer. I think the answer is that in American individualistic western culture, we don’t understand the power of community, the power of relationship, in driving enterprises toward their best outcomes. There’s been a whole body of research and some of it has been focused very much on schools, the work of Tony Bryk and Barbara Schneider for example, called, “Trust in Schools.” And, a whole body of research now, on the fact that something called “relational trust,” is one of the primary drivers of mission success in any kind of enterprise you can name and it’s pretty obvious why if we don’t have relational trust among each other, as colleagues, as co-workers, each of us is going to be hunkering down, hiding out, competing to get the biggest chunk of the pie and undermining each other, either consciously or unconsciously, at every opportunity. That happens in professional life a lot and that also then creates the silos in professional life, where each of us is doing our work, you know, individually in isolation, even in hiding from other people, because we don’t want them to learn what the “secret sauce” is, if we’re doing our work well, and that undermines everybody.
So how do you build relational trust? Well, you build relational trust by doing some of the things that we do in Circles of Trust. As I said earlier, my book “The Hidden Wholeness,” has a whole catalogue of such things. So, I’ll pull out a couple of other possibilities that apply directly in the workplace. Here’s the one that comes quickly to mind. One of the things we do in Circles of Trust is we invite a lot of personal storytelling, right? And, so, when we work with teachers, for example, one of the first things that happen as a cohort is getting together, is we’ll throw a question out there, “when was the first time you thought, I want to be a teacher.” And, for a lot of people, some, you know, very touching stories come up very quickly and, we tell those stories to each other. We get in triads, and we tell those stories and as you hear another person’s story, it often evokes your own story and I’ve heard people say, “well, you know, I had this five-year-old brother, I was seven years old, we set up a little classroom down in the basement, I taught my brother lessons. You know, we took a piece of cardboard and made a chalkboard down there that I drew, and so forth.” And then another question like, “when did you first know that you were a teacher? You know, what was that moment of ignition in your own life?” So, stories like this, first of all, they bring forth something within us, they make us more self aware. We also get a chance to build that relational trust by connecting with each other at the biographical or autobiographical level. There’s a famous saying that floats around these troubled days, “the more you know about another person’s story, the less possible it is to dislike them, dismiss them.” Well, the truth in our workplaces, I think, Tyler, is that people go 10, 20, 30 years not knowing any more about the guy in the next cubicle or the gal in the office across the hall, than we then we did when the day we took the job. Because the workplace factors out all of these – these stories that could help us weave, not only a collaborative working environment, but communal resilience for when the hard times hit. So, in a workplace situation, I’ve seen it happen many times with good effect, you start a staff meeting, maybe you have eight people together around the table. Okay, for starters, before we get to our agenda, the question for the day is, “how did you earn the first dollar you ever earned or was there an older person in your life who was especially meaningful to you?” You know, these kind of non threatening, simple questions that invite storytelling. You do that, frequently, when you meet eight people takes half an hour to get two or three minutes stories out on the table and you start learning about each other, you start creating those bonds that can carry you through, that weave, that fabric of community for better collective outcomes, and also for resilience when the hard times hit. So, that kind of personal storytelling is one sort of module of what goes on in a Circle of Trust, it’s very unlikely that your whole staff is going to want to engage in a total weekend long Circle of Trust,-
TYLER
Right.
PARKER
-but these modules can serve you well, to do what we’re doing in those circles, which is to build a community in which people are free to explore what really matters to them and the work benefits as a result.
TYLER
So, it sounded like in many of the examples you just shared, and certainly a core component in the circle of trust is vulnerability and, you know, having a facilitator model that and encourage it with learners and participants. And that’s not always easy to do in a workplace, especially depending on the culture, the organizational culture. So, I’m just wondering if you have any insight or anything to add to, yeah, just this point, that modeling vulnerability and how it enables folks, learners to build trusting relationships in various contexts?
PARKER
Well, it’s a great question and – and honestly, it’s a tricky proposition. No question about that. Let me start with the story I know best, which is my own. So, folks who have read my book, “Let Your Life Speak” or a couple of the others where I at least mentioned this, will know that three times in my adult life, I’ve taken a deep dive into clinical depression twice in my 40’s and once in my 60’s. I’ll say this, that it took 10 years after my very first depression, until I felt that that experience was well enough integrated into my own sense of who I am, that I could start to go public with it and the reason I wanted to go public at that point was not to gather pity, or point to myself and say, “poor me,” which is exactly the wrong reason to share an experience of that sort. The reason was very simple. Millions and millions of people suffer from clinical depression, millions more suffer from trying to live with someone who has this really, really challenging condition and not knowing what to do about it. And as part of my own meaning making, out of the series of really really hard experiences in life, each of which lasted months and in each of which I wasn’t just lost in the dark, I had become the dark. My own desire to make meaning out of what was otherwise a meaningless experience took me in this direction, I wanted to, you know, use it in service of other people to say this is – you can not only survive this, but you can even thrive on the other side.
And so it’s, it’s important, first of all, for anyone considering becoming more vulnerable, to be able to look at their own life shadow and light, and say, yeah, that’s me, all of the above, every bit of it, you know, I’m not just my gifts, my strengths, I’m not just the things that might draw you to me or my work. I’m also stuff that is very, very difficult, because we’re all in this together, you know, I’m human, welcome to the human race, isn’t – is part of the message here. So, yeah, it’s a decision you make with care and I’m very, very aware of the fact that depending on who you are, in terms of demographics, it’s a more or less dangerous decision and the concrete example would be for a successful white, straight male, like me, to say, I’ve struggled with depression, can also can almost, you know, earn you a hero role for being so brave and so vulnerable. But if you’re a woman, if you’re a woman of color, if you’re struggling to make it in a world where men are pretending that they’re just fine and they don’t know what’s wrong with you, it’s a very – it can be a very dangerous decision. So, there is no “one size fits all.” And I’m not saying that in a workplace, you lead with that kind of thing. But surely, when you go in to tell your boss that your father died, or, you know, it’s a really rough time in life, your relationship, your primary relationship is falling apart, or a child is very, very ill. Surely you want some empathy, you want some understanding, you don’t want to be treated as just another cog in the machine who can be replaced if you can’t be fully functional. And anything we can do toward building that sort of environment, I think is critical and that kind of empathy does not come from people who aren’t in touch with their own shadow side. It does not come from people who refuse to acknowledge even to themselves, their own suffering. And I’ll refer to men again, who are often guilty of this syndrome of denial. One of the best books on depression is about male depression and it has the brilliant title, “I Don’t Want to Talk About it.” Because that’s exactly the phrase that a lot of men will use when, you know something comes up that might invite them to share the shadow side of their life, the side that isn’t shiny, and successful and all about winning.
And I feel, Tyler, I feel very strongly that this principle that I’ve tried to articulate about how, I guess one way to put it is – it’s in our vulnerabilities that we connect most deeply. It’s in our broken places that we connect most deeply, not in in places where we shine, and that we want to toot the horn about on our resumes. That’s where we kind of put each other off and threaten each other even. If we want to connect with students, for example, let me tell you a little story which will carry the point better than abstraction will. I did a faculty workshop at a major research university one time. I happen to find myself in the middle of this day long workshop, at a lunch table with, I think, seven other male faculty. And somehow, it came up for one of these men, that he found himself talking about a course that he had gone to college wanting to succeed in, let’s say it was organic chemistry, because his parents wanted him to become a doctor, he failed miserably at it, he thought his life was over. But, as a result of that failure, he discovered 19th century French literature, which had become the topic that had entranced him for the rest of his life and here he was, you know, soon to retire having had a very satisfying career teaching that subject. And, as that story got told, in this kind of private peers setting, everybody around the table had a story like that, including me, about an aim they once had as a younger person at which they failed. But that opened the door to something that they love, and are still loving. So, we were about to break to go back to the workshop and I said, before we leave, let me ask you guys a question — how many of you have ever told that story to your students? And not a single hand went up, because that’s how guarded we are in the academy and elsewhere, about even this mild form of vulnerability. It’s very mild for a successful academic to say, you know, when I was 21, I failed a course. I said, would you please, please tell the story, because you’ve got students out there who are scared to death, that they’re, that they’re struggling, maybe failing in your course. And they think their lives are over. And they think they’re going to be cast into the outer darkness. Please liberate their brains liberate their spirits, by telling a story that comes out of your empathy for what it is like to be in that situation. And, I think some of them, in fact, went and did that over a period of time.
TYLER
I love hearing you talk about empathy, and I’d love to hear more about that. I will move us to our closing, though, you’ve been more than generous for your time, and I really appreciated the opportunity to deeply listen to you in a live one-on-one setting, and I’m sure our listeners are grateful for that as well. So, in our closing, what is one final practical tip, or wisdom you would like to share for our listeners?
PARKER
Yeah, well, let me say it’s been a pleasure talking with you, Tyler, and I applaud the work that you and your colleagues are doing. Thank you for inviting me. I guess what comes to me in closing has to do with a question I often get asked about hope. I’m often asked, do I hold to hope, do I have hope? It’s an interesting question for me, because what I hold to or what I have in that regard, is a matter of choice, you know, there’s no one out there and no force out there, if I’m living my life properly, that can say, do or don’t have hope. That’s my decision. That’s my call and, yes, I have hope. In this sense. Hope is not just an attitude. It’s an action and it’s not just one action. It’s especially not just one big action. It’s a lot of little, little, little tiny actions day in and day out through the course of your life. That’s the way all social change has been accomplished. So hope for me is acknowledging the hard realities around us. Holding your imagination of the possibilities that still exist and every day when you get up resolving to take 1, 2, 3 more small steps in the direction of bringing those possibilities into being. So, I’ll leave it at that with gratitude for our conversation.
TYLER
So much gratitude. Thank you, Parker, again.
MEG
[OUTRO MUSIC] Thank you for tuning into another episode of Shift the Power: A Learning-Centered Podcast. This podcast is produced by Global Learning Partners and Greg Tilton with music by Una Walkenhorst. To find out more about Global Learning Partners, whether it be our course offerings, consulting services, free resources or blogs, go to www.globallearningpartners.com. We invite you to sign up for our mailing list, subscribe to our podcast and find us on social media to continue the dialogue. If you enjoy the show, please consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or your preferred podcast player. [OUTRO MUSIC FADES]