Real Presence As The Key to Compassionate Leadership: With Parker J. Palmer [Podcast]

In this episode of The Compassionate Accountability Podcast, Dr Nathan Regier, your host, welcomes Parker J. Palmer. He is a legendary writer, traveler, teacher, and activist who has dedicated his life to understanding and promoting an authentic and practical kind of compassion: his magnificent essay, The Gift of Presence. The Perils of Advice, highlights the common mistake of trying to help people when they often need our presence.

In today’s conversation, Parker shares his views about our culture and democracy, how leaders can avoid burnout, and a simple practice for building resilient communities at the beginning of every staff meeting.

Watch the video for this episode of The Compassionate Accountability Podcast with Nate Regier Ph.D.

What’s In This Episode

• What is the Center for Courage and Renewal?
• What is your critique of today’s educational system?
• What’s your view on the relationship between compassion and conflict?
• What lessons did you learn living in a Quaker intentional community?
• What’s the role of creative conflict in a democracy?
• What are the five habits of the heart for a democracy to function?
• How can leaders avoid burnout?
• How do you start staff meetings to build a resilient community?
• What is your best advice for leaders?
• What energizes you these days?
• What is life trying to teach you

Watch The Video

Read The Transcript

Nate Regier: Hello, I’m Nate Regier, founder and CEO of Next Element, a global consulting and training firm helping organizations transform their cultures with Compassionate Accountability®. Thanks for joining me on the Compassionate Accountability Podcast, where we get to meet amazing people who are bringing more compassion to the world. I hope you’ll find something useful in this episode. And if you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, and review to help us reach more listeners. Be sure to visit our website at next-element.com, where you can learn more about our work and check out all of our previous episodes.

My guest is a legendary writer, traveler, teacher and activist. He’s dedicated his life to understanding and promoting an authentic and practical kind of compassion. I learned about him from a friend who forwarded me one of his essays called: The Gift of Presence, The Perils of Advice. It not only hit a chord with me, but it hit me in the gut.

How often do we try to help, but what people really need is simply our presence? I know this is tough for me. So who’s my guest?

Parker Palmer is the founder and Senior Partner Emeritus of the Center for Courage & Renewal, an organization that focuses on issues in education, community, leadership, spirituality, and social change. Parker holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, as well as 13 honorary doctorates, two Distinguished Achievement Awards from the National Educational Press Association and an Award of Excellence from the Associated Church Press.

He’s the author of 10 books that have sold nearly 2 million copies and have been translated into 10 languages. His awards and accomplishments are too numerous to list here and, being the humble man that he is, Parker would probably prefer I don’t list them all. But I will mention that in 2021, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Freedom of Spirit Fund, which honors exemplary individuals and institutions embodying that inner freedom that is the energizing source of human courage, creativity, and love in the world.

One of my biggest beefs with contemporary understandings of compassion is that we focus so much on alleviating suffering, like we’re supposed to fix the problem and make it all go away. That’s great on a couple levels, but terribly disempowering on so many other levels, especially in leadership and business. My other big beef is that we avoid talking about conflict in the context of compassion, like somehow they’re opposite.

So I asked Parker to come on the show to talk about what real presence looks like and his view of conflict within compassionate communities and relationships. And I got a whole lot more. You are in for a treat because Parker shared wisdom on what he sees going on in our culture, his views on democracy, how leaders can avoid burnout, and a simple practice for building resilient communities at the beginning of every staff meeting.

Parker, welcome to the Compassionate Accountability Podcast.

Parker Palmer: Well, thank you, Nate. It’s great to be with you.

Nate Regier: I’ve really been looking forward to this conversation and I thought we could start by having you share a little bit about the Center for Courage & Renewal. I know that’s kind of part of your life’s work. It’s a place where all of this kind of emanates from, and would you share a little bit about the purpose of the center and how you go about living out that mission?

Parker Palmer: Delighted to do so. So the Center for Courage & Renewal celebrated its 25th anniversary last year as a non-profit. I founded it in the nineties to start doing something that I call putting wheels on ideas. The ideas I’d written about in several books, all of which have to do with rejoining soul and role, or to put it a little differently, bringing personal identity and integrity more fully into our private and vocational and public lives.

And so we’ve now trained several hundred facilitators who work all over the U.S. and all over the world to gather groups of people, sometimes within a profession. We work with physicians and other healthcare workers, with K through 12 teachers, university professors, with attorneys, with non-profit leaders, with clergy, et cetera, et cetera, and sometimes across professions. And these circles are usually about 25 people who go on a year-long journey together, moving through three or four retreats to go to the depths of personal inquiry. The unexamined life is not worth living, as our friend Socrates reminded us, and also to go deeper into community, which is something that many professions don’t offer. They’re so siloed and even competitive.

Nate Regier: Yeah.

Parker Palmer: So we’ve worked with hundreds of thousands of people by now, and it’s wonderful work that I think has changed the lives of many people, not least, those of us who facilitate those circles.

Nate Regier: Wonderful. When we talked earlier, you talked about what your connecting theme is. You called it your red thread, and you said that your red thread is the dance between the inner and outer life and how to negotiate staying true to yourself while also pursuing truth, love, justice, and this is so important for you. I wonder if you could share a little bit about what that means.

Parker Palmer: Well, I think that, let’s look at our educational system for a moment, which educates people largely in external realities. We learn how to observe, we learn how to analyze, we learn how to manipulate the external world. But it’s very, very rare, in K through 12 education, in higher education and professional education, for people to be pressed on taking an inner journey, exploring, however you want to say it, their psyches, their souls, their minds and hearts, what it is that drives them inwardly. And I think we all know that we speak and act in public, not in random ways, but in ways that fulfill some kind of inner need for better or for worse. Sometimes those inner needs are wholesome and life-giving and in the common good. Sometimes those inner needs are frankly pathological and narcissistic and highly self-serving. So I’ve been fascinated for years with looking at teaching, with looking at medicine, with looking at the practice of law or leadership in various settings, mostly in non-profit settings.

I haven’t done all that much work in your world, the world of business and corporate life, but I’ve been fascinated for years with looking at how it is that things can start to change for the better when people understand more deeply the inner dynamics of what they’re doing externally. I just referenced Socrates saying, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” And at age 85, I’ve decided I’m old enough to amend Socrates. And so I’ve added to his classic statement the following, “If you decide to live an unexamined life, please do not take a job that involves other people.”

Nate Regier: Ah! Wow. If you choose to live an unexamined life, please do not take a job that involves working with other people.

Parker Palmer: Correct.

Nate Regier: Yes. Well, I so can resonate and appreciate with your emphasis on the inner journey and the way you talk about how we train and educate for that external world. And we work with leadership in corporate, and it’s no different. Most of the leaders we work with have not really examined or truly understood what makes them tick, what’s going on with them, what is it about their inner journey that is impacting the way they are with themselves and with other people. And as you know from our conversation, Compassionate Accountability is kind of our shtick. It’s our thing that we’re really interested in, but it really is about building connections with ourselves and other people while also pursuing results. And that could be in the form of justice, it could be in the form of productivity, it could be the form of commitments that we’ve made to each other. And what we’ve noticed, and I think you resonate with, is that sometimes conflict is actually a necessary part of that. Will you talk a little bit about where you see conflict fitting into this whole thing?

Parker Palmer: I’ll just mention briefly that I spent 11 years of my life, between ages 35 and 46, living in an intentional Quaker community near Philadelphia. The Quaker community that was also an adult living and learning community or adult study center. We had resident students with us accumulating a total size of about 80 people nine months out of the year. So, I lived a deeply communal life where everything was shared economically in terms of decision-making and common meals and so forth. And I learned a very important lesson there, which is, A, conflict will happen.

Community is not all sweetness and light any more than family life is all sweetness and light. We hit those collision points, we all know about them because we’re human, we’re fallible and we’re finite. But many people regard conflict as the end of community. I came to understand it as the doorway into deeper community because conflict demands that we let go of some of that internal narcissism, which to some extent I think infects most of us with self-interest. We let go of some of that and start learning to do things like listen, like appreciate other people’s viewpoints, even if we don’t agree with them, like learning the life story of other people, so that we can understand them more deeply. The more you know about another person’s life story, the less possible it is to despise them or dismiss them.

And, of course, we learn to forgive, in part because we come to those moments when we need the forgiveness. In order to take next steps, we need to forgive ourselves, we need to forgive other people, we need to be forgiven. So in mentioning all of those things, listening, getting the ego out of the way, inquiring about others, are we not of interest to each other, as one great poet has said? Forgiving. I’m ticking off a list of inner dynamics that can be studied as clearly as the external world can be studied. In fact, the internal world is worthy of study. It’s because it’s far more baffling than the external world. We can figure out the external world, but we’ve never figured out the internal world with any great degree of satisfaction, it seems to me.

Nate Regier: Yeah. Well, as a former practicing psychologist, that’s always been a passion of mine, is how is it that we can understand how those patterns came to be, how they influence us today, what we can change, what we can live with. When you talk about conflict, the role it has and about how we see it, I’d love to just zoom out for a little bit and let’s talk about what’s going on in our culture right now. What is working, what’s not? What is your view of how conflict is, what’s happening with it in our bigger society?

Parker Palmer: Well, I think what’s happening in American culture, and particularly in American politics, goes back to all kinds of deformed assumptions we have made about the field of conflict in the first place. Let me name one of those assumptions, and that is that life is always a win-lose proposition. It’s a zero-sum game. And if you get more of what I want than I get, then I’m losing, and you’re winning. And my ego need is to make sure that I win and you lose. But that’s a real distortion of the way human life works. Here’s another thing I learned in 11 years of living in a pretty intense intentional community, and that is working together we create abundance. Sharing, the act of sharing material, economic and goods and things like decision-making and mutual affirmation, creates an abundance which makes people feel more secure. We can even survive a lot of economic insecurity if we know we have each other’s backs in a communal setting.

I mean, families do that all the time. Families are doing this right now in the midst of a tough economy for young people in an age cohort where they’re having trouble finding work that satisfies, work that provides a living wage, et cetera, et cetera. There’s an abundance in community, in relationships themselves. And when said about when our assumption is that everything is competition over scarce resources, and if you get more, I get less, so I have to win the battle, everything goes to hell in a handbasket. That abundance gets undermined, disappears. And people walk around saying, “What do you mean abundance? This is a dog-eat-dog world.”

Nate Regier: Yeah, yeah. So the messages we’re getting in our culture seems so counter to what you’re talking about. Where the messages are, “Be afraid there’s not enough. They’re out to get you. If you don’t win, then you’re a loser. And if you’re not with me, you’re against me.” And at the time that we’re recording this, we just finished the Olympics, and it’s an amazing… It’s competition. There’s winners and losers, but there were these few examples of where finalists would choose to share the gold. Really an interesting phenomenon. Instead of deciding, “We’re just going to go after it until there’s a winner and a loser.” If we could come to each other like that in community and say, “Let’s share the gold,” what kind of inner journey do we need to take as humans to be able to get there?

Parker Palmer: Well, first I think we need to take a close, clear-eyed look at what happens to what you might call peak performance when we go into it expecting to be attacked the way prey in the jungle is attacked. Somebody’s going to win, somebody’s going to lose. It’s all knives out there. You’re going to get cut up pretty bad. That, I dare say that psychological studies would prove this, reduces peak performance because it adds an element of anxiety that no person at peak performance ever has.

I remember 10 or 15 years ago seeing brain scans of professional golfers as they were hitting the ball in a way that I never could myself. And the question was, “What’s going on in the brain at that moment of peak performance where somebody, at least proverbially speaking, gets a hole in one from 300 yards?” And the answer is, nothing’s going on in their brain at that moment. It’s blank. It’s all body knowledge, it’s all physiology. There’s no interference from human thought. So if we take a clear-eyed look at that, we start working on reducing our sense of, “I’ve got to beat somebody else,” and maximizing our sense of, “I just need to do my very best.”

Nate Regier: Yeah.

Parker Palmer: And again, we have an educational system that conditions us in backward ways. We get rewarded in our educational system for beating other people, for being high on the curve rather than low on the curve. Good teachers know, “No, this is really about understanding each student’s limits and potentials and inviting that young person to maximize their own capacities within a set of limits and potentials which we all have.”

Nate Regier: Yeah, so we’ve been talking about our culture and the political climate right now. It’s kind of on everybody’s minds. And one of your books actually is titled: Healing the Heart of Democracy. And you talk about the role of creative conflict in democracy because diversity takes center stage and diversity is a big topic right now in our country, in our world. And in your book you talk about five habits of the heart, that inner journey that we need to take in order for a democracy to function. Will you share what those are?

Parker Palmer: I’d be glad to. Let me just say as a bit of backdrop briefly, I do this at more length in the book, that I think the genius of American democracy is that it was set up from the very beginning as a tension-holding device. And the division of powers is all about holding tension creatively so that there’s always a kind of three-way look at any significant issue, when the system is functioning as it should, a three-way look at any given issue and an ongoing debate about the best way to handle that issue from the executive to the legislative to the judicial branches of government. And so it’s in that larger context, the context of what I’ve called democracy’s loom, that holds the threads of a living democracy in tension, that I then start talking about these habits of the heart that are things that can be cultivated and have been cultivated within individuals that make democracy work.

And this cultivation goes on not in the halls of government, not at high bureaucratic levels, but in the everyday venues of our lives. Habits of the heart get cultivated in the family and in friendship groups, in neighborhoods, in voluntary associations and workplaces, et cetera, et cetera. This is our pre-political life.

Nate Regier: Right.

Parker Palmer: It’s the preparation of citizens through these habits of the heart for citizenship in a democracy, rather than being subjects of an authoritarian regime. So the five I name, Nate, are these: an understanding that we are all in this together, an appreciation of the value of otherness, an ability to hold tension in life-giving ways, a sense of personal voice and agency and a capacity to create community. And for me, as I try to spell out in the book, that’s a sequence that’s logically related. It sort of forms a fabric of inner life as you work on those habits, which is, I think, never-ending work. We have to work on them with regularity, with ourselves and with each other, but we are all in this together. Every discipline under the sun that studies humankind, tells us that we live in an interconnected system and that what happens in one part of the system impacts what happens in the other part of the system.

Nate Regier: Yeah.

Parker Palmer: In other parts of the system. And, we know that within that system there is great diversity, by definition. Not everyone is the same. Not everyone has the same story. Not everyone looks at the world in the same way. So it’s a kind of no-brainer that we have to appreciate the value of diversity rather than seeing it as a threat. And I often look at a healthy ecosystem. If you look at the prairies, you live in Kansas, I live in Wisconsin. The prairies as they once were, were in a highly resilient ecosystem because of the number of species that existed in any one small plot of land, 150, 160 species of plants and even more of animal life.

And that meant that if a disease hit one species, there were other species to help bring things back. It meant that not everything was dependent on one crop like soybeans or wheat or corn, as agribusiness brought to our prairie land, which has resulted in thinning topsoil across the Midwest and all kinds of ecological pathologies. So, if it’s true that diversity is, number one, real and, number two, a good thing, that leads us directly to the need to hold tension in life-giving ways. So diversity doesn’t have to mean us versus them. Diversity can mean doing the dance of the whole in a way that benefits the whole, that serves the common good.

Nate Regier: Thank you for that. And I resonate so much with this, and I can see why I hope my listeners appreciate this too. Your very first habit was, “We’re all in this together,” and that we cultivate, and that really is the definition of compassion. Compassion means we suffer together, not against each other, not to a win-lose, but together. And that to do that, we have to be able to embrace the conflict that comes with diversity. And, so thank you for sharing that. I really encourage people to take a look at Healing the Heart of Democracy, what a timely book, and many other books you’ve written that are just phenomenal.

I want to move the conversation a little bit here, before we wrap it up, to leaders. Because I speak to a lot of leaders, we work in leadership in corporate settings. A lot of the leaders who listen to my podcast, one of the most common things they struggle with is feeling overwhelmed and tired from taking on so much of the struggle. They fall victim to taking on other people’s baggage, giving advice, trying to take over work, bearing the emotional weight of their own unrealistic expectations and their desire to make sure everything turns out right. Let’s talk about presence in this context of burnout. What would you have to say on that?

Parker Palmer: Well, your question leads me in two directions. Maybe I’ll come to presence second. The first thing it makes me think of is that the leader who fails to understand the importance of cultivating community in the workplace is a leader who is going to end up trying to hold all of this herself or himself, and the end of that is burnout and worse. Period. That’s just a law of life, I think. The only thing that can save us, that can save the compassionate person, the person who feels with others and on behalf of others, there’s a lot of suffering in the world, so there’s a lot to feel. The only person who can hold that adequately is one who understands that it must be held in community together and that his or her most important work is cultivating that community, so when the crunch moments come, you’re not the only show in town.

The downside of trying to hoard power, of treating power as a scarcity game, and, “If I can get more, then you have less, and then I can operate you more effectively,” the downside of that is the personal cost you pay for trying to bear all of the burdens in a way that’s frankly inhuman. It can’t be done. So to do those little things that build community, for example, I’ll just give a quickie because, for me, this is all wheels on ideas, and it’s not abstract, it’s very concrete. One of the things people learn about in our circle of trust work is the power of coming to know each other’s stories. And a lot of people have taken that experience back to the workplace and have learned how to start staff meetings. For example, eight or 10 people around the table with a go-round in which each person has one or two minutes to, for example, tell the story of the first job they ever had in life.

Tell the story of a beloved elder who had an important role in your life. Tell the story of the best vacation you ever had. You don’t have to say a lot. In fact, the ground rule is, if you don’t want to speak to it, you don’t have to speak to it. But if you keep that practice up, it takes 20 minutes for 10 people. You keep that practice up over time, you’re weaving a fabric of mutual understanding, which helps that resilient community be there when the stress points come, and you can’t possibly hold them yourselves, but together you can.

And so, I think it’s not just about being compassionate, it’s about spreading compassion in community in ways that are highly doable.

Nate Regier: Right.

Parker Palmer: Again, the more you know about another person’s story, the less possible it is to despise or dismiss them.

Nate Regier: Right.

Parker Palmer: That builds compassion. It can be done in the workplace. I’ve seen it done time and time again. But here too, speaking of time, we have this false notion of time that we have a big agenda today, so we can’t waste time doing something stupid, silly, like telling stories. It’s not a waste of time. It’s a time saver in the long run, and it’s a soul saver as well, at least for you and probably for a bunch of other people.

Nate Regier: I know that’s a very important part of our company from day one. We start all our meetings with check-ins, and that’s precisely what they are, is a time for us to talk, not about what we’re doing, but about how we’re doing and who we are. And it’s interesting what you said about how when things get tough and the crises hit, that’s the glue, that’s the resilience. That’s where the rubber bands got built that we can stretch together and be there for each other. Thank you for sharing so much wisdom around that. Just to wrap that up, I’m curious, would you have any advice for leaders specifically, and maybe just for our society as a whole, but what advice would you have for leaders in today’s world with what we all have to deal with?

Parker Palmer: Listen, listen, listen. If I had to boil it down to one key thing, I think leadership is too often misconstrued as standing up in front of people and telling them what the score is, and that’s just not something, I don’t think it ever worked, but it doesn’t work today, for sure. Of course, you have to have a vision as a leader. Of course, you have to know the ground on which you’re standing. That’s called presence. And if you know the ground on which you’re standing, you have that non-anxious presence that is so valued when the leader can face into the storm without falling apart because they’re standing on some ground other than the logic of work itself.

I mean, not meeting this quarter’s goals isn’t the end of the world, but if you’re a leader who stands only within the logic of the system, of a profit-making system, it’s going to feel like the end of the world.

Nate Regier: Right.

Parker Palmer: Stand somewhere else, stand on firm ground, inner ground that you find through the inner journey we were talking about earlier, and you have a chance to negotiate the hard times. Yeah, so it seems to me that with all of that in mind, the vision, the solid ground, the capacity to speak when it’s needed, I think the leader’s job is to listen, to understand, to find out where people are and where they’re coming from. And again, to understand limits and potentials in individual cases and help people fulfill their own potentials as best they possibly can.

Nate Regier: Thank you. So much great wisdom. And you’ve spent many years teaching and learning and listening. I’m curious as our last question here: what is life – this is one of the questions actually we pose when we’re building teams, when we’re working with groups – what is life trying to teach you right now?

Parker Palmer: That’s a great question, and I think life’s lessons are repetitive. Maybe it’s just because I’m a slow learner, or I have to go around the horn several times before I figure out how to sail this route. But I am struck by the fact that things that I thought I had learned at 40 or 50 or 60, I need to relearn at age 85. And that’s partly because as we age, our life circumstances change. I’m not up to my ears in daily work. I’m not traveling all over the country and giving talks and workshops and retreats these days. The whole context of my life and work as a writer and a speaker and a social change guy has altered, and I have to keep up with that and relearn some lessons that are now fitting. So, I mean, one quick answer is life is trying to teach me right now how to be an old man without being a grumpy old man, right?

Nate Regier: That’s fantastic. Well, Parker, you don’t seem like a grumpy old man. You seem like a very wise old man, and I’m curious if people would like to learn more about you, your work, your books, the work of the center, where would you direct them?

Parker Palmer: Well, I’d say, first of all, you certainly are invited to visit the website of the Center for Courage & Renewal, which is couragerenewal.org, www.couragerenewal.org. Among other things, they have a section where my bio and my work is highlighted because the books are kind of foundational to the work they’re doing in the world.  But there’s a lot more there, including a constantly evolving array of retreats in the US and around the world. Circle of trust retreats we call them, where they’re welcome to inquire and apply and participate. The other possibility, another possibility, is that I have a Facebook author page where I’m pretty active. The tagline is Prose, Poetry and Politics.

Nate Regier: All right.

Parker Palmer: So trying to mix and match some things that aren’t normally mixed and matched, but I contribute once or twice a week there and am always glad to have new visitors to that site.

Nate Regier: Well, we will put all of those links in the show notes and Parker, again, thank you so much for bringing your wisdom, bringing your presence for my audience on the Compassionate Accountability Podcast.

Parker Palmer: Thank you, Nate, and thank you for the work you’re doing. It’s such promising and important work, so keep at it, young man.

Nate Regier: Thank you.

Thanks for joining me, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Compassionate Accountability Podcast. What struck you? What can you take and use today? I’d love to hear from you. And if you haven’t already, pick up a copy of my new book; Compassionate Accountability: How Leaders Build Connection and Get Results. If you’ve already read the book, I’d appreciate your review on Amazon. Contact us today to learn more about how Next Element helps companies transform their cultures with compassionate accountability. And remember, embracing both compassion and accountability is the secret to great leadership and the roadmap for thriving cultures and strong brands.