Viv and Geoff have done a podcast with Patti Digh author of the newly minted Life is a Verb.
I’m a big fan of Patti so there’s lots in here that I like. Here’s what she says about her work doing diversity training (and I think you can insert any abstraction in place of diversity eg leadership, assertiveness etc):
(There’s this) incredible longing for people to engage with each other as human beings and yet we constantly put restrictions on that… we constantly say that’s not going to happen at work. So there’s this abstraction of the idea of diversity
She mocks the T shirts and posters which talk about diversity in the abstract which offer, as she puts it, nothing you can hold onto in moments of stress.
I particularly liked the passage where she talks about using physical games. Language can create big barriers. So working with a university, an action game levelled the playing field between the chancellor and the janitor. As a fan of slow motion samurai, I completely relate to that.
