Center for Purposeful Leadership

Turning Your Worst Enemy Into Your Best Teacher

Seeing conflict as a birthing process...

Deidre Combs has spent decades obsessing about conflict. From her early family days, being one of four sisters, to her 12-year stint at IBM, she's plumbed the depths of what conflict is all about. My one-hour interview with Deidre was one of the most intriguing ever. How does one see conflict as a birthing process? As a Minnesotan, like many other cultures, we're bred to avoid conflict at all costs—to move through life with stoic resolve. What the hell is so frightening about conflict?

THE GREAT REMEMBERING

A conversation-starting essay by Craig Neal
In 1963 my first remembering came spontaneously at the civil rights march “on” Washington DC, in which Martin Luther King delivered his legendary I Have a Dream speech. Although transfixed by the moment as I stood swaying with the crowd on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, it was the throngs of people I turned to during the speech that triggered my memory of a prior state, a remembering of the human condition as that of love in motion and therefore catalyzing my life’s purpose into motion.

We’ve all had those moments of awakening or remembering, some fleeting as if from a dream, where we know and feel connected in a visceral sense to all things, human and otherwise. Then, for most, we return to the “real world” where day to day life resumes.