Ever hand a piece of your writing to someone to get their reaction or approval?
I did that a lot as I was beginning my career. Usually, the person would go straight to the gap between what they saw and what they thought it could be. (As H.G. Wells said, "There is no passion in the world greater than the passion to alter someone else's draft.")
Now, it's useful that people can see a gap. It shows they have high aspirations. But focusing only on the gap drains our energy.
Decades ago, the president of Indiana Bell showed me another way of working, when I gave him a piece of copy to review for Butler University. Instead of plunging into critique, he told me what he liked about the piece. "It's simply amazing," he said. "I don't understand how you people do this." I met the man for an hour, and would have rewritten the copy all night long for him.
That same kind of approach can energize and encourage people in all sorts of situations.
Charley Whiton, when he was a county commissioner in Wyoming, told me about a meeting that had him squirming in his chair. His fellow commissioners were lamenting what they had just learned: seven out of ten high school students in their part of the state had tried drugs. The hand wringing was intense. Many people had chosen to live in the community because they thought it would have fewer of these "big-city problems."
Now, Charley is a friend of Anne Nickerson, who we met earlier. Remember how she came to realize that others shared her hopes for her community, so she decided to start speaking up with confidence? Charley had participated in a community-building initiative, together with Anne and others in their town, which had sharpened their ability to use the ideas we've been working with in this book. He was the only commissioner who had that experience.
Charley told me that in the meeting of the county commission, the framework he had learned "cried out to be applied."
"So when I spoke," he continued, "I asked what turned out to be a surprising question: 'What about the other three? You could just feel the tension melt away, as they began to think about working from the power of the three, rather than the problem of the seven."