I was delighted to read this Huffington Post article below, which sings the praises of Courage & Renewal work in US schools.  Schools are relationship-centred organisations, and open, trusting relationships between teachers and students, teachers and their colleagues, and teachers and parents are key to raising student achievement.   Yet the current emphasis in education on accountability and measurable outcomes is more likely to foster fear than trust in the hearts of teachers.  

As a Facilitator in preparation with the Center for Courage & Renewal, I am happy to be able to offer this work to NZ educators.   As an introduction, I invite you to join me in August 2015 in Hamilton to participate in the first Courage to Teach retreat to be held in New Zealand.  See the Event Calendar for details.

I am an optimist.  My default position has always been that things will get better; they will turn out for the good.   It’s easy to be an optimist on a personal level, but much more difficult on a global scale.   That’s because the future of our beautiful planet and our human race looks bleak most days, and downright doomed on others.

As an optimist, I love it when my optimism is reinforced and justified when good things happen around me.  And right now I’ve got an enormously good feeling of good things happening around me, with the potential that even better things are about to happen.  And I’m talking on a global scale here.  For me, the future of the world is looking brighter.

That’s because I’m one of the 26,000 people from all around the world (from nearly 170 countries) who are taking part in a massive, open (free), on-line learning course through EdX - Transforming Business, Society & Self  led by Otto Scharmer from MIT.   We’re exploring the environmental, social, and spiritual-cultural challenges we’re facing across the globe and the entrenched structures and paradigms of thought that mean our societies collectively keep on creating results that, individually, none of us want.    

It’s remarkable to realise that there are so many people – people from across the globe, from different cultures, with different beliefs and practices – yet we all share similar hopes and dreams, and worries and fears for the future of our planet and those who live on her.

Otto Scharmer ‘s U.Lab heralds a global movement for good of a scale and complexity never before experienced.   He practises what he preaches by leading from the emerging future*.  There are already many people in many places around the world doing many good things in many different areas of need.  But this massive global learning platform has the potential to bring the energy and visions all these change-makers together and create a momentum for change powerful enough and broad enough to shake the entrenched practices and paradigms of the past, and widen the opening to allow the emergence of a much healthier, more just and altogether rosier, future.

It inspires me to know that my work as a Facilitator-in-preparation with the Center for Courage & Renewal is based on principles and practices that resonate very closely with Scharmer’s vision for the emerging future.     I am part of a global movement that is part of a much greater global movement for change.

It is I who must begin.
once I begin, once I try –
here and now, 
right where I am,
not excusing myself
by saying that things
would be easier elsewhere,
without grand speeches and
ostentatious gestures,
but all the more persistently
-to live in harmony
with the ‘voice of Being’, as I
understand it within myself
-as soon as I begin that,
I suddenly discover,
to my surprise, that
I am neither the only one,
nor the first,
nor the most important one
to have set out
upon that road.

 Whether all is really lost
or not depends entirely on
whether or not I am lost.

 Vaclav Havel
(Human rights activist, political dissident and first president of democratic Czechoslovakia)