Hi, everyone, Sophia Bush here. Welcome to Work in Progress, where I talked to people who inspire me about how they got to where they are and where they think they're still going. Today, I'm working Progress. I am thrilled to share my conversation with an incredible and amazing word Smith. He's adventurous, self examining, and dedicated to evolving and helping others evolve as well. It feels incredibly timely as we look toward a new year. Today's guest is Mr David White. David is an accomplished poet and Associate Fellow at SAD Business School at the University of Oxford. He grew up in Yorkshire to an Irish mother and an English father, and his love of poetry and the natural world started very early in his life. Rather than formally study pop petry in literature, David took a different path and earned a degree in marine zoology after being inspired by Jacques Cousteau. He was a nature guide in the Galapagos Islands and led tours into the Himalaya that all of his adventurous travels ended up leading him right back to poetry. David has published several books of poetry and prose, including The Bell and the Blackbird, Everything is Waiting for You, and the House of Belonging. He also has the unique credential of bringing poetry into the corporate world for the purpose of enhancing leadership. On today's episode, David and I discussed the robustness of vulnerability being ravished by the natural world, and how sometimes you have to start undoing yourself in order to progress. We sat down via zoom to share ideas about destiny, finding yourself, and how poetry is, in his words, the language against which we have no defenses. If you've been hoping to see a little more poetry in the world lately, this episode is definitely for you. David, I'm so excited that you've joined me on the podcast today. I'm I'm such a fan of your work and I I think even more of your way of looking at the world. And to be able to dig in with you over the next hour so about where you find inspiration is something I'm really looking forward to. So thanks, my pleasure, good to be speaking with you. There's there's a place I would love to start as as a fan of poetry and the planet and learning, which are three things that that you study and teach so beautifully. Um, I think there's really no way to avoid coming across your work. And there was something I read you. You were interviewed about your collection The Bell and the Blackbird, and the person interviewing you asked about this recurring meme in Irish poetry amongkh who stands and here's the bell calling him to prayer. And you went into the most beautiful answer about it, and you talked about the bell as a call to prayer, calling you to a greater context to the one that you inhabit, and that the blackbird is the world calling to you as it finds you. You went in to speak about contemplation and and the crossroads that people live in constantly simultaneously. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, I think that meme isn't just an Irish meme. It takes that particular Irish form. Irish monasticism was so singular and so particular to that to Irish culture. But it's really the the invitation in all of our great contemplative traditions to to live at at the crossroads, the conversational crossroads, the invitational crossroads between going deeper, coming to ground, getting below the horizon of your personality and going out and meeting all the horizons of the world so that we're we're actually not supposed to choose between them. Where you know, the human conversation is holding the conversation between the inner what seems like the inner world, and what seems like the outer world. And and in many ways that's why it's so difficult, that's why it's so wonderful all at the same time. Do you find in your practice of holding both worlds, does it get a bit easier or perhaps a bit more magical when you finally accept that two things that or quite different are true at the same time. Yes, I mean I think yes. And then a third quality is created out of it, just as you find in a in a marriage, often the difficult parts of another person and the difficult parts of you are can create something quite remarkable. If they can be reconciled. You can apprentice yourself to one another in a way. Your ability to work with your own vulnerabilities I think gives you compassion for other people's vulnerabilities, and I often feel with vulnerability to that. It's where you're open to the world, whether you want to be or not, and you could. It's also it's also where the world is is open to you. It just seems to find you in those moments. You know, we you know, we talk about destiny for a human being, and I often feel that human beings always live out their destiny. But it it just it depends upon the leveler which you want to live out that conversation. You can live out your destiny from the point of view of complete frustration, it's still your destiny. It's still colored and the conversation. No one else can be as frustrated as you are and in the way that you are, and so it has your particular stamp on it. But you're your experience, your your destiny only through the the quality of distance. And the more you open yourself, the more vulnerable you make yourself, but vulnerability not as weakness, but as a different kind of robustness. The more you have a chance of actually consuminating that destiny, of actually through many wonderful and often quite painful steps, you know, beginning to hold the conversation at deeper and deeper levels. I love that idea of vulnerability as robustness. Yes, yeah, I have an essay I wrote coll vulnerability, and the first line lines are really about the way vulnerability just isn't a choice, and you don't you think when you're younger that you have a choice about being vulnerable or not. But the more we go through the verstitutes and difficulties of life, and the humiliations of life, you know, the humiliations of relationship, the humiliations of being a mother or a father, the humiliations of being an artist, you know, where you mess up in public. The more you realize that, and the humiliations of health actually of having difficulty, you know, with our own viability and weakness. Um, the more we realize that that we're creatures who are always vulnerable, and the only question is how you will inhabit that vulnerability? Will you inhabit as a wholehearted citizen of of grief and loss? The Irish know this very well. Oh, you constantly try and abstract yourself out of your body in order not to feel these vulnerabilities, and abstract yourself out of relationships with other people. You know, we often won't have intimate relationships with other people or with ourselves because of the because of the pain we've experienced through those intimate relationships and hoping that you can have a good friendship without pain, hoping you can have a good deep marriage or relationship without humiliation and heartbreak. Part of our maturity, I feel, is is learning that it's all approached through the doorway of of a kind of woundedness in a way mm hmmm, that it can be too defined quite beautifully by being being the way, the place where you're open to the world, whether you want to be or not. I think about it to your point when you talk about as we as we mature, we find ways to do this perhaps better. And I think about maturity as being marked by tenderness and people. I find that if we're willing to mature in a way where we remain open, we get more and more tender to others into their experiences and and you're right, there is no way to avoid vulnerability. I I consider it by this phrase, let go or be dragged, And I think about your going. You're going in that direction, whether you want to go or not. If you let go, perhaps you surrender and then you have a tender experience. And if you refuse to let go, you'll be dragged and perhaps become one of those people you reference who is trying to escape themselves all of the time to avoid the feeling. Yes, now we we meet at this moment where you have such beauty to share and wisdom to offer, and and the way that you do so in this conversation or in your work and your writing is so incredible to me. And I'm always curious when I sit with people who I admire who you were as a child, because I wonder as I hear the way you speak and your perspective on the world, my brain can't help but think was he like this when he was ten? You know who is David as a child? Old? Can you pay a picture for us of of your life? Then? I know that you grew up in Yorkshire. I know that your mom was Irish. Were you spending a lot of time in Ireland? What? What were you interested in as a child? Were you always curious about about words and people? Well? I was spending a lot of time in Ireland through my imagination and my mother's imagination. So I didn't tend to go over until I was later, until later in my team's but but it was ever present in our house through my mother's You know the way my mother shaped her identity and her singing and storytelling and all the rest of it. Um um. But I was, I'd say I was. You know, I was quite a visionary child in a way. When I look at that young boy I was. I was quite ravished by the natural world. I could look at landscapes and ice gates, the offer in England, you know, because the the weather systems are always changing, which is why people are talking about whether all the time. In Britain, and you've got these great moving skies and the moors and woods and fields around where I grew up, these steep valleys, and I was completely mesmerized by the world. And I felt mesmerized by the world. And I wasn't I wouldn't say I was very articulate about it, although I was writing from quite a young age. But I was reading a lot of very articulate people, even from when I was quite young. And I was very lucky, lucky to have really really good teachers, both in sciences and in arts, and and so I was schooled really well in in you know, the poetic tradition, which is very very rich in Britain of us. And I grew up, you know, not far from where the Bronte's sisters lived. They were they were a big part of the way everyone looked at the moor lends and and the skyscapes and the landscape around us. I grew up not far from where Ted Hughes the Pot grew up, and he had a very descriptive ability, you know, to bring to bring the wilder parts of that world alive. So I felt very privileged to grow up in both in a rich family environment. Um, I mean, we weren't rich financially, but it was a very rich inheritance from both Yorkshire and Ireland, and then a very very rich landscape, and and a marvelous school a series of marvelous schools and teachers that I went to. I was just very lucky that way. M hmm. Do you remember when when you think back on that time period, all of the things you were reading and when you began writing, did you have a favorite poem as a child. My favorite poem was was also the most terrifying poem that I read at that time, and that was Cole Ridge is the Ancient Mariner. I don't know if you know it's the classic piece. It was an ancient mariner. He stuffeth one of three by the long gery beard and scrawny hand, Why four thou stoppest me? And that the ancient Mariner, of course, as an old sailor who was stopping these three wedding guests on the way to the wedding. And they can hear the wedding in the background and there and the celebrations and everything, but they're so mesmerized by his story that they cannot go on, and so the wedding proceeds without him, while the ancient Mariner tells them about his harrowing tale of his voyage into the nether regions of the world. And I read that poem accompanied by these engravings done by a French engraver called Dory. They're the most famous engravings that go with courageous poem, and and I was terrified by it and mesmerized at the same time. So I really realized the impact. You know, I felt like passing hawk could come past sunk its clausing to me and then carried me off into this guy when I read the Ancient Mariner, And so I felt abducted by poetry and ravished by the natural world. And at the same time I was a local kid, you know, running around with all my mates and getting building dens in the fields and all the rest. So so it wasn't an abstracted, lonely childhood. But I had this this very powerful and singular relationship with the natural world. Singular also in the sense that I would go off by myself quite quite a lot. And I was I was quite quite competent later on to find that words with William words At, the great poet from the Lake District not far from Yorkshire, spent a lot of time alone as a child too, in the in the mountain. So some of us there, some of us have just made that way. M So I was that I was that boy who like to go off by himself into the woods and fields and on the moor, spend time. I just mess him. Yeah. I remember having such a feeling of kinship listening to an interview of Mary Oliver's where she spoke about her daily routine and how early she'd get up and just go out and explore and look around and observe nature. And it's not lost on me that so many of my favorite poems and words Smith take time to observe the magic in the world around us. And then you you describe it in such a way as being carried off by you know, a great bird of prey. That feeling feels familiar to me, though I don't think I've ever described anything in that way before. Yes, yes, and and and you say, especially as it pertains to that phrase, that it was this story of the mariner that did it to you, which makes me feel a bit giddy because you wound up getting a degree in marine zoology. And and I'm so curious. You know, through through your childhood and your schooling and as you mentioned, you know, being out with mates and playing and doing all of the things that boys in the wilderness do. What was it that led you from this poetic space. I imagine the fascination with the natural world had much to do with it it into marine zoology. How how did you end up choosing that path? Yes, well, first of all, it's is interesting, guy. I've never put the two things together of being mesmerized by the ancient mariner and and then find out myself failing in the Gallophagus Islands for yeah, um, working as a naturalist there. But they're modern, modern mariner if you will, Oh so. Yeah, Although I a slightly more comfortable time than he did. But although I had my own my own harrowing experiences too. Um. Well, it was another form of in transpmant, and that was with seeing Jacques Cousteau, the famous French marine zoologist. Uh. He was also an innovator in the diving world. He invented the aqua lung and the regulator through which you breathe. So and his series of programs on the television when I was young really captured my imagination, and I thought it was quite astonishing that you could actually have worked like this in the world where you could follow the life of the dolphin the board the good ship clips so that was the name of his ship. And so I I decided that I could always read a book of John Donne or Emily Dickinson or William Words. I didn't need anyone to teach me how to do that. But I didn't need someone to teach me biochemistry and the crib cycle and all the rest and uh. And so I put myself into sciences, knowing knowing that I could always write, I would always and I would always read literature. But I needed some help in sciences. And then I started to I think seriously about the sea and the ocean, which I had also always loved coming out of this, out of this entrancement through Jack Gusto, and then things came together in a very remarkable and coincidental in North Wales, where I went to university, and through a through a series of a series of of really remarkable events and help both visible and invisible, I found myself, um, in the Galpagus silence in a complete rise. You know, six weeks before I was there, I had no idea that my life was going to be heading in that direction. But yeah, so I got the most remarkable uh luck of the Irish job and and Gelepagus became my home for for over a year. What was it like? It's It's one of those places that in my head feels so romantic and raw and vibrant. And I just him, how did you wind up there? And what were you doing? You know, you said you had your own harrowing tales being there? What what was that like? Well? I mean, galapagus are romantic only in the sense of imagining yourself adventuring to go there. They're actually very very wild, very very austere, and very very fierce set of environments. Um, you know they the the edge between life and death is very very thin there. And when you live there and when you study the animals, and when you you you witnessed alongside them, you're you're witness to a lot of of living and dying. Uhreaches many creatures that you get to know as individuals. You know, we're not quite aware of it, but every creature in the wild has just as much individual character as as a human being has an individual human being. As you get to know them, they all have different behaviors and different mannerisms, and so you'd actually get you actually you know many animals although they were wild. You would visit them in certain places, and because they have no fear of human kind, you would get to know them quite well. And then you would find them dead on the beach when you came back on one time or another um and all you'd actually witness them being killed by other creatures. So so the land environment's very faierce that the the environment underwater is very fair, very fierce, especially when you're there to begin with, there you know six or seven different species of shark, and before you understand their behaviors and and are able to identify sharks in which which one is a day dress in which aren't, and at what time are they dangerous and when are they not? The you know, the whole environment can actually seem completely and utterly anti human um. So it takes some settling in, uh in order to really really feel at homing Lepigus as the human being were just visitors there. Having said that, it's just I mean, it's one of it is one of the most remarkable places in the world. Funny enough, just this morning I was looking up on the internet to see what effect the virus was having on the islands, and of course all of the visiting and all of the boats, including the boats I used to work on, um have stopped. UM. So I'm sure all the animals and birds are getting a great rest from everyone. Although the place was well organized and for minimum impact, you know, just high number of people. But it is one of the most remarkable places on the world, in the world, but very very fierce. Indeed, when you're there, you get a sense of what the world was like before human beings evolved, never mind took over creation. So so it's quite disturbing from that point of view. If you really attention, yeah, in in your time there, and I know you spent time in the Amazon as well. What what was your work you know you mentioned being on boats. What what is the experience of working in those environments. Yes, I was a naturalist guide Gia naturalista for the the National Park and for the company that implied me you. You had this strange work relationship of working for both the National Park and for the people who actually paid your wages. And no one, no one can visit any of the islands or any of the visiting parts of the islands without being in the company of a Gianetta Dalista and and and so you're a kind of policeman or woman. But you you do all your best policing through educating, you know, if you really teaching about the the both robustness and fragility of the place and not carrying things away and not disturbing nesting birds, and everyone gets it, you know. And so um it was really you know, I was privileged to spend hours every morning and every afternoon and then from the boat also paying attention to animals and birds and landscapes. There were other than myself, So in many ways it was like a two year meditation retreat um in the sense that you were constantly paying attention in silence. Two, this astonishing creation that we're a part of sorts very very transformative that way, and and absolutely remarkable as a as a a place of apprenticeship, I would say to the two poetry and the writing of portray in the poetic tradition, although I wrote very little when I was actually there, but as a yeah, as an apprenticeship into deeper states of attension from which you then speak, it was. It was a marvelous, marvelous place. Mm hmm. Do you think that was perhaps your biggest takeaway or observation from that time period in your life, the the way to pay attention, the way to sit in reverence. Yes, um, it was. It was a very participant tif. It wasn't just sitting because you were having to You were having to help navigate and stand watch on the sailing board. At that time, we had no gps um. It was pre gps um. There were no navigation lights in the islands, and all of the sailing was done by night, so we had lots of adventures and lots of near misses sailing in the dark between these islands, you know, and you did it NonStop. So anything that can go wrong at sea will go wrong, and many things did so, lots of near drownings, lots of um close shaves, and and always working with this fierce element called the sea or the ocean, whether you were on it or trying to get ashore through the through the surf, you know, boats turning over the beach when you were trying to get people ashore and bit and buy things and poisoned by things. Goodness. So yeah, it was. It was a really actively reverend time. It was. It was a sense of I was you know, it was great being a young man or woman there because it was very robustly embracing you. Yes, and how did you make a shift from that type of work into writing? What? What was it that made you decide you were ready for the next adventure? Yeah? So I was reading the whole time I was there. I had a shelf full of potrait that I'd taken with me. I got to know those parts very very well. Indeed, you know, there was no internet in those days. Um so um I uh. I read a lot of John Donne, which I had with me at the time. It just happened to be one of the books I flung in my bag, and then this moment so and then other books that other that travelers would bring on board, and so I was always keeping my poetic identity, your life, you could say, but I wasn't writing at all, um um. And I had the choice to stay on in Gelephagus because we were needed as guide. Trained guides were hard to come by, and but at the end of my time there, I decided I could stay if I wanted, and I would have a remarkable life, but it would be it would be the Peter Pan life of never actually growing up. Uh that I knew there were other forms of maturity, of apprenticeship, of exploration which had to do with my work in the world, whatever the full form that fully took, you know. So I left and traveled off through South America with my then girlfriend Kibbe quas woman Mum, and had a very traumatic time of it actually, because I was very happy, very robust, very healthy, on top of the world and completely competent in the Galapas Islands. And then I went through this kind of undoing when I left the island. I went through this incredible vulnerability physically. Um. I went through some strange kind of physiological illness where I couldn't eat, and I started shedding the pounds and and I went through a kind of molting phase, you know, of of suddenly being strangely feeling strangely incompetent in the world from being absolutely competent in in Gelepargus uh. And it was allied with this break down in my body that was occurring, um. And that was allied with the that then, of course created difficulty in my relationship. So I had the breakdown of my body, the breakdown of myself identity and the breakdown of the relationship all happening at once as we traveled through Peru and Bolivia and yeah, and then I said said goodbye to my partner in in Machu Picchu, you know, match Picchu. Very romantic place to say goodbye um. And then I made my way back via California, UH, where I lived on a goat farm for six weeks nooking goat and in Santa Rosa, UH, and then made my way back to Britain, so where I tried to adapt to the northern winter having lived for two years on the equator in the pair of shots and a T shirt. So it was all all good for me, but quite difficult times after I left Alephigus. I imagine, yes, and it and it strikes me because I think about some of the work that you do now, this this world of conversational leadership and and and you speak so much about adaptability. How do you think you began to find your way back to yourself at that point to two adapt Well, Um, you know, I had I lived through um the winter in North Wales where I gone to university. I mean I did go back to auction see my family and everything, but North Wales was my kind of spiritual home at the time, but it was very difficult. I mean, a wet Welsh winter is quite difficult to live through living in the tropics. And I woke up one morning with the notion that I should go to India. And at that stage in my life I always moved very quickly, and within a few days I was on my way to India. And the intuition was really good because first of all it took me to India, but more importantly it then took me to Nepal and the Himalayas. Um I had a series of absolutely incredible and remarkable um invitational experiences in those mountains. We you know, it's the classic voyage to the Himalayas, you know, to find yourself. And it actually worked for me at and through you know, through adventuring in the mountains and through getting really sick and through almost die ing of any big distentery up in the the bet areas of Nepal and then um walking out back by myself. I really turned my right life around and I had a sense of of a kind of soul adventure that I was on, a really palpable sense of the soul adventure that I was following. I feel that the essence of that what what adventure lies ahead, or the potential of it. When I read one of my favorite pieces that you've written, which is what to Remember When Waking, and you talk about that, it's it's a as you mentioned about the g Up Goes, it's it's almost a razor's edge between two worlds. And while it isn't life and death, it's it's that dreaming and waking. It's it's the other dimension that we touch in a different kind of consciousness and the place we might go today that moment seems hyper precious to me in a time like this, you know, being being on the precipice of possibility. I'm I'm curious. Do you think that that adventure in the Himalaya did that inform a perspective like that one? Well, I suppose you know the poems about um really being present at the threshold between your sleep and suddenly coming back into the world, suddenly opening out into this consciousness that we take is the every day but which isn't every day at all. It's absolutely miraculous and remarkable, and your sleep as has enabled you to reimagine yourself in it and to re learn what you're involved with. So I suppose you could say there were lots of lots of experiences in the Himalayas around that, around that waking. Uh. There's one poem called Muktinas about waking in the morning before leading a group of people over a very high pass. This is from a This is from a a much later trip after my first trip to the Himalayas, when I and then I returned and took people on on tracks I suppose through the mountains and waking one morning before going over the throng La Pass, which is eighteen thousand feet and when you're at eighteen thousand feet, things can go very, very wrong. You're on a kind of knife fetch of survivability, and when you have a group, it's all magnified by the number of people you have. The more people you have, the more chances there are of things going wrong. So waking into that morning when we were first setting up the pass was waking into a really powerful sense of responsibility that I wasn't wasn't necessarily fully ready for. We talked about the power of leadership and the power of responsibility, but we don't talk about as much about the vulnerability of leadership here. So so this is the piece. It's God, I think I can remember remember it. It's mud enough dawn at Muktinough, and I looked through the window, white mountains and the solid slopes of snow, cold scent of pine, and the raven call of black birds circling upward toward nothing. Dawn at muckt Enough, and I look through the window, white mountains and the steady slopes of snow, cold scent of pine, and the raven call of black birds circling upward toward nothing. So the breath escapes the mouth, So the breath escapes the mouth spiraling in a cold room, so the words leave our lips. The first line of a long palm, with no courage to finish, So the lines leave our lips, The first lines of a long palm, with no courage to finish. This is the pay This is the place the path begins. The empty room beneath the breath, where everything we've broken comes back to be repaired. Mm hmm. This is the place we stop. Look up, um see it here a child crying. Ah, I've just lost the last part of it now, um, the first lines of a long poem, with no courage to finish. This is the place the path begins. The empty room beneath the breath, where everything we've broken comes back to repaired, where bitterness returns, turns to a final sour nous, sourness on the lime washed walls, and disappears. This is the place we stop. Look out the window beneath us, a child is crying, while above a tight arrow have driven ponies points the way to the high pass. And I did actually have that experience of looking out the window saying, oh my god, I've got to lead everyone up there. Uh, this path that disappeared up into the waists, you know, of twenty feet and and I heard this child crying beneath me, and I saw this arrow of Tibetan pony has been driven up the hillside at the same time, And of course that was exactly exactly the conversation I was involved with. Was was the child, you know, the part of you that wants to be taken care of by the world, and the world literally in the form of an arrow, inviting you out of yourself and beyond yourself, beyond what you feel you could do. And the ability to hold those two qualities together, I think is is actually part of leadership. If you have no relationship with the crying child in you, then you have no compassion for people who work with you, are for you when they get frightened and you and perhaps even more importantly, you can't recognize when they're frightened. Ah, so you can't help them or you can't get others to help them. So um yeah, So lots of different forms of waking into the world. And the interesting thing is, throughout our life we never stopped disappearing and then waking back into the world. You do it when you're when you're an infant three days old, you do it, you do it when you're ninety years old. Yeah, So, always disappearing, always waking again, and it's always it's interesting to think that we might be doing that ourselves too, in in every part of our lives. Well, that that ebb and flow, that cycle, it's title really thank you for sharing that. That was really just so so beautiful. Thank you. It relates so much to the conversation we were having earlier about vulnerability. You know, do you surrender to it? Do do you open yourself to experiencing yourself fully including the pain or the fear, or the loss, the things we so often are encouraged to turn away from. If if, if you can become more whole, you can see others more wholly. And so when you when you relate that to leadership, what what can you tell us about conversational leadership? Because you work on this now, you apply these philosophies to working with people in leadership positions with companies, and I wish there was more of this energy in those spaces. So how did that begin? And what is it that you're teaching these leaders to do? Well? Um, that's a very very big topic. But um, you know, one one immediate thing I can think of is that when I'm talking about conversational leadership, I'm often you could just as well say invitational leadership. Just when you think about it. If you've ever had a boss, or I suppose in your case as an actress at an actor a director, you know, one of the first things you're looking for in leadership from that person is is their invitation. You want to know what what invitation is this person making to me? And one of the existential disappointments around leadership is when you find they're making absolutely no invitation at all to you. They're so caught up in their own lives and in their own defensive postures, and they're so afraid or that they actually aren't making any invitation to you at all. And that's that's one of the most dispiriting things in the workplace. And and then it's interesting to ask the question why is it so difficult for all of us to make invitations actually, And well, because it's actually one of the ultimate forms of vulnerability. When you make an invitation to someone else, they will always respond in a much larger way than you would first imagined. When you made your invitation. You know, and you know that's true in the intermacies of of a love relationship. It's also true in an organizational sense. You if you make a heartfelt invitation, it will always come back to you in a way that breaks apart the identity that first made the invitation and started the conversation. Um. So that really is an invitation not only to understanding, but to self understanding. You have to actually to be a good leader. You have to apprentice yourself to yourself. You you have to find out where you're afraid of the world. You have to find out where you're reluctant to have the conversation, where you're not very good, and where other people might be better than you. You've only got one pair of eyes, one pair of ears, one pair of hands as a person, and one intellect and imagination. If you're in an organization, you're surrounded by dozens of ears and eyes and hands and intellects and imaginations. Yeah, there are many of those eyes that see better than you do in certain directions. In other directions you see better than them. But you try to bring in a ecology of qualities. So this is where you have to be big and you know, one of the things we notice in our present politic the leadership is the lack of generosity and bigness, you know, just the inability even ever to admit that you might be wrong, uh oh, that you might have got something wrong. Um, that you need other people in order to to do something well and competently. Yes, And isn't it in isn't it interesting? Because we do know that as humans we need other people. We evolved in a village, we evolved in an ecosystem, to your point, and and I love that the the observation you make in your verbiage there goes back to your earlier work as as a scientist, because it's true, every living organism in an ecosystem has a place and has a purpose. And it it really reminds me that I was so lucky to to work for a boss. Early in my career, I worked for this lovely executive producer on a television series who directed a lot of our episodes. And I was shadowing him as a director to prepare for my first foray into directing, and I was asking him about what his biggest realizations have been, and he he said to me, my career as a leader changed when I realized the best idea always wins. And he said, whether that's my idea, your idea, the idea of the Dolly Grip or the third Electrician, best idea always has to win because this is a team sport loveless. Yeah, and that's a great example. Yes, mm hmmm. So is that part of what you work on when when you're encouraging leaders to be bigger, when you're reminding them that true leadership requires generosity. Are are you asking them to get vulnerable or perhaps teaching them how to do so in the workplace while I do it through my art phone, which is portray So I used poetry just as much in the organization world as I do anywhere else. And so the physicality of the poem um creates the experience in the room. You're not talking about it in the abstract. So often, UM, my job is to actually create a hunger to want to have the conversation. And that's half the battle. If you can set that hunger for the conversation up, Especially in men um, they get quite excited about having these courageous and difficult conversations. And I do work with what I call the phenomenology of conversation, which is just a fancy way of saying what happens along the way when you try to have one? Ah, And I've identified these seven steps, um, and that's the book I'm writing at this very desk right now. Actually is it's called a timeless way. Seven steps were deepening any conversation, And they're steps, they're timeless steps, but I've kind of uncovered them in and put them in there in a sequence. I suppose, Thank goodness, because i was about to say, how do we learn? And I'm thrilled that you're writing a book about this? Do you want to know what the first step is? I would love to know what the first step is. The first step in deepening the conversation is to stop having the one you're having now, just to stop it. Yeah, so and create a relationship with silence. So and on it goes from there. Yeah. Mm hmm. That's beautiful. Mm hmm. When you talk about setting the space with a poem, using your art form to encourage this, which truly does it stops any kind of you know, quote workplace conversation these people are having and you put them in their heart, you put people in their bodies with poetry you put them in in a or open emotional state. It happened to me when you read that poem to me just a moment ago, I lost my place. It took me a second to recover and figure out what question I wanted to ask you next. What do you think it is that makes a great poem? Why do you think they affect us that way? Mm hmm, Well, I always say one of my definitions of poetry is that it's language against which we have no defenses. It's like when you just say something exactly right to someone. You've been trying to say it to them for years, and finally you say it at exactly the right moment, in exactly the right way, with exactly the right rhythm and cadence, and they hear it M and you know they've heard it. Uh, that's portrait. Yeah. Um, you've actually probably fallen into I am the pentameter. You've actually probably got a chorus in there where you've repeated yourself for a couple of times. You know. Um, Poetry is not abstracted art form language. It's the way human beings speak on their emotional and intellectual edge. So you'll often you'll often hear poetic diction in a good marital argument, you know, yeah, emphasis, repetition and h and a voice you know that's discovering what it's saying as it's going along, covering that it knows something. And you know, in the best marital argument, both sides of the argument. Here something new, and once it's said, then the marriage can't go back to where it was before because it's being said, you've actually emancipated in yourself into a new articulation and a new level of understanding. And that's exactly the same uh, exactly the same dynamic in the writing of poetry. You're trying to overhear yourself say something you didn't know you knew, and it's couched in a way, often in a very beautiful way, where it just pierces you and carries you off. The language is just taking you and and got you just beyond yourself here. That might this might be a good place to finish with the poem. Actually, yeah, I would love that. I've I've got one last question for you, and we can we can do that now where we can do that at the very end. But maybe it's better that I ask you now and then we finished very end with your words. Okay, So my my favorite and final question that I get to ask everyone is, as you know, the podcast is called work in progress. Always curious with my guests when you hear the phrase, be it personal or professional, what is it that triggers in your brain? What what comes up for you as a work in progress in your life right now? A work in progress? Um? Well, I there's two things come to mind. One is, um, the kind of inner exploration, and the the quarantine and the lockdown is very good for me at the moment I'm sitting you know, I sat then for many years chapter of my life we didn't speak about today. But so I'm getting back on the black cushion every day. And that's a powerful magnifier of of inner ex exploration and dropping dropping below the verbal and into this formless but incredibly present state. So that's very sighting at the moment for me, that feels like wonderful work that I've returned to. But that is a really progressing in a very very powerful and magnified way. And then the other working progress is this this book conversational you know, these sudden steps for deepening any conversation. And I just feel like I've got to the place where I just want to write it in an incredibly simple way. So it's rather than it being a work of art on my part, although hopefully it will be, it's just something that is absolutely clear and helpful to people. So so I'm quite excited about the kind of invitation to radical simplicity and in in the writing of that book at the moment. So exciting, all right, lovely, And if there is a poem you'd like to uh give us in parting, I would love that. And if that doesn't feel right, it's okay too, Yes, I'll This seemed to follow on from from the question earlier getting over yourself, And um, I think one of the one of the difficulties in life is that when we get very competent at something, we start to actually go into a dynamic of impersonation. After a while, we get so you we get so used to being that competent person, whether it's a competent style of poetry, or a competent musician, or a competent style of acting or and in order to progress, you have to kind of undo yourself. Uh you don't realize it, but you've started this processes of impersonation, and the impersonation is incredibly subtle because you're actually impersonating yourself. You don't realize it's actually you've actually moved on, but you don't know. But you don't really know that you've moved on. So so this is an invitation. It's called just beyond yourself. M hmm, to that place, yeah, just beyond yourself, Just beyond yourself. It's where you need to be, just beyond yourself. It's where you need to be half a step into self forgetting and the rest restored by what you'll meet. Just beyond yourself, it's where you need to be half a step into self forgetting and the rest restored by what you'll meet. There's a road always beckoning, as a road always beckoning when you see the two sides of it closing together at that far horizon and deep in the foundations of your own heart at exactly the same time, That's how you know it's where you have to go. That's how you know it's the road you have to follow. That's how you know it's just beyond yourself. It's where you need to be. The show is executive produced by me Sophia Bush and sim Sarna. Our associate producer is Kate Linlee, our editor is Josh Wendish, and our music was written by Jack Garrett and produced by Mark Foster. This show is brought to you by the Brilliant Anatomy