We have experienced another hard week of gun violence in America. For me, it has been a week of intense emotions – heavy emotions as well as joy and hope. How do we escape the doom loop? How do we stop partaking when it is dished up to us from all sides of the media and culture that we swim in?
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Embracing ‘fierce conversations’
Jan 13 2020
Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash
I have spent the past week in Florida embracing deep conversations, and a little sun! I’ve been meeting with the other Mennonite higher education presidents, attending the annual President’s Institute of the Council of Independent Colleges, and then visiting with several alumni and friends of Goshen College.
Recently, I wrote about my commitment to let my work “be shaped and given form in the conflict and constructive dialogue with the ideas of others.” Certainly this week has given me lots of opportunity to practice that commitment.
It has also been a week of being reminded that I love being around other college presidents, because when you get us alone together we get really honest. Higher education faces unprecedented challenges, and as leaders we need ideas, we need advice, we need each other! And the path is conversation…honest conversation.
The quality of conversations reminded me of Susan Scott’s excellent book, Fierce Conversations. You’ll get the gist of it here:
Scott reminds us: “What gets talked about and how it gets talked about and who is invited to a conversation determines what is going to happen.” Every conversation moves us closer to what we really long for — or moves us farther from it. “One conversation at a time we are either succeeding or failing,” she writes.
We all know the feeling when we’ve been part of a conversation that really mattered — one in which people were fully present, spoke honestly and clearly, and where ideas were formed and tested. We need more of that — not only at Goshen College and all of our places of work, but also in our churches and communities. One of the essential skills of leadership is crafting and hosting such conversations.
I am grateful for the fierce conversations going on amongst higher ed leaders in Indiana and in Mennonite Church USA, and similarly with Goshen College’s friends and alumni. Especially in these polarized times, I embrace Scott’s admonition: “The only sustainable competitive edge, unless you have a monopoly, lies in the area of human connectivity.”
So, who are you in conversation with this week?
Rebecca Stoltzfus
‘Even in darkness, ever-rising joy’
My 17-year-old self
Marvin Blickenstaff was my piano professor at Goshen when I began as a first-year student in the fall of 1979. Seeing him, and listening to his teaching and performance, transported me back to my 17-year-old self – a strange and vivid experience that was both disorienting and orienting.
‘Freedom for everyone’
Every day is a good day to learn a little more about history. Today, Juneteenth, is an especially good day to listen to a story that has shaped our present day through a long and painful struggle for freedom. In the words of Opal Lee, the grandmother of Juneteenth, the freedom we celebrate through the telling of this story is freedom not only for enslaved people, or Black people, or Texans, but for everyone.