Skip to content
Adam Fletcher, speaking, writing and teaching about youth, social change, education and more.

Adam F.C. Fletcher

Expert Support for Youth Engagement

  • Home
  • About
    • My Story
    • Past Projects
    • What People Say
    • Clients I’ve Worked With
    • Case Studies
    • In The News
    • Mailing List
    • My Videos
    • Online Payments
  • Services
    • Speaking
    • Consulting
    • Writing
    • Workshops
  • Online Learning
    • Adam Fletcher’s Online Workshops
    • Bookstore
    • Articles
    • Free Publications
    • Blog
  • Contact
  • project database

Category: personal engagement

Surviving Youth: Take Care of Your Heart

October 9, 2019 ~ Adam F.C. Fletcher ~ Leave a comment

A lot of us working with youth today came from hard times. Whether we came from adversity or trauma, or if we grew up in challenging ways, we have to take care of our heart. The times we live in today are conscientious and aware of how these hard times affect us. This article is about surviving youth. Your youth.

What Is Your Youth?

Your youth is two things: First, it’s the time you lived when you weren’t seen as a child or as an adult. Second, it’s the young people you are meaningfully connected to right now, whether they’re your children, students, program participants or otherwise. Youth isn’t “yours” in terms of possession; it’s yours because you are engaged in youth, whether we’re talking about the time of your life or the people you serve.

You need to survive your youth if it’s affecting your adulthood in negative, hard or challenging ways.

Over the past 20 years, I’ve facilitated self-care learning for thousands of teachers, youth workers and other adults who work with youth. Many people have shared that their awareness of the adverse childhood experiences they lived through as young people shine through in their current jobs. They specifically work to support young people growing up with abuse, household challenges and/or neglect, and they’re very committed. These people are surviving youth.

3 Ways to Survive Your Youth

Many people are surviving the challenges of their younger years at the same time they’re working to support young people. When we work within these realities, we have to be precautious, patient and promising for ourselves.

Here are three ways I teach people to survive their youth.

  1. Be Precautious. Your experiences make you relatable and grant you powers of reciprocity. However, they can make you vulnerable, too. If you haven’t addressed your childhood trauma intentionally, if you haven’t addressed your wounds and sought healing, then be precautious. Even if you have dealt with your suffering and challenges but still hyper-react, overreact or otherwise act disproportionately to the situations, you might need to continue being precautious. Take care of your heart.
  2. Be Patient. While you may want to challenge your own inabilities or charge into changing yourself and the world, you should be patient. Your calmness and self-control can be a model for the young people you work with, however you positively express them. If you feel anxious, excited or too ambitious, be patient and know that the challenges of your younger years are teaching you right now. Allow calmness to hold your heart.
  3. Be Promising. Seeing a greater picture, understanding the wider world and knowing the best possibilities are the best way to be promising to yourself. Don’t make promises you can’t keep, and don’t promise things you can’t follow through. However, hold your heart accountable, listen to your intuition and keep yourself true and honest with what you know best. Set the bar for your heart and keep yourself accountable.

Surviving your youth is essential to being a hopeful, supportive and effective adult ally to children and youth. The steps above can help you understand where to begin doing that. There are a number of great resources emerging in the field, and more organizations are supporting their staff dealing with their trauma as well as promoting trauma informed care throughout education, youth services, at home, throughout communities, and beyond.

However, ultimately you need to deal with your youth. Soothing the inner challenges can only go so far, and these steps are simply triage for the complex wounds you might have. Deal with those challenges, get help and move forward in your career, your family and throughout your life.

After working in hundreds of communities nationally, I am primed to explore this more. Call me to talk about my consulting, training and speaking services at (360) 489-9680.

You Might Like…

  • Personal Engagement Tip Sheet Series
  • Critical Self-Awareness
  • The Danger of Hype
Adam Fletcher workshop Take Care of Your Self
This is a flyer for Adam Fletcher’s workshop called “Take Care of Your Self” for teacher.

It Takes Humility to Change the World

August 26, 2017 ~ Adam F.C. Fletcher ~ Leave a comment

“If you have to write about it, you don’t know what humility is.”

—My Dad

Let me start by saying that I don’t know what humility is. For more than a dozen years I’ve consciously struggled with the word and the concept of humility, and I’m still not sure. I do know this: If you want to change the world, humility is definitely a requirement.

The dictionary says humility is simply defined as the quality of being humble. It also says that to be humble is to lower something in importance.

This means developing and maintaining a modest view of our own importance in public and personal regards to who we are and what we do. Sometimes, we are given struggles that humiliate us, cause us to get humble and send us down the road with compromise in our hearts. That is the core of humility: Accepting that everyone, everywhere screws up and is screwed up. 

That doesn’t mean we can’t make a difference in the world, and that doesn’t lessen our responsibility to make a difference in the world. It does mean that while we’re working for social change, we shouldn’t be arrogant. Being proud and selfish can mean not seeing our faults and hoarding our accomplishments without sharing props with the people we worked with. That selfishness is typical in a lot of activist campaigns, where peoples’ egos and conceits become obvious. Its selfish to think the world owes you anything; to think the good guy always wins; to think the world works in a balance that will benefit you particularly.

Being right is the enemy of understanding. There’s a difference between knowing what you know and knowing what you don’t know; one suffocates curiosity while the other leaves the door open to possibilities. In the same way that being perfect is the enemy of being good, so it holds true that being right is the enemy of being humble. Screwing up and being wrong, as well as tripping and falling, are all pathways to humility. They won’t automatically make you humble, but they can help you get there quickly.


Opportunities Ahead

“Humility is a sign of self-confidence; it means we’re secure enough to alter our views based on new information and new circumstances.”

—Peter Wehner

Despite all the things we may have accomplished in the past, there will always be opportunities ahead. Our ideas, activities, outcomes and struggles do not make us better than anyone else, more correct than anyone else, or less faulty than anyone else. Being humble means acknowledging our mistakes, accepting responsibility for our inabilities, and working in earnest to make progress within ourselves as well as throughout the world around us.

Its a leap for some people to understand, but just to check whether you’re paying attention, I’ll say the reality for me: True humility means accepting our equality with everything else on Earth, including past and present, old and young, rich and poor, human and animal and insect and plant and dirt. All of it.

No matter what happens, in trying to change the world we should always really, really try to be respectful towards everyone, all the time. Humility is an absolute requirement for changing the world. Look at yourself honestly, strip yourself of your pride, puffed up chest and closed eyes. Look at yourself and what you’re trying to do and allow yourself to develop a humble attitude. Then, correct your defects, ask others for help and keep taking action to make the world a better place.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate our successes, but it does mean that we shouldn’t be arrogant or boastful. Don’t brag. Feel quiet confidence, because in the long run your character will speak for itself. C.S. Lewis once wrote “If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.” Understanding that is a pathway towards being humble.


6 Ways to Be Humble

"True humility means accepting our equality with everything else on Earth, including past and present, old and young, rich and poor, human and animal and insect and plant and dirt. All of it." - Adam Fletcher
“True humility means accepting our equality with everything else on Earth, including past and present, old and young, rich and poor, human and animal and insect and plant and dirt. All of it.” – Adam Fletcher
  1. Learn to be humble and always strive to become a better person.
  2. Give up individualism and accept interdependence.
  3. Be passionately curious, deliberately open-minded and consciously critical.
  4. Find your moral compass and strive for constant conscious contact with what matters most to you.
  5. Stay humble while you’re trying to change the world.
  6. Stop being selfish and start being selfless.

If you want to change the world, be humble.

Oh, and if you think you are humble, you’re not. If someone else tells you you’re humble, you lose it. If you are striving for humility everyday in every way in everything you’re doing, you cannot become humble.


You Might Like…

  • Addicted to Others
  • Your Paper Lantern
  • Change The World? Change Yourself!
  • Personal Engagement Tip Sheets (PETS)

Elsewhere Online

  • “Personal Growth and Social Change (Part 1)” by Miki Kashtan for The Fearless Heart on August 7, 2010
  • “6 Ways Humility Can Make You A Better Leader” by Gwen Moran for Fast Company on August 11, 2014
  • “The Quiet Power of Humility” by Peter Wehner for The New York Times on April 15, 2017
  • “Leaders are more powerful when they’re humble, new research shows,” by Ashley Merryman for the Washington Post on December 8, 2016.

What You Need to Change the World by Adam Fletcher for adamfletcher.net
Learn more by reading What You Need to Change the World by Adam Fletcher

What YOU Need to Change the World

August 21, 2017 ~ Adam F.C. Fletcher ~ Leave a comment

There are a lot of people who want to make a difference in the world. However, many get frustrated because they don’t know what it takes.

After more than a decade of teaching people around the world how to do it, I’ve developed this list of what everyone needs to have in order to make a difference. They are grounded in my experience, pulled from a variety of research and proven by the fires of social change over the decades. These capacities make the difference between those who talk about successfully changing the world and those who actually succeed.

I call these items capacities because they provide definition to our vessel in life. They determine what we can do, who we can be, and where we are. Each of us is absolutely limitless in our capacities. If it helps you understand them better, think of this as a list of traits, skills, dispositions and abilities.

If the title is highlighted, there’s an article about that topic.

 


Capacities to Change the World

  1. Change Management—We successfully move people, leadership, and constituents through transitions and times of change.
  2. Humility—We develop and maintain a modest view of our own importance in public and personal perspectives regarding our efforts. Despite all the things we may have accomplished in the past, there will always be challenges ahead. No matter what happens, we want to always respectful towards everyone. We love to celebrate our successes, but not in an arrogant or boastful way. We believe in a quiet confidence because in the long run our character will speak for itself. We strive for humility.
  3. Collaboration & Teamwork—We build and sustain the necessary group and cross-group cohesion and operations needed to maintain success.
  4. Learner Mind: We work to S-T-R-E-T-C-H ourselves both personally and professionally. We see the differences between being stuck in a rut and moving through a groove. We know everyone, including me, has more potential than we ever realize. We work to constantly unlock that potential, both in myself and the people we work with. We will never “get it right,” and that’s a reality we gladly accept. The only way we can solve new problems that arise is by learning and growing myself to meet them head-on. We are learning.
  5. Conflict Management—We identify and successfully navigate conflicts and problems from an operational, day-to-day perspective.
  6. Openness: We are open books. Our availability and vulnerability can lead to creating strong relationships built on trust and courage. We can use these strong relationships to accomplish so much more than we can otherwise. It’s not easy getting there! We strive to always act with integrity, be compassionate and loyal, and try to be a good listener. At the end of the day it’s not what we say or do, but how we make people feel that matters the most. We care about others, both personally and professionally. Peeling away the layers, we work to be open.
  7. Passion: What keeps us going? It’s passion for engaging people. We’re inspired because we believe in what we are doing and where we’re going – even when we don’t know where that is! We don’t take “that’ll never work” for an answer. A lot of people tell me that the Engagement Revolution will never happen; imagine if we had listened to them so far! We have positive and optimistic attitudes because we have open eyes and are inspired by everyone around us. We are passionate.
  8. Decision-Making—We discern how, when, where, and why to make decisions, and how to help others make decisions, both on a micro- and meta-level scale.
  9. Community: We want to build community, not just colleagues. We serve children, youth, adults, and organizations by removing obstacles and enabling people to succeed on their own terms. The best decisions and ideas are made by people who take action, and we want to foster action among people. We collaborate with people and organizations to address the challenges in their worlds. Beyond that, we watch out for our community and care for others. We work together and play together with our community because our bonds go beyond the typical consultant/coach/trainer/speaker relationship. We work to build community.
  10. Diversity & Cultural Competency—We acknowledge, embrace, and enable all sorts of differences as powerful motivators and assets.
  11. Amazement: We seek amazement in this work, and we seek to amaze others when it happens. To amaze, we differentiate myself by doing things in an unconventional and innovative way. We go above and beyond the average level of action to create an emotional impact on people and organizations and to give them a positive story they can take with them the rest of their lives. We seek to amaze.
  12. Coaching—We guide, transition, and mentor others through their daily professional and personal challenges without attempting to teach or lead them.
  13. Boldness: We are bold and try not to be reckless. We aren’t afraid to make mistakes because that’s one way we learn. We take appropriate risks and we encourage others to take risks too, and we use risks to make better decisions. We believe gut feelings, and we know everyone can develop gut feelings about decisions as long as they are open to new ideas and can allow failure to happen.
  14. Motivating & Empowering—We constantly seek to engage others in consistent, substantive, and sustainable ways that are motivating, empowering and sustainable.
  15. Drivenness: We constantly change and embrace it with open arms. We never accept status quo and I’m always thinking of ways to change processes, perspectives, and opinions, hopefully for the better. Without change, we can’t continue to be useful to myself or other people. We are driven.
  16. Personal &  Professional Goal Development—We recognize our own goals and their relevance to our position, as well as help others do the same.
  17. Open-Heartedness: Help is a key word for us. We offer it and ask for it often. Often, we can’t do everything required in a project, so in a large part, part of our livelihood is helping others do their projects successfully. We are not expected to know all the answers, but we know where we can go to find them, and we share that with others. We help myself help others.
  18. Knowledge Management—Using diverse ways of identifying, developing, sharing, and effectively using the knowledge of communities, we work to expand the knowledge of individuals and organizations.
  19. Humor: We have a sense of humor, and we know it’s good to laugh at ourselves frequently. Living shouldn’t be drudgery or toil. We have fun and can be goofy even when there’s work to get done, and we get lots done. Being a little goofy requires being a little innovative, and we are always looking for a chance to fully engage in life by bringing out the fun and goofy side of it.
  20. Problem-Solving—We effectively, consistently and realistically identify, address, critique, and re-imagine challenges.
  21. Action Orientation: We avoid the risk of not trying and the regret of wishing we had done something. When we were young, we knew that it would be far more haunting to live with the regret of having not followed our instincts than to have followed our gut and failed. We have lived in action and done risky things. We see our ideas when we have them and make note of them. That’s why we always have a notepad. If we think an idea is compelling, we go after it. We live life only once, and we all die too soon. We always try. We take action.
  22. Training & Facilitation—We successfully identify and meet the needs of people through group training and individual learning.
  23. Simplicity: More and more, we realize the power of simplicity. Since we are in the business of ideas in action, we want to share them as effectively as we can in our complex world. We do that by being simple. It takes more mental space for me to create something simple or communicate something complicated in basic terms, but ultimately, that’s what people want. We don’t need to explain everything the first time around. WE need to facilitate the best tailored learning experience ourselves and our organization or community. We always need to break down knowledge into easily digestible, clear statements and actions. We work hard for simplicity.
  24. Verbal & Written Communication/Public Presentation—We engage the public through customer service and imaging.
  25. Release: We have to release everything we do when it’s done, and just let it go. Instead of trying to figure it out, we just let it be and accept that it is what it is, nothing more or less. It doesn’t determine our worth, others don’t validate our choices, and our contributions never go unnoticed, even if it seems like it. We release what we do when it’s done.
  26. Personal Engagement—We foster our own connection to the work you’re doing, maintain that connection, and sustain the relevance of the work you’re doing throughout our own life, as well as help others do the same.
  27. Focus: We work to transform the lives of youth, no matter what I’m doing. We do not look for fame or fortune, and we reject greed and deceit. Instead, we constantly look for opportunities to serve others, and we share our energy and efforts as often as we can. We see the ripple effect in everything we do, not just the flashy or huge things. If we don’t see the ripples, we trust the waves work. We know every action in our lives sets off an entire cascade of responses whose overall impact is huge, and we know this is true for others, too. We are focused.
  28. Compassion—We develop our ability to establish and foster empathy with people and places outside of our own personal or professional sphere.
  29. Listening: We speak by listening. Instead of rushing to come up with a quick reaction to what someone has said or done, we listen to them. When the time is right, we respond with knowledge. When we were younger, we assumed that the world was more interested in us than we were in it, so we spent most of our time talking. We were generally under-informed, we shared whatever we thought, we tried to be clever, and we thought about what we were going to say instead of listening to what someone else was saying to me. We have learned to slow ourselves down and engage rather than debate. We take time to really listen to what people say, and we try to learn from everything we hear. We listen to people.
  30. Systems Thinking—We see how small things that seem separated can create big things through complicated interactions.
  31. Facilitation: We provide appropriate support to learners. We do not train people, because we don’t do tricks or routine work. Instead, we adapt and contrast, modify and transform. We encourage learners through questions and activities that build confidence, stretch understanding, and foster engagement in learning. We facilitate learning.
  32. Deliberation: We regularly stop to check our intentions and affirm our actions, so that what I’m doing actually reflects who we are. If I’m not aware of why we do what we do, we are disconnected from what matters to me. If I’m disconnected, I’m ineffective. Staying aware of our intentions and being deliberate allows me to guide our work with purpose, and challenge myself when its time. We are deliberate.
  33. Challenge: When a we get too attached to the way things are, we lose the the greatest freedom of all: the freedom to fail. Without feeling like a failure, we don’t have to assume that a slight misstep is a deep plunge into the abyss. Instead, we step forward to challenges and see them each as an opportunity to innovate using a smart idea or strategic thinking. When I’m stepping up to challenges, we accept that failure is going to happen while I’m growing. Ultimately, we won’t become a better person because of how we respond to success, but instead, what we do with failure. We accept the challenge.

 

The entire list of capacities for changing the world includes: Change Management; Humility; Collaboration & Teamwork; Conflict Management; Decision-Making; Diversity & Cultural Competency; Coaching; Motivating & Empowering; Personal & Professional Goal Development; Knowledge Management; Problem-Solving; Training & Facilitation; Verbal & Written Communication/Public Presentation; Personal Engagement; Compassion; Systems Thinking; Challenge; Focused; Deliberate; Facilitate; Release; Listen; Simple; Action; Help; Amaze; Driven; Funny; Bold; Learning; Openness; Community; Passion; and Humility.

Respond below and let me know what you think!

If you’re really interested in these capacities, send me a message for my free one-page self-assessment tool. I also provide training and coaching in each of these capacities for groups and individuals.

 


You Might Also Like…

  • 5 Easy Ways YOU Can Change the World
  • Change The World? Change Yourself!
  • For Fighters: Five Steps to Change the World, NOW.

Full Personhood for All

February 9, 2017 ~ Adam F.C. Fletcher ~ 3 Comments

 

The sun is rising on schools around the world as student voice moves from being passive and coincidental to taking the forefront in schools through Meaningful Student Involvement that engages students as partners throughout education. In twenty years, this will be normalized practice in all schools, and this article will not seem so outlandish.

Timeline

By 2030, the complete enfranchisement of full personhood for all people regardless of age will be embraced world-over by governments and communities of all sizes, and young people will be seen and treated as fully human. Originally suggested between the lines of the Convention of the Rights of the Child, this will be the greatest transformation ever in society, and will ripple through all corners of our world.

Walking into an average school, the physical appearance, daily operation, and every outcome will be wholly transformed by this transformation. Rather than stuffy hallways packed with hyper-frenetic students seeking momentary relief between classes, children and youth of all ages will be welcome to come and go at will.

Behavior

Recognized as self-driven learners from their earliest years, all young people everywhere will be in charge of their own learning, and because of that, every single student will be completely motivated and surely empowered to initiate, drive, fulfill, and complete education to their own satisfaction.

Attendance in schools won’t be limited by age, either. Rather, students will be able to select the learning environment that best suits their desires. Adult learners will co-mingle with young learners as both learn to value the other in new ways.

The hearts and minds of adults will continue to expand as well. Our ability to more effectively engage young people in equitable ways will become invaluable as social change moves more rapidly. People who currently practice and teach the practice of student engagement and voice will be mainstreamed in professional development across all fields of industry, economy, governance, education, human services, and beyond. The frameworks of Meaningful Student Involvement will be seen as essential components for successful living far beyond schools, as the role of the learner becomes ubiquitous throughout all sectors of society.

Systems

This enfranchisement of full personhood will transform educational management as well, and necessarily so. Given the ability to vote from birth, the voices of young people will suddenly be valued by politicians in a new way. Those who did ran early programs to engage youth voice will be awarded with immediate youth support, while others will be required to earn the trust of students. School board members, state, territorial, and federal parliament members, mayors, all elected positions will suddenly be held directly accountable to students themselves. This will lead to a kind of authority that completely transforms educational management in a variety of ways. Pushing for the type of participatory engagement they routinely experience on the Internet today, children and youth will insist upon active democratic processes that reflect their best interests. School bureaucracies will be forced to reinvent their activities to suit the expectations of the elected representatives that control their budgets, who in turn will be voted in by young people.

The outcomes of these systems will be as radical as their transformations. Academic achievement will no longer be the measure by which school performance is metered. Rather, students will come to understand that personal engagement throughout their own lives and within the larger world they’re members of is more important. Schools will devise systems for measuring self-sustainability, personal growth, and social well-being. Their actions will be valued throughout the larger society, as the health of democracies suddenly spikes upon these transformative measures. Ultimately, economic growth, civic engagement, social contributions, cultural inheritances, and peace and nonviolence will be seen as the outcomes of the experience of schooling.

Pathways

As a pathway towards enfranchisement of full personhood for all people regardless of age, student voice in schools is one avenue. Others include youth engagement throughout society, including civic, economic, cultural, recreational, and familial activities. Further still, the creation of advanced structures of support for young people, including training, funding, and personal support programs, will help take society there.

Ultimately though, the most powerful step any of us can take is to transform the ways we see and treat children and youth every single day. If every one of us changed our own attitudes and behaviors, we would see the complete engagement of young people emerge as a new cultural norm within a generation. More importantly though, we would continue to influence and motivate succeeding generations of children and youth as they change the world they live in. I believe there is no greater action we can take.

 


Related Articles

  • Students Have to Fix Schools
  • Adultism in Democratic Education
  • 34 Ways to Meaningfully Involve Students

The Emerging Economy of Passion

March 10, 2016 ~ Adam F.C. Fletcher ~ Leave a comment

I have to admit something: for all of my life, I have tried to make a living following my passion. My experience in the fields of human motivation and civic engagement have shown me I’m not alone, and that there’s an emerging economy of passion. Here I reflect on my experience, and share some of the markers of this new economy.

 

“…[L]ife is too fleeting, too restrictive and too short to do work that doesn’t reward the soul.”

 

My Passionate Journey, So Far

When I was 14 years old, I realized that youth empowerment enlivened my soul. Over the next decade, I worked with in a dozen nonprofits striving to empower young people through mentoring, teaching, facilitating and supporting communities, families, schools and other places where children and youth spent all their time. I did this work in many roles: tutor, mentor, ropes challenge course facilitator, adult living skills teacher, naturalist, youth center director… Sometimes I volunteered; oftentimes I got paid.

Immediately after 9/11, I decided I wanted to teach others how to make a living following their passions, too. Reflecting on the struggles my family faced while I was growing up and watching the horrific events of that fateful day unfold on TV, I immediately decided that life is too fleeting, too restrictive and too short to do work that doesn’t reward the soul.

Up until that point, I met and was inspired by a lot of people following their dreams, making a difference, and living as fully and wholly as they wanted. Reflecting on those people and examining my own experiences, I found a series of patterns emerge and recalled powerful lessons. Absorbing research and literature on passion, engagement and empowerment, I found some vital points I wanted to teach.

In the 15 years since, I’ve worked to help people live their passions. I’ve spoke at more than 100 conferences worldwide and facilitated many workshops with countless young people and adults. All of them have shown me one thing: An economy of passion is emerging that is changing the world right now.

 

“We already have everything we need… All these trips that we lay on ourselves, the heavy-duty fearing that we’re bad and hoping that we’re good, the identities that we so dearly cling to, the rage, the jealousy and the addictions of all kinds – never touch our basic wealth. They are like clouds that temporarily block the sun. But all the time our warmth and brilliance are right here. This is who we really are. We are one blink of an eye away from being fully awake.” – Pema Chödrön

Markers of an Emerging Economy

I believe an economy of passion is emerging around the world. With more access to more knowledge than ever before, more people are cultivating the skills, habits and beliefs they need to live their dreams. This isn’t exclusive to wealthy white people in the Western hemisphere, either; instead, communities of color and the Global South are leading the way. Maybe that’s because they’ve never left this economy.

My experience and studies have shown me there are five major markers of this emerging economy of passion: Jobs of Passion; Population Sustainability; Nodes of Passion; Intergenerational Equity; and Obvious Interdependence.

  1. Jobs of Passion—In order to establish an economy, there has to be an exchange of goods and services for value. Jobs of passion allow people to follow their dreams, empower their interests, and engage their networks. There are no limits on what is a “job of passion” either: A gas station attendant can be equally passionate about their work as a visual artist. What matters are individuals’ self-perception of their work, and how they feel about their jobs. In the emerging economy of passion, people will have jobs they are excited, interested and fulfilled by.
  2. Population Sustainability—Economies of Passion can work because of the longevity of interactions; the healthy relationship between production and consumption; and the ongoing interest of individuals within it. These factors sustain populations where people are passionate about what they do, why they do it and what difference it can make. When an Economy of Passion has population sustainability, it can feed upon itself, grow its boundaries and engage people more effectively.
  3. Nodes of Passion—Practical, purposeful places where individuals can connect, engage and empower each other are key to Economies of Passion. Whether happening in workplaces, community centers, schools, or someone’s garage, nodes of passion engage like-minded people with common passions in collective action that can benefit groups and individuals. Beyond that, there are no parameters for nodes of passion. They can be online spaces or happening in realtime; they can be singularly focused or represent a multiplicity of interests.
  4. Intergenerational Equity—Young people and adults are gradually moving beyond historically negative, belittling relationships by establishing thoughtful, mutually respectful and empowering partnerships that benefit everyone involved. Economies of Passion require this intergenerational equity in order to engage, sustain and expand on positive things happening right now in communities. Intergenerational equity allows children, youth, young adults, adults and seniors to establish foundations for healthy, positive and empowering passions throughout an individual’s lifetime while providing sustained engagement for all members of a community.
  5. Obvious Interdependence—While people are increasingly understanding the interdependent nature of society, many don’t understand that our emerging Economies of Passion completely necessitate interdependence. Because of this, it becomes startlingly obvious throughout all facets of these economies, including each marker mentioned above. Jobs of passion require interdependence in order to exist and sustain; Population sustainability relies on interdependence, particularly as transparency and mutuality are made apparent; Nodes of passion require all hands on deck as individual own the collective good, and; since Intergenerational equity cannot happen in a vacuum can’t exist without attentiveness towards relationships, it is essential for younger and older people to rectify the imbalance of their interactions today.

These are the major markers of the emerging economy of passion for many reasons, not the least of which being that they are the most repeating factors I’ve discovered through my work. Other markers include Environmental Well-Being; Accessible Passion-Based Education; Apparent Culture; and Expansive Opportunities.

Experiencing an Economy of Passion in Action

In  November 2014, I sat calmly with some friends in the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art in Brazil. Invited there to speak at an education conference, my hostess took me to a beautiful park to share her community’s emerging Economy of Passion. It was there in the museum that she shared with me the power of The Tree School.

Located in the southern Bahia state of Brazil, this dynamic learning space was created by two local nonprofits, one working in Brazil and the other in Palestine. In each community, young people, adults and seniors were provided space to learn with each other. They were given access to tools and knowledge, provided with time and space, and granted explicit permission to follow their hearts and dreams.

As I sat in the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, I was a member of a circle of Brazilian students who generously translated the conversation to English for my sake. They told me about the baobab tree whose rootball was suspended above the circle and is pictured above. It was a metaphor for the inherent connection between nations where Africans were enslaved for the benefit of Europeans, and the baobab trees that grew where those slaves were originally from.

As I learned more about this school, I saw all the markers of an Economy of Passion become more obvious:

  • The people facilitating The Tree School were living their passion while the people learning there were finding theirs;
  • The groups who benefited over the years ensured future students would continue coming;
  • The Node of Passion wasn’t actually the physical space, but instead the entire community where the learning happened;
  • At the heart of all actions was Intergenerational Equity, where a 60/40 split of authority and ability often fluctuated as needed;
  • Everyone involved was knowledgeable, committed and felt strongly about the ways they relied on each other for their creativity, well-being and sustainability.

As The Tree School and my professional experience have taught me, the emerging Economy of Passion will provide opportunities for everyone to establish sustainable connections to their hearts and minds, and to share those connections with the people around them and beyond them.

 

“No matter who we are, where we are or what we’ve done, we all have passionate possibilities for the future.”

Changing the World with Passion

Everyone can access the Economy of Passion, and increasingly, more people are whether they know it or not.

As we establish more access to more interesting things that grip our hearts and minds, many of us are enlivening parts of ourselves that were rocked to sleep by today’s consumerist economy. Too many people have become too reliant on other people doing things for them and doing things to them, and we have allowed ourselves to become more passive and less passionate everyday. We don’t have to live that way.

Instead, we can activate our personal passions by identifying what matters to us most, naming that out loud, and giving ourselves the time and space we need to activate, captivate and motivate our own attention. By doing this, we can become active masters of our lives who nurture and infuse the emerging Economy of Passion.

If you’re interested in becoming an active player in the future, embrace the markers I’ve outlined here and work to acknowledge the emerging Economy of Passion in your community. No matter who we are, where we are or what we’ve done, we all have passionate possibilities for the future. The Economy of Passion will engage those as soon as you become engaged. Can your future wait?

 

Radical Engagement in My Own Life

December 11, 2015 ~ Adam F.C. Fletcher ~ Leave a comment

I don’t understand. In the neighborhood where I grew up, in this last week there have been A LOT of shootings, several murders, three home invasions, and a lot of robberies. I turn on pop music though, and here’s another rapper claiming to “rep the hood” while they’re driving expensive cars, wearing expensive jewelry and shooting guns. I don’t understand.

Shooting guns. With the rash of mass shootings over the last year, I don’t understand how people can still assert their supposed Second Amendment rights, allowing corporations to flood the streets with mass amounts of weaponry and exploiting peoples’ feelings of insecurity and doomsday-ism. I don’t understand.

In the place where I was born, there’s a lot of joblessness and fear washing into the lives of everyday people. With the North American oil market collapse, my cousins and brothers-in-law, their families and friends, and a lot of people are suffering from economic insecurity. Yet these same people are damning the election of a Liberal prime minister who wants to build sustainable power options across the nation, create a new economy that’s not reliant on raping the Earth, and building community among a damaged people. I don’t understand how anyone can hate that.

THOSE THINGS are all true. But I want to tell you what I DO understand.

I understand radical personal engagement. Everyday I’m faced with the choice of whether or not to maintain the connections I have within myself and to the world around me. Everyday I get to decide who I am, how I connect, and whether something matters to me or not.

I do understand the world is working exactly how it needs to right now. There are crappy situations for a lot of people in a lot of places, and even though they look compromised and painful, they are the right things for this moment. From the tragedies and drama, hurt and discouragement, something is getting dismantled, and something else is getting built.

That’s true for me, too. For the last several years, I’ve struggled to make sense of this career I’ve made for myself. I’m a bit of a consultant, a bit of a writer, a bit of a speaker, a bit of a designer… I’m a little bit of all of these, and yet, none of them. My audience wavers, bringing me in when its popular or convenient, but forgetting me when there’s more to be done. But this is exactly how its supposed to be!

Right now, the fiery furnaces of our individual bodies, hearts and minds, are working in concert with everything, everywhere to create the massiveness that is within each of us. The gangbangers and the concert maestros, the mothers and the children, the vandals and the politicians… all of us are within this place doing this thing in concert with one another.

Maybe Neil DeGrasse Tyson said it best:

“Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.”

 

Just by being alive, the world is moving along perfectly, imperceptibly excellently. I have lived through a lot of things, lost a lot of things, and done a lot of things, and I know this one thing is true for me. This is what I understand today, and what I wanted to share with you.

I really wanna hear from you. Give me a call or reply to this? Take care.

 

Reconnecting With Transparency

November 6, 2015 ~ Adam F.C. Fletcher ~ Leave a comment

Adam at age 5
This is me at age 5, already pondering the world from a 30,000 foot view…

My childhood was rough. As a way of coping with the experiences I had, somewhere along the way I started to gloss over details of my days by concentrating on big pictures. That was fun when I was younger, as it afforded me views I didn’t experience a lot of my peers having. However, it has cost me as I’ve grown older, since operating at 30,000 feet doesn’t make for close connections with a lot of people. I want those connections.

As part of my work, I get opportunities to talk with a lot of youth workers and community educators. Their perspectives of young people are fairly unique, and their jobs are always demanding. Every time I interact with them, I try to thank each one for what they do because youth workers saved my life as a teenager.

Recently, I’ve had the privilege of being in contact with a youth worker in the upper Midwest who has reminded me of something very important to me. In my email exchanges with him, BC comes across as a down-to-earth, authentic person who is conscientiously, intentionally working to be real, true and honest with the people he serves and the ways he’s serving them.

I’ve been pouring over his blog for the last few days. In the course of 100s of entries, he continually lays it on the line, connecting deeply within himself in order to have a more genuine relationship with himself. For me, it’s been a refreshing, ernest reminder of the power and potential of personal engagement.

So, I’m committing myself to reconnecting with two things in my writing from this point:

  1. My personal experience in life and through my work that allows me to do what I do, and
  2. My practice in personal engagement that sustains me.

In doing this, I hope I can speak as truthfully as BC has reminded me that its necessary to do. Over these last several years, I’ve been learning to let my feet truly soak into the Earth as I walk, whether or not I let my hands brush the bushes I past or keep my eyes to the skies.

When I was very young, my cousin cut off a section of an oil barrel and hung it from a gate header. He spray painted it “Adam 5” and used to launch me on wild rides inside of it. Today, I can’t imagine that would be any fun, but then I thought it was the bees knees!

Sometimes, being transparent can seem like a losing proposition. Openness leads to vulnerability, and being soft can lead to getting hurt. However, the old way of self-defense is slowly making its way into history. More than ever, we need leaders and followers who can be truthful, ernest and real with people.

Here are a few things I try to remember when I want to connect with my reasons:

  • What matters most to me?
  • Where do I come from?
  • Where do I want to go?
  • What difference do I want to make?

Those questions bring me back to my heart when I’m drifting, and nearer to my essence.

That’s where I strive to work from. Thanks BC – I appreciate you reminding me to do that!

3 Ways to Look Inside

September 3, 2015 ~ Adam F.C. Fletcher ~ Leave a comment

Personal Engagement Tip Sheets by Adam Fletcher for CommonAction
This is the logo for the Personal Engagement Tip Sheets by Adam Fletcher for CommonAction

Carl Jung once wrote,

“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.”

While a lot of things in our world want us to watch shiny, flashy stuff going on around us, the practice of personal engagement encourages us to look inside. That doesn’t mean you have to sit uncomfortably and call out “Om” for answers, or spend hours journaling alone in your backroom.

When I look inside, I’m most often in a contemplative space.

When you take a look inside you might be sitting in traffic or getting dressed for work; walking your dog or grocery shopping. Of course, you can meditate, do yoga, journal or paint, or do anything that you know gets you inside of yourself, and away from the world.

Becoming personally engaged means we learn to do look inside on purpose, instead of by accident. Personal engagement is a choice we make in our every breath, whether consciously or unconsciously. Engaging in a practice of personal engagement means that you are choosing to become engaged on purpose.

Here are a few ways I looks inside myself.

  1. Get alone. Whether I’m rushing through the airport or cooking dinner, when I want to look inside myself I have to get alone. That means turning inside myself and away from everything going on around me. When I do that, I can hear the small inner voice that animates my heart, and I can hear what it says. Sometimes I need to go away from everyone else, while other times I can be alone in the middle of a crowd. Either way, getting alone lets me look inside myself.
  2. Still the racket. Good ol’ Carl Jung. “Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.” I have big eyes that like to see the world around me. I love traveling, exploring, being enticed by motion and getting absorbed in doing things. However, to look inside myself I have to still the racket. I have to acknowledge the things distracting me and then consciously, deliberately look away and turn them off.
  3. Hear the small inner voice. In the middle of everyone is a small inner voice calming waiting to usher us through life. This voice is our connection with the middle of us. For me, it can come in the dark of night when I’m rolling around and unable to sleep; as I walk down the street and I’m approached by someone for a few dollars for a coffee; or when I’m rushing around and trying to do too many things at once. Its can be inconvenient! But its always true. Your small inner voice is waiting to talk with you.

Looking inside is an avenue towards personal engagement. In his classic work, Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse wrote,

“‘I shall no longer be instructed by the Yoga Veda or the Aharva Veda, or the ascetics, or any other doctrine whatsoever. I shall learn from myself, be a pupil of myself; I shall get to know myself, the mystery of Siddhartha.’ He looked around as if he were seeing the world for the first time.”

What are the ways you look inside you? I would love to hear your ideas – please share them in the comments section!


You Might Also Like…

  • Personal Engagement Tip Sheets
  • Look Back to Move Forward
  • Reflections of Heartspace

 

 

 

Steinbeck Quote

August 20, 2015 ~ Adam F.C. Fletcher ~ Leave a comment

Tonight, I’ve started testing a new brand. My project formerly known as “Engaging In Your Self”, “Personal Engagement” and “Heartspace” is now going to be called “Be Your Own Hero”. Tonight I made a new meme for it based on a quote from John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men:

“As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.”

Here’s the meme I made:
John Steinbeck wrote, “As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.” Be your own hero. Let it all remain and stop...
 

Be your own hero. Let it all remain and stop…

Share your thoughts in the comments section below!

5 Ways to Face the Fear of Living

July 27, 2015 ~ Adam F.C. Fletcher ~ Leave a comment
 “Slap! Slap! Slap!”

The sound of flip flops slapping across the old oak floor of the gym greeted me every hot summer night of 1995. That year, I was a determined youth worker in the neighborhood I grew up in. The news blared to the rest of the city that our hood was racked by gang violence, drug abuse and rampant vandalism and theft. I thought it was home.

I was a goofy 20-year-old white guy who moved from Canada as a kid to grow up in a hood I knew nothing about. I was jumped more times than I could count for ten years of my life. Crips and Bloods and Vice Lords roamed our blocks at all hours, with drivebys, drug deals and all kinds of crap happening all the time.

I could have been afraid of life then, and I wouldn’t have been wrong. But instead, I found inspiration in the strife and disruption; motivation from the pain and struggle. My parents struggled to teach me better, and their friends expected more from me. Adults who mentored me, including ministers, nonprofit workers and cultural teachers in the community, helped me decide early who I was and what I wanted to do in my life. My fears didn’t have a choice but to be allayed.

Eventually the sound of flip flops slapping went to the back of my mind, but the fear of living hung around somewhere in the back of my mind.

 

These are youth from my midnight basketball program in 1995.
These are youth from my midnight basketball program in 1995.

 

Growing Into My Future

A lot of life has conspired since I moved from my hood. I’ve made mistakes, learned lessons, built some things, destroyed others, made amends, held hands, grown vegetables, prayed, stolen, travelled, taught, broken stuff, and all the other sundry things some people do when they’re living. I’ve loved some people who’ve stayed on straighter and narrower paths than me, and envied others who veered so far astray that they never made it back.

It was when I was a youth that I found my trajectory in life. Growing up as a homeless child of a Vietnam veteran, border hopping ad naseum and unable to develop healthy attachments to the world around me, I struggled to make meaning in the world around me. However, as my life became more stable and I grew more adapt at learning (both through formal education and self-learning), I became more capable of finding meaning, constructing knowledge, critically evaluating, and sharing what I’d been through, as well as going into new experiences again and again. Transferring learning from one situation to the next, keeping an open mind in new situations, and critically thinking about what I’d experienced and learned let me become a knowledge creator, instead of simply collecting learning from other places.

All these experiences, from the “slap, slap” of flip flops to the challenges, rewards and realities of daily living have constantly startled me into living larger and more spectacularly than I ever expected to. The fear of living stayed in my imagination along the way though, as I moved from being a youth program worker to becoming a youth researcher and trainer, and then as I transitioned towards writing and speaking more. I’ve found that knowledge isn’t armor: As I’ve learned more, I’ve become more vulnerable and insecure. Where I stand, the world is becoming less and less firm under my feet, and I’m becoming more anxious to move. For a while now, I’ve been afraid of confronting the reality that I face today, rather than living in a projected fantasy that simply isn’t what’s happening.

This insecurity is the fear of living.

I am not a fearful person. I am generally not an immature person. However, just like everyone, I have my moments. Sometimes I am a chicken; sometimes I flinch; and sometimes I disappoint myself and others.

The days when I’m not busy ill-serving myself, I expect that I will grab a hold on my life, and do what Charles Fillmore affirmed to himself every morning at the age of 93:

“I fairly sizzle with zeal and enthusiasm and spring forth with a mighty faith to do the things that ought to be done by me.”

 

I want to live that! There’s the book I’m afraid to write, and the physical shape I’m afraid to get into. There’s the studying I’ve been neglecting, and the speeches I haven’t given. So many flights to be taken and world to experience, and the classes I want to teach. I want to love another person freely and endlessly, and raise more kids – I love kids! There are places I want to go with my family, including my awesome daughter, my wise mom, my spectacular sister and my best friends. I want to have great long conversations with old friends, and make new friends in places I want to be. There are so many things and places and people and opportunities and experiences I feel I’ve only been preparing for in all my life, and so much ahead of me that I look forward to.

Those aren’t the words of a fearful person. I hold onto life truly and honestly, and I hope for all that’s ahead of me to happen, good, bad, ugly and lovely, all of it. They didn’t come to me overnight.

 

Five Ways I Challenge the Fear of Living

In order to move ahead in my life, I have used a lot of different ways to embrace what I’m doing, why I’m doing it and when its getting done. Here are five ways I face the fear of living.

  • Affirm what works in life. Whether or not your life is filled with suffering and pain or happiness and fulfillment, there are things that work in your life. When I’m feeling most fearful of living, I affirm what works for me by writing it down, drawing it, and otherwise naming it. Sometimes that kicks my butt back into seeing hopefully.
  • Listen to people who aren’t afraid of living. I talk with people about life a lot. In my workshops, I regularly lead participants through exercises that let them celebrate what they’ve done by sharing it with other people. If you can’t see fearless people in your own life, then listen to music, read poetry, watch movies and do what you can to listen to people who aren’t afraid of living.
  • Give thanks. When I’m afraid, I find that I’m refusing to face things in my life. Whether its a deadline, my bills, projects, my relationships, or any other situation that I don’t want to face at a particular moment, I have to face my fears. I start doing this by giving thanks for the things in my life that work, have worked, expect to work or simply want to work. Sometimes I give thanks for other things too.
  • Name what doesn’t work. When I’m struggling, I have to be honest about what doesn’t work in my life. Instead of spouting off random disappointments, I get deliberate and actually name what I’m struggling with. That can be a firm, strong and pointed way to face my fears and make a change. If I lied because I was afraid of living, I name that. If I ghosted people because I was afraid of living, I name that. If I screamed, cursed, cheated, stole, manipulated or otherwise didn’t something that didn’t work, I name that. There’s power in facing my fears head on.
  • Take action. I have to do something to make a difference. When I’m feeling afraid of life, I try to face it head on, and the best way for me is to do that is by taking action. That action can be as varied as the ways I show my fear of living. Facing my fears often starts with making honest amends to others. My apologies can be a simple “sorry”, or much more. I have to get vulnerable though, and be earnest with the people I’m apologizing to. Other times it means getting back on my bike after the crash and giving it another go around. I’m scared to do that, but I still will. It means actually talking with people who I avoid, even when I don’t want to talk to them. It can mean being candid, and sometimes it means being bold. I want that book published, and I’m going to tell the publisher that I’m a good risk just because of that determination. But in some way, I take action.

I might never overcome my fear of living, entirely. I might not feel like challenging it somedays. However, I can always face it, and the steps above are how I’ve learned to do that.

I may not know much about living or loving or being, but I know that when I follow my own intuition and do what’s right for me, my life feels more familiar to me, more knowable, and mine. That’s a good, firm and real goal for me, because when something is mine, I’m not afraid of it.

My life is mine – and I am not afraid of it!

 

 

 


You Might Also Like…

  • It Is Not Fear You Are Feeling
  • My Fear of Heartspace
  • Constant Conscious Hopefulness

 

Posts navigation

Older posts

Contact Adam

Adam F.C. Fletcher
PO Box 6185
Olympia, WA
98507-6185

Email: info@adamfletcher.net
Phone: (360) 489-9680

All content on this website is © 2021 Adam F.C. Fletcher. All Rights Reserved.

Adam is with…

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • WordPress
Create a website or blog at WordPress.com
Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×