Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.
Greek Proverb

Imagine that you are in a room with a small group of other adults, say about eight to ten of them. You work closely with them every day. Now imagine that you have spent about two and a half hours every other week with them talking about where your personal and professional lives - your values, aspirations, concerns, hopes and fears - all intersect. In other words talking about things that really matter to all of you. There are conversations about feelings of adequacy, of whether or not you can do this work. Questions about generosity and stinginess surface – What does it really mean to be generous? Am I as generous as I think I am? Am I as stingy as some people say or imply? Questions about authenticity emerge - Am I an imposter, just faking it and hoping that I won’t be found out before I really do master this work? Questions about identity emerge - Do I really matter? Am I loveable? Questions about efficacy arise – Is what I am doing here making any difference? Will it matter a year from now what I am doing today? Deep, powerful, moving questions that you encounter every time you come together. And then…

Imagine that after several months of being together, you say to the group “I trust you will tell me the truth, so what I really want to know from you is…” and then you ask your question. A question that perhaps you have never uttered before, but you realize in that moment that it is a question, perhaps it is the question, that has shaped much of your life, that drives many of the choices you have made – both large and small. And it is the question you may have avoided asking your whole life... until this moment. What would that question be?


THE ORIGINS OF ADULT REFLECTION

All truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer

The organizational structure, or process tool, that became known as Adult Reflection was the result of several conversations among adults working in HOME, a youth development organization in Alameda, California, during the first months of the organization’s formation. The initial question they grappled with was how do you create an authentic youth and adult collaboration – one that is not just in name only, but is a true collaboration on a day-to-day basis. Then they wondered what would be the best way for the adults to mirror what they hoped would occur in the youth they served? The founders of HOME began with a deep belief that this rigorously integrated structure would enable true transformational learning – learning that creates emotional as well as rational clarity – to occur for everyone who is committed to building the organization’s capacity to have a positive impact on the youth they serve.

Of the many learnings that have occurred over the six plus years of convening Adult Reflections at HOME the most significant one is just how essential it is for the adults working with youth to have a finely honed sense of curiosity. Not for its own sake, but as a way for adults engaged in the work of youth development to also engage in the hard work of their own development, of their own learning, as well. Curiosity seems to be the fuel that energizes these adults as they struggle with the youth to co-create an environment that is truly responsive to the needs that adolescents have to learn about themselves, about others, and about the complexities of the modern world in deeper ways.

This passionate curiosity may also be the key ingredient in sustaining an atmosphere of urgency – a kind of dramatic intentionality that generates as much heat as it does light. The purpose of Adult Reflection in HOME is to help each adult participant come to a conscious realization of what that force is for them in their lives. This powerful kind of awareness comes as the result of a particular process of deep self-reflection in action.

Popular culture often confuses reflection with introspection. While personal and private self-inquiry is crucial to self-understanding, it is only part of the process. The other, equally important component is reflection in action – an inquiry process not unlike dialogue in which meaning and understanding emerge from a particular type of conversation. From this perspective, action precedes insight rather than the more traditional analytical model of insight followed by action. In the case of Adult Reflection the conversations involve ever deepening and challenging questions about what adults believe about themselves and their work. These conversations also seek to discover what happens when adults speak honestly and directly to each other in order to have an impact in ways well beyond the superficial – an impact both in Adult Reflection and in their day to day interactions with youth and other adults.


WHAT IS YOUR QUESTION

Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it,
without knowing what's going to happen next.     Gilda Radner

To build on the quote above we might say that life is just as much about knowing as it is about not knowing. This awareness of not knowing, so characteristic of adults who are awake, stimulates a different kind of curiosity than we see in children. For young children curiosity is usually tied to wonder and amazement. They become mesmerized at their first encounter with a spider web or witnessing the descent of an autumn leaf. Ancient wisdom traditions teach us that there is a deeper awareness of the mysteries of life, an awareness that did not escape Gilda Radner. For adults to come to know life in all its profound mysteries we must rekindle the capacity for wonder and amazement in every encounter we have, to step into the future not knowing and knowing at the same time.

Why is this form of a seemingly esoteric kind of knowing important for adults working with youth? Because when adults find the deepest connection with their authentic selves they can model their passionate curiosity for the youth they serve. In turn the youth will mirror this back to the adult and to their peers. On numerous occasions adults who have participated in Adult Reflection report that when they begin to become truly curious about who they are now, as they become current with themselves, they bring a new intensity to their work, which has an immediate impact on the youth they are working with*.

In a nutshell this is what real, lasting and transformational learning is all about. It is simultaneously mundane and magical. And it is the result of the hard work of taking time over time to transform oneself into increasingly more self-aware and engaged participants in the co-creation of one’s environment. This is at the core of Adult Reflection’s purpose – not self-awareness for its own sake (although that is a good unto itself) - but a transformational process that enables adults to engage youth and each other in an authentically powerful way, one that transcends the positional power that many adults employ in more traditional organizational settings.


MAKING ROOM FOR THE NOT YET ASKED

Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.    Rumi

In the literature of Family Therapy and Systems Theory the corollary to this kind of knowing/not knowing polarity is the notion of “the not yet said.” In a therapeutic context space is created for individuals (either in a private, family or group setting) to say what has not been said, to tell their story in the deepest and most profound meaning of this word “story.” In such a space a skilled therapist will generate in his or her own mind certain creative hypotheses about the underlying dynamics of the system and ask questions or make comments that serve to enhance this sense of spaciousness. The questions are open and serve a number of purposes – not the least of which is to allow the therapist the opportunity to test out these hypotheses.

While Adult Reflection shares this urge toward explicitness, it differs with these therapeutic models in some key areas. Where Family Therapy is concerned with statements or assertions “not yet said”, Adult Reflection goes further into the inquiry by focusing on the questions “not yet asked”. Questions surface about how to repair rifts in relationships with peers – How do we recommit to our shared purpose when you have let me down? How do I reestablish trust with you after I acknowledge that I have let you down, or broken an agreement? How do I establish and sustain boundaries between work and my personal life and at the same time allow these boundaries to become blurred when such blurriness serves a higher purpose? And questions surface about how to deal with everyday, concrete realities - How do I find the wherewithal to come in to work in the morning when the place is a mess and I feel disrespected because of this mess?

Each of these questions, from the most profound to the most mundane, share a common characteristic with each other and with Adult Reflection – they focus on the how of things, not the why and not the who of things. The essence of this adult development model is in these questions of how. Perhaps a useful shorthand, developmentally, would be to say that the questions of early childhood involve “What in the world am I?,” for youth and adolescents it is about the “Who and why in the world am I?,” and for adults it is a matter of asking the question “How in the world am I?” Each of these questions has its own urgency about it and each of them involves enormous amounts of creative energy to work through. But it is the “how questions” that become questions about the work itself, and these ultimately become the questions that are modeled by the adults for the youth, who then mirror those questions back as they focus on meaningful work and mature in the process.

Since this particular type of reflection forces the participants to confront the central question that serves to compose their lives, they ultimately create a sacred time and space in which they can become truly real to each other. They come to share a kind of intimacy in the professional world that is usually reserved only for those marked “special” for some reason in our culture – certain members of elite military units and athletic teams come to mind, for instance. The most important point to note here is that such learnings are crucial if adults working with youth are to have the kind of impact necessary for those young people to become truly engaged in the world believing in their own personal efficacy.


THE MIRROR IS NOT THE MESSAGE

When someone asks what there is to do,
Light the candle in their hand.    Rumi

When we are small children we experience the world primarily through our parents and other significant figures in our world. The adults strive to shape and limit our experiences of our world; inevitably (and fortunately) they fail. Something happens and we encounter ourselves as different from others, as individuals. Most young people experience the world much as did Narcissus from the ancient Greek myth. Although not inevitable, most youth do have a similar experience to Narcissus’ first encounter in the world. They become caught up in their own reflection. They see the world as a mirror of themselves. This healthy narcissism becomes the fuel of their journey through adolescence, and hopefully to a maturity beyond the confines of Narcissus’ pool.

So as we mature, as we move into adulthood from adolescence, our internal conversation shifts. In broad strokes we might say that the transition from childhood to adolescence is one from an undifferentiated, highly dependent, enmeshed self to a self-absorbed, individuated, fiercely independent self. And the transition to adulthood then would be a kind of return to an interdependency, an awareness that this distinction made between myself and others is in some ways an artificial one; a realization that our similarities outweigh our differences. Adult development involves a conversation that creates a distinction between uniqueness and specialness. Each of us is unique to the world, but ultimately we learn that we are not all that special.

A cautionary word about “maturity” may be in order here. Unlike its conventional use, the word mature is purely descriptive from a developmental perspective. So an “immature” adolescent is in some ways redundant. One would not say “an immature green banana”. Nor would any of us blame the banana for not being ripe. Yet many adults, who act perfectly reasonably in the market when they encounter fruits and vegetables, find it difficult, if not impossible, to sustain this level of rational thinking when they encounter a teenager who is acting “immaturely.” The fact that all fruit and vegetables left to their own devices eventually do mature, (and that the same cannot be said of humans) should give us pause, but that is for another discussion.

By the very nature of the interactions, adults who work with youth, and particularly adults who work with adolescent youth, are continually confronted with an array of unresolved issues – what Erik Erikson called “crises” – from their own childhood and adolescence. Following this Eriksonian approach, adolescents are by and large on a single-minded quest to discover/create their identities. As was mentioned earlier, for them a fundamental question is: Who am I? Since this quest is a process rather than a product, most young people learn in time that this question will emerge repeatedly during the course of their lives. In that moment of adolescent drama, however, caught up in this question as they are, there is usually a sense of relentless urgency about it. This urgency creates a fair amount of friction in their interactions with the adults around them be they parents, teachers, coaches, or adults working with them, all of whom (hopefully) are on this same on-going quest.