We tell stories in Ireland.

Yet, we don’t talk enough in conversation about what our current and past realities are.

Stories set our experiences in stone; a concrete past. Conversations allow us to evolve and to heal. In repeating, even our traumatic experiences from a distance, in a now safe environment, we re-experience them as our current selves, older and stronger for having survived.*

Storytelling has us repeat experiences along our tribal, party lines. We can be two faced in our delivery, polite and politically correct when telling them to the outside world; but within our tribes we stubbornly cling to old narratives, and we are often intolerant and recalcitrant in the telling.

Three speakers from panels at the XchangeNI Summer School, challenge us to tell fewer stories and have more conversations.

Debbie Watters in Changing the Conversation about Liberties has offered what we could be talking about. Steven McCaffery in Changing the Conversation about Media has offered why those conversations must begin in earnest. Ruth Dudley Edwards in Changing the Conversation about History has articulated how our old way of framing these conversations traps us in the past. She goes on to offer a compelling insight into our rhetoric.

Debbie Watters‘  talk began with a question and ended with one.

“We’re 16 years on from the peace process, where are we now? And what does liberty and peace process look like in loyalist communities?”

You have never heard such passion more gently expressed about, among other things, the realities of life and absence of leadership in the working class Protestant community.

Debbie pointed out that within the loyalist community she hears that “things have never been so bad”. She reminds us that “(p)eace is not just not absence of violence, it is about quality of life …”

Her questions included:

• How do we make our voice heard in ways that allow us to be heard in ways that …don’t demonize us…?
• What is our mutual responsibility to encourage, if not to coerce, our politicians to stand up and take care of the people most in need in NI….?
• What would that strategy look like?
• And what is our responsibility to help those communities come up with that strategy?

I was left wondering: does liberty even exist in a democratic process if a community perceives themselves without representation?

Steven McCaffery led with: “We don’t talk enough about parades… parading has been a massive issue we trade arguments and insults but we don’t actually trade facts.” He called for data rich conversations on a range of subjects in which we talk with each other; not at each other.

He challenged us to take a long view and focus on “political dynamics building outside NI which will have a huge impact on NI”.

Why does the rise of UKIP, predominantly in England matter? How many of us are aware that as much as 85% of farming income relates to EU funding?

“It will raise questions…about the UK’s place in the EU…  NI has an entirely different relationship with the EU than the rest of the UK…It’s a big debate leaning in on us.”

A long view, he reminded us, would also have us focused less on the “flag stories” of December 2012 and more on the census results released that month.

A fall in the Protestant population to 48% and the rise of the Catholic population to 45% means:

“We are a society of minorities, more diverse than ever… this (c)hanging demographic means the future has to be a shared future.”

In this context let me reinterate Debbie’s question:

“What is our mutual responsibility to encourage, if not to coerce, our politicians to stand up…”

Lastly, Ruth Dudley Edwards spoke of changing narratives. She articulated an inelegant truth about our tribal rhetoric:

“Nationalists are quite often less nice than they seem because they’re very good at seeming nice and
the Prods are quite often nicer than they seem because they’re really good at seeming awful.”

This was not a flippant observation, her call was to “challenge the ancestral voices of our own tribes”. This requires a new narrative about our history. The approach of the centenary of 1916 invites such a challenge. Framed in the context of a democracy in which “the constitutional nationalists were driven out by violent nationalists” we might begin to discuss how that legacy of violence has and continues to have an impact.

She calls for more of an “equality of rhetoric”. And less of what she describes as the “immensely defensive” Orange narrative, or the “impressive” but “profoundly dishonest” Republican narrative.

Please follow the links to the left of the photo. Listen to the speakers in their own words, and then, let the conversations begin.

*For an interesting read on rewriting our most traumatic memories see “Partial Recall”, Michael Specter, The New Yorker Magazine 19. May 2014 on the work of Daniela Schiller, PhD

Visit AlaninBelfast’s Audioboo to hear playlists of each “Changing Conversations” panel.

Sustaining change in life and work is hard. Groups of like minded people keep you focused and on track as you go through The Artist’s Way.

Explore a disciplined approach to effecting a real life change,  rediscover and engage your most creative self.

Join us for a free introductory session, twelve week groups will then commence in late September/October 2013.

The Artist’s Way

Dublin  @ The Howth Yacht Club
Tuesday evenings 

Tuesday morning location tbd

Belfast, @ The Source Wellbeing Centre

Thursday evenings 

Thursday morning location tbd

The Prosperous Heart

Newry @ The Bath House

Monday, evenings

Carlingford, @ Saddle View
Sundays, 11:00am

For more information or to
register interest, contact us.

This blog is a relaunch of one that I started in 2009 in support of an enthusiastic mid-life relocation to Ireland while embarking on the path of a reluctant entrepreneur.

Reluctant because in 2008/09 there were few other choices – and because the gods have a sense of humour. I began training for the work I do now during the great recession of the early eighties when career development work was ‘teaching entrepreneurship’. I’d never expected to be taking my own advice – thirty years later.

You can learn more about my ongoing work, find out about our courses and workshops, and join the conversation at Empowering-Change.com.

Why have a separate blog?

The change I encourage there is an invitation to repair and restore your own sense of self and to bring those lessons and habits into an effort to repair and restore your world.

Globally we’ve seen a post-pandemic shift. There’s less of a call to return to normal than there is a demand for a new normal. One that is focused on the environment, wealth inequality, the millions displaced by climate and conflict – in short the needs of the many over the tyranny of a power elite.

What you’ll read about here are reflections by and about empowered citizens and servant leaders.

My story, other people’s stories, observations about Ireland and Northern Ireland from the lens of this blow-in perpetually frustrated that so many of my neighbours can’t see the possibility and potential of a prosperous future on this island.

More importantly through the lenses of native changemakers who believe that were we to embrace diversity, demand transparency and accountability, and excellence from both taxing authorities things would improve economically, politically and socially.

When we’re less angry about the failures of systems and leadership we can begin to concern ourselves -with a shared future to benefit every citizen rather than fear monger over a need to share an identity or nationhood.

A Culture of Recovery

In a 2012 TEDx talk I related the experience of being shamed by a butcher because my order was not to his liking. Oh, I pushed back, got what I wanted and I do business with his shop this day.

At the time I could often be heard suggesting that what the island needed was its own 12-step program – rooms in which I had learned to unapologetically assert my position and invite further conversation.

The lessons of recovery are developmental and universal.

Well-reared children in all cultures come of age with the skill to live at peace with themselves.

They move from dependent infants to terrible toddlers, to determined and rebellious teens. Through the course of adulthood, they evolve into confident, consensus-seeking adults who negotiate calmly, personally and professionally, to establish their place in the world.

Sadly, most of us don’t experience this ideal and uninterrupted progression. We reach adulthood struggling with dis-ease or discontent.

At best, we wish we were happier at work or at home, at worst we self medicate our dis-ease with substances or behaviours to numb it.

Thankfully if motivated by our discontent, we can all choose change.

Catalysing Conversations & Connections

If you can see it, you can be it.

The first time I heard that it was powerfully uttered by Irish Senator Lynne Ruane.

The occasion was an event convened to honour the memory of a young Irish mother who succumbed to the despair of homelessness – the legacy of an economic recovery that focused on preserving the wealth of a few over the needs of women, children and families.

Notably in direct contravention of the one of the founding principles of the Republic.

Her own story – and book – People Like Me gave voice to the experience of being marginalised – and it gave me hope that a generation of truth tellers was emerging here.

“Few voices ring out as clearly as those who have long been oppressed or silenced. In her heartfelt memoir People Like Me, author Lynn Ruane tells the gripping story of her working-class Dublin life, the kind of life that rarely gets a hearing elsewhere and so she does it with the kind of detail those who have been waiting years to speak up bring to a written work.”–Irish Voice

Her story powerfully illustrates that witnessing our personal stories of change is where societal change begins.

I have been privileged to know changemakers on both sides of the Irish border – and there is power in connecting them with constituencies that can amplify their messages.

We don’t know what we don’t know

It’s an invitation to become curious.

However, a post-conflict society requires more than an invitation.

What’s needed is the kind of relationship building that introduces the safe space that gives over to brave space where trust and compassion can overcome the wilful blindness wrought by generations of the wilfully blind leading the wilfully blind.

Empowering Changemakers

I’m convinced that you can’t teach or evangelise about excellent leadership – but you can witness and celebrate it.

If you recognize the dysfunction of our social, economic and political systems rooted in the dis-ease of our leadership, then we must share the stories to inspire and empower each other to challenge that leadership.

That is the call to “servant leadership”.

And please – email eve@eveearley.com to share your stories.

I’m passionate about celebrating the privilege of living in a place so beautiful that C.S. Lewis modelled Narnia on it. Carlingford Lough & the Mournes is where he spent childhood summers with his grandmother.

I’m passionate about working to teach entrepreneurship, creating jobs and bringing investment.

The granddaughter of a reluctant emigrant, I returned a century after he left to find work. The children of this island are leaving again. We are exporting 1000 a week. 54,000 left in a 12-month period between 2010 & 11.

Sadder still is we are now exporting our first generation reared in peace. We must focus on exporting their intellectual property, not our children.

I am passionate that to do this, to create jobs and have our children take their place on the world stage, they must find their voices.

Whatever does that mean?

Tolstoy suggested that everyone wants to change the world, but nobody wants to change themselves.

If we are going to compete in a global economy, we are going to have to sell our location, our gifts, our talents and ourselves.  We just aren’t very good at that.

Reared with generations of conflict our parents and we were taught to “not get above our station”, not “raise our heads above the parapet” and for some of us, to be unfailingly polite. Fitting in, sometimes invisibly, mattered, so from a young age we were silenced.

How? Well, in my Irish American family, with shame and humour. Oh, the “reared in conflict” way of being crossed the pond.

Delighted to be meeting my dad and brother for dinner, I confidently strode in with a new, 1975 permanent – the rage of the day. Was I greeted with: “you look nice”? No. “Hi, love, how are you”? No. A hug? No.

My father, his loving blue eyes, glaring over the rim of his glasses said:

“My, don’t you look like the ass-end of a poodle”.

Every time I saw him for the next six months, I blew that perm out straight. Never wore a perm curly again!

Fifteen years later, while studying counselling, I read that the Irish discipline their children by chastising with shame and humour. Definitely. I skipped to the Italians, my mother’s tribe, they didn’t. Then I read about my husband’s ethnic background. They didn’t chastise at all – they lavished praise and encouragement.

Oops! An “aha” moment: for the better part of two decades, when he’d done something that annoyed me, I made a joke.  He thought I was amused. He continued the behaviour. He never got the “cease and desist” message.

I took the lesson on board in my personal relationships, framed my communications with clients and coworkers more carefully and never gave it a conscious thought again.

Until I moved to Ireland.

I walked into a village butcher shop, asked for brisket and went on to describe it.

“What would you be wantin that for?”
“My children are coming and it’s their favourite meal.”
“Well, your children will just have to learn to eat Irish.”
(momentary stunned silence)
“Well, I will learn to ‘eat Irish’, my guests will learn to ‘eat Irish’, but my children will have what they have always had, I’ll be in tomorrow at 2 to pick it up.”

On leaving I had two reactions. Initially, simply dumbfounded; then shocked by my response. In spite of believing that I no longer defaulted to adaptive responses learned in childhood, I’d been close to changing my order.

Had it been for myself or for a guest, I likely would have. But no, only because it was for my children!

 They have been the motivation for the most significant life changes I have made.

In my office in Newry, I observed someone a bit younger than I tense up. Stiff shoulders, straight back – but why.  Weeks later I observed it again.  A bit after that I asked what was happening?

 “Didn’t you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“The helicopter”

No, these American reared ears don’t hear – or listen for helicopters. It means only a traffic report, an air ambulance, a visiting dignitary ferried from an airport.

Not so for my border colleagues and neighbours. The sound of a helicopter catapults them back in time. They know in their bones this sound means danger.

My American childhood, unencumbered by conflict, allows me to meet and greet a police officer – feeling secure and safe. No so for my border and Northern Ireland reared neighbours. They are reactive, still carrying the fear and/or the rage of past encounters.

These adaptive responses – survival skills – served them well during the troubles. They no longer do. Now it is problematic; as our reactive responses do not serve our children well.

Do I want them to “get over it”? Absolutely not!

The pain and trauma of generations of conflict needs to be honoured. It needs to be talked about. Not having had an unencumbered childhood is a loss. We must individually and collectively grieve it.

For our children, though, we can change our behaviours. Why?

Because, in our automatic, adaptive responses we transmit to our children our fear and our anger.

Because in our effort to care for them we rear them as we were reared.

“Don’t put your head above the parapet” (Don’t take chances)
“Don’t be getting above your station” (Quiet that ambition)
“You won’t be bringing shame on this house” (Don’t tell the truth)

To take their place on the world stage our children need to “put their heads above the parapet”; To lead in a global economy they need to “get above their station” and to model to the world how a post-conflict society comes to thrive – they need to tell the world the truth:

That it was hard; their parents, grandparents and great, great grandparents were wounded and scarred. Some neither forgave nor forgot – but in service to the future, they made peace, spoke civilly and kindly to each other so that in the space between peace and prosperity our children could throw off our survival skills and adopt their own ‘thrival’ skills.

Will it work?

Back to the butcher. I’d related the story in a group I was running – as an example of assertion vs. cheekiness. I ran into a woman 6 months after it ended.

“I have a ‘butcher’ story for you”

“You, do?”

“I remembered that you said speaking up, asking for something you don’t see or sending something back presented an opportunity for a shopkeeper to serve.

So I asked: Do you have any rhubarb?

“No, and I don’t know why. John up the road has a field of it. Leave it with me and come back tomorrow.”

A few hours later there was a knock on her door. The lad from the butcher’s, holding a bunch of rhubarb.
“He said to give you this.”

We can throw off the adaptive behaviours, and model new and assertive ones better suited to the 21st century.

One day, one transaction, one kind and civil conversation at a time. For our children.

I know it will take time, but I come from a tradition that says restoring the earth and repairing the world is our obligation – “Ours is not to complete the task, but neither may we desist from the labour”. (Ethics of the Fathers)

I am proud to live among the people who made the peace. I am reminded too of an Irish expression I didn’t understand when I arrived in a hurry to do everything. I appreciate it better now:

“We’ll get there.”

Thank you to Frank Kernohan from Corporate Image for a video of the talk.

“The Ark was built by amateurs, the Titanic by professionals”

A frequent challenge to my work with clients re-entering the job market is confidence. Otherwise skilled, even expert in their field, I am met with: “But I don’t have a degree”.

Sir Ken Robinson, renowned educator, education policy advisor and author, describes college degrees as currency.

A university education was once a guarantee of a job.  Why?  Because a relative few attained the distinction.  Greater numbers now achieve graduate and post graduate degrees.  Few would question the benefit.  Even fewer would discourage their own children from pursuing one.

This “over supplied” currency is, nonetheless, devalued.   A degree is no longer a guarantee of work.  Perhaps not a bad thing.  Education, like the pursuit of any skill set, is just a process.

Let’s learn to value skill, not the degree, as currency.

Proven results are the only measure of value. Nearly every banker, regulator and complicit government official responsible for the recent economic meltdown had a degree.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were college dropouts.  They are admired as “self made” men. After the fact.  Let’s choose to suspend judgment before the fact; no one needs a degree to excel.

Employability needs to be the currency of the 21^st Century.  What has greater value: employability or a degree?

Education often happens “at home”.  Do we devalue second language fluency because it was learned there?

Computers, smart phones, games and medical devices are now an integral part of our lives.  More importantly they drive our economy.

They are run by a language.  We think of it as complicated.  It is not.  Fluency and proficiency in this coded, binary language can be achieved by 6 & 8 year olds.  They learn to think, develop and create in that language.

Their computer ceases to be a time trap of numbing games.  It becomes the canvas on which they can create their own game (or hack the one they are playing to win).

These skills can be self taught.   Apprenticeships in this field are simply trial and error. They rely on a community of peers, on and offline.  There is a vast shortage of programmers and developers on this island and worldwide.  There are lucrative jobs to be filled.

Self taught fluency or competency is not limited to programming or web design. Leadership, sales, logistics – these are all skills learned “on the job” by experienced workers who started employment and rose through the ranks.  No degree.

Collectively a community needs skilled joiners, plumbers and electricians to build our homes, farmers to see that we are fed, and merchants to procure the goods we require. Most learned from masters and mentors, formally or informally apprenticed.

Physicians “practice” medicine.  Their skills are developed after their studies, in training best described as apprenticeships.

The artists, artisans, musicians and writers who enrich our lives are judged simply by their work product.  It is the only measure of success.  Their distinction is  excellence.

My point about the Titanic?

Simply that the loss of so many lives was owed to the judgment of experts that “enough” lifeboats would be redundant.  Her sinking was owed to a series of failures by the professionals into whose hands she was delivered.

What do we honour 100 years later about the ship herself? To quote the locals, descendants of the skilled tradesman who built her well and to spec:

 “She was fine when she left here”

I offer this not to preach – but as a courtesy to those of you who follow this blog and participate in my groups based on The Artist’s Way series.

There is much talk of God in Cameron’s work. And she invites you to experience it as the God of your understanding 0r simply Good Orderly Direction.

“As I understand…” is meant as a personal statement only. I welcome any discussion that reflects your own relationship to the source of creative energy in the universe.

I do not think the world’s religions as we know them offer an adequate explanation for – or representation of the divine. We do not, I believe, have a mind capable of wrapping itself around infinity. But we have evolved in our thinking to be able to handle complexities that were out of the range of our ancestors, I believe we are still evolving.

World religions are based on and arguably stuck in the language of what was known in ancient times to the sages of their days.

So when I own Judaism as the language and structure of my conversation about and with the divine, it is only the “baby talk” I am using to place myself in a universal family of origin.

That spirit or longing that seeks to understand the unknowable in myself, others and the world is the god of my understanding. God as a father or king doesn’t work for me. How could the divine be either masculine or feminine? Hence, I experience this unknown in the way of the complementary yin and yang described in the eastern traditions.

So why would an Irish/Italian American reared Roman Catholic use the language of Judaism?

Simply the love and example of a couple who gave this little loved child the wherewithal to wake up and put one foot in front of the other every day. The example of their lives carried me lovingly into the future when my own family could not.

Survivors of the Shoah they left Europe and the camps alone. Abe & Rose found each other and had one daughter, who was my mother’s best friend. They knew the horror of burying families and then their own daughter, the woman who was my mother’s friend. She succumbed to breast cancer in her forties having endured the trial of having to institutionalize her schizophrenic daughter, their granddaughter.  Abe and Rose did not have a happily ever after.

They did have enough, and they gave much to me.

I believe in the abundant way of the universe – as distilled in the teachings they modeled. Those of the Jewish sages. I learned that by exercising the commandment to do every day as they did – an act of mitzvot – loving-kindness; tzedaka – charity; and Tikkun Olam – an effort to restore the earth/world – they affected a healing for themselves. I could do the same.

By simply living their lives “Jewishly”, unconsciously focused on these commandments as a way of life, they brought healing to the world. Perhaps not directly to theirs, but to mine.

Today my three girls and I, say Kaddish* for them – they are not forgotten. Little of their gene pool is preserved but – who they were and what was important about how they lived, lives on.

I don’t believe in a god. I don’t understand the divine. I worship the creator of the universe by practicing the teaching that we are the caretakers of the planet and each other and while “we are not commanded to finish the task, nor are we excused from the work”.

I do not judge one rule book or game plan as right or wrong, good or bad, I just know that to be available to good in the world I have to make room for it.

Unless the divine can inform me personally and expand my grey matter to understand it, I’ll keep putting one foot in front of the other – their way. It has worked so far….

And I happily reflect every sabbath – usually every day – “Blessed is the Lord, God, Ruler of the universe for giving us life, for sustaining us and for enabling us to reach this season”.

I say this prayer of gratitude by rote in Hebrew, a language I do not understand.

That is a gift. I don’t have to struggle with the inadequacy of language, but I am able to express my thanks that I have lived abundantly for this long.

*Kaddish is a prayer that praises God and expresses a yearning for the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. The emotional reactions inspired by the Kaddish come from the circumstances in which it is said: it is recited at funerals and by mourners, it is the way we honor the memory of those who have gone before us.