Listen To What You Love Most

Conversation with Bill Isaacs Cambridge, MA December 21, 2001 Interview by Otto Scharmer

I. Nonlocality and Place

... that we experience which have a certain total or complete dimension to them and I think these kinds of things are happening all the time and that perhaps only sometimes are we conscious of them or only sometimes is there a sufficient intensity to sort of waken us to them. But for me, there is something to do with the place, but it's more to do with our relationship, actually.

II. Stand still and listen

Listen to the course of the world and to your own nature; and you'll know what to do.

III. Always pay attention to what you love most

What you love most will tell you where your compass is. You will go in that direction.

IV. The other side of dialogue: the capacity to express what you love most.

Develop your ability to express that which you love most. And in some ways, that's the whole game. So here's where the other side of dialogue comes in, which is the capacity to bring out - to express what you love most.

V. The essence of leadership

So leadership is the precise bringing forward of the essence that is meant to be brought forward in this moment in whatever the situation is.

VI. Container building: Pay attention to the spaces

The container is the pattern of energy and relationship.

VII. Future events casting their shadow: 9-11, 1933

I think that this is another way of thinking about leadership - providing and doing the work inside oneself so that one is able to provide the point of reassurance for one's world that it, in some sense, seeks.

VIII. Emergence and the Hitler issue

Do we have collective containers that are large enough to shift how we frame this overall or do we act out the ritualized patterns of reaction that have always moved when these kinds of complications and fragmentations show themselves?

IX. Containers for healing the global crises of today

My friend, Peter Garrett, once said, and I think accurately, that inquiry and violence cannot co-exist.

X. The Boston Miracle

"Well, we've been creating different kinds of conversation." That was what the essence of this whole thing was and that's led us on this journey of beginning to talk about what's the technology of introducing and producing profound change.

XI. The Metamorphosis of the Container to the Grail

... the myth was that the person, who took the sword out of the stone, out of the stuck structures of the subconscious if you will, was the king.

XII. Parsifal's Journey

Parsifal is the fool who takes on the most destructive and difficult knight and defeats him and is knighted immediately by Arthur.

XIII. Shadow work and the transformation of memory

... but this is invisible leadership and you may or may not get payments for this. This is not really about that, but it is what it's missing on the planet. And you could say that if no one does what I'm talking about, and then I think we're sunk.

XIV. What is the Excalibur that's presented to us?

... love what you love. And ultimately take back your authority. Dare to own your own authority. And author your experience. And dare to feel what that feels like: dare to love that. There's not much more one can say about that.

XV. The Blind Spot of Dialogue

Well, I think ultimately this work is about the transformation of power.