During late summer of 2019, I participated in one of the most impactful educational experiences of my life.
Created in collaboration between DSIL Global and the University for Peace, (an institution based in Costa Rica, established by the General Assembly of the United Nations), the executive leadership course was a 9-day intensive in-person experience, paired with several weeks of follow-up online lectures and distance-based learning.
On the third day of the course, we engaged in an intensive storytelling workshop, inspired by a group of slam-poetry artists. Gathered in that Bangkok co-working space, we were asked to share “a story or moment in your life that needs to be told so you can boldly grow.”
Here is what I shared that day:
Inspired by the Poets: breaking myself and remaking myself.
Courage: breathe out trust.
To boldly grow, to embrace my inner critics, not to get past and beyond these ever present feelings of fear, but to bring them along for the ride as friends, bedfellows, or something in between — it’s okay, they are many, and I can make time and space to love them all, polyvulnerbiliamory:
I need to tell the story of my life in California, as an entrepreneur, and community builder: How I split from my wife and my job, changed myself, clothed myself, with the trappings — no liberations — of a bold new identity. Building the strength to speak out about getting to the heart of systems of power and inequity — law, then technology.
Learning what I learnt, to design think, and empathize, identify, and build. To fail fast and break myself, over and over. From being the bookish lawyer, how I learnt to step into my possible, potential, open-hearted unconventional: Looking new friends in the eye and smiling, words to actions, hope free-styling.
And finding different ways to do that, for the different groups who’d listen: I christen myself anew for each of them:
- researchers
- innovators
- lawyers
- operators
- Americans, Chinese, Singaporeans,
- creators of community and compassion.
All the parts that make up the you, Tony Tony Tony, Anthony, Li Jia Hao, Lai Ka Ho, lover, lawyer, improviser, writer, poet, son, brother, colleague, advisor, leader, listener, thinker, brainstormer, explorer, interpreter, translator … bridger. Waypointer. Star, in the sense of, bringer of energy. Making meaning, third spaces for differences to transcend into shared consciousness and collective action, the force that can draw together individual minds, and the threads of thinking, and yearning to connect — letting them be drawn out from the resonating patterns of our brains. The ability to transmit those resonances, through words, and actions, music and meaning, to bridge minds, to bridge souls, and species — the essence of reconnecting with our collective divine.
This story of inter-subjectivity, bridging, a community space where all the connections that need to be made are there as potential. Reaching out to the world, founder by founder, personal whispers in the ear of each willing individual, channeling energy, the purity of intent, to bring this world together with words and deeds….
Words made powerful, letting the different parts of our being come together as representatives for the family of the multitude, to be advocates, waypoints on the journey to empowerment, freedom, agency, a balance of forces between the communal and the personal, from transparency to the safety of private belief and thought, and back again.
Justice ecosystems, and the justice gaps, how people and families were falling through the cracks. We built out waypoints to act as the addressing system, the naming, and learning of value judgements that come with every name, or identity given. We set waypoints to guide us to the people and things we all needed in the world.
Open sourcing information and resources to be available to us at every waypoint, to know what people and things we can access. Mapping reputation dynamics, the ‘trust data’, the layer of meaning that overlays the information — so critical to discerning which people and things to use. What we trust is based on our value system, our acceptance of a collective set of beliefs that shape the perceived benefit we receive from acting in a certain way, with a certain set of people or things.
So if we trust somebody because they share the value system that climate action is important, and we trust a product we buy because it is manufactured in a way that takes climate action into account, that it is certified in a particular way as accounting for its externalities as part of the well-governed ecosystem of sustainable circular economy practices, then that should be taken into account.
The power of belief systems is their ability to create shared waypoints, shared addressing systems that help to channel people together towards the more objectively and subjectively beneficial concentrations of people and things. Sharing waypoints, collective intelligence, allows individuals to act in concert, in resonance, with one another’s methods and means.
So, I learnt to bridge, liberate and clothe myself anew: To bridge between people, places, cultures, beliefs, sounding resonance in diversity, let the music be made in the bridging of tones and rhythms, the collective dance we shall dance, with love, and words, and visions of a better, collective future…
The Future We Want: Enabling the collaborative, interdisciplinary flow states, density in space and time; facilitated sparks of co-creation; a temporal, physical, spiritual halo around all of human knowledge to draw that Future towards us.
This is the story I need to tell, to boldly grow and be all I can be.
I’ve since joined forces with DSIL Global to support their work in innovation and EQ capacity building, especially within the worlds of organizational design, law and policy, supporting culture change, human and equity-centered design, and emergent strategies for systems change.
Please do get in touch if any of this is of interest!