by Chris Liuzzo
Beth Mount, John O’Brien, Hanns Meissner and I have been colleagues for years creating and facilitating Learning Institutes in New York and elsewhere on the broad subject of person-centered work.
A theme that runs through many of our sessions is what we have called “turning the beam of inquiry inward”. Briefly, this means to examine oneself. What are one’s mindsets and assumptions about people with disabilities? What are one’s beliefs about one’s personal ability to effect change, about one’s personal agency? What capacities does one have to effect change and what need to be developed?
We believe that effective person-centered work is grounded in one’s interior condition (to steal a phrase from Bill O’Brien) and one’s courage to confront that condition. As Beth and John wrote in their book, Pathfinders, social inventors “listen and act in ways that develop their own highest potential for leadership…it is not a matter of motivating and directing others.”
It isn’t about “them”. It’s about me.
At the close of last week’s session, one Studio member expressed what I heard as an urgent plea from a person frustrated and exasperated with his situation. He sought help from the rest of us in devising ways to, in effect, get the “higher ups” in his agency to do better, to be more engaged with the people supported by the organization. Ironically, earlier that very day, Hanns and I, in the course of leading a Learning Institute, heard two different people say, in effect, “we are higher ups and we ‘get it’. How do we get the DSP’s, down there in the hierarchy, to better ‘get it’?”
See the contrast? Wherever I sit, I get it. It’s “them” that do not. I get it but:
my boss
my subordinates
my colleagues
my CFO
the state
those families
do not “get it”.
I wonder how this Studio might assist all of us to “turn the beam of inquiry inward?”
How might the Studio assist us all to think about meaningful differences we can make, whatever our roles and authority? What good moves are available to us in whatever our situations may be?

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