THIS WEEK’S FEATURED AUTHOR IS CAROL SANFORD, AUTHOR OF NO MORE FEEDBACK AND NO MORE GOLD STARS
Carol’s book, No More Gold Stars: Regenerating Capacity to Think for Ourselves , offers a powerful alternative to Behaviorism and can teach your audience how to question and change the traditional methods of teaching and control in today’s education system, and, by extension, how we view leadership. She is passionate about helping leaders think for themselves instead of following the status quo. And, as you know, Carol knows what she’s talking about! She is a prolific author and business leadership expert whose books are required reading at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and even Google.
Who or what inspires you?
The concept of work idea is what inspires me most now days. A work idea is something a person holds in mind to raise or develop themself. It is challenging and difficult to achieve but very, very important if one’s life is to evolve and be lived in service to the whole. For example, in my own thinking, ideas are never repeated. I don’t do anything the same way twice or give the same answer to the same question. Case in point, I have never before given work ideas as an answer to the question of what inspires me. An idea must always belong to the present moment and be relevant to its current context and time. It’s very hard to think this way. We like to have pat answers to good questions. I like to think in the moment, within the current context, in order to push beyond what I thought last time. I don’t let myself draw on what I have known before.
I have been in the business of developing individuals, businesses, and organizations for fifty years. In all that time, I’ve never offered the same lesson twice, the same curriculum, or the same driving idea or overarching concept. Everything is designed based on now. The world is where this person or group is and where I am, and I demand of myself that I come up with something new, relevant, and meaningful. There are no final, true answers. That’s what has really inspired me and what I have kept in mind for all these years. Sometimes I want to be lazy and repeat what’s worked in the past, but that’s not what the world needs of us. It needs us not to be experts, stuck in old thoughts and ideas, but instead always to be developing better thinking and creating better being.
What is your day like now, and how is it different from the past?
I don’t travel anymore to work with corporations and other large enterprises, but I still run membership community groups for individuals. I host 40 ongoing events a year for these groups and don’t allow myself to repeat any content. I must evolve the work and never repeat slide decks. I haven’t got a curriculum that I run year every year. Plus, I have events with my kids and grandkids. I consider my adult children to be a place for long-term contribution. I have to change so that each of us learns all the time. This is also an increasingly demanding commitment. My grandchildren and I meet weekly to work together on the bigger and bigger questions they are encouraged to bring. So, my days are spent thinking, writing, and engaging with community members and family. And I make podcasts, on my own and with others who request time with me. The same rule applies in all of these activities: never offer the same idea twice in the same way.
For example, my 24-year-old grandson decided about two years ago to develop understanding of “how he works.” He asked, “what drives me and why do I let it drive me?” We read books on spirituality and philosophy, and we talk about ideas at least once a week. I have also worked for several years with my son on developing ideas for the company he owns. I have been a member of his board, but beyond that we read and write as philosophers and dialogue about questions that resonate and lift us up to higher levels, questions about great ideas from wisdom writers, indigenous science, and physics. This work together enables both of us to think more deeply into what is most important to us in terms of developing ourselves and making contributions to others.
I have published seven books, all number-one bestsellers on Amazon or somewhere. In my daily writing now, I continue to ask myself harder, deeper, bigger questions, figuring them out on the page as I go. I start from what I don’t know, never from what I know. This writing has been a dedicated practice in the second half of my eighty years of life. It’s what keeps me pushing myself to go beyond any current answer that I have and never rest on my laurels.
To sum it up, this is what makes up my day: writing, engaging with family and/or members of my communities, and preparing for upcoming events that I’m running.
How did you get your idea for your business
When I was seven years old my father, who was not a nice man, forbade me to go to a friend’s birthday party because she was Hispanic. The words he used to explain why, and what he said about Maria, were racist. I remember sitting there on that day, even as young as I was, thinking how did he get these crazy ideas? He can’t see very well. He can’t make sense of things. I wondered how people got like that, and I continued to think about this and similar questions for many years. I was always questioning how I might help people see reality, see through what gets in the way, like the idea that people are defined by the color of their skin.
I didn’t question myself in terms of racism and diversity. I was working to understand the underlying causes of blindness to bias, what determines one’s quality of thinking, and the false paradigms we have adopted to help us make sense of ourselves and the world. I started when I was very young and never stopped. I became fully aware that I was working on thinking and how bad we are at it when I was a consultant to Colgate Palmolive South Africa at the end of Apartheid. My task there was helping develop people to take on the new world that was evolving—to build a company while we built a great country. I understood that Apartheid was based on poor quality thinking that led to bad action and horrible effects. It was the ideas people held, those they adopted as their own, that determined what they could see.
The developmental way of thinking we instituted in the new, post-Apartheid South Africa was necessary to overcome our failure to discern that all people have the potential to create great things. My most recent book, No More Gold Stars, tells the story of what we did, how we worked together, and the pretty good culmination of our efforts. It provides a good overview of how I came to understand that my business was dedicated to education, wherever learning was occurring, in families, schools, businesses, and governments.
What made you choose this kind of business?
Well, my essence calls me to disrupt certainty. I disrupted certainty in a big way on the day my father forbade me to go to my friend’s birthday party, and he punished me for it by locking me in a closet for several hours. He tried to break my spirit, but it didn’t work, even though over the years he repeatedly locked me in that closet. Who I am is the disrupter of whatever people are certain about. More than anything, I don’t want them to remain locked in the thought that they’ve got it right, attached to their past ideas and identified with groups of others who have also got it right, locked into their beliefs and biases.
What else is unique about what you do?
I don’t give answers, templates, or blueprints. I don’t do Q&As to address people’s confusion. My epistemology is not authoritarian or expert-based, and I make it hard to copy me. My epistemology if self-determining, self-revealing. I am Socratic in the original meaning of the process. I start by waking people up to their laziness and mechanicalness. I destabilize them and I disrupt their certainty. I teach people to think for themselves, to reject their unexamined biases and preferences, to watch their own processes and learning and be rigorous in examining the products of their thinking, to question the premise behind every idea that comes their way, to identify its source and test its validity. My work is about learning to learn by challenging what you hear before you accept it, to disrupt what we have accepted as truth.
This is how cultures and societies grow and innovate. The reason it matters is because we need to close the gap between the capability humans have now and what they need to develop in themselves in order to do their right work on the planet. All of us need to bring consciousness into play in our interactions and stop acting like robots, as if we were living in the worlds of movies like Ground Hog Day, The Matrix, and The Truman Show.
Have your dreams and goals changed throughout your life?
When I was younger, I did set a goal to have a business, and I wanted it to make a difference in the world. But a time came when I switched from goals to having aims, instead. Aims are not concerned with the material world and what I might achieve. They have to do with how much I will grow, how much courage I have for big challenges. I have traveled around the world doing really important work, like the work I did with Colgate in South Africa. Our focus was building the capabilities of individuals and teams to transform the economies of townships, their overall health outcomes, and community cohesion. We worked on this by resourcing initiatives created by all of Colgate’s employees.
I developed courage as an aim in order to face being met at the airport by guards carrying machine guns and riding in bulletproof limousines. Although this endeavor was far too important to be about me and my fears, I had to talk myself into it. I concentrated on developing courage in myself in order to make myself available as a resource for the self-development of others, and thus their lives changed in part because I worked on myself. To have goals would have been self-centered; instead, my aims were inner work in service of the outer world. They were about growing me to be big enough in heart, courage, and wisdom to figure out how to do this important work in this place with these people.
Aims were also about expanding my intelligence, and also growing my physical health and energy, in order to find ways and develop capabilities to take on things that really mattered. In South Africa we made a huge difference, and along the way I learned to use work ideas as aims for self-development in service of larger whole systems development.
How do you define success?
Well, I don’t think I attribute success to anything or even think about success much. That’s a very self-centered question. A better one might be how do I assess whether my efforts, my life, are contributing to life as a whole. What I’m really interested in is learning how people work, their psychology and philosophy, their motivation and inner being. This is not for my own benefit, although finding keys to the puzzle does keep me up to speed. I do it in order to help people live meaningful, significant, and contributing lives.
Am I successful at that or not? Success is about personal rewards, which are most often measured in terms of recognition and financial return. My daughter, who is my business partner, will tell you that I never know how much money I have in the bank or what I’ve earned in a year. I care about whether members of my communities stay for their lifetimes and every year make greater contributions to societal and planetary health. I don’t throw people out when they encounter life challenges, as long as they keep working on themselves. I work on myself so that I can keep helping them grow and learn. I advance my ableness to help them. This is as close as I can get to the notion of success.
What sorts of community projects are you engaged in now?
Well, I don’t really do projects, if you mean starting and finishing things. My life now is a continuum of the same work I have always done. People step into my sphere, take up my work, and almost never leave. Those who do leave usually know after only a short time that this is not their world. I have created member communities that some people have been part of for as long as forty-five years. I tell them these are not projects or programs we’re working on but a living developmental community making its ongoing contribution. They enter and then attend my events year after year, never knowing what I’m going to offer at the next one because, remember, I never do anything twice. I now offer member access to forty events a year. Over the entire course of my career, this has become one massive, live project. My life until the age of thirty was just preparation for this Life Project.
My events are always scheduled for Tuesday, Friday, or the weekend. People sign up to become members in order to attend, and they show up. There is no course for them to take, they become part of a community; they learn and develop themselves and resource the development of others. We have members in North and South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Deep Pacific, and there is a separate Deep Pacific and Japan group. A person simply can’t develop adequate understanding of their own growth without a community to learn and develop with. The average number of years people stay in educational or supportive groups is about fifteen. My communities are lifelong, and they include thousands of people around the world in businesses and change agent roles.
Because I have always wanted to do really important work, work that takes a lifetime, I don’t do projects
What, if anything, would you do differently if you lived your life again?
I don’t answer hypothetical questions like this one, which ask me to imagine the impossible. They are a waste of life energy because they move us to think wishfully, rather than image how life is actually working and what we can change as we move through it. So, I would do nothing different. My cosmology includes the belief that I chose my life and chose to live it as I am. I chose the nature of events that would develop my soul. I made these choices before I was born. I also believe that I chose to die of ALS, a motor neuron disease (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease). Most people would say this is a horrible fate. But because I chose it, I don’t fight it. And because I accept it, I face every aspect of it differently than I might otherwise.
I can’t prove any of this, but my beliefs are a working cosmology that leads to a life of learning and discovery and never a day spent wishing for something different. I am not afraid of dying. And what’s amazing is that I am able to know how I will die and to have an inkling why I chose this way, and so I am fully ready to take it on.
All the events of my life, then, have played out exactly as I determined they would, and this keeps me from ever having regrets or guilt or wasting time. So, I don’t answer hypothetical questions, only real ones. I recommend that all people try this out and see how much more powerful they and their lives become.
If you had the power to solve only one problem, what problem would you choose and how would you solve it?
Another hypothetical question! I can’t solve any problem, and neither can anyone else. We can only make contributions to whatever is calling us. As far as I’m concerned, solving problems is a bad paradigm, a problem-focused paradigm in a world that does not have problems to solve in the first place. A paradigm that assumes something is wrong with the world and with life, itself.
A far more effective alternative paradigm is regeneration, which starts from the idea that the world has a way of working that we humans continually disrupt in harmful ways because we have yet to understand it. Our interventions are based on partial, human-centered views, and this is why they seem to create problems and then make them worse. What would be better is for humans to learn to really understand how the world works and to make themselves part of the overall whole system, playing co-evolutionary roles—which definitely do not include the roles of problem solver or wise leader.
I work to develop people and to create a living education process for use in everyday life, consistent with living-systems processes, diametrically different from arrogantly assuming that the world and life, itself, have problems and that we humans are the ones to fix them. A little humility, please!
By developing ourselves and our roles, we have potential to grow everything around us. As we become more able, with more capacity and capability, we make beneficial differences in the world by focusing on the powerful potential in the unique living systems in which we are nested. Our evolution as a species and the possibility of contributing to the ongoing evolution of all living systems, is based on learning to recognize and understand the essences of everything we touch.
What advice would you give your younger self?
Again, a hypothetical question, abstract and generic, and another that I don’t accept as a valid way of developing oneself. I can’t redo anything, and neither can anyone else. Also, I tell people that my only advice is never to give or accept advice. Better to help others learn to think for themselves and—when they request it—resource their self-development. Learning is based on reflecting on one’s own lived experience, and this is true even for children.
WOW: What’s next on your bucket list?
Well, I have ALS. I believe I chose this before I was born, and maybe this was because I wanted to build the courage to deal with it. It’s hard for me to breathe. After talking with you for a while it, I have to pause to catch my breath. But what you still see me doing is working on myself in every minute I have left in this body of mine—which will be recalled sometime soon.
I’m working on big, long-thought questions, and I want to complete two more books—a memoir centered on the role of work ideas in my life and a novel—The Contest, based on how humans really work—to replace Ayn Rand’s fictions. Both of these books are about combining life and spiritual paths, learning to observe yourself and developing a way to really engage with yourself in order to become wiser every day. So, my bucket list has always contained only one item: every day, I will work on something; I won’t think about anything today that I haven’t taken further than I took it yesterday; and I will include what I am working on in my writing, as contributions to the world and the people who will carry the work forward.
Is there a recent nonfiction book you would recommend to our readers?
CS: I don’t recommend popular books because I think most of the stuff published today is nonsense based on outdated psychology (if it even ever was timely and useful psychology). But I think the ideas emerging from quantum and indigenous sciences are great. I would recommend David Bohm’s Wholeness and The Implicate Order. Bohm was a student of and collaborator with Einstein, and in this particular book, he argues for something very important: we must to learn to see the world as whole and to stop fragmenting what we are observing.
We tend to divide everything into smaller pieces in order to make life comprehensible. We dissect frogs and label their parts, rather than watch them jump and live in community and see how they contribute to a watershed and a greater lifeshed. When we divide everything up this way, we can’t help but see the world as full of problems. We do this with children, also. We make lists of all the things they do, well or poorly, and work on these separately, and we lose our grasp of each whole, unique child. David Bohm wrote that the biggest capability we have failed developed as a species is discerning wholes and seeing them at work, adding value in larger whole systems.
