Right Livelihood update April 15

Right Livelihood update

This message is going out to all of you who expressed interest in Right Livelihood Circles. Some of you were unable to come last Wednesday evening but, having raised your hand once, I want to keep you in the loop because I want to welcome and invite you to join us as soon as you are able and moved to do so. I will also be posting this at the Right Livelihood Circle group page on Village Vancouver.

Wednesday night we began forming a group and inventing a way of working together. I led the proceedings, using my proposed agenda, which was:

Introduction and Thanks

Attunement: something to get us into a good headspace for sharing, exploring and collaborating. It’s a ritualistic idea for establishing the psychological space conducive to a meeting, and we can experiment with different ideas to find what works best. I think it’s good to occasionally stop and recognize what’s going on inside, and useful to be able to change our internal state, as needed,

Our Pact: If we are to build trust in the group, we need to know what we can depend on each other for, and I think it helps to articulate what we are committing to. I brought my ideas, to which we added others, so we have a starting point that can be elaborated, pruned and refined. Here are the bare bones:

Confidentiality: protecting each others’ personal info is essential to trust
Be honest about what you’re willing to commit to, and communicate that clearly
Growing (heart)
Learning to Risk
Perseverance
Training (head)
Seeing opportunities
Connect/communicate
Learning
Facts
Skills
Collaborate
Persist until we succeed
Patience, Generosity and Supportiveness

Sharing Stories: We spent the bulk of our time in a round where each person had the chance to say what motivated them to participate and where they see themselves going.

Work and Homework: After a brief interlude of milling and talking, we finished by giving ourselves homework to do by next meeting:
Small goal: Think of a shorter-term goal you would like to reach as we begin this process - something to keep you interested
Inventory - Self-evaluation of:
Skills, both soft and hard
Experience
Areas of Interest, i.e. food production, re-purposing of clothes and other goods, etc.
Resources: We can also be thinking about how we can access knowledge and excellence from outside the group to help us along:
Outside organizations that complement what we are doing
Other allies and collaborators
Entrepreneurs who are already doing this and might serve as models and mentors

There was some discussion around creating a Google document to begin organizing our self-inventory information. I think these collaborative tools are very useful, but I want to wait before we launch into online sharing of this information for a couple of reasons:

• I think self-evaluation is, at first, most valuable as a solitary process, so you have the opportunity to dig deeply without concern for how others might see it. Once that’s done, we can choose what to share about ourselves.
• There were some concerns about over-use of computers in our process, and this was from people with serious technical savvy. While I think technology certainly has a place in what we are doing, I am interested to explore how we might ensure that we use it mindfully and appropriately.
• While the issues we face are urgent, I think we will be rewarded by carefully crafting our collaborative process, so the tools we create truly fit our needs. At our next meeting, I propose we give this task to a few people who like doing this kind of work.

So, that’s the update! Our next meeting is this Wednesday, April 18 at 7 pm. Again, it will be in the common room of Grace MacInnis Housing Co-op at Salsbury and Adanac. If you have any suggestions for the agenda, please email me – or you can just bring them to the meeting.

Before the last meeting, I had some help setting up chairs and such, which was very nice!!! I will plan to be in the room at 6:30 pm, so the early birds can lend a hand, and chew the fat, etc.

One quick advertisement: I’ve been reading Dave Pollard’s book, Finding the Sweet Spot, and so far it looks like a manual for finding Right Livelihood, full of lots of practical, no-nonsense stuff that is interesting to read. I haven’t begun doing exercises from it, so I’ll have to keep you posted on that. Dave emailed me yesterday and, among other things, had this suggestion:

I heard a lot of ideas about shifting from part-of-the-problem employment to part-of-the-solution self-employment (right livelihoods) and a whole set of thoughts on what kind of enterprise they'd like to found or get involved in (mostly around local clothing reuse/manufacturing and food security). What I didn't hear was any evidence of work done to research the market to discover genuine needs not already met by existing companies, or effort flowing from such research to co-create affordable solutions to those needs. As my book points out, developing a product and then trying to market it is pushing the boulder uphill; doing the market research with potential customers up-front not only guarantees that the product will succeed without expensive marketing, it can often identify sources of organic financing that is much cheaper and easier than either venture capital or government financing.
I would therefore be pleased to offer your group a workshop on doing market research, similar to the one I offered in Powell River. It would be principally hands-on exercises rather than lecture. Half-day would be best but we could try squeezing the essential part into a couple of hours.

We can talk about this and other possibilities on Wednesday.

Many Thanks!!!!
-cabot