(Keynote Address at the 29th Annual Workshop for Personnel who Work in Homes for Children; Fort Worth, Texas - June, 1987. Dedicated to my dear friend and high performer extraordinaire, Richard F. Dangel.)

I appreciate the opportunity to make this presentation to you this evening. Over the past several years I have worked with over three hundred individuals who, like you, have lived and worked in homes for children. Some of them I have studied from afar, others I have studied up close and now, after ten years, I believe I have something of relevance to say to your profession.

In 1953, Isaiah Berlin wrote what is now considered a classic essay entitled, The Hedgehog and the Fox. It begins with a Greek poem fragment that reads: "the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Berlin argued that the hedgehog and the fox represent two quite different ways of thinking, two distinct predilections of mind. In the case of the fox, though he may look with great insight, he never sees any reason for assuming that this problem is related to that problem. For the fox, the problems are separate, unrelated. Whereas for the hedgehog, they are related, intertwined; his inclination being to pull both this and that into one unifying vision. To the extent possible, I am going to give you a hedgehog's view of high performance.

In his book, Go East Young Man, William Douglas writes of his father, a minister, who, for his first ministry, was placed in a rural county in Pennsylvania and who, for his first church service, had one person show up. "Maybe we ought to skip this," said the minister, "after all, you're the only one here." "Well, Pastor, I'm just a cowboy but if I went out in the pasture with forty bales of hay and found just one horse, I don't think I'd let it starve." So William Douglas' father gave his entire sermon, his first sermon, the one he had worked on for months and when he was done he asked, "How did I do?" "Well, Pastor, I'm just a cowboy but if I went out in the pasture with forty bales of hay and found just one horse, I don't think I'd give it all forty bales!"

This is the very advice we will fly in the face of tonight. There will be parts of this presentation that will require your undivided attention, your concentration; other parts, I hope, will be easy on you, inviting you to sit back. The hedgehog's view implies both parts. It is a full-circle view, an attempt to deliver all forty bales.

 

At the institution where I work(ed), those hiring the couples living in the homes with the children look first for individuals who will be good role models. While this is not the only consideration, it is the primary one. So, during the interviews, those doing the hiring consider the appearance of the applicants, their social and interpersonal adeptness, their ability to communicate, their interest in and experience with children, their treatment orientation, their eagerness to learn, their willingness to accept what is sometimes uncomfortable feedback, their "tolerance" for an array of specific behaviors, their work expectations (whether or not they are realistic) and finally, whether or not, with one another, the applicants have a strong, viable and mutually-respecting relationship.2 This last item is particularly important since the job of the house-parent is a 24-hour, 7 day-a-week commitment with enormous minute-to-minute responsibility. Unless the couple is confident about who they are and already committed to their marriage, the stress of their job can overwhelm them, threatening both their sense of self and their relationship.

Even so, . . . these couples, when hired, last only 29 months. One third are gone before completing their first 12 months. And it is no wonder. Despite careful selection and what seems to us like thorough training, it is difficult at best to prepare individuals for the rigor of a day-to-day life with six, seven, eight or nine adolescents who may be angry, depressed, dangerous, or suicidal, and who know little or nothing of the peaceful side of family life.

Ask these individuals, these house-parents, of the problems they faced upon entering their home and they will tell you of the loss of their personal life, of how they no longer had contact with family and friends, and of how this tested their marriage as they came to lean all the harder on one another; they will tell you of the difficulty implicit in integrating their natural children into their program, of the physical and psychological threat the older youths represented to their natural children, and of the unhappiness and depression of their natural children who, understandably, wondered, "Why this, and why now?"; they will tell you of the massive amount of new information they had to absorb--through training and meetings and from the background files of the youths with whom they had to acquaint themselves; they will tell you of their lack of adequate administrative support, their lack of adequate training and their lack of adequate compensation; they will tell you of the rejection they experienced from the youths, youths who (naturally!) preferred the previous house-parents; and finally, they will tell you of the mental, physical, and emotional fatigue brought on by the fact that at the end of the day they do not leave work and go home.3

Ask them then to tell you of the qualities and characteristics that have permitted them to persevere in the face of these obstacles and they will be hard put to answer. Some will say that they are successful because they are highly organized, as it always has been their inclination to attend to details; others will say that they are able to find time for themselves and for the renewal that comes with "outside" interests; still others will say that they have learned to relax on the run, and/or that it always has been their desire to help others. But these answers never seemed very satisfying to me. So, in recent years, I have observed on my own the high performers in your profession and I now think I know what permits them (and should I say, permits you) to persist in the face of these obstacles. I think it is madness, pure and simple. These people . . . these house-parents--the high performing ones--are mad. It is madness that drives them. It is not uncommon at all for administrators where I work(ed) to have couples come to them and say, "We divided our salary by the number of hours we worked this past week and we figured out that we made 37 cents an hour . . . We must be mad."4 Yes, exactly!

I submit to you that the hedgehog's view is incomplete without the kind of madness of which I will now speak. It is the fortieth bale. Without it, there can be no sustained high level performance.

When you observe closely, as I have done, the high performers within your profession, observe them day to day, over months, interacting with the children in their care, you are struck by many things: by their consistency, for example, their even temper, their good mood; by their naturalness, their ease of interaction, their continuous acquisition of job-related skills; you are struck by their fearlessness, as they seem unafraid to say "no", to deliver the consequence that makes life momentarily harder for the youth in their care and hence, momentarily harder for them;5 and, in the face of deliberate attempts to make their day go badly (instigated often times by the youths themselves), you are struck by their capacity to not take it personally.6 These people are blessed . . . and you know what they say, "you can have the madness without the blessing, but you can't have the blessing without the madness." 7

 

When I received the invitation to make this presentation, my friend, who in part arranged for my invitation, said, "Now, Dave, you're going to have to be funny. These people won't stand for anything less."

This has weighed on me, weighed on me until I realized that the deeper you go into the hedgehog's view of high performance (in your profession), and specifically, into this notion of madness, the funnier it all gets. To illustrate, I have created a schematic that points out what I believe are the five possibilities lying along the human continuum. It is a developmental psychology of sorts, one that attempts to define the path that we all are on; you, me, the children in your care. And with the help of this schematic, we can define the hedgehog's view of high performance as well as what is meant by the proper madness. (NOTE: This schematic is provided elsewhere in this website - see "The Five Levels of Being"/Game of Life website.)

 

I believe that if you are lucky enough, persistent enough, and "mad" enough about it, that you move in this world from No Mind to Hive Mind to Heroic Mind to Poetic Mind to Never Mind. Allow me to explain.

The No Mind(s). They are the innocents, the infants and the senile, the comatose and the retarded, the children in your care--individuals who mind the commands of their infant and sometimes damaged genes. The psychology that drives them is that of approach-avoidance, move forward--it is safe, move back--it is dangerous, and hence, the switch, "on-off," is their technological metaphor. They seek satisfaction. Organized at the cellular level, they seek satisfaction to the fundamental demands of life maintenance. They are, in effect, amoebas, pre-believers, going nowhere. "System" drains, preserved and furthered, if at all, by the "System's" grace. Perhaps as many as forty-five million in this country and, at most, they harvest survival.

The Hive Mind. The robots. The functionaries who carry out with their every act the precepts embedded in the Hive; held in place because they've learned to mind so terribly what other people think. Their psychology is that of modeling and imitation and hence, the mirror is their metaphor. They seek acceptance. Organized at the autonomic or involuntary level of the nervous system, they are, when domesticated to the extreme, termites or lemmings; believers, going to war or to peace, the Renaissance or the Dark Ages, wherever the herd happens to take them as they are "System" followers. Perhaps as many as 165 million in this country, seventy percent of us operating predominantly in this mode and they, we, are out to harvest security.

The Heroic Mind. The self-actualizers, fulfillers of the minor dreams. They're minding themselves. Their psychology is that of the decision-maker, the goal-oriented operative and hence, the thermostat is their metaphor. Having just undergone the heartache and ridicule implicit in breaking with the Hive, they seek self-esteem. They're organized at the somatic level, they move their bodies through space as they narrow their oscillations about their goal. We're talking about eagles, disbelievers, going "their" way; on principle, "System" rebel(ers). Perhaps as many as 22 million in this country and literally or figuratively, they are out to harvest new territory.

The Poetic Mind. The relativists, because they know that reality is as relative as speed or beauty; so they mind their world, mining from it the many realities it holds. Their psychology is that of the creative role player, they know how to distance themselves from what's going on--they look though the masks that they wear. Their metaphor is the lamp and like the lamp they cast light on that which they see, extracting the figure from the common ground that gives them the rhyme and reason they seek. They're organized at the psychosomatic level because they know that the reality to which the body responds is, in large measure, the reality selected by the mind. We're talking about dolphins, suspension of disbelief(ers), capable, when they so choose, of going "with the flow." They're pattern recognizers, system recognizers, and when they desire, "System" makers. Only a few million in this country, all on the outside, trying to get in with their harvest of vision.

The Never Mind(ers). They are the free. They're always free, because they're never minding anything except the rule to synergize. In one discipline's phrase they are contingency-shaped, which is to say that they draw the energy from the contingencies and factors that comprise the moment through themselves, transforming that moment into something new and of their own choosing. They attempt to bring the factor to the factors at play that bring It, us, all together as they are seeking unity and fusion. They are organized at the psychic level, they are "spirits in the material world." At last, we're talking about Man and Woman, and they are beyond belief, which is to say that they are not rule-governed. If anybody is, it is they who are going to the stars. They are "System" transcend(ers), nothing holds them. Only a few thousand free men and women in America and they are out to harvest soul.

There you have it, one way of looking at (one way of talking about) the steps en route to human completeness. I presume that we all are somewhere along this continuum. Or, to put it another way, that we are all over this continuum, spending varying amounts of time at each level. In fact, the American Norm may spend up to 15% of his time going around with absolutely "No Mind" at all inside his head. Then, 65 to 70 percent of his time, he finds himself simply living out the "program," following the dictates of parents, teachers, peers, neighborhood, community. Then, tiring as all of us do of life as a robot, he decides--perhaps 10% of his time--to behave on purpose, to pursue his own goal(s). Then, four or five percent of his time, he remembers that it is not what we do that matters but how we choose to do it, and the quality of his experience lifts, taking on a poetic quality. And then, finally, on rare but unforgettable occasions, he slips fully into the groove and feels in himself the unlimited capacity he has always known to be his.

The issue throughout our lives is: how do we get more and more of ourselves over to the right side, the fully human side, of this continuum. You all know the beautiful lyric, "Everybody's got mixed feelings about the function and the form, everybody got to elevate from the norm."8 The "norm" just described (the American Norm) is the norm of which they speak. And madness, which we are now in a position to define, is the enthusiasm for life that permits us to persist--despite fatigue, discouragement and increasing age--in our effort to move from No Mind to Never Mind. That is the obsession, the pursuit, of the would-be high performer.

 

John Dewey said that the bad man, no matter how good he has been, is the man who has stopped trying; and the good man, no matter how bad he has been, is the man who is again making the effort (i.e., the effort to "elevate from the norm"). Here, at last, we find ourselves face to face with the fundamental tenet of your profession; namely, that human beings first and foremost are characterized by their capacity for transformation,9 by their ability to change, to change course, to acquire new behaviors that permit them to navigate more effectively the demands of everyday life. As practitioners of your profession, you believe this tenet and you organize your household and your time accordingly. It is not unfair to say that your own actualization as a high performer depends on it, on helping your youths transform themselves. Mindful of this then, you say to each new youth who enters your home, "Welcome, . . . I will be honest with you and I will never let you off the hook.10 Because if I let you get away with your pouting, your tantruming, your abusiveness, your general withdrawal from life and from your own problems, then when you get older, you will use these same tactics on your friends and on your loved ones. In your effort to get what you want you will use these same "hoodwinking" techniques on your wife, your husband, your friends, your fellow employees, and you will drive them away from you. You will wreck these relationships and you will wreck your life.11 People will think that you still have 'No Mind' at all inside your head."

And, in the course of this parenting and teaching that you do, you have the pleasure (and sometimes it may not seem like a pleasure) of revealing you to yourself. Your past month's effort, indeed, your past week's effort, reveals to you your inclination to over-commit yourself, to underestimate yourself, to fall prey to "hurry" sickness;12 it reveals to you how you sometimes bully new and threatening situations, how you put things off and how you occasionally settle for less than you deserve; you see again your inclination to feel picked on, to be inflexible, to blame others for how you feel, to remain unorganized and forgetful of your intent; in a word, you see the degree to which you remain distracted. How many times, for example, have you found yourself standing in front of someone--staring right at them as they chatter away--and all of a sudden wake up to the fact that you have no idea what they are talking about? You can notice, however, that they are coming to a close and that your turn is coming up. So you take your best shot with the hope of remaining in the field of play. The problem is that the person with whom you are interacting may be one of the children in your care--or your own child--in need of a carefully tailored response which you are hard put to provide because you are distracted from receiving all but the sketchiest outline of the child's need. The problem, in T. S. Eliot's words, is that we are "distracted by distraction from distraction." And yet this is the problem the high performers overcome. They work on themselves and continue to work on themselves until they have developed the strength to Never Mind all that would otherwise distract them from their duty to the child in front of them. That is their hallmark.

 

To teach children is to discover what we must learn. That is the elegant way in which those we serve, serve us; both students and teachers, house-parents and the children in their care, advancing one another's development--or, at least, taking away the excuse for not advancing. And to advance--though this is not meant to suggest that it is other than extremely hard work--can be put in very simple terms, terms we have heard all of our lives. To advance from No Mind to Hive Mind, for example, the Developmental Imperative says, "Grow Up!"; from Hive Mind to Heroic Mind, it says, "Go for it!"; from Heroic to Poetic, "Cultivate the imagination!"; and for those who would go all the way, it says, "Turn the Fool loose."

 

Tomorrow, we will discuss in specific and operational terms the process by which one moves from No Mind to Never Mind. But tonight, in order to launch this conference, we will stay with image and metaphor so as to speak to the spirit of your profession.

This drawing by Daniel Luna, Jr. offers a metaphor for our discussion. "Here," says the artist, "is the old Mexican woman burying the owl, burying knowledge so that evil can reign." This, of course, goes to the heart of the high performer's struggle. For to move from No Mind to Never Mind means that the high performer must do anything and everything required in order to prevent this old Mexican woman from burying the owl. He or she must be adamant about it, mad about it, particularly if he or she is interested in providing a suitable role model for the children in their care. These children, it must be remembered, have reason to be confused. Already they have seen too many adults with whom they have lived lose their struggle with this old woman, lose because they could not sustain the performance, or engage in the behavior that their knowledge of what was appropriate required . . .

What is it that Woody Allen says human beings need more of than anything else? It is courage, the courage required to sustain the course called for by one's knowledge of what is right, the courage to follow-through to the completion of one's goals. Ask long term house-parents to tell you what they find most striking about the high performers in their profession and not infrequently they will answer, "The ability to set goals and complete them";13 (i.e., the ability to bring their vision to reality). It is by means of the will, "the strong blind man who carries upon his shoulders the lame man who can see,"14 that one's vision, both of oneself and of the ideal program, is brought to reality. Courage and will wrest the owl from the old woman's grasp and the high performer knows it.

 

What I would like to do now is invite you to sit back, to relax your concentration and enjoy the work of two friends of mine, work which on the surface may seem unrelated to your own work, but which, I believe, is highly related. In fact, I think that they are engaged in exactly the same work that you are engaged in.

(At this point slides of the artwork of Elizabeth Layton and Stan Herd were shown.)

Elizabeth Layton did not begin drawing until she was sixty-eight following the death of her son. For years, until the time of her death, she produced some of the richest, most wonderful, most thought-provoking drawings in contemporary art.

Stan Herd uses the tractor as his brush, the land as his canvas and crops as his paints. His field murals have received international attention.

In preparation for this presentation I spent time in over forty homes where individuals with commitments like your own have implemented programs for children. These homes varied tremendously in their quality. But in the top homes . . . the ones operated by the high performers, I invariably left with exactly the same feeling I leave with from a viewing of Stan Herd's and Elizabeth Layton's work. I left inspired. And moved, moved to consider the seriousness of my own work . . . to consider, in Buckminster Fuller's words, whether or not I am doing an adequate job of "turning my experience into products and events that bring advantage to others." Anyone engaged in work that makes others wonder about this, about the quality and seriousness of their own work, is performing a community service. That is what you, Stan Herd, Elizabeth Layton and high performers in general have in common; you are performing a community service.

As this presentation draws to a close there are three additional characteristics of high performers that I would like to discuss. With these we can come close to completing the hedgehog's view. The three characteristics are 1) Neoteny; 2) Daring, Risk Taking, the Leap of Faith; and 3) Grand Illusion.

Neoteny - the extension of certain juvenile characteristics into adulthood. I would suggest to you that you are not a group of adults working with adolescents. Rather, you are a group of advancing adolescents working with children. And why? Because adults too often are serious, uptight, defensive, over-specialized, habit-governed, dispassionate, drained, blank-eyed and hopeless! You wouldn't leave your children alone with a bunch like that and neither would I! In fact, the word "adult" is the past participle of the verb adolescere (to grow). It means that the "action" already has taken place. The present participle of the verb adolescere (to grow) is the word "adolescent." High performers are, in that sense, adolescent. They are neotenous, which is to say that they are change-able, that they continue to grow, that they are open-minded--that they are looking to build something better than they have ever seen before.15 And there is no reason to exclude yourself from this concept. It has nothing to do with age. Elizabeth Layton--at age 75 and beyond--was a neotenous individual.

Next, Risk-taking, the Leap of Faith. Everyone by the time they have reached our age--and particularly if they are in your profession--knows how important risk-taking is. "No daring is fatal"16 as the saying goes. And it is so important that we learn this that the Force behind Evolution has gone to the trouble of creating high school dances!

"I've been staring this girl down for hours and I don't aim my sights too high if you know what I mean. It's five to ten, five to eleven, whenever those dances use to end and a tune like this (a slow dance tune) would come on. So I'd start walking across the dance floor and let me tell you that is a long walk. Many a night I never made it across. You know, I'd get half-way and turn back cuz you weren't askin' a girl, 'Do you want to dance?', you were askin' , 'Do you WANTA!' My life is in your hands. We're not talking about a dance, we're talking about SURVIVAL. If she said no . . . but if she said yes, you were saved."17

In this profession of yours--speaking figuratively--if you don't ask them to dance, then you can forget all about it . . . because it will not happen otherwise. The kind of program you dream about, the kind of transformation you believe possible for the children in your care, your own pursuit of high performance, all are impossible without your willingness to take risks analogous to that walk across the dance floor.

And when the first person you ask to dance turns you down, you must pick yourself up and walk across the dance floor and ask someone else. And if that person turns you down, you must ask someone else--and if that person says "no", then someone else, and so on, and if still they say "no", then you have a problem. To pick yourself up and ask still another person after so many have said "no", requires something special--it requires grand illusion.

Grand Illusion. "The wisest men (and women)," wrote Henry Miller, "are those who speak of illusion. Illusion is the antidote to fear," . . . the fear of rejection, the fear of failure. And by illusion I mean the image you adopt of yourself, your self-image; how you see yourself even though you may find you are going through a period when it is clear to you that others do not see you the same way.

What "image" is appropriate? How, indeed, should you see yourself as you undertake the many risks and hardships implicit in this profession of yours, this community service you have decided to provide? In what way should you view yourself that is consistent with the proper madness and is not, instead, absolutely crazy?

There are guidelines. First, you should not select a view of yourself that is in any way self-limiting or developmentally distorting. It must be large, with room for you to move around . . . where error is accepted and used as a catalyst for growth. Second, you should not select an image, a grand illusion of yourself, that you take so seriously that you take offense to challenges of its accuracy. And finally, you should embrace this view of yourself, this grand illusion, as though it were an hypothesis--in the spirit of what is sometimes called "controlled folly." You are, after all, an experiment.

Following these guidelines (and realizing that everyone must come up with their own grand and sustaining illusion), what are examples of appropriate or suitable grand illusions? Who are you, after all, as you struggle to bring your vision of the ideal program to reality?

You are the cat's meow; you are whatever it is that brings the grain out of wood18; you are an agent for the Force (there are a lot of variations on that theme); you are forever experiencing what you experience when you "take off your uniform and put on civilian clothes"19; you are a child of the higher man20; you are a professional teacher and parent; you are the meat flambeau21; no matter how tired, how beat up, how under-appreciated or how old, you are "cream rising."

That's who you are . . . because its only the cat's meow who is going to pick him or her self up after the 25th person has said, "Thanks, but no thanks, I don't want to dance with you," and walk over and ask someone else just like it was their mistake all along!

Only that kind of persistence gives you the advantage you need to overcome the obstacles in yourself and in the outer world that must be overcome if you are to establish a successful program.

And besides that--and most important of all--it's that kind of persistence that makes you handsome. And that is what every child in your care wants to learn, how to be handsome. And it is your job to model it for them. That is what high performers do.

To summarize, high performers, fueled by the only madness that is proper, labor to bring their vision of the ideal program to reality and in the process, make for themselves the kind of character that must be modeled for the children in their care. This, as it turns out, is the wisest of all treatment interventions, wise because it is the means by which they themselves move toward completeness and thus, toward whatever increase in personal effectiveness that may imply; and wise also because it undercuts the legitimacy of the child's excuse, later in life, to settle for anything less in him or her self. Because whenever they do settle for less, the shadow of your example will remind them that human behavior exists and that to engage in it they need only answer the call; the call to grow up finally to the point when they too can Turn the Fool Loose.

This has been a demanding presentation. But that is always the way it is with the Hedgehog's view; so many issues must be drawn together as though there is only one.

Tomorrow, as this conference gets underway, I encourage you to enter the scheduled presentations and workshops with the same enthusiasm that you would have the children in your care enter the program you have created for them: to get everything out of it. As for this evening's presentation, it has been my pleasure.

Thank you very much.

REFERENCES -

1 Keynote address at the 29th Annual Workshop for Personnel who Work in Homes for Children; Fort Worth, Texas - June, 1987
2 Boys Town's Consultation Manual (in press)
3 Personal communication: Bob Pick, Layne Yahnke, Mark and Kay Graham, all current or former house-parents
4 Personal communication: Lou Palma, BT Community Director
5 Personal communication: Mark Graham
6 Personal communication: Kay Graham
7 Norman O. Brown
8 From "Vital Signs" by Rush.
9 From the works of M. Scott Peck and others who argue that human beings have an unlimited capacity for psychological and spiritual growth.
10 Personal communication: Kay Graham
11 I am indebted to L. Keith Miller for pointing out to me the way in which we bring self-defeating thoughts and behaviors, acquired in childhood, into our adult lives.
12 Kenneth Pelletier
13 Personal communication: Layne Yahnke
14 Schopenhauer
15 Timothy Leary
16 Rene Crevel
17 From Bruce Springsteen by Peter Gambaccini.
18 Personal communication: Dan Daly, Director, BT National Family Home Program
19 Colin Wilson
20 Bob Marley
21 Michael McClure