By Bill Harley
(Photo By Nancy Wong)
Jean and I recently met up with old friends and made new ones at the 2017 Green Lake Bahá’í Conference. The focus of this year’s conference was on the family unit as a component of the family of humankind. Jean and I led workshops on using Compassionate Consultation in the family. Using Compassionate Consultation is a wonderful way to make transformative decisions that solve problems in ways that are just and unifying for the whole family.
We used deliberative examples from our own family and from those of our clients’ families to demonstrate the dramatic difference between trying to solve problems and make decisions the way the larger culture teaches us to do it, and how things work when we instead use Compassion Consultation to draw forth our truest selves, align our solutions and decisions with spiritual principles and values we want to live by, and reach profound levels of understanding and unity.
Our experience at the conference reminded us that once we begin to see the dramatic difference between the relatively adolescent methods of deliberation, problem solving and decision-making currently in use in our larger culture and the beauty, profundity and maturity of the Compassionate Consultation process, we also begin to realize that this process that can transform the life of a family at the micro level can also transform the life of humankind at the macro level.
All of us are pre-wired to use Compassionate Consultation; it just takes learning the principles and disciplines involved to begin putting it into practice and gaining the transformative outcomes. To explore these ideas and examples more fully, see our book, TRANSFORMED: How to Make the Decisions That Change Your Life. If you live in the Minneapolis/St. Paul region and want to join a group of people who meet together regularly to improve their practice of Compassionate Consultation (and Wall-Seeking), please contact us for more information on The Growth Lab (contact[at]harleycoaching.com).