What Do You Do?

Greetings from South Gippsland where spring is stubbornly forgetting to arrive.

I had the opportunity to explain what I do with HIP to someone this week. How do you summarize more than fifteen years of working on a topic? Start with the topic, I guess.

“Yes, I know the word hero doesn’t work in Australia the same way it does in the U.S. Nowhere treats ‘hero’ the same as the Americans. Not in Portugal or Poland, the Faroes or France, India or Istanbul.”

The usual topics were covered. Zimbardo? Check. Superheroes? Check. “You seem to fly a lot.” Yes, we get to work in all sorts of great places with even greater people. “What do you actually do?” Ah………

What do we do? Less than we want to and more than we have time to. Somehow.

The sixteen board members all do interesting things in their lives and still carve out time and brain power and perspective to meet every month and plot out a way to make people more likely to act heroically when someone needs them to.

We write papers, we hold conferences, we create online training, we present workshops to academics, children, executives, and community groups. We connect people doing their own hero-based work and we try to let people know what we’re doing. None of it as well as we’d like.

But we really enjoy it. There’s not much better than the reactions received by the people in the room, whether that room is physical or virtual. In the last month, I’ve had an experienced professional tell me I changed their life, a number of people tell our crew that they’d just had the best two days of their lives, and a consultant say he wished he could do something as meaningful.

Why am I writing this today? It’s important to remember the value of what we’re doing. There are frustrating moments when a group we thought was hiring us to run a week of training in a fancy city ghosts us, but that’s balanced by an anonymous donor making sure we provide that same kind of training to refugees, students, and children in Sicily, Senegal, and Porto. I’m writing to give myself a reminder that from a lot of perspectives, we’re doing interesting, important, and envy-producing work. And if you’re reading this, you’re in some part a reason for that work. Thanks.

Now, onto the juicy stuff.

The Jai Hind Project

This project, starting January 1st, has been born to give India better and more everyday heroes by telling their stories so others may be inspired to be heroes themselves. (LINK)

Founder, Vineet Panchhi, was a member of our Level 2 small-group training. We’re planning a new Level 2 cohort soon, so if you' think you’d like to further your understanding of heroism, consider ways to teach it, and meet half a dozen others like you, get in touch.

Citizens versus Motorbike Thieves

Watch this scene unfold as a number of people fight through the barriers to action and force a group of potential thieves to give up their efforts. What do you notice? What would you do?

Seeing your life story as a Hero’s Journey increases meaning in life

Scott Plous sent the following paper to Phil this week. Eight studies reveal that the Hero’s Journey predicts and can causally increase people’s experience of meaning in life. Have you looked at your life or some part of it as a hero’s journey? Can you see the steps in your own stories? These results provide initial evidence that enduring cultural narratives like the Hero’s Journey both reflect meaningful lives and can help to create them. That certainly mirrors what I’ve seen in our trainings over the years. (LINK)

That’s it this week. Pay attention to the good things you’re doing this week. It’s easy to think things are blah, but when you give yourself some time and some credit, you might surprise yourself.

Matt