A lot of workplaces these days suffer from toxic competition, misogyny, and discrimination. There are tons of ways to overcome these obstacles, but the best approach is encouraging every team member to experience inner transformation. Ina Gjikondi and Bonnie Buckner chat with Sean Harvey, a TEDx speaker, author, and interfaith minister. He talks about being an agent of change who guides others in tapping into their creative mind and unleashing their authentic self. He explains how a transformation from within can lead to a complete systems change, giving birth to heart-centered spaces. Sean also talks about his project called Men’s Soul Adventures, where he bonds with fellow men through soul-connecting conversations that lead to life-changing spiritual growth.
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How Inner Transformation Can Lead To Systems Change With Sean Harvey
We have Sean Harvey as our guest. He is the Chief Compassion Officer of Warrior Compassion Men’s Studio. He is also a TEDx speaker, author, and interfaith minister whose book, Warrior Compassion: Unleashing the Healing Power of Men Leadership Culture offers a roadmap for men’s healing as a catalyst for systems change and will be released in September 2023.
He does a lot of work around systems change and police departments, Federal law enforcement, and military security forces. He served as the head of personal transformation and well-being for Eileen Fisher. Prior to that, he led a talent consulting division in New York City, where he created a socially conscious leadership program for Wall Street. When he was sixteen, he launched Youth Quest, an LGBTQ+ youth group for the city of Dayton, Ohio, which continues to serve you throughout southwest Ohio.
We are happy to have you with us. The story that you tell when you speak about how you have moved from one place to the other, and how that has been woven into the fabric of the work that you’re doing is quite interesting. I know you are also writing a book. Just being with you in that conversation makes me think of my own journey and the places I have been. I lived in Albania. At that time, I worked a lot with the United Nations and nonprofits. That was a lot about my organizing self. The organizer in me was cultivated.
Coming to the United States, I moved into leadership development. I almost feel like I went deeper. It is interesting because when I go back to Albania, parts of me that haven’t been aligned or need different attention, that land and space itself, almost push me to do something new. It triggers a part of me that hasn’t learned or needs to learn. It is like medicine. These spaces become the medicine that we need and the medicine that we teach. I would love to learn more about how that works for you and how that has moved you in your own journey.
It is great to be with both of you. We had a conversation, and I’m going to take us even a couple of steps before that because each location has been part of the key ingredients for whatever is emerging now. I started out consulting on Wall Street in New York. At a certain point, I had enough. I was the vice president of a talent consulting practice of a consulting firm in New York. On my 40th birthday, as my birthday present, I walked into the CEO’s office and said, “I have lost my heart and soul in the job. I quit.” I resigned.
Within two weeks, this opportunity came along at this women’s fashion company, Eileen Fisher. I interviewed for it and met with 27 people, multiple projects, and case studies. I finally got the offer out of about 80 candidates. On my first day, my two bosses sat me down and said, “Sean, we want you to know that you have proven yourself in the interview process. We now want you to stop proving yourself and learn how to be who you are. When you interviewed with us, you showed us your heart and you showed us your polish. We hired you for your heart, and we want to see less of your polish. We want to see you unfiltered and who you authentically are.”
I don’t know about you, but I think that it is pretty remarkable for leaders to say that. It is remarkable for men to hear that, especially someone coming from a Wall Street environment. Three weeks later, I found myself in Eileen’s living room. In Eileen’s living room, she is a real person. In an all-day retreat, about two and a half hours in, I was doing an interpretive dance to a poem about a bumblebee finding her nectar while drums were beating in the background. My boss came up to me and said, “Sean, you are in a different world now. You know that, right?”
That began the journey of learning the power of the feminine because Eileen Fisher wasn’t just a feminine leadership female-dominated company. The model was based on the feminine. What was remarkable was seeing how men were being transformed by the feminine more organically than what I think happens in a lot of men’s work, which still comes at it from a masculine approach. The way I see it is as men, we start in the wounded masculine, and we move to the wounded feminine because we don’t know what the heck it is. We heal in the healing feminine, and we strengthen in the healing masculine to come into our divine masculine and feminine when we become truly integrated.
We heal in the feminine energy and strengthen in the masculine energy to come into our divine masculine-feminine self, when we become truly integrated.
As I think about this, that led me on this journey to ask three questions. What I started hearing when I started talking to men about how they were being transformed in this environment was, “My wife said I’m more patient. I listen differently.” My personal favorite was, “I stopped needing to be right. I started to be more curious. I started to create space for others who don’t look like me. I started to have more access to my emotional expression, tap more into my creativity differently, and solve problems differently.”
I started asking these questions. What if more men had exposure to what the 200 men in Eileen Fisher had been exposed to? What if we could create true gender bridge building, not just from a place of equity but from a place of innovation to solve societal and organizational challenges that are becoming more complex? They have fewer black-and-white answers and get men to be more comfortable in the gray and the tension of the polarities. Third, what if we could redesign organizational systems that take the best of the healthy masculine and the best of the healthy feminine, and create an integration for true cultures of deeper consciousness, deeper compassion, and deeper connection?
I have a burning question for you. It is something I have been thinking about a lot. In a lot of leadership and coaching programs, they talk about fostering trust, compassion, and these values that we are talking about. I always am curious how, on the one hand, we can tell people you need to learn to trust more when on the other hand, they are in an environment that is built on the competition for position and title. How do we work around that?
My role at Eileen Fisher started as the change agent for creative. I was the OD, organization development partner for all creative teams. I evolved into the head of personal transformation and well-being for the company. We believe that before you can do the leadership work or the culture work, you have to do the personal transformation work.
We guided employees through ego work, limiting beliefs work, shadow work, spirit and mindfulness, and embodiment and somatic work. I go and talk to chiefs of police and say, “I’m going to help your cops tap into their feminines, they can be more integrated and be better cops. When they have their finger on the trigger. They are going to have a different level of embodiment of who they are as they make those decisions.” That is a hard sell.
It goes back to your question. In a culture like policing or the military that is often fear-based and is often based on fear-based control, how do we create that space for vulnerability? What I found when we did the work with the police was that we put all of that to the side. The intentions of change and the intensities of transformation that goes on go to the side.
When I work with men and White nationalists, I’m going in saying, “Where is their suffering and where is their yearning?” I’m speaking to the suffering and yearning, and taking everything out of the equation. These concepts are both foreign, at the same time, uncomfortable and haven’t been accessible. It’s being able to create the opportunity to give them space. When I train facilitators, I always say, “Your facilitation is defined in the first 30 seconds. It has nothing to do with your content or opening. It has everything to do with your presence and energy. What have you cleared coming into the space to allow that to happen?”
When I do the work with men and in these environments, I know it is my energy, presence, and clearing that allows me to create safety in the space where they are feeling an energetic pull even when their minds don’t understand what is going on. Part of it is in order for us to do the work we have to think about, I hate the term meeting people where they are. I think what we have to do is understand that where people are is not necessarily where our aspirations are. Take a step back and say, “What does this person need? What is this person’s fear? Where is this person suffering? Where does this person need to be heard?” There is often a core energetic dimension to this that is important.
Early on in my career, I remember I was interviewing for a job to consult with McKinsey Consultants. I didn’t get the job, but I got the feedback at the end of this training that I have an unusual ability to make people feel calm right out of the gate. I never understood what that meant, and now I understand the power of it. When we relax the ego and we come in authentic, and we come from a place of heart-centeredness, that is going to speak to someone in their heart. When we come from a place of the mind, we are going to speak to them in the head. It is hard to translate between the two. Part of it is the way we ground, have intentions, and manage our expectations. The most important thing is that we extend an invitation to an inquiry and not show people that this is the way.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. At the same time, I’m going to flip my question a little bit. It is still burning in me. I get that if I’m coming to work with someone one-on-one, I think about your experience at Eileen Fisher, where the whole company was bought in. For me, companies, capitalists, and the economy are masculine structures.
Let’s say there’s a company or a government department that has 300 employees, and they send ten to leadership development. Those ten are expected to be vulnerable and learn trust but go back into an environment that is built on competition. Eileen Fisher was an oasis of a beautiful ideal example because it was all–in. How do we get people to go in as a tiny little portion of an already entrenched organization and be there in a new space of trust when everyone around them is hoping to someday get promoted ahead of them?
Three things are coming to mind. One, be realistic about what the re-entry will be like, and don’t sugarcoat or minimize what the culture actually is. Let’s not create a utopia here. You have evolved as a leader. Now you will come back and be the savior of your organization. First, having real and honest conversations is part of the experience for what the re-entry looks like, and how to help those folks manage expectations.
Two, what I find is understanding your sphere of influence and where you have control. In terms of managing my expectations, you don’t need to go and look at, “How do I change the organization?” but in the area that I have influence, “How can I start to create a model of behavior?” If you go back to your point around competition, if the other department looks at the performance I’m getting because I’m engaging differently, their competitive streak is going to go, “What are you doing?” They want some of it. It becomes an opportunity to spread the methodology and idea because they are seeing results in a different way that they can’t understand. It is going to create curiosity.
We’ll come back to it, but I want to go back a little bit to what you were sharing when you went through the interview process. That is quite an intensive eight months. Also, it shows the integrity of the company and the intention to find the right people who are going to do the work. The thing that stayed with me was what they invited you to do to show them your heart.
Fast forward, you spoke a bit about this heart-centeredness and how you show up in the space as a facilitator, a leader, and a human being, and how your energy matters. The presence matters. It made me think of something. I know you might know this because you have studied Enneagram. Gurdjieff, when he meets Father Giovanni and asks him about direct knowing and faith, he tells him the tale of the two brothers.
Both of them would come and speak to this brotherhood. One of the brothers would speak but then whatever he said was forgotten the next day. The other brother would say whatever he needed to say. At the moment, it would make no sense. Sometimes, people would feel like, “What is going on here?” His teachings would come back and hunt and be with people for the days ahead.
The distinction that Father Giovanni was making here for Gurdjieff is saying that the first brother’s teachings came from the mind and the others came from the heart. I saw that story mirrored what you were telling and what you were sharing. I am curious, how do you cultivate that heart-centered space? I know part of that is the inner work. How do you work with your own self, and how do you work with others, especially with men, to come to that heart-centered space?
I was fortunate to go through a number of different unique experiences. One, a human interaction lab with NTL. Two, look at my level of emotional intelligence in my first year on the job, and then being sent to an artist commune for five months in Canada to learn how to incorporate the arts, create facilitation, and see how the arts are a pathway into the inner life. Third, living with mystics for nine months in the Blue Ridge Mountains and feeling the power of nature.
For myself, it has been a journey of finding what gets me connected to myself. It has been looking out and being realistic and honest about the distractions, be it addictive behaviors or whatever it is that keeps me from listening to myself and my highest essence or my deepest intuition. I talk about it in the book Warrior Compassion, how do I have compassion and forgiveness for the things I don’t want to see? How do I have the courage to look at the things that are uncomfortable? How do I have the presence and resilience to walk into the places that I don’t want to go?
Often, it is also going against my own grain to say, “I’m walking into my edge.” With other men, especially, it is helping them find what paths are going to help them to come into themselves. A lot of men I talk to can’t do visualizations, can’t sit through and go in. Meditation is hard, but moving embodiment is easy. I’m helping them find different modalities. What is going to be a pathway within? Is it the arts, creative endeavors, movement, sports or just me?
My most meditative state either comes from driving in nature or playing with bunny rabbits. I’m a bunny dad. I remember volunteering at the shelter around Christmas or Christmas Eve, being the only person in a room with 25 bunny rabbits. The stillness, the calmness, and the quietness were one of the most profound experiences, so helping them discover that.
One of the pathways that were the most helpful for me at Eileen Fisher was doing my purpose work. I’m coming in because that revealed so much about who I am and what I’m about. My second master’s degree was in counseling with a focus on existential psychotherapy. Being able to go in, that’s what I do with men. With men, there are two pathways that I have. One, I created something called men’s soul adventures, where I take men out into nature. We have deeper male bonding, and we have soul-connecting conversations, where I bring in either the philosophical existential or spiritual growth questions to bring that in.
In DC, I launched this on Meetup, and within 24 hours, we had 52 men in the group. By the time I left DC, we had 180 men in over 4 or 5 months. I brought it to Philadelphia. We had 51 men. I experimented in New York. We have 50 guys. I took it to Chicago: 32 guys. I tried Seattle, to ask, “Is this an East Coast thing?” About 40 guys signed up in Seattle. We had about 310 men in the group.
I started to ask questions, “Why did you come?” They were like, “I want a deeper experience when I do an adventure. I don’t want to just have the adventure.” Most wanted a deeper connection with other men. As I’m writing my book, one of the things I found was one of the biggest fears men have is the fear of other men. White men would say, “One of the biggest fears is the fear of other White men.” We can get into what that is about.
The other piece was they wanted spiritual awakening. They wanted to go deeper spiritually. Going back to not giving something to men because I think they need it, but exploring and examining what is the yearning and where is the suffering. I remember being in a meeting with our police team. After the Uvalde shooting, we had a meeting with senate staffers on the judiciary committee under Senator Durbin. It was a week after Uvalde. Our conversation was about men’s mental health, mass shootings, police shootings, gun violence, and police suicides. I went, “This is the conversation. This is taking everything to the extreme of why we do this work.”
When we go to the core of where the suffering is that creates someone to want to shoot up a grocery store or an elementary school, take their own life, assault someone or take a gun, and they get to that level of there is no other option, what is breaking down? It is not just from a systems perspective. What is breaking down for them? What is happening from a place of conditioning? What is happening from a place of unhealed trauma and wounding?
These are the things that prompt me in the conversations. I take all the overthinking, over-packaging, over-processing and go, “What is the thing the guys need?” They need connection. They need the invitation to go deeper. They need something that is going to bring them together and that they are going to be interested in and do on a sustainable basis.
As much as I respect a lot of the men’s work that is out there, sitting in a circle every week is going to be hard for a lot of guys to talk about their stuff. It’s very different. It is more like a water cooler conversation. We are going to go out and we are going to go on a hike. We are going to have these informal conversations. The way I design it is we go out for about half the experience. We sit down, do some meditation or embodiment work, and go into deep exploration. We have the whole journey back for folks to find their people and go deeper into the conversations. It is creating that limitation.
It is not just meeting men where they are. It is offering it in a non-headed and non-ego-based way. What is the thing that is going to invite men to explore in a way that they can tolerate and embrace? There is an opportunity for sustainable connection, conversation, and, more importantly, friendship and community. I have been around the men’s workspace now for a while. Even in the men where we espouse compassion, connection, and community, most of us suck at it. Where my book starts is men have not been socialized in healthy ways. The thing we yearn for the most is that deeper connection. The thing that alludes to us the most is a deeper connection.
I’m Jewish. One of the things in the Jewish tradition, particularly in the orthodoxy, is that there are certain prayers that require a minion, which traditionally was ten men, but in liberal Judaism, it can be ten people. I was having a conversation with an older Jewish man about why the ten men. He said to me, “It is because men don’t know how to come together, and men don’t know how to make a community. Women do it all the time.” This is a means to make them come together because you can’t do certain prayers without them. I thought that was so interesting and such a different way of looking at that.
I often say this work is about three things, basis and existential thought. It is about authenticity, purpose, and connection. This is where I started this from the beginning. I always bring it down to four questions. The existential deep dive is what I call it. I’m about to do brewery. In Philadelphia, we’re going to a brewery every other week and having an existential deep dive on some aspect of these four questions. Who am I? Why am I here? What am I here to do, and how do I love? I keep bringing it to the simplest form. I find that talking about my self-care and well-being may not appeal to men, but there are a number of men that are asking the meaning of life questions, especially now as the world is changing fast.
As many men are feeling lost, and a lot of White straight men are feeling lost, where do I fit into the equation? Where do I fit in my organization? Where do I fit as a man? Where do I fit as a White man? All these conversations are around power and privilege. As gender rules and roles are changing, how do I navigate that? As we come into the conversation around racial justice, how do I navigate that? How do I navigate that the power dynamics are changing rapidly and dynamically? How are men able to stay in this versus feeling left behind?
With the world changing so fast, many men are feeling lost. They don’t know where they fit in their organization and as men in general, especially as gender rules and roles continue to change.
In one of my conversations, I was in between a police conversation, a progressive and a conservative. I’m somehow able to manage the conversation between the two without pissing either off and keeping them engaged with thought-provoking conversations and questions to get them to both have a paradigm shift. I was talking to Judi Neal, whom we both know, and she leads a group called Edgewalkers. Part of the work we do when we are in these spaces is we walk the edge between communities because we don’t fit in any particular community fully, but we are able to be a bridge amongst communities.
You started talking about the police, and this is where I was interested to go because you have shared a bit about the experiences and how these men are looking for deeper connection and spiritually, but even connecting deeper with themselves. You spoke about the work you have been doing with the police. I’m curious, how is that even being introduced in the context of the organization, the work you are doing? Is it men only because you put the ask out there, and whoever feels that energy goes in? With an organization, how does that energy move? What is that dialogue like?
Each location I’m in has a different part of this equation. In Philadelphia, where I am now, it is this integration. The way I look at it is this work is about how we create societal systems change. When I work backward as a systems thinker and OD practitioner or organization development practitioner, they go, “What is the Achilles’ heel?” I say, “It is men in power who are holding onto power out of fear and are not their inner work to be able to relax the ego to create space for others to elevate. That is where we need to pay attention.”
When I started this, it was about how we create the systems change. I’m working backward on those three questions I said earlier. How do we create the systems change? How do we develop the change agents to be able to come in and do the systems change work that is coming from deeper consciousness and allowing for it to be comfortable in the emergence of hyper-masculine environments? Third, how do we invite more men into the process, so it is not 85% women and the particular type of men coming in to do this work? How do we reach more men across communities?
When I think about that, the work around culture change is mixed gender. The work on how I develop change agents, facilitators, bridge builders, change-makers of the world, and leaders is mixed gender. Inviting men into the conversation is one piece where I put particular attention because if not, it becomes a lopsided type of conversation where more men aren’t in, and more men who are holding power aren’t involved to be able to release the power.
When I watch men talk about race versus gender, there are different levels of awareness. I find a lot of men don’t want to talk about race, but a lot of men will consciously think about gender in ways that their misogyny comes through in ways that their racism doesn’t. We were racialized at a particular age, probably 3, 4, 5 or 6, but we were gendered nine months before we were born. It affects everyone. You can’t take yourself out of the gender conversation. You can take yourself out of the race conversation.
“I’m not a racist. This doesn’t apply to me, and I’m going to check myself out.” You can’t get out of the gender conversation because it affects all of us in different ways. Through an intersection of lenses, we start with gender, then we can look at where the other places of hate or bias have to come into the exploration.
By starting to solve issues around gender, an organization can look well within at other places of hate and bias.
It is not just inviting men in. It is also helping men learn to navigate the shifting rules and rules around gender so they can come into gender bridge-building conversations in a different way. We go from that into change agents. How do we start looking at the systems of repression in organizations? How do we start to look at the ways that the power dynamics are unfair, and how do we start to create cultures of compassion in these environments? We can then come into the consulting work to say, “How do we start to transform system structures and cultures in a way that is equitable, conscious, and compassionate, in the ways that we are connected in a different way?
Sean, tagging onto that, I have a question because you have been talking a lot about paradigm shifts, creating change, and changing cultures. What does it look like? What is the image of that destination?
Three hundred seventy million. When I think about men’s work, the largest organization for men’s work has reached about 76,000 men worldwide over 50 years. We have 3.7 billion men on this planet. If we want to create scale, what is 10% of that? Even 1%. I like to be ambitious and crazy. If we were to reach 370 million men, and not that we are creating transformation. My sense is you can’t measure personal transformation. You are going to go through training and you are going to be healed.
When we are coaching and healing as therapists, ministers, and change agents, each one of us is creating an imprint on someone else. Each one of us is planting a seed. It is for us to let go of our own ego or manage our own expectations that, “I don’t have to see the seed germinate, but I can trust that by my imprint, my connection, my love for this person, my modeling, and my inquiry, I’m going to plant a seed that will germinate in this person’s time as they continue to do their work.”
My goal is to have 370 million imprints for men to be able to be invited into their own spiritual awakening journey, and trust that as they walk on the path. The path will show them where they need to go for their soul healing, ego journey, and ego disillusion so they can come into the truest sense of themselves.
To tack onto this question, when we are talking about a shifting paradigm, we are going from one paradigm, which you have described well, to some new paradigm. What does that look like?
The way I often say this is this work is a lever for compassion and bridge-building across gender and for shifting leadership models. They are coming from a place of deeper compassion that integrates the masculine-feminine. Power dynamics are shifting so they are equitable. They are taking out the places of oppression, and all voices can rise up. The systems and structures that have been built from the masculine are having space for the feminine for the flow. We go into the place of structure and flow. We can go to the place of tapping into the emergent of what wants to come through from deeper consciousness. We can start to create cultures that are healing.
I often describe it in simplest terms as cultures that are more conscious, more compassionate, and more connected. Part of this is because this is still early in the journey. It is pretty much the blueprint in my head. More of it is I as more of us walk this path. There are many communities of folks who are in this place, exploring and inquiring. The more important thing is we find each other and find ways to truly collaborate versus having all these silos of these journeys in these communities.
As we find each other, we are going to be able to innovate and solve challenges differently. The other piece is our challenges, be it from a climate, economic, political, or authoritarian leadership government type of situation. They are not going to get easier or simplified. They are going to become more complex. That also requires us to innovate differently to be able to solve those challenges and address those challenges.
I want to build on your question, Bonnie, because I know you have asked about what it looks like. I want to ask that question once more in a way because I feel like you have described what shifts and how it shifts, and I‘m curious. We can’t pretend to know, and yet we know. How does it feel to be in this new paradigm or this new space? What a human being, a man, a woman, or an organization would look like? Maybe just the experience of a human in this new shift. We can’t pretend to know, and yet we know like we bring our hearts to it. What is it?
I’m going to shrink it down to what it was like to go from Wall Street to Eileen Fisher because that is a microcosm of what I’m talking about. In some ways, what I am bringing forward is a model that was created at Eileen Fisher that can be a model for systems change in other organizations. What it felt like was liberation, freedom, and comfort to be in my own skin, and to be supported by my leaders and my team.
I felt a genuine sense of care, nurturing, and love. I was free to fuck up and make mistakes. It was learning. It wasn’t a consequence. I was able to be given the space to go into my discomfort and to know that I was supported and at the same time, honored that I was on my path and my peers were witnessing me. They were holding me up. They weren’t letting me fall, but they were also letting me experience what I needed to experience.
My father died while I was at Eileen Fisher. I had not talked to him for fourteen years after I came out as queer. I found out a year before he died that he was dying. My boss stepped in and said, “You are going to see your father.” I said, “No, I’m not.” He was like, “You will regret it until the day you die if you don’t do this. I’m making you go see your father.” There weren’t a lot of discussions.
I went and honestly, that last year, after the first time I saw him, he said, “I don’t condone your life choice and you are going to hell.” This is an important story that I can share because it is why I believe this work is possible for men. My father was a Vietnam vet. I was supposed to be a third-generation truck driver. That did not happen. My dad was very conservative, and he was a Jehovah’s Witness. The gay thing did not go well. After I saw him, that’s what he shared.
My father started to reach out once we reconnected. I was ignoring his calls. Finally, I’m like, “Sean, you have two choices here. You can stay in resentment or you can lean into love. Which do you choose?” I chose to lean into love, let go of the resentment and started to engage. There was one conversation in particular where he started talking about politics. I remember every time he gives one of his talking points, I come back with one of my talking points.
He started laughing at a certain point. I said, “Let me check on something. No one ever calls you out on your bullshit, do they?” He was like, “No.” He started laughing. I said, “I’m your son. Whatever you do, I’m going to do better because that is how this father and son thing works.” He started laughing. That was the moment we realized we were truly father and son.
A few conversations later, I reached out to my dad. We were talking. I said, “I want to take you back when you told me you didn’t condone my life choice. Let me break down the impact that had on me at every level.” I did. He said, “I didn’t realize that. I’m so sorry.” That opened our relationship to the point that I saw him the day before he went into hospice. I’m an only child. I’m his only son. I said, “What advice would you give your only son, your only child?” He said these words, “Son, don’t let anybody get your powder wet.” I said, “My powder.” He said, “Your gunpowder, son. Don’t let anybody extinguish your flame. I want you to be proud of who you are and what you are because I’m proud of who you are and what you are.”
The next day, he let his queer son say a prayer for him, the Jehovah’s Witness. Seeing that transformation, love, and the transforming power of love in our relationship showed me that the hardest to love and the hardest to reach man, there is a possibility when love is the guiding force and the energy. I will leave it at that.
That is a very powerful and beautiful story. The thing that is ringing in my ear is your ability to be reached and your choice of choosing to let go of resentment and step in. For me, that is the moment where the transformation happened and points to how powerful it is for one person to do their inner work and make a choice and a transformation, and how that affects those around us.
What to build on that is this idea of power. You talked earlier about powerful men or men who hold their power for the sake of fear. This is a different way of owning your own power because you are breaking down to your father, “This is what you said. This is how it impacted me.” That is owning your own power. You understand this is a different perspective. You see this for you to step into that in a different way. This is a different way of approaching love and owning your power in a very compassionate way as you have been speaking.
It is the connection between forgiveness and compassion. It stems from this place of love.
The other thing I was going to make a note of is how your boss at Eileen Fisher and your belief as well that you have been holding is that there is no systems transformation without inner transformation. That example also was showing how your boss was inviting you to step into that value system that you had said yes to. This was a practical way because we brought our whole selves into the space. It was not, “This personal life got to be tucked away. Yet, I’m going to be good here in this workspace and will help transform the organization.” That is a remarkable example when we think of, “What is this new paradigm look like? That is a concrete example. Having someone that calls you on your values and invites you to leave them in a direct way. Thank you for this story.
I would like to invite you to share any last words or practice you would want to invite people into or a question that could be a good way to ponder further. I had many notes here as you were talking little words. It has been a rich conversation. How does it land for you? What else do you feel you want to say?
I did a soul adventure over the weekend, and I gave the men a question to ponder after we checked in and connected, “What is the adventure that your soul is yearning for now?” I believe this work has to be soul-inspired, not just heart-centered, and not out of the head. We can get men out of the head and tap into the heart by learning to listen to the soul and to be with where your soul is calling you. How is your soul speaking to you? That is a different type of seeking a deeper connection.
That is what becomes pivotal because that is the place. It stems from the truest essence of unconditional love. That’s what ignites compassion, compassionate behaviors, empathy, and our actions in the world where we are minimizing, reducing, and eliminating suffering for others and ourselves, which is the essence of compassion.
One of the things we do with compassion is we intellectualize and idealize it. It is a great term to have. What I always ask folks when I do work around compassion at bridge building is, how do you bring compassion into every interaction that you have at every moment of your life? How do you bring unconditional love and compassion to your greatest adversary? How do you give unconditional love and compassion to yourself? Within those questions are some profound answers for folks to grapple with.
It is the warrior’s compassion. That is the essence. Thank you very much, Sean. This has been wonderful. I hope you can join us back again. We are going to be doing these because there is a lot more here that we can go into.
I love to.
I have about five more burning questions, Sean, but please come back.
Do you want to share one that I can ponder? One of your burning questions. I’m curious.
One of my burning questions is still about this image. I love that Ina pointed out the Eileen Fisher story of your boss having you go and meet with your father. I have a question. What does that look like on a bigger scale for organizations? As you said, the blueprint you are operating off of. Part of what deters people from change is that change implies stepping into mystery. They hear things like a paradigm shift, and it stifles because it sounds scary, “What are we shifting to?” I would love to hear more and talk more about that blueprint. What would it look like for you and collectively to start to fill in, connect the dots on that blueprint, and make it a tangible image of where people are going so we are all operating off of a clear blueprint?
I’m really about to ask a question on why you shared your question because as I said before we go down on the call, each location is a different part of the puzzle. Philadelphia, for me now, is the place of integration to bring the systems work with the change agent work, men’s work, and the healing work into focus. As you were talking, my immediate thought was, “This is a great question to start bringing the community together around for the collective consciousness and blueprint versus just my blueprint.” I never identify as a coach. I always identify a facilitator first and foremost, and then I do coaching. As a facilitator, how do I hold space for a question like this to emerge so we are learning to do this together versus 25 people in a room having their own idea of what that blueprint is?
I love that. We have a date for another episode after you float that into your groups and come back with some stories for us.
We have somehow come to a full circle because we started with your story and all these places you had moved. You spoke about how Philadelphia right now is that place of integration and this question. This is another seed. That is where you were speaking, to the seeds. Bonnie, we had this conversation before. When I went through my own, what is the thing, or what is that? You shared this saying with me. I think it was Hillel the Elder, and it stuck with me. It says, “It is not for you to finish the job, but it is for you to contribute.” That is another way. For me, it gives me permission not to know everything, but to be in the space that moves my energy at this moment to give that contribution, which is like the question that was generated.
It is also not lost on me to bring this work to Philadelphia, which for all intents and purposes, is the birthplace of America. It is where documents were created. When I was living with shamans, we did a journey. One message came through from a Cherokee warrior because we were on Cherokee land, and I’m for Cherokee.
This work is healing from the time of the Trail of Tears. When we go back to the history of this nation, we are not going to be able to do the healing work until we do the healing work of both. What happened to the Native Americans? What happened with slavery? To bring forward the healing that I think we are in the midst of as part of all that is going on, and how we navigate is contributing to some powerful energetic shifts. There is the recalibrating, healing, and moving forward in a different way.
Looking back on the history of the United States, no healing work can be done until we study what happened with Native Americans and slavery.
Thank you again. I think you should come back. After you have played a little bit more with that question or wherever you will take you, we should jump in and do another round of exploring. Thank you again.
Thank you.
Thank you, Sean.
Important Links
- Warrior Compassion
- Warrior Compassion: Unleashing the Healing Power of Men
- https://www.WarriorCompassion.com/adventures
- https://www.TED.com/talks/sean_harvey_msod_msed_compassion_makes_the_warrior
About Sean Harvey
Sean Harvey is Chief Compassion Officer of Warrior Compassion Men’s Studio. Sean is also a TEDx Speaker, Author, and Interfaith Minister who’s book, Warrior Compassion: Unleashing the Healing Power of Men, Leadership & Culture, offers a roadmap for men’s healing as a catalyst for systems change and will be released in September 2023.
Sean founded Men’s Soul Adventures as a way to bring men together around outdoor adventures with deeper male bonding and soul-connecting conversations.
Sean co-founded Project Compassion, a national coalition of culture transformation, compassionate masculinity, and law enforcement who are developing a compassion-centered systems change model for police departments, federal law enforcement, and military security forces.
Sean most recently served as the head of Personal Transformation and Wellbeing for EILEEN FISHER. Prior to EILEEN FISHER, he led a talent consulting division in NYC where he created a Socially Conscious Leadership program on Wall Street.
Sean brings 20+ years of experience in leadership and organizational development consulting and taught Management at Cornell, NYU and Baruch College CUNY and is currently affiliated with George Washington University.
At 16 years old, Sean launched YouthQuest, an LGBTQ+ youth group for the city of Dayton Ohio, which continues to serve youth throughout Southwest Ohio.