David Gershon—Living the Possible

September 7, 2010

By: Rachel Schaeffer

David Gershon has spent his lifetime achieving not only his dreams, but also supporting and inspiring millions of others to achieve theirs.

David is the author of eleven books, including the 2009 award-winning Social Change 2.0: A Blueprint for Reinventing Our World. His other books include Low Carbon Diet: A 30 Day Program to Lose 5000 Pounds, and Empowerment: The Art of Creating Your Life As You Want It, which has been translated into eight languages.

He is the founder and CEO of the Empowerment Institute, and with his wife, Gail Straub, co-directs its School for Transformative Social Change. Through their empowerment programs over thirty years, millions of people have been taught how to employ the principles of empowerment. His clients have included large organizations, government agencies, and cities. The broad range of issues he addresses range from environmentally sustainable living to disaster-resilient communities.

Low Carbon Diet shows a person how to reduce their carbon footprint quickly and effectively. With Low Carbon Diet as the guidebook, David initiated Cool America, a movement that has grown to 300 cities helping their citizens reduce their carbon footprint through neighborhood-based EcoTeams.

David and his wife, Gail Straub, were the initiators and organizers of one of the planet’s most remarkable events, the First Earth Run, where runners circled the globe with a torch, the universal symbol of hope and peace. The 86-day run began in the United Nations in 1986 with a sunrise ceremony by Native Americans. The First Earth Run included and brought together twenty-five million people in 62 countries, including 45 heads of state, during ceremonies celebrating the coming of runners, from country to country in a global relay. The millions of dollars raised went to their global partner, UNICEF.

David has taught worldwide and lectured at universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Duke. He was an advisor to the White House and the United Nations on both empowerment and sustainability issues.

As an expert in large-system transformation and societal change, David continues to carry the torch as an inspirational living model for both vision and action.

PIM: You’ve been called a social architect, a master visionary, and a social change agent. How do you see yourself?

DG: I view my life as an experiment. “Experiment” is the operative word. I ask defining questions that are open ended, so it’s an ongoing adventure. I always felt that I was a prototype, a social experiment. I feel like my life is an experiment of the possible.

PIM: Growing up, what influences did you have? Who positively impacted your life?

DG: My mother always encouraged me to have an open mind, to explore new ideas. It wasn’t so much that she was a visionary or that she had significant social consciousness, but more that she encouraged me to be an independent thinker. If one really is a free thinker, a person with an open mind, one tends to be curious, ask questions, one wants to learn and grow. If you are alive as a human being, one starts to ask questions about yourself, about the world, about what is possible.

I have always been attracted to the notion of possibility. That has always been my fascination in life. It really hasn’t been so much about taking on the problems of the world or trying to make a difference as much as “What’s possible?”

So, once I ask that question, then I start to go down the path of trying to answer it.

I began to be attracted to the big questions: What’s possible for my life? What’s possible for my world? What’s possible for the various sub-entities of my world: organizations, cities, communities, neighborhoods, for people who live in challenging environments from the inner cities of the United States, to people in poverty in the developing world, to women who are disenfranchised? What would it look like to have it be better or different or changed? These have always been such fascinating questions that I have spent my life trying to answer them.

PIM: What started you on your journey of social consciousness?

DG: It’s not like I started with social consciousness. I think human beings feel empathy for one another. I think you can close that off, but it’s a natural instinct. So once you start to explore, you feel connected. You want to contribute. It’s not so much a moral imperative as it is a human imperative, and that’s what I’ve been following. I’ve been on a quest to learn and grow and contribute my full talents. And then I started discovering my talents around several things—the architecture of social change: how do you actually make change happen in society, how do you design it such that you can produce outcomes, how do you do this for individuals, within organizations, in communities? How do you create environments that are conducive to producing those outcomes?

I was attracted to two things.

First, how do you really make change happen? What does it take at all these levels to improve society? Secondly, what are the biggest needs and where are the leverage points? Where can I make the biggest impact? And then how do you design a strategy that could change the game if it went to scale. That is, how do you design a social change intervention which if fully received could transform the current state to something that doesn’t currently exist?

PIM: What are the top motivators to get people to change?

DG: Well, fundamentally, there is one. It is a vision that excites you and attracts you. I use the analogy of sunshine. If it is a sunny day, you want to go out in the sun and you want to enjoy how good it feels on your face and your body. The sun energizes and excites you. A vision is like that. It’s like the sun in your life. It’s something you want to go toward; it motivates you.

The key to empowering someone who wants to make changes is to help them shape a vision that is really compelling. That comes out of a deep place that they can step into and own. This can be at an individual level, an organizational level, at a community level, or at a planetary level.

A key part of Social Change 2.0 is getting people to want to move toward building a different experience for themselves in the world—versus Social Change 1.0, which is forcing people to change because you passed a law or you paid them to change. If you get people to want to go to a new place because it is intrinsic, it pulls them, it compels them, then you have a powerful force unleashed in society. The key is a compelling vision.

PIM: So, if a compelling vision is the top motivator, what is the process for achieving it?

DG: This is the “how-to” or architecture of an empowerment change process. We have a four-part empowerment methodology with four questions and a set of processes that goes along with each question.

First question: Where am I now? Where am I now in my life at finding a meaningful way of, for example, expressing my desire to contribute to the world? What excites me? Where do I find passion right now? What gets me motivated, angry, touched?

Second question: Where do I want to go? What’s my vision? What would I like it to look like? What kind of contribution would I like to make? Where do I feel like I could really make a difference? And you start to shape a vision with a series of questions to help a person articulate that.

Third question: What do I need to change to get there? This is the transformation piece. Now that I know what I want, what do I need to change? Do I need to get more knowledge? Do I need to get connected? To change some part of my personality that gets in the way when I try to join a group—do I become a difficult person to deal with? What do I need to do differently? Do I need to balance my life better? Change my strategy? Begin to start asking questions. A key tool for this step is to recognize limiting beliefs and to transform them.

Fourth question: What is my next place of growth or development? This is the growth step. I have to take responsibility for how I’m contributing to my issue—positively or negatively. I have to make changes in my life and that will influence the outcome that I want. We call that the growing edge—it’s not the same as my vision, but it’s the next step in moving my vision forward.

PIM: Being a visionary, or a dreamer is the first step. Many people don’t know what they want or how to figure out what they want. What is your technique for becoming a visionary or a dreamer? How do you find your dream?

DG: That comes back to the fundamental question of passion and interest.

I was just on the phone with a very large multi-national company that wants to grow its talent so it can grow its company. So that’s their aspiration. They know what they want: people operating at a higher level to help them be more successful in the marketplace. How do you do that? Or, I’d like to find a better job. Or, I’d like to find the right relationship. Or, I’d like to make my community a better place to live. Or, I’d like to have less crime where I live, or I’d like to deal with climate change.

If asked what would life look like if it were working better, people generally come up with answers. You can help them build more dynamic, compelling visions, and have them go to deeper places that touch deeper parts of themselves.

But at the end of the day, the work of empowerment is to structure the process so that you can help them move through all of the steps on the journey to make that happen. And it’s that architecture, that structuring of the change process—whether it’s a personal change or an organizational change, or a societal change—where my work has been over the years.

I think we all, if given permission, know what we want. It’s the how. How do we actually help people make that happen? That’s been the focal point of my life—asking that question, answering it, and learning how to do it.

PIM: In the EcoTeams, you talk about neighbors getting together and talking to each other. What a concept these days! Beyond helping the environment and people lowering their carbon footprint, what are the benefits of these teams?

DG: These teams are amazing! They are a new kind of cultural model of how we need to live together as human beings. It is an interesting statement of our times that we don’t know the people who live in physical proximity of our homes, that the culture does not enable it, that we don’t know how to get there. We’ve lost such a foundational dimension of the human experience. Years ago, this was core to one’s life. Now, it’s peripheral.

So you get people to meet their neighbors and to feel connections and to feel rooted in place – not just with the physical land, but also with the people who are in immediate proximity. People who live down the street, people whose cars you see driving by, who walk their dogs past your house, or whose kids ride their bike on your sidewalk. That’s an amazing improvement in one’s quality of life.

We call it “Smart Block” vs. “Dumb Block.” If you think about it, if you know the people, you have a greater sense of security, of well being, you feel good about the fact that your children have some place to go if for any reason you weren’t able to be there, or if you needed help for something. So it’s an immensely powerful thing. And the EcoTeam process itself is a way of people building community at a more intimate level. People are learning to work together to accomplish meaningful goals, learning how to engage in something that brings forward altruistic behavior, and learning how to cooperate with other people.

It’s much larger than just reducing our carbon footprint, although that is such a powerful driver because it’s so much the right thing to do. But the social dimension is equally significant in terms of what we need as a society to grow and improve.

PIM: How did you get from the Empowerment work to deciding to write Social Change 2.0?

DG: Well, I’ve been writing Social Change 2.0 for 30 years—I just didn’t know I was writing it. What I’ve been doing is having this great adventure trying to answer these questions that I come up with of what’s possible. It’s a very interesting occupational hazard of doing this empowerment work because you keep asking these big questions like “What is your vision?” and “What does it look like?” You start asking them in more and more interesting areas like world peace and climate change and lifting the 80% of the world’s poorest people out of poverty.

You start asking every major question that exists on the planet. And you don’t take it on from what’s wrong and how to fix it, which defines what you do by how you define the problem. But you start by asking, “What’s possible? And how can we get there?”

Then your outcomes are defined by your imagination.

If we want to talk about moving this new framework for thinking about how to reinvent the world, we must first recognize that we’ve invented the world unconsciously; we’ve created our lives unconsciously, with our unconscious beliefs and fears. The principles of empowerment are to create your life consciously, which means you have to be clear where you are and where you want to go.

That’s how we change the world: where are we now, where do we want to go? What do we need to change to get there, what’s our next growth step, is the process of reinventing our world. And that’s how I would define Social Change 2.0, it’s that process, and it means taking it down to specifics: How do I reinvent my block, my community, the Gulf Coast, South Africa, Afghanistan, or the planet?

PIM: The imagination is so important to your life’s work. Say more about it.

DG: The imagination is such a rich, exciting, alluring dimension of our reality that you want to go there. When you go there, your mind starts to open up to all kinds of interesting ideas and connections. And then you try to put them together. If the dream is compelling, if the issue is intrinsically rooted so that it can pull you, if you are motivated by compassion, contribution, caring, love, and service, then you find yourself with the tenacity to stay with it.

There really is nothing that limits us from achieving the things that we want other than how we go about it. It’s not to say that these things happen instantly. There’s nothing on the planet we can’t change. We just have to figure it out and think out of the box. And Social Change 2.0 takes us far enough out-of-the-box to figure out how we can change the world.

PIM: You talk about being fearless, and taking risks, and not letting the world’s view influence you. You once said that if a lot of people are agreeing with you, then you need to change your vision.

DG: Yes, if people aren’t considering what I’m doing as naïve, then I know I’m really not on the frontier. Because naïve is the word people use to describe what is beyond the realm of their current reality system or where they place their boundary on the possible. So unless you’re going to the realm of the impossible, that is to say, out of the realm of the current definition of what’s possible by that consensus view, then you’re not pioneering. Then you’re problem solving and there’s a role for that, but that’s not how we reinvent the world. And that’s the mantel, the mandate that I feel drawn to working with.

PIM: The First Earth Run was such a significant event. What did you learn from it?

DG: One of the principles that I learned from the First Earth Run is a story of the impossible becoming possible. It also helped teach me about the metaphysical principle of expansion and contraction. The principle is like a pendulum: when something swings one way, when it reaches a certain point gravity will pull it back other way.

What was happening during the time of the First Earth Run—the height of the cold war in 1986—was that there was so much contraction about the very real possibility a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union that there was a powerful in people to expand. That is that there was so much fear that people wanted to move toward something hopeful, something expansive, to move them out of that contractive state. You can’t just stay in that state. So the First Earth Run got pulled into that vacuum and as a result was a very powerful planetary intervention. And that’s one of the deeper principles of how the global psyche and world events work.

PIM: How do you define “positive impact?”

DG: Positive impact in the context of what we have been discussing is transformative change in the world. It is something that changes the game. It moves something forward in new ways that reinvent the world. It specifically has people adopt the behaviors that society needs to help further its evolution.

PIM: You worked in New York City post 9/11. What was that like and what was the long-term impact of that?

DG: It provided a transformative intervention opportunity similar to what I described earlier with the First Earth Run. Because there was a tremendous state of fear in New York City after 9/11 we found a very powerful pull in people toward hope and community. And we designed our transformative change strategy to offer that by creating a program that was about emergency preparedness and building disaster-resilient communities. A disaster-resilient community is a very different than the devastated and traumatized state in which people found themselves. The name of the program was “All Together Now,” so it was all about community, connection, and resiliency, and taking responsibility. We stepped in and created a transformative intervention, a Social Change 2.0 intervention. And as a result we were pulled into the immense vacuum that existed.

The Empowerment Institute was hired to come in and build this program and spread it throughout the city. Hillary Clinton backed it and got us a half million dollars to initially start the process. Because it was well financed, had a lot of political will backing it, and people were psychologically ready for it, it took off. On a personal level, as a former New Yorker, it was very exciting to get out into the outer boroughs, work with all of the community groups and city agencies, and experience this wonderful, amazing city. It was such a superb experience. I write a lot about that in my book.

From a Social Change 2.0 point of view, it was also amazing. It was a fantastic learning platform for applying the five design principles of this model – empowering people to take personal responsibility for the change they wish in their lives, designing a game changing strategy, creating high level collaboration and synergy between people and organizations, and learning how to take a transformative social innovation to scale. And all under the umbrella New Yorker illustrator, Ed Koren, drew to represent “All Together Now.”

On a deeper level, what was also happening was that we were doing deep personal transformation work with New Yorkers around the trauma they had experienced. By getting together with their neighbors, talking about it, and developing a solution, they were able to do deep healing and come out the other end with something practical—here’s how I can prepare for an emergency should such a thing ever happen again. And, by the way, I now know my neighbors so we can take care of each other.

I am doing a big project in South Africa right now, and the question we’re asking is: What’s the blueprint for reinventing South Africa, post-reconciliation? This is the type of questions that gets a very different answer than “How do we get out of poverty or solve this problem or that?” One opens up the imagination, and one is defined by the problem.

PIM: You always say that empowerment starts and ends with your own personal empowerment. When you did the work in NYC, how did the Empowerment Institute bring that to New Yorkers?

DG: They got to take personal responsibility to create more resiliency in their lives. They were empowered to build disaster-resilient communities. They met their neighbors in their buildings and on their blocks and created a greater sense of community. They were empowered to become a part of community, and they transformed their whole way of working with 9/11 from fear to possibility.

Once you start to take responsibility to change what isn’t working to something that does work, you also create a new personal capacity to transform from victim to responsible person.

PIM: If all empowerment is personal, what was your personal empowerment out of the 9/11 project?

DG: The bottom line for me was that I was inspired by NYC, by a city that said “Yes!” to a trauma and came out the other side stronger, more whole, with greater self-esteem and pride.

PIM: What is your vision now?

DG: My vision is to create a movement of people who are reinventing the world, who are not defined by the problems, but are inspired by their imaginations. That’s what inspires me. That’s the heart, the soul of Social Change 2.0.

PIM: You’ve done so much. What is it from your lifetime that you’ve done so far that you are the most proud of?

DG: That’s a great empowerment question! I ask a similar question in the Empowerment Workshop. “What is your most meaningful creation or accomplishment?” Then comes the fine-tuning: inner or outer, ongoing or complete? I have a different version depending upon which way I answer that question. Probably the interior is the place I would go first, and that is: The belief in possibility and the ability to invite others to believe in possibility. This ability is based on my life’s experiences showing that the impossible might in fact be possible. So getting people to dream bigger dreams than they might normally otherwise dream.

In terms of the outer things, there are many. I feel truly grateful to have had the opportunity of all these experiences. And I always think of them as in “in service.” The issue itself was an example of possibility, but now how can it help people do other things. That’s where it starts to get interesting because the issues that we have in society are so big, any one thing that one does is just a piece, but the challenges are so much bigger. And so, the big question for me is—how can these experiences and stories serve as models, templates, and inspirations – that others can then use to run with?

That’s what the Social Change 2.0 book is. A set of design principles, practices and techniques—the architecture for transformative social change—undergirded by inspirational stories showing how they were applied. What I’ve found happening is that people read the book and say, “I’m so inspired not by your design principles, but by your life, and how you’ve led it.” And I was taken aback by it. I thought the purpose of the book was these design principles, but they hone in on me as a human being.

That was an interesting learning for me. It was about the modeling of a life. I’m proud that my life can be seen in that light.

David Gershon—Living the Possible (on the Impact Magazine web site)

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