lessons from the justice collective: part 2

more reflections/lessons learned from the retreat we had with the justice collective (continued from yesterday):

• this gem: “white good intentions are often used as a tactic to avoid dealing with real harm and impact.” so real.

• how to deal when you’ve made a mistake: “listen. reflect. apologize. do better.” there was a more eloquent way to phrase this but i can’t remember it…

• marjorie shared this line which she uses in her work empathy-development work with young people: “empathy can’t be taught, but it can be caught.” she’s referring to the notion that empathy is something that can be learned, but is tougher to pick up (even tougher than emotional intelligence which is really just a set of skills) for two reasons. one, is that it develops in people at a young age. it becomes harder, though still possible, to develop when older. the second is that you can’t teach it directly. it develops by mimicking after observation in context. if you don’t have the right context(s) early on in life, empathy is just a difficult thing to build in later.

• this activity around intention setting is just lovely:

  1. set intentions for the days together individually (journaling is good for this)
  2. in pairs or trios, share intentions, ask for and offer ways to support each other in holding the intentions.
  3. in a big group, share all intentions out loud and put them somewhere in the room.

to be continued…

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