The (Humility) Mindset by Josh Rowland

The Five Percenters Forum held its 2018 retreat in Miami.  It was remarkable and challenging.  We drafted a new Constitution, which started with this Vision Statement:

The vision of the Five Percenters is to share that 5% of our most personal, challenging and heartfelt selves with our Forum, in order to achieve greater personal connection, fulfillment, and success.  We believe that, in sharing our highs and our lows, without inhibition or fear of judgment, we will gain meaningful insight and strength for the future.

We now take turns reading this statement before every Forum meeting.  It brings us together and challenges us to be our most true and authentic selves.

A little history about The Five Percenters, aka “The Fivers,” may be useful:  the forum had existed, under that name, for a couple of years, notwithstanding member departures and additions.  Throughout that period, say, up until 2016, the forum had faced challenges in creating meaningful value for its members.  After a retreat in 2017 in San Diego, it became clear within the group that the members were not in synch about either the meaning (and importance) of the gestalt mindset or about how the members could achieve that rare 5% insight and transparency from which it took its name.  Of course, those two challenges are really one and the same.   This shared realization led to the departure of a Forum member from EO after that San Diego retreat and, for the remaining members, a new commitment to work together on reviving the Fiver’s practices and thinking.

So, in that context, the Miami retreat was a time to take stock and plan ahead.  Our social time was good and more intimate; our work time, culminating in our shiny new Constitution, was productive (we debated and determined among other things: late fees, social budgets and obligations, officer positions, commitments to advanced forum and moderating training, and, we wrote it all down!)

A month or two later, as moderator-elect, I attended a Moderator Training and Summit in Omaha. That was a transformative experience: I realized that our Fivers’ Vision was a really powerful synthesis of the goals of EO: namely “gestalt mindset” creates the context in which the most profound realizations -- the fabled “Five Percent” – can be nurtured.

But I must confess that I was gestalt skeptic, at first.  The word seemed to me little more than EO corporate-speak, a buzzword, and a strangely named practice that was more reflective of an American cultural obsession with therapy and self-help than with business or personal success.  What I have since realized, though, is that gestalt is profound, and profoundly necessary, if a forum is to create meaningful experiences for its members.

The thing that converted me (so to speak) was that Summit. The room was packed; full of people from across the Midwest, sharing some key attributes (not least of which being the willingness to go to Omaha to attend a multi-day EO training!) but, most importantly, being distinct, unique individuals. Sure, we are all “Entrepreneurs” together. Sure, our challenges have generic similarities (management succession, family, and personal problems), but fundamentally, the challenges and opportunities are as unique as each of us deals with them.  Our backgrounds, how we were raised and educated, the ways we’ve loved and been loved, or not, the things we fear, the things we laugh at, are so impossibly varied in their combinations that it would be the worst kind of foolishness to project my own opinions as relevant for someone else to observe. There is, simply, a kind of messiness to our humanity – as embodied in a group of earnest EO members – that defies either easy categorization or answers.

What that messy humanity revealed to me was essentially the rightness of humility in the face of uncertainty.  How could I presume to know what another person was going through, let alone presume to advise them? Indeed, all I can offer is my respect and humility – perhaps with reflections upon my own direct experience. 

This “humility mindset” – my own translation for gestalt – brings me more strongly into connection with my peers in Forum.  It also works another slight shift; forum presentations become for me an opportunity to be taught about another person’s experience rather than a chance for me to listen and opine.  Presentations flip from a discussion of the presenter’s “need” into a kind of parable of the lived experience of an entrepreneur to spark – humbly – self-recognition, self-awareness, and fulfillment. 

To learn more about, watch How To Manage Gestalt In Your Forum, Beyond Just Knowing Its Definition

About Josh Rowland