Guiding lights from Eric Liu

Who influenced you? And how do you pass it on?

These are the two animating questions behind every interview I did for Guiding Lights.  I discovered, as I traveled from place to place and profession to profession, that the two questions are simple enough to open up a broad conversation and unusual enough to get people off conversational autopilot.  They allow us – indeed, require us – to examine more closely than we usually do the web of relationship and obligation that holds us all together.

 

In the months since the book came out, I’ve used these two questions to catalyze countless conversations about the art of mentoring.  These conversations have evolved into a format I call “Talking Circles,” and to my great delight the circles have been rippling out all across the country.  This part of the website is to tell you about what happens in Talking Circles, to show you how easy it is to create your own, and to prompt you to pass it on.  

 

Here’s what happens.  I gather up a group, usually about a dozen people and rarely more than two dozen.  Sometimes the participants know each other through some affinity or affiliation; sometimes they are complete strangers to one another.  I provide some context for what brings us together.  And then everyone around the circle spends about five minutes answering my two core questions.  

 

That’s it.  We tell stories.  We see our own lives in the stories of others.  Without fail, as we realize that we are safe to reflect and share, we talk about our search for purpose, our reckonings with failure, our resilient sense of possibility.  We remove our masks.  And in the process we do something subtle but powerful:  we create trust, empathy and community.    

  

These Talking Circles have taken place in workplaces, houses of worship, classrooms, neighborhood centers, locker rooms, kitchens, cafes.  (In Seattle , the Starbucks Coffee Company has sponsored several series of Talking Circles in stores across the city, where anyone is welcome and all comers get free coffee, dessert and books!).  I’ve led Talking Circles with people from all walks of life:  schoolteachers, corporate executives, librarians, union members, pastors, nurses, lawyers, engineers, artists, life coaches and many others. 

 

Facilitating a Talking Circle is like conducting a small musical ensemble in a largely improvised performance.  It requires you to listen with great intensity, to anticipate how to stitch threads from one story to another, to roll with unexpected riffs, to judge when silence is golden and when a note will help.  I love doing Talking Circles.  But my purpose is to make it so that I don’t have to do the conducting or the catalyzing.  And I hope that as a reader of Guiding Lights, you will be sufficiently inspired to lead your own circles.  Here are some guidelines on how to do it.