THE POWER OF COMMUNITY

After 21 days of trainings here in Colorado and seeing so many people from so many countries coming here for the Leadership Trainings of NSTT and seeing people network, create new associations, and plan how they will support each other, I feel impelled to write about the power of community. This is one of the things that people most often speak about when they speak about the value that they derive from Neuro-Semantic trainings. They talk about feeling a part of a community, that they have found a new family, and that they are part of something bigger than themselves—a world-wide community of like-minded visionaries out to change the world!

The power of belonging is an incredible power and, of course, is one of the basic “needs” in our hierarchy of needs as detailed by Abraham Maslow. Because we are social beings, we need to be welcomed into community where we feel love and affection, and where we are valued and appreciated. And when we experience the gratification of this need, it brings to nearly everyone a healing and wholeness. And because it does, with it we are enabled to move up to the highest needs, the being- needs of self-actualization.

The power of community not only speaks about what it does for us in terms of our health, well-being, completeness, and motivation, it also speaks about what we can do together as a community. We have a special way that we express this in Neuro-Semantics.

We can do so much more together, than alone or apart.

Doing things together— that is actually also the secret of the success of the human race, the secret of civilization itself. Korzybski called it time-binding. By creating symbols and then language, we have been able to cooperate and collaborate with each other over the years and centuries and millennia. Today you and I can read Aristotle and as we do, we train our brain and nervous system with the very distinctions that Aristotle learned, discovered, and transmitted. We bind what he learned in his time to what you and I can learn today and as we bind those learnings into our nervous-system–and–brain. And together we can know more and do more than alone or apart.

The same principle holds for all of the manmade “wonders of the world” that we hold dear and awesome, whether the Pyramids of Egypt or the Eiffel Tower of Paris or one of the Castles of Europe, the Great Wall of China, or one of he skyscrapers in today’s modern cities. We marvel in amazement at what we can achieve by working together, coordinating efforts, cooperating with resources, and collaborating in visions. So also what we can do when we collaborate: defeat a Hitler, engineer nuclear power, go to the moon or send a rover to Mars, invent computers, and a million other things that makes life better. Together we can generate more transformative creations than we can alone or apart.

Actually, in the lives of all genius and creative people, we find that they didn’t do it alone. There were always colleagues and supporters whether they be mentors or sponsors or co-workers. Michelangelo did his work through 14 painters that worked with him. Edison created thousands of patents, many if not most of them created by his thousands of workers and associates.

The power of community is the power to multiple one’s influence, to spread new resourceful ideas, and to embody the transformation it makes in human lives. The power of community in today’s world also facilitates credibility. In research, the most credible journals are peer-reviewed which means that others who are equally knowledgeable and experienced examine the writings and offer critiques. And this refines the articles making them more accurate and therefore useful. In community we can create accountability structures so that we manage ourselves, our egos, our pride, and our use of power.

Communities generate numerous energies. They generate for us a context in which to make sense and meaning of what we do and create. Here is a place and a group that recognizes the contributions that individuals make and that honor those contributions. This was the point that Howard Gardner made about “creating genius” in his book, Creating Minds. To have a “genius” legitimized as a genius, you need a community that does precisely that.

Yes, community is powerful. In an effective and especially in a self-actualizing community, we are able to become more fully ourselves, more loving and compassionate, more disciplined and focused. Community brings out our humanity as social beings and calls upon us to move beyond the small world of self and to enter into the larger world of others. Community also challenges us to develop the special social skills, states, and attitudes that enable us to from being a private person to being a public person — a man or woman for others.

Today community and the power of community is spoken about in so many different ways and studied from so many different perspectives: social intelligence, emotional intelligence (EQ), groups, high performance teams, organizations, sociology, anthropology, social psychology, and the list goes on and on. We are social beings and, on the average, we do not do well alone. While we can use solitude for growth and reflection, we are diminished by loneliness. We need others. We need to be a part of a cohesive and supportive community.

And yet needing others doesn’t mean that we innately know how to get along well with others. If we see anything from human history— we don’t know that intuitively. We have to learn that. We have to discover and be trained for the social skills, states, and attitudes. High performance teams do not just happen, they are created, or better, co-created. They are facilitated by group and team coaches who know how to bring people together, integrate differences, confront and resolve conflicts, and empower people for “playing well together.”