I thought Jenny should know that I was bar-hopping on the Wednesday night of last week’s work trip. After all, she was keeping the household running and managing the care and feeding of the dog while I was away. “I’m at a dive gay bar with Rockwood folks in Penngrove,” I texted her from the Black Cat Cafe.

Jenny responded that this was probably where one of our former tenants worked. “Oh, really?” I asked. “Was she from around these parts?”

Jenny, who has very good listening skills wrote back, “Were you not listening all those hours?” She raised a good point, we did have long conversations in the backyard with our former tenant and she probably did mention something about working at a dive bar in Penngrove when I was not listening.

I assured Jenny, “I guess not, but I have been practicing my active listening skills this week.” I was at the Rockwood Leadership Institute where we learned a lot about the importance of active listening.

I told Jenny, that the dive gay bar in Penngrove was not all that we had hoped it would be. It was open mic night and the presentations, in our opinion, were not of the highest quality. Jenny, who is a quick study, was getting the Rockwood groove. “What’s your vision?” she asked.

I told her our immediate vision involved a hoochie bar in downtown Petaluma. One of the members of our small (bar hopping) group found it on Yelp and it looked promising.

“That does not sound good,” Jenny responded. “So the visioning piece, as they call it, involves free-ranging on hump day?”

“Yes,” I said. “We have found our purpose and our vision, and tomorrow we will be having essential conversations.”

But first, there was the hoochie bar. We drove back to Petaluma and decided we would appoint a subcommittee to investigate the hoochie bar while the rest of us went into the Pub across the street and ordered some drinks. The subcommittee reported back from their site visit to the hoochie bar, and informed us that there was only one lonely hoochie mama dancing by herself which was depressing, so we stayed put and got a head start on having some essential conversations.

Roz and I decided that we needed to have an essential conversation about movement building. So we began to plan our essential conversation. This was on the next day’s agenda,  where different groupings of us would be hosting conversations.

The next day we had to give our essential conversation a title. I would have been fine with calling our conversation Funders’ Role in Movement Building, or some such boring title, but then Vini and Todd raised the bar when they titled their conversation a catchy, “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” They were hosting a conversation about supporting community leaders.

So Roz and I decided to call our conversation, “Who Let the DAWGS Out?” We felt this was more than appropriate since after finalizing the PUP Analysis (Purpose Unleashing Power), DAWG now stands for Doing a World of Good. (See: Pass the Talking Stick, posted February 28, 2010).

Another group decided to call their session. “Pump It!” They were discussing strategies for turning up the dial on leadership development. That group said they were a little anal retentive in planning their session. To which our trainer, who I will call LaWanda, said, “With a name like ‘Pump It!’ you might not want to be anal retentive.”And then Todd started forming the Ass Slander committee to raise awareness about all the ways in which the anus is used in a derogatory way.

That night we had to split up into groups and come up with a skit. We had very clear guidelines and were told that we could use any items lying around as props as long as we returned them. By now I had really improved my active listening skills and heard one of the participants asking LaWanda a question. “Do you have a special dong?” Not that it was immediately apparent to us, but my Institute colleague was referring to the device that LaWanda used to ring her Tibetan Bell when she wanted us to stop doing something or start doing something.

I looked at LaWanda and answered for her since she still looked surprised by the question, “Well, maybe at home,” I offered. I didn’t think bringing a dong to a training was very professional and I knew LaWanda to be on the up and up.

 

My experience at Rockwood was good for a number of reasons. I laughed a lot, I made new friends, I furthered my skills as a leader, and I came closer to realizing my vision and purpose. Part of my vision involves transformative change, and I think to do that we need to reach a lot more people. Which is where this blog comes into relevance. You may think this is frivolous, but I have a larger purpose. I am hoping that the spirit of levity which I bring to this blog (and hopefully to the subsequent book project) will have wide appeal which might help us build a broader-based movement for social change. Are you still with me?

Ok, so this finally brings me to my point. I have a modest number of followers on this blog, fifteen to be exact. I know more people than that are reading the blog and I am hoping they will also make it official by “following” me. I think I will look more favorable to potential publishers if I have more followers, which will also serve my vision of movement building and transformative change. So if you are reading this, won’t you give me your vote of confidence, or khanfidence, and follow this leader?

Just click the button on the top right hand side of this page where it Says “Follow.” I can assure you it really does not mean much in the way of daily alerts or anything. I follow a couple of blogs and nothing happens when you click the button, except that it will help build my confidence if I can grow my readership into the triple digits. In my line of work, we call this measurable outcomes.