GROUNDWORK€¦ · “If you are seriously interested in changing your outlook or your life, ... I’m trying to keep this guy alive with everything I can muster up. And he doesn’t

GROUNDWORKPREPARING THE SOIL for GOD’S TRANSFORMATION

SCOTT LARSON // DANIEL L. TOCCHINI

“The first challenge I had with this book was that I couldn’t actually read anything through my tears! Scott’s vulnerability put me in touch with my own deepest desire to be profoundly transformed by Jesus and for Jesus. Years ago I concluded that I need to gain doctoral-level expertise in the formation of my own heart before I could be what God wants me to be for others. That conviction was reinforced by Groundwork. More than that, this book demonstrates that when we are seriously dedicated to adjust our ministry practices based on how God brings about transformation, no one is beyond reach.”

—Dave Rahn, Ph.D., Senior Vice President and Chief Ministry Officer for Youth for Christ/USA; Director, MA in Youth

Ministry Leadership for Huntington University

“Scott Larson and Daniel Tocchini have provided a valuable manual for transformation and growth. I will be using this book both personally and as a coach for years to come.”

—Dr. Monte E. Wilson, Author of Legendary Leadership: From Commoner to King

“If you are seriously interested in changing your outlook or your life, Tocchini and Larson are proven ‘change agents.’ Enjoy the ride.”

—Gary Black, Jr., Ph.D., Co-author with Dallas Willard of The Divine Conspiracy Continued

“This book is unique in its synergy of spiritual values, practical wisdom, and fresh knowledge about resilience and human growth. All of this is wrapped around inspiring personal stories from authors who have distinguished themselves in lives of service, creating transformation in individuals and organizations.”

—Larry K. Brendtro, Ph.D., Founder of Reclaiming Youth International; Former member of U.S. Department of Justice Steering Committee

“Count me in! Having dug into my own broken story and invited in Groundwork to engage in the stories of the wounded healer authors, I remain convinced that in order to get to true transformation one must transcend resilience and trust God to do what only he can do. Genuine life change comes when we’re receptive soil, eager for the seed, and willing to grow where we’ve never grown before. Let’s all embrace our daily condition and align it with our secure position in Christ and then watch our vision for God expand while genuine transformation occurs from the inside out.”

—Stephen A. Macchia, Founder and President of Leadership Transformations; Director of the Pierce Center at

Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

“When I got to about page 12, I looked for a pen to start underlining and writing notes in the margins. By the end of Chapter 1, I was answering the questions posed and quoting the book to those around me regularly. This book invites you to places you aren’t naturally going to go, and the resulting change is exponentially worth the time you invest in the process. Parents, pastors, business persons, educators, and seekers will be moved, inspired, and, if willing, changed by this book.”

—Paul Hurckman, Executive Director of Venture Expeditions

“Great leaders transform something bad to something better than ever. Scott and Daniel masterfully illuminate the art and science of transformation. That skill set is desperately needed in society today.”

—Bruce Grant, Executive Chairman of the Applied Value Group

2 GROUNDWORK: PREPARING THE SOIL for GOD’S TRANSFORMATION

GROUNDWORK: PREPARING THE SOIL for GOD’S TRANSFORMATION

Copyright © 2015 Scott Larson and Daniel L. Tocchini

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher, except where noted in the text and in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, visit group.com/permissions.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

ISBN 978-1-4707-2423-8

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CONTENTSPart 1: What Is This Thing Called Transformation? 5

Chapter 1: Learning About Transformation? Yeah, Right. 7

Chapter 2: Teaching for Transformational Change 15

Chapter 3: With All the Talk About Transformation, Why Do We See So Little of It? 25

Part 2: Fertile Ground 47

Chapter 4: Feelin’ the Pain 49

Chapter 5: A Future Worth Having 65

Chapter 6: Do You Know Who You Are? 83

Chapter 7: Thinking About My Thinking 93

Chapter 8: All Action Occurs in the Context of Relationships 117

Chapter 9: The Wounded Healer 135

Chapter 10: Victim to Victor 151

Chapter 11: Moving Beyond Individuals 169

151CHAPTER 10: Victim to Victor

CHAPTER 10: Victim to Victor

“Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?” —Gimili, son of Glóin, Lord of the Rings

When the phone rang, I was already exhausted, having just sat down to watch the evening news after a long day. I didn’t have the energy nor was I in the frame of mind to engage what was to come.

“Hello?”

“Scott. This is Marcus. I called you, ’cause you’re the last one I thought I could call before I do it.”

“Do what?”

“End it.”

“End what?”

“All this misery, man. I can’t do it anymore.”

“You mean, end your life?”

“Yeah.”

I felt a panic. What can I do to save this guy? I had spent countless hours with him, trying to help him find freedom. I had gotten him an apartment, found jobs for him, enrolled him into drug programs. Whatever he thought he needed, I would work to help him get it. I was becoming frustrated, too, as securing jobs, apartments, and money to record his music all seemed to bring only temporary relief. And inevitably, on the heels of forward strides, Marcus would relapse on drugs or do something else to sabotage any progress made, landing him back in that same familiar place of despair.


I started to get off the couch, frantically looking for my coat and car keys, “What is it you need, Marcus?”

“I don’t know, man. Nothing seems to work for me. Even when I get the stuff I say I need, it doesn’t work. I always end up back at the same place. I just don’t have it in me anymore to keep fighting.”

Oh no. What am I supposed to do here? I felt the panic. If he kills himself, it will be on me.

“Marcus, you have so much to live for. I know you’re feeling down, but it’s just a slump. Things will get better.”

“Nah, not this time.”

Suddenly it hit me. I’m doing all the work here. I’m trying to keep this guy alive with everything I can muster up. And he doesn’t seem to be invested at all. I’m the one feeling all the stress and panic. It all hit me in the span of just a few seconds, but it hit me hard. God, what does Marcus really need right now?!

“Marcus, I’m starting to see that I’m one of the obstacles here. What you need is God. And I’m starting to wonder if I’m getting between the two of you. I hear you, that there is no hope left for you. And I can’t help you. So if it’s curtains for you, as you say, it sounds like only God can help you now. If I were you, I would call out to him with everything I have in me.”

“You’re not going to help me? You’re the only one I have.”

“This one is out of my territory. Only God can meet you here, Marcus. But if you’re done anyway and the next step is killing yourself, why not give him a real chance? You don’t have much to lose.”

“Yeah…Whatever. Bye.”

I started praying like crazy. Intermixed with self-condemnation like, Did you just push this guy over the cliff? What if he kills himself, how will you live with yourself?! You were the only one he felt he could go to, and you just slammed the door in his face!

Somehow I resisted the temptation to phone Marcus back that night and waited until the next morning to call. I admit I was half shocked when he picked up the phone, as I figured there was at least a 50/50 chance he’d be dead.


“Scott, you won’t believe what happened to me. I met God in a way that I never knew he existed before!” And he went on to tell me about how God was there when he cried out to him in that place of dire desperation.

I wish I could say it’s been clear sailing for Marcus since then. It hasn’t. But he does know that God is real in a way that would not have happened apart from his experience that night.

It was an equally powerful experience for me. The questions that arose in the aftermath were: Who or what was driving my actions? Was it all my care for Marcus or something else? I was concerned for him, but I had also made his situation a great deal about me. I had to keep him alive. If he killed himself, his blood would be on me. The fear that if he decided to end his life I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. And my fear that God wasn’t enough to meet and save Marcus. That I needed to do something to keep him going.

I had started resenting Marcus every time I saw his number come up on my caller ID. As he was getting more and more desperate, so was I. I don’t have anything more to offer him. Everything I have is not enough! It’s the place I had to get to so there could be room for God to show up. And it’s the place Marcus had to get to, so that with me out of the way he could see God.

Whenever we notice ourselves reacting out of fear and panic—in ways that others might observe are irrational for the situation—we know we have gotten “hooked” by it. This means that something of my personal identity has been put at stake. Each of us tends to live in one of three primary identity conversations: Am I competent? Am I a good person? Am I worthy of love?

You have probably discerned by my interaction with Marcus that mine is “Am I competent?” Much of the despair I felt in dealing with Marcus came from feeling inept and powerless to make things better. The identity conversation that most often hooks my wife is “Am I a good person?” When someone views or accuses her as not being good, it really plagues her.

What do you think yours is? It’s helpful to know, for when someone taps into and threatens this, it awakens the monster in you, and you react far stronger than the circumstance would

Identity conversations (Am I competent? Am I a good person? Am I worthy of love?) short-circuit transformation and make it all about me.


otherwise merit. It has now become more about you than about the other. Knowing your area of vulnerability doesn’t make it go away, but now you can consciously surrender it to Christ when it emerges rather than have it run your life and cause further damage to your relationships.

The Necessity of DespairWe’ve said it already. Despair is a vital element in the transformational process. It can hardly be overstated. Jesus boldly declared, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink” (John 7:37, NASB). I can actually stand in the way of someone like Marcus coming to Jesus by continuing to give him what he thinks he’s thirsty for and, in the process, keep him from the real Living Water. It’s why sometimes I must break rapport with people for them to experience transformation. This requires me to break camp with my own identity conversation—to risk appearing incompetent, unloving, and like a bad person—for the possibility of something greater happening in the other person. Doing this infers I have gone through the process of first building rapport, which was the case with Marcus.

Oswald Chambers writes:

If you become a necessity to a soul, you are out of God’s order. As a worker, your great responsibility is to be a friend of the Bridegroom. When once you see a soul in sight of the claims of Jesus Christ, you know that your influence has been in the right direction, and instead of putting out a hand to prevent the throes, pray that they grow ten times stronger until there is no power on earth or in hell that can hold that soul away from Jesus Christ. Over and over again, we become amateur providences, we come in and prevent God; and say—“This and that must not be.” Instead of proving friends of the Bridegroom, we put our sympathy in the way, and the soul will one day say—“That one was a thief, he stole my affections from Jesus, and I lost my vision of Him.”43

Things generally need to get really dark before someone goes on an all out search for light. Every addict I have known who has come to wholeness has come this way. When the last person who was standing with them moves out of the way, it opens a space for the first step. Literally.

We admitted we were powerless over (fill in the blank) and that our lives had become unmanageable (Step One of Alcoholics Anonymous).

I must be willing to break rapport for the possibility of transformation.


Standing with someone in the midst of despair requires a deliberate act of relinquishment. But to relinquish is not to abandon. It is giving that person back to God, and in the process taking our hands off him or her. Any attempt to help a caterpillar break free from its cocoon will only kill it. It must go through its own process of dying to its original state. This death to resurrection struggle is necessary for anyone to experience spiritual transformation.

Marcus has struggled greatly since that time of desperation, but he is much clearer about Who can ultimately save him, which is the next step to wholeness.

We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity (Step Two of AA).

This clears a path to Step Three: We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood him. This is the first deliberate choice someone makes in this process. And until that choice is made, no substantive change will occur. For Marcus, the need to choose became clear once I stopped protecting him from the consequences of his destructive behavior.

Significance Breeds Resistance Marcus’s story reveals another principle of transformational change. Significance breeds resistance. This is a challenging one because it’s counterintuitive. The more I want or need someone to succeed or get what I’m trying to explain or give them, the more they actually resist it. Even if they might agree it would be good for them!

I had invested more than a decade in Marcus, and at some level I

wanted to protect my investment. I wanted him to succeed, but I also needed him to succeed. Seeing Marcus attain a successful job and live in a nice apartment would reflect well on me. I could feel better about myself and my ability to help others. It would also bring some sense of closure or completeness to an otherwise painful and undone area of life. And the thought of having to live with the guilt of someone I’d invested so much in dying (or going back to prison or suffering other irreversible consequences) is terrifying. All of these served as backdrops to my decisions to “help.”

While all of these motivations are natural and normal, there is an underlying reality that his success is as much about me as it is about

Significance breeds resistance.


him. At some level I need him to do well so that I can feel good about myself. Even if I’m in denial about this, others can sniff it out. One young man I was working with told me, “I don’t want to be one of your success stories, Scott!” I didn’t understand what he was saying at the time, but I do now. While every motive is mixed, at least recognizing the mixture is the beginning of healthy engagement.

Every engagement stems from either fear or love. One of the ways to know which of the two is driving my motives is to ask myself, “What am I afraid of here?” I should consider what am I afraid I might lose, like my significance, control, or image. Or I can consider what am I afraid I might not get, such as respect, power, or position.

Owning the part I contribute doesn’t excuse the choices others make, nor does it remove the consequences of their choices. But it does help me when the next similar situation comes along. Marcus is not the first person I have gotten into an apartment or helped get a job who couldn’t sustain it once those elements were secured. There is something about the process of getting a job or saving up to get an apartment that develops the skills necessary for sustaining them. For people like me who like to think they can save the world, it’s tough to relinquish control and responsibility to others, especially when I suspect they could never do it as well as me! I ask God for advice on how he does this with me, and the rest of humanity quite regularly.

My friend J.C. Chambers is a very effective adolescent drug and alcohol counselor. He often starts a conversation with someone with, “Hey, just so you know…I’m not particularly invested in your sobriety.”

That always throws the person off. “What? How can you say that? That’s your job. That’s why I was sent to you. I got a drug problem. You’re not gonna do anything for me?!”

“No. I just want to get to know you. If you get sober, that’s great. I’ll provide all the resources I can if you want to take advantage of them. But your sobriety is not my job.”

Such a dialogue decreases resistance and creates an opening for people to step into what they alone have responsibility over: themselves.

But What If It Really Is Significant?!How does this apply to the truly significant things in life? Like someone embracing the Gospel of Jesus? This is truly a matter of life and death


for eternity! The principle is the same: The more I need for someone to embrace Christ, the more likely they are to run from him. At some level they intuit that I am more committed to getting them to embrace my message than I am committed to them as a person. And in many cases, they would be right.

Jesus illustrated that attraction is far more powerful than promotion. He offered invitations to people, not desperate pleas. As a result, people were drawn to him. If they didn’t want what Jesus

had to offer, or weren’t yet ready, he didn’t chase them down. He let them go, which also created space for them to re-engage, as Nicodemus did on three separate occasions (John 3:1-9; 7:45-52; 19:38-42). The first time he came secretly at night so as not to risk his standing as a respected Pharisee. The last time he came, it was with 75 pounds of myrrh and aloes to wrap the body of Jesus and to place him in a tomb. Doing so would surely cost him his status as a member of the Pharisees, but by now he had been clearly transformed by God, so it didn’t matter!

Even though something may be of the utmost importance to us, its significance still breeds resistance. Anthony of Sourozh, the Metropolitan Bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church, nails the concept:

If the victims of our love dared to speak they would plead: “Oh, please love me less but leave me free, I’m a prisoner of your love; because you love me you want to determine all my life, you want to shape all my happiness”…How costly our love is to others and how cheap it is to us.44

We have all felt suffocated by pleas of self-protection or promotion masked in love. Yet curiosity is the strongest motivator in our brains.45 People were, and continue to be, enormously curious about Jesus. Perhaps this is because Jesus wasn’t intent on trying to suppress, direct, manage, or make other peoples’ choices for them. At creation God granted humans the ability to choose. It’s the foundation for all relationship and the only thing that makes love a possibility.

The ability to choose also opens the possibility for evil, selfish, and destructive choices. But all attempts to curb the negative

impact of another’s bad choices only result in further destruction. As Dr. Timothy Jennings says, there are three inevitable consequences that occur when liberty is violated:

Attraction is more powerful than promotion.

Curiosity is our brain’s strongest motivator.


1. Love is always damaged and will eventually be destroyed;

2. A desire to rebel is instilled in the heart and, if one has the option to restore freedom but instead chooses to remain violated, then

3. Individuality is slowly eroded and the person becomes…a mere shadow.46

Jesus didn’t resist peoples’ choices, he engaged them. Our choices reveal our hearts, and that’s the place God is most interested in engaging (1 Samuel 16:7). What short-circuits this is when we opt for being mere victims of the choices of others. This allows us to justify every level of destructive behavior without a twinge of personal responsibility, as was illustrated by the popular book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson.

Victim ThinkingResearch psychologists Samuel Yochelson and Stanton Samenow studied criminal behavior for decades before publishing their landmark three-volume work entitled The Criminal Personality. In summary, they concluded that the more energy one expends in justifying why he is a victim, the closer he moves toward perpetrating and harming others.

In other words, the criminal mind justifies itself by blaming circumstances for the behavior it chooses. By this definition we all possess the same disease. In the Garden of Eden, Adam accused Eve and indirectly blamed God for his own choice to eat the forbidden fruit. And we have carried on the tradition ever since.

Victim thinking can be challenging to confront, as so many have been legitimately victimized. Jesus himself was victimized. But Jesus never related to himself as a victim.

Victimhood is a mindset. A mindset that places the responsibility of my way of being now and forever at the feet of circumstance or history. Relating to the world as a victim transforms love into fear and the rest is downhill from there. Fear is what justifies harming others, grants license to retribution, and excuses reprehensible behavior.

So why would anyone choose to be a victim?! Oh, there are plenty of reasons. Uncovering those hidden motivations, however, often requires a prices and rewards inquiry like we introduced earlier in this book.

Whatever comes up in people is perfect. It reveals what is true for them.


Victim MindsetRewards I get for being

a victim Prices I pay for being a victim

Have an excuse to remain the same

Opportunities pass me by

Engender sympathy from others Settle for what I say I don’t want

Gives me license to do whatever I want

Stuck in a small world with other victims

Justifies my actions Miss witnessing God showing up

Connects me to others who feel victimized

Never experience growth in my character

Makes me the center of attentionMiss out on seeing God move through me

Until we clearly see how the prices we are paying exceed the rewards we’re receiving, we will remain forever stuck in victim and criminal thinking. But seeing it is not enough. Developing new patterns of taking responsibility demands practice. And that doesn’t happen through merely teaching or telling someone what to do. New pathways in our brains are formed only when we have a new experience. It’s the application of new information that rewires our brains and creates the possibility for subsequent choices to also be made in the future.

Think of a wheat field. If you walk through it, you will cut a new pathway among the stalks. If you never tread that way again, it will soon fill back in like before. If, however, you continue to take that route, eventually

it will become a trail. Though it may never overtake a well-worn path in the field that may have been trodden for years, at least it has become an alternative pathway.

As an example, I developed a habit of lying early in life. I have never liked conflict and discovered that telling people what they wanted to hear created less conflict than telling the truth. At least in the short term. Lying had become a super-highway of connected neurons in my brain—

Having a new experience not only helps us learn about something new, but it rewires our brain.


fully set in place by age 12 or so when our brains start to become more efficient in the activities that are most frequently used.

I’m now in my mid-50s, and I see things much differently than at 12. However, I notice that almost every time I’m driving to a meeting and running late, I start making up lies in my head to tell about why I’m late (stuck in traffic, got held up in a previous meeting, car wouldn’t start, and so on). It’s clear to me that this pathway is not going to disappear. It’s the rut my thoughts fall into whenever I’m faced with the uncomfortable reality that being truthful might bring. Fortunately, I have also journeyed down the pathway of telling the truth for some time. Because I have experience in telling the truth, I’ll usually be able to interrupt my victim story with, Hey, why are you plotting to tell a lie here? Is that really what you want your life to be about?! And I can get off that beaten path and onto one that’s far more supportive of whom I’m committed to be.

All this to say, we must move beyond teaching information and into creating actual experiences with people if we want to give them real options and choices.

Victim Thinking Versus Responsible Thinking One experiential exercise I’ve found useful in interrupting victim thinking is to pair people up and have them tell a story from their past when they were a victim. It’s important to distinguish this from abuse or early childhood victimization, so have them think of something more recent. The object of the activity is to get your listener to say yes when asked,

“Do you think this person was a victim?” Like any exercise, it should be fun. And there are rules. They are:

1. The story you tell must be true.

2. You win by getting your listener to agree that you were a victim.

3. You don’t actually have to fully believe you were a victim; your job is just to convince your listener.

When I did this with kids who were locked up, one young man was anxious to tell how he had recently gotten out of lock-up and was with one of his friends when his friend got pulled over by the police. They searched the car and found a gun in the trunk. Even though it didn’t


belong to this guy and he didn’t even know about it, they nailed him for it since he had just gotten out of jail. And that’s why he was back again.

“They were just waitin’ to get me,” he explained.

Wow. That stinks, we all agreed. And when asked whether we thought he was a victim, we all agreed he was.

After everyone tells their victim story and gets feedback from their listeners, you have them tell the same story again, but this time from a place of responsibility. By responsibility I don’t mean blame. Like what happened was all your fault. Telling the story from a responsible place just means that you are taking 100 percent responsibility for the part you played in what happened. So even if your part was only 1 percent, you’re taking full responsibility for that 1 percent.

The rules are the same:

1. The story you tell must be true.

2. You win by getting your listener to agree you are taking full responsibility for the part you played.

3. You don’t have to fully believe you contributed toward what happened; your job is just to convince your listener.

Hint: In order to gain a perspective on your contribution, you may have to look at events leading up to the point of victimization and search for contribution earlier in the process.

Here is what the young man said who had gotten blamed for his buddy’s gun.

“Well, when I got out I was supposed to stay at home for the first week. I got bored so I told my mom I was going to visit my aunt down the street. My boys had been texting me saying they wanted to pick me up and hang out, so I made it look like I was going to my aunt’s house and then jumped in their car. Something told me not to go in, ’cause I know my boy always has a gun in his trunk and I didn’t want to take the rap for it if something happened.

“But instead of saying something, I just jumped in, not wanting to look like I was a wussie. We were driving around for a while when the cops pulled us over. I took off running right away thinking there might be a gun in the trunk. They chased me down, and that’s probably the reason they ended


up searching the car. When they found a gun they figured it must be mine ’cause I was the one who took off running.”

“Wow. Good job telling it from a place of responsibility. That was amazing,” I said. He got all our votes on taking full responsibility. When I asked him how it felt to tell the story that way, he said, “It feels weird ’cause I never thought of it like that before. But it also feels kind of good. Now that I can see how what I did contributed to me getting locked up, I can also see what I can do different next time. I was starting to lose hope thinking there was nothing I could do to make it out there.”

The notion of taking responsibility feels like it will inflict blame, shame, or obligation. But it actually instills a sense of empowerment, as the young man in that detention center experienced.

In the prior chapter, I told a victim story about losing all kinds of money because of a town that was bent on not having us open a program for kids there. All the details

were true. Death threats, “Stop the Prison” signs, lies made up about me in the newspaper, and so on. But it was also clearly told from the vantage point of a victim. For me to tell the same story from a responsible place, like the young man in jail did, would require that I too go back a little earlier in the story.

Long before the town meetings began, I was talking with town officials about what we wanted to do there. They asked me specific questions about the sort of kids we would be bringing in. I said they were

“disadvantaged kids” who hadn’t had all the opportunities afforded to most. I assured them we had been working with this population in communities like theirs for two decades with great success.

“Well, what sort of crimes have they committed?” they asked.

“Well, nothing really serious like sex offenses or murder.”

The newspaper got wind of what we were trying to do and interviewed me as well. I was just as vague in my responses to them as I had been with the town officials.

Not surprisingly, concerned citizens went onto our website and saw that we actually worked with some of the toughest kids out there—hardly the bleeding heart picture of wayward and disadvantaged children that I had been painting.

Seeing our contribution brings power to act in a new way.


I didn’t want to say something that might get people too alarmed, but my ambiguity created enormous suspicion and distrust in the local citizens. So, even when I was clear about not bringing in sex offenders, they didn’t believe me.

There was a lot I contributed to what happened in that community. My owning it doesn’t shift all the blame to me. It doesn’t even mean the end result would have been different had I answered their questions more directly. What it did do was empower me to see what I contributed so I could engage the next town we came to in new and resourceful ways that created trust instead of suspicion.

When we found another property, the first thing I did was go to the police and tell them exactly what we wanted to do there and what sort of kids we would be taking in. The chief responded by saying, “I appreciate you coming to me first. I think we should set up some community meetings together with neighbors so we can be proactive and address any concerns they may have.”

Wow. What a difference that was. Amazingly, there was no resistance to us coming and no resistance in all the time we were there. It was a lesson I will never forget.

Response AbilityWhen people hear the term responsibility, they naturally migrate toward the concepts of blame, shame, credit, or obligation, all of which miss the opportunity for transformation. This is because each is rooted in the notion of a future based on the past, with the outcome of people justifying their past performance to preserve their future.

If I ask you to come to a meeting to account for what happened in a project that failed to make it’s declared objective—and you knew from experience that this meeting would be about finding out who was to blame for the breakdown, who was to get the credit, and who was obligated to make up the difference, how would you prepare for such a meeting? You would most likely be looking for ways to defend what you did or didn’t do, said or didn’t say, to get as much credit and as little blame as possible, deferring the obligation to make it “right” to the party who is to blame for the outcome.

Now imagine a meeting to debrief a project that failed to meet the declared outcomes so that we could account for what worked and what


didn’t work to ultimately discover what is wanted and needed to have the project accomplish all we had intended it to. The purpose of this meeting is to get to the future worth having, not to justify the past that didn’t work.

Which meeting would you rather participate in?

Responsibility has to do with one’s owning his or her contribution when things go awry. It’s only when someone recognizes their contribution toward what is not working that they are also able to shift and make deliberate choices that create value and open possibilities for powerful action to the unprecedented future. True responsibility is defined as the ability to respond in ways that create something entirely new. It is a choice and a privilege, not an obligation or admission of failure. How we choose to frame our choices can be even more impactful than whatever the various choices might be.

The great Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was imprisoned for years during the Holocaust. It was a despairing reality that seemingly offered no possibility for life or beauty. Yet in the midst of it, Frankl realized he could transcend the despair of circumstance and history and open up possibility in his own mind even while living in cruel captivity. It came one day in the midst of experiencing his own beatings and witnessing the beating of his family members. In that moment he began to remember meal times at home with his family and suddenly realized the Nazis couldn’t take his ability to remember and use his imagination. From that point on, he refused to have them control his experience of the camp.

Instead of succumbing to bitterness or despair, he began to write and deliver brilliant speeches as he paced back and forth in that cell. Refusing to be a victim, he instead discovered the importance in finding meaning in all forms of existence and later penned Man’s Search for Meaning, a book that has influenced countless lives and even altered how psychotherapy was traditionally done.

Have To Versus Get ToViktor Frankl provides a bigger-than-life illustration of how to walk free of victimhood in the worst of conditions. Most of us get tripped up in the far more mundane details of life: the endless series of petty, obligatory tasks that make up much of our days. We naturally resist doing such things, especially when we feel like we “have to.” And for many, this category occupies a large percentage of what they do on a daily basis. I have heard it said that most teenagers feel they don’t have a choice in 80


percent of the decisions they make! But is that really a true assessment? It may feel that way, but in reality, no one can make someone do something they really don’t want to do. Even God removed his hands of control over us when he took the risk of creating people in his image. He coaxes, leads, disciplines, woos, and warns. But the choice is always left up to us.

An exercise I’ve found helpful in illustrating this for people is called Have to/Get to. It can be applied to any number of things we do on a daily basis—things that make us feel lousy when we do them, primarily because we feel like we have to do them. Some examples would be, I have to go to work. I have to pay taxes. I have to walk the dog. I have to ride the subway. I have to mow the lawn. I have to cook dinner. I have to live with my parents-in-law. I have to go to school, and on it goes. Perhaps you’re thinking, That’s pretty much my whole life!

When someone seems stuck in a victim mindset and trapped by all the many things they have to do, engage them in a dialogue like the example below:

What is your biggest “have to”?I have to go to work.

What if you don’t go to work?I’ll lose my job.

What if you lose your job?I won’t have any money.

What if you don’t have any money? I lose everything.

What if you lose everything?I’ll feel like a failure.

What if you feel like a failure?I’ll feel depressed and worthless.

And then?I’ll be tempted to just kill myself.

It may seem like a rather childish exercise, but one can quickly see the enormous contrast between choosing to go to work and choosing not to. Either way, it’s a choice. And framing it as such makes all the difference in the world. Saying “I’d rather go to work than to feel so


depressed I want to end my life” introduces gratitude where there was only complaint.

So instead of saying, “I have to go to work,” why not say, “I choose to go to work” or “I get to go to work”?

Finding Perfect Without a “Perfect” ChoiceChoice is always better than no choice. And God has granted each of us a full measure of it. Even though we may not be able to choose what comes our way, as Viktor Frankl illustrates, we always choose how we interpret and relate to what comes our way.

Ecclesiastes 11:4 says, “If you wait for perfect conditions, you will never get anything done” (TLB). The reality is “perfect” seldom happens. Or might we have a faulty definition of

what perfect is? What if “perfect” was defined as any moment we are fully engaged in and aware of God’s presence and desire to use us to be his agent of blessing? As C. S. Lewis said, we must:

Stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day: what one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phantom of one’s own imagination.47

Another Holocaust prisoner, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, expressed this reality most profoundly in the last letter he penned to a friend just days before his execution:

It is only in living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. By this I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously not only our problems but those of God and the world. That, I think, is what it is to live by faith.48

Choosing how we relate in any circumstance is a core competency in engaging for transformational change. First comes the recognition that

We may not be able to choose what happens to us, but we can choose how we interpret what happens to us.


the choices we make reveal how the world occurs to us. So unless we change the way we think, the world will always occur to us in the same way. Short of this, any attempts at change are relegated to mere rearranging of the furniture on the Titanic. Transformational shifts in thinking demand true repentance—which in Greek is metanoia, literally translated as “to change one’s mind.” When our mind is transformed, our character follows. The origin of the English word for character dates back to the 14th century, meaning “engraved mark.” As our thinking changes, the mark we leave on the world also changes. Just as geologists can tell what kinds of environments existed on earth through the ages by the distinct marks each left upon the surface of the earth, the mark we leave reflects what we chose to allow to control our lives: fear or love?


Reflection Questions

1. Journal about a time when you were clearly a victim.

How did it feel to relive this memory and write about it in such detail?

2. Now journal about the same incident where you take full responsibility for the part you contributed toward this happening. Regardless of how small that part may be, take 100 percent responsibility for what you contributed. This does not infer you were to blame or that the result may have been any different had you not played some role. You don’t even have to believe you played a contributing role. Just journal from the perspective of taking full responsibility for the part you contributed.

How did it feel to write about the same experience from this perspective?

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GROUNDWORK€¦ · “If you are seriously interested in changing your outlook or your life, ... I’m trying to keep this guy alive with everything I can muster up. And he doesn’t