LISTENING FOR PASSION and commitment is the practice of the silent conductor whether the players are sitting in the orchestra, on the management team, or on the nursery floor. How can this leader know how well he is fulfilling his intention? He can look in the eyes of the players and prepare to ask himself, “Who am I being that they are not

Each new paradigm gives us the opportunity to “see” phenomena that were before as invisible to us as the colors of the sunset to the frog.

But the central self is open and aware because it need only be the unique voice that it is, an expression that transcends the personality that got it out of childhood alive.

I began to ask myself questions like “What makes a group lively and engaged?” instead of “How good am I?” So palpable was the difference in my approach to conducting as a result of this “silent conductor” insight, that players in the orchestra started asking me, “What happened to you?”

The pie is enormous, and if you take a slice, the pie is whole again.

no matter how objective we try to be, it is still through the structure of the brain that we perceive the world.

think of “personality” as a strategy for “getting out of childhood alive.”

Thurgood Marshall was asked of what accomplishment he was most proud. He answered, simply, “That I did the best I could with what I had.” Could there be any greater acknowledgment? He gave himself an A, and within this framework he was free to speak of errors of judgment, of things he would have done differently had he had access to other views.

This A is not an expectation to live up to, but a possibility to live into.