Michael Schreiber

Your fear is the sharpest definition of your self. You should know it. You should feel it virtually constantly. Fear needs to become your friend, so that you are no longer uncomfortable with it.

All we have to believe with is our senses: the tools we use to perceive the world, our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.

Grace is the realization that no matter what appears on the surface of life, no matter what has come before or what appears to be lost, when you tap back into this perfect seed pattern, it will emerge again, fresh, vital, overflowing with new possibilities.

I realized that providing expertise is antithetical to cultivating agency, and I began seeking new ways to engage my client organizations. For example, I stopped offering organizational models and started emphasizing the use of living systems frameworks, which provide the structure for thinking but require participants to supply the content and do

I’ve taken a different tack. After years of experimenting, I discovered that the more I tried to exert power directly, the less powerful I became. I learned to dial back my ego and distribute power as widely as possible without surrendering final authority. Paradoxically, this approach strengthened my effectiveness because it freed me to focus on

Combined with self-confidence, agency is the attitude that any problem can be fixed, given enough resources in the form of time, effort, and determination. This attitude rests either on a thorough knowledge of or training in what is to be done, or on the surety that such knowledge or training can be attained. This attitude is often transferable