How To Build your Practice Through Active Listening

With experience working in a Bordello, at the corner of Wealth and Bondage, serving the Ultra High Net Worth Markets, (before I went to jail and got born again, thanks to Chuck Colson Prison Ministries) I learned that the key difference between a street hooker and an in-call escort was what we called "priceless conversations," keeping the Johns and Jills talking about their purpose driven life, as we serviced their needs all the way up and down Maslow's hierarchy. I find these skills, I mean active listening, and kneeling, to be transferrable to my new work as Morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families. I am studying to be a Geisha to broaden my cultural literacy. Learning to make tea and play the flute while my Private Clients tell me ad nauseam about the meaning of their lives. Well, it is good for business, brightens their evening, and keeps me from the streets, unlike certain others I could name.

Comments

[Jon Husband]

You certainly seem as if you would be Appreciative when you listen or make enquiry.

[Mortrn]

Up and down Maslow's.. Good one. :)

[Phil Cubeta]

I am appreciative on behalf of those who pay me for that emotional labor. If the client writes a life story that is self serving, or a mission statement that is pure cornpone, why not appreciate it until the fee check clears? We are not here to judge, educate, improve, but to serve. Such is the prevailing ethos.

[tm]

It is for such tasteful service that we laud our Great Universities. Or rather, that they laud themselves.

[phil]

As long as you stop short of good taste, wit, and compunction, you will do well in appreciative approach to Socratic dialog. "Discernment" is the goal. To see without being seen through, or to see what is presented as intended, without seeing through the screens to the incoherent self seeking validation of its self deluded self presentation. That the client might an unreliable narrator of his or her own "life journey," "purpose," "mission," "gospel of wealth," or "values" is wholly beyond the ken of the professionals now doing this work. We take good notes, write it all up, or make a video and present at if this touching charade were, well, Gospel. The poet holds a mirror up to human nature, so does the publicist, the flatterer, the courtier, the life purpose coach. Each mirror distorts, no doubt. Midas's Barber held the mirror up to Midas, showing his Ass's ears. "Replace the crown, please," said the King. The Barber whispered, "The King is an ass," to the reeds. And the reeds whispered it to the world. This was a break of Confidentiality. The Barber as Homme de Confience, he deserves what he gets. Goya's portraits of the royal family are instructive. They must have loved these portraits and hung them on the Castle walls. Yet what we see are grotesques. Could we then limn the client's Gospel of Wealth so that the client loved it, and the more knowing reader saw through it? Yes, but what would drive a Goya to take such chances?

[jr]

You can't squash something that isn't squishy. You can flatten it, maybe, but for squashing you need something hydrous. Humans are xx% water. Very squishy. Which is why the prudent take care.

[Phil Cubeta]

Yes, as Seneca found, bleeding to death in his tub, having offended the Emperor, Nero, with some misplaced wisdom.

[jr]

I've got a new phrase for you:

"To give one the little phil"

as in

'e set 'im up real pretty, then slipped 'im the little phil.

Waddaya think?

[tm]

to see what is presented as intended, without seeing through the screens to the incoherent self seeking validation of its self deluded self presentation. That the client might an unreliable narrator of his or her own "life journey," "purpose," "mission," "gospel of wealth," or "values" is wholly beyond the ken of the professionals now doing this work. We take good notes, write it all up, or make a video and present at if this touching charade were, well, Gospel.

This could be classified as willful or perhaps hysterical blindness. Either way, it's a superb description of the New York Times and USian Journalism. Moyers was a fine critic of this rot, but something kept him from making it howl in pain.

[phil]

Reading Browning's Dramatic Monologues should be required of all journalists and family wealth counselors.

[tm]

Maybe throw in Burroughs' Naked Lunch for a dollop of viscera.

[Phil Cubeta]

In doing wealth consulting we seek a narrative, TM, of genesis and telesis. (C.f. Paul Schervish). Such narratives show the interaction of moral compass and financial capacity. They are a narrative of virtue, generally. Consultants now teach salespeople and tax attorneys how to elicit these narratives. The result is often pure cornpone. Poor Richard's Almanack meets Pilgrim's Progress.

[tm]

Similar narratives have filled our televisions, pulpits, advertising slots, newsreels, newspapers, NPR web sites, commencement exercises, political campaigns, Chambers of Commerce luncheons, dog park gatherings, Senatorial debates, Small Business Administration Bulletins, trade shows, PSAs, School Broadcasts, letters from the principal, letters from the President, letters from the Pope, letters from Lake Woebegone, letters from Bill Moyers, letters from Scott Simon, letters from Oprah, letters from University Chancellors, from truck stop grandees, developers, circus masters, environmentalists, shoemakers, manufacturers of frozen meat, Pharmaceutical Giants, Steve Jobs, Fake Steve Jobs, Frozen Walt Disney, Special Correspondent Susan Stamberg, Deepak Chopra, Bruce Springsteen, Matthew Arnold, Rudyard Kipling, Martin Seligman, Mr. Ed, Simon and Garfunkle, Lawrence Welk, John Denver, Ronald Reagan, Friends of the National Association of Associated Nations, Acolytes of This or That Flag, Peter Lemongello, Katie Couric and Glenn Beck. Cornpone for all God's children.

[Phil Cubeta]

How did Matthew Arnold make the list? His stories seem the counter story of the underground river, barely heard, the mermaids inaccessible to human love, the wistfulness of a life story truncated and off track, of ignorant armies clashing by night. It is that level of counterthought and regret, of compunction, that seems missing in the others. We should try adding Rosseau's Confessions to the list and see where that gets us, and St. Augustine's. Tennyson might fit your list, but ah, the gloom and neurosis that is allowed through. "Positive Psychology" is our new Victorian Synthesis. We need our own "Charge of the Light Brigade" to keep up morale in the Homeland.

Crappy stories are a symptom and cause of a crapped out culture. The stories you mention are our cultural operating system. No wonder we are all on meds. The darkness, the tragic vision, the irony, ambiguity, paradox, the counter story, the subplots, the aporia, the lacerations of curative satire, the emetics and purgatives, the lash, are edited out, as "negatives." We are so brittle now, our narcissism so easily wounded.

Could you and Kia use a few bucks? I need someone to write up and buff the cornpone dialogs we advisors to America's Wealthiest Families record for posterity. It pays well by adjunct standards. I can go as high as $13 an hour, with a bonus for client self satisfaction. http://www.storyzon.com/approach.html.

There might be a franchise opportunity in this for you and Kia, or better yet a multi-level marketing opportunity. We all know plenty of journalists, English majors, and Comp Lit PhDs who could buff the cornpone in return for minimum wage, and/or a good meal.

We call the planning we do for the Wealthy, "Discernment," and draw on the Wisdom Literature to help them write their obtuse Gospel of Wealth. Yet those I know with discernment, who have paid the price of it, are appalled. The Gospels of the Derelict, the off scourings, the scapegoats. Who will ghostwrite those?

[tm]

I'm happy to de-list Matthew Arnold - he was no slouch in many ways. He was probably there because of something Cyril Conolly once said:

When we compare the nineteenth century in the two countries [England and France] the situation is different. In spite of all the scientific and philosophic achievements of the Victorian age, it stands condemned of Unreality in the world of art. It had its poets and novelists, and they were born into their world with a wealth of talent, but they suffered from a worse disease than boredom, that of complacency. They flinched from poverty and unpopularity, from the tragic implication and the dangerous thought. They ran away from the city terror, and the fearful human enigma, to cling to the folds of their stupid, cosy Victorian Nanny, the Upper Middle Class. Flaubert and Baudelaire, giants of prose and poetry, were contemporaries of Matthew Arnold; they were some ten years younger than Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, and Browning, and Hugo and Balzac were some ten years older. When we compare Balzac and Flaubert to Dickens and Thackeray, Baudelaire to Tennyson, Sainte-Beuve to Hazlitt, we must lower our eyes. There is nothing to say; the Frenchmen are adults: beside them, the English, for all their natural advantages, have not grown up.

[Phil Cubeta]

Which would you hire to run the school system? Baudelaire or Arnold? Wasn't Arnold actually the person who got literature, other than "classics" (ancients) accepted into the Oxford curriculum?

[tm]

Before we "architect" a new civic world, we might bring in M. Baudelaire to help forestall, prolepticaly and for all future occasion, certain toastmasterish impulses to self-encomia.

[jr]

"When I came home and told a couple of my friends I was going to buy a university, they all said, are you back on crack or something, I mean no one buys a college, and I said, no, no, I think it can be done."

..

There are people who would say, look, this guy Michael Clifford, he never went to college, he was a musician, he sort of drifted around, he had a born-again experience, do you have the credibility, do you have the bona fides, to be determining the future of colleges around the country?

No, but I'm doing it. And I think that's the great thing, only in America, I mean, my new book is called How To Run A College By A Guy Who Never Went To One."

College Inc.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/

[Phil Cubeta]

TM, wrote, Before we "architect" a new civic world, we might bring in M. Baudelaire to help forestall, prolepticaly and for all future occasion, certain toastmasterish impulses to self-encomia. The editor rejoiced. Of course, we were not talking about self econmia here. Those in need of encomia are incapable of spelling same, much less doing same. So we outsource the service. Good taste reports to bad taste and keeps a civil tongue in its head.