July 29, 2010
Confessions of a Recovering Spitzer Skeptic
By John Keenan
It was one year ago that I first met Fr. Spitzer and started editing this website. Along the way, I’ve used stories to try to flesh out his philosophy, but I’ve never told the story of my own unlikely path to the Spitzer Center. It’s unlikely because I had theretofore been a certified training skeptic – a fellow whose favorite part of any personal development course was lunch. In my corporate career, which included altogether too many such courses, I regarded them as a waste of time on a par with watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island.
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| The author, left, with then Bishop-elect, now Bishop James S. Wall of the Diocese of Gallup (center) and Fr. Spitzer. The photo was taken last March in Phoenix, the day after I first met Fr. Spitzer. |
I wasn’t sure if the problem was me or the quality of the courses I’d been exposed to, but it struck me one day that I couldn’t recall one bullet point from any course I’d attended. By the time this recognition dawned on me, I had been through Leadership Development … Leading in Difficult Times … Inclusive Leadership … Change Management … Making Change Your Friend … Inspirational Coaching, etc. The only reason I could even remember taking these courses was that I still had the three-ring binders in my bookcase. Expert after expert had labored to change my default settings, and the changes persisted until I awoke the next morning, refreshed and rebooted.
I would gladly have avoided any more programs for the rest of my career, but my boss was as enthusiastic about training as I was dubious. He was pushing me to take a weeklong program, so I plea-bargained: Would a new curriculum called Journey to Excellence be acceptable as a substitute? The Journey appealed to me because a friend of mine, Jim Berlucchi, was teaching it. More importantly, it consisted of five half-day sessions spread over five months. I got the green light and signed up, not expecting much. But I was surprised. Very pleasantly surprised.
Not only did I remember the salient points long after the sessions, but I found myself explaining these points to anyone who would listen. I’m still doing so five years later, and not in these pages alone but in my daily life. Just last week, I gave the short course on the Four Levels to two guys from Orkin, who were at my home doing routine bug deterrence. We conversed enthusiastically for 15 minutes or so about Level 2 cultures, until they realized they were running late for their next appointment. I wish I had jotted down the nice things they said so I could post them on our Endorsements page – right next to the feedback from Costco’s Ed Sinegal and Alan Mulally, who now runs Ford. A philosophy that excites corporate titans and pest control technicians is a lucid, highly practical philosophy indeed.
Spitzer Center people – the directors, staff, and supporters – share a commitment to spreading these insights far and wide. We are not content to shrug off the fact that most of the people we meet are far more likely to know The Three Amigos than know the Four Levels of Happiness®. |
The practicality lies in Fr. Spitzer’s reclamation of old but commonly overlooked truths about human nature. We all want the exact same thing in life: We want happiness. The level at which we pursue it shapes our purpose in life, our identity, and our destiny. The most frequent trap we face is a desire for pleasure or victory so consuming it blinds us to deeper, more enduring and pervasive forms of fulfillment. Our problem doesn’t tend to be that we make the good the enemy of the best; our problem is that we make what’s good a barrier to what’s best. We strive for short-term satisfactions that lead to long-term misery.
Spitzer Center people – the directors, staff, and supporters – share a commitment to spreading these insights far and wide. We are not content to shrug off the fact that most of the people we meet are far more likely to know The Three Amigos than to know the Four Levels of Happiness®.
A Work in Progress
Back to my journey. Eventually, I left the corporate life, or to be more precise, the corporate life left town. My company shut the large site where I was working. Rather than move my family far away to another site, I decided it was time to try something different. That’s when Jim called and explained a challenge he faced with the Spitzer Center, a challenge I was personally familiar with.
The journey from the lower levels of happiness to the higher ones is difficult, largely because (as I mentioned above) one’s default settings are very hard to extinguish. To stay on the journey, it helps to have encouragement and occasional food for thought, but the Spitzer Center, at that point, lacked such content or a person to produce it. Could I help out?
The intriguing part of the offer was it implied a chance to get to know Fr. Spitzer. Intriguing, but intimidating at first. Everyone who already knew him advised me that Fr. Spitzer was a genius, a fact that was driven home to me the first time I asked him a question over the phone. His reply was a survey of everything Western philosophy had to say concerning my question; he didn’t so much as pause to catch his breath for 40 minutes. “Wow!” I thought. “This guy can give an extemporaneous lecture on any topic, and I can’t make an extemporaneous change to my voice mail greeting.”
I would like to say that, after a year of working with Father, Jim, Sheri Hull, Joan Jacoby, and others, I am finally a thoroughly Level 3 guy. But of all the people who work at the Center, I’m the one with the highest quotient of Level 2 moments.
Just last week I made a recommendation to Fr. Spitzer, which for some inexplicable reason, he rejected. “I agree with you 90 percent of the time, John,” he said, “but not this time.” Then you ought to try agreeing with me 95 percent of the time! I fumed to myself.
I wish I’d said it aloud. He would have laughed, as his audience laughs whenever he acknowledges his own residual moments of Level 2 petulance. That’s one of the things that attracted me to Fr. Spitzer’s message – his admission that old habits are very difficult to demolish, and new ones are a long-term construction project. But at least I now have a Spitzer Center hard hat to go with my own hard, Level 2 head.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably engaged in your own long-term project, and I hope that, from time to time, you find some material here that helps in one way or another. If you have any questions you’d like Father Spitzer to address, or suggestions for making our second year better than our first year, please pass them along. You can reach me at john@spitzercenter.org.
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Last changed: Mar 10 2010 at 12:35 PM