M, the monk

Posted on November 14, 2008. Filed under: Individual Voices | Tags: journey, leadership, self-knowledge |

M, choosing his metaphors

A couple of days ago, we went to Monk Chat for the second time, to talk to “M” again. The first time we monkchatted, M told us that monks are supposed to be leaders in the community and that he, particularly, was interested in social justice. That is why he was studying politics in school. M’s big dream is to create economic balance among all the countries. That way, people in Thailand will have the same sort of socioeconomic status as those in the US. That way, people in Thailand can travel all over the world like people in the US.

At our second conversation, we broke out CCL’s Leadership Metaphor Explorer cards. These are a series of cards with pictures of different sorts of leadership dynamics and a descriptive phrase on them. Most of them are fairly straightforward, although a few are slightly esoteric. Vocab was a big issue, so M broke out his electronic translator and went to town. Over and over, M said, “why they use such hard words?!” I wish I knew, M, I wish I knew.

M chose two pictures, one to answer the question of how a monk should be a leader in the community and one to answer the question of how he wished to be a leader. Both intersected in the theme of “know thyself.” For M, the most important part of leadership is knowing onself first. Only when we know ourselves, can we then lead others. He also chose several other cards to represent the various aspects of leadership a monk exhibits. But the crux of the issue was self-knowledge.

M and his mentor/friend choosing pictures with Amy

After we went through that set of questions, we broke out CCL’s Visual Explorer, a set of photographs of a variety of things. We asked M and his friend to choose photos that represented where they were now in reaching some of the goals we had just discussed. M chose two that were folks at the beginning of great journeys. One was of a man at the bottom of a tall ice covered mountain, looking up. M’s friend’s English wasn’t as good, so he just chose pictures that struck him as beautiful or engaging–”freedom” of a little girl dancing. All in all, a great conversation and a great afternoon!