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" I have hundreds of poems memorized. Mostly by others, but also my own. I use the poems when I lead retreats for management groups on topics like creating teams, or coming up with a more entrepreneurial system, or creating more excitement. "

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" We're moving toward the kind of work world which has less security. But we hope it has more creativity and possibility of real engagement. "

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" There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from. "

" Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends. "

" A sure sign of a soul-based workplace is excitement, enthusiasm, real passion; not manufactured passion, but real involvement. And there's very little fear. "

" A soul-based workplace asks things of me that I didn't even know I had. It's constantly telling me that I belong to something large in the world. "

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" A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain. "

" One of the great difficulties as you rise up through an organisation is that your prior competencies are exploded and broken apart by the territory you've been promoted into: the field of human identity. "

" There are many tough conversations, but one of the most difficult is between a parent and an adolescent daughter, partly because as a parent we are almost always attempting to relate to someone who is no longer there. "

" To regret fully is to appreciate how high the stakes are in even the average human life; fully experienced, it turns our eyes, attentive and alert, to a future possibly lived better than our past. "

" By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar. "

" Without the compassionate understanding of the fear and trepidation that lie behind courageous speech, we are bound only to our arrogance. "

" It is difficult to be creative and enthusiastic about anything for which we do not feel affection. "

" Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can't be used for manipulation; it's why you never see good poetry in advertising. "

" A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing, beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything extraneous has been taken away. "

" Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is in effect to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness. "

" It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances as much as by gifted appearances, allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living. "

" In Germany, they have great difficulty with anything that smacks of cultism or messianic leadership. You can't talk about leadership in its charismatic forms. "

" Being a good parent will necessarily break our hearts as we watch a child grow and eventually choose their own way, even through many of the same heartbreaks we have traversed. "

" The greatest luxury of having money should be not having to worry about it. "

" A real conversation always contains an invitation. You are inviting another person to reveal herself or himself to you, to tell you who they are or what they want. "

" To admit regret is to understand that we are fallible - that there are powers beyond us. To admit regret is to lose control not only of a difficult past but of the very story we tell about our present. To admit sincere and abiding regret is one of our greatest but unspoken contemporary sins. "

" It is not the thing you fear that you must deal with: it is the mother of the thing you fear. "

" Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless. "

" The marvelous thing about a good question is that it shapes our identity as much by the asking as it does by the answering. "

" It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life. "

" Sincere regret may be a faculty for paying attention to the future, for sensing a new tide where we missed a previous one, for experiencing timelessness with a grandchild where we neglected a boy of our own. "

" All of our great traditions, religious, contemplative and artistic, say that you must a learn how to be alone - and have a relationship with silence. It is difficult, but it can start with just the tiniest quiet moment. "

" The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body. "

" Sometimes you have to make a complete disaster of your life in such an epic way that it will be absolutely clear to you what you've been doing. "

" Honesty allows us to live with not knowing. We do not know the full story; we do not know where we are in the story. We do not know who, ultimately, is at fault or who will carry the blame in the end. "