Gary Quehl and William Bergquist
In my mid-20s I was the first woman to cross Alaska by foot, snow shoes, and canoe—100 years after my great grandfather had done the same. Emerging Sage Leader
Peak experiences of the 50 emerging sage leaders cluster around eight themes: overcoming tragedy and hardship, personal challenges, birthing and parenting, work, politics, international experiences, mentors, and educational achievement.
Highly Personal Experiences
Some of the peak experiences involved events that have had a very personal, often family-based, and powerful impact.
Overcoming tragedy and hardship
The death of parents had a profound effect on several emerging sage leaders, as did going through an incredibly painful and dark 32-hour labor to deliver a dead child. Two emerging sage leaders had life-changing, sage-provoking experiences resulting from car accidents:
I started my freshman year and was in a serious car accident where I broke my back, was paralyzed, and became permanently wheelchair-bound. This was a major life-altering experience, without which I probably would not be working in the disability field today.
Just a few weeks before my 21st birthday, friends and I were on our way back from the theatre one evening and got in a terrible car accident. The experience totally reshaped my life in an instant because two of us died and two of us lived. I wondered how I could have lived and someone just inches away from me hadn’t. This experience helped move me to being more present in the moment, more honest, and clearer about my intentions.
Personal challenges
Many emerging sage leaders have encountered and overcome personal challenges in their lives. One was born cross-eyed and was diagnosed with kidney disease. Another had a life-giving heart value replacement at age 50 that dramatically changed his perspective on life. A third had just gotten pregnant and somehow coped when her husband stopped coming home. Then there is the county official who realized there was nothing she could do to off-set rumors about herself and stoically learned to live with them. And there is the professional educated in a world-class university who learned the hard way to be open to lessons from others:
Early in my career I was involved in pulling together key community leaders to work in improving the quality of life for low-income residents without imposing a particular program on them. We held a community meeting, and I had my flip charts and markers and questions up on the wall. We were so proud of ourselves, asking for all of this input before designing the program. During the meeting one African-American woman, who was a leader from the neighborhood we were working in, became teary-eyed and walked out. When I followed up with her I found she was really angry. She felt manipulated by my process. Once again professionals had come in with their flipcharts and markers and talked rather than sitting down and listening to and her and her associates and learning what their values are. That was devastating for me in my early thirties. I went to the woman’s home, and she made me tea and brought out food. She said, “Listen, we all have gifts. I have gifts, you have gifts, the single moms have gifts, and the drug dealers down the street have gifts. Let’s just come together and understand what gifts we have.” That experience brought me to my knees and emptied my cup. So what I learned from this peak experience is to keep my cup empty.
And then there is the amazing story of the emerging sage leader who had an experience that no woman ever had before:
At age 24, I moved to Salt Lake City and organized the American Women’s Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Ten months after forming a team of the top female mountain climbers and explorers in the world, I was dropped from the team—supposedly for not having sufficient experience. This was the first all-women’s team to make it to the South Pole. I moved back to Nevada County, worked to save money, and then went to fish commercially in the Alaskan Gulf. During this time I also trained Iditarod sled dogs in order to get ready for my solo trans-Alaska expedition, skiing 600 miles down the frozen Yukon River pulling a 160 pound sled behind me. I then spent time in an Athabascan village building a traditional canoe. This became my transportation for the last 900 miles and 11 days of my 1500-mile journey. I was the first woman ever to accomplish this—one hundred years after my great grandfather had done the same thing.
Birthing and parenting
A number of emerging sages have been transformed by having had children and learning how to effectively parent them. Another became politicized by her pregnancy experience when, in a vulnerable state, she realized how manipulative and unsupportive society can be with pregnancy and birth. And a third had a life-changing experience that put her on the career path to child development when she witnessed a pregnant mother who had no idea of how to mother her child.
Collective and Shared Experiences
Some peak experiences of emerging sages have involved important relationships with other people—whether these were positive, negative or a mixture of both.
Work experiences
Emerging sage leaders identify a variety of work-related experiences that have been life-changing. One points to difficulties she experienced in learning the different ways that men and women are treated in the workplace, and another attributes transitioning from being an hourly worker to a supervisor as illuminating. While managing the store of a national retail chain one emerging sage leader was told she was not a good merchant and would need to find another niche in the organization, which she very successfully did—in marketing. A young, green attorney realized she had to choose between helping the individual client or changing systems that impact domestic violence victims, so she gave up a promising law practice and chose the alternative. The zoo provided one sage leader the opportunity to build a fund development program, which she found she enjoyed and was good at. Another got a position working in the county CEO’s office and had her eyes opened to the “big picture,” which enabled her to see how little changes could make big differences. And one emerging sage leader learned something important about being an artist:
When I was young, I was friends with a guy but never understood what he did for a living because he was never around much. When I found out that he was a superb professional musician, it was the first time I realized one could make a living making art.
Politics
The peak experiences of other emerging sage leaders were in the political arena. A new mayor discovered she could make mistakes in the public eye, learn from them, and still be effective. A very young person was asked to run for the school board and, to his surprise, was elected. A third emerging sage recalls the energy, excitement, and sense of common purpose that arose during a presidential rally for Geraldine Ferraro. And then there is the newly-appointed county executive who had to cope with a serious emergency:
A major flood occurred right after elections, with an elected body that was changing but where the existing elected body was still making decisions. My challenge was to work through this process and make decisions in a very stressful environment. Just responding to the flood crisis, and what came out of it, was pretty powerful. In the end, we did a good job.
International experiences
One emerging sage leader credits his Peace Corps experience and later work in poor Oakland California neighborhoods as the greatest influences on his life, while a second identifies his Peace Corps work in Russia as seminal. Other emerging sages had different international peak experiences: one learned a new language while serving as an exchange student in Germany, and a second volunteered for a program called Amigos de las Americas; another emerging sage recalls the powerful high school experience of listening to a visiting South African talk about apartheid, while a second participated in Semester at Sea and a third found that extensive international travel with parents was transformative. One emerging sage leader recalls a particularly potent experience while she was studying painting and photography in Barcelona, Spain:
I got really involved in the gypsy culture there. It was one of the first times that I was excluded from a group. At first, I was treated like an outsider and was largely ignored. It made me very aware of pervasive racism, and how we separate ourselves from those who are different in some way. I started educating myself and learned more about these issues. Ultimately, I became a trusted friend and was able to hear from them about their history and ancestry, their music and culture. I was able to see first-hand that not everyone is free and able to do what they want.
Mentors
Many emerging sage leaders identify the great influence that mentors have played in guiding their lives. One identifies a caring former boss and another identifies a philosophy teacher who believed in her. A special relationship with a grandfather who taught you can change things, or a grandmother who gave constant encouragement are also mentioned, as is the impact of a father turning over to his sons the reins of Campus Life Ministry. Another emerging sage identifies working with the founder of a service learning and mentoring nonprofit organization at UC Irvine, and one reports as uplifting the impact of his boss placing confidence in him:
My boss asked me to run a $2.5 million project when I had never managed a project all the way through. That catapulted me into a level of leadership I hadn’t expected.
Educational achievement
Various educational experiences are also the source of peak experiences among emerging sage leaders. One mentions the planning and successful implementation of a retreat that resulted in her school being named Northern California Flagship School. Another identifies the pivotal experience of having placed tenth in an all-state high school debate. One emerging sage leader wanted to be a biologist but didn’t enjoy the classes, so he took an economics course and fell in love with numbers and graphs. Another was about to leave for graduate school at the London School of Economics when her boyfriend asked, “Why don’t you become a chiropractor (her father’s occupation)?” And she did. Then there is the boy who hung-out with troubled kids in 8th grade:
I was a good guy who hung out with bad kids just because they gave me self-esteem. I wasn’t very proud of my grades or my lack of involvement in school. One of the hardest things my parents ever did was making the decision to hold me back a year. Because of this decision, I became an honor roll student and was involved in school sports and student council leadership. These leadership roles went all the way through high school and college.
Competence in Meeting a Challenge
Contents of their stories vary widely, but an underlying theme is emerging sage leaders’ sense of competence, a belief that they rose to the challenge and as a result are now able to provide valuable service. “I can do this” becomes the clarion cry of the emerging leaders. In many instances peak experiences happened because someone, usually a mentor, invited them to take on a challenge and expressed belief in their ability to achieve it; this was inevitably a very personal experience, a powerful interpersonal connection that made it happen. The mentor pushed the emerging sage forward (the role of challenge) while providing reassurance and encouragement (the role of support). Nevitt Sanford believed that all peak experiences, and especially significant adult learning, occur under conditions when challenge and support are in balance: the greater the challenge, the greater the need for support (Endnote 1). This parallels the model of “flow” offered by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which is the threshold between anxiety and boredom (Endnote 2).
Challenge without Support
In several cases, the emerging sage leader experienced all of the challenge but none of the support earlier in life. One emerging sage notes that he was hanging around with the wrong kids and was failing in school; his parents held him back, and he was forced to take eighth grade over again. Now with support and different friendships, this emerging sage forged a different kind of life for himself. Another emerging sage leader talks about a tragic car accident that forced her to reflect on the reasons she was placed on this earth, to question why she is still alive while others died, and what she is meant to do with this life she has been granted. Other emerging sages also report certain traumatic experiences as being “peak.” These difficult challenges taught them about endurance and persistence, about compassion and justice, about privilege and opportunity—and about collaboration.
Emerging sages’ peak experiences mostly had to do with personal challenges, but in several instances the experience involved coming together with other people to tackle a difficult and complex problem. From this they learned it is often critical to find other people who can help (the balancing of challenge with support) and to share the burden through cooperation with them. This enabled them to learn about both personal empowerment and collective empowerment.
A Taste of the Real World
Two emerging sage leaders talk about working in a nonprofit women’s crisis center early in their adult lives; they say it was this early taste of the “real world” that pointed them toward their current social service work in Nevada County. Other emerging sages identify international travel as being influential in shaping their worldly perspective; by leaving their home town, they went beyond their “comfort zone” (challenge, the anxiety side of flow) and saw the world as a bigger place than just a few square miles of Nevada County. Then they returned to apply what they had learned. Ironically, these emerging sages might not have come back to Nevada County if they hadn’t experienced the world outside. But they did and their motivation was to share what they had learned in order to make Grass Valley and Nevada City stronger communities.
Notes
1. Nevitt Sanford, Learning After College, 1980.
2. Mihalyi Csikszentmihali, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, 1973.
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