In this episode, we speak with David LaMotte - songwriter, speaker, activist, and author about the topic of change both at a personal and community level. The conversation is filled with helpful guidance and inspiration to rekindle and/or light a spark in you!
Changing Ourselves & Changing the World:
Challenging the Myth of Power withDavid Lamott
Intro: This podcast is brought to you by the South Carolina Department of Mental Health - a healthcare organization providing innovative mental health and Wellness services across all of South Carolina. Learn more about our services and resources at www.scdmh.net
How do we bring about positive change in ourselves and in the greater community and to take it an even deeper level? How do we live a life that's more aligned with our truth and our passions? The mere mention of this topic and these questions can bring about thoughts of self-doubt, powerlessness, and even discouragement from the outside world. In today's conversation ,we addressed this topic head on with David Lamont, songwriter, speaker, activist, and author of the upcoming book, “You Are Changing the World Whether You Like It or Not”. It's a conversation filled with helpful guidance and inspiration that I hope will rekindle and/or light a spark within you.
Moderator (M): David thanks so much for being part of this. Really looking forward to having a conversation with you. I know you wrote a book a while back, “World Changing 101: Challenging the Myth of Powerlessness”. And this idea of the myth of powerlessness is kind of what brought me to you and the work you were doing with your speaking and your writing and I believe it's coming out as a new addition correct?
Guest (G): Yeah in the summer of 2023 it's going to be put out by Chalice Press under a new title which is “You are Changing the World Whether You Like It or Not”.
M: Great yeah all right so I'm looking forward to that a lot. I've heard you speak and you're a musician as well so great performer and there's a story that you that you give I think it's some of your talks where you talk about your move. There was a point in time where you were giving up music or you decided to sort of put that aside at some point and you were going to further your education. And I think in general terms I'll say here “peace studies” but I believe you got a masters in international relations peace and conflict resolution at the University of Brisbane, Australia correct?
G: That's right that's right.
M: And it was so powerful to me and maybe you could share this with our audiences is that you know you just talk to your wife you had a newborn baby and you make the decision and you kind of up and move. Most of us, and we're going to talk about this is sort of making change in in our lives and all of that, but most of us have a hard time sort of making even the simplest of changes. What was that like for you in terms of making this profound change that seemed to have a huge impact on your life?
G: I have to admit that I think sometimes making the small simple changes is harder for me than making the huge drastic ones but yeah that was an amazing time in my life. I was 18 years into a music career. Things were going really really well and, you know, as a folk singer really really well means that you can pay a mortgage and you have a van. It doesn't mean that you're super rich and famous but as a singer-songwriter is really delighted to be making a living doing something that I really loved. I was traveling the world doing shows in Australia and New Zealand and Europe and having a big time and that was when I quit I heard about this fellowship through Rotary International to go and do a Masters degree in Peace Studies. And that had always been a passion of mine in my undergrad degree at James Madison University of Virginia. I had really focused on conflict mediation/conflict resolution kind of at the community level. You know we're all dealing with conflict all the time and the work of peacemaking I think is often misunderstood as an effort to quell conflict make conflict go away. Actually, I think conflict is really important. Sometimes it's really good. It's often necessary on the way to justice but the question is how we do that conflict? I think making peace isn't making nice. It's not pretending that there isn't conflict it's just trying to find ways to do conflict to approach conflict in ways that are more constructive than destructive right? And we do have good ways to do that and weirdly we don't teach them much. I don't understand why conflict resolution or conflict transformation isn't taught in schools along with Math and English because what could possibly be more relevant to a human life than knowing how to deal with conflict right? And of course that's something I'm continuing to learn about. I still get it wrong all the time but there are good resources out there and there are ways that we can learn to do this better and that felt like it felt like a calling to me at that time in my life. Again things were going really well with my music career in some ways it was weird time to step away but I had always had this passion for peace work and when this opportunity presented itself I felt so passionately about it that I announced a farewell tour not knowing if I would ever come back to music suspending it indefinitely before I heard whether I got the fellowship or not. Because the sense of it that I had was so strong that I thought OK if I don't get this fellowship, which there were lots of reasons to believe I would not, then I would have to turn my attention to that kind of work in some other way whether that was Peace Corps or working for fellowship or reconciliation or whatever, and any number of paths. But against the odds this fellowship is given to 50 people worldwide every year and that year I got to be one of the 50. And so my wife's an amazing human being and she said, yeah let's go that sounds great, and we moved to Australia with our ten week old baby and were there for two years minus three months in the middle when we were in rural India doing field work.
M: Wow I mean that's incredible. So let me unpack this just a little bit here because maybe it could be some things that people that folks can learn just from your own journey there in making that decision you know? What are some of the things that you had to grapple with? Were there inner demons or some tug of war kind of so to speak or maybe there wasn't in terms of a man making that decision?
G: Yeah I have inner demons you know about whether to pressure my teeth or not every morning yes everything involves struggle and discernment. That's always always part of the journey and yes sure there were lots of internal and external conversations that were happening around this. I had people say huh you're going to do a Masters degree in “peace studies”? OK good luck with that! Which I think brings up another whole conversation about whether there is value in changing things for the better or whether you have to fix them. You know because I do think we live in a culture that only seems to value fix it and then go on to the next thing. And in fact most things aren't like that you know? Like a marriage for instance it's not something you fix it one day and then it's good forever. It's something you work on all the time yeah and I think peace work is like that. The question isn't - can we fix it? The question is -can we do any better than we're doing right now? And so yeah, I mean it sounds like a good question to ask ourselves just in terms of anything that we were going through everyday. I mean any better than we're doing right now and this is a kind of a recurring theme for me. I think so often we use the phrases “changed the world” and “fix the world” and “save the world” interchangeably like they mean the same thing and we roll our eyes at all three of them like they're all completely naïve. And the fact is I think that it is completely naive to think you can fix the world. It's completely naive to think you can save the world. But it's not at all naive to think you can change the world. In fact it's naive to think you can be in the world and not change it. Everything you do changes the world whether you like it or not so the question for us is which changes we're going to make today and so like making that decision
M: You know again because not only is that a big decision you obviously had support from family, which is great but you also had those folks there that were you know telling you - oh wait you're getting a masters in peace studies? And then you're going to be going to Australia? It sounded like they were of the view that is like - why would you be doing that? How do you stay true to yourself when making decisions like that?
G: Life decisions yeah well I should say I don't always get it right. Some days I blow it. That was a good decision and it worked out well but yet what you're saying is right you know there were certainly lots of questions internally and externally and added to that was the fact that I'm the rare musician whose dream came true yeah making living making music and I had been for 18 years and that's you know that's nothing to take lightly right? And yet I also think it's really important to it's easy to just get really self-absorbed frankly as a singer-songwriter on the road that's singing songs you wrote all the time. It's easy to just get wrapped up to fall into your own navel as the expression goes and so I was feeling that danger. I had been on the road a long time and it was kind of working and I also almost had the sense that you run the risk at some point and becoming an impersonation of yourself yeah and I didn't want to do that and I felt like it was time to just make a really big change and have some more input you know? So yeah even though I toured Australia 6 times before I went there for the Masters degree to do concerts, when I went for the masters I didn't perform at all in the time that I was there partly because I really felt like I owed it to them. They were making a large investment in me and I felt like it was right to give the study my entire attention. But also because it felt like a good time to reinvent myself and to sort of explore one of the things I found in my life about changing your context completely yeah going to another country etcetera is that it helps you figure out who you are because you're the constant part. When everything else changes whatever is left that stays the same that's you right and so it helps you to know yourself a little bit better and that was a real good gift to me.
M: Explain that a little more that sounds really interesting David.
G: I had my first experience of that kind of radical scene change when I was in college and I went to I got to do a semester in Paris as part of my undergrad which a lot of people do right go overseas for a semester and have an adventure. And that was a really striking thing for me to go and be really outside of my context and outside of my culture and outside of my comfort zone with language. And I did learn a lot about myself in that trip and then I took it farther and I went hitchhiking around Europe for a while afterwards this was pre cell phone you know. I had a guitar and a backpack and that's it and I was hitchhiking I was catching rides with whoever picked me up. I had crazy adventures that slipped in alleys. I met people who were a little bit dangerous. I met people who were incredibly kind and I sort of experimented with trusting the world. What does it look like if I just make myself completely vulnerable yeah? What I found my whole life is that security is an illusion and that the times that I've made myself most vulnerable other times when I've been most aware of. I'll say in my own language folks can translate this to their own cosmology but of spirit moving in the world right? I have the sense of things that go past logic that are happening in the world and I was so beautifully cared for in that time. Now I also acknowledge that that's partly a function of privilege and the skin and the passport that I was born into and the gender etcetera. I can't divorce that from that experience obviously it's a factor but I do find in conversation with a lot of friends who a lot of different social locations this is a theme that comes up pretty often. And folks whose wisdom I admire that when we make ourselves vulnerable there's a chance for the world to come through.
M: I love this idea when you make yourself most vulnerable and what happens with that if there any other words of wisdom I guess you might provide to folks about how they might do that in their lives?
G: Well I guess I'm reluctant to offer any generic advice to anybody because I think different people's experiences are really different and if you are in an abusive relationship the advice you need is not make yourself vulnerable. The advice you need is make yourself safe. That's a different time and place and perspective and social location but I do think we sometimes get tugs on our spirits you know to say OK step outside. And I find that when I'm most protected is when I am least alive frankly. I just don't want to miss my life. I have found that security is a really expensive illusion.
M: Well with regards to that then David, let's kind of take that towards your work the book that you had written and how it's coming out as a new addition because you talk about this - the challenges of the powerlessness and maybe narratives that we tell ourselves. Are there some core elements within the writings that you can share with us today?
G: I guess the main concept of the book comes down to the idea that hero stories have a downside. We tell hero stories a lot with the with the intention of inspiring each other right? And we all need to inspire each other bring that on that's good yeah. And sometimes hero stories can have that effect but I think there is an unspoken narrative in our culture that is really dominant and also not true because hero stories don't scale. So if you ask the question on a cultural level and a really large scale we've got a large problem. How do we address it? I think our culture has an answer and the answer is found in the plots to 10 of the 15 movies on the nearest marquee to your house right? And that answer is you need somebody who's really special in some way, somebody who's different from you, somebody who's not normal. They're super brave, they're super smart, they have superpowers or whatever to do something dramatic in a moment of crisis and then you roll the credits because the problem is fixed. And that's the story we tell right and sometimes that story is true on a small scale like we read in the paper fairly often about somebody who does something really brave and save somebody else's life - often a stranger. It's extraordinary when something that we should celebrate that that's great but if that's our model then one of the problems is that it's extremely reactive. It's responsive. It's not necessarily generative. It's not necessarily intentional. The locus of control is outside right so if somebody falls into the train tracks in the metro in New York and you jump down and you get them out awesome. But if but if that's our model for how we deal with large problems how do you do climate change or actually how do you do anything at all like if that's the person you want to emulate then what do you do hanging out in subway stations a lot just in case somebody falls like how do you take action right and I think there is this this subconscious or at least often unnamed narrative that says look in there there's gonna be a moment in your life when all of your courage and strength and wisdom are called upon in that moment rise up and do the same thing do the right thing. The problem with that narrative is your instructions for how to have a positive impact in the world are - Step one: Wait for the moment. Maybe it rises, maybe it doesn't. If it does arise frankly David I don't wake up feeling particularly heroic most days I don't know about you but I think so often the hero stories you know. There was a man named Wesley Autrey who in 2017 did something very similar to what I just said about jumping down into the metro in New York City and he and another bystander were trying to get the man out who had had a Gran Mal seizure and fallen into the tracks. His name was Cameron Hollopeter - 22 year old film student and they couldn't get him out so the other bystander saw that a train was coming. Wesley Autrey looked at Cameron Hollopeter there in the tracks, looked at the train and the space between the train and the gravel laid down on top of him and pulled his arms and legs in and pinned them down with his own so they wouldn't be cut off by the wheels of the train. As it came over five subway cars came over, the engineer saw them there but it took that long to stop the train and then they pulled them out and they were OK! This was incredibly amazing thing for human being to do right? So here's the question - when you hear that story is your first reaction yeah that's probably what I would have done? No of course not. There are very few people who respond that way to hearing that story. So I think it's worthy of notice that that story, as inspiring as it is on one level, is also demotivating because it separates out heroes and the rest of us. Heroes do stuff like that. So in the hero narrative if you want to have a positive impact in the world step one - wait for the crisis. Step two: wait for the hero, because it's not you right? So your instructions are wait, wait, and wait some more and then if somebody fixes it clap.
M: And that's kind of when I heard your story in terms of your move to Australia and all that just as an example it's the stories that we tell ourselves. Do you want to make some sort of a change? Maybe you're unhappy where you're at or maybe there's some sort of social change or impact that you wanna have and you're like well, just like you said, we need to find somebody who's pretty special who can make that happen and then somebody who could also save me in a way by guiding me or supporting me through this or bringing me along for the ride or whatever it might be. And what it does to me, it sort of puts within you sort of these untapped potential just sort of sits quietly because whether it's fear or just the constant narrative that's beating it down. And until it's so minuscule you can't hear it.
G: And I think we have a tendency to do this with history as well we'll take the movement story and we'll cut away facts from it until it's a hero story because we like hero stories better. They're easier to tell but they also get us off the hook. Yes we don't have to be the heroes we just have to clap so everybody sort of - Rosa Parks, nobody's heard of the women's political council headed up by Joanne Robinson who had organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott a year before Rosa Parks was arrested and had it prepared to launch this is a group of between two and 300 African American women in Montgomery AL in 1955 that had chapters around town and they were really well organized. And they had put together the whole boycott they had it ready to launch anytime and they had had it ready to launch anytime for a year. And the night Rosa Parks was arrested Joanne Robinson, who was the president of the women's political council, was also a college professor at Alabama State which was then a black school and she went to the school at midnight with two of her students and they made copies on an old school mimeograph machine cranking that handle for four hours made 17,000 copies and cut them into three up strips and then distributed them all over town from 4:00 AM to 7:00 AM so that within 14 hours, without the benefit of social media or e-mail or any of those things, every home and business in the black part of Montgomery had a flyer. This is Friday morning calling for a one day boycott on Monday and then they had the weekend to organize the churches etc. And the Montgomery improvement association was formed and Dr. King was elected to be the head of that, which was really his first foray into civil rights work. But we don’t tell the king story, we tell Rosa Parks story. We don't tell the story of the women's political council Joanne Robertson called the Montgomery Bus Boycott and nobody's heard her name.
M: And so you know when you're talking to folks who come to you and they want to have an impact, again I'm bringing it back individually but also in terms of whether it's climate change whether it's social change or whatever, it may be and they don't know where to start. What are some things that you might be able to share with folks when they are asking that question?
G: So it turns out there's another narrative. The hero narrative is not the only one that's just the dominant one. The other narrative has the added benefit of actually being true and it says what really has an impact on a large scale movements, which means a whole lot of people doing a little bit each. Some people do more but the defining characteristic of a movement is that there are a whole lot of people who do a little bit and that's actually what changes the world. In my own study and experience I haven't found any examples whatsoever of one person having a large impact on a large problem societal level problem in the absence of a movement. It just doesn't happen. The function of the hero is not to fix the problem. The function of the hero is to inspire the movement and when the movement gets to work then you can make changes. So to me - the steps that I found so much more useful than being immobilized by my lack of heroic excellence is to figure out what's pulling on my heart right now. What's calling to me and my community. And find other people who care about the thing I care about, get together, do an asset inventory, figure out what we each bring. My wife has this lovely tool that she taught me for asset inventory she said there are gifts of the head - things you know about, gifts of the heart - things that you're passionate about because that matters it keeps you in the game, gifts of the hands - things you can actually make and do, and then gifts of the hive, which is to say social networks that you're connected to who can you draw on in your hive. And if you do that kind of asset inventory with a small group you'll find an amazing abundance of assets in the room. You know things skill sets that people bring and then make an achievable goal. You know smart goals come to us from the business community there's this that are achievable and relevant and time bound and all those things but do something achievable like if you can't do it in the next month you probably need to break it into a smaller piece right? And then set out to do the thing and figure out when you're going to meet up again and see who did what and then start at the top again and keep going. And that really is you know that's what the women's political council did. They didn't wait till the fire broke out to build the fire station so I think breaking things down into bite sized pieces and acknowledging that all large changes are made-up of really small ones is really important. And that's not to say that all small efforts change the world because I think actually that may be true on some esoteric spiritual level but I don't think it's true in a practical level. I've tried to do lots of things that went nowhere right nothing happened but that's you know so I don't want to be pollyanna about it. It's not that everything you try works but every large change is made-up of millions of small ones many of which are determinative the big thing could not have happened without that little thing for me it's a I mean it doesn't you could have big a big vision or a big dream
M: Yes I think where a lot of people get tripped up is they say OK we want this and then they look for whatever the home run is and they don't realize that the people in most cases the people who've gotten to there have worked very hard just been focused on these smaller sort of steps. And, you know, they may have diverted, they may have hit roadblocks with it you know and it became something they didn't expect but they wouldn't have known it unless they kind of went and did the work and then ultimately you find that you get to a certain place and I know that's been very valuable.
G: People tell me that all the time right and I think we really kind of love the overnight success story because it holds up the possibility that we might wake up tomorrow and be on TV or whatever. But it's just so seldom true for most of us. Rosa Parks was an activist for decades she had been the secretary for the WCP and recovery for 12 years by the time she got arrested that day and at 55 she had been an activist for decades. She had gone to the Highlander center in Tennessee three months before she was arrested and trained for a week in voter registration and nonviolent activism and then three months later what a coincidence got arrested on that bus right. My friend Shawn Mullins had number one hit on the Billboard charts for couple months back in the day with the song called “Rockabye” and he was on Jay Leno at the time that it was a big hit and Leno sat down with him and said, man you came out of nowhere. John took this as a teaching opportunity. Oh yeah I mean if you count several years with a military band and many years on the road and a masters degree in music and eight independent albums as out of nowhere then yes I have. But of course that was most people's experience of Sean. Suddenly he was known by millions but it's good to tell the rest of the story. My friend taught me a really wonderful phrase that someone taught her she said, you know when we were looking at the other people's lives and they look so shiny and we look back at our own lives and they look kind of messy all of which of course is hugely amplified by social media what you're doing there is “you're comparing your insides with other people's outsides” and it's really good to be reminded that life's messy for everybody and it's a lot of work and a lot of things go wrong. We don't get it right all the time and the things you hear about are the things that tend to go right you know for folks who are prominent and respected but a lot of things didn't. A lot of things still don't. It's just messy being alive and I think coming back to you were talking about kind of the inward journey I think you know I hear some people say you know you want to change the world first change yourself. And I want to say yes and right because yes I've been around activists who were fighting for causes that I really believed in but they were throwing shrapnel everywhere they went and doing damage to their cause as well as to the people around them because of stuff that they needed to work on internally. Maybe I should say we have needed to work on internally. I've probably been that guy at times too and I also don't think we can wait until we are self-actualized to start the work on the world because then we wait forever. So I feel like these are parallel tracks and we've got to do the work on both of them and let each inform the other keep learning from folks around us about ways we could be doing this better and doing less damage and doing more good and keep working on ourselves and doing the internal work so that we have a little bit of light to shine.
M: I'm David Diana host and producer of, A Look Within: Conversations on Mental Health and Well-being”. We want to thank David Lamott for joining us today and you may learn more about his work at davidlamott.com that's Davidlamott.com. And as always, we want to thank all of you for listening and hope you'll join us next time.
Closing: A Look Within: Conversations on Mental Health and Well-being podcast is hosted and produced by David Diana and the South Carolina Department of Mental Health. We hope you'll join us for our next conversation
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