Meeting Six– Risky Business

Opening Round:

Keep the Opening Round short, and include a Query or a work statement if you like.

First Exercise: Visual Tools

In this exercise the men learn hand signs with which they can signal speaker or the leader without interrupting, when they believe the meeting or speaker is straying from the topic, the guidelines are being compromised, or the leader needs to exercise control.

Second Exercise: Risky Feedback

This exercise is designed to make everyone uncomfortable, perhaps even a bit wounded so that you can practice healing.  Men who can’t absorb criticism or discomfort will leave the group soon anyway because they lack the ability to withstand any perceived attack on their self-esteem.  Unfortunately in society, there are many men who run at the first moment of discord or conflict.  Doing so, they fail to reap the rewards of truly bonded kinship.

Even more difficult than receiving a painful comment is giving uncomfortable feedback.  Speaking means being accountable and many men have never learned to take responsibility.  Even when we know we are speaking for the benefit of the other man, we may be so fearful of being misunderstood, or of being disliked, that we remain silent or make a meaningless watered-down statement.

Third Exercise: Truth Telling

This exercise revisits group confidentiality.  Sometimes breaks happen.  This can be easy to do, depending on where the boundaries have been set.  For example, a man might tell his wife, “Gosh, Bill lost his job, I felt so bad for him.”  Then he realizes that, again depending on what the group has decided is confidential, he has crossed the line.  

Talking about it now will hurt, but it will also make the group stronger.

Closing the Meeting

The meetings typically end with a short round in which each man says how he is feeling and takes can of any unfinished business. The manual also contains various rituals that groups use to close a meeting.