7 
No Masks, No Bargains
- Proximal Health: A Surgeon’s Perspective | Paul Uhlig
- My Worst Consulting Nightmare | Amy Katz
- Seven Questions to the Most Frequently Asked Answers | Peter Block
In her poem that appears in Chapter 1 of this fieldbook, Meg Wheatley writes:
Naked in dirt
no mask
no bargains
To be clothed, clean, masked, and making deals is so tempting that when we allow ourselves to be naked, transparent, and without an angle, it is almost a state of grace. This grace comes with time and age, but also with a willingness to understand ourselves as eagerly as we wish to understand our clients. The challenge in knowing our “Self” is to face the shadow side with an open curiosity. It is at the end of the day that we get a glimpse into what is normally hidden. It is when we are away from others, and have time to reflect on our experience, that we begin our real wondering. This is where our failures, our fears, our dreams in the night can become our ally.
This section is about our becoming more transparent, at least to ourselves. This takes us briefly into dreams, stories of some failures, and finally to a short roadmap of traps that I have fallen into, over and over. The purpose of all of these reflections is to remind ourselves again that we are not in this alone, especially when things don’t work so well, and that our work is always to go deeper into understanding our ...
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