{"id":5028,"date":"2016-11-25T17:08:07","date_gmt":"2016-11-25T22:08:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/roadsfromemmaus\/?p=5028"},"modified":"2016-11-25T17:08:07","modified_gmt":"2016-11-25T22:08:07","slug":"key-growth-not-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/asd\/2016\/11\/25\/key-growth-not-data\/","title":{"rendered":"The Key to Growth is Not More Data"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"platonic-academy\"
\nJ<\/span>ust a few quick thoughts for today from Edwin Friedman, whose works I’ve been getting to know over the past few years—all three from his work A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix<\/i>:<\/p>\n

Even the United States Government Printing Office has pamphlets about \u201cA Teenager in Your House\u201d which, like \u201cTermites in Your Basement,\u201d is designed to teach parents what to be wary of. Yet there is absolutely no evidence that the most successful parents are those who are most \u201cknowledgeable\u201d of either the \u201cproper\u201d techniques or the latest data on the children who are either most troubled or most happy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Parenting is no different from any other kind of \u201cmanaging.\u201d The critical issues in raising children have far less to do with proper technique than with the nature of the parents\u2019 presence and the type of emotional processes they engender. I have, for example, almost never seen a mother who had a mature relationship with her own mother have trouble with her daughter. Similarly, I never saw a highly reactive or hypercritical father who was not distant from his own family of origin (and who, thereby, made the members of his new nuclear family too important to him).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But there is another side to the data deluge. For the greatest mental health problem in America today may be the substance abuse of data. If the data deluge puts all leaders on an anxious treadmill of pursuing more information in order to \u201cstay on top of things,\u201d the pursuit of information also offers family and institutional leaders and healers an easy escape from having to deal with society\u2019s chronic anxiety as well as with their own personal being.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How much effort is expended in our personal and ecclesial lives on trying to know the “right” things in order to bring change? Information has its place (and is critical in certain ways), but most of our failures aren’t failures of information. They’re failures of process. Information can serve the process, but more information doesn’t always mean better process.<\/p>\n

Knowledge may be power, but not all information is knowledge. What seems like knowledge but isn’t leads away from power to paralysis.<\/p>\n

Spiritual life, in so many ways, is about learning how to process life’s experiences in healthier ways. Isn’t that what humility is? It isn’t so much a static achievement of virtue as it is an expanded repertoire of responses. And in that repertoire, we take responsibility for our own thoughts and feelings and stop blaming others for them. And we therefore are capable of seeing ourselves much more clearly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just a few quick thoughts for today from Edwin Friedman, whose works I’ve been getting to know over the past few years—all three from his work A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix: Even the United States Government Printing Office has pamphlets about \u201cA Teenager in Your House\u201d which, like \u201cTermites in Your Basement,\u201d is designed to teach parents\u2026 <\/i> <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":5030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[751],"tags":[893,939],"class_list":["post-5028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-spirituality","tag-edwin-friedman","tag-emotional-process"],"yoast_head":"The Key to Growth is Not More Data — Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/asd\/2016\/11\/25\/key-growth-not-data\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Key to Growth is Not More Data — Fr. 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