I’ve been thinking about the phrase, "meeting people where they are at." It comes up with my clients. It came up in a workshop I took this past weekend with pioneers in the psychology world.

I have a hard time working with people who have a limited capacity to grasp new ideas. Okay, I’ll be really politically incorrect and say I have a hard time working with people who are not intelligent, people who don’t have sharp minds. People who are dumb. Fortunately, I seem to attract clients who are bright.

I was in a coaching training last month where I had to describe "My Land," the place where I like to live. We were asked who was not welcome in each of our lands. I quickly replied, "the mentally ill, the homeless, and people who are unpredictable in their anger." Life must be trying to teach me something as I have run across my share
of all three in various forms.

I have clients who are visionaries. They see the future so clearly that they have trouble meeting people where they are at, in the present.

I have trouble being with people who whine about the status quo but aren’t willing to participate in changing it. At a workshop with Amy and Arnold Mindell on working with groups, we played with a process called World Work. The idea is to create a space where different voices in a system could be heard and honored as valuable and out of that, something will shift in the system. People literally step into a space to speak while others observe and listen.

One person voiced a provocative position from the back of the room, sitting down. He refused to move but kept talking when the facilitator asked questions. He reminded me of a sniper. I could feel myself getting angry that this person would not step into the space as a participant. What the facilitators did next surprised me. They went to the back of the room and met the sniper where he was at–both physically and emotionally. This created the space for more dialogue and for others to join the now disarmed sniper in his viewpoint. This simple gesture was the door to rich learning.

So I’m going to be working on meeting people where they are at. I don’t expect to become a special ed teacher or a social worker or therapist any time soon. But I know there’s more for me there if I explore it.