I invited Pete Carroll, head coach of the Seattle Seahawks, to the Bowen Center Clinical Conference on Friday March 6th, at 9:30am. The reason - his response to the intense and personal criticism directed at him after his historic call at the Super Bowl.
Pete Carroll's message, days after his decision to call for a pass on the one-yard line in the last seconds of the Super Bowl, shows what it takes "to be a self" in the middle of a storm of criticism. Does his experience with intense emotionality help at all with those of us who are trying to think about our family when we are no longer alive?
In an interview with Matt Lauer on the Today Show, Carroll said:
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| Pete Carroll and Matt Lauer |
"After the event I needed to think about the future. I had a job to do. They needed me to be 'on it.' I needed to figure it out. I had to get myself into the right place to deal with the future. It was my responsibility to deal with all the feelings and use them for the benefit of the future."
He went on to add, "Think how strong we will be if we can address this and move forward using these hard times to fuel the future. The feelings are there and do not go away but if we are honest together, we can go places we never dreamed of."
Facing extreme disapproval, Carroll is able to demonstrate how he could be separate from the surrounding emotionality to 1) address what the truth is and not run away while 2) building capacity for the future. While Carroll was referring to a difficult time in the last seconds of the most important football game of the 2014 season, he could have been talking about the subject of this month's clinical conference that I will host in Washington, DC.
The focus is: How to move into the future and build capacity in a family to deal with the challenge of any family leader's possible death.
This month's Bowen Center Clinical Conference includes videotaped interviews with three people who take the process of building capacity in their family system seriously. They have carefully found a way to consider how to relate well to their family while addressing the challenges that are a result of trusts and estates and a multigenerational family emotional process. Rather than ignoring these challenges, they have decided to address the inherent emotionality with the assistance of family systems thinking.
Please join us at 9:30am for what will be a stimulating day with relevant case studies and dialogue for family leaders, lawyers, accountants, financial advisors and those of us who are thinking about our family when we are no longer living.
If Pete Carroll can't make it, I hope this meeting will be of interest to you.
Register for the March Clinical Conference at the Bowen Center here:
