Question: Are you convinced that you can quietly and quickly do a couple of simple tasks--answer an email, write a check--at the same time you're talking to someone on the phone?

Next question: Are you aware when the person you're talking to is sneakily doing something else during your conversation?

I'll bet you are.

You know the subtle little signals. You're talking, possibly about something important to you, maybe about an idea you have, or a concern. And the person on the other end mutters things like, "ah" or "uh-huh" in places that don't quite feel like they're in sync with your remarks. Or you finish speaking and the response is delayed just a little too long to be a sign that your friend or colleague is giving thoughtful attention to what you've said before commenting.

It's subtle, yes, but it's palpable.

I find that when this happens, I feel quite hurt, almost in a childlike way. I feel that what I have to offer has suddenly been deemed less important than something else that has come into the life and attention of the other person on the phone.

Assuming that others feel as I do, I hereby make two resolutions:

1. When I sense that the attention of the person on the other end of the line is not fully with me, I'm going to say something like, "Are you there?" or "Are you with me?" or even "Are you doing something else?"

2. I resolve to pay full attention to everyone I speak with.

We talk a lot about what technology offers, but we should also be honest with ourselves about the less positive attitudes it encourages, i.e. the belief that we can get away with being inattentive to those who matter to us.

 IMAGE: "MULTI-TASKING QUEEN" BY BEVERLY NAIDUS 

When Tom Rubens of Dayton, Ohio decided to embark on our leadership program, Lead Like a River, in Morocco's Atlas Mountains, he knew he was ready to make a change in his life--he just didn't know what it would look like.

And he certainly never imagined that the shift would come about as he sat in a dilapidated old sheep corral on a hot day devoted to regret.

Tom is a high-energy, open-hearted man, one in whom good, solid business sense and fidelity to the emotions are not only not in conflict, but are actually in harmony. In the past he'd worked as a commodities and options trader and had owned both a basketball team and a minor league baseball team. At the time of Lead Like a River, a program devoted to exploring individual leadership visions through being in wilderness, he was working as a real estate broker.

Tom had fasted on vision quests and had trained as a vision quest guide. On a vision quest, what's important is uncovering the authentic essence of the participant to reveal the core of meaning and passion within. Lead Like a River used many of the same principles of learning from wild nature, but reconfigured them, so the focus was less on personal healing than on clarifying and committing to one's contribution to the world.

Midway through the program the group hiked from the ecolodge, Kasbah du Toubkhal, deeper into the Atlas Mountains, passing through small Berber villages tucked into the mountainsides, orchards fed by mountain rivers, and long stretches of sand and stone. The next day each participant did a dawn-to-dusk solo. On the evening before they went out, Tom announced, with both surprise and a sense of resolve in his voice, "I'm going to spend the day with regret."

The place he chose for his solo was an old stone sheep corral banked up on the side of a mountain. It was made of crumbling stones and stood about knee-high. It offered no respite from the sun.

Tom had realized that he could not move forward unless he came to terms with "the cost of regret." During that day, as he shifted his position only to seek out patches of shade as the sun moved around the corral, he discovered that the regret was not as intense as he had anticipated. "I found gratitude instead," he told the group that night as everyone shared their stories. "What all those experiences had in common was my not being courageous. If I had been courageous, there would have been zero regret. If I give in to my fear, that's where regret comes in." He determined to move forward boldly and without succumbing to fear.

Two and a half months after returning home, he had sold his real estate business and founded The Accountability Factor, a small business coaching and consulting practice. His ideal clients, he says, are entrepreneurs and creative people "who may at this moment not think they're entrepreneurs and therefore have a tenuous, sometimes contentious relationship with money."

He credits the drive with which he began developing the practice, a website, radio program, blog, and even a book idea soon after his return from Morocco not just to those hot hours spent with regret, but to the two facilitators, who approached the subject of leadership from different, yet compatible ways, and to the people he met. The other participants of Lead Like a River were women and men from several countries who represented a variety of leadership positions. "Everyone brought power to that event," Tom said.

Lead Like a River will once again be offered in the Atlas Mountains on August 10-17, 2013.

PHOTO: TOM RUBENS IN THE ATLAS MOUNTAINS BY MARIA ANDRADE  

While writing an article for Parabola about the power of certain places (not yet published), I came across an interesting story from Australia. In the late 1980s, conservationists joined the Aboriginal Jawoyn people to file a lawsuit against a joint venture of mining companies that wanted to develop a uranium mine on land the Jawoyn called Guratba and non-natives called Coronation Hill. The land is associated with the Aboriginal Ancestor, Bula, who is said to be resting there and whose influence extends to all the other sacred sites in the region. As one Aboriginal man, John Ah Kit, explained it, Bula is "sort of wired up" to all these other sites, so disturbing his sacred place would disturb all of them.

At the trial in 1991, the joint venture defense team accused the Jawoyn of deliberately "creating new sacred sites... and incorporating the area into songs and ceremonies in order to mark it out as their territory," for the sole purpose of acquiring more land.

What this accusation amounts to is: You people have been trying to make that land sacred!

Imagine that! Has such a charge ever been issued before? The mining companies seem to have believed that the Jawoyn were trying to make something sacred that was, in truth, simply ordinary land with no particular interest.That they were trying to give it what Yankton Sioux writer Vine Deloria, in God Is Red, called "a qualtitative holiness above other places."

Dianne Monroe, "Radical Joy: Healing Earth from Human Damage," Living Green Magazine, February 20, 2013

Trebbe Johnson, "When It's Time for a Soul Vacation," Soul/Body Connection 2013 (Special edition of Spirituality and Health)
 
Schumacher College, Interview with Trebbe Johnson,  

Trebbe Johnson, "Reuniting with Wounded Places," The Ecologist, 1/21/13 

Grove Harris, "Winter Solstice 2012: Time for New Alignment," Huffington Post, 12/21/12