« Return to blog main page
Nobody Gets to be Wrong in Any Language
I’ve just returned from Tokyo, Japan and 10th Anniversary Celebration of CTI Japan. 240 people came from all over the country to participate in creating a new story.
I remember the very first course we did in Tokyo in 2000. Henry was co-leading with Hide Enomoto and I hung out a lot in the back of the room because I was wildly curious to see how it would go. We’d never done our work in a different culture and Japan was certainly different. Would it translate? Henry would be working with translation. One person (his ear) would translate Japanese to English in an ear piece in Henry’s ear. Another translator (Henry’s mouth) would translate everything Henry was saying into Japanese.
It seems like no big deal now but at the time we weren’t certain how it was going to go. However my brave hubby and the even more brave Hide Enomoto were going to give it their best.
I walked into the class room and saw some Japanese characters on the flip chart in the front of the room and asked what it said. Chika (who has since become a dear friend) told me that it said “Nobody Gets to Be Wrong”.
I burst into tears. It was so powerful for me. Nobody gets to be Wrong in Japanese, or in Chinese or Norwegian or Russian or any other language in the world. Nobody Gets to be Wrong in any language.
Karen with dear friends Kyoko Seki and Chika Hasegawa.
It was wonderful to make new friends and connect with old ones. The photo is of me at the conference with two very near and dear friends, Chika—whom I mentioned in the paragraph above—and Kyoko, who was a participant in that first class in Japan and now leads our Co-Active Leadership Program in Japanese. Of course I was completely inspired by the vision and heart of my dear friend Hide Enomoto as well. It was a powerful 3 days and you can imagine how powerful it was for me to return to Japan 10 years after that first brave course and see how much the work has spread.
The conference was simply amazing. We had group process, diads, triads, a World Cafe, Open Process Technology, a stunning video, post-its and flip chart paper for days. At the end of each day, they showed a video that was a compilation of shots from the day. . .REALLY well done! We felt the pain of the world and dug down for the love underneath. People declared, committed, conversed, collaborated and celebrated themselves and each other.
An incredibly dedicated team of volunteers worked so hard to coordinate logistics and technology. I was so well cared for. . I think I had a whole team of folks whose sole job it was to be sure that I wanted for nothing and that I had a translator whenever I needed, which was most of the time.
I couldn’t BEGIN to count the number of people who came to talk to me on breaks, in the bathroom line, before, after, during. In a wild mix of Japanese and English they absolutely HAD to tell me how much CTI had changed their life. It was truly wonderful to make new friends and connect with old ones. Generally I fell in love with everyone at the conference they were so beautiful, sincere, heartfelt and breathtakingly, heart achingly available.
So that’s a little report from the front lines. Here in Japan, we are most definitely Changing Business and Transforming Lives.
KKH
[See photos of the celebration on CTI's Facebook page.]
[Related post: comments from Hide Enomoto about the 10th Anniversary Celebration.]
-
Kyoko Seki
Subscription Options:
