it started as a road trip. It became a mission.

In January 2017 I took a road trip across the United States with my then 23-year-old son, Will. We called it a Conversation Road Tour. Donald Trump had just been elected president —a political pendulum swing so far outside the norm it could not be dismissed — and we wanted to understand why. What fundamental shift had taken place in our country that so many of us missed? What were the people who voted for Trump trying to tell those of us who did not?

Academics and journalists have worked hard to try and answer these questions. The problem is that each answer given — such as economic inequality, systemic racism, hyper-individualism, and just plain greed — seems only to exacerbate the polarization. Rather than helping us move toward reconciliation, the answers appear to be doing the opposite: hardening tribal identities, strengthening defenses, and in some cases, igniting violence.

I believe there’s a reason for this. In our rush to identify the causes of our disconnect, we missed the most essential first step: Reaching out to those we felt disconnected from. Focus groups and polling surveys do not lead to understanding. Human beings are not lab rats to be poked and prodded to see what makes them tick. Relationship building — inquiring, listening, sharing, building trust  — is the path to understanding. It dials down the rhetoric, lowers the emotional heat, and opens up channels of authentic communication. Explanations and paths forward are discovered together, not assumed and imposed. 

That was the lesson of our road trip. By listening, we were listened to. By asking questions, questions were asked of us. By beginning to understand the ‘other’, they were beginning to understand us. We became more human to each other. Our different perspectives, when shared, did not die on the other’s vine. There was a chance they would at some point yield fruit.

The challenge, of course, is that talking to people we disagree with is difficult — especially people we associate with highly objectionable ways of thinking and acting. That’s why I founded the Difficult Conversations Project: To help people see that engaging people we disagree with is essential to our collective future, and that there’s a way to do so that’s creative, constructive, and healing.

This, I’m convinced, is how our national healing will occur: Relationship by relationship, conversation by conversation. That’s my mission. And I can’t think of a more important one.

A life-long passion.

My focus on relationship building did not begin in 2017. My whole adult life I’ve been involved in efforts to bridge seemingly unbridgeable divides. In the 1980s, at the height of the Cold War, I was a Fellow with the Beyond War Foundation, a multi-national effort to educate people on the obsolescence of war in the nuclear age, and the imperative of improving US/Soviet relations. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and relations between the superpowers dramatically improved, Beyond War became the Foundation for Global Community. I joined the board of the new enterprise, and throughout the 1990s we expanded our focus to address a wide range of social and environmental issues. Again the means was education, and as a board member I helped create and lead the foundation’s workshops and seminars, which sought to illustrate that all our challenges share a common root: a lack of understanding of the fundamental unity of life, and that what we do to others and to the planet, we ultimately do to ourselves.

In the 2000s, the Foundation for Global Community sold it assets and became a funding foundation. One of the efforts it funded was mine. In 2005, after leaving my job as the vice president of communications at a major technology firm, I helped launch Global Mindshift: a non-profit social network offering online educational programs to develop the personal skills we need to live in an interconnected and interdependent world. While hundreds passed through our courses, to be viable we needed tens of thousands to do so. After five years we closed our doors.

But then, as is often the case, another one opened. Earlier I’d met the founders of FeelGood, a non-profit that engages college students in the mission to end global hunger and poverty The two founders were followers of Global MindShift, and invited me to take the educational materials we’d created and incorporate it into FeelGood’s program. Together we adapted it to their online curriculum, and made it a central component of the organization’s annual retreat.

Eventually FeelGood was handed over to a new generation of leaders, and the two founders and I launched a new non-profit initiative: a consulting firm specializing in helping organizations build empowered communities of youth leaders. Called Crew 2030, it’s still active today, serving dozens of organizations that in turn serve hundreds of thousands of youth. While I still serve as a consultant, the 2016 presidential election shifted my priorities and my mission, bringing me to the work I’m doing today.

Some people will say their mission is their life, and that’s mostly true for me. But I do have a family that also absorbs my loving attention: my wife of 40-plus years, who’s a high school English teacher; and our two adult sons who traded the high cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area for the more reasonable, and some say more beautiful, Pacific Northwest. One son makes a living as a PR consultant, the other as a wine, beer and food enthusiast.

Other than my work and family, I love to read, play pickle ball, and travel. In fact, it was traveling that probably had the biggest impact on my life’s direction. In 1983 my wife and I moved to China for two years to teach English at a small engineering college in Kunming. When our tour in China was over, we spent another six months traveling throughout Southeast Asia and India.

Throughout our travels, the beauty of the people and the landscape was overwhelming. But so was much of the poverty, and the contrast between that and our life in the United States was impossible to overlook. It changed our lives.

When we came home, we told ourselves that no matter how much money we made, we wouldn’t follow the path of continually increasing our material standard of living. Instead, we’d live more simply, save money, earn our financial freedom faster, and devote the majority of our life’s energy to the wellbeing of all.

Considering that when we came home we had $10 to our name, Amy was pregnant and I had no job, it was a pretty audacious commitment. But happily, it all pretty much worked out.

I hold a BA in psychology from the University of California at Los Angeles, and live in Mountain View, California.