COMMENCEMENT SPEECH San Francisco State UniversityMasters Degree Program in CounselingMay 24, 2003Dr. Charles A. Garfield

Looking at you today brings me back to my own graduate school commencement 29 years ago at U.C. Berkeley. It was a cloudy day— much like this one—and I was acutely aware of a strange mix of feelings. There was a desire to get it all over with and move on with my life, and a hope that my parents and professors would be proud of me. There was also a sense of genuine accomplishment at getting to graduation, and a serious plan to party and celebrate until the cows came home.



I don't remember much else about the young man I was back then but I can assure you that he lived in a pressured world where success was not an option but a necessity. All the adults in my life—especially my parents and professors—spoke non-stop about how important it was to be a success, rise to the top, and strive to be the best that I could possibly be.



Every day I got up with a message in my head that was loud and clear: the world can be a tough place and winners are a lot better off than losers. So, work hard, they said—and do everything you can to make sure you excel, stand out, get very high grades in just the right field so good things come your way. But, if anyone sat me down and asked me why I worked so hard to excel or whether I was enjoying myself, I doubt if my answers would have been very convincing. Especially to someone who understood the ingredients of a life well lived. I can guarantee you, though, that I always felt pressured to excel at everything that was important to me. Why? Because I was already burdened by the belief that bad things happened to those who didn't excel.



Now, excelling all the time was really hard work and it got harder and harder as time went on. One of my undergraduate math professors told me that all the great discoveries in the field were done by a half dozen geniuses and the rest of us would have to just fill in the nooks and crannies. Now there's a real motivator for a young math major hoping to excel! My English literature professors taught us about Shakespeare and Joyce and I gritted my teeth in post-adolescent confusion. How in the world could I ever rise to such a level?



I chose mathematics as a major—and later received three degrees in math because I was told that it led to a good career, and that it was a field I could succeed in. But I didn't have a clue about what mathematicians did every day. What was even more startling—when I think about it—was that when one of my friends asked me—since I was planning to spend my life as a mathematician—whether I really liked math, I was dumb struck. It was as if she'd asked me whether I could speak classical Greek. "Like it, what do you mean like it? Whoever said you were supposed to like your work" I replied,—mouthing a message I'd heard from an adult or two in my young life.



So, if any of this resonates with your experience, if you're experiencing an intense pressure to succeed in the eyes of the world—and in your own eyes—then let's take a brief break in the action on this special day and think things through a bit. Let's slow down and listen for a few moments to our hearts. Let's put ourselves in the way of grace and—from this vantage point—let's consider my main messages to you today. What I'll call: "Five Key Lessons for the Rest of Your Lives."



First, trying to succeed by sticking to the straight and narrow may be predictable for people who are ambitious and who want to feel secure and comfortable in their lives. But the well paved, straight and narrow road is always someone else's road leading to someone else's life.



Nothing meaningful or important or deeply satisfying ever came from composing a life by the numbers. What can be difficult—but is also a challenge that's soul satisfying—is to let go of the blind desire to succeed and embrace, as Socrates advised long ago, the life long work of knowing yourself. Who are you? What will make you truly happy in life? And, most important, what are the world—and your own heart—calling you to be?



Second, remember that the two most important questions you will ever encounter in your lives are: What is the good person and what is the good society?



Yes, it's true. No man or woman is an island. We're all in this life together. Put simply, if my end of the boat sinks, so does yours. So, don't let anyone convince you that looking out for number one is a way to live life—not unless you want to embrace a formula for despair and misery. We are all co-creating our shared world, and each of us is responsible for doing the best job we can to serve both ourselves and our world.



I care about your values more than your fancy car or your investment portfolio. Your willingness to be tough on problems yet tender on people more than your success in the rat race. After all, as Lily Tomlin said, the problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.



Third, pay close attention to the choices you make every day. Don't just drift through life or leap impulsively at each hot, new direction that grabs your attention.



When I left a promising career in space science after the Apollo 11 first moon landing to study psychology at Berkeley, many people in my life told me I was insane—or at least seriously misguided. It didn't matter to them that I had discovered my life's calling and that it focused on helping people rather than solving equations. The main lesson I learned from the first lunar landing was that "not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."



Later, when I turned down prime academic appointments in psychology to found a volunteer organization named Shanti that cared for seriously ill people and their loved ones, a different set of authorities shouted at me like a Greek chorus, yelling from the sidelines that I had lost my marbles. But on both occasions, I trusted my inner sense that I was making the growth choice not the fear choice and that I was doing what was constitutionally right for me.



As some of you may know, Shanti later became the first community-based AIDS caregiving organization in the world and a model for over 600 organizations in the U.S. and abroad serving tens of thousands of people with AIDS, cancer, the homeless, the hungry, and many others in need. No professor or text ever taught me as much of value in my life as the hundreds of Shanti caregivers and clients I've known.



I learned from them that the need to care for others is as deep as the need to care for ourselves. At Shanti, I found my bliss as a mental health professional and I was determined to follow it—in the words of Joseph Campbell, that wonderful scholar of mythology. Founding and leading Shanti taught me that my daily choices mattered deeply and that there is such a thing as free will. So I'd better choose my loves and my work wisely. After all, no less an authority than Jewish Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer—when he was asked if he believed in free will replied: "Of course I do. I have no choice."



Fourth, if you want to be happy on the job, in school, and in your personal life remember that "people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."



Now, as you've hopefully learned already—thinking well is necessary to a life well lived. It's necessary but not sufficient. Our capacities for empathy and compassion for those in need are every bit as vital as critical thinking. And kindness is never an optional aspect of life, somehow less important than the so-called hard realities that are measured in scientific calculations and financial reports.



After nearly 30 years of serving men and women who have been left out of our nation's safety net—the poor, hungry, homeless and sick who are often the social casualties whose presence we've convinced ourselves is normal since "they've always been with us"—I've learned from Shanti that these neighbors of ours are far more like us than they are different and that our society needs caring communities of compassionate souls far more than it needs a slew of lone, struggling heroes whose focus is on themselves and their own needs.



Today, I continue to learn about counseling and caregiving from these extraordinarily diverse men and women, these exemplary caregivers who I've written about and worked with for decades. They've showed me that the need to care is as basic as the need for care—and about the radically social nature of life—particularly in chaotic and stressful times. Their actions speak to us of compassion. Compassion means "to suffer with". It's an imaginative entrance into the world of another person's pain. Through compassion—as the historian Terrance Des Pres taught us—we close the distance between one person's experience and another's and we start to heal the divisions between us. Certainly, prolonged, challenging work can numb us into burnout and compassion fatigue but it can also compel us to transform ourselves and the usual ways we experience our lives.



Now, let's switch gears a bit and look ahead at your upcoming careers. One of the most important issues facing health and social service professionals today is the way our organizations are structured and what their priorities really are. Today, stress overload, insane budgetary cuts, staff shortages—and increasingly bureaucratic and dysfunctional models of organization have sadly become the norm. Organizations that are themselves stress producing, that operate in a kind of siege mentality, create the optimal conditions for burnout and compassion fatigue.



All too often our organizations lose track of their caregiving missions and focus their time and energies not on superior service delivery but on funding and staying alive—as organizations—while slipping more and more into corporate style hierarchy, rigidity, and badly executed downsizings which crush our counselors in the process. The problem, of course, with crushing our counselors is that we then have to serve our clients with crushed people. It will never happen.



So the lesson here is to never forget that the quality of service we offer our clients will be no better than the quality of service we offer one another. In fact, our organizations would work far better if they were structured as chains of service rather than chains of command. It is vital that we get our houses in order internally, that we create caring organizations in which to do our caring work.



Simply put, the old command and control, boss/subordinate paradigm is dead. It's an old story that needs to be replaced by a team-based partnership story in which a chain of caring must exist from the boardroom to the client. This is a new story of compassionate service delivery that each of you can inherit, and that will gratify you in your careers far more than chasing the phantoms of power, prestige, and money.



Our counselors continue to tell us that the reason they burn out and suffer from prolonged stress overload is due more to working in organizations that don't work, that don't support people, than from the caring work itself. A new story of counseling can guide us to an understanding of the difference between self-renewing counseling and self-depleting counseling. Counseling that enhances aliveness rather than counseling that deadens the spirit and numbs the heart.



So, toward that end, let's remember C.G. Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist, who observed: "We could say, without too much exaggeration, that a good half of every treatment that probes at all deeply consists in the doctor's examining himself, for only what he can put right in himself can he hope to put right in the patient." Where Jung said "doctor" we could certainly insert counselors in rehab, gerontology, school, career, college, and marriage and family specialties.



The good professor Jung goes on to refer to the Wounded Healer paradox when he says: "Only the wounded doctor can heal." And we might safely say; only the wounded counselor heals. A Wounded Healer who holds an awareness of suffering, an empathic consciousness, and a search for meaning and mystery as vital to the counseling partnership.



Those of us who are beginning to see a new story of counseling may also see that our intention will be to value our own wounds and vulnerabilities as a foundation for gaining insight into the needs, suffering, and potential of those we counsel. Shanti counselors have taught us for years that we can assist others with their dilemmas only to the degree that we are willing to go beyond our designated roles and stay open to our own wounds.



And last, lesson number five, and perhaps most important: never forget that each and every one of you is a miracle, an expression of the miraculous never before seen on earth and never to be seen again. Now that's something to put on your spanking new résumé!



Speaking of that new résumé, don't let anyone else—no matter how well intentioned they seem—sell you a version of the good life or the good career that isn't your own. I guarantee you that someone else's good life or career will not be as good for you as advertised. Avoid walking in lock-step mimicry of anyone else's version of what your career is supposed to be about. Trust that still, small voice within that will guide you to your own bliss in a world that badly needs you to do well by doing good. Don't be afraid of being inspired at work and in your personal life. Be creative not redundant, and avoid—like the plague—the boredom that comes from a career of over-work and under-utilization that will exhaust your spirit and erode your soul.



Let me be as graphic as I can be. I remember an old psychology textbook that had two pictures right after the title page. At the top of the page was a picture of babies in a maternity ward—beautiful, wide eyed miracles, overflowing with life and fidgeting with promise and potential. At the bottom of the page was a picture of passengers on a New York subway. They were staring morosely in a hypnotic trance waiting for their ride, their day, and—I imagine—their lives, to be over. Way at the bottom of the page were the only written words: "What happened?" Each of you was one of those maternity ward miracles and each of you can avoid the fate of those who go through life hypnotized by someone else's dream.



I can assure you that one day when your heart is broken or when you're grieving the loss of a loved one or when you want to succeed badly at something but fail instead, it'll be a boost beyond measure to remember how much of a miracle you really are. And, if you decide to have children of your own some day, remember that they too will be expressions of the miraculous—and they'll need and deserve the most loving and wise guidance you can offer them.



So whether you ever have a child or give a commencement speech, one day you'll surely be speaking to a young man or woman who needs your best shot, your wisest counsel. Look him or her in the eye, smile lovingly, and tell that young person how special she is. How fulfilling his life will be when he finds and follows his own dream, and makes his own unique contributions to the greater good that nurtures and sustains us all.



Congratulations to every one of you, and my very best wishes on this singularly important day in your lives.



© Charles A. Garfield 2003