Pass On the Evocateur’s Gift 5

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TO LIVE CONTENT WITH SMALL MEANS

TO SEEK ELEGANCE RATHER THAN LUXURY, AND REFINEMENT RATHER THAN FASHION

TO BE WORTHY, NOT RESPECTABLE, AND WEALTHY, NOT RICH

TO STUDY HARD, THINK QUIETLY, TALK GENTLY, ACT FRANKLY

TO LISTEN TO THE STARS AND BIRDS, TO BABES AND SAGES WITH OPEN HEART

TO BEAR ALL CHEERFULLY, DO ALL BRAVELY, AWAIT OCCASIONS, HURRY NEVER IN A WORD,

TO LET THE SPIRITUAL UNCONSCIOUS AND UNBIDDEN GROW UP THROUGH THE COMMON.

William Henry Channing

YOU HAVE COME some distance in answering your call. You believe intensely that you have a calling, and you have escaped the clutches of a saboteur or two. The good news is that people who have identified their calls don’t just attract saboteurs, they also attract supporters.

CALLING FORTH POTENTIAL

When you find support for your call in the form of people who take the time to assist your development, you begin the work of adding value to the world by becoming more of who you are. In this chapter we explore how assistance often comes in the form of dedicated others. Providing this assistance in and of itself is a type of calling.

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People who provide assistance have a common characteristic: they see past the routine flow of events and people and sense the deeper issues at work. They see “the spiritual unconscious and unbidden,” as the epigraph to this chapter by Channing puts it. They then take it upon themselves to help those around them to see these essential possibilities, both the ones just beneath the surface and those more deeply buried.

A person who expresses this talent we will call an evocateur—one who evokes out of people and their circumstances the skills, gifts, and potential they did not know they had. The word evocateur comes from the Latin ex, which means outside of, and vocis, to call. An e(x)-vocateur is someone, then, who calls to the outside, who calls forth that which was within.

The etymological root of evocateur is the same as vocation, which we described earlier. People with a calling have gone beyond their careers, beyond the roles that society provides them, beyond the social noise that demands they fit in and consume. By evoking that which lurks under the surface, by calling forth that which is embedded in the everyday, an evocateur shows others how the journey to their destiny is possible. How this calling forth of hidden potential comes about is worth investigation.

More questions for answering your call arise as we think about the types of support we have received:

• What can you learn from those who have permanently touched your life with their support? How did they help you grow?
• What is it that you can tap in yourself and others that helps you and them become more than they currently are?
• How can you pass on the gift, the one that you were given, of soul activation and becoming prepared for your callings?

THE COACH AND THE NO-DRIBBLE, NO-SHOOT POINT GUARD

I have encountered many evocateurs in my life, some great and some small—people who invited me to take the next step, large or not, in realizing and living my potential. Anyone who has ever had a mentor knows what it’s like to experience an evocateur.

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I choose to tell the story of an evocateur I encountered in my early teens because it includes so many of the essential elements of how evocateurs work. And I tell it because as I see mommies and daddies across the land taking their kids to soccer and basketball practice, I know that a lot of evoking is going on. During an ordinary Saturday morning game or match, some essential dimensions of being human are being called forth.

When I was fourteen I had mixed self-confidence. I got good grades in all my academic subjects, but then there were sports. Basketball was becoming my favorite sport—and I played them all, thanks to a father who loved sports—but I had developed a raging case of performance anxiety. Some kids get uptight when tested academically. I got uptight in games and important practice situations. The evidence: although I was as good as the rest of the kids on the playground, I scored a total of two points in two years of playing on the seventh- and eighth-grade teams at Holy Cross School on the near south side of Omaha, Nebraska. My love of basketball and lots of playing didn’t produce much.

My father got transferred to Cheyenne, Wyoming, to continue his training as a federal executive in the summer after eighth grade. So when I tried out for the freshman basketball team at my new high school, I wasn’t exuberant about my chances to do much on the team.

The good news was that at St. Mary’s High School, the only Catholic high school in the state not tied to an Indian reservation (it has since closed), there weren’t very many kids. So any warm, breathing body could make the team. I don’t remember anyone being cut.

We had a memorable coach that year—a six-foot four-inch, slender, early-thirty-something salesman by trade by the name of Jim Robey. Coach Robey, as we called him, had played some pretty good basketball in his day at Oklahoma City University, which had made a name for itself in the 1950s with its program. What made him memorable for my teammates and me was that he was a skilled evocateur.

Coach Robey often was unshaven—we noticed his stubble on his thin face, very unlike our clean-shaven dads. His eyes sparkled a lot, and he liked to laugh. He did the usual amount of yelling and cajoling that coaches do. What made the yelling tolerable was that he kidded us a lot and had fun—we knew his yelling was more about intensity than anything. He liked to run a lot of drills before we scrimmaged. He had no doubt noticed that we needed a lot of work on the fundamentals.

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Coach Robey was realistic in his assessment of the talent, and in many cases the lack thereof, that he had inherited. Before games when he knew we were facing far superior talent, our goal was not to win but to improve some aspect of our offense or defense. Through his realism we could walk away from defeats with some learning and some pride in our improvement.

As the weeks went by, Coach Robey noticed something that was more than a little detrimental to my play. Since I was only five-foot-three, he had made me a point guard, third-string point guard. But I had a little problem: I was nervous with the ball in my hands and I’d get rid of it as soon as possible on all occasions. A point guard without the ball is a problem. Since handling the ball is a central skill for this position, Robey pulled me to the side more than once, which wasn’t that easy because our gym was so small—one of the backboards was actually attached to a wall—and assured me I could dribble just fine and that I should not be so eager to pass.

I took his words to heart; I was a coachable kid.

As our season wore on with a bit more than 50 percent wins, more than our talent alone could account for, it was clear that we were better coached and drilled than most of our opponents, and we had a system with real options for both defense and offense. Our little team, the St. Mary’s Gaels, would wheel across half of Wyoming for a game or two—a state with only half a million people spread all over mountains and high prairie demanded long trips. Which, when you are fourteen, is part of the fun.

I didn’t play much in the games but that did not stop Robey from giving me and the other non-first-stringers some individual attention. He noticed another thing about my game that was hurting my performance. I had very little confidence shooting. I’d pass up all but the most open shots, even short ones, passing to someone I was sure would score more effectively than I could. So we had another little talk on the side of the court one day.

“You’ve got to put the ball in the hole,” Robey insisted. (That was the equivalent of “shoot the rock” in today’s terminology.) “The offense needs you to score and to shoot on some of those plays. You can distribute the ball and shoot too.”

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I was a coachable kid, so in the scrimmages I started taking some more shots.

Then I had a practice on a night toward the end of the season that has gone down in my memory. I couldn’t miss. Everything I put up went in, and I put up a lot of shots for a change. At one point I took what today would be the equivalent of a long three-pointer; I winced a little at my recklessness—how could I take such a long shot? The ball hit nothing but net. I was hot.

After I made the long shot, as I ran down the court to play defense, Robey saw I was all aglow and obviously still relishing the shot. Robey seized the moment. Like all good evocateurs, he could see that the student was ready for a message. He knew that the potential he had been coaxing out of me a little at a time could now make a big leap. In my agitated state, he could implant a new message. The moment presented him with the opportunity that evocateurs live for.

Robey cupped his hands over his mouth and yelled across the gym at me: “Schuster, what’d I tell you—you’re a shooter!”

It was as if my back had a steel band that went up and down just inside the skin, and Robey’s proclamation reverberated the length of my spine like a jolt of jagged lightning. Waahh… waahh… waahh went the jolt. I can still feel it almost four decades later.

At that moment, in the little gym at St. Mary’s, a shooter was born.

It happened by decree, apparently, as Coach Robey assumed some magical power to declare my identity. In the remaining weeks of the season, with my newfound confidence, I actually scored some points in every game we played. As adolescent hormones rush and churn, I grew seven inches the next year. I was the leading scorer on the junior varsity the next year and started on the varsity the one after that.

LASTING MEMORIES, LASTING LESSONS

Fast-forward four decades. To this day, as I live and breathe in the second half of my life here in the twenty-first century, on most Sunday nights, with my buddies and some of our twenty-something kids and nephews, I still play ball. It isn’t like the ball we used to play. It’s not very pretty, this older, white-man type of basketball, with very few offensive moves. Rebounding and shooting are about all that is left. But many years after the practice in which I couldn’t miss, I still shoot with confidence. When I have a bad night, I know I’ll come back the next time.

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The work of evocateurs usually lasts a while.

At our end of the season party back in 1963, Coach Robey arranged for a little celebration of his own design. The school couldn’t afford trophies and he maybe earned $200 for his entire season’s pay, but out of his own pocket he got each kid on the team a little trophy, the three-inch-high variety with a plastic basketball figure on top of a wood base. The plastic was painted gold, which started to chip on the way home from the party and was half gone by the time I lost it during one of my many moves ten or twenty years later.

Each trophy had a few words composed by Coach Robey taped on the base—engraving was out of the question. The first strings got what they deserved: Ace Evans, the highest scorer, Mike McDill the most rebounds and the beginning of a basketball career that would take him to the Air Force Academy on scholarship, Gerry Tomlin, the most assists, and so on. When he got to the lesser players, Robey kept going with his acknowledgments of our unique, if not so noteworthy, contributions.

I still remember mine. Affixed to my trophy were these words—

Best Question Asker

Now that’s reaching a bit.

But sure enough, it was true. During the practices, as we were working our systems and getting shots for this guy rolling off of that pick or passing to the second player through, I’d raise my hand and ask why this and why that. Coach Robey noticed, and he liked the fact that my head was in the game.

I’ve had other mentors and evocateurs in my life. As I went on to teach high school, create a consulting business, and coach executives, I remember as much as any the call that touched me as a high school kid. Coach Robey had probably never attended a seminar on how to get people to do their best. Who knows how much he thought about having a calling, and surely he never thought about being an evocateur.

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What Robey loved was basketball and kids, and the rest came to him naturally. He did what he did for a reason—to make a contribution in some way. He answered his call to coach. “You’re a shooter!” That moment was identity-forming. It showed me as clearly as all the events of the first third of my life how people can evoke the skill and potential of other people that lie dormant, waiting to be released.

TAPPING THAT WHICH LIES DORMANT

How did Robey, a coach I had for five months as an early adolescent, make such an impact? How do evocateurs like him operate? What do they think, and what do they do to call forth all that latent energy and capacity?

They do several things.

EVOCATEURS SOAK UP REALITY AND TELL THE TRUTH

Although evocateurs work at bringing to the surface what has not yet arrived there, they don’t make the debilitating mistake of dreaming that reality is something other than what it is. They work from the hard facts and accept them as the facts, not something to wish away. Robey, like other coach evocateurs, had success because he worked with what he had and set realistic goals—like to improve rather than to win against the obviously more gifted.

EVOCATEURS SEE WHAT OTHERS SEE, BUT THEY THINK SOMETHING DIFFERENT

If evocateurs see reality, they concentrate on potential. They are gifted in understanding people, hearing what people say and then listening to what was meant. They hear the subscript of deeper meaning behind the words and actions. Evocateurs live in the subscript, in the deeper computer language behind the software. In this way, they may observe what others do but they think under the surface, at the core, the essence, the seed level.

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EVOCATEURS APPEAL TO THE INNATE HUMAN LONGING TO BE MORE THAN WE ARE

My former partner, Tom Stevenin, often used to close his speeches with one of his favorite old poems:

• Three women walked down the road, did she
• The one she was
• The one they saw
• And the one that she wanted to be

As the old poem indicates (and if anyone knows the source, please let me know—I lost it some years ago) the reality of who the woman is differs from what others think she is. And both of those differ from who she hopes to become. Evocateurs live in the realm of what we hope to become.

EVOCATEURS BOTH FIND AND CREATE TEACHABLE MOMENTS

Steve Sheppard writes about his evocateur:

Harold’s pushing and providing teachable moments were the essence of the growth process that Steve lived as he led the exciting social experiment of Foldcraft from his CEO position.

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EVOCATEURS ADAPT THEIR METHOD

Dorothy Delay, the great Julliard School violin teacher during the last half of the twentieth century, had one of her students say this about her: “She can look at a student and figure out in a very short period of time how to get into here [pointing at her head]. She figures out how they think. And that is her method—that she has no method.”

Coach Robey worked with my performance anxiety in a much different way than he worked with my teammate, Ace Evans, who had an overconfidence challenge, or Mike McDill, who was working on coordination. Evocateurs know when to push and prod, when to celebrate, when to answer a student’s question with a question, and when to give a directive.

EVOCATEURS WORK AT THE LEVEL OF IDENTITY

Evocateurs use many methods, but all are aimed at transforming their student’s understanding of what it means to be a person. Their work advances skill and shapes capability, but their fundamental lessons are about who a person is, what his mission is, what purpose he wants to serve.

I became a shooter under Robey, but the experience affected my self-confidence and my learning about how I wanted to help people grow into their gifts. Steve Sheppard became a businessman, and with his mentor’s guidance, the CEO of a company. But mostly, he became more of a person.

EVOCATEURS ACKNOWLEDGE

Evocateurs call forth by naming, affirming, acknowledging what a person is or has or will be.

The behavioral psychologists call positive consequences for behavior reinforcement. Reinforcement is powerful and is connected to evoking, but doesn’t go deep enough. Evoking is to name the essence of what is, before it is fully realized, so the person can grow into that identity.

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These declarations by the evocateur awaken the will of the student or colleague.

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The will of those being evoked, the identity that is coming into being, aligns with the will of the evocateur through the act of acknowledgment, receiving an adrenaline boost of human intentionality.

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Acknowledging is the essence of the evocateur’s creative alignment with the calling of another. Acknowledging the deepest longing of another to grow is the essence of the evocateur’s call.

A WRITER’S EVOCATEUR

I want to continue with my high school period for one more example, but I shift to a new chapter and a friend in a new city.

Toward the end of my junior year at St. Mary’s, my father got a promotion and the family moved east to Cincinnati. I had a rough transition, the only one in all the moves we had made, and it had to do with being sixteen rather than younger.

But by fall of my senior year, some six months after the move, I was making new friends. One of the more important ones was a kid like none other by the name of Dave Quammen, the one I quoted at the end of the first chapter as the writer answering his call: “I sit down at the computer with a cup of coffee at 8 A.M., blink once, become mesmerized, blink again, and it’s 6 P.M., the coffee is half-drunk, my shirt is drenched with sweat, and maybe, maybe, I have three pages of workable, fixable first draft. This is ecstasy. This is life.”

That one, if you remember.

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Dave taught me mah-jongg and tennis, liked different music, always had his head in a book, and usually said things in ways no one else would say or think them.

But before “Q,” as we called and still call him, became a writer’s writer, before he won awards or became a Rhodes scholar or spent fifteen years writing the “Natural Acts” column for Outside Magazine, or went on tour lecturing about losing species across the globe, before he traveled to the Amazon or retraced the steps of nineteenth-century naturalists into the South Seas, before he had figured out how to yoke his love of science and nature to his gifts and passion for writing, before any of that took place, he had to encounter an evocateur to acknowledge and call forth his gifts.

We had an English teacher in our senior year at all-boys St. Xavier High School. This man had gone to Oxford, wore a beret, and excelled at being a crusty forty-something with a passion for literature, nasty cigars, and sherry. He was the best and most demanding teacher any of us had ever had. He taught us new ways to think and he insisted that we write lots of essays in class. He opened up the worlds of literature and art and metaphor. For those of you into pop culture, if you saw Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, this teacher, Fr. Thomas Savage, Jesuit, was our Robin Williams. He turned us on to our own minds and the gifts of literature and read the carpe diem poem, if you remember the intense scene from the movie.

It was the late sixties and Vietnam and racism and civil rights were exploding into our living rooms and “Sav,” as he became known, was one of our intellectual anchors, one of our headlights for finding our way in the darkness of a world that didn’t inspire much confidence but did generate healthy doses of cynicism.

For Q, Sav was the first and deepest and most lasting of the evocateurs to affirm his talent and give it shape.

Here is Q talking about Sav.

I asked Q, after he gave several more responses, if he had any other thoughts. He added this: “Have I mentioned that Thomas G. Savage was the greatest teacher and sweetest man who ever lived? If I ever shot a movie about fate and muse, the guardian angel would wear a black beret, a Roman collar, and smoke cigars like old tarred rope.”

That would be Q’s tribute to his main evocateur, and hundreds of other Xavier students’ main one as well.

GIFTS SURFACED: PASSING IT ON

The best part of Coach Robey and my love for basketball is not what it has done for my health or my high school glory years. It’s what is still going on now.

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I became a father in my midtwenties and I passed my love of the game on to my two sons, who still let me play with them on occasion. The older son has coached a seventh-grade team in Ohio and poured his energy and personality into it. The younger son played on a team that was state-ranked and turned out college players. (My grandson, Micah, sent me a picture of him—all four feet of him—in a uniform holding a “bakaball.” He shoots regularly on his seven-foot basket and watches NBA tapes of master slam dunks with his parents.) My sons have healthy confidence derived from many aspects of their lives, but which was helped by mastering aspects of a game. They enjoy physical activity and have a love of healthy competition.

These boys, at best, however, have only a distant awareness of a coach who gave extra time and attention, forty years ago and thirteen hundred miles away, to the younger, nervous version of their dad.

That happens with time and generations.

But that’s OK. That is how calls make their impact.

The work of evocateurs lasts a long time, longer than the memories of the people they affect or the generations following.

The invitations for developing beyond our current limitations pop up unexpectedly, happen, and then disappear. The spurts of growth and deep identity-building that come from evocateur co-workers, teachers, coaches, parents, friends, aunts, uncles, and bosses are often lost by those who do the growing, let alone their kids. Life enfolds in its past a blur of memory fragments and misty knowings, and we realize that we didn’t become who we are by accident. We are able to attribute some specific talent and qualities to certain evocateurs, events, and influences. But we don’t hold onto them all.

For every Coach Robey I remember, for every Thomas G. Savage, whose callings had such an impact, I’m sure there are others I don’t remember.

It’s the memories we do have that matter, and the attitude that we assume for those we have forgotten. The attitude that seems most useful is one of gratitude for all the formative moments, for all the “You’re a shooter!” happenings that make up our life. Those who activated something of lasting value in us may not all be remembered, but they must be honored.

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We are all self-made, but not without a thousand life-altering impacts we absorb along the way. Honoring those whose lessons have helped shape our identities increases the chances that we will pass on the invitation to grow to others.

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The requirement to pass on the invitation is obvious. Once you reflect on how you were on the receiving end of evocateurs’ invitations and activations, you are capable of passing on the same gift. By remembering what they provided, and how, you see the opportunities to do the same for those in need of the activations you can provide.

Increasing the total number of invitations and activations is the task before us all. It is our collective calling.

In the final chapter of the book we will delve more into the practices of evocateurs. In the next chapter we discuss the unique call that creates the conditions that allow evocateurs to do their work.

Potential Everywhere

Learn how others evoke the possibilities that they see. The world needs realism as its foundation, and it needs the calling forth of potential as its hope for the future.

The practices of the evocateur are fundamental to finding and providing the needed support for answering a call to meaning and purpose. Calling forth potential through declaration and affirmation is an act of human will that can happen even in the routine aspects of life.

Practice seeing the potential beneath the surface. The universal yearning to become is the force that evocateurs tap. By cooperating with this yearning they coax potential into reality. Extending this invitation to grow as often as possible ensures that more of us can access our inner authority and live our possibilities.

Pass on the invitation, spread the gift.

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EXERCISE: DEEPENING YOUR APPRECIATION OF EVOCATEURS’ IMPACT ON YOUR LIFE

• Who has been an evocateur in your life?
• What dimension or dimensions of you did they call forth?
• How did they do it? What methods did they use and what teachable moments did they create or seize?
• How are you being asked to be an evocateur in your life now?
• How have you been one in the past, and what are you hopes for your future of calling forth potential?