Greg Walker

GRADUATE PROFILE

Sometimes it takes a day or two for a participant to jump into the training process. Not so for Greg Walker, a 34-year-old angiographer for Harvard Medical School and attending physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. He began the process of discovery and rigorous self-examination from the very beginning of the Basic Training.“As the time for the training approached, I had this sense of anticipation. I had high expectations that the training was really going to be something big. As a result of those feelings, I was a little bit afraid. I kept thinking that if I really wanted to get out of it, I could say I'm on call. I realized that as often as thoughts of avoidance were coming up, those were the very reasons why I should go ahead and do the training. My inclination to avoid only reinforced that I needed to come face-to-face with what I was trying to avoid.

“The first night we went through a long tedium about the ground rules that everyone would agree to during the training. To me, they were very straightforward, very easy to comprehend. However, to some other people in the group, they were absolutely a source of contention and every one of them had to be examined in minute detail. What I thought was easily a ten-minute process turned into a threehour process, just to go over eight or nine rules.

“Then, after the rules were completed, we did an exercise where we wandered around the room and talked about trust. The thing that hit me right in the face was that two people came up to me and just flat out said ‘I don't trust you.' I was really upset by that. On the way home (I was riding with a friend of mine who was also in the training, and who had been the person that originally introduced me to Lifespring) I was just screaming at my friend. ‘How could you ever get me involved in something like this? I hate the trainer. He is a jerk. I cannot believe I've wasted this money, etc., etc.'My friend just suggested to me that something must have touched a real nerve for me that night, or I would not be reacting that way. He pointed out that all we had done that night was go over some rules, and do one exercise. He told me that if I walked away from it without finding out why I had that reaction, I'd be selling myself short.

“The next night started with people sharing. One of the people who had said he didn't trust me stood up. He shared that one of the revelations he had the night before was that through his whole life he had basically never trusted anybody. He found it very difficult to rely on other people; he tried to be totally self-sufficient in everything he did. He looked out for himself only and not for other people and, therefore, didn't allow anybody else to look out for him. While he was sharing, I remembered how angry I had been the night before-in large part because this same man had said he didn't trust me. It came to me in this flash that I had been making all this stuff up about his not trusting me. I was making it all my problem, like I was this totally untrustworthy person. I never even could see another possibility that this could be his problem; that he could have an issue with trust. He was probably walking around the room telling everyone that he did not trust them. Instead, I was so focused on me, me, me, that I could only interpret it as being an indictment of me. That experience showed me how narrow I can be in my vision of things. I saw that there are really huge possibilities that I could broaden myself and my perspective through interacting with other people, sharing their experiences, and listening to them elaborate on their lives.”

Why did Greg do the Basic Training? “I guess I was looking for something without even knowing I was looking. I just had this constantly uneasy feeling about things.I was really successful in my career and my job is an exciting one. A lot of people dream of doing the kind of work I do. And yet, I just wasn't that excited about all of that. In terms of relationships, I only had a very limited number of friends, which I said was because I didn't take the time outside of my work to go out and meet other people. I knew, though, that that was only an excuse. I wasn't really extending myself to people.

“I heard about the Lifespring training from a friend of mine whom I hadn't seen in two or three years because he had moved away from Boston. We had had a major falling out before he left. When I bumped into him last summer, I noticed something really different about him. When I mentioned it to him, he started telling me about the Lifespring trainings, which he had done since we had last seen each other.Hearing him recount what had happened for him, and being able to see that there was an obvious difference in him interested me.I went to a Guest Event and was very impressed with the speaker and with what she said was possible in the training, so I registered.

“Another key experience for me during the training was an exercise in which I realized that all my life I had been living for what other people thought of me and not for myself. I was absolutely willing to be the person I thought I should be for my friends, my family,people I worked with,and the average man on the street, instead of the person I was. I was willing to have unbelievable inner feelings of turmoil. I was willing to live a life that was not full of happiness and joy,but was full of compromise. I realized in an instant that the key to a successful,happy,gratifying,effective life is not to live something I am not,or to try to be something that I can never be because in my heart it isn't really me.

“Once I had discovered that, I wanted to examine it further.I had learned something, but could I realistically live my life that way and put it into practice? In a small group exercise I started to look at this question more closely. I looked at how I had been letting my circumstances completely control me, rather than me controlling my circumstances. Although on paper I looked like a success, I had this feeling that if people really knew who I was, they would see that my life was just a mockery. I thought that if they knew the real me, that they really wouldn't like me, that they would reject who I really am. So I had put up this elaborate screen and my life was all about projecting this image of being a successful doctor. I only had a few friends with whom I'd allow myself to be absolutely who I am and really show when I was hurt, when I cried, or when I was terrified. Although I am a pretty emotional person, I always put up this big facade. I was just so afraid to really let people know who I was for fear I would be ridiculed or humiliated or made fun of.

“Just sharing this with my small group was stepping right into that fear. Instead of reacting the way I feared they would, I saw people in my group with tears in their eyes. I realized that I was really putting limitations on other people, assuming that they were not big enough to accept me just the way I am. So the training for me was all about self-acceptance, about taking delight in myself and the wonderful things about me. At the same time it was about accepting that there are things about me that aren't so great, but not letting those control me, handicap me, or run my life.

“I find that my life is so enriched by grasping a couple of very very simple concepts. That is something else I learned, that it helps not to make things so complicated. In the training there is this very simple approach to life that consists of just looking at things as they really are instead of trying to dream up some unbelievably complicated, convoluted, elaborate scheme for everything.Just being authentic is what really makes my life interesting. And it's what makes me the kind of person that people want to know, because they really get to see who I am and what makes me tick.

“Honesty was another big part of the training for me. By that I mean being honest with myself about what I stand for and being honest with other people. I had never before thought that I was dishonest. But, really,I was often telling people things that I thought they wanted to hear rather than what was really true for me. I realized in the training that I was really not serving people well by doing that -they really are counting on me to tell them the truth. Here's an example that coincidentally happened on Friday during the training while I was at work: One of the nice things about being at this famous hospital is that there are a lot of people who want you to come and work for them. Before the training, I was asked by a doctor in New Mexico to come out and become the chief of one of the sections in his department. That is very, very flattering.I thought about it for a month and had pretty much decided, for an array of reasons,not to go. But when the doctor called me I told him I hadn't decided. He said he would give me another month to think it over. Then, a month later, on Friday of the Basic Training, I got a call from this doctor. I already knew 100 percent that there was no way I was going to take this offer. But I told him what I thought he wanted to hear. I ran the same story all over again about how honored I was, and how I was really trying to decide,and how I loved Boston, but I knew I wasn't going to be in New England for the rest of my life. And on and on and on. He said that he really needed to know by the following month and we hung up. After I hung up I realized that I had just done what I always did.I had been totally dishonest. And I hadn't helped out this doctor at all-all he wanted was a straight answer, yes or no, so he could start the ball rolling if I were going, or get another doctor to fill the position if I weren't. He wasn't going to think any less of me if I said no. So I picked up the phone and called him right back. I told him that I wanted to be totally honest with him, that the fact was I really had made up my mind, and that I was declining his invitation. He then told me how much he respected me for calling him back and telling him that, and he thanked me for handling it promptly so he could get on with things. After I hung up, I laughed because I'd had this turmoil for months about how to tell this guy that I was not going to accept his offer, and it had been so easy. I felt great about it and he felt great about it.

"Outside of my professional life, the training has also made a difference in my personal relationships. For instance, with my sister. She and I grew up very close, but yet constantly bickering with one another.In recent years, we would see each other about once a year. And initially in those meetings, it would be like we were strangers. We would say the words ‘I love you,'but they were just words, the necessary thing to say. I don't think there was really the meaning behind them. After I did the training, I was able to open up more,tell her more about myself, things that I had never shared with her before, things that I had thought she might use as ammunition against me. Now I cannot imagine myself thinking that. At one point I shared some things with her that were very important to me that I had wanted to get off my chest. She grabbed my hands, looked into my eyes and told me how much she loved me and that there is nothing I could say or do that would make her love me less or not want to have me in her life. Now I find that everything I experience I want to let her know. Instead of trying to harbor those things, I want to share them. And the same is true with other people in my life.

"In another instance, I can still remember the day I was with a friend at the Marketplace.I was really upset about something and I got very emotional and the tears just started pouring. My friend couldn't believe that I was standing there in that crowded place with hundreds of people walking by, crying like a baby, but what was going on with us was more important to me than what anybody on the street thinks.I guarantee you that what the person on the street thinks ran my life for a long time. I'd been more concerned about what my friends would think about my sister than what she was going through-the person I've grown up with and lived with and loved all my life. How I looked to others, even strangers on the street, was more important than being authentic with the people I cared for. My concern for how I appeared controlled my life instead of being true to what really mattered to me.I was more concerned with appearances than substance. What's true for me now is that when my life is over and I'm gone from this earth, what I want to have ascribed to me is that I really cared about other people honestly and openly,not that I always looked slick and never embarrassed myself.

“In retrospect I can see how some of the exercises in the trainings are designed to provoke people to be themselves in the most pure, basic, simple ways. I feel like I was able to really let people see every bit of me. Even when I thought I looked ridiculous, I still felt a simple, human dignity at the core of my being.

“I don't think I can ever really be afraid of people again. Fear of rejection,humiliation,ridicule,the feeling that I'm not enough,often controlled me before. Now, those fears don't influence me much because I had an experience in the training of putting myself out on the line and having the results be far greater than I had ever hoped they would be. Not only didn't my fears come true, but people were really moved by my contribution.

“When I say that I believe in the trainings, what I mean is I believe in people stopping and critically examining their lives and then getting a handle on what,in fact, their lives could be. And then,with that vision and knowledge, acting on that possibility. In the trainings we talk about an opening or an interruption, something that gets us to just stop, take a look, and realize, like I realized in that exercise on trust,that there are other possibilities for being that we have not even considered."