It’s easy enough to look at what you have going for you when you’re in a cozy conference room enjoying a workshop. But how does it play out in the “real world”?

Well, imagine yourself in a village in Nepal, the second poorest country in the world … where most years even the farmers go hungry for a few months.

That’s where Tricia Lustig, a British consultant, found herself several years ago, invited by the village headman to work with the villagers on community development. She began her work by asking them if they wanted to tell stories of times they’d achieved something together in the village.

“They didn’t understand what we’d accomplish by talking about what had gone well, instead of things that were wrong or things that needed to be done,” says Tricia.

But then she asked them to dream: What kind of a village do you want for your children and grandchildren?

“That began to get great excitement going,” Tricia says. “But as soon as we moved to talking about how we might do this ourselves, the energy started to dissipate.”

That’s why Tricia had wanted to begin by filling the room with their best moments of the past—so they’d see their capabilities and know they could do whatever they dreamed. The best first step would have been to talk about what they were proud of, and what they had going for them. But like most people, they hesitated to go there.

Then Pasang Lama, a subsistence farmer with but a few acres—a man who could neither read nor write—stood up.

“We’ve been bloody lazy,” he proclaimed. “For the past 40 years we have been holding our hands out for aid, and what do we get? I’ll tell you what we get: We get fights. We can’t agree on anything, and we don’t feel good about our village or ourselves.

“Forty years ago we did a lot together because there was no one else to help us, and you know what? We were proud of what we did! We were proud of our village!”

Silence.

“Are any of you proud now?” he concluded. “No? Well, let’s work together and be proud again!”
Beneath his accusations, Pasang was in fact praising their past successes, a past that they could reclaim and use to build their future.

“After Pasang spoke, it was amazing,” Tricia says. “People stood up and offered the most impossible things. Children wanted a new school. One man, Mr. Bal, was blind and could not provide for his family himself. But his wife ran a teashop. He said she made 600 rupees a month and they would pledge a whole month of her wages to building the new school. She was there too, nodding enthusiastically. He cried as he said, ‘our future is our children.’”

Three years later, Tricia returned to the village and saw that the school they’d thought would take five years to build was already filled with schoolchildren. Today there are eight teachers, two paid for by the villagers themselves. There’s even a village bank. (Can you imagine how Tricia felt?)

All from a shift in what people were talking about.

Keep that in mind as you read the next section.

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