Bill Cumming is a thirty-year coaching veteran known as The Coach’s Coach. He has been a coach, consultant, and trainer to CEOs and executive teams of healthcare delivery organizations, businesses, school systems, and nonprofit organizations ranging in size from startup to three-quarters of a billion dollar corporations. Bill’s work focuses on creating inspired environments where individuals can take responsibility for their lives and the organizations for which they work.

In 1964, Bill helped found the Ford Foundation Project, which became a pilot for Upward Bound, a federally funded educational program that works to give young adults a leg up in life. Bill has also worked tirelessly toward the transformation of educational systems in prisons. Specifically, Bill spent thirteen years as an adjunct member of the faculty at the College of Education at the University of Maine helping found the University’s Aspirations for School project. He is the founder of the Center for Responsible Education, as well as a two-time elected chair to the Maine School Union #47 Board of Directors where he has served for six years. To date, Bill has worked with more than four thousand teachers in critical case studies in his courses, “Motivating the Unmotivatable” and “Inspired Teaching.”

I: Let’s start off by talking about the term unmotivatable.

BC: Well, there is no such word as “unmotivatable” in the English language. We named that course “Motivating the Unmotivatable” for two reasons: because it attracted teachers tremendously, and because we wanted to address two issues. First, there is no such word as “unmotivatable,” and you and I can’t actually motivate other people; all we can do is create an environment in which they’re more likely to choose to be motivated themselves.
I: What happened in 1979 that changed your life?

BC: I had been doing work—or doing life, I guess. I’m honored by the things that I had a chance to participate in, especially the founding of Upward Bound, but I went from there to being a YMCA director, and then I became the Corporate Responsibility Officer for what is now Key Bank nationally.

In 1979, one of my children was raped. I want to fast forward to 2011—that young woman is now the CFO of an organization called The Transformation Center in Boston that helps returning troops from Afghanistan and Iraq readjust to society using peer coaching. She’s fine, but on that day, our world as we knew it stopped. My child was standing in my kitchen bleeding, and I knew that she had just been through one of the most traumatic experiences in the world. I literally—if I had caught the person in that instant—would have killed him.

I’ve spent my life doing things that are nonviolent and completely antithetical to that emotion that arose, but there was no missing the emotion. Obviously, we took care of my daughter, Joy. We immediately went to the hospital, and there were police and social workers and all kinds of other things.

For a period of a few days, I couldn’t shake that desire. It didn’t take me long to figure out that it was completely antithetical to everything I’d spent my life being about, but it gave me a little bit of an indication as to where some of the violence in the world comes from.

I started to study—some of it academic, but a lot of it just through what I was hearing going on around me—about where violence comes from. To make a very long story very short, one day I had the television on and Phil Donohue’s show was on.Donohue, in my opinion, did some great television before trash TV came along. He had a man named Nick Groth who ran the sex offender program in the state of Connecticut on his program that day, and three inmates were behind a theatrical scrim so you could see their body movements and hear their voices, but you could never identify them; it was completely anonymous.  What I was struck by was what I didn’t hear: I didn’t hear any of them blaming their circumstances for how they go to be where they were, which was in a maximum security prison, having been convicted of violent crimes.

I cold called Nick Groth, and some phone calls are just meant to go through. It happened to be a taped delayed program that day, and he answered the phone, and we talked. He said, “There’s only one way you’re going to understand what I’m doing, and that’s if you come down here.”

I agreed to come down to the maximum security prison in Somers, Connecticut, and while there were a lot of things that took place along the way, I will cut to the core of what happened. Nick introduced me to two groups. One was a group he had just started working with, and they had the usual litany of people they felt were responsible for how they got there: mom, dad, the judge, the lawyer, the cop, and then we finally got to the victim—“If only she hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have killed her.”

At that point in the conversation, that feeling that I told you about that arose in my kitchen began to well up inside of me again. Either Nick saw that, or it was time to go anyway, but in either case it was fortunate. We then went to talk with people Nick had worked with for a couple of years, and in that group there was a person who, as a child, had been locked in a closet for ten days at a time. That’s where he ate, that’s where he slept, that was the bathroom—you get a sense of that room. Those were the good times, because when the children weren’t locked up, they were being raped and sodomized by the entire adult community.

It was not hard for me to figure out how that man got to be where I met him in the maximum security prison in Somers, Connecticut. What I didn’t expect was that at the end of that first day—and this was in 1979 when there weren’t any video cameras around, there were no guards who could hear, and Nick wasn’t close by—this man said to me, “Bill, I am sorry that your daughter was raped.” I knew he meant it. I didn’t know what to do with it, but I knew he meant it.

It began to dawn on me at a very deep level that I had spent my life trying to do things that I considered useful and worthwhile, and I just acknowledged to you that I have the capacity to kill (and you’ll notice I didn’t put that in the past tense), and here’s a man who committed violent crimes and admitted it—he was not only convicted, but he admitted to me that he had done that—who was capable of loving kindness.

What really became clear to me in a relatively short period of time is that the capacity for everything is inside of us. The question is, what do we nurture? What do we water?

I began building programs that allowed people who had never experienced their value and worth in the world an opportunity to experience that. But they could also experience the reality that inside of them is the ability to make choices that allow them to take charge of their own lives. That’s what happened , and that’s what I’ve spent the last thirty-three years doing.

I: What did you discover about yourself, your daughter, and people in general?

BC: I realized that one of the reasons people engage in violent behavior is because they think they have no control over their circumstances. Riots break out—not the kind that have to do with looting and things like that—when people become overwhelmed by their circumstances and feel like they have no control, they will resort to almost anything, especially when it comes to protecting their children. It’s been said numerous times that unless we end the issue of world hunger, we’re never going to have a world of peace, and I believe that to be true.

What I discovered about my daughter was that she was a lot more together than I was. She would tell me later that it was simply because she was a better actress than I am. She really was stoic in relationship to this, and those days are a blur to me. All I remember is my white rage and wanting to do everything I could to protect my daughter, which I clearly couldn’t do. What I discovered, therefore, was this incredible courage and fortitude in my daughter that I was astounded by. I always knew she was a neat kid, but the fact of the matter was she was tough as nails.

I also found that no matter how much discipline you bring to the work that you do, there are going to be things that bring up feelings that are elemental in nature. When you begin to look at where violence and damage comes from, you begin to realize that well people don’t damage other people. If you and I are in a good mood, we’re going to trea t each other well, generally speaking.

If I’ve had one of those days where I just lost my biggest client, a person I care about has been rude and offensive, and I had a flat tire on the way home—it doesn’t make any difference what the circumstances are, but if it’s one of those days where I’m frustrated with myself and my circumstances—I’m much less likely to be loving and kind to those around me. If I’m in good shape, I’m much more fun to be around than if I’m in lousy shape.

One of the first things I do when I go to work with a group of prisoners is to acknowledge them for reaching the pinnacle of their success, because most of them that I’m talking to are in the big house for their state. I congratulate them for being successful at having achieved this particular benchmark, and I’m not being sarcastic at all.

My next question I ask is, “Is this what you set out to accomplish?” There’s a lot of silence. What they discover is that I am not judging or evaluating them as people. I know that inside of them is the capacity to turn their lives around. That capacity resides inside of all people. There’s no one who doesn’t want to love and be loved and to know that their life has value and purpose.

I: Basically, it’s a humanistic psychology approach tool—unconditional positive regard as well as acceptance of prior behavior?

BC: No. Holding people in high regard, positivity, all of that stuff is good—that’s a step in the right direction. What I mean is showing absolute loving kindness the way you love a child, a loved one, etc., so that person knows they’re cared for as a human being.

The right words won’t do this. It isn’t about the words. It’s about recognizing that the value and worth of those people is a given. As a matter of fact, some of the language that surrounds self-worth and self-esteem is so damaging to what I’m working on that it’s almost difficult to describe, because people feeling good because something happened externally has nothing to do with it; I’m talking about knowing inside of your heart that you’re okay, no matter what happens today.

Nelson Mandela went through twenty-seven years in a prison, and in the year following his release with his captor, desegregated the country. That capacity resides inside of all people. Viktor Frankl said, “The last of the freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” He wrote that in a concentration camp, and the depth of our ability to do that is that deep. It’s not as if Viktor Frankl is the only one who has that capacity.

I: I fully believe in that. I raise my children to believe that you are in charge of your attitude. You can’t change what happens to you. You can only dictate what you decide, how you view it, and how you’re going to accept that in your life.

BC: The problem is that not everybody grows up knowing that they’re loved absolutely and unconditionally, so consequently, they may hear all those words, but if they have no experience that they’re loved at that level, that place inside of them where their real value exists has never been touched—those words don’t mean much, which is why they’re not particularly successful.

A board member of a nonprofit organization that I was doing some work with happened to work for the department of Health and Human Services. She said in a public meeting that she didn’t believe that you had to hold people in high regard, and especially not hold them in a place of loving kindness, because she absolutely felt that some of the people she worked with were despicable, but she provided good services for them anyway.
“The capacity for everything is inside of us. The question is, what do we nurture?”

In actuality, there were services provided, but what the people also got was a heavy dose of, “You’re not worthy. You’re not valuable. You have no significance.”

Most of the doing-ness to solve the world’s problems already exists. The issue is, we don’t treat each other well. We actually treat each other very poorly, and we need to be mindful of finding ways to nurture all that is good in people and to be mindful of operating with one another with dignity, grace, and loving kindness. That sounds simple, but it applies in every situation, not just some.

A few years ago the federal government came out with a pretty important program, the title of which is very telling. The program is called “The Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Program.” The reason it came out is that three years ago, and for the next ten years forward, the federal government is releasing 100,000 violent prisoners a year, and they know they haven’t had an impact on them.

To call them “Departments of Corrections” is where the problem lies. You can’t correct people into wellness. All of the successful rehabilitation programs have at their core loving kindness and choice. The ones that are about force and discipline may be able to modify behavior, but nothing happens at an internal level, so people go out and recreate the same problem. If you don’t alter that core place in people—or if they don’t alter it for themselves, more accurately—then nothing has really happened.

I: What changed in the way you see and experience the world?

BC: I used to believe there was right and wrong, and now I realize there’s only wellness and unwellness. People who are well don’t damage other people in any way, shape, or form. If you’re in a place of loving kindness, it’s impossible for you to intentionally do damage. That doesn’t mean that I don’t do damage from time to time, I do, but that’s because of moments of unconsciousness.

We are trained to believe that some people are good and some people are evil. I’ve read the source documents of about fifteen different major religions, and all of the spiritual traditions point to two things: love all people with no exception and grow in wisdom. I don’t care whether it’s in the Koran or the teachings of Buddha or the Bible, that’s the message, which means it isn’t ours to judge. That’s not to say that I expect people to be running around the street who have not had an opportunity to do some work. I’m not suggesting that we necessarily release all the prisoners. I am suggesting that the way we work with them is absolutely antithetical to what it is we say we want to accomplish. What changed in me was the way I saw the world.

I: What is the connection between these revelations and the current problems in schools and business?

BC: In my experience, we keep looking to the wrong things to make the changes. At the moment, we’re looking to change public schools by doing more testing. The testing is getting better; at least now we’re testing the same student to see whether they learned anything in a particular year. In the old days, they used to test a particular grade level every few years. That’s significant because it’s like comparing apples and oranges; there’s no correlation between test results for an eighth grade class three years from now and what’s going on in eighth grade now.

However, the core issue is, if youngsters don’t feel well about themselves—and this has nothing to do with being happy, it’s about seeing themselves as valued and valuable—if they don’t see themselves as able to be responsible for their own lives and well being, they’re not going to produce the kind of results we want to have produced.

The reason Upward Bound worked was because it was created an inspired environment where people could choose to take responsibility for their own lives and caring faculty were sought. When the government wanted to take over the pilots that had been started—one of which was ours—they wanted to make it a remedial program. I and a number of other people said, “If you do that, you will kill the essence of Upward Bound”.

“I used to believe there was right and wrong, and now I realize there’s only wellness and unwellness. People who are well don’t damage other people.”

If you talk to anyone who runs an Upward Bound program now, they will tell you that the reason it works is that often this is the first time youngsters have been involved with an entirely inspired group of adults. Again, this is not to say their teachers in school are wrong, but we have to ask, “If they can’t create an inspired environment and they don’t love kids, what are they doing in this business?”

Again, in prisons, unless we get over the notion that you can correct people into wellness, we’re never going to be able to change things. By the way, you can’t build prisons fast enough to take care of the unwellness that’s bubbling up right now, and the reason is, we brought a lot of children into the world who weren’t really wanted.

In all of our struggle for freedom of every single kind you can imagine, we’ve forgotten the fact that raising children is more important than any other job on the planet, and until that gets reinforced—not by some artificial, “It has to be a man and a woman,” or this, that, and the other, but by realizing that it’s got to be the primary responsibility of people in relationship to these young people’s lives—very little is going to change. The way we’re operating with one another needs to shift; it’s not the doing-ness.

I: What does the word love mean to you now?

BC: It’s not that the word love means something different to me. There has been a lot of conversation that you can’t talk about love. For example, in most public schools, it’s taboo. Superintendents say, “Don’t talk about love—you’ll get in trouble, lawsuits, etc.”

Youngsters need to know they’re loved, period. What I mean by that is the same thing I mean in relationship to my own children: I want you to have a meaningful, productive, contributory, joyous life. I don’t want food or shelter to be an issue. I care about you as a human being.

There is no scarcity of love. As a matter of fact, the more you do it, the more you’re able to do it, and the clearer you become in communicating to a person their value and worth in the world. We did a demonstration program for the Department of Labor last summer, and there was a youngster that I was interviewing for a spot in that program. About twenty minutes into the interview I asked, “You don’t have the experience at all that you’re already valuable, do you?” This was about a fifteen year old. She looked at me and burst into tears because no one had ever said to her that her value and worth in the world was a given.

People need to know that, and we need to stop being concerned about words and focus on intentions. Loving kindness is exactly what’s wanted and needed.

I: Loving kindness doesn’t sound like much of a problem solver. Why do you think it is so important?

BC: The majority of people don’t see it as a problem solver because they don’t experience it in their own lives. It is absolutely a problem solver. If you want corporations to work well, have a team that cares about each other and can tell the truth. If you want a school that functions well, have a faculty that knows that its opinion is going to be valued. Operate with dignity and grace and loving kindness.

Loving kindness is a problem solver. The problem is that we don’t hold it that way because we’ve heard about it for a long time, and we think it’s something we can’t get a handle on. That’s not true.

Consider any person who has ever moved from, “I don’t matter, I don’t value myself,” to “I do matter, and I’m starting to produce results.” I’ve asked thousands of people like that this question: “What was present at the moment you were able to make that transition?” The answer in every case but one was that first, there was an adult who absolutely cared about them, and second, they began to make changes that allowed them to take charge of their own life. When those two things happen simultaneously, all kinds of things become possible in people’s lives.

I: Do people have to work with you in order to understand this work?

BC: Not in my experience. What they need to do is look inside to see whether or not they can access that space of loving kindness, and then do everything they know how to do in order to stay in that space on an ongoing basis.

Everything is a miracle. One of the things I discovered about fifteen years ago is that no matter how well you may have thought out anything, you need to do self-care. Take some time every day to recognize that we live in a miracle. The fact that you and I are breathing is a miracle. The fact that we’re able to communicate is a miracle.

Everything is interconnected. Everything you and I do has an impact. Jane Goodall said, “It isn’t whether you make a difference in life—everything we do makes a difference—the only question is whether it’s going to be positive or negative.”

The only thing I control today is how I’m going to be. The question is, “Is the way I’m being right at the moment useful, productive, contributory, etc.?” It’s absolutely possible. I see places where this is bubbling up all over the place.

What happened in Egypt was a group of people deciding that they wanted the world to be different, and interestingly enough, the next country where it was tried got slapped down militarily because people began to realize that there was no way to stop a group of people who had decided that enough was enough.

I believe even though things look a little dark right at the moment that we’re actually coming to a place where people are able to see that Mahatma Gandhi and a few other people were pretty much on target relative to loving kindness being the most important tool in the world. It can’t be manipulated, because it’s either present or it’s not.

I: How do you stay optimistic in the face of a world at war and in chaos?

BC: If we focus on what’s not working, we can depress ourselves into next week pretty easily. You have to stay and see what the reaction is to the work that you’ve done.

The people who have been through the work I’m talking about allow us to know that it’s possible for all people to do that. If I focus on what’s been accomplished as opposed to what hasn’t yet, I’m able to keep my equanimity. Why wouldn’t I look toward the positive in life as opposed to looking at what’s not working?

Norman Vincent Peale had a great notion—The Power of Positive Thinking. If you add The Power of Positive Thinking to the incredible force of loving kindness, what you get is unstoppable; it will continue to have an impact on and on, just as it did in Egypt not long ago.

I: You talk a lot about self-care. What do you mean by self-care?

BC: A lot of people do things that are good for them. They run, they watch their diet, they do whatever is constructive from their point of view. Self-care is getting focused every day on what the reality is in terms of the opportunity.

I used to go to the ocean, and every time I went to the ocean, I automatically felt more peaceful, and I began to analyze what that experience was like, because I realized that I wasn’t always going to be able to be by the ocean. The force of the ocean, unfortunately, has incredible power as demonstrated in Japan, and the fact of the matter is, that force allows me to recognize that Mother Nature, God, the force of all of that—however you choose to hold it—is so much bigger than we are. It’s mind boggling.

The universe is expanding at 200 million miles a second. That’s an inconceivable notion, but if I focus on the miracle closest to me, which is you and I talking, or the fact that I have three bionic parts in me—two artificial knees and an artificial hip— and I’m without pain for the first time in forty years which is a miracle to me, and if I recognize that everything is interconnected, then I can keep my attitude in good shape, because I don’t have any expectations about what other people do. I’m focused on how I’m managing myself.

Self-care is being consistent about managing myself and being disciplined in the way I go about that.

I: Why is what we do with children so critical?

BC: A lot of youngsters were born not because they were chosen or wanted, but because they simply arrived as a result of other’s activities. If a youngster does not feel valued, they begin to live out of that self-fulfilling prophecy.

I have never talked to a group of prisoners who said, “Yes, as children, we were all well loved and nurtured and felt good and everything was lovely.” They have nightmare stories—horror stories.

Don’t get me wrong, it is not about blaming mom and dad. If those folks felt well about themselves, they wouldn’t have done what they did. What’s important is that we make sure that youngsters at the earliest possible age get into environments that are truly nurturing, creative, and inspired, because if that gets cemented early on, it’s much more likely that they’ll be successful down the road.

I: What can people do to be part of the solution?

BC: First, they can make a decision right this second that that’s what they want to do, and they can work toward being in place of loving kindness.

Being in a place of loving kindness doesn’t mean don’t have standards, aren’t thorough, aren’t well organized, or that we don’t do an inspired job. It means being gracious to yourself and focusing on the things that you can do, and not necessarily on the things that you can’t do.

We started seriously working on the issue of world hunger about forty years ago. Bucky Fuller had talked about sustainability all of his life and, God rest his soul, he pointed to the direction that it could take. A lot of his thinking has gone into a great many solutions to end hunger; 45,000 people used to die per day, needlessly, of hunger and starvation. That number is now down to 25,000 a day.

The entire death rate following the earthquake and tsunami in Japan is going to be about 25,000, and I have absolute empathy for the souls that are touched by that and those that have been lost. That number seems so staggering to most people in that context. As a society, we need to look at some things that we can actually solve today that have to do with persistent hunger and starvation that haven’t been ended, not because we can’t end them, but because we haven’t made the decision.

Anyone can simply make a decision to be responsible for their own well being and to be in a place of loving kindness toward other human beings. That will open up immediate doors for what the doing-ness needs to be; it will be obvious.