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Talking Tall Poppies
Robert Rabbin
“When you find your voice, your life takes on grace.”
M. Night Shyamalan
I had never heard of the “tall poppy” syndrome before moving to Australia from
the United States in 2005.
My first direct experience of this tall poppy notion came one morning in a
workshop I was leading. I wondered aloud why a few of the participants danced so
delicately around an issue they wanted to discuss. They demurred, suggested,
inferred. They did everything but speak plainly. I encouraged them to speak more
boldly and directly. In our subsequent conversation, they said they had learned
to not be bold or direct. They said that it wasn’t right to speak out too
loudly. They didn’t want to stick out, or stand above the others. They told me
about the tall poppy syndrome, which I’ve come to understand as a kind of
cultural suppression of creative self-expression.
The tall poppy syndrome is a topic that comes up in every one of my workshops
here in Australia. It is a fire-walk that many have to take in order to break
the hold of this socialization, their learned reticence to stand up, stick out,
and speak brilliantly, powerfully, passionately, authentically!
When I asked one of my Australian friends to give me her definition of the tall
poppy syndrome, she said, “Let’s not get too high and mighty, let’s not get too
carried away with our self. We don’t want anyone getting too full of their own
talent or accomplishment. If they do, why we’ll just cut them down to size.
We’ll have no tall poppies in our fields!”
Another said, “Australians are carrying a national consciousness of
unworthiness, stemming from our roots as a convict colony. When one of us tries
to move into the bigger world, to dream a bigger vision, we briefly project all
of our personal unmet ambitions onto him. When it turns out he is human and
experiences a moment of failure, or is in our eyes somehow not good enough or
undeserving, we pull him down justifying our own choice not to have at least
tried to expand our horizons. Just like the elephants tied to the chains who
don’t realise they are bigger than the chains, we are re-creating our convict
history via our tall poppy syndrome, believing ourselves to be prisoners
simultaneously worshipping, fearing, and resenting the ones who break free.”
And another friend talked about the “cultural cringe, a peculiarly Aussie
malaise, a leveling attitude that seeks to keep people chained to mediocrity: in
thinking and doing and dreaming big dreams — but most of all, in speaking. We’re
just not supposed to speak up. That would be big-noting and arrogant. That’s for
the Americans.”
I am not speaking against modesty, nor am I speaking on behalf of wild arrogance
or the unwarranted elevation of others as in the vulgar worship of
“celebrities,” one of the United States’ cultural pathologies. I am talking
about our right to own our own voice and vision, about our right to fully
express our own aliveness, as only we can. To do so is not arrogant or
self-centered, but natural.
I think of how natural it is for children throughout the world to exult in
discovering their creative and expressive powers! Once we can make a sound, we
start gurgling, hummming, singing, crying, wailing — wow, look, we can make
sounds! Once we can crawl, and then walk and skip, you can’t keep us penned in!
And then, we can draw! We can create with color, with pencils, pens, crayons,
paint — on everything! And then, to the dismay of all grown-ups, we realize we
can make music by banging with this on that! The poet Derek Walcott
surely wrote this line for children, and anyone, in the throes of discovery:
Feast on your life!
Expressing our self in uniquely creative ways is natural. It is the feast
prepared for us at the moment we were created. And it is also natural to want to
be appreciated and recognized for our creative expressions, for they represent
our very essence of being! Look at the gleam and glow of any child as they rush
to show a parent or teacher their picture — all excitement, joy, and pride! The
only, I repeat: the only, appropriate response is overwhelming
appreciation and encouragement. If we in any way ignore, disparage, or dismiss
their work, we do the same to them, we will have hurt and wounded, perhaps
fatally, their self-image and self-esteem, their enthusiasm and joy, their
confidence and courage.
Since I have always been interested in the transformative power and
inspirational potential of public speaking, I began to extrapolate this tendency
to underachieve. If people were guarding against authentic self-expression and
self-censoring heartfelt sentiments, if people were aiming for the lowest common
denominator, if people were afraid to be vulnerable and transparent, to connect
intimately with others … what happens to people’s soul? How would this cultural
leveling mechanism restrict and repress a person’s urge to rise above
mediocrity?
What happens … ?
What happens when you begin to speak in unauthorized, powerful, poetic,
passionate ways? What happens when your speaking sets you apart, because you are
clear, confident, compelling? What happens when you begin to speak the
unspeakable, which rocks the status quo, or which gives shape and texture to new
possibilities, new freedoms, new solutions? What happens when you speak dreams
and visions from other levels of consciousness, from other dimensions of being?
What happens if you question a public official’s rhetoric? … Hey, that’s
enough!!
Stop right there! Who do you think you are to say such things? You have gone
far enough. Now be quiet, mister, or you are going to find yourself in a world
of trouble.
In a Sydney workshop, one woman told of standing in front of her class, I guess
she was about seven years old, to show her picture. Everyone had been told to
draw snowflakes. This woman proudly showed a picture of multi-colored
snowflakes, not a single one was white! How original! How imaginative! How
colorful!
Oops, no. The teacher had apparently lost too many important brain cells. What
happened was that the teacher raced forward, grabbed the picture, held it aloft
and began almost screaming: “Look at this! Children, look at this! This is
wrong! Snowflakes are white. Everyone knows that! Have you ever seen
colored snowflakes?! No! Now go back to your seat and do this over, and do it
right.”
In the midst of this public shaming, this poor little girl just then and there
decided for all time: I am not good enough. I can not draw. I am stupid. I
will never again dream, imagine, or do anything different.
These self-limiting decisions in the face of life events are the beginning of
what I call diminished capacity, which is the major, if not singular, cause
underlying our inability to lead truly authentic, happy, creative lives of
intimacy and originality. Once we shut down and close off, we are cut off from
the very life-force we need to be whole, to be powerful, to be passionate, to be
productive, to be successful in whatever way we want.
The tall poppy syndrome, especially as it pertains to speaking, is not
proprietary to Australia. It is universal. Every society and each culture has
sought to regulate speaking with bribes and intimidations. We all have to learn
to speak our truth from the depths of our being, heart to heart and eye to eye.
We all have to transform diminished capacity into ferocious and fearless
speaking and truth-telling. This is where and how we connect with our
life-force, how we inspire ourselves to dream big dreams, to take on
unimaginable projects, to bring forth fire, and to learn to love the Earth.
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