We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Table

A Soul Leader’s Antidote to Narcissism

Hello friend.

Thank you for being here today. There is a bigger conversation taking place on how character leaders form True, Brave, Kind, and Curious communities that transform culture. Join us here.

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Imagine if your favorite celebrity, or politician, or recording artist invited you into their home.

Picture them making space around their table for you and a group of your peers to feast, ask questions, be asked questions, and genuinely get to know this person with whom you’ve only had a parasocial relationship.

Now consider the people our culture platforms—the influencers, the artists, the world leaders. Can you picture many of them doing something like this? Gathering people around a table in a non-performative way—merely for the sake of knowing and being known?

We don’t expect this sort of behavior from our leaders because, quite frankly, we don’t believe it’s possible.

While the number of clinically narcissistic people is statistically low, narcissism is a prevailing characteristic of our culture itself.

Hyper-individualism, performative relationships, transactionalism everywhere you look, a total lack of empathy (especially for those outside our echo chambers).

The media platforms the loudest, angriest, most outlandish, most selfish, least curious, and least kind figures it can find. These people garner attention much the same way a car crash does—not because we necessarily like or agree with them, but because the carnage takes our attention hostage. We just can’t look away.

This is great for ratings and engagement. Terrible for the health of our society.

We all feel the effects—the sickness of selfishness, the loss of connection, the intuition that something vital is missing.

I would propose that what’s missing is waiting for us outside of the screens and off of the proving ground.

It’s a place where people belong without having to perform, pretend, or keep up the pace. It’s a place where honest opinions can be shared in an atmosphere of psychological safety. It’s a place where the goal is connection, not transaction, and the way forward is collaboration, not compromise.

In other words, we need a Table, a bigger Table. And a Table needs hosts.

The Hosting Leader

We need a new generation of leadership hosts. Influential people in every sector of society who prioritize listening, vulnerability, empathy, and kindness. Leaders who seek to know the people they lead at a deeper level. These leaders measure the value of their decisions in the impact those decisions make upon others, not merely their own personal gain.

This may sound soft at first, but becoming a hosting leader is immensely practical.

If you want to become a hosting leader, learn to lay a Table.

Tables are the domain of the Kind. Here’s how you can lay one today:

Choose your guests

Who in your sphere of influence will benefit and bring benefit around your Table?

Gather supporters—the ones who are so safe you can risk much with them. Choose a few of these friends. The Table will be Kind with these people.

Gather challengers—the people who sharpen you through clashing. The Table will be Brave with these people. They will shake the room out of echo-chamber thinking or binary dogmas (pro tip: 1 or 2 is plenty).

Gather wild cards—the people who you just don’t know yet, the ones who are unlike you. The ones who ask unexpected questions or whom you can’t “read” easily. They might need this environment, but, more importantly, the environment needs them. And your leadership needs them more than you know. The Table will be Curious with these people around it.

Host the room

Serve a generous meal. It doesn’t need to be lavish. In fact, lavishness will almost certainly detract from the task at hand (the people and their POVs), but it can be beautiful, comfortable, and plentiful. And it must be Kind, above all, for that will open hearts and minds to ways of thinking and acting that are yet to be discovered.

People think hosting is complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Intentional and complicated are not the same thing. Ask some great, open, deep, and wonder-filled questions, establish attentive listening as the baseline (listen with your eyes and ears), and push the room—not to conclusions but to imagination, possibility, and hope.

Keep pushing the conversation beyond the ordinary boundary lines.

Disallow soapboxes. They hijack the space and short circuit connection.

Gently dissuade preaching.

Make it personal, but don’t take it personally. You’re a conductor, not a performer. Conduct all voices skillfully by giving each space to speak (some will require more encouragement than others).

In this room, you are catalyst and coach, not expert or boss.

Calendar it

Now rinse and repeat; make Table a habit.

Keep inviting new people around it. Keep it growing with new people so it flows with new perspectives.

I believe you will find thinking partners.

I hope you will grow new friendships.

I know you will uncover Kind leadership and poke a hole in the narcissistic veil smothering our culture.

Lay a Table, my friends. It might just be the greatest force multiplier of our time.

Sincerely,

Karl

P.S. If you’re a coach who wants to apply this culture-transforming, relational leadership with your clients or a leader who wants to do the same with your team, we’ve just released a new guided cohort—it’s called Coaching The Arable Way, and it is our flagship training pathway to becoming a soul leadership coach or a coaching leader in your workplace. You can learn more about it here.