eaglesflite “Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” – Henry Ford
tonyrobbins: “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” –Bill Cosby
This is a time when many of us will be faced with the challenge of “doing more with less.” How we face that challenge provides an opportunity for choice. We may not be able to determine which challenges we face – but we may have choice as to how we face them. NPR’s Chana Joffe-Walt explains: (Audio)
I had a great time at the BIF open house last night as we celebrated their Nursing Home of the Future Project. Viewing Stephanie’s photos documenting the life of the elders was both inspiring and humbling. (more photos) As I understand it, her work not only documents the project but helped shape the process. This is a good example of what we call “co-determination:” success based on clear intention and the relational processes that actualize that intention.
So many of my clients find themselves in a perpetual state of physical and mental activity. I too am guilty of this “gerbil-like” mentality that keeps the wheel of the cage spinning. Dr. Lloyd J. Thomas, in The Value of Stillness, sheds some light:
“The Chinese word for “busy” is made of two characters. The first is
“heart,” and the second is “killing.” For the Chinese, to be busy is to kill the heart.
Children raised by insecure parents often learn that the faster they
talk, the faster they move, the faster [they] think, the safer they feel. A
moving target is harder to hit. Such children seek safety in the
speed of their activity and speech. They take refuge in relentless
action. When they feel insecure about what they know, they produce
more words and share them in rapid-fire, to hide their perceived
ignorance. Constant motion keeps them from being caught. Relentless,
busy activity distracts them from experiencing their fear. They are
often misdiagnosed as “hyperactive” or having “attention deficit
disorder” when they are actually trying only to protect themselves
from a frightening environment. Their constant motion of mouth and
body, kills their heart.
Gary Kinder wrote a book about a team of adventurers who recover tons of gold from a sunken ship resting in the deepest part of the sea. The success, he recounts, is due to one man’s willingness to open to his dream and move through all of the associated obstacles:
“You just had to shed old ways of thinking and reexamine old assumptions and do it smart from the beginning. You had to keep diverging, even beyond the point where it all became difficult and confusing. That’s where [he] lives, and he made those around him live there, too, some for far longer than is comfortable for most people. Yet just on the other side of that juncture is where impossibility sometimes vanishes and the world can be seen in a new way. . . if you do that . . . all kinds of things can blossom.” (Speaking of Tommy Thompson, pp. 506-507)
Do you have a dream? What will you do today to recover and embrace the “possibilities” that await you?
Kinder, Gary. (1998). Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea
I am often fascinated by the idea that; our choices determine one life as they exclude another. We make choices throughout the day; to listen, to ignore, to inquire, or to close-off. These are subtle choices driven by forces beyond our recognition. We can be in a hurry and overlook the expression on a colleague’s face, ”was there something there to pay attention to?” We can leave our home in the morning having put off an opportunity to focus on a loved one, because we were trying to capture the last few fragments of a news report - Not good, not bad, just the choices we make, as we either drive or are driven through our day. What life goes unlived as we make these choices? The following story speaks to these moments and asks the question; “how many other things are we missing?”
A Violinist in the Metro Read the rest of this page »
“A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousands of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.
Robert, has avoided his senior team for years. While they “run” the business, he tells himself that his job is to work “on” the business. Slowly, he is losing touch and now feels he needs to “re-connect.” He is considering instituting one-on-one meetings with each of his senior staff. This low agenda, “personal,” time with his key people feels intimidating. But with some prompting he is going to take a risk and blaze into this new territory with hopes of improving his communication with each of his key people.
When we take a risk and question into the unknown, receiving into consciousness thoughts and feelings that may disturb and riddle us, we are “blazing” new territory. Much like the early explorers, we have before us the opportunity to venture into relational terrain and find new and unexpected insights. But to do this, we have to listen. Read the rest of this page »
You are running your own business and have a team meeting scheduled for today. You are highly energized, focused and clear about your agenda. However, when you enter the meeting the energy in the room does not match your expectations. Things are sluggish or disjointed, so you take it upon yourself to “act” to “change” things. It can be a look, a gesture or your words which give you away. As you “confront,” you evoke your team’s defenses. You are perceived in a way that further distances you from your intentions, to connect. You can almost hear them think, “oh boy, not this again.”
“Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains,
and the maker of pine mountains!
All seven oceans are inside, and hundreds of millions of stars.
The acid that tests gold is there, and the one who judges jewels.
And the music from the strings that no one touches, and the
source of all water
If you want the truth, I will tell youthe truth:
Friend, listen: the God whom I (you) love is inside.”
Bly, R. (1971). The Kabir book: Forty-four of the ecstatic poems of Kabir. Beacon: Boston
Culture: Participants are of the same organization or business and are seeking to deepen, expand and advance their mission.
Reparation: An organization is in need of repairing and mending an individual, relationship, team, department or the entire organization.
Innovation: Designed to evoke the realization of organizational growth, change or transformation through releasing the brilliance and essential resources that lay dormant, repressed, static or yet to be realized.
Cross-cultural: When different cultures merge and attempt to emerge as a unified whole as in – “bolt-on” acquisitions, mergers, or reorganization – many challenges arise and need to be addressed. Through a collaborative context all the associated “costs” – human resources, dollars, time and energy are utilized for the evolution of the individual culture as well as their developing unification.
Family: The dynamic reality to family networks and family business is addressed in a context that embraces the evolving differences and the sustaining likenesses so that growth and stability can co-exist.