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Part 1 – Family History Comes to VisitEvery time I go to a doctor, I am asked to fill out a form that, at some point, will ask me about my family medical history. I list my father’s death at age 23, recently adding that it was most likely from contaminated water at Camp Lejeune. I mention my mother’s alcoholism and heart attack death at age 56, and my grandmother’s deadly aortic aneurism. In my younger years, these reports were of interest to me, but not necessarily pertaining to me. I rarely drink and never smoked. As I got older, there were concerns about blood pressure, cholesterol, and most recently type II diabetes. Currently, all those issues are under control with meds, diet, and exercise. I’ve been patting myself on the back for controlling my blood sugar so well that I don’t need any medication for that. Recently, after reading about a female runner who didn’t start running races until she was 70, I decided to start training myself. I was excited about completing my first race.

Who knew I was walking around with a heart that would soon be described as having a 90% chance of a heart attack?

It started with my younger sister. Eager to take an early retirement, she decided to get a complete physical and check-up while she was still employed. Within a short period of time, she learned that she had an elevated calcium score, was catheterized, and had two stents put in. One of her arteries was 95% blocked. She encouraged me to get checked. Suddenly, our mother’s deadly heart attack at 56 could have been caused by more than her alcoholism. Family history is important.

I started the tests. At first, things appeared good, excellent blood work, especially regarding triglycerides and cholesterol. The cardiologist told me that once the tests were finished, I’d probably have to see him once a year. Until yesterday.

The day before I had a calcium score test. The technician told me that it would take about a week to get the results. I went on my merry way. I even missed the early morning call from the cardiologist. He left a message about some elevation, and I should start taking baby aspirin and call the office. While I was driving to work, I called his office (hands-free, of course! Safety first). What they told me almost caused me to drive off the road.

“Elevation” was a mild word for my results. My score was way higher than my sister’s, putting me in the 90% chance of a heart attack category. Suddenly, everyone at the cardiologist’s office knew my name. They fast-tracked me for a Nuclear Myocardial Perfusion Scan, transferring me to the scheduling department with instructions to remind them this was an urgent situation. Well, I didn’t have to do that. As soon as I said my name, she replied, “Oh yes, I was just reviewing your paperwork.”

And despite the urgency, I will still have to wait a week to get the test done. As a person with anxiety issues anyway, it sounded like an eternity. I spent the rest of the day alternately crying and sleeping. Dale, the love of my life I have written about before, was supportive. He has his own calcium score burden, thankfully much lower than mine. It was a comfort to feel like we were now on the same team. We were horrified to discover how much salt contributes to these issues (we knew about cholesterol, and rarely added salt to our food – but it is in practically everything!)

As my anxiety quieted, I realized that my sister’s issue and my issue have a common denominator – family history. We have to take it seriously.

Part 2- The Golden ThreadWhen thinking about life, it is easy to understand why so many cultures have stories and legends about gods, goddesses, and all sorts of beings invested with power over human life. In times when diseases were not understood, it made perfect sense that someone, or something evil, caused afflictions. Recently, The Fates has occupied my thoughts. One Fate to spin the thread of life, one to measure that thread, and one to cut the thread to end life. Their work seemed capricious, taking down both good and evil gods, as well as mortal humans. In fact, their power over life and death made them the most feared and the most powerful of all the magical deities in both Greek and Roman mythology.

Three weeks ago, I was given health news that made me think of my own golden thread. How Atropos may have been sharpening her scissors not so far behind me. Meanwhile, Cotho, the spinner, and Lachesis, the allotor, would continue to spin and measure until the scissor performed its duty.

I spent anxious days waiting until the “as soon as possible” test would confirm what I had already been told – a 90% chance of a heart attack — soon. I learned how capricious life is. Within two weeks I lost two friends. One who had called me to tell me she was going to die, and there was nothing to do about it, so she was at peace with it. She said she specifically called me to “make her laugh,” using my Laughter Wellness powers. And laugh we did. We made plans for a short visit, depending on how her day would be going, but the Fates had other plans. On the day I was having my nuclear scan and stress test, she passed away in her sleep.

This news came right after there was an unexpected turn of events for me. Had this been Ancient Greek, I would have sworn that Zeus intervened for me. After the testing, my doctor called me and said, that despite the frightful calcium score, my heart was just fine — not just fine, but strong, and there were no restrictions to blood flow. As he had originally predicted from my first visit, he instructed me to continue with my cholesterol meds, stay on the baby aspirin, and come back in six months. Atropos would have to wait.

As I was processing mixed emotions, three days later, a long-time friend died suddenly and unexpectedly. I could not comprehend it. My grief-stricken brain kept playing out the “why” and “what if” scenarios. As humans, the only guarantee is that you will die — your golden thread of life will run out.

I know in my heart that there are no Fates pulling the strings. The world is full of religions, beliefs, theories, and superstitions. In times of grief, heartache, and loss, we seek to make sense of tragedy through our beliefs. Well-meaning friends offer condolences, prayers, meditations, hugs, and helping hands. But in the end, Death holds all the threads and leaves behind the scars of loss. Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy said it best:

“It has been said, ‘time heals all wounds.’ I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.”

May all our wounds gently rest as scars, and memories of shared smiles and laughter weave a golden thread around our hearts, to bring us comfort, and restore our resilience.

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My friend likes the woman and mentally she attracts him. However, his heart repels her. He asked me what to do? I said I do not trade short pleasure for lifelong suffering. For me, to feel my heart repel somebody could mean it is a permanent issue.

It is a dilemma in life wherein you find yourself in a situation urging you to take opposite ways.

Do you listen to the sound of the mind or the heart?

There shall be no problem if both the heart and mind are in alignment and pointing in the same direction. The problem starts when they are not.

Take another scenario. You have an employee who is talented and has many rare skills that you need. However, he is arrogant with his subordinates. Employees kept complaining about him. They threatened to submit all their resignation if this employee stayed. Now, your mind says no we need him. However, your heart says no he is pathetic. Get rid of him.

Is it a change of mind or a change of heart? What do you find?

• Do you find it easier to change your mind or heart?
• Do you go after what your heart tells you because you trust your feelings?
• Do you consult with others but then only to justify your choice and validate it?
• Do you ignore your feelings and go along with what your mind tells you?

It is not a matter of having two choices to select one. It is not that simple. The way we choose depends on many factors. One main factor is how much trust we have in our minds and hearts?

If you were in similar situations what would you decide and why?

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In today’s complex business world, change is hard. Companies venturing through major culture shifts, mergers, or other forms of change often struggle to make it to the end. The idea that people hate change is a phenomenon that is taught, coached, and wrestled with in many ways, shapes, and forms. Regardless of your mindset about CHANGE, there is one vital aspect you should explore.

PROGRESS is what you should be focused on. Change for the sake of change is meaningless. However, progress toward a new goal or achievement is more vital and more valuable to your organization.

Dean Lindsay, America’s premier authority on Progress, writes:

All progress is change, but not all change is progress.

Lindsay uses an illustration. If you wake up in the morning with a stomach ache, you want to change. You want it to go away.

If you tell a friend and they punch you in the nose, you got a change. But it wasn’t progress toward curing your stomach ache.

The RhetoricThere are voices in the media demanding change. The word has been worn out. Again, change for the sake of change is not progress.

When you sense the need for change or you design an intentional change in the way your business operates, be sure you are designing progress toward a new goal.

I know companies who have launched major change initiatives (they call it that) with the intent to become more profitable, increase margin, find efficiencies, or become more competitive.

Those are great objectives.

Yet what they are really saying is we need progress forward to be better situated for growth and survival in our industry.

Too often the well-intended change that is initiated gets bogged down in all the adoption and adaptation process. As soon as the change feels hard and resistance begins to mount, plans are adjusted.

Many times the shift is pulled back or canceled in the face of resistance.

Living Through the CurveRoxanne Chugg writes: “The fact is that most change initiatives are done “to” employees, not implemented “with” them or “by” them. Although leaders are pushing behavior change from the top and expecting it to cascade through the formal structure, an informal culture left to instinct and chance will likely dig in its heels and resist or even hijack the change.”

There is a popular model that describes the change cycle. Dr. Virginia Satir first introduced this model when explaining emotional life-changing events in family therapy. However, it has been widely adopted in change management circles to help businesses plan for and implement change.

The “S” shape of this curve helps us see the complexity of making a change. When applied to a work team, each member of the team will experience their own progression through the curve, each moving at their own pace.

The key matter here is that everyone in the organization faces their own emotional curve when forced into change. Acceptance or adoption of the change is dependent upon the progress one can make moving through the curve.

If plotted together on a single graph you could see the lag points where the manager/leader may be further along the curve than his people. If the leader is not sensitive to this lag factor, then the message from the top might be skewed.

The leader could be thinking “Come on people, don’t you get this? Why aren’t we further along?”

In reality, the team may be lagging behind the leader’s position moving along the curve. A little bit of lag is normal. However, the leader must decide how much lag is tolerable.

Back to ProgressGiven the tremendous effort and disruption a change may cause at work, leaders must be mindful of the progress being made.

Leaders need to ask: “Is the company moving ahead because of this change or are we merely spinning our wheels, burning out the staff, and creating very little value?”

Question: What change initiative has your company gone through recently? Or were you the one directing it?

The post Change and Progress, Are They Twins? appeared first on Business Advisor and Executive Coach | Doug Thorpe.

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“Where are all the eggs?” he asked, his head buried in the fridge.

“What do you mean?” she replied.

“You know, the two large yellow and green Styrofoam cartons sitting on the top left shelf; the ones that held eighteen eggs each. Where did they go?” he responded.

She paused. “Oh, those eggs,” she murmured. “I gave them to our son when he picked up the oxygen tanks this morning.”

Silence blanketed the room for a hot minute. His brow furrowed as he stood up and inhaled deeply. “Babe, our son passed two and a half years ago.”

“Nonsense,” she said casually from the other room. “I happen to know that the young man who arrived here at 11 am was the same soul who delivered six high-efficiency portable oxygen tanks, one mega high efficiency ‘mother of all O2 tanks’ specifically designed for power outages, and one transport dolly eight weeks ago. He arrived with goodies for me, so I could stay alive after COVID attempted to do fuckery with my lungs and organs and such.”

She spoke as if in a trance. “You know, he might be our son.”

“He reads a lot and is a self-described nerd who recently moved back in with his parents to save money. Did you know this guy works crazy hours, like a doctor?” she asked proudly. “He’s frequently on call and makes late-night runs that often come in just as his shift ends. Sometimes, he even goes back out after he gets home. He takes all the calls no matter how tired or late the hour, delivering air to folks who are critically ill or dying.” Her husband caught the admiration in her voice as it trailed off.

“He worked in a factory, punching rivets and geedonks, before COVID. Did you know he especially adores his nursing home clients because they see him without prejudice or judgment? He said their chats are filled with wonder and to the point. Time is of the essence for these folks and he loves their honesty, focus, and humor.”

She paused and giggled before continuing. “He once drank a bottle of hot sauce 30 minutes before work, to see what might happen. It went as expected and he regretted the decision for most of his shift.”

“When he was a kid, his dad was given three months to live; some crazy cancer had invaded the family fortress. His old man, now a cancer survivor and a diabetic, is still alive and kicking. Talk about a miracle.”

“He is dog and cat sitting for friends this weekend. Apparently, there are five cats with cool, anagram-like names. He adores all of them. Oh, and COVID hunted him down twice. He escaped the first round without incident, but the virus permanently trashed his singing voice the second time he got sick. He still sings a lot, though mostly in the car. He hates that his singing voice is now raspy and scratchy. Since COVID, he cannot hit the high notes. He wouldn’t sing for me. I think it makes him sad because he looked away when telling me how much he misses singing in public. That must be hard.”

The room grew quiet.

“Anyway, at the end of the day,” she declared firmly, “it was a business transaction, a simple decision really. He was here to collect that which allowed me to breathe when I could not do so by myself. The least I could do was chit-chat with him and offer something in exchange for his hard work.”

“Eggs seemed like a logical trade for oxygen. You know, the circle of life, bound together by love. Food, Air, Life; it’s such a simple pattern.”

Her words trailed off again.

By now, her husband was standing at the edge of the living room, watching and listening intently.

She continued, confident in her assessment. “Honestly, this stranger seemed so familiar. I recognized his wrinkled T-shirt, slouchy jeans, and a dark hoodie. There was something about his crisp arm tats, twinkling, slightly introspective eyes, quirky humor, raggedy hair, and scruffy beard. His hot sauce story had me rolling on the floor in laughter. And, I especially liked his hippy hoppy happy steps as he waved goodbye when he left. He is a deep thinker, very observant, and awfully kind. His eyes had a gentle, genuine glow about them. It was hard to say goodbye.”

“Anyway, I’m certain this young man carries our son’s soul with him wherever he goes. He shared snippets of his life story with me. He makes a living by helping others. It’s our son. I felt it in my bones. I have no idea how our son’s soul got into this young man. I know it makes no logical sense; I just know it did.”

She paused again, sighing deeply. “Yes, I’m certain of it because, for a split second, I felt like everything was ok, whole again, like it was a few years back before it wasn’t.” She smiled a broken smile through her tears as her husband hugged her tight.

Food, Air, Life: Fitting symbols of love, gratitude, and loss. The circle of life lives in the eggs.

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While waiting for a train at a station in Atlanta, Georgia, a young man wearing dress pants and a button-down shirt sat on a bench. As he struggled with his tie, an older woman encouraged her husband to help. When the elderly man hunched over and began teaching the young man how to knot the tie, a stranger took a photo of the trio. When this photo went viral online, many viewers left comments about the power of random acts of kindness.

In a world filled with darkness, let us be the light.

Imagine a news cycle where headlines are filled not with tragedy, but with triumph. A world where stories of kindness are as commonplace as the morning sunrise. Instead of being bombarded with negativity, what if we were inspired daily by tales of everyday heroes, selfless acts, and communities coming together to make a difference?

Let’s flip the script. Let’s choose to focus on the good. Let’s be the change we want to see in the world. By sharing stories of compassion, we can ignite a spark of hope in others, reminding them that humanity is capable of incredible acts of love and kindness.

Join us in spreading positivity. Let’s flood the world with stories that uplift, inspire, and remind us of the inherent goodness in all of us. Together, we can create a brighter future, one act of kindness at a time.

CLICK TO SHARE YOUR STORY OF HUMANKINDNESS WITH THE UNIVERSE

What moments of human goodness have you witnessed this week, this month, or this year that have touched your heart or renewed your faith in humanity? CLICK ABOVE and tell us about those moments so we can spread the warmth of goodness across the universe by adding your story to our global HUMANKINDNESS Showcase.

Editor’s Note: Enjoy our evolving *Exploring Our Shared Humanity Series HERE*

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“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.” — Nikola Tesla

The world of manifestation is filled with different techniques to help people align their thoughts with their desires, but one of the most intriguing is Nikola Tesla‘s 369 Manifestation Method. Tesla, known for his fascination with the numbers 3, 6, and 9, believed these numbers held the key to understanding the universe. Today, this has evolved into a popular manifestation technique, with two distinct interpretations for how to use it. Both methods are designed to focus your mind on your desires, helping you manifest them into reality.

The Two Interpretations of the 369 MethodInterpretation 1: Repeating Affirmations Throughout the Day

The most widely known version of the 369 method involves repeating your affirmations at specific times during the day:

In the morning, repeat your chosen affirmation 3 times.

In the afternoon, repeat it 6 times.

Before bed, repeat it 9 times.

This approach is simple and focuses on the repetition of affirmations to help reprogram your mind. The idea is to consciously focus on your desires multiple times a day, reinforcing the belief that they will come to pass. By doing this consistently, your mind starts to align with your intentions, and you begin to notice opportunities or pathways that bring your goals closer to reality.

Interpretation 2: Setting Alarms and Repeating Desires

The second interpretation is based on setting reminders throughout the day to help keep your desires top of mind. Here’s how it works:

Choose 3 things you want to manifest.

Set 6 alarms throughout the day to remind yourself of these desires.

When each alarm goes off, repeat each desire 9 times in your mind.

This method emphasizes keeping your mind consistently focused on what you want. By setting alarms and repeating your desires, you train your brain to stay connected to your goals throughout the day. This approach engages your reticular activating system (RAS), the part of your brain responsible for filtering information and helping you notice things that align with your intentions. By constantly reminding yourself of what you want, you become more aware of opportunities to manifest it.

Why 3, 6, and 9?“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” — Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla famously stated, “If you knew the magnificence of the numbers 3, 6, and 9, you would have the key to the universe.” He believed these numbers represented universal patterns and energy. The number 3 signifies creation, 6 stands for harmony, and 9 represents completion and fulfillment. By focusing on these numbers during the manifestation process, you align yourself with these universal principles, allowing you to tap into the energy required to manifest your desires.

How to Choose Which Version to UseBoth interpretations of the 369 method have their strengths, and which one you choose depends on your personal preference. If you enjoy structured routines and are drawn to writing or speaking affirmations, the first version may be a better fit for you. On the other hand, if you prefer integrating manifestation into your daily life more subtly, using alarms and mental repetition, the second version might resonate more.

Ultimately, both approaches are about focus, repetition, and belief. The method you choose should feel comfortable and natural, so you’re more likely to stick with it and consistently put your energy toward your goals.

Manifesting with IntentionTesla’s 369 Manifestation Method isn’t just about numbers; it’s about intention, focus, and reprogramming the mind to attract the things you want. Whether you choose to repeat affirmations throughout the day or use reminders to keep your desires in mind, the key is consistency. Keep your focus on what you want, trust the process, and allow yourself to embrace the opportunities that come your way.

The 369 Manifestation Method, inspired by Tesla’s belief in the power of numbers, offers a simple yet powerful way to manifest your desires. Whether you prefer structured repetition of affirmations throughout the day or setting reminders to keep your goals top of mind, the key to success is consistency and belief. By tapping into the energy of 3, 6, and 9, you align yourself with the universe’s flow, opening the door to achieving your goals.

The Science Behind Repetition and Manifestation“My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe, there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength, and inspiration.” — Nikola Tesla

The essence of the 369 Manifestation Method lies in the power of repetition. When your mind is continuously reminded of what it desires, it begins to focus on ways to achieve it. This taps into the brain’s reticular activating system (RAS), which acts like a filter, bringing to your attention things that are relevant to your goals and desires. By reminding your brain of your aspirations multiple times a day, you are essentially training it to notice opportunities that align with what you want.

This method is also a form of visualization, another powerful tool in manifestation. By visualizing your desires while repeating them, you’re not only stating what you want, but you’re also seeing yourself in the reality of having it. This practice can elevate your emotional and mental vibration, making you more likely to take action toward manifesting your goals.

More on “Why 3, 6, and 9?”Nikola Tesla believed that 3, 6, and 9 were the most important numbers in the universe, stating that “If you knew the magnificence of the numbers 3, 6, and 9, you would have a key to the universe.” According to Tesla, these numbers have profound connections to universal patterns, such as the patterns found in nature, mathematics, and even energy.

The number 3 represents divine creation—think of the power of triads, like past, present, future or birth, life, and death.

The number 6 relates to harmony and balance.

The number 9, Tesla believed, was the key to unlocking higher dimensions and universal truths. Nine represents completion and wholeness.

These numbers also appear in mathematics, geometry, and many spiritual traditions, further cementing their significance. In the context of manifestation, 3, 6, and 9 serve as reminders to focus on the things that matter and to align your thoughts and energy in a balanced and harmonious way.

Here’s An Example For You“The secrets of the universe lie in the numbers 3, 6, and 9.” — Nikola Tesla

Imagine you’re trying to manifest a successful business venture. You begin by clearly identifying your three specific goals: increasing revenue, securing a new client, and enhancing your product line. You set six alarms throughout your workday and each time one goes off, you take a minute to silently repeat these goals nine times, visualizing each goal coming to fruition.

Over time, these affirmations and visualizations will begin to shape your actions, decisions, and even the opportunities you notice. You may find yourself coming up with creative ideas to enhance your product line, or you might meet someone unexpectedly who becomes your next major client. The consistent focus on your desires trains your brain to find ways to achieve them, turning intention into reality.

Is the 369 Method Worth Trying?Tesla’s 369 Manifestation Method is not about magic or quick fixes; it’s about focus, intention, and aligning your mind with your desires. By continuously reminding yourself of what you want, you become more attuned to opportunities and pathways that bring you closer to your goals.

Whether or not you believe in the metaphysical aspects of the 369 numbers, there’s no denying the power of focused thought and repetition in shaping reality.

By integrating this method into your daily life, you can create a clear and purposeful mindset, making it easier to manifest what you truly desire.

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Uncertainty is massively de-stabilizing to the nervous system. Us humans like predictability – which is why we like to categorize people, by their job, marital status, ethnicity, city of birth, political party affiliation, gender etc.

The last few months (and years) have been hugely unstable for many people. The extreme weather decimated communities, the extreme polarity in politics, and the beginning of the awakening by many of the extraordinary disparities between people when you categorize us according to the census—races/ ethnicities/ genders/ city & state—perhaps you feel that too.

This uncertainty has, in many cases, created loss for many people: jobs, relationships, homes, and communities. What amplifies the loss is the lack of ritual to mark the transition.

This is called ambiguous loss.This is the kind of loss that occurs without closure or clear understanding, such as when someone you have been communicating with ghosts you, and you don’t know whether it’s because they found a better option or you offended them somehow.

The thing about ambiguity is that you create potential answers, or play out scenarios of things that you would like to say or do, as you try to create clarity and understanding. And this slows down your grieving and complicates the healing process. We get stuck in what I like to call the “subjective swirl” in our own heads. And this plays out in our energy body & consumes our limited time, energy, and focus.

Ambiguous loss can create anxiety, confusion, and chronic sorrow.

Emotions are energy in motion – e-motion. An emotion has a lifespan of about 90 seconds. However, this is where things get sticky. It is really easy for this emotion to get stuck & not disperse through your system rather than getting stuck. When that happens the emotion becomes a mood. Moods can last for hours to days, to weeks, to months, to years. And then, at some point, these moods become your personality. And then shifting becomes much harder.

Our brains are designed to be efficient – creating automation is one of the ways that our brains reduce energetic output. Our brains work in tandem with all the other systems that comprise us – eleven in total. For example, the hormonal system. If we habitually react to adrenaline to complete tasks – it can be hard to complete tasks without adrenaline. As a sidebar – this is something that people like me, who have ADHD do – we create adrenaline due to the low levels of dopamine that we naturally produce. The adrenaline (like coffee, Adderall etc) gives us the fire to take action. Another example could include working to retrain your most habitual response to stress – fight-flight-faun-freeze responses.

So, how do we process ambiguous loss?There are of course many options that can support this, for example, exercise, conversations with friends, and various forms of therapy, including talk therapies, EFT (tapping), EMDR, plant-based medicines, etc. I am also a huge fan of finding and practicing tools that I can institute on my own, and repeat, reflect on and rely on, and then use in these other spheres of support.

I am going to share my THREE favorite tools for processing and managing ambiguous loss.

1 – DIALOG JOURNALING

This is a style of journaling that helps you play out the ambiguity.

1. Take a moment to identify the person you would like to communicate with, who played a significant role in your experience of ambiguous loss. If it’s not clear yet, follow the steps below and see who emerges.
2. Grab a notebook and pen and set it next to you.
3. Close your eyes, get grounded. Either crossed legs or sitting in a chair ground with your feet, sit up straight and lengthen your exhales for a few minutes.
4. Allow a soothing place in nature to emerge in your mind’s eye – and start to walk along the path that emerges in front of you.
5. Notice someone walking towards you on the path.
6. As you start to see the features of the person walking towards you, notice that this is the person who you did not have a resolved interaction with (note – the person can be living or dead). Look at them, see them, feel them.
7. Open your eyes, take your notebook, and have a conversation with this person: Your initial: “…..” Their initial: “…..” Repeat. For example:
   1. You: Why did you never respond to that last text?
   2. Person X: I felt uncomfortable and ashamed
   3. You: I was deeply hurt by your silence & lack of explanation
   4. Person X: etc…

You are literally writing out a conversation with this person.

When you are finished read through and write a summary statement with any observations. THIS STEP IS KEY to providing an extra level of objectivity to your observations. You might notice the emotional valence of the dialog – sadness, hurt, anger. You can release this into the universe – by burning the piece of paper. You can use your revelations to reach out to them, if that feels good, you can take this to your next therapy appointment, or you can do some more journaling about what you concluded.

You can use this technique with people from your past too – perhaps a family member, ex-lover, or ex-boss who you have some residual and unresolved feelings toward.

2 – CREATE YOUR OWN RITUAL

Rituals are practices that have been lost by many cultures. Whether they are coming of age – the red tent, bar mitzvah, quinceanera or mark a transition in life like a baptism, retirement party, a wake.. All these events have an energy of transitioning from one state, one place, one energetic frame to another. And as humans, they help us with the grief, the mourning, the excitement and all the emotions in between that are often ignored by our society,

When I got divorced nine years ago, I was really struck by the legal aspect of the ending, standing there in court, which in Ohio has such a vile patriarchal thrust because ALL women are asked if they are pregnant (even if you’re 90 years old or you have been separated for years) as part of the process. It felt hollow and failed to acknowledge the beauty that had come out of the marriage – my three children. Also, it only focused on the ending, not the beginning – my re-entry back into the world again, as a whole person – because I refused to buy into the “better half” narrative.

The first ritual was one that I repeated for the next eight years. I committed to having a party for me and my three babies every year on my wedding anniversary. I would bake a cake and celebrate THEM, because without my marriage, they would not exist. Now that day just passes me by without much awareness or reflection.

The second ritual I participated in was a one-off event – a friend of mine organized a divorce party. It was similar to a bachelorette party (AKA Hen Party if you’re a Brit). It was a combination of food, dancing, strippers, silly gifts and celebration of the next stage of my life. I was 39 when I got divorced – so a lot of life ahead of me!

3 – MEDITATION – loving-kindness or tonglen

There are two really useful meditations that I have been practicing for well over a decade and are really helpful when you want to shift the sad or angry energy regarding a person or group of people.

Tonglen is a process of absorbing the pain of others and transmuting it. This practice requires you to be feeling strong enough to absorb the pain of others, so don’t do this if you’re feeling emotionally battered. I have done this for people who are dying – either sitting with them and far away. I have done this for groups of people during times of extreme stress.

1. Sit quietly, and think about who you would like to do this for – it could be a person, a group of people, the whole world
2. Start your meditation practice by taking your seat: closed eyes, chin parallel to the ground, firm seat, erect posture, hands relaxed in lap, legs crossed or feet on the floor
3. After a few minutes of quiet breathing, bring your attention to your heart center & see it start to energize as a bright, golden healing center
4. Exhale all your air and then inhale all the pain of the person/ people you have chosen. Imagine it is dark, heavy smoke that you inhale through all your pores and into your heart center
5. The bright, golden healing light transmutes the smoke and you exhale that bright healing light
6. Keep going for as long as you feel able!

Loving-kindness

This is a practice which I was taught in 2008. In December 2012 my Buddhist teacher, a nun, had us practice this for the Sandy Hook events. The twist was we were to do this for the shooter, not the families. We found this really hard, but she suggested that the way to heal the world was to work with the harder emotions, our feelings towards people who had hurt us, hurt others and behaved in destructive, abusive ways.

What I have noticed over the years of teaching this practice is the throb of emotions as they play across the faces of those I am teaching – sometimes the tears, the tightening of the jawlines.

1. Start your meditation practice by taking your seat: closed eyes, chin parallel to the ground, firm seat, erect posture, hands relaxed in lap, legs crossed or feet on floor. This practice helps you move through your different emotions toward people.
2. Start by envisioning someone you LOVE. Let their image appear in front of you – see their clothes, eyes, and expressions. Feel them.

Then say to them:

May you be happy
May you be healthy
May you be safe
May you feel at ease

Let that image disperse.

1. Next, envision someone who is NEUTRAL to you. Let their image appear in front of you – see their clothes, eyes, and expressions. Feel them

Then say to them:

May you be happy
May you be healthy
May you be safe
May you feel at ease

Let that image disperse.

1. Then envision someone who you HATE or DISLIKE intensely. Let their image appear in front of you – see their clothes, eyes, and expressions. Feel them

Then say to them:

May you be happy
May you be healthy
May you be safe
May you feel at ease

Let that image disperse.

If you continue with this practice you will notice that people might move between the categories. Someone who is neutral today might become someone you love. Someone who you hate might become neutral. The way we categorize people is essentially being challenged too. What most people report – and I have personally experienced, is that when I work with a very challenging individual in the hate category, their power over my emotions diminishes.

So my lovelies if you are experiencing ambiguous loss at the moment, know that you are not alone. There are many of us here who feel it and are holding your tender heart.

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Ego, the Latin word for “I,” involves a sense of self-importance that can slow down personal growth and negatively impact interactions with other people. This term is used to define our own sense of self-worth. Often, it is applied in a negative context, with the phrase “inflated egos” associated with arrogant or unapproachable leaders. On the other hand, leaders without healthy egos may struggle to inspire confidence and trust in their teams. So, when it comes to ego management, there’s a delicate balance to strike. Egos can be both a blessing and a curse.

Difference between Ego and PrideWe need to know a subtle difference between ego and pride though it is often used interchangeably by many. However, these two words are interlinked since they refer to a state of mind of an individual. Ego can be defined in simple terms as the way how a person perceives him/herself.That is how the particular individual thinks, feels, and distinguishes him/herself from the rest.Pride, on the other hand,is a feeling one may get after an accomplishment or a success of oneself and someone else. This is the key difference between the two.

Let’s assess who these ego-centric people are around us?

1. Control FreaksOne of the most prevalent ego traps in leadership is the desire to control and dominate every aspect of their businesses. Leaders who fall into this trap struggle to delegate tasks, micromanage their subordinates, and avoid feedback. To overcome this trap, leaders must learn to trust their team members, empower them effectively, and embrace collaboration and diverse perspectives.

2. Individual DecisionmakersLeaders with inflated egos are bound to fail eventually in one way or the other as they love to listen to themselves only. As a result, they avoid taking risks and seek feedback from their team. Instead, they make unilateral decisions to protect their ego and sometimes they avoid making any decisions. However, failure is an inevitable part of leadership and offers valuable learning opportunities. Leaders should cultivate resilience, adopt a growth mindset, and encourage experimentation and innovation within their teams.

3. Recognition SeekersSome leaders promote self-recognition and status over anything else in their respective organisations. A classic example is they would be over-cautious to know in advance where exactly they are seated at an event — be it a corporate dinner or an award night. They go through this Me-Centric syndrome all the time. They stay engaged in self-promotion, taking credit for their employees’ accomplishments, and prioritise their own agenda over collective business goals. True leadership involves humility and a commitment to serving others rather than seeking personal glory.

4. Inflexible & Closed-mindedEgo-centric leaders strongly advocate that it’s their way or the highway and are resistant to change over new ideas. They remain strong advocates of the status quo. They consider their past successes as the only way to look to the future, without realising that times have changed. This closed-mindedness stifles innovation, creativity, and adaptability within the organization. Leaders should remain open to feedback, embrace diversity of thought, and cultivate a culture of continuous learning and improvement.

5. Overconfident & ArrogantWhile confidence is an essential trait for effective leadership, excessive self-assurance can lead to arrogance and hubris. Overconfident leaders may underestimate risks, dismiss feedback, and make reckless decisions that harm their teams or organizations. Cultivating humility, seeking diverse perspectives, and acknowledging limitations are essential for tempering overconfidence.

How to escape these Traps?Here are five tips to help leaders identify and overcome “ego traps.”

1. Go through Personality Assessments

Every leader must know his/her personality type. For that, they must acquire the learning agility that follows their own path to maturity and neutralising their ego. This is because individual behavior is a result of our life experiences and beliefs. So, it’s important to understand how our most powerful personality traits drive our behavior. This will help us avoid affinity bias. Multiple types of assessments aim to measure personality traits, like the Myers-Briggs personality test and Rorschach Inkblot Test.

2. Identify a Role Model

Let’s learn to associate with the best people around. Identify role models within and outside the organisations who can guide us to operate on a positive note. Mature leaders are good mentors and active listeners who create authentic cultures where employees thrive. Let’s consider a leader like this to be our role model. This will help us examine our ego-driven behaviour and guide you toward psychological maturity.

3. Sharpen People Skills

Leadership is all about people. Talking to them, mentoring them, coaching them, resolving their issues, and becoming more mature while using their positions to help others achieve their goals. Learning must continue at every stage of our careers to refine management styles to help teams succeed by providing constructive feedback.

4. Learn to Let Go

Success is not only about individual achievement and power, but it is also about being thoughtful and reflective on account of others in our teams. By relinquishing control, we promote a sense of trust in our team members and overcome our sense of being in power. We must understand the real meaning of “letting go” and “stepping back’ in organisational context. We need to understand why we get attached to people or things in the first place.

5. Stay Empathetic

InTim Cook’s 2017 MIT commencement address, he warned graduates, “People will try to convince you that you should keep empathy out of your career. Don’t accept this false premise”. The Apple CEO is not alone in recognizing and emphasizing the importance of empathy — the ability to share and understand others’ emotions — at work. At the time of his remarks, 20% of United States employers offeredempathy trainingfor managers. In arecent surveyof 150 CEOs, over 80% recognized empathy as key to success.In short,Empathyis the ability to see things from another’s perspective and feel their emotions. Putting yourself in another person’s shoes might lead you to act with compassion and do what you can to improve their situation. In doing so, you can reduce the other person’s distress as well as your own.

In a NutshellTo conclude, let’s understand that ego can be both a driving force and a stumbling block in leadership. By recognising and overcoming common ego traps, leaders can foster a culture of collaboration, growth, and success within their teams and organisations. Cultivating humility, empathy, and a commitment to lifelong learning are essential for effective leadership that prioritizes the collective good over personal ego. While confidence and self-assurance are often necessary traits for effective leadership, unchecked ego can lead to a host of problems that hinder personal growth and team success.

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I saw a post on Facebook that read, “Just because we disagree on politics, doesn’t mean we can’t still be family, friends, and neighbors.”

Family. Friends. Neighbors.

Community.

As I walked my neighborhood this morning, I found myself searching the faces of the people I passed. Is he in my community? Is she? Sure, we live in the same space, but are we in community?

Community is not just where we live, work, or play. It’s the human spirit that connects us. It’s the norms we embrace, the values that define us, and the participation in a shared story that becomes the lens through which we see the world. It’s how we take care of each other.

As political pundits twist themselves into post-mortem pretzels trying to explain what went wrong or what went right, this election has taught us a lot about the construct of community. One community is celebrating while another community mourns.

For the latter, grief and loss are personal and subjective. Many people are struggling to find the words to describe their feelings. Not just the loss of an election, but the loss of ideals that we thought defined us as Americans, the loss of hope for a more unified country, and the loss of respect for people we thought we knew.

For some, the outcome of this election won’t be life-changing. To many of my family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues who ask why we can’t just agree to disagree and still love each other, I’m struggling to understand what to do with the dissonance in values we’re experiencing in our respective communities. If countless people have to suffer for others to prosper, is that just a difference of opinion?

In this “brave new world” we’re about to embark upon, maybe we save a few dollars on groceries. Perhaps federal and state budgets won’t be burdened with social programs that feed children and give the homeless a fighting chance to get on their feet. Some might even see a bump in their financial portfolios and a break on taxes.

But at what expense? At whose expense?

If the Affordable Care Act is gutted as promised, those lucky enough to have health benefits or concierge care will be fine. While you might be sympathetic for friends or family with pre-existing conditions who may never find the health care they can afford, or worse, be bankrupted by medical costs without coverage, at least the government won’t have a role in yours.

Most agree there is a problem at the border, and that will surely be fixed with the incoming administration. The centerpiece of the Republican reelection bid was a promise for mass deportations of more than 1 million immigrants per year – an effort that will not only be costly to our economy but also inhumane leading to cruel family separations. Unfortunate casualties?

If a woman or, God forbid, a little girl in your life needs reproductive care, you’ll have the means to find it in a place where she can get it without putting her or her doctor at risk of criminal charges. Those without the financial resources who live in a state with draconian laws will be profoundly scarred by circumstances beyond their control.

If you’re one of the lucky ones, life may not change much. With privilege comes the comfort of a bubble that insulates you from experiencing the pain and hardships of others. Of course, you’re not heartless, but sacrifices must be made. It’s much easier to pull the shades down and go on with your life than to reflect on the impact this decision will have on millions of families.

When I don’t know what to do with the thoughts in my head or the hurt in my heart, I write. Sometimes it’s to help me make sense of it all. Sometimes it’s with the hope that my words matter. This time, I think it’s both.

So, as I reflect upon this place we’re in, these are my words:

I’m afraid that people I love will be hurt, and I’ll be helpless against it.

I’m angry that our children are learning that name-calling and dehumanizing language – even under the guise of humor and sarcasm – is how to treat people.

I’m terrified that sentiment echoing the ideology of Adolf Hitler has become acceptable vernacular on the public stage.

I’m devastated for immigrants aspiring to become American citizens, the LGBTQ+ community seeking acceptance and safety, people of color striving for equality, and women fighting for the right to control their own bodies.

I’m stunned by the ignorance of people who are just “glad this whole thing is over” with little comprehension of the severe consequences to come.

I feel stupid for having faith in our “better angels.”

As hard as it is to articulate fear, loss, and anger, words give us voice. Words give us agency. Words enable us to connect with compassion and humanity.

James Baldwin is quoted as saying, “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”

Powerful words, indeed.

If we preach love but practice hate, the words are meaningless. Hate wins.

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If you’re anything like me, you have days in which, on things you’ve seen a million times, you suddenly notice something you’ve never noticed before. So it was that Saturday morning, I reached for the box of Melitta Coffee filters for which I reach every day, more than once on most days. The word, German, seemed to jump off the box at me. And I read this:

In 1908, a German homemaker, Melitta Bentz, made history when she invented the coffee filter. Tired of drinking bitter coffee, she poked holes in the bottom of a brass cup and lined it with a sheet of her son’s blotting paper. The result … rich, flavorful coffee without bitterness or mess.

After I read that, Anne came into the kitchen. I was still standing by the cupboard from which I’d retrieved the coffee filters, box in hand, with this look on my face:

Needless to say, Anne’s seen that thousand-yard look before.

“Uh oh. What are you thinking about now?” she asked.

Snapping out of my reverie, I said, “How do you think a German woman knew, a hundred-and-sixteen years ago, that if she poked holes in one of her husband’s brass cups, stole a piece of her son’s blotting paper, lined the cup with the paper, filled the cup with ground coffee, and poured hot water over it, the coffee would be less bitter?”

“I have no idea,” Anne said.

I went on: “How did she poke holes in her husband’s brass cup? Did she use a drill? Was it his drill? Did he get angry that his perfectly good brass cup was now perforated? Did she put his tools back where they belonged? And what about her son? Was he sore that some of his blotting paper was swiped by his mom for a beverage experiment?”

“I really don’t know,” Anne said, a hint of impatience creeping into her voice.

“Do you think anybody got poisoned? What if the filter didn’t prevent copper or zinc from the brass from leaching into the coffee? And what if there was aluminum or nickel in the alloy or the plating? If Melitta had put baking flour into the cup with the blotting paper and poured water over that, do you think it would have filtered out the glutens?”

“Mark.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you ever going to make the coffee?”

Ouch! Well … ya can’t hate a guy for being curious.

P.S. For those of you who doubt the veracity of Melitta’s story, here ya go. And for those of you who wonder at the cause of my airheadedness, blame it on Melitta.

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Kelley Cours Anderson, College of Charleston, and Karen Anne Wallach, University of Alabama in Huntsville

Life in the digital world can be rewarding. It’s convenient to order groceries for pickup, share photographs or music, and keep in touch with family and friends, no matter the distance. However, it can also be draining. The feeling of being constantly “on” and productive has driven people to reconsider their balance in the saturated digital world.

More than 70% of American adults are concerned about how technology affects their mental health and personal relationships. This worry is reinforced through media that point to people’s unhealthy habits with social media and phones.

What to do? There is a fuzzy line between healthy and unhealthy digital consumption. Some folks feel the need to fully disconnect from the digital world to understand this boundary. The idea of digital detoxing is gaining popularity. This practice involves intentionally unplugging from digital technologies in the pursuit of balance and digital well-being. Nearly half of Americans report that they are making a conscious effort to regularly step away from their screens.

But is this attempt enough? It’s no surprise that 62% of Americans confess to feeling addicted to their devices and the internet. Despite people’s best efforts to unplug and strike a balance, research indicates that digital detoxes often fall short.

Digital well-being is subjective. We research technology and consumer behavior. Our recent research studied the digital detox journey, where people take a much-needed break from digital consumption, aiming to uncover what supports or sabotages those seeking digital well-being. Our findings highlighted four key strategies to improve the outcome of this journey toward achieving a healthier digital balance: replacement practices, social bonds, mindfulness, and digital well-being as a journey.

1. Finding replacement practicesWe found that feelings of withdrawal during a digital detox are quite common. For many, reaching for their phones and scrolling has become such a ritual that they often don’t realize they are doing it. Many turn to their devices when bored or stressed, much like an adult pacifier. As a result, finding an alternative to distract your mind and occupy your hands can be crucial during a digital detox.

These replacement practices often involve hobbies or activities that result in play. As adults, people sometimes forget what it feels like to have fun. By separating fun from your task list and engaging in play for its own sake, you can significantly reduce stress levels and boost your digital well-being.

1. Shoring up social bondsHumans are inherently social creatures. Indeed, tools such as email, text messages and social media offer ways to enhance social connections. This innate desire for connection, however, combined with people’s reliance on technology, can lead to feelings of FOMO – fear of missing out – and anxiety during a digital detox.

The average adult now spends 70% less time with friends than they did two decades ago. Digital devices offer connection, but pieces of the experience are missing, such as the joy of in-person contact and trust in others that can be difficult to get online. So while we’re a more connected society, relationships suffer and people are more lonely than ever.

Therefore, during a digital detox it is vital to fill your cup with community, whether through existing friendships or by creating new ones. We recommend engaging in a digital detox alongside others, because FOMO may rear its ugly head if your friend pulls out their phone during a night out.

1. Emphasizing mindfulnessIn today’s fast-paced environment, finding a moment to pause can feel nearly impossible. Many experience solitude deprivation, meaning people often don’t have moments to be alone with their own thoughts. Yet, the ability to just be can allow time for reflection, helping you consider what makes you happy and healthy. Finding moments where you can step away – to be still and silent – can provide a much-needed recharge.

With adults spending about 90% of their time indoors, breaking the routine and heading outside can offer a more holistic perspective on both personal and global well-being. In our study, yoga and meditation were common ways that detoxers found moments to become more aware of their own thoughts, which helped foster more intentional behaviors.

1. Viewing digital well-being as an ongoing journeyUltimately, digital well-being is a journey. It is not a checklist that, once completed, means you are fulfilled.

Unfortunately, a single detox isn’t enough to cure digital imbalance. Instead, a successful detox often leaves people feeling introspective and curious. Our research participants shared that relapses are common, especially if they don’t set and monitor ongoing goals. Importantly, your needs change and evolve over time. In other words, what works now might not be what you need in the future.

Willpower just isn’t enough. We recommend identifying specific goals for yourself related to your own digital well-being. These aren’t productivity goals but goals to be unproductive. The aim is to unplug in more fulfilling ways. Whether planning a weekly game night with friends or taking a 10-minute walk without your phone, making time to unplug is worth it in the long run.

Researchers still have more to learn to help support digital wellness. We should remember, though, that individual differences play a crucial role in this equation, meaning that the journey to achieving digital harmony is uniquely personal. Thus, as people navigate their tech-saturated lives, it’s clear that finding the right balance is a complex, highly individualized process.

The digital detox journey can be challenging, but many people discover it to be rewarding in the end. People are not machines, however, so recognizing your limits and finding ways to reconnect with yourself and others during a detox can significantly enhance your sense of humanity and digital well-being.

Kelley Cours Anderson, Assistant Professor of Marketing, College of Charleston and Karen Anne Wallach, Assistant Professor of Marketing, University of Alabama in Huntsville

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Our ongoing series of Studio 360° “fireside chats” brings you face-to-face with some of the most intriguing human beings on the planet. We get to the essence of who they are and what matters most with our probing, unrehearsed questions coupled with the same from our Studio audience. Which brings us to our recent chat with Tony.

In a thirty-plus career spent working with some of the world’s leading artists, David Bowie, The Police, U2, Whitney Houston, Depeche Mode, REM, and Peter Gabriel to name but a few, Tony earned an irrefutable reputation running one of the UK’s foremost promotion companies. After being granted an ‘Alien of Extraordinary Ability’ for services to the music and arts he moved to the USA, and became a music industry consultant, published author, and TEDx speaker. He now shares the ‘Lessons Learned from Rock n Roll’ with a multitude of audiences all over the world. He is also a published author, podcast host, and radio presenter. Grab a large coffee, sit back, and enjoy our enlightening one-hour chat with Tony.

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I did not vote for Donald Trump.

I desperately hoped the Republican party would find its way back to sanity and nominate Nikki Hayley. But extremist rhetoric and cult of personality won the day. So I did what I often do. I voted third-party.

That being said, I feel the same way I did after the 2016 presidential election: I’m dismayed that Trump won, but I’m relieved that his opponent lost.

Beyond the result itself, it’s the response from Harris supporters that is disturbingly surreal:

• America has fallen.
• Democracy is dead.
• How could this happen?
• We’ve shown who we really are.
• A fascist dictator now rules our country.

Talk about surreal. Bill Maher, once considered a beyond-the-pale progressive, has now become the voice of reason and balance: None of the doomsday predictions came true during Trump’s first term. They won’t come true during the second.

I know… liberals don’t like his Supreme Court picks. But it would have been no different with any other Republican president. That’s the way the system works.

He took away a woman’s right to choose. No, he didn’t. None other than Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a fervent abortion supporter, observed that Roe was shoddy jurisprudence. The High Court’s reversal of Roe did not outlaw abortion; it overturned a poorly conceived decision and returned the issue to the legislative branch, where it belongs.

The real catastrophe of the recent election cycle is the tsunami of misinformation and muddy thinking on both sides.

Many conservatives who celebrate Trump’s policies – for good reason – excuse his deplorable character and divisive rhetoric. Many liberals who despise Trump’s behavior – for good reason – refuse to recognize any of his accomplishments. Both are equally disingenuous.

As I wrote after Biden’s victory in 2020 and revisited earlier this year, Trump deserves accolades for:

• leading the United States toward energy independence
• dramatically lowering unemployment, especially among minorities
• overhauling the criminal justice system
• shoring up the Veterans’ Administration
• aggressively filling judicial seats left vacant by his predecessors
• maintaining confidence in the economy during the devastating crisis of COVID-19
• helping drive the creation of an effective COVID-19 vaccine
• avoiding new military entanglements
• achieving stunning diplomatic victories in the Mideast and the Balkans
• being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize

It’s defensible to argue that these victories don’t outweigh his corrosive personal conduct and caustic rhetoric. It’s irresponsible to refuse even to acknowledge them.

Worst of all, dislike of Trump is no excuse for the irrational exuberance celebrating the most lackluster candidate to lead the Democratic ticket since George McGovern.

In one exchange on social media, Harris was described as one of the most qualified candidates ever and extremely likable. How much Kool-Aid does one have to drink to achieve this level of delusion?

Only a few months before Biden named her heir apparent, Democrats were debating whether Kamala Harris was qualified to remain on the ticket with Biden as VP. Early on, she was accused of refusing to read her briefing materials only to turn around and “berate employees” whom she accused of being responsible for her embarrassing unpreparedness.

By the summer of 2022, 13 senior Harris staffers had abandoned ship. Their revolt coincided with a one-on-one interview with NBC News reporter Lester Holt, in which Harris defended her failure to visit the chaotic Southern border by cackling and insisting she hadn’t “been to Europe” either. Whatever that was supposed to mean.

And yet, despite all that and more, the moment Biden threw his support to Harris she acquired a messianic aura and was deified as the savior of the civilized world.

There’s a very good reason why her primary bid was the first to implode in the 2020 campaign, just as there’s good reason why she received 15 million fewer votes than Biden received in his presidential victory. She speaks in canned soundbites, has no ideas of her own, and oozes condescension whenever challenged on her policies or her record.

Harris has long-appeared to have no core values. The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board wrote in its endorsement of her 2016 Senate candidacy that she “has been too cautious and unwilling to stake out a position on controversial issues, even when her voice would have been valuable to the debate.”

It’s not as if the Democrats didn’t have options. RFK, Joe Manchin, and Amy Klobuchar would have made respectable candidates. So why was Kamala coronated?

That was the question that haunted conservatives, who widely saw her as a tool to advance the woke agenda associated with the most progressive wing of the Democratic party. Their vote for Trump was largely a backlash against the real or perceived attack on traditional values that include:

• Redefining marriage
• Biological men competing in women’s sports and in women’s locker rooms
• Open borders
• Sanctuary cities
• Radical education agendas
• The rise of socialism on college campuses
• Weaponization of the Department of Justice
• Incoherent international policies
• Equivocation about or enthusiastic support for Hamas
• The resurgence of violent anti-Semitism

The persistent progressivism of the Democrats was more than enough to convince conservatives to overlook Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and personal shortcomings. Who else would save the country from the moral corruption certain to befall us under a Harris presidency? Better a competent boor, they told themselves, than a useful idiot in the hands of anti-American ideologues.

Then there was this remark about Kamala:

Say what you want about her, but she is a good person with the interests of the common person as her priority.

Really? How do you know? Jimmy Carter appeared to be a deeply moral and virtuous person, before he revealed himself as a delusional anti-Semite. And even if he were truly good-intentioned, his incompetence as president was so glaring that voters ousted him in one of the greatest electoral landslides in history.

But even that didn’t make him less dangerous. Carter’s good intentions enabled North Korea to develop atomic weaponry. Barack Obama’s good intentions convinced him to reinvigorate the terrorist theocracy of Iran. Neville Chamberlain’s good intentions allowed Hitler to capture Europe.

There’s a famous road paved with good intentions. Who knows what damage Kamala might have been wreaked with hers?

Let me be clear: None of this is a defense of Donald Trump. But it does explain why so many voted for him. Yes, he had plenty of true-believers, as did Kamala. But many more simply felt they had no choice.

All the hand-wringing and lamentation by crestfallen Kamala supporters is deeply misdirected. The question is not why Trump found enthusiastic supporters. The question is why conservatives who would have preferred almost anyone other than Trump decided they had no option but to give him their vote.

Conservatives should be engaging in similar introspection: Had the Republican party not been blessed with such an untenable Democratic opponent, their candidate would surely have gone down in flames.

Caricaturing those who don’t see the world our way only contributes to an increasingly dysfunctional political culture. If all you want to do is preach to the choir, go right ahead. By doing so, you support the political duopoly that preserves its hold on power by polarizing and tribalizing the electorate.

But if you really want to promote a healthy society, make the effort to understand those who think differently from you. By showing them that you understand where they’re coming from, you might convince them to consider trying to understand you. Then there’s at least a chance that you might get them to see things your way, or at least find a way of meeting somewhere in the middle.

What are the chances that we might be able to choose between two worthy candidates in 2028? The Republicans certainly have viable options: Nikki Hayley, Marco Rubio, and Tulsi Gabbard would all make solid, balanced nominees. Presumably, the Democrats can find someone better than what they’ve given us in the last three cycles as well.

But the most important thing is to remember the old cliché:

When you’re pointing your finger at someone else, there are three fingers pointing back at you.

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On Deepavali Eve, my partner called to inform me that it was happening again. I had texted partners and employees early in the morning and followed up multiple times. He reminded me of such a behavioral pattern in January, which resulted in an organization’s implosion, and almost all employees left.

I tried to explain my side — first, how the organization was chasing deadlines, and then how I was built. His point was that if the employees did not understand the importance of deadlines, they wouldn’t do it anyway. And some things, my friend, do take time.

Fact. That is just about right. If only, the organization could grow at everybody’s whimsical pace. I was the managing partner and therefore responsible for all facets of the organization. But sometimes, that is just the honorable name for a beast of burden. My other partners are smart, learned, and perhaps, even wise. They have their fries in the oven.

Here, I decided to step back. Well, that’s that.

I strongly dislike the term “silent partners.” These partners possess substantial equity in a company and usually have their positions due to passive support from a group of founders.

The managing partner and operating partners are supposed to run the show. The silent partners are to be just that — silent. So, I realized that when I rushed to seek help from them — their purpose of existence anyway — I was not getting the support I needed. But in review meetings, the remarks of dissatisfaction and innovating answers of why they are yet to be satisfied enough to contribute — they expressed that their contribution was a risk they would not take yet.

The load on me, the managing partner, has piled on as a result. There are deadlines because some transactions were coming to fruition. The complaint that the product was not there for fundraising is now gone.

The most frustrating aspect of their approach is their indifference and silence. From just seeking help, I am not sure if they want me to pray and beg, that I would not.

I operate from Chennai, which is about 300 km away from our office in Bengaluru. While Bengaluru is an attractive city, I can’t afford to relocate there. My wife prefers to stay in Chennai due to her familiarity with the area and the support network she has established here. My previous move to Mumbai was a disaster, so I am very cautious about considering another relocation.

We are well-equipped to work remotely. My business partner works from Mumbai and can effectively handle her responsibilities. The challenge we face is that, since we operate remotely, I rely on frequent updates from our employees to keep things moving forward.

When the updates are unclear and undefined, I have to get specific and more frequent updates and follow-ups.

I designed the roles of program manager and operating partner to oversee the business-as-usual processes. Initially, everything was going well; however, issues began to arise in January when deadlines started to be missed. I faced criticism for my aggressive follow-ups and for sending messages at inconvenient times. The program manager left, and a new team gradually settled in after a mass exodus. Currently, the team is still short three qualified candidates, and we have encountered challenges related to working capital during this difficult period.

I established a daily huddle mechanism in which I participated. The partner who advised me at the beginning of this process suggested that I step back. I handed over the assignment to the new program manager and stepped away from direct involvement. Since then, things have generally gone well. While there have been a few minor issues, the new team has come together effectively and is emerging as a cohesive workgroup.

Then, there are new operating partners who funnel their requests through me. The transmission of these priorities from working partners to the team is critical. This is the unaddressed space.

Why am I responsible? Because I don’t want anything to go wrong. If somebody understands the requester’s priority, then my job is done. Somehow, that is the reason for the current situation. However, it also brought forth, the challenge I posed.

Once again, I have the responsibility of setting the stage. Therefore, I have decided to take a step back.

Instead of making impetuous decisions or snap judgments, we must step back, sometimes, and grant ourselves time for slow thinking, allowing critical thinking to open deadlocks and clear up clouds dimming our journey.

― Erik Pevernagie (“The postman always rings twice”)

*Step Back and Observe: *

Stepping back means allowing myself to be for a while simply. I plan to remain quiet and inactive, letting time pass to observe how people collaborate without my involvement. This approach differs from my usual style. However, as a visionary and someone responsible for strategy and operations, I recognize my right to intervene if necessary. For now, though, I will hold my opinions and be discreet about follow-ups and interventions.

*Set Rules of Engagement: *

There will be a Category B, where the team can talk to their supervisors, which is business as usual. There will also be Category A, which deserves my time, attention, and decision-making. This will evolve into an informal mechanism that will slowly become an unspoken rule. This way, adoption will be more effective.

*Review and Support: *

There are already designated review time slots. I will focus on engaging with the team only during these times. I will ask for updates before meetings and minutes after. The team will run the meetings, and I will offer help only when needed.

*Give It a Month: *

Let’s try this out in November and share the results and learnings afterward. Why don’t we wait until then?

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My recent post on “Musical Thinking” drew excellent comments. I found that some of the commenters summarized the idea of my post better than I did.

This was initially surprising for me. Thinking more about this I concluded that it is the “The Proximity Effect” that is in play.

The author focuses on the main idea but the readers focus on the whole article. Besides, the author is very close to what he is writing which may blur his eyes from seeing the whole post clearly.

Back to the Musical Post, Dennis Pitocco summarized it very elegantly. He wrote, “What a great analogy, my friend Ali Anani, PhD … Ideas are the building blocks of creativity, and just like musical notes, they sound best when harmonized. A diverse team, like a well-orchestrated ensemble, can create something truly magical when everyone plays their part and works together. It’s a reminder that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

This comment coincided later with a comment from Sujit Patel in which he wrote. “– If an individual is good at a musical instrument – chances are he/she might or might not make it to a commercial success. Now, Instead of each individual playing an instrument in a silo – why not – play in an orchestra/band – where a group of performers is showcasing their art on various musical instruments, for symphonies, theatricals, opera, etc. – all guided by the conductor/director”.

This comment invoked two ideas that I want to share with the readers. First, one is about the “Team Blurring Effect” in which the noise from the individual is hidden by the beauty of the teamwork.

Blur effect distorts the detail of an image which makes it less clear. The most common use of image blurriness is to remove noise from the image.

Teamwork does that for the individual in a similar manner to a band concealing the noise of individual musicians.

The other effect is the “Team Uplifting Effort”. This includes the synergistic part which Dennis Pitocco expressed in his comment, “. It’s a reminder that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

The other part is the uplifting of individuals’ performance by “beautifying” their work in hiding their noises. Not only do we uplift the individual’s productivity but also that of the team.

Team leaders are like great musicians and photographers. They know how to blur the shortcomings of their team members and make them look great within the team effort.

Team leaders are not pursuing defects in others, but in beautifying them and planting confidence in what they do.

It is not a game of finding defects; it is in hiding them so that the good efforts shine out. This boosts the morale of every team member and amplifies the effort of all team members.

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All of us would agree that children’s success at the beginning of their educational journey is pivotal. Many educational systems also have arrangements that allow them to identify children who would benefit from early intervention to not fall behind at the beginning of their educational journey.

But we must ask ourselves questions if these systems, which have not changed as much over a long period, are working. In the United States, if children are not doing well academically, either as writers, readers, or in math, they are put in remedial groups to work with them on skills they are not mastering. Usually, even the youngest children do not really like going to these group activities because they know that the reason they are in those groups is that they are weak academically. They can tell they are singled out.

For a couple of years, together with a wonderful elementary school teacher, Lucinda Ormiston, I’ve been involved in innovating in animal-assisted education to see if therapy animals could be incorporated more creatively into children’s learning to become more than therapy animals and take on a more involved role of teaching assistants, within their preferences of activities. What we have seen because of our simple but creative innovation surpassed our expectations. We have published a book about it and have been presenting at conferences and other venues because we want parents, teachers, and administrators to know what is possible to achieve.

Of course, every time the therapy animal appears in the classroom, such an interaction already changes the way children feel, which influences their attitude toward learning, because even petting an animal makes children feel safe and happy. But so much more than this simple interaction can be done as many therapy animals are playful and can do and want to do more than sitting down, lying down, or walking around the classroom.

One of our first activities with a small group of children struggling with math was using Carmel’s kibble. Each child received a handful of my dog’s kibble, a math fact to solve, such as addition and subtraction, and was asked to use dog food to manipulate its pieces and come up with the correct answer. Children had so much fun with this idea. They also knew that my dog would check if their answers were correct by coming over and eating all the kibble from the plastic trays. If my dog ate all the pieces, that would mean the answer was correct.

In a different activity, children played hide and seek with my dog. To this day, I remember the unbelievable excitement on their faces when they learned that they were going to hide, and my dog would look for them. This activity released so much joy in these children. Before hiding, each child received a math fact that they needed to solve. Of course, they were extremely delighted to solve this math fact because once my dog found a child, the child told my dog the answer. I have never seen so much excitement on children’s faces as they were telling the right answer and getting confirmation of correctness from Carmel by wagging her tail or sitting down. Even a child who had very serious behavioral issues transformed and became engaged and creative.

Last year, we worked with a very small group of boys whose math skills were very weak. One of the boys was always sad in the classroom, but when it was time to come to the math group, his face lit up when he found out that Carmel was going to be present. One of the activities we did with these boys involved laminated leaves and laminated circles. When a student picked two or three leaves off the floor and showed them to Carmel, Carmel would naturally sniff one of the leaves, which indicated that she picked one of them for the child to use. The students were already very excited because their favorite therapy animal picked a math fact for them. After that, they solved the addition or subtraction and matched the addition with an answer on the laminated circle. After a student matched an addition or subtraction with the circle, he called Carmel and asked her if it was correct. As my dog usually wags her tail or sits down, this was a very clear indication that the answer would be correct. The boys were enthusiastic, “I am right because Carmel just sat down!”

We observed several outcomes of including my therapy dog innovatively in children’s learning math. First, this inclusion completely changed children’s attitudes and motivation for learning a subject they struggled with. They wanted to participate in learning that included their dog as a teacher’s assistant. They also wanted to put more effort into trying those math facts. They were even entertained throughout the whole activity and at the end did not want the activity to stop. We also noticed that this type of teaching influenced us as educators. We were both entertained as well and excited to see the children’s enthusiasm. I remember when I told Lucinda that I didn’t see these children struggling in math because they were doing so well when my dog was helping them. Seeing children learning math while they moved around, interacting with their teaching assistant-therapy dog, was transformational for all of us. Children became much more successful in math and started liking it because fun, especially fun with animals, can make any subject interesting. Lucinda and I were equally delighted because seeing happy children who wanted to learn is what teaching is about.

Based on our observations, I conclude that the most important aspect of improving education for struggling children might be allowing children to experience learning differently.

Having a furry friend who joins children in innovative but simple ways makes this transformative learning experience possible.

Co-author, Lucinda Ormiston is an experienced teacher. She’s currently teaching fifth-grade children. Her educational experience includes teaching third, fourth, second-grade, and remedial math. Together with Barbara Vokatis, she co-created the dog therapy/literacy lab and co-authored Teachers and therapy dog teams: Innovative collaborations to make a difference for children.

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I recently said this to a client I was working with…

All the problems we encounter and all the opportunities we create, stem from what goes on in our minds. That’s why studying and being more aware of the mind is so fascinating.

He agreed and immediately looked up the word psychology. He discovered it comes from the Greek words psyche, meaning soul or mind, and logos, meaning study or discourse. Combined, psychology literally means the study of the soul or the study of the mind. The word has evolved over time to encompass the scientific study of behaviour and mental processes, reflecting the broad scope of the field as it is understood today.

If psychology is concerned with studying how we humans experience life, we might ask what are the principles that underpin it.

In my own journey looking at this question, I landed on these three principles:

1. Thought: we have a capacity to think. We humans receive between 70 and 150 thousand thoughts a day, most of which we’re unconscious of. By ‘capacity to think’ whatever we do think, I’m talking impersonally, as one principle making up experience. This capacity is distinct from your or my personal thinking.
2. Consciousness: whatever thoughts we are aware of come to life via the gift of consciousness. Thoughts arrive in consciousness neutrally, before, quick as a flash, we fuse meaning into them. Whatever that meaning-making happens to be, it shows up as sensations and feelings in the body. We get tingles of excitement, knots in the stomach, sweaty palms, and feelings that range from joy and bliss at one one of the scale to shame and guilt at the other end.
3. Being alive: how we got here, with the gifts of Thought and Consciousness is somewhat mysterious. Often referred to as ‘The God or Spiritual Principle’, it refers to that formless energy that underpins all things and is beyond any one human’s intellect. It may be collectively felt, and if experienced profoundly, either naturally or under the influence of psychedelics, is ineffable.

Suffice to say, for our purposes here, without being alive and having the gifts of consciousness and thought, human experience of any kind whatsoever cannot form. To test how true this is for you, see if experience exists should you take one of these principles away. Have no thinking capacity? Not conscious? Not alive? Your moment-to-moment experience resides in these three principles.

Another way to think about them is to sit with the idea that you, me, and everyone else on the planet are doing the best we can given the thinking we are experiencing. Should that look vaguely true to you, you might avoid doing what I used to do, hurtle into the world of blame when business problems arise. And instead, seek to understand precisely what thinking might be causing people to feel and act as they do. Understand that and new solutions may appear that otherwise would not if we’re caught up in the blame or any other game.

Psychology and how it relates to business problemsArmed with the above principles, let’s take a look at how people experience some common business problems.

#1. Cash Flow Management

At one time I worked as an accountant. The cash-is-king mantra rang out in my head a lot. Metaphors like cash are the lifeblood of the organisation too. Whether we had just the right amount of cash to do what we needed to do, was a good measure of the firm’s health.

Cash doesn’t always flow at the same rate though, in or out. It can also debase over time, think how much £100 buys you today compared to just five years ago. Holding too much of it is not good, not having enough bleeds you, and creates dependencies on other providers of funds such as banks.

There are many systems for managing cash flow. The numbers they produce, however, reflect the psychology of those who influence how cash flows most. If you think hoarding cash, for that rainy day, makes you feel safer, doing just that would make complete sense. Conversely, if you think holding as little as possible frees up cash to reinvest in the business or elsewhere, just-in-time systems will appeal more than just-in-case ones.

How cash is managed is governed by whatever makes psychological sense to key influencers. What makes the most sense to you?

#2. Market Competition

Staying ahead of competitors can seem like an obsessive preoccupation to some. It taps into that survival-of-the-fittest meme wrongly attributed to Darwin. Tactics like deliberate price undercutting, limiting access to resources, and dirty tricks in marketing campaigns can result.

Conversely, I know of purpose-driven firms in the healthcare sector that is so determined to help patients live independent lives at home surrounded by supporting neighbours, that they train their competitors how to accomplish this in less-expensive-yet-more-patient-centred ways. You might call that a collaborative approach to competition.

Once again, how an organisation competes, reflects the dominant ideas present in its leaders’ psyches. What’s in yours?

#3. Regulatory Compliance

Some leaders resent compliance with industry regulations and laws. They think it’s too complex, time-consuming, costly, and an attack on their free will or free market principles. “Too much red tape” is a rallying call in political circles too.

This was the case when the Financial Services Authority became the Financial Conduct Authority here in the UK after the financial crisis of 2007 / 8. The switch to the regulation of conduct reflected how the integrity of the market as a whole can suffer when actors in it make up their own moral code when faced with a chance to make a lot of money even at someone else’s expense. Nowadays, unlike back in the noughties, named individuals in financial services firms carry personal liability and potential imprisonment for rule breaches. A long way from the laissez-faire ideals of those pre-crash times.

Others see compliance regimes as the minimum and use it as a base to build off; to do even more than the regulations require. Outstanding schools that see the national curriculum as just a baseline, rather than the standard to reach, are good examples.

What would you say the predominant thinking on regulation is where you work? What impact does this have?

#4. Talent Acquisition and Retention

I’ve written a lot about culture and how I think of it as an overall feeling people have about the way things get done around here. A vibe that can attract new people to join, keep skilled employees, and bring out all staff members’ potential to adapt and develop as changes in their operating environment unfold.

For instance, I recently spoke to someone who was creating what they called a prejudice-free culture. It was premised on the fact we humans are essentially the same in that we each navigate our way through life using the three principles described above, whether we’re aware of them or not. Prejudice is what she called “contaminated thinking”. It only led to notions of inequality, exclusion, and a lack of diversity; three traits that inhibit how organisations learn and adapt in these uncertain times.

While prejudice could be understood, given how deeply rooted it is in our societal culture, her view was we don’t need to blame people from all backgrounds for being contaminated. The main issue is to be aware of it and dissipate thinking that doesn’t help living a prejudice-free existence as much as possible.

This thinking is a far cry from employees being viewed through the lens of cost, or a resource that needs to be tightly monitored and controlled if it is to deliver that which is expected. This creates a very different vibe, which if accompanied by overly competitive, silo-like working, can become toxic.

Once again, people’s willingness to join you or leave is, in part at least, a function of the vibe present in your workforce, which, in turn, is driven by a leadership mindset when it comes to how best to get people to work with and for you.

#5. Technology Integration

What do you think about the technological changes that have taken place in your lifetime?

From air travel to the mobile revolution to artificial intelligence, do these disruptions excite and enthrall, offering up new opportunities or evoking that well-worn idea that we humans don’t like change, despite it being pretty constant and fast of late?

See how minds work here? If you’re implementing a change of whatever kind, technical and behavioural, people’s sense-making will differ. And it’s through understanding why those differences exist that gives you the best chance of seeing what the next best step for your project might be.

#6. Customer Satisfaction

Ever had the experience of a waiter in a restaurant wishing you a nice day but not really meaning it – as if that’s what they’ve been told to say?

Often, client satisfaction is thought about in mechanistic terms – say this twice, that three times, and this when the customer leaves. That’s what gets measured and conclusions about satisfaction levels drawn.

It’s quite different to clients saying of their own accord how a supplier really ‘gets’ them, listens so well to what they need but don’t have, and responds to this in delightfully surprising ways. This is about trust and delight not just satisfaction.

What’s in your leaders’ and teams’ psyches when it comes to serving those who depend on the work they do?

I have found the psychological lens really useful in my work. Sure other issues like systems, processes, procedures, contracts, rules, and incentives matter too, but how these are designed and implemented still reflects the deeper thinking we each live from, but often aren’t aware of.

The golden nuggets regarding how best to initiate and lead change lie in understanding thoughts embedded deeply in our individual and collective psyches. Surfacing these and helping people perform at their best, no matter what circumstances they’re in, becomes much easier.

Thanks for being here. I hope you’ll join me next time.

Until then,

Kindest,

Roger

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The measure of our humanity is not found in the heights we achieve alone, but in how many hands we extend to others along the way.

—Leonard Peltier

Let us traverse the winding trail toward humanity together. Though we’ve faltered and strayed at times, our spirit remains unbroken. Standing atop each conquered mountain, we see an endless range of challenges stretching to the horizon. In this precious moment, we catch our breath and gaze upon the breathtaking panorama of our achievements, marveling at the distance traversed. Yet we dare not linger here – our newfound understanding of humanity demands action.

The journey toward our fullest human potential has never been a straight path. It meanders through valleys of doubt, scales cliffs of adversity, and crosses rivers of uncertainty. But with each step forward, we discover something profound about ourselves and our connections to one another. The footprints we leave behind tell stories of resilience, of hands extended in solidarity, of voices raised in unity.

In today’s fractured world, the call to embrace our shared humanity rings louder than ever. We witness daily the consequences of forgetting our fundamental interconnectedness – the conflicts, the prejudices, the walls we build between hearts that should beat as one. Yet simultaneously, we see extraordinary examples of human compassion and courage that light the way forward.

The expedition continues, calling us ever forward. Each new dawn brings fresh opportunities to demonstrate the depth of our commitment to this noble quest.

Will we choose to hide in the comfortable shadows of complacency, or will we step boldly into the light of action and understanding?

Stand with us! Lock arms with your companions on this transformative journey. The path unfolds endlessly before us, demanding every ounce of courage, every spark of wisdom, every beat of compassion we possess. Together we press on, for our shared mission endures. Tomorrow’s promise echoes in our ears – whose footsteps will help forge the way?

The answer lies not in distant horizons but in the choices we make today. Every small act of kindness, every moment of genuine connection, every stand for justice adds another stone to the path we’re building together. The mountains ahead may seem daunting, but they are not insurmountable when we face them as one.

The mountain before us may seem insurmountable, but together we are an unstoppable force for change. Reach out, connect, and become part of something greater than yourself.

Your voice matters in this grand chorus of humanity. Step forward, share your truth, and join the movement that’s reshaping our collective future. The world needs your unique footprints on this path. Don’t let another sunset pass without adding your strength to this noble cause. Whether through small acts of kindness or bold stands for justice, your actions ripple through the fabric of our shared existence.

This moment in history calls for more than spectators; it demands participants in the great dance of human progress. Your chapter in this story is waiting to be written. Will you rise to meet this moment with courage, compassion, and conviction?

Editor’s Note: Enjoy our evolving Exploring Our Shared Humanity Series HERE

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Somebody should tell us, right at the start of our lives, that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit, every minute of every day. Do it! I say. Whatever you want to do, do it now! There are only so many tomorrows.

~ Michael Landon

We’ve all heard the saying, “Life is too short not to enjoy it today” but we seldom take time to personalize the deeper meaning. It’s like the universe’s way of saying, “Hey, you! Time’s a ticking—so quit procrastinating!” Years ago, this sentiment hit home for me personally while conducting a memorial service for a young man who left the planet suddenly and far too early. People at the gathering shared heartfelt stories, some funny, some tearful, and others regretfully lamented he didn’t get to surf the Great Barrier Reef in Australia—something he always dreamt of doing.

This event got me to thinking, and it changed the arc of my life to a point that “no regrets” became my mantra. Now, when my last day on Earth comes, I’m very clear I don’t want to be the one left holding the bag regretfully saying, “Dang … if I had only known, I would have spent fewer hours at the office, taken that trip to Thailand, learned to skydive and salsa dance, written that next book, studied French, adopted that dog, or run that marathon.” Seriously, I don’t want to be the person who spent so much time in the office that my computer gets more face time with me than my own family.

The takeaway for me is as clear as a crisp winter day in Big Sky. Michael Landon’s quote is accurate, except for one thing: there is no limitation on our tomorrows because, as a spoiler alert, tomorrow does not exist—never has and never will! It’s the world’s biggest mirage, a cosmic prank. We can sit around waiting for “tomorrow” until the cows come home (and trust me, sometimes cows take their sweet time), but when tomorrow arrives, guess what? It’s still today! Then what? More of the same old, same old?

So, here’s the million-dollar question: What have we been putting off until “tomorrow”? And why are we waiting any longer?

Life’s too short for “business as usual.” Go ahead, take that trip, adopt that dog, dye our hair the color of a rainbow, and learn French (even if the only thing we ever say is “Oui, oui, croissant!”). Just do it now before we all end up with more regrets than a bad haircut the day before the big prom.

Peace, Dennis Merritt Jones, DD

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Maybe you have heard something about individual and planetary consciousness shifting to a different vibration. Maybe you are well aware of this from personal experience and information shared from sources you consume. Maybe this is something you have no understanding of. Maybe you think the whole idea of a planetary shift in consciousness is woo-woo nonsense. For purposes of this post, it doesn’t matter. It’s happening irrespective of whether this is in your awareness or not, whether you believe it or not. What does this mean?

You can think of evolution as change occurring over time along some developmental sequence. Thus, concepts such as single-celled organisms evolving into multicellular creatures, or the solar system evolving as interstellar dust coalesced into planets, or societies developed from agronomy to industrial, to technological. These are just three examples of evolution along a developmental sequence involving life, cosmology, and humanity’s history. Individual humans develop increasing motor skills (crawl-walk-run), progressing cognitive skills (sensorimotor-pre-operational-concrete operational-formal operational)—just two of many developmental sequences that describe human growth. Plants and animals evolve. Systems evolve. Societies evolve. People evolve. Planets evolve. Consciousness evolves. This is the natural order. For our planet, the collective consciousness of the earth is represented by the noosphere. [For those unfamiliar with this term, this short video explains: Introduction to the Noosphere, and this article has more details: Theory and History of the Noosphere.]

I wrote a previous article, Writing to Raise Consciousness—Meaning, Method, and Intent, in which I mention the noosphere as one of the three levels at which I strive to raise consciousness. The other two levels are individual and collective. What I have learned about my own personal evolution of consciousness is that it is an ongoing process. While I have been comfortable writing in ways to elevate consciousness at three levels, I am applying myself only partially connected to a network of other people and organizations that are also working to raise consciousness through their individual and collective efforts. Now is the time for me to connect more formally, which is why I have become a member of the Advisory Board of Planetary Citizens and a Founding Member of The Octopus Movement . If this intrigues you, I encourage you to delve into both of these organizations.

So, what does this have to do with the shift in consciousness occurring on this planet? Note that this is occurring now, in our lifetimes. Much like a tipping point, we have reached a point in Earth’s evolution where consciousness is shifting to a different energetic frequency. The energy I am referring to is the energy of consciousness and this includes all the types of energy you are familiar with, plus all the types you are not. Everything is consciousness, and therefore all energy is part of consciousness. You can think of reality as organized energy. Information provides the blueprint on how to organize that energy and love provides the power. You read that correctly. Love in this context is unconditional love, not some of the other concepts that we associate with love—erotic, romantic, filial, etc. More details about this notion of the role of information and love in creating reality can be found here: The Mind and Heart of God.

A commonly used example that is helpful in understanding how a shift into a different energetic frequency is accompanied by a new ability is represented by a radio. Information is broadcast at different frequencies. When you are able to move the radio’s dial to capture the signal from a higher wavelength, you can then tune into that frequency. The energy of consciousness is broadcast at all frequencies but the vast majority of these we do not access. The reasons for this are beyond the scope of this article, but we have the capacity to capture a higher frequency of love energy than we typically do. This capacity extends to all of humanity and to the entire planet itself. We are shifting both individually and collectively. Some refer to this as a shift from 3D to 5D reality. 3D is energetically vibrating to support an interpretation of energy as separate, while 5D supports an interpretation of energy that demonstrates the unity and oneness of creation. It’s the same energy but it is interpreted differently depending on what frequency you are tuned into.

Any single individual’s resonance with source energy is affected by the predominant field energy they are interacting with. This is captured by terms such as harmony, coherence, as well as discord, and asynchrony.

Everything vibrates. Basically, we vibe at a certain frequency and are energetically interacting in a field of energy. When we are in tune with the energy around us, we are in resonance. When we are not in tune, we are energetically dissonant with the field. One of the reasons that I have chosen to get involved with Planetary Citizens and with The Octopus Movement is that I sense more harmony interacting in a collective field that feels more aligned with my individual efforts to raise consciousness. There is actually a force amplification as my resonance is amplified in a coherent field. You know what it feels like to walk into a room of angry people. There is a collective emotional energy that affects you. It’s easy to be influenced by this collective energy and you might find yourself beginning to feel angry. This applies to any energetic field you are interacting with—fear, reverence, peace, etc.—you vibrate in harmony or discord but tend to be pulled toward the predominant energetic frequency in that field. This is a simple matter of resonance. I am making an active choice in aligning myself to a collective field that is listening to the same station on the radio as I am. That can be very powerful.

Part of creation involves destruction. There is a cycle of birth, death, and renewal. Worldwide we are witnessing many old paradigms crumbling. These paradigm shifts span across multiple areas of human endeavor—education, politics, religion, economics, business, and ecology, to name a few. The old ways of doing things have taken us thus far but they no longer seem to work as well as they used to. Energetically, there is growing disharmony. This is all part of the growth cycle. What is emerging is a new earth. Powering this transformation is love. For each of us, the love doesn’t come from, it comes through. Source energy is coming through us and our planet at higher and higher energetic frequencies. We are receivers and emitters of this love.

It is exciting to witness this great shift in consciousness. The evolutionary arc is that of expanding love. After a long gestation, labor and delivery can be painful. Yet, what is being birthed, and we are experiencing, is the birth of new earth vibrating at a higher level of consciousness.

We are all embodied consciousness and love flows through us at different frequencies. Unconditional love is not selective. It does not discriminate based upon the presence or absence of some condition or characteristic. Unconditional love is nonpartisan. Efforts to pick and choose when to be loving derive from a belief system based on separation. Unconditional love is both unifying and universal. The more you love, the more you accelerate your shift in consciousness. The more you love, the more you hasten the shift in consciousness in those exposed to your energetic field. When you love more fully and deeply, you help to facilitate the entire planetary shift in consciousness.

I hope you will open yourself more fully to the transformative power of love. Let it flow through you more fully and help to augment the global shift in consciousness as we all individually and collectively evolve into a higher state of being. Here is my reminder to self that helps to keep me on this evolutionary trajectory:

Be filled with love…let it overflow.

You are a fountainhead of love…do nothing to restrain this, to hold it back. Do not try and parcel out your love.

Can you contain the air?…the oceans? Why would you want to try?

So let it be with your love—at all times, under all circumstances, love with the fullness of your being, because that’s who you are in the essence of your being, a creature of love. You are happiest when you are the most loving because at those moments you give expression to your being…Express yourself more fully!

Love …

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It is important to project a positive self-image on social media. We see a lot of people posting negative comments or pictures. In some cases, these people can get away with it by posting anonymously. But if you post in a negative manner and people find out it is you, this can stick with you for a long time, perhaps even the rest of your life.

More and more companies are using what is posted on social media against potential candidates. Argue all you want about whether they have the right to do this. But the truth is, it’s happening and there is little anyone can do about it. Even if legal actions were brought against companies for these practices, it’s difficult to prove. Companies can simply state they had other reasons for not hiring you.

Whenever you do anything online, it leaves a trail of actions that are open for people to investigate. This is especially true of social media. It’s as easy to post positive messages as it is to post negative ones. So why not concentrate on staying positive? This may even help you when you are looking for a job. Potential employers love people who have positive attitudes.

Being negative can also bring about legal actions if you are posting smear campaigns. If you are writing negative messages about others, they could sue you for slander. Even if you believe you are justified in what you post because it is the truth, that won’t necessarily stop someone from bringing legal action against you. You may win, but it will cost you time and, possibly, some money. That is compounded further if you live far away from where the court is located. You will have to pay for transportation and lodging. So you have to ask, how much did you gain by leaving negative messages? Doing this often enough will put you in the poorhouse.

Negative messages are seldom justified. It almost always comes back to haunt you and is all-around bad practice.

Alternatively, positive messages have a huge potential to make others happy, which can be rewarded when they, in turn, share with others. In social media, the old adage, what goes around, comes around, could never be more appropriate. Keep all your messages and postings positive on social media and you should never have anything to worry about, except maybe viral shares and an overabundance of goodwill.

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I don’t know about you, but the last few weeks have been emotionally exhausting. Political polarization is through the roof while trust in media and institutions is in the ditch. In the final stretch of what feels like the longest election cycle in history, there has been no shortage of anger, anxiety, and ugly arguments.

The majority of us find information and news about politics on social media, but much of the content we find is not factual. Rather, we see hostile, uncivil, and divisive opinions. Whoever has the loudest megaphone can outlast and overwhelm any set of facts. Off-hand remarks, derogatory memes, and altered photos often spark fierce debates about who’s right, who’s wrong, who’s nuts, and who’s nasty.

In Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People there is a chapter titled “You Can’t Win an Argument.” In it, Carnegie writes in part:

“Nine times out of ten, an argument ends with each of the contestants more firmly convinced than ever that he is absolutely right.

You can’t win an argument. You can’t because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it. Suppose you triumph over the other man and shoot his argument full of holes and prove that he is non compos mentis. Then what? You will feel fine. But what about him? He will resent your triumph.

A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”

It turns out science proves Mr. Carnegie correct.

No matter what happens in this election, the arguments will likely continue. Both your truth and my truth are most likely emotional and messy and complicated.

When we are passionate about deeply held convictions, emotions can feel so convincing and so intense that we each believe they represent the absolute truth.

While emotions contain truth, they do not always align with the truth. And while feelings are plentiful, they’re not necessarily factual. But facts have no feelings. And facts don’t win arguments.

Share stories instead.

As Plato is said to have remarked: “Those who tell stories rule society.”

Three Golden Rules for Productive ArgumentsShare More Feelings than Facts

Facts don’t care about your feelings. Just as your feelings don’t care about facts. People are stubborn, wary, and afraid of change. Stories engage the brain differently and are far more compelling than facts.

Lead with Laughter

You know the old saying, “laughter is the best medicine.” It’s true for the body and your brain. Laughter increases your brain’s production of natural painkillers and stress relievers. But laughter is also social glue as one of the best ways to win people over. When we can make others laugh, they are much more likely to like us and consider our perspectives.

Use the SEXI Strategy

The SEXI strategy is a great way to structure your argument in a way that combines facts with feelings. Make a STATEMENT, EXPLAIN with a clear EXAMPLE, and tell why it’s IMPORTANT.

Excessive social media use can impact one’s quality of life (statement).

We need the companionship of others to thrive in life, and the strength of our connections has a huge impact on our mental health and happiness (explain). Multiple studies have found a strong link between heavy social media and an increased risk for depression, anxiety, loneliness, self-harm, and even suicidal thoughts (example).

These mental health challenges can impact everything from workplace productivity to interpersonal relationships (importance).”

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Learning to love takes time, sometimes a long time. Sometimes we feel crushed and like we can’t rise up again, but Antoinette Pienaar’s wish for humanity is for all to know that we are never completely dead inside. Life can begin again. Mother Nature teaches us the truth of our resilience and is there to help us.

In this film, she wants humanity to remember these words: Open your heart like a flower. Don’t lose hope. Give yourself water for your soul and you will rise up again just like the plants in the South African desert where she lives. In the process of opening our hearts and releasing the energy of sadness, anger, and fear, and even breaking apart inside, we are letting go of that which deadens us and dries up our inner landscape. This desolation from a life of artificiality and stress keeps us from living life fully. By letting go of our dis-ease, we can be well again.

If we are willing to take the inroads given to us—many that are unknown and unasked for, we can find peace in the end—and even along the way. This is Antoinette Pienaar’s wish for humanity: to let go of all that keeps us from living real lives of love. Not the romantic, Hollywood kind of love but the love that is quiet, powerful, and true, and takes time to grow. It is to experience reality in the beauty of a life without expectations or judgments.

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You see, when you’re homeless, you’re invisible. People don’t want to see you because when they see you it’s very hard for them to just ignore you, to just pretend that you’re not there.

~John S., a homeless man

Homeless culture is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. It is shaped by a variety of factors, including individual experiences, socioeconomic conditions, and the broader social and political context.

For most of us, homelessness is unimaginable. We take for granted that we’ll be able to meet our daily needs of safety, food, shelter, and companionship without facing incredible obstacles. But every day, thousands of people awake in every region of the world and build their lives despite the challenges of living without shelter or a regular address.

There is no “average” life of a person experiencing homelessness. Life on the street is as varied and complex as life anywhere, and an individual’s experience of homelessness can be a product of their age, health, relationships, employment status, and many other factors. You may be surprised to learn that the homeless culture reflects:

• A strong sense of community and mutual support. Homeless people often form close bonds with each other, sharing resources and providing emotional support.
• A shared set of norms and values. Homeless people develop their own unique ways of coping with the challenges of living on the streets. These coping mechanisms can include things like developing a strong sense of independence, learning to trust others, and developing a sense of humor.
• A unique language and slang. Homeless people often develop their own unique language and slang, which can be used to communicate with other homeless people and to express their experiences.

Homeless culture can be a source of strength and resilience for homeless people. It can help them to cope with the challenges of living on the streets and to maintain a sense of hope for the future. However, homeless culture can also be a barrier to getting help. Homeless people may be reluctant to seek help from mainstream institutions because they fear being stigmatized or discriminated against.

It is important to remember that the homeless culture is not monolithic. There is a great deal of diversity within the homeless population, and homeless people come from all walks of life. Homeless culture is a complex and ever-evolving phenomenon that is shaped by a variety of factors.

Here are some additional insights into the homeless culture:

• Homeless people are not a monolithic group. They come from all walks of life and have a wide range of experiences.
• Homelessness is not a choice. It is the result of a complex set of factors, including poverty, mental illness, addiction, and domestic violence.
• Homeless people are often stigmatized and discriminated against. This can make it difficult for them to get the help they need.
• There are many things that can be done to help homeless people. These include providing affordable housing, access to healthcare, and job training.

There are a wide range of reasons and situations that force a person to homelessness. But one thing is for sure, most of them didn’t choose that life. They’re mostly just victims of circumstances beyond their control. Sometimes, all they need is someone to empathize with them and a chance to redeem themselves. It’s time for us all to come together to “debunk the myths” about the homeless so we can change the narrative “for good” ….

Editor’s Note: Homelessness is a complex and pressing issue affecting millions of people worldwide. It is a condition that is often misunderstood and stigmatized and is often seen as a personal failing rather than a systemic problem. We listened, gathered their stories, and crafted them into our special edition anthology book below, with all profits donated to nonprofits serving this unfortunate population. Help us help them by grabbing your copy HERE.

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My husband loves a challenge. He is one of those people who will start biking and then it becomes too easy; he has to bike over 100 miles. Once that does not challenge him, he has to do a triathlon even if he does not enjoy running or swimming as much. He starts to do some triathlons; then he finds out about Ironman and now he wants to try that.

He signed up for half Ironman (Total distance of 70.3 miles (113.0 km) covered in the race, consisting of a 1.2-mile (1.9 km) swim, a 56-mile (90 km) bike ride, and a 13.1-mile (21.1 km) run) around 6-7 months ago to do one on June 1st. This is his 5th one.

The discipline that goes into training to do this race is crazy incredible. I am not kidding when I say “I get tired watching him”. He trains 6 out of 7 days for hours. He watches YouTube to get better at his swimming strokes. He gets into these training programs with coaches to get better and better every day as Ironman Day approaches. Only one month left he got covid so he had to recover from that too and he does not panic at all. He always does the best he can.

We fly to the destination renting boxes for his bike breaking it into small pieces, and carrying every little equipment, gear, and clothing he needs for the race. It is no easy task to pack all of that.

We arrive a few days earlier to get used to the weather. It is much warmer, humid, and windy. The ocean is rough. He trains more without depleting his energy to save it for the race day. He attends briefings for athletes. We are in this beautiful place with lots to explore yet he is always focused on the task at hand. Stays crystal clear about his why.

The race day comes. He wakes up at 4 AM. We are at the start of the swim by 5:20 AM with more than 1,000 other athletes. It is a scene that is worth experiencing. You get inspired by every one of them. You are excited and anxious at the same time as a spouse. All I care about it he is healthy at the end. He already is my Ironman by signing up for it. Just to say “I want to do this, pay for it, and train for months are all very impressive to me. It is a long, tough journey for sure.

They all go in the water and they have at the most 8.5 hours to finish. The only transition I got to see him was when he finished swimming and started his bike ride. I heard him say the ocean was rough and then as I looked around I knew it was going to be a very windy day as they climbed some hills.

As a spouse or as a spectator you can follow them on an app. It is wonderful and nerve-racking at the same time. You can track them which is great yet when you don’t see that little tracker moving, you are worried.

After around 5 hours or so I got a text from a number I don’t know that told me my husband left the race and was waiting for me. I immediately asked if he is OK. The guy said yes. I went to find him. You feel great that he is OK, at the same time I know how much he trained to do this so it feels sad that he could not finish it.

That is where my admiration for my husband takes over. Although it was a difficult decision to make he always does the right thing. Not only that but he also adapts very quickly. He told me it was rough for him; the winds were too much and he could not even take a hand out of the handle to drink his water; he knew at some point he would not finish on time and decided to leave the race. He said this is what he does for fun; he does not make money out of it, actually, he spends a lot to do it, so he would not risk his health. Thank God! He is thankful that he was able to do the 5-hour piece of it and experience this new Ironman location.

It makes me think of what we hear all the time “It is all about the journey, not the destination”. He exemplifies that with his actions. He had to leave the race one other time when he got sick. This is easier said than done. I am not sure if I can handle it this well. I would at least cry a bit. He tells me it is not about his ego or what others will think. He was even joking around saying “Why be bad in one sport when you can be bad in three”.

Every time he has a goal and works so hard for it; I watch him closely. Not only to see his determination but also to see how he handles the curve balls thrown at him. I get inspired each time and want to believe I am learning how to enjoy the journey without being too hung up on the outcome myself.

This applies to our lives and our search for the work we love too. It is an amazing journey to find out more of who we are. I believe it is the whole purpose of life: being and living more of who we are. Doing it for our own good; not for approval, not for our ego. It is the biggest freedom we can ever have.

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The natural human experience of grief so often gets stifled. How can we allow ourselves to grieve life’s many losses, in ways that help us grow in health and happiness? In this video, Jenny Elinora shares her creative exploration into Grief + Joy.

Editor’s Note: Enjoy all of the ConverSessions by the best Orators on the planet by clicking here; insteadTALKS 360° ORATOR SHOWCASE

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A serious debate about workplace culture and employee welfare in corporate environments has erupted with the death of Anna Sebastian Perayil, a chartered accountant at Ernst & Young (EY) India, who tragically passed away in July, just four months after joining the firm. Her parents have attributed her death to the excessive workload and pressure she faced at her new job.

EY’s India chief, Rajiv Memani, has since said the firm attaches the “highest importance” to the wellbeing of its employees. “I would like to affirm that the well-being of our people is my top-most priority and I will personally champion this objective,” he stated in a LinkedIn post.

While every company wants their teams to work hard, and produce, it’s important to remember more hours don’t always equal better results. Overwork can lead to the creation of a toxic work environment which – along with low productivity and stressed-out employees – often creates burnout and eventual quitting.

According to recent research:

• 33% of workers feel constantly exhausted due to work pressure
• 44% of U.S. employees report feeling overworked
• 50% of full-time employees work more than 40 hours a week.

A toxic workplace (also considered a hostile work environment) is characterized by a negative and harmful workplace that can have a significant impact on employees’ mental and physical health, as well as job performance.

For example – many companies, that underwent layoffs earlier this year, are now burdened with employees stressed out and overwhelmed by increased workloads, having to pick up the pace as well as handle the workload created with the loss of the laid-off workers. These employees, often not compensated adequately for their additional responsibilities, are quitting or considering leaving their jobs.

Clinical Health Psychologist Amy Sullivan PsyD says “A toxic work environment is a feeling and not necessarily a checklist. People know when they’re in a toxic work environment because you pay attention to what your gut is sharing with you as well as any physical responses. Your gut reaction is intuitive, but it’s also that feeling of, ‘something feels off for me right now. Either the way I’m being talked to or the way I’m not being included,’” says Dr. Sullivan.

And, by the way:

An employer can force employees to work mandatory overtime plus terminate an employee – either salaried or hourly – for refusal to work the required overtime. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), as formed by the US Department of Labor, is responsible for establishing the 40-hour work week for employees. However, the law does not place a maximum limit on the number of hours employers can require their employees to work. 

Workers, psychologists tell us:

Employees have changed their attitude towards work since COVID – prioritizing work-life balance, and seeking less stressful jobs. Plus unwilling to return to what they now realize has been a toxic work environment in favor of continued remote work.

People are becoming more aware of the importance of mental health and are willing to sacrifice higher salaries or job titles for a less stressful work environment. Bottom line – prioritizing work-life balance is essential for overall well-being and job satisfaction.

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In May this year, I had the opportunity to share my work of deep listening with the Tibetan Community in Kathmandu, Nepal. I was able to sow the seeds of listening with over 200 students, 30 teachers, and a small leadership team.

The students enjoyed the sessions stating they loved to hear English being spoken and meeting someone from the UK in person. For many it was the first time, rather they listened to the language from YouTube or the movies. The students enjoyed the activities in not only discussing the impact of listening, but then experiencing it for themselves. They quickly picked up the core skills of EARS (soft eye contact, ask open questions, resist the urge to interrupt and comfort with silence) and applied them to experience being listened to in a way, unlike they had before.

They described the experience of being listened to as making them feel happy, valued, respected, motivated, and a desire to continue sharing. They recognised the impact this level of listening would have on their friendships and communication skills.

During several sessions with both the students and teachers, they asked some thoughtful questions which we explored together and came up with some fresh ideas and ways of being to address them. What about you, what do you think are the ways in which you might answer the questions below:

Questions asked:

● What is more important listening or communication skills?
● What is more important equity or equality?
● How do we stop others interrupting us?
● How do we stop someone who keeps talking non-stop?
● How do we encourage others to listen to us?

During my visit I witnessed that whilst British and Himalayan cultures represent significant diversity within their respective regions, there are still some general trends in listening behaviours which include:

1. Respect for tradition and authority figures : Both British and Himalayan cultures often have a respect for tradition and authority figures. In listening contexts, this might manifest as attentiveness and deference towards older or more experienced speakers. Consequently we looked at the idea of generating equality in our capacity to listen and think well, irrespective of hierarchy.

2. Value of politeness : Politeness is generally valued in both British and Himalayan cultures. This can influence listening behaviours, such as maintaining eye contact, nodding, and providing verbal cues to show engagement and respect for the speaker.

3. Importance of context : Both cultures recognise the importance of context in communication. Listeners in both British and Himalayan cultures may rely on contextual cues to interpret meaning and understand the speaker’s perspective.

The Principal and Headmaster kindly shared their feedback of our sessions together:

“Hearty Welcome Mam Jane all the way from UK to Namgyal High. A beautiful lady exuding all the amazing virtues- warm grace, elegance, soft spoken, humble, passionate active Listening skills coach and facilitator – Enjoyed listening and attending to her session. We are all delighted to have her in the school. She also took two sessions for our Class XII students today.

Cultivating listening skills can enhance our personal relations with other people around us, become effective leader and improve ones career and standing in community.” -Principal, Mr Norbu Tsering**

“Thank you so much for the valuable service rendered for our students and staff members. Sure, the seeds you have sown in our mind and hearts will bring fruitful results. My students love to see their pictures and remember you.” -Headmaster, Mr. Tsering Palden**

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Friends, a title given to many and earned by few.

Many will come and go, change over time, use you for a purpose, and sadly, hurt you.

But in between those disappoints, there will always be the rare few who are truly a friend, they remain by your side through life’s up and downs, forgive you when you are an arse, help you up when you fall, sit with you in non-judgemental compassion, not being able to stop your pain but staying there all the same so you do not carry it alone and create genuine moments of joy, of laughter and of love, that last a lifetime.

And these are the people that matter. Genuine, authentic friends that see the genuine authentic you, with no hidden agenda or self-serving demands.

But sadly it’s often the friends that are not really friends that take our time and energy, that lead us to question ourselves, change to fit in, and generally feel a bit sh*t.

And despite our best intentions, we have all had them haven’t we?

The friend that gushes when they see you, tells you how much they love you, reminds you of how much you have shared, and says you must make time for one another and yet when you reach out to make that time, they are always too busy as their life that has no room for you. And then you randomly bump into them again and their gushing starts again and it’s just so sh*t because you know it’s just not true.

The friend who contacts you when you can serve a purpose, tells you how much they appreciate you, talks incessantly about their life, their woes, forgets to ask about yours or when they do, obviously gets bored before you have had a chance to talk and then despite promising that dinner that you really must have as it’s been so long, goes silent until the next time they need you.

The friend who you see regularly through interests or work. You share your worlds, always so much to talk about, and you check in on one other, you can never imagine it not being like that until that shared interest, place, or thing is removed and all of a sudden you are not so interesting to them and the time you always thought you would spend together is somehow no longer available and eventually you just get sick of asking because you know there will always be an excuse.

The friends who you bond with over a shared time of life, you face the same challenges, you come from a similar background, and they make your world feel safer, less alone, a comrade in arms. Until they are not as their social aspirations begin to bear fruition and you find yourself left off the guest list for important celebrations, an oversight you think until it happens so many times you realise you are not an oversight, but the sight not required in their world anymore.

And yes all of this hurts far more than it should because they were never really friends no matter how much they tried to convince you otherwise, so this is a reminder to celebrate our rare and authentic friends and to let the others go because life really is just too short.

With love

Nik x

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We live in a world that tells us to do our best while at the same time telling us our best is not good enough! This is a struggle for many of us. It is a conundrum for the perfectionist. Tune in as Jim gives us a new take on responding to perfectionism and helping ourselves and others who struggle with it.

An insteadTalk is 15 minutes talk followed by 30 minutes of real conversation. Please check out my insteadTalk. Then, please click this link to discover more incredible messages from thinking minds. Real talk! Real conversation!

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I was in a group conversation a while back and somebody a generation younger than me used the word duty. Oh my, you would think this four-letter-word was a profanity. I didn’t have my thoughts fully formed on the subject, but I thought it worth mulling over.

Please help me mull in the comments.

First, apparently, there is a small difference between duty and obligation. You feel an obligation to do your duty. Or you feel an obligation but don’t do your duty. That usually leads us to feeling guilty – even shameful – and we hate to feel that way. Perhaps that is why just mentioning duty caused such a stir in the discussion? Perhaps that is why we prefer not to feel an obligation but “volunteer to do the right thing”? Or not to feel an obligation and do whatever we please? Let me continue with using the term obligation rather than duty. As our feelings motivate our actions, no reason to get you into an off mood.

This, doing whatever we please, is usually called freedom. And if we can keep the focus on freedom, we don’t have to feel as guilty or shameful when we do whatever we please. After all, we are only exercising our Constitution-given freedom rights, aren’t we? But are we, as a super social species, at our best when we do as we please and don’t feel obligated to anything or anybody? (And are our Constitutional rights even about how we are with each other or just about what the State can’t stop us from doing?)

As can probably be read between (or even on) these lines, I have a bit of trouble with how we balance the concepts of freedom vs obligation. My main concern is I think we have an obligation to ourselves and each other to grow in our trustworthiness.

A hard part of trustworthiness is that it requires good boundaries. And that requires we sometimes are willing to say No. No to events. No to things. No to people. No to the immediate-gratification-hungry parts of ourselves.

Saying No can create conflict. Or disappointment. And that can make us feel guilty – and we (still) hate to feel that way. So rather than saying No we say some version of Perhaps. Or we say Yes – knowing we will probably not follow through. There is even such a thing as “The California Yes.” How sad is that?

We are unaware that when we say yes to convenience; we often say no to commitments and trustworthiness.

In my youth, I would always get involved. HOA. Industry organizations. Teaching. But when I first landed in the US and was completely overwhelmed with culture shock, I could not commit to anything. I started to get around the problem by consciously not taking on any extra responsibilities. In the first years my children went to school here in the US, I would for example not volunteer at the school. Then I took on small tasks that just required showing up. You didn’t need to sign up in advance, and nobody noticed if you didn’t follow through on your purely internal plan to help pack back-to-school envelopes or whatever was the task of the day.

I noticed that the people more committed had more fun. They got to know one another. They formed a team. So, I started chairing subcommittees. I could be committed for a couple of weeks. If I had promised to take on a task, I was good on my word. But no long-term commitments, please…

Surely, you can see it went “downhill” from there: naturally, I have done years on the PTA board. And the HOA. And the Danes Abroad Business Group.

I use volunteering as an example because the special thing about volunteer activities is people volunteer. Volunteers don’t get paid. You can’t order a volunteer to do anything. If the climate in the group gets toxic, nobody wants to join to do the work, so volunteer organizations require a type of leadership able to create a non-toxic environment. What could create a toxic climate? People who don’t feel a sense of obligation to do the work they signed up to do.

You know the volunteer who must be the chairperson but who delegates everything, and the constituents never see them or hear from them? They can kill an organization.

There is one more reason I talk about volunteering: it is because the commitments we sign up for voluntarily differ from the tasks we get assigned. Who assigns them? One source is our culture and traditions. I could have felt obligated to volunteer, had it been the norm where I grew up, but it wasn’t. Fundraising was not only not a norm for a public school; it was considered elitist and thus improper in my egalitarian birth culture.

Who are the people or causes you feel an obligation to because of your culture and traditions? How deep and wide are the obligations? To your children? Your parents? Siblings? Other family members? Friends? Colleagues? Neighbors? Fellow congregants? The Party? Fellow countrymen? Causes? The planet?

In her early memoirs, Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote how in her Somali traditions everybody knew their ancestors ten generations back. Whoever descended through their male line from your 10xfather was your clan. And within that clan were obligations to support each other: provide room if they travel to your town, give jobs, give money… Her father, who left the family to fend for themselves and basically sold his daughter into a heinous marriage, expected the daughter to provide for him in his old age. (I will leave it up to your imagination how she felt about this.)

In a society without any other social safety net, you can see how this system of mutual obligations might be a way to assure that everybody, regardless of whether they had living descendants or not, could have some support.

Did we start to build organized safety nets because we wanted everybody to have some support – or because we didn’t want to have face-to-face interactions with relatives demanding we live up to our obligations? Or a bit of both, perhaps?

I have over the years in so many different settings seen how those who are more committed trust each other more and feel a stronger sense of belonging. Commitment and trustworthiness are siblings. When we voluntarily commit, we generate an obligation. Others may have to rush their part of a task or risk their credibility by delivering late if we don’t deliver our work in time. Just because we can send a text, doesn’t mean there is no loss of credibility when we cancel an appointment at the last moment with no excuse. After all, the other party could figure out to set time aside; a time where they might have said No to other activities to hold it open for us.

Commitment and convenience are opposites. Until we learn to say No when we don’t want to commit and give up a little of our freedom to do whatever is most convenient right here and now, we can’t say Yes to becoming trustworthy.

If you will argue that people calculate into their planning that other people will not show up, or deliver on time, or we get used to last-minute cancellations and know it is not personal, I will agree. In many cultures, punctuality is not a value. We respect other people’s freedom to change their minds. We just have to accept that, empirically, the cultures where people prioritize this way are lower on trust. And in many societies, we are gradually becoming aware trust is a high price to pay – far beyond a pervasive feeling of not belonging.

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At the Therapist“How has the week gone?”

“I don’t know. . . . not going well. . . I’ve been quite anxious. . . can’t get ahead. . . seems to know and is taking the opportunity to be more of a . . .over and over.”

“Are you ready to move on? What happened with. . .?”

“That went well I guess. I mean, I think it’s better, and it’s more . . . and different but I’d have to . . and yeah, there is really nothing holding me . . , but I just feel so stuck. I’m not sleeping and I keep having that dream. I wake up sweating and can’t get back to sleep.”

“Tell me about this dream.”

“I don’t really remember it, I’m in a hallway, or a staircase, I don’t remember. I just get so anxious.”

“Would you be willing to try a little hypnosis. It might help you remember.”

“OK?. . . I mean, I guess. . .You think it means something? I keep having it. . . sure, I guess. . .”

“Let’s try. Sit up. Feet flat on the floor. Close your eyes. Breathe deeply. . . just listen to my voice. . . you are feeling a little drowsy. . . eyelids heavy. . . count backwards from 30. . .29. . . 28. . . hear nothing but the sound of my voice. . . imagine you are sleeping. . . . Are you sleeping?

“Yes”

“Good I want you to enter that dream you keep having. . . nothing in it can hurt you. . . it will be just like going to the movies. . . Are you in the dream now? Nod you head. . . Good tell me about it.”

“I’m walking down a long corridor. . . the walls are stone. . . it looks like a castle or something. . . it’s damp. . .I keep walking. . . I think I’m supposed to. . . I’m going around curves in the corridor. . . I can’t see what’s ahead. . . I have to keep moving. . . There’s something behind me.”

“Turn around and look behind you. What do you see?”

“Nothing. . . . just darkness. . . I have to keep moving. . . faster . . . there’s a staircase, a stone staircase. . . it’s old. . . it doesn’t look safe. . . there’s no hand rail. . . “

“Go up the staircase.”

“Going up. . . there’s another hallway. . . and another stone staircase . . . running now. . . I stumble on the stairs . . . hurt my hand or maybe my knee. . . there’s a door. . . there’s light behind it. . . I push on the door, but it won’t move. . . pushing harder. . I throw my body against the door, but it won’t move. . . my shoulder hurts. . . I’m beating on the door. . I keep pushing . . . it won’t open. . . open! . . . why won’t it open?. . . Why? OPEN!”

“Stop a minute and breathe. . . this is like the movies. . . nothing here can hurt you. . . step back a little. . . tell me about this door.”

“it’s brown, wood, I guess, old. . . I push, why won’t it open. . .“

“Step back a little more back down the stairs. . . can you se the whole door now/”

“Yes.”

“Describe the door.”

“It’s dark brown wood. . . worn. . . round at the top. . . paneled. . .

“Is there anything on the door?’

“I think so. . . yeah. . .there’s a plaque on the crosspiece . . .old and very faded. . .”

“Can you read the plaque?”

“Well maybe. . . if I get down on my knees. . . Yeah. . . it’s definitely a word. . . “

“What does it say. . . “

It’s faint. . . hard to read. . . it says. . . PULL.”

What dreams may comeIn dreams our subconscious sometimes reflects our anxiety. I have the “unprepared dream” a lot. You know the one I mean. I’m taking a test I didn’t study for, I’m in an unknown play where I haven’t learned the lines or I’m presenting on a subject I know nothing about. That’s an imposter syndrome dream, a reflection of my insecurity. . . where I am anxious about doing something for which I think I’m unqualified or unprepared.

I don’t have the test dream much anymore. I guess I graduated and the curtain fell on my acting “career” fifty years ago, so those dreams are less frequent. But I retired six years ago and I’m still having unprepared work dreams. I’ve trained myself to wake, tell myself I’m “good enough” and figure out what, if anything, I might need to prepare.

Sometimes our dreams give us a message. Early in my consulting career, I was managing multiple projects, traveling internationally, and working more than a hundred hours per week. I had a recurring dream that I was trying to get over a hill on a skateboard where the wheels kept falling off.

An old friend told me “Fritz Perls, the German Gestalt psychiatrist, said we are all characters in our dream.” Andre encouraged me to “play the hill, me, and the skateboard.” It turned out that I was abusing the skateboard (my body?) and I slowed down and asked for help at work and ended up being more productive.

The dream in the shaggy dog story above is like that. How can you step back and realize where you are your own obstacle. That isn’t to say that genuine obstacles don’t exist, but it is still useful to ask:

What is my part of this problem? How am I getting in my own way? Does my persistence inhibit me?

When you feel like you are “beating your head against a brick wall,” step back, or rise up. Can you go around the wall or over the wall, rather than through it?

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The journey from ordinary to extraordinary is a thrilling yet treacherous climb. As you ascend, the landscape of your relationships shifts. The camaraderie that once defined your interactions must now accommodate new responsibilities and expectations. It’s a delicate dance, requiring you to redraw boundaries without severing the bonds of trust and respect.

As a mass communication specialist and ACC-certified life coach, I’ve witnessed countless individuals grapple with this midlife crisis. Drawing from the principles of NLP, I believe that authentic leadership lies not in asserting authority but in mastering the art of “relationship recalibration”. In my career spanning over 30 years, I have followed a conscious and compassionate approach to navigating change while staying true to myself.

“The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.” – Ronald Reagan.

Whatever stage of your career you may be always remember: It’s not about building walls but about creating healthy, empowering spaces where trust and respect flourish. It’s about recalibrating, not rupturing, the connections that fuel your team’s success.

Shifting Landscape: Navigating the Changes in Relationships

Step up, refocus, and take charge!

The moment you accept a leadership role, the ground beneath your relationships subtly shifts. The casual banter and shared confidences that once characterized your interactions may now feel tinged with a newfound awareness of your authority. This isn’t a betrayal of your past connections but a natural evolution as you step into a position of greater responsibility.

New Role, New Rules

As a leader, you’re no longer just a member of the team; you’re its guide. This brings along its own distinct set of challenges:

• Decision-Making: Your decisions now carry weight and impact the entire team. This can create a sense of distance as you grapple with choices that may not please everyone.
• Accountability: You’re ultimately responsible for the team’s performance, which can lead to difficult conversations and the need to hold others accountable.
• Confidentiality: You may be privy to sensitive information that you can’t share with your former peers, creating a sense of separation.

Balancing Act: Preserving Camaraderie Amidst Change

Balancing existing relationships while stepping into your new role demands careful navigation and finesse.

• Acknowledge the Shift: Openly acknowledge that your role has changed, but reassure your team that your commitment to their success and well-being remains unwavering.
• Set Clear Expectations: Communicate your new expectations and boundaries clearly, ensuring everyone understands the shift in dynamics.
• Be Approachable: Foster an environment where your team feels comfortable approaching you with questions, concerns, or even just casual conversation.

The Power of Transparency

Transparency is the cornerstone of trust during this transition.

• Open Communication: Keep the lines of communication open, sharing information whenever possible and addressing any concerns directly.
• Explain Your Decisions: When making decisions that impact the team, take the time to explain your reasoning, demonstrating that you value their understanding.
• Be Vulnerable: Share your own challenges and uncertainties as a new leader. This humanizes you and encourages open dialogue.

Remember, this transition is a journey, not a destination. By embracing transparency, setting clear expectations, and acknowledging the changing dynamics, you can navigate this shift with grace and authenticity, preserving the trust and respect that underpin your relationships.

The Cornerstones of Connection: Trust and Respect

Trust and respect are not bestowed upon leaders simply because of their title; they must be earned through consistent actions and genuine connection.

Open and Honest Communication

Clear communication forms the foundation upon which trust is established. As a leader, be transparent about your decisions, motivations, and even your vulnerabilities. Invite your team to share their thoughts and concerns openly, fostering an environment free from judgment. Create an environment where dialogue flows freely, fostering a sense of shared ownership and mutual respect.

Active Listening: Beyond Hearing

True listening goes beyond merely hearing words; it involves seeking to understand the underlying emotions and perspectives. When your team feels heard and understood, it strengthens their trust in your leadership. Maintain eye contact, ask follow-up questions, and restate their concerns to confirm mutual understanding.

Leading by Example: Actions Speak Louder

Your actions shape the team’s culture. Model the qualities you expect from them—integrity, accountability, and respect. Be dependable, honor your commitments, and own up to your mistakes.

When you lead by example, you inspire trust and cultivate a culture of respect.

Remember, fostering trust and respect is an ongoing process. By prioritizing open communication, active listening, and leading by example, you can build strong, resilient relationships that empower your team and elevate your leadership.

Feedback: The Catalyst for Growth

Feedback, when given and received effectively, is a powerful tool for individual and collective development. As a leader, mastering the art of feedback is essential for fostering a high-performing and engaged team.

Constructive Criticism

Constructive feedback targets specific behaviors and their effects, providing actionable suggestions for improvement.

• Be Specific and Actionable: Focus on observable behaviours, avoid generalizations and provide straightforward suggestions for improvement.
• Focus on the Impact: Explain how the behaviour affects the individual, the team, or the project.
• Offer Support: Frame your feedback as an opportunity for growth and development, and offer your support in achieving those goals.

Receiving Feedback with Grace

Accepting feedback gracefully demonstrates humility and a willingness to learn.

• Listen Actively: Resist the urge to defend or justify yourself. Listen carefully to understand the feedback.
• Ask Clarifying Questions: If something is unclear, seek clarification to ensure you fully grasp the feedback.
• Express Gratitude: Thank the person for their feedback, even if it’s difficult to hear. It reflects maturity and a dedication to personal growth.

Cultivating a Culture of Feedback

Foster a culture where feedback is appreciated and welcomed.

• Lead by Example: Regularly seek feedback from your team and demonstrate how you use it to improve.
• Normalize Feedback: Encourage regular feedback exchanges between team members, fostering a culture of continuous learning.
• Celebrate Growth: Acknowledge and celebrate individuals who actively seek and implement feedback, reinforcing its value.

Remember, feedback is a gift. When given and received with the right intentions, it can unlock potential, strengthen relationships, and drive collective success.

Stepping into Your Power: Embracing Leadership

Transitioning into a leadership role isn’t just about managing tasks; it’s about inspiring and empowering others. Embrace your leadership with confidence, clarity, and a vision for the future.

Confidence and Clarity: The Compass for Decision-Making

Leaders make decisions, both big and small, every day. Project confidence in your choices, even when faced with uncertainty.

• Do your homework: Gather information, weigh the pros and cons, and consult with relevant stakeholders before making decisions.
• Communicate clearly: Explain your decisions to your team, outlining the rationale and the expected outcomes.
• Be decisive: Avoid waffling or second-guessing yourself. Once you’ve made a decision, own it and move forward.

Ask yourself: Am I making decisions based on fear or informed confidence? How can I communicate my decisions more effectively to my team?

Delegation and Empowerment

Delegation isn’t just about offloading tasks; it’s about empowering your team to grow and contribute.

• Identify strengths: Acknowledge the unique skills and talents of each team member.
• Assign tasks strategically: Delegate tasks that align with individual strengths and provide opportunities for growth.
• Provide support and guidance: Offer clear instructions, set expectations, and provide ongoing support as needed.

Practical step: Start by delegating a small, manageable task to a team member. Observe their progress, offer feedback, and celebrate their success.

Vision and Inspiration: Charting the Course

A leader without a vision is like a ship adrift without a rudder. Paint a compelling picture of the future and inspire your team to join you on the journey.

• Share your vision: Clearly articulate your goals and aspirations for the team and the organization.
• Connect to individual goals: Help team members see how their contributions fit into the larger vision.
• Celebrate milestones: Acknowledge and celebrate progress towards the vision, keeping the team motivated and engaged.

Practical step: Organize a team meeting to share your vision. Encourage discussion and brainstorm ways to achieve collective goals.

Remember, true leadership is about more than just authority. It’s about inspiring trust, empowering others, and guiding your team towards a shared vision.

Embrace your role with confidence, clarity, and a genuine desire to help others succeed.

Conclusion

Lead with Heart, Guide with Grace. As you step into leadership, remember that your relationships are not obstacles to overcome but bridges to build upon. Recalibrate, don’t rupture. Lead with authenticity, communicate openly, and foster a culture of trust and respect. Embrace your new role with confidence, knowing that genuine leadership lies not in wielding power but in empowering others. As you navigate this transition, may your journey be marked by grace, growth, and the unwavering support of those you lead.

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Whenever I reflect on the way I make sense of the word success, I notice this springs to mind.

Throughout much of my life, success has always been defined by what others believe I needed to have that would be good for me. Good grades throughout my education. A good job. Career prospects built on delivering key performance indicators. A growing bank balance and net worth etc.

Others’ expectations are well-intentioned, of course, and, useful once met, both for me and them. On reflection, however, they speak more of achievements – what we have as a result of our endeavours, which earns us the right to be described as successful. What they don’t do is speak to how we need to be to become successful in the first place.

When I’d consider future success in terms of what I will have, I would often find myself being anxious. These unhelpful questions, which I took very seriously, would show up in my consciousness.

• What will people think of you if you fail?
• What kind of homeless future awaits you if you don’t succeed?
• What if I fall short, don’t make the grade, get found out, or otherwise get it wrong, etc.?

In other words, unknowingly at the time, and in all innocence, I looked at success through the lens of failure. That’s why I was anxious. Self-doubting. Suffering Imposter Syndrome – call it what you will. Depressed too.

Since then, and after looking at the why-do-I-experience-life-as-I-do question in more depth, I now pay closer attention to the meaning I attach to words that I once never questioned, and just took for granted. I do so because I know my experience… of whatever I’m focussing on … be it a critical, calm or compassionate one, is connected to this sense-making.

Having success and being successfulTake the way we each judge someone else as successful by what they have. The cut of their clothes, the car they drive, their address, status, social media profile, qualifications, etc. On what basis do we make these?

I don’t know about you but it seems to me that one way of answering this question is with reference to win-lose gaming theory. It goes something like this…

…we assume there are finite resources in the world and that individuals will be rational actors when it comes to decision-making and conflict resolution. Their likely choices and outcomes can be modelled and predicted. If you can understand the model, therefore, you can game what they’ll do to win and ensure what you do is better so that you win and they lose.

This win-lose idea is ubiquitous in (western) societies. We pass or fail exams, win or lose in sport, get jobs or be rejected for them, watch heroes defeat villains in films, come out best in negotiations or come off second best, and so on. It was front of mind for my parents, teachers etc. They wanted me to stand a good chance of winning, or succeeding, in this game they called life.

I once heard someone say “Children don’t always hear what you say, but totally get how you are. They pick up on your mood or way of being while you’re conveying a message to them”. If true, what I picked up on, as a young boy, in the way my parents and teachers encouraged me, was their fear of what would happen should I fail. This is what entered my brain. Unknowingly. It created a neural pathway, which shaped my sense-making of success thereafter.

You might say my hidden fear of failure, like many others I’ve since discovered, meant I’d got the wrong end of the stick. True. Perhaps. I just hadn’t noticed this. My system simply did what it does subconsciously – note the fears that sat behind encouragements to succeed and internalised them without telling me!

Having what success gives us, I learnt, depends on our way of being with ourselves first and foremost and others secondarily. If we interpret failure, for instance, in less fearful terms, more as an opportunity to learn, it can’t grip us so tightly and helps us be more curious and experimental. Free of self-limiting self-talk about failure, we find listening to what others need and want easier. We get to enjoy the puzzle that is helping them get what they value. They feel we understand them and are rooting for them. In turn, they reward us, financially, emotionally, in kind, etc., which brings us back to the start – the success we have.

Virtuous cycles like these can be created in teams, families, and networks. First, though, we need to surface the fear-based mindsets that key influencers in these groups operate from, unknowingly most often.

I have a way of helping you do that, which I call the…

..The feeling testIt’s premised on the idea that when a thinking habit you’ve had for some time, but didn’t realise you had, is no longer helpful, your body’s pretty good at letting you know. You’ll feel an unease. Whether it’s because the context in which you’re working changes or colleagues around you have ways of doing things that aren’t optimal, or whatever else, my encouragement is to tune into what you’re body’s trying to tell you, rather than brush it off.

The opposite is true too, of course. When the thinking you’re living in resonates with those around you and the context you’re working in, you’ll feel great on the whole.

This is how the test works. Below are representations of two mindsets that reflect similar, but subtly different understandings of what success and failure mean in an established team. As you read or listen to each, I invite you to notice which resonates most with you. See what bubbles up in you with respect to Mindset A and B and what you feel about each.

Mindset A

Success in this team is measured by the money people earn. It reflects the rewards people get from taking risks in a competitive environment. It’s rooted in the idea of survival of the fittest. The most talented of our members will always rise to the top. They are good at predicting what clients want and controlling employees and suppliers to deliver in ways others can’t. Failure occurs when clients’ expectations are not met and rewards dip below plan. Extrinsic motivators like promotion, commission, and bonuses mitigate the risk of failure. They’re awarded when a job is well done and so bring a sense of well-being to those who contributed to it.

Mindset B

Success in this team is measured by wellbeing: the extent to which our employees and partners are free to think. It’s rooted in the idea of survival of the friendliest. Talents and potential are abundant. When free to think, we are innately collaborative creatures. We sense what’s needed and organise to respond to what clients really value. Failure is useful, it signals freedom to think is absent, teams are stuck in ruts and learning needs to be stimulated. Intrinsic motivators such as care for one another and pride in a job well done mitigate the risk of catastrophic failure. That’s how we attract clients, investors, and employees to us and why we’re financially successful.

What showed up? Did one resonate more than the other?

Much of the work I do is with project directors and their multi-disciplinary teams in the Construction Sector. The Sector has an unhealthy reputation for delivering overspent projects late, time after time. It operates from a fragmented, litigious culture that isn’t always conducive to collaborative working. Many of my clients want help to turn that around.

Before we begin working with each other in detail I ask them to do this simple feeling test. Most conclude their daily lived experience resonates more with Mindset A – but – they intuitively feel much better when tuning into and contemplating Mindset B.

By looking at each one in more detail we uncover a number of unspoken, hidden assumptions that we can all carry around with us, which unknowingly drive our behaviour. For instance, both mindsets contain assumptions we all hold about…

• Success – a financial must-have or what flows when a team is in a being well state?
• Failure – cause for punishment or a chance to learn?
• The nature of human nature – based on survival of the fittest (competitive) or friendliest (collaborative)?
• Talent – is it scarce or abundant?
• The future and present – predictable and controllable or emergent via sensing and responding to changes?
• Motivation – carrot and stick extrinsic motivators or intrinsic ones based on care and pride?
• Wellbeing – the by-product of a job well done or integral to it?

I’m not suggesting some assumptions are better than others because context is all important. More that by bringing those that are often buried to the surface, teams realise they needn’t behave in a one-dimensional way. They see they have more options than they might otherwise have imagined. And, more importantly, can now wonder which assumptions, if changed, might be a game changer. For instance, depending on what a team is trying to achieve, questions such as these arise…

..do the benefits of doing the following outweigh the costs and risks…

• Creating the conditions in which sense-making, choice making and action taking is decentralised?
• Making collaborative, not transactional relationships central to how we compete?
• Working from principles rather than setting targets?
• Building on strengths rather than focusing on weaknesses?
• Focussing more on prevention than fire-fighting cures?
• Changing our own perceptions first, before demanding others change theirs?

See you next time, where I’ll look at the different ways of thinking about the culture in groups, and which you find most helpful.

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My cohorts and I recently engaged in a conversation about humor on the Friendship Bench. As we considered what makes things funny — why some people find things funny and others don’t, why some people can tell jokes to some people and not to others — my friend, Phil Williams, said in his inimitable fashion that it all comes down to relationships. I interpreted that to mean the respect shared between the teller and the listener. Both of those parties have responsibilities in the way, and to whom, jokes are told and received.

Jokes may or may not reflect opinions. They may not indicate deprecation, disparagement, belittling, or, worse, dismissal of a people, a race, or a class. Case in point:

An Irishman walks into a bar and orders three beers. He does the same thing for four consecutive days. On the fifth day, the bartender, curious about the Irishman’s practice, asks him about it.

“Ah,” the Mick says, “I left me two brothers in the old country. But I promised ‘em every time I stopped for a pint, I’d also have one in honor of each of ‘em.”

One day the Mick comes in and only orders two beers. He does the same thing the next day and the day after that. On that third day, the bartender says to him, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Whatever de ye mean, Mate?” the Mick asks.

The bartender responds, “Given what you told me about your two brothers, I assumed one of them must have passed away.”

Ah, no,” the Mick responds. “It’s Lent, don’t ye know, and I gave up the drink.”

If I weren’t Irish, would I or should I tell that joke? Should I tell it to anyone other than Irish people? Should I be offended at what it suggests about Irish people and their tendencies to bend their elbows? What does it say about me that I think it’s funny? In hearing that joke, do I have some specific responsibility as a result of my Irish heritage to perceive it and/or react to it in some way? What is my responsibility as teller of or listener to that joke? Do I have any responsibility other than to recognize, reflect on, and manage my own reaction?

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All of that compelled me to wonder how those responsibilities play out beyond jokes and humor.

If I see things, do I have a responsibility to express what I see? If I have particular beliefs, do I have a responsibility to express what I believe? If I know people who disagree with what I see, believe, and express, is it necessarily a sign of disrespect for those people that I express what I see and believe? Do the people I know who disagree with what I see, believe, and express have any responsibility in the way they respond or react to what I’ve expressed? If so, what might that responsibility be? In contemplation of all that, was Albert Einstein correct?

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot stand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence and fulfills the duty to express the results of his thoughts in clear form. (Albert Einstein, in a letter to Dr. M. I. Cohen, March 19, 1940)

I don’t mean to suggest I consider myself to be, in any way, a great spirit. But regardless of the answers to any of the questions I asked above, I recognize two things:

1. My right to express what I see and believe.
2. The right of anyone else to dismiss me and whatever I see, believe, and express.

On balance, it seems to me that’s life.

That’s what makes horse racing. (Grandpa O’Brien)

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Miracles. The word alone has a way of stirring something deep within us. Whether it’s a sunrise after a stormy night or the feeling of hope when everything seems lost, we all yearn for something that defies logic—a moment where the impossible bends to possibility.

When we think of miracles, our minds often race to grand, almost cinematic, events: someone waking up from a coma after years, a rescue from a life-threatening situation, or an unexpected turn of fate when all hope seemed lost. But what if we’ve been looking at miracles the wrong way? What if they aren’t always about the extraordinary? What if the real miracle lies in the ordinary moments we often overlook?

Miracles in the Mundane

We live in a world so fast-paced that it’s easy to lose sight of the small wonders that surround us. A flower blooming through cracks in a concrete sidewalk, a baby’s first cry after birth, or even the simple pleasure of watching your favourite person laugh—these are miracles in their own right. They are the universe’s way of whispering that life, no matter how chaotic or ordinary it may seem, is filled with magic.

In fact, the most miraculous moments are often hidden in the everyday grind, waiting to be noticed. Have you ever considered how your body knows exactly how to heal itself when you get a paper cut? Or how your heart keeps beating, silently working to sustain life without you giving it a second thought?

It’s in these quiet moments, in the spaces between what we expect and what we receive, that miracles often occur. And if we pay attention, we might just realize that we’re living amidst a thousand little miracles every single day.

The Miracle of Connection

One of the most profound miracles we experience in life is human connection. Think about it—how remarkable is it that out of the billions of people on this planet, you find those few who resonate with your soul? The friend who always seems to know when you need a call, the stranger who offers a smile when you’re having a rough day, or the partner who loves you even when you’re at your lowest, or your pet’s friendly and constant presence that makes you feel special beyond words, etc.

These connections may seem like chance or coincidence, but isn’t there something miraculous in the way they unfold? Every relationship, every shared moment, is a reminder that we are never truly alone. It’s a miracle in itself to find people who understand and accept us in a world so vast and diverse and many times indifferent towards us too.

Miracles of Inner Strength

Sometimes, the most significant miracles aren’t the ones that happen to us but the ones we discover within ourselves. Life has a way of testing us—be it through loss, heartbreak, illness, or failure. In these moments, we often wonder, “How will I ever get through this?” And yet, somehow, we do.

The real miracle isn’t just surviving adversity, but thriving through it. The strength that appears when you thought you had none left, the courage to face another day when it feels impossible, and the hope that refuses to be extinguished—these are all miracles of the human spirit.

Miracles: A Matter of Faith and Perception

Miracles, those extraordinary events that seem to defy the laws of nature, have captivated humanity for millennia. They are often seen as divine interventions, supernatural occurrences that challenge our understanding of the world. But what exactly constitutes a miracle? And how do we reconcile such events with our scientific understanding of the universe?

For many, miracles are a testament to the power of faith. They are seen as divine manifestations, proof of a higher power at work. Religious texts are filled with stories of miracles, from the parting of the Red Sea to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. These tales have inspired countless believers and have played a central role in shaping religious traditions.

Yet, the interpretation of miracles is not always straightforward. What one person may see as a miracle, another may simply attribute to coincidence or chance. The line between the natural and the supernatural can be blurry, and our perceptions are often influenced by our beliefs and worldviews.

From a scientific standpoint, miracles can be difficult to explain. They often involve events that seem to violate well-established laws of physics. However, scientists have also been known to be cautious about dismissing the possibility of the unknown. There have been instances where seemingly miraculous events have been explained through scientific investigation, revealing natural causes that were previously overlooked.

It’s important to note that science is not designed to prove or disprove the existence of miracles. Science focuses on understanding the natural world through observation and experimentation. While it may not be able to explain every extraordinary event, it can provide valuable insights into the underlying causes of many phenomena.

A Personal Journey

Whether or not you believe in miracles is a personal matter. It is a question that has been pondered by countless individuals throughout history. Some find solace and inspiration in the stories of miracles, while others remain sceptical. Ultimately, the decision of whether or not to believe is a deeply personal one that cannot be dictated by others.

Miracles, at their core, are about hope, faith, and the human experience. They are a reminder that at times, extraordinary things happen. Whether these events are divine interventions or simply the result of chance, they can have a profound impact on our lives.

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Zoë Fowler, University at Albany, State University of New York and Brendan Bo O’Connor, University at Albany, State University of New York

Warm sun on your face, a gentle salty breeze, the sound of ocean waves. Your friend earnestly suggests surfing lessons, and you both laugh as you imagine the two of you gracelessly tumbling through the water.

Could imagining this beachside road trip together bring you closer, before you even pack your bags? Is imagining a shared future together the first step toward creating one?

From friends and family to lovers and acquaintances, people collaborate all the time to imagine shared experiences. They can be as whimsical as make-believe, as mundane as what’s for dinner, or as consequential as the future of our politics and planet.

Yet social scientists have traditionally researched imagination as an individual psychological process.

Our research in the Imagination and Cognition Lab at the University at Albany, SUNY has studied the various ways that imagination can shape people’s social and emotional lives. While “imagination” can refer to many different ideas and processes, the form of imagination our work focuses on involves the ability to mentally create and represent novel, hypothetical, personal experiences that are specific in time and place.

To begin to bridge the gap between how psychologists understand an individual’s capacity to imagine and how social interactions can affect this cognitive process, we recently proposed a new framework of collaborative imagination – what we call co-imagination. It casts imagination as an interactive, co-creative process between two or more people in which they converse and collaborate to construct a shared representation of a specific possible experience.

With our colleagues Daniela Palombo and Christopher Madan, we set out to explore how collaboratively imagining a shared future with someone else might influence the shared relationship.

A shift from studying solo imagining to sharedYour ability to imagine the future as an individual can shape how you navigate your social world.

From job interviews to first dates to family reunions, people often think about future events that involve others. This tendency not only helps you plan and prepare for future possibilities, but it can also serve important functions related to social bonding, empathy and moral decision-making.

Such research has helped psychologists understand the central role that other people and social dynamics can play in an individual’s imagination, and how imagined experiences can affect people’s social lives. What’s more, work in other fields such as philosophy and sociology has demonstrated at the group level how people and institutions can build shared worldviews and understandings of future possibilities.

In its focus on either the individual or the social collective, prior studies have largely overlooked the possibility that imagination can occur within interpersonal interactions.

We wanted to see how collaborative imagination might influence feelings of closeness. So in the first psychology experiment exploring this interactive process, we paired strangers to complete a collaborative imagination task. They needed to work together to imagine and describe a positive, shared future experience that could realistically occur – such as going for a hike together in the forest or meeting for dinner at a restaurant. We asked for details, including where and when the event will occur, what people will do and how they will feel.

To rule out other possible explanations for any effects we might see, we had other volunteers complete one of two alternative tasks. One group of participants paired up to collaborate on an interactive task that didn’t involve imagination, such as putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Another group of participants each worked independently to imagine a future experience shared with their assigned partner.

After completing the given task, all participants answered questions about how close and connected they felt with their study partner.

Closeness through co-imaginationWhen we compared how participants in each group felt about their study partner, we found a consistent effect: People who collaboratively imagined a shared future together felt closer and more connected to their partner than those who independently imagined a shared future and those who collaborated on an unrelated task. This finding begins to illustrate how collaborative imagination may support new social relationships, allowing people to forge deeper connections by co-authoring imagined experiences in possible shared futures.

We were also interested in whether co-imagining a shared future together could provide a way for people to develop similar visions of what the future might hold. To shed light on this, we used computational tools that analyze language – called natural language processing – to test similarity between the narratives that each partner provided while independently describing the events they had previously co-imagined together.

We found that people who imagined collaboratively provided similar narratives about that shared future, suggesting that co-imagination may be a way for people to co-create a shared understanding of possible future experiences.

What’s more, this study provided the first experimental evidence that imagining future experiences in our personal lives is not always something we do in solitude. Rather, people can imagine a future by envisioning it together, co-creating a shared understanding of what that future could hold and, in doing so, growing closer and more connected.

Other potential effects of co-imaginationWhile our research has begun to illustrate the importance of co-imagination, it also raised several new and intriguing questions.

What functions does co-imagination have in existing close relationships? Co-imagining a shared future seems to be a part of everyday life with those you are closest to, from friends and family to romantic partners. Indeed, we suspect it might be important in both forming and maintaining close relationships broadly.

While psychological research on imagination has yet to directly explore these questions, other studies find that individually imagining an experience involving a significant other can bring about feelings of warmth and love. It’s possible such effects may be enhanced when imagining that shared experience together with your significant other.

Another important function of imagination broadly is improving your ability to successfully pursue goals. Could co-imagination be a particularly powerful way to work toward relationship-focused goals, making it possible for relationship partners to co-create a shared vision of what pursuing and accomplishing a given goal might involve?

For instance, a couple who want to move in together may co-imagine a future experience of cooking dinner in their new shared apartment. Co-imagining this shared future could allow each partner a way to express their own needs and desires in relation to that goal – what neighborhood are we living in? They get to test out how they may feel in that future – excited, tired, loved? They have a chance to anticipate potential challenges and navigate those possibilities together – what happens when one partner, who lacks cooking skills, burns dinner?

Just as co-imagination may enhance feelings of connection, it also has the potential to combat loneliness and disconnection.

Loneliness is a widespread issue, linked to several health and well-being concerns. We hope future research will explore how to use the social benefits of co-imagination to address feelings of loneliness.

Our studies focused on co-imagination as it unfolds between two people imagining their shared future. But the futures people imagine can be much vaster, encompassing a broader social collective such as one’s extended family, town, or even country. In what ways might co-imagination shape such collective-oriented future thoughts? Could co-imagination influence collective beliefs or ideas about the future throughout a broader social group?

Co-creating a future through co-imaginationSo, should you ask someone to co-imagine a shared future when you’re out on your next romantic date? Well, we’re not quite sure. The evidence we have shows that co-imagination indeed can increase feelings of closeness among people who were previously strangers and give rise to a shared understanding of what the future could look like.

But there’s a lot more work that needs to be done to understand just how co-imagination shapes relationships. Studying more people, across different relationship types, over prolonged periods of time and in more natural, everyday environments will better enable us to understand how to effectively harness the social effects of co-imagination within relationships.

Your potential futures are not yours alone to imagine. Rather, the future and its possibilities are something that you actively co-create with others. In doing so, you become closer and more connected to them in the present. Collaboratively imagining a shared future together, it seems, may be an important first step toward creating it.

Zoë Fowler, Graduate Assistant in Psychology, University at Albany, State University of New York and Brendan Bo O’Connor, Associate Professor of Psychology, University at Albany, State University of New York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Featuring Andy Bird who shares stories of how he began his career in radio before climbing the entertainment ladder to become the Chairman of Walt Disney International. The curiosity and belief that he had in the early days of his own career carried forward into recruiting others who had their own story to tell. Lessons learned from Rock and Roll!

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Homelessness is the space between the place where you once lived and the place where you will live again. It is the place of dislocation, transition, waiting …

~Lucy, a woman who was once homeless

What does homelessness look like, and who does it affect? Martha Stone, the executive director of a 96-bed homeless shelter, shares the stories of a few residents of the shelter, and shares how we can all end the cycle of homelessness in our communities.

Editor’s Note: Homelessness is a complex and pressing issue affecting millions of people worldwide. It is a condition that is often misunderstood and stigmatized and is often seen as a personal failing rather than a systemic problem. We listened, gathered their stories, and crafted them into our special edition anthology book below, with all profits donated to nonprofits serving this unfortunate population. Help us help them by grabbing your copy HERE.

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In the dynamic landscape of contemporary leadership, the philosophy of servant leadership has emerged as a transformative catalyst for holistic organizational development. As we venture deeper into the exploration of this philosophy, we uncover its profound impact on fostering an environment of collaboration, empathy, and empowerment—an environment where the growth of individuals, the alignment of purpose, and the well-being of the collective take precedence over traditional notions of leadership. This chapter delves into the core principles and practices of servant leadership and unveils its harmonious alignment with the ideals of holistic growth.

The Essence of Servant Leadership: Leading Through Service

At its heart, servant leadership redefines leadership as a service to others. This paradigm shift challenges the conventional notion of leaders as authoritative figures who dictate directives. Instead, servant leaders view their role as that of facilitators, mentors, and enablers of growth. They prioritize the needs of their teams, acknowledging that their own success is intrinsically tied to the success of those they lead. This fundamental shift in perspective sets the stage for the creation of an environment where collaboration and empowerment flourish.

Nurturing a Culture of Collaboration: Open Communication and Shared Purpose

Central to the philosophy of servant leadership is the emphasis on open communication. Servant leaders create spaces where individuals feel safe to voice their opinions, share ideas, and engage in dialogue.

By actively listening and valuing diverse perspectives, servant leaders cultivate an atmosphere of inclusivity and mutual respect. This culture of collaboration not only fuels innovation but also ensures that the organization benefits from the collective wisdom of its members.

Shared purpose is another cornerstone of servant leadership. Servant leaders work to align individual and organizational goals with a broader sense of purpose—one that transcends financial success and encompasses a positive impact on society.

By imbuing every action and decision with purpose, servant leaders inspire a collective commitment that goes beyond personal gain and elevates the well-being of all stakeholders.

Empathy and Empowerment: Fostering Individual Growth

Empathy lies at the heart of servant leadership. Servant leaders possess a keen understanding of the emotions, concerns, and aspirations of their team members. This empathetic approach not only nurtures a culture of trust but also creates a sense of belonging within the organization. By acknowledging the holistic well-being of individuals, servant leaders create an environment where employees are valued not just as resources, but as human beings with unique talents and needs.

Empowerment is the natural outcome of this empathetic approach. Servant leaders provide their teams with the autonomy, resources, and support needed to excel. They encourage individuals to take ownership of their roles, make decisions, and contribute to the organization’s growth. This empowerment unleashes untapped potential, driving innovation and fostering a sense of pride and ownership among employees.

Leading by Example: Humility and Integrity

Servant leaders lead by example, embodying qualities of humility and integrity. They are not afraid to admit their mistakes or acknowledge their limitations. This transparency creates an atmosphere where individuals feel comfortable taking calculated risks and learning from failures.

By upholding a high standard of ethical conduct and moral integrity, servant leaders set a precedent for the organization’s values and contribute to a culture of accountability.

Servant Leadership and Holistic Organizational Development: A Seamless Integration

Servant leadership seamlessly aligns with the principles of holistic organizational development. Its emphasis on collaboration, shared purpose, empathy, and empowerment resonates deeply with the holistic perspective that considers the well-being of employees, communities, and the environment. In organizations guided by servant leadership, growth is not confined to financial metrics but extends to the growth of individuals, relationships, and societal impact.

As we journey further, we will explore how servant leadership forms the bedrock for navigating change, embracing diversity, nurturing employee well-being, fostering purpose-driven performance management, and envisioning a future where organizations thrive through authentic connections and sustainable impact.

The subsequent chapters will unveil the practical strategies, real-world examples, and actionable insights that illuminate the path towards holistic growth through servant leadership, creating a blueprint for leaders who seek to shape organizations that transcend conventional boundaries and embrace holistic excellence.

Reflections:

1. Personal Reflection on Well-Being: How have you experienced the impact of leadership styles on your well-being in the workplace? Can you recall a time when a leader’s approach positively or negatively affected your job satisfaction and overall well-being?
2. Empathy in Leadership: Reflect on how empathy in leadership can influence employee well-being. Can you think of specific examples where empathetic leadership made a tangible difference in an organizational setting?
3. Fostering Growth and Empowerment: Consider how servant leadership principles can foster individual growth and empowerment. How might this approach contrast with more traditional leadership styles you have encountered?
4. Servant Leadership in Action: Think about a scenario where servant leadership could have a significant impact on employee well-being. How would you apply servant leadership principles to improve the situation?
5. Challenges to Implementing Servant Leadership: What challenges might a leader face when trying to focus on employee well-being within an organization? How could these challenges be addressed through servant leadership?
6. Personal Alignment with Servant Leadership: How do your own values and leadership style align with the concept of enhancing employee well-being through servant leadership? Are there areas where you see opportunities for growth or change in your approach?
7. Long-term Impact on Organizational Culture: Reflect on the long-term impact that a focus on employee well-being can have on organizational culture. How does investing in the well-being of employees contribute to the overall success of an organization?

These questions are designed to encourage introspection and application of the concepts of servant leadership and employee well-being in both personal and professional contexts. They aim to deepen understanding and inspire practical application of these principles in the workplace.

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It was a dark, cold night. Sarah was returning from a Christmas party with her two kids. The roads were slippery due to the snow, but she did not care much and continued driving fast. When she saw the signal light turn yellow, she accelerated her speed to pass through the signal before it turned red, but unfortunately, she collided with another speeding truck. She and her two kids were severely injured. It took her six months to recover entirely physically, but the trauma of that accident severely affected her mental health. Before that accident, she used to enjoy long drives, but after the accident, the thought of driving a car triggered panic attacks. Anybody can experience a traumatic experience in life. Trauma is an emotional response to a distressing event, such as the death of a loved one, rape, violence, natural disaster, etc.

It is important to note that any experience that may sound traumatic for one person may not be traumatic for another.

For example, Michelle had a traumatic experience when she fell off the swing. The embarrassment of falling off the swing in front of her classmates was so traumatic that after that incident, she suffered from neck pain for years until she went through hypnosis to heal from that traumatic experience.

Valerie Candela Brower, a licensed professional counselor, defined Trauma as “when too much happens too soon for the nervous system to process.” Candela Brower explained further. “It’s like eating a big meal and not fully digesting it, but then eating another big meal, and then another. The body does not digest what has happened, and instead, we stuff our feelings, numb out, or deny reality.”

Throughout a lifetime, it’s common to be exposed to a traumatic event, whether it is a violent act, a serious injury, sexual abuse, or other shocking event. It can take a while to get over the pain and feel safe again when bad things happen. Emotional and psychological trauma is the result of extraordinarily stressful events that shatter your sense of security, making you feel helpless in a dangerous world. Psychological trauma can leave you struggling with upsetting emotions, memories, and anxiety that won’t go away. It can also leave you feeling numb, disconnected, and unable to trust other people.

Usually, these symptoms get better with time. But for some people, more intense symptoms linger or interfere with their daily lives and do not go away on their own. Most of the time, people are stuck with their past memories and shame. These thoughts /feelings of embarrassment are internalized and become an integral part of your self-talk. Our brain holds on to these memories as if they are still true in the present. For example, when Sarah tries to drive a car, her mind replays the memories from the accident, which triggers a panic attack.

What to do to stay in controlThese memories of the traumatic experience can be harrowing and demoralizing, but the good news is that they can be controlled. Healing from trauma is not easy, and it gets trickier as everyone reacts to trauma in different ways, experiencing a wide range of physical and emotional reactions. Following are a few tips to help you heal from trauma.

Focus on Physical/body reactionsTrauma disrupts your body’s natural balance, freezing you in a state of hyperarousal and fear. The traumatic memories can live in your mind and body, creating continuous havoc. Working on releasing the stress caused by these memories may help you break free from traumatic memories of that event. Whenever you start feeling fear, overwhelming anxiety, or experiencing the onset of panic, try focusing on your body’s reaction. The bodily responses are mostly similar in several experiences, such as the body reacting the same way when you feel nervous or excited. It all depends on how you label these experiences and; makes you feel the emotions at that time. If any particular event triggers the memories of the past traumatic event, focus on bodily reaction and try to change the label of the feeling. If you are feeling fear, tell yourself that you are experiencing the thrill at the moment, as experiencing fear is similar to experiencing the thrill. This is the reason why people love roller-coasters, haunted houses, and horror movies. Once you take charge of your emotions, try to take deep breaths. Start relaxing your body. Body scan meditation may help you relax your body.

Here’s how to practice body scanning meditation:

1. Try to get into a comfortable seated position. Close your eyes.
2. Focus on your lower body and consciously feel that it is getting completely relaxed. Notice how your feet feel on the floor. Slowly, move your attention to your ankles, knees, thighs, and then pelvis. Identify temperature, pressure, tension, and any other sensations as you move up your body.
3. When you feel any tension, take a deep breath and exhale as you release it.
4. When you feel the body part relax, you can move to the next one and repeat the same.
5. Finally, end by focusing on your neck, head, and face. By then, your body should be completely relaxed.

Remind yourself that you are safeIn your brain, the thoughts from traumatic experiences remain active, and your mind perceives them as if it is happening in the current moment. Reminding yourself that “It’s over can help you to deal with it effectively. When these traumatic thoughts start haunting you, repeat to yourself, ‘I am safe’, ‘it’s over’.

GroundingGrounding exercises can help you anchor yourself to the present moment. This could help you take your mind off past events that are causing you distress. Grounding may be particularly helpful if you’re experiencing flashbacks, anxiety, and dissociation symptoms.

Here are a few grounding techniques to try at home:

Run water over your hands. Start by running water over your hands. Focus on the temperature and its sensations on each part of your hand, from your wrist to your nails.

Move your body in ways that feel most comfortable to you. This can include jumping up and down, dancing, jogging in place, or stretching. As you move, focus on how your body feels.

Try to feel the sensations from all five senses. Focus on your current sensations, such as room temperature, your breathing, and your surroundings. Feel the taste in your mouth, the smell at the moment.

Resourcing and visualizationDuring time of distress, it may help you to resource your past memories that made you feel good. Resourcing and visualization simply mean tuning into specific body sensations that may be the opposite of what you’re experiencing at the moment.

Some of the simple ways to practice resourcing and visualization

• Create a safe place in your mind. Go back to a time and place when you felt safe and happy, for example a walk on a sea shore. Or you could create an imaginary new safe place that you haven’t experienced yet. Feel your body there and focus on how comfortable you feel.
• Think about people you love and focus on the way it makes you feel. You could start by looking at photos of them or focusing on specific memories you share.

It is not easy to deal with the trauma alone. It is highly recommended to take help from a trained therapist. Just remember, Trauma is not your fault but, healing from trauma is your responsibility.

References:

• https://psychcentral.com/lib/somatic-therapy-exercises-for-trauma
• https://www.sunshineclinic.org/blog/emotional-and-psychological-trauma-what-is-it-and-how-to-heal/
• https://www.helpguide.org/articles/ptsd-trauma/coping-with-emotional-and-psychological-trauma.htm
• https://www.verywellmind.com/10-ways-to-heal-from-trauma-5206940
• https://www.nm.org/healthbeat/healthy-tips/emotional-health/5-things-you-never-knew-about-fear

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In a comment on a recent post of mine titled, “The Ice Cream of Success” Gladstone Leslie Samuel wrote, “Climbing the summit is success. To remain at the top is a perpetual challenge”.

This comment brought up the question of positional change, and if what positions we hold dictate how fast we need to change?

Leaders are on top and have maximum exposure to outside challenges and obstacles. The heat of challenges may melt them and start flowing their effect on employees and dishearten them.

Those leaders may cause their organizations to shrink. They need to self-inspect their mindsets and view challenges and obstacles as the salt that lowers their freezing temperature to remain “solid” in facing challenges.

The world we live in is witnessing rapid change. Change brings opportunities and challenges. Leaders may need to adapt faster than change to meet the challenges of change and grasp its opportunities.

This means leaders must foster their self-belief to make their employees feel the same. The big challenge is to keep self-belief in times of rapid change and not melt because of their heat. And if they do then only to become more fluid leaders to go around challenges and obstacles and even melt them.

Leaders may melt under the heat of challenges to enhance the speed of their leadership. Those leaders melt to enable them to execute fast and execute right.

Fluid leaders are not slow leaders who only act if they go wrong and not as planned or hoped for. They are accountable and have the agility to spring back fast.

Those leaders know well the challenges ahead but also know what opportunities are hidden in those obstacles.

Those leaders work to foster collaboration and innovation as Dennis Pitocco mentioned in his recent post on “Community Matters: Because “Everything Belongs Together”.

To do so, those leaders have the ability to keep their empathy and open communication, conflict resolution, powerful persuasion, high agility, and trust.

Those leaders adapt their leadership style to be in alignment with the challenges lying ahead. The five leadership styles are authoritarian, democratic, participative, delegating, and do as I want style.

Not all leaders are in the same position and so no leadership style shall fit all situations of the position in which leaders are.

Maybe this is a “Customized Leadership” style.

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When have you heard that someone went into risk, or danger for another because they were “psychologically safe”? You haven’t. You don’t, and, you won’t. Because we don’t go towards danger because we’re psychologically safe. We go into the unknown, the risky places, and the danger, and then innovate, for those who matter to us. For those with whom we belong.

Simply, they matter more to us than the danger. So, when it comes to that line in the sand, where on the one side we’re psychologically safe, and then on the other, we’re not, we ignore it. Our line of inhibition to take action diminishes as our belonging gets stronger.

No amount of psychological safety motivates you to have somebody’s back. You know, stick your neck out for them. That’s a function of belonging in our neurobiology. And that’s why I say, this big push to enable DEI through psychological safety misses the mark.

Companies have been spending some $8 billion a year on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) (in the US)—and see remarkably few results (Fortune, citing McKinsey & Company Dec. 7, 2021). I know the statistics show that DEI is better for business. I agree 100%!!! It’s just that the evidence and arguments don’t pan out very well across the work world. If they did, we’d have progressed way farther. I mean, really, the data proves it’s not working.

And, don’t get me wrong, a psychologically unsafe environment can definitely inhibit DEI efforts. But more importantly, a psychologically safe environment can’t pave the way for DEI. Harder still, DEI efforts threaten the status quo. And here again, I believe the status quo really needs to change. It’s a disgrace. In 2021, companies founded solely by women garnered 2.4% of the total capital invested in venture-backed startups in the US. Here’s a quick unscientific study. Just did a LinkedIn search: CTO in People. Out of the first 100 people, only seven are women. No one steps into the discomfort to disrupt the status quo because they’re psychologically safe. Other reasons, yes, just not that.

I’m a former VP of people & culture, and now, an executive/orgdev coach. I’ve observed these four things about DEI efforts in both, psychologically safe and unsafe environments. And, the answers are the same.

When DEI comes before B(elonging) DEI, outside of belonging is fraught with resistance. * Diversity, without belonging, it’s a quota that gets fought * Equity, outside of belonging, gets seen as an unjust handout * Inclusion*, less belonging’s embrace, makes for a stranger in an unfriendly land

This is why, regardless of the arguments, all the data-driven evidence, the anti-bias training, training on how to make a psychologically safe workplace, etc… at 8 billion dollars a year hasn’t done much to change things. The arguments and the mandates keep failing. Because, the moment DEI efforts, even with all their honorable objectives, threaten our belonging, DEI becomes the adversary. It’s neurobiology. We’re wired to belong, as in, to really belong, before anything else.

Outside of belonging and regardless of how psychologically safe, each area and DEI easily triggers fight/flight responses.

We don’t think about DEI efforts as threatening our belonging. They’re supposed to expand belonging! But if we’re willing to be honest, yes, DEI can and does threaten. As a VP of people and culture, I found myself in an inequitable situation. It was time for raises and I was reviewing salaries. I found out that a couple of my women co-VPs were making less than me. So, I made the case for our salaries to be on par. And as much as I love the infinite game thinking, the reality is, company financial resources are finite. Their getting moved into a salary range on par meant my slated raise wouldn’t happen. What does that have to do with belonging? Lots!

My choice for equity for them came into conflict with my primary circle of belonging, providing for my family. It was my belonging with my women co-VPs that opened the door for me to choose also them, and, my family. No “Belonging” and the “E” in DEI didn’t stand a chance. And that’s regardless of how psychologically safe the environment was.

Know this. If you put your DEI efforts in the way of your people’s belonging, expect those efforts to go nowhere in the face of passive-aggressive resistance.

But when you start with belonging, real Feel, Own, Care Belonging, not a Sense of Belonging, we can open the hearts and minds to embrace DEI

We are not thinking beings that feel. We are not feeling beings that think. We are belonging beings that feel and think.

It’s from the story where we belong, that we’re willing to give, even go without, for another, to bring them into our company tribes. Moreover, each we bring in each person with their full uniqueness. We bet on their potential. From the heart in belonging, we feel, own, and care for each other. DEI gets a red carpet treatment when the filtering bias for who’s in and who’s out, gets measured by living the ways we belong* in the company and accomplishing the belief in her shared purpose. DEI becomes the means for a better Us Story. Here, filtering by how one sounds and looks, seems kind of dumb.

*(The Ways We Belong = how the lived core values guide all company deecisions.)

I love Susan LaMotte‘s definition of culture.

When asked what culture is, I use the word tribe. A functioning tribe has rules to join, rules to leave, and rules that keep the tribe running smoothly. Take modern American Indian tribes. They still run by tribal councils, and have rules to enroll and dis-enroll in the tribe. They have traditions, symbols and ways of being that are different and may even seem strange or odd to non-members. But members of the tribe relish in them. They belong.

The codified ways we belong prevent the vacuum that would otherwise get occupied by the fight/flight that comes with fitting in. Fitting in is the natural outcome in the absence of clearly defined ways of belonging. People who fight for DEI outcomes from their belonging, on the other hand, fight for each other’s diverse uniqueness. Belonging provides the inviting embrace as well as the clear and agreed-upon boundary. And, no, not everybody belongs. Only those who adhere to the ways the company tribe belongs in pursuit if it’s shared belief in purpose. (Yeah, I know I sound a little Brené Brown-ish.)

With respect to a “Sense of Belonging,” I’ll just ask you. Will you work for a sense of a paycheck?

Pause… would you work for a “sense” of a paycheck?

And though belonging is the answer, the current often-cited institutional models for understanding belonging also add even more resistance to DEI. The problem: they are one-way, receiving transactional models of understanding. An affirmation model. One-way-emotional streets. I get, therefore I belong. You’re left asking, “When the money runs out, will you still have my back?” “If they get, and I don’t, do I belong?”

Here’s Cornell University’s understanding of a Sense of Belonging for reference:

Belonging is the feeling of security and support when there is a sense of acceptance, inclusion, and identity for a member of a certain group. It is when an individual can bring their authentic self to work.

Here’s the APA definition:

n. The feeling of being accepted and approved by a group or by society as a whole. Also called belongingness.

Both of these popular definitions get cited regularly. And they’re both one-directional and in receive mode. They’re both affirmation/acceptance models. Nothing in them says, “we belong… I got your back.”

A New Model for Belonging, Feel, Own, CareBelonging, it’s a state of being, in relationship with others:

When you feel, own, and care for them, in their successes, dreams, and failures. And, they feel, own, and care for you in yours. It’s a two-way street.

DEI efforts need the “we’re in this together” bidirectional space so it’s not working against the neurological tide. Belonging fills the emotional space with a unite-and-fight neurochemistry, leaving less room for fight/flight. It’s a two-way street of feeling for yourself and them, owning your life and theirs, and, caring for yourself and them. And they do the same with you. If you prefer today’s typical business emotional intelligence language, it’s mutual- empathy (feeling), accountability (owning), and compassion (caring for).

I prefer to use the simpler regular language of, feel, own, and care for. It’s how we would actually talk to each other, and think, and feel towards each other if we were sitting in a coffee shop, or bar, or now, across the Zoom. We say, “I feel for you, my sister (or xi, or brother), what can I do to lighten your load?” We don’t say, “I empathize with you, person I am accountable towards, what act of compassion do you need?” The more academic and intellectual the language, the farther from the heart we seem to get.

Belonging requires all three – Feel, Own, and Care forThere’s a hollowness that we know, that comes when any of the three: feel, own, or care for, aren’t genuine, or, are missing.

• Without the Feel, (empathy) we question whether or not we’re really theirs, when they say, “You’re my friend… or my employee…” We question the “why” of their care for us.
• Without Own, (accountability) we’re stuck with the nagging doubt of whether their expressed feelings for us are true. We doubt if their care for us is actually for us.
• Without Care for, (compassion) we disbelieve in the genuineness of their expressed feelings and their claim that we are theirs.e Feel Own Care Belonging

But when you have all three, look out, you get a company of people that will find a way for each other.

You know you belong because first, YOU feel, own, and care for them, AND, second, THEY also feel, own, and care for you. If it’s just them, you’re getting affirmation, and yeah, that feels good. If it’s just you, you’re probably just fitting in, or in codependency.

It really comes down to this, we’ll fight for those that we feel, own, and care for. It’s how we get to this type of scenario.

Maori Woman With Face Tattoo Is 1st to Anchor Primetime News

You love and belong at your company so much you want to include someone from another circle of your belonging, into it. So you invite her to join. Her values align. She’s excited about joining in purpose. She didn’t come from a fancy college, but you don’t care. Hard knocks couldn’t stop her. She meets with the team, and they see she’d need some added mentoring and training, well, in the comparison of the skills to the other candidates. She’s been out of the workforce for 20 years. You could invest in her, and give some equity on her behalf, for a better company in the future. And, she even looks different, diverse, in her bright-colored clothes, and what looks to be she-warrior tattoos on her chin and up her right arm to her bicep. She sees things differently than you, but comes from the same heart, with similar enough core values.

When she told her back story, you could hear the company’s core values echoed in it. Your people could tell she’d already chosen them, and she was bold and vulnerable about it. She wanted in on the tribe. And they chose her too. Belonging’s a 2-way-street.

That’s what you get through feeling, owning, and caring for each other – real F.O.C.’n belonging.

Win the DEI long game in FOCn’belonging! Think BIED, not DEI+B1. Create a place where the ways you belong (feel, own, care for) come from your no-compromise lived core values for each other, as you work towards your shared belief in purpose. This is your primary bias/filter. 2. Include, or invite someone in, based on whether they’d embrace the ways your company tribe belongs and in their shared belief in purpose. 3. Look more towards their potential, what they can and would agree to do, vs just what they’ve done before and where they’re from. You’re willing to use equity to get them and bring them into the company belonging. 4. Seek those, in their complete and individual diversity, from a biased filter of, they’d embrace the company’s ways of belonging, and pursue its shared belief, promised land.s We take action sooner in belonging.

When your people belong, their efforts pertaining to DEI play a natural part in deepening the company tribe. In the search for adding another person to the company Us Story, they’ll unite and fight for each other’s diverse uniqueness, because the ways your people belong are clear in their invitation and boundary. They’ll act for it sooner!

Psychological safety can’t provide that. You can’t just play it safe.

You play to belong, and then you win with DEI.

I’ll leave you with a wonderful description of belonging by Owen Eastwood, the author of, Belonging, The Ancient Code of Togetherness.

Whakapapa (Maori for, “you belong here”) points a finger at us and tells us, You will not be judged by your money or celebrity or sense of self pride . . . you will be judged by what you did for our tribe. When the sun is shining on us, we must be guardians of our tribe and of each other.

Belonging, The Ancient Code of Togetherness. (pp. 18-19).

Thanks for taking the time to read this, really. If you’re curious, or, you’d like to couch your DEI in belonging for real success, give me a holler. Catch ya, Paul

This piece was originally published on LinkedIn, , November 2022.

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Once, and not that long ago, two young lovers greeted the beauty found in each sunrise and frolicked in the sands of time together. Searching for the hidden secrets and treasures of their world; while storing away memories for another day.

Never tiring, but fueled by one another’s energy, they built a family and a world that gave them a sense of safety and security.

Talking daily with God, they thanked Him for the family and health He had given them, neither ever dreaming of it being any other way.

They watched as the sun set each evening, its beauty only adding to the warmth already felt in their hearts; having experienced love, life, and God’s mercies together.

And they stood in awe and amazement of heaven’s beauty late into the evenings; two joined figures silhouetted against the night, while the vastness of it all drew them even closer.

But then, without warning, time and life took their silent toll, and heaven called one of them home, leaving the other here, to finish their walk alone.

So now, as I lament her absence, I find peace in knowing that she’s talking to angels while I talk to God.

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Mutual reflection. Open and candid conversation. Questioning of old beliefs and assumptions. Learning to let go. Awareness of how our own actions create the systemic structures that produce our problems. Developing these learning capabilities lies at the heart of profound change.

–Peter Senge

We’re excited to announce the launch of Studio 360°, an innovative, virtually live (via Zoom) interview series that brings you face-to-face with some of the most intriguing human beings on the planet. Studio 360° offers unprecedented casual “fireside chats” founded upon open, honest, engaging perspectives poised to inspire anyone and everyone to get to the essence of who they are and what matters most. Our unique, interactive format creates a relaxed, unfettered environment where guests feel comfortable sharing candid thoughts and personal insights.

What sets Studio 360° apart: Audience Engagement: Unlike Podcasts and other business-as-usual formats, we set the stage, light the fire with our probing questions, and then fan the flames for you (our audience) to join the conversation with our special guests. * Authentic Conversations: Our guests engage in genuine, unscripted dialogue, free from the constraints of typical media appearances. Together, we ask questions that matter and get honest answers. * Universal Themes: While our featured personalities are extraordinary, the conversations touch on experiences and emotions that resonate with us all. * Inspirational Focus: Each episode aims to inspire audience interaction, encouraging self-reflection and personal growth. * Expert Moderation:* We bring years of experience fostering meaningful conversations, ensuring each discussion reaches its full potential by stoking the flames so each fireside chat burns brighter.

Studio 360° delivers candid insights for a wide range of individuals – from ambitious professionals to lifelong learners, and anyone intrigued by the expansive nature of human potential. Join us live for each enlightening one-hour chat as we explore the minds shaping our world and uncover the wisdom that can transform your perspective.

Our inaugural event premiers Tuesday, August 13th at 11:00 AM Eastern, so don’t wait, register below to grab your free seat to join our conversation with special guestMelissa Hughes, Ph.DCLICK HERE TO GRAB YOUR FREE SEAT

Studio 360° – Where great minds open up, and everyday wisdom comes full circle.

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Clinical psychologist Meg Jay has a bold message for twentysomethings: Contrary to popular belief, your 20s are not a throwaway decade. In this provocative talk, Jay says that just because marriage, work, and kids are happening later in life, doesn’t mean you can’t start planning now. She gives 3 pieces of advice for how twentysomethings can re-claim adulthood in the defining decade of their lives.

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Family life often requires extraordinary bravery, from navigating the daily challenges to surviving the unexpected crises. Author and podcaster Kelly Corrigan offers profound wisdom (and seven key words) to help you focus in on what matters most.

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The Camino scallop shell symbolizes rebirth, leaving your old life behind and embarking on a new spiritual journey.

Author’s Note: Over the course of 40 days (and circa 1.3 million steps) my wife Ali and I recently completed our long-planned pilgrimage across the Camino de Santiago, also known as the “Way of St. James”. We’ve done our best to capture the essence of our life-changing experience within the essay below.

As we embarked on the 500-mile Camino de Santiago starting from the small town of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France, and culminating in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, we endured a pivotal journey that touched our very cores. Each step along this ancient pilgrimage route challenged us physically, mentally, and spiritually, pushing us to limits we never knew we had. Our feet ached and blistered, our muscles screamed in protest, yet our spirits soared with a newfound sense of purpose.

We experienced a tumultuous rollercoaster of emotions: frustration when faced with unexpected hurdles, pure joy in the friendships forged along the way, and awe at the breathtaking landscapes that unfolded before us. But there was also trepidation as we pushed our bodies beyond their comfort zones, overwhelming gratitude for the kindness of strangers, moments of unbridled wonder at the centuries of history beneath our feet, and unexpected waves of grief. This grief emerged not only as we confronted and released old burdens, but also as we learned of fellow pilgrims who departed this life on the trail, their journeys abruptly ending before reaching Santiago. Each loss was a stark reminder of life’s fragility and added a bittersweet note to our pilgrimage.

We felt exhilaration as we conquered steep climbs, and discovered deep inner peace in quiet contemplation. In moments of solitude, we were enveloped by a symphony of silence, where nature’s subtle sounds became a melodious backdrop to our introspection. Through often scorching heat and treacherous conditions, we pressed on, slowly shedding the weight of our everyday lives and embracing the beautiful simplicity of the Camino.

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. – Maya Angelou.

With each milestone, a sense of accomplishment washed over us, and we found ourselves changing in ways we couldn’t have imagined when we first shouldered our backpacks. As our journey came to an end, it became clear that we had left behind our doubts, fears, and the constraints of our old selves. In their place, we gained extraordinary gifts of wisdom: the power of perseverance, the beauty of human connection, the peace found in simplicity, and the profound understanding that life’s true journey is not about the destination, but the transformation that occurs along the way.

OUR FINAL STEPS INTO THE SANTIAGO COMPOSTELA PLAZA ADJACENT THE CATHEDRAL

The Camino is a path that leads you back to yourself. – Unknown

Wisdom Gained The power of simplicity and minimalism: Living with bare essentials for hundreds of miles proved liberating. Happiness was found in basic comforts like a comfortable bed, warm meal, or beautiful sunset. This simplicity allowed for mental decluttering, providing clarity on priorities and values, and inspiring a simpler lifestyle focused on what truly matters. * Transformative community and connection: The Camino created a unique social environment where strangers quickly became friends and supporters. Diverse individuals from around the world united by a common goal experienced kindness from fellow pilgrims and locals alike. This restored faith in humanity and inspired more open, trusting, and meaningful relationships in everyday life. * Growth through discomfort: The journey challenged us physically and mentally with a daily routine of long walks, difficult conditions, and unfamiliar situations. Overcoming these obstacles built resilience, self-confidence, and adaptability. Stripped of familiar comforts, we were forced to confront avoided aspects of ourselves, leading to personal breakthroughs. * The power of presence: The repetitive nature of walking for hours each day naturally led to a meditative state, shifting relationships with time and thought. We became intensely aware of our surroundings, finding deep peace in the present moment. This practice of staying present surfaced as an invaluable skill to be carried forward into our post-Camino life. * Life’s cycles and perseverance: The Camino’s day-to-day rhythm mirrored life’s cyclical nature. We experienced highs and lows, learning to keep moving forward one step at a time, while experiencing every conceivable emotion over time. This taught endurance through difficult times and the importance of balancing perseverance with rest and self-care. * Purpose and intention: The clear goal of reaching Santiago de Compostela provided profound motivation and fulfillment. This experience inspired reflection on the role of purpose in everyday life, encouraging the pursuit of meaningful goals aligned with personal values. Over time, the journey itself became increasingly more rewarding than reaching our destination. * Letting go of control: We learned to surrender their need for control and embrace uncertainty. Adapting to changing plans due to weather, physical limitations, or unexpected opportunities opened them up to serendipity and unexpected joys. This lesson extended to rethinking and discarding entrenched perspectives, lingering animosities, and accumulated psychological weights, while opening the door to releasing the burden of hollow relationships, allowing more room for genuine bonds to flourish going forward. * Spiritual and philosophical deepening: Our journey irrespective of its original purpose, organically evolved into a profound exploration of existential matters. Along the way, we forged unexpected bonds with the natural world, other wayfarers, historical narratives, and a sense of the transcendent. This process broadened our perspectives and led to a more nuanced grasp of our individual convictions and principles. * Rediscovering authenticity:* Freed from daily routines and social pressures, we rediscovered our core identities. Long-neglected interests and aspirations resurfaced, bringing new perspective on life’s priorities. This deeper self-awareness motivated us to reshape our futures and value genuine connections more deeply.

Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about un-becoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place. – Unknown

Our “Way” Forward40-days, 500-miles, 1.3 Million Steps. We walked. We talked. We laughed. We cried. We prayed. We witnessed nature at its very best while enjoying a rare and remarkable “symphony of silence” day after day. We are blessed and grateful for the opportunity to have followed so many on such a storied path. The Camino stripped us bare, revealing life’s essence. In its simplicity, we discovered profound connections and inner strength. Each step, a meditation; each challenge, a catalyst for growth. We emerged transformed, our spirits awakened to life’s true purpose. The path became a mirror, reflecting our authentic selves and our place in the vast tapestry of existence. In the end, we realized: the Camino wasn’t just a journey across Spain, but a pilgrimage through the landscapes of our souls.

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Jason Walker, Adler University

Having meaningful connections in the workplace is essential for personal and organizational success. Most of us form these bonds naturally, as we spend a significant amount of our lifetimes at work.

After leaving college, many people in their 20s move to new cities for career opportunities, where they face the task of creating a brand new social circle from scratch. The workplace becomes an ideal place for people to connect. Activities like grabbing drinks after work, playing team sports or just sharing meals serve as opportunities to form connections with co-workers. These interactions not only help combat feelings of isolation, but also add a sense of camaraderie and support to the daily work routine.

However, as individuals reach milestones like getting married or starting a family, their priorities in life naturally shift. The enjoyed after work hangouts and casual meetups start taking a backseat to family commitments and home responsibilities.

Consequently, you might find that keeping up with work friendships becomes more challenging over time. Balancing professional growth and one’s personal life often leads to a decrease in the frequency and depth of these relationships while still preserving any already-established connections.

Making friends at workThere is a difference between typical co-worker relationships and true friendships. Generally speaking, people we work with are not necessarily friends. In our personal lives, it often takes years of building trust to bring someone into our circle of friends. Yet many of us do develop friendships with colleagues we have worked alongside — often for years. For instance, I’ve made friends at work whom I respect and trust immensely — one of my best friends is someone I met on the job. Our friendship continued to thrive long after I left that workplace.

That said, do I share my deepest, darkest secrets with work friends? Nope. So then, is a work friend worth it? In short, yes — even relationships with weaker ties can be beneficial. But it depends on the depth and nature of the relationship.

The benefits of friendships at workFriendships can result in substantial benefits. A 2021 survey on workplace friendships and happiness found that 57 per cent of workers said having a friend at work significantly boosted job satisfaction. Additionally, 22 per cent of survey participants believed friendships in the workplace enhanced their efficiency. Another 21 per cent thought these connections stimulated innovation.

When employees are happy, engaged and productive, and the organization is meeting their individual needs, they are more likely to meet their full potential.

When employees are happy, engaged and productive, and the organization is meeting their individual needs, they are more likely to meet their full potential.Strong relationships can facilitate communication and advice-sharing among co-workers.

However, it’s important to note workplace friendships can have a downside. Friendships at work can be problematic due to rumours of relationships, nepotism and favouritism, to name a few. The concept of “work” and “play” can often conflict when career goals intersect or worse when there is a conflict. That said, many of these issues can be mitigated with clear boundaries and communication.

Preventing burnoutEmployees are not the only ones who benefit from workplace friends — there are also significant benefits for employers. Promoting employee engagement through a respectful and inclusive work culture, for example, decreases employee turnover rates.

Employees with friends at work are twice as likely to feel passionate about their roles. These individuals also tend to interact with clients, deliver high-quality work and express overall greater degrees of well-being than those without work friends.

Apart from creating a supportive atmosphere, workplace friendships lead to people being less inclined to look for other job opportunities.

This element of workplace culture has become increasingly important as companies deal with the aftermath of the Great Resignation, where 4.3 million Americans left their jobs in August 2021 alone.

Inter-generational friendshipsInter-generational friendships are important to cultivate at work. You should consider expanding your networks to get the most out of these meaningful relationships.

However, forming friendships with supervisors can be challenging. Such relationships carry the risk of cronyism and nepotism and can undermine the integrity and effectiveness of a workplace.

A study in the health-care sector found that health-care professionals who felt unfairly treated were more likely to feel unmotivated, which impacted work performance.

This illustrates the struggle for organizations to combat perceptions of nepotism while fostering trust and camaraderie among employees. Friendships with a superior can work against personal relationships and the organization as a whole.

Instead, organizations should prioritize mentorship programs. Pairing younger employees with seasoned employees provides guidance, feedback and support, bridging the gap between individuals and the organization. Mentoring is also a great way to bridge any generational gaps.

Whether a traditional peer-on-peer program or someone taking you under their wing, the rewards are significant. About 70 per cent of Fortune 500 companies have some mentorship program, which speaks to their value.

Dos and don’tsTo ensure that workplace friendships are positive and don’t result in consequences, there are some essential guidelines and boundaries employees should consider following.

1. Go out of your way to greet your co-workers, celebrate their accomplishments and invite them out to lunch or happy hour after work.
2. Maintain your professionalism at work, even when spending time with friends. Remember that your supervisor could be watching.
3. Be kind to those around you: Avoid behaviours that may exclude others and steer clear of gossip. While not everyone may naturally form friendships, maintaining a respectful attitude is key.
4. Handle conflict maturely: If you and your work friend run into difficulty in your relationship, don’t place all the blame on them or ghost them. Address issues maturely and work together to resolve them.
5. Balance socializing with working: If your friendship is taking up too much of your time or impacting productivity, adjust how you interact at work.
6. Don’t engage in favouritism: Ensure your friendship doesn’t lead to cronyism or nepotism, which can harm team dynamics and trust.
7. Respect privacy: Don’t share personal information about your work friends with other colleagues without their permission.
8. Clearly communicate and stick to boundaries with your work friends.

Having friends at work can be a good thing — it’s good for mental and physical health, prevents loneliness and organizations perform better. But, like all relationships, it’s important to always remember and respect boundaries.

Jason Walker, Program Director & Associate Professor of Industrial-Organizational and Applied Psychology, Adler University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Sleep is your life-support system and Mother Nature’s best effort yet at immortality, says sleep scientist Matt Walker. In this deep dive into the science of slumber, Walker shares the wonderfully good things that happen when you get sleep — and the alarmingly bad things that happen when you don’t, for both your brain and body. Learn more about sleep’s impact on your learning, memory, immune system and even your genetic code — as well as some helpful tips for getting some shut-eye.

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Michal Lehmann, Carnegie Mellon University and Taya Cohen, Carnegie Mellon University

Every year, employees worldwide enter annual performance reviews with mixed feelings. Do employees enter these conversations with enthusiasm to learn new things? Rarely. Are managers eager to have these conversations and coach their employees on how they can improve in the coming year? No.

These meetings are typically experienced as difficult conversations. Opportunities for learning and relationship-building are often missed.

In an ideal world, employees would learn and improve from the feedback their manager provides in the annual review. But there are at least two obstacles that can stand in the way of that best-case scenario. It can be hard to hear painful truths. Critical feedback can trigger defensive reactions: That’s wrong. Who are you to say? This is a disaster, and I’ll never be able to improve. And, even if employees are receptive to the intended message, they may have trouble understanding the information and face difficulties implementing the feedback to improve their performance.

In an effort to get through, managers may try to soften their delivery. For example, they may use the much-maligned “feedback sandwich,” which bookends a critique between two compliments. But this tactic can obscure truthful and useful information, resulting in confusion, misunderstandings and worse.

We study organizational behavior and are especially interested in how people interact and communicate at work. Drawing from our research on humility and feedback, we suggest a new way for managers to approach performance reviews: Create what we call “humble encounters.”

By expressing humility, managers can transform performance reviews from monologues into dialogues, with greater learning and improvement as a result. Our studies indicate that when a team member expresses humility to a co-worker, it leads their partner to feel greater “psychological safety” – more comfortable sharing candid opinions and concerns without worrying about backlash or negative consequences. This, in turn, helps improve performance in the team.

Creating humble encountersHumility has a few key ingredients: You must be willing to view yourself accurately, as you really are. But that’s not enough to create a humble encounter. You must also show that you are teachable by exhibiting openness to feedback, ideas and suggestions. Finally, it’s critical that you acknowledge and express appreciation for the contributions that others make.

So, how might a manager do all this in a performance review?

You can signal that you’re willing to view yourself accurately by sharing personal experiences of dealing with challenges: “I also struggled with this issue when I first entered the company.” By sharing your own challenges and how you worked through them, you signal that you’re aware of your own weaknesses and vulnerabilities, as well as your strengths and achievements.

You can signal teachability by demonstrating that you’re open to learning from others. Managers can use what organizational culture experts Edgar and Peter Schein call “humble inquiry” – asking questions you don’t already know the answer to, listening intentionally and responding with curiosity.

Be mindful of assumptions implicitly conveyed to the listener by how you phrase your questions. Negative assumption questions
– like “What triggers you to argue with your co-workers?” – presuppose a problem. The employee might be surprised by this question and the assumption behind it because they don’t remember the last time they argued with someone at work. A negative-assumption question can help clarify undesirable behaviors if they are indeed happening, but at the same time it can signal distrust and hinder the receptivity of the receiver.

Another way to express humility is by good listening. It includes three crucial elements: paying attention to the speaker, showing positive intentions toward the speaker, and demonstrating that you understand their message. Managers who listen well to their employees elicit better performance and establish stronger relationships with them.

Spotlighting an employee’s strengths and contributions is active acknowledgment of the employee’s value without the manager devaluing their own. During the annual review, it’s possible to recognize an employee’s strengths while still providing developmental feedback.

Managers should provide support by conveying a sense of care, understanding and validation:
“I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations, and I know you can reach them.” Using language that communicates support fosters trust and a sense of belonging, thus breaking down walls of defensiveness.

Humble encounters enable growthBy modeling humility, managers provide employees with two key, seemingly contradictory signals.

They show relational acceptance – a signal that they accept the employee as they are, thereby calming feelings of threat and defensiveness. At the same time, they also communicate an expectation of change. Learning and improvement are not only possible but necessary for the employee to reach their full potential in the job.

In response to managers’ humility, employees will reciprocate humble behaviors, showing more willingness to view themselves accurately, be teachable and appreciate others’ contributions.

Managers might be concerned that expressing humility might signal weakness. However, research shows that this is not the case. When leaders are perceived to be humble, they are also seen as effective, competent and charismatic. Therefore, being a humble leader has benefits not only for employees, but also for the leader’s reputation.

Humble encounters can transform annual reviews into a more positive and enriching experience for both managers and employees. By enacting the three key aspects of humility – a willingness to view yourself accurately, teachability and appreciation for others’ contributions – you can both change your employees’ learning curve and strengthen your relationship with them.

Michal Lehmann, Postdoctoral Fellow in Organizational Behavior and Theory, Carnegie Mellon University and Taya Cohen, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Business Ethics, Carnegie Mellon University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Julia Minson, Harvard Kennedy School

Your 18-year-old daughter announces she’s in love, dropping out of college and moving to Argentina. Your yoga-teaching brother refuses to get vaccinated for COVID-19 and is confident that fresh air is the best medicine. Your boss is hiring another white man for a leadership team already made up entirely of white men.

At home, at work and in civic spaces, it’s not uncommon to have conversations that make you question the intelligence and benevolence of your fellow human beings.

A natural reaction is to put forth the strongest argument for your own – clearly superior – perspective in the hope that logic and evidence will win the day. When that argument fails to have the intended persuasive impact, people often grow frustrated, and disagreement becomes conflict.

Thankfully, recent research offers a different approach.

For many years, psychologists have touted the benefits of making parties in conflict feel heard. Making someone you’re arguing with feel that you’re listening can calm the troubled waters, allowing both parties to get safely to the opposite shore. Two problems can get in the way, though.

First, when encountering disagreement, most people jump into “persuasion mode,” which doesn’t leave much room for listening, or even for pursuing other goals for the interaction. Any conversation could be an opportunity to learn something new, build a relationship that might bear fruit later, or simply have an interesting experience. But most of those goals get forgotten when the urge to persuade sets in. Second, and just as important, is that even when people do wish to make their counterparts feel heard they don’t know how to do so.

I lead a team of psychologists, negotiation scholars and computational linguists who have spent years studying ways that parties in conflict can behave to make their counterpart feel they are thoughtfully engaging with their perspective.

Rather than trying to change how you think of or feel about your counterpart, our work suggests that you should focus on changing your own behavior. Focusing on behavior rather than thoughts and feelings has two benefits: You know when you are doing it right, and so does your counterpart. And one of the easiest behaviors to change is the words that you say.

A conversational toolbox, based on what worksWe used the tools of computational linguistics to analyze thousands of interactions between people who disagree with each other on hot-button social and political issues: police brutality, campus sexual assault, affirmative action and COVID-19 vaccines. Based on these analyses, we developed an algorithm that picks out specific words and phrases that make people in conflict feel that their counterpart is thoughtfully engaging with their perspective.

These words and phrases comprise a communication style we call “conversational receptiveness.” People who use conversational receptiveness in their interactions are rated more positively by their conflict counterparts on a variety of traits.

Then we experimented with training people to use the words and phrases that have the most impact, even if they’re not naturally inclined to do so. For example, in one of our earlier studies, we had people who held different positions about the Black Lives Matter movement talk to each other.

Those who received a brief conversational receptiveness training were seen as more desirable teammates and advisers by their counterpart. Training also turned out to make people more persuasive in their arguments than those who did not learn about conversational receptiveness.

We encapsulate this conversational style in the simple acronym H.E.A.R.:

• H = Hedge your claims, even when you feel very certain about your beliefs. It signals a recognition that there are some cases or some people who might support your opponent’s perspective.
• E = Emphasize agreement. Find some common ground even when you disagree on a particular topic. This does not mean compromising or changing your mind, but rather recognizing that most people in the world can find some broad ideas or values to agree on.
• A = Acknowledge the opposing perspective. Rather than jumping in to your own argument, devote a few seconds to restating the other person’s position to demonstrate that you did indeed hear and understand it.
• R = Reframing to the positive. Avoid negative and contradictory words, such as “no,” “won’t” or “do not.” At the same time, increase your use of positive words to change the tone of the conversation.

Measuring benefits of the tools in practiceIn a recent set of studies, my colleagues and I recruited people who were supportive of or hesitant about getting COVID-19 vaccinations. We paired vaccine-supportive participants with the vaccine hesitant and instructed them to persuade their partner to get the shot. Before the interaction, we randomly assigned the vaccine supporters to receive brief instructions in conversational receptiveness or guidance simply to use the best arguments they could think of.

We found that participants who received a couple minutes of instruction in conversational receptiveness were seen as more trustworthy and more reasonable by their counterparts. Their counterparts were also more willing to talk to them about other topics.

In a subsequent study, we explained the concept of conversational receptiveness to participants on both sides of the issue. Just knowing that they’d be engaging with someone trained in this technique made both parties report being 50% more willing to have a vaccine conversation. People felt more confident their discussion partner would hear them and less worried they’d be a dismissive jerk.

Dialing down the acrimonyThis approach might be especially beneficial in conversations in which one party is highly motivated to engage while the other is less so. When such conversations turn contentious, the less motivated person can simply walk away.

That’s an all-too-familiar experience for parents of teenagers who seem to have advanced degrees in ignoring unwelcome advice. Health care providers often face a similar challenge when they try to persuade patients to change behaviors they do not wish to change. In the workplace, this burden is most acutely felt by people lower in the hierarchy trying to have their views heard by higher-ups who just don’t have to listen.

Conversational receptiveness is effective because it makes the interaction less confrontational and therefore less unpleasant. At the same time, it allows both parties to express their perspective. As a result, it gives people some confidence that if they approach a topic of disagreement, their partner will stay in the conversation, and the relationship will not sustain damage.

In recent years, many scholars across the social sciences have expressed concern about Americans’ seeming inability to talk to their political opponents.

Yet the skills that are necessary for Democrats and Republicans to engage with one another are similarly lacking in our families and in our workplaces.

Our work on conversational receptiveness builds on extensive prior research on the benefits of showing engagement with opposing perspectives. By focusing on language that can be easily learned and precisely measured, we offer people a broadly applicable toolkit to live up to their best conversational intentions.

Julia Minson, Associate Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Michelle Devereaux, Kennesaw State University and Chris C. Palmer, Kennesaw State University

Pop culture abounds with examples of very fast talkers. There’s the Judy Grimes character played by Kristen Wiig on “Saturday Night Live,” or that guy from the 1980s who did commercials for Micro Machines and FedEx. Of course, there are also extremely slow talkers, like the sloth in “Zootopia” and the cartoon basset hound Droopy.

Real-life fast talkers are staples in some professions. Auctioneers and sportscasters are known for their rapid delivery, though the slower commentary in golf shows there is a range for different sports.

As professors of English who study linguistic variations, we know that how fast a person speaks is a complicated phenomenon. It depends on a range of factors, including the types of words used, the language spoken, regional differences, social variables and professional needs.

Different countries, different speedsSpeech rate refers to the speed at which a speaker verbalizes “connected discourse” – essentially anything more than a sentence. It is measured by counting segments of sound and the pauses in a specific time frame. Typically, these segments are counted as syllables. Remember clapping syllables in elementary school? SYL-LA-BLES.

Linguists have discovered that humans vary their speech rate within sentences across all languages. For example, most people slow their speech down before saying nouns. Researchers have also found that languages have different speech rates when speakers read aloud. French, Spanish and Japanese were shown to have high average speech rates – with close to eight syllables spoken per second. German, Vietnamese and Mandarin exhibited slower rates – with about five syllables per second. English was in the middle, with an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second.

There is also global variation within the dialects of a language. In English, for example, one study found that New Zealanders spoke the fastest, followed by British English speakers, then Americans and finally Australians.

Stereotypes don’t hold upMany people have expectations and assumptions about different speech rates within English dialects. For example, there’s the often-observed “drawl” of those living in the U.S. South. The term drawl denotes a slower, drawn-out speaking pace. And, indeed, some research supports this perception. One study found that participants in western North Carolina spoke more slowly than participants in Wisconsin.

Other research has demonstrated that some Southerners may speak more slowly only in certain contexts – for example, they may pause more often when reading aloud. And certain elongated vowels in southern American dialects can also slow down the speech rate. This can be heard in the pronunciation of “nice” as something like “nahhce.”

Some people assume that all Southerners are slow talkers who exhibit these features. This is perhaps due, at least in part, to the perpetuation of stereotypes and caricatures in popular media, such as Cletus, the stereotyped hillbilly from “The Simpsons.”

But it’s important to recognize that language also varies within regions, including the U.S. South. For example, a study involving North Carolinians found that speakers in western and central North Carolina spoke more slowly than those in the state’s eastern and southern parts. And some North Carolinians spoke about as fast as Ohioans – suggesting the stereotype of the slow-talking Southerner doesn’t always hold up.

Age, gender and other variablesSex and gender may also influence speech rates, although results have been conflicting here, too. Some research shows that men speak faster than women, while other studies find no significant difference in speech rate between genders.

The demographic variable that seems to have the most significant and consistent impact is age. We speak slowly when we are children, speed up in adolescence and speak our fastest in our 40s. Then we slow down again as we reach our 50s and 60s.

While geography, gender and age may affect speech rates in certain cases, context plays a role as well. For example, certain professions use oral formulaic traditions, meaning there’s a framework script when performing those jobs. An average person can speak about as fast as an auctioneer – 5.3 syllables per second – when saying something they’ve said many times before.

However, auctioneers use certain patterns of speech that make it seem like they speak incredibly quickly. They have few pauses in speech and repeat the same words frequently. They also use unfamiliar phrasings and rhythms, which makes listeners have to process what was said long after the auctioneer has moved on to the next topic. And auctioneers have a constant rate of articulation – meaning they rarely stop talking.

While recognizing differences in speech rates can help people to better understand linguistic, cultural and professional identities, it also has technological and other applications. Think of how computer scientists must program Alexa and Siri to both produce and recognize speech at different rates. Speaking more slowly can also improve listening comprehension for beginner and intermediate language learners.

Perhaps the most valuable takeaway when considering speech rate variation is the fact that linguistic perceptions don’t always match up with reality. This is a perspective we often emphasize in our own work because linguistic stereotypes can lead to assumptions about a person’s background.

Recent studies of perceptions of U.S. dialects confirm that, despite variation in speech rates within regions, people persist in labeling large regions of the South as “slow” and the North and Midwest as “fast.” Moreover, these evaluations are also typically associated with negative stereotypes. Slow talkers are often assumed to be less intelligent or competent than fast talkers, while very fast talkers can be seen as less truthful or kindhearted.

There is no inherent connection between the rate of speech and levels of intelligence, truthfulness or kindness. Language use differs for all sorts of reasons, and differences are not deficiencies.

Michelle Devereaux, Professor of English and English Education, Kennesaw State University and Chris C. Palmer, Professor of English, Kennesaw State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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What does inclusive leadership look like? Artist and TED Fellow Constance Hockaday shares how the captain of a trans-Atlantic community raft taught her how to voice her hopes and desires, inspiring a vision of possibility for the future. Hockaday calls for mentors everywhere to step up and invites aspiring leaders to answer one crucial question in order to unlock their agency and power.

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Over the years, people have come up with some truly awful apologies. From classic non-apologies, to evasive excuses, and flimsy corporate promises, it’s all too easy to give a bad apology. Good apologies generally share certain elements, and considering these factors can help you make amends in a variety of situations. Explore what to do— and not to do— in order to deliver an authentic apology. [Directed Vitalii Nebelskyi, and action agency, narrated by Jack Cutmore-Scott, music by Salil Bhayani, cAMP Studio].

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What if you knew that the way to access the very best in yourself – the light side of your humanity – was by facing your darkness?… One of the most powerful turning points in life comes when we begin to understand the shadow as a great teacher. In darkness, it waits for the light of our own awareness – to be seen, heard, understood, and embraced. And as we learn to accept and care for all parts of ourselves, we grow and evolve into our best selves. Gradually coming to love the shadow gives us access to the wisdom that it holds for us at its core – the secret gems we find when we dare to open the hidden door of the shadow.

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Casey Fiesler, University of Colorado Boulder

As public concern about the ethical and social implications of artificial intelligence keeps growing, it might seem like it’s time to slow down. But inside tech companies themselves, the sentiment is quite the opposite. As Big Tech’s AI race heats up, it would be an “absolutely fatal error in this moment to worry about things that can be fixed later,” a Microsoft executive wrote in an internal email about generative AI, as The New York Times reported.

In other words, it’s time to “move fast and break things,” to quote Mark Zuckerberg’s old motto. Of course, when you break things, you might have to fix them later – at a cost.

In software development, the term “technical debt” refers to the implied cost of making future fixes as a consequence of choosing faster, less careful solutions now. Rushing to market can mean releasing software that isn’t ready, knowing that once it does hit the market, you’ll find out what the bugs are and can hopefully fix them then.

However, negative news stories about generative AI tend not to be about these kinds of bugs. Instead, much of the concern is about AI systems amplifying harmful biases and stereotypes and students using AI deceptively. We hear about privacy concerns, people being fooled by misinformation, labor exploitation and fears about how quickly human jobs may be replaced, to name a few. These problems are not software glitches. Realizing that a technology reinforces oppression or bias is very different from learning that a button on a website doesn’t work.

As a technology ethics educator and researcher, I have thought a lot about these kinds of “bugs.” What’s accruing here is not just technical debt, but ethical debt. Just as technical debt can result from limited testing during the development process, ethical debt results from not considering possible negative consequences or societal harms. And with ethical debt in particular, the people who incur it are rarely the people who pay for it in the end.

Off to the racesAs soon as OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released in November 2022, the starter pistol for today’s AI race, I imagined the debt ledger starting to fill.

Within months, Google and Microsoft released their own generative AI programs, which seemed rushed to market in an effort to keep up. Google’s stock prices fell when its chatbot Bard confidently supplied a wrong answer during the company’s own demo. One might expect Microsoft to be particularly cautious when it comes to chatbots, considering Tay, its Twitter-based bot that was almost immediately shut down in 2016 after spouting misogynist and white supremacist talking points. Yet early conversations with the AI-powered Bing left some users unsettled, and it has repeated known misinformation.

When the social debt of these rushed releases comes due, I expect that we will hear mention of unintended or unanticipated consequences. After all, even with ethical guidelines in place, it’s not as if OpenAI, Microsoft or Google can see the future. How can someone know what societal problems might emerge before the technology is even fully developed?

The root of this dilemma is uncertainty, which is a common side effect of many technological revolutions, but magnified in the case of artificial intelligence. After all, part of the point of AI is that its actions are not known in advance. AI may not be designed to produce negative consequences, but it is designed to produce the unforeseen.

However, it is disingenuous to suggest that technologists cannot accurately speculate about what many of these consequences might be. By now, there have been countless examples of how AI can reproduce bias and exacerbate social inequities, but these problems are rarely publicly identified by tech companies themselves. It was external researchers who found racial bias in widely used commercial facial analysis systems, for example, and in a medical risk prediction algorithm that was being applied to around 200 million Americans. Academics and advocacy or research organizations like the Algorithmic Justice League and the Distributed AI Research Institute are doing much of this work: identifying harms after the fact. And this pattern doesn’t seem likely to change if companies keep firing ethicists.

Speculating – responsiblyI sometimes describe myself as a technology optimist who thinks and prepares like a pessimist. The only way to decrease ethical debt is to take the time to think ahead about things that might go wrong – but this is not something that technologists are necessarily taught to do.

Scientist and iconic science fiction writer Isaac Asimov once said that sci-fi authors “foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.” Of course, science fiction writers do not tend to be tasked with developing these solutions – but right now, the technologists developing AI are.

So how can AI designers learn to think more like science fiction writers? One of my current research projects focuses on developing ways to support this process of ethical speculation. I don’t mean designing with far-off robot wars in mind; I mean the ability to consider future consequences at all, including in the very near future.

This is a topic I’ve been exploring in my teaching for some time, encouraging students to think through the ethical implications of sci-fi technology in order to prepare them to do the same with technology they might create. One exercise I developed is called the Black Mirror Writers Room, where students speculate about possible negative consequences of technology like social media algorithms and self-driving cars. Often these discussions are based on patterns from the past or the potential for bad actors.

Ph.D. candidate Shamika Klassen and I evaluated this teaching exercise in a research study and found that there are pedagogical benefits to encouraging computing students to imagine what might go wrong in the future – and then brainstorm about how we might avoid that future in the first place.

However, the purpose isn’t to prepare students for those far-flung futures; it is to teach speculation as a skill that can be applied immediately. This skill is especially important for helping students imagine harm to other people, since technological harms often disproportionately impact marginalized groups that are underrepresented in computing professions. The next steps for my research are to translate these ethical speculation strategies for real-world technology design teams.

Time to hit pause?In March 2023, an open letter with thousands of signatures advocated for pausing training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. Unchecked, AI development “might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us,” or even cause a “loss of control of our civilization,” its writers warned.

As critiques of the letter point out, this focus on hypothetical risks ignores actual harms happening today. Nevertheless, I think there is little disagreement among AI ethicists that AI development needs to slow down – that developers throwing up their hands and citing “unintended consequences” is not going to cut it.

We are only a few months into the “AI race” picking up significant speed, and I think it’s already clear that ethical considerations are being left in the dust. But the debt will come due eventually – and history suggests that Big Tech executives and investors may not be the ones paying for it.

Casey Fiesler, Associate Professor of Information Science, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Many artificial intelligence researchers expect AI to outsmart humans at all tasks and jobs within decades, enabling a future where we’re restricted only by the laws of physics, not the limits of our intelligence. MIT physicist and AI researcher Max Tegmark separates the real opportunities and threats from the myths, describing the concrete steps we should take today to ensure that AI ends up being the best — rather than worst — thing to ever happen to humanity.

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We’ll go to the doctor when we feel flu-ish or a nagging pain. So why don’t we see a health professional when we feel emotional pain: guilt, loss, loneliness? Too many of us deal with common psychological-health issues on our own, says Guy Winch. But we don’t have to. He makes a compelling case to practice emotional hygiene — taking care of our emotions, our minds, with the same diligence we take care of our bodies.

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Morgana Bailey has been hiding her true self for 16 years. In a brave talk, she utters four words that might not seem like a big deal to some, but to her have been paralyzing. Why speak up? Because she’s realized that her silence has personal, professional, and societal consequences. In front of an audience of her co-workers, she reflects on what it means to fear the judgment of others, and how it makes us judge ourselves.

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“We underestimate the power of our own generous actions,” says Asha Curran, CEO of the global generosity movement GivingTuesday. Sharing stories of people making a difference through simple acts of kindness, she shows how generosity, even in its simplest forms, can be a transformative force — and explains why we all benefit from a world grounded in giving.

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In a world that’s constantly connected, sometimes the greatest act of rebellion is to disconnect so we can reconnect with our own inner world, our inner wisdom, and our deeper truths.

–Unknown

We live in curious times. It’s called the “Age of Information, but in another light, it can be called the Age of Distraction. While humanity has never been free of distraction – never have the distractions been so voluminous, so overwhelming, so intense, so persistent as they are now. We have forgotten how to slow down.

Clash of the Titans: Well-Being vs FOMOAh, FOMO, the ever-present fear of missing out. It’s a common feeling in our hyper-connected world, fueled by social media and the constant barrage of information about other people’s exciting experiences. Evidence strongly suggests that taking breaks from our digital devices can significantly benefit our mental and physical health. Yet despite the benefits, few ever actually take that elusive break.

Step back and think for a moment – who do you know (including yourself) that has really (I mean really) gone the extra mile to make it happen? When was the last time you went an entire day without checking email, X/Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or any other social media channel?

And if you did, was “even just a glance” really enough to get by? What did you miss? How much time did it take to get back on track? Too long, you say? What did you learn or accomplish? Will you do it again, and if so, for how long next time? Or is it simply easier to go with the flow and settle for the “status quo?”

Unplugged: Disconnecting to ReconnectIt sounds like a contradiction, but sometimes you have to disconnect to reconnect. Disconnect – both physically and emotionally – from all those devices, apps, and virtual worlds that constantly steal our attention, satisfying our inexplicable fear of missing something. And reconnect with the real world, with the people we are closest to but leave out, with those activities and experiences that don’t need a screen to be memorable.

Going, Going, Gone: Walking Our Talk (May 15th – July 15th)Yup – as Chief ReImaginator for the global media site, I’ve got a bottomless bucket full of reasonable and rational justifications as to why the concept of and rationale for a digital detox doesn’t apply to me or us, why it simply wouldn’t be practical or possible. But as they say in my wife Ali’s home country of Great Britain, “rubbish” to all that. It’s time for us to walk our talk. No, not for just a few hours, a few days, a few weeks, or as extreme as an entire year – but for eight glorious weeks commencing May 15th, 2024. YES, our Site will still be up and running. YES, our 31,000-plus Article Archives will continue to be accessible. But NO to NEW publishing, NO to email responses, NO to anything compromising our quest to reconnect with each other and what’s really important –until we return on Monday, July 15th.

Finding Our WayCoddiwomple has become one of my all-time favorite words, especially as a metaphor for life. It means to travel purposefully towards an as-yet-unknown destination. Isn’t that what we’re all doing, at the end of the day? Coddiwompling doesn’t mean a lack of direction; quite the opposite. A coddiwompler has peace of mind because they’re not waiting to “become” someone or for something else to happen. They’re comfortable getting lost because they know that’s where the truly worthwhile opportunities and Ahas are to be found.

Our particular coddiwomple will take us over 4,000 miles away from it all, as we begin our 500+ mile walk (“pilgrimage”) across the storied Camino de Santiago. The Camino de Santiago (the Way of St. James) is an extensive network of ancient pilgrim routes stretching across Europe and coming together at the tomb of St. James (Santiago in Spanish) in Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain.

We’ll be walking “The French Way” or the Camino Franc’es, with the most deep-rooted historical tradition and the most popular one. The Camino Frances is the most famous Camino de Santiago trail, featured in books and movies about the Camino, such as ‘The Way’ with Martin Sheen and ‘The Pilgrimage’ by Paulo Coelho. It stretches over 500 miles from St. Jean-Pied-du-Port near Biarritz in France to Santiago.

The pilgrimage of Camino de Santiago is indeed, our microcosm of coddiwompling. But unlike many, we know that it’s not the real journey. The real Camino is our inner journey. It’s peeling back the layers of who we are. It’s an opportunity to get lost in our thoughts, to gain fresh clarity about our values and priorities, to let go of what no longer serves us… leaving it on the trail. Because when the Camino de Santiago ends, the real Camino (of life) begins. … And that’s our “why” for finding our “Way”.

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AI chatbots are intruding into online communities where people are trying to connect with other humansCasey Fiesler, University of Colorado Boulder

A parent asked a question in a private Facebook group in April 2024: Does anyone with a child who is both gifted and disabled have any experience with New York City public schools? The parent received a seemingly helpful answer that laid out some characteristics of a specific school, beginning with the context that “I have a child who is also 2e,” meaning twice exceptional.

On a Facebook group for swapping unwanted items near Boston, a user looking for specific items received an offer of a “gently used” Canon camera and an “almost-new portable air conditioning unit that I never ended up using.”

Both of these responses were lies. That child does not exist and neither do the camera or air conditioner. The answers came from an artificial intelligence chatbot.

According to a Meta help page, Meta AI will respond to a post in a group if someone explicitly tags it or if someone “asks a question in a post and no one responds within an hour.” The feature is not yet available in all regions or for all groups, according to the page. For groups where it is available, “admins can turn it off and back on at any time.” Meta AI has also been integrated into search features on Facebook and Instagram, and users cannot turn it off.

As a researcher who studies both online communities and AI ethics, I find the idea of uninvited chatbots answering questions in Facebook groups to be dystopian for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that online communities are for people.

Human connectionsIn 1993, Howard Rheingold published the book “The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier” about the WELL, an early and culturally significant online community. The first chapter opens with a parenting question: What to do about a “blood-bloated thing sucking on our baby’s scalp.”

Rheingold received an answer from someone with firsthand knowledge of dealing with ticks and had resolved the problem before receiving a callback from the pediatrician’s office. Of this experience, he wrote, “What amazed me wasn’t just the speed with which we obtained precisely the information we needed to know, right when we needed to know it. It was also the immense inner sense of security that comes with discovering that real people – most of them parents, some of them nurses, doctors, and midwives – are available, around the clock, if you need them.”

This “real people” aspect of online communities continues to be critical today. Imagine why you might pose a question to a Facebook group rather than a search engine: because you want an answer from someone with real, lived experience or you want the human response that your question might elicit – sympathy, outrage, commiseration – or both.

Decades of research suggests that the human component of online communities is what makes them so valuable for both information-seeking and social support. For example, fathers who might otherwise feel uncomfortable asking for parenting advice have found a haven in private online spaces just for dads. LGBTQ+ youth often join online communities to safely find critical resources while reducing feelings of isolation. Mental health support forums provide young people with belonging and validation in addition to advice and social support.

In addition to similar findings in my own lab related to LGBTQ+ participants in online communities, as well as Black Twitter, two more recent studies, not yet peer-reviewed, have emphasized the importance of the human aspects of information-seeking in online communities.

One, led by PhD student Blakeley Payne, focuses on fat people’s experiences online. Many of our participants found a lifeline in access to an audience and community with similar experiences as they sought and shared information about topics such as navigating hostile healthcare systems, finding clothing and dealing with cultural biases and stereotypes.

Another, led by Ph.D student Faye Kollig, found that people who share content online about their chronic illnesses are motivated by the sense of community that comes with shared experiences, as well as the humanizing aspects of connecting with others to both seek and provide support and information.

Faux peopleThe most important benefits of these online spaces as described by our participants could be drastically undermined by responses coming from chatbots instead of people.

As a type 1 diabetic, I follow a number of related Facebook groups that are frequented by many parents newly navigating the challenges of caring for a young child with diabetes. Questions are frequent: “What does this mean?” “How should I handle this?” “What are your experiences with this?” Answers come from firsthand experience, but they also typically come with compassion: “This is hard.” “You’re doing your best.” And of course: “We’ve all been there.” A response from a chatbot claiming to speak from the lived experience of caring for a diabetic child, offering empathy, would not only be inappropriate, but it would be borderline cruel.

However, it makes complete sense that these are the types of responses that a chatbot would offer. Large language models, simplistically, function more similarly to autocomplete than they do to search engines. For a model trained on the millions and millions of posts and comments in Facebook groups, the “autocomplete” answer to a question in a support community is definitely one that invokes personal experience and offers empathy – just as the “autocomplete” answer in a Buy Nothing Facebook group might be to offer someone a gently used camera.

Keeping chatbots in their lanesThis isn’t to suggest that chatbots aren’t useful for anything – they may even be quite useful in some online communities, in some contexts. The problem is that in the midst of the current generative AI rush, there is a tendency to think that chatbots can and should do everything.

There are plenty of downsides to using large language models as information retrieval systems, and these downsides point to inappropriate contexts for their use. One downside is when incorrect information could be dangerous: an eating disorder helpline or legal advice for small businesses, for example.

Research is pointing to important considerations in how and when to design and deploy chatbots. For example, one recently published paper at a large human-computer interaction conference found that though LGBTQ+ individuals lacking social support were sometimes turning to chatbots for help with mental health needs, those chatbots frequently fell short in grasping the nuance of LGBTQ+-specific challenges.

Another found that though a group of autistic participants found value in interacting with a chatbot for social communication advice, that chatbot was also dispensing questionable advice. And yet another found that though a chatbot was helpful as a preconsultation tool in a health context, patients sometimes found expressions of empathy to be insincere or offensive.

Responsible AI development and deployment means not only auditing for issues such as bias and misinformation, but also taking the time to understand in which contexts AI is appropriate and desirable for the humans who will be interacting with them. Right now, many companies are wielding generative AI as a hammer, and as a result, everything looks like a nail.

Many contexts, such as online support communities, are best left to humans.

Casey Fiesler, Associate Professor of Information Science, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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In the dynamic landscape of contemporary leadership, the philosophy of servant leadership has emerged as a transformative catalyst for holistic organizational development.

As we venture deeper into the exploration of this philosophy, we uncover its profound impact on fostering an environment of collaboration, empathy, and empowerment—an environment where the growth of individuals, the alignment of purpose, and the well-being of the collective take precedence over traditional notions of leadership.

This chapter delves into the core principles and practices of servant leadership and unveils its harmonious alignment with the ideals of holistic growth.

The Essence of Servant Leadership: Leading Through Service

At its heart, servant leadership redefines leadership as a service to others. This paradigm shift challenges the conventional notion of leaders as authoritative figures who dictate directives. Instead, servant leaders view their role as that of facilitators, mentors, and enablers of growth.

They prioritize the needs of their teams, acknowledging that their own success is intrinsically tied to the success of those they lead. This fundamental shift in perspective sets the stage for the creation of an environment where collaboration and empowerment flourish.

Nurturing a Culture of Collaboration: Open Communication and Shared Purpose

Central to the philosophy of servant leadership is the emphasis on open communication. Servant leaders create spaces where individuals feel safe to voice their opinions, share ideas, and engage in dialogue.

By actively listening and valuing diverse perspectives, servant leaders cultivate an atmosphere of inclusivity and mutual respect. This culture of collaboration not only fuels innovation but also ensures that the organization benefits from the collective wisdom of its members.

Shared purpose is another cornerstone of servant leadership. Servant leaders work to align individual and organizational goals with a broader sense of purpose—one that transcends financial success and encompasses a positive impact on society.

By imbuing every action and decision with purpose, servant leaders inspire a collective commitment that goes beyond personal gain and elevates the well-being of all stakeholders.

Empathy and Empowerment: Fostering Individual Growth

Empathy lies at the heart of servant leadership. Servant leaders possess a keen understanding of the emotions, concerns, and aspirations of their team members. This empathetic approach not only nurtures a culture of trust but also creates a sense of belonging within the organization.

By acknowledging the holistic well-being of individuals, servant leaders create an environment where employees are valued not just as resources, but as human beings with unique talents and needs.

Empowerment is the natural outcome of this empathetic approach. Servant leaders provide their teams with the autonomy, resources, and support needed to excel. They encourage individuals to take ownership of their roles, make decisions, and contribute to the organization’s growth. This empowerment unleashes untapped potential, driving innovation and fostering a sense of pride and ownership among employees.

Leading by Example: Humility and Integrity

Servant leaders lead by example, embodying qualities of humility and integrity. They are not afraid to admit their mistakes or acknowledge their limitations. This transparency creates an atmosphere where individuals feel comfortable taking calculated risks and learning from failures.

By upholding a high standard of ethical conduct and moral integrity, servant leaders set a precedent for the organization’s values and contribute to a culture of accountability.

Servant Leadership and Holistic Organizational Development: A Seamless Integration

Servant leadership seamlessly aligns with the principles of holistic organizational development. Its emphasis on collaboration, shared purpose, empathy, and empowerment resonates deeply with the holistic perspective that considers the well-being of employees, communities, and the environment. In organizations guided by servant leadership, growth is not confined to financial metrics but extends to the growth of individuals, relationships, and societal impact.

As we journey further, we will explore how servant leadership forms the bedrock for navigating change, embracing diversity, nurturing employee well-being, fostering purpose-driven performance management, and envisioning a future where organizations thrive through authentic connections and sustainable impact.

The subsequent chapters will unveil the practical strategies, real-world examples, and actionable insights that illuminate the path toward holistic growth through servant leadership, creating a blueprint for leaders who seek to shape organizations that transcend conventional boundaries and embrace holistic excellence.

Reflections

1. Understanding Servant Leadership: Reflect on how servant leadership differs from traditional leadership models. What aspects of servant leadership stand out to you as most impactful for holistic organizational growth?
2. Applying Core Principles: Consider the core principles of servant leadership such as empathy, active listening, and humility. Can you think of a situation in your professional life where applying these principles could have led to a different outcome?
3. Personal Growth and Empowerment: How do you see the role of empathy and empowerment in your own growth as a leader or team member? Can you identify instances where these elements were present or lacking in your work environment?
4. Leading by Example: Reflect on the concept of leading by example in the context of servant leadership. How can this approach influence the culture of an organization and contribute to holistic growth?
5. Challenges in Implementation: What challenges might arise when implementing servant leadership principles in an organization? How could these challenges be addressed?
6. Personal Alignment with Servant Leadership: How do your personal values align with the principles of servant leadership? Are there areas where you feel particularly strong or areas for improvement?
7. Servant Leadership in Action: Think of a leader you admire who embodies the qualities of servant leadership. What specific actions or behaviors make them a good example of a servant leader?

These questions are designed to encourage readers to introspect and apply the concepts of servant leadership to their own experiences and organizations, fostering a deeper understanding of how this approach can catalyze holistic growth.

“Navigating Holistic Growth: The Servant Leader’s Guide,” demonstrates, that true leadership is not about authority, but about fostering an environment of growth, understanding, and cooperation. This guide is an essential resource for anyone looking to make a meaningful impact, through self-discovery and by empowering those around them.

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Angela and Dana discuss the importance of finding your community. They focus mostly on business relationships but recognize the importance of finding your people in all aspects of your life. With humor, they share their personal stories of relationship misalignments, and yes, of course, at about one minute, ten seconds, the subject of poop came up. No big surprise. These two just can’t help themselves!

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A large part of being alive is feeling emotions. It is a blessing to be aware enough of that which goes on inside us. All emotions are valuable and can teach us profound lessons if we are willing to see them in this way. And, emotions do not define who we are at our essence. We can choose how we react to them. We can choose to feed the dark sides of these emotions that only breed more darkness. Or we can choose to use these emotions as a compass pointing us towards our light.

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Most of us will do anything to avoid being wrong. But what if we’re wrong about that? “Wrongologist” Kathryn Schulz makes a compelling case for not just admitting but embracing our fallibility.

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Google News is the Infinite Library of Alexandria made accessible to all. Its power to inform and enlighten is beyond measure.

~Unknown

Author/Editor Note: This Article was inspired by the fact that our award-winning site is now syndicated via Google News, substantially amplifying the visibility of our 1100+ Featured Contributors, while extending our reach across 130 countries. FOLLOW US HERE

The Library of Alexandria was an ancient universal library and one of the largest repositories of knowledge in the ancient world. It was located in Alexandria, Egypt, and flourished in the 3rd century BC under the Ptolemaic dynasty. Google News, on the other hand, is a modern online news aggregator service operated by Google that collects content from thousands of sources across the globe. Both “libraries” are considered vast repositories of information in their own right.

The Google News RepositoryLaunched back in 2002, Google News is a free aggregator service that continuously scours the web to bring you the latest content from over 25,000 publications worldwide. At its core, it uses clustering algorithms to group related content together from multiple sources into tidy story bundles. Every month, Google directs users to content sites 24 billion times, providing an opportunity for publishers to grow their audiences and users more efficiently gather insight. That panoramic breadth of coverage is one of Google News’ greatest assets. The platform draws from publications in over 30 languages across the globe, giving users an incredibly diverse array of local, national, and international sources. Using customizable search filters, users can narrow their feed by topic, location, source, and other criteria to focus on just the content most relevant to them.

On BalanceGoogle News is a convenient news aggregator that provides a comprehensive collection of stories from thousands of sources in one place, with personalization features and a clean interface. However, it faces criticism for its opaque algorithms that may prioritize mainstream outlets over smaller voices, its lack of human editorial curation which can impact quality control, and its potential to create filter bubbles and information overload by automating content based on user interests. While praised for its breadth and real-time updates, Google News also prompts debate around transparency, media bias, the de-emphasis of local journalism, and the role of algorithms in controlling content consumption. On balance, the best approach may be to simply use it in moderation alongside other curated sources.

Cutting Through The ClutterFor those adrift in an endless stream of content and desperate for a comprehensive anchor, Google News might be the life preserver to stay afloat and informed. With its potent aggregation technology and wealth of customization tools, the day’s most vital content from every corner of the globe is just a click away. And that now includes essays across the life, culture, and business spectrum authored by the (our) “best writers on the planet.”

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The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.

– Arthur Koestler

In his book Houdini, author Harold Kellock shares a story about Houdini on one of his European tours when Houdini found himself locked in his own thinking.

After he had been searched and manacled in a Scottish town jail, the turnkey shut him in a cell and walked away. Houdini quickly freed himself from his shackles and then tackled the cell lock. But despite all his efforts, the lock would not open. Finally, ever more desperate but completely exhausted, he leaned against the door- and it swung open so unexpectedly that he nearly fell headlong into the corridor. The turnkey had not locked it.

Houdini was not locked in a cell by a key but by a belief.

Your belief systems directly influence every part of your life. The larger question is: what does your belief system look like? Let’s explore a few ways this happens in your life.

Wrong beliefs and assumptions lead to wrong actions

Houdini assumed the door was locked. Because his assumption was wrong, his actions were wrong. Wrong assumptions caused him to waste a lot of time and energy trying to accomplish something that was not even necessary. It will do the same for you.

Decisions you make as a leader must be grounded in facts and reality. The worst thing you can do as a leader is to make decisions based on bad information.
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When this happens, you waste valuable time. Your people lose confidence in your leadership.

Wrong actions lead to wrong conclusions

Because Houdini believed the door was locked, he worked tirelessly to open it. Imagine his reaction when he leaned on the door and it opened, realizing that he had been needlessly working to solve a problem that did not exist. I can only imagine his frustration when the cell door opened that was not even locked.

When your thinking is wrong then wrong actions will follow. This leads you and your team to make faulty conclusions. This only compounds already strained morale.

Understand the power of right-thinking leadership

You do not want to be locked in by negative thinking as a leader. Right-thinking leaders seek solutions, explore options, empower their team, and share the credit. Right-thinking leaders have a mindset shift that’s not fixed but one that is growing, expanding, and overcoming its challenges because they refuse to be trapped by limited belief systems.

Your growth as a leader is determined by the choices you make. Don’t allow yourself to be trapped by beliefs that hold you back and limit your leadership capacity. Embrace right-thinking leadership with a passion to grow and your possibilities will be unlimited.

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AI is at the same time an existential risk and the pathway to overcoming some of humanity’s biggest existential challenges. We must proactively and collaboratively steer its development to harness its immense potential for good while preventing its potential for catastrophe.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming our world, offering both immense opportunities and daunting challenges. As this powerful technology continues to advance, it is crucial that we navigate its development with care, mitigating its risks while harnessing its potential to better society.

The Perils of AIOne of the major perils associated with AI is the threat it poses to human employment. As AI systems become more sophisticated, they may eventually outperform humans in a wide range of tasks, leading to widespread job displacement. Historically, technological advances have always created new jobs to replace the ones they made obsolete, but the pace and scale of AI’s impact raises legitimate concerns about societal disruption.

Another peril is the potential for AI to be weaponized or used for nefarious purposes. Powerful AI systems could be exploited by bad actors to cause harm, from cyberattacks and surveillance to automated disinformation campaigns and autonomous weapons development. Responsible governance and stringent security measures will be essential.

The Pitfalls of AIDeveloping AI that is reliable, unbiased, and aligned with human values is an immense technical challenge fraught with pitfalls. AI systems can perpetuate societal biases and discriminate against certain groups if their training data reflects real-world prejudices. They may also make mistakes with severe consequences in high-stakes domains like healthcare and criminal justice.

There are also concerns about an AI system becoming superintelligent – vastly outstripping human capabilities in a way that renders it uncontrollable and potentially indifferent to human welfare.

While the likelihood of this is hotly debated, the implications would be staggering if it occurred.

The Opportunities of AIDespite the risks, AI presents incredible opportunities to solve some of humanity’s greatest challenges. AI could help us cure diseases, solve climate change, and unlock new frontiers of scientific understanding. It has already demonstrated immense potential in fields as diverse as education, transportation, energy, and scientific research.

AI also promises to be an engine of economic growth, unleashing new efficiencies and spawning entire new industries and business models. It could automate mundane tasks, freeing humanity to focus on more fulfilling creative and strategic endeavors. Ultimately, harnessed responsibility, AI could help create an unprecedentedly prosperous and capable civilization.

The Path ForwardAs with any transformative technology, AI carries both promise and peril. It is up to governments, industries, academics, ethicists and the public to work together proactively to maximize its benefits while mitigating its risks. We must prioritize AI safety research, develop robust governance frameworks, and foster greater public understanding and discourse.

With foresight and wisdom, we can navigate the challenges of AI to create a future in which this powerful technology benefits humanity as a whole. But that future is by no means assured – it will require our sustained commitment and vigilance to get there. The high-stakes saga of AI is just beginning.

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Adrenaline is my best motivational drug, and it is generated by many things’ excitement, fear, rejection, and many other things. I regularly use it to contribute to my successes. My long experience of “Living by the Split Second” is something that I have enjoyed, and I have to admit to it being very addictive. I do not advocate it because there might be fewer people on the planet! The best example I have of personal value is when I felt that I was going to flunk out of IBM Mainframe School, I began my weekend trips to go skydiving and it helped me gradually regain my confidence and succeed.

I am confident in my ability to defy the societal myth that intellectual value diminishes with age as time ticks away. It’s time to break free from this limiting belief and embrace the full potential of aging. My practical skills now can be instrumental in developing many things that will aid functionality as people age. I plan to help create and fully use the mobility tools being developed if necessary. As my website indicates my “RAIotic Buddy” might Skydive with me into my Hall of Fame induction.

I have decided to write some stories that illustrate the skills that I have and continue to use in real-life situations to resolve problems. I believe that they will aid in the safe rollout of AI. It will also help other people to lead an active life rather than just involvement social and discussion groups. The breadth of situations I have encountered and overcome has equipped me with valuable experience and insight that I can contribute to navigating the AI revolution. From overcoming challenges to capitalizing on transformative opportunities, my diverse background has honed my problem-solving abilities and strategic thinking. I bring a seasoned perspective that can help organizations anticipate and adapt to the profound changes AI will bring, allowing them to stay ahead of the curve and maximize the potential of these disruptive technologies. My wisdom, forged through adversity and success, can be an invaluable asset in charting the course through this uncharted territory.

My revelation today is to persist with my proven methods, adapt by acquiring new ones as needed, and avoid the distraction of craving constant validation and recognition. I aim to embody, with others of similar age and experience the value of the “Total Package,” the depth of understanding that comes from combining age, experience, and wisdom when approaching situations. I remain astounded by the numerous flawed results I encounter from AI queries. The inaccuracies in the responses and subsequent apologies after I correct them are staggering. As I document stories about my multiracial background, places I’ve lived, and solo travels, the reasons behind these mistakes become evident. I’ve led a life quite different than the norm, and those validating the responses simply lack the breadth of experience and knowledge to comprehend what they don’t know. Therein lies the peril.

It is imperative that I shed light on how I have endured, preserving my life and others through practical survival skills honed over a lifetime. Those lacking such capabilities are naively awed by AI whose intelligence pales in comparison to the depths of human cognition. We celebrate incremental strides as “sentient” when vast leaps are required to truly mirror the human mind.

Many business failures have and will stem from a lack of experience and practical knowledge. Mature experience, what I term “adaptive intelligence,” is crucial for success.

I have written about the birth and necessity of the Crisis Management position and why every company should have a position with that functionality. The skills that made me successful in the Crisis management role are the most important right now. I was allowed to create the position by a very forward-thinking CEO and I completed the projects successfully in multiple locations around the world. The sole reason for its termination was the company’s acquisition. After the acquisition, I was allowed to use the same skills in sales to demonstrate that I could resolve sales problems using those skills. By utilizing my skills and resourcefulness, I was able to achieve the title of “Salesperson of the Year.” I truly enjoyed the experience of being featured in the Bell Atlantic Annual Report, wearing my Gold Rolex watch prize until unfortunately, it became too dangerous due to blatant crime.

The COVID-19 Pandemic was a different reality for me than most people. A priceless memory from that experience was when I was busy meticulously explaining all my qualifications on a video call to the person, Dora Regalado, who was interviewing me for a job. She interrupted my lengthy, meticulous explanation and said, “Are you going to take the job or not!” My kind of person! Later, she helped change my position to working more safely in the mobile facilities. For almost 4 years I was outside almost every day, by choice, relating to people who generally wanted to talk, and I was able to make them feel good or help them in some way. Unfortunately depending on the location. too many were combative because of their fear, and I was able to get through those years without any physical altercations but came close many times.

I have enjoyed this opportunity, thanks to Dennis Pitocco, that I have had to write, think, and prepare for the AI Revolution. I have set records in the past and with all the assistance of the remarkable people in BizCatalyst 360°, we are going to enjoy setting more records and continue enhancing and enjoying our Big Dreams … in Vivid Color!

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Lud*·dite ˈlədˌīt/noun: Luddite; plural noun: Luddites*

A member of any of the bands of English workers who destroyed machinery, especially in cotton and woolen mills, that they believed was threatening their jobs (1811–16).

A person opposed to increased industrialization or new technology.

Perhaps named after Ned Lud, a participant in the destruction of machinery

What you see above is the encyclopedia definition of a Luddite. I have, more or less, always called myself one. But my self-definition translates more along the lines of preferring to live and work with as little technology as possible.

When I started as a writer, I did not even own a typewriter. That came a little later. Actually several of them, then a word processor, then a personal computer, then an Apple computer, then a whole series of them right up to the MacBook Pro I am writing this piece on and the 24” iMac that is just over my shoulder and kinda gathering dust.

I also have an iPad, which I use for reading articles and checking the weather and a smart phone with no SIM card, (both of which were hand-me-downs from my wife), that I use as a camera. My real phone is a dandy little Alcatel flip phone which suits me just fine.

So I have obviously never been philosophically opposed to technology in and of itself. And I have certainly availed myself of as much as I felt necessary.

Being a communications professional, I have also made it a point to keep up to speed with technology, and I find that process quite enjoyable, although I do not immerse myself in it to the extent that a number of people I know have done.

So I am really a relative Luddite. I have all the tech I need to do my job and pursue my writing, but no more than that.

Up-To-Speed With vs Overwhelmed By TechThere is a very good reason I have chosen this Luddite-like path and that is simply that most of what I need to know about communication I pretty much already know. It’s not my job to show people how to build an SEO program, or how to create an online retail site or create a successful blog site for themselves.

My job is just to know enough about how all this technology works, and what it can theoretically do, to advise people on the best courses of action for their businesses. And then help them get there with good ideas.

If I have to I have at least a dozen people who know all the ins and outs of these various vertical platforms who can advise my client or build them whatever they need to make their businesses go.

So in a way, you could say that my pursuit of Luddite-ness, gives me a kind of objectivity that is very helpful in terms of the advice I give my clients.

And that very objectivity is the thing that businesses need, especially in this day and age when there are literally thousands of digital marketers out there proclaiming that their tech is the answer to the prayers of a client they know virtually nothing about, except the industry they happen to be in.

It Just Does Not Work Like ThatSolving communication challenges, creating strong brands powered by unique selling propositions and all that other good stuff is not, I repeat not, something that should be left in the hands of someone whose vested interest is in a specific vertical silo, be that digital or analog.

It should be left in the hands of the company decision makers and the people they bring on board to strategically connect their business with their prospects.

Because without that critically important step in the process, everybody is simply taking a wild-ass guess. And more often than not just throwing money down the drain.

Being A Luddite Means Projecting A Simple ViewpointBeing unencumbered by technology preferences is not only exhilarating, it’s an absolute necessity for anyone in the communications business.

Because keeping the focus on the business-to-customer relationship always, always, always has to be the first step that every business needs to take in order to ensure any sort of long-term success in the market.

After that has been established, tested and proven, then the choices come into play. Sometimes they are ornate and cutting-edge digital processes. Other times they are something much simpler and more direct.

The Luddite looks at all of this stuff objectively. And that objective point of view is really the element that can be traced directly to smart choices and successful outcomes.

So I’m proud to be an aspiring Luddite, and still be able to create smart, well thought-out solutions for my clients. Because at the end of the day, the decisions you make about communication and the tools you use to make that communication effective are what it’s all about.

There’s no old school or new school, there’s just a right idea in the right place at the right time.

Heere Are Some Quotes By People Who actually Get This

“I’m not a tech guy. I’m looking at the technology with the eyes of my customers, normal people’s eyes.”

~Jack Ma, Creator, Ali Baba

“Our business is about technology, yes. But it’s also about operations and customer relationships.”

~Michael Dell, Dell Computers

“It’s hard to say exactly what it is about face-to-face contact that makes deals happen, but whatever it is, it hasn’t yet been duplicated by technology.”

~Paul Graham

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I mean, after you finish the dishes and figuring out what to wear tomorrow.

Priorities, people.

Ask yourself, has this thought ever consciously occurred to you?

Because it does, subconsciously, every day.

You create a new universe every time you meet someone new. Every time you take a trip somewhere. Every time you start a new job. You’re creating a ripple that births its own infinite potentialities. The creative being inside you, the one that can’t truly be named, but only felt, drives this impulse every day.

Back in January, a friend of mine were talking about starting a fictitious football league in second-tier cities, featuring former NFL players and coaches turning up on hilarious redemption tours. The El Paso Chilies vs. the Omaha Steaks featuring guys who were fired and/or kicked out of other leagues.

Then, after realizing I’d be sued up to my eyeballs for using the names of real players and coaches on a podcast about this league, I had a follow-up thought during another conversation with another friend – what if I could invent my own sport?

As I said that, I was in my kitchen, looking at a pair of tongs.

And I immediately started laughing. Tongs as the foundation of a sport? Sure. Why not? We name sports after pickles these days, after all.

Thus, Tonger was born.

And with it, the Tongerverse.

A place where Cthulhu and Poseidon have a longstanding Tonger rivalry. Where our Board of Directors features a puppy name Colonel Cuddlesworth and a Walrus in a soccer jersey. Where we have a Ten Commandments of Tonger to include, “Thou shalt Tonger-crash expo floors with a boombox while playing Partyman ala the Joker in the art museum.”

Most of all, where the core rule is…there are no rules. Grab a tong and create a new sport, and with it, a new universe. Your own custom Tongerverse. Just because you can. That’s literally it.

But you don’t have to create a new sport to create a new universe.

You’re already doing it every day.

But when you remember that you’re doing it…well, that’s where the real fun begins.

And the magic begins to unfold in ways that were previously unimaginable.

Happy creating, my friends.

And tong on.

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Amara clutched the worn photo, its edges softened by a thousand touches. It depicted a bustling marketplace in Marrakech, her family laughing amongst the vibrant chaos. Now, the only chaos Amara knew was the relentless symphony of car horns on the streets of Tokyo. Migration, the decision that had tasted like freedom on her tongue, now left a bitter aftertaste in her mouth.

Amara was a baker, renowned in Marrakech for her intricate gazelle horn pastries. In Tokyo, her skills were relegated to the back of a cramped convenience store bakery, churning out the identical melon pan, their pale uniformity a stark contrast to the vibrant colours of her homeland. The language barrier was a constant wall, isolating her from customers and colleagues alike. Loneliness gnawed at her like a desert wind.

One evening, a quiet man named Takeshi hesitantly approached her. He pointed at a photo of the gazelle horns on her phone, his eyes wide with curiosity. Amara, surprised, launched into a passionate explanation, her hands mimicking the delicate folds of the pastry. Takeshi listened intently, a small smile playing on his lips. That hesitant exchange sparked a fragile friendship. Takeshi, a widower who ran a traditional Japanese tea shop, was drawn to Amara’s warmth and the stories woven into her pastries. He, in turn, became her bridge to Tokyo, patiently teaching her the language and customs.

One afternoon, Amara presented Takeshi with a gazelle horn, its golden crust dusted with sugar. He took a bite, his eyes closing as the familiar flavours of cardamom and orange blossom filled his mouth. A tear rolled down his cheek. “It reminds me of my grandmother’s baklava,” he whispered.

That simple act of sharing ignited a spark. Amara began experimenting, fusing the rich flavours of Japan with the fragrant spices of Morocco. She created yuzu-infused gazelle horns, matcha-dusted mochi, and Sakura blossom buns. Takeshi, recognizing her talent, proposed a collaboration.

Amara’s creations became a sensation. The tiny tea shop became a haven for those seeking a taste of something new, a bridge between cultures built on flaky pastry and steaming cups of tea. Amara, once adrift, found her place. Migration, the bitter pill she’d swallowed, had blossomed into something beautiful, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the unifying power of shared experiences over a plate. The photo in her hand, once a symbol of loss, now held a bittersweet joy. It was a reminder of the home she’d left behind, and the new one she’d built, layer by delicious layer.

Memories become stories, a tale when shared opens the mind of the listeners or readers, giving birth to new perspectives and ways of looking at things.

The so-called different worlds reveal the essence of common emotions and doubts, fears, and excitement. We realize we may look different and have unique experiences but we all face the same roller coaster of emotions at different time stamps in life. We are all united in our differences, It’s just a matter of time and intention to understand, that our differences are, what makes our individual journeys special.

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Most of us have experienced challenges in our lives that called for resilience. So, we could rightly think of ourselves as resilient entrepreneurs.

Do you ever wonder what it takes to bounce back from life’s toughest moments?

Think about it for a moment. When you hear ‘resilient entrepreneur,’ whose story resonates with you? Perhaps it’s the perseverance of Albert Einstein, who, despite initial academic setbacks, revolutionized our understanding of the universe with his theory of relativity. Or maybe it’s James Dyson, whose relentless experimentation led to the creation of the iconic Dyson vacuum after numerous failed attempts.

Or is it someone closer to home? A friend, a mentor, or even your own story? Someone who, against all odds, rose from the ashes of adversity to not only survive but thrive. If you or someone you know embodies this spirit of resilience, I’d love to hear your story.

The Resilient Dolly Parton

The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.

~ Dolly Parton

Regardless of what you think about country music (and I’m a huge fan of classic country), Dolly Parton’s journey exemplifies true resilience. Her story is one of triumph over life’s harshest conditions. Raised in poverty, with her family often struggling to make ends meet, Dolly’s early life was far from easy. Yet, her spirit remained unbroken.

Facing rejections, stereotypes, and even threats, Dolly’s path was anything but smooth. Her unwavering determination has made her a symbol of strength and success. At seventy-seven, she continues to inspire with her unstoppable energy.

We all encounter our unique challenges – financial woes, personal struggles, or professional obstacles. The key lies in how we face them. Intelligence, passion, and faith are crucial, but there’s something else – resilience. This invisible armor enables us to withstand life’s battles and emerge stronger.

What Is Resilience?

Resilience isn’t a single skill. It’s a variety of skills and coping mechanisms.

~ Jean Chatzky

Resilience is about more than just ‘bouncing back’; it’s about adapting, learning, and growing from our experiences. It’s about maintaining our core strength, even when faced with life’s relentless challenges. Real resilience can be messy and challenging, often stirring up a whirlwind of emotions. But it’s also crucial for our overall well-being.

Studies show that those with higher resilience can navigate life’s trials more effectively and they also enjoy better physical health. It’s not about being unaffected by hardships but it’s learning to navigate them with grace and strength.

When Resilience Falters

Life’s not always smooth sailing. Sometimes, even the smallest setbacks can feel overwhelming. When our resilience falters, recovery becomes harder, and new challenges can feel insurmountable. It’s crucial, then, to nurture our resilience, keeping it strong and ready for whatever lies ahead.

Boosting Your Resilience

Here are four actionable tips to enhance your resilience:

Practice Gratitude: Appreciate the small joys – a sunny day, a good meal, a laugh with a friend. Cultivating gratitude helps build a positive outlook, vital for resilience.

Embrace Realistic Optimism: Optimism is essential, but it must be balanced with a realistic view of the situation.

Find Meaning in Challenges: Look for lessons and growth opportunities in difficult situations.

Nurture Your Sense of Humor: Laughter can be a powerful tool in the face of adversity.

The Climb – Embracing the Struggle: We usually perceive adversity as an obstacle; and it often is. Yet, it can also be an opportunity for growth. Facing challenges head-on can be incredibly rewarding, often more so because of the struggle involved. It’s about the journey, the learning, the growth – it’s the climb.

Your Resilience ChallengeIdentify a current challenge in your life. Apply just one resilience strategy to this situation. Notice the impact, no matter how small. Life is a series of actions and reactions – each step, a building block towards growth and change.

If you’d like, please share your challenge and how you overcame it. You may be surprised at the effect you may have as someone else may have encountered something similar and discover a solution through your experience.

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We’re conditioned to believe that those who work the hardest will be the most successful. Rewards will come to those who are the first to arrive and the last to leave. Pedal harder and faster and your efforts will be rewarded.

Amazon is a great example of the “pedal harder and faster” mantra. For years, Amazon has been criticized for treating employees as cogs in the larger business machine. This 2015 New York Times article exposes edicts such as “toil long and late,” and “when you hit the wall from the unrelenting pace, the only solution is to climb the wall” as the Amazonian rules for success. While Bezos has publicly disputed many of the claims, the company manifesto that he wrote himself states, “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.”

While Amazon is known for its customer-centric approach, innovative capabilities, and long-term vision, the organization is notorious for putting profits over people. Based on interviews with over 100 ex-staff members, The New York Times discovered that Amazon’s culture exhibited the following characteristics:

• Anonymous evaluations and forced elimination of underperformers: Employees engaged in informal agreements to provide negative feedback for specific colleagues, leading to their termination during annual performance reviews.
• In hostile work environments: individuals were actively encouraged to engage in intense debates and criticism of their co-workers, often reaching levels of humiliation.
• Poor work-life boundaries: Some employees were expected to participate in conference calls while on vacation or work weekends and nights from home. Additionally, the company demonstrated a lack of consideration and empathy toward individuals dealing with personal hardships. Culture 500Culture 500 provides a data-based view of company culture within some of the largest and most powerful organizations in the world. In a collaboration with MIT Sloan Management, Glassdoor and CultureX, they use cutting edge AI and other technology tools to examine how companies measure up on culture in the eyes of employees.

Culture 500 measures company performance across nine cultural values — agility, collaboration, customer orientation, diversity, execution, innovation, integrity, performance, and respect. These values are among the most frequently cited by large companies in their official corporate culture value statements as well as by employees in company reviews, and they are linked to a variety of desirable outcomes like financial performance, innovation, and employee engagement.

Among over 24,000 Amazon employees, the most frequently discussed cultural value is execution, and the most positively discussed value is innovation. While Amazon walks the talk when it comes to customer orientation and innovation, employees don’t experience the same with integrity, performance and respect — the three most negatively perceived values.

Even according to Bezos himself, the currency at Amazon is time and energy for money. Considering that the very definition of energy is the capacity to do work, the logic is twisted. The more time we put in the less energy we have. The less energy we have, the less productive we are. The cumulative effect becomes a powerful current that leads us right out of our peak performance zone.

“To win in the marketplace, you must first win in the workplace.” – Doug Conant, former CEO of Campbell’s Soup

Today’s leading companies strive for continual improvement across the board. Reduce costs, improve processes, increase revenue, streamline processes, build a better widget, be first to market, do more with less. But the most successful companies recognize the currencies that drive high performing, bright employees to achieve those goals. They understand that people go to work for more than a paycheck and are motivated by more than money.

The companies that nurture healthy high-performing teams breed an atmosphere of success by cultivating the kind of culture that inspires people to take pride and ownership in their individual contributions toward to those goals. In fact, employees who feel their contributions are valued are 60% more likely to deliver their peak performance for their employers.

People who love what they do are more engaged. But, people don’t love their jobs because they are making millions of dollars for shareholders. While the bigger bottom line may be the payoff for the organization, it’s rarely what inspires the individual. People love their jobs because they feel like their contributions matter.

“Everyone wants to know that what they do really matters.”
—Bob Chapman

Employee engagement is measured by individuals’ contributions to organizational success as well as the personal satisfaction people feel in their roles. Highly engaged employees are not just committed. They are passionate about the contribution they make to the success of the team, and they feel valued and respected for their talents. That collective passion fuels a collaborative culture rather than a combative one. These are the teams that recognize the competition is not “inside the house,” but out there.

Engagement isn’t a utopian ideal. In fact, a sense of belonging and value are innate human needs that contribute to the highest level of self motivation. Psychologists refer to this as self-actualization, and it ‘s the realization of one’s full potential – being the best one can be. People actually want to contribute to something bigger than themselves. Their level of engagement is defined by the alignment between the satisfaction they get from the contributions they are able to make.

“The engaged stay for what they can give; the disengaged stay for what they can get or leave to give their talents to someone else.”

A highly engaged culture, however, is not synonymous with a kinder, gentler, happier workplace. Happy people do not automatically create an engaged culture. The irony of a “smile and nod” culture is that, while it might feel good, it can actually cripple innovation by creating an environment where there is no impetus to change or there is too much pressure against rocking the boat to welcome new ideas.

Overachievers are looked down upon because they make mediocrity feel uncomfortable. Disagreements are uncomfortable. Challenge is uncomfortable. The status quo often wins. The 7 most expensive words in business, ‘We have always done it this way,’ not only prohibit the next big idea, they discourage people from even thinking about the next big idea.

“We tried that once; the guy who came up with the idea isn’t here anymore.”

Full engagement happens in a culture that inspires people to stretch and challenge themselves and each other. It isn’t written down in a binder; it’s deeply embedded in the way people feel about their capacity to contribute. Enabling people to take risks leads to innovation, creativity, and process improvement. But it requires a healthy balance between challenging new ideas and promoting teamwork.

Productive disagreements shouldn’t be sacrificed by harmony, nor should candor and respect. A healthy challenge of ideas is essential. Without it, people fall into the status quo mindset laced with apathy or complacency. However, challenging the status quo only works within the context of healthy relationships built upon mutual respect.

Organizations that truly want to not only achieve but fuel sustainable peak performance have to consider a new value exchange. What does it take to engage employees, enable them to contribute productively to organizational goals, and create the conditions where everyone operates within their zone of peak performance?

Care and empathy can coexist in a culture that fosters candor and honesty. Likewise, candor and honesty can be delivered with respect. Leaders who foster a culture of respect, learning, and individual contribution don’t take capacity for granted and they don’t mistake time for value. They create the conditions necessary for people to work in their performance zone and encourage them to shift to the renewal zone when they need to. These are the leaders that have the maturity and the vision to recognize that the health of the organization is defined by the health of the people within it.

So, the million-dollar question is this: What is the price of success? Perhaps it’s a good time to take inventory what you do each day, how it makes you feel, and how it impacts others.

The only way to do great work is to love what you do.

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“Describe strengths and weaknesses” is one question that makes most candidates somewhat uncomfortable. The million-dollar question is how one answers it. Again, it varies from one candidate to another as how do they respond. However, when we respond to this question, we must start by saying that we are aware of our challenges and how we are working to overcome those. Understanding how to answer this interview question can improve our chances of being seen as reasonable candidates and receiving a job offer.

In this article, we shall discuss examples of both strengths and weaknesses and provide tips on how to prepare our responses.

Why employers ask this question?A job is never a skillset alone that we sell to an employer. It’s primarily the behaviour as well. In other words, it’s a complete package. A hiring manager asks this question to understand how self-aware a candidate is. They want to know if s/he is familiar with what areas of improvement and what steps s/he needs to take. They also want to know what a candidate thinks about his/her qualities which will be applied in the new role in their organisation.

Preparing ahead of time for an interview question concerning our strengths and weaknesses is a valuable use of our time before the actual interview. Even if a hiring manager doesn’t ask about strengths and weaknesses specifically, writing out our response on a piece of paper to this common question can help us describe what we can offer to an employer and how we wish to grow in our professional career in future.

How to answer “What are your strengths?A hiring manager may ask “What are your strengths?”, but you can also prepare for them to deliver this question using different phrasing. For example, they may ask “When they’re describing you, what is one word your colleagues and managers would use to describe you?” While these questions don’t ask you about your strengths directly, they encourage you to talk about your positive attributes. Start by clearly stating your strength. Then, you can strengthen your answer by providing context and telling a story. Address the traits that qualify you for the available position and distinguish you as a candidate.

Here are some examples to reference as you create your own response:

Example 1

Here’s an example answer from a candidate who has strong leadership skills:“I’ve always been a natural leader. With more than 10 years of experience in sales, I’ve exceeded my KPIs every quarter and have been promoted four times. Reflecting on those successes, I know that I wouldn’t have reached them if I hadn’t built and led teams of highly skilled and diverse individuals. I’m proud of my ability to get cross-functional groups to collaborate well. I’ve regularly honed my management skills through 360 reviews with my team, and I know I want to continue to build my leadership skills in my next role

Example 2

Here’s an example response from a candidate with strong collaboration skills:“I strongly believe in team collaboratiion and have always preferred to work with the teams. In the project teams I’ve directed, worked with a variety of people and motivated them through diverse creative tasks. Since I began managing my current team, I’ve increased productivity by 15% and retention by 25% over three years.

Example 3

Consider this example answer from a candidate whose strength is their interpersonal skills:“I’m an empathetic person who’s skilled at relating to people. In one memorable instance from earlier this year, I was on a call with a customer whose contract for car insurance we had terminated. Reinstating the service agreement would’ve caused her rates to increase dramatically, which was something she couldn’t afford at the time. She was understandably upset and worried.It became clear that we couldn’t meet her needs, but I wanted her to walk away with a favorable impression of the service we had provided. I talked her through some of her other options and even let her know of other providers who might be able to offer her a lower rate so she could avoid a lapse in coverage. In the feedback survey from that interaction, she specifically mentioned that she would still be recommending our services to others.

Turning a weakness into a strengthTo answer the question “What are your strengths and weaknesses?” we can be sure to mention a weaknessbut we don’t have to leave it as a weakness, though, as it’s possible to transform a weakness into a strength. We can start by giving a truthful answer as to what our weakness is. Then, we can explain how we’ve been working to improve it. We can also state what lessons we’ve learned and how we’re becoming a better personby identifying our weaknesses.

Wrap UpNavigating the “What are your weaknesses?” question in job interviews requires finesse, self-awareness, and strategic communication. By choosing relevant weaknesses, emphasizing growth and improvement, and maintaining a positive attitude, one can turn the tables and question into an opportunity to showcase suitability for the role. Remember, honesty and authenticity are key, so approach the question with sincerity and confidence. With preparation and practice, one can master the art of answering this question and leave a lasting impression on the interviewers.

At the end of the day (or, at least, at the end of the interview), what the recruiters, potential colleagues, and supervisors we met may not be really interested in our biggest strength and weakness. All they want to know what kind of person we are and how we can contribute to the Bigger Picture. The question itself “What are your strengths and weaknesses?” = Are you the kind of person who can contribute the bigger picture? Let’s be honest about our abilities, and take advantage of opportunities to improve and grow?

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In a world marked by rapid technological advancements, shifting cultural values, and a renewed focus on social and environmental responsibility, the concept of organizational development has evolved beyond its traditional confines.

While the traditional models of growth emphasized the pursuit of profit and efficiency, a new paradigm has emerged—one that encompasses a more holistic approach to organizational development.

This chapter explores the transformative journey of organizational development, tracing its evolution from conventional growth models to the embrace of holistic paradigms, all within the context of servant leadership.

The Genesis of Organizational Development: Traditional Growth Models

Historically, the primary goal of organizational development was centered on financial success and market dominance. Businesses sought to increase profitability through strategies such as cost reduction, operational efficiency, and market expansion.

While these approaches delivered results in terms of bottom-line growth, they often overlooked the broader impacts of their operations. Employee well-being, community engagement, and environmental sustainability were secondary considerations, leading to a skewed perspective that failed to address the intricate interplay between business and society.

The Rise of Holistic Organizational Development: Beyond the Balance Sheet

The transition towards holistic organizational development signals a shift from profit-centric metrics to a more comprehensive approach. This approach recognizes that an organization’s growth is intertwined with its impact on various stakeholders—employees, customers, communities, and the environment.

Holistic development acknowledges the intricate relationships that exist within and beyond organizational boundaries, advocating for a harmonious coexistence rather than a one-sided pursuit of growth.

The holistic paradigm acknowledges that an organization’s long-term viability is directly linked to its ability to create shared value. This entails aligning business strategies with societal needs, ensuring that growth contributes positively to both economic prosperity and social well-being.

Holistic organizational development strives to create an ecosystem where organizations thrive not in isolation, but as integral parts of a larger societal fabric.

Servant Leadership as the Guiding Light: Aligning Holistic Values

In the midst of this transformative shift, servant leadership emerges as a natural fit—a philosophy that aligns perfectly with the ideals of holistic organizational development. Rooted in the belief that leadership is synonymous with service, servant leadership fosters an environment where the growth of individuals, the empowerment of employees, and the well-being of the community are paramount.

The core principles of servant leadership—empathy, active listening, humility, and a commitment to nurturing potential—resonate profoundly with the ethos of holistic development. Servant leaders view their role not as dictators, but as facilitators of growth. They create spaces where open communication thrives, ideas are valued, and a sense of shared purpose is cultivated.

By placing the well-being of their teams and the community at the forefront, servant leaders inherently align with the holistic perspective, ensuring that growth transcends financial numbers and encompasses a broader positive impact.

A Holistic Development Framework: Integrating Holistic Values

Holistic organizational development, guided by servant leadership, introduces a framework that extends beyond financial measures. It encompasses a spectrum of factors including employee engagement, diversity and inclusion, ethical practices, environmental sustainability, and community engagement. By considering these elements collectively, organizations ensure that their growth aligns with the well-being of all stakeholders, leaving a positive imprint on society.

Servant leadership serves as the connective tissue within this framework. It encourages leaders to embody qualities of empathy and compassion, making decisions that resonate with the organization’s purpose and values. By fostering an environment of trust and collaboration, servant leaders empower employees to thrive, innovate, and contribute meaningfully to the organization’s growth trajectory.

The Path Forward: Holistic Organizational Development through Servant Leadership

The convergence of holistic organizational development and servant leadership ushers in a new era of leadership—one that acknowledges the intrinsic interdependence between organizational success and societal well-being.

This chapter sets the stage for the exploration of servant leadership’s multifaceted role in the holistic growth journey. As we delve deeper into the subsequent chapters, we will uncover how servant leadership principles empower individuals, foster collaboration, navigate change, and ultimately pave the way for organizations to flourish holistically in an interconnected world.

In the chapters that follow, we will explore how servant leadership serves as the cornerstone for navigating change, embracing diversity, nurturing employee well-being, fostering purpose-driven performance management, and envisioning a future where organizations thrive through authentic connections and sustainable impact.

As we embark on this transformative journey, we invite you to explore the intersection of servant leadership and holistic organizational development, discovering how these principles can reshape the way we lead, grow, and create meaningful change in the modern world.

Reflections

1. Understanding Evolution: Reflect on your current understanding of organizational development. How has this evolved over time, and how does the concept of a ‘holistic paradigm’ fit into this evolution?
2. Personal Experience: Think about an organization you have been a part of. How did its development approach align or contrast with the holistic paradigms discussed in this chapter?
3. Challenges and Solutions: What challenges do organizations typically face when shifting towards a holistic development approach? Can you think of any solutions or strategies that might help overcome these challenges?
4. Holistic Impact: Consider the broader impact of embracing a holistic paradigm in organizational development. How do you think this approach affects employees, leadership, and organizational success?
5. Case Study Reflection: Reflect on a case study presented in this chapter. What key lessons can be learned, and how can they be applied in real-world organizational settings?
6. Future Perspectives: How do you envision the future of organizational development? What role will holistic paradigms play in shaping this future?

These questions are designed to encourage deep thinking and personal engagement with the concepts discussed in Chapter 1, aiding in the understanding and application of holistic paradigms in organizational development.

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The skills that made me highly successful as a Worldwide Crisis Manager started in early childhood when I lived with my divorced father and a group of men in a house. I was taught to fend for myself in many things that would normally be handled by a mother. All the males were involved in trades of all kinds, including construction, auto, and all kinds of machine repair so I was taught how to repair anything and everything when it broke just like everyone else. I don’t ever remember any outside help ever being called for anything. With the knowledge inside the house, we could solve any repair or building problem. We had a variety of animals on our property, including chickens, turkeys, ducks, and rabbits.

On weekends, we would hunt and fish, so knowing how to prepare food from live animals was essential. I fired my first shotgun at age ten and that did not go so well. There was a lot of laughter, but it was not so funny to me when it lifted me completely off the ground as it knocked me over backward! I proved my value when we went hunting, we were never able to properly train a dog, so my job was to retrieve anything that was shot and went down on the land or in the water.

That early training worked well for me later in my Air Force Arctic and Desert survival training and later in some extreme skiing situations. When many people turned down the opportunities to repair aircraft in flight was confident that I knew enough to handle any situation, save some lives, and help accomplish many missions. My longevity of being a part of the IBM Mainframe Era and now being able to use that “assisted knowledge” as a part of the AI Revolution is something valuable, I am very proud of and plan to enjoy to the fullest.

I was allowed to create the Crisis Management role after winning the top technical award in a company. My role in crisis management involved coordinating specialized teams to rapidly respond to and resolve major IT, security, and communication issues on a global scale. The skills I developed include rapid response, expertise allocation, cross-functional collaboration, global reach, knowledge management, resource allocation, and incident command/oversight. The ability to manage critical situations is crucial for preventing disruptions or risks. My experience in crisis response, assembling experts, and utilizing my skills prepared me for managing high-stakes challenges, which will be assets in navigating the coming “AI Revolution”.

Maintaining composure and leveraging specialized teams in a coordinated way is crucial during crises and imperative for success.

The skills I developed before, during, and after my Crisis Management role, are highly valuable for the coming revolution, and I have experience in effectively utilizing many of them. I am incredibly excited about combining my natural skills with augmented Intelligence, also known as intelligence amplification. This AI is designed to enhance and complement human intelligence rather than replace it. Augmented intelligence systems work alongside humans to improve decision-making, problem-solving, and task completion.

My long history of Crisis Management skills has allowed me to come into any situation with the confidence that I will be able to find a way to resolve it successfully. Once I analyze the information and form an initial team, I incorporate additional skills as necessary to solve the problem. Many times the key to what I accomplish is to recognize something that is being overlooked.

An ongoing issue usually causes some level of frustration. Arriving at one project, I gathered all parties involved in a single room and announced that… “the Crisis team has arrived, we have never failed, and the problem will be solved!” “We have successfully done this before and the speed at which the resolution will happen depends on how much cooperation we receive.” I also added, “That will be the only thing that will slow us down!” I must have pressed the right button because there was a period of silence, and the highest-level and loudest manager went silent and grinned! The mood of the whole room became supportive. I know that many times, confidence can be everything! Most of the people that we helped were very happy to see our team arrive but, in many cases, the local management team did not want us to be successful because the perception was that it would make them look incapable. In many cases that was true and after some problems were resolved people were released or reassigned.

I am working and studying long hours every day to make certain that I can prove that I am a model of what can be achieved with Augmented Intelligence and a very high and lengthy level of natural, practical skills. I am very excited about another beginning!

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Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.

~Henri Nouwen

When France and Argentina met in the 2022 World Cup final, it was an incredible contest that many dubbed the “greatest World Cup match in history.” As the final seconds ticked off in extra time, the score was tied 3-3, sending the soccer teams to penalty kicks. After Argentina scored the winning goal, the nation erupted in celebration. More than a million Argentineans overwhelmed downtown Buenos Aires. Drone footage spread across social media showing this raucous, happy scene. One BBC report described how the city quaked with “an explosion of joy.”

In this fast-paced world filled with constant demands and stresses, it’s all too easy to lose sight of the simple joys in life. We get caught up in the daily grind, rushing from task to task, obligation to obligation, rarely taking the time to pause and truly appreciate the small wonders around us. However, when we make the conscious choice to slow down and be present, an entire universe of joy awaits to be rediscovered.

Discovering authentic joy requires us to step outside of our whirlwind minds and come home to the beauty of the present moment. It asks that we cultivate a sense of wonder, curiosity, and gracious appreciation for the miraculous embedded within the seemingly ordinary. With a commitment to mindfulness and an open heart, we can unearth the magic of finding joy in the simplest of life’s details. And in doing so, we awaken to the truth that we are surrounded by an abundance of reasons to feel grateful and fully alive each day.

What Sparks Your Joy?We recently reached out to people across the universe in search of a brief (video) answer to one simple question: “What Sparks Your Joy?”. The end result became the foundation for our JOYFEST 360° Signature Edition – a celebration of those sparks – the little moments, experiences, and perspectives that bring light to people’s lives. Their answers, conveyed with candor, humor, and heartwarming insight, remind us to appreciate the easily overlooked sources of wonder around us.

In this kaleidoscope of human experiences, we discover that joy comes in countless forms – but it’s always there if you take a moment to focus on it. So pause, and let these stories of Joy inspire you to notice and nurture your own sources of everyday delight – perhaps inspiring you to seek your “explosion of joy”.

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A note about Helpful Questions Change Lives:

If you’re curious about why you experience life as you do and what changes your experience when it’s unhelpful, the posts in my first series can help. They invite you to look more closely at the relationship you have with you. Especially the sensations, thoughts, and feelings that make up, and automatically appear as the contents of your consciousness in any moment. They invite inquiry into how liberating it can be to entertain and play with these unique-to-you contents, rather than be entertained or hijacked by them.

I make such an invitation because it’s that freedom bit that helps change lives – for the better. You not only see why your experience unfolds as it does more clearly, but why others behave as they do too.

Series 2 explores what makes sense to you in your relationship with the different groups you’re a part of – teams at work, professional networks, family and friends, for instance.

Suppose you, and other members of these groups were NOT bound by sense making that no longer helps you. Then what?

Enjoy playing with and wondering about what works for you on the questions in this series. Let me know in the comments if they help or not.

Colin Newlyn began The Decrapify Work Not-Newsletter as..

“a form of therapy… A way to work out loud, to figure out what I think and to connect with others who see the world in a similarly sideways and outraged fashion.”

His outrage is supported by numerous workplace engagement surveys, done by Gallup, Deloitte and many others, all of which point to high levels of disengagement among two-thirds of employees – and here’s the rub – persistently across about 20 years of surveying who knows how many people, yielding millions of data points, all around the world.

A post inEliza Filby’s Newsletter called Introducing Inheritocracy asked this question “Do young people want to be managers?”

Citing influencers on TikTok and an article in The Independent she writes..

“While we shouldn’t take a TikTok trend as representative of anything anymore, it’s interesting to note how prevalent this feeling is amongst older Gen Z/early Millennials (between 24-30) who entered the workplace at a time of the pandemic and who now find themselves in management positions. They were never exposed to good practise in this area themselves, and so are struggling now. The legacy of COVID continues to be felt at different points throughout the career ladder”.

Over the last 30+ years I’ve had countless coaching-and-mentoring conversation with leaders in both public and private sector organisations. Most entered these from a stressed state of mind to differing degrees. One big contributing factor, I concluded, connects to the way they think about their role. Being the chief sense maker, decision taker and action initiator, may have felt exciting once, but, over time, overwhelms many.

If my work points to leaders’ stressed, overwhelmed states of mind with respect to how they think about their role. And, among others, Colin’s speaks up on behalf those who’ve been on the wrong end of poor leadership. While Eliza highlights why many of the younger generation don’t want more of the same – not to mention you’re own direct experience of leading and leaders, of course, – we might conclude that many people believe leadership, as we’ve known it, isn’t working.

Our beliefs about leadershipBeliefs about the role a leader plays can hang around for a long while. They get passed on from one generation to the next. They are reinforced via art, literature and films. They take on more relevance and meaning when experienced first hand. And, like us, they may evolve and adapt as circumstances change. But they may not too. We have a tendency to hold on to beliefs. Which is why we get stuck sometimes.

Though I was once a subscriber to the belief that leaders are born not made, that doesn’t make sense to me now. In my experience, we are all provided with opportunities to take a lead even when we don’t see ourselves in a formal leadership role. Life invites is to make sense of being a parent, losing a loved one, getting married, caring for a friend, choosing a career, bringing out the best in others, having purpose, crafting a culture in our workplaces and other groups we’re proud of, resolving the inevitable differences that arise in these, and more. We may not always recognise it, but such sense making, choice making, and action taking opportunities are abundant.

Our beliefs about the leader’s role determine whether and how we seize such opportunities.

No matter whether you have a formal leadership role in a business or family, say, or are taking a lead on a particular issue, look at the beliefs we can each hold about leadership below. Note which resonate with you – that is to say what you’re drawn to, and which you find less attractive, because it’s less you, as it were.

Knowing what kind of beliefs about leadership automatically show up in you, makes playing with each, and wondering which are most helpful in your circumstances, easier.

1. The Tribal Leader

You see your role in terms of protecting your tribe and bringing cohesion to it. To be the one who is relied on for communal survival because of your strength, wisdom, and skill.

Though rooted in early human societies, this same belief can be seen today in those who run their part of the organisation, or family, as fiefdoms or factions, and are tribal in how they relate to others and compete for resources.

2. The Divine Right Leader

You believe your role is to deliver on a divine-given mission, which you see as essential for stability, order and authority. To be the one on whom power is bestowed and centralised as a way protecting the mission, or God’s work, and growing the number of fellow ‘believers’.

The consolidation of power through hereditary rule was often legitimised by claims of divine right, linking leadership to religious beliefs and establishing dynastic traditions. In modern times monarchies still prevail – think King Charles III’s divine-like coronation ceremony, which epitomised this belief. More commonplace, though, are leaders of dynasties or big family-run organisations who believe their mission is inspired by divine intervention and seek fellow disciples to enact it.

3. The Warrior or Military Leader

You see your role is to gain authority through conquest and (military-like) strength. To be the one who can maintain control and protect conquered territories (or market share gains.)

The feudal system thrived on a hierarchical structure, and leadership was closely tied to military prowess. Kings and lords gained authority through winning military battles using strategies designed to defeat an enemy, step by step. We get the term ‘command and control’ from here – needed to ensure each step of a strategy is executed well. Competitive marketplaces are often thought of as being analogous to battlefields and war.

4. The Enlightened Leader

You feel your role is to govern for the betterment of societal progress as a whole. To be the one who embraces, articulates and enacts new intellectual and philosophical shifts.

Rooted in The Age of Enlightenment, this belief marked a shift toward reason, science, and human rights. Leaders fostering the growth of cross-border collaborative networks, working on science-related topics such as vaccine research and climate change, would be examples of modern-day equivalents.

5. The Captain of Industry Leader

You see your role is to oversee enterprises that can manage complex processes, and navigate societal transition with attendant economic shifts. To be the one who can clearly envisage the benefits new technology brings before others have any inkling of these.

The Industrial Revolution brought about significant technological disruption, from agricultural to industrial production. New captains or pioneers like Brunel in the UK, Rockefeller in the US, and Benz in Europe, were driven by the benefits innovative new technology brings. Modern day captains in this digital age are epitomised by Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and leaders of many different start ups including those building new blockchain and AI technologies on Web 3.0.

6. The Inspirational Leader

You believe your role is to inspire others and win their hearts and minds. To be the one who sets out a clear vision of what is possible, builds up people’s resilience and motivates them in the face of rapid social changes.

The 20th century witnessed a shift toward this belief about leadership, especially at times of war, think Churchill regarding the cause of freedom, Gandhi and Mandela on equality, and on inspiring a nation to bold technical accomplishments, think JKF and the Apollo programme to the moon.

7. The Servant Leader

You feel your role is to be of service to those in your organisation or family whose work is valuable, and on which others depend. To be the one who understands wellbeing, inclusivity and the impact both have on collaboration and, ultimately, what is and isn’t achievable.

The shift to servant leadership responded to a growing awareness of the importance of wellbeing and engagement – the extent to which group members feel good about the way things get done and play a full part in making them even better.

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Most of the time, I’m pretty serious as a writer. But every now and then, maybe 20% of the time, I veer off that highway and into whatever this is.

I don’t profess to know what the original definition of the 80/20 Differential Rule was. Maybe there really isn’t one and it’s just one of those things that came about as a number of people in different spheres saw the same things happening around them and quantified it in this particular way.

My First 80/20 Differential EncounterAs a young warthog in advertising agencyland, the first time I heard it discussed and named was from my group head, Terry Hill, who earnestly explained to me that 80% of everything I would do in advertising would be crap and 20% of it will be good. I asked him why and he just replied that, in his opinion, it was the way of the world: that it all breaks down that way, no matter what dimension you choose to use as a measure.

This was one of those tiny gems of (arguable) wisdom that stuck with me over the years. And I have to tell you, thinking in terms of 80/20 has really helped me understand, well just about everything I need to understand to keep from feeling hopeless, or otherwise downtrodden and oppressed by the vicissitudes of the crazy business of communications, which has more than its share of peaks and troughs.

Learning to look at the world and all its microcosms in this way is very clarifying. It’s also a way to keep from being in a constant state of pissed-offness, because most of the stuff you see around you just doesn’t make sense.

There really isn’t too much that happens in life that can’t be understood and dealt with through the use of 80/20 Differentials.

My Personal Top 10 Dimensions Of The 80/20 Differential

1. In any given geographical location, 80% of the people inhabiting that location will be pretty much out to lunch. 20% will have their acts together. Hopefully the 80% aren’t running things.
2. In any given working environment, 80% of everybody will be under-performing or deadwood. 20% will be making the company money. Hope they are being properly compensated for that.
3. On any given pro sports team 20% of the players are responsible for 80% of the team’s success. And they are being generously compensated for that.
4. On any given stretch of highway in rush hour, 80% of the drivers will be distracted from too much booze or drugs, eating, texting, talking on the phone or trying to carry on a multichannel conversation with everybody else in the car. If it’s a family, this number is even higher. I’m amazed there are not more traffic accidents than there are. This is probably due to a whole lot of dumb luck.
5. In any given supermarket, 20% of the people will not have enough money to pay for the groceries they bought and ask the cashier to remove one or more items. Part of the other 80% are standing in line behind this person wondering why they are so shortsighted.
6. In sales, an 80% rejection rate is common. The successful salesperson is the one who can suck it up and carry on regardless.
7. In China, 80% of everything made there will only last 20% as long as anything made anywhere else, except Apple products.
8. In any given population, 80% of the people are suffering, to a greater or lesser extent from diet, smoking, drug or alcohol-related diseases and conditions.
9. In social media, 80% of all active participants would suffer physical withdrawal if their computers were taken away from them. 20% would just go outside and play.
10. On the Internet, 80% of everything that is transmitted via text, graphic, audio or video is indulgent crap, bullshit or propaganda that 80% of the people will consume. Maybe even 80% of this post, although I certainly hope not.

There are many more examples of how the 80/20 Differential can be interpreted and measured. These are just the ones that sprang to mind while I was writing this. I’m certain you will have a number of examples in your own world where this is a true indicator of the way things are for you.

If all this sounds a little cynical to you, then I admire the fact that you are a glass-half-full person. I myself am a glass 20% full person myself. So we’re really not that far off. In my opinion, the difference is simply how we view reality. I guess you could call me an uber realist.

Please feel free to comment with your 80/20 Differential insights. If I get enough, l will post another list. Because you can’t have too many of these things, now can you?

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Author’s Note: May is Mental Health Awareness Month. I offer this post as a means of sharing my experience, even as I grant I’m more fortunate than many. If you or a loved one struggle with mental health, call the NAMI HelpLine at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), text “HelpLine” to 62640, or email helpline@nami.org. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide or experiencing a mental health crisis, dial or text 988 to connect with a trained crisis counselor 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There’s more help available in the world than you might think — and more people in the world willing to help than you could ever imagine. You are not and don’t have to be alone.

I have a confession: I play Angry Birds 2.

I started playing to keep myself occupied while waiting for people to respond to instant messages (which, much like the Express Lanes in grocery-store checkouts, are anything but instant), waiting in line at the DMV, waiting for doctor or dentist appointments, waiting at railroad crossings, or keeping my wife company on the couch while she watches Fixer Upper, Property Brothers, Love It or Li$t It, Windy City Rehab, Home Town, Good Bones, Flip or Flop, House Hunters Renovation, This Old House, Grand Designs, and Dr. Pimple Popper.

But after playing for a while (say, roughly 350 levels or so) something revelatory and quite unexpected happened: In the face of what seemed like insurmountable frustration at having to replay every room in every level, sometimes innumerably, only to be unable to reach — or to be unable to conquer — the Boss Pig (or the King Pig, or the Chef Pig, or the Foreman Pig, or any other of his myriad manifestations), I learned patience.

Boss Pig
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Perseverance

First, Angry Birds 2 taught me the patience to study. The game can be a series of mindlessly distracting tactical moves (which attracted my initial interest), or it can be a strategic, fully engaging, and relentless pursuit of a singular goal (which attracts my abiding interest): Blast the Boss Pig to Hell, move on to other levels and, in some instances, to other worlds entirely. Wow!

Second, Angry Birds 2 taught me to persist, to endure, to recognize the temporary nature of frustration, and to realize the conquering power of tenacity. By its addictive nature (or mine), the game compels players to keep coming back, regardless of the seemingly impossible adversity — to think, to examine, to analyze, and to find a way to move on.

To find a way to move on. Think about that. Moving on, determining to move on, finding a way to move on, settling for nothing less than moving on is the modus operandi for a rewarding life. It’s the remedy for procrastination. It’s the antidote for anxiety. It’s the defeat of paralyzing depression. It’s the answer to the age-old philosophical question: Why are we here?

To move on. Period.

Birds of a Feather

Finally, Angry Birds 2 is of a piece with two other things that have always helped me move on. The first is a quote from Mikal Gilmore, from his book, Shot in the Heart. I read the book in the late ’90s, during a bout of crippling depression characterized by stark, unrelenting terror.

The book recounts the Gilmore family’s dark history, leading to the execution of Mikal’s older brother, Gary, in 1977, by a Utah firing squad. (Gary’s last words: “Let’s do it.” Gary’s execution is also the subject or Norman Mailer’s book, The Executioner’s Song.) The book’s unremitting bleakness had me wondering at every turn of the page why I continued to read it while experiencing my own period of darkness. It felt masochistic.

But there, on page 374, I found my answer.

Gilmore wrote:

Depression is a hard experience to communicate, and perhaps a hard one to understand, but once you’ve had it you don’t forget it. It makes you look on the rest of the world with a bit more compassion, and it also causes you to watch the corners of your life more closely, so you can spot the darkness rapidly if it begins to creep back in.

Reading that gave me no instant relief. But I was in the care of a psychiatrist, whom I still see every six months, and I was surrounded by friends who’d also experienced depression. They told me I wasn’t myself — but I would be again. They were right. And Gilmore’s words assured me they were right.

Even more, Gilmore’s words eventually led me to see the depression I’d experienced as a gift. It taught me the temporary nature of misery. It taught me much about what I can and cannot control. It helped me to understand my capacity to overcome affliction and misfortune. It did make me more compassionate. It did teach me to watch the corners of my life ever more acutely. And it helped me to realize all I was capable of achieving if I mustered the resolve and the energy to just … keep … moving … on.

Failure Is Not an Option

The other thing that never loses its ability to help me move on is this quote from the brilliant inventor, accomplished businessman, technological pioneer, and ardent player of Angry Birds 2, Thomas Edison:

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

Give up? Not a chance. Giving up is a Boss Pig in a poke.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back in the game.

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In many respects, the role of a shrink is ticking boxes.

Psychiatrists and psychologists, as their respective functions require, employ the diagnostic criteria of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders towards reductive classification of a specific condition. To wit, Antisocial Personality Disorder, unofficially sociopathy or even psychopathy, requires a minimum of three identified of seven diagnostic criteria, manifesting as “a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others…”

Editor’s Note: Enjoy Part I HERE

Writers, on the other hand… writers who want to invest their story with all the suspense that derives from an intriguingly, appallingly, expectation-confoundingly complex villain or an upping-the-ante anti-hero – they needn’t be so constrained. For them, the DSM provides not a tool for narrowing options, but rather one for creating layer upon layer of intricate entanglement and convoluted entrapment in the detestable and irresistible psyche of evil.

That’s the appeal, to writers, of exploring the psychological underpinnings of psychopathy – genre thriller writers obviously, but no less relevant to writers of literary fiction, and re-fashioners of the criminal outrage de jour into the now-ubiquitous genre of True Crime (so ubiquitous, in fact, that getting the requisite psychological richness should be an imperative to these writers, to differentiate their work from the morass of crap out there)… anyway, the appeal to writers of developing multifaceted and substantiable malevolence is in the anything goes license that psychodynamics allow their “show don’t tell” intentions. This is a freedom that comes with caveats, though – the most important of which is to never do it formulaically. After all, every cack-handed second-to-fifth rate police procedural has had at least one episode in which the suspect is apprehended by the doughty officers, after digging into a past to reveal the so-called serial killer triad… “Ah, bed wetting too, as we just heard from his old nanny… on top of the juvenile arson and the disinterred corpses of seventeen pets in the backyard of his childhood home… yes, we’ve got him now…”

So, let’s look at those seven criteria, as the American Psychiatric Association ordains them, to explore their potential for mosaic-like construction of character history, motives, aspirations and definingly malign peccadilloes:

1. Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors… while, from the writer’s perspective, never ceasing to be mindful of how the deliberately provocative or provocatively deliberate violation of social manners, mores, customs and taboos can be even more shocking, more compelling and repelling to a reader’s sensibilities than transgressions of the law…
2. Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure… while the profit motive unquestionably fuels many a plotline, it’s the “pleasure” aspect in which complex character-drawing comes into its own – to bring that pleasure to life in the reader’s mind… through an ambiguous sneer/smile, a gesture of unsuspected and patronizing consolation to the poor oblivious conned mark, a signature phrase of aberrant philosophising or uniquely bizarre sophistry, an idiosyncratic taste to be satisfied before, during or after the successful con, verbal or behavioral quirks that connote inadvertent prickings of conscience, or else the all-encompassing arousal to do it again, better, bigger… any, all and many more are the ways to make the reader infer that pleasure, even feel it themselves, in a visceral way that makes them abhor and perversely admire those manipulative skills as that character has implemented them, with understated subtlety and gracefulness, or overtly romantic dash and a splash of sprezzatura…
3. Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead… this is not merely indicative of brutish impatience, but is more enlarging of a sociopathic nature in respect of the malignant narcissism that derives from absolute entitlement, the contempt for the world at large with its plodding predictability, a contempt that the virtuoso-rendered villain will project onto the reader as an intimately embracing and constraining folie a deux…
4. Irritability and aggressiveness… it’s true that the formularized thug has their place in genre thrillers, but the compelling narrative exponents of evil eschew cheap ruffianism – it’s beneath them, beneath their literary or cinematic composers, as much as it is beneath the rapt attention of the reader… even unthinking aggression does not need to be represented unthinkingly… the escalating array of triggers, the slow build to explosive release, the physiological markers of emergent unreasonable aggression, how the visual frame of reference narrows, the smell and taste of the uncontrollable urge to cause pain, the particular piquancy of revenge served cold or piping, piping hot…
5. Reckless disregard for safety of self and others… criminal masterminds think big in terms of carnage… but the axes of misanthropic unconcern and obliviousness to personal preservation can be algebraically plotted to a myriad of moral complications…
6. Consistent irresponsibility… failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations… perhaps the most singular aspect of immersively enthralling villainy is the nature and make-up of their personal moral system… even the irredeemably immoral or amoral possess their own compelling conception of individual morality… in the sociopath, this is frequently tied to their simultaneous persecution complex and delusions of grandeur that make them reject the moral responsibilities that the rest of us observe, the intrinsic grasp of the social contract understood by even the most unversed in moral philosophy, the mutual obligation of one to all and all to one (the sewer of social media notwithstanding)… villainy is the essential rejection of contractarian ethics… character richness deriving from malevolence must exemplify a personal moral code that is cohesive on its possessor’s terms, even if it is loathsome on our own – even the most unreasoning villain must act within the bounds of their own reasons… the extent to which the reader can become inclined to suspend personal moral qualms, or even become stickily enmeshed in the self-vindicating moral casuistry of a character’s malignancy, is testament to the richness of their reading experience.
7. Lack of remorse… related to the above, to the distinctly sui generis nature of a private moral framework which does not feel subject to compunctions of regret because its conception of right and wrong, and the right to do wrong, is mis-wired… and more psychologically intriguing, more embracing of human complexity than DSM’s “lack of remorse,” is the exploration of misplaced or misdirected remorse… the villain is not one-dimensionally unfeeling, at least not if they are to sustain the reader’s attachment – the villain is all too feeling, in ways that make us feel exposed, vulnerable, violated and even, perhaps, unsettlingly, culpably involved.

Some of these diagnostic criteria seem, prima facie, antithetical to others. Only, though, through the seductive interpretive lens of attribution theory, whereby we tend to characterize what happens to others as deriving from their innate character flaws, while we conceive of our own circumstances as created by the multifariously complicated dynamics between the external world and our richly intricate inner life. We need to be reminded that we, all of us, contain multitudes. To writers, these diagnostic criteria are not for character diagnosis. They are for character enlargement, narrative enlargement, enlargement of the whole damned imagined world. It’s not a matter to cross each symptom off a list, chapter by chapter, as they’re each sequentially given a guernsey. Rather, it’s to explore what any of them can do, in isolation or jigsaw-like in combination, to intensify characterisation, motivation, and opportunities for facilitating, tightening, or expanding plot resolution and denouement… To be continued

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Heather Lench, Texas A&M University

Remember the sadness that came with the last time you failed miserably at something? Or the last time you were so anxious about an upcoming event that you couldn’t concentrate for days?

These types of emotions are unpleasant to experience and can even feel overwhelming. People often try to avoid them, suppress them or ignore them. In fact, in psychology experiments, people will pay money to not feel many negative emotions. But recent research is revealing that emotions can be useful, and even negative emotions can bring benefits.

In my emotion science lab at Texas A&M University, we study how emotions like anger and boredom affect people, and we explore ways that these feelings can be beneficial. We share the results so people can learn how to use their emotions to build the lives they want.

Our studies and many others have shown that emotions aren’t uniformly good or bad for people. Instead, different emotions can result in better outcomes in particular types of situations. Emotions seem to function like a Swiss army knife – different emotional tools are helpful in specific situations.

Sadness can help you recover from a failureSadness occurs when people perceive that they’ve lost a goal or a desired outcome, and there’s nothing they can do to improve the situation. It could be getting creamed in a game or failing a class or work project, or it can be losing a relationship with a family member. Once evoked, sadness is associated with what psychologists call a deactivation state of doing little, without much behavior or physical arousal. Sadness also brings thinking that is more detailed and analytical. It makes you stop and think.

The benefit of the stopping and thinking that comes with sadness is that it helps people recover from failure. When you fail, that typically means the situation you’re in is not conducive to success. Instead of just charging ahead in this type of scenario, sadness prompts people to step back and evaluate what is happening. When people are sad, they process information in a deliberative, analytical way and want to avoid risk. This mode comes with more accurate memory, judgment that is less influenced by irrelevant assumptions or information, and better detection of other people lying. These cognitive changes can encourage people to understand past failures and possibly prevent future ones.

Sadness can function differently when there’s the possibility that the failure could be avoided if other people help. In these situations, people tend to cry and can experience increased physiological arousal, such as quicker heart and breathing rates. Expressing sadness, through tears or verbally, has the benefit of potentially recruiting other people to help you achieve your goals. This behavior appears to start in infants, with tears and cries signaling caregivers to help.

Anger prepares you to overcome an obstacleAnger occurs when people perceive they’re losing a goal or desired outcome, but that they could improve the situation by removing something that’s in their way. The obstacle could be an injustice committed by another person, or it could be a computer that repeatedly crashes while you’re trying to get work done. Once evoked, anger is associated with a “readiness for action,” and your thinking focuses on the obstacle.

The benefit of being prepared for action and focused on what’s in your way is that it motivates you to overcome what’s standing between you and your goal. When people are angry, they process information and make judgments rapidly, want to take action, and are physiologically aroused. In experiments, anger actually increases the force of people’s kicks, which can be helpful in physical encounters. Anger results in better outcomes in situations that involve challenges to goals, including confrontational games, tricky puzzles, video games with obstacles, and responding quickly on tasks.

Expressing anger, facially or verbally, has the benefit of prompting other people to clear the way. People are more likely to concede in negotiations and give in on issues when their adversary looks or says they are angry.

Anxiety helps you prepare for dangerAnxiety occurs when people perceive a potential threat. This could be giving a speech to a large audience where failure would put your self-esteem on the line, or it could be a physical threat to yourself or loved ones. Once evoked, anxiety is associated with being prepared to respond to danger, including increased physical arousal and attention to threats and risk. Being prepared for danger means that if trouble brews, you can respond quickly to prevent or avoid it. When anxious, people detect threats rapidly, have fast reaction times and are on heightened alert. The eye-widening that often comes with fear and anxiety even gives people a wider field of vision and improves threat detection.

Anxiety prepares the body for action, which improves performance on a number of tasks that involve motivation and attention. It motivates people to prepare for upcoming events, such as devoting time to study for an exam. Anxiety also prompts protective behavior, which can help prevent the potential threat from becoming a reality.

Boredom can jolt you out of a rutThere is less research on boredom than many other emotions, so it is not as well understood. Researchers debate what it is and what it does. Boredom appears to occur when someone’s current situation is not causing any other emotional response. There are three situations where this lack can occur: when emotions fade, such as the happiness of a new car fading to neutral; when people don’t care about anything in their current situation, such as being at a large party where nothing interesting is happening; or when people have no goals. Boredom does not necessarily set in just because nothing is happening – someone with a goal of relaxation might feel quite content sitting quietly with no stimulation.

Psychology researchers think that the benefit of boredom in situations where people are not responding emotionally is that it prompts making a change. If nothing in your current situation is worth responding to, the aversive experience of boredom can motivate you to seek new situations or change the way you’re thinking. Boredom has been related to more risk seeking, a desire for novelty, and creative thinking. It seems to function like an emotional stick, nudging people out of their current situation to explore and create.

Using the toolkit of emotionPeople want to be happy. But research is finding that a satisfying and productive life includes a mix of positive and negative emotions. Negative emotions, even though they feel bad to experience, can motivate and prepare people for failure, challenges, threats and exploration.

Pleasant or not, your emotions can help guide you toward better outcomes. Maybe understanding how they prepare you to handle various situations will help you feel better about feeling bad.

Heather Lench, Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Texas A&M University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The Philippines, an archipelago nation comprising over 7,000 islands, maintains a profound relationship with the sea. Yet, for certain Filipinos, the ocean represents more than just a lifeline—it embodies their entire existence. These communities, often labelled as sea outcasts or sea nomads, defy conventional living norms, crafting a distinctive lifestyle deeply entrenched in maritime customs. Nonetheless, their way of life faces formidable challenges. These sea nomads, indigenous tribes who have spent centuries residing on boats or in stilt houses erected over water, typify their intimate bond with the ocean. Their traditional abodes, commonly referred to as “vintas,” epitomize their profound connection to the sea. Although the exact enumeration of sea nomads remains elusive due to their nomadic tendencies, estimates suggest tens of thousands reside in the Philippines, with the Badjao tribe emerging as the most renowned.

Life at sea necessitates a unique skill set. Studies indicate that some sea nomads exhibit remarkable adaptations, including exceptional underwater vision comparable to dolphins and the capacity to hold their breath for extended durations—some surpassing seven to thirteen minutes. These adaptations are believed to stem from generations spent hunting and foraging underwater with minimal technological assistance.

Nevertheless, the seafaring lifestyle confronts substantial hurdles. Escalating sea levels imperil the very existence of their domiciles. A 2020 World Bank study projected that by 2100, 20% of the Philippines’ landmass could be submerged, displacing millions. This directly impacts sea nomads residing in low-lying regions or fragile stilt structures.

Discrimination poses another impediment. Sea nomads are occasionally viewed as outsiders, encountering difficulties in accessing fundamental services such as education and healthcare. Moreover, overfishing and pollution jeopardize the fragile marine ecosystems vital for their sustenance.

Despite adversities, sea nomads exhibit resilience. Some communities transition to semi-nomadic lifestyles, alternating between land and sea dwelling. Others innovate by initiating aquaculture ventures like seaweed farming to complement traditional fishing practices.

The future of the Philippines’ sea nomads remains uncertain. Safeguarding their unique culture and lifestyle mandates a multifaceted approach. Government initiatives aimed at providing land ownership, education, and healthcare access are imperative. Additionally, adopting sustainable fishing techniques and prioritizing marine conservation efforts are vital to ensure the vitality of the ecosystems upon which they rely.

The narrative of sea nomads underscores human resilience and adaptability. By comprehending their challenges and bolstering their endeavors to thrive amidst change, we can guarantee that these seafaring experts continue to inhabit the Philippine seas.

In Southeast Asia, particularly in the Philippines, sea nomads have long embraced a life on the waves, traversing vast expanses of ocean and deeming the sea their abode. Indigenous tribes like the Badjao and Sama-Dilaut epitomize this lifestyle, residing on boats or stilt houses constructed over water. Recent statistics indicate that the Badjao and Sama Dilaut communities constitute a significant portion of the Philippine populace, with estimates ranging from 200,000 to 500,000 individuals. However, their marginalized status and restricted access to basic services, such as education and healthcare, heighten their vulnerability. Their way of life faces myriad threats, pushing these resilient communities to the brink.

Discrimination exacerbates their plight. Sea nomads often find themselves marginalized, relegated to the outskirts of society due to their transient lifestyle and distinctive cultural customs. Consequently, they encounter discrimination and exclusion from mainstream opportunities, perpetuating a cycle of impoverishment and marginalization. A 2019 UN study revealed that a troubling 75% of sea nomads in the Philippines reported experiencing discrimination when attempting to access fundamental necessities like education and healthcare. Their nomadic lifestyle complicates governmental efforts to track and register them, leaving them marginalized and susceptible.

Remote coastal villages inhabited by sea nomads frequently lack access to essential services, including education and healthcare. Many children from these communities struggle to attend school regularly, contributing to low literacy rates and restricting avenues for socioeconomic progress. Similarly, inadequate healthcare infrastructure and limited access to medical facilities pose significant health risks for sea nomads, particularly during emergencies.

The transient nature of sea nomad communities renders them vulnerable to exploitation, encompassing human trafficking, forced labor, and illicit fishing practices. Limited legal safeguards and ineffective enforcement mechanisms exacerbate their vulnerability, leaving them susceptible to exploitation by unscrupulous individuals and criminal syndicates.

Unsustainable fishing practices, propelled by commercial interests and unchecked exploitation, deplete marine resources, undermining the food security and livelihoods of sea nomads. Overfishing and pollution wreak havoc on the marine ecosystems that sustain these communities. The FAO estimates that Philippine fisheries are already stretched to their limit, with some commercially valuable fish species nearing depletion. This decline directly impacts the food security of sea nomads, who heavily rely on fishing for sustenance. Plastic pollution, oil spills, and other forms of marine debris degrade marine ecosystems, endangering marine life and livelihoods dependent on healthy oceans.

Rising sea levels, elevated ocean temperatures, and intensifying storms pose existential threats to coastal communities, displacing populations and eroding traditional livelihoods. Climate change exacerbates the issue further. Rising sea temperatures disrupt fish migration patterns, complicating nomads’ quest for sustenance. Additionally, stronger storms and unpredictable weather render traditional seafaring practices more perilous.

Rapid modernization and cultural assimilation jeopardize the rich cultural heritage and traditional knowledge systems of sea nomad communities, imperiling their identity and sense of belonging.

The future of sea nomads hinges on collaborative efforts. Governments must strive to integrate them into mainstream society, granting them access to land ownership, education, and healthcare. Sustainable fishing practices and robust marine conservation efforts are imperative to ensure the health of the ecosystems they rely on. Additionally, raising awareness about their unique culture and the challenges they face is crucial for garnering public support and fostering inclusivity.

Sea nomads represent more than just a cultural curiosity; they epitomize human adaptation and ingenuity. By addressing the threats, they face and supporting their adaptation efforts, we can ensure that these mariners continue to navigate the ever-changing tides and secure a future for their way of life.

Despite the myriad challenges they encounter, Filipino tribes inhabiting treacherous seas showcase remarkable resilience and adaptability in the face of adversity. Their profound connection to the ocean, coupled with their ingenuity and resourcefulness, enables them to navigate the turbulent waters of existence with grace and dignity. However, concerted efforts are indispensable to address the systemic inequalities and structural barriers perpetuating their marginalization and vulnerability. Only through collaborative action and inclusive policies can we ensure the preservation of these unique maritime cultures and the sustainable stewardship of our oceans for generations to come.

Featurd Image coutesy of https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2012/10/10/in-pictures-indonesias-nomadic-sea-gypsies

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Tim O’Reilly, UCL; Ilan Strauss, UCL; Mariana Mazzucato, UCL, and Rufus Rock, UCL

Time and again, leading scientists, technologists, and philosophers have made spectacularly terrible guesses about the direction of innovation. Even Einstein was not immune, claiming, “There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable,” just ten years before Enrico Fermi completed construction of the first fission reactor in Chicago. Shortly thereafter, the consensus switched to fears of an imminent nuclear holocaust. Similarly, today’s experts warn that an artificial general intelligence (AGI) doomsday is imminent. Others retort that large language models (LLMs) have already reached the peak of their powers.

It’s difficult to argue with David Collingridge’s influential thesis that attempting to predict the risks posed by new technologies is a fool’s errand. Given that our leading scientists and technologists are usually so mistaken about technological evolution, what chance do our policymakers have of effectively regulating the emerging technological risks from artificial intelligence (AI)?

We ought to heed Collingridge’s warning that technology evolves in uncertain ways. However, there is one class of AI risk that is generally knowable in advance. These are risks stemming from misalignment between a company’s economic incentives to profit from its proprietary AI model in a particular way and society’s interests in how the AI model should be monetised and deployed.

Photograph of Albert Einstein in his office at Princeton University, New Jersey, taken by Roman Vishniac in 1942.
The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SAThe surest way to ignore such misalignment is by focusing exclusively on technical questions about AI model capabilities, divorced from the socio-economic environment in which these models will operate and be designed for profit.

Focusing on the economic risks from AI is not simply about preventing “monopoly,” “self-preferencing,” or “Big Tech dominance”. It’s about ensuring that the economic environment facilitating innovation is not incentivising hard-to-predict technological risks as companies “move fast and break things” in a race for profit or market dominance. It’s also about ensuring that value from AI is widely shared, by preventing premature consolidation. We’ll see more innovation if emerging AI tools are accessible to everyone, such that a dispersed ecosystem of new firms, start-ups, and AI tools can arise.

OpenAI is already becoming a dominant player with US$2 billion (£1.6 billion) in annual sales and millions of users. Its GPT store and developer tools need to return value to those who create it in order to ensure ecosystems of innovation remain viable and dispersed.

By carefully interrogating the system of economic incentives underlying innovations and how technologies are monetised in practice, we can generate a better understanding of the risks, both economic and technological, nurtured by a market’s structure.

Market structure is not simply the number of firms, but the cost structure and economic incentives in the market that follow from the institutions, adjacent government regulations, and available financing.

Degrading quality for higher profitIt is instructive to consider how the algorithmic technologies that underpinned the aggregator platforms of old (think Amazon, Google and Facebook among others) initially deployed to benefit users, were eventually reprogrammed to increase profits for the platform. The problems fostered by social media, search, and recommendation algorithms was never an engineering issue, but one of financial incentives (of profit growth) not aligning with algorithms’ safe, effective, and equitable deployment. As the saying goes: history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself but it does rhyme.

To understand how platforms allocate value to themselves and what we can do about it, we investigated the role of algorithms, and the unique informational set-up of digital markets, in extracting so-called economic rents from users and producers on platforms. In economic theory, rents are “super-normal profits” (profits that are above what would be achievable in a competitive market) and reflect control over some scarce resource. Importantly, rents are a pure return to ownership or some degree of monopoly power, rather than a return earned from producing something in a competitive market (such as many producers making and selling cars). For digital platforms, extracting digital rents usually entails degrading the quality of information shown to the user, on the basis of them “owning” access to a mass of customers.

For example, Amazon’s millions of users rely on its product search algorithms to show them the best products available for sale, since they are unable to inspect each product individually. These algorithms save everyone time and money: by helping users navigate through thousands of products to find the ones with the highest quality and the lowest price, and by expanding the market reach of suppliers through Amazon’s delivery infrastructure and immense customer network. These platforms made markets more efficient and delivered enormous value both to users and to product suppliers. But over time, a misalignment between the initial promise of them providing user value and the need to expand profit margins as growth slows has driven bad platform behaviour. Amazon’s advertising business is a case in point.

Amazon’s advertisingIn our research on Amazon, we found that users still tend to click on the product results at the top of the page, even when they are no longer the best results but instead paid advertising placements. Amazon abuses the habituated trust that users have come to place in its algorithms, and instead allocates user attention and clicks to inferior quality, sponsored, information from which it profits immensely. We found that, on average, the most-clicked sponsored products (advertisements) were 17% more expensive and 33% lower ranked according to Amazon’s own quality, price, and popularity optimising algorithms. And because product suppliers must now pay for the product ranking that they previously earned through product quality and reputation, their profits go down as Amazon’s go up, and prices rise as some of the cost is passed on to customers.

Amazon is one the most striking examples of a company pivoting away from its original “virtuous” mission (“to be the most customer-centric company on Earth”) towards an extractive business model. But it is far from alone.

Google, Meta, and virtually all other major online aggregators have, over time, come to preference their economic interests over their original promise to their users and to their ecosystems of content and product suppliers or application developers. Science fiction writer and activist Cory Doctorow calls this the “enshittification” of Big Tech platforms.

But not all rents are bad. According to the economist Joseph Schumpeter, rents received by a firm from innovating can be beneficial for society. Big Tech’s platforms got ahead through highly innovative, superior, algorithmic breakthroughs. The current market leaders in AI are doing the same.

So while Schumpeterian rents are real and justified, over time, and under external financial pressure, market leaders began to use their algorithmic market power to capture a greater share of the value created by the ecosystem of advertisers, suppliers and users in order to keep profit growing. User preferences were downgraded in algorithmic importance in favour of more profitable content. For social media platforms, this was addictive content to increase time spent on platform at any cost to user health. Meanwhile, the ultimate suppliers of value to their platform – the content creators, website owners and merchants – have had to hand over more of their returns to the platform owner. In the process, profits and profit margins have become concentrated in a few platforms’ hands, making innovation by outside companies harder.

A platform compelling its ecosystem of firms to pay ever higher fees (in return for nothing of commensurate value on either side of the platform) cannot be justified. It is a red light that the platform has a degree of market power that it is exploiting to extract unearned rents. Amazon’s most recent quarterly disclosures (Q4, 2023), shows year-on-year growth in online sales of 9%, but growth in fees of 20% (third-party seller services) and 27% (advertising sales).

What is important to remember in the context of risk and innovation is that this rent-extracting deployment of algorithmic technologies by Big Tech is not an unknowable risk, as identified by Collingridge. It is a predictable economic risk. The pursuit of profit via the exploitation of scarce resources under one’s control is a story as old as commerce itself. Technological safeguards on algorithms, as well as more detailed disclosure about how platforms were monetising their algorithms, may have prevented such behaviour from taking place. Algorithms have become market gatekeepers and value allocators, and are now becoming producers and arbiters of knowledge.

Risks posed by the next generation of AIThe limits we place on algorithms and AI models will be instrumental to directing economic activity and human attention towards productive ends. But how much greater are the risks for the next generation of AI systems? They will shape not just what information is shown to us, but how we think and express ourselves. Centralisation of the power of AI in the hands of a few profit-driven entities that are likely to face future economic incentives for bad behaviour is surely a bad idea.

Thankfully, society is not helpless in shaping the economic risks that invariably arise after each new innovation. Risks brought about from the economic environment in which innovation occurs are not immutable. Market structure is shaped by regulators and a platform’s algorithmic institutions (especially its algorithms which make market-like allocations). Together, these factors influence how strong the network effects and economies of scale and scope are in a market, including the rewards to market dominance.

Technological mandates such as interoperability, which refers to the ability of different digital systems to work together seamlessly; or “side-loading”, the practice of installing apps from sources other than a platform’s official store, have shaped the fluidity of user mobility within and between markets, and in turn the ability for any dominant entity to durably exploit its users and ecosystem. The internet protocols helped keep the internet open instead of closed. Open source software enabled it to escape from under the thumb of the PC era’s dominant monopoly. What role might interoperability and open source play in keeping the AI industry a more competitive and inclusive market?

Disclosure is another powerful market-shaping tool. Disclosures can require technology companies to provide transparent information and explanations about their products and monetisation strategies. Mandatory disclosure of ad load and other operating metrics might have helped to prevent Facebook, for example, from exploiting its users’ privacy in order to maximise ad dollars from harvesting each user’s data.

But a lack of data portability, and an inability to independently audit Facebook’s algorithms, meant that Facebook continued to benefit from its surveillance system for longer than it should have. Today, OpenAI and other leading AI model providers refuse to disclose their training data sets, while questions arise about copyright infringement and who should have the right to profit from AI-aided creative works. Disclosures and open technological standards are key steps to try and ensure the benefits from these emerging AI platforms are shared as widely as possible.

Market structure, and its impact on “who gets what and why”, evolves as the technological basis for how firms are allowed to compete in a market evolves. So perhaps it is time to turn our regulatory gaze away from attempting to predict the specific risks that might arise as specific technologies develop. After all, even Einstein couldn’t do that.

Instead, we should try to recalibrate the economic incentives underpinning today’s innovations, away from risky uses of AI technology and towards open, accountable, AI algorithms that support and disperse value equitably. The sooner we acknowledge that technological risks are frequently an outgrowth of misaligned economic incentives, the more quickly we can work to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

We are not opposed to Amazon offering advertising services to firms on its third-party marketplace. An appropriate amount of advertising space can indeed help lesser-known businesses or products, with competitive offerings, to gain traction in a fair manner. But when advertising almost entirely displaces top-ranked organic product results, advertising becomes a rent extraction device for the platform.

An Amazon spokesperson said:

“We disagree with a number of conclusions made in this research, which misrepresents and overstates the limited data it uses. It ignores that sales from independent sellers, which are growing faster than Amazon’s own, contribute to revenue from services, and that many of our advertising services do not appear on the store.

Amazon obsesses over making customers’ lives easier and a big part of that is making sure customers can quickly and conveniently find and discover the products they want in our store. Advertisements have been an integral part of retail for many decades and anytime we include them they are clearly marked as ‘Sponsored’. We provide a mix of organic and sponsored search results based on factors including relevance, popularity with customers, availability, price, and speed of delivery, along with helpful search filters to refine their results. We have also invested billions in the tools and services for sellers to help them grow and additional services such as advertising and logistics are entirely optional.”

Tim O’Reilly, Visiting Professor of Practice at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, UCL; Ilan Strauss, Head of Digital Economy Research, UCL; Mariana Mazzucato, Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value and Founding Director of the UCL IIPP, UCL, and Rufus Rock, Researcher, Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, UCL

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Recently, I celebrated a significant milestone—my 60th birthday! As I reflect on this moment, I’m overwhelmed with immense gratitude. How swiftly the years have flown by!

During the celebrations, I experienced an extraordinary sense of love and connection. It felt as though every cell in my body was infused with unconditional love. This profound feeling of gratitude brought immense joy and peace to my heart, reminding me of the beauty that life holds when we open ourselves to receive it.

I cherished every moment spent with my family—the laughter, the smiles, and the warm embraces. We enjoyed morning walks along the beach, heartfelt conversations under the shade of our umbrella, delightful swims in the Gulf of Mexico, a serene sunset cruise, and shell hunting in the crystal-blue waters. Each experience was a reminder of the breathtaking beauty of God’s creation and the love that surrounds us.

It dawned on me that this connection and joy are not limited to special occasions. They are always available to us if we choose to see and embrace them daily. Living with awareness is the key.

As we move forward, I invite you to join me in this practice of embracing immense gratitude. Close your eyes, recall a moment you cherish, and let that feeling fill you. This mindset of appreciation not only enhances our own lives but also helps us see more positivity in our world.

Take a moment to identify something in your life that you truly appreciate. Foster and nurture this immense gratitude and watch as it inspires you to open your heart to the abundance of love surrounding you.

Let’s continue to support each other in finding and acknowledging beauty every day. Thank you for being a part of my community. Here’s to more mindful moments together!

With love in my heart,
Nancy

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For generations, college students have been encouraged to participate in civic engagement and express their views about causes they care about. Student protest is a proud democratic tradition on our campuses. Many people view it as an integral part of the college experience.

Freedom of opinion and expression are, indeed, cornerstones of human rights and pillars of free and democratic societies. Instilling constitutional values — in particular, the value of free expression — should be a core mission of any college or university.

The current anti-Israel/pro-Palestine protests on college campuses have fired up both sides of the issue – calls for a cease fire and divestment versus calls for police intervention and arrests. But at what point does free speech become hate speech?

At Cornell University, in New York, anonymous threats flooded an online message board: “If you see a Jewish ‘person’ on campus, follow them home and slit their throats,” said one.

Don’t forget the viral video recorded by Khymani James, the Columbia University student protest organizer who said, “…fascists don’t deserve to live, racists don’t deserve to live, Zionists, they shouldn’t live in this world,” adding, “be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.”

Not to be outdone by James’s fellow Columbia protesters screaming at a group of Jewish students, “Remember the 7th of October? That will happen not one more time, not five more times…but 10,000 more times. The 7th of October is about to be every fucking day for you. You ready?”

These are just a few examples of the 843 incidents of antisemitism on college campuses that Hillel International has tracked since the Israel-Hamas war began in October 2023 – a 700% increase over the same time period last year.

“As a Jew, I’m scared for the first time in my life. After Oct. 7, Jewish persecution is no longer just a part of history.” Congressman Dan Goldman

To be clear, criticism of Israel is not antisemitic. However, when anti-Zionists call for the end of the Jewish state, when Jews are verbally or physically harassed and threatened, that is no longer criticism of Israeli policy. That is antisemitism.

While these comments and others like them have ignited vehement debates about whether they are protected under the First Amendment, most agree that they are alarming and dangerous.

Freedom of speech is fundamental, but it is not absolute. Public universities are bound by the First Amendment, but all students have the right to a learning environment that is physically and psychologically safe.

Threatening the lives of Jews with vitriol that echoes the rhetoric of terrorist and Nazi ideology, especially in the wake of the worst massacre committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, far exceeds First Amendment protection. Yet, under the guise of “free speech,” these protests have become fertile ground for extremists to propagate hate.

This devastating conflict – the death, destruction, and humanitarian crisis – should compel us all to speak out. But before we praise these protesters for their civic engagement, we should have a clear picture of the hateful rhetoric that is being defended as “free speech” and stoking violence.

• Pamphlets declaring “Death to America” were shared at a growing anti-Israel encampment at the University of Michigan this week.
• At the University of Maryland, the words “Holocaust 2.0” were chalked onto campus sidewalks.
• One Jewish Columbia University student was repeatedly kicked in the stomach as protesters told her to “kill yourself.”
• US-designated terror group flags and flyers are popping up at protests from California State Polytechnic to Princeton.
• Students at the University of Pennsylvania gathered chanting ‘We want Jewish genocide’ and ‘there is only 1 solution’ in reference to the Nazis ‘final solution’.

Many protesters will tell you they are not extremists. They are simply advocating for human rights. But the most common refrains at these events are frighteningly reminiscent of the Nazi worldview. Calling for people around the world to “rise up” against Jews (“Globalize the Intifada”), justifying the kidnapping, torture, and murder of innocent people (“by any means necessary”), and clamoring for the eradication of Israel (“From the river to the sea”) is the antithesis of advocating for human rights.

“There is only one solution, intifada revolution!” is the ideology of Hitler. There is a reason Neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups are showing up in growing numbers across the country. It’s not because they care about the Palestinians, but because the hatred of Jews is their unifying animus. This is a golden opportunity for them to foment extremist views and violence.

Historically, Jews have been accused of being alarmists. Today, the threats they face are nothing less than alarming. The Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism recorded more antisemitic acts in the first three months after October 7 than normally seen in an entire year. As the violence on our campuses escalates, a direct manifestation of “freedom of speech,” so does the permeation of the hate and antisemitism.

There has possibly never been a more dangerous time to be Jewish in America.

We all want a cease fire. We all hope the hostages are released and the suffering stops – for both Israelis and Palestinians. But hope is not the message at these protests. Hate is the message.

When fomenting hate and the violence it breeds is inculcated as a “right,” it should alarm us all.

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Whatever the sporting discipline, those who coach have the task of preparing the athlete to give their best in competition. Then there are those who transform training into the simple execution of orders.

The authoritarian approach in training is as widespread as it is harmful.

The challenge is no longer reserved for sporting performance. The competition expands and the athlete not only faces his opponents, but also his teammates, trainers and coaches.

There are those who, under such pressure, give their best, win, become a champion and unconsciously also become an example legitimizing this type of authoritarian training: it almost seems that sporting success comes thanks to the harshness of the coach, when instead it comes, more often, by the resilience of the athlete, able to resist, to improve, despite the humiliations of those who should be his ally.

Not only that, but there are many other potential champions who do not have the same resilience and will to overcome the “harassment” of authoritarian coaches and remain unfulfilled promises, anonymous data of statistics on sports abandonment. From them the coach, with his authoritarianism, has obtained the only result of distancing them from the activity and also reducing their well-being and self-esteem.

The relationship between coach and athlete should instead be deeper and more bon, based on an empty relationship of authority. For potential to become reality, trust is needed: from the athlete towards those who train him, from the coach towards those who are training.

That is how the exhausting training sessions are not carried out out of blind obedience to orders, but out of the trust placed in the mutual relationship, with the authentic awareness that the aim of the training is improvement, sporting, but ultimately also human, of the athlete. And only in this way do the weight of expectations, the pressure of competition, lighten, finally when it is understood that the first fan of whoever is competing must be on the bench.

Sorry, I realize now that, due to my sporting passion, I indulged in talking about sport when I wanted to talk about the relationship of trust in the company. However, if you think about it, situations like those described above can still be configured even in companies.

The authoritarian (not authoritative!!) attitude creates a situation similar to the one just described: if mutual trust does not arise, only a few talents emerge, energy and potential are wasted, turnover increases, the environment becomes toxic even among colleagues.

The relationship of trust in the company is fundamental: it makes the relationship with the customer possible, directly influences the economic results and is an inevitable prerequisite for better performance.

Trust is the basis of all relationships, especially between a manager and his collaborators. On the one hand, the manager relies on the skills, seriousness and work of the employees; on the other hand, employees rely on the manager for their professional growth and well-being in the workplace.

Unfortunately, there are managers who have not yet realized the importance of creating a company culture based on trust.

Trust management, on the other hand, is a corporate objective to be treated with attention, planning, consistency and commitment.

A strong bond of trust between the two parties is essential even to create a positive and high-performance work environment.

It is trust that binds people, strengthens bonds, and gives rise to collaborations and exchanges. It is the force that creates projections, expectations, involvement. It can open up a world of opportunities.

Building employee trust is also important for the long-term success of the company. The real challenge, in fact, is to be able to build trust and maintain it over time.

Only in this way do employees trust their managers and tend to be more certain that the company is going in the right direction. As a result, they will be more willing to do whatever it takes to help their manager achieve goals and stimulate even less proactive colleagues.

But the manager must be the first to trigger this process, placing trust in his collaborators and delegating roles of responsibility to them.

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• “Why am I not …?• Why am I not supposed to be …?• When did I stop being …?• Who told me that it is not OK to be …?• What would it take for me to think that I can be …?”

I am stealing these questions shamelessly from Pernille Melsted, a Danish coach, who every May dedicates her work to addressing what she calls “the Golden Shadow”: the positive traits that we dare not flaunt, whether they be creativity, sensuality, joy, power, vulnerability…

Mariah Edgington has on her and Byron Edgington’s website Mandate To Elevate an affirmation exercise where you look in the mirror daily and tell yourself some positive things about yourself.

From the list:

“…I am BraveI am ConfidentI am DeterminedI am EnergizedI am Fearless…”

Some people break down crying if they say something positive to themselves. Some people can say something positive but not “just anything” positive.

Can you look in the mirror and say “I love you” out loud to yourself?

Try it, it’s powerful. (If you think this is ridiculous, “who told you that it is not OK” to love yourself? Does somebody have to be perfect to be worthy of your love? Alas, then I will never qualify.)

Sure, there may be some affirmations that are more easily said because we already own that part about ourselves. E.g. I see myself as pretty confident overall even if there may be specific contexts in which this doesn’t apply. Some affirmations don’t apply at all and never did – and I can own that as well. But some affirmations stir up something, a resistance felt in the body, indicating that there is more to the story. That back in time I learned how this way of being was not welcome. At least not for me. There is a feeling of shame attached to them.

This is where a bit of curiosity paired with the questions starting this piece of writing can be helpful.

No, I am not going to go through all the affirmations from the dynamic Edgington-duo and let you into my shadow work (and my list is far longer than the 26 letters of the alphabet.)

I just want to offer these questions to you as tools. Because every time we feel judgmental about somebody, they are probably violating a “rule” that says We/You/I are not supposed to act this way. And wouldn’t it be a relief to understand why you feel so strongly about this before you heap judgment on somebody else?

Here are some examples and their long reaching consequences:

My mother never sported colorful nail polish. She had well-kept and buffed nails but never adorned them with something more attention-grabbing than transparent slightly pinkish polish. Use your imagination about for whom red nails were reserved according to her script. You can imagine my childish confusion when, at my father’s round birthday bash, his cousin showed up with bright red nail polish. My eight-year-old-self stared at this woman the whole evening, trying to square my impression with what I otherwise knew about the world and about my family. It took many years before I stopped at some subconscious level to hold her nails against her. And this despite that I knew she was among my father’s favorite cousins; my sister was even named after her.

To this day I still don’t do much nail polish-wise. But my daughter loves playing with the colors, and I am so relieved that I am not carrying my mother’s old script with me because that would be asking for friction where none needs to exist.

Another story:

My department’s administrative assistant L told me how her mother had been around when she got a drawing from her kindergarten-aged daughter. As one does, she praised the drawing before hanging it on the fridge. When the daughter had left the kitchen, her mother said: “You shouldn’t praise her too much. She risks becoming too full of herself.” “In that moment I knew why, all my life, I have lacked self-confidence” L said. The spell had been broken and soon I heard she was off on a for her more self-affirming career track.

And I have shared this story before:

After MC’ing at a party where everybody – including the waiters – were laughing their heads off, one of the guests I had known for a decade said, “I have never seen you like this before.” I took away some indirect feedback that I had let a goofy side of myself slip into the shadow – and I am reclaiming it.

Although the critical words of a parent, grandparent, sibling (or anybody) can send our talents into hiding, many of these scripts are not brought to us by one single person but by the culture we live in. I can more easily agree or disagree with my mother’s nail polishing script when the culture where I live and in my time doesn’t care one way or the other about colorful polish.

Today I use this learning to keep myself in check when people younger than me sport what is this time’s equivalent to “bright red nail polish” – understanding that the meaning they put into what they do probably is very different from what it would have signified 1-2-3 generations ago. Initially, my reaction may automatically be to distance myself emotionally from the person. But accepting their choice – for them – doesn’t mean that I must adopt something similar for myself. Knowing this, I can instead choose to engage and learn what is behind their choice. Some lovely and meaningful stories have been shared on that account that otherwise would have remained unknown to me.

I think it behooves me, as an adult, to own my shadows, whether I like all of them or not. So, every May, I, too, look in my handbook and see if I can reintegrate one more lovely aspect of younger me that at some point, for whatever reason, moved into the Golden Shadow, by asking these questions:

• Am I …?• “Why am I not …?• Why am I not supposed to be …?• When did I stop being …?• Who told me that it is not OK to be …?• What would it take for me to think that I can be …?”

Hopefully, when I am 180 years old, I will be complete.

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So much of what we have believed to be true has turned out to be completely wrong. If something isn’t working for you, in your life, perhaps it’s time to question it. My goal for this channel is challenge longstanding beliefs, myths, and rules. I want you to THINK and FEEL for yourself and if something I share resonates with you then give it a try and do your own experiment. Let’s wipe the slate clean – TABULA RASA style!

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For the better part of the last decade, I have been on LinkedIn where I would average close to 3500 views for many of the posts I did. Several of them went viral, A lot of them were blog posts in which I attempted to educate new business owners on the ins and outs of effective communication. I published more than 300 blog posts when they gave a shit about that stuff. And I commented a great deal on the posts I both agreed and disagreed with.

You could say I was a pretty good member. I can only recall getting three warnings, but there were probably a few more since I am vehemently anti-idiocy.

Over the years I had built up a modest following of about 3500 souls.

Then one day, about a week ago now I found myself locked out of the site. The way to get back in was to go through what turned out to be a constantly repetitious set of functions that took me absolutely nowhere.

The only reason I have any presence on that site at the moment is because my posts are being published by my friends at BizCatalyst 360°. I hope they will publish this one because perhaps it will get through to someone at LinkedIn who can, at the very least, explain to me why this is happening.

LinkedIn, as many of us know, is primarily a recruitment site. But it’s also a site where a lot of business issues and political issues are discussed. And of course, they are, especially in America, where LinkedIn’s largest audience resides, pretty much intertwined.

As a Canadian who pays a lot of attention to US politics, I like to think that my point of view, if nothing else is semi-objective. If I were an American I would probably be a Democrat as opposed to a Republican, because in Canada I am pretty much a Liberal, mainly because the Conservative party in our country hasn’t had any solid leadership for decades.

The weird thing is that LinkedIn only tells you that you are in trouble and never bothers to explain why that is so you can course correct.

If I am in trouble for something I did, and they explained that to me, I would definitely stop doing whatever that was because A) I am not an idiot and b) I am a professional writer and it’s a relatively easy thing for me to do.

During the course of trying to get back on LinkedIn I reached out to a LinkedIn friend with whom I am also connected on Facebook, and he, in turn, reached to LinkedIn out on my behalf.

Lo and behold, the response he got was something that sent me to the same link I get every time I try and open LinkedIn myself. And round and round it went.

Sometimes I get the feeling that the lights are on there, but nobody’s home.

So for the past week, I have been in the process of learning to live without it. And you know what, life is not so bad. I belong to several other sites and it seems, at least at the moment, that the longer I live without access to LinkedIn, the less I miss it. The only thing I do miss about it is a small discussion group that I belonged to that consisted of four very bright people that I have gotten to know.

I can keep up to speed on a lot of the stuff that interests me, especially the wild west show that AI has turned into and the US political circus through several emails I receive regularly.

Plus, in a couple of weeks, my pool will be open and I can start meditating on a new series of short stories that I will write at the end of the summer season.

Who knows, maybe LinkedIn has actually done me a favour by locking me out the way they have. Hopefully, I will still have a presence there through my published BizCatalyst 360° posts. I’ll try to make them as useful as I can, because what’s the point of having more than fifty years of experience in the high end of any business, without being able to share your insights.

So to quote, the master, Bob Dylan, which I often do.

“Time will tell
Just who has fell
And who’s been left behind
When you go your way
And I go mine”

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Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution.

~ Goethe

As Goethe inferred, life is not a straight ascending ride but more like a universal roller coaster—an endless continuum of dips, rises, and spirals; of beginnings and endings . . . successes and failures . . . wins and losses . . . setbacks and advances . . . good days and bad days . . . peaks and valleys . . . light and darkness. In the human realm we can’t have one without the other because we need the contrast of one to give meaning to the other. We just need to remember that this is so and to keep moving, whether we are on an “ascending or a bending” part of the ride. Life is rife with changes and challenges that perpetually come and go.

Throughout the ages masters have described this universal principle as the “heartthrob” of Life, always pulsating in a circular manner that serves the creation, evolution, and, ultimately, the dissolution of all living things. What matters is our perspective of the process and understanding as to how it affects every area of our lives. The ancient wise ones have reminded us that all that “is” has a beginning and an end, where there is a period of rest (or restoration) between what was and what shall be. But they never described that period as a permanent stopping place. Just as the planets have cycles, our lives have cycles: day ends with night, night with day; summer ends with fall, fall with winter, and on it goes. In short, life is one wild ride on a universal spiral. The secret of the ages has been to experience the ride, the beginnings and the endings, the good and the bad, and not get consumed by either the positive aspects or the negative. But how do we do this in a world where there appears to be so much chaos that pummels our senses and pulls us in every direction? The practice is called “The Wisdom of Equanimity.”

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.

~ Carl Jung

Equanimity is defined as “mental or emotional calmness or equilibrium.” In the context of this writing, equanimity allows us to stand where we are on the ride of life and simply “be” with it. In other words, equanimity is detached observation; it is the practice of being mindfully aware whether we are leaning toward “whatever is” and favoring it, or, pulling away from “whatever is” and disfavoring it and then finding the balance of a neutral position that favors neither. The wisdom of equanimity can be applied when navigating our way through difficult times as well as when dealing with difficult people. It is a mindfulness practice that helps us be the observer of our thoughts and feelings before we act on them in a manner that we may later regret. In Buddhism equanimity might be considered an aspect of walking the middle path because it creates the perfect emotional balance required to stay on the ride and not be seduced by the polarity of life in the human condition.

To cling to the belief that our life is supposed to continually progress in an ascending straight line causes much suffering. If today is a day of curves and bends rather than an ascending straight line, darkness rather than light, sadness rather than happiness, failure rather than achievement, remember that it must have an end just as it had a beginning. Equally important, remember that while it is not to be perceived as permanent, just as a roller coaster stops between rides, there is a period of rest in between the two. Take a breath and fully “be” in that sacred space.

The wisdom of equanimity brings balance to our perspective; it allows us to breathe and experience the sacred gap—the space of what is—that lies between what was and what shall be, knowing as surely as night follows day, this too shall pass. Remember, there will always be more peaks and valleys ahead on the spiral of life. This is truly great news because it means we’re alive . . . and that’s a ride worth staying on.

Just remember to breathe and keep your balance!

Peace, Dennis

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We are living in a time of such rapid change that it is truly head-spinning and mind-boggling all at the same time. How do we keep up with the pace of change and the subsequent demands on our time, learning and growth while still being actively engaged in our conscious evolution as a person and as a human collective? The complexity of life today demands that we not just learn new skills, but that we grow in consciousness, becoming more aligned with the true nature of our birthright.

I’ve been committed to my personal growth and that of other people for as long as I can remember. Choosing a career first as a psychotherapist and later as a leadership coach and conscious living teacher, I have discovered that the path of growth in consciousness is anything but a smooth one! It demands more of you than simply going through the motions of life as a passive bystander.

In this article, I will explore some of the signs that clearly indicate that you are growing in consciousness. By this, I mean evolving your perspectives to be more broad and inclusive, while also becoming free from the confinement of the human ego. As you read through these seven signs, look to see where your growth in consciousness has evolved as you have grown over the years.

1. An Expanded Experience of Inner Peace

One of the most profound signs of shifting to elevated levels of consciousness is the experience of inner peace. Things that used to be bothersome or stressful no longer have the same power. Instead, inner peace illuminates every aspect of life. Acceptance, serenity and peace transcend feelings of angst, stress, or overwhelm.

1. Taking Responsibility for Life

Another sign of shifting to higher levels of consciousness is the realization that happiness and success are choices that come from within. You learn that you are completely responsible for creating the life you desire. As you assume full responsibility for your life, you no longer depend on external circumstances or other people to generate your happiness. Instead, you take full responsibility for your life and make empowering choices that align with your values and higher self. By embracing self-empowerment, you release the multitude of fears and “what if’s” that your ego sends your way.

1. Prioritizing Self-Care

An integral part of the journey to elevated consciousness is the acknowledgement that self-care is not selfish, but essential, especially in these fast-paced, demanding times. Over time, you learn to prioritize mental, physical, and spiritual well-being as a central value of your life. By taking care of yourself, you become better equipped to address the needs of others and bring forth your best self. Making time for good nutrition, adequate exercise and rest, quiet time of meditation, reflection, or other spiritual practices are not a luxury but a necessary component of growth and spiritual development that flow naturally from the core of elevated states of consciousness.

1. Being Called to Live a Purpose-Driven Life

An essential aspect of growth in consciousness is the realization that life is not just about getting what you want or achieving all of your goals. Shifting to higher levels of consciousness often brings about a deep desire to serve others and live a purpose-driven life. As you do so, you become aware of your unique talents and desires to serve others, and feel pulled to use your gifts in ways that contribute to the well-being of humanity.

Material concerns and external validation become less important as you prioritize sharing your knowledge, wisdom, and expertise with the world. The pursuit of a meaningful life becomes a high priority.

Even with the rapid changes in our world, you don’t feel disconnected or lost but intimately connected to the greater tapestry of life itself. This deeper connection motivates you to live a life of purpose and contribute to the conscious evolution of humanity.

1. Embracing Solitude for Growth

In my journey towards higher levels of consciousness, I have come to realize the immense value of spending time alone. Solitude offers a sacred space for introspection, self-discovery, and the ability to hear that still small voice within. As you detach from the noise and distractions of the external world, you create an inner environment conducive to transformation. You come to crave time alone in a new and fulfilling way. The more time you spend in solitude, the more your vibration rises, aligning with the frequency of Divine Intelligence.

1. Being Pulled to Make Change

As you grow in consciousness you will find that certain aspects of your life no longer align with the person you have become. This inner transformation prompts the feeling that it is time to make change. Sometimes it is a change in career to bring about more authentic self-expression. Other times people leave marriages or relocate to new regions of the world to pursue an inner call. You feel a deep pull within, urging you to take a leap of faith and step into the unknown. The old ways of being and doing no longer resonate, and you feel compelled to make transformative choices that align with your new sense of self.

1. Detachment from the Material World

As you grow in consciousness, you will notice a gradual detachment from the physical and material world. The superficial allure of possessions and material wealth loses its grip. Instead, there is satisfaction in connecting with nature, close relationships, and spiritual endeavors. This detachment doesn’t mean renouncing the physical world completely but rather recognizing its impermanence and placing greater importance on the intangible aspects of life.

As you detach from the material world, you find yourself drawn towards a deeper connection with the Divine presence within. This inner connection provides a source of comfort, guidance, and inspiration, and reminds you of the infinite potential that resides within you. Through practices such as reading, meditation, affirmative prayer, and gratitude, you strengthen your connection with the Divine and tap into the wellspring of wisdom and love that lies within your being.

This simple list is by no means exhaustive. There are so many signs to notice as you embark on the profound and transformative journey to elevated levels of consciousness. It is a journey of self-discovery, and personal and spiritual growth. The signs discussed in this article offer glimpses into this process, but there are other signs to notice as well. You will likely feel an expanded sense of gratitude toward all of life, and a richness in even simple experiences. You feel less stress over simple things, and have a greater ability to get along with all kinds of people. Notice the small, simple changes as you grow, and celebrate your expansiveness.

As you experience inner peace, take responsibility for your life, prioritize self-care, and foster a greater sense of purpose and meaning, you inch closer to our true nature.

By embracing solitude, making transformative changes, and detaching from the material world, you pave the way for a deeper connection with your authentic self and a connection with your spiritual nature. May this journey guide us all towards a life of greater compassion, love, and peace.

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In learning how to fly an airplane, one of the first lessons has to do with understanding winds. Winds come in basically three types;

• Head winds – those hit you right in the face
• Tail winds – those from behind
• Cross winds – those at angles from the side

I believe the challenges we face in life and in business model these three types of wind as well. If we consider all the forms of challenge we face, we can boil it down into these three categories. However, it might be interesting to compare the pilot’s concern with each of these winds as we think about our daily responses to life’s winds…..

Head WindFirst, the head winds. Too often we might be prone to think of these negatively. As wind hits us in the face, it slows us down, forces us to press harder against the wind. Bob Seger wrote a great ballad titled “Against the Wind…stronger now still just running…against the wind”.

When a pilot encounters head wind during flight it can be a challenge. Fuel consumption is increased as air speed decreases. The time it takes to reach a destination increases. Stress and fatigue can set in. But did you know it is preferable to take off and land “against the wind”? Why? Because the increased force of that head wind causes “lift” on the wings which is the force that makes planes fly.

A good steady head wind actually makes take-offs and landings easier, more comfortable and effective. So the next time you sense a head wind in life, ask yourself whether it has been provided to allow more lift for a better take off to a new place in life or whether it is there to afford a safer, smoother landing from where you have just come.

Tail WindNext let’s talk about tail wind. This is just the opposite from a head wind. We tend to think of tail wind as favorable. During flight that might be true. It can serve to push us forward, reduce effort and speed the time towards the destination.

But did you know it is the most difficult force with which to reckon during take off and landing? At those times, it actually impairs control, reduces efficiency and creates danger.

Maybe in life we need to be cautious of the perceived tail winds. Rather than gliding along with them, we need to watching for hindrances to gaining new achievement or resolving old challenges.

Cross WindThe final force is cross wind. All things considered, crosswind is the most challenging of all flying situations. That is true in life and business too.

Crosswind means what it implies… a force crossing you at an angle to the direction you intend to fly. During flight, a cross wind will blow you “off course”. A constant watch must be given to direction and compass heading while flying in crosswinds. There is no cruising during crosswind conditions. It is a constant battle.

Take off and landing is even more severe. Very special techniques are required to manage a crosswind situation. This is why you see planes doing a crab landing, angling sideways right before touchdown. In some situations the crosswind can be so severe that its force exceeds the designed strength of the air frame on the airplane, which makes the good pilot seek an alternative landing site, one where the winds are more favorable.

Life has crosswind too.

It is the skill and grace with which we handle life’s crosswinds that determines our ultimate success. Failure to recognize and manage a crosswind can cause certain disaster.

Either we ignore the presence of that crosswind or we acknowledge it but underestimate the consequences. Forging ahead means grave results.

So next time you feel a certain extraordinary force influencing your life, consider the pilot. Is the wind you feel one of these? If so, which one and how will you choose to handle it?

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In today’s fast-paced digital world, the phenomenon of shrinking attention spans has become increasingly prevalent. This is equally true for both youth and adults. With the constant bombardment of information, people are finding it challenging to focus their attention for extended periods. This trend has significant implications for productivity, learning, and overall well-being. However, understanding the causes behind shrinking attention spans and implementing strategies to mitigate them can help us reclaim our ability to concentrate effectively.

Causes1. Digital Distractions

Having more than one digital devices in this age is no more a luxury. Mobile handset is one of those options which is used more than anything else in this age. People just cannot afford to miss out on any information which they assume to be significant for them. Be it a turbulent political scenario in one part of the world or industry related info. We all love to stay updated just about anything and everything.

1. Death by Information Overload

Researchsuggests that the surging volume of available information — and its interruption of people’s work — can adversely affect not only personal well-being but also decision making, innovation, and productivity. People took an average of nearly 25 minutes to return to a work task after an e-mail interruption. That’s bad news for both employees and their organisations.

1. Multitasking Culture

Since we all love to be recognised for the volumes of work that we produce at our respective workplaces and in an attempt to achieve that in the limited timeframe, we push ourselves and go an extra mile and get things done quickly. Here quality of the work produced in a haste is not accounted for and could be a big question mark. While doing that, we remained successful in producing large volumes of work in the shortest possible time frame.

1. Soul Searching

If you’re going througha period of soul searching, keep going. AsThérèse Cator, embodiment practitioner and founder ofEmbodied Black Girltells: “Soul searching often arises from an inquiry, whether it’s a broad question around your overall purpose or something more focused, such as a difficult decision you’re facing.” “I see soul searching as a threshold in our lives,” Cator says. “It’s a crossroad and we’re trying to figure out what the right next path is, what the right next decision is, or who are we in the greater scheme of things.”

1. Lack of Sleep

When we don’t get enough sleep, our Focus and concentration abilities decline. Their reaction time lengthens, they’re inattentive, and they don’t respond as well to environmental signals. That means they can’t take in new information or react to dangerous situations. This is particularly worrisome if you’re behind the wheel of a car.

Remedies1. Limit Digital Distractions

We have no choice but to set boundaries around digital devices and establish designated time slots during the day for checking emails, attend to missed phone call or short messages, and browse social media (if needed). Let’s use productivity apps or browser extensions to block distracting websites during focused work sessions. Let’s also try out the following:

1. Let’s put cellphone on silent mode or upside down so we don’t have to see the incoming call and message traffic.
2. Log off frequently used social media apps viz.: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn etc. For some people, it’s very tempting to frequently check the updates.

3. Turn off unnecessary websites or apps that aren’t necessary for the task at hand. Move tempting apps to the third or fourth page of your phone screen so that you have time to catch yourself mindlessly opening them.

4. Be Selective on Information Consumption

We have to understand that there is good information and then we have bad information. Information overload can fragment our attention and make it difficult for us to focus on important tasks. Filtering information (suppressing, deleting, and selecting irrelevant information) helps reduce information overload. In addition, work can be delegated, especially for screening or filtering tasks. Also, let’s prioritise information as what to consume and what to avoid in that particular moment.

1. Multi-tasking isn’t Efficient

The real issue is that multitasking, at least for humans, doesn’t really work well.“We know from the psychology literature that multitasking is bad for you,” saysGal Zauberman, a professor of marketing at Yale SOM. Research shows thatwe can’t really do two things at once. We’re actually switching our attention back and forth between the two tasks — and we perform worse at both. Multitasking is inefficient — but we feel like we’re getting so much done.

To avoid the possible deleterious impact of multitasking:

1. Limit the number of things you juggleat any given time to just two tasks.
2. Use the “20-minute rule”. Instead of constantly switching between tasks, try to fully devote your attention to one task for 20 minutes before switching to the other.
3. Practice Mindfulness/ Meditation

Meditation, in form or the other and in all faiths and cultures or traditons exists. Besides, every single sphere of our life does seek help from mindfulness to provide relief from the anxiety and stress of everyday life. This wellness movement has made its way into the corporate organisations across the world. They don’t only encourage employees at their workplaces to find time for silent self-search but also motivate them to go beyond and convince their families and friends to try out the same in their free time.

1. Get Enough Sleep

“More sleep will dramatically improve your performance”, says career and branding expert Wendi Weiner, since you won’t be yawning your way through a blizzard of emails. “Being well rested will definitely help improve your memory and concentration alike, as a rested brain is a stronger brain,” she says. “Remain on a sleep schedule so that you train your body and mind to relax at specific points in the day and night”.

Take AwaysThe human brain is always in motion, handling various thoughts, while the duration we can concentrate on one thing before losing focus or requiring a pause is influenced by our attention span. However, life is bustling with numerous components, and it’s entirely typical to occasionally become sidetracked due to its complexity. In reality,researchrevealed that, on average, 47% of our waking moments are spent thinking about matters unrelated to our current activity. Nevertheless, a limited capacity for sustained attention can have effects on both your personal and work-related spheres.

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It had been a long six months, with relatively few, if any, days off for our entire crew. Yet, we tried to stay warm and keep our minds on the pipeline; which was supposed to be the answer to everyone’s concerns over the soaring cost of fuel, while our need to be home with our families was overpowering. Especially for me, as I had left my wife and children in the lower forty-eight to take this job; hoping the big payout it had promised would once again renew mine and my family’s spirit toward life and allow me to better provide for them.

While almost everyone on my crew was from a local indigenous tribe of people, I had only moved up one week before starting this job; from a little town in Missouri by the name of Doniphan. A town that had a population of about one thousand seven hundred and twelve souls. And it seemed as though each one of them knew of my failures; and how, as a family, we were hurting, but there just wasn’t enough money to go around at the end of the month to make a difference.

Lately, the cold temperatures and shorter daylight hours appeared to be wearing me down more than usual; and with Christmas nearing, my longing to be back home with those I loved made each day that much more wearisome.

But this day had a feeling of excitement about it, as earlier in the day, I and others, those on our crew, and some locals had been invited to a gathering at the home of one of the fellow crewmen for a home-cooked meal and a sampling of a new mead that he had been aging, and I was looking forward to it.

As the workday drew to a close, I was eager to get back to my room, which I had rented from the pipeline company. It wasn’t much, but it had a bed and a small radio, which came in handy for those long nights; when, because of missing my family, sleep would not come, and the silence was deafening. The other crew members living there and I shared a couple of bathrooms with showers, and I was ready for my turn at one of them.

After getting my shower and some clean, warm, dry duds on, I felt as though I could once again conquer the world or at least manage this evening. Pushing back against the loneliness of winter, which had settled in with its long, silent, dark days and nights.

On arrival at my coworker’s home, I was thrown off by the size of the gathering and how well his home accommodated all of us. There were those dressed as I was and others dressed in clothing of another time. A time long ago, but kept alive by folks such as these, who refused to forget their old ways and the stories that were handed down, and that is where this story begins…

As we mingled one with the other while slowly sipping on mead and telling stories, the night slowly perused by us. Many strange tales were told about the job site, including catastrophes, unexplained events, and healings.

According to an old chieftain, his people had passed his story of the Snow Queen down from generation to generation; although it was seldom told in the presence of a white man. Still, as he began to tell his tale, I found myself mesmerized, being drawn in as tight as a bowstring by his every word; while those very words were twisting my logic and understanding into a knot.

And although I knew I hadn’t hit my friend’s mead that hard, his story still took me back to a time shortly after arriving here. While missing my family, I found myself unable to sleep one night, so I got out of bed and, even though very late and in unfamiliar surroundings, I went walking.

After a long while walking and thinking of my family back home in Missouri, I lost track of time. And whether in the body I do not know, or out of the body I do not know, only God knows — I felt as though I was being watched by what I did not know, but it put me on edge, causing the hair both on my neck and arms to stand up as if, by some strange force or power, it had been energized. I walked a bit further before entertaining the thought of turning around, as I thought that I had seen something that I knew, or had at least thought, to be impossible; before it, they vanished.

On my way back, I tried my hardest to reason out what my mind had presumed my eyes to see, but I could not. And I knew I could never speak of it to anyone, lest they think I had lost my mind out in the dark cold of an Arctic night.

But now, listening to the story of this old chieftain, I was beyond perplexed. Had my mind interpreted what my eyes saw correctly? As the thought lingered in my mind, I felt the coldest of chills run down my spine. Was it the Snow Queen riding on her bigger than life lynx that I had seen, after all? Had she appeared as the old man’s story touted to protect me from an unseen or unrecognized danger?

I’ll always wonder and be forever grateful to her.

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Keep aiming and contributing how you can and success will be created for everyone by taking Fifth place and earning only one point, was enough to earn the one-half point that decided the win of the San Francisco City Junior High School Track and Field championship.

At the tender age of fourteen, I found myself in an embarrassing situation during a high jumping competition. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t match my friend’s impressive jump, which secured him the coveted first place. The following day at school, amidst the announcements and celebrations for the team’s victory, my friend took an unexpected and remarkable step. As the spotlight shone bright on his accomplishment, he momentarily hushed the crowd and drew attention to my contribution. With grace and wisdom beyond his years, he acknowledged that without my fifth-place finish and the single point it earned, our team wouldn’t have clinched the championship that we had won by one-half a point. At that moment, he insisted that I stand and receive the applause I deserved.

That profound gesture left an indelible mark on me, instilling a deep admiration that has persisted throughout my life.

From that early experience, I learned the essence of true leadership – the ability to recognize, acknowledge, and fully appreciate every contribution, no matter how seemingly small, that leads to success. In my professional and personal endeavors, I have strived to embody this principle, understanding that triumph is a collective effort, and every individual’s role deserves recognition and gratitude.

As I am writing this, Sejal Thakkar is coming to mind, her efforts with Nobody Studios, her introduction to Dennis Pitocco, and their remarkable additions to my life. I had decided to continue my high-level solitary ventures and focus my efforts on returning to Skydiving and qualifying for entry into the Hall of Fame, but all that has changed. I’m now addicted to AI and plan to combine my much-needed aged practical experience to aid in any way that I can, in the safe and sane functional development of it, and continue my New Beginning!

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If you’re anything like me, you don’t believe in indecision.

In an earlier post, I wrote about self-faith and our inner genius. Consistent with what I wrote, I typically assess the situation requiring a decision, trust my senses, apply my intelligence (such as it is), and decide. If my decision turns out to have been wrong — and presuming it wasn’t fatally so — I assess the implications of my first decision and make a different one. Since my stethoscope tells me I’m still among the living, I have to conclude that approach has worked pretty well, so far.

Nevertheless, I do understand the complex, contradictory aspects of human psychology. What I don’t understand is why we pay so little attention to them, why we examine and question them so infrequently, if at all. I don’t know if there’s any necessarily ordinal sequence or priority to any of those complex, contradictory aspects. But here are a few:

We have to allow for genetic predispositions, which affect our brain chemistry and our physiological responses to situational stimuli and, so, influence our psychological responses. Hello, serotonin and dopamine. Those chemicals and/or lacks thereof can affect mood and emotional responses. We also have to allow for the extents to which our experiences and the outcomes of those experiences influence our responses to circumstances in the present. If we associate mistakes with lowered booms , we’re likely to live our lives in defensive postures on precarious psychological edges.

Factor in conditioned thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, interpretations, biases, and ideological predispositions, and we start to start to perceive the thickness of the psychological stews in which we live. Add social and cultural norms, traditions, routines, expectations, and pressures — along with whatever independent, empirical perceptions we might have of any of those things — and, voilà! Instant cognitive dissonance.

Another aspect of human psychology, emotional regulation, is related to everything that precedes it here. Our ability to regulate and manage our emotions influences (and, if left unexamined may predetermine) our psychological responses. Throw in varying degrees of goodies like extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, openness, self-awareness, courage, vulnerability, agreeability, skin thickness, et al., and we have the entire scale from peaceability to volatility.

I don’t give much credence to environmental factors like weather, lighting, spatial configurations, and noise levels; although, I readily admit to hating loud noises. And I suspect if I were locked in a dungeon for any period of time, I might tend to be a tad disagreeable. At the same time — since I’m the poster boy for the fact that wisdom doesn’t necessarily come with age — I tend to discount aspects of our psychology like age and developmental stages. But I do recognize (hope) children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly likely have different cognitive abilities, coping mechanisms, and emotional regulation techniques.

Certain Uncertainties

In 1789, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to Jean-Baptiste Le Roy. (Jean-Baptiste and Ben used to fly kites together.) The letter read, in part, “Our new Constitution is now established, everything seems to promise it will be durable; but, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” Close but no cigar. Had Ben given that a few more moments’ thought, he surely would have realized the only thing more certain than death and taxes is uncertainty. Given the fact that Jean-Baptiste was struck by lightning while flying kites with Ben, I’ll bet he knew that.

I’ll leave you with two perspectives. The first is from the noted physicist, Richard Feynman, who said:

I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here. I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.

The second is from Woody Allen. He wrote:

I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.

If you can’t decide which one of them is correct, make peace with the uncertainty.

It’s the best we can do with our friend, psychology.

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A good baddie is hard to findThrillers, especially psychological thrillers, depend upon sociopaths – as formidably shocking antagonists or even, at times, morally compromised protagonists. What they don’t need any more of, given a sigh-inducing surplus, is any more one-dimensional baddies.

One dimensional baddies – typically playing enemy, adversary or nemesis – limit the potential for the story’s hero/ine to distinguish themselves by contrast. So they too are unfortunately rendered one-dimensional. The most involving characterization eschews simplistic Manichean morality – unadulterated good versus irredeemable evil. Even so, the layers of nuance by which a hero or perhaps an ethically blighted anti-hero, is rendered as compellingly as possible, is considerably enriched by an antagonist who defies easy categorization, and so sidesteps suspense-negating predictability – surely the death knell of any kind of thriller.

How frequently, in psychologically complex representations of villainy, does the antagonist manifest what the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM would categorise as diagnostic criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder… unofficially sociopathy, even psychopathy. How frequently, too, does the richly drawn villain make the hero appear milquetoast by contrast – or challenge his literary creator to strive to avoid that, so making the whole of the story more rewarding in the process.

From the writer’s point of view, and to the reader’s benefit, it should work both ways. Protagonist and antagonist, hero and villain (sometimes even switching roles) are locked in a kind of symbiosis in conflict. Like an evolutionary arms race, fitter predators cull the numbers of prey, leaving those who survive fitter, faster and more elusive, putting pressure in turn on the weaker predators, and so on as it has always been Darwinianly. In this case, of contending characters, the better drawn either hero or villainous counterpart, the more demands are made on the writer to up the ante in relation to the other. Not to do so is to end up with glaringly weak and unengaging characters. On the other hand, an eye on the psychological bases of character enrichment benefits not merely characterization and the hero/villain conflict by deftly fleshing out their inner lives, but also flows to surrounding characters and their reactions, and the potential for greater intricacies of plotting and more subtle or audacious twists in suspense.

Falling for the VillainThe sociopath transcends the moral objections of the reader in the most arresting depictions of evil. The best of them, the most memorable or haunting sociopaths, eclipse virtue in reader fascination. They inspire, in even an unwilling or resistant audience, the breathless thrill of being lured, seduced, courted, or even dared towards the dark side.

Multi award winning sci-fi writer John Varley, in his genre-spanning The Golden Globe – with no small amount of thriller in it – has protagonist actor Sparkie Valentine bemoan losing out to his opposite, when playing the villain to the other actor’s hero. “And by the way, there is no damn justice. Dixon de la Mare won that Alley Award, stole that Alley Award. It’s the same old story. I played the villain so well the voters subconsciously didn’t like me.” Here he puts the blame on the audience’s psychology, in not rewarding the subtlety of his own.

It doesn’t appear so, though, in our own Hollywood system. There, the villains – the more sociopathic the better – are frequently rewarded over dramatic aspirations to virtue. In the Oscars, while they have not positively dominated the gongs, the sheer extent of their representation is testament to the appeal of nefarious characters who embody everything the audience should revile but are perversely titillated to lionize.

Don’t, though, take false comfort from the seeming comprehensiveness of what Hollywood has nailed in the finest depictions of gradations of evil, whether wilful or instinctive.

These examples reflect the crème de la crème. They reflect what a screenwriter can achieve in intricate composition of a character’s problematic morality or motives, given life through an actor’s or actress’ interpretive performance, strategic or intuitive, through character or method acting – the manifestation of maleficence given its fullest, final texture in the director’s imposition of tone and mood.

The following list, this bounty of Hollywood’s most compelling sociopaths, is only a drop in the bucket, exposing just how enriched a story is by richly conceived narcissism and misanthropy. These characters are able to compromise the audience’s, even at times the culture’s, conception of morality, conception of the imperatives of character-identification, conception of how they subsequently see themselves… all deriving from astutely nuanced integration of the underlying psychodynamics of villainy.

This is the level of psychological insight into character and world building to which every novelist and dramatist and screenwriter should aspire. What narrative riches then, for the audience scrolling through book options for something they want to read, or through their streaming platforms for something they want to watch.

Sociopathic HollywoodTake Alec Guiness’ Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai, whose monomaniacal narcissism rose to the level of the sociopathic. Or Maxamillian Schell in Judgement at Nuremberg, who charismatically twisted moral relativism to self-serving vindication of murderous Nazi collaboration. George C Scott’s Patton was an astonishing application of sociopathic obsessiveness to the arena of war, while the following year Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle took the concept of the anti-hero and juiced the “anti” full of steroids while the “hero” just drained away.

Brando’s Don Corleone…? ’nuff said.

Peter Finch took societally destructive sociopathy to the level of advanced psychopathology in Network. F Murray Abram’s archly duplicitous Salieri, in Amadeus, saw him take home the statuette over Tom Hulce’s dissolute but utterly trusting Mozart. Then Michael “Greed is Good” Douglas put the sociopathy on and in Wall Street. Jeremy Irons’ character in Reversal of Fortune, while legally found innocent, wore aristocratic sociopathy on Claus von Bulow’s impeccably tailored sleeve (and some, ourselves included would adhere to the conspiracy theory that his award that year was a make-up for being passed over the year before, for his staggering portrayal of not one but two – twin – sociopaths in Cronenberg’s body-horror Dead Ringers). And a year later, Anthony Hopkins took his bows as Hannibal Lecter, in sixteen minutes of chillingly charismatic iniquity. It was an Edenic time for cinematic sociopaths, until an audience taste for Tom Hanks feel-good took over for a while.

Then a resurgence in the noughts. Denzel Washington for Training Day… Philip Seymour Hoffman as Capote (that literary sociopath given a recent reinvigoration by Tom Hollander)… Forest Whitaker as a bloodcurdlingly realistic Idi Amin… Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood… and on into Joaquin Phoenix as the comic book quintessence of sociopathy, Joker (going one better, in the same role, than Heath Ledger’s Best Supporting nod in Nolan’s The Dark Knight).

As to actresses… a shorter list (with acknowledgement to Margaret Atwood in the next instalment of this article), but performances no less unsettling. Bette Davis putting sociopathy into the femme fatale in Dangerous and Jezebel… Maggie Smith’s Miss Jean Brodie as a sociopathic malignant narcissist in her own little fiefdom… Elizabeth Taylor’s reluctant prostitute in Butterfield 8, Jane Fonda’s dysfunctionally vulnerable prostitute in Klute, and Liza Minelli’s pretty-much-prostitute Sally Bowles, all forced into self-protective self-centred sociopathy by circumstances, as was Julie Christie’s Darling… Liz Taylor again, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, brilliantly illuminating mutually vituperative malevolence in the folie a deux of a doomed marriage… and Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins (ok, just kidding… nearly).

Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched revelled in sociopathy in Cuckoo’s Nest’s mental institution, Faye Dunaway likewise in Network’s mental institution of broadcast media (the best actress/actor double for a film that in retrospect uncovered the degeneracy of an industry far more degenerate these days). Kathy Bates is the psychopathic manifestation of every writer’s nightmare in Misery, and Charlize Theron uglies-up on the outside and the inside to play the eponymous Monster. Finally, Kate Winslet heartbreakingly evinces the horrifying credulity of Nazi “just following orders” collective sociopathy.

The big gong, the lot of them – deservedly, by dint of the psychological completeness that entranced and transfixed viewers. All of them compelling, in all the shades of malevolence and malignancy.

These characters, in the cinematic context, variously represent the benchmark of wickedness, baseness and criminality, of turpitude and abandonment of scruples. They reveal the narrative heights possible in the depths of depravity. They set an aspirational standard for all writers, in all forms, that depend upon thrilling an audience through suspense. The psychological diagnostic criteria for just being plain bad comprise a suite of symptoms – each one of which is an enhancement of complexity, and all of which together are a guard against reductive under-estimation or expedient simplification of a character who might otherwise be represented on page, or screen, as so much more… To be continued…

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There are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world — and they all have different sounds, vocabularies and structures. But do they shape the way we think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shares examples of language — from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses cardinal directions instead of left and right to the multiple words for blue in Russian — that suggest the answer is a resounding yes. “The beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is,” Boroditsky says. “Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000.”

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Have you ever felt like you’re talking, but nobody is listening? Here’s Julian Treasure to help. In this useful talk, the sound expert demonstrates the how-to’s of powerful speaking — from some handy vocal exercises to tips on how to speak with empathy. A talk that might help the world sound more beautiful.

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One of the key things I have learned from talking to both clients and people in the communications business over the years is that they believed that the hardest thing to do was to develop a methodology or personal business philosophy to help guide them on the long and winding road.

A lot of these people tend to run mainly on inspiration. But the fact of the matter is that there needs to be much more than that if you are going to be a truly effective communicator.

And I’m not just talking about ‘creative’ people. This applies right across the board. Because communication really is all encompassing, and good communication is all important.

What follows here is a list of ‘rules’ I carry around in my head, kind of like a GPS system, that have guided me through the process of my independent career.

Some of these ‘criteria’, also help us make sure that, if nothing else, the strategic-to-the-creative will be in synch all along the line and be well received by whoever the communication is designed to reach.

1. Every client, no matter how big or how small, deserves your best effort 100% of the time.
2. Advising clients to put all their eggs in one basket is dangerous. We have all have seen baskets come and baskets go. And we have seen baskets shrink and baskets grow. It’s never about one basket, but the right combination of baskets and how many eggs you put in each.
3. Always look for and pursue clients who are truly committed to making the world a better place. This is always a more gratifying environment in which to work, especially if their commitment to their goals is driven by more that just profit motive.
4. Understand that consumers, still go through the same thought processes they always have when it comes to making purchasing decisions, be they for themselves or for their businesses. They simply want to be told the truth in a persuasive way,
5. Always work to make your client’s businesses look and feel appealing without resorting to hyperbole, exaggeration or any other form of aggrandizement that would artificially inflate the importance of that business at the expense of the importance of the customer.
6. In order to do the best job possible, always learn how your client’s business works, from the perspectives of: product or service, sales, marketing, competition and target audiences.
7. Understand that clients seek help because they can often feel they are too close to their business to be objective about their communications, so it’s up to you to provide objectivity and perspective.
8. A solid understanding of the entire marketplace your client operates in is the only way to figure out where your client’s business fits and how to position them accurately.
9. Know that with smart thinking, solid positioning and honest communication, you can keep your clients in the preferred 20% of their market, and out of the 80% of less than successful businesses.
10. Never forget, no matter what, that developing great communication is a much simpler process than a lot of people would have you believe it is.

As you can see these ‘Commandments’ cover a fairly wide range of activity. But this is necessary simply because communication is a multi-faceted area of any company’s business.

In today’s world, an understanding that in order to survive and thrive in a highly competitive marketplace every business needs to be able to communicate effectively. Either internally or with the help of objective and professional allies, who will always have their best interest at heart.

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I was told by a dear friend that if I stopped working, the world would end. Currently I am in three different businesses and write as well. Seeing that the customer facing ne has me working weekends and I seem to get the most urgent requests only on my days off. As a customer-centric person, I do what I can to avoid problems that result if one is deemed in-attentive! Example one customer very well educated, and very specific directions had a question the day before install. It was a Sunday. Not only did I have back-to-back customers all day, so I wasn’t on my computer or even my phone she texted and called, but I was talking with a person every time, showing products so no hands free to text. She called the office and left a message. When I finally got a moment towards the end of the day, I got yelled at and she yelled at everyone in the office. My customer service was her issue. Our business is very keen on speaking with whoever is with us directly first. It made me upset as I take my role seriously and there is no way to know each day the ebb and flow of clients in person.

Contrast to the software part time position that is on the 24-hr. clock because of the global nature of staff and clients. Though I set hours every week on my calendar, the 4 or 5 that I do as a business development/salesperson, this one can easily make a mess of my schedule. Textile consulting is appointment based and easy to manage. This difference between work styles made me think I should investigate the issue more! I was speaking to an IT friend who I know because of our shared passion for rugs and textiles. A treasure trove of information, this is what he offered.

Barry O’Connell shared:In the dynamic and ever-connected world of global collaboration, working across time zones is a familiar challenge that demands flexibility and sometimes, a touch of personal sacrifice. For one dedicated professional, navigating the time difference between the United States and Kerala, India, has become an art form, honed by necessity, and facilitated by the freedom of remote work. Our protagonist finds themselves bridging the geographical and temporal divide that separates their US-based operations from their development team in India.

The logistical puzzle of coordinating efforts across continents is a common scenario in today’s interconnected workplace. Yet, it’s the personal adaptation to these circumstances that truly encapsulates the spirit of global teamwork.

With team members in Kerala wrapping up their day as the US team is just beginning theirs, this individual has embraced an unorthodox schedule to keep the wheels of progress turning smoothly. Working from home offers the flexibility to adjust working hours, and this has become a cornerstone of their strategy for seamless collaboration. Embracing the quiet hours of the early morning, they’ve turned what could be seen as a disruption into an opportunity. Waking up for a 4:00 AM call to India is not just about troubleshooting or crisis management; it’s about fostering a continuous flow of communication and ensuring that both teams move forward in harmony. This unconventional schedule has its perks. After the call, a return to sleep is not just restorative; it’s a tactical pause. By the time the US management is ready to discuss the day’s agenda, our interviewees are refreshed, informed, and ready to brief them on the overnight developments. This approach also offers an unexpected benefit in the realm of workplace autonomy. The necessity of being available during the wee hours grants a certain degree of freedom during the conventional workday.

In an era where digital tools like Teams make it all too easy for managers to monitor activity levels, there’s a certain satisfaction in knowing that true productivity can’t always be measured by keyboard strokes or mouse movements. Our protagonist’s story is a testament to the adaptability required in today’s global workforce. It highlights not just the challenges of working across time zones, but the creative solutions that emerge when individuals are committed to their team’s success, regardless of the hour. It’s a narrative of compromise, ingenuity, and the subtle rebellion against the digital oversight of modern management tools—a reminder that in the vast web of global collaboration, the human element remains the most critical connector. Also, I should have posted into that article as well to keep your manager off balance. Shoot him an email at 9:00 at night and then answer a call at 4:00 in the morning. He won’t know when you’re working when you’re not and he will think you’re wonderful.

From Forbes: The world is experiencing a pandemic disruption that is changing our perspectives and beliefs about how we work. In particular:

• The balance of power has shifted from employers to employees.
• The employee value proposition has shifted from “work for me” to “work with me.”
• Employees favor a hybrid model versus going back to the office full time.
• Employees are rethinking their purpose—they are searching for meaning, not activity. In particular, millennials are interested in working with purpose-driven companies rather than those focused on shareholder value.

As governments start to ease pandemic restrictions and employers prepare to welcome employees back to work. The successful transition of the workforce from the known pre-pandemic world to the unknown post-pandemic world will depend on shifts leaders make to navigate this volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment. According to Andy Grove, former chairman and CEO of Intel, “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, Good companies survive them, Great companies are improved by them.” Below are five shifts’ leaders must make to transform the pandemic work disruption into a gift and opportunity:

#1 Focus on purpose: What kind of employees would leaders attract if they measured their value not from Wall Street but by improving people’s lives—resolving environmental, social, and governance issues? Your organization will attract and retain employees searching for meaning and not activity. According to Mckinsey, “70% of employees now demand purposeful work.” These purpose-driven employees are “6.5x more likely to report higher resilience, 6x to stay at the company, 1.5x likely to go above and beyond.” Also, shareholders and customers make choices in the market based on purpose and sustainability.

#2 Change your paradigm: The implications of the post-pandemic disruption on the future of work are still unknown. Tim Elmore, the author of The Eight Paradoxes of Great Leadership, said, “Uncommon leaders leverage both their vision and their blind spots. We must not fall in love with an idea but fall in love with a problem. If we fall in love with an idea, we may be blinded to the better idea that comes along later.” You can mandate people to return to work, but you can’t control their levels of engagement. The current problem is complex, which means the problem must be managed, not solved. Also, it requires a cautious and experimental approach to bring employees back to work.

#3 Shift from customer-first to people-first: It is widely known that Amazon Founder, Jeff Bezos, leaves an empty chair to represent the customers’ voice during the company’s most important meetings. In today’s world, you need two chairs, the customer, and your employees. Like your customers, your employees are human beings. Howard Schultz, the former CEO and Chairman of Starbucks said, “We are not in the coffee business serving people, but in the people, business serving coffee.” Simply, treat your employees with the same respect and passion as you would a customer.

4 Embed your talent strategy into every phase of your business: Your HR partners are closest to the pulse of your organization, and they can leverage these insights to engage, energize, and unleash the power of your talent.

5 Shift your leadership operating model: With the shift to digitization, small businesses have been struggling to keep up with consumers’ insatiable appetites and changes in technology. Costs associated with bigger, better, newer, and faster software and hardware were a burden. The X-as-a-service (XaaS) model (where X = platform, software, infrastructure, etc.) is catching on in these environments as an intangible value to customers while lowering the total cost of ownership by providing subscription-based technology. It helps business owners meet their customer needs by accessing the latest technology while keeping CapEx low.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardosibanjo/2022/02/27/the-post-pandemic-workplace-5-shifts-every-leader-must-make/?sh=1c4f96354fc1

Some things businesses have to consider post pandemic according to: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7566764.

The pandemic has pointed out problems in the current systems, as well as speeding along progress in the technology realm. A structural-unruly duality characterizes emergence, progression, and impact. Mainstream development thinking the problem. Transformations are needed in science-policy, economies. Resilience, equity, diversity, and inclusive politics are required.

This was a predictor back in 2020 and I believe it certainly has proved true!

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/11/our-post-pandemic-world-and-whats-likely-to-hang-round/

That ongoing uncertainty takes a big toll. That’s the basis of a traumatic stressor — unpredictability, uncontrollability — until it exceeds the ability of the organism to cope,” Koenen said. “It’s affecting every milestone: graduation, entering school, leaving school. For the older Gen-Zers: marriages, dating, jobs — in fact, there aren’t jobs. That’s a formative period in their lives when people are figuring out: What’s important to me? What do I want my life to look like compared to my parents’ life?”

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Stagnant and frustrated? Spinning your wheels but going nowhere? You’re not alone. We all hit plateaus where growth feels impossible. But what if I told you there’s a roadmap to reignite your progress and smash through those barriers?

As a mass communication specialist with over three decades of experience and a business coach dedicated to transforming lives, I’ve seen countless individuals break through plateaus and achieve incredible things. My passion lies in helping people connect, and that connection fuels growth.

But what if growth doesn’t have to be such a struggle? What if there’s a method to the madness, a formula you can follow that will get you unstuck and moving in the right direction again?

There is, and it starts with being honest with yourself. You have to get a clear-eyed assessment of where you’re at now before you can plan the steps to get where you want to go.

This guide unlocks the secrets to transforming struggle into steady advancement. We’ll explore how to set powerful goals, navigate setbacks with optimism, and celebrate every step on your journey to becoming your best self.

The opportunity for growth is there in every moment – you have to be ready to seize it. So, ditch the frustration and get ready to unleash your potential. Let’s take control of your growth starting today.

Graduating to the Next Level: Upgrading Your SkillsYou’ve been doing the same thing for a while now and feel stuck in a rut. Your job has become mundane, or you’ve plateaued in your career. It’s time for a change—an upgrade. Growth doesn’t happen by accident. You have to be intentional about improving your situation.

Continuous LearningThe key to progressing in your career or relationships is continuous learning. Take a course on a new skill, read books on personal development, or learn from a mentor. Exposing yourself to new ideas and ways of thinking helps spark creativity and opens you up to new opportunities.Expand Your Network

Those that share your growth mentality should be in your immediate vicinity. Connecting with like-minded individuals, especially those further along in their journey, helps motivate you and opens doors to new possibilities. Join a local networking group or online community to make valuable connections.

Look for New ChallengesOnce you’ve built up your skills and network, look for ways to apply your newfound knowledge. Ask your boss for more responsibility or look for a promotion. If that’s not possible in your current role, start searching for a new position that will challenge you.

Growth may feel uncomfortable, but that’s how you know you’re progressing. While change can be difficult, focusing on self-improvement and expanding your opportunities leads to a more fulfilling life. Continuously learning, networking, and taking on new challenges will set you up for success at the next level. The key is taking that first step. Are you ready to graduate?

Reality Check: Action Plan for Strategic GrowthWant to grow into your best self? First, take an honest look at where you are right now. Ask yourself the hard questions about what’s really going on in your life and how you truly feel. It may not always be pretty, but facing the truth is the only way to build the life you want.

Where do you stand in your relationships?

Are you making time for the people who lift you and support you? Or are you neglecting them in favor of work or other responsibilities? Please create a list of the relationships that nurture you and commit to strengthening them. Your connections with others are the foundation for growth.

How’s your physical health?

Are you exercising, eating balanced nutritious meals, and getting enough rest? Or are you burning the candle at both ends, surviving on caffeine and junk food? Take stock of your habits and make a plan to establish a healthy routine. Your physical health impacts everything else in your life.

What are your current skills and abilities?

Do you feel challenged and engaged at work? Or have you been coasting along, doing the bare minimum? Continuous learning and improving your skills is key to progress. Look for opportunities to advance your knowledge and take on more responsibility. Stagnation stifles growth.

How do you feel emotionally and spiritually?

Are you practicing self-care, engaging in meaningful pursuits, and maintaining an optimistic outlook? Or do feelings of boredom, restlessness, or apathy dominate your days? Your inner life steers your course, so make sure to nurture your emotional and spiritual well-being.

With an honest self-assessment in hand, you’ll gain clarity on what’s working and not working in your life. Growth happens through gradual progress, not an overnight transformation. But the journey starts here.

Developing Objectivity: Clarifying Your Goals and TimelinesAchieving growth requires developing an objective view of what you want to accomplish. Ask yourself some tough questions to gain clarity on your goals and timelines.

What exactly are you aiming for?

Be specific about what you want to achieve. Do you want to advance your career, learn a new skill, improve a relationship, or something else? The better, the more accurate you can be. Rather than expressing a general desire like “I want to improve my public speaking skills,” you could specify a concrete goal, such as “I aim to deliver an engaging and informative TEDx talk within the next six months.” This approach adds clarity and direction to your aspiration

How will achieving this goal benefit you?

Connect your goal to the benefits to stay motivated. Will it increase your confidence, open up new opportunities, or allow you to help others? Remind yourself of the benefits when obstacles arise.

What are your timelines?

Set both short-term and long-term timelines to keep yourself accountable while still being realistic. If your goal is to run a 5K, aim to run one mile within the next month, two miles within two months, and so on. Breaking a big goal into smaller milestones makes it feel more achievable.

Are there any preliminary micro goals?

Stay calm by the end goal. Remember the small accomplishments along the journey. If you want to learn Spanish, start by learning five new words daily. Celebrate achieving these micro goals to stay motivated for continued progress.

Developing objectivity around your goals and timelines is key to achieving real growth. Be specific about what you want, connect your goals to benefits, set timelines, and focus on small wins. With this approach, you’ll be making steady progress in no time. Remember, growth is often gradual, so keep putting one foot in front of the other, and you’ll get there.

Riding the Waves: Maintaining Positivity and Persistence Through ChallengesStaying Afloat Amid the Highs and Lows

Growth is a journey filled with ups and downs. Some days, you’ll feel on top of the world, energized by progress and breakthroughs. Other times, obstacles may seem impossible, and self-doubt starts to creep in. The key is learning how to ride the waves—how to maintain optimism and motivation even when times get tough.

Focus on Progress, Not Perfection

When facing challenges, it’s easy to become discouraged by how far you still have to go rather than appreciating how far you’ve come. Make a habit of regularly reflecting on your wins, big and small. Notice the milestones you’ve achieved and the skills you’ve gained. This helps build your confidence and resilience for the road ahead.

Look for the Silver Lining

Even when things don’t go as planned, there are lessons to be found. Ask yourself what you can gain or improve from the situation. You may have discovered a new approach that didn’t work. You have the chance to try something new right now. Growth often happens when we step outside our comfort zone. Look for the upside in any perceived “failure” or setback.

Take a Step Back to Recharge

When the going gets tough, pause to renew your motivation. Do something to shift your mindset and lift your mood, like exercising, spending time with loved ones, or engaging in an enjoyable hobby. A recharged mind and body will help you feel ready to dive back in with fresh enthusiasm and determination.

Connecting With Your “Why”

Remember your initial motivation for embarking on this trip. What motivated you to push out of your comfort zone and work to achieve your goals? Revisit your original inspiration and vision. Let it reignite your passion and strengthen your resolve. When challenges arise, your “why” can be the driving force that keeps you going.

Growth is a journey, not a destination. Learn to find the joy in overcoming life’s obstacles, both great and small. Maintain an optimistic mindset, focus on progress, and reconnect with your motivation. With persistence and positivity, you’ll build resilience and continue moving forward. The obstacles you encounter today will mold the person you end up being tomorrow.

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“You will never find time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.”

Charles Buxton

We all share the same 24 hours in a day, yet some people seem to effortlessly accomplish their goals while others struggle to keep up. The secret lies in effective time management—a skill that can transform your life and lead you to success. In this blog post, we will explore practical strategies to make the most of your time, ensuring a balanced and fulfilling life.

One of the fundamental principles of time management is prioritization. As the renowned productivity expert, Stephen Covey, once said, “The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.” Start your day by identifying the most critical tasks and allocate your time accordingly. When you focus on what truly matters, you can achieve more with less effort. By doing so, you not only increase your efficiency but also move closer to the life you envision.

“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.”

William Penn

Reflecting on how we spend our time is crucial to effective time management. The above insightful quote from William Penn reminds us of the value of this finite resource. Take a moment to evaluate your daily activities, identifying those that contribute to your goals and eliminating habits that waste your time. This mindful approach ensures that each moment is an investment in your personal and professional success.

The Power of PlanningEffective time management starts with a well-thought-out plan. Break down your goals into smaller, manageable tasks and create a daily or weekly schedule. As the saying goes, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” When you have a roadmap, you can navigate through your day with purpose and avoid the chaos of unplanned moments.

Take ownership of your time by consciously making choices that align with your goals. Create a balance between work and personal life, ensuring that you allocate time for relaxation and self-care. Recognize that making time for what matters requires intentional effort.

Embrace the 80/20 RuleThe Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule, suggests that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. Identify the tasks that yield the most significant impact and prioritize them. By focusing on the most critical aspects of your work and life, you can achieve remarkable results with minimal input.

So, mastering the art of time management is something that requires self-awareness, planning, and intentional choices. By listing your priorities, planning your days, and focusing on what matters most, you can unlock the full potential of your 24 hours. As you go through the path to success, remember the wise words of William Penn: “Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.”

Make the most of your time, and watch how it transforms your life.

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In large processes of cultural evolution, such as the current contexts, leaders have an even more relevant role. Recent events have literally forced a cultural evolution at all levels in companies and leaders have been inexorably overwhelmed by it.

Many have been able to ride the wave. They experienced, understood, learned and were truly able to seize a precious opportunity for authentic evolution. Some others improvised and, ultimately, improvisation represents a resource, perhaps even a genuine talent.

The majority faced the unprecedented and extremely difficult challenge with a great sense of responsibility and conscience and had the intellectual honesty to admit some defeats along with the successes.

What is certain is that reality sees us projected into a world with technological and organizational phenomena whose scope is enormously difficult to deal with.

Today it is talked about inclusive, inspirational, feminine, heartfelt, sustainable, humanist leadership etc. and, undoubtedly, each of these proposals brings with it the authentic value and weight of those years-long research or those experiences accumulated even with great effort.

And since on this matter there is nothing certain, final, to be negligible, especially in constantly changing times, and then, every experience, opinion, study or research, survey, are always opportunities for consideration and reflection, I will try, I too, to propose some aspects which, in my modest way of seeing, should characterize a leader so that he can face this historical phase with a sense of presence and responsibility:

Curiosity, which must never be lacking, because after all there are many proposals and there are no recipes; stopping at the first reading or at the first inspiration could be fatal.

The ability for synthesis and personal elaboration, because the approach to the many proposals must not be encyclopedic but synthetic, that is, capable of drawing the best out of every idea to obtain a very personal proposal.

Anti brittleness, the ability that perhaps we have really put aside, that is to lend ourselves to chaos (absence of routine, points of reference, regularity, habits, serenity) with the aim of learning and thriving.

Attention to those who have a vast repertoire of experiences accumulated over time.

The ability not to be shocked by the contradictions of the reality that surrounds us; paradoxes are an integral part of a complex worldle and leaders (and not only) are faced with the challenge of identifying useful and intelligent syntheses.

Lastly, I would add a great sense of sportsmanship in the face of what represents an unavoidable factor in the leaders’ daily game, and in the face of which one sometimes runs the risk of becoming a little “over-confident”: the risk, which it cannot be eliminated from the life, not only of leaders but also of all of us.

In short, we could say that what is worth focusing on is, more than ever, the “quality” of the daily action of a leader and his collaborators.

I hope I have not added to the confusion in the debate.

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At work we have all kinds of people. Some are extroverts and others are introverts. Some people love to socialise to their fullest and others stay reserved, uninviting and minding their own businesses. The extroverts, sometimes, really talk endlessly. We might think of those colleagues who hardly talk as unsocial but they may be doing it by design and in many situations, they are wise enough. They are also extremely good at observing what goes around them. The real game is what they need to disclose with colleagues @work and what to keep it to themselves. In fact, it’s a subtle art to maintaining our mystique at work.

Successful people know this very well — there are certain things, outside of work life, that we just don’t need to disclose it anyone at work. It’s not about being sensitive to information sharing and being secretive at the same time, rather, it’s about being strategic. Revealing too much can sometimes lead to unnecessary judgments or biases. But keeping certain things to ourselves can keep us on our path to success.

Let’s explore how these successful colleagues operate in their private and professional. What they disclose publicly and what keep under wraps.

1. Personal strugglesWorkplaces are often seen as professional environments, and successful people understand this very well. They know that their personal life, particularly any struggles or issues they might be dealing with, are usually best kept separate from their work life. This may include some family disputes, other issues i.e. health issues within the family etc. This isn’t about creating a false facade or pretending everything is perfect.

Rather, it’s about maintaining a professional image and ensuring that personal issues don’t distract from work related projects and assignments. This category of colleagues tend not to air their personal issues in the workplace. They also don’t add or invite office colleagues to their personal social media platforms. Needless to say that we all have our own life struggles. But successful people know that the workplace is not always the best place to discuss them.

1. Future Career AspirationsThese wise people also understand the importance of commitment and dedication to their current job roles. While it’s completely normal its their right to have long-term career goals or aspirations outside of the company if they cannot make it within the organisation for obvious reasons, voicing these openly at work may send the wrong messages for no reason.

Talking about plans to leave for other opportunities can create doubt in our dedication to the current job roles. It could impact our relationships with our current colleagues and bosses and even affect our progress within the company. While it’s crucial to have career goals and ambitions, successful people usually keep these future plans close to their chest until they’re ready to make their next move.

1. Self-doubtWe all grapple with self-doubt at times, even those who seem the most confident. I remember early in my career, I would often question my abilities and wonder if I was truly capable of succeeding in my role. Successful people are no strangers to this feeling. However, they tend not to reveal these insecurities at work. They understand that self-doubt can be perceived as lack of confidence or competence, which can impact their professional reputation.

This doesn’t really mean that one starts talking about it publicly or to the “trusted colleagues”. Instead, they work on overcoming these doubts on their own, focusing on not self-sabotaging their careers and craving for growth. They know that everyone has areas to improve on and they strive to turn their insecurities into motivation to perform better.

1. Past FailuresAs Michael Jordanvery rightly said: “I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying”. Failure is a part of life and often a stepping stone to success. But successful people know when and where to discuss these failures. While it’s important to acknowledge where we go wrong and learn from them, dwelling on past failures at the workplace can create a negative impression. It can lead others to question our very existence at that organisation.

Successful professionals tend not to reveal their past failures at work, unless it’s relevant to a learning experience or a particular discussion. They focus on their achievements and future goals, using past setbacks as lessons they’ve already learnt, not as defining factors of their professional identity.

1. Political leanings / affiliationsThis one is highly important. I’ve seen a few colleagues losing their jobs and their sufferings due to making such an information public in one way or the other. Research suggests that political discussions at work can lead to decreased productivity, poorer work quality, and increased hostility. Successful people understand the potential pitfalls of discussing politics @workplace. While it’s natural to have political views, voicing them in a professional environment can lead to unnecessary conflicts.

Keeping political leanings to ourselves help maintain a harmonious working environment with colleagues of all backgrounds and beliefs. It’s all about focusing on what unites us in the workplace — our shared goals and tasks — rather than what might divide us.

Final ThoughtsLet’s remember that acting maturely at the workplace is all about creating and maintaining a ‘Fineline’.The road to success is often paved with caution, care and wisdom, and part of that strategy is knowing what to keep under wraps. The art of maintaining professional boundaries is a skill successful people have mastered. Recognizing that some aspects of life are best kept out of the workplace isn’t about creating a persona or hiding who they truly are. It’s about understanding the dynamics of a professional environment and fostering a productive and harmonious workspace.

Whether it’s personal struggles, political leanings, or health concerns, the decision to keep these matters private can significantly impact how others perceive us in our professional lives. Navigating these boundaries might not always be easy, but it’s an essential part of the journey towards success. And as we’ve seen from those who’ve walked this path before us, it’s a journey well worth taking.

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One of my coaching clients shared with me recently how she was feeling insecure in her job role and lacking motivation. The company she works for is acknowledged as an entrepreneurial industry leader. Because it is currently being challenged by poor sales performance, it has bunkered down and frozen any change initiatives, learning programs or new projects until mid-2025. Because my client is in a substantial Research and Development function, crucial to innovation, we aimed to explore new ways of helping the company use their existing equipment (capital investments) and resources (people and expertise) to design and deliver low-cost and sustainable innovations to the market and creating a focused, meaningful, purposeful role and a values-based motivating opportunity for my client to be proactive, impacting the company by adding value to the bottom line by improving productivity and cost efficiency because anyone can learn to innovate.

Learning to innovateAs a result of our short time together, my client felt confident and empowered, motivated and energised, to invest time in learning how to apply her current skills and strengths, focus and attention to connect with key people and resources, explore options globally for identifying new business development opportunities, and in developing her technical skillset.

My client enrolled in an online innovation learning program to learn to innovate by acquiring the fundamentals of mindset and behaviour changes to shift their thinking and act differently.

The innovation imperative has shiftedProductivity growth needs to accelerate
According to McKinsey and Co, in the article “Investing in Productivity Growth”, it’s not only time to raise investment and catch the next productivity wave; the world needs to and can accelerate productivity growth.

“Productivity growth means getting more from our work and our investments. It is especially needed now as the world faces the many challenges of a new geo-economic era. Productivity growth is the best antidote to the asset price inflation of the past two decades, which has created about $160 trillion in “paper wealth” and even larger amounts of new debt”.

Adapting to the new net zero reality
The world must be on track to meet net-zero targets, yet many opportunities are available to accelerate efforts and help meet decarbonisation goals. Whilst some progress has been made to reduce global carbon emissions, under the current trajectory, the world won’t achieve net-zero emissions even during this century. Again, according to McKinsey and Co., in an article “Adapting to the new net-zero reality”, mitigation efforts alone are no longer sufficient – the world will need to adapt as well by going green, ramping up technologies and increasing investments.

Improving cost efficiencies
According to new BCG research, corporate leaders are making better cost management a priority as a hedge against ongoing economic, financial, and political uncertainties, stating that:

“Wholesale cuts are one way to manage costs. However, drastic measures such as sudden workforce reductions may lead to unintended consequences because they fail to address the root causes of inefficiencies. Nor do they position an organisation for future success”.

Generative Ai is a critical enabler of innovation
Whether the organisation focuses on developing new products, services, processes, or business models, Generative AI (GenAI) can enhance and challenge the work of leaders and teams across all phases of the innovation cycle and process.

By learning to innovate through knowing how to generatively question and listen, reveal and challenge operating beliefs and test assumptions to enable them to emerge, diverge, converge and prioritise high-quality creative ideas for change.

According to BCG in a recent article, “To Drive Innovation with GenAI, Start by Questioning Your Assumptions.”

“GenAI’s most prominent contribution is in idea generation and validation—innovation’s divergence and convergence phases. Yet, it can play an even more critical role in helping leaders confront and update the strategic assumptions at the foundation of their business and innovation strategies: the doubt phase of the cycle. Organisations that regularly question their beliefs are more resilient because they are more likely to see and position themselves to benefit from the shifts on which competitive advantage turns”.

The innovation imperative is paradoxicalSuppose we combine the contradictory features or qualities of developing productivity growth while adapting to the new net zero reality and improving cost efficiencies. In that case, many organisations have reverted to their conventional, business-as-usual focus, relying on Generative Ai to solve their problems.

This demonstrates a typically faddish response to a revolutionary, transformative new invention whilst being avoidant and resisting the urgent need to change by building the fundamental foundations in enhancing people’s capacity by learning to innovate.

Thinking and acting differently
Anyone can learn to innovate, and it starts with allowing, accepting and acknowledging that a business-as-usual focus, avoiding risk, making the tough decisions and resisting change are no longer effective, profitable, or sustainable because:

We all know that doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. We can no longer afford to keep producing the same results that no one wants. We can’t solve the problem with the same thinking that created it; we have to learn how to be, think and act differently to deliver the sustainable and innovative solution we want to have.

Learning to innovate requires a radical strategic shiftHarnessing collective intelligence
Anyone can learn to innovate; it’s simply a matter of leveraging talent to know, combine, leverage and scale people’s multiple and collective intelligence – heads/cognition, hearts/emotions and hands/actions.

Revealing and closing knowing-doing gaps
Then, we should align these to close the significant knowing-doing gap or disconnect between what people know and what people do.

Everyone knows that innovation is the most impactful lever to use to scale and leverage change, yet are primarily unwilling to pause, stop and take time to retreat from their short-term focus, pay attention and reflect on how to equip people with the innovation fundamentals by getting people’s:

Heads to make sense of innovation and what it means by defining and framing it in their organisation’s unique context, setting a strategic focus, determining the level of risk involved in achieving it and mitigating the roadblocks that may arise.

Hearts aligned to embody and enact what innovation means by setting and sharing a passionately purposeful reason for innovation, building change receptivity and readiness for designing and delivering a range of bespoke deep learning processes and equipping people to activate it.

Hands dirty by creating a safe environment where people are encouraged to emerge and share creative ideas and permission and be allowed to experiment by making small bets and mistakes and learning by doing to know what not to do.
Innovation requires a strategic and systemic focus

Innovation is subjective and contextual, so it must be defined and framed in an organisation’s unique context. It requires a strategic and systemic focus, so an organisation needs to agree on whether they will choose an incremental, sustainable or disruptive strategy and the level of risk.

The 21st century requires us to unlearn, learn, and relearn different mindsets, behaviours, and skills; anyone can learn to innovate to deliver successful change and transformation initiatives.

Commitment and conviction to learn to innovateIt’s only through being committed and having the conviction that my coaching client now has – to explore new ways of helping their organisations use their existing capital investments, collective intelligence, people resources, and expertise, supported by Generative Ai and deep learning processes, to design and deliver low-cost and sustainable innovations to the market.

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I have been ‘retired’ for about seven years now. But by no means have I stopped writing. No. Writing is a blessing and a curse and it’s something, I am finding out, that doesn’t get time off once you have committed to it.

For the better part of my life, I was an advertising writer. This was back in the day when advertising was a truly creative process and not the endless show-and-tell crap it is these days. I spent twenty years working in ad agencies and that equipped me for another 25 or so on my own, where I also became and strategist, producer and art director.

The bottom line is that it was lucrative enough to finance a worry-free retirement.

So the question became ‘Now that you can do pretty much anything you want (within reason), what do you want to do?’

That question is a lot harder to answer than it would appear. But for me, it was fairly simple. My wife, Heather, had gone back to work in the school system after the kids were grown, after spending a more than decade in the music business. What she wanted, more than anything, having been born and raised in Toronto, was to get the hell out of there.

So that was the first thing. Fortunately, when we decided to do that it was at the pinnacle of the housing insanity in Toronto and other cities in the country. We ended up getting an obscene amount of money for our house, and we found another house in a small city on the other side of the lake, (Ontario) called St Catharines where the real estate insanity hadn’t hit. So we were able to buy our new house outright and still have a ton left over for our investment people to play with.

The Reality Of No Longer Working

When we got here, I have to admit that it took about a year and a half before I got it through my rather thick skull that I did not need to work. I think a lot of people, especially the self-employed, have a good deal of trouble understanding when they have actually crossed the finish line work-wise. Maybe it’s because they loved their work, which was the case with me. Or maybe it’s because they are terrified by the question of ‘what will I do now?”

In my case, even after we had relocated, I will still in the worker bee headspace, Then I met someone who was thinking pretty seriously about starting a boutique agency here in St Catharines, so, of course, I jumped in.

But, and that was very revealing, because while my head was all for it, my heart was not. And in my business, at least, if you don’t have both things firing on all cylinders you can run into trouble.

The Much Needed Intervention

One day my wife and my sister ganged up on me. Sat me down and told me to just stop working. And gave me a few good reasons why. Sometimes it takes an intervention. But it worked, and slowly but surely I started to feel like I didn’t need to work.

For the next couple of months, I rode my bike around and thought a lot about how I would fill my time. I used to be a big TV watcher. In fact, for many years I wrote an email column called The Couch Potato Chronicles and sent out all kinds of reviews to a mailing list of about 1200 people. So when Netflix and Prime and Apple TV etc. came along and sucked up all the good talent off the network, I decided to revive that column. So that was one thing.

The next thing that happened was that I got ill and had to have spinal surgery, for an ecoli infection, so recuperating from all of that became Job #1 for the better part of a year and a half. But I eventually got back on my feet. I bought myself a three-wheeled bike because my ability to balance was something that the surgery took away. Slowly but surely I got back into most of whatever groove I was in before all that happened.

The Retirement Solution

Then one day, for no reason that made any real sense at the time. I started to write a story. I didn’t plan it out consciously. In fact, the only motive I had was to see if the surgery had affected my mind. Much to my delight it had not.

So I spent the better part of two months working on this story and as I continued to write, it grew, almost organically into a small novel. I have never written anything quite like this before. It was a completely fabricated story about a girl who wanted to be a writer and slowly but surely became one. I suppose I identified with the character I was creating. There’s a little bit of ourselves in everything we write.

When I finished that, I realized that I enjoyed the writing of it immensely so, almost immediately, I started another story. And I realized that, for the first time since I was a teenager, I was writing stuff for myself. Not for money. Not for other people. Not for big corporations or small independent businesses. Not for government ministries. Not for some film producers. But just for me.

It felt like I was building a road. Every day I would lay a few feet of pavement, then go for a swim, or watch a movie or walk or ride. After a while, writing the stories became an ingrained part of my daily routine. I never thought of it as work. All it was what what I was now doing.

After a year and a half or so. I had written one novel. And close to thirty stories, several of which were adapted and updated from screenplays I had written while I was freelancing and messing around in the movie business. Biz Catalyst was kind enough to publish a couple of these stories recently.

What was interesting was that having the writing to do allowed me to organize and not overdo the walking and exercises I needed to do to get back on my feet. So today, except for some minor balance and stamina issues, I’m pretty much back to normal, no longer an advertising guy, but still very much a writer guy.

I have a huge inventory of stories, several of which I am adapting to screenplays, which I will then start sending out to production companies in Toronto since most of them are set there.

But the best part of all is that I can help my wife do a lot of the outside stuff that needs to be done, which, in turn, keeps me on my feet, which in turn helps improve my stamina and balance. Because now we have a house we have grown to love in a city we love, the last thing we want to do is give it up and move into one of those little boxes where they stick old people.

Retirement Isn’t The End Of Anything

I guess the moral of this story is that retirement is not something that needs to be feared. I know I feared it when it became obvious that I could retire. The key to a good retirement is having something to do that gives you joy and pleasure. Because the last thing you want to feel is that your retirement is the beginning of the end of your life. Oh yeah, I also wrote a bunch of new poems and am in the process of making a little book out of them. This is one of my favorites.

WHATEVER & WHAT FOR

At the end of the day
My thoughts drift away
Through a sky so blue
Through the clouds so grey

And they travel forever
With no rhyme or reason
To a far distant place
To a fine summer season

And as I watch them fly
So free and so light
As the end of the day
Just turns into night

Then my thoughts, they return
To people my dreams
They are the strong stitches
That sew my loose seams

And I wake the next morning
With ideas galore
And a whole day to make them
Whatever and what for

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Consistency in the day-to-day requirements of leadership is essential, but the best leaders also know how to intentionally create moments that inspire, engage, drive imagination, and have an impact that far outlasts the moment itself. In a recent reading of The Power of Moments by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (2017), I was fascinated by the dynamics that allow certain experiences to have an extraordinary impact upon our lives as humans and leaders within an organization.

Leadership moments matter, and they cannot be artificially created. They must stem from leaders who learn from life journeys and who remain authentic (Luthans, Avey, Avolio, & Peterson, 2010). Authentic leadership is “the result of combining your personal and professional identities into an integrated whole, allowing you to rise up and adapt to new challenges while still being true to yourself” (Her New Standard, 2023).

Good leaders bring their whole selves to the people they lead and the challenges they face with creativity and humility, which in turn can inspire others and bring life to an organization.

Listening

Defining moments are an important part of the leadership experience, but they can be hard to recognize when one is in the midst of such a moment. It should not be surprising that the first prerequisite to discerning an opportunity to create a leadership moment is listening. To be a good communicator is to be a good listener. It is absolutely fundamental to true leadership. (Wooll, 2021). Listening leads to relationships built on trust and a shared sense of loyalty. Inviting employees to share honestly and asking thoughtful questions to increase understanding indicates that a leader has others’ best interests at heart (Llopis, 2013). Leaders should consider listening to be their “full-time job,” as it helps them identify when a moment is needed to make a change, inspire, or simply to tell a story.

Engage

Good listening inherently requires a response from the leader. Actively engaging with people helps generate understanding and accountability. When leaders hold themselves accountable to follow-up with employees on what they have shared, “they will know that you are listening, paying attention and attempting to understand what matters most to them” (Llopis, 2013). This understanding helps build relationships. Research in the field of social psychology increasingly shows that leaders who “prioritize relationships with their employees and lead from a place of positivity and kindness” are more successful leaders in every sense of the word (Seppälä, & McNichols, 2022). Strong relationships must not be left to chance, but instead are a “matter of choice” (Zimmerman, 2016). Leaders can take positive action to build healthy relationships built on trust.

Inspire

Truly inspirational leaders “attract and engage others through their words, actions and beliefs” (Kurter, 2020). Leaders who desire to inspire must build the ability to discern when the moment is right to lean in and point the team back to their shared vision or goal (Garton, 2017). Moments like this can expand a team’s understanding of their goals, how they can each contribute, and what they might accomplish by bringing their full selves and unique skills together (Cohen, 2020).

Hypocrisy is the greatest danger to creating this kind of environment. It is nearly impossible to motivate and inspire a group when the leader’s integrity is in question. Attempts to inspire where respect is not present can actually do more damage in the long-term and create a memorable negative moment instead of a memorable positive one. Inspiration often comes from the consistent demonstration of values and follow-through, not just waxing eloquent about those values (Eades, 2019).

Translate

Good leaders must be good translators (Morgan, 2020). Dealing with complexity is part of the everyday job. However, disassembling an issue and then reassembling it in a way that creates understanding is an acquired skill. This requires a leader to have a full understanding of the issue and the use of “strong listening and communication skills to build bridges between people” (Benjamin, & Komlos, 2022). Leaders act as a translator for all parties so that the same language is being spoken, which is essential for creating a leadership moment.

Like a poem

Think about a moment that stands out in your memory—a moment that had special significance and meaning for you. Like the art form of poetry and story, such moments help us make meaning of our experiences. Leaders can harness the power of story to create moments that resonate (Xing, & Liu, 2015). “Ultimately, we bond over, grow through, and feel seen, heard, and valued through the specific moments that leaders create for us. These leaders and these moments leave us feeling capable, inspired, and like we belong” (Josh, 2023).

When you fail

Leaders are human, and at some point, will fail or experience letdowns. One cannot always control their circumstances, but good leaders control what they can—their responses to failure and disappointment. How a leader responds reveals their character. Every failure is an opportunity to demonstrate to every person in the organization, both in actions and words, how to move forward with grace and resilience (Russell, 2020).

A distinction should be made between a failure based on incompetence and a failure caused by experimentation (Good, 2015). “In the former, learning might focus on an individual’s capacity, the latter might look at how to evolve the experiment. Similarly, understanding the consequences makes a huge difference in how we deal with a failure and should help us determine how many and which people to involve in the learning process as well as how to turn that learning into change, and eventually, success” (Good, 2015).

Defining moments in leadership

As leadership experts Ed O’Malley and Julia Fabris McBride emphasize in their book, “When Everyone Leads” (2023): “Leadership is an activity, not a position of authority.” Because leadership is active, everyone has an opportunity to get better at it with practice (Birsel, 2018). Admittedly, this learning process is complex, and can at times, feel overwhelming and impossible.

Each step leaders take on this path of growing their ability to lead is a step toward becoming more human. “Leadership moments are ones that make your heart leap with hopeful anticipation or fear of taking the next step” (Martin, 2019)” Each step that is chosen is an opportunity for inspiration, understanding, and wholeness. This dialogue, so to speak, with one’s experiences and the world helps create moments with those around them.

Creating leadership moments has the power to open hearts and expand an organization’s vision for who and how they serve, and allows the leader to express that which has no easily definable shape or form, the essence of leadership. The journey toward this kind of leadership takes time, space, and the willingness to commit to being rather than only doing. For the individual leader and the people they lead, it is worth the struggle.

Resources

• Benjamin, D. & Komlos, D. (2022). Why Leaders Should Make The Extra Effort To Translate Numbers: Insights From Author Chip Heath. Forbes.
• Birsel, A. (2018). 4 Small Moments that Make a Huge Difference in Your Leadership Style. Inc.
• Cohen, S. (2020). Leadership and the Power of Inspiration. Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.
• Eades, J. (2019). 3 Ways to Immediately Inspire Anybody (From the Moment You Meet Them). Inc.
• Garton, E. (2017). How to Be an Inspiring Leader. Harvard Business Review.
• Good, A. (2015). 5 ways the best leaders learn from failure. World Economic Forum.
• Heath, C., & Health, D. (2017). The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact. Simon & Schuster.
• Her New Standard (2023). Authentic Leadership: What It Is and Why It Matters Now More Than Ever. Her New Standard.
• Josh (2023). Leadership Worth Remembering: 10 Types of Moments the Leaders We Remember Create. 3×5 Leadership.
• Kurter, H. (2020). 7 Powerful Characteristics Of A Truly Inspirational Leader. Forbes.
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• Martin, E. (2019). Your Leadership Moment. Medium.
• Morgan, J. (2020). Want To Be A Better Leader? Master The Skill Of The Translator. Medium.
• O’Malley, E., & McBride, J. (2023). When Everyone Leads: How The Toughest Challenges Get Seen And Solved. Kansas Leadership Center.
• Russell, J. (2020). Just Move On: The Best Leaders Own Their Failures And Learn From Them. Forbes.
• Seppälä, E., & McNichols, N. (2022). The Power of Healthy Relationships at Work. Harvard Business Review.
• Wooll, M. (2021). The importance of listening as a leader in the digital era. BetterUp.
• Xing, Y., & Liu, Y. (2015). Poetry and Leadership in Light of Ambiguity and Logic of Appropriateness. Management and Organization Review: University of Cambridge Press. 11(4). 763 – 793.
• Zimmerman, A. (2016). The Things Successful Leaders Do and Don’t Do to Build Relationships. Entrepreneur.

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Author’s Note: This post isn’t intended to be how-to. Rather, it’s intended to be a why-not. The stunts we can pull — and the trouble we can get into — are limited only by our imaginations. And if you’d known Grandpa O’Brien, none of what you’re about to read would surprise you.

To the south of us, between our home and the next one down the street, there are two empty building lots. Across the field behind our home, running east, and on the hill that rises up from the field, there’s a street that runs parallel to ours. Two new houses have been built on that street. The sewer lines from those houses are going to run west, through the building lots to our south, and connect to the main sewer line on our street.

When the excavators came to start digging the trench for the west-running sewer line, they encountered the shale that comprises so much of the ground where we live. (We encountered that when the foundation was dug for our sunroom 18 months ago and when we make any attempts to plant anything in the yard.) As a result, I imagine there was a conversation that might have gone something like this one between all the contractors involved. (Fast forward to 10:25 for the conversation.) And, so, the decision was made to blast.

For days afterward, there was a bulldozer out on the empty lot, dozing away the earth to expose the shale. The bulldozer was followed by an enormous rig that drilled holes in the shale, west to east, in which the explosive charges were to be placed. During the morning of the day the charges were to be detonated, someone called Anne to say they’d be blasting that afternoon, and she’d get another call 15 minutes before they were to be detonated. When she let me know she’d received that call, I went outside and walked up to a member of the explosives crew.

“Hi,” I said. “Can I help?”

“Help?”

“You know. Help. Lend a hand, be of assistance, hold up my end, pitch in.”

“What the hell are you doing here?!” he asked incredulously. “We’re about to set off a series of explosive charges!”

“Yeah. I know,” I said. “I already have my earplugs in. But don’t you need somebody to yell, ‘Fire in the hole!?’ I want to do that.”

What?!” he asked again.

“Dude,” I said. “Don’t you watch TV? There’s always a guy on TV who yells, ‘Fire in the hole!’ when somebody’s about to blast. I just want to be that guy.”

I have to give that guy from the explosives crew credit. There was no swearing at me. No threats were made. No guns were brandished. Then again, I’m an astute enough reader of death stares that I opted to scram of my own volition.

Put the Shove in Shovel

After the blasting concluded, the excavation resumed. A backhoe showed up on the lot. As the backhoe dug and dumped mounds of earth aside the trench, the bulldozer that had remained onsite pushed it out of the way to make room for more earth as it was dug.

I went into our garage, took my trusty Contractors Choice shovel from its hook on the wall, slung it jauntily over my shoulder, and marched across the lot like the good soldier I am to where the backhoe and bulldozer operators were working. When they saw me walking toward them, they turned off their machines.

“Do you guys need any help?” I asked with deadly earnestness.

“Who the hell are you?” one of them asked me.

“I’m the guy next door,” I said. “My wife and I bought that house …”

“Are you nuts?” the other one asked me.

“Well, I haven’t been certified … yet,” I said. “Neither has it been officially ruled out.”

They shook their heads and turned their machines back on.

Before I went to talk to them, I’d worked out the fact that I could move about a half a cubic foot to one-and-a-half cubic feet of dirt per shovelful versus the 27 to 54 cubic feet per shovelful the backhoe could move. And I was fully prepared to tell them I didn’t presume to compete with heavy earth-moving equipment. I just wanted to do my part. But they didn’t seem as if they’d be receptive to the idea or that information just then. Besides, they wouldn’t have heard me over the noise from their machines. So, I took my shovel and went home with a hangdog expression on my face, doing my level best to look somewhere between crestfallen and despondent. Anne, to her credit, didn’t even hint at divorce.

The Morals of the Story

Unlike most stories, which typically have one moral, this one has two: First, to master the fine art of idiocy, it’s generally best to administer some sort of test to determine if people have senses of humor before you pull any weird shit on them. Second, not all shovels — or the people who operate them — are created equal. But I think that one may be self-evident.

And for safety’s sake, regardless of what Moe said to Curly, remember dynamite does not always blow down.

Fire in the hole!

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I visited two neighboring farms. One farm was rich in crops and the other was poor. Both farmers had similar lands and their farms experienced similar environments.

Richness of crops signaled that farmer managed his farm well. He applied new technologies; he dealt with weeds and pests promptly and he knew the quality of soil and water he used well. The other farmer did not.

Ideas CropsThis brought the idea of this post. Our minds are the farms for the crops of ideas. Our mindsets are the farmers who either know how to grow crops well or not. Positive mindsets are like good farmers and know well how to grow ideas to generate good crops.

To generate successful ideas and grow them well requires a positive mindset that embraces

• Uncertainty and VUCA environment. Positive mindsets generate different scenario for possible future scenarios. These mindsets look for alternate possibilities. They do not try to control the uncontrollable but to adapt to it with agility.
• Growth oriented. They want to grow ideas to produce invitingly rich crops.
• Positive mindsets do not give up. They are persistent. They know failures are lessons and they learn from them.
• Embrace change. Positive minds embrace change rather than resisting it. They accept the opportunities change brings and the problems it causes and find solutions for them.
• Success-oriented. Positive mindsets work towards a successful results. They know they shall face obstacles and failures but remain committed to success.
• Weeds removers. Positive mindsets are weeds removers. Weeds come in different forms such as negative thoughts, discourage from others and feeling hopeless.

It is not enough to generate creative ideas; more is growing them successfully. Ideas are like seeds and they may be good or bad.

It is important to sort out the good seeds from the bad ones. However having good seeds without positive mindsets will only lead to poor crops.

We are farmers planting seeds of idea in our minds. It is our responsibility to grow them to yield rich crops.

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Frank J. Infurna, Arizona State University

Middle-aged Americans are lonelier than their European counterparts. That’s the key finding of my team’s recent study, published in American Psychologist. Our study identified a trend that has been evolving for multiple generations, and affects both baby boomers and Gen Xers. Middle-aged adults in England and Mediterranean Europe are not that far behind the U.S. In contrast, middle-aged adults in continental and Nordic Europe reported the lowest levels of loneliness and stability over time.

We used survey data drawn from over 53,000 middle-aged adults from the U.S. and 13 European nations from 2002 to 2020. We tracked their reported changes in loneliness every two years across the midlife years of 45 to 65. This span provided us data from the so-called silent generation of people born between 1937 and 1945; baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964; and members of Generation X, born between 1965 and 1974.

Our study makes clear that middle-aged Americans today are experiencing more loneliness than their peers in European nations. This coincides with existing evidence that mortality rates are rising for working-age adults in the U.S.

We focused on middle-aged adults for several reasons. Middle-aged adults form the backbone of society by constituting a majority of the workforce. But they also face increasing challenges today, notably greater demands for support from both their aging parents and their children.

Following the Great Recession from late 2007 to 2009, middle-aged adults in the U.S. reported poorer mental and physical health compared to same-aged peers in the 1990s. Compared to several European nations, U.S. middle-aged adults currently report more depressive symptoms and higher rates of chronic illness, pain and disability.

Why it mattersThe desire to belong is an innate and fundamental need. When this is lacking, it can have downstream consequences.

Loneliness is bad for your health. Researchers have found that loneliness is as dangerous as smoking. Loneliness increases one’s vulnerability to sickness, depression, chronic illness and premature death.

Loneliness is considered a global public health issue. The U.S. surgeon general released an advisory report in 2023 documenting an epidemic of loneliness and a pressing need to increase social connection. Other nations, such as the U.K. and Japan, have appointed ministers of loneliness to ensure relationships and loneliness are considered in policymaking.

What still isn’t knownWhy are middle-aged Americans exceptional when it comes to loneliness and poorer overall mental and physical health? We did not directly test this in our study, but in the future we hope to zero in on the factors driving these trends. We think that the loneliness Americans are reporting compared to peer nations comes down to limited social safety nets and to cultural norms that prioritize individualism over community.

Individualization carries psychological costs, such as reductions in social connections and support structures, which are correlates of loneliness. Relative to the other nations in our study, Americans have a higher tendency to relocate, which is associated with weak social and community ties.

One of the reasons why we chose countries from across Europe is that they differ dramatically from the U.S. when it comes to social and economic opportunities and social safety nets. Social and economic inequalities likely increase one’s loneliness through undermining one’s ability to meet basic needs. Generous family and work policies likely lessen midlife loneliness through reducing financial pressures and work-family conflict, as well as addressing health and gender inequities.

Our findings on loneliness in conjunction with previous studies on life expectancy, health, well-being and cognition suggest that being middle-aged in America is a risk factor for poor mental and physical health outcomes.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Frank J. Infurna, Associate Professor of Psychology, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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In the sunset of life it isn’t fun to suddenly realize, that you never had the life you wanted. That things never went the way you thought they should, and even if you generally think that your life has been mostly fine — the day will come when you realize, the “somedays” you dreamed about aren’t coming.

It can happen when you are watching an old show on TV, that show you watched in your formative years, the one that made you laugh, the one you all talked about the next day, the one that seemed to describe your forward path — but it never did. And that is because life is not a sitcom. There is no team of writers plotting all the twists and turns. No one to type up the happy ending.

They say that you are responsible for writing your own story. But no one tells you that you may carry one story in your head, while you live out another. And even if that life is full of love and laughter, the day will come where a snippet of music, a mention of a movie or the title of a book will open up a dark hole under your feet. And if you aren’t careful, you will fall into this hole, tumbling over and over like Alice, watching all the souvenirs of your life cascading around you, and as hard as you try to catch them, you can’t.

Tokens of you childhood streak by like shooting stars, the puffs of smoke that were your dreams, from the days when all seemed possible. And as you plummet you are joined by fleeting ghostly shadows of lovers and friends who swirled in and out of your life. They whisper as they pass by, but you cannot catch what they say, you’ve forgotten the sound of their voices. From deep inside you, memories flicker, what were those plans we had? The promises made to each other, the song you promised to sing at her funeral, but by then you had lost touch.

Soon you are wrapped in swirling clouds of motherhood — diapers and first teeth and the leftover equipment of their childhood activities, photos and toys and high school rings: the music of a thousand performances. Then comes the rising of a deepening ache as one by one they leave home, and the feeling of loss, of “never again” threatens to drown you. There are points of light that fill you full of warmth, and again your head fills up with dreams, this time you will get things right. The circle will re-form itself with everyone reachable, touchable, lovable and the next generation running in and out, calling for you.

However, the hole continues to widen and as hard as your try to hold their hands, to encircle them with your arms, they drift away, smiling as they go, their own dreams covering them like fog.

And you wake up one day to realize, you are living in a house that no one will visit, in a place where no one will return, and the vision of your sunset years reveals itself to be just more smoke.

You wonder what was the turning point, where was that bend in the road that took you in the wrong direction.

No amount of turning around will get you back to that place, you have no choice but to continue falling, holding on to the new life where there is still love and laughter, no longer trying to catch the things that are falling away, trying as best as you can to quiet the heartache, accepting that you have reached to part of the journey where losses mount.

With an understanding nod (after so many years denying it) to Judith Viorst’s “Necessary Losses.”

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Think of the ripple effect that can be created when we nourish someone. One kind empathetic word has a wonderful way of turning into many.

~ Fred Rogers (a.k.a. Mr. Rogers)

When was the last time you considered the impact your words and actions make on others? We seldom take time to sit with this question. If more of us did perhaps the world would be a healthier, happier place for us all. Most of us are aware of the “ripple effect” and how one human being can affect others downstream for generations to follow. Are you ready for a “flash back”? Knowing we all live downstream from those who have come before us I would like to share one such person with you who affected my life profoundly. Depending on your current age, you may or may not remember Mr. Rogers; a television personality whose program was solely dedicated to children, spanning three decades. What put Mr. Rogers in a class all by himself was that he was not on the air just to entertain children but to assist them in becoming better human beings.

One of the greatest dignities of humankind is that each successive generation is invested in the welfare of each new generation.

~ Fred Rogers

A movie starring Tom Hanks was released in 2019, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, documenting the impact (or ripple effect) of Mr. Rogers. Recently, as I watched the movie on Netflix, I had an instant flashback to how Mr. Rogers affected my life and my daughter’s as well. I thought back to 1986 and remembered how Merritt and I would begin each morning together by watching Mister Roger’s Neighborhood on television. We continued this practice until she was about seven years old. We also watched Sesame Street, which was great for learning unfamiliar words and simple math skills, but what Fred Rogers could convey to children went far beyond proper grammar and addition. He taught his TV family of children (and a few of us older kids) how to experience our emotions and feelings. He ignited a spark of joy in children’s hearts, empowering them to experience happiness and teaching them the art of expressing emotions affirmatively.

It’s Always About Love

Love is at the root of everything; love, or the lack of it.

~ Fred Rogers

What hooked my attention most was his willingness to live and teach from his own sense of connectedness to life and others; by example, he showed us the true meaning of friendship, generosity, kindness, respect, compassion and, most importantly, unconditional love. His message consistently centered on love. By his example, he reminded us love is the genuine root of everything good, everything that connects us and makes us better human beings. That was a lesson I have never forgotten. What better legacy could he leave to future generations?

Fred Rogers passed in 2003. Wherever it may be, the neighborhood in which he now lives is a better place because of his presence there. I know that my grown daughter, who is now 39 years old and has two children of her own, carries a piece of Mister Rogers within her heart and soul. I have confidence that as a wholistic physician specializing in womens reproductive health, those whom she will serve for many years to come will reap the benefits from the time she spent hanging out in a particular neighborhood so many years ago. That is the power of the ripple effect, the difference one person can make. Here’s to Mister Rogers. Because, as I have learned, healthy and happy kids grow into healthy, happy, and compassionate adults, and that’s what our world can always use more of—especially now.

Featured Image courses of Terry Arthur (given in “eBay (v1)”), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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Facing a workplace situation that feels more like a never-ending marathon than a fulfilling career? Sounds like you’re stuck in the “24/7 rule” circus, where the company’s demands are juggling you around like a reluctant clown! But fear not, it’s time to add a dash of humor to lighten the mood and find your way out of this job jamboree.

Imagine this: you’re the star performer in a workplace drama titled “The Great Escape from 24/7 Land.” Cue the dramatic music as you dramatically roll out of bed after hitting the snooze button more times than you can count. Your reluctance to face the day rivals that of a cat avoiding a bath – and trust me, that’s some serious reluctance!

But wait, there’s more! Your inner circle knows all about your workplace woes, making you feel like the lead character in a soap opera where everyone’s in on the juicy gossip. And as for having fun? Well, it’s become as elusive as finding a unicorn at a corporate retreat.

Now, let’s sprinkle in some wit and wisdom. Picture yourself sitting down with a trusted confidant, pouring your heart out over a cup of coffee. You lay out your grievances, and they respond with a quip so sharp, it could cut through the corporate red tape like a hot knife through butter. Together, you brainstorm a plan so ingenious, it would make even Sherlock Holmes proud.

As you jot down your thoughts on paper, you realize something profound: it’s time to reclaim your power and put yourself first. You’re not just a cog in the corporate machine – you’re a force to be reckoned with!

So, armed with humor, wit, and a newfound sense of determination, you set out on your journey to find greener pastures. Who knows? Maybe your next adventure will involve writing that book you’ve always dreamed of or embarking on a spontaneous trip to Singapore – because life’s too short to be stuck in a job that feels like a never-ending sitcom rerun!

Remember, laughter is the best medicine, especially when dealing with workplace woes. So, chin up, my friend, and let’s add a little humor to this chapter of your life story!

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I recently saw a Facebook post where the meme said “When I am driving in a rain storm, I carefully watch other people’s wiper speed to make sure I am not being too dramatic.” At first, I chuckled at the sentiment. We all have probably had the experience of having the speed of our wipers being either too slow or too fast. It can be hard to get it just right!

As I thought about the post, I found myself wondering how often we look to others for what we should or should not be doing. I believe that two potentially dangerous things happen when we compare ourselves to others. When we focus on other people’s wiper speed, we risk judging ourselves and judging others.

Judging OurselvesComparing ourselves to others is a dangerous thing to do. It is a flawed process that rarely leaves us in a good position. When we measure ourselves up against someone else, we most often compare our liabilities to their assets. Think about this for a minute!

When we look to others to measure how well we are doing, we are looking at their outsides. This is all we can see.

So, we look at their appearance, their clothes, their muscles, their speech, their behavior and more. We also may look at their possessions and all the things they have accumulated.

Then, we take that information and compare ourselves and what we have and are to that outward measure. However, we cannot help but add what we know about our “insides” to the equation. So, we compare only what we outwardly observe in others to what we are inward and outward. This is not a fair comparison.

I remember counseling with a friend as she told me about how inadequate and frustrated and overwhelmed she was. As part of her story, she began to tell me about another friend of ours who she wanted to be more like. She told me how much she admired her because she was so this and so that. She was saying her wiper blades were not moving at the right speed and this other woman had it figured all out.

Imagine my experience just a week later being in the home of that other woman. Her house was a mess, her hair was frazzled, and she vented about how hard her life was and how she was struggling to keep it together. Then, she did the most interesting thing. She brought up the first woman. What did she do? She admired and praised her while she delivered lashing to herself. She believed her wipers were moving at the wrong speed and the first woman had it all right.

What an ironic and instructive experience for me. I learned dramatically how painful we can make it for ourselves when we compare ourselves to others. It is rarely ever fair or rational to us or them. It hardly ever results in a positive feeling or self-improvement. Comparing our wiper speed to others rarely results in good and reliable data or feelings.

Judging OthersWatching what others do can also be quite problematic because it may lead to criticism, contempt, and even harsh treatment. What happens to us when we get so focused on what other people are doing? We can too easily lose perspective and become condemning and inappropriately judgmental. We are rarely good judges of what is going on. In fact, we may even be dramatic.

Watching what others do creates problems because we have to watch them through our windshield. We are limited by the lenses we look through. Our vision is likely clouded by our own storms and rain drops and bug guts! So, when we look out at others, we are highly likely to see ourselves as better than them. This is dangerous.

When we judge others we naturally become myopic or near-sighted. Let’s face it! It is quite easy to point out the bugs on someone else’s windshield and self-righteously condemn them for their lack of attention or knowledge or whatever. We tend to take out a magnifying glass when we look at others, not recognizing how we may not accurately see the whole. When we zero in on the behavior of others, we may see the proverbial tree and miss the forest.

The truth is, we simply do not know what other people are thinking, what they are going through, and what they may need. Often we do not know anything about their challenges, upbringing, and more. Simply, we do not know what storms they are driving through. So, we better judge carefully. Or better yet, we could resist the temptation to judge at all.

This is my New Year’s Resolution. I am going to get so focused on driving my own car that I don’t pay attention to what is going on in the car next to me. I am going to set my wiper speed at the best one I can find for me and let others do the same. There is great happiness in choosing to focus on what I know, need, and can do and let others do the same. I don’t need to look to anyone else for how I should be. Even more, I never need to judge someone else.

This may be a good measure of our happiness. Can you drive through that rainstorm without once looking to someone else’s wiper speed? When you are more concerned about your speed and the road you are on, then, you are really getting somewhere!

So, I might re-word that post to say something like “I am too busy focusing on getting through my own storms and challenges and blessings to be worried about the speed by which you are getting through yours.”

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Right now the world seems somewhat bleak, we are fearful and angry, living in unprecedented times and life is desperate and unfair for many, all of which means that it is difficult to remain hopeful and to have faith that our actions, our words, our thoughts can make a difference.

But we must remember that they can.

The reality is, that since the beginning of modern history, most of our challenges have been unprecedented, humanity has suffered enormously, life is unfair and random and often cruel, but yet the human race is still here, we have evolved beyond all imagination and the lives of many have improved immeasurably.

So, during these difficult times, I thought it would be good to remind ourselves of what us mere mortals are actually capable of by looking to the past for inspiration.

It was 1993, Andrew Sullivan, a journalist was diagnosed with AIDs. It was a truly terrible time – there was no cure, the deaths were desperate and lonely and prejudice was rampant.

So, Andrew took himself off to die. But he decided that it was important for him to leave some kind of legacy, a note that he had been here and his parting birdsong, was to write a book and that book was called ‘Virtually Normal’. And that book suggested a totally unthinkable thing at that time, that gay people should be able to get married. Andrew was acutely aware of the shame and subsequent self-hatred that so many gay people were unfairly and inhumanely forced to live with and could see no other way, in which gay people could be freed.

When the book came out, it was harshly criticised, by both right wing parties and the gay community. Andrew thought his work had all been for nothing and he would die not having made a difference.

It is now 27 years since that book was published, Andrew is alive, his book sparked a movement and was quoted in a key supreme court ruling in the US, declaring marriage equality for gay people. Andrew also received a letter from the president of the USA, telling him that the fight for gay marriage, succeeded in part because of him. He was invited to the Whitehouse for dinner and that President was black.

Enormous changes happen because seemingly ordinary people think the unthinkable and then have the courage, faith and passion to do something about it.

So, today and every day, please think the unthinkable and keep the faith that your actions, your thoughts and your words will make a difference to someone, somewhere.

P.S. I read this story in Johan Hari’s book ‘Lost Connections’ one of the few books I would say was definitely life changing for me as is his new book ‘Stolen Focus’.

With love

Nik x

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More than ever, organisations and individuals are looking ahead to the future with a close lens and keen insights. This type of big-picture thinking is imperative to the success of any company or a person. It’s part of building mental fitness. After all, our world is not static, rather it is in a constant state of change. With much of the future unknown and uncertain, companies (and people) need to stay agile and think strategically about what’s to come ahead. In fact, half of us feel unable to plan for the future.

Having said that, we also need to make sure to stay reactive. Our organizations know that the future isn’t set in stone. Nowadays, the future is fluid. To look at the bigger picture ahead, we know that we need to make space for reflection in case things don’t go as planned.

In this article, we shall deliberate on how to adopt habits to become a BIG Picture Thinker. Let’s find out how BIG Picture Thinking Pattern can keep ourselves and our organizations a step ahead from the competition, from the market place — and be better prepared to pivot when needed.

Who’re the Big Picture Thinkers?The BIG Picture People tend to be creative, strategic, and visionary, but they can also be messy, disorganised, and forgetful. On the other hand, the detail oriented people are conscientious and exacting, but may lack perspective or fail to prioritise long-term goals. These types of thinking skills aren’t inherently natural to us. Like any other sort of skill or muscle, it takes practice to start thinking with a BIG Picture view. Let’s see how BIG Picture Thinking should work for us and why it’s worth investing in building a future-mindedness in our respective workplacs?

Ways to Embrace Big Picture Thinking1. The Power of seeing the Whole

In most cases, particularly in our part of the world, we are not trained to have a holistic view of things. Rather, we look at the transactional value of the pieces. We love to work in silos and we feel good about it. Also, in most cases we don’t like others to interfere in our respective domains even for our own good. We live with this distorted desire to control i.e. I am the In-charge for my own little kingdom.

Unfortunately, most managers are trained like that, not bothered to look at the BIGGER Picture, e.g., the Heads of HR, Finance, IT or other support function are generally busy adding frills to their little empires without realizing the purpose or core of their organisational existence. Similarly, they train their successors in a similar fashion, living in their own (fool’s) paradise.

2. Spare Time to Reflect

Rather than acting on short-term conditions such as emotions, fatigue, time pressure or distraction, deciding based on the BIG Picture can ensure us prioritise effectively and set achievable goals. Here are a few methods we can use to think about the big picture:

1. Connect with the Divine and seek help
2. Write down the BIG Goals
3. Go for a thoughtful walk
4. Talk to a friend or a family member who is a good listener and seek advice

3. Build Future-Centric Skills

We all understand that due to the current economic situation around the world, the future will remain uncertain for a foreseeable time and that’s fine. Organizations and individuals everywhere are navigating the same uncertainty and unknown. In fact, 63% of Americans say they’re stressed about the unknown. But our workforce doesn’t have to feel like it’s navigating the unknown alone or without support.

Creating future-centric leaders in our organisations will help keep our employees agile, healthy, and engaged. Researchshows that future-centric leaders report increased team agility, team performance, innovation, and resilience. 82% of people have significant room for improvement in at least one area of future-centric leadership skills.

4. The Journey Starts from Within

It takes a “leadershift” — a balance between standing back and seeing the big picture (vision) and moving in close while painting all of the fine details (execution). BIG Picture Thinkers dream of the opportunities, not just the problems, they see possibilities, not barriers. They have the capability of see across the wall.

BIG Picture leaders then take those abstract thoughts and envision strategic outcomes. They can make a plan for how to create opportunities from challenges, and outcomes that drive an organization to somewhere ahead of where it is today. BIG Picture leaders elevate possibilities, processes and people.

5. Convert Plans into Action

Since we are discussing the BIG Picture Thinking and painting a vision, let’s see what the great artist Pablo Picasso had to say: “Our goals can only be reached through the vehicle of a plan. There is no other route to success.”

As we look through our own leadership lens today, let’s ask ourselves:

1. Do we have a vision for what we do?
2. Is our vision in sync with our life goals?
3. Are the goals outlined with a plan that is SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-bound)?
4. Does our vision include leading others toward the end state? If so, am I more focused on managing an operation or leading people?

SummaryIn short, “Symphony” is the ability to see the big picture not only in terms of analysis, but also to integrate and synthesise to see that the whole is greater than the sum of all the parts. It is a capacity that each person has to a degree. The more this symphony is cultivated the easier it becomes to communicate and understand the job as a whole, the significance of each part to success, and the subtle interrelationships among the parts.

Let’s not forget that the change is the only constant and is necessary for evolution. Leadership Guru John C. Maxwell writes in his book Leadershift, “You cannot be the same, think the same, and act the same if you hope to be successful in a world that does not remain the same”.

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"We can look into the rearview mirror and smile with a grateful heart, knowing old age is not a slow march into enemy territory; it’s a necessary glide path to the next great “yet to be” and that is a beautiful thing." ...

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"You can keep pondering on which thing to do first or which path to take or by simply taking action now of most any kind, you may just find yourself on the way to where you most needed to go." ...

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"I suppose writing my heart out consistently for almost a year has brought me here - to this place of reflection. In doing so, I’ve been able to wade through the current as it forces me to stop and take stock." ...

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"We tend to put self-esteem and self-awareness in two different directions. Do you agree?" ...

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"This is an episode that will make evident that is not about what happens to us, is about how we react to what happens to us." ...

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"My love for performing, language and linguistics, listening to lots of audiobooks, and meeting a voiceover artist all led me to voiceovers." ...

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"Emoticons are the smiles of writing, but also the tears of communication. What is your favorite emoticon?" ...

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"In spite of the doom and gloom that reaches us through the internet, there’s an enormous wave of progress and goodness underway, hidden under the noise of our digital lives." ...

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"The question remains, however: Why are people so consistently drawn to Buffett’s special brand of escapism? Or to escapism in general?" ...

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"AI systems do not have the same understanding of context, nuance, and emotion as humans do." ...

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"Journaling is possibly one of the simplest yet most profound tools to enhance well-being on all levels." ...

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"It’s as though the windows of my heart have been thrown wide open, where once they were closed, though not latched; only to be opened when my heart sensed a need to." ...

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"Homeless individuals belong to a ‘population’ teetering on the edge of an abyss filled with pain and poverty." ...

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"Increasing awareness of your body language and that of others will enhance your conversations exponentially." ...

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"In a world filled with divisiveness, the art of "calling in" stands as a beacon of hope. It's a reminder that, in our shared journey of understanding, we have the power to shape our conversations positively." ...

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"Whom will you thank today for teaching you about the wisdom of self-trust?" ...

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"Work hard. Add value to yourself. Your time will come when you are ready to give from your abundance." ...

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"Please never allow one little mistake to cause you to believe that nothing is good.  Correct what you need to correct and cherish and nurture all that is still good."

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"Success happens when both parties take responsibility for making it work. Success happens when best practices are in place and so on and so forth." ...

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"Many people are very busy living for tomorrow, today, which only robs us of the experience of being fully immersed in the present moment which is all we really have." ..

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"It’s not a choice. Not everyone who’s homeless is a drug-addict or in need of mental health care. Most are normal people who’ve been knocked down, and it can happen to you too." ...

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Barry Schwartz makes a passionate call for “practical wisdom” as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world.

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The way we’re taught to live has got to change, says author Casey Gerald. Too often, we hide parts of ourselves in order to fit in, win praise, and be accepted. But at what cost? In this inspiring talk, Gerald shares the personal sacrifices he made to attain success in the upper echelons of American society — and shows why it’s time for us to have the courage to live in the raw, strange magic of ourselves.

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Bruce Morton is involved with the professional sports industry in the Denver area, which includes the World Champion Nuggets, the Avalanche, the Rockies, and the Broncos. Bruce also runs an enterprise called “Cancer Interviews”. I love talking sports with Bruce, and in this interview, we tie the cancer world to the world of Major League Baseball. Here is Bruce’s link: http://www.cancerinterviews.com/ Please join us for this truly engaging interview with a different spin.

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Safe words are a tool used by people who enjoy play-acting danger. In such scenarios, words like no, stop, or help might just be a part of the scene as the naughty butler tries to evade the licentious baroness (or what have you).

And so a duo needs a safe word, something that wouldn’t naturally occur in such a scenario. For example, a naughty butler is unlikely to randomly shout, “Pineapple!” but a person who just got slapped too hard most certainly would, if it was their safe word.

At that point, all play stops. I would imagine a debrief would be helpful, too – what went too far? How could the scene be safer in the future? Is any repair needed between the two? This is one of the ways trust is built and maintained among duos who enjoy this kind of dangerous make-believe.

Also dangerous, though in a very different way, are all the rest of the iterations of interpersonal relationships.

Outside of the role-play, the danger lives in the emotional vulnerability of the connection, the way the more we open ourselves to emotionally intimate connection, the more we inevitably also open ourselves to painful fissures in those connections.

Recently, I was talking with a friend of indigenous Hawaiian lineage who also lives in Hawaii. People had been reaching out to her about the Maui fires, intending to be solicitous and kind. Statements like, “But you don’t live on that island, do you?” only added to her emotional strain, though, as she navigated how to respond to these texts on top of her grief around the fires.

As she shared this with me, she also shared that in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, as she reached out to Black friends in Minnesota (where she then lived), she received back some texts that suggested that they were feeling that same kind of exhaustion, as if to say, “I recognize you’re attempting kindness but really you’re adding to the emotional burden for me.”

I recall feeling a related form of conflict when George Floyd was murdered. Do I reach out or is that part of the performance of being a Good White Person? I did reach out some; some folks responded with moments of connection with me and some chose not to respond at all, presumably as each individual navigated their unique relationship with the moment and my outreach.

The day after my conversation with my Hawaiian friend, I sent a text with the suggestion of a safe word.

She loved the idea as much as I did… and it’s inherently flawed. Here’s the problem:

In the role-play, the licentious baroness-player has to be fully willing to own her responsibility in the scene. If she hears “Pineapple!” she has to be willing to stop immediately* and own her over-exuberance.

This might be hard for her. Really hard.

She might be wrapped up in thinking she’s great at this kind of role play or embarrassed that she got swept up in the moment, or feel shame that she was taken to task when she was intending to create something fun and sexy.

Her job – what allows the relationship to move forward – is to take responsibility and be willing to regroup with the naughty butler with openness and curiosity.

If she instead protests, “I didn’t hit you too hard!” or, worse yet, “I didn’t mean to hit you too hard!” she’s breaking the trust that allowed for the setup in the first place.

I say this to all of my fellow white folks who are reading: Same, same.

If you are a white person who cares about making positive world change on the interpersonal front, it starts with being willing to be uncomfortable.

That means being committed to owning your own responsibility so that you can bring openness and curiosity instead of staying in defensiveness or embarrassment or shame.

To recognize the problematic and long-standing racial dynamics in America is an important start. And it’s only that: a start. Awareness doesn’t make a person a Good White Person.

Truthfully, there is no such thing, not with the implications of having crossed a finish line of awareness, introspection, and full responsibility.

Instead, there is only continual learning…

…ever-expanding curiosity…

…and practicing managing our reactions so that we can be in it with the people we care about.

So! Ask your friends if they, too, would like what my friend and I now call a White Lady Safe Word… but be sure you’re up to owning your role in it first.

Be the best licentious baroness you can be, friend.

* I asked my friend to read this and give her edits and/or blessing and/or veto. That’s when she told me that “pineapple” – a word I chose with intention to be as random a word as possible and thus fit the bill for a solid safe word – has actually been historically used as a slur against native Hawaiians by colonizers. Happily, she found this coincidence mighty amusing.

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Redundancy in industrial plants plays a crucial role in ensuring reliability and continuity of operations. This strategy involves the duplication of critical components, enabling the system to operate even in the event of failure. Sectors such as energy, chemicals, and aviation benefit from this practice, as it ensures human safety and operational resilience. The benefits of redundancy include increased safety through risk reduction, business continuity during failures, overall reliability, and ease of maintenance. Ultimately, redundancy in systems is a fundamental approach to minimising disruptions, preserving safety, and ensuring the stability of industrial operations.

In the complex symphony of life, the human body emerges as a masterpiece of biological design. Every aspect of human anatomy and physiology appears to be carefully orchestrated to ensure survival and optimal functioning.

One of the fundamental principles that emerges from this evolved design is redundancy, a concept that shares remarkable similarities with the engineering strategies adopted to ensure the reliability of artificial systems.

Biological redundancy manifests itself in a number of ways within the human body. For example, the circulatory system, the heart in particular, is an eloquent example of this characteristic. With its four chambers and synchronised valves, the heart has a double pump that can continue to ensure effective blood circulation even if one part of the system is damaged. This dual structure ensures that the body can continue to supply vital oxygen and nutrients to the tissues even in adverse circumstances.

Another obvious example of redundancy is the nervous system. The brain is the body’s command centre, sending signals through complex neural networks. The presence of multiple neural pathways allows the brain to maintain communication even if some pathways are compromised by injury or disease. This multiple network ensures that crucial functions, such as muscle control and sensory perception, can continue smoothly.

Nature does not neglect vital organs either. The human body houses dual vital organs, such as the kidneys and lungs, which can perform their functions even if one of them is affected. This redundant approach provides a backup mechanism that helps preserve the survival and well-being of the individual.

Biological redundancy goes beyond mere structural duplication. It involves complex interactions between genes, proteins, and metabolic pathways, creating a resilient and flexible system capable of adapting to environmental challenges and stresses. This intelligent design, shaped by evolution over millions of years, demonstrates how nature itself embraces the concept of redundancy to ensure the survival of life.

In artificial intelligence (AI), redundancy comes in different forms. Redundant data include various sources of information to improve learning. Ensembles combine models for more reliable decisions. Deep neural networks with multiple layers act as redundant architectures. Physical AI systems have multiple safeties. Human interaction adds backup security. In critical situations, contingency plans maintain stability. Redundancy in AI aims to guarantee accuracy, security, and resilience.

In conclusion, redundancy in the human body is an eloquent witness to evolutionary ingenuity. This biological principle, which aims to ensure survival and optimal functioning, shares remarkable similarities with the engineering strategies adopted to ensure the reliability of artificial systems.

The human body is a model of how intelligent duplication and flexibility can work together to preserve integrity and functionality, offering a fascinating perspective on the interplay between nature and design.

Can the same logic of redundancy that makes the human body so reliable inspire and guide the engineering solutions that keep our industrial world functioning? How might we better apply this biological wisdom to address increasingly complex technological challenges?

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Hey, there! AmyK here.Could you use a lil’ more trust amongst your leadership team?

I get it. I really do.

Trust is often poorly defined which means it can be hard to genuinely create. Yet, there are several behaviors that result when you absolutely got it. Watch this quick video on how a leadership team with elevated trust plays full out and yields unprecedented growth.

From my heart to yours – hugs!

AmyK

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A dear friend who is both a poet and a contemplative shares his insights about what the external world reveals through the lens of the internal world. This inner world is a heart-space. For it is when we go within that we begin to see what is without with new eyes. He shared a recent unpublished poem titled, “This Day,” that opened my heart in stark realization about what normal is. The poem detailed the remarkable aspects of a normal day that starts with the unremarkable head lifting from pillow. It caused me to ask what is normal, what is remarkable or unremarkable, what is ordinary as opposed to extraordinary?

I cannot help but conclude that normal is breathtakingly extraordinary, and that sets the stage for a paradox—the ordinary is extraordinary, and that makes the extraordinary ordinary. Poet and mystic William Blake saw the world in a grain of sand. A simple and unremarkable grain of sand, totally ordinary and indistinguishable amidst the trillions of other grains shows us all we need to know about the deepest wonders and mysteries of creation.

When we awaken to the depth and meaning of the seemingly innocuous, the ordinary, and normal that surrounds us, it is an awakening within.

What presents around us is the ocean in which we swim without realizing all that the ocean represents. It is easy to notice the beauty of a majestic sunset or be swept away by watching a child comforting another child. These are moments of awareness when we are watching from the heart and noticing what the moment reveals. We are often struck with wonder and appreciation at these times when something breaks through and we are overtaken by our heart. We take note of the moment with a sense of awe, joy, or gratitude.

Yet, the sun rises and sets throughout the day, children play and interact all the time.

Is there anything less remarkable about the sun overhead right at this moment? At a dewdrop, or raindrop, or people riding in a bus, or the sidewalk that lies beneath our feet?

In mindful awareness, when we open up to how incredible everything around us is, the normal becomes extraordinary. We see everything with new eyes. In some ways, this is the heart of contemplation as we come to recognize the wonder that surrounds us.

When we begin to recognize and appreciate that we are both observing and participating in this incredible experience we call life, it is transformative. This opening to depth is present and available at any time in all circumstances. My fingers typing on this keyboard—who designed it, how many people helped produce its many component parts, transport it, market it? How many people handled it prior to it being delivered to me so that I can type this message? Who are these people and what are their stories? I could go deeper and deeper into all the incredible things that went into this moment of creation when I am sharing my thoughts with you. Or I can overlook, fail to appreciate, ignore this depth as I type. In so doing, I have failed to notice the extraordinary hidden in plain sight, literally at my fingertips.

It just rained and now the sun is shining. How remarkable is that? Just a simple rain shower at first glance. But at depth, it’s absolutely astonishing and reflects millions of years of planetary evolution, the water cycle on this planet, cloud formation, rain that nourishes the plants, sun, and water that give life to us, and all the living things around me. I don’t see a rainbow at this moment, but I don’t need one to break through to the contemplative heart within. I see the extraordinary in the ordinary and it’s a normal day to be alive and aware, to see the remarkable in the unremarkable, to recognize the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower. With this recognition, I drop into the moment, struck with awe, wonder, gratitude, and appreciation. And so as not to disrupt the contemplation, I halt my typing. Words are inadequate…

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Did you know that there is a marked difference between your inner critic and self-bullying?Your inner critic shows up through the words we say to ourselves during moments of frustration, angst, and despair. Self-bullying goes beyond this to behaviours we engage in which we bully ourselves and they are more damaging because we fail to recognise these behaviours in ourselves or even consider them motivating!

For example, we look at overachievers and admire them. But what really drives an overachiever? The need to find their worth and value in their achievements, if they don’t meet their goals, they feel like a failure. Are we really what we do?

What about an underdog? They thrive on proving others wrong but here’s the real question, would they have set out to prove naysayers wrong if no one doubted their abilities? They give their personal power away to the opinion of others. The need to prove others wrong doesn’t come from self-belief, it comes from self-doubt. Think about this – if we truly believed in ourselves and our abilities, would we feel the need to prove others wrong?

Being an obliger is another way in which we bully ourselves – avoiding tension, and keeping the peace but battling a raging war within ourselves because we choose not to speak our truth.

There are other ways in which we bully ourselves because of our Thought Processes and our Uniqueness (e.g. an Exhorter engaging in attention-seeking behaviour – causing drama. Afraid to take action/worry wart/fretter/nervous Nellie). This is something I teach extensively in my Uniqueness workshop.

So, why aren’t we able to stop these behaviours? Are we even aware of them?

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE INNER CRITIC AND SELF-BULLYING?

In order to understand the difference between the inner critic and self-bullying, it is important to understand how our brains work. Imagine driving a car. What do you control? The brakes, the accelerator, the clutch if you are driving a manual transmission, and the steering wheel. What do you have no control over? The engine, how the oil ensures the engine runs smoothly, and how the gas gets to the engine to turn it over.

We have direct control of only 10% of the functions of the car and no direct control over 90% of the other functions. That is how our brains work – we have direct access and control over 10% of our brain (the conscious brain) and no direct control or access to the remaining 90% of our brain (the unconscious brain).

Our behaviours come from the unconscious brain which we have no direct access to or control over. This is why we are unaware of self-bullying behaviours. Self-criticism comes from the conscious brain which we have direct access to and control over and hence are aware of the way we speak to ourselves. Furthermore, we rationalize our unconscious behaviour consciously, we condone/justify the bullying behaviour and hence are unaware that it is bullying.

The inner critic is a voice that speaks to us harshly often in response to an immediate external event – mistakes, failures, self-doubt, insecurities, etc. It is from the conscious brain. We are somewhat aware of how we speak to ourselves. “I am so stupid, I am dumb, I am an idiot, what’s wrong with me, I should’ve known better!” Sound familiar?

Self-bullying are behaviours that are run by the unconscious brain – we are actually not immediately aware of these behaviours because of this. These behaviours are usually not in response to an immediate external event though it is built up as a response to a series of external events. Self-bullying is usually a way of self-guarding from feeling hurt or disappointed, judged or rejected and because of this, we convince ourselves that these are motivational behaviours and not bullying. Self-bullying behaviour is one response to silence negative self-talk, the other is embracing a growth mindset.

WHY ARE WE NOT AWARE OF THESE BEHAVIOURS?

There are two main reasons why we are unaware of these behaviours, the first is mentioned above – our unconscious brain is the source of all of our energy, has an accurate record of everything that has ever happened to us, and is where our behaviours come from. We aren’t consciously aware of these behaviours and in addition to this, these behaviours come across as motivational and even inspirational. Because we consciously change them and try to ignore our unconscious when it makes us uncomfortable. We try HARDER.

Let me ask you this: Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten what you wanted to do? Have you ever tried to put the milk in the pantry? Have you ever written 2022 instead of 2023 for the first few weeks in January of a new year?

This is known as the Regulation Thought Process. When operating in this thought process, we are distracted and on autopilot. We have no thoughts or too many thoughts, making us unable to focus on a thought.

During the Regulation thought process, we are very likely to engage in self-bullying behaviours because we are distracted and unable to focus on what we are actually saying and doing resulting in us being unable to understand the consequences thereof. It turns out, people are in this Regulation thought process 94% of the time!

HOW DO WE COMBAT THE INNER CRITIC VS. COMBATING SELF-BULLYING?

In order to combat the inner critic, we need to address the harsh things we are saying to ourselves. What makes this somewhat “easier” is the fact that we are comparatively more aware of how hard we can be on ourselves because we are consciously aware of how we speak to ourselves. We can trace how we embraced and caused the thought process.

When I work with those who are mean or harsh to themselves, I like to ask a few questions to help them address this negative self-talk. For example: What is my negative automatic thought? Can I prove that this thought is true 100% of the time? Is this thought leading to healthy feelings and behaviours? How am I likely to feel and act if I continue to think this way? What evidence can I find against this thought? Has this belief worked for or against me in my life? Does this belief help me or restrict me in life? Would I encourage a friend to speak to themselves in this way?

COMBATING SELF-BULLYING

In my experience, self-bullying rears its ugly head often when we are consciously trying to achieve goals, avoid tension/criticism or disprove others/prove something to ourselves, and our unconscious responds with a behavior that we didn’t choose. Instead, we rationalize its value so we can continue moving forward, embracing the self-bullying without being conscious of it.

What is important to note is that whatever goals one sets out to achieve through self-bullying WILL be attained/achieved which is why self-bullying often wears the mask of self-motivation. The healthy way to achieve goals is through embracing a growth mindset. What sets a growth mindset apart from self-bullying is the intention (cause) of the actions we take in order to achieve our goals.

I would like to demonstrate this through two examples:

Recently, I was invited to attend a workshop and when I looked at the date and time of this workshop, my initial thought was, “I don’t want to go, I can’t make it, there’s too much going on around that time.” The workshop was scheduled to take place two days before my kids went back to school, it would run through dinner prep time and I wasn’t familiar with the part of the city where this workshop was being hosted.

If I were to bully myself into attending this workshop, this is what it would look like:

The cause of tension: Taking a chance to meet new people and doing a lot of work to get there.

Comfortable Result (excuse not to go): it is two days before the kids start school, the location is too far, it is late in the day, I won’t be back in time to make dinner etc. So I can choose to stay home instead because I have “valid” reasons not to go.

Self-bullying approach: Telling myself to do it, forcing myself to do it to prove that I can do it for the effect (not the cause) – the effect of not feeling FOMO, the effect of not wanting to lose out on the opportunity to network, the effect of not having regrets or what people will say about me.

If I were to approach attending this workshop with a growth mindset, this is what it would look like:

The cause of tension: Taking a chance to meet new people and doing a lot of work to get there

Growth Result: Build connections, learn something new, and build confidence driving to a new part of the city.

Growth mindset approach: This is an opportunity to network, to meet new people, to learn something new. I will figure the rest out (dinner, school etc.).

What is worth noting is that I decided to attend the workshop either way but the WHY (the cause of why I attend it) would differentiate whether it is self-bullying or a growth mindset. The end result would be the same – attending the workshop but the difference between self-bullying and a growth mindset lies in the cause/ the WHY of attending it.

The second story I wish to share comes from Andrew. In his words:

“When I was in high school I struggled with my mental health, but my teachers often could tell that I was gifted in my intelligence. They pushed me to try honors courses.

But when I took honors chemistry my teacher didn’t have patience for me loafing off. He made jokes at my expense and I felt stupid. After that class, I didn’t have to take any more science classes, but I wanted to prove him wrong because I felt bullied by him so I enrolled in physics, which was spoken of as the hardest class in the school by the student body.

I fell in love with the field of physics and that’s what springboarded me into engineering and getting deeper into science.

Because my teacher bullied me, I found a field of study that I got energy from intrinsically. That never happened from the teachers who tried to encourage me even though I was a mess. Comparing those two scenarios could easily cause someone to come to the conclusion that bullying works.

But I was still a mess! I continued to struggle with depression and suicidal thoughts for the next five years until I learned to deal with my own thought process.”

Take note, Andrew took on the hardest class in school to prove his chemistry teacher wrong. This is a self-bullying approach – trying to prove others wrong. What would this have looked like had he embraced a growth mindset to take physics?

The cause of tension: Being misunderstood and bullied because of being gifted in intelligence.

Growth Result: Exploring an area of science that would cultivate and nurture Andrew’s gifts.

Growth mindset approach: Seeing physics as an opportunity to cultivate, nurture and explore the extent of Andew’s gifted intelligence.

Note, the end result is the same – Andrew still would have springboarded into engineering and science but the cause (the reason WHY) he chose to do it would’ve been different resulting in him being in less of a mess than he was when he bullied himself into it.

In conclusion, I feel it is important to differentiate between combating the inner critic and combating self-bullying because how we address each is different. Furthermore, self-bullying is a silent bully who wears the mask of inspiration and motivation which is celebrated and encouraged.

Are you wondering what the harm is in bullying yourself into achieving your goals vs. having a growth mindset? After all, either way, you achieve your goals, right? From my personal experience, self-bullying eventually results in burnout.

How do you approach goals? Are you bullying yourself into achievement by disguising it as motivating yourself?

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Everyone will have heard of the “great resignation”, i.e. the tendency to voluntarily abandon jobs, even well-paid ones, opting for one where work is more on a human scale.

Resignations can have very different reasons: work methods more on a human scale, a greater balance between the private sphere and the working sphere, ethical motivations, environmental situations, etc. are at the basis of the decision to leave the job. It is the desire, increasingly widespread in the new generations, to “re-appropriate” one’s life by reshaping the relationship with work.

Unfortunately, not always with a radical change of life as an epilogue.

So, we can say that today’s cultural challenge is to rediscover the human dimension of work as an element of citizenship, participation, and inclusion, without forgetting the search for sustainability.

This vision starts from the assumption that work does not only serve as an element of income and, indeed, the new generations in particular are aware that not only what can be measured through a price has value.

Work must be experienced as a collective commitment to social cohesion and inclusion. It must be a path of relationship between people, of personal growth, an instrument of autonomy and emancipation, the continuation of creation for believers, and a collective effort where everyone can make choices that determine their own future and that of society.

The world of work must include young people who are the best wealth that a country possesses, if only because they have the necessary initiative to blaze new trails.

It must include women to enhance the work with their sensitivity and organizational aptitude. Must find effective solutions for the inclusion of those who have been forced out of work during a crisis, promote a healthy balance between people from various backgrounds and cultures, recognizing, without prejudice but promoting their valorisation, the differences between employees (age, gender, ethnicity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, education or nationality).

As a further matter, the great challenge, at the beginning of the era of man-machine interaction, is precisely the enhancement of the person, for an increasingly human work, based on knowledge and protection of the environment.

The world of work has always been the best promoter of development, well-being, equality, and emancipation for all, helping to create a development that has been able to combine wealth and solidarity, although it is not always easy to achieve these purposes everywhere.

In the future, the challenge of putting the person at the center will be even more demanding: young people, the elderly, women, agile work that does not mean “working remotely” and that’s it but, rather, combining remote work with office work, reorganizing work based on the concept of responsibility and not of time, having adequate tools to facilitate collaboration, redesigning physical spaces, imagining different ways of using services by citizens, etc.

And then (better now!) addressing the major issues of inclusion and sustainability, not only from an ethical point of view but simply because we are realizing that it is convenient for everyone.

In fact, I do not believe that ethical motivations alone can solve every problem in this sector, then also have a positive impact on the economy.

We must be firmly aware that an inclusive approach is not only good for those who, for the most varied reasons, experience a condition of diversity with respect to the context in which they find themselves, but it represents an advantage for all people, for companies, for society in general.

The same goes for sustainability, the ability of companies to commit their efforts not only to safeguarding the environment but also to operate taking into consideration other variables such as the social context in which the company operates and the people who work in the business (but I would like to talk more about sustainability).

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Episode DescriptionI changed the name of my podcast this year to View From the Roof because I wanted to go deeper with my conversations. I believe that’s a vast understatement of what I explore in this episode with my guest Zen Benefiel.

When I met Zen at the beginning of this year, I had an experience of nothing other than pure love. He was leading a discussion and it seemed with every syllable he spoke, the room allowed for just a little bit more vulnerability and flow than they did before. The space between those syllables was the sacred, the space of a harmonious being.

As we got to know one another, I found him remarkably adept at tying big concepts together, which is something human beings are hungry for right now.

In the old paradigm, we viewed aspects of our lives in a state of separateness. Science, spirituality, religion, our careers, our bodies, our friendships, etc were things that we viewed as, for the most part, seemingly unrelated.

Even now, as society intellectually explores things like AI and UFOs – many of these concepts are filed away in our minds as “other.” And yet, what if it’s all part of the infinite intelligence?

Zen has been talking about consciousness deeply since the 70s and 80s, when his message could hardly be heard, never mind understood. I’ve been a voracious consumer of his content for a few months, and I’m honored to have him as my guest on View From the Roof. The pandemic facilitated a phenomenal opportunity for us as points of consciousness to become more aware of who we truly are. As Zen says,

We all have a perfected form, fit, and function. It’s a genetic and solar blueprint that we carry, that we have not been paying attention to because we didn’t understand the intricacies of how well-designed we are. That comes from acquiescing to allowing that flow to come, and not using the same thinking that caused our problems to solve them.

Maybe it’s time we start connecting the missing links.

I hope you’ll take an opportunity to explore some big shit with us in this episode. I find that so many of us share that deep inner knowing of who we are, and we allow whatever we think we should be to take over and keep us from ourselves. This podcast is just one more step in putting all of the things together and having it make sense. As Zen would say, “Then make sense common, so we can all rise to that level of love that we’ve been living in, that we’ve been denying for millennia.”

You can learn more about Zen by checking out all of his links below. If you don’t know where to start, I’d say check out his primary website and his show One World in a New World on YouTube.

Zen’s Links:Primary Website: https://ZenBenefiel.com
Coaching: https://BeTheDream.com
Partnering: https://TeamPartnering.com
Facebook: https://facebook.com/zenbenefiel
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/zenbenefiel
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bethedreamllc
Medium: https://medium.com/@zenbenefiel
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Be_The_Dream
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/zenbenefiel
YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/OneWorldinaNewWorld
Substack: https://zendorphines.substack.com

**If you liked this episode and want to support View From the Roof, you can do so by leaving a tip in the tip jar.

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Recent discussions about antisemitism have fostered awareness of hatred in all its myriad forms. As a result of this awareness, some people are stepping up to raise awareness still higher — to communicate, to educate, and to move toward the middle ground at which every stereotype breaks down at the level of the individual. Mark is joined by three guests to discuss hate and to announce two new initiatives: Stop Hate 360˚ and Unsheltered: Voices From the Street.

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Our lives are sometimes held together by masking tape. No, not the kind you buy in the hardware store. This kind of tape is built thread by thread, incident by incident, decision after decision; taped over abandonment, unworthiness, guilt, shame, fear, or any other variety of demon. Given enough time, it is strong enough to hold all our cards in the game of adulthood. Every day we are in this game, playing with our deck held together by that masking tape. Of course, our masking tape is undetectable, even beautiful in an odd sort of way never noticed by others. It comes in many shapes, sizes, colors, and expressions. And, on its surface, it holds any mask you want and sticks you together. Pretty cool don’t ya think?

Original painting by Anne O’BrienWe can seem invincible in our craft of hiding, stretch after stretch after stretch. But deep down, under the persona of the mask, under the threads we so carefully weave together, lie open wounds that never get enough air and sunlight to breathe. They grow and grow, seeping and festering in the dark, past corners where no one is allowed to go, not even you.

I wonder in a fleeting moment: why doesn’t this ick just go away? But I know, and I can tape a good game. My masking tape is so strong it can hold me together. Words like, “I’ve got this. I’ll keep on going. I just can’t worry about being so tired. This game is exhausting,” swirl like funnel clouds in the demanding murk.

It’s a beautiful day. The air waltzes with the sun on the dance floor of that mask, moving with the utmost grace and tenderness. Feeling? What’s that? Feeling? Why would the mask cry at such an incredible tender feeling? Why is the tape softening? Fear oozes out from behind the mask, grabbing hold of all that darkness.

“Don’t melt my persona!” the mask cries. “I’ve been friends with those demons I hide for a real long time and they don’t want to go!” But the dance continues, reaching for the light of the sky with all the goodness it beholds. The mask cries and melts to the change of the game. A strange little whisper comes in:

“Help me,” it whispers.” Help me”.

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According toRobert Bruce Shaw, author ofLeadership Blindspots,blind spots are unrecognized weaknesses or threats that can hinder a leader’s success. Weaknesses that we possess and that we know about aren’t likely to derail us from our goals. However, the weaknesses that we don’t know about are the dangerous ones.

Based on my experience as an organisational consultant, as well as what I’ve learned from the research of Shaw and Karen Blakeley (who is also an expert on the subject), I’ve found that one of the most common causes of leadership blind spots is pride bordering arrogance. This very ignorance generally manifests itself in the following ways:

1. Overconfidence: A Silent KillerNeedless to say, excess to anything in life isn’t normal. The same goes forconfidence. We, as professional leaders, must make a deliberate effort to normalize the talent and attributes associated with all the aspects of what we call ‘Talent’. The bell should start ringing when we see someone is committing an act or overdoing or overcommitting etc. As per Encyclopedia “Overconfidence is an overestimation of one’s abilities and need for expended effort and an underestimation of the situational demands that one will face”. In fact, Overconfidence bias can destroy the company.

Willful blind spots occur when people are overconfident. For instance, some leaders only want to hear what they want to hear or read reports and data that they want to read. This can be extremely dangerous for an organization, because leaders need to be able to comprehend issues from various viewpoints. Confidence typically grows with past success, and it can lead to overusing the formula that provided results, thus creating blind spots on alternative solutions for the same goal.

1. Masked Positivity: An Uncalled for ActBeing overly positive can also create blind spots. In such a “euphoric” stance about something, some leaders can’t rightly assess when and why other people disagree with their ideas. The common trap is that great leaders commonly champion and push ideas that go against the grain. I don’t believe we would recognize the names Ford, Gates, Jobs or Musk (no first names are required to know who we are speaking about) if they did not fight with a fierce commitment to their ideas and vision.

To me, positivity is essential to drive a vision and inspire and overcome problems. Still, we must also build checks into our processes and methods to identify elements that can present risks and other immediate threats.

Remember that a leader’s job is to ensure weaknesses and risks are taken care of long before they create problems.

1. Power CorruptsAlthough power is essential to taking charge and driving change, it makes leaders vulnerable to two traps that can not only erode their own effectiveness but also undermine their teams. Hubris — the excessive pride and self-confidence that comes with power — causes people to greatly overestimate their own abilities, while focus makes them less attentive to subordinates, diminishing their ability to lead successfully. A balanced relationship with power can seldom be developed overnight, but in time, leaders who follow this advice will boost their own effectiveness and facilitate exceptional performance from their teams.

Power or perceived power that is related to a position or title can create a level of over-confidence and, in many cases, a false perception that others expect the person with the title to solve unilaterally. That mistaken perception (itself a blind spot) will create other blind spots by shutting out different perspectives and potential solutions. Power-related blind spots can be exacerbated in times of crisis when immediate action is expected and required.

1. Indecisive Leadership StyleWorking with a few CEOs, I always wondered how they made it to that level with such poor decision-making ability. I’ve seen indecisive leadership sink more than a few ships. Our job as a leader is to make decisions that make things happen. That doesn’t mean we make decisions all by ourselves. The best leaders always involve a team in their decision-making. But we still need to make timely decisionthat what we are paid for. What makes decision-making hard at a senior leadership level is that someone’s neck is on the line.

Remember, delay leads to paralysis. And paralysis leads to stagnation and decline. Delayed decision-making demotivates the team. So make a decision, and create a process for making sure decisions get made regularly and quickly. Sure, every once in a while you need to take a long time to make a decision. But far too many leaders use that as an excuse.

1. Solo Decision MakersEvery problem has a flip side, and the flip side of being indecisive is being overdecisive. Some leaders make instant decisions based on their gut feeling, without any input from anyone else, and that is also frustrating to their teams. I think it’s a good practice for every senior leader to be a part of something they don’t lead. I’ve e worked with a couple of organizations where the top man calls the shorts on everything. It helps me realize how the team feels being left out in the key decision-making process.

Xerox’s Barry Randwas right on target when he warned his people saying that“if you have a yes-man working for you, one of you is redundant”.As leaders, we don’t need to surround ourselves with ‘puppets’ or ‘yes minsters’. Let’s help create a healthy, lively, and thinking work culture. Encourage teams to bring forward newer ideas, come up with logical debate, and have the courage to sayNO.

Wrap UpTrust is the invisible thread that weaves through the fabric of successful companies. It’s the catalyst for effective connection, communication, and collaboration. To effectively navigate the intricacies of today’s workplace, we need to be aware of the above key leadership blindspots that hinder trust, and then be intentional about overcoming them.

When we lead, we are certain about the incredible responsibility we have assumed toward the organisation and our teams. Always remember that leadership, by definition, is not a solo sport. We’re leading people, and how we do it ultimately determines how effectively we perform as leaders. It also means we need to become exceptionally self-aware of our weaknesses. If we think about it, the leaders we’ve probably liked the least have been the least self-aware.

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I remember calling my father many years ago and asking him about the time change (Daylight Savings Time).

I wasn’t sure whether I needed to set my clock forward an hour or back an hour. After he confidently gave me his answer, I questioned him, “Are you sure?” Being the subtle character that he was, my dad said to me, “Why did you call me if you did not plan to believe the answer I gave to you?” This experience has stayed with me most of my adult life, for I reflect about it in a deeper way now. He was right, of course. Why would I call upon him if I did not have faith and trust in his answer? From various experiences with him in my youth, my father had rarely witnessed my total trust in him. I had seen him respond to so many events in such a reactive and insane way that I could never completely relax, let go, or be myself around him.

It took his death to open my heart and fully engage in the gifts he had offered me. He gave me the ability to communicate with anyone, to connect immediately with strangers (this is definitely a skill), the openness to always seek a solution, the strength to persevere, and the ability to move beyond “no” as the final answer to bravely and confidently discover what was before me. This experience with my father touched me, yet I was guided to apply the lesson to a deep spiritual level. What about my Creator, Spirit, God? Why do I similarly call upon this amazing presence if I am unwilling to believe in the answers that I receive?

Why do we take time to pray if we do not trust our answers? And why would we not totally trust the same energy which we are made of? Why are we so willing to listen so quickly to the opinion of anyone else, even though he or she may not model the answers we are seeking?

An Enlightened Rebel understands the immense value of trusting the inner core and wisdom which comes from a power greater than themselves. It is time for a TIME change, and we are the ones to move it forward.

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Celebrate the power of unity with “Better Together” Song Around The World, featuring Jack Johnson, Paula Fuga, Lee Oskar, and talented musicians from around the globe. This beautiful, feel-good song was a single, released in February 2006 from Jack Johnson’s third studio album, “In Between Dreams,” and was inspired by his love for his wife. “Better Together” has a universal message that “it’s always better together” when we lead with love as the answer.

None of us, including me, ever do great things. But we can all do small things, with great love, and together we can do something wonderful.

~Mother Teresa

Join us on Our Friendship Bench any Thursday or every Thursday at 11:30 AM Eastern if you’re ready to do small things with great love and create something wonderful while making new friends along the way. Click below for more︎

Discovering Magic: At The Middle of a Bench

Because it’s ALWAYS better when we’re together …

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“Why did she love him so much? He always seemed to women different from what he was, and they loved in him not himself, but the man created by their imagination, whom they had been seeking all their lives; and afterwards, when they noticed their mistake, they loved him all the same. And not one of them had been happy with him.”

–From The Lady with the Dog, by Anton Chekhov

In Anton Chekhov’s short story, The Lady with the Dog, a bored, cynical, serially unfaithful married man has a brief affair with a frustrated, insecure married woman while each is taking a holiday alone. Two deeply unfulfilled people persuaded that adulterous sex will overcome the pointless charade of their lives, drift into a relationship fated to become an “intolerable bondage”. Consumed by shallow passions, and oblivious of the needs of others, they can see no meaning in life, just futility, the burden that characterises their affair from the start.

Chekhov understood the impact that loss of a sense of meaning must inevitably have on society, and he recognised the psychological flaw that has over several centuries come to exemplify the modern mind: the ancient affliction of acedia, or accidie in English. His insight was reaffirmed by Victor Frankl, the Austrian psychotherapist, who saw that the “will to meaning” has priority over Freud’s “will to pleasure” and Nietzsche’s “will to power”.

The implications for leadership, especially at a time when we suffer from a leadership deficit at all levels of society, are far-reaching. People afflicted by acedia will hardly be predisposed to inspire others – in the home, workplace, community, or nation – to be the best they can be in working together for the good of all.

Acedia is the refusal to acknowledge one’s true nature, the denial of one’s purpose and potential in life. It is a rejection of the demands and duties that accompany the essential dignity of human nature, that of the rational animal, the puny creature that can nonetheless comprehend the cosmos. Of course, the dignity of the human person is today widely disputed, though hypocritical appeals to the responsibility of rationality are still made in pursuit of certain ideological agendas.

The ancient Greeks understood that one of the greatest moral failures possible was acedia, from the prefix ‘a’ denoting negation, and ‘kedos’, meaning care. They saw it as a lack of mindfulness, a spiritual indifference, an alienation of self from the world. In the Iliad, Homer tells of the acedia of Achilles in his shameful treatment of the body of the defeated Hector, which he drags behind his chariot in defiance of the Olympian gods and the Greek code of conduct.

In the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica, likened the sin of acedia to torpor mentis, inertia of the mind, which captures the sense of acedia more fully than mere sloth. Later, Chaucer gave an illuminating discourse on acedia in The Parson’s Tale.

Aldous Huxley, in an essay entitled “Accidie”, found it strange that acedia morphed from a deadly sin in the Middle Ages to become understood as the disease of melancholy during the Renaissance, and later as a lyrical emotion, inspiring much of the most typical modern literature. A sense of futility and alienation, and feelings of ennui and despair, seems to have fired the imaginations of creative minds for a century and more, and still does today. Boredom, futility, and despair are known throughout history, but the modern world contrived to make them respectable as signs of heroic self-expression.

Acedia is rife today, afflicting those appointed to lead as well as those called to follow. It is evident in the music and lyrics of the widely popular Billie Eilish, for example. The enervating lack of meaning arises from a worldview that exalts the detached, autonomous self, and proclaims the inviolability of individual choice. Predictably, unrestrained shopping, sex, and self-exaltation, the nihilism that insists that “what I want is all that matters”, issue only in the spiritual wasteland of acedia.

For the Greeks acedia had to be conquered by ‘enkrateia’, from kratos, meaning power, not over others, but over oneself, the willingness to subdue weakness, and obey a properly formed conscience. In Hinduism, enkrateia would be likened to dharma, which is seen in the Bhagavad Gita when Krishna exhorts a hesitant Arjuna to attack his kinsmen, the Kauravs, on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. Failure to do so would be a denial of dharma, the spiritual imperative that directs virtuous conduct in defiance of emotions like fear, anger, dejection, and the carnal promptings of the ego.

Where there is a lack of meaning, there can be no meaningful society, because social bonds require motivation, which necessarily rests on things that have meaning for the people to be motivated. And where there is no society, there can be no leadership, just raw power and compulsion. Acedia drains the spirit from both individual and community, from workforce and management, from citizen and nation.

As Plato told us, “Man is a being in search of meaning.” To abandon the search is to reduce the human person to a thing. And things don’t need leaders, they are simply used.

Originally published on my Substack, a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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What is it that has us needing to ‘know’ what is going to happen before it even happens? We used to love the experience of not knowing as children – we loved being surprised! Each breath was filled with magic and wonder as we interacted with the world around us. Each moment was new, and all possibilities were open to happening in our lives.

These days, as an adult, I see so many people struggle with themselves at work or school, feeling less than, unimportant, or cast aside when they don’t ‘know’ what is going to happen. They fear that not knowing could keep them from having a choice in the future. Needing to know before it happens can limit our experience as we bring all of our unmet expectations to the unknown situation. Most of us want to know about how and when things are going to happen – those things we want and those we don’t want. Knowing in advance is a common strategy of the ego trying to keep us safe and protect us from harm. The strategy goes like this – if we can build a story now about what is going to happen later, then we can use that story to stay safe and have choices when the situation happens. It gives our ego the illusion that we have a choice by knowing in advance so we can decide what is the best upfront, instead of responding with our preference during the actual experience.

While planning is helpful, we often miss the richness of a new experience by leading with our expectations. For instance, if we go into a public space anticipating people to respond in a judgmental way, we may go into that experience feeling guarded and reticent to engage with others. As a result, we may come off as aloof or snotty because we have an assumption that we need to be cautious and limit our connection with others to protect ourselves. In another example, If I take a self-care trip to recharge and reset with my natural rhythm but plan every moment of the getaway, it defeats the purpose. Without allowing time for ‘not knowing’ or ‘just being’ I never come back to my natural rhythm.

What if we could go into each new experience innocent, knowing we can choose what is best for us based on what we know in each moment?

If we let go of needing to know the future and allow ourselves to ‘go with the flow’, the possibilities are endless! Trusting that we can honor what is right for us moment-to-moment, opens our lives to a newfound sense of adventure and excitement unbound by the limits of expectations. What is happening right now is perfect and if the next moment doesn’t feel the same, I trust myself to honor and do what is most loving to me when that moment comes.

Can you shift from needing to know to being in the flow today?

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Being free means being free from our egoistic desires, which make us wish to benefit ourselves at the expense of others and nature. In other words, freedom means becoming free from our egoistic nature that rules over us, so that instead of constantly thinking about our personal benefit, we instead think about the benefit of others—of everyone together as a single whole.

Freedom means becoming free from our egoistic nature that rules over us, so that instead of constantly thinking about our personal benefit, we instead think about the benefit of others—of everyone together as a single whole.

Similarly to how we think about ourselves today when we become free from our egos, we then think about humanity as we now think about ourselves. Also, even beyond humanity, we then think about the whole universe—nature on the still, vegetative, animate, and human levels—as a single system of which we are its parts, and that there is an upper force filling and sustaining this system.

We then accept everything as our own system, which we live in and care for, and that everything and everyone in this system is equally important, equally caring about everyone to the maximum of our ability.

Reaching such a state of freedom requires mutual support, consideration, and encouragement of one another to overcome our divisive egoistic desires.

Reaching such a state of freedom requires mutual support, consideration and encouragement of one another to overcome our divisive egoistic desires.

How could we reach such a level of support, care, and encouragement in society, to overcome the ego?

We can do so through education, i.e., by adjusting our educational, media, social, and cultural influences so that we learn why we are alive, what we live for, how nature works both inside and outside of us, what nature wants from us, and that we truly reach a state of positive human connection, with friendly relations between people, nations and continents—that everyone would connect around the world “as one man with one heart.”

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Jose Hernandez’s ambition to become a doctor in Cuba was thwarted.  Hear how he came to the US and planted seeds that revived his grandfather’s business.  Jose has grown it into a firm with international reach.

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The tendency to see what you expect to see, to project your core beliefs outward, is very powerfully manifest in what you say, in your words. So, if you’re walking around believing, “I am a mess” or “I am a loser,” or “I am unattractive,” then chances are you will also say these things, in one way or another. And the very act of verbalizing this false belief reinforces those fundamental lies about who and what you are. And of course, from there, the tendency is to seek relief in all types of detrimental external behaviors. Therefore, it’s important to recognize the power of language, specifically the power of the “I am.” What you attach your “I am” to is quite powerful. Every time you say (or think), “I am _______ (a drunk, boring, stupid, etc.),” you reinforce a lie about yourself. In my counseling work, when I can help someone move from “I am” to “I have,” there is often a powerful shift.

For example, some years ago my friend Gavin told me that he had been saying “I am depressed” for a long time and had recently come to realize what he was saying. Once he noticed this, he also realized that the more he continued to believe and express the belief, “I am depressed,” the more depressed he felt. But when he shifted to saying, “I have depression” or “I feel depressed,” everything began to change. He was able draw the important distinction between being depressed and having the experience of depression. Saying “I have depression” allowed him to start to see the depression as something nonessential and changeable, rather than as something fundamental to his identity. This opened him up to his essential self, his true self, which wasn’t depressed. This true self was beyond the symptoms of depression.

Gavin’s story had a profound impact on me and dramatically shifted the way I work. I started to work on helping people shift from statements like: “I am an addict,” “I am broken,” “I am damaged in some way,” to “I have these things about myself that want to be healed.” A profound healing realization can happen when we make that shift because, for the first time, we have identified the truth of who and what we are not as brokenness, but as something else, something more positive and powerful.

In other words, when we can finally shine some light on our inner dialogue and witness that these seemingly broken portions of ourselves are not essential, but are changeable, then we can start to open to the possibility that our true self is something much more profoundly beautiful and whole.

My invitation to you today is to take a moment and really ask yourself, “How am I speaking to myself? What am I attaching my ‘I am’ to?” My hope is that it will be possible to shift that language to something that’s more accurate and that the distinction that this creates will make further room for what you genuinely are: “I am whole and perfect; I am love; I am lovable.” Just imagine what might happen if you were to shift this focus from something that seems broken about yourself into something that supports your wholeness and healing.

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In January 2008, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed a sweeping plan to ease Manhattan’s desperate traffic problems. At the time, according to U. S. News and World Report, the number of vehicles entering downtown had been growing annually by an average of 8000 per day since the 1920s, resulting in an unsustainable critical mass.

The mayor’s plan would encourage – or coerce – commuters to rely on public transportation by imposing a daytime tax of $8 per car and $21 per truck traveling onto the island. City officials believed that this “congestion pricing” would ultimately reduce traffic by as much as 12 ½ percent.

At first, the plan seemed a sure bet. A broad coalition of civic, business, labor, health, and environmental organizations endorsed the plan, together with state senators, representatives, and councilmen. “Congestion pricing,” they claimed, would increase revenues, expand regional rapid transit, reduce air pollution, create jobs and, of course, ease traffic. The U.S. Department of Transportation was so enthusiastic that it had already awarded $354 million to New York to kick-start the project. The planning commission approved the project by a vote of 13 – 2.

But the proposal generated equally passionate opposition, so much so that the state assembly failed to hold a vote by the April 7 deadline. Opponents argued that drivers seeking to avoid the pricing zone would cause traffic to spill over into adjacent communities, that added fees would place undue burden on the middle class, that not all neighborhoods would benefit equally, and that enforcement cameras threatened civil liberties. Despite the success of similar programs in London, Stockholm, and Singapore, the proposal died.

Would it have worked? Probably, yes; and here’s the evidence:

Only three months later, gas prices spiked to nearly four dollars a gallon. Simultaneously, traffic into Manhattan dropped by 5 percent, the initial target figure for Mayor Bloomberg’s plan. A significant number of people who had fought the government’s plan willingly traded their cars for public transportation when the cost of driving became too high.

More than any other nationality, Americans love their cars. This comes as no surprise if we consider the car as an allegory for personal autonomy. In a very real sense, nearly all of us are control freaks; we want to feel our hands firmly on the wheel of destiny, steering our own course into the future.

But when we come to life’s crossroads, we often choose one road over the other without adequate knowledge of where either may lead. And as we embark down the path of unanticipated danger, we may only discover much later how fortunate we were that obstacles appeared in our way to stop us in our course. The problems, frustrations, and inconveniences we curse when they arise often prove our greatest benefactors in the end.

A young man from the country traveled to the big city to buy supplies for his father’s store. In the city, he stayed with his uncle, on whom he relied to guide him in his business dealings.

Upon hearing of his nephew’s excited plans to sample the nightlife of the city, the uncle feared that the inexperienced young man might fall prey to unscrupulous characters and come to harm through all manner of unsavory activities. The uncle made a number of calls to contacts throughout the city, and immediately the young man found himself so preoccupied with business that he had not a spare minute to indulge his curiosity.

At the end of his trip, the boy complained to his uncle that he had been unable to experience the city. On the other hand, he confessed, he had done more business than he could have anticipated so that his father would surely be proud of him and give him more responsibilities in running the family store. The uncle smiled and expressed delight that his nephew’s business had turned out so well.

Only long after the young man had returned home did it occur to him that maybe his uncle had had something to do with the remarkable success of his trip.

Some call it karma. Some talk about destiny, or fate, or kismet. In Solomon’s tradition, it is the hand of Providence that causes obstacles to spring up before us and make the paths of personal autonomy increasingly difficult to travel. We feel stifled in our jobs, unhappy with our families, and discontented with the direction of our lives. We perceive the natural ebb and flow of life as a continual series of roadblocks and dead ends.

So we seek out “detours,” looking for fulfillment in the least likely places: alcohol, drugs, gambling, or adulterous affairs. We think change will make us feel better, but we usually find ourselves worse off than before.

And even when we get it right, even when we find fulfillment in our careers, families, and communities, the paths of life are rarely without potholes; holding a straight course poses a never-ending challenge.

With every step forward, we need to weigh our options and calculate the costs and benefits, evaluate which detours are necessary and which are more hazardous than keeping to a straight but tortuous main road.

If we hit a brick wall, we have to decide whether to go under, over, around, or through it – or turn back and seek a different course altogether.

Even if we are willing to reevaluate our course constantly, we may find that repeated obstacles seem to be telling us that we should give up, when in fact we are on the verge of a breakthrough; or we may try to conquer obstacles before us again and again when in fact we have no chance of success.

But if we keep our eye on the distant goal of living our lives according to moral principles and moral discipline, then whatever detours we have to traverse and however much backtracking we have to endure, we can be confident that our efforts have not been wasted and will not be in vain. By keeping our objective in sight and our eyes on every step, we cannot fail.

From Proverbial Beauty: Secrets for Success and Happiness from the Wisdom of the Ages, just released in audio format. For information, please click here.

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Let us take four scenarios first.First Scenario- You meet with an over-talker. He takes over the discussions. You try to say something but then he jumps to say let me finish my point of view and continues. This person does not know that he made you feel irritated and angry.

Second Scenario- You meet with a person who is consistent in what he says and does. Soon, you feel relaxed talking to him.

Third Scenario- You meet with a person and you have no idea what his intentions are. You suspect this person to say sweet things to cover his real intentions. He makes you feel worried and undecided.

Fourth Scenario- You meet with a successful man who suddenly lost his zeal for life. He does not know why. You too have no idea what is wrong with him. You feel unknowing what to do. He feels the same. Could it be he is suffering from an unknown illness? Probably, either one of you have a clear idea. You both feel undecided.

Classification of BehaviorsThe preceding four scenarios lead to the following classification of human behaviors

• Behaviors known to others and me (open area)
• Behaviors unknown to others and me (unknowns area)
• Behaviors known to me but not to others (hide area)
• Behaviors known to others but not me (blind area)

Behaviors that I know and others know put both in the open area. I know my behaviors well and others’ behaviors. We both know we make each other feel relaxed. We have no doubt of each other’s intentions. We exchange information openly.

A great leader is one who creates an atmosphere of openness in his team because this is what maximizes cooperation and the exchange of information and skills. Leadership becomes simple and fun in this area.

The unknowns are the most complex area a leader faces in leading. He is dealing with unknowns such as the sudden emergence of competing technology. When in new competitor shows up is another example.

Leading in the darkness of unknowns is a challenge that leaders face in our VUCA world.

The hide area such as having a secret hiding from others or a skill that you hide from others is another challenge for leaders. This attitude stifles cooperation in teams.

Hiding real intentions from others brings doubt and doubt erodes trust. Transparent communication is a prerequisite to collaboration among teams. In an environment with overshadowing clouds of doubt, it only rains more doubt. A team leader must cater for this issue promptly.

The unfortunate reality is that many people think they know themselves and in fact, they do not. They hide from themselves. They think they are friendly when they are arrogant. They behave the same way without attempting to amend their behaviors. Aristotle was right to call for the need to know self.

The blind area is when people know about you what you do not know. Talkative people do not realize they are talkative but other people know. Feedback is necessary in these cases.

In today’s world with multicultural prevailing teams, a leader will have many new unknowns emerging. The transition period for reducing the areas other than the open area is decreasing.

Great leaders have a big task and that is to make what seems undoable to the majority doable. These leaders grasp the concept of The Johari Window.

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If you’re feeling lonely, the natural thing to do might be to seek out company: to call a friend or say yes to a hangout. But, counterintuitively, a new study finds that if we’re very lonely, being around other people may not actually help us feel any better.

Degrees of lonelinessAcross three studies, researchers surveyed over 3,000 people in Germany and the U.K. about their daily experiences. In one study, people recalled events from the day before; in the other studies, people received pings by phone up to seven times a day and filled out mini-surveys about what they were doing and how they were feeling in the past hour. In each, the researchers found that people who felt lonelier had lower well-being in that moment (in terms of the kinds of emotions they were feeling, like happiness, anger, sadness, and boredom, as well as their sense of satisfaction and meaning). That wasn’t surprising.

What was surprising is that this pattern was even stronger when people were in a social situation, when we might expect to be protected from the pain of loneliness.

“Simply spending time with others . . . may even backfire,” write researchers Olga Stavrova and Dongning Ren of Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

Here’s another way to look at the findings: On average, people felt better when they were with others. But that wasn’t the case for people feeling very lonely, who either felt the same or worse when they were around other humans.

The burden of lonelinessWhy? The third study, conducted five months into the COVID-19 pandemic, suggested two reasons why being around others might not comfort us when we’re feeling lonely.

First, people feeling lonely had a greater desire to be alone—and the more they wanted solitude, the worse they felt, especially when they were in a social situation.

“The presence of others or having to engage in social interactions under these circumstances might feel particularly burdensome and aggravate the unpleasant feeling of loneliness,” write Stavrova and Ren.

On top of that, people feeling lonelier had more negative social interactions, which also seemed to contribute to how bad they felt. When we’re lonely, the researchers explain, we may act in ways that make socializing less fulfilling than it could be.

“Loneliness predisposes people to approach social interactions with cynicism, distrust, and an expectation of rejection and betrayal [which] might in turn negatively affect other people’s behavior towards them,” write Stavrova and Ren.

“Loneliness might make it harder to establish a true sense of connection with others. Having to socialize with others without achieving a sense of connection might feel particularly draining and meaningless, damaging one’s psychological well-being.”

Find a way that works for youDoes this mean that social interaction can’t help the lonely?

Certainly not. This study included all kinds of social interaction, from having a conversation with a friend to simply being in line at a grocery store. It’s possible that certain types of social interactions are helpful when we’re lonely—like getting emotional support from a trusted confidant—and others are not.

We also shouldn’t discount the value of solitude. If lonely people need some time alone to cope and feel better, there’s nothing wrong with that. “Research on solitude suggests that being alone can be functional, allowing individuals to regulate their emotions,” write Stavrova and Ren.

Overall, this study is a good reminder of how complex loneliness is; it’s more of a state of mind than a simple indicator of how many connections we have. The triggers for loneliness change across our lifetime, and it can’t be easily solved by getting out of the house.

In fact, a review of studies found that the best strategy might be to teach ourselves to question our automatic negative thoughts, like blaming ourselves for feeling bad or thinking that no one wants to be our friend.

Hopefully, all this can help us be a bit more understanding to others when they suffer from loneliness, and to ourselves, as well.

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The hard choices — what we most fear doing, asking, saying — are very often exactly what we need to do. How can we overcome self-paralysis and take action? Tim Ferriss encourages us to fully envision and write down our fears in detail, in a simple but powerful exercise he calls “fear-setting.” Learn more about how this practice can help you thrive in high-stress environments and separate what you can control from what you cannot.

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"What about you, my friend? Are your kites going to be found in your cupboard, or do they fly in the sky?" ...

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"Remember, you’re not alone. Procrastination is a common problem, but it’s one that you can overcome with determination and effort." ...

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"Think about how your distractions affect you at home and in the workplace. It’s critical to find ways to minimize your distractions so that you can be more present for those who need you to be with them at that moment." ...

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"A post is not only a post. It is the opportunity to get exposure to different ideas. Sharing comments offers a great means to get exposure to new ideas." ...

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"What is undeniable is that over the past 50 years, hip-hop has evolved, grown, and influenced nearly every aspect of modern U.S. culture – from dance, theater, and literature to visual arts and fashion." ...

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"We need balanced empathy with the two types of empathy coexist. Balanced empathy is what we should seek." ...

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"Annihilate hate and become a beacon for positive actions and reactions. We might just change and save the world." ... Where do you sit in the Pyramid of Hate?

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"While each generation faces challenges, it truly seems that children today face far more challenges than previous generations during the years I have been alive." ...

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"How could you be leading the world of work more joyfully?" ...

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"A need to be authentic with our teams and create an environment of total transparency can lead to oversharing, but how do we know if we’ve gone too far in being authentic and transparent?" ...

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"The transformational leader must transcend the bounds of ego and old culture and bring unity to the change they lead." ...

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"There was not only a lack of a smile from me in these photos but also a presence of sadness. One that I couldn't understand at the time." ...

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"Thanks to all of those who touched my life and allowed me to touch theirs. This isn’t a requiem, because I’m not planning to check out anytime soon. But it is a thank you. All of you." ...

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"We expect the world to operate in a predictable, orderly way. It usually does; except when it doesn't. ... What do you have to be grateful for?" ...

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"Should we move from the notion that winning is a solo event to the idea we can benefit society, we may accomplish much more than we already do." ...

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"As human beings, we can control ourselves.  That is powerful.  Could we bring the pendulum back to equilibrium?" ...

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"Spiritual bypassing can subtly infiltrate various aspects of our lives, hindering authentic growth and self-awareness." ...

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"You don’t recognize the humanity we share. You don’t recognize or are afraid of the responsibility that comes with your humanity. But make no mistake: I am you." ...

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"When we lose control of our thinking and actions, we may control nothing. We drive our lives in the dark on a slippery and foggy road." ...

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"Hear the words that silence whispers to our hearts and to find a quiet space in the busyness of life, wherever we live." ...

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"Newer generations of AI models, with their more sophisticated and less rote responses, are making it harder to tell who benefits when they speak." ...

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"While some view failure as a final roadblock, the journey's end, they perceive it as a temporary detour, a stepping stone leading them one step closer to their goals." ...

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"There is no leadership possible without care for people, without this underlying sensitivity that is necessary to govern complexity, to relate to individuals, even before employees, roles, and functions." ...

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"This sort of love is cosmic, and I only know I feel it when I do… There for a moment, gone in an instant." ...

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"Notes and music are much like words and sentences. Jumble all the notes together, or in no particular order, and you get a cacophony of sounds. Organize them according to the principles of music composition and you get a tune, a song, a symphony." ...

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"When my grandmother came visiting, my sister and I were each given a yellow 2 crown – the equivalent of about a quarter – and we put them in our piggy banks." ...

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"Operating outside of one’s Uniqueness is the same as filling the gas tank in a car with jet fuel." ...

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"We are told that the EV move will do much to reduce the pollution caused by burning fossil fuels in our vehicles." ...

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"Leaders who lose their track are not necessarily bad people; rather, they lose their moral bearings, often yielding to seductions in their paths." ...

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"Are you bogged down with too much to do?  Are you living life distracted from what really matters?  Are you standing on the sidelines distracted by the latest Buzz Feed that you are missing out on the dance?  Are you trying to fit it all in anywhere you can and really missing out on enjoying your life?" ...

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"Before you ignore another homeless person on the street, just remember that that could be someone’s father or someone’s mother and they have a story." ...

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"How can you create a psychological fog of sorts in your distracted, busy world to allow you the focus you need to be productive and in the flow?" ...

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"As projects are delivered in all types of work situations, the need for project management professionals to be skilled and future-compliant in ML-oriented advancement is much more pronounced than ever before." ...

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"Historically, people have always strived to make a better life for themselves and their families. Many, however, have succumbed to the "three strikes and your out” mindset." ...

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"Comparisons are often inexact, but I am a student of history, and I can’t help but compare the book burning to the book banning, curriculum censorship, and the outright attempts to rewrite history flourishing in the U.S. today." ...

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"We’d rather fear, hate, and abuse each other than to talk with each other, to learn what we don’t know, and to overcome our own fear and hatred." ...

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"It is the new game that many people with just talents for spread bad news and false information to enhance their influence." ...

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"There is no such thing as a fake laugh. All laughter serves genuine social functions, helping you navigate complex social interactions." ...

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"Do you believe that what you see influences how you feel? You experience the world through affect-colored glasses." ...

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"Becoming more and more of my authentic self has shown me so many things." ...

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"Don’t we all have some habits we need to be made aware of – kindly - and work on if it pushes people we care about away, or hampers us in our professional or personal development?" ...

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"Children may face various challenges that lead to struggles in school. Understanding the reasons behind these difficulties is the first step towards providing the necessary support and interventions." ...

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"Here is the most dangerous fantasy of all:  The belief that it could never happen again, that it could never happen here, in the land of the free and the home of the brave." ...

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"Ask yourself "Who have I become as a result of staying true to my heart?" ...

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"For those hours, we weren't just orphans. It felt as if we were superheroes, explorers, and more." ...

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"You don't have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman." ...

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"In the world of work, values are too often considered in the background or not even taken into consideration." ...

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"What if we were to raise good employees by being the kind of bosses that allow employees to grow into who they are supposed to be and then encourage them to be precisely that?" ...

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"If you find yourself as a parent at odds with your Neurodifferent child, with lots of tension, disagreement, and frequent battles, it may be time to consider your own diagnosis." ...

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"Having a pet can have positive effects on your health and happiness. Your new pet may become a beloved member of the family." ...

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"How do we break patterns of old thinking so as not to keep feeling sleepy with indigestible and old information?" ...

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"Unexpected turns, unforeseen struggles - they're part and parcel of life, springing up when we least expect them. It's essential not to ignore these moments or turn a blind eye." ...

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"Children’s leadership shines through in their ability to lead others without ever losing sight of the beauty of simplicity." ...

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"WE are alchemists one and all as we turn an Idea (thought energy) into physical matter!!" ...

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"At the heart of it all, real conversations are human. They embody our humanity by encompassing the sharing of emotions, a willingness to be vulnerable, and a receptiveness to fresh and different ideas." ...

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"Many people have failed to understand that the quality of their lives depends on the relationships they've formed." ...

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Solving issues in group dynamics takes courage to lift the lid and start talking and sharing more deeply.

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"The weaponization of AI is a serious risk that could have devastating consequences for humanity." ...

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"Sarcastic quips can undermine relationships, erode trust, sour alliances, alienate potential advocates, and toxify community culture." ...

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"Rabbit holes are our creation. They slowly squeeze in and grow on us as poison ivy. They can put us on a path that slides and it is difficult to crawl back out." ...

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"There's no such thing as no. NO just means New Option. NO just means Next Opportunity. I never believe that no is something that can hold you back. Someone's no is just their no; it’s not your no." ...

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"In our adulthoods, Sam and I seemed to free ourselves in certain ways from the hurt and pain of the primitive wound of being despised and abused by our own mothers." ...

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"As we get older, memories appreciate." ...

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"Pathway of Awakening (to Joy:) Slipping through the net of our own illusions Seeking Redemption and Liberation" ...

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"Leadership training has failed to fix the leadership crisis because it doesn’t address the central question: why do people think the way they do? " ...

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"You know how important it is to have a team that works well together. But did you know that emotional intelligence could be the key to unlocking your team’s full potential?" ...

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"Is there anyone in your life you want to thank for shining light on your life?" ...

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“We're seeing opportunities for education where conversation and dialogue are being stifled. And that has to be part of the work that we're doing.” ...

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"Stand in the theatre where history happened, and you can’t help but feel the presence of those who were its actors." ...

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"Our world needs a period to pause and rethink what is going on if we are to avoid sliding down into the chaos deep and dark hole." ...

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"We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep." ...

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"Valuing one's depression does not prevent a relapse, but it may make the prospect of relapse and even relapse itself easier to tolerate." ...

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"If we do not use our voices to reach out to others, we may become numb to our own inner voice and our conscience." ...

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“The day you speak to someone who has their head held down and when they lift it up and smile, you realize how powerful it is just to open your mouth and say, "Hello." ...

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"In a world where deception and manipulation can be prevalent, choosing honesty becomes a transformative act." ...

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"The greatest relationship, the greatest one you will ever have is with yourself. Believe me. Have faith in yourself. Believing that faith can make broken wings fly." ...

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"We can grow our brain's capacity to learn and to solve problems." ...

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"Deep inside, and including all of the ups and downs, all of the comings and goings, the direction of travel is towards the truth. You literally can’t stop it. You can’t keep it down." ...

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"Here’s a possibly controversial idea: we are NOT all thought leaders… and that is a GOOD THING." ...

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"My thoughts on incorporating social themes and issues into literature in general, but particularly in the genre of science fiction." ...

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"Ultimately, whether AI is a threat to humanity or not depends on how it is developed and used." ...

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"As a leader, you need the awareness of knowing if your organizational culture is out of alignment and what corrections are needed." ...

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"Why is it that expressing caring thoughts for a man more often than not sends him into an emotional tailspin? " ...

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"On an individual level, people who tend to be excessively controlling pay the bill of losing control. They are bathing in extremely hot or chilling water." ...

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"As you deepen your relationship with yourself, your self-love grows. And accordingly, the quality of your life improves. As simple as that." ...

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"It’s time to rethink and restructure the meaning of grief and the time you need to grieve." ...

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"For very many of the youngsters of today will never believe that this sort of life was possible and these kinds of people ever lived." ...

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"A seemingly insignificant event on one side of the world may produce events of titanic proportions on the other." ...

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"It's OK to fall down. It's NOT OK to stay down." ...

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"The online ecosystem where today’s antisemitism flourishes is a Wild West of information and misinformation that is largely unmonitored, distributed in an instant, and posted by anyone." ...

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"Life is a singular event, and if I’m to make a contribution to the great collective message board I must of necessity get after it and be shameless about sharing what I’ve discovered." ...

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"What will happen next, you might wonder? How will life love you all the way with or without your shaker of salt? What kind of human being are you becoming?" ...

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"My question is – “Should I intend to launch a company based on evolution or revolution? Which is more beneficial to me and society?" ...

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"Reading plays a vital role in a child’s overall development. It enhances vocabulary, improves critical thinking skills, sparks creativity, and fosters empathy." ...

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"With a sharp intuition and an uncanny ability to connect with others, The Empowerer brought hope and transformation to those who sought his guidance." ...

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"This is all about emotion. We’re not supposed to be curious and objective enough to think and to reach our own conclusions. We’re supposed to feel. To feel what? Fear." ...

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"To explore new horizons the basic traits that are needed are flexibility to change for the better, being open to new people and surroundings, being open to new perspectives, interacting with respect and kindness, and acknowledging the presence of all beings with respect."

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"It's the "deliberate practice" studied by psychologist Anders Ericsson, and noted by Abraham Lincoln when he said, "I'm a slow walker, but I never walk back." ...

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"I’m lost in an echo chamber, physically, digitally, spiritually. In the morning, I ache for quiet. I used to love you so." ...

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"As humans, we are continuously creating our own lives, consciously or unconsciously. We each create the movie of our life and our view of reality." ...

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"Animals grow old, grow tired, can’t move as quickly, can’t move as well, get injured, can’t get at whatever seed or bread or foodstuffs they can find and, in the end, even predators become prey." ...

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"What do you do when something profound and impactful happens in your life? Do you dig deeper into its truth, or keep it at a distance for future reference or reflection?" ...

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"People who think Irish pubs and grills are a dime a dozen are most likely correct. But they probably don’t know why there are so many or why they’re called pubs and grills." ...

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"Tthe persistence of Neurodifferences in the human gene pool may be evidence that those differences kept us alive as a species." ...

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"What will happen if technology erodes social empathy and where we shall head?" ...

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"Resilient people are really good at choosing carefully where they select their attention. They have a habit of realistically appraising situations, and typically, managing to focus on the things that they can change, and somehow accept the things that they can't."

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"It is overwhelmingly easy for local government to fall off the rails.  It can happen at any time or place. That is where citizens come in." ...

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"Procrastination always gives you something to look forward to." ...

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"Life can be full of bad situations. Those are temporary. Choosing to call yourself less-than or a ‘loser’ is a permanent solution to a very temporary circumstance." ...

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"I believe that every day of my life people are doing things for me to help me, or to serve me.  This gives me a ton of opportunities every day to practice gratitude." ...

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"Because we always seem to assume that the answer is in a decision, when it is, in fact, to be found in the question, which we may not always truly understand, or find too uncomfortable to consider." ...

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"As we began preparing for this cruise, we made a list of everything that we had thought that we would need or could inadvertently use, and either purchased it or gathered it all up, before loading everything and more into our vessel last week, just to be sure there were no hic-ups." ...

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"Buried deep within each of us, there is worth beyond definition, a glorious dimension that “is” us." ...

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"What is a story from when you were too young to remember?" ...

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"Do we hesitate to put in the effort if we don’t think we will live in a community for more than a few years?  And is that why people leave, because they don’t feel they belong and haven’t gotten any friends, and feel unrecognized?" ...

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"The time is NOW for you to act, girt up your loins and take the initiative, take charge of your future, and start building it the way you have always dreamt, one step at a time." ...

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"Are you free to say what you think, feel what you feel, do what fulfills your heart and soul, and be the person your dog loves?" ...

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"Do you count? If so, decide how you count, what you contribute, and what you want in this world." ...

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"When we truly seek to understand another we are committing ourselves to bringing an open mind and a level of curiosity that means we are really open to learning." ...

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"Sorry" is indeed, one of the most difficult and most powerful words, provided one can feel and say it at the same time." ...

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"like a flower that blooms against all odds in the crack of the prison wall I too can turn my face to a sliver of light and find what I need to sustain my soul as I summon the courage to offer my own invisible gesture to the world ..."

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"Today I bedazzle - radiate - glimmer- scintillate, deflect – rejecting senses of injury for the injury itself to disappear – dispel doom to rise above gloom - Inject a bright glow of hope." ...

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"When your priorities and values are rightly aligned, you can lead with a greater sense of humility and purpose." ...

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"If we are motivated by our passion, our energy arises as authentic and exuberant expression. What is motivating you today?" ...

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"Even if good leadership is based on defined skills, it is very important to remember that, in the day-to-day functioning of a company, the mere possession of these skills is not enough to help everyone move in the right direction." ...

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"It’s crucial to be emotionally bulletproof so that you can ride the waves of life elegantly and with the right attitude." ...

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"Reach out to those (especially the elderly) who we suspect might be feeling lonely or isolated. Just a phone call, a message, or an email can engage those who are feeling desolate." ...

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"We don’t have to believe what other people say about us." ...

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"Many people do not differentiate between jealousy and envy. In fact, they do in that extreme jealousy converts to envy makes sense." ...

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"Divorce is a difficult and emotional process for everyone involved, especially for children. When parents decide to end their marriage, it can have a significant impact on their children's well-being and development." ...

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"Our work and our titles can be ripped away from us in seconds. Who are we actually without any of them? What is the essence that can never be taken away from us?" ...

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"Should you feel like ghosting somebody - for being an ultracrepidarian, negative, meddlesome - just send them this prayer instead." ...

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"What leaders do is lead by example, bringing people together and guiding them in pursuit of universal values. What they don’t do is try to exploit trends to make a quick buck." ...

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"The medical community pathetically doesn’t address the problem or the solutions for menopause. They simply want to treat the symptoms leaving the woman with lifelong weight problems." ...

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"Can You Define Spirituality in One Sentence? What Are Some Practical Examples of It in Our Daily Lives?' ...

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"By truly listening - to understand, not just respond - you will be more present and gain a better understanding of the message of the speaker." ...

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"When minds meet, they don't just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, and engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards." ...

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"Let us make ourselves a proud race that even the possibly smarter species can learn from. Let us course correct now. We need to live in peace with ourselves and let others live." ...

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"Promoting someone to a new manager without sufficient training is a set-up for everyone involved but it doesn’t have to be." ...

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"While I’m working out the details, if you see something that seems to have better than even odds of going sideways, call me before you go for it." ...

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"I am in awe of those who are walking their path with a laser that fuels their enthusiasm and life force. Have you found your niche?" ...

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"Positive emotions and negative emotions are energies and it is the transformation of their energies into creative works that makes the difference." ...

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"If we're going to find our way back to each other, we have to understand and know empathy, because empathy's the antidote to shame." ...

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"By leveraging the power of kindness, companies are reshaping the business landscape, proving that empathy can lead to extraordinary outcomes." ...

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"The scam was dead simple, as most effective scams usually are." ...

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"Gratitude fosters empathy, promotes positive relationships, counters entitlement, and enhances overall well-being." ...

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"Hubris and pleonexia spawn deceit and make justice impossible.  And where there is no justice, there is no leadership." ...

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"She grew up in a small Ohio town where her father was a medical doctor. Her story is bookended by prejudice she experienced as a child and by recent hate directed at Asian Americans." ...

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"Would it not be more valuable to focus on all of the little things that make up the key areas all people need to navigate daily?" ...

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"How can we expect to appreciate those moments where everything seems right or is going the way we want if we never experience the opposite?" ...

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"Paradoxes are not new to leaders, but they are becoming have become increasingly important for leaders to navigate." ...

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"Our amygdala and limbic system not only protect us from physical harm and pre-historic dangers but also safeguard our identity and authentic self that is unique to any of us." ...

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"Great leaders acknowledge that change and uncertainty are inevitable." ...

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"Where might you go if given the freedom to? What new beginning is waiting for you?" ...

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"Ask, inquire, be curious, and don't stop at the surface. Many times whoever has the problem also has the solution: listening to what he says because will often it be a source of improvement, in solving the problem as well." ...

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"Stress. It makes your heart pound, your breathing quicken, and your forehead sweat." ...

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"Each of us is accountable for how we view our world. Nobody else has the power to change the internal workings of our minds and hearts. However, surrounding ourselves with people who support and encourage our evolving perspective can be enormously powerful." ...

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"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." ...

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"Enhancing memory in seniors is possible through a combination of lifestyle modifications and cognitive stimulation." ...

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"The three important tenets of the Baha'i Faith Bahai.org are; Oneness of God, all true religions come from the same one God, and oneness of the human race." ...

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"We the people, are not powerless if we work together to end spiritual ignorance!" ...

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"Do you ever do that? Resist things that are good for you because of some underlying story. Maybe it’s a toughness story. Maybe it’s shame. Maybe it’s an insistence to let the world know you’ve “got this” when it’s something you do not, in fact, got?" ...

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"With STAR and CARL, you're all set to compose a symphony of compelling stories, turning your interview into a stage where your experience and personality can shine." ...

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"Congress was not set to resume for another two weeks, so Shawna and Terry had a bit of time to decide what exactly they wanted to do with the resources they had at their disposal." ...

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"One of the earmarks of truth is its applicability in contexts beyond that truth's initial setting. The more often a thing remains true regardless of its context, the more true that thing is." ...

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"Using very simple language and images, this book helps children ... and adults too ... understand how thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations are driven by needs that we all share. ... " ...

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"How do they never get defeated? Or when they do, where does that strength come from to get up, dust off, and move forward again?" ...

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"Challenging our worldview and being conscious in shifting our perspective is so important in ensuring we move towards higher quality communication, greater inclusivity, and unity." ...

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"The recognition that the body-mind has imperfections can lead to the false conclusion that it is not divine unto itself. Yet, it is a unique expression of creation and thus an expression of divinity." ...

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"Sometimes we flat-out deny what we simply don't want to believe. And sometimes, acknowledging the truth can take... 350 years." ...

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"Being negative has been made into a full-contact, no-holds-barred sport where gossiping gladiators fight to the death with sharp tongues as their weapons.  It is brutal! Why not try a little kindness instead?" ...

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"If you are thinking of holding a meeting, your very first question should always be, do we really need a meeting? Ask yourself, can the topic be resolved through a phone call, email, or other method?" ...

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"The ability to adapt allows us to detect those skills that have allowed us to advance to the present moment, set aside those that don't work, and learn new ones." ...

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There are times when the governing body of any organization may appear to be “broken.” The board members, whether for-profit or nonprofit, may be polarized—progress is stunted – apathy and confusion replace purpose and efficiency. A listing of ways to resuscitate dysfunctional business firms prompted me to expand on actions for nonprofits in similar conditions. […]

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"Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good." ...

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"Drugs DO enhance performance. Then you die. Tell your children." ...

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"It takes courage to engage in a sometimes messy process of leading and motivating people to do hard things." ...

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"Oh, how I long for those days of old when her warm smile from across the table would make my coffee and the start of my day so much better when her presence would brighten those gray days and warm those chilly mornings." ...

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"Storing this tension inside us can lead to depression and mental disorders. Such tension may affect the chemistry of our bodies and throw them out of order." ...

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"Contrary to popular belief, the original Luddites were not anti-technology, nor were they technologically incompetent." ...

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Introduction: These articles are part of Intercultural dialogues, to celebrate, leverage and chronicle diverse stories, narratives, voices, and cultural identities of inspirational Indian women achievers.

As an Indian-born woman, my life has been enriched by a colorful spectrum and cultural impact of the 9 Indian cities I grew up in, and the 8 international cities I lived in thereafter, giving me an in-depth understanding of overall internal and cross-cultural diversities that are perceived through life’s unique and everchanging emotional and psychological lenses.

With the power of the written word, I hope to address the relevance of a woman in India’s emerging economy, as she prepares to face conflicting issues of social division vs cohesion, and, discrimination vs reconciliation, across cultural divides. With dreams, desires, and circumstances reflective of many women across all corners of our world, these shared stories seek to ignite, inspire, and empower another sister with one aim – creating a virtuous circle to uplift the overall human spirit through the coming decades.

Women in IndiaA wise man of great intellect and power once said, “The best measure of a nation’s progress is the way it treats its women.”

From times immemorial, legends and cultural metaphors of India, have allowed the subtle expressions of patriarchy’s regulated sexuality, reproduction, and social productions, to become part of an accepted social fabric. The role of women has been emphasized as faithful wives and devout mothers, who are trained since childhood to sacrifice their aspirations and individualism, and never challenge discrimination, subordination, exploitation, and subjugation.

Till the 13th century, India was a country that shunned widows and allowed the Hindu practice of “Sati” (burning to death of a recent widow; self-immolation or by force or coercion, and deemed as an act of peerless piety that would purge her of all her sins, release her from the cycle of birth and rebirth and ensure salvation for her dead husband and the seven generations that followed her), till it was abolished in1827, during British Raj, by the Governor-General of India, Lord Bentinck, claiming it had no sound theological basis.

In this age of ascending feminism and focus on equality and human rights, the contemporary modern Indian woman is switching between multiple roles successfully, but still struggles to find a balancing act between being respected, feared, insulted, sidelined, and is constantly being defined and re-defined by contradictions and comparisons to a “traditional woman”. She forges ahead irrespective…leaving behind her legacy of fearlessness.

Meet one such woman, Jija Madhavan Harisingh, first lady IPS officer in South India, who is an epitome of an “Officer and a Gentle Woman”, uniquely striking a “rare” balance of logic, calm and collected, on one hand; and creative, intuitive, sensitive, flexible, adaptable, with an adventurous and relentless “never say never” attitude, on the other. Her mantra: “Never stop exploring, never settle, as a curious mind knows there is more to life than existing, so keep expecting bigger things from life”!

A Thought Leader, Visionary, Catalyst for change, Mentor for Women and Youth, Philanthropist, Humanitarian, Artist of repute and an art connoisseur, Spiritual Seeker, a multifaceted icon with strength & simplicity, Singh was the first woman to join the premier Indian Police Service ( IPS), Karnataka, in 1975, and who at the young age of 24, after three years of tough physical and professional training, was posted to the conservative state of Karnataka (post of Assistant Superintendent of Police – Research), where a strong patriarchal mindset was to confront her at every step. But the warrior that she was …her brilliant career spanned three and half decades, earning her the highest rank of Director General of Police (DGP). She retired in 2011.

Her early life was influenced by her father, T.K. Madhavan, and later, she blossomed under her mentor Madhukar Rao (with whom she shared her love for Shakespeare, poets of the romantic era, like Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth, and modern poets like GM Hopkins and TS Eliot), and learnt live model studies under the well-known artist M.V. Devan at Kalapeetom, (helping her establish as an artist of refute in traditional figurative gold paintings of Mysore and Tanjore, abstracts, painting color fields in oil and acrylic).

She finished her graduation and post-graduation in English literature from University College, a Journalism course at Press Club, a short working stint at the Indian space Research organization, followed by a brief English teaching phase at Maharaja’s College, Ernakulam. Her enthusiasm, eagerness, and insatiable curiosity about life enabled her to balance a challenging career, and competent motherhood, and she went on to gain another MA Degree in Sociology from Mysore University, followed by a Ph.D. in Development Studies on the topic of her special interest, women’s empowerment. Her research study with title ‘Gender status in Karnataka police, a study of entry-level cadres in women police’.

In just four years, Jija rose to be a force to be reckoned with and was handed tough assignments like Asst.

Superintendent of Police of a strife-ridden subdivision of Bangalore and Madhugiri. Her tough and meticulous handling of confronting unruly crowds and hardened criminals in this area was acknowledged by higher authorities, and she was soon picked to head a district as the Superintendent of Police, a district with 30-plus police stations and 1000 personnel, becoming the first woman ever to be allowed such an onerous responsibility in the country. Her other successful career stints were Airports Authority of India, Nuclear Power Corporation Limited, National Textiles Corporation, Karnataka State Police Housing Corporation and Mysore Minerals Ltd., and Jungle Lodges & Resorts Ltd (Corporates under the Government of Karnataka).

Inspired by Nehru’s words ‘I am not interested in excuses; I am interested in work done”, Jija’s positive and diligent mindset, and spirited quest to perform against all odds, helped her establish herself as the only woman DGP (Director General of Police) in the state, in spite of the challenges of gender power dynamics, and the Indian patriarchal/conventional style of bureaucracy (“I convert even the dullest assignment into a “glorious lake of lotuses”, she says).

Never allowing a dull moment in creativity, her solo exhibitions in India and abroad, the establishment of a Trust called “Art Mantram” (that has organized over 500 events, online Art souks, camps, and workshops that address burning social issues, promotes patronage, awareness, and accessibility of Art), won her the “Indira Priyadarshini National Award”, for Contribution to Art.

Today, she has chosen to retire in Bangalore (also spelled Bengaluru), the capital city, (since 1830), of Karnataka state, southern India, which lies 3,113 feet (949 meters) above sea level, atop an east-west ridge in the Karnataka Plateau in the southeastern part of the state. According to an early 2023 survey, and has an estimated population of 11,644,000, an average literacy rate of 88.71 percent (of which male and female literacy is 91.71 and 85.44 percent), and the sex ratio of Bangalore city is 923 per 1000 males.

I reached out to Jija Hari Singh, to talk about what it takes for a woman to break the glass ceiling in one of the toughest professions, handle insensitive gender environments, deal with Bigotry and gender bias, and still leave her mark as a leader; and how a heightened EQ (Emotional Quotient) in a woman can fuel progress, and art of thriving in life through self-mastery, curiosity, and creativity. Excerpts from the Interview…

Q. Jija, is it true that the Indian police culture is characterized by gender inequalities and hegemonic masculinity?

A: Of course! Women police officers face greater organizational, psychological, and physiological stress and distress than men officers. Especially with the bias and gender-related work stressors like perceptions of sexually offensive behaviors, vulgar/offensive language around them, and sexual and racial harassment. Police forces across the world (not just in India), have been strongly patriarchal and also adversarial towards women who “dared” to join their ranks. Especially, 40 years ago, it was almost unheard of.

Q: What about you personally? Did you also find yourself dealing with bigotry, rude and supercilious behavior, or a disparaging attitude from your men colleagues that made you feel less influential than your men colleagues? How did you handle it?

A: Indeed, it was a rough time. Difficulties of confronting and overcoming prejudice, rude and supercilious behavior, and bigotry were tougher than the actual policing duties. How did I handle it? A combination of strategies, I could say. A meticulous and flawless working style, a thorough knowledge of the job, a lot of homework, and thinking through SOPs and Emergency plans, combined with assertiveness and a sensible, common-sense, often compassionate approach cannot go wrong. When it is untiringly repeated, the adversaries back off, noise levels come down and you emerge victorious, again and again. Results in policing, positive or negative cannot be hidden. Crime prevention and investigation or law and order maintenance or security administration are all in the public eye and quickly bring laurels and public appreciation or condemnation. Good work is seen! And acknowledged.

Q. As someone who has been a catalyst for change, and a Thought leader, do you think that Indian patriarchal masculinity is being challenged in contemporary times? What will it take to change the long-standing patriarchal values to be more inclusive of women?

A. If we look at India’s rich cultural heritage, during the Vedic period, women enjoyed equal status with men in all aspects of life, and this is actually documented by ancient Indian saints like Patanjali and Katayana too. Moving through the “Medieval period, and the late medieval period” (from the 13th to the 16th century, ending with the start of the Mughal Empire in 1526), women’s image became a self-sacrificing, self-effacing pure image, trained only as faithful wives and devout mothers, as you rightfully said. Let’s face it, like many Asian, Hispanic, and Latino cultures, Indian society too, is still patriarchal, and gender inequalities in patriarchal societies favor men with the gender norms constructed around masculinity and a man’s sense of self, that hinges on his ability to control and protect his daughter (and her chastity), till she’s married.

However, let me share some interesting data I came across. Apparently, Thailand and Cambodia are the only two countries, which have more women running companies than men, and it’s also true that, when the top manager of a firm is a woman, that firm usually tends to have a larger share of permanent female workers. Amazing. Maybe we should study this more to understand why this is manageable there and not in other parts of the world.

Perhaps, the answer lies in bringing in attitudinal changes in both men and women – a collective social effort, an awareness, to build gender equity, to empower, encourage, and welcome more women in any male-dominated profession. We need to encourage men and educate them to take responsibility as responsible sexual partners, husbands, and fathers, and willingly work towards removing stereotypical attitudes, socio-cultural barriers, violence against women, and gender injustice, and increasing women’s workforce.

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In 1979, Mylinh Luong left communist Vietnam with her father, mother, and four siblings in a crowded fishing boat. She was six years old. She vividly recalls the deprivation, squalor, and brutality of the journey and life in a Malaysian refugee camp. She knows what it is to be without resources, education, family, and friends. In the US, she experienced acts of kindness that helped her overcome the lack of these things. Now a successful businesswoman, she puts her knowledge into practice by helping and supporting other immigrants in a big way.

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Every month of the year has pet awareness events. For instance, June is National Adopt a cat month, it is National Zoo and Aquarium Month, and National pet preparedness month. June also has National hug your cat day, International Corgi Day, World Pet Memorial Day, National take your cat to work day, Ugliest dog day and take your dog to work day. Why do we care about animals to give them so much attention?

According to Forbes, 65.1 million U.S. households own a dog, 46.5 million households own cats and 11.1 million households own fish. 66% of US households (2/3) own pets. Americans spent $136.8 billion on their pets, up 10.7% from just last year, which turns out to be an average of $730 a year just on each dog. 38% of dog owners and 40% of cat owners got their pets from an animal shelter or rescue.

Web MD tells us that pets are natural mood enhancers where in only a few minutes with a dog, cat, or watching fish swim, we become less anxious and less stressed. Pets help keep blood pressure in check in adults, and blood pressure of children with hypertension decreases while petting their dog. Playing and petting with an animal increases levels of serotonin and dopamine (nerve transmitters known to have calming effects) and these transmitters help reduce not only depression but stress. If you own a dog, you tend to be more physically active, and being forced to walk your dog daily may be one of the main reasons animals help with our heart and stress. Dog owners walk 300 minutes a week compared to 168 minutes for non-pet owners while walking a dog leads to a 28% increase in walking speed. Web MD also reports that when children grow up in a home with a dog or cat, they are 33% less likely to develop allergies; and the same is true for kids living on a farm with large animals. So maybe pets are truly the miracle drug we have been waiting for!

We know the medical reasons for a pet, but what about the psychological advantages?

The American Psychological Association did a study, done at Miami University of Ohio and St. Louis University, where they concluded that people with pets were actually closer to other important people in their lives and received more support, not less from their friends and family. The study concluded that pets complement other forms of social support rather than compete with them, indicating there was no evidence that relationships with pets came at the expense of relationships with other people. The study also concluded that owning a pet can teach children valuable life lessons. Kids with dogs have a higher level of empathy and self-esteem, and learning to take care of an animal teaches the value of routine, accountability, nurturing, and good habits. Interacting with pets stimulates cognitive development in children. Caring for and training pets improves problem-solving skills, memory retention, and concentration in both children and adults. Being outside in a public setting with your animal increases social interaction because pets are great icebreakers and can help ease people out of social isolation and shyness.

But with all these reasons to own a pet, we still have homeless animals, and what really happens to these poor creatures? According to PetKeen, there are 3,500 brick-and-mortar animal shelters across the USA. Entering these shelters each year are 7.6 million animals- 4.2 million dogs and 3.4 million cats. 2.7 million are euthanized.

Even though every month we celebrate days honoring our pets, there is no celebration for the 2.7 million animals America euthanizes each year. We as taxpayers spend $2 billion annually to round up, house, and dispose of homeless animals, but that is not enough to keep our animal shelters running in a humane manner. You would think that such a large profitable industry like the pet industry would step in to help these rescue shelters and these poor animals in need, but we have not seen that happen as the pet industry sales and profits are increasing every year. It falls back on all of us to have the heart to help defenseless animals that can’t speak for themselves. For anyone who has ever looked into the eyes of their pet and felt that unconditional love looking back, we cannot continue letting animal shelters go underfunded and undermanned. All of us need to reach deep into our pockets to help these shelters find homes for these innocent animals; and if we don’t have the dollars to help, we should be volunteering.

Pets provide healing benefits for many of life’s invisible scars. They help us emotionally and socially. The unconditional love pets give us transcends work issues, family conflicts, death, and divorce.

Our pets don’t care if you can read or not, they don’t care about the color of your skin or if you are missing a limb. This country has a lot to fix in not only solving homelessness for our fellow citizens but taking care of the homeless animals in our lives. Volunteer at your local shelter to help these powerless animals cope with being alone. None of us want to be alone, and your simple act of kindness goes a long way for animals who can’t speak for themselves.

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Richard Gardiner, Columbus State University

In the years following the bitter Civil War, a former Union general took a holiday originated by former Confederates and helped spread it across the entire country. The holiday was Memorial Day, an annual commemoration that was born in the former Confederate States in 1866 and adopted by the United States in 1868. It is a holiday in which the nation honors it’s military dead.

Gen. John A. Logan, who headed the largest Union veterans’ fraternity at that time, the Grand Army of the Republic, is usually credited as being the originator of the holiday. Yet when General Logan established the holiday, he acknowledged its genesis among the Union’s former enemies, saying, “It was not too late for the Union men of the nation to follow the example of the people of the South.”

I’m a scholar who has written – with co-author Daniel Bellware – a history of Memorial Day. Cities and towns across America have for more than a century claimed to be the holiday’s birthplace, but we have sifted through the myths and half-truths and uncovered the authentic story of how this holiday came into being.

Generous acts bore fruitDuring 1866, the first year of this annual observance in the South, a feature of the holiday emerged that made awareness, admiration, and eventually imitation of it spread quickly to the North.

During the inaugural Memorial Day observances which were conceived in Columbus, Georgia, many Southern participants – especially women – decorated graves of Confederate soldiers as well as, unexpectedly, those of their former enemies who fought for the Union.

Civil War Union Gen. John A. Logan.
Library of Congress Glass negativesShortly after those first Memorial Day observances all across the South, newspaper coverage in the North was highly favorable to the ex-Confederates.

“The action of the ladies on this occasion, in burying whatever animosities or ill-feeling may have been engendered in the late war towards those who fought against them, is worthy of all praise and commendation,” wrote one paper.

On May 9, 1866, the Cleveland Daily Leader lauded the Southern women during their first Memorial Day.

“The act was as beautiful as it was unselfish, and will be appreciated in the North.”

The New York Commercial Advertiser, recognizing the magnanimous deeds of the women of Columbus, Georgia, echoed the sentiment. “Let this incident, touching and beautiful as it is, impart to our Washington authorities a lesson in conciliation.”

Power of a poemTo be sure, this sentiment was not unanimous. There were many in both parts of the U.S. who had no interest in conciliation. But as a result of one of these news reports, Francis Miles Finch, a Northern judge, academic and poet, wrote a poem titled “The Blue and the Gray.” Finch’s poem quickly became part of the American literary canon. He explained what inspired him to write it:

“It struck me that the South was holding out a friendly hand, and that it was our duty, not only as conquerors, but as men and their fellow citizens of the nation, to grasp it.”

Finch’s poem seemed to extend a full pardon to the South: “They banish our anger forever when they laurel the graves of our dead” was one of the lines.

Not just poems: Sheet music written to commemorate Memorial Day in 1870.
Library of CongressAlmost immediately, the poem circulated across America in books, magazines and newspapers. By the end of the 19th century, school children everywhere were required to memorize Finch’s poem. The ubiquitous publication of Finch’s rhyme meant that by the end of 1867, the southern Memorial Day holiday was a familiar phenomenon throughout the entire, and recently reunited, country.

General Logan was aware of the forgiving sentiments of people like Finch. When Logan’s order establishing Memorial Day was published in various newspapers in May 1868, Finch’s poem was sometimes appended to the order.

‘The blue and the grey’It was not long before Northerners decided that they would not only adopt the Southern custom of Memorial Day, but also the Southern custom of “burying the hatchet.” A group of Union veterans explained their intentions in a letter to the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph on May 28, 1869:

“Wishing to bury forever the harsh feelings engendered by the war, Post 19 has decided not to pass by the graves of the Confederates sleeping in our lines, but divide each year between the blue and the grey the first floral offerings of a common country. We have no powerless foes. Post 19 thinks of the Southern dead only as brave men.”

Other reports of reciprocal magnanimity circulated in the North, including the gesture of a 10-year-old who made a wreath of flowers and sent it to the overseer of the holiday, Colonel Leaming, in Lafayette, Indiana, with the following note attached, published in The New Hampshire Patriot on July 15, 1868:

“Will you please put this wreath upon some rebel soldier’s grave? My dear papa is buried at Andersonville, (Georgia) and perhaps some little girl will be kind enough to put a few flowers upon his grave.”

President Abraham Lincoln’s wish that there be “malice toward none” and “charity for all” was visible in the magnanimous actions of participants on both sides, who extended an olive branch during the Memorial Day observances in those first three years. Although not known by many today, the early evolution of the Memorial Day holiday was a manifestation of Lincoln’s hope for reconciliation between North and South.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on May 25, 2018.

Richard Gardiner, Associate Professor of History Education, Columbus State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Sometimes, whether it be while sitting in my yard swing as a gentle breeze blows the fresh scent of the newly opened blossoms my way or while standing on the shoreline of my favorite lake, taking in the beauty and serenity of the view before me, as a crisp fresh scent wafts across the surface of the water in my direction, filling my senses with a renewed energy as I inhale deeply, or setting in my living room with the lights low while listening to the soft instrumental music of my favorite artists play, their music allowing me to close my eyes and drift away as if a piece of me leaves riding away on each note or chord played; I feel as though I never want to leave the moment.

Sometimes to stay and let life pass me by as I hide beneath the layers of each moment would seem the best place for me to be. Safe from a world of sadness and regret. One where people no longer care for each other but look for what value they can get from one another. A world of loud intrusive noise and confusion.

But upon further pondering, I realize that by leaving this world behind, I would also leave behind many of the wonderful things I find beauty and joy in, like watching my children make their way in this world and visiting with those of kindred spirit: or watching the surrounding wildlife happily play while listening to the music of the birds as they sing in chorus each day: or viewing a magnificent sunrise and the calming beauty of a sunset: or the joy I find in working amongst the flowers scattered throughout my yard, and the memories found within the walls of this house, which once made it a home.

And soon I realize that there is still much here for me to enjoy and love and that if I were to leave, staying in one of those sometimes moments, I would miss everything that means so much to me. So I will instead treat myself occasionally with a visit to one of those moments, knowing that what makes them so special is I can visit them anytime I want to.

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As I’ve written previously, I have a very difficult time separating hate from ignorance. I take hate to be a subset or a symptom of ignorance. Ignorance can scale, of course. It can be as small as one Hibernophobe burning down my house. It can be as large as one power-mongering lunatic attempting to create a master race, or as large as another power-mongering lunatic attempting to create a collectivist Utopia.

But hate and ignorance possess a corrosive energy that eventually causes them to decay from within. Kenneth Burke called man the symbol-using animal. And so it is, that symbol-using lunatics adopted symbols for their misguided causes.

In his book, Language as Symbolic Action, Burke also alluded to the self-destructive power of hate and ignorance when he wrote this:

Man is/the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal/inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative)/separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making/goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order)/and rotten with perfection.

Likewise, Carlos Fuentes hinted at the rottenness of that perfection when he wrote this:

Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.

Germany’s National Socialist Party, China’s Communist Party — history is rife with examples of attempts at perfection that yielded otherwise inconceivable horror, brutality, cruelty, carnage, and suffering. If you’re up for a little light reading, here are some books on the subject:

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

The Killing Wind: A Chinese County’s Descent into Madness during the Cultural Revolution

A State of Blood

Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare

The Butcher’s Trail

Or if you’d like a broader view, you might skim through Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. Here’s an excerpt from the book’s description:

This new book—the first global history of genocide and extermination from ancient times … examines outbreaks of mass violence from the classical era to the present, focusing on worldwide colonial exterminations and twentieth-century case studies including the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s mass murders, and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides. He identifies connections, patterns, and features that in nearly every case gave early warning of the catastrophe to come: racism or religious prejudice, territorial expansionism, and cults of antiquity and agrarianism. The ideologies that have motivated perpetrators of mass killings in the past persist in our new century.

We create new things, new people, and new ways to hate with every generation, across all nationalities and geographies. The evidence piles up, right along with the bodies. Yet, on we hate.

Using the word, stupidity, rather than the word, ignorance, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote this:

Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplishes anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one.

A fascinating contemplation that.

We’ll begin to push back against hate, malice, ignorance, and/or stupidity on Tuesday of this week at 1:00 p.m. Eastern time, in a critically important Salon 360˚ session. How much we accomplish will be determined, in part, by the number of people who participate in the conversation.

To join us, please click here to reserve your seat in our Zoom room. Registration is free.

If we don’t stop hate, we’ll be paying the price forever.

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Author’s Note: As I was creating the video that appears at the end of this post, I was recalling a piece I’d written some years ago, inspired by something I’d witnessed in a gym. Thanks to a portable floppy-disc drive and my pack-rat compulsion to hang on to my old floppy discs, I was able to find the piece. I had no idea it was almost 30 years old. But, as we know, time flies ….

While the video I created is intended to commemorate Memorial Day 2023, the sacrifices we honor on Memorial Day are ultimate manifestations of giving without season. The only way we can repay our debt to those who’ve given their lives is to honor the freedom they died to preserve.

On Saturday, December 18, 1993, with anticipation of Christmas at its warmest, fuzziest, and most superficial pitch, I happened to be in Gold’s Gym in Manchester, indulging my vanity in the selfish preoccupation of another in an endless series of workouts, when Chapter 120 of the Vietnam Veterans of America interrupted my self-absorption by holding a ceremony — curiously moving, quietly disarming in its deliberate yet humble solemnity — in honor of some other spirit of giving with which I am not entirely familiar, a spirit of sacrifice without season, artifice, or pretense.

These survivors, anonymous in their uniform camouflage fatigues as they were in their trials in Southeast Asia, as they remain in their efforts to reconcile themselves to those trials, had come to recognize Gold’s Gyms for participating in the holiday food drive the Veterans annually conduct for the benefit of their homeless and otherwise needy peers. They had also come to honor the service of members of the state and local police forces and to present commemorative gifts to wives and mothers of their fallen police and military brethren.

All of those assembled, veteran and active soldiers and police officers, widows, and childless mothers, shared this singular bond: No matter how compelled — by self, family, government, or ideology — they have given of themselves and their families in service to people other than themselves, in service to institutions other and larger than their families. They continue to give in ways more painful and profound than most of us will ever have to know. And it occurred to me in watching this ceremony that the least I could do is understand that.

But this is not a lecture on moral obligation. It is not (intended to be) a pedantic diatribe on duty; on the morbid and mortal price paid by others for our freedom; on the guilt we might feel for never having been asked to pay so dear a price ourselves, thereby earning our right to enjoy that freedom. Rather, this is intended to be as sincere and focused an expression of gratitude as I can muster.

To each of the men and women I saw that December afternoon, I wish to say thank you. But my gratitude is not limited to their having given of themselves so profoundly, for sacrificing in ways I can only feebly imagine with horror and hope that neither I nor my children may ever be asked to give the same. More fully and purposefully, I say thank you for their having penetrated my sarcastic cynicism for a meaningful, reflective moment, for reminding me that it’s only by the sweat and blood of selfless souls such as theirs that, once the blush of the Christmas spirit has faded for another year, I have the inestimable freedom to remain detached, sarcastic, and cynical of all that frightens or mystifies me.

Yes, dubious as its value might seem, that is the freedom exercised most frequently by many of us. It is the product of too much abundance, too much freedom to choose among options too numerous to fully evaluate, too much opportunity to take that freedom for granted, too many chances to benefit from the sacrifices of others without thought, acknowledgment, or reciprocity.

For these reasons, I must say to that group of men and women I am frightened and mystified by their sacrifices. But, thanks to that public demonstration of their commitment to giving, I know I am deeply and forever grateful for what they’ve given, and for their having reached me on one, cold winter afternoon, while I, as always, was deep in self-absorption.

In this season and all others, as they have given of themselves so others might not have to, and for helping to purchase the very liberty by which I might write this opinion, God bless them, every one.

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It amazes me how nature law applies to organizations and people. One example is hypothermia. A human body that exposes to very low temperatures soon loses its body energy. This may affect the brain and its ability to make wise decisions.

The same applies to studying organizations. I share my friend’s story to explain.

My friend was in a bad mood. He had a good job and happily engaged in his work. A rich businessperson tempted him to work for him for a much better salary. He resigned and joined the rich man’s organization. The man initially treated my friend so well until he finished an important project. Suddenly, the man moved him to a tiny office. He ordered his staff not to talk to him. He moved him from hot water to a chilling one.

My friend felt that he started to fall off balance. The man hired him to complete an assignment but then he had no need for him. He suffered virtually from hypothermia. His brain stopped functioning. He resigned with a broken heart.

We hear terms such as the manager froze an employee. Those managers cause much harm to humanity. These managers do this for a variety of reasons. These include not favoring their suggestions, excelling and the fear a manager the employee would replace him and grudge against certain nationalities.

The same hypothermic effect applies to celebrities who suffered from poverty to richness of money.

Social media has served many unknown singers and actors to become very famous in no time. These unknown singers and actors move from the chilling waters of poverty in money and fame to become rich in both. These artists suffer from “Sudden Wealth Syndrome”. This syndrome coupled with hypothermia makes these people act in an unacceptable way.

The fear of losing fame and money and as fast as they earned them make them live in fear. Soon their minds lose the ability to make good decisions. They lose old friends; spend money to focus the light on them on showy things like buying the most expensive cars.

It is amazing how fast they can change their behavior because they started by changing their words. These sudden rich people remind me of the wisdom of Mahatma Gandhi:

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Keenan Scott Il’s passion for words, stories, and superheroes fueled his journey to becoming a celebrated playwright, producer, director, and actor. Showing how language can illuminate the superhero in all of us, Scott performs three spoken word pieces that seamlessly weave together literary devices like simile, assonance, and slant rhyme, sharing the talent he’s cultivated despite the obstacles (read: kryptonite).

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Neurodiversity and innovation often go hand in hand, but does that mean visionary entrepreneurs get a free pass to say and do anything they want? Bonobos founder and mental health advocate Andy Dunn shares his experience navigating bipolar I in the midst of running a successful startup, offering lessons learned on his journey to wellness and steps to create a future where everyone is able to “dream crazy dreams” — while being held accountable.

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Around the world, people who work hard are often seen as morally good — even if they produce little to no results. Social psychologist Azim Shariff analyzes the roots of this belief and suggests a shift towards a more meaningful way to think about effort, rather than admiring work for work’s sake.

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It is a common stereotype that men tend to say they’re fine when they’re not. While this may not be true for every individual, there are several potential reasons why some men might do this:

Societal pressure: Men are often socialized to be tough and not show vulnerability or weakness. Saying they’re not fine could be perceived as a sign of weakness, which can be challenging for some men.

Fear of burdening others: Men may not want to burden their friends, family, or partners with their problems. They might feel that it’s easier to say they’re fine than to open up and talk about what’s really going on.

Difficulty expressing emotions: Some men may struggle to express their emotions or put them into words. Saying they’re fine may be a default response when they don’t know how to express what they’re feeling.

Lack of trust: Men may not feel comfortable opening up to others if they don’t trust them or feel that they won’t be understood. Saying they’re fine can be a way to avoid the risk of being judged or misunderstood.

It’s important to remember that not all men will say they’re fine when they’re not, and that everyone’s experience is unique. If you’re concerned about a man in your life, it can be helpful to approach them with empathy and understanding and let them know that you’re there to support them if they need it.

Which of the above is the reason you say you’re fine when you’re not? A shift in mindset can help you get past this.

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Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, I’ve had the opportunity to watch many TV series and movies, and one genre I very much enjoy is period pieces. I love to think about times past and how people lived especially in the day-to-day. Not just taking note of the big events but rather the more ordinary experiences of everyday life, in that time.

In a recently watched episode of Outlander (S01, E06, 13Sep2014), there was an exchange between a British Officer and Scottish War Chieftain of Clan MacKenzie, in 1743. In this scene, the War Chieftain is attempting to safeguard an English-woman and “guest” of his clan who has been invited to dine with British officers. From the start, the British insult and demean the Scotsman, most certainly treating him like the “second-class” human Brits believe all Scots to be. As the exchange wraps up, it goes like this:

Brit: Well, it’s been a delight meeting you, but I am afraid the venison is losing its heat.

Brit: I would ask you to join us, but as you can see, no room.

Brit: Beastly sorry.

Scot: You can keep your scraps. They’re still serving good Scottish ale in the taproom.

Scot: I’ll be downstairs.

Brit: How are we ever going to make peace with such ill-mannered people?

It’s easy to see, from this exchange, the Brit has no intention of extending hospitality to the Scot and his sarcasm is a further insult and acknowledgment of how little [value] the Brit regards the Scot. In an attempt to “save face” and not acknowledge the [emotional] pain of being unwanted, unvalued, and not belonging to the “superior” nation, the Scot states he prefers the Scottish tap room downstairs, anyway.

After the Scot leaves, the Brit boasts further his “position of superiority” with a statement about how “ill-mannered” the Scot people are and how peace is not possible with such a [lesser] people.
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I find this exchange fascinating and as true in 2021 as it was 278 years ago. As I see it, humanity will never experience peace if one nation, group, or person, continues to believe they are “superior” to another. Choose your conflict over superiority:

• British — Scottish
• White — Black
• Black — Asian
• Christian — Jew
• Republican — Democrat
• West Coast — East Coast
• Maryland — Virginia
• New York City — Los Angeles
• Heterosexual — Homosexual
• Vegetarian — Carnivore
• Weight Lifter — Endurance Athlete
• Manchester United — Liverpool
• “Hard” Sciences — Humanities
• Boss — Employee
• Teacher — Student
• Parent — Child, etc.

Since the Brit believes himself to be a “superior human” then he expects the inferior Scot to “bow down” and submit to him and when he does not, the Brit believes the Scot is “ill-mannered” and unreasonable which reinforces his belief of superiority because the “low life” Scot won’t agree to his “station”. In other words, “You’ll only be considered valuable, in some regard, if you acknowledge my superiority”.

Meanwhile, the Scot, holding the inferior “status” (or, more likely, less power, army, money, and land) is kept to his “position”, without a shred of offered respect, which reinforces his position. Still, he knows he’s “as good as any Brit” yet he must reconcile that is not the view of those in power who are claiming their superiority. (It’s easy to claim superiority when you hold the power and resources.)

Another example that comes to mind, sadly, is how often police officers take this “superiority” position over citizens and if their position of authority and power is not recognized, immediately and without question, physical violence and even death too often ensues. Heck, even questioning an officer’s actions or comments can get you arrested or shot.

Sadly, no progress toward equality or peace is possible if the “people in power” continue to operate in a way that reinforces this false belief of higher value within the species. By claiming the other peoples’ inferiority (e.g., the Scots’ “ill-mannered” ways) and their superiority, equality simply is not possible. For equality and peace to exist, there is no superiority or inferiority of peoples.

At what point will humanity recognize we are all one species and no sub-group is better or worse than another?

While we each have our strengths and weakness, we are ALL homo sapiens, and there is no superior or inferior sub-group of people. When we perpetuate this myth, by assuming this position, then our species, as a whole, suffers.

“A rising tide lifts all the boats.”

If we continue to assume “we are better” and “they are worse” and we act accordingly then little will improve for humanity, division will grow, relationships will degrade further, and we’ll continue to hurt each and ourselves.

In Outlander, given the Brit assumes his superiority, the only way he will be satisfied [emotionally] and believe peace is possible is if the Scot agrees and concedes his inferiority. Since the Scot knows he is not inferior (and likely takes the position his people are actually superior to the Brits even if they do not have the power, money, land, etc.) then in order to compensate for that emotional attack (i.e., an attack on his peoples’ value as a species) he assumes their own superiority thereby perpetuating the cycle.

It’s simply a “no win” scenario for humanity, at large, when we continue to proclaim our superiority over others. And the more people believe they are superior the more destructive (often by physical force) their behaviors tend to be in order to maintain that “superior” position.

All the while, I submit, it is more likely each person’s own, individual, feelings of inferiority drive them to attach and associate with a group’s perceived superiority, if at all possible.

What if each and every person felt valued because they ARE valuable, as a human being, and all of humanity operated with this simple understanding?

What if we each took it upon ourselves to seek out, understand, recognize, and acknowledge the value each person we interact with has?

What would it take to discover another person’s gifts rather than assume their uselessness and your superiority? What if we operated from a position of “assumed value” and “positive intent”?

How might our world be different? How might you behave differently if equality truly existed within our species?

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Yesterday, I was part of an exercise called “if you really knew me,” which took place in a room of about 40 people. The idea was for each of us to, for a few minutes, say “if you really knew me—-” and then allow whatever came out to come out.

When it was my turn, I said to the room “If you really knew me, you’d know I don’t have much ambition…

…and I get irritated when people judge that as a bad thing.”

I saw a few smiles.

“My favorite times of the day,” I continued, “are waking up, and eating. And I like making money, but only to further the pursuit of waking up… and eating.”

In my poorest year of business, I became intimate with how special it is to be able to buy food and have shelter. Truly, I’m blessed. I recognize that as a white woman with an education and a family that makes a comfortable middle-class income, I can only ever enter into elected poverty, not actual poverty. Not to mention, I have a massive assortment of highly successful friends- people who did have ambition in the years when I was gallivanting around New York City as a modern-day Beat.

I likely will never fall into dire straits –my life has not been designed that way. I recognize how truly fortunate this is. Nevertheless, I do not judge my value by my “output,” nor have I ever, really.

The only time I would let myself get down about it was when other people judged my value by my output. Why didn’t they see? All I wanted was love, and quiet. For me, waking up and eating was the definition of sublime. (And running too, eventually.) If I could sit by the water for a few hours every day, even better. Doesn’t even have to be fancy water. Dirty water like the East River suits me just fine.

One time I was meditating by that filthy estuary and I opened my eyes to see several police boats, and a police car approaching with flashing lights. Some cleaners thought they found a human body, which they do from time to time. Not that time, though. Even that water is fine. That water, eating, and waking up. That’s the elite trifecta.

Some of you will not understand this, but here’s the thing…

Ray Kurzweil predicted that in 2029, computers will pass the Turning Test and convince us that they have consciousness. Technology holds massively accelerating returns, and within a little over 15 years, we will expand our intelligence a billion-fold. So as threatening as it might sound to you, you were trained to be a piece of machinery to move a motor. That function will become obsolete.

Is it bad? Absolutely not. You’ll get to be with yourself again like you were when you were young, and you picked blades of grass and were giggly curious about everything you saw.

And I’m just here to help with the transitioning process… to help you see the value you hold as a cell in the organism of Earth.

That’s the view from the roof today.

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My partner and I decided we needed to learn, understand, and implement a marketing and promotion program to create and execute campaigns to give our books and those of our clients the best opportunity to become a #1 bestselling new release and/or #1 best seller.

Why did we do this? After writing books that did not achieve what we hoped, we invested time, effort, and money to first understand the publishing/distribution/marketing business and second to develop a sustainable and repeatable program. We interviewed authors who had experienced success and disappointment. We learned how to identify and overcome the landmines, myths, and obstacles that negatively impact authors.

We tested the program on ourselves before offering it to clients. We now have multiple bestselling books. In May of 2021, our Trust the Process – Book Marketing Program was offered to clients. How has that worked?

In the 22-month window from May 2021 to March 2023, our campaigns have produced 11 consecutive Amazon #1 bestselling new releases in multiple categories and two award-winning books.

Our message to authorsSo, you want to write a book. As hard as that is marketing/promoting and selling your book is even harder. The average for book sales is 250 copies. The author makes on average $500. Did you pour your heart and soul into writing a book for this? Don’t you want more? What are you doing to make your book stand out? Do you have a marketing/promotion plan BEFORE your book is finished? The sad fact is most authors do not have any type of marketing/promotion plan.

Let’s look at the facts:* 200 million Americans say they want to publish a book. * Somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 books are published every year in the US alone. That is at least 11,500 books published each week.

Let’s look at the myths:As stated above, the sad fact is that most authors do not have any type of marketing/promotion plan. They mistakenly assume the publisher or editor or illustrator or writing coach will do the marketing. Publishers publish. Their job is to get the book finished and ready to be released. They do not run marketing campaigns. It is up to the author to market their book. Most do not have the expertise or the time to create and execute a comprehensive marketing and promotion campaign.

Most authors do not understand all the steps for a book to go from an idea to a finished product. Initially, I didn’t understand the process and was misled or completely misunderstood the marketing & promotion process. Here are the eight common steps to get a book from idea to a product. Note: none of the eight include marketing and promotion of the book.

1. Write the book: Start with an idea or a concept. It is best to start with something you know. Try to visualize how you see the book flowing. Write your thoughts and arrange them in the order according to the flow in your mind. This is the creative part of the process. Most authors think this is the hardest part. It’s not. This is just step one.
2. Edit the book: The author makes their best effort to edit the book, but as we all know editing what you wrote does not usually go well. Authors tend to see what they intended to write not what is on the page or computer screen. This is where a publisher usually comes into play. Most books will need a line edit and copy edit.
   • Line Editing is focused on the content, style, and language used within the manuscript. A professional line editor may point out sections that can be improved, parts where the style is inconsistent, issues with pacing, or overuse of certain words or phrases throughout the manuscript.
   • Copy Editing is focused on making sure a piece of writing is accurate, clear, and correct. For example: checking the facts; checking the math; ensuring that the writing is free from libel, plagiarism and conforms to the ethical standards of the publication and the profession.
3. Proofreading: Review the manuscript for corrections. This may require two or more rounds of editing for a manuscript of 60,000 words.
4. Final Proofreading: Review the entire manuscript plus interior formatting review and confirm proof. Final edits are made as needed.
5. Manuscript Review: Author approval or comments and corrections. This may occur two or more times.
6. Book Design and Cover: Design of front and back cover with author’s approval
7. Publishing the book: Self-publish or contract publishing
8. Distribution of the book: This is order fulfillment not marketing or promotion. The author can do it themselves. Contract with a publisher or use Amazon for order fulfillment.

The publisher will market the book myth:We just went through the eight common steps in the publishing process. None of them include marketing and promotion. The publisher may write a press release or social media post. The burden of marketing a book falls directly on the author, not the publisher. Publishers publish they do not market or promote. We do.

In Penguin Random House/S&S antitrust trial it was revealed that out of 58,000 trade titles published per year, half of those sell fewer than one dozen books. LESS THAN 12 BOOKS!!!

I will post to my social media myth:Large social media alone is not enough. While becoming a published author is a major ego boost, very few receive income or effectively leverage their book to expand their brand and business. Far too many authors equate likes, followers, and social media connections with increased revenue. Nothing is further from the truth. Never confuse activity with results.

“The pop star Billie Eilish, who now has 102 million Instagram followers and 6.7 million on Twitter, sold just 64,000 copies of her self-titled memoir from May 2021 to December, according to the New York Times. Justin Timberlake, who now has 64.5 million followers on Instagram, only managed to sell 100,000 copies of his autobiographical collection of observations, Hindsight, in the first three years. And the media personality Piers Morgan, who has 7.9 million Twitter followers and 1.8 million on Instagram, managed to move just 5,650 U.S. copies of his book, Wake Up: Why the World Has Gone Nuts, from September to December.”

“If being a celebrity with millions of followers does not guarantee high book sales, what does? Is there any hope for the rest of us?”

~ The Enigma of Book Sales May 9, 2022, By Alesha Brown

Trust the Process – Book Marketing ProgramWhile no campaign can guarantee a #1 bestseller, our campaigns dramatically improve the odds. They are a proven layered multi-step process to build a brand that will significantly increase exposure, awareness, authority, credibility and ultimately create multiple streams of revenue.

Consistency and frequency of the message matter. One post, email, letter, or Facebook live is not effective. For example, everyone knows Coca-Cola and Mcdonald’s, yet every day we see ads, commercials, etc. for these products. Our campaigns keep your message in front of the target market.

The key is to surround yourself with people who have been where you want to go. Keep in mind, many people, friends, family, colleagues, associates, etc. will offer their opinions and ideas on how the author should release and or promote their book. Most have never created and executed such campaigns. The secret to walking on water is to know where the rocks are! We will show you where the rocks are!

Executing a successful marketing/promotion strategy requires the cooperation of all parties including but not limited to; the author, writing coach, adviser, and publisher, who must agree to follow the steps listed in the Trust the Process Statement of Work and take subsequent instructions from.

When does a campaign startWe start our campaigns before the book is finished. The best campaigns build a groundswell of demand before the book is released.

Three stage campaignOur base-level campaigns have three stages.

1. “Priming the pump” in anticipation of the book(s) launch.
2. Launch campaign
3. Post-launch follow-up

The investment will vary depending on the level of depth.

Are you ready to take control of your marketing/promotion? Let’s see.* Why are you writing this book? * Have you written a book before? If yes, What were the results? Did it achieve #1 bestselling status in any category? * Are you looking to leverage the book to create multiple revenue streams? * Are you willing to invest in your marketing, and promotion campaign? * Are you willing to be coached? * What genre is your book? * Are you willing and able to commit to and follow the campaign – prelaunch, launch, post-launch – potential multiple-month contract? * Are you willing to invest in your book’s success? * Will you put in the time and effort to do the tasks assigned to the author? * Do you have an email list and an email program (MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc.)? * What organizations do you belong to as a member, adviser, volunteer, etc.? * Who is your publisher? They must be willing to follow our plan (post the book where and when per the plan). We can suggest a publisher if needed. * Do you need someone to assist you with the writing, formatting, and editing?

As you move through the decision process to write a book, you will hear many stories and claims from publishers, editors, illustrators, friends, and associates. Ask yourself this question, who has created and executed marketing and promotional campaigns that have achieved 11 consecutive #1 bestselling titles and two award-winning books in 22 months?

Magic happens when people Trust the Process. Message Melissa Van Oss or Frank Zaccari on LinkedIn. Let’s talk.

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Why is it that we struggle with our self-care? What is it that has us forget to take our vitamins, give up our sleep for one more episode, skip the walk for a little more work, eat potato chips instead of salad, and then regret our choices at the end of the day? We can ‘should’ on ourselves all day long about our less-than-perfect choices, yet what is motivating us in the first place?

For many of us, we unconsciously focus more on avoiding fear and pain, than on pursuing the feeling of well-being. Many of us were given a sense of ‘well-being’ from what others did for us or to us. We learned this as children when our parents gave us the care and love we needed when we didn’t know how to give it to ourselves.

Some of us still don’t know how to give it to ourselves and our parents were unable to teach us. This has many of us still looking outside of ourselves for our care and well-being. The doctor, our partner, the company, our children, or the teacher. We want to do what they think is best for us. Many of us see what success looks like on those we look up to including celebrities and athletes thinking they look like they have the answer, so we try to mimic what they say or do. Regardless of our income, we all seek to replicate what self-care looks like in the hopes that we will actually feel better. Unfortunately, most of us find ourselves disappointed when we use another’s solutions or wait for someone to take care of it for us. None of them know what is better for us than we do.

I know many people who do little to care for themselves as they have simply ‘numbed-out’ to what they are feeling. Without a connection to our feelings, it is very hard to focus on our self-care. Self-care requires a sensitivity to what is true for us in each moment and a willingness to just ‘be’ with our inner experience. It’s important to be fully present with our thoughts, feelings, sensations, and ideas about what is and isn’t OK for us in how we get our needs met. Some of us are dealing with an issue that narrows our focus into solving that specific problem instead of listening to the rest of what we need inside. Self-care is about all of myself, not just the parts that need to be healed or fixed.

What I have found in my own journey is that my self-care has been directly connected to my level of self-love. The more I offer love and acceptance to myself exactly as I am, the easier it is to pay attention to my own needs and remember that it’s my job to take care of those needs, not someone else’s.

I know what feels best for me and the universe wants to give it to me in surprising and delightful ways when I ask for what I want and say no to what I don’t want. We are each responsible for focusing on our own well-being through the choices we make for ourselves including the thoughts we allow, what we put in our bodies, and the experiences we say yes and say no to. Our parents, teachers, lovers, friends, bosses, health care providers, employee or government are NOT responsible for our well-being. There is no one we need to wait for to give us the care we need BEFORE we can start caring for ourselves. When we claim responsibility for our own self-care, knowing we are whole and complete exactly as we are in our unfolding, we can act in loving ways towards ourselves without judgment. When we are fully accepting of how we are, we realize there is no comparison to anything or anyone, and no destination to get to. No need to compromise or give up what feels best to us. We can choose what is best for us, and others can do the same without anyone giving up their own self-care. Being aware of and choosing what is most loving for us in each moment becomes our natural self-care norm.

What can you do to increase your own self-care today?

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What do the fear of failing, the fear of making mistakes, and the fear of being criticised have in common? It feels to us that the world will end, and there won’t be any life after, so we stay stuck in our comfort zone and miss opportunities for growth and learning.

Chances are that we will fail, be criticised, and make mistakes; it would be ignorant to think that we will not experience any of these situations in life or that somehow we can prevent them from happening.

In this episode, we explore the fear of failure and questions like; what if it was OK to fail and make mistakes? What if it didn’t mean that life will end, and what if it is just another step in our experience as a human and another step in our personal and professional growth?

Peter also shares one of his significant failures during an important performance at a music showcase and how it became a valuable learning experience and sparked more opportunities in the future.

The name of the four-member band Peter played with was MASS. Tune in to hear the whole story.

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Summer time off arrives, and with it arrive new opportunities, chief among them the opportunity to properly understand what leisure ought to mean.

Leisure is not merely time off from labor. Leisure does not just mean sitting around, watching TV, playing games, and giving in to the near mindlessness of clickbait social media and news entertainment. Leisure has a higher purpose. As Josef Pieper’s thesis states, “[I]t is essential to begin by reckoning with the fact that one of the foundations of Western culture is leisure” (Leisure: The Basis of Culture).

“Leisure” has its roots in Latin, specifically the verb licere, which means “to be allowed” and is also the root of the word “license”. In Greek, Pieper notes, “leisure” is skole, which means school. The classical conception of leisure asserts that leisure is a privilege, a time free from the demands of labor performed for the benefit of others which is then used for the benefit of the self.

In short, leisure, properly understood, is time I use to make me better than I am.

Leisure time should be oriented toward self-improvement based on my talents, my interests, and my honest assessment of my deficiencies. C. S. Lewis compared a bad habit to a bent wire. If I want to straighten the wire, I have to bend it in the other direction. For example, if I know I spend too much time reflexively refreshing this or that social media site, then my leisure time should be spent doing something else.

Reflexively refreshing this or that social media site adds little value to my life. It doesn’t make me a better man, a better father, a better teacher, or a better husband. One could argue that it detracts from progress toward those goals. Odds are really good that if I stopped posting on social media that few people would notice. Social media sites don’t do much other than feed morsels to my ego. The likes, shares, and comments, no matter how superficial, reinforce the illusion that I’ve connected in a meaningful way to another person.

​The truth is this: Just about all I’ve really done is continue to provide data to be sold to advertisers, who are then better able to target me with solicitations for products that algorithms indicate I might purchase. Surely I can do better, and so, little by little, I must strive to straighten a few bent wires.

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Like millions of others globally, I watched with fascination, the sensational and striking spectacle of the ceremony, significant symbolism, spectacular artifacts, and rituals at the recent King of England’s majestic coronation. At the same time, I allowed my mind to wander and wondered how this visually stunning and unrivaled British ceremony would impact the nations and realms’ culture and leadership, today and in the future, wondering if, indeed, it is at a cultural tipping point.

Where it is believed, by some, that the coronation made “two statements of great importance for today’s world about the place of religion in public life and the importance and meaning of the nation”. Acknowledging that such a monumental and marvellous event is indicative of a cultural tipping point, not only for the people it embraces but also for organisations, nations, and realms as a whole, to search for what is meaningful and valued by its people.

Making the connectionMy mind wandered and made some obvious connections between the core and common elements that embody both organisational, and national cultural realms – the values, beliefs, assumptions, and mindsets that drive key behaviours and deliver the common implicit messages. As well as the disciplined systems and processes that deliver the results, the rituals that are enacted, and finally, the artifacts whose symbols represent what the culture values.

Maintaining relevance and engagementLike the monarchy, what do organisations need to do to maintain relevance and engagement to thrive in unstable and uncertain times, especially when their existence and legacies are being questioned and evaluated by the people they serve?

At a pivotal time when new sets of global, societal, and organisational demands are being made, largely as a result of the fourth industrial revolution, encompassing the convergence of exponential technologies impacting all of us globally. At the same time, we are all still affected by the consequences of the global pandemic-induced lockdowns, impacting every fabric of our social and civic structures in our world today.

A case study for leveraging cultural tipping points differentlyThe coronation of King Charles III provides us with a great case study of an outstanding and remarkable display of English cultural attributes. This enables us to ask some serious questions about how national and organisational cultures and leadership in times of exponential change, like today, might thrive with uncertainty and co-create solutions to some of the most complex global challenges, by leveraging the range of cultural tipping points differently.

A range of cultural tipping pointsWe are in effect, experiencing globally a range of cultural tipping points:

1. At the macro level, according to a recent article here in Australia, where King Charles still resides as our head of state, the local SMH states that this realm is in a state of flux:

“The King is head of state in 15 countries. More than half of the so-called “realm states” are in the Caribbean and most of them are bailing out. Barbados two years ago, Jamaica probably next year. Belize, Grenada, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines are planning their exit as well”.

1. At the micro level, according to Mc Kinsey & Co, in a recent article “New Leadership for a new era of thriving organisations” stated that organisations and leadership are also in a state of flux:

“Organizations such as Allianz, Haier, Microsoft, and Nucor are transforming their industries with a new organizational approach that seeks to be open, fluid, and adaptable; unleashes the collective energy, passion, and capabilities of its people; reimagines strategy; and focuses on delivering greater value to all stakeholders”.

“Their cultures support a more open, collaborative, and emergent way of working. And the shift to this new kind of model changes the way businesspeople must lead”.

Going back to culture and leadership fundamentalsBecause culture and leadership are, according to Edgar H. Schein “two sides of the same coin and cannot understand one without the other” we have to be in charge and focussed to intentionally, constructively, and creatively manage their interdependence. He also states that culture matters because it is a “powerful, tacit and often unconscious set of forces that determine both our individual and collective behaviours, ways of perceiving, thought patterns, and values”.

If we do not intentionally and strategically take charge, focus, and leverage these forces, we will simply always be at the effect of them, as they take us down the path of least resistance, remain implicit, and will not deliver the results we want and need in a disruptive world.

Making the coronation linksMy mind wandered and considered what might be the range of core values at play on the weekend and landed on a range of seldom-used words including – power, sovereignty, continuity, divinity, tradition, wealth, accession, diversity, responsibility, pride, and loyalty, supported by the key values of Christianity and a belief in divine right and the crucial role of righteousness.

The ceremony was jam-packed full of amazing seldom-seen rituals, including public prayer, polite bows, serious vows, anointment, and elaborate crowning, to name just a few.

The variety and assortment of symbols were mesmerising, including priceless golden carriages, bejewelled coronation swords, golden scepters, the solo glove and silver spoon, beautifully crafted and jewelled orbs and elaborate crowns. Plus a selection of artifacts included religious items and a variety of civic and military seriously gold braided red, black and white regalia.

Delivered by a set of carefully planned processes and an orchestrated set of scheduled events, including flybys, a range of powerful military processions and parades, serious police presence and awesome security all enacted with mighty precision.

Sharing the key messagesMy mind then wandered and considered what might be the key messages being communicated by this incredible series of marvellous events, and wondered how relevant and engaging they might be to people today:

• A coronation signals the conferment of God’s grace upon a ruler,
• A coronation appoints the king as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England,
• A coronation is a joyous and celebratory event.

Back to the SMH “The people got what they wanted. The cheers in the Mall, the boulevard built for the adoration of royalty, were real, even if the masses were down on those for the Queen’s Jubilee.”

Impacting the futureIt remains to be seen if this powerful, majestic, memorable, and significant once-in-a-lifetime ceremonial event will ultimately help unify or divide the English realm. Which it seems, is facing its own range of unique challenges and a controversial cultural tipping point, ultimately and seriously impacting its future viability.

Back to the SMH “But Charles’s big show might be his last great day. The last dance of a wheeling, brilliant circus that has entertained and beguiled but which soon enough, in its distant realms, will stutter and shrink and reel no more.”

Why does this matter?This matters today because we are individually, and collectively at a range of social, civic, and organisational cultural tipping points. Where we organisation and leaders are also dancing many of our “last dances”, and “stutter and shrink and reel nor more” because, according to some, we are not strategically focussed on leveraging the culture and leadership basics:

• Implicitly clarifying values that focus on delivering value that improves the quality of people’s lives that they appreciate and cherish and explicitly making them an active part of corporate life.
• Ensuring that leaders role model and enact behaviours that demonstrate the values in action, where people are accountable and rewarded by rigorous systems and supportive disciplined, and agile processes.
• Co-creating powerful sets of rituals, symbols, and artifacts, aligned to the values, that deliver the “new architectures” to create permission, safety, and trust that drive collaboration, experimentation, innovation, inclusion, and sustainability.
• Communicating engaging and inclusive messages that resonate creativity, respect, and appreciation for people, profit, and the planet.

Shifting the cultural tipping pointsIt’s time to transform leadership to transform organisations, in ways that are self-aware and inspiring, meaningful and purposeful, equitable and sustainable, with increasing speed, resilience, and efficiency to guide organisational cultures and leadership that:

• Helps people navigate and balance in-person and remote work, be mentally healthy and well, and make the way for both applied AI and human skills development.
• Develops new rules for attracting and retaining people, close the capability chasm and walk the talent tightropes to better equip, empower and harness people’s harness collective intelligence to make both the organisation and the world better places.
• Creates, invents, and innovates new ways of thinking, and acting that ultimately shift the range of cultural tipping points to meet new sets of global, societal, and organisational demands and challenges emerging in the 21st century, and lets go of what is no longer relevant to better serve humanity as a whole.

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Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

~Buddha quote

Life constantly presents us with difficult situations and I am constantly thinking about how I can better deal with them and not become embroiled in a vicious circle of angst, fear, and hurt and therefore ultimately extending the amount of suffering I subject myself and others to – because it’s just not very nice and I get sick of lying awake at night going over and over things in my mind, with no obvious resolution in sight, very often because there isn’t one.

So, what is it that we can do when faced with seemingly unfair, hurtful, and insensitive events/circumstances, over which it feels like we have absolutely no control and are often blind-sided by them in the first place?

The first thing I’ve decided to try and do is not to take it personally. When we come up against negative circumstances, comments, or actions, we generally assume it is because of something we have done or said, or it is because we believe there is something wrong or lacking in us.

The reality is often quite the opposite. The actions we are encountering are generally about the person or environment that they are coming from – fear, angst, pain, which is ultimately being passed on to others because there is neither the awareness or availability of emotional tools, to deal with the root causes which have driven the situation in the first place – which is hardly surprising, as an emotional education is sadly lacking in our modern-day society.

Secondly, I have decided not to respond in the moment but to step back and force myself to pause, to reflect, and to sleep on it, because if not it will be my ego, my fear, and my pain that responds and two wrongs have never made a right.

Thirdly, I have decided that sometimes life is just unfair, sh*tty and people and circumstances can feel terribly unkind, but that does not mean that I have to be too. Therefore sometimes we just have to sit with this uncomfortable truth and feel uncomfortable about it – interestingly, I have found that after a while that discomfort does become more bearable and more irrelevant to my everyday existence.

And fourthly and finally, for now, I have decided to simply accept whatever it is that is beyond my control, let it go and move on. My days of pushing boulders up hills are over, I simply do not have the motivation nor energy.

Now, that may bring sadness and grief as I let go of my expectations or my relationship with something or someone, but again it does become more bearable with the passing of time, whereas staying in the moment of suffering and constantly replaying the hurt, rejection, and unfairness of it, simply means that I re-live the same pain, time and time again.

And that is the most damaging thing of all, because not only do we then choose to constantly carry our own pain, but we also choose to carry another’s too.

Life is just too short, just let it go and move on.

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That was the question I asked myself as I sat down to finish one of the dozens of drafts waiting for me in my notebook.

In the two and a half years I have been on this platform, I have written sixteen articles, which is a pretty small number compared to other authors. However, I am very pleased with my published work and feel truly honoured to be one of the 300+ Featured Contributors. Many contributors were already well-known authors before they joined BIZCATALYST, while others, like me, were just casual bloggers and novice writers who wanted to “spread their wings” (in Dennis’ words).

Before I started writing here, I had already found my voice through five years of blogging. I wrote whenever I had something to say and was ready to express it. Even after being named a Featured Contributor, I haven’t changed my approach to writing. Many unwritten thoughts and ideas are buzzing around in my head. It takes me a long time to turn them into pieces I am willing to share.

I couldn’t think of a better place to express myself than BIZCATALYST 360°. As demonstrated numerous times, this platform truly is a community.

It’s a place where an introvert like me feels comfortable writing. A writing community that values and encourages diversity. A welcoming environment of mutual respect and understanding. I’ve had constructive discussions with several writers who disagree with me but are open to hearing and understanding different ideas and perspectives. Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share your point of view and attempting to see things through their eyes can be both challenging and refreshing.

My most recent article was published eight months ago. The last two years have been physically and mentally exhausting for me. I wrote about it in my article below:

Tears and Joy of Caring for Ageing Parent(s)

Everyone is unique when it comes to life’s challenges and demands. I’ve always been hesitant to write about my struggles, not because I lacked courage but because I believed such things should be shared only with my family and close friends. However, after joining BIZCATALYST, I read many outstanding and truly inspirational stories from fellow writers who overcame life’s most difficult challenges and remained optimistic. These stories literally changed the way I thought about writing on publishing platforms and inspired me to share my struggles with others.

The entire experience of caregiving profoundly altered my life. It felt liberating to write about it and put my deepest feelings on the screen. Sharing my struggles allowed me to connect with others who could relate to my story. I’ve received encouraging messages from others who have faced or are facing the challenges of caring for loved ones. Those messages taught me that telling your story is not only a powerful tool for self-discovery; it can also provide comfort and support to others who struggle in silence and inspire them to tell their own.

Being on BIZCATALYST has taught me that stories inspire and encourage people to act. Even a small action can cause a ripple effect of change.

I will do my best to continue writing on this platform. It does not have to be perfect writing. Nothing is perfect. There is no “right” way to write about what is on your mind and heart. Another thing I’ve learned from being here is to always write in your own voice, with your passion, personality, and genuine heart shining through. I sincerely hope that my imperfect writing reflects all of this.

Writing for BIZCATALYST 360° has allowed me to reach a much larger audience than I could through my blog. It has also connected me with some wonderful people outside my professional and personal circles. I look forward to writing more and making even closer connections within this amazing community.

Why do you write for BIZCATALYST 360°? And what have you learned from it?

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I‘m a big believer in setting goals. My mentor taught me this skill at the early age of 12. Goals give us a sense of direction and purpose and help us stay motivated. I use the SMART framework to set my goals as Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Specific: Goals should be clear, well-defined, and unambiguous. Instead of setting a vague goal like ” improve my career,” a specific goal would be “earn a promotion to a managerial position within my current department.”

Measurable: Goals should have quantifiable criteria that allow us to track progress and determine when they have been achieved. For example, if the goal is to increase sales, a measurable goal is to “ increase monthly sales by 10% within the next quarter.

Achievable: Goals should be realistic and attainable. While it’s essential to aim high, setting goals far beyond our capabilities can lead to frustration and demotivation. An achievable goal might be “complete a marathon within the next year” if you have been consistently running and training for shorter distances.

Relevant: Goals should be aligned with our broader objectives and aspirations. They should be relevant to our values, priorities, and long-term vision. For instance, if your long-term goal is to become a published author, an appropriate goal is to “ complete the first draft of my novel within the next six months.

Time-bound: Goals should have a specific timeframe or deadline for completion. This helps create a sense of urgency and provides a timeline for tracking progress. For example, a time-bound goal could be ” attend three professional development workshops within the next six months.”

I’ve found that using the SMART framework to set my goals has helped me achieve more personally and professionally. I am more likely to stay motivated and on track when I set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals. I also find tracking my progress and celebrating my accomplishments easier when my goals are SMART.

My Personal Mission, Vision, and GoalsEveryone has a unique purpose in life. My goal [particular purpose] is to use my knowledge and skills to help others. I want to positively impact my sphere of influence and leave it a better place than I found.

I have developed a personal mission statement and vision to achieve my purpose. My mission statement is:

To use my knowledge and skills to help others and positively impact the world.

My vision is:

To create a world where everyone has the opportunity to reach their full potential.

I have also set SMART goals to help me achieve my mission and vision. My goals are:

• Volunteer my time. This allows me to give back to my community and make a difference in the lives of others.
• Write and publish my second book. This will allow me to share my knowledge and experience with others and help them more meaningfully.
• Start a podcast. This will allow me to share my knowledge and skills with others and inspire them to achieve their goals.

I am confident that I can achieve my mission and vision by setting SMART goals and working hard to achieve them. I am excited to see the future and grateful for the opportunity to make a difference.

I encourage you to develop your mission, vision, and goals.

It is a powerful way to focus your energy and achieve your dreams.

If you want to achieve more, I encourage you to use the SMART framework to set your goals. It’s a simple but effective way to set yourself up for success.

SMART goals are more likely to help you stay motivated and on track. You are also more likely to achieve your goals because they are realistic and achievable.

Here are a few tips for using the SMART framework to set your goals:

• Make them specific. What exactly do you want to achieve?
• Make them measurable. How will you know when you have reached your goal?
• Make them achievable. Are you setting yourself up for success?
• Please make them relevant. Are your goals aligned with your values and priorities?
• Make them time-bound. When do you want to achieve your goal?

By applying the SMART framework and these tips, you will be well on your way to setting and achieving your goals.

Enjoy your journey!

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When you want to achieve something in life or master a goal it is important to imagine yourself experiencing and living that dream. Literally, visualize the dream into reality. Visualizing yourself through your senses is a great way to manifest your dreams. Begin taking steps towards your goal. You will notice challenges along the way, that is part of the human experience. And obstacles may cause self-sabotage, resistance, and fear to throw you off course. But something that makes the journey exponentially better is awareness and action through self-loving practices. Most people don’t realize self-loving strategies reduce the resistance and self-sabotaging behavior. And this is possible because regularly using self-loving strategies reduces the impact stress plays on the nervous system, mind, and body when challenges happen. Tackling your stress response regularly reduces the buildup of stress and toxins in the body. So here are some steps that helped me master my goals as I worked through the resistance that trauma left behind.

Step 1: Visualize the Goal through your senses. Dream it.You need to daydream in the waking hours and your subconscious will replay it in your sleep. Visualize the goal unfolding and manifesting in your life. Visualize the environment. Notice the people around you and see them benefiting from your goal. Notice the blessings you receive (trips, cars, gifts). Use your senses to feel the experience (taste, smell, touch, sensations) to bring it into your physical reality. And visualize it often, daily or weekly for best results.

Step 2: Redirect Your Thoughts. And address self-sabotage or resistance.Redirect the negative thoughts in your mind. And remind yourself to Believe in your dream. Believe it is possible to achieve it. Believe you are worthy of it. Believe you will get it. And remind yourself as often as needed that you deserve it and will manifest it.

That negative voice will sometimes get the better of you. And when it does self-sabotage and resistance will occur. And that is the tricky part of manifesting a dream. You need to prove it to the judge in your head that you are worthy and deserve this goal. So repetition and consistency is key.

Every time a negative thought or belief pops into your mind, remember to shift the thought to a positive, grateful, and hopeful one instead.

And when the positive thought won’t stick or frustration sets in, notice your body. And recognize if the emotion is creating a symptom in your body. Do you feel fatigue, stress, pain, or some other physical symptom? If yes, it is time to practice self-love (self-love strategies coming below). The thought created a symptom that needs to be addressed to move forward.

Therefore, to master your mind, remind yourself often…The only person that needs to approve is the face in the mirror. Forget the judgements and criticism that may come your way. And whenever you feel stuck or frozen, use self-love to shift the body through movement. Because moving the body releases emotions and stress thus allowing the mind to feel more calm, peaceful, and relaxed. Thus, setting the stage to move forward rather than getting stuck.

Step 3: Repeat, Repeat, RepeatRepetition and Consistency is key. Every day you need to visualize, redirect and shift thoughts, feelings, and beliefs through self-love. Because you are worth achieving the dream. You are capable of reaching for the sky and the stars. It took me years to believe this was possible. But shifting your perspective and practicing self-love will prove to manifest your goals rapidly. So reach for your dreams and get out of your own way.

Step 4: Shift Your body and mind often.The challenge that happens often in life is obstacles, challenges and triggers happen regularly. So mastering self-loving practices and shifting the mindset is crucial to flow towards your goal rather than getting stuck or falling off track. Physical activity through exercise, dance, movement, yoga, touch, etc. will address the body to free the mind.

Step 5: Recognize your triggers and take action when they arise.It is part of life to learn the triggers that get in your way. These triggers can easily throw you off course and set you on a path of self-sabotage. It is normal that triggers happen but self-sabotage doesn’t have to be normal. Recognizing and addressing the reaction to your triggers with self-love will break the cycle.

The real secret to mastering the patterns triggers and challenges bring is to identify and use strategies that destroy the stress by addressing the body. The more you recognize your patterns, use the strategies and break the cycle, the easier the journey becomes. And one day you will suddenly notice those obstacles that used to throw you off course suddenly propel you forward. This shift in mindset and perspective is essential to reach for the goal and attain it. So here are some tools to get you back on track and setting your destination towards your dream.

Setting A Course Toward Your Dream:1. Visualize yourself achieving the dream goal
2. Notice what feelings, beliefs, or emotions this goal will bring you (calm, balanced, joy, freedom, courage, etc.) Use your senses to feel the benefits of reaching the goal. What do you taste, smell, feel, sense, see?
3. Repeat often

Shifting the Negative Voice:1. Notice the way you feel after the thought arises. Notice if you have a symptom or pain arise with the thought, feeling or belief.
2. Take a deep breath and reframe the thought or voice in your head. Example: I can’t do this. = I can do this. Breathe in the new thought several times. Close your eyes if you need to and focus your breath on the thought.
3. Write it down. A great way to shift a persistent negative voice is to write the new positive thought down. Write it several times to reinforce the change you are choosing.

Transforming a Trigger into Motivation:1. Identify the trigger that throws you off course (person, place or situation). Keep note of each trigger. And recognize and address it if it arises.
2. Find the emotion or feelings felt after being triggered
3. Identify the physical symptoms you experienced (tension, pain, hot flash, dizziness, etc.)
4. Use a self-love technique (self-love hug):

• Notice the symptom, feeling, or emotion in your body
• Take 3 deep slow breaths.
• Try the 555 Breath. Count to 5 as you slowly inhale, hold your breath for 5 seconds, then slowly exhale for 5 seconds.
• Notice your face and body as you shift your focus into your breath.
• Self-love hug. Cross your arms and gently massage your arms and shoulders. This is an easy way to calm the nervous system through touch. Combine with 555 Breath for maximum results.
• Notice any lingering tender or sore spots in the body.
• Gently massage any tender spot while you focus on your breath
• Imagine the stress melting away. Close your eyes and imagine a colorful light entering that tender spot. And imagine your breath is releasing any stress or tension with each exhale.
• Repeat self-love regularly.

Self-love has many different tools at your disposal but the secret to unlocking them is to recognize the activities that bring you joy and calm your body. The self-love hug is a simple strategy but techniques like yoga, dancing, swimming, singing, etc. will also support you. Once you identify which self-love activities work for you, then it is a matter of repeating them and using them regularly. All it takes to make it into a habit is to use the technique for the next 21 days. And once it is a habit, it is easy to add another habit to your tool belt. All you need to reach your goal is consistency and dedication. So plan a goal and set a course toward your dream by using self-love to empower you.

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Can you sense the pull toward more and more group work? The word collaboration is used frequently in organisational life but isn’t well understood or practised in reality…and yet somewhere within us, we know that working across boundaries and overcoming the isolation of long-held silo thinking will be one of the keys to elevating the impact of our work in its many forms.

The silos sit at so many levels – roles, departments, directorates, companies, organisations, institutions, nations and so on. There’s push and pull of getting our own ‘part’ working well and protecting it alongside deep knowing that in fact, true success relies on a higher level of interplay between ‘us’ and ‘others’.

On the global level we are seeing the challenges and the pull of group working in so many aspects of the Pandemic as, in some cases, we seek to work out how we work as a single Humanity rather than with separatist tendencies. Simultaneously we can see the undercurrent and indeed stark evidence of ‘me first’ or ‘protectionist’ behaviour. So too in organisations we can see this play out as we become immersed in our own priorities and agendas – not necessarily fuelled by political or personal gain but because we find it too difficult to lift our heads up and look outward.

Thinking and acting as a ‘group’ demands that we set or can connect to a higher collective purpose or focus. It needs an emotional maturity from everyone as we act from generosity and a higher point of service to the purpose rather than our own egos. That said, we know that in organisations so many of the performance reward mechanisms are geared toward the individual rather than collective performance. This will need to change for us to really harness the power of group working.

A group mindset has within its core a deep sense of unity and oneness…a bringing together of the unique talents and gifts of each entity – person, function, nation – and harnessing these in service of something bigger and which cannot be achieved alone.

This is the future and opening ourselves more deeply to the potential of group working will reveal many new opportunities for making it live. The question is how long will this take us given how pressing the need is now in our world?

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Why is anti-Semitism on the rise?The last two years have witnessed the Pittsburgh massacre and the San Diego shooting. Grotesque caricatures in a Belgian parade and the New York Times. The proliferation of BDS. Proposed legislation in Ireland criminalizing tourism in Israel. Synagogue and cemetery desecrations. Openly anti-Semitic epithets from within the American Congress and the British Parliament. Unprovoked threats and physical assaults.

After decades of dormancy, why now? The question is impossible to answer unless we understand why Jew-hatred exists at all. And that question has been debated almost from the moment the Jewish people came into existence.

Sigmund Freud (like many before him) identified cultural “otherness” as the source of Gentile animus toward the Jews.

However, history refutes Freud’s hypothesis. The violent oppression of the Syrian-Greeks following the rise of Jewish Hellenism, the auto-de-fe of the Spanish Inquisition following the conversion of the Marranos, and the incineration of countless acculturated German Jews in Hitler’s crematoria all prove that assimilation intensifies, rather than inhibits, anti-Semitism.

In fact, that very “otherness” has earned the Jews admiration and praise. The non-Jewish historian Paul Johnson echoed sentiments expressed by John Adams, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, and Winston Churchill when he wrote in his History of the Jews —

To [the Jews] we owe the ideas of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of the human person; of the individual conscience, and so of personal redemption; of the collective conscience, and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal, and love as the foundation of justice; and many other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind.

Why should such high-minded idealism produce hatred? The answer can be found in the schoolyard.

Something’s MissingIn 2008, bestselling author Jodee Blanco embarked on a campaign to eradicate bullying. In Please Stop Laughing at us… One Survivor’s Quest to Prevent School Bullying, Ms. Blanco attempts to deconstruct and quantify the social dynamics that divide children — and sometimes adults — into predators and prey.

Based upon countless interviews and observations, Blanco arrives at an intriguing hypothesis: she describes the typical bullying victim as an ancient child, an individual possessing a more developed sense of empathy than his or her peers.

By consciously or unconsciously flexing their “compassion muscle,” these little adults set themselves apart from their less sensitive peers who may come to feel inferior in the presence of greater emotional maturity and threatened by a response mechanism that they cannot understand. Once a tormentor targets a victim, other children readily fall into line.

Ms. Blanco suggests that bullies are afflicted with empathy deficit disorder, an underdeveloped level of sensitivity that inhibits their ability to feel compassion. The tragic irony is that the victim, unable to conceal his own hyper-developed sense of empathy, becomes despised for his atypical maturity by the individual who stands to benefit most by learning from his example.

On a national and historic level, are not the Jews the ancient child, the small, upstart nation that challenged the pagan values of might makes right and moral anarchy? What happens when the gift of moral maturity is not appreciated when it demands a higher level of responsibility than the recipient is willing to accept? Won’t that gift inevitably become a threat, a curse, and a source of profound resentment?

Beginning with the biblical account of the nation of Amalek attacking the Israelites as they fled Egypt into the desert, history records a litany of cultures all seeking to crush the descendants of Jacob. Why? Because the Jews stood for an ideal those cultures despised: the rejection of moral autonomy, and the assertion of moral duty to live a life of virtue.

So it was with the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Syrians, and the Romans. So too with Spain, France, Turkey, Poland, Russia, and Germany — each warmly welcoming the Jews at first, then turning viciously against them.

The Final FrontierAt last, America offered refuge for the Jew. Building upon principles introduced to the world by Jewish teaching, the Framers fashioned the first pluralistic society founded upon the ideals of meritocracy, human rights, and human dignity.

The community of mankind responded by gradually beginning to acknowledge the nobility of every human being, the value of collective responsibility, the obligation upon every citizen to help carry the yoke of those too weak to carry their own.

Liberal sensitivities began to take hold until no clear-thinking person dared argue with such fundamental progressive values as social justice and charity — values that flowed forth from the ancient teachings of Jewish tradition and Jewish law.

And when the Nazi Holocaust confronted the world with the ghastly handiwork of unbridled evil, the world embraced the Jewish people as the poster children for the overarching moral standards that govern civilized society. The innate empathy of mankind began to emerge. Anti-Semitism became as indefensible as infanticide.

Tragically, the pendulum has swung back again.

In part, memory fades. More significantly, politics has come to replace religion as the guiding doctrine of mankind. The principles introduced to the world by the Jews have been hijacked and conscripted to defend an ideology of irrational utopianism. Judge every person favorably has mutated into non-judgmentalism. Charity has morphed into entitlement. Liberty has devolved into libertinism. Civility has been weaponized into political correctness.

Most perversely, Israel has been compared to Nazi Germany.

As moral autonomy supplants moral duty, the traditional values of Judaism become worse than irrelevant; they become a threat. The mere suggestion of higher moral authority annuls the right of the individual to define his own moral code. Traditional values become a form of heresy, and all heretics must die.

Nuance, reason, and compromise are supplanted by inflexible dogma. Ideologies become entrenched. Truth becomes subjective. Civil discourse disintegrates. Rhetoric becomes weaponry. Society descends into empathy deficit disorder.

Inevitably, violence follows as bullying becomes the new normal.

Back to The FutureThe resurgence of Jew-hatred, therefore, is a symptom of the moral decline of man, not into immorality but amorality, the rejection of moral absolutes, and embrace of moral relativism.

Ironically, Anti-Semitism has much more to do with non-Jewish society than it does with either the Jew or his Judaism. It is the bully’s reflexive response in the face of moral maturity on the playground of human society.

That’s why empathy deficit disorder extends to every form of ethnic, racial, religious, cultural, and ideological prejudice. We don’t want to be forced to think. We want our feelings vindicated. The rise of identity politics and cultural tribalism is turning us all into victims, paradoxically granting us license to bully our perceived oppressors.

People of color are victims of white privilege. Whites are victims of reverse racism. Women are victims of male domination. Men are victims of militant feminism. The poor are victimized by a disparity of wealth. The wealthy are victimized by wealth redistribution. Rather than moving forward to combine our strengths by building bridges, we use our differences as an excuse to attack the foundations of civilization, and one another.

Is there a solution? Of course.

We need leaders secure enough to engage their opposition without resorting to misinformation, hyperbole, or character assassination. We need a citizenry that refuses to support candidates who subvert the ideals of intellectual and personal integrity. We need a media with the ethical courage to set aside ideology in favor of both factual and contextual truth. We need to confront the vicious circle of empathy deficit disorder and take responsibility for disrupting its relentless advance.

The battle for the soul of Western Civilization will be won when voices of rational debate and civil discourse join together against ideological extremism on both sides of the aisle. Only then will hatred in all its forms begin to lose favor. Only then will the ancient ideals of human nobility prevail.

You can be a bully or a victim. You can be both. Or you can be neither. Which will you be?

Editor’s Note: Click here to join us for a special Salon 360° Session on Tuesday, May 30th focused on Anti-Semitism,**

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Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us.

–Marianne Williamson

I‘m a big fan of Marianne Williamson. She embodies spirituality, intelligence, and integrity with everything she says and does. Though I must admit, another reason I feel close to her is sharing the same last name with her.

She states the above quote in her book A Return to Love. And she continues by saying, “We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

I wonder what reading this makes you feel. For instance, does it resonate with you? Are you your biggest saboteur? Do you question your abilities? Let’s cut to the chase. Are you afraid of success?

Ways to Recognize the Fear of SuccessA big challenge in recognizing the fear of success one often experiences is having difficulty detecting it. You may have a sense that something is off, but you cannot put your finger on what’s wrong. If that’s you, you might look for a few common symptoms in yourself. Like one -or more- of these:

• Worrying that your big break will come, and when it does, you’ll not be able to deliver.
• Fearing that success will turn you into something you don’t want to be.
• Creating beautiful, detailed business and marketing plans while not acting on any tasks that will help them materialize.
• Thinking that if you become successful, it’ll be too much pressure and too much work.
• Starting and making it halfway through your plans, and then not showing up at a key moment because you hit the terror barrier.
• Doubting yourself and believing that you are not good enough to sustain success.

Success is an island far away that you can see on the horizon. You keep telling yourself that you want to go there, but when it comes to jumping in the boat and starting to paddle, in other words, when things get serious, you withdraw.

Let’s say it’s the case… Then what?People don’t fear becoming successful; they fear the results and consequences of success. They worry about the ways success might change their lives and put them outside their comfort zone.

But getting clear on what you want and working with a coach or mentor could help you explore how that would look. Also, regularly reminding yourself of your genius improves your self-confidence and self-belief.

You already have everything you need to succeed. You’re just not tapping into your capabilities. Connect with your inner self and choose to start. Then, keep moving toward the goals that scare you.

Even if you don’t succeed at your first attempt, you will grow along the way and come back stronger for the second one.

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Ernest Holmes would go to the drugstore each day for a snack. One day, he saw a drunk man and offered to buy him a cup of coffee. The man accepted. As Ernest spoke with him while he was sobering up over his cup of coffee, he discovered that the man was a sign painter. Ernest asked the manager of the store for some paper and some markers and asked the man to paint some signs with letters and numbers. The store manager who was watching this stated that he actually needed some signs. “How much are you going to pay him?” asked Ernest. The manager made an agreement with the man to create some signs and agreed to pay him for his work and expertise. A few months later a man knocked at Ernest’s office and asked to see him. He was clean-shaven and wearing a nice suit he had purchased from the thrift store. He came to say thank you to Ernest. Ernest told him to get in the car and they rode around until Ernest saw a store for lease and made arrangements for the man to start his own business. The man became successful and repaid Ernest.

Ernest Holmes was a Quiet Genius. He could see the genius within others and make a difference in their lives. I still use this story as a guideline in my life of what small or sizable ways I may be of service to another living being. Some acts are small and happen quickly while other acts of a Quiet Genius happen over time. I have returned payments for services rendered and given away important things of value to me because spiritually I felt guided to do so knowing I may positively impact someone’s life.

Who knows who we may truly be if someone like Ernest Holmes or some other Quiet Genius would come along and see our further potential?

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Five years ago, I didn’t know what a County Commissioner was. Today I find myself engaging regularly with them and their staff. I even speak to elected state officials about issues important to the 3-mile barrier island on which I live.

What I have learned in the past five years is that the American people are failing Civics 101 if we even knew much about it from school. And we have paid a significant price for this failure.

Here is the gist of my lesson. Our everyday life is impacted by local issues. That is what is important. And by knowing the local issues, we gain a unique insight into state and even national issues.

Sure, I saw it as my duty to pay attention to national elections. After all, I had to support the party that I was raised to believe in, right? When the ballot listed referendums or local elections, I diligently read about each before casting my vote, but my heart wasn’t in it. Local issues are nuanced, and it really isn’t possible to read about something in one day and know enough to extend a vote the following day.

To cap it off, what you choose to read to educate yourself may be carefully curated to point in one direction, failing to reveal important issues on the other side.

After several years of learning about local government, my mind is overwhelmed. My solution for that is to write.

I am not writing so much to convince anyone that I am right about the failure of Civics 101 – there is always room to debate that very specific complaint. I am writing to sort out for myself what I have learned, and perhaps to provide information that others have not considered and may find helpful.

I will try to stick to short topics and may tackle several of those or just a couple. I’ll be done when I’m done.

And I must offer this disclaimer: if I am the only one who has been clueless about this, I don’t mean to offend those who already have figured all this out. But it has been so transformative to me that I want to share what I’ve learned.

Why Local GovernmentWhile we’re watching national news, our local government is making decisions about our water, our trash, our lifestyle, our schools, our roads, our safety, our sanitation, our trees, our land, our business, our heritage, sea level rise, flooding, bike safety, pedestrian safety, vacation rentals, noise, wildlife…. essentially every aspect of our daily lives.

When the federal or state government takes a stand on an issue, it is the local government that must apply for funding dollars and compete with other local governments for that funding. There is never enough funding to go around, so the competition is fierce. Some local governments don’t bother. Many understand how to compete effectively.

Our state – Florida – also budgets billions, available to local governments through application.

How effectively they can make a business case for the funds results in whether that funding is available locally.

Take sea level rise. If you don’t live near the coast this might be a foreign concept but those of us who do are very familiar with the devastation that storm surge flooding can wreak. The new word for dealing with sea level rise is resiliency. The Federal Government has allocated billions of funding to resiliency. The money is available as grants to state and local government only if they apply and are seriously competitive.

If you think all local governments are on top of these opportunities and aggressive in going after them, you are wrong.

Local government could be a city, a county, or other municipality that must identify the need, apply for the grant and administer the paperwork associated with the grant.

In a diverse county with diverse districts, how does local government make the decision about what communities will get help?

I suppose that the answer to that question varies by local government.

My experience has been that the citizens of the community are the ones that make their case (or not).

Think about that. I started out hypothesizing that citizens often do not become involved in local government. But some do and their communities may reap the benefit of their activism.

What does that mean for those who do not take an active role in local government? I have found that it often means that they lose out.

This is an example of how and why citizens need to take an active role in local government. Citizens’ groups can make a difference.

Sometimes citizens’ groups run into bigger obstacles – lobbyists.

But that’s for another day.

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What if

every moment spent in awe
of the authentic beauty that surrounds us
contributed to the healing
of our hearts
and by extension
the worrisome state of the world

What if

every moment dedicated
to bearing witness
to the more-than-human
life that abounds all around us
added to the joy in our soul
and by extension
the capacity for joyfulness everywhere

What if

every moment of rapt attention
to the bold unfolding of everyday miracles
every moment not spent
wrapped up in the day’s to do list
added immeasurably to our experience
of this amazing gift called Life

What if

every day we stepped outside
the noise and news and views
bombarding our senses and sensibilities
making time and taking time
finding ourselves replenished by the immediacy
of our living breathing planetary home

What if

we stepped away from the habitual
familiarity of all too many depleting routines
and into an expansive comfort zone
enriched by rituals and reverent practices
that invite us to embrace
the fullness of our time here
Who might we become
and what might become possible
in the process?

from the heart, mind, and pen of Minx

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Do you know that women who had to leave college to have children can feel like they cannot return and finish their degrees? It can be challenging, especially if years have passed. But don’t worry!

There are various options available for you to return to school and complete your education. With flexible scheduling, online courses, or part-time enrollment, you can make it work!

Here are some tips that can come in handy if you are considering returning to college:

1. Research Your Options – Whether you want to finish your degree or explore a new field, researching your options is the first step. Check out schools that offer degree completion programs or services dedicated to helping adult students like you.
2. Build Your Support System – Talk to your family and friends about your plan to return to college and enlist their help and support. You may also seek a mentor, either in real life or online, who can inspire and advise you throughout your educational journey.
3. Develop an Education Plan – Put together a plan for completing your degree incorporating the new challenges you face as an adult returning to college. Set realistic goals for yourself, and plan for the time commitments associated with classes, studying, and other activities.
4. Pursue Financial Aid – Do some research to learn about grants, scholarships, loans, or other financial aid opportunities tailored to adult learners. Knowing what resources are available can help make it more affordable for you to pursue your degree. Also, consider pay-as-you-go with cash; it may take longer but will avoid debt. If already employed, review company benefits for educational purposes.

Lastly, let’s talk about the importance of education in a world where most jobs require some education today and in the future. Education is a cornerstone of society, and fostering the best educational opportunities for everyone is crucial. By leveling the playing field, we can make progress and enhance the prospects of all citizens in our global society.

As we look ahead to 2030, it’s clear that the need for specialized and diversified education will only increase. Advances in technology, artificial intelligence, and other disruptive forces will shape the world of tomorrow; new degrees will be needed to provide them with broad skills and knowledge.

One such degree is the Bachelor of Distributed Ledger Technology or BDLT. This degree will prepare students to understand the principles behind distributed ledger technologies like blockchain and its potential applications across multiple industries. Through courses in coding and cryptography, students will learn to design secure systems that can be

I hope this helps!

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I read a quote by Elizabeth von Arnim the other day that said;

A woman’s tongue is a deadly weapon and the most difficult thing in the world to keep in order, and things slip off it with a facility nothing short of appalling.

What do you think about this quote? To me, this quote makes me think of those of us that have a quick, oftentimes sarcastic, wit. This speaks to our high intellect and the ability to process information at a lightning pace. It’s possible that some people might not get this quick wit, and may be offended if they don’t know what it means. Our brains are often too fast to even stop the words from coming out. There is no way for us to dictate who understands and who doesn’t.

But like it or not, women with quick wit and intelligence are sexy. After all, the most erotic part of the body is the brain because without the brain nothing is possible…not our fantasies, not our desires, not our bodily responses to stimuli. Nothing is possible without our magnificent brains.

So if you have a quick wit and words just roll off your tongue….Count yourself lucky. With you, there is never a dull moment in the conversation. You can talk about almost any subject matter. You listen as well as you speak. You know when to let the other person have the spotlight and talk about themselves. These are valuable skills. These are the skills of leaders and visionaries.

Be proud that you are a woman with a quick wit, intellectual and know what you want….

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I admit that I was originally drawn to Harley Davidson because of their mission of freedom. “More than building machines, we stand for the timeless pursuit of adventure. Freedom for the soul.” But an even bigger reason that fills my heart is the fellowship.

It’s not just a brand it’s a family. No matter where you go, if you’re wearing a Harley Davidson shirt somebody’s going to talk to you about it. When you’re riding and you pull up at a light next to someone on a Harley you get the nod, a comment or question “How do you like the bike?”, and sometimes conversation about make and model, depending on the length of the light.

I have many stories.

One time I was driving my three young sons from Connecticut to South Carolina, and I ended up with a flat tire in Virginia… In the rain no less. I carefully rolled the car off the exit and was grateful to see a tire place right up ahead!

The owner was a towering man who seemed twice my height and three times my weight. He had a long beard and a Harley bandanna. I must say he was one of the kindest men I’ve ever met. When he saw how upset I was, he asked one of his workers to entertain my three kids and then escorted me over to the couch in the waiting area. With a gentle smile, he said, “Everything is going to be OK.”

This angel fixed my tire, revived my spirit, and entertained my kids…all for the sum of $10. I offered more but he wouldn’t take it. I will never forget that guy. His huge heart saved my day.

More recently during an impromptu ride it started to rain. We pulled into a gas station and found ourselves sharing the overhang with another biker. We learned about his travels, family, and some great suggestions for new Harley gear to purchase. (Sidenote: This is a reinforcement of the concept I speak on about how companies who do the right things find that it comes back in profitability.)

And if you have to get lost…it’s nice to have another biker nearby. At another gas station, we saw a couple gassing up their bikes and waved. When she smiled and walked over to say hello, we decided to admit we needed directions. We had heard of a good restaurant in the area but had no luck in finding it. The woman gave us outstanding directions, and then said the place we were headed had good food, “but not quite as good as where they were going… And oh by the way, why don’t you just come with to have lunch with us!”

And so, we did- and fast new friends were made.

Story after story.

There’s often a perception that bikers are Bad@ss and frightening. I’ll give you the former but I believe kindness and humanity are fierce so I will fight the latter.

I’ll leave you with this last observation. No matter what make, model, or year of your bike- if you’re on the road, you get The Wave. A low peace sign- cool yet subtle. I’ve heard that this greeting between motorcyclists, is a gesture of recognition, friendship, and community, “accomplices even without knowing each other.”

This wave makes you feel connected. A wave that says we are one, we are family, and “I See You.”

Well, HD- I See YOU. And my hat’s off to you for generating this culture that prioritizes people, planet, and profit. You understand that your role in society gives you purpose beyond financial performance… and that it’s also tied to it. Kudos!

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Searching for truth is a tiring journey. A great description of truth is that Rached Alimi presented in a recent post:

Truth is like a spark in the night, difficult to see but always present. Science is the path that leads us towards this spark, helping us to see the world with new eyes and to understand what exists.

Finding truth even between two ideas may require serious effort. For example, social media webs are they blessings or not? The illusion of social webs can have ill effects on our lives.

Let me ask simple questions

• Is a virtual tour of the pyramids in Egypt a substitute for being them and enjoying their greatness?
• Can the joy of a virtual tour to Venice be a substitute for being there physically?

Having been to both places I know from experience that being there physically is a much richer experience than taking virtual tours.

The Big QuestionThe big question then is why people get so addicted to virtual friends on social media at the expense even of their families. Social webs are changing our cultures and style of life.

Are we living in the illusion that virtual friends are more important than physical ones?

I read many posts by Dennis Pitocco in which he met physically with many of his virtual friends. He wrote a lot about there being nothing equal to hugging a friend.

The Bigger QuestionIf so, why are we stuck in the social web? A spider knows well how to produce sticky webs that stick to the victims but not themselves.

Are we allowing ourselves to be stuck in social webs and be their prays?

The social web is having a great impact on our lives. Not only do we spend most of the time clicking pages and hardly reading useful articles, but also doing activities like void chatting that only increase our shallowness.

The ill effects include bullying, addiction to the web, and spreading fake news.

How many people are trying to attract followers by spreading fake news so that they earn more money? Only yesterday, I read a story of an old mother who asked her teenage daughter to perform naked on the net to get subscribers to her website.

Morals are corroding. Shallowness is increasing. Misinformation is spreading. Useful articles are losing interest and they keep getting lesser attention.

Are humans becoming biased favoring what is not good for the health of their minds and hearts but good for their pockets?

The Stockholm Paradox is showing itself in another form. Humans are falling in love with the web makers who stick them to drain their time, minds, and pockets.

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Being your True Self is the hope of many, but it can be scary too. How often do we sabotage ourselves from living into the truest expression of who we are because we are afraid? We worry that we do not really have what it takes to be our authentic selves. Michael Canfield had achieved the heights of being a musician, yet he went into a downward spiral of self-destructive behaviors due to his avoidance of painful memories.

What he learned is shown in this film. He says that being free means facing yourself so that you can let go of what holds you back and become all that you dream of being. “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free,” became a living statement for him even when he did not like what he saw. Facing himself allowed him to heal and to enter into the fullness of life and of his giftedness as a musician. His story is a lesson for anyone hoping to find their way to freedom by letting go.

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A clinical psychologist explains how these science-backed practices can improve mental healthRachel Goldsmith Turow, Seattle University

Mindfulness and self-compassion are now buzzwords for self-improvement. But in fact, a growing body of research shows these practices can lead to real mental health benefits. This research – ongoing, voluminous, and worldwide – clearly shows how and why these two practices work.

One effective way to cultivate mindfulness and self-compassion is through meditation.

For more than 20 years, as a clinical psychologist, research scientist, and educator, I taught meditation to students and clinical patients and took a deep dive into the research literature. My recent book, “The Self-Talk Workout: Six Science-Backed Strategies to Dissolve Self-Criticism and Transform the Voice in Your Head,” highlights much of that research. I learned even more when I evaluated mental health programs and psychology classes that train participants in mindfulness and compassion-based techniques.

Defining mindfulness and self-compassionMindfulness means purposefully paying attention to the present moment with an attitude of interest or curiosity rather than judgment. Self-compassion involves being kind and understanding toward yourself, even during moments of suffering or failure.

Both are associated with greater well-being.

But don’t confuse self-compassion with self-esteem or self-centeredness, or assume that it somehow lowers your standards, motivation or productivity. Instead, research shows that self-compassion is linked with greater motivation, less procrastination and better relationships.

Could mindfulness meditation be the next public health revolution?Be patient when starting a meditation practiceI didn’t like meditation – the specific practice sessions that train mindfulness and self-compassion – the first time I tried it as a college student in the late ‘90s. I felt like a failure when my mind wandered, and I interpreted that as a sign that I couldn’t do it.

In both my own and others’ meditation practices, I’ve noticed that the beginning is often rocky and full of doubt, resistance, and distraction. But what seem like impediments can actually enhance meditation practice, because the mental work of handling them builds strength.

For the first six months, I meditated, my body and mind were restless. I wanted to get up and do other tasks. But I didn’t. Eventually, it became easier to notice my urges and thoughts without acting upon them. I didn’t get as upset with myself. After about a year of consistent meditation, my mind seemed more organized and controllable; it no longer got stuck in self-critical loops. I felt a sense of kindness or friendliness toward myself in everyday moments, as well as during joyful or difficult experiences. I enjoyed ordinary activities more, such as walking or cleaning.

It took a while to understand that anytime you sit down and try to meditate, that’s meditation. It is a mental process, rather than a destination.

How meditation works on the mindJust having a general intention to be more mindful or self-compassionate is unlikely to work. Most programs shown to make meaningful differences involve at least seven sessions. Studies show these repeated workouts improve attention skills and decrease rumination, or repeated negative thinking. They also lessen self-criticism, which is linked to numerous mental health difficulties, including depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Meditation is not just about sustaining your attention – it’s also about shifting and returning your focus after the distraction. The act of shifting and refocusing cultivates attention skills and decreases rumination. Trying repeatedly to refrain from self-judgment during the session will train your mind to be less self-critical.

An interconnected group of brain regions called the default mode network is strikingly affected by meditation. Much of this network’s activity reflects repetitive thinking, such as a rehash of a decadeslong tension with your sister. It’s most prominent when you’re not doing much of anything. Activity of the default mode network is related to rumination, unhappiness, and depression.

Research shows that just one month of meditation reduces the noise of the default mode network. The type of meditation practice doesn’t seem to matter.

Don’t be discouraged if your mind wanders as you meditate.Establishing the formal practiceA common misconception about mindfulness is that it’s simply a way to relax or clear the mind. Rather, it means intentionally paying attention to your experiences in a nonjudgmental way.

Consider meditation the formal part of your practice – that is, setting aside a time to work on specific mindfulness and self-compassion techniques.

Cultivating mindfulness with meditation often involves focusing on paying attention to the breath. A common way to start practice is to sit in a comfortable place and bring attention to your breathing, wherever you feel it most strongly. At some point, probably after a breath or two, your mind will wander to another thought or feeling. As soon as you notice that, you can bring your attention back to the breath and try not to judge yourself for losing focus for five to 10 minutes.

When I was just getting started meditating, I would have to redirect my attention dozens or hundreds of times in a 20-to-30-minute session. Counting 10 breaths, and then another 10, and so on, helped me link my mind to the task of paying attention to my breathing.

The most well-established technique for cultivating self-compassion is called loving-kindness meditation. To practice, you can find a comfortable position, and for at least five minutes, internally repeat phrases such as, “May I be safe. May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I live with ease.”

When your attention wanders, you can bring it back with as little self-judgment as possible and continue repeating the phrases. Then, if you like, offer the same well wishes to other people or to all beings. Every time you return your focus to your practice without judging, you’re flexing your mental awareness, because you noticed your mind wandered. You also improve your capacity to shift attention, a valuable anti-rumination skill, and your nonjudgment, an antidote to self-criticism.

These practices work. Studies show that brain activity during meditation results in less self-judgment, depression, and anxiety and results in less rumination.

Mindfulness also occurs when you tune into present-moment sensations, such as tasting your food or washing the dishes. An ongoing routine of formal and informal practice can transform your thinking. And again, doing it once in a while won’t help as much. It’s like situps: A single situp isn’t likely to strengthen your abdominal muscles, but doing several sets each day will.

When thoughts pop up during meditation, no worries. Just start again … and again … and again.Meditation reduces self-criticismStudies show that mindfulness meditation and loving-kindness meditation reduce self-criticism, which leads to better mental health, including lower levels of depression, anxiety, and PTSD. After an eight-week mindfulness program, participants experienced less self-judgment. These changes were linked with decreases in depression and anxiety.

One final point: Beginning meditators may find that self-criticism gets worse before it gets better. After years or decades of habitual self-judgment, people often judge themselves harshly about losing focus during meditation. But once students get through the first few weeks of practice, the self-judgment begins to abate, both about meditation and about oneself in general.

As one of my students recently said after several weeks of mindfulness meditation: “I am more stable, more able to detach from unhelpful thoughts and can do all of this while being a little more compassionate and loving toward myself.”

Rachel Goldsmith Turow, Adjunct Assistant Professor in Population Health Science and Policy, Seattle University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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What if leadership at work wasn’t for a select few, but rather shared among many? Management consultant Gitte Frederiksen gives us the recipe for “distributed leadership” — dynamic, multidimensional networks of leaders that tap into everyone’s knowledge and creativity — and shows how it allows teams to do more and do it better.

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Gord Lightfoot passed away yesterday. He was 84 and he lived a hell of a life. My wife Heather and I were part of that life back in the late seventies. Heather was the first employee of Attic Records, which was started by Tom Williams and Al Mair, who was, at the time, Gord’s manager. They actually started the label in Gord’s Office on Davenport Street, which is where I first met him.

During that time Gord decided he wanted a new house and his sister, Bev and Heather went looking for one. They found a pretty massive house on Beaumont Road, which Gord really liked. The house had a coach house over the garage and so Gord asked Heather if she and I would like to live in it. He didn’t charge us any rent, so all we paid for was the utilities, and away we went on a three-year adventure over Gord’s garage.

Gord did a lot of his gigs on the weekend and part of the deal with us is that we would use the house while he was gone. Mostly it was just turning the lights on and off. But he had a pool table in one of the rooms so we would play the odd game. Gord was drinking a bit at the time and every so often he would shout out to Heather to come and let him in because he couldn’t make his key work. Gord really liked Heather. She knew how to deal with him.

Over the three years we were there all got to know each other pretty well. Gord would take us out to dinner at Bigliardi’s Steakhouse on Jarvis Street. Then we would ride around downtown in his Cadillac convertible Heather and I in the back, Gord and his girl Cathy Jo Coonley in the front.

One day when I was home Gord came over and we had a long talk about songwriting. He explained his process to me, which involved writing all the music for about fifteen songs and then going to his writing room over in Forest Hill and spending two or three days writing all the lyrics. Then he would get his band together and everybody would add to the songs.

Every once in a while he would get an idea for a lyric and find a melody to go with it. I remember one night we were having dinner with some friends and he knocked on the door. He sat down on a chair in the living room with his guitar and played a song called Sundown. He didn’t have the whole thing figured out. But there was real greatness about that song, even in its first draft form. We were blown away that he would actually audition a song for us.

The best night of all was the night the Rolling Thunder Review came to town and Bob Dylan asked Gord to do a couple of songs. We went to the concert and then Heather and I came back and got stuff ready. Within an hour, Gord’s house was filled with legends. Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Bobby Neuwirth, Ronnie Hawkins, Scarlett Rivera.

My job that night was rolling joints. I was sitting at the dining room table I looked up and Bob Dylan was sitting there with a beer in his hand. We started to talk. I told him I lived in the coach house and we kinda kept an eye on things while Gord was touring. I spent a good 45 minutes talking with him and even showed him around the coach house. He said he had one at his place in California. Very interesting fellow. I told him I liked to write lyrics. Dylan told me that I should keep on writing them because lyrics were the key. Lyrics dictate much of what the song is about. Dylan thought the world of Gord and told me as much.

After three years of living this life, and meeting all kinds of incredible people, we finally decided to start a family and bought our first house. We had enough for a great down payment because for three years we lived virtually rent-free thanks to Gord.

Gord was a very interesting man. He was guarded about some things and an open book about other things. He was one of the greatest songwriters in Canada and probably all of North America for that matter. I was always impressed with his stage presence, his taste in wine, and the loyalty he showed to the people he considered friends. He was a good guy. They broke the mould after they made him.

Featured Image courtesy of Piedmontstyle at en.wikipedia, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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In February 2021, I wrote about how Gordon Lightfoot aged appropriately with his song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” After sharing the essay with my close friend, Mark, he surprised me with tickets for a Gordon Lightfoot show at Infinity Hall in Hartford, CT. The night of the show, Mark, and his wife, Anne, my wife, Tracey, and I enjoyed a superb steak dinner and walked to the show. Infinity Hall is an intimate music venue that seats only 500. This is exactly the kind of place to see a folk/rock singer, guitarist, and songwriter like Gordon Lightfoot. You can hear the music while not being blasted by arena-size speakers. You can see the band without the aid of large screens.

The show was pleasant, but sadly, at 83 years old, Gordon’s voice was not fully up to the task anymore. He still sang the songs, but his voice lacked the robust range and strength he had as a younger man. I still enjoyed the show and still loved his current reduced-voice version of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” for the same reasons I shared in my earlier piece. I did at times, however, find myself wishing for Gordon’s full voice or for him to allow for more background vocal support on some songs. His bandmates provided some background vocals, which enhanced Gordon’s voice, but it was used sparingly.

I don’t know why, but I imagine Gordon wanted it that way. He may have felt that the people came to hear him play, which he did with excellence, and sing. He may have felt that If people wanted to hear the band sing, they could go see a cover band.

I came away from the show with respect for him continuing to tour his way at the age of 83. I also imagined I’d probably not see him perform live again.

I woke up today, May 2nd, 2023, at 4:00 a.m. I couldn’t fall back asleep, so I grabbed Mark’s latest book, Random Thoughts: A Writer’s Notebook, and went downstairs to read. The book did what well-written books do — it fully absorbed me. I finished the second half of the book in two-and-a-half hours; although, it felt like ten minutes. I made a cup of coffee and turned on the news just in time to hear that Gordon Lightfoot passed away the day before at the age of 84. The report said he had canceled some shows about a month ago, citing health issues. I shared the news with Mark via text. He replied with this obituary from RollingStone.

I was amazed to learn from the obituary that in 2002, at age 64, Lightfoot suffered a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm and spent six weeks in a coma. He eventually recovered after four surgeries, using 28 units of blood, and a tracheotomy that damaged his vocal cords, greatly weakening his singing voice. He later commented that he was embarrassed that they used 28 units of blood to save his life. Gordon’s humility, along with the realization that his voice was impaired from the tracheotomy rather than hard living, heightened my respect for the man immeasurably.

At 64 years old, after surviving a health event that kills 85 percent of the people who experience it, Lightfoot could have retired, and nobody would have faulted him. Instead, he made what I imagine to be a significant effort to recover and rebuild his voice as best he could, mustered his courage, and went on doing what he loved to do. I’m so glad he did.

I’m so grateful that I got to experience his genius, talent, and humility before it was too late. I am sad to hear of his passing, but I’m more enriched by his living than I imagined possible.

Featured image courtesy of Arnielee, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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The Benefits of Laughing to WellbeingLaughing is contagious and has many proven benefits to our Wellbeing. The eminent psychologist on laughter, Robert Provine, Ph.D., of the University of Maryland, sustains that laughter is about relationships. It is a social connector.

“World Laughter Day” was established in India, on 10 May 1998, by Dr. Madan Kataria, Founder of the worldwide “Laughter Yoga movement“, and it is now celebrated in early May worldwide.

The World needs more laughter, more positivity, and a far greater positive outlook. A genuine smile pairs with intention in conversations that are characterized by deeper and authentic listening.

When was the last time you laughed from your heart? Do you remember the last time you spoke to someone, finding yourself laughing out loud? Do you remember how you felt?

Given what is happening in the World, at the macro and micro levels, you’ll agree with me that we need more laughter in our lives and at work. No, you won’t lose your credibility if you laugh more with colleagues and peers. Being credible and revealing yourself as being human are not mutually exclusive.

A smile goes a long way: Not only does it help feel more relaxed, shifting the energy within, but it will also enhance your connection with the people around you.

Laughter builds trust: It paves the way towards more self-compassion, in turn generating more empathy in everyday communication.

On the 7th of May, which marks World Laughter Day this year, bring some fun into your day by challenging yourself with extra, intentional smiles.

Learning to laugh/smile more requires “deliberate change”. Change in the brain response to inner and outer stimuli. Instead of defaulting to a day-by-day habitual mood, try to bring a gentle smile to your lips, and observe any shift occurring within you and how this will shape your next conversation.

How to laugh more?

Watch your favourite comedy or movie.
Read a funny book.
Gather some friends to tell jokes and get your diaphragm working!
Try a “Laughter yoga” class. Kundalini Yoga embeds diaphragmatic laughter too. it is an exhilarating experience!
Smile more during meetings and when you converse with people.

“I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose. ” –Woody Allen

To more laughter this weekend and beyond.

Should you wish to explore more of the benefits of laughter, feel free to visit the link provided below.

Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-it/201503/7-research-based-reasons-laugh-every-chance-you-get

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Does money give you power, or does power give you money?

This is an interesting and ongoing debate between my high school best friend and her son, which I was recently pulled into. It’s a worthwhile question to explore in today’s power-hungry world, where billionaires often pay little to no taxes and outdated male-centric mindsets can shape laws.

For me, money and power are two terms that are often interchangeable. Many people believe that if you have money, you automatically have power; others argue it’s the reverse.

So, my question to you is, does money give you power, or does power give you money?

I see no straightforward answer to this question. It is a complex issue, a debate that has existed for many years. Some believe that money gives you power because it allows you to control resources and influence people. For example, with significant wealth, one can potentially influence political decisions and even sway political figures through financial means. Examples can be observed all around us.

On a more positive note, personal wealth can create new businesses, employ people, and support causes that you believe in. In addition, you can make positive changes within your community by choosing to help those less fortunate, sponsor local events, help families by giving them a hand up and a second start, or maybe even support GoFundMe drives that move you.

Critics of this argument say that it is not always the case. They claim that there are wealthy people who have little power while others have power with little money. For instance, a wealthy person may not have the power to make decisions that impact their community or country. In contrast, an influential activist can significantly impact without much money. Perhaps this is because those with wealth and little power remain passive observers and do not get actively involved.

On the other hand, others believe that power gives you money. When you are in a position of power, you can use that power to create wealth. Consider for a moment a CEO of a large company; they can use their power to make strategic decisions that increase profits and grow the company. Negotiate better deals and more profitable contracts, resulting in more money. Leveraging their power creates influence, and influence creates multiple streams of connectivity that lead down paths to more wealth.

Critics of this argument argue that it is not always the case, as power can also be used to create wealth unethically or illegally. For instance, corrupt politicians can use their power to amass wealth through bribes and embezzlement. However, in my opinion, great power comes with great responsibility. If corruption exists within an individual, it will eventually come to light. The difference is that wealth and power put individuals on a different stage, with a bright spotlight where millions can observe and witness their every move – all their wrongdoings and potential fall.

Some argue that money and power are interdependent. They believe that money and power are two sides of the same coin. To be successful, you need both money and power. Money gives you the resources to gain power, while power helps you acquire more money. This argument holds merit. Money and power are indeed closely intertwined. In many cases, one needs wealth to attain influence, while power enables accumulating further resources. But do you see it as a mutually beneficial relationship leading to greater success in various spheres of life?

According to a study by the University of California, money and power are closely linked. The study found that people with more money tend to have more power, and people with more control tend to have more money. [Indicating they go hand-in-hand.] The study also found that people with more money and power are happier than those with less. Does having more of each equal more happiness, or do you think there are other factors to consider?

Some argue that money and power do not necessarily lead to happiness. On the contrary, some studies have shown that people with wealth and power are more likely to experience stress and anxiety. This is because power and money only allow you to solve your problems in style and maybe even at a distance.

So, as for my opinion on the money vs. power debate between my friend and her son, it’s clear that the relationship between these two concepts is complex and multifaceted. While some argue that money gives you power, and others claim the opposite, the truth likely lies somewhere in between.

One thing I am sure of when listening to those in positions of power and influence, it’s crucial to exercise diligence in fact-finding and consider all perspectives.

We must gather all relevant information to make informed decisions, considering who stands to benefit and who stands to lose. Private parties, hidden parties, and foreign parties may also be at play, so it’s essential to evaluate the situation critically and avoid a pack mentality.

While financial stability and influence may have some benefits, true happiness is a multifaceted experience that involves cultivating meaningful relationships, pursuing passions, and practicing gratitude. Instead of focusing on accumulating wealth and power, we can focus on the things that truly matter and positively impact our communities.

So, how will you use your limited or abundant resources to create a better world for yourself, those around you, and your community? How will you make a lasting and positive impact?

Let’s commit to taking action and using our power and wealth to effect positive change in the world. Whether volunteering, donating to a cause, or advocating for important issues, whether local or global, we all have the potential to make a difference. One small step at a time!

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Anger and violence are everywhere. Family violence in our homes, bullying, and shootings in our schools, anger on the sports field, the playground, and road rage in our cars are the chosen ways for many to solve problems. But, does it really resolve anything? Cultural differences and differences of opinion aren’t solved by violence and anger. They only deepen the wedge and wounds of separation, creating more distrust and violence.

We’re bombarded with newscasting that dramatizes theft, home invasion, corruption, killing, kidnapping, and more. And this is just about what’s happening locally in our own neighborhoods and nearby towns. Yes, it makes for headline news, but do I really need to know all that 24/7? Do you? Unfortunately, it fills our waking and sleeping states and who knows what distortions it generates in our subconscious minds.

Are we undergoing a moral crisis in this country and also globally? Is there hope for peaceful coexistence, collaboration and cooperation, and the conscious decision that we are stewards of the world we live in?

Stewardship means the care and responsible oversight of something of value and pertains to the management of property, finances, and estates. Commercial stewardship refers to caring for the domestic and service requirements of passengers and guests on ships, trains, airplanes, and restaurants.

Today we’re rightly concerned with the stewardship of our natural resources for the purposes of preservation and sustainability over time and for leaving a legacy for future generations. Yet, it seems vital right now to extend the meaning of stewardship to each other. We decide that it’s time to recognize the joint responsibility we all have to safeguard one another. Human life and human dignity are valuable assets to protect as I believe all life is. Life is worth caring for and preserving.

Just as we choose our friends, recreation, and our preferences about clothes, cars, and food, how we act and what we transmit to others verbally, physically, or in our minds is also a choice. Choosing service beyond self-interest is a critical selection. Technological developments advance us in so many wonderful ways and truly connect us instantly across vast oceans and time zones. Yet, the spiritual and humanitarian values that can preserve and advance civilizations have unfortunately regressed.

Individually and collectively, we have an urgent and growing responsibility to support and practice compassion, goodwill, peaceful conflict resolution for one another and for ourselves with the utmost care.

We can quiet the internal churning of hatred, intolerance, impatience, and anger. Think before spewing hate and embracing greed. And, we can also remember and find ways to recognize that when we wrong someone else, we also wrong ourselves. Together we are immeasurably wonderful and powerful, and we can create a world that breeds love and creative possibility.

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We can’t all be in one place at the same time. Therefore, being able to travel makes it possible, desirable, preferable, and practical that we can go to all sorts of other places.Travel allows us to go from where we are to places we might want to be, or at least to be temporarily. We can see things in those places that we can’t see where we are. We all know that pictures don’t do justice to the real thing. Seeing the real thing teaches us about intricacies, nuances, and details that we might not pick up on by just reading about those other places. Or by seeing pictures that someone else took.

Because we can’t all be in the same place together, not all of us anyway, travel allows us to meet other people, learn about them, and see things from other perspectives.

If we were, somehow, able to all be in the same place at the same time, storytelling would have to be way different than it is, because a lot of us would be able to witness and participate in the same things together, and it wouldn’t be as incumbent upon us to paint mental pictures, because, well, we didn’t “have to be there,” – we were.

Traveling to faraway places gives us the opportunity to be not where we usually are, and that usual place is probably work. So when we travel, there are times when we can be doing lots of other stuff besides working, and that can be a lot of fun, educational, and just downright good for our mental and spiritual selves.

When we aren’t working, or if we are, but just in another place, there is no telling how much good can come of that. And when we take some time to take in where we are, and maybe capture some pictures, because we always want to show others how the pictures of where we were don’t do justice to what we saw, we get to freeze some of those memories in time and add some depth and texture to the stories that we harvest, when we travel.

Travel, by its very nature, is temporary. Like life, we’re hardly ever always in one place all the time. When we give ourselves the gift of travel, we know that at some point we will go back home. Back to where we were. Back to work, even.

Sometimes, the temporary nature of travel is a blessing. We can come home to people that didn’t travel with us. We can return to our routines, and our normal lives, and… you get it. Endless travel is for some, but not for all.

I would say, overall, travel is good.

These are things one ponders when travel is temporary. This little gigantic piece of my heart, in the picture, is a world traveler. She’s been here, with us, for almost two months, and now, as you read this, she is about to board a plane to take her across the ocean. For more travel, more pages to her book of life. She’s my only granddaughter, Naomi, and right now, I have mixed feelings about travel. I am so grateful for the trip that brought her here, and the memories we made. Travel is temporary, you know…

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Equanimity is calamity’s medicine.

~ Publilius Syrus

Do you know anyone whose life doesn’t have a few ups and downs? Ya, me neither. Equanimity is detached observation; it is the practice of being mindfully aware whether we are leaning toward “whatever is” and favoring it, or, pulling away from “whatever is” and disfavoring it and then finding the balance of a neutral position that favors neither. Equanimity can be practiced when navigating our way through difficult times as well as when dealing with difficult people. It is a mindfulness practice that helps us be the observer of our thoughts and feelings before we act on them in a manner that we may later regret. In Buddhism, equanimity might be considered an aspect of walking the middle path because it creates the perfect emotional balance required to stay on the ride and not be seduced by the polarity of life in the human condition.

To cling to the belief that our life is supposed to continually progress in an ascending straight line with no bumps, dips and whoop-de-do’s causes much suffering. If today is a day of curves and bends rather than an ascending straight line, darkness rather than light, sadness rather than happiness, failure rather than achievement, remember that it must have an end just as it had a beginning. Equally important, remember that while it is not to be perceived as permanent, just as a roller coaster stops between rides, there is a period of rest in between the two. Take a breath and fully “be” in that sacred space. This is the wisdom of “Whoopdedo” in action.

Equanimity embraces all of the whoopdedos life offers us as well as the days of blue skies and green lights—and takes neither too seriously; it brings balance to our perspective, allowing us to breathe and experience the sacred gap—the space of what is—that lies between what was and what shall be, knowing as surely as night follows day, this too shall pass. Remember, there will always be more whoopdedos ahead on the roller coster of life. This is truly great news because it means we’re alive—and that’s a ride worth staying on. Just remember to breathe and keep your balance!

Copyright © 2023 – DMJ Presentations LLC

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May the Fourth be with you! Today is Star Wars Day, a celebration of the beloved science fiction franchise that has captured the hearts and imaginations of fans around the world.

The origin of Star Wars Day can be traced back to a pun based on the iconic catchphrase “May the Force be with you.” In 1979, just two years after the release of the first Star Wars film, Margaret Thatcher became the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. To congratulate her, the London Evening News placed an advertisement that read, “May the Fourth Be With You, Maggie. Congratulations.” The phrase caught on, and fans began to celebrate May 4th as Star Wars Day.

Since then, Star Wars Day has become a global phenomenon, with fans of all ages coming together to celebrate their love for the franchise. The day is marked by special events, merchandise releases, and social media posts from fans and celebrities alike.

One of the most exciting aspects of Star Wars Day is the announcement of new projects in the franchise. In recent years, May 4th has seen the release of new trailers, teasers, and announcements for movies, TV shows, video games, and more. In 2021, for example, fans were treated to the first footage from the upcoming Disney+ series “The Bad Batch,” as well as news about the “Obi-Wan Kenobi” series and the upcoming film “Rogue Squadron.”

But Star Wars Day isn’t just about new projects. It’s also a time to reflect on the impact that the franchise has had on popular culture. Since the release of the first film in 1977, Star Wars has inspired countless books, comics, video games, and other forms of media. It has also spawned a vibrant fan community, with fan fiction, fan art, cosplay, and fan events popping up all over the world.

Of course, Star Wars Day wouldn’t be complete without a rewatch of the films themselves. Whether you’re a die-hard fan who can recite every line of dialogue or a casual viewer who just enjoys the spectacle, there’s something for everyone in the Star Wars saga. From the original trilogy to the prequels to the sequels and spin-offs, the franchise has captured the imaginations of generations of fans.

In conclusion, Star Wars Day is a special day for fans of the franchise to come together and celebrate all things Star Wars. It’s a time to reflect on the impact that the franchise has had on popular culture and to look forward to new projects on the horizon. May the Fourth be with you!

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Although it’s usually not the case, some things get better with age.I’m a baby boomer. Technically, I’m not. I was born in April of 1965, missing the cut by four months. I am the youngest of four. My oldest brother is 13 years older than me. Culturally, my preferences always seemed to align with baby boomers. That being the case, I’m a big fan of 1970s and ‘80s rock and roll music.

Surprisingly, many of the iconic rock bands of the ‘70s and ‘80s have maintained enough health, or have replaced certain band members, and continue to play music and tour. Sadly though, when these bands play, many times the instrumentals are good, maybe even better than in their relative youth, but the vocals just don’t sound good anymore.

A particularly painful example for me is David Lee Roth’s 2019 tour with Van Halen. DLR’s antics on stage and in music videos of my youth led me to believe his value to the band was mostly personality. After hearing some of their live music in 2019, I now understand how Roth’s vocals counterbalanced the instrumentals in the band’s heyday. I’m not knocking DLR or other musicians of my youth for aging. It beats the alternative. So, as happy as I am that many of these bands continue to play, it can at times give me one more reason to long for my youth.

One of my favorite old tunes is Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”. I have never been on a ship in a storm, but his lyrics take me there “Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?” Haunting.

The song does some amazing storytelling with history, the wreck, and the aftermath.

I’ve heard this song from time to time for the last 44 years. Every time I hear it, I get chills, just like I did the first time I heard it. I would have thought it couldn’t be improved upon.

Gordon was working on the song in 1976 while in the studio with his band recording the Summertime Dream album. The song wasn’t finished and was not originally intended to be on the album, but they recorded it anyway because they had finished all the planned songs and had some extra studio time. It turns out the recording on the album is the first take because after recording it, Gordon and the band decided they had not improved upon the recording with subsequent takes:

I recently heard another recording of the song, Live at Thomas Wolfe Auditorium Asheville, NC 2/17/20:

As much as I love the original recording, this story now needs to be told with a more experienced voice. In 1976, the song told a story of current-day tragedy and loss of life, and 41-year-old Gordon Lightfoot was the right person to tell that story. Now, the song is legend, and 81-year-old Gordon Lightfoot is again the right person to tell the story.

Note: Featured image file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Attribution: Greenmars

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The challenge for authenticity is complex. Indeed, it would be simplistic to always interpret it as the free expression of who we are or being direct and transparent, sometimes even risking compromising relationships with others. Our very identity is constantly evolving, shaped by the experiences we have and the people we meet

Unfortunately, one can struggle with authenticity today for many reasons.

First of all, the continuous changes to which we are exposed change us radically, and therefore our own identity evolves.

Of course, it’s important to have a clear and stable sense of who you are, like a compass that helps guide you through the complex choices you make and towards your goals. But often a too-rigid sense of ourselves prevents us from progressing towards new opportunities, it becomes an anchor that keeps us trapped in old habits.

Secondly, the growing diversity in the workplace brings us into contact with people with different cultures and expectations of how to behave, and, to be effective and understand each other, we must necessarily adapt and therefore become less authentic, and more flexible.

Furthermore, our identities are constantly being shown in today’s world of social media and permanent connectivity. How we present ourselves has become an important aspect at stake and exposes us to the risk of showing contrasts or contradictions that are there for all to see.

Certainly, however, the possibility of wearing a mask is to be excluded, simply because it does not work (others will not believe it and sooner or later we will be discovered) but it is also unhealthy for ourselves. Inauthentic living and working is tiring, inspires no one to action, and holds us back from reaching our full potential.

Being authentic has to do on the one hand with presence and participation, and on the other with trust in one’s own organism that feels, perceives, intuits, and regulates itself. Who is authentic lives, is passionate, risks, loves, gets angry, grieves; he is willing to penetrate everything he hears, including painful passages, out of trust in his own internal reality.

Authentic people are aware, spontaneous, and genuine. They are not afraid to show their flaws, their vulnerabilities, simply because they are aware that we all have them, we are all weak, vulnerable, and imperfect.

The essence of being authentic is to live one’s life according to one’s own values and goals rather than those of other people, to conform to one’s personality, values, and spirit without worrying about the pressures that lead us to act otherwise.

As a result, we are perceived by others as genuine and are willing to accept the consequences of being true to our beliefs and what we believe is right.

In conclusion, we can say that to live a life in an authentic way it is necessary that the choices and actions are the mirror of one’s ideas and beliefs, putting aside everything that feels like it does not belong to one’s way of being, overcoming the standards imposed by the company.

Comments are really appreciated!

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What’s the biggest impediment every human being faces in their life? Fear, and that’s not surprising when you think about it.We are born into a world with no idea how we got here, where we are going, or what we’re supposed to do in our short times on earth. Not a warm and fuzzy scenario. We bide our time with work, food, and sex but those are distractions because we experience fear every day—fear of dying, fear of poverty, fear of disapproval, fear of rejections—the list goes on.

All the distractions we mentioned can be seen as a kind of daily drug. We immerse ourselves in relationships, entertainment, and work avoiding the deeper questions about our origin and destiny because those things are just too abstract and unanswerable to deal with.

I disagree. I disagree because I’ve had personal experiences with a higher source of consciousness that altered my life for the better. And I’m not special. I’m the same as you, perhaps a bit more inquisitive, but the same as you.

I didn’t just accept these experiences, maybe because I’m a Capricorn, but I embarked on a 40-year investigation of how the phenomena I experienced could happen—medical intuitiveness, clairvoyance, premonitions, remote viewing, prescience—and I came across some very interesting things.

Of course, I delved into spiritual and mystical things to begin with, but my research soon led me to quantum physics. Not so strange really, because quantum physics essentially deals with the relationship of light energy and matter and that’s the core focus of both mysticism and philosophy, you know, God is light, spirit vs. matter, and so forth.

Well, I learned some fascinating things. A universal wisdom tradition was common to most cultures thousands of years ago. It’s called the Perennial Philosophy today. It was present in such traditions as Hinduism, Persian Zoroastrianism, Greco-Roman philosophy, and Jewish Kabbalism. But is so happened that the cultural melting pot of the ancient world was the Greek city of Alexandria, Egypt, and the melting pot of all these traditions was a group called the Gnostics based in that city.

The Gnostics were a fascinating story. They predated Jesus but became among the first Christians because they recognized he was teaching the same mystical information they had gleaned from their penetration of higher dimensions. Indeed, we know Jesus had one teaching for the public and another for initiates. This is attested to in the Bible (Matt. 13:11) and in the writings of early Church fathers like Origen and Clement of Alexandria. The story of their suppression is told in my book, Quantum Spirituality.

Gnostics, or Gnosticism comes from the Greek Gnosis (no-sis) “to know.” So, the Gnostics were those who knew divinely revealed information. What I discovered pouring through their suppressed, accidentally recovered texts was that they had predicted nearly every major theory of modern quantum physics including parallel universes, the God particle, and the Big Bang. From these sources, I began mapping out an understanding of the true nature of reality, the creation, and the purpose and destiny of humanity.

My book, Quantum Spirituality, is about creating a roadmap to higher consciousness. Every map needs more than one coordinate to navigate like an x and y-axis. The coordinates I use in the journey for higher consciousness are ancient Gnostic mystical wisdom and quantum physics. The end goal is overcoming fear by answering life’s deepest questions—what is the nature of creation, what is our life’s purpose, and is there a higher power or life after death?

Using other road signs on this journey to understand our source, I also show how the findings of astronomy and the works of the great psychologist Carl Jung directly tie in with the scientific and mystical story of our origins.

We see that we do live in a virtual simulation, an electromagnetic matrix of illusions, but one in which we can become co-creators of reality because we are not separate from the Source Consciousness that projected us. Rather, we are part of that consciousness, and like relay stations in an electrical grid we contribute to the energy stream that produces matter from light.

For those seeking more information, please look at this short, informative video:

and visit my website https://www.petercanova.com/

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The absence of Meghan Markle and the participation of Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis at the coronation of Charles III speaks volumes about cultural valuesThis Saturday, the world will witness a rare tradition as Prince Charles ascends the throne to succeed his mother as monarch of the British Isles. According to reports, his daughter-in-law Meghan Markle will not be in attendance.

However, Britain’s Chief Rabbi will be there. The dichotomy offers a profound lesson in noblesse oblige.

I’m not a big fan of Meghan Markle, although I think she’s a fine actress. It’s true, she has faced some difficulties and discomforts as Duchess of Sussex. But she had ample opportunity before marrying into the royal family to contemplate and prepare herself for exactly what was coming. Moreover, as a Hollywood celebrity, she certainly understood the demands and responsibilities of fame. For her to play the victim card so publicly is more than a little disingenuous.

Moreover, it’s beside the point. After all, her father-in-law is becoming King of England.

Most families have members who have trouble getting along, sometimes for entirely valid reasons. But there are moments when we put aside our histories, our feelings, and our egos to honor the family bond.

To deprive Charles of the presence of his grandchildren, and to deny them the memory (if only through pictures) of having taken part in the once-in-a-generation celebration, bespeaks a degree of self-absorption and pettiness that is frankly inexcusable.

True nobilityOn the other extreme, consider the obstacles facing Britain’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis. The requirements of Torah law prevent him from driving on the Sabbath, and Sabbath morning services overlap the coronation ceremony. He could easily excuse himself for purely logistical reasons.

But he has made no attempt to do so for two simple reasons: reverence and gratitude.

Some 2500 years ago, the sages encouraged Jews to seize any opportunity to go and behold royalty; they even composed a blessing to be recited in the presence of gentile monarchs: Blessed are You, O L-rd, our G-d, King of the universe, who bestows from His glory upon flesh and blood.

In an age when we have lost respect for leadership, it is more important than ever to remind ourselves of our responsibility as subjects and citizens to honor the trappings of power.

All too frequently, individual leaders fall short of the mark; but institutions endure. Indeed, the sages admonish us to pray for the welfare of the government, for without it man would swallow his neighbor alive.

In this case, there is much more involved than formality and propriety. Charles has displayed sound friendship and commitment toward the Jewish people, which is more precious than ever with anti-Semitism on the rise. It would show appalling ingratitude for the Chief Rabbi to miss the coronation if there were any possible way for him to attend.

One good turnWhat’s especially heartening is the length to which the British have gone to make the rabbi’s attendance easier. He and his wife are invited to stay at St. James’ Place, walking distance from both Buckingham Palace and a neighborhood synagogue, where he will pray a special sunrise service in order to be on time for the ceremony. His menu for the entire weekend will be provided by a kosher caterer.

As one of a host of religious leaders, Rabbi Mirvis will offer a blessing over the milestone. Since Torah law prohibits him from using a microphone, it was decided that none of the clergy will use microphones — although there is certainly no Jewish objection to them doing so. This gesture demonstrates the lengths we go to in a civil society to show consideration for one another, to respect others’ practices and beliefs, and to strive to make others comfortable even when it causes some inconvenience to ourselves.

Shalom means more than peaceThe fallout from our cultural obsession with personal rights is that we too easily forget about personal responsibility. If I demand my rights and you demand yours, we end up butting heads again and again and again.

But if I take responsibility for your rights and you take responsibility for mine, then we will live together amidst harmony, mutual respect, and love. This is true in our homes, in our businesses, and in society at large.

Judaism teaches that, as a prerequisite for Torah law, we are required to observe what is called derech eretz. The term translates as the way of the land, and it refers to character, manners, refinement, and sensitivity for our fellow human beings who share our world. A healthy and vibrant society is the natural outcome of committing ourselves to what is best for all of us together, even if that means we may have to occasionally put the interests of others ahead of our own.

When we do, we will find that the deal is a bargain, for we then get to live in a better, more beautiful world of our own making.

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In today’s world of instant information, uncertainty, cruelty, and differences in ideas, what is the true role of parents? Obviously, parents provide their children with food, clothing, and a place to live. They also are to provide financial support, medical care, and the opportunity to receive an education. And they are to protect their children from harm and provide them with a safe environment that includes supervision and control of any situation.

Because parents are the most influential people for our children, they have more power to bring the good qualities needed in our daily lives. Traits all parents should strive to instill in kids include but are not limited to:

• Honesty
• Responsibility
• Kindness
• Independence
• Respect
• Positive thinking
• Creativity
• Healthy eating & exercise
• Success that can be learned from failure
• How to have fun

So, the real question becomes, in today’s hectic world, how can a parent juggle everything to even come close to instilling these traits into this newest generation? Is it even possible to raise a “normal” kid with everything going on in this country and the world?

With the events our kids are facing, and the constant media attention given to the evil in this world, parents today have got to be focused on the mental health of children, and we have to reinforce the basics learned throughout the generations. One way is to make sure each child has chores assigned, which teaches life lessons as well as having kids understand their role in the home. Making kids feel appreciated for achieving their chores, helps kids understand other people’s needs, and creates a strong connection with the family. Doing chores teaches our kids:

• Responsibility
• Self-confidence
• Time management
• Work ethic
• Structure and routine

Another way we can focus on raising good kids is to never lose sight that we are role models, where they reflect just about everything we do. If we spend a lot of time on our phones or computer screens or watching TV, our children will spend a lot of time on their screens and watching TV. If we spend time reading, they will spend time reading. If we are active outdoors, they will be active outdoors. Children learn more from our actions- so if we are polite and good role models, they will grow up to be polite and good role models. Instilling confidence in our children by being more encouraging and helping to motivate the kid’s strengths, interests and good qualities is a task we should all be practicing every day. We know that constant criticism can deprive children of their self-esteem and can really leave deep scars demoralizing their wants and needs to succeed.

More than ever, parents must be the role model our kids most admire, to get us through these troubling times. On the matter of parenting, America cannot be separated by political ideology. We want all of our kids to grow up in a safe and secure United States. Positively changing the life of one child, will change the world for the better. This I hope the entire country can embrace.

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The last couple of decades in the life of planet Earth have been very strange ones indeed.As a writer and observer of as much of the world as I can learn about without extensive travel, I have seen that there very much appears to be a revolution going on.

It’s not a noisy revolution with lots of human victims. It is a quiet one that’s taking place inside the minds of people, at least the people who are paying attention.

It’s a revolution In attitudes. A lot of the things we didn’t think about so much are being thought about. And these thoughts are congealing into a new kind of cement that is binding the world together in a strange way.

It starts with the way we think about where the world is going. Right now, it’s divided up into a few hundred countries, each with its own challenges.

But this revolution is congealing around many of the things that all these countries have in common. Like how they are going to keep their air clean and their water supply plentiful. How they are going to grow enough food to feed all their people. How are they going to attract investment for their industries. What kind of world they will leave their children.

Part of the reason for this type of thinking is that for a lot of people, it has become clear that the world can no longer afford to go on creating products at the expense of the environment. The air is saturated with carbon, from the mining of metals to the manufacturing of products to the massive number of fossil fuel-burning machinery operating at any given time.

Truth be told, all these things; air, water, food, shelter, transportation, and fuel, are all tightly interrelated, and the old-school fossil fuel-driven processes required to keep this relationship going are quite simply choking us, slowly but surely, to death.

Two Roads ForwardThere are two roads we can take from here. One is to continue on the way we have come. To keep using fossil fuels and delude ourselves into thinking that someone, somewhere, at some time in the hopefully near future will come up with a way to keep these fossil fuels from producing the carbon that is killing us.

Or, we can take the other road, which it very much appears that we are doing, in limited ways, by turning to the gifts the earth has given us, the energy from the sun, the ability to harness wind and water, and the heat deep in the earth’s crust. The ability to use other non-toxic elements, like oxygen and hydrogen in ways that create the power we need to run just about anything but with exponentially less toxic by-products.

All of this is going on right now. Thousands of forward-thinking minds are at work all around the globe developing new and better ways to create power, grow food without the need for toxic chemicals, clean the air and provide us with all the energy we need to survive and thrive here on earth.

The Catch 22And there’s always one of those, and that is that the vested interests and most powerful businesses on the planet are the ones who are killing it.

They are resisting change because the market-driven commodities: oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear, are in almost complete control of the economies of most countries in the world. And the people who run the majority of those energy companies have no desire to see things change. And they have no desire to invest in transforming their businesses into those that would protect our environment from further degradation.

It’s All About The BenjaminsThe amount of capital that any of these large companies would have to lay out to change their modus operandi is staggering, to say the least.

And it’s always going to be cheaper for them to keep on pumping money into the back pockets of politicians who will keep the environmental laws from hurting these behemoths in any substantial way.

And that’s where it is suddenly very clear that it’s the people of the earth that need to force these companies to change. Through the choices they make in the cars that they drive, in the food they buy, and in the lifestyle they re-shape around conservation and renewability.

You’d be surprised at just how effective a weapon the will of the people can be.

And we are seeing it take hold in certain parts of the world. Like the Scandinavian countries, and countries in the Pacific Rim, including China and Vietnam, that have made massive investments in solar and wind power. We’re seeing it in developments in the steel industry working to reduce and eliminate carbon pollution from the steel-making process. And we’re seeing it in the ever-growing market share that electric vehicles are starting to develop.

The Paris Climate Accord was a positive step forward for the world, but its progress has been slow and tedious, slowed down to a great extent by the capital that countries all over the world have had to lay out to fight the Covid pandemic.

But in spite of all that, companies in the renewables sector continue to keep coming up with ideas, and continue to refine those ideas to make them workable on a larger scale.

There is progress. There is forward momentum too, You really don’t have to look too far to see it.

Sooner or later, these renewable industries will reach a critical mass and start to displace the carbon-based industries, mostly thanks to the will of the people, and their desire to see the human race survive the end of the industrial revolution and herald the new renewable era in our life here on earth.

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What is hell? Hell is oneself. Hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from. And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

~ T.S. Eliot in The Cocktail Party

Leadership is built on relationships, the very foundation of human flourishing. So there is an obvious correlation between the global leadership deficit and the relationship dysfunction that characterises western society today. Social isolation, or loneliness, is the real pandemic in the Third Millennium, and it lies at the root of most of our social maladies.

Leadership is first learned in the family, where the virtues essential to all relationships – honesty, trust, faithfulness, compassion, forgiveness, and a natural sense of obligation to others – are best nurtured. Where those virtues are sincerely held, there can be no loneliness, and relationships will flourish. And that provides the ideal context and conditions for community and leadership.

Where those virtues are absent, family, friendship, and community break down, and social dysfunction ensues. The reality is that our mental and physical health actually depend heavily on the quality of our relationships. Studies around the globe have shown that:

• Social isolation is a one of the most common causes of clinical depression
• It impacts artery erosion, blood pressure, heart disease, hypertension, and stroke risk
• Chronic loneliness is a significant factor in many cases of alcoholism
• It is closely linked with anti-social and self-destructive behaviour
• It has a negative effect on learning and memory
• It can affect sleep patterns, promoting a wide range of attendant problems
• It actually increases an individual’s mortality risk more than smoking does
• Up to 80% of people who fail at work do so because of poor relationship skills
• Emotional support has been shown to be a significant factor in healing generally.

Why are there so many lonely people? Why is it so hard to form real relationships when that is what everybody both needs and wants? Well, if the family is where the virtues essential to all relationships are best developed, then dysfunctional families and the widespread loss of family life must inevitably give rise to a dysfunctional society in which relationships generally fail to flourish.

And this is, of course, precisely what has happened. A psychiatrist friend recently told me that over the past 20 years, some 80 percent of her patients have come from families broken by divorce; the burgeoning mental health crisis didn’t spring from nowhere. So if the loneliness pandemic is a result of family breakdown, what is the cause of the collapse of family life?

The root cause of this social cataclysm is, of course, the modern rejection of classical virtue ethics in favour of the personal choice of the autonomous individual, and the moral confusion that has accompanied it. But the “Who are you to tell me what is right and wrong?” mindset has been puffed up to planetary proportions by the removal of restraints on humanity’s most unruly appetite.

Science and common sense agree that promiscuity, prostitution, and pornography are inevitably destructive of family life, and relationships generally. Yet the Sexual Revolution of the past half-century continues to be driven relentlessly forward, not only by the many who profit so richly from it, but also by its many victims who refuse to admit their folly. Hence the increasingly dysfunctional culture of lonely, wounded people, incapable of meaningful commitments and self-sacrifice, and the insidious and intensifying mental health crisis.

Social science clearly shows that children in fatherless families are more likely to suffer emotional and behavioral issues, physical and psychological abuse, poverty, health problems, academic failure, relationship dysfunction, and susceptibility to criminal activity. Moreover, opinion polls over the past sixty years have recorded a steady decline in female happiness. The reality is that the Sexual Revolution has been a disaster for women and children, exposing them to ever-greater social and economic insecurity and unrelenting loneliness. More than sixty million abortions in the US since 1973 are a gruesome reminder of the horrifying tragedy visited upon women and children in the Western democracies under the influence of the Sexual Revolution. And, of course, the debilitating loneliness sooner of later catches up with the men involved.

Proponents of the permissive society misguidedly argue that lust and promiscuity are natural urges, but while they might be natural urges in animals, they can be naturally directed by rational animals. The power of reason enables human beings to know what is good for us and what is bad for us, so what is natural in us is the ability of the intellect to control the chaos of our carnal desires.

Most people associate the Sexual Revolution with a predictable loosening of moral standards that accompanied the decline of Christian belief in the 20th century, but the full story is somewhat more disturbing. If we are sincere in seeking an end to the endemic social dysfunction assailing the Western democracies, we will take account of this story, which is very well documented.

At a time when women are being subjected to absurd and wholly unwarranted threats to their dignity, comfort, and safety, the establishment’s response to a growing number of men embracing a measure of sexual restraint is curious to say the least. The men are accused of fascist tendencies. In an illuminating article, Was the sexual revolution a government psy-op?, philosopher Matthew Crawford retraces the genealogy of the Left’s association of sexual self-regulation with fascism. It is a tale of cynical social engineering that started long before the “sexual liberation” of the ‘60s.

Far from being a simple organic cultural development, the Sexual Revolution was the design of psychotherapists who emerged from the cataclysm of World War II with the aim of pre-empting a flowering of fascism in the US. Government complicity in this program is a documented fact. The movement started in the early1930s when the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich split with Freud, and, calling himself a Freudo-Marxist, set about using psychoanalysis for revolutionary purposes. Society was not merely unjust, but also mentally ill as a result of the superego, that “sham social surface”, repressing natural instincts (read sexual desires) that the psychoanalysts considered wholesome and morally unproblematic.

Reich and other intellectuals saw fascism as a consequence of bourgeois society and sexual repression and called for the destruction of the family and fatherhood, as well as authority and morality itself. The end of the war provided the opportunity. In 1946, President Truman declared a mental health crisis in the US, indicating that the way Western governments viewed democracy and the people they governed was somewhat less than charitable.

A study commissioned by the War Department to investigate psychiatric disorders in returning soldiers was conducted by emigre psychoanalysts from central Europe who focussed on repressed anger and sexuality in family life instead of the traumatic wartime experiences. They concluded that small-town America was a breeding ground for fascist attitudes, and their remedy was to “change the inner structure of the human being” to make people docile supporters of a particular political order. The National Mental Health Act of 1946 deployed hundreds of psychiatrists across the US in “Psychological Guidance Centres” to reshape the way people thought and behaved.

In 1948 Alfred Kinsey published the first of his now-discredited reports on sexual practices in the US, and his bogus science claimed to link the “authoritarian personality” to people who adhered to traditional sexual morality. Kinsey saw his work as furthering the “mass psychotherapeutic function” of eradicating the sense of shame in society. The manipulation of the moral judgment of ordinary people by psychology, which had been going on since the beginning of the century was set to shift into a higher gear with Playboy and Lady Chatterley just around the corner.

Crawford’s discourse echoes a shorter article by Italian academic, Carlo Lancellotti, who has provided excellent English translations of the works of Italian philosopher, Augusto Del Noce, an early critic of the Sexual Revolution. Del Noce analysed Freudo-Marxism and the cultural links between political progressivism and the Sexual Revolution. He pointed out that both regarded human reason as incapable of attaining metaphysical truths, a stance typical of the self-refuting scientistic mindset that views empirical science as the sole source of truth. The facile reduction of reason to science is of a piece with reducing freedom to the satisfaction of desires, and such a mindset naturally regards politics as the means to eradicate not only “repression”, but virtue and tradition as well. Del Noce stressed that scientism is inherently totalitarian, seeking to silence all other forms of knowledge.

Lancellotti sees Del Noce as original in studying the sexual revolution as a philosophical phenomenon that reflected a new worldview and not just new social circumstances. And he is convinced that, “…a failure to fully grasp this worldview is the reason why today many intelligent people seem genuinely surprised that movements putatively seeking tolerance for marginalized minorities should be so intolerant of dissent.”

Crawford’s essay also tallies with a well-researched three-part essay by Professor Patrick Deneen, “The Crisis of Democracy”, inspired by a 1973 book by Edward A. Purcell Jr. entitled: The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value. Purcell traced the history of the social sciences – psychology, sociology, politics, economics, and anthropology – that have today become the blindly followed authorities on the human condition. The tragic irony is, of course, that the allegedly indisputable claims of those disciplines are undergirded by hidden metaphysical assumptions that are suspect to say the least.

Deneen shows that the social sciences in the early 20th century boldly set about dismantling “democracy” in the name of efficiency and expertise. Leading social scientists confidently, but unscientifically claimed to identify cognitive and moral inequalities in different ethnic groups, and their bogus “scientific naturalism” gave encouragement to class, race, and sex discrimination. Many Western intellectuals at the time flirted with totalitarianism, either Marxist, Nazi, or Fascist.

Opposed to “scientific naturalism” were proponents of the classical natural law tradition, significantly including many Catholic intellectuals, who affirmed the equal dignity of all human beings, objective moral standards regardless of culture, and democratic societies committed to the Common Good.

After World War II, when social scientists found their flirtation with totalitarianism an embarrassment because of gas chambers, gulags, and other barbarous violations of human dignity, they deflected attention from their inhumanity by switching the narrative. They loudly proclaimed that the totalitarian mindset was linked to a belief in objective morality, traditional family virtues, and sexual restraint, all of which were labelled as impediments to the self-fulfilment of the individual. So the social engineers disguised themselves as defenders of democracy and accused the real defenders of human dignity of totalitarian repression. And great swathes of Westerners, seduced by the Sexual Revolution, have unthinkingly bought the lie. The loneliness pandemic currently exploited by an oligarchic establishment is the result.

It is dismaying for people in a civilisation built on the foundation of reason, who naturally take it for granted that dissent, dialogue, and disagreement are healthy and necessary to civil society, to be confronted by angry zealots who present themselves as defenders of absolute human rights that may not be called into question. The radicals smear opponents as bigots and haters and stop at nothing to silence their dissent.

Acceptance of the insidious philosophical fraud of the Sexual Revolution means most people do not want to address the root cause of the culture of loneliness. They simply assume that since “science” insists that humanity can achieve “happiness” by eliminating all forms of “repression,” religion and traditional ethical standards must not be permitted to stand in the way.

When our appetites are not controlled by our rational minds, they enslave us, sex being the most tyrannical of all. And with individuals rejecting moral restraints, egalitarian societies slide into Hobbes’ “war of everyone against everyone”, which opens the door to the abuse of power. Tyranny and sexual profligacy go hand in hand, and the egalitarian attitude typically ushers in totalitarianism.

Some two decades ago, I recall reading about a woman who was deeply saddened by the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal and then discovered that her own husband was having an affair. Her psychotherapist counselled her to accept the break-up of her marriage, and her pastor echoed the advice. In the space of a week, she lost her husband, her president, her psychotherapist, and her pastor, and was consigned to the ranks of the socially isolated. The story is emblematic of a society engineered to self-destruct.

What is a leader to do? Leadership means service, not status. It is about promoting the common good and not self-aggrandisement, in the home, school, workplace, or community. That demands honesty, trust, faithfulness, compassion, forgiveness, and a natural sense of obligation to others, all of which entail the eradication of sexual profligacy as the first step to restoring healthy culture, relationships, and community, the criteria by which leadership is measured.

A big ask? Of course, it is, but as Solzhenitsyn told us, “Let the lie come into the world, but not through me.” And it is the lie that unleashed the deluge of lust, and the desolation of loneliness that followed. Tragically, many people in positions of leadership will dismiss the call to action as too idealistic, too difficult, or simply contrary to their own concupiscence. Yet many others are increasingly aghast at the ugly absurdities defiling contemporary Western society, and new leaders are emerging far more rapidly than the complicit mainstream media would have us know.

The Latin phrase “divide et impera”, divide and rule, expresses a political ruse as old as civilisation itself. So where a leader unites and inspires for the common good, a misleader divides and rules for self-interest. The lonely society serves the misleaders. Solzhenitsyn saw it: “People have learned from their own misfortunes that revolutions demolish the organic structures of society, disrupt the natural flow of life, destroy the best elements of the population, and give free rein to the worst.”

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Episode SummaryWhich door or doors will you choose today because they lead you nowhere?

Hello to you listening in Belgaum, Karnataka, India! Coming to you from Whidbey Island, Washington this is Stories From Women Who Walk with 60 Seconds for Story Prompt Friday and your host, Diane Wyzga.

There is so much noise about the many ways available to us to open a new door, more doors, better doors to your life, your business, your heart, your relations… it’s exhausting! Do we need all those doors? Might there be another way? Yes.

Perhaps you’re familiar with the Brazilian novelist Paolo Coelho de Souza who wrote the bestseller The Alchemist, as well as The Pilgrimage about his road of self-discovery on the Camino de Santiago.

When I read what he had to say about doors I paid attention. “\

Close some doors today. Not because of pride, incapacity, or arrogance, but simply because they lead you nowhere.

Story Prompt: The miracle is that you begin. Which door or doors will you choose today? What might happen next? Write that story!

Practical Tip: The magic of stories is also in the sharing. If you wish share your story with someone or something. All that matters is you have a story.

You’re invited: “Come for the stories – stay for the magic!” Speaking of magic, I hope you’ll subscribe, follow, share a 5-star rating and nice review on your social media or podcast channel of choice, and join us next time! Remember to stop by the website, check out the Services, arrange a Discovery Call, and Opt-In to stay current with Diane and Quarter Moon Story Arts and on LinkedIn.

Stories From Women Who Walk Production Team

Podcaster: Diane F Wyzga & Quarter Moon Story Arts

Music: Mer’s Waltz from Crossing the Waters by Steve Schuch & Night Heron Music

All content and image © 2019 to Present: for credit & attribution Quarter Moon Story Arts

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What’s the point?

Seriously.

What. Is. The. Point.?

It’s not as if we go. Is it?

I always come back. Don’t you?

Eventually.

Or not.

Of course ‘eventually’ might only be a couple of seconds.

Sometimes.

Might be a couple of centuries.

When do you stop counting?

When does it stop?

Counting how many times you pass the point of no return only to return.

Because we always come back.

Don’t we.

Don’t we?

Push on the membrane. It gives.

The more you push, the more the resistance.

Until it doesn’t.

It just gives.

It pushes back. And back. Resisting your desire. And then not.

Through to the other side. Past the point of no return.

Except you do return. Don’t you. Don’t you?

You return from beyond the point of no return.

Or do you arrive?

Maybe that – whatever ‘that’ is – is?

Maybe that is reality?

Maybe this is the dream?

Does it matter?

My reality is a construct of my mind. So is my dream.

Why are they different? Are they?

I can’t remember dreams. I don’t. I do.

It’s the recall that is faulty.

The storage is just fine.

The dreams have started jumping the membrane.

It’s happening more.

The ‘recalls’, when they happen, feel different. Are different. Different to reality.

To what I understand to be reality.

At least they used to. Boundaries are blurring.

Is this dream in my head?

Which dream?

I do recall they are different. Generally. There is no connection.

But that can be true of a dream.

Pushing past the point of no return.

Through the membrane. The gossamer.

Then you don’t.

The gossamer softens over time.

And hardens.

It depends on the direction.

It’s getting harder on the return journey.

It is harder on the return journey.

Harder makes it harder.

One day it will be too hard.

The soft giving gossamer giving way to the hard unforgiving rubber.

Soft gossamer. Hard rubber.

Wondering when I will forever push past the point of no return.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

~George Bernard Shaw

I wrote the first draft of this one morning after a dream. And there it sat until a couple of weeks ago.

Die on it by SMBC Comics. Same wavelength.

And because no article seems to be complete without a reference to A.I. (note – the only writer involved in this piece was me – not so much this one, which on reading brought tears to my eyes.

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I’ve written extensively over the past several weeks about being at the beach. It is my happy place. Being relocated for the past four months has had its challenges, but it has also been chock-full of blessings.

Our home is still being remodeled due to the aftermath of Hurricane Ian last fall. We lived there for only two months. I know, bummer, right?! We were forced to relocate and have been living one hour south until it is completed. Finding the blessings in the curses is what I do best. If you are looking in your rear-view mirror, you cannot see what is in front of you.

We are currently staying one mile from the beach and may only be here another month. I decided it was time to spend my last few weeks watching the sunrise, smooshing my feet into the white sand, and swimming in the salty waters.

As I lay drying off from my swim in the 78-degree Gulf Coast waters, I realized today was the first day in a long time my monkey brain might be forced by nature to take a break. During my swim, the waves were crashing like I’d never seen them before, and my mind couldn’t play its game of distraction as I had to concentrate on the undertow. And now, as I lay on my pink and white polka-dotted towel, the breeze is flowing through me like a ping-pong ball in a Pac-Man game.

It was time to see if I could remain thought-free and listen to my body or other messages being sent to me. For most of my career, I have shared Western medicine approaches to health, wellness, and wellbeing. However, I have a robust spiritual connection and killer intuition.

Before closing my eyes, my 3-D mind notes the huge skyscrapers behind me. I take a few deep breaths and settle in. I begin a rhythmic breath with my arms spread out to the side like a female Jesus on the cross. Feeling the weight of my body press into the sand, I begin to feel weightless. When I “ground” myself, I work from head to toe. Like many of you, I perhaps have the same approach. Visualizing my feet tethered to Mother Earth right down to her bubbling core center, and I then begin working up through my chakras. Being aware of all my energy centers is crucial to me. When I am off kilter – I am off-kilter! Dependent on my restricted areas, I eat foods aligned with my chakras, such as yellows and oranges for my solar plexus, and throw on some jewelry to match. You should see the 74-pound rose quartz I have. She is a beauty.

Today was a unique experience. My human brain didn’t need to lead a body assessment at all. The sea took care of that. Very quickly, I became aware that as the ocean waves crashed onto the shoreline, they were in sync with my breathing pattern. As I worked my way up from my root to my crown chakra, the thrashing of the current flushed my pipes, so to speak. Though I was about 30 feet away, I felt like my feet were in the sea, and the high tide worked through my vessel.

As the flushing continued, there was quite a bit of energy swirling in my root and sacral chakras, so I hovered. As the waves continued to crash, so did the energy push through my body. I am most in tune with my solar plexus located around the belly area, which represents confidence, purpose, and self-esteem. When it is off, I am well aware of it. Today she was a dancing ray of sunshine.

Upon the next few exhales, the energy of the waves began approaching my heart chakra. It felt a bit heavy, but not in a negative way. It felt full. Gushing and swirling like a little whirlpool of joy. It started to expand, and I feel the energy branch out and shoot into my shoulders and armpits. As the riptide continues moving up into my throat chakra, I realized it had been scratchy and sore when I woke up this morning. The flow felt like I was gargling in salt water. Now that was cool!

I realized the energy felt like white light today and pure, almost like what a white feather would feel like if you were tickled on the inside. Now you might think I am losing my mind, but I get weirder, trust me. A burst of energy rolled over my tongue. And I choked. It was like my tongue got thick, and I nearly swallowed it. Within seconds, it moved into my third eye. The space between my eyebrows became hot and pressurized. It was like the entire top of my head was ready to burst. My mind’s eye saw a beam of light or a funnel stretching through my crown chakra and connecting to the sun just off to my left. It looked like a luminating gold Twizzler stuck to the sun.

I pinged back into my earthly world and felt the urgency to see what time it was—only seven minutes had passed. I set up grateful, aligned, and thanked all the beautiful messages that came in from Spirit—a seven-chakra tour in only seven minutes.

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I do not surrender myself to guides, ascended masters, beings of light, or other energies. Rather, I know them to be Allies who guide me as I surrender to the eternal light of source which resides within me and to which I am directly connected from the beginning.

It’s time to GO DIRECT!

My inner spark. I feel the flow of energy along the kristinline cord which runs through my light body, my heart… it’s magnetic pull from my roots, igniting the neuro pathways of my being as I become PRESENCE

I AM in breathing

I AM absorbing

I AM expanding

I AM Projecting

The primordial light of my true essence and the current of essence which runs through the whole of life. The whole of Creation.

It’s time to GO DIRECT

I AM the STAFF and I AM the ROD

I AM the light that will not veil.

I AM PRESENCE

It’s time to GO DIRECT

Gently anchored to the bounty of the earth and spirit.

In-Body, In Power, In-Soul

I AM my I AM Presence

I walk in PEACE

I walk in the cosmic fires and rays fed through the pillar of light. No harm comes to me.

Through my body, the vibration of my love is offered and added to the currents of life for those who wish to be reminded of their own light. The signs are in the earth, air, seas, and skies. When looked upon my gaze, it is seen through my eyes. Felt in the Heart.

When taken in through the body and breath I AM the fire that will ignite and awaken others by PRESENCE. The flames embodied are infinite, dancing together in harmonic resonance.

Allow PRESENCE to flow in and through the body.

It’s time to GO DIRECT!

Love You,

Gina

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Delicate, tiny

Seemingly fragile

Surrounded by green waves

Flowing all

Around you.

Tuck in close to these

Valleys,

Far below mountains of

Majesty,

To catch the

Fragrant scent of

Mystery.

For in your blossoming

You softly perfume breaths

Exhaled

Close to the earth

Near the places

Birthed from sorrow,

Love, and despair.

White bells of

Hope, you

Appear in the springtime,

Awakening the power

Of tenderness,

The importance of

Remaining sturdy

In the swirls

Of sighs.

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Career development appears at the top of many lists. Unfortunately, they tend to be lists focused on what employees desperately want but are not getting from managers.As for managers, most appreciate the value of career development and really wish they could do it more frequently and more effectively. But let’s face it: A manager’s day-to-day reality is a kaleidoscopic blur of meetings, responsibilities, and shifting priorities. Helping employees to develop and grow is one of many activities that is continually pushed out in time to that elusive “someday” that too rarely comes.

How can managers get past this conundrum? How can they make career development happen within the pressure-cooker reality that is business today? The answer is definitely not new systems, checklists, processes or forms. Those have actually contributed to the problem.

Instead, the answer lies in a new mindset — a different way of thinking about what career development is — and a few key behaviors.

Transfer OwnershipManagers don’t own their employees’ careers. Employees do. All that managers can (and should) feel accountable for is guiding, encouraging, collaborating on, and supporting the effort. When a manager really internalizes this reality, it can produce a powerful energetic shift. The weight of responsibility lifts, allowing managers to approach this task with greater energy and creativity than when it was another of their many “duties.” This transfer also ensures that employees have some skin in the game. Personal ownership enhances their engagement, interest, commitment, and results.

Cultivate CuriosityWhen ownership of development is transferred to the employee, career conversations suddenly become much easier and less stressful for managers. Managers don’t need to have all the answers. But they must be ready to pose the right questions. Questions are the most powerful tool managers have to support career development. And cultivating a genuine sense of curiosity and interest in others and their goals sets the tone for the most productive conversations possible.

Iterate the IDPMany organizations have formal individual development planning processes, during which managers engage in a lengthy annual analysis and career discussions with each employee. For the manager, it’s a huge time sink, and for the employee, it’s frequently like drinking from a fire hose. So, break it up. Do a little bit each month — or better yet, each week. These smaller, iterative chunks better accommodate the cadence of business. Perhaps more importantly, they better accommodate how development really occurs: little by little over time.

Engineer ExperiencesMany managers avoid career development conversations because they believe that to make employees happy, the goal of such conversations is to provide ideas about how to move up or around in the organization. That’s simply not part of today’s de-layered, leaner approach to business. So how then does development occur? Through experiences that leverage talents and build the skills that employees need. It might be leading a team, analyzing data, or getting to know new customers. Jointly arriving at development experiences is smart business because while the employee is developing, important work gets done simultaneously.

Seize Coachable MomentsCareer development opportunities occur countless times each day, but only when managers are sensitive to the cues around them and are willing to seize coachable moments. When an employee shares a new interest, is starting a project, has just come back from training, or has experienced a setback — all of these are career development cues. A 1-3 minute conversation in the flow of the work that needs to be done can help employees reflect, analyze, consider, and plan their career development. There’s no need to wait for some big career meeting (that likely won’t occur anyway).

Managers who consistently engage in career development that employees appreciate don’t have more time than others. They have a mindset that allows them to deploy the little time they have toward efficient high-value conversations that drive employee ownership, reflection, motivation, and action.

In fact, it’s the busiest managers who realize they don’t have the time not to develop those around them.

This article originally appeared at SmartBrief.

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Being a consistent sponsor or guest on traditional, mainstream, or Web TV to reach and engage with audiences that equate to your ideal customers may seem like a low-priority expense today when compared to advertising, marketing, and promotion via Facebook ads, Instagram posts, TikTok videos, and Social Media Trends. But when it’s done right, TV can provide immense benefits—helping your business engage, inform, and entertain.

Brilliant ValueWhatever your marketing budget, TV sponsorship/advertising and guest appearances give you three bags full. Did you know that TV is almost half the average price per 30 seconds of YouTube? And 17 times cheaper than other online video advertising? These other forms of video cost advertisers more because of their cost-per-start trading model and the ease with which users can avoid the ads.

And this is before you consider all the other environmental and quality factors that distinguish TV – its high ad completion rates, full-screen viewing, high-quality and brand-safe content, the fact that it is watched so much with other people, all of which influence what matters most: effectiveness.

Makes You KNOWNTraditional, mainstream, or Web TV turns brands into household names, making you shine in the spotlight and twinkle like a big star. Why is this important? Because being KNOWN is important in advertising. Marketing effectiveness researchers Les Binet and Peter Field have repeatedly shown that campaigns with notoriety at the core of their strategy are easily the most effective at creating large business effects like sales and profit. In fact, they are 50% more likely to create these effects.

TV’s scale and reach are unbeatable. You can’t become KNOWN if no one has heard of you. And brands on TV are making a very public promise, which, as Ogilvy chair Rory Sutherland points out, is powerful in itself: “Public promises carry more weight,” he says, “hence why the words ‘as seen on TV’ are more convincing than ‘as seen on a post on Facebook’.”

The fact that both traditional, mainstream, and online TV is a shared experience also contributes to its BE KNOWN-making power. Viewing TV and its advertisements creates opportunities for personal recommendations, generates conversation, increases memory, and intensifies emotions. Everything you want associated with your brand and business to stay top-of-mind in your customer’s minds.

Signals SuccessIn all forms of publicity, promotion, and advertising, it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s where and how you say it. In all its forms, TV is proven to be heads, shoulders, knees, and toes above others at driving the strongest fitness, social, popularity and success signals, and to outperform other media at suggesting brand quality, self-confidence, and strength.

The Lowest RiskEvery business and brand worries about the economy. They want visibility & exposure, and reassurance that their media/marketing dollars will deliver results. During the best of times, rolling the dice might be an option. In these times, we choose the safest bets possible on our investments.

While this is difficult to predict and even guarantee, recent research by Gain Theory, MediaCom, Wavemaker, and Mindshare found that the variability of returns differs significantly across different forms of promotion.

On & offline TV emerges as the safest bet: broadcaster video-on-demand (BVOD) is the least risky of all video channels, delivering just 20% of variance compared with the median return, followed by linear TV with a variability of 24%.

It’s for EveryoneButchers, bakers, candlestick makers…TV’s reach is extended to everyone: every sponsor/advertiser, every interviewee/guest, every marketing budget, every audience.

In 2022, linear TV and BVOD combined reached 90.3% of the adult population each week. BVOD, in particular, is vital to younger audiences, accounting for 26% of their broadcaster viewing (more than double that of the average viewer).

More and more brands are turning to traditional, mainstream, and online TV to share their messages and reach their ideal customers.

Nielsen Ad Intel reports that, in 2022, 1,286 advertisers used TV for the first time, or returned after five or more years away. This followed 1,243 new sponsors/advertisers in 2021.

Between 2015-2019, the yearly average was significantly lower at 841. This dramatic recent increase (up 50%) demonstrates the increasing appeal of TV to businesses of all shapes and sizes.

It’s also important to note that these aren’t just huge businesses with huge budgets. In 2021, 31% of TV’s sponsors/advertisers spent under $50,000 on TV, and 54% spent below $250,000. Only 29% of all TV advertisers spent more than $1m and only 5% spent above $10m.

With its ability to reach vast audiences, its amazing value, its fame-making power, the opportunity to spread your message, the body language it gives brands and its reliability of return – traditional, mainstream, and online TV helps brands of all shapes and sizes reach the top of the line.

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When she was 19, Amy Purdy lost both her legs below the knee. And now … she’s a pro snowboarder (and a killer competitor on “Dancing with the Stars”!). In this powerful talk, she shows us how to draw inspiration from life’s obstacles.

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Is AI as smart as it seems? Exploring the “brain” behind machine learning, neural networker Alona Fyshe delves into the language processing abilities of talkative tech (like the groundbreaking chatbot and internet obsession ChatGPT) and explains how different it is from your own brain — even though it can sound convincingly human.

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In many of my previous writings, I refer to the ‘space between’ our thoughts and ‘things’ and our subsequent reactions to these things. The question is, how do these internal spaces interact with and influence the outer spaces of our lives?

The answer lies within the intentions behind our thoughts. How we direct our internal thoughts in our daily narrative influences what plays out before us externally. This is how we serve as portals for change.

This magical space is where we get to play director and ‘take a knee’ to contemplate our choices. The act of simply taking a pause moves us immediately from a ‘reactive state’ governed by the chaotic unconscious to that of an ‘active state’ of conscious choice. In other words, do we wish to create consciously or unconsciously the outcome of our circumstances?

To create consciously, we need to first be aware of the aspect of our personality being triggered by some ‘thing’. The best results emerge from sharing stories with simplicity.

One story I’d like to share is the of a book I used to read to my daughter every night before bed called,’ The Kissing Hand,’ written by the lovely author Audrey Penn. Its message is about trying to understand the mindset of a ‘bully’ as being a misguided soul acting out of contempt when confronted by feelings of inferiority. Bullies have an incessant need to be the ones ‘in charge’ all the time. Controlling others is how they feel powerful.

The mother of the ‘bullied’ character in the story encourages her child to act with compassion rather than contempt when confronted by the bully. She explains to her child that the bully is a wounded soul, looking to hide his pain by behaving badly. It is not easy to be friendly to a ‘bully’. And only other bullies remain in ‘bully groups.’ Birds of a feather, you know. Best to swim in warmer waters.

However, in my young daughter’s case, she so wanted to belong in a ‘friend group’ that she did not see the turbulent waters of the cesspool she was attempting to swim in.

She experienced a different side of the ‘bully factor’ by being excluded from the ‘girl groups’ that began forming early on. Lordy, I saw it emerging in kindergarten! By middle school, those waters were shark infested. So instead, I encouraged her to form her own alliances with the other castaways from the so-called ‘cool girls.’ As it turned out, many of them were formerly associated with these ‘clicks’ or bully groups and sent packing for one reason or another.

There was only one condition for membership in my daughter’s group. No one was the ‘leader’ and everyone was welcome so long as kindness and inclusion were always demonstrated. Opening the doorway to one’s sense of belonging is transformational and will lead to a path of better understanding others.

It is more than just discovering the good in people or seeking new relationships. These are the doorways to the space between. An opening into our own consciousness that leads to the discovery of all possibilities within a deeper realm of experience.

How we treat others, (and especially ourselves) matters. It is the way we interact with the world around us that moves us to think and engage in diverse ways so we may rise to the challenges of day-to-day life.

I am pleased to see the articles published lately that are heavily focused on the ‘re-framing’ of the mindset in the act of ‘taking pause’ when we are engaged in conflict or ‘triggered’ emotionally in some way. It moves us from ‘re-action’ to ‘action’ by creating the space needed to make shifts in our thought processes when interacting with the world. That ‘space’ could be the difference between life and death.

I think of this every time a mass shooting occurs. My mind is immediately catapulted back in time to my senior year of high school. Life was simpler then. When I think of the world my child is growing up in now, with active shooter drills, bans on books and bodies, and harmless drag shows, it makes me sad.

My intention for this post is NOT to get political. But seriously folks. What is more likely to cause severe injury or even death to your child? Is it a drag show or banned reading material? Or is it staring down the barrel of a gun? For me, this is a no-brainer. And for the love of God, what kind of world have we created when an innocent act of pulling into the wrong driveway or fetching a basketball that has rolled into someone’s yard gets you shot?

My early experience involved losing a loved one to gun violence. In fact, it was during the summer of my senior year that my girlfriend was shot and killed by her stepbrother. I cannot go into the details, but that memory bubbles to the surface every time I hear of these shootings. Those gunshots ring out in my mind, piercing my heart all over again as if it happened yesterday. That is how raw the wound still is, over forty years later. It NEVER goes away.

The questions still haunt me. What if I was there? Could I have stopped it? What if she had lived? Would she remember me? The answer came in a dream the other night. I dreamed of walking through her old neighborhood and showing her photograph to everyone I encountered. No one recognized her face, but one lady recognized her by name.

I asked if she could take me to her, and she said, “Yes, she is standing right behind you.”

I turned around to meet the eyes of a stranger. Her face was disfigured, and unrecognizable to me. That would make sense, as the bullet struck her in the face. She seemed not to have any idea who I was either. She shook her head no when I mentioned my name. But I did notice the very distinct birthmark on the side of her face that confirmed her identity to me.

In an instant, I was devastated all over again. But shortly thereafter, my thoughts suddenly shifted, and I became acutely aware of being in the ‘space between.’ It is in that ‘dream-like’ state where we are present in the realm of all possibilities. Was this an alternate version of what may have played out had she survived? Maybe…maybe not. But for me, the message of this version was clear.

If she had lived, she would not have remembered who I was. The memory of us was wiped away by a single bullet. Perhaps, to lose her in that way would have been even more painful, not to mention the physical challenges she would have endured.

When I awoke, the memory of my dream lingered for a while as I contemplated my feelings about it. My perspective of the events of the past had shifted. The heart that had been shattered so long ago finally felt ‘at peace’ for the first time in decades. I found myself suddenly filled with gratitude instead of anger.

They say God only gives you as much as you can manage. And I am now certain that her death was an act of his loving mercy on us both. “Thank you, God,” I whispered. “For not putting us through that.”

My dream sequence is the perfect example of recognizing a part of me that still suffers from my past when triggered by current events. The transformation begins when the mindset shifts from pain to compassion, patching the deep puncture wounds of trauma.

Every time that memory is stirred, it no longer sits at the bottom of the cauldron building layers upon layers of soot to sift through later. It is a process of healing, as with any buried trauma. It will continue to recycle its energy every time the wiring of that memory is tapped. However, when we address each uprising with compassion for ourselves and even the ones who may have hurt us, we set in motion a mindset of healing rather than one of pain and dis-ease.

I saw a quote the other day that sums things up here beautifully:

No amount of regret changes the past. No amount of anxiety changes the future. But any amount of gratitude changes the present.

– Marc & Angel Chernoff

Always seek the ‘higher ground’ in every situation…It just may save your life.

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Nursing school was rocky for me, at best. The community college where I received my Associate Degree in Nursing (ADN) had a perfect record of students successfully passing state boards on the first sitting. Never a failure on their part. To ensure this excellent record remain unstained they set the bar high. The last passing grade was 84%. Score 83.9% and you were out. If any of the instructors didn’t like you, you were out. No explanation needed; you were just done. I was fortunate. All but one of the instructors liked my empathy, my wit, and my goofiness. The one, a former army drill sergeant (no joking), did her best to get me removed… three times. I firmly believe to this day that she’s the reason I succeeded. Thus, she’s the reason many of my patients lived. My innate, highly acute intuition saved many people’s lives.

Ever wanted something so badly, especially when all odds were stacked against you, that failure was not an option? Yep, me too.

In the ’80s, the term neurodivergence was unknown. So, I clearly couldn’t have had it, right?

Looking back, I scratch my head in wonder at that young nursing student who pulled grades > 84%, passed every test – and clinic — in that nursing program, and passed her state boards on the first sitting. Now, I’m proud of what I accomplished. Yet I’m sorry to say it’s only been in the last few months that I’ve awakened to this realization.

That amazing young woman was beaten up, often, by the person who was closest to her: herself. Sadly, this continues to happen to other neurodivergent people every day. I’d be embarrassed to tell you what I told myself over the years. Suffice it to say, you can guess what it is. I’m making it my mission to call attention to this, to call it out, to shed light on – possibilities. To finding a way to elevate others like me. Other neurodivergent’s who continue to berate themselves because no one has shared with them their innate brilliance. They’ve yet to learn there’s a better way. Join me as I take this walk through the unknown, as I toss down a few words leaving a paper trail of hope for those who follow.

I ask my friends who have done this, could it be like walking The Camino de Santiago?

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On the plane about to take off, I’m sitting in the exit row, and the flight attendant asked us, “Are you ready, willing, and qualified to assist in case of an emergency landing?” Hmmm, I thought. Qualified? I have never had to reload an entire plane because of an emergency landing before. How could I be qualified? This made me think of new managers, those who are promoted or ones hired who have no experience leading people. Yet, we think they are “qualified”! Is that fair? Shouldn’t we do something to prepare them?

People often believe that if they don’t feel capable, influential, or experienced enough to be leaders then they aren’t “qualified” for the job. However, this couldn’t be farther from the truth! Leadership is not only about technical skills and knowledge; it’s also about confidence, flexibility, and resilience. An article from CCL says “A good leader should have integrity, self-awareness, courage, respect, empathy, and gratitude.” Despite our own doubts and insecurities about leading others, there is no set mold for what makes someone qualified–each person has their own unique traits that make them a great leader.

Leadership TrainingLeadership training can have a profoundly positive impact on your ability to lead your organization, team, or project forward. If you feel stuck and unable to develop strategies that bring together both short-term and long-term objectives and shape cultures of mutual respect within your organization, leadership training can help. It offers opportunities to develop the skills to reflect critically upon all the decisions you make, understand and accept different perspectives, delegate effectively, and motivate your colleagues. With all these tools at hand that help you foster meaningful relationships with colleagues while driving results through dynamic decision-making, you’ll be well on your way toward becoming an influential and momentous leader. Leadership training is the perfect stepping stone for you if you’ve been looking for ways to step up in the type of leader you want to be.

Mentoring or ShadowingMentoring or shadowing is a great way to gain knowledge, increase your skill set and make valuable connections. A mentor can help you develop an understanding of the profession you have chosen by providing practical advice and guidance. Shadowing someone in a role that interests you is equally beneficial, allowing you to put the skills learned through self-teaching into practice. With both of these strategies, gaining insight into different approaches can be invaluable for your learning. Don’t forget that mentoring or shadowing requires commitment and dedication, and it can often take hard work and perseverance to receive the maximum results. However, with any effort comes a reward so take the plunge and reap the rewards!

Peer ReviewsBecoming a qualified leader is an important skill, and peer reviews are a great way to help the process. Providing and receiving thoughtful feedback can bring an understanding of strengths and development opportunities to aid any aspiring leader. Careful consideration of feedback from someone in the same field can be invaluable, as it comes from experience that may not be available outside of your peers. Peer reviews provide a platform for growth and development for anyone looking to build their leadership capabilities, which ultimately promotes self-confidence in workplace decisions.

Acknowledging and Celebrating Other People’s SuccessesAs a qualified leader, I understand how important it is to recognize and celebrate other people’s successes. Showing gratitude for the hard work of others not only maintains our relationships, but it’s also a great way to boost confidence and soften competition. Each time someone excels, I feel privileged to be around them and acknowledge their success. Through noticing great accomplishments throughout my circles and offering congratulations with warmth, I hope that others can experience the same inspiration and motivation as I do when witnessing successes.

ReflectionDeveloping leadership skills requires dedication and thoughtfulness. Qualified leaders are aware of their own strengths and weaknesses and how to leverage them for the benefit of their goals or environment. They take initiative and recognize the potential in others, while not forgetting to establish structure and guide their teams. All the methods discussed – rigorous training, mentoring or shadowing, peer reviews, and celebrating successes – can help build strong leadership skills that qualify you as a leader. Take stock of what’s comfortable for you – do you prefer a classroom setting? Or one-on-one meetings? Is public speaking natural for you? Knowing what works best for you is key to nurturing your capabilities. And at the end of it all, it’s important to reflect: What makes YOU a qualified leader? With careful investments into honing your leadership craft, continue to equip yourself with the knowledge and humility necessary to become an effective leader who moves people and brings out the best in them.

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In accounting, a balance sheet is the core of accounting. A balance sheet is a financial statement that reports a company’s assets, liabilities, and shareholder equity.

I find the same sheet applied to human relations. Two people in relations and a third party representing the shareholders’ equity replace the triad of assets, liabilities and shareholders’ equity.

This is consistent with the scientific fact that there is no strong relationship between two parties as it is stronger through a third one that couples the two parties. For example, a wife and husband their relationship strengthen usually by having a third party- the children in this case.

This is also in accordance with Heider’s Balanced Theory I psychology. This theory states that the reactions of each individual are framed within a triangle that Heider called the P-O-X model. The triad consists of

P = the person to analyze

O = other, or the comparison person

X = the third element for comparisons such as a third person, a physical object, an idea, or an event.

Human Relationship Is More Complex than a Balanced Sheet

Human relationship is more complex than those we encounter on a balance sheet. This is because one must have balanced relations with self to have one with others.

Let us go back to the wife-husband relationship. If the husband lacks self-balance of health, heat, and mind, would he be able to have one with his wife and his kids? The answer is no.

The imbalance in one person may cause an imbalance in other people. A recent crime serves as a good example. A husband wanted to remarry his divorcee. She refused. He lost self-balance and decided to take revenge. He knew of his divorcee’s love to their only son. He killed the son just to bleed her heart.

The imbalance in the life of one person can have a rippling effect beyond imagination.

There is no balance in the relationship between two people without being open to each other and keeping the communication line between them. If not, what starts as a small gap of difference allows this gap to grow. A gap is a weakness that allows the relationship to deteriorate and ends up in saddening acts. The story of the father who killed his son serves as an example.

Two people even though each might have self-balance shall not have a balanced relationship. To keep the balance there are conditions such as communicating with empathy, respecting boundaries, and balancing work-life.

The law of life is balance everywhere at all scales.

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Have you ever gone for a walk with others only to find that one or some make way too much noise as they trample and stomp their way along through the woods?

One with NatureTo be one with nature is to stand alone in the woods at night, never fearing terror or fright, feeling the vibration of the earth’s floor as it laments in anguish at all man has done to it while shedding a tear as you touch the wound in the side of a tree, where someone earlier carved “you and me forever,” never giving heed to the life inside.

To be one with nature is to know the animals and not fear them as they close in to see if you are worthy of their affection while leaning with ease against a stump or tree, feeling the quiet breeze as it makes its way amongst the trees. While listening to the music of the woods and the whispers of the trees, feeling their heartbeat as they sway to and fro breathing a soft sigh of relief at your contentment while nature moves closer to share in the moment.

To be one with nature, we must first be one with ourselves. We must determine who we are and what we stand for; because, unlike our ability to hide our authentic self from man, nature has a way of seeing through our persona to our genuine character before allowing us to get too close.

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Welcome to the brand new episode of “The Conscious Living Podcast.”Today I have the pleasure of interviewing an amazingly evolved soul, entrepreneur, and dear friend and colleague, Mrs. Jill Lublin. Jill Lublin is an international speaker on the topics of Radical Influence, Publicity, Networking, Kindness, and Referrals. She is the author of 4 Best Selling books including Get Noticed…Get Referrals (McGraw Hill) and co-author of Guerrilla Publicity and Networking Magic. Her latest book, Profit of Kindness went #1 in four categories. Jill is a master strategist on how to position your business for more profitability and more visibility in the marketplace. Here’s what you will discover in the latest episode:

1- Why is kindness so important today?
2- How can we be more kind in a divided nation?
3- To be kind, do you have to be weak?
4- How do we bring back kindness to a divided nation?
5- How do we create success through kindness, and bring back a happier nation?

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If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything. I’m positive that a doer makes mistakes.

~John Wooden

As an avid photographer (semi-professional) of many decades, I’ve come to learn a thing or two about mistakes. There’s nothing more satisfying than taking a good picture. Many factors come into play to make that happen, and oftentimes a little luck.

But on a typical photoshoot, it’s not uncommon to take 300-plus pictures in order to narrow down to 20 or 30 pictures that will pass muster for consideration in the final selection process.

Why do so many pictures not make the cut? In a word – mistakes. If the photoshoot was outdoor it could be lighting issues, eyes were closed, hair was a mess, the picture was not in focus, the composition wasn’t right, the 3-year-old quit cooperating, I hesitated too long on the shutter, and the list goes on.

Photography has been a rewarding passion for me over the years. But it’s also quite humbling. It humbles me when I step into the home of a family member or a friend and see their family portrait prominently placed and knowing I took it is humbling. Knowing the backstory of my countless mistakes in getting to that prominently placed picture is equally as humbling.

In leadership, as in photography, mistakes are bound to happen. Sometimes they are mistakes of our own creation while others are not. Either way, it’s part of a leader’s life.

My leadership mentor John Maxwell writes, “All leaders make mistakes. They are a part of life. Successful leaders recognize their errors, learn from them, and work to correct their faults.” And this is what separates successful leaders from the rest of the pack. Let’s look a little closer look.

All leaders make mistakesThis shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Welcome to the human race. But in leadership, perhaps we need to ask what mistakes are we making. Are they the same ones over and over? If so, perhaps the lessons haven’t been learned. But that aside, as a leader, don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Making mistakes is a sign of progress and without making mistakes there will be no progress.

Successful leaders recognize their mistakes and learn from themThis is the distinguishing characteristic of a strong leader. Being able to recognize one’s mistakes is essential. This involves humility and being grounded in reality. Perhaps you were just tone-deaf at the moment and made a poor decision. You didn’t take advice or listen to others before making a critical decision. Perhaps you didn’t delegate a task when you should have and it created issues you otherwise could have avoided. Successful leaders recognize this.

Successful leaders work to correct their mistakesIn order to be successful in your leadership, acknowledge that you make mistakes and also pour yourself into learning from them and making the necessary corrections. This is your work and obligation as a leader.

As a leader, there will always be something to work on and improve, but as you stick with it, you’ll be well on your way to significant growth as a leader.

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It’s so very normal for this question to come up in the exploration of our essential nature. But in my experience it’s always a move towards what’s more aligned — and therefore what feels better — so what’s to fear?

It’s so very normal for fear to arise in the nondual awakening exploration. Particularly with the direct path (as opposed to the progressive path) because with the direct path, we look directly at who you are and directly at what you’re not. It can be done gently and lovingly, which is totally my preference, but ultimately there is one recognition of who you really are.

When you’re identified with the mind, you don’t want to look at this and the obvious next question is ‘what will become of me?’

Why does this fear and question arise?Because when identified with the mind you believe that what you’re not is who you are. Read that again — there’s a belief that what you are not — what is not essential to who you are — is essential to who you are.

Can you feel the confusion that arises from believing that?

Can you see why the fear makes perfect sense?

Imagine it like this.There’s a person who was born holding a hat. They didn’t know they were holding a hat. It had always been there so it was invisible to them that this was an additional object. One day someone pointed out to them that the hat wasn’t essential to who they are. Instinctively they pulled the hat closer. And told the other person to go away and leave them alone.

This is the fear that arises.

And so, given we’ve grown up collecting more and more hats, with nobody telling us they’re not essential to us, it’s understandable that fear will arise when this is suggested. Because by this time you’ve come to identify with the hats, and you’ve collected so many of them, and they all look necessary for you to continue being you. So yes, you don’t like it when someone says they’re not who you really are.

If you do manage to entertain the consideration that they’re not who you are, the obvious question then arises “but what will become of me if I don’t hold onto all these hats?” (You get it that the hats are like thoughts and ideas, right?)

So therefore, in more detail, the question (and fear) is “what will become of me if I don’t [do this / behave like this / enjoy that / speak like this / have those people in my life / have this reputation / job / income]?”

I get it.On my journey, I had the fear of becoming an unmotivated blancmange in the corner (it was always a blancmange for some reason!).

I had the fear of becoming weird. Or woo woo.

Fear of becoming like ‘those’ nondual teachers.

And yet — the pull of the exploration drew me on. It far outweighed any fear that the mind could bring. And I was helped by my own coach reassuring me that the exploration doesn’t lead to a cookie-cutter outcome.

My clients tell me this too.

These same kinds of fears about who they will become if they keep exploring.

And yet I’ve never met or worked with anyone for whom these fears came true.

It doesn’t mean things don’t change. Friendships might change. Preferences might change. Your job might change. The kinds of things you talk about might change. And they might not.

We can’t predict it. And we don’t need to predict it because:

These things are not essential to who you are and so you are unaffected by them coming, going, or changing. If and when they do change, there is a known perfection to that. It’s often a relief. Always a move towards what’s more aligned — and therefore what feels better — so what’s to fear?

Have you been afraid of what will become of you? How does that feel now?

Much love, Helen

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Every act of love is a work of peace no matter how small.
~ Mother Teresa

One of my Danish connections on LinkedIn, Lars AP, runs a non-profit for the purpose of spreading kindness.

Although he lives in Denmark and writes and works in Danish, one of his parents is American, and his kindness focus arose from observing that he liked himself better when he was his outgoing American self, speaking English than his more introverted, “let me not be in your way”, Danish-speaking version. Well, now older and wiser, he shows up as his outgoing relationship-building self regardless of which language he speaks.

After Lars had made a name for himself doing kindness happenings, he invited people to send in their kind stories: something they had done for somebody, that somebody had done for them, or when they had been a bystander left with that little “aah, that was so nice”-feeling. He shares these stories in his Friday emails along with uplifting music or thoughts or gimmicks or jokes or… you know, it’s a bit like getting a mix of Susan Rooks’ Friday Funnies and David Marlow’s Daily Ikigai in your inbox.

In a recent post, Lars described how he some years back, on an otherwise emotionally gray day, held the door for a young father with a pram and produced a kind-moment right there. It stimulated him to do other small connective actions from his café chair by the window – like smiling to random people in the street. He had the insight that when we experience awe, we say “awe” – usually spelled aah (or in Danish årh, pronounced – wait for it…: awe). In that moment we are very present, we may have goosebumps, and we are “feeling with” the people/animals/nature involved in the interaction (or the video or story we see/read.)

When Lars has done corporate and culture events – and yes, kindness in the workplace is a good thing, too – he noticed that when he asked the participants to recall kind events, up to a third of them couldn’t come up with any stories.

What if they just needed the right kind of prompt?Fortunately, Lars had the data to figure out what such prompts might be: the over 10,000 kind stories people have sent to him over the years. Coding all these stories for themes, he and his team found that – at least in Denmark – people observe and remember awe in these scenarios:

1. They experienced an unexpected “good luck” kindness (a compliment e.g.)
2. They had some bad luck, and somebody ameliorated that
3. Somebody had pointed out something about them – a talent, skill, habit, or trait – they weren’t aware of was exceptional (secret superpower) or had functioned as an “enlightened witness” and thereby changed the storyteller’s life trajectory
4. They were engaged in play
5. “Love songs” – to people, nature, sunsets,…
6. A time when they were authentic and felt belonging
7. Socially risky situations, like hearing a vulnerable share of a personal story, or doing/seeing something that may run against social norms in order to build a connection.

Lars took this one step further. He made mood-board-based stories that came up for him when he thought of his awesome experiences from each of these seven categories. And then he took that activity out in his workshops to see how the participants reacted.

Now people have a scaffold around thoughts of kindness, and -– lo and behold – it does prompt the memory. Not only can more people recall incidents, but the incidents that have lodged in their memory also say something about what is important to them. Are most of your stories happening outside? Might it then be an idea for you to do your meetings from outside if that is where you breathe a little more freely and relax into who you are?

We can meditate on a mountaintop and feel “I am one with the Force and the Force is with me.” But might we also be able to reach transcendence just by being kind? To Lars, kindness creates small, everyday self-transcendence moment; the sixth step in Maslow’s unfinished Hierarchy of Needs theory. And who knows what Maslow intended? Unfortunately, he didn’t get to make that part of his work clear to the world before he died of a heart attack.

To make sure that I understood correctly what Lars wrote in his article, I sent him a LI message inviting him to a Zoom. And he zoomed in the next day – in the middle of his Easter break – and not only did he spend an hour with me, but immediately afterwards he sent me a pdf of his book Awesome – or, this being in Danish, Århsome, a word he invented for his book. To me, it was like a category 1 kindness story happening in real-time.

Now I am curious, so I just might come up with a few more stories that are part of my Århsome collection and see if they point me somewhere interesting.

What is important to you? Share your kind stories – from whichever categories are most available in your memory. And if you decide to do a mood-board and gain insights from doing that, I would love to hear of your stories and findings – as, I am sure, would Lars.

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I recently had the privilege of joining the University of South Wales at their 10th-year anniversary Coaching Conference where I was invited to share a keynote on how do we evolve as coaches and leaders and how do we help our clients evolve in their thinking.

In preparation for this speech, I reviewed my own and others’ lived experiences and discovered a recipe with a number of ingredients in how we might EVOLVE more intentionally. Firstly let’s check in with our mutual understanding of the verb evolve. The dictionary defines it as to develop gradually, or to cause something or someone to develop gradually.

It seems to me that as a coach or leader, you are a catalyst for your clients and team members to gradually grow and develop both personally and professionally. Equally, there are times when your client or team member may experience a transformation through your coaching conversations having a significant impact in their personal and professional lives.

I believe as coaches and leaders we have a profound responsibility and privilege in our roles because of the impact we have on the lives of others – the way they think, feel, and act. This may sound daunting. This may sound exciting. Coaching conversations expand from the tender to the challenging, each one of them having an impact on the life of another. And so how do we evolve as coaches and leaders more intentionally?

Below I share the ingredients by way of an acronym in the form of a question which I’d love to engage with you on:

● Who do you ENGAGE on your journey?
● What VALUES do you want to upgrade?
● What enables you to be OPEN-MINDED?
● What is the purpose of your LISTENING?
● What VARIETY of experiences do you create?
● What takes you and others to the unexplored EDGE of their thinking?

Who do you engage on your journey?I realised that my own journey became clear once I looked back and joined the dots. I enjoyed a career serving people in the corporate environment from secretary to HR director spanning 16 years. Later I was encouraged by Gladena McMahon an inspiring and dedicated coach, to consider and retrain as a coach based upon my observations and the impact of conversations I was having with individuals as they navigated the many organisational restructures we witnessed in the early 2000s. I was curious to learn more.

Coaching was not so well known in the corporate setting at that time. I had studied NLP with the superb Ian McDermott and Jan Elfine and became more interested on the impact of language and emotions in our lives and so began my coach training in this field. A few years later I pursued a post-grad diploma in psychological coaching deepening my understanding yet further on what it means to be human under the wise stewardship of Stephen Palmer, Gladena, and colleagues at the Centre for Coaching.

Twelve years ago I discovered the Thinking Environment and the work of Nancy Kline. This experience transformed my life. As a mum, daughter, sister, friend, and my coaching practice. I discovered a different level of listening and how to help others think as and for themselves rather than conforming to what others wanted them to think or being fearful of reprimand when they did share their thoughts.

As I looked back, I saw what each part of the journey had taught me. I also acknowledge that I was not alone, at each stage I had been inspired, encouraged, and stretched by my coach supervisors Georgina Woudstra and Anne Hathaway, teachers and leadership mentors Bob Chapman and Anthony Howard in my leadership and coaching evolution.

Supporting our coaching clients is to invite them to consider who do they engage in their life, in their relationships, in their work in support of their personal vision. We evolve as we ENGAGE with others to help us become who we are meant to become.

What values are driving your decisions?Reflecting on your own coaching and leadership journey is in itself a useful process in how you have evolved. Specifically, at the start of your journey, what values underpinned your decisions and behaviours? Pursuing a career as a coach requires much learning, commitment, and excellence most definitely if you want to pursue an accreditation.

These were indeed my own values when I began my coach training. As I grew in experience and skills I continued to revisit my values and upgrade them. Today the values that drive my decisions are those of nurturing, gratitude, personal growth, and goodness. I decided to upgrade my values in service of my ongoing vision where I imagine a world where we listen first enabling others to step up and into who they are meant to be.

Nelson Mandela, an exceptional leader was someone who upgraded his values as he evolved. He had a vision to bring about a rainbow nation. In his early years, he was very different to who he became after 27 years in prison. Prior to his incarceration, he described himself as an angry and rebellious man fighting injustice. He left honouring the values of humility, wisdom, reconciliation, and forgiveness.

As I have said, the first thing is to be honest with yourself. You can never have an impact on society if you have not changed yourself.

– Nelson Mandela

Supporting our coaching clients and team members is to invite them to revisit and upgrade their values as they consider who they wish to become. We evolve as we upgrade our VALUES revealing our lived experience and what is important now in service of our personal vision.

What enables you to be open-minded?Over the past year, I have asked a number of audiences to describe how they would characterise our current reality. The same words emerge each time; unpredictable, changing, unknowing, chaotic, possibility, urgent, confused, anxious. Given our reality, how do we as coaches, leaders and human beings evolve to thrive not simply survive in the context we find ourselves in today? I propose we need to be open-minded so that we can continue to adapt, be flexible, think as and for ourselves, be willing to change, and to keep learning.

Kendra Cherry, in her article How to be More Open-Minded, describes open-mindedness as being non-prejudiced, tolerant, and being willing to see another’s perspective. Being open-minded helps us to gain insight, have new experiences, achieve personal growth, become mentally strong, feel more optimistic, and learn new things – all of which help us navigate the complex reality we face today. Cherry goes on to say we benefit from being open-minded as it helps us learn new things, grow as a person, and become more optimistic and resilient in the face of life’s challenges.

Supporting our clients and team members is to role model our own open-mindedness, celebrating what’s right with the world and encouraging different perspectives. We evolve when we choose to be OPEN-MINDED to what is possible.

Being open-minded also requires us to deepen our capacity to listen.

What is the purpose of your listening?In my work, I have discovered 5 levels of listening, each of them having a purpose.

• Self-listening – pausing, being present with yourself, and reflecting: What is working well? What am I assuming that is holding me back? How do I feel? What thought is behind that feeling? What do I want to change? And then listening to your answers with compassion rather than in combat to help develop a greater self-awareness. We need to get good at listening to ourself so we can listen well to others.
• Pretend listening – your mind is elsewhere being caught up in your thoughts and feelings and your eyes are wandering and glazed. Your attention is no longer on the person speaking.
• Factual – listening for information and the facts which will help to discern a course of action, make a decision, and clarifying our understanding of what we have heard.
• Empathetic – listening to the non-verbal cues, emotions, and feelings of another and acknowledging what you have heard and seen so that the other feels seen, heard, and understood.
• Generative – listening to free and ignite the mind rather than direct it for another to be their best self. Holding a safe space free from interruption and judgement that says ‘you matter’.

In one conversation, we may be in any one or all of these levels of listening. As we deepen our listening skills and experience, we are able to adjust to the situation and person to whom we are listening, therefore deepening our connection, enhancing our communication, and releasing the human potential in front of us.

When we speak, we say what we already know, but when we listen, we may learn something new.

– Dalai Lama

We evolve when we LISTEN generatively to ourselves and others, fostering the finest independent thinking honouring our own and others’ dignity.

What variety of experiences do you create?The pandemic created new experiences and opportunities for many. I wonder what you experienced in your coaching and leadership practices and how they expanded in ways you had not imagined before the pandemic. Perhaps you began working with clients outside of your region or specific area. For example, many coaches gave up their time and shared their skills with the NHS, for the first time, during the pandemic. New programmes were commissioned in serving those who took care of those with Covid.

Technology enabled us to connect globally. We witnessed a level of acceptance for a new way of being and working with each other. My hunch is that you used your coaching and leadership skills and experience beyond your everyday practice in your community, at the school gates, and with your own family.

Supporting our clients to evolve in their thinking is to invite them to consider a variety of experiences in their work and life. We evolve when we create a VARIETY of experiences, new experiments, possibilities, and opportunities.

It takes courage to create and step into these new experiences, just as it does to go to the unexplored edge of our thinking. The last ingredient in our recipe.

What takes us to the unexplored Edge of our Thinking?Being a Thinking Environment coach, facilitator and teacher is a privileged role to uphold because the nature of this work reveals having a deep impact on the lives of others. The decision to be a Thinking Environment for others is a way of being. It is to embody The Ten Components of a Thinking Environment and it is in this embodiment that we are able to take our clients to the unexplored edge of their thinking.

When we give our attention free from interruption and judgement, holding a deep respect for others in their thinking and where they go next, they think well as and for themselves, often uninhibited. When we create an equality between us, they think better due to the absence of hierarchy. When we ourselves are at ease in our listening free from rush and urgency, they think with greater clarity. When we appreciate the goodness, and the character qualities we witness in them, they think with even more imagination. When we encourage them to think and feel more, freeing them from the internal competition in their own mind, they are filled with the courage to go further than they imagined in their thinking.

When we welcome the release of feelings honouring their humanity, they will think and feel more deeply than if we simply stepped over their feelings and closed the space down. When we prioritise their lived experience and celebrate their difference rather than wanting them to think and be just like us, they will know and feel that they matter for who they are not just what they do. When we, as the listener, absorb all the facts and provide information when asked in service of the thinker, they will continue to think well for themselves.

When we ask incisive questions to remove untrue limiting assumptions and replace them with those that are liberating and true, breakthrough ideas emerge, new ways of behaviour are revealed and the dignity of the human mind and soul is revealed right in front of our eyes, the listener’s eyes. When we create a place that says ‘you matter’ both in the physical environment that is free from distraction and also our own – the listener’s body and face – they will think with greater ease and confidence. Being a Thinking Environment coach, facilitator and teacher is a privileged role to uphold.

The most valuable thing we can offer each other is the framework in which to think for ourselves.

– Nancy Kline

Generating a space for another to think as and for themselves is still radical. It is radical not because it is difficult but because it is rare. Today, there continues to be much societal and organisational pressure to think and feel that we need to think and be like others in order to fit in, feel like we belong, or conform to be accepted. Whereas in reality, it is the very nature of our capacity to think independently well for ourselves that our teams, organisations and communities benefit from. It is our unique perspective that when given the chance to contribute our own thoughts and ideas brings creativity and difference in resolving a situation, a challenge, a problem or taking forward an opportunity for the good of all.

I acknowledge the courage every one of my clients demonstrates in our coaching conversations. Because it takes courage to go to the unexplored edge of our thinking and it is at this edge that we grow and develop. And it’s worth it.

We support our clients and team members to go the unexplored EDGE of their thinking by choosing to embody the ten components of a Thinking Environment. We evolve when we engage in our finest independent thinking for the good of all.

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

– Maya Angelou

I celebrate you in your own journey of evolving in who you have become and who you go on to become.

Thank you for listening!

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Have you ever wondered how people perceive the term “woke”? Guy Kawasaki conducted a LinkedIn poll asking just that. He wanted to know whether people view the term as positive or negative [negative won in his poll]. Kawasaki shared a national survey that showed most Americans view “woke” positively, which is encouraging.

After reflecting on Kawasaki’s poll and considering the current climate of weaponizing language, I found myself pausing to contemplate the implications of these issues. The word is heavily debated, particularly in the political sphere. Even the article Kawasaki referenced in his poll mentions multiple polls that suggest a divide over the term. I wanted to delve deeper into the meaning of “woke” and the weaponization of words in general.

NOTE: I’m not interested in starting a political discussion. Blue, red, left, right, them, us, they … we all have opinions. This article is simply about the impact of the weaponization of words.

I believe, I hope, we can still engage in productive conversations about complex issues without resorting to name-calling, or disrespectful and hostile language.

This returns us to my opening question, have you ever wondered how people perceive the term “woke”?

It’s essential that we recognize the impact of language and the weaponization of words.Using language to belittle or dismiss others creates a sense of isolation and exclusion, leading to a breakdown in constructive dialogue. In contrast, by using language that promotes empathy, understanding, and mutual respect, we can create a culture of communication that encourages progress toward social justice and greater unity.

When we use the term “woke,” it typically refers to being Informed, Educated, and Aware of social inequities. Unfortunately, the word has been weaponized to mock or belittle those committed to social justice or dismiss their concerns as unimportant or misguided. Unfortunately, this kind of word weaponization is not unique and is more prevalent and divisive than ever.

Using language as a weapon does not serve any constructive purpose. Instead, it contributes to the toxic culture of division and polarization that plagues our society. Recognizing that word weaponization has a lasting impact on future generations is critical. Children are particularly vulnerable to the harmful effects of divisive language and rhetoric.

In a study published in the Journal of Social Issues in 2017, researchers found that exposure to divisive language can significantly impact children’s psychological well-being. The study involved a group of 8-12-year-old children who were asked to listen to a short audio clip containing either neutral or divisive language. The children exposed to divisive language showed higher anxiety levels and a decreased sense of social belonging compared to those who heard neutral language. The study highlights the importance of monitoring the language used around children and its potential impact on their mental health.

There are plenty of studies that support this theory; here are four more:

1. “The Power of Words: How Words Impact Children’s Development” by Dr. Erika Burrows and Dr. Rachel Barr (2019) – Examined the impact of language on children’s social and emotional development, including the effects of word weaponization.
2. “The Weaponization of Language: How Verbal Aggression Affects Children’s Well-Being” by Dr. Angela M. Fournier and Dr. Barbara L. Fredrickson (2020) – Examined the impact of verbal aggression on children’s psychological well-being.
3. “Media Exposure and Children’s Language Development: The Role of Word Weaponization” by Dr. Marie-Pierre Gosselin and Dr. Sandra Mathison (2017) – This study examined the impact of media exposure on children’s language development, focusing on the use of word weaponization in media content. The researchers found that exposure to word weaponization in media content can negatively affect children’s language skills and social-emotional development.
4. “Family Dynamics and Children’s Language Development: The Impact of Word Weaponization” by Dr. Rachel Knight and Dr. Beth Kurtz-Costes (2018) – This study found that exposure to word weaponization in family interactions can adversely affect children’s language skills and emotional well-being.

These studies highlight the need for us to be aware of the potential harm that word weaponization causes children and to promote positive language use and healthy communication in various settings.

As a just society, we are responsible for creating a positive and constructive communication culture for our children and future generations. We must be mindful of our language and its impact on others, especially our youth. It means engaging in respectful and productive conversations, even when we disagree. And it means modeling behavior that promotes empathy, understanding, and mutual respect.

For example, by simply twisting the meaning of “woke,” those seeking to undermine progress toward social justice attempt to sow confusion and create a false narrative. Shouldn’t we work towards a more informed and unbiased public discourse using language accurately and responsibly? If for no other reason than for our children’s well-being.

The weaponization of language is a pervasive problem in our society. It leads to division, misunderstanding, and a lack of progress toward social justice. However, we can all play a role in creating a more positive and constructive communication culture. We can work toward a more informed and unbiased public discourse by being mindful of our language and its impact on others. We can commit to using language to promote understanding rather than division. Doing so can create a more positive and constructive communication culture for everyone. Our children and future generations depend on it.

So, what can you do to help? It starts with committing to using language to promote understanding and mutual respect, even when we disagree.

Second, listening to others and actively trying to understand their perspectives.

Third, it means engaging in productive conversations that help build bridges rather than walls.

Let’s do our part daily to promote empathy, understanding, and mutual respect. Doing so can create a more just and inclusive society for ourselves and future generations.

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Ana Arellanos was born in Mexico and came to Texas, undocumented, when she was five. She grew up in Gail, a small town in West Texas. Now, at age 34, she is a U.S. citizen and an immigration attorney. She knows the system from both sides. She wishes the whole country could be more like the tiny town that prepared her for U.S. success.

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Bob and I arrived in Wisconsin without a hitch, the drive was uneventful, and I found myself deep in thought; we had found a Trailor in the woods to rent close to the town outside of Watertown, Wisconsin the Trailor had a backyard patio for suntanning. I did a lot of sunbathing.

SEE ALL PRIOR PARTS HERE↴

Shattered Innocence (Part 12): Bad Choices

Bob started working for a roofing company contracting roofs, I started looking for work finding a job in town at a little café waitressing, customers were friendly, and I earned generous tips; Bob; was paying child support by the time he paid out his insurance and taxes; Bob; was in a hole; I set out to look for another job he went back to work for a guy he knew in town doing roofs and other odd jobs.

I landed a job at the famous Gobbler Super Club in Johnson Creek; the main course was turkey, and their bar was round and had a rotating bar with purple shag carpet walls and a suspended dance floor; called the Gobbler Theater now; I worked the supper hour and had to wear a black skirt, a white shirt, and a black bow tie, it was a lot of work carrying that food, but the tips were great! I would work at the café at noon and the supper club at night; one day, my boss at the café had no one to work and begged me to fill the shift. I called the gobbler and told them I; was needed at the café, but they replied, we need you also. The café won out, as I had grown to like the owners and patrons were my family away from home.

Meanwhile, Bobs; boss had been flirting with me and making it clear; he was interested. I just shrugged him off; until one day, he showed up at my house when Bob was at work. I sent him packing and never let him in the Trailor; things were going well between Bob and me; neither of us was drinking. Bob was so tired when he finished work; he just came home, ate, and went to bed! I was working so much I was dropping weight; I did not realize that my main course was donuts from the café; that was about the only thing I had been eating! I would spend an hour or two outside sunbathing every day.

Then one day, everything came crashing down on me like a ton of bricks; I was driving the car to meet Bob; I was lost driving, having no idea where I was; it was a road I had taken many times before, back then, there were no cell phones yet. I; do not know how I; made it back home, but I was disoriented and sat down and cried. Bawling more than I had in a long time, and I had this sense of fear and anxiety crawl over me that was all foreign to me, like a deserted island. I was on a trip now to nowhere in my mind. I thought I had done something wrong; Bob came home to me in a mess. I cried and told him I was sorry; Bob did not know what I was talking about, so he said sorry, never knowing what this terrible dark feeling of doom and incredible sadness was if someone I loved had passed away; I asked him; did someone die? He assured me no one had, but I did not believe him, I was in a strange state of mind, and nothing was making sense, knowing this dark place I had gone to was full of sorrow.

Bob called my parents, and my mom and little sister met him halfway to pick me up; Bob did not know what to do, he called my mother. I remember her asking him, what did you do to her? Bob told her nothing, he had not laid a hand on me, and he had not. All the while back to Waterloo, Iowa, I was in the back seat of my mom’s car and kept crying, asking what I had done wrong; did someone die? I could not control the fear that had taken over my body like a terrible rash; we had arrived at my parents; farmhouse, where I found myself still crying; and rolling around on the carpeted floor like a baby and asking what I did wrong. I did not believe them when they said nothing because, in my mind, something was wrong, something terrible had happened, and I was to blame; they were lying to me. Why were they lying to me? My mother called two; of my friends to come over and try to reach me, but it was a lost cause because I just kept hugging myself and was so full of fear and anxiety. I knew what I was doing; I’ did not know why, and I trusted no one; I started to doubt that my parents were my parents; they were some aliens disguising themselves as my parents. That is how far my mind had drifted from me. They all had decided I needed help. I should go to the psych ward. I did not want to go, but I had calmed down enough for breakfast with them.

At the restaurant, I thought my milk tasted like pine sole and; someone was trying to kill me, meanwhile; my thoughts went back to thinking they were not my parents, so I went into the bathroom and wrote on a piece of toilet tissue, call my parents and wrote the number on the tissue paper, before that, I had tried to use the phone, but my mom made me hang up. I told her I just wanted to call home to make sure they were not there, then I would know it was them, but I was not making any sense to them. They told me if you do not sign in yourself, we are going to have you committed I finally agreed we went to Allen Hospital, after breakfast I was to go into like a day area well; I stood by the door with sudden fear and shoved my foot in the door, so, they could not close it however in the end, they won I was behind locked doors.

There was a lady in there talking to someone else who wanted out; I asked her are you a lawyer? She said yes, so I told her they were holding me against my will. I signed myself in, and I’ should be able to leave, right? Well, she agreed, but guess what; after that, the staff came in, and gave her a set of clothes, and told her to shower. Oh, wow; now I am talking to someone who is not an attorney; she just thought she was. That was the beginning of my long road to recovery and finding some answers; I was in shock! Being in the hospital gave me some sense of reality back. The psychiatrist put me on medication, and they had crafts and groups going on that I was to join in, however; I stayed in my room, off to myself, refusing to eat their food as if someone was trying to kill me when I met my doctor, he seemed nice enough, but I; did not trust anyone everyone was plotting to get me, and I; did not know why, but I must have done something wrong.

To be continued …

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It is difficult to imagine the immensity of the ocean—so vast, so deep, and extending far beyond the limits of our vision. The ocean represents a metaphor to help us understand that which is beyond creation, beyond the limits of time and space, beyond the limitations of language and concepts. How do you explain something that is outside the limits of explanation?

The ocean, so immense and unfathomable hints at the isness, the suchness, the fountainhead, the Godhead from which creation came forth as incarnation of the word. Though finite, the ocean hints at the infinite.

A cup is simple by comparison–a relatively small device to store or transfer some quantity. Such quantity is easy to measure, limited only by the size of the cup.

In trying to understand the truth of oneness and the illusion of duality, we are sometimes encouraged to consider ourselves as a wave in the ocean. While the wave may be misperceived as somehow separate from the ocean, it is not. It is every bit a part of the ocean and only seemingly apart from or separate from the ocean. The wave in the ocean helps us to comprehend this perceived duality. Yet, the wave itself seems so much a part of the ocean that separation is not readily apparent.

So, let us then consider the cup. If we dipped our cup into the sea and removed one cupful from the infinite expanse of ocean, and we carried this cup away to land, the separation would be most evident. But is the contents of the cup any less ocean than before we removed it? Has the contents of the cup stopped being ocean as a result of being contained? It is every bit, every drop still and fully ocean. While that one cupful of ocean is seemingly diminished by the process of removal and separation, this too is an illusion. You cannot take away or somehow diminish the essence of what ocean is by simply removing it to a different place. Content is held and occurs within context. Content is limited. Context is unlimited. The cup contents are limited by the size of the cup, but the essence of what the cup holds is infinite. In much the same way, our bodies and minds are but vessels to hold our infinite souls.

Each day, many cupfuls of ocean evaporate into the atmosphere only to return again as rainfall in a vast cycle of re-creation. And so, when our time here in this world of creation is ended, our ocean essence evaporates, only to return to the sea of infinity.

There is no duality, there is only oneness.

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We expect more from technology and less from each other. We create technology to provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people.

A walk down memory lane is a journey back in time, to a place where we can remember the good times, the bad times, and everything in between. It can be a time of nostalgia, laughter, and tears. It can be a time to reflect on our lives and appreciate all that we have. Which is why we are so grateful for the “gift” of genuine community experienced just a month ago during our Encounter 360° gathering in Tampa Bay, where we listened, we learned, we laughed and we shared tears of joy. More about it all here: NOURISHING HEARTS: A SYMPHONY OF TREASURED MOMENTS

Savoring Our Moments TogetherWe understand, appreciate and fully embrace the spirit of “Ichigo-Ichie”, the Japanese idiom that served as the foundation for the two-day experience, as we treasured every moment, recognizing that every moment, every gathering, and every encounter only happens once, and it will never be repeated in the same way again. If you haven’t already done so, perhaps it’s time to take a stroll through our 100+ photos, capturing so many special moments in time: ENCOUNTER 360° GALLERY And thanks to Richard Meyer, we’ve got a NEW SECOND GALLERY HERE.

Basic human contact – the meeting of eyes, the exchanging of words – is to the psyche what oxygen is to the brain. If you’re feeling abandoned by the world, interact with anyone you can.

~ Martha Beck

Rediscovering the “Magic” of Handshakes and HugsAs social creatures, humans need interpersonal contact to survive. These connections range from your inner circle of family and close friends to the outer rungs of your social network — and it’s important to have this variety. And what better way to initiate that social contact than with a hug or handshake? Handshakes and hugs are two simple gestures that can have a big impact on our health and well-being, making us feel more connected to others, reducing stress, and boosting our immune systems. Handshakes are a common greeting in many cultures around the world. They are a way of showing respect, trust, and goodwill. Studies have shown that people who shake hands more often are more likely to report feeling happy and satisfied with their lives. Handshakes can also help to reduce stress. When we shake someone’s hand, we release oxytocin, a calming and bonding hormone.

Hugs are another way of showing affection and support. They can be even more powerful than handshakes when it comes to reducing stress and boosting our immune systems. When we hug someone, we release oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin, all of which have mood-boosting effects. Hugs can also lower blood pressure and heart rate. In addition to their physical benefits, hugs can also positively impact our mental health. They can help us to feel more connected to others, reduce loneliness and isolation, and increase feelings of self-worth.

So next time you see someone you know, don’t be afraid to reach out and shake their hand or give them a hug. These simple gestures can have a big impact on your health and well-being.

What’s Next?We’ve got plenty of “good stuff” filling up our proverbial whiteboard, so watch this space as we re-imagine even more ways to rediscover humanity at its best! And please know that we appreciate and thank all of you who have graciously joined our journey “for good”.

A Peek Under the Hood?As an aside, we’ve been approached by more and more people since the above gathering who want to learn more about what’s under our 360° Nation umbrella, inspiring us to create a one-time Online Event where the doors will be wide open to share more.

Join us here: 360° NATION INSIDE OUT**

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Cause I know that
Fate could never force your hand.
Not in the future, not in the past
In every breath I can feel your resolve
Let yourself fall,
Run where the light calls.
Destiny can’t hold you down.
So, don’t look back over your shoulder now.
If there is nothing left inside the walls
Let yourself fall,
Run where the light calls.

…. Luca Fogale

How many times have we felt that calling; that knowing but stayed where we were because it was safe? I know for me, more times than I care to remember.

I recently heard this song by Luca Fogale and it has stayed with me in a haunting yet beautiful way. It has landed on my heart, like a soft feather feeling the sweet affirmation to my life choices, and permission to keep moving forward in a way that is always walking toward the light.

As we grow into ourselves it is only with retrospect that we see how serendipity and or synchronicity shaped the trajectory of our path. Some choices were easier than others – energetically trusting that next step, a move, relationship or career change.

Other choices were harder – acknowledging our own boundaries or just doing what we know needed to be done. Perhaps it was protecting our peace, defending our family, or securing our future? It begs the question still: were we running FROM something or TO something different?

And then there were times as we were tripping over ourselves consciously choosing NOT to choose, which is a powerful choice. This is the safe space. It is not apathy, it is comfortable. And sometimes we need the familiarity to ground our thinking and know that we are protected. I can think of so many scenarios where this was my chosen path. No regrets.

Then as Paulo Coehlo shared so eloquently:

“One always has to know when a stage comes to an end. If we insist on staying longer than the necessary time, we lose the happiness and the meaning of the other stages we have to go through” ….

For me, this is running where the light calls.

This takes an immense amount of courage, trust, determination, and grace. It is a feeling under your skin, and in the deepest core of your being. It is an invisible pull you may not fully understand but trust the shades of grey and the clarity when it arrives.

The most challenging part of this process can be the perception of others, the idea you are resisting the ‘normal way’ or at least not following the story that others may have written or at least expected.

Unconventional, untraditional, out-of-the-box, rebel, or maybe just a little weird could be one viewpoint.

Adventurous, daring, brave, bold, or fearless could be another viewpoint.

And then the time will come, where these descriptors just don’t matter anymore.

Seasons change, we change, we move with our personal currents of truth, or we don’t.

I read once, if we do not change, we do not grow, and if we do not grow, we die.

I remain committed to growing and am dedicated to running where the light calls.

Almost 28 months ago, my husband and I moved from Houston Texas to Portugal. It was a thoughtful, energizing, and scary process. We knew there was something calling us to an expanded view of the world, to our relationship and family. It felt CRAZY and out of the normal path, but we could feel that invisible pull – we listened, and we moved. No regrets.

This is not for everyone – these are all very personal choices and should be held as such. There just comes a time, once you have the awareness and the feeling of resolve, it is giving yourself permission to fall, to fail, to soar.

In the past 2 years my life has expanded in ways that I never knew was possible:

Traveled to 7 countries.
Did stand up paddle board and stand-up paddleboard yoga in the Atlantic Ocean.
Took a cooking class in Paris.
Dove into the Ionian see off a boat.
Mastered a headstand.
Currently helping a 90-year-old friend recount her life history on paper.
Reconnected with my sister who I have not seen or known for 50 years….

This is not off a bucket list… It is my version of letting myself fall.

Running where the light calls.

Is there a light calling you?

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I’m a big fan of TV drama and have been for a long time. Good dramas have long since replaced movies from where I sit because most movies are aimed at getting 18-35-year-old butts in seats and from my perspective, mostly suck.

Good TV dramas on the other hand allow for much bigger storylines and character arcs. You get to care for the characters, you get to root for them and appreciate them because there’s enough time for them to reveal their whole selves to you. And writing is usually good enough to bring real humanity to the whole effort.

Engagement 101In social media, everybody talks about engagement. These people should watch a little more good TV to really see how that is done. You don’t engage people just by telling them stuff, even if it’s stuff that they haven’t heard before. You engage them by working your true self into everything you do and everything you say. By telling the truth as you see it. By showing people your flaws and your good points and letting one help build the other so that eventually the people you are trying to reach can have a clear picture of you.

People Buy People. Then They Buy Stuff. And Good Stories Sell Both.I learned this very early on in the advertising business. Because I have news for all you hot shit digital marketers out there who preach that storytelling is the key to success in digital media. That’s been true since the beginning of advertising as we know it. It’s how guys like David Ogilvy, J Walter Thompson, Leo Burnett, and Raymond Rubicam became the emperors of the communications business.

I studied these people. They were my mentors. And the truth-telling they espoused is still how all good, effective marketing communication is done today. The only difference is the media that carry the message. If you’re not telling a story and not telling it honestly, you’re not going anywhere.

So What Does This Have To Do With The Newsroom?The Newsroom, which ran for three seasons on HBO, is the story of the people who work in a fairly large cable TV network newsroom. The storyline has to do with a number of things, mostly exploring the theme which is established beautifully by the lead character, played by Jeff Daniels, in response to a naive question posed to him at a panel evening at Northwestern University. The question was, “What makes America the greatest country in the world?” The answer, so eloquently put by series creator Aaron Sorkin, and gotten across with astonishing power by Daniels, is that it’s not. (but with the caveat that it could be again)

From there the series goes on to explore many of the reasons why that idea is the truth. The core reason, from the main character’s point of view, is that America has simply gotten away from communicating information in an intelligent way, which has led to all kinds of bad things, politically and socially, which, in turn, have degraded America’s greatness from within.

The quest for all the characters in this series is to get back to doing the news honestly. But it’s really a metaphor as well, because what Sorkin wants is a more honest and open dialogue between the people and the powers that be, which means somehow getting the powerful people in America to start telling the truth again. To stop bullshitting the public. And stop religiously following party lines.

If you only follow the central theme of this series, you will see whatever we communicate should tell our story honestly, convincingly, and in an engaging fashion. This, in turn, will make our communications more honest, our connections to each other better formed and deeper and our engagement most positive.

The Newsroom was way more than a first-class piece of TV entertainment. The writer, whom I consider to be one of the great geniuses of his generation, is going deep because he sees how shallow the world has become since the advent of the Internet. How quantity has overtaken quality. How relationships have trouble forming within all this chaos. And how little people actually listen to each other, as opposed to just being polite and waiting to speak.

This Has A Lot To Do With You and MeThe Internet has definitely changed the ways in which we communicate. But it should not change the ‘how’ of it. We should always communicate honestly. We should always leave a solid impression of ourselves and our beliefs in the posts we write. We should always be inviting deep engagement.

We are, all of us, learning to communicate in a different ways. But the best way to do that is by figuring out how to use the new tools to do an old job. Because communication is the constant, no matter what media you’re using.

PS: This series, The Newsroom is available on CraveTV, AppleTV, and YouTube.

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Folk healers are people from all levels of society who live and work in intimate relationships with their environment. Their healing practices range from home remedies related to nutrition and treatment for minor illnesses to those with an intimate knowledge of medicinal plants. These healing practices have had their folklore preserved and passed down throughout the generations. Such healing practices are considered sacred and associated with certain kinds of rituals that help safeguard them.

It is interesting to note that in folk traditions, there is considerable overlap between healing plants and sacred plants, all honored with great respect and devotion through the act of ritual.

In the last few decades, there has been a growing interest in alternative forms of therapy on a global scale. The sacred Sanskrit-based Ayurvedic practice is such a therapy and for centuries was practiced by certain segments of society. Even today, Ayurveda is held in high esteem among the more ‘scholarly’ practices of modern biomedicine. The basic concepts of Ayurveda have been modified over the years with many spas and hotels offering more simplified versions of treatments, stimulating a sort of ‘tourism’ for well-being.

Personally, I find one of the more fascinating concepts of the Ayurvedic system is its five-element approach to nutrition. In Ayurveda, it is believed that all matter and energy consist of the five elements…Air, Water, Fire, Earth, and Ether. It is said that our personality traits carry a distinct vibration that corresponds to the food energy that is unique to our system. When we consider this, there is much truth to the saying, “we are what we eat.”

When we are young, our metabolisms are strong, so the body can better tolerate our not-so-healthy food choices. I know those powdery donuts are yummy, (sorry to call you out Dana!) But as we age, all that sugary junk food builds up a residue on our cells and creates what we call ‘oxidation.’ Think of it as the rust build-up on your car as it ages. If you do not regularly maintenance your car, you will eventually need a new one. Unfortunately, we do not have the ‘trade-in’ option on our bodies.

The body, being the physical manifestation of energetic intelligence, requires food that is in alignment with its vibration. When we feed our body the proper nutrition, healthy cellular activity happens spontaneously, allowing it to do the job it innately knows how to do…heal itself.

Our cells communicate with each other in a language all their own. When we “feel good” after consuming certain foods, it is a signal from our bodies that there is integration among the “whole”, working toward a state of balanced health.

Energetically speaking, all foods carry a particular vibration, and it is best to feed your body with the foods that best match your energetic signal. The quality of the food products you choose is equally important as poor quality equals poor digestion.

Let’s break this all down into the Ayurvedic system’s five-element approach to nutrition:

AIR- (breath and circulation) Corresponds with anxious, overly active personalities. Recommended foods include citrus fruits, nuts, fermented foods, yogurt, and acidophilus to balance intestinal tract health.

WATER- (soft tissue: skin, muscle, ligaments, etc.) This element represents the highly emotional personality. Helpful foods include water-based foods such as celery, cucumber, green leafy, squashes, and sea foods.

FIRE- (heat of digestive system) Persons of great mental energies represented here… Seeds, grains, and legumes (all rich in proteins), replenish these energies.

EARTH- (solid, bone material) Persons who engage in hard physical labor require foods of this category to replenish their systems…Root vegetables such as potatoes, carrots, beets, and onions.

ETHER- (represented in all the joints) The Ether element responds to the way in which food is prepared. Vital nutrients can be removed during preparation, so steaming as opposed to boiling is preferred for vegetables.

Now, if you are like me and love to explore more natural ways of boosting your body’s immune system and resistance to dis-ease, try this yummy little concoction I have created to sip with my tea!

Add 1 orange peel, 2 or 3 slices of fresh ginger, and the peel of 1 red onion (the crepey part we throw away) to a large saucepan filled with water. Cover and slowly bring to a boil over medium heat, allowing it to simmer for at least ten minutes. Then pour the hot fluid into your favorite mug with whatever tea you like and enjoy sipping on it all day!

The pith of the orange peel is your best source of vitamin C, the ginger will stimulate your digestion, (Oh boy, does it ever!) and the peel of the red onion is loaded with polyphenols, a natural antioxidant to help rid your cells of all that nasty oxidative stress.

It is that build-up of oxidative stress on our cells that contributes to disease. In fact, there is compelling data that Dementia and Alzheimer’s are deeply influenced by the lifestyle choices we make every day, such as, what we eat, how often we exercise, the quality of our sleep, and how we respond to stress.

Remember, this is just a general guide. Everyone will fall into several categories in the Ayurvedic approach to nutrition as each of our digestive processes is unique. So just be mindful of the way your body “feels” after consuming certain foods and you will enhance your quest for balanced health.

Happy munching!

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30% of grandparents are classified as being “remote”, according to an often-quoted study by Cherin & Furstenberg. The remote definition of these almost 1 out of every 3 grandparents is they rarely see their grandchildren and most contact is made on birthdays and holidays.

This same study says 55% of grandparents are defined as “companionate” where they will do things with their grandchildren but have little authority or control over them. The last 15% of grandparents are defined as “involved” where they take an active role in their grandchild’s life.

We may want to rush to judgement and say “what is wrong with our baby boomer generation” that they are not involved in wanting to raise this next greatest generation. But many of these broken relationships may not be caused entirely by the grandparents.

While grandparents are crucial in a grandchild’s development, grandparents can also cause a strained relationship with the kid’s parents. They can facilitate dividing spouses and can cause generational anxiety.

Issues such as giving unsolicited advice by telling the parents what to do; and disrespecting boundaries by dropping in unannounced are just some examples of how grandparents can cause family strife without realizing it.

Now, just like when we were raising our own kids, a bit of head-butting happens when you simply don’t see eye to eye in the best ways to raise and care for children. But too many times grandparents go way far over that line, which does give our children the right to distance the grandchildren from the grandparents. Examples that push grandparents away include:

1. Undermining the parents’ authority by challenging what a parent is teaching their children. Grandparents question the parents’ values and family structure.
2. Tendency to play favorites and manipulate siblings.
3. Transactional control of the kids through money, gifts, and vacations.
4. An overall lack of empathy, known as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another, which is so crucial in very young children.
5. Grandparents who demand that a grandchild comply and respect them.

We cannot lose sight that grandparents help teach kids values, help strengthen their moral compass, and help advance their language skills. We also know that the more social support grandparents can give to parents, the more bandwidth this gives the parent to just be a good parent. Kids assume that whatever environment they grow up in is normal. So, if they see positive and respectful interaction between their parents and grandparents these are the values they learn. If they see their parents push away their grandparents, this is what they will think is normal.

We must now ask ourselves, what kind of grandparent are we really, or what kind of grandparent do we want to become? How will our grandchildren remember us?

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It amazes me that we humans reject certain things and only accept them after paying a heavy price. When we have to accept what we rejected before is a big question why not then have not then accepted from the beginning?

Change goes in four main stages. These are rejection, resistance, acceptance, and demanding what we initially rejected.

Change happens but at a heavy cost. Like two warring countries rejecting a compromising solution and going to war both suffering heavy losses. Only then, do they accept what they initially rejected?

The question that we need all answer is can we accept change from outside even if we do not accept ourselves and suffer from self-rejection?

Self-rejection happens when we accept what others think of us and we sink into the belief that we are worthless. When we face self-rejection, we fall into despair. We lose hope and may reach a stage of depression.

It is a reverse cycle of normal change. It is accepting the low evaluation of others in us to reject ourselves.

The antagonist becomes us more than the antagonist from outside who demean us. Can be there any hope to make a meaningful change before defeating the antagonist inside us?

My answer is no. We can only walk our way in life if we first accept ourselves. By doing so, we gain self-esteem. We gain self-confidence. We become more aware of our authenticity. We become self-supporters.

When we accept pain, we can change. We save our energy and resources to move forward rather than draining them and becoming even less self-accepting.

Change has a story that tells us unless we accept ourselves we cannot deal with changes from outside. We fail to adapt and lose our agility. We reject ourselves like people who reject the wrinkles of time. They spend their effort on fighting time. Eventually, they realize that the only way forward is to accept themselves with their wrinkles.

Accepting what we rejected before can be very costly. Let us accept who we are.

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This animated video offers hope for creating together a world that honors our collective needs by building on what unifies us. Making personal change that scales up to social change requires meeting our most important needs and recognizing that people are different. These differences can add color and richness to life and they can also be polarizing. Knowing another person’s needs is a starting point for understanding and co-creating a world that meets our collective needs.

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Work that’s dictated by a fixed schedule, place, and job description doesn’t make sense anymore, says leadership expert Debbie Lovich. In light of the cultural shift towards remote work sparked by the pandemic, Lovich gives three essential tips to leaders so employees can keep their autonomy (while remaining productive), companies can let go of rigid bureaucracy and we can all reshape work to better fit our lives.

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The impact of long Covid on women has been particularly significant, as evidenced by a growing body of research, but no one or organization understands how many women are suffering. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, November 2023, estimated that between 7.7 million to 23 million Americans were suffering from Long COVID. While the global estimates of people suffering from Long COVID can’t be measured.

It is clear that further research is needed to understand the underlying mechanisms behind these differences and to develop tailored treatments for female long Covid sufferers. Scientists are only beginning to unravel the complex web of gender-specific factors that influence how the virus presents itself and how it progresses in female patients. This includes investigating differences in immune responses, maternal-fetal interactions, levels of hormones such as estrogen, and environmental factors.

What Women Should Be Reviewing?Politics

In the United States Congress is beginning to look at ways of providing relief for people who have been affected by long Covid, but progress is slow to develop. The situation in other countries is no more helpful to women.

“We don’t know enough about how things develop, and we need to be better at that”

~Public Health Minister Jakob Forssmed, Sweden, 2022.

Symptoms

Women with long covid often have difficulty finding the right type of care and support they need to manage their symptoms. Unfortunately, too many doctors are not well informed on long covid or are dismissive of its severity, leading to frustration and feelings of helplessness for women dealing with this condition. To help get past this obstacle, it is important to be armed with knowledge about long covid and to have a good support system. It can also help to be assertive and firm when talking to doctors or healthcare providers so that they take your condition seriously and provide appropriate treatment. Women should seek out knowledgeable and understanding medical professionals who are aware of the latest research on long covid, and willing to work with them to find the best possible treatment for their symptoms. Additionally, it is important to have a support system of family and friends who can provide emotional support during this difficult time.

With the right knowledge and resources, women can find ways to manage their long covid symptoms and get on track toward better health.

Research

Research to review if you think you’re suffering from Long COVID.

• American Disability Act (ADA), American women need to remember, Long COVID is now covered by and work with their doctors and employers for the best solutions of working with Long COVID.
• Women more likely to have long COVID, and different symptom profiles. CIDRAP News June 21, 2022.
• Women “Significantly” More Likely to Develop Long COVID, Review Finds. AJMC, Jun 22, 2022.
• 63% of Long COVID Patients Are Women. WebMD, Oct. 2023.
• Most Common Long COVID Physical Symptoms in Working Age Adults Who Experienced Mild COVID-19 Infection: A Scoping Review. Dec. 2022.

Resources

If you’re looking for support groups or to gain information from, try the following.

• Covid-19 Longhauler Advocacy Project.
• Pandemic Patients.
• Long-COVID Alliance.
• Pitra Moeis, Bandung, Indonesia, longcovidlife, TikTok.

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When I asked, “What was the most difficult raising your sons?” It doesn’t take long to answer, “Trying to protect their hearts.”

It became very clear early on that both of my sons were going to be athletic. Though they were seven years apart they played the same sports, soccer, baseball, and football, and raced motorcycles. My oldest was seven when he got his first bike and began racing. My youngest started at four.

With extreme, high-adrenaline sports such as motocross or supercross, one expects it will not only be expensive but take immense dedication and focus to compete at high levels. Oh, and then there are all of the broken bones.

In order to stay at the top of their game, my sons were required to maintain their grades and attendance in addition to their nutrition and physical.

Physical injury is 100% guaranteed when racing competitively. It is not a matter of if, but when. And it happens over and over again. Along with physical injuries, comes broken hearts. No one likes defeat. My sons goals were clear since they smelled their first whiff of 105-octane race gas. They wanted state and national titles.

It didn’t take long before my sons realized that with the wins come losses, and with the losses, comes intense desires to win. And it was on repeat. Their internal drive is hard to explain. Some people are just hard-wired to compete. And they pushed their bodies and minds to the limit.

By the time my sons were in their 20s, I think we had all shed enough blood, sweat, and tears to fill the Atlantic Ocean. They were some of the most joyous years of our lives. We spent every minute together for years, practicing, racing, traveling, exercising, and more.

I could face any of their physical injuries. Darting onto the track after one of them crashed jumping an 80-foot triple, came naturally to me. Loading them into an ambulance, adjusting their external fixators, and hanging out in the surgery waiting rooms with shoulder, collarbone, back, leg, or ankle surgeries, came naturally to me. Operating at fight or flight is my drug.

What I couldn’t handle was their broken hearts. A broken heart from losing a race, being bullied, having jealous friends, or when a relationship failed… killed me.

One of my children wears his emotions on his sleeve. The other one keeps them locked up like Ft. Knox. I can be a badass, handle anything thrown at me, and climb mountains, but if you break one of my baby’s hearts, I will either come out swinging or I might drop to my knees in a writhing mess.

My youngest son was bullied in elementary school. His interest in style and white-frosted hair made him an easy target. He kept it together at school but would race home in tears with a combination of hurt, anger, and wonderment as to why people could be so mean.

I started saying something to my sons very early, “When your name is in somebody else’s mouth, good or bad, that means you have made it.” At first, that didn’t make any sense to them. If somebody is talking about you, whether it’s to your face or behind your back, whether it is positive or negative, you have become a big enough deal that you are either a threat or they actually admire you. Likely it also has nothing to do with you. They are facing their own triggers and learning to cope with their own feelings. It truly is just an internal reflection of their trials.

A second mantra I told my sons and still remind myself, “What says about you is not your business.” That one took a long time to explain.

As adults, we still face bullying, especially in the workplace Social media has also created an opportunity to hide behind a keyboard and make others feel less than. There are snide remarks made at the boardroom table, there is trash-talking on social media or in friend groups, and my advice is changed a little bit along the way.

I still struggle when my sons have their hearts broken, and I don’t think that will ever end.

When my youngest son was 21, he spent four months learning to walk again after a tragic motorcycle accident left him with shattered ankles. We all strapped in, assumed our roles for rehab and recovery, and got him the best surgeon and rehab possible, and he’s walking today. My oldest has broken his back twice, and we battled through that. Between the two of them, they have had over 20 fractures. but when they are upset because their dog is in pain or someone is being unfaithful or untruthful to them, I melt like cotton candy in a bucket of water.

Regardless of how difficult it is, my ears and arms are always wide open for them. Talking about emotions has marginally improved over the last few decades. However, men still find it a struggle. Here it is 2023, and there is still a stigma for men to talk about what’s going on in their hearts. What really makes them angry, what scares them out of their mind, and how do they turn a negative into a positive way and not give up or want to hurt themselves?

As parents, we know that there are tons of manuals and workbooks out there to guide us on the basics, but until you live it, you can’t always learn it.

I am so blessed to have a close relationship with my sons. Of course, I don’t want to know every single thing going on in their life, oh my gosh, can you imagine, but they do know I am an open book and an open door if they need to discuss anything. With me, they know they’re safe, they will receive true and honest feedback, and I will always leave them with positivity and motivation so that they can push through their hardship. But it doesn’t make it any easier for me to sit back and watch their heartstrings be pulled. I remind myself constantly that it’s their life path, and I am just a blessed player in their game of self-discovery.

I’m about ready to become a grandmother for the second time, I often wonder what role I will play in their life. Will I be the one that they call and beg, “Please don’t tell Mom and Dad?” Will I be the one that they want to visit every summer because Disney World is only a few hours away? Will I be the one that they race to the mailbox to see if I sent him a card with some money in it? Who knows. But I can tell you one thing I will repeat the same mantras I have, if your name is in somebody else’s mouth, positive or negative, that means you’ve made it. And, what someone else says about you is none of your business.

A win is a win, but a loss is an opportunity to learn. It hurts to see any of my baby’s hearts be broken. A broken bone can be put back together again.

It’s interesting when I think of hearts and my family tree. There have been heart “issues” for generations. My grandmother had a pacemaker, my aunt and mother both had to have heart ablations, and my grandson, Crew, had open-heart surgery at five months old.

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Here’s a war story. When I was flying helicopters in Vietnam, my days, believe it or not, were often boring, almost enervating in their predictability. Most days were a full 24 hours, too hot by half, and free of real purpose except for putting one boot in front of the other to get a day closer to coming home.

Then there were other days. There was no middle ground. The days that stand out were those filled with — forgive the cliché — heart-stopping fear. It seemed like there was either utter boredom, or sheer terror, with nothing between.

But those fear-filled days were marked with intention. Here’s an example. One August afternoon I was the third ship in a four-ship formation when our flight was dispatched to extract a group of GIs pinned down by enemy fire atop a ridgeline we called The Rockpile. Located just below the DMZ, the rockpile was a crag 200 feet tall, with one tiny landing zone on its west side, a postage stamp level spot that would accommodate exactly one Huey at a time.

The dozen troops waiting for us were unable to move. Heavily armed North Vietnamese troops were above them up the ridge. But those GIs had to be rescued, so in we went. Our lead ship landed first, loaded three of those men in the three or four seconds he was able to stay, then number two, then it was my turn.

I’ve been asked a number of times how I managed to dive into that rescue, get those men off that ridge while under fire, and fly them to safety. The question has always mystified me.

Was I going to leave those men there? No. It was my (our) intention to get them off that hill and give them at least a chance to go home standing up. It never occurred to me or any of my colleagues in their cockpits to do otherwise.

My year in Vietnam was a long slog of putting one boot forward, then another, until that happy day when I stepped aboard the freedom bird and returned to the world, as we said. Vietnam taught me little except for the futility of war, the necessity of ending it, and the power of living with intention.

How many of your days are little more than the getting through?

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It was early 1958 and my father was taking me for a ride into town for a haircut. Daddy had the windows down and turned the radio up loud, he loved Johnny Cash, and his new song Big River was blasting on the radio. He was smiling, patting his hands on the steering wheel, and singing along.

Daddy’s favorite was George Jones, he always had time to listen to sad songs and said sad songs were like smoke in a bar and made you breathe the smell of loneliness. He would often say that there is nothing sadder than sad county songs, old dogs, lonesome highways, and the sound of a steel guitar.

In the winter of 1971, I went on the road playing music, and one of the benefits was going to late-night bars and hearing some of the best unknown singers and players who were the heart of the music. Often, I got to sit in with some of those amazing players and singers. It was how you learned your trade.

At a club just outside of Richmond, we stopped at a small Honky-Tonk around midnight. Our bus and truck barely fit in the parking lot, and we offloaded and headed straight to the door. The bar was in an old rebuilt barn, with wooden floors that sounded like a deep bass drum, a single light shining, and a singer on stage with just his guitar singing Daddy Frank. As we got closer to the stage, we realized it was indeed Merle Haggard.

He played way into the night and the sad songs rolled off his guitar, his voice like smooth bourbon. I couldn’t help but remember what my daddy always said, “sad songs were like smoke in a bar and made you breathe the smell of loneliness.”

I often close my eyes and feel the wind from the open car window and hear the sound of sad songs on the radio, those were special times, the best of times. Pop, I miss you and hope that you still listen to sad songs in heaven, and I will always think of you when I hear Sing Me Back Home by Merle Haggard.

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I‘m a slow learner. Things taught to me in my youth I’m just now achieving and understanding. Case in point, The Savoring.

I call it “The Savoring” because there are no words in English that correctly convey its entirety. The closest word in English is actually borrowed from fictional Martian; Grok.

In Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, a human, Valentine Michael Smith, is raised by Martians. He’s taught their ways, their beliefs, their culture, their language, their philosophy, their science, their their and one such their their is Grokking, the ability to so completely understand something that you become one with it.

Or the ability to become one with something and thus completely understand it.

Anyway, several human languages have equivalents, English doesn’t and thus I use “The Savoring” because it’s the closest I can get to what I was taught.

BasicsTaste an apple pie. Really taste it. Most people (unless they’re culinarians or gastronomists) don’t keep the apple pie in their mouths long enough to truly taste it. Take a moment and taste the difference in the apples, taste what goes into the crust. What kind of sugar is used? Did eggs go into the crust? Do you recognize that one part of what English labels “taste” is also texture, as in “how does the food feel in my mouth?” as in hard, soft, malleable, thick, thin, and so on? We experience a thick potato chip differently from how we experience a thick steak and lots of science goes into deciding how thick (or thin) is too thick (or thin) of mass-produced food products.

But back to that slice of apple pie. Take a moment and catalogue all the different kinds of sensations the apple pie is causing you to experience. Appreciate the apple pie as fully and completely as you can.

It’s not easy (for me, anyway), and it takes time. I can do it and I have to remember to do it. It’s like Intention taken to the next level. I’ll often catch myself in mid-chew or with whatever I’m eating halfway to my mouth and then stop, pause, close my eyes, breathe, center, lower, and then start to experience the totality of the apple pie (or whatever).

Can you taste the energy of the cook in what you’re eating? Can you savor their effort? Can you appreciate what they did?

Here’s a trick for you; Savor something prepared for you by someone who loves you truly, deeply, and dearly, then savor something prepared in a restaurant kitchen. They may both be delicious and can you taste the different kinds of love that go into each, the former love for you, the latter love for their craft?

Do this often enough and you’ll never experience an unpleasant taste again.

More AdvancedI use taste above because taste is really taste and smell and they’re primitive sensory systems that are more closely tied to our primitive brains than sight and hearing. Sight and hearing such as humans have came along long after evolution had been turning us from two amino acids accidentally bumping into each other in a hot chemical broth into things that moved with a purpose.

You can savor someone’s touch. Or the earth’s touch. Or the moon’s pull. Think I’m crazy? Have you never felt the sun on your back or arms or shoulders? Have you never felt the pull of the ocean or mountains on your soul? Or lakes or rivers? Or iceflows? It’s only a matter of what you’re willing to experience versus what you’ve been trained (via language and culture) to experience.

Our sense of touch is even more primitive than our senses of smell and taste, and touch uses the largest sensory organ we have; our skin. Most people can be blindfolded and tell the difference between the touch of a loved one and a stranger. That difference has to do with the energy of the person touching. Savoring through touch and hearing is part of the Blinds’ way of life.

You can savor sounds. Susan is often amused and sometimes annoyed when I play the same piece of music several times in one sitting. I have a musical background and can isolate the different instruments being played, savoring and appreciating each musician’s contribution to the whole. I was born blind and through my Grandfather’s teaching, the trainings of others he brought me to, and my other senses developing to take up the gap, I also feel the music both internally and externally via its vibrations. I can, as I often describe, bathe in the sounds (and often do when no one’s around).

All of this requires intention and forethought (at least for me). I’m not at the stage where I automatically savor my experiences as I’m having them. For example, I stopped typing the previous sentence between “automatically” and “savor” because I realized I wasn’t savoring the experience of communicating this to you.

I can savor the experience. I need to learn how to savor it with you so you will savor it, too. As I wrote above, I’m a slow learner. Perhaps because I savor my learnings?

Other CulturesSavoring is well understood in aboriginal cultures because it is a way of survival. Aboriginal hunters surveying the prairie, plain, ocean, or sky take their time. They pull everything in and savor it until they’re confident they fully and completely understand it. The phrase often used (regardless of culture or language) translates to “I become a part of it” (also the title of a worthy read, I Become Part of It: Sacred Dimensions in Native American Life) . Study and work with Aboriginals and you’ll be amazed at the details they remember, and the amount of information they recall and describe vividly. Watch their eyes and how they shift their position, change their balance, how their breathing changes and you realize they’re going back to the original event they’re recalling (even if it was several generations back), experiencing and savoring it all over again. Spend time with Native Apache and you’ll learn the word Agodzaahi. One aspect of Agodzaahi is to start and end each story with a recollection of where the story took place, who was there, and what the day was like, …

Savoring.Indigenes develop powerful memories, amazing mental disciplines, because it allows them to savor their experiences. Nowadays we tap messages to ourselves on our mobiles, take pictures, make recordings, and then forget we’ve tapped, taken, or made them. I’m not sure “unlimited” storage space is a good thing. I have very few pictures in my wallet because there’s not a lot of space for pictures, therefore each picture in my wallet has vast meaning to me.

Ever spent minutes waiting for someone to swipe through images on their mobile to get the one image they want to show you? There’s also scientific research indicating we’re losing the ability to remember details. It’ll be interesting to learn how this affects courtroom testimony. I guess it’s a good thing there are so many web-enabled cameras now.

Being able to quickly get something off the internet inhibits our ability to savor, me thinks. Savoring takes time and the internet – at least as most people use it now – is not about taking one’s time to savor experiences. Part of our brain’s reward mechanism relies on our ability to savor (granted, in a limited form of what I call “The Savoring”) an experience. When we search for something in the wild, while driving, in our homes, our desks, our closets, in a building, a town, a city, the countryside, on a trip, or a brick&mortar store and find it, our brain gives us an Attaboy! or Attagirl! with all sorts of neuropeptides, enzymes, and other assorted chemicals. Those neurojuices cause us to congratulate ourselves and lock whatever we found along with where we found it in long-term memory.

Ever savor fast food? Savoring is anthemic to the very concept of fast food. Spend time in a culture that is largely gustatory or olfactory in its language and you have a start at savoring because they’re been taught at an early age to appreciate sensory experience (note, not hedonistic experience). Spend time in a culture that is largely kinesthetic, proprioceptive, tactile, or vestibular in its language and you have a start at savoring physical experience.

Or you can slow yourself down, center, and allow yourself the luxury of fully understanding and appreciating your experience.

The next time you’re talking with someone, savor what they’re saying, how they’re saying it, where the conversation’s taking place, et cetera, and you’ll be able to remember it with crystal clarity. Savor your life and you’ll fulfill the saying, “Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll enjoy it a second time.”

Want an experience that will truly knock your socks off every time?

The next time you’re with your lover, take the time to savor the experience (yes, I understand that sometimes the excitement and possible discovery of a quickie can be jubilant and worth savoring in itself. I’m old(er), not dead!). The next time you’re with someone you love, take time to appreciate the entirety of the experience (including the things that irritate you, if any, because you’ll miss those irritations when they’re gone).

Savor your time with yourself, with others, with everything around you, with the Universe in and of itself.

Take a moment to savor your lifetime. No one else has ever had the experiences you’ve had in just the way you’ve had them. Your first taste of chocolate, your first kiss, your first smell of wet dog fur, the first time you heard a kitten purr, the first time you saw the ocean or the mountains; these are all your firsts, nobody else’s. When you go, they’re gone. Savor them so you can share them while there’s still time.

The first step?

Breath.

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It was the time shortly after the coming of the scribes, men who made marks on tablets of clay to be hardened by fire or wrote stories on scraped sheep skin with a tree gall and rock oil ink.

People lived closer together than before, sometimes behind walls that protected them from marauding bands of thieves and armies sent to steal the food that they grew.

Often they were governed by a king, a chief deemed strong, or wise, or in rare cases both strong and wise. People who were happy to follow such a man gave him a portion of that which they took from the earth in return for his strength, or his wisdom, or both.

These communities often believed in something larger themselves, a god or gods who dictated the rules of the community and punished those who did not abide by such rules. Some such communities had a keeper of the rules, a priest, or judge, or a wise man. In some communities, this role fell to the king.

While it was good to be king and to receive food grown and wood cut by others and metals extracted from the ground, it was not an easy job. If there was a priest, he or she asserted that they spoke for the gods and sat in judgement of you, while exacting payment from the people to intercede with a god on their behalf. Those who collected your food and other tribute had power and were easily tempted to steal from the tribute they collected or to mistreat people, especially those with no power, the poor and disadvantaged.

In this day there were some who travelled from kingdom to kingdom, freelancing their skills for a living. There were itinerant farm hands who showed up at harvest time, or traveling builders who arrived when a community was growing and grave workers who came following Death’s visits.

One of the many traveling freelancers was the prophet, the seer, the holy man. These seemed to come when a community was doing well, but when there was discord, when some did very well and others complained. The prophet often had an unkempt style, ragged clothes, and poorly coifed hair. They often had “The Voice,” a way of speaking that immediately drew attention. “The Voice” might have boomed out or seemed almost a whisper, but one could not deny having heard “The Voice” or fail to pay attention.

Most holy men had some ability that set them apart, a detailed people’s perception that seemed like mind reading, an uncanny intuition about cause and effect that seemed like telling the future, an extensive knowledge of law, history, and the natural world that made them seem omniscient.

The prophets represented themselves as speaking for the god or gods and perhaps they did. For they were fearless. They spoke forcefully and directly to the powerful, demanding that leaders change, follow rules, and stop stealing others’ food, money, partners or lives.

The prophets told stories of kingdom conflagrations, and people turned to salt and the scribes recorded it all. “The Voice” that carried pronouncements was powerful, but when combined with the prophet’s unique skills, people listened, especially kings and priests.

Now in this time, as the scribes have passed down to us, there were two kingdoms, just on opposite sides of a mountain ridge, Ur to the east and Ny to the west. Both kingdoms were ruled by strong and wise leaders, but both had grown corrupt. Priests and tribute collectors stole from the king and mistreated the people. Neighbors imitated the powerful and cheated each other in exchanges, and lied to avoid accountability or to make themselves more important.

Two itinerant holy men, Rax and Pix, met on the Ridge Path over Ur and Ny.

“Where are you bound, Brother?” They each asked the other. They were each undecided.

“Ur and Ny seem equal, Brother Rax” said one.

“That they do, Brother Pix, equally rich, equally corrupt, equally in need of renewal.”

The WagerThey fell to boasting as itinerant professionals sometimes do. Soon one proposed a wager, which the other readily accepted. Rax would visit Ur; Pix would visit Ny. They would each use their best holy man skills to “clean up the town” and effect renewal for six months. Then they would each visit both communities one year after that. Whichever prophet had created the most lasting change would win and pay the other the agreed price.

The Holy Men InterveneNow Rax and Pix were both holy men of the first order. Both had “The Voice” though Pix’s voice boomed a bit more. Rax’s intuitions were about people. It was said he could recognize a liar or a thief by just looking them in the eye for a few seconds. Pix had an uncanny ability to see the consequences of small actions; some called Pix “Seer,” which he waved away like he was shooing a fly

When each arrived at the city each wandered the streets before going to see the leader. When Rax saw King Ur he boomed out how his land had betrayed the gods, people were immoral and without honor. He named the most egregious sinner a priest, Clert who had taken great “gifts’ from a very rich man and delivered great judgements that oppressed the disadvantaged. “This man has debased Ur, he has defiled his office and cannot be tolerated.” He demanded that King Ur banish Clert. King Ur was cowed by Rax’s righteousness and sent Clert east into the wilderness. People saw the downfall of Clert and took heed of the warning to change or face similar punishment.

When Pix had his audience with Chief Ny he railed at the sinfulness of the community. He foretold of the destruction of the city due to poor livestock husbandry near the river, a just punishment from angry gods. He denounced Chief Ny and all his advisors as corrupt and he named the specific greedy and malicious actions of each and their ultimate consequences.

Pax then brought forth a shepherd, Iben he had met in the hills. “Iben’s flock is well cared for. He gets good but fair prices for wool. Though he is poor himself he has taken in others less fortunate than himself. He has healed their wounds and shared his own meager repast. Can you all not please the gods by following Iben’s examplar?”

Over the next few months, both Rax and Pix preached morals, right action and wisdom. In Ur and Ny some were called out and punished. In Ur Rax picked another high profile example, who was made to pay restitution for his actions. In Ny, Pix insisted that a sinner of whom Chief Ny flogged and demanded repayment of food tribute stolen, also work in a poorhouse at mealtimes.

Each holy man stayed in his town for half a year and then moved on. One year later they each visited both towns and then climbed to the Ridge Path to discuss the outcome of their wager.

Wherein Lies the Tale?There is a tradition in many cultures of using stories to teach the rules of society, what is right and what is wrong, what works and doesn’t work in governing people. The ancient Athenians used the Eleusinian mysteries, Aesop told fables, The Celts and Germanic tribes told Fairy Tales, Lao Tzu and the Taoists wove the adventures of sages, Jesus told parables, and the Sufis to this day create stories to teach.

The point is not just the narrative, but critical thought and refining discussion. I invite you to discuss this story in comments here or less publicly with your friends and family.

Whose intervention do you think worked best? Why?

What are the downsides of each approach to change?

What is naïve about this narrative i.e., “not like the real world at all?” How would you change this story to make it more realistic?

This story seems to be about. . . _______, what else could it be about?

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Every April, people with autism and their families, friends, and advocates come together to celebrate people with autism, share their stories and create a more inclusive world—together. – Autism Speaks website

As most of you are aware, our oldest son, Matthew, was diagnosed with a form of autism over 10 years ago. It’s a challenge raising children in general. It’s more of a challenge raising children with special needs. The most challenging part for Jenn and me was being first-time parents and not knowing where to go for information, support, and guidance.

Life is not linear. There are many twists and turns as you know. Our son, Matt, is thriving. Upon diagnosis, his medical practitioners classified him as Level 1 on the Asperger’s Spectrum. Sounds like a foreign language when you are scared young parents trying to be the best parents you can be.

Matthew is a highly functioning 21-year-old. He is taking courses in college for music production, is a trained kickboxer moving towards his next belt level, and is a music artist/producer working with his best friend to make a name for himself in the music industry.

This month and every month, please celebrate and pray for people with autism. They are resilient, smart, and elite human beings and we can all learn so much from them.

I love you, Matthew. Love, Dad

Who do you celebrate today?

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Many of us have heard that expression about silence, right?Meaning, of course, that the noise from our voice and words may not help in a difficult situation.

But is that always true?

Let’s say someone you’ve known and worked with for many years suddenly has a strong negative response to something you did.

They immediately tell you via email, using words that hurt, that seem to belittle you and your actions, that make you wonder about the time you’d known each other and thought you understood them, thought you knew who they were through and through.

Confused about it, you immediately reach out via an email, a text, or a phone call, all in the effort to find out the why of the situation.

Why are they so upset? How can you make it right?

Then, of course, you wait for a response, holding your breath, hoping …

Wait a day.

Two days.

Three.

You follow up with a “Are you OK? Are we OK?” or something like that. No attack, just concern. Because you are concerned; this is not something you ever envisioned with this person.

Two more days go by.

Silence continues.

You try again, valuing the relationship you’ve had for so many years, mentioning that silence is impossible to understand, that you only know YOUR side of the situation that has somehow become a real issue between you two.

Something you never imagined could happen given your five years of a strong, mutually appreciative work partnership.

You explain how you feel.

You ask them to please, please respond. Please help you understand what’s going on.

Please see if you two can talk it out, find a path that works for you both, stay as friends / colleagues / whatever.

More silence, now for two weeks.

Is this golden?

Is this anything you ever imagined could happen with this person?

Nope.

And that’s the saddest part, isn’t it? You can’t go back, yet you can’t move forward with certainty because you only know one-half of the situation.

You can’t effectively apologize because you don’t know what the right words would be due to the silence.

The silence “speaks” to the fact that reconnecting with you isn’t what they’re going to do.

The silence seems to say that all you did together no longer matters, that they’re going on their own without you supporting, helping, caring.

The positive partnership you believed you had crumbled, turned to dust …

It’s like fighting a ghost …

And it hurts.

For me – this is real.

It happened.

Recently.

Five years of working wonderfully well together, gone in a flash, with no explanation.

I remain mystified, sad, angry – working on getting over it.

Lesson learned?While silence may be golden in some circumstances, and we likely shouldn’t speak out in anger, we should at the very least explain our side in a situation that is confusing to one or both.

Especially if we’ve had a positive relationship of any kind for so long.

Take the high road, if possible.

Maybe we’ll each still go our own way, but at least we’ll know why.

And that’s what matters most to me: Why.

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There have been 147 mass shootings this year. In Louisville, KY, four died, and nine people were injured at the hands of a 23-year-old man. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear lost his best friend and said, “Violence tears at the social fabric of our community. What we need now is LOVE and wrap our arms around each other.” So, how can we do that?

In the past, we have been dealing with symptoms, not solutions. We assume if we had more gun control and mental health facilities, the problem would fade away.

Let’s get real! There are 393.3 million guns in circulation today. As a crime and violence prevention specialist, I know that criminals have hundreds of firearms stashed for easy access or to sell. One inner city ninth grader told me he could leave the classroom and buy a gun within 20 minutes.

America is divided about gun control. Perhaps, politicians can work together on a five-year moratorium on assault weapons to see if mass shootings decrease.

Violence, drugs, abuse, suicide, and homelessness are signs of a failing society. When Americans lack support and self-awareness, we see unchecked violent behavior, which can destroy a once-free nation. We will no longer be the leader of the free world as we become more dependent on the government to fix us.

According to the CDC, at least 1 in 7 children experience child abuse and neglect, the leading cause of death for youth ages 1 to 19, costing $592 billion in 2018. America needs a PREVENTION PLAN OF ACTION.

What are the unaddressed issues that fuel mass shootings and teen violence?

We can expect more mass shootings, with ten million children growing up in abusive homes. Americans must work together to create safe homes and neighborhoods. Let’s discuss two critical solutions.

1. Strengthen parents, guardians, and children!
2. Neighborhood involvement for safety!

Responsible Parenting Empowers Youth:

Children are not born with mental health problems. Children need boundaries and rules and to be accountable for their behavior. Many young people don’t feel loved, needed, or wanted and don’t know how to develop self-control or a self-protective conscience that can keep them safe. Isolated youth don’t know how to handle anger, social isolation, or loneliness. Children need a spiritual understanding of self which can give them a value system to grow strong and resilient. One responsible adult in the family or the neighborhood can change a child’s life. Children learn respect from people who care about them. Families need support groups in churches and connected neighbors to reduce social isolation, which can be deadly. It’s time to focus on young children because once they are teens, it becomes more difficult.

Neighborhood Support:

A single parent may be working with little time to spend with children, or they may be victims of abuse. Youth today do not have the support they need that trusted family, friends, and neighbors can provide. Neighbors need to create a community around children. In high-fear areas, we need trained, paid “Neighborhood Safety Experts” to go into neighborhoods and bring people together. When neighbors work together, they build trust, develop friendships, and put a check on bad behavior as they reduce the isolation that negatively affects children. Good neighbors protect, guide, encourage, and can “wrap their arms around each other.” Adults who see bad behavior in young children must be allowed to say something to family members without being dismissive or defensive. Religious groups can reach beyond the church and unite neighbors to provide needed support without proselytizing. Three hundred fifty thousand churches in America can demonstrate the power of “Love thy Neighbor.” “It takes a village to raise a child.”

Will we continue to blame youth, police, guns, and drugs and ignore what must change to provide love and support for children? Responsible parenting and neighborhood involvement can empower teens to be successful. We must discuss what happened, why we are so violent, and what “we, the people,” can do today to make our communities safe and peaceful for all American families and children.

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We tend to believe that happiness comes from success. In reality, then, it doesn’t work (at least not always) like this.

We agree: people, in general, want to obtain a good level of financial stability and due recognition for their achievements, they want to experience the maximum possible pleasure in the professional field because it is a reason for greater happiness in life.

And they are right, they are reasonable aspirations. In fact, it cannot be denied that with willpower and commitment, significant results can be achieved in the context of one’s goals in life, however ambitious they may be. For this reason, therefore, many individuals, especially the more ambitious and diligent ones, simplify the equation in an apparently logical way: they seek success, engaging all their energies, in the belief that it is the antechamber of happiness.

How to explain, then, that often, once you have achieved professional success, that one wonders if it was worth wasting so much energy for a success that doesn’t fully fulfill? I guess the following reasons.

The exaggerated cult of performativity at any cost, the idea that to be worth something in life you need to be able to impose yourself better and in less time than others. A rhetorical model that is passed off as the only possible and, as such, is suffered by parents, not opposed by society, is fed by the media with the exaltation of superstars and the diffusion of talent shows, where one is judged continuously and all that counts is to be first.

A more balanced society shouldn’t just exhibit role models who always push to be exceptional, and successful in a given profession.

Success itself does not guarantee happiness. To be happy it’s not enough to win, it’s not even enough to become the best in the world, you have to feel fully accomplished, love what you do, and express all the potential you have within us and that drives us to succeed.

It is above all the journey, not the destination itself, that counts: dreams and goals are used only to measure progress, and it is precisely the latter that brings happiness, not the goal itself: satisfaction comes from the steps we do towards activities that are meaningful to us. Small progress must already make us feel good. In short, it is the emotions we feel along the way, the state of mind, which play a central role in a person’s professional and personal life.

Meanwhile, we should decide what is the right goal “for us”, and ask ourselves if we are looking for what can produce within us those emotional states that we really want, those feelings that we want to experience continuously in our lives because they satisfy our most deep. Don’t spend energy to achieve goals proposed from outside, moving away from our most authentic desires, those that make us feel complete, that make our life satisfying, and interesting, according to “our” point of view.

The road to happiness passes through self-realization, through a journey of emotions experienced in full awareness of what we are building, what makes us feel truly fulfilled, what we need, and what we must leave instead lose because it has no real meaning to us.

Success and happiness are obviously linked, but this alchemy may work better in the opposite direction to what most people imagine. Convincing ourselves that pursuing the success suggested by externally imposed models is no guarantee of happiness, indeed, at best it is an ineffective strategy for us.

The best strategy is to understand what can make us happy, to know our inner needs, and, by working to achieve “our” happiness, we can also achieve success.

So, then, can we conclude that happiness is not simply the consequence of ephemeral positive events but, on the contrary, it is the inner condition that contributes to generating and also producing success, results, and rewarding conditions of life?

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Carlos Santana is an American guitarist, composer, singer, and band leader, known for his blend of rock and roll and Latin American jazz. Santana, born in Jalisco, Mexico rose to fame in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with a resurgence in his career in the 1990s. Santana has won ten Grammy Awards and continues to share his music with the world.

As you can imagine, Santana loves creating music and playing the guitar. Santana after all of these years, still does not consider practice a drudgery, or sacrifice. This time gives Santana the opportunity to “tinker” with his music, sharpen his skills, and experiment with new songs. Santana likens time with his guitar as an offering.

During a recent interview, Santana summed up his philosophy on music and life. When asked what he was searching for in life, he replied, ”the perfect note”. Santana is not looking for eternal happiness or world peace, but “the perfect note”! One might ask at seventy-five years old, what does Carlos Santana need to prove? For some fifty-five-plus years, Santana has entertained audiences and written and performed Grammy-winning songs. Perhaps what Santana is really saying is, his best work is still ahead of him. Entertaining audiences, using music as his offering, Santana is striving for later-in-life activities, lifelong learning, and living life to its fullest. Santana is still searching for “the perfect note”.

Being happy and productive past the traditional age of retirement is becoming a goal for more and more people. Later in life activities and lifelong learning are gaining momentum with many mature adults. Folks from all walks of life are exploring new passions, creating “bucket lists” and “giving back” as they create their next phase in life. When does one start to plan for this “Third Act”? The sooner the better!

Start to explore your passions with lifelong learning. Be curious about all that is around you.

There are multiple avenues to being a lifelong learner. Explore books, podcasts, classes, etc. to learn as much as possible about your “Third Act”. The question is, are you still searching for “the perfect note”?

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The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention… A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Welcome to Listening Workshop V.2023.Colin Smith and I are getting together again to offer a space where we can train nonjudgmental listening.

Many things can be learned by reading and writing and giving and receiving feedback in the dialogues we have with our articles and comments. But reading and writing wouldn’t be a great way to learn to swim. Partly because swimming requires that at least one person gets wet. Partly because by the time a lifesaving comment filtered through the systems, the student might have drowned.

Likewise, listening and communicating with empathy are skills that are hard to learn except in real-time. It doesn’t have to be face-to-face in the same room, though. I think many of us have experienced that in the small groups on Our Friendship Bench or in other Zoom gatherings over the last three years.

From many of Colin’s articles and some of mine, you can see what this is all about:

• Feeling curiosity rather than judgment about the other person.
• Giving feedback on how what is said and how it is said lands with you.
• Getting feedback on how what is said and how it is said lands with others.
• Increasing emotional awareness and literacy.
• Getting comfortable with silence.
• Realizing how much of what we hear is influenced by prior experiences.

There will be a little theory and “handouts”, but mainly we plan “facilitated swimming” by mutually sharing in small groups/pairs based on prompts.

The format we have in mind is to meet for one hour Wednesday, May 10th and 17th, 4 pm-5 pm UTC+1, 11 am-12 pm EDT, 8 am-9 am PDT, with a possibility of expanding with more weeks and/or longer sessions over the summer.

Ready to come swimming with us? Register below↴

CLICK TO RESERVE YOUR SEAT FOR LISTEN 360°

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It amazes me how wisdom from old times keeps its value over time. One example is “Temptation Bundling” that Professor Katherine Milkman of Wharton University introduced in 2014.

Temptation bundling is a productivity technique that involves combining an activity that gratifies you, such as watching TV, with one that is beneficial but has a delayed reward, such as exercising. It is mixing what you desire with what you avoid doing.

The Old StoryThe readers might be hesitant to read about the concept of temptation bundling. Stories are attractive to people. They have the power to explain the undesired concepts in desirable stories. Great stories are great examples of temptation bundling.

The old story from Arab history explains this concept very well. A Bedouin was sad because of his ailing camel. He made a promise to sell the camel for just one pound if it recovered. The camel recovered and the Bedouin felt unhappy to sell the camel but wished to fulfill his promise. He consulted one of his friends who came up with a bundling idea. He advised the owner to go to the market and say, “The camel is only for one pound, the cat is for one hundred pounds, and interested people should buy the two as a bundle”.

A man said how cheap the price of the camel was but for the price of the cat. Everyone wanted to buy a camel for a pound. Nobody was willing to buy the cat and the bundle was too expensive to buy.

Temptation Bundle in My LifeWhen we were children, my brothers and I loved going to the movies. It was the only entertainment for us. My father realized this and made use of it.

During the long summer vacation he bought selected English stories for us to read, (we did not like reading much at those times). My father did not force us to read. Instead, he promised us to each get a movie ticket on one condition. That was to summarize the story in an acceptable two pages.

He combined our love for movies with much less love to read. That resulted in all of us becoming fond of reading. Reading became a daily habit.

Creativity PowerI find temptation bundling a great source for creative ideas in every aspect of our lives and businesses. This bundling has a simple concept to dilute what you do not want with something you want wholeheartedly.

You are a manager- find ways to mix what your employees do not like with what they like. In marketing, selling, or whatever activity creativity in offering a temptation bundling is possible.