Archive for Different Thinking
September 27, 2008 at 4:32 pm ·
What a privilege that it is “my turn at last” to host the magical, practical, life-changing and unable to be categorised book “Life Is A Verb” as it tours the world!
After much anticipation, Patti Digh’s masterpiece began showing up in mailboxes at the end of August and officially launched on 2 September. Since then readers around the world have been called to Action, and this is how we’ll change the world – one intentional day at a time.
Patti didn’t set out to write a bestseller. She wasn’t filled with grand visions for saving the planet, or being famous. She doesn’t pretend that her life is perfect, and that she has the answers to the “big” questions. Patti writes about the detail of her day that for many of us in the hustle and bustle of busy lives goes by unnoticed. She shares her life with her readers from a place of humour, joy and love and invites us to feel into our hearts to discover the richness of our own lives.
Patti’s intention was to write her stories for her daughters so they could live their lives fully – she wanted them to know what to care about, how to treat others, what to stand up for and why they should tell stories and listen to the stories of others. You don’t just read this book – you soak it in, eat it up, drink it deeply. It is designed to move you. It does.
I have been reading Patti’s blog for almost two years, which I discovered at a time in my life where I was needing a huge reminder to Say Yes, to Be Generous, to Speak Up, to Love More, to Trust Myself and to Slow Down. These six practices are the essence of Life Is A Verb, and Patti shows us how to embrace them instantly in the day we are living right now!
With essay titles like “Dance in Your Car”, “Carry a Small Grape”, “Consider the Flea”, “Polish Your Mud Balls”, “Bust your Toast Rules”, “Save a Grocery List” “Go See the Tiny Ninjas”, this unique work can’t be explained in words on this page.
Order your copy today. Order fifty copies and give them to everyone you know.
Start doing this book! You don’t have a minute to waste.
What would you be doing today if you only had 37 days to live?
What will you say Yes to?
Who will you share your time with?
What are you waiting for?
Filed under Communication, Values, Different Thinking, Guest contributors/p
September 3, 2008 at 9:29 am ·
Ah, September. Blogs, books, and other media are filled with references to Spring - metaphors abound, and the seasonal cliches are everywhere! I shall spare you, and instead thank those of you who have enabled me to exceed my fundraising target for The Black Dog Institute two weeks out from “The Big Run”.
Ironically at the time of writing my last blog-post, I had not yet been informed of the death of my cousin – suicide from depression at the age of 48. The third generation of men in my family who ended their lives rather than deal with the vicious black dog every day.
There are some excellent resources from people who are far more informed about this topic than I. Start with these two: “Back from the Brink” and “The Depression Book”.
Since I declared my intention to support this cause, I have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of stories of how depression has impacted the lives of so many people I know. Acknowledging depression and sharpening awareness gave them permission to speak about it without shame or guilt – sometimes for the first time in their lives.
This has encouraged me to renew my commitment to continue my work with values, purpose and visions with increased energy & focus. When I am distracted & disconnected from my purpose, I become despondent, disillusioned and destructive – the D’s of despair and depression. When I reconnect with my core values and deepest purpose, there is energy, enthusiasm, effervescence, enjoyment, effortlessness, elation and empathy – all the E’s of ease. In alphabetical terms, just one single step forward, yet a whole world of difference.
One of my favourite futurists, John Renesch, commences his September newsletter with a quote from Buckminster Fuller, “If the success or failure of this planet, and of human beings, depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be? What would I do?”
Renesch writes:
“One thing about Bucky which is less well- known: he seriously contemplated suicide in mid-life. He had a series of business failures, an experience known all too well by inventive types whose ideas are a bit too far ahead of the crowd, had gone bankrupt and lost his young daughter to polio. He reportedly had an epiphany which caused him to step back from the brink of taking his own life and embark on what he called “an experiment” - to discover what a single individual could contribute to change the world and benefit all humanity. For the next half century, he lived that experiment.
What if we lived that experiment each day? What if we asked ourselves,“What can I do today to benefit humanity?” Instead of wallowing in powerlessness what if we simply did something every day that contributed to the success of the human species? I guarantee you the world would start looking better.”
What if?
Filed under Values, Different Thinking/p
December 16, 2007 at 9:19 pm ·
I just love the way H B Gelatt thinks - and presents his ideas. He often puts into words just what I’m thinking, and he generously gave me permission to reproduce this thought-provoking article:
Beware of Your Dogma - by H B Gelatt
The truth is that we cannot avoid uncertainty. This not-knowing is part of the adventure. It is also what makes us afraid. Pema Chodron
Niels Bohr, one of the founding fathers of quantum physics, tells a story about a young student attending three lectures by a very famous rabbi. The student said the first lecture was very good — he understood everything. The second lecture was much better — the student didn’t understand it but the rabbi understood everything. The third lecture was the best of all — it was so good that even the rabbi didn’t understand it. Bohr tells this story because he says he never understood quantum physics, even though he helped create it.
I think this story illustrates that what we are learning about the world nowadays is “so good” that nobody really understands it all. This is the certainty of uncertainty. In fact here is the opinion of the “new sciences:” Reality may not be structured in any way the human mind objectively discern.
This article is part of my Process of Illumination, creating a collective worldview that is open and inclusive. The basic premise is that uncertainty is certain and the illumination strategy is: Beware of your dogma. I probably should say that I don’t really understand everything I am writing about in this article. But I will say that I am certainly uncertain.
Say Hello and Goodbye to Your Dogma
Absolute certainty is dogma. I believe dogma is a major deterrent to growth, development and learning … and to a collective worldview that is open and inclusive. However, as Swami Beyondananda puts it: Dogma is truly man’s best friend. This is because certainty feels so good … yet you can’t grow clinging to the status quo.
However, there seems to be an emerging collective worldview that acknowledges the uncertainty of our reality and the reality of uncertainty. This comes from Niels Bohr’s and Werner Heisenberg’s quantum physics, and from the cybernetics, and constructionist work of Gregory Bateson and Heinz von Foerster, among others. And from some of the “old” eastern philosophies. Yet some of us, at times, still reject the possibility of uncertainty.
If you are certain about the security of your current job or certain that your country will always protect your freedom, it might be dangerous because you may not pay attention to signs that your job is becoming obsolete or that your personal freedom is being restricted. Are there someareas of your personal life where you are so comfortable with knowing for sure that you might be unable to “see” beyond your sureness? The answer is probably yes. Recognizing it and its dangers is the beginning of illumination.
Years ago Emile Chartier warned us, Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when it is the only one you have. Today I would say that nothing is more dangerous that a dogmatic belief, no matter how many you have. Get acquainted with your dogma and then say goodbye. Mark Twain points out a problem with such sureness. It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble; it’s what you know for sure that ain’t so. How do you live without certainty? Here are two suggested illumination methods. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under Leadership, Communication, Different Thinking, Guest contributors/p
July 25, 2007 at 11:40 pm ·
Here we are almost at the end of another month, and my best intentions to blog have gone out the window. Last night I attended an event convened by AmCham Women In Management, hearing three inspirational women speak about Entrepreneurship. A key tip (amongst many) was delegate, delegate, delegate!
So, demonstrating my rapid learning and ability to instantly implement lessons, I have asked a talented friend to “guest write” something for you. He has often told me about his “reverse pumpkin theory”, so it’s a pleasure to share it with you:
Reverse Pumpkin Theory - David Smith, (Author, Musician, IT guru and creative genius)
We all have friends who live in the country. People who have eschewed the lure of the bright lights and the traffic jams and the freshly ground Brazilian coffee lovingly steamed by Manuel, the only barista who really understands us. Or was that Columbian? Whoever… Anyway, we all have friends who live in the country. It’s a rule.
And, sure enough, the same as we denizens of the metropolii occasionally decide that what we really, really need right now is some country air, and head west over the mountains to the great beyond, so our country friends decide that what they really, really need right now is a dose of carbon monoxide poisoning, a high stress ride through the streets of an unfamiliar city with one hand on the street directory and the other, white-knuckled on the wheel, and a personal introduction to Manuel, the only barista who really understands them.
So they arrive, dusty, tired, stressed. It’s usually a Saturday, mid-afternoon. You usher them in, show them the shower, pop a nice bottle of something in the freezer, and half an hour or so later, they emerge, human… almost normal. Small talk is exchanged, the good old days dissected and then one of them gets a gleam in their eye and says “We’ve brought you something from home. Gerald (Norman, Barry etc) will get it from the car.”
And so it begins… A battered cardboard box arrives. Inside is a scattering of potatoes with clumps of red dirt still attached, perhaps also an obscure vegetable that you’re not quite sure of, like a turnip or a parsnip, and always, always, a pumpkin.
It’s not a small one either – this is a real mother of a pumpkin, staring up at you out of the box in a round and vaguely malevolent way. It’s a nice pumpkin, and no doubt it tastes exquisite. Well, great. Well, nice. Well, OK. Well actually I don’t really like pumpkin all that much, truth be told. The saving grace of a pumpkin is however, that you are under absolutely no obligation to do anything with it right away. Your friends will be gone soon, and it can sit there in the corner, staring at you in a round and vaguely malevolent way while you ponder the meaning of its life. Eventually it rots and you throw it away – around about the time when you ring your friends up and tell them it was absolutely delicious as soup.
Next time, a year or so on, there’s another visit, and another pumpkin, because we all have friends who live in the country, and they always bring pumpkins when they come to town.
This, dear reader, is Pumpkin Theory. You know it. I know it. So, when it’s my turn to go and reacquaint myself with the quaint country charm of wherever it is they’re living – the termite ridden fence posts, Ethel the goat who, despite all evidence to the contrary, is still alive, and the dry, dry ground, well I like to indulge in what we’ll call Reverse Pumpkin Theory.
It’s the nobless oblige of city / country relations – the rich man / poor man saga writ large in the dusty window of the Holden station wagon parked for several years now, in big shed. Reverse Pumpkin Theory involves bearing gifts to our poor country cousins – not a pumpkin of course, because that would just be Pumpkin Theory in reverse, which is a different thing entirely, but instead the very crème de la crème of epicurean delights.
David Jones is a good place to start, assuming there’s a Food Hall, natch. Perhaps some gently spiced goat’s cheese (the like of which Ethel could never hope to produce), a new variant on the scale of dried / sun-dried / semi-dried tomatoes in triple virgin olive oil perhaps (you can never have too many virgins associated with your food), the finest Belgian dark chocolate with 85% cocoa butter from Columbia, or is it Brazil? Perhaps a special salad dressing from a famous local restaurant – a steal at only $25 for 375 ml. Is that French truffle oil or a local Tasmanian version? That sort of thing.
It’s not hard to fill up a basket with such wonders – and it’s fun. You get to buy things that perhaps you’d otherwise be too afraid to tangle with on your own, and watch to see if they’re actually edible.
You arrive, your basket piled high – and they’re very glad to see you. It’s Saturday, mid-afternoon. You’re stressed from the constant bumping of fifty or so kilometres of corrugated goat track. They show you the shower, although asking if perhaps you could not spend more than a minute in it due to the drought, and they slip a fine bottle of something into the freezer.
You emerge half an hour later, human. Almost normal. The basket is presented. You explain Reverse Pumpkin Theory – as a thank you for all those lovely pumpkins they’ve bought down over the years, you’ve bought some real food for them to eat. It never occurs to either your friends or yourself that you’ve brought it merely so that you can ensure that you yourself will eat well whilst staying with them.
The cellophane wrapping is removed and the contents lovingly spread on the kitchen table whilst you sip a brisk young New Zealand sauvignon blanc not of your providing that’s not only many cuts above the Ben Ean Moselle you were expecting, but gets you wondering how, living in such a crusty old backwater, they managed to get hold of it.
One of your friends picks up a jar of hand picked Peruvian high altitude special large capers in rice vinegar and says, “You know, these are absolutely my favourite capers. They’re just a touch saltier than the standard ones you get at Woollies – and it’s more a sea salt than a rock salt flavour, while putting them in rice vinegar gives them a subtle sweetness that I’ve not tasted in inferior brands. I get them all the time from the new deli in town.”
“Oh… and I love these too,” she says, moving onto the next impossible-to-procure-in-the-country item that you’ve spent the best part of last Saturday tracking down in an obscure Portugese deli in Newtown that a friend told you about only if you promised not to let the secret out to the hoi polloi… “and these are just darling….”
Damn the global marketplace…
Filed under Different Thinking, Musings/p
June 10, 2007 at 7:49 pm ·
This month, I’ve really noticed the challenge of how easy it is to talk about embracing change, yet how difficult it can actually be to really do it! I have had my laptop for almost 5 years – it’s my primary business tool, and some of the letters on the keypad have worn off with constant use. The battery has seen better days, and it began to just shut down at inconvenient times, causing me to lose my work. I went and bought a lovely new replacement model. Updated software, much faster, better, newer, more efficient. I brought it home and put it next to my “old” one.
What do you think I did next? Yes, I started it, did all the configuration steps, began to transfer files, and then as I tried to use it, realised how uncomfortable it felt. The keys were stiff, the screen looked alien, the windows operating system is different. I had to learn a new navigation system, and it wasn’t fun! Even though my old one was unreliable and dodgy at best, I kept going back to use it, because it “felt part of me”. I was willing to lose work / take longer to complete things just because it felt familiar.
I know the new one is better. I know it is more stable, will deliver faster and smarter results. Yet, I need a transition time… a time where I can “say goodbye” to my old habits and familiar ways of doing things, and make a gradual change to the new one. So too with organisational change. Just because we know we need to move to new and better ways of doing things doesn’t mean we can do it easily.
I turned to the wise advice of William Bridges, author of “Managing Transitions – Making the most of change”, who suggests it’s not the change we’re afraid of, it’s the transition. He offers that transition consists of three phases: Ending, Losing, Letting Go / The neutral zone / The new Beginning. Changes of any sort, even though they’re better for us, finally succeed or fail on the basis of whether the people affected do things differently. How do we let go of how we’ve always done things, go through that tough time between the old and the new, and come out doing things the new way?
Filed under Different Thinking, Musings/p
March 30, 2007 at 7:12 pm ·
This week I stumbled upon a local artist who teaches - and before my self-doubt could get in the way, I booked into his Wednesday class. I had never painted with oils before, and it was with some trepidation and much excitement I opened the little wooden gate and entered his studio. All the places were set-up with paint on palettes, boards on easels, ready for his students to take their places. The love and care that had gone into the preparation was evident, and as the 6 other students arrived, I could hardly contain myself. I was the “newbie” - a little over dressed, and naively under prepared for how messy the process can be. A delightful lady was quick to give me a painting shirt, and I was all set.
Under the expert guidance of a master teacher, I watched in awe as 7 masterpieces unfolded. We were all painting a scene from Hinchinbrook Island and Peter patie
ntly and lovingly made every student feel like they were Rembrandt. Even when one person mixed far too much blue into the yellow, when another kept asking him questions he’d already answered, and yet another spilled their turps he stayed calm and positive. It was great to leave the lesson with a painting to be proud of, yet it was the energy and vitality that was residual for the rest of the day and into the next day that amazed me. I reflected on what it was that made it such an uplifting experience… it wasn’t the high from the smell of the oil paints, it wasn’t that the painting itself was pretty good, it wasn’t even the comraderie or conversation even though that was fabulous too. It was the energy that comes from positive acknowledgement, from being recognised as special, affection without affectation, and having someone hold the vision for me that success was possible whilst I struggled to imagine it for myself! Peter expected that everyone would do well. He sincerely believes in the genius in each of us.
In our leadership workshops, we state several key assumptions at the beginning of a program - one of which is “assume everyone is a genius”. This creates interesting reactions - from agreement to outright indignation and audible gasps of disbelief. Participants are so uncomfortable with this assumption, that we suggest they score the statement with a level from 1 - 10 (1 being totally disbelieving and 10 being in total agreement) on day 1. By Day 4, they usually adjust their score upwards and closer to 10!
How would your work and home life improve if you embrace this assumption? Try it for a week, and I promise you will be surprised and delighted.
Filed under Leadership, Communication, Values, Different Thinking/p
March 15, 2007 at 8:42 am ·
Last week I had the pleasure of working with a group of leaders in a country town – a vibrant community in Australia’s glorious Hunter Valley whose livelihood depends mostly on the mining, wine and tourism industries. Each person in the workshop is actively involved in community service, their energy, optimism and commitment to service is inspirational.
We were discussing the attitudes of “locals” to “blow-ins” (i.e. people who reside in the town who were actually born there, as were their parents and grandparents before them) versus those who had come from outside – the “transients”. Despite having settled there, building homes, having children and sending them to the local schools (some of these people have been in the community for more than twenty years) they are still just “blow-ins”. Interestingly enough, these very same people were the majority on the boards of the local service organisations, the ones who give generously of their time and expertise to ensure that there is a prosperous future for their children (and all the children in the town). One of my participants shared the story of having a “local who was born there” explain to him very seriously that he couldn’t consider himself a “real local” unless he was here for the 1955 flood!
As I drove the few hundred kilometres home, I couldn’t help but reflect on how these ingrained attitudes, whilst appearing to be said lightheartedly, perhaps even delivered with the good old friendly Aussie back-slap, continue to separate and divide. In our organisations, how often do we diminish and ignore fresh ideas when they come from “newbies”? In our lives, how often do we reject “new wisdom” because “you just don’t know what it’s really like – you haven’t been here long enough!”
In a workshop the following day (same company) a talented young man dismissed his opinion by saying, “… but I’m just a trainee”. I challenged the use of the word just… after all, what better place to view an organisation from than that of an enthusiastic new “trainee” - keen to learn everything about his new role, thrilled to have been considered for a position straight out of school, and filled with a passion for possibility that hasn’t yet felt the sting of rejection often enough to stop putting forth his ideas. Then, it gave me an excuse to refer to the delicious Johnny Depp in “Finding Neverland” - the scene where he dances with his dog, Porthos, explaining that he is a dancing bear in the circus. Little Peter dismisses the act by saying,
“That’s absurd. He’s just a dog”… and in his most gorgeous accent, Johnny Depp stops horrified….”just a dog? Porthos dreams of being a bear, and you want to shatter those dreams by saying he’s “just” a dog? What a horrible candle-snuffing word. That’s like saying, “He can’t climb that mountain, he’s just a man”, or “That’s not a diamond, it’s just a rock.”
Just.
Filed under Different Thinking, Musings/p
February 12, 2007 at 4:18 pm ·
Avoid the ruts - they are so hard to get out of . The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth
When was the last time you took a different way to work, tried a new recipe, met a new friend? It’s so easy (and comforting) to rely on the familiarity of routine yet in the context of creativity and innovation, it can be toxic! The cliches “if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got” and “Insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result” are other ways of describing being stuck in a rut. In the bush, ruts were the result of people who drove on the road when it was wet (see Outback Tip Number 2). We could also see the ruts as pathways trodden by others, where we just copy ideas and try to follow other’s recipes for success rather than listen quietly to our inner voice and map our unique path. This week, take some time to identify the current “ruts” you’re in and set yourself at least one new experience each day – as small as having something different for breakfast, or as big as resigning from the job you are unhappy in!
Filed under Outback Wisdom, Mud Map for Aussie Leaders, Different Thinking/p
What a privilege that it is “my turn at last” to host the magical, practical, life-changing and unable to be categorised book “Life Is A Verb” as it tours the world! 
