Bits of Life Missed Worth Exploring
Three words bring fear into our hearts. Change, difference, & doubt. They make us stop in our tracks. Fooling us into being more fragile than we truly are. They make us hesitate. Watch from the sidelines. Look behind us. Hold on to what we had. When we feel any of these words we become uneasy, unsure, and tentative. It’s almost as if these are signals for imminent death. What we fail to...
We glorify leadership as being a special quality that only a few possess. While true some have more experience than others, it is not something magical or necessarily rare. One can learn many aspects of building leadership skills once you are aware of them. One of the least mentioned is that of preparation. Our stories about leadership tend to focus on outcomes. Results. Grand plans that come to...
Sometimes the unexpected can surprise us in a very positive way. I heard a graffiti artist. Erik Wahl, speak at a conference I was attending a few years ago. His hands full of paint, music, and video interrupting his speech, together with his words of insight provided everyone with the value of the unexpected. During his talk he painted three incredible art pieces, with paint brushes and his...
Understanding makes us too certain fooling us into thinking that our understanding is complete. Not knowing that to truly understand means to discover the rough edges, around what we think, believe, and see. Filling them in with new bits of knowledge, over and over, that continue to expand the picture that we see. Powerfully changing our perspective over time with what we thought we first...
Entropy is a scientific term to describe the dissipation of order and energy in any physical system. Going from order to disorder naturally. It happens to all of us in our lives. A simple example to describe entropy is when we clean our room or office what happens? More things slowly are left here or there and then guess what? There now is a mess without us even trying needing us to clean it all...
We tend to think highly of people who either get things done or can figure things out. Thinking vs doing are clearly two different skills. Someone recently chose to use the descriptors “passive” for thinking and “active” for doing. I found this interesting but it did leave me unsettled. My intuition is that thinking and doing are symbiotic. They need to live together...
New Year’s Eve is truly a night of hope, joy, and celebration. As we get ready for the countdown to a New Year, we rush to think about what we want the New Year to bring. What we miss in these festivities are the nuggets of wisdom that are hidden within us from the year now ending. Where only reflection, awareness, and self-assessment can uncover them if we take the time to listen. Simple...
[First Published: December 2014] New Year’s is a time for resolutions. Making lists of things we hope to do in the New Year. The forgotten ingredient necessary to succeed when boasting about our resolutions is the need for us to change in some way. To do something different than we have done in the past. To start something we have always wanted to do but never have. Without realizing it...