Uncommon Wisdom

Are You the Captain of Your Soul? The Choices One Makes

2010-08-10T10:38:00.000-07:00

In the poem, "Invictus" by English poet, William Ernest Henley, the last stanza reads as follows:

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

South African President Nelson Mandela found solace and affirmation in this poem during his decades in Robben Island Prison as others controlled his circumstances and even whether he lived or died. He made a choice that no one would strip his dignity nor take away his mastery of his own soul. He would own his decisions and actions and never blame them upon external circumstance.

Just a few decades earlier in the hell of Auschwitz, Dr. Viktor Frankl had found refuge from the otherworldly hell by cultivating his inner life. He also resisted the temptation to allow circumstances to determine the choices he made for himself.

In his book, Man's Search For Meaning, he speaks of the brutality, the deprivation of freedom, sleep and food and the temptation to fall into hopelessness. Underneath it all was a fight for survival that laid open one's soul.

"The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity -even under the most difficult circumstances- to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult decision may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his suffering or not."

Who knows what the future holds. A few of us will need to face circumstances as bleak as those faced by Nelson Mandela or Viktor Frankl, but most of us will not. We will be tested on a soul level when faced with divorce or substance abuse. We will be challenged when we have an opportunity to take unfair advantage of a situation to pocket extra money. We will lower our standards, behave selfishly or be creatively unethical because of the pressures of a situation with consequences.

Just as the fight for survival or unjust imprisonment could be used as an excuse for rage and the unleashing of evil, we will have good reasons for our own failures to captain our souls. I am not writing for the evil nor am I writing for the perfect.

In July of 2002, my wife of 16 years asked for a divorce. While we had been struggling in our relationship for a period of time; I still loved her, was committed to our marriage and cared deeply about our three children. This divorce demand was a relief in terms of getting the issue out into the open but was also an internal seismic event. I began my education in divorce and sought counseling help to gain both assistance and perspective. This unwanted destruction of my marriage became the most significant opportunity for me to become and remain the captain of my soul but it was a struggle to do so.

Divorce in America is common and has become a spectator sport. Many people will take sides and then encourage the participant they are rooting for to be selfish or to dole out punishment. It is hard not to feel victimized by circumstances that you can not control. The disruption of your life and the losses to what you've built are real, even if you make it all the way through the process while doing your best to be a good person. It is even harder to regain your sense of optimism and inner peace. Inner peace is the compass, the source of bearing, and optimism for the future is the prevailing wind, the power to move forward, for the captain of the soul.

We did finally divorce after five years of separation, a period in which our children moved most of the way to adulthood. The failure remains a disappointment, but today I primarily give weight to my failure to provide my children with something better. I truly wanted to provide my children with something better than my own parents failed marriage and the broken apart family that resulted. Alas, all that one can control is one's choices and subsequent actions. My choices and actions will need to suffice as a small legacy to my children.

I have also chosen to remain the captain of my soul in professional situations. Years ago, I attended a meeting where the executives were discussing upcoming projects. The head of facilities reviewed a project he had been working on for six months and was about to implement to install new electronic door hardware on about 350 doors in our major facility for a cost of $200,000. The hardware was on its way and the installers were set to go. At the time of the meeting I had no responsibility for the facility. Because of past work, I knew that at least some of the doors had fire proof cores that contained asbestos. I spoke up and raised the issue. I asked if they had tested the doors. My boss very much wanted the project to move forward and began to voice his disapproval. In an agitated manner he dismissed my concerns and told the manager to go forward with the project. I strongly objected until they agreed to put the project on hold until the doors were all tested.

After the meeting, my boss invited me into his office and chastised me for both having "higher" standards and for imposing those standards on others. Who did I think I was to be setting standards for others? He demanded to know. I had delayed a project and embarrassed him in a meeting, but I had also prevented the inadvertent release of asbestos particles into the air due to sawing or drilling into those doors. My relationship with this person slowly and steadily spiraled downward from that point and led to me leaving a good position and decent paying job, but I remained the captain of my soul.

This is not about perfection. I lay no such claim as I am clearly a faulty human being not a divine entity.

It is more of a life stance. The leader, the creator, the artist, the builder all must choose not to be the victim of circumstance. My life is not a "reaction" it is rather a chosen "action".

The captain knows that the ocean is unpredictable and unforgiving, beautiful and sometimes deadly but the ocean is also the source of life and container where life is lived.

To be the master of your fate and be the captain of your soul, you must embrace the suffering that comes your way and remain brave, unselfish and dignified in its very presence. Be bowed to God but not to your own circumstances.

Are You Living an Unexamined Life? The Journey

2010-07-06T09:03:00.000-07:00

If Socrates contention that an unexamined life is not worth living, is correct. What is an appropriate response for a thoughtful and compassionate person?

I am at a point, and have been for about a year, where I am thoughtfully examining both the outcomes and patterns of my life. While the journey of my life has been for the most part enjoyable, there have been times of intense emotional pain and occasional disappointment.

At 52, I find myself feeling very different than I did in my 20s and 30s, which is to be expected. However, I also find myself feeling quite different than I did in my early 40s, and that awareness is intriguing to me. How can I be so much more at peace with reality than I was ten years ago? In many ways, the outer world is not better, whether looking at my home life, my finances or my current professional endeavors; it is more of a struggle today. Between divorce and my three children entering into college and adulthood, my reserves have been depleted. I also lost a significant amount of money as the direct result of the economic collapse of 2008 both in terms of investments and professionally.

While plugging away day-to-day in a small consulting firm and teaching a couple of college courses, the economic pause of the last two years, has thus far limited my rewards. I have had more potential business relationships end prematurely than blossom in the past three years and I do look at how my actions limited those relationships. On my own part, I turned down two offers that were not quite right but workable as I could not get the other party to see the full value of my long-term participation in their ventures. I have been confronted with ethical dilemmas, bullying and unkempt promises. While I have stood my ground, I have not fully defended myself and my legal rights.

During this same period of time, home life has been difficult with problems thrust upon me by others as well as the problems that were the direct result of choices I have made. I have had to deal with a few volatile situations and keep them from escalating, which is both humbling and frustrating. I could take on a cynical view of the world and yet I have not.

One of my sources of wisdom is Buckminster Fuller, a genius but also a man who dealt with failure and serious life problems. At a low point in his life, he came to the conclusion that all he had learned in the past should be set aside. The patterns of the past had led him to his current low point, so what good were they? He vowed to go forward living his life as a fifty year experiment, that is judge each situation with openness and attention.

I began attempting this philosophy of living nearly a decade ago. It is has allowed me to be both true to myself and accepting of consequences during a tumultuous period. I am not harsh with myself but observant. Sometimes my actions are the cause of a result that I wanted or did not want. Yet often it is clear that my influence on the behavior of others is quite limited and that my direct actions did not change the results at all.

Steven Covey in the book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, speaks to the three circles emanating outward from an individual. The first circle is the circle of control. It is a relatively small circle and mastery of it provides benefits. Those benefits however are limited. The next circle going outward is the circle of influence, which is both the circle demanding the most skill and the circle with the most potential for creating. The third and outermost circle is the circle of concern. This third circle is a trap for most of us as we become concerned about all kinds of causes, issues and problems that lie outside of our circle of influence.

I have worked during the past decade as well on testing my circle of concern against my circle of influence. I have done this not just on a political or professional issue but also with regards to my inner circle of friends and family. Anyone with children, even adult children, knows that our concern for our children nearly always exceeds our influence upon them in the short term. Children teach us that the most powerful aspects of our influence often lag our actions-behaviors-words by years.

Let's get back to Socrates. I do not contend that I have perfected self-examination but point out merely that I have attempted it and continue to do so. With regards to the more subtle meaning of Socrates statement, I have the following take. By examining ones life it becomes possible to true up ones values and beliefs against ones actions. By examining the results that occur over time it becomes possible to see truth as reflected back by the world. Self worth is built by the iterations of being aware of one's self and in responding not merely reacting to life. Since the death of our body and the loss of all possessions is the end result of this life, maybe taking our own unique journey is the point of examination.

A Walk on the Edge of the Woods

2010-06-27T07:43:00.000-07:00

There are more animals living on the edge of the woods than there are in the deep woods or in the meadow. This zone provides both an abundance and a diversity of food as well as ample protective cover. In the meadow, raptors fly above and silhouettes bring the attention of every predator. In the deep woods, the lack of sunlight on the forest floor creates a zone that provides little sustenance; animals climb the trees or cluster near streams and lakes where there are openings to nutrients.

In our society, the public life is out in the meadows and the media provides attention to those that dwell there. While rewards can accrue to those that live in the meadows, there are raptors above and predators of every type examining the silhouettes. Do you seek a public life? If so, what drives your desire? Does attention translate to inner worth?

Are you one of those people that would rather hide in the deep woods? Do you do this for protection or is it an act of rejection? In many ways there is a peacefulness and wholeness to time spent in the deep woods and I would encourage everyone to choose to withdraw inward from time to time. However, complete disengagement is a path without sufficient nutrition for the soul and the ego.
I choose to walk on the edge of the woods. I purposefully wander into the meadow from time to time and retreat into the deep woods periodically. Some times I walk the edge of the woods alone and some times I walk it with others.

A creative life occurs both in the deep woods as there is an inner creative act that precedes any outward creative act and in the sunlight of the meadow where the creation is exposed to the often harsh mid-day sun.
Too much time in the meadow often triggers a defensive rather than creative response to life. Is it any wonder that sunlight provides needed vitamins, then the skin tans to a deeper color but beyond that the long term results are destruction of the skin and poisoning of the body. People and organizations that stake themselves in the meadow of attention often lose the sheen of health and become merely bleached bones of their former selves.
Whether hiding in the deep woods or staked in the meadow, choose to expend your energy and walk at the edge of the woods. Bring balance back to your life, not by taking on more but by shedding the imbalance. Return to the creative path and actively create again.

Vision - Leads to Awards and Recognition (Boston Globe)

2010-05-20T08:10:00.000-07:00

Reissue: A year ago, I wrote about my vision to create a retreat center and my projects at Kripalu. I just wanted to share some of the recognition given to four years of thinking, selling, planning, managing and sweat that I did there.

My Project at Kripalu was just featured in an article in the Boston Globe entitled Kripalu Center Dorm Radiates Simple Sustainability.

The project was also recently awarded an AIA Housing Design Award for 2010 and my thanks go to Peter Rose and his team at Rose + Guggenheimer (now Peter Rose + Partners).
photo courtesy of Rose + Partners

You can also read about the analysis and financial justification required to build such a beautiful green project at Metamorphosis Management Group (white paper) -and- read about how I built the team that designed and built this project employing the principles of Engagement and Respect at my blog on business solutions.

Here's the story of where it all began.

In 1993 during a workshop on Empowering Leadership, I was working along with my clients on developing a personal vision. There for the first time, I wrote about creating a retreat center. I had never heard of Kripalu at the time. But in 1996, three years later a former colleague from International Paper, Belinda Bothwick became the first outsider to be hired as Executive Director of Kripalu and I eventually received a phone call asking for help.

I took on Kripalu as project, so that I could learn about retreat centers and stayed 3 years, becoming the COO. I left Kripalu for five years and then returned to work upon strategic planning and development of both the operating educational and service businesses and the infrastructure of both the facilities and the technology. Although I resigned my full time position in April of 2008, I stayed on part-time through May of 2009 to complete the large construction projects which I have been working on for four years. Like all personal visions that are successful, they look now in reality, as I have imagined them for years.

In 2007, we began construction by moving a road and the adjacent parking lots to accommodate the Annex building. Once the road was moved and site cleared, I asked the civil engineers to have the Annex's corners staked out on the ground. The surveyors marked and placed the stakes. I walked to the stake marking the northeast corner of the building. I moved over a few feet to stand on the spot where one day there would be a beautiful enclosed walkway and above it five stories of bedrooms. When I looked out toward the Stockbridge bowl (Lake Mahkeenac) the view was wrong from what I had visualized from the building plans. The building had existed in my minds eye for years before we built it. I asked the civil engineers to check the stakes and they found out that they were off by seven feet. Only seven feet, but seven feet which blocked the view with an existing building.

The Annex building is an exceptional green building using Integrated Design methodology. It employs a radiant heating and cooling system for both the building as a whole and individually for each guest room. Day-lighting systems are designed into the building to allow the low winter sun into the building and to block the high summer sun and heat gain. The hallways of the building are "venturi tubes" and will provide passive cooling without wind. All in All, the building as built uses 45% of the energy of typical new construction of this type and can accept geo-thermal in the future.

I have posted an end of construction slide show on slideshare.com as well as my presentation on this project at the Nation Council for Science and the Environment annual conference in Washington, DC. (NCSE 2010:The New Green Economy.)

Learning Skills: Counterfeit Thinking versus Critical Thinking

2010-05-13T11:43:00.000-07:00

Back in the mid 1990s, I contributed regularly at an annual conference on the teaching of problem-solving and thinking skills with the moniker, Problem Solving Across the Curriculum (PSAC) that was the brainchild of a friend of mine Dr. Daniel K. Apple, the President of Pacific Crest. The concept of the conference, which attracted mostly educators along with a few business executives and consultants, was that there is a common set of learning skills required to solve problems that is applicable across and independent of the specific subject matter being taught.

At the time, I was heavily engaged in corporate consulting and training. We were teaching problem-solving under the umbrella of Total Quality Management and World Class Manufacturing methods, the precursor to today's Lean and Six Sigma methods for problem solving and process improvement.

At the third PSAC Conference, I was a panelist at the plenary session on the topic of thinking skills along with Dr. Donald Bishko and Dr. Gary A. Woditsch co-author of The Thoughtful Teacher's Guide to Teaching Thinking Skills.

One of the topics we grappled with was whether or not you could in fact teach thinking skills. Dr. Woditsch contended that with few exceptions, individuals were capable of further development of their thinking skills. He countered the premise of the question by pointing out that we have “always” been teaching thinking skills as a byproduct of teaching subject matter.

Furthermore, Dr. Woditsch offered that two things that confused the issue. They were the lack of assessment around the effectiveness of the development of thinking skills -and- the ability of individual learners to develop coping strategies in place of thinking skills to produce "counterfeit" results. For example, rather than actually learning a skill, one can simply memorize a pattern and as long as the circumstances do not change significantly the pattern would yield a similar result.

My son Will was developing these coping strategies in 1st grade when it came to math. His teacher handed out worksheets where you first did the math in a “box” and then based upon the answers, colored the “box” to produce a pattern. William simply, figured out the pattern and skipped nearly all the math, as evidenced by the high percentage of incorrect answers in his work that was colored flawlessly.

There are many examples of counterfeit thinking and its limitations. Have you ever worked for someone who was promoted to being a manager because they were the best at following orders or getting tasks done? They often make dismal managers because the underlying pattern for success has changed. Even successful managers and businesses fail when the pattern of the marketplace or regulatory environment changes.

Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." Counterfeit thinking, the attempt to follow patterns that worked in previous and similar situations, is exactly what Einstein is speaking of.

The episode of the Simpson’s where a lobbyist suggests to Mayor Quimby and the community leaders that all Springfield needs to cure its problems is a “Monorail”, mocks the counterfeit thinking so often employed by politicians in their “pork barrel” funding of projects that have zero possibility of producing the results promised but follow the pattern of similar projects done elsewhere.

To read more about Seattle's Monorail, Check out Transit Miracle or Urban Toy.

As opposed to “counterfeit” thinking, the term "critical thinking" takes thinking in a focused and diagnostic direction as it means "thinking" directed at finding and examining that which is fundamental to understanding something. Critical thinking is about finding patterns not following patterns. The leap from thinking about something -to- developing an understanding of something is the same as the difference between standing on a pool deck and looking at an object on the bottom -and- diving into the pool, swimming to the bottom and examining the object down there.

The primary tool in critical thinking is "asking questions". When you work at developing "content rich" questions about something, you must examine and inventory that which you already know or assume that you know. In working out which questions need to be asked you seek questions that when answered will further your understanding.

Counterfeit thinking will lead you to dead ends and cliff faces but critical thinking will open doors and minds.

Power to Destroy Always Greater than the Power to Create

2010-04-27T15:06:00.000-07:00

While we spend much of our time attempting to create what matters most or build upon the things we have invested our love, time or money into; it is none-the-less important to remember that at any point in time, our ability to destroy exceeds our ability to create.

This power dynamic, unfortunately appears to be a universal truth. For any individual or group, the instantaneous capacity to destroy exceeds the instantaneous capacity to create.
It takes at least two people to build a relationship, yet only one to destroy it. Twenty years of good will can be undermined in an afternoon. It's kind of scary when you think about all the implications of this principle. Relationship building and the development of intimacy take time and trust, there really is no short-cut. Once one person in a relationship gives up, for whatever reason a long-term relationship is in deep danger. The power is now completely in the hands of the person willing to destroy the relationship not the person attempting to save it.
If you read the 9-11 Commission report, the most stunning thing is how a group of about 30 people spent two years and about $500,000 to put together and pull-off an event that took 3,000 lives, caused $10 Billion in direct damages, shattered our sense of security and unleashed a decade of war. Look at the imbalance of their effort to destroy and our efforts to restore what was lost.
I am not writing about this topic to depress your senses or call upon your destructive impulses but rather to highlight the challenge that creators face when they begin to make progress and have in-fact empowered themselves. When trying to create, you will face many roadblocks and negative feedback. Do not let impatience or frustration draw out your anger.
When you feel angry, regardless of cause, it is always best to carefully choose your response. You may need to take a breather by going for a run or walk to avoid reacting to the situation.
Anger at its best is a call to energize for self-defense but anger at its worst is reckless lashing out that usually inflicts far more damage to our creative efforts and relationships than it dies to our target.
In other articles where I examined developing a personal vision, the focal point of our creative efforts, it was important to note that creating a vision is choice with consequences. In fact, in order to create, you must accept all of the consequences of your choice.
Let's return to anger, the power to destroy and the creative empowered path.
When angry, it is important to revisit both the long-term results that are encompassed within your vision -and- to examine the values and beliefs which inform your spiritual path. When the impulse to destroy rears its ugly head, it is more important to take a stroll on your spiritual path than it is to force progress or undermine your vision.

Confidence or Arrogance: What to do with Feedback

2010-04-19T11:42:00.000-07:00

A leader, inventor or artist must have a strong ego to persevere in the face of failures, mistakes and indifference. If you attempt to create what matters most you will receive feedback in many forms and sometimes the feedback will be in the deafening silence of apathy. When you are pushing forward, some will see your actions as confidence and others will see them as arrogance.

To ignore feedback is folly and yet to be weighted down by feedback is to disempower yourself and surely fail. There are several planes upon which critical examination of feedback is important among these are structural, values and financial.

Structural feedback is feedback focused upon whether your approach is naturally delivering the desired result. The focus here is not upon the opinions proffered but rather gaining understanding of what is working and to what degree is it working. To assess what is working, you need data whether it is observed or measured. Your own honest observations may, in fact, be the only available data early on and at points in your creative process.

When the developed parts of your intended creation exist primarily in your head, you need a thinking discipline to conduct experiments. These "thinking" or gedanken experiments were used by Einstein to test his theories. It was often decades before his could be tested with actual experiments due to both cost and technological capability. Both Eliyahu Goldratt in the book, Theory of Constraints and Gerald Nadler and Shozo Hibino in their book Breakthrough Thinking, have outlined approaches to conducting thinking experiments that are useful for both developing and testing solutions..

On the values plane, both your approach and the consequences must be examined in terms of your values. Here you must take in data that is direct and indirect as well as data which is immediate and data spaced over time. When you are creating, your ultimate success depends on the sum of all results including those which are unintended.

Many otherwise successful leaders and creators are undone by the long-term ripple of values flaws and their unintended consequences. Each creative idea has a window of opportunity for its fruition and this window narrows when value-based standards of behavior, methods and outcomes are lowered.

The final plane for examination at this time is the financial plane over which you are working. Given the rate at which the resources available to you are being consumed, how much time do you have to work with? Given the estimated cost of the next step or the next experiment, can you afford to take it? If not now, when?

Actions and experiments that are cost prohibitive may need to curtailed, modified or only conducted in your head.

Whether you are confident, will depend upon your ability to filter and handle input and then keep moving forward. Arrogance will need to be kept in check by honestly assessing the feedback and revisiting the values plane examination.

Materialism: Salt, Fat, Sugar and Limits

2010-04-05T09:39:00.000-07:00

Human-beings naturally consume too much salt, sugar and fat when it is plentiful. Science tells us that these three items were both needed for survival -and- were generally scarce in the natural environment during most of human existence. Therefore, we are genetically designed to detect and enjoy the taste of foods containing salt, sugar or fat to help ensure that we seek and ingest at least the minimal quantities for survival.

The dominant feature of snack food is their content of sugar/salt/fat. Remember the Lay's Potato Chip add, "Bet you can't eat just one"? It is possibly the most truthful add slogan of all time. It is true that once, that salty chip hits your tongue, you do crave more.

What happens when we eat too much sugar, salt or fat? Data suggests that we increase our chances of diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity and heart attacks if we consume too much of these items amongst other things. This provides good long term reasons not to overindulge in these items and yet our taste buds and cravings make limiting these items a hard thing to do.

Materialism is similar to salt, fat and sugar as a dominant driver in human behavior. If truth is, “what works in the world”, then materialism is partially true. Materialism run amok causes social, spiritual and well-being problems just as too much sugar or fat would cause a health problem.

The partial truth of materialism is similar to the eating of potato chips. The first bit of material wealth does meet our survival needs and provide some security. The next bit brings us some comfort. The bit after that brings us a little luxury and then a little more. After a while there is a disconnection between the desire to have more material wealth and the unintended consequences and limitations of material wealth.

Material wealth can be consumed, invested in the ownership of assets or given away to friends, family or others such as charitable organizations. The government will take its fair share of your material wealth as well. I am not opposed to the accumulation of material wealth. A common quote that is misquoted is "money is the root of all evil" when in fact the truer quote is, "the love of money is the root of all evil".

Materialism raises the accumulation of material wealth above all other things as it tends to assign value only according to direct financial measurements of income and assets. With the great support of advertising, personal attributes are associated with the possession of certain material goods. "Success" is defined by the car you drive, the town you live in or the clothes you wear without any consideration to your sense of happiness, peacefulness or self-fulfillment through creative expression.

The path to building a legacy is a three-fold path as first consideration is given to the focal point of your creative expression, “creating what matters most” and second consideration is given to, living a life that affirms your beliefs and values on a daily basis. These are never separated from but purposefully placed above the third essential ingredient which is earning enough money to support your efforts.

Yoga and Buddha: Connection and Disconnection on Your Path

2010-03-12T09:29:00.000-08:00

I have found it interesting that the focus of the two great spiritual practices to come out of India, Buddhist meditation and the practice of Yoga have such a surface level difference in focus.
Suffering and transcendence of suffering are the focal point of much Buddhist meditative practice whereas the focal point of yoga is yoking yourself to the world and your experience. In Buddhism a focus on your ability to disconnect yourself from your personal experience is emphasized. In yoga a focus on fully connecting yourself to your experience and manipulating your experience is emphasized.

I know that there is much in common with both practices from a philosophical and cultural context but they take very different approaches to get to similar destinations. Connection and disconnection is a common theme whether we are compared to a wave in an ocean, temporarily separate but eternally connected or we conduct experiments using posture, breath and focus.
I find Buddhist practice to share more common ground with the practice of the Catholicism that I was raised in than most yogic practice with the exception of Bhakti Yoga. I am not specifically speaking of the Catholic Mass or Liturgy but rather that of devotional practice.
In the past twenty years, as I have worked to find my place in the world and to live each day along a spiritual path, I have softened in my judgment of others and in organized religions and have focused more upon the prayers that connect me to God or the divine nature of the world, a purposeful disconnection from what is occurring here and now.
But I have also purposely connected to the here and now by more directly living by a set of expressed values.

Risking to Win: Irrational Risk Avoidance and Real Risk

2010-02-21T11:13:00.000-08:00

Why does it seem as though too much of our psychic energy and some of our efforts are spent protecting ourselves from perceived risks rather than producing something of benefit? I call a purposeful risk, taken to achieve meaningful progress in creating a vision affirming result, "risking to win".
Although you may feel anxiety or stress when risking to win, it is purposeful risk and when successful worth the investment.
Perceived risks result in more worry than action but they often result in misplaced action. Popular media is a big part of it but human nature is also a large player. The media uses "threats" to get our attention in a world of information overload. Every storm has become a potential "storm of the century" to keep us watching and we are promised that "poisons in our own homes are killing us", but we must stay up till eleven O'clock to find out what they are.

When it comes to human nature, familiarity breeds comfort and comfort diminishes the sense of fear. We tend to grossly over value the risk posed to us by something that is new or little understood. We also are more likely to fear something sudden to those things that threaten us slowly over time. The same principles apply in business, but I will take them on in my business oriented blog: On the Case: Business Solutions rather than in this space.

Speaking of fear, I have a master’s degree in Applied and Mathematical Statistics, and lot of student's have related to me their fear of that one course in statistics they need for their degree. But given my background, I am not afraid to delve into the data and test my own assumptions. I am 51, so I decided to take a good look at the population data from the US Census and the death data from the Center for Disease Control for the most recent data for people aged 45 to 54. (Each age group is different in its death rate and the causes of those deaths.)

When it comes to death, other than meditating or praying to transcend my fears of the finite number of days that my body will survive on this planet, is there some meaningful data to guide my actions or reduce my anxiety?

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) publishes cause of death statistics. In the most recent data available online (2004) there were 180,000 deaths among people aged 45 - 54, my group. The total population of this group was 41.5 million people. (Therefore, 4,150 deaths in the CDC data equates to approximately 1 death in 10,000 people.)The survival rate my age group was 9,956 out of 10,000 or 99.56%.
Cancer at 50,000 and cardiovascular disease at 47,000 were by far the leading causes of death with chronic liver disease next at 7,700. The old adage of eating healthy food, exercising regularly, avoiding smoking and drinking alcohol in moderation seem to be the most important actions that you could take to move your survival rate upward.

All accidental deaths were totaled to 19,675 with 8,200 deaths due to accidental poisoning and 6,600 due to automobile accidents. I do not have the information on the poisoning data but suspect that it's primarily related to medication and it was a surprise to me. (This probably leads to the spate of local news stories when it is published annually.) In the intentional category the leader was suicide at 7,400.

At age 50, the real risks to our health and safety come from our lifestyle, our household and things that we are comfortable with such as driving our car around town. The violence, disasters and exotic diseases that the news is filled with total less than 2 deaths in 10,000. That is, if they were eliminated our survival rate would move from 99.56% to 99.58%. They are neither likely nor are they a significant relative risk factor.
Personalization of one's experience often distorts our assessment of risk as well as our fears. Airplane travel on a mile traveled basis is incredibly safer than automobile travel. We tend to drive every day and are in control of our own vehicle, so even reckless drivers tend to pass off being lucky as skillfulness and are comfortable with their own driving.

In relation to creating our own legacy and "risking to win", we also tend to associate going along with the group or what's popular with being safe. Employees in a large multinational corporation are far more likely to lose their jobs due to a business decision that has nothing to do with their work or the success of their work group or business unit than someone working in a small owner-operated business. Small businesses are at a greater risk in the short-term, but the risk is in the open, is being actively dealt with and your personal efforts can have direct tangible impact.

The mistaken belief that one is "safer" when you go to work everyday in a beautiful office with well dressed people is the same mistake people make when they believe they are safe in a crowded night-club or stadium. As long as everything goes well, you probably are but when there is a crisis, you are less safe and may be damaged by the panic of those around you.

I will visit risk again in this journey to gaining wisdom and creating a meaningful legacy. I would ask you to reflect upon your fears and evaluate the underlying risks. Since there is a finite end to our bodies, we live most fully when we "risk to win" rather than merely try to avoid risk or worry.

Spiritual Path: Develoment of Personality or Character?

2010-02-08T13:27:00.000-08:00

Several of my previous blog topics; an orientation towards solutions, technology connects and disconnects and being of value, have gotten me thinking about a concept from a book I read in 1990, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven R. Covey. The concept that I was thinking about this week was the difference between character development and personality development.

Covey contended that much of what was going on in the self-improvement field in the 1980's was really oriented towards personality development whereas back in an earlier time in America, people such as Benjamin Franklin espoused character development. Character development's goal is to cultivate a virtuous life and be of service to others. Personality development's goal is to sell yourself to others for personal benefit. Development of both types has benefits in the short term but our spiritual growth demands we follow the basics of character development.

In many ways, the entertainment industry, "Hollywood", is the most successful industry in the United States over the past 100 years. I am not speaking in terms of financial performance here but rather in terms of cultural dominance. There are plenty of industries which have been more profitable, but the entertainment industry has successfully positioned itself on top psychologically, due to its ability to bestow celebrity. It has made celebrity the most desired attribute in our society ahead of even wealth.

Celebrity is an extrapolation of personality development as everyone knows that celebrities have a public "persona" that is different than the actual person and their private life. It is clear with a celebrity that it is the image of the person that is being sold, marketed and the image is what is really attractive to others. It is no wonder that personality development gurus such as Tony Robbins have intertwined their own celebrity with their methods of helping other's develop.

This past October, there were three fatalities during a sweat lodge ceremony being conducted by James Arthur Ray at the Angel Valley Retreat Center in Sedona, Arizona. Mr. Ray was running a "Spiritual Warrior" retreat where participants paid $9,695 per person to spend a long weekend with the self-help guru and author. Mr. Ray gained celebrity through his appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Larry King Live and the Today show. He fled to his home in California while the participants in his Warrior program were still heading to the hospital in Flagstaff. Mr. Ray has been charged with three counts of manslaughter.

I do not know Mr. Ray, what I know about his personality is that he presented himself very well and built a successful business based upon people wanting to spend time with him. What I know about his character is his reaction to illness and death during his ceremony.

I have not sought development from people who are out on the self-promotion tour. I have mostly sought to foster my development from people who live both a principled and accomplished life. I am indeed interested in principles and accomplishments rather than merely one or the other.

Shin-ichi Suzuki, whom I have mentioned in earlier blogs, believed that character was a skill (talent) to be nurtured and developed in others. While Suzuki gained world-wide recognition through the training and development of young musicians, he always saw his primary focus as developing fine human beings. In the books "Nurtured by Love" and "Ability Development from Age Zero", Suzuki writes with deep passion about how teachers and parents can work together to develop a fine character in their children. It will not surprise you that character is best developed in children when adults model values as they work towards results.

I would urge each of you reading this blog to choose to develop your character as you work towards creating results. Do this, even if there is less to show in the short term. When you work hard towards achievement with a process and discipline that respects people and honors values there will be an enduring quality to your accomplishments. You will build yourself as you build your creation and be a full person not a persona.

A Solution Orientation: What Floats Your Boat?

2010-01-31T07:26:00.000-08:00

When you are confronted with a challenge, do you set your mental tent around the problem or do you set the tent around the solution?

One of the most amazing things to discover is that the most powerful solutions are not merely the opposite, or negation, of the problem. Another key concept, is that problems are usually the downstream result of a previous solution.

I first learned how to more rigorously and effectively apply these solution oriented approaches to my work after reading and studying the book, Breakthrough Thinking: Why We Must Change The Way We Solve Problems and the Seven Ways to Achieve This by Gerald Nadler and Shozo Hibino back in the late 80s and early 90s.

A solution orientation is always broader and longer in scope, results oriented and anticipatory of future problems - whose seeds are planted along with the new solution. A solution orientation is akin to playing chess where past play and the current board both provide data and each potential move can be evaluated in terms of the future. In fact, players who can not imagine and evaluate future scenarios will quickly lose interest in chess.

A sinking boat is a problem but what is the best solution? The solution orientation discerns between a penetration to the hull of the boat, leaking seams or joints in the hull of the boat, poor boat design, misuse or neglect of the boat and using the wrong boat for the task. While you still may need to pump quickly and get the sinking boat back to harbor, the most long term leverage comes from understanding what you are trying to accomplish and the best solution for achieving that. If you pay attention to boats you will quickly notice the size, shape and materials used in building the boat are all in anticipation of boat function.

A boat floats as long as the volume of water that the boat displaces weighs less than the weight of the water itself. More simply, all boats are like cups, if the weight of the cup is less than a cupful of water it floats. You can float a cup in a sink full of water and slowly fill the cup with weight until it sinks. Some cups weigh so much, even empty, or are shaped in a way that they do not float or can not stay afloat. A boat is a solution for staying afloat but whether or not you need a boat and what type of boat you need is a function of what you are trying to accomplish.

I like the boat analogy because nearly everyone as a child floated and sunk objects while playing. This experience allows us to see that some things work and some things do not and it's not based upon the personality, character or intelligence of the people involved. All the praying, begging and encouragement could not save a toy boat loaded down with too many rocks. A true solution works because it is in harmony with the true nature of the world in which we live. Much of the wasted effort and frustration in our lives is the direct result of trying to force a result that was not in harmony with the truth or true nature of the world.

If one wants to enjoy a day of running whitewater, a boat, probably a kayak is a great solution. But if the result you want is to move goods from one side of a river to another, a bridge may be a far better solution than the best designed ferry. If you want to move goods and people across a shipping channel, a tunnel may be a far better solution than a bridge. The solution orientation, as mentioned earlier, creates a bigger space for evaluating alternatives when alternatives are in response to desired results not merely the negation of an existing problem.

Organizations and people, whose sole orientation is the problems they face, may both effectively handle current problems and entrap themselves in a world where much less is accomplished and the end result is failure. This occurs because they solve their problems by elimination of the problem itself.

Negation problem-solving is like a snow plow, plowing a road in an endless winter. At first plowing is easy and slowly the snow banks build up. Eventually, the snow banks tower above the height of the plow and the plow merely pushes snow around in the canyon of its own making. If the snow keeps coming eventually the weight of the snow trapped between the banks is t0o great to push.

The true nature of the world contains both harmony and conflict. In saying yes, we are also saying no to other alternatives, yes and no are inseparable.

In his book, The Path of Least Resistance, Robert Fritz declares that "structure determines performance". Our solutions when implemented create structure whether physical or virtual and these structures support the desired result to a degree. Excellent solutions naturally produce the desired result for long periods of time without creating significant new problems. Excellent solutions leverage your strengths across "what works" in the world.

No amount of strength can overcome a boat which does not float because water and gravity without effort or regard to time keep pulling the boat downward and eventually the boat succumbs.

Visualization is an important part of solution orientation as the gulf between current problems (reality) and the desired result (solution) may only be bridged in the mind initially. Some excellent solutions require a number of steps. Each step solution addresses current reality with an implementable solution. Each step fully anticipates a future solution and naturally produces both interim results and provides leverage for achieving the future solution. This path of leveraged solutions is the antithesis of the snow plow analogy and is more akin to building bridges, where sometimes you need to build an island or a tunnel to connect two bridges as a one bridge solution will not work.

This orientation applies to both the spiritual path we take through life and the relationships we have with others but I will take those on in future blogs.

Community: Technology Connects and Disconnects

2010-01-24T10:12:00.000-08:00

Reissue: I am just about done with a new blog about using technology to connect with resources to help you create and like-minded folks. Here's a take on the double-edged sword of a globally connected world.

One of the legs of creating legacy is using appropriate technology to assist you directly in your creative efforts and to connect you with others in your effort to create your vision.

Technology has connected the globe primarily through advances in transportation and communication. This past November, I traveled to Arizona for a week. I spent three days camping and hiking in the Grand Canyon with my oldest son Andrew and three days working in an office in my hotel suite on the sale of one of my client companies to its employees.

I hosted conference calls with participants in Florida, Ohio and Utah but they could have been anywhere. When I returned home, I posted photos of my Grand Canyon hike on Facebook where I shared them with my family and friends, some of whom I have not seen in person since high school.

The story above is common place. While it might have astounded our grandparents, it would not even impress our children. Through infrastructure networks on the ground and in the air and between towers, satellites and over optical fiber we are all truly connected on a potential level.

At the same time, we are becoming disconnected from our families, friends and neighbors. As email replaces hand written notes and text replaces conversation the quick blast has replaced a deeper level of communication. What is being lost is subtle but its long-term impact is not.

The movement from face to face to writing letters to phone conversation to email and texting has removed both reflection in choosing what we really want to say and the nuance of receiving the subtle emotions which provide meaning from our interactions. The full range of human emotion and interaction has been reduced to only those things that can be communicated more bluntly.

My observation is that the first wave of disconnect came from families moving physically apart from each other but currently the biggest disconnect of technology is within our neighborhoods and local communities. People often do not speak to or even know the names of their neighbors. Our local contacts have become more transaction-based and less about socialization and building deep friendships or intimate relationships over time.

Within large organizations this problem also occurs as people spend little time face to face and more communication is done with large distribution list emails.

What is lost with this disconnection? Community building is the primary casualty. Community is not just a function of sharing but it is also a function ownership. While a physical and transactional sharing goes on regardless of ownership, both building a shared vision and cultivating shared values are stunted by the lack of ownership required for community building.
Reconnection is possible but only when both time and space are sufficient. Direct human interaction whether around a task/problem or in celebration are needed to establish emotional ownership and hence a sense of community.

Producing Value versus Being Important

2010-01-11T22:01:00.000-08:00

Leaders and Creators need egos to persevere and enlist support for their endeavors. One of the traps of ego is the need for recognition. Receiving positive recognition for your accomplishments is rewarding for most people and in fact motivates many leaders. The trap comes up to bite you when you attempt to be important rather than of value to others.

In America today marketing takes precedence over research. The sizzle gets more attention than the steak. Do you remember the 1984 tagline, "Where's the beef?". It is common knowledge that we are both an impatient and impressionable society. This all feeds the ego into trying to be important rather than being of value. Being of value is a soft sell but a long term winner. Being important is a quick sell -or- a hard sell and typically temporary.

Joe Dominguez, referenced in other blog posts of mine, presented the following model in his workshop on "Transforming Your Relationship With Money"

HAVE-DO-BE versus BE-DO-HAVE

Have is the result whether its money or praise or recognition.

Be is the inherent qualities and attributes.

Do is the activity.

According to Dominguez, true success comes from BE-DO-HAVE. That is; BE honest, hardworking and professional when you DO your work and you will HAVE rewards.

He also says that failure comes when the focus is HAVE-DO-BE. That is; if I HAVE money, fame and resources then I could DO all these things and then I would BE happy or succesful.

Value is delivered in many forms whether it is the support and assistance you provide to those in need or the pleasure you provide to those who listen to your music and observe your art. Within organizations value can be multi-faceted across the various stakeholders.

Providing value to your customers is contexted by the product or service that you deliver but ultimately comes down to the customer receiving benefits that they value far beyond the money they pay you.

In educational organizations, some value comes from a degree or certification but true and deep value comes from the life-long benefits of the application of knowledge, skill and awareness or perspective imparted by the education. Value in education is also delivered through relationships both in the form of peer relationships with fellow seekers and in mentoring relationships with faculty members.

Leaders and creators who focus on providing value rather than being important are more likely to keep both themselves personally and their organizations, grounded and engaged in the work that will create value to society. When you regularly produce societal value then importance is an attribute given to you by others rather than an illusory and ego driven futile quest.

Peace in an Internal Storm: Creation and Destruction

2009-12-21T08:50:00.000-08:00

The holidays and year end create both excitement and disappointment, the weeks are filled with emotional highs and lows. The day after Christmas (I was raised Catholic, so that is our family focal point and tradition) is said to be one of the most depressing days in America. For some, the depression starts before the Holidays and for others it begins the moment that the last present is opened.

For many, the holidays are a stark reminder of the difference between an idealized vision of how our lives should be and the reality of the how we live most days. It is important to note that the holidays merely bring to our consciousness an underlying truth that escapes our attention most of the time. The truth is that the reality of our lives and the envisioned results that we want for ourselves are not the same much of the time.

Our families and friends and our connection or disconnection to them becomes a major part of the fabric of our end of year holiday experience. Aloneness plays tag with loneliness if we are apart from our loved ones. Not only is anxiety in the air, but so is reflection. This is for many a time to build energy into resolutions to change in the coming year.

The challenge here is twofold. On one hand, the difference between current reality and a desired result is empowering. It empowers one through the very tension that is experienced. On the other hand, the emotions that are brought up can be difficult to both feel and endure.

The cycle of creation and destruction of love and loss has been studied deeply by both students and teachers on a spiritual path. While it can be explained simply, whether in Buddhist or Western terms, it is quite another matter to live through it.

How can you remain a fully engaged and compassionate person and not be overwhelmed by both these internal storms?

The person committed to creating must be open to the true difference between reality and desired results, but must build inner strength to function when the awareness of the gap between the two causes pain in the heart. Inner strength comes from being both attached to life and yet detached from our efforts. Some efforts succeed and other efforts fail. Some help us move forward in creating and others take us backwards and yet we are only guaranteed to fail when we cease in our efforts.

Putting forth a good effort, an effort which fully reflects your passion, your values and your creativity, is all that you can control and all that really matters. Paying attention to the results but accepting that the world in which you create lies completely out of your control and only marginally open to your influence. Treating the failure of results as an opportunity to learn and then applying learning tools such as critical thinking and analysis will keep you moving. Even so you will need to rest and rejuvenate and find a peaceful place to do so.

Peace is found at the center of the storm. Peace is found when we both acknowledge the grace we receive every day and accept the eventual loss of every thing we possess or attempt to possess. We move out to create and experience both creation and destruction. We move inward to find peace and experience ourselves.

Build or find a small place or space where you can retreat to during these times and then pay attention to the signs and signals that it is time to go there. When you can find peace alone with yourself you are on the path of building inner strength as well as cultivating the experience of inner peace.

Spiritual Practice Releases You From Reactivity

2009-12-15T14:05:00.000-08:00

While there has been hype and mysticism as well as cultural miscommunication, yoga has gained mainstream popularity in the United States because it works. That is, when hatha yoga is practiced people experience benefits.

The benefits of spiritual practice are not limited to yoga nor even alternative paths as all of the great religions have within them traditions and practices that have been handed down through the generations by the the more serious devotees of each religion. The catholic practice of praying the Rosary is an example of such a spiritual practice.

Yoga's roots 5000 years ago in India have given us a body of practices that have been refined over hundreds of generations. Active experimentation has led to the adoption and discarding of elements based upon the their active testing and the observed benefits of each specific practice. The teacher-based lineage of practice playing out over time have presented us with many flavors of yogic practice and in the United States someone interested in yoga has a variety of options.

When doing hatha yoga, the body is manipulated into postures (asanas) and your breathing is manipulated as well. The specific manipulations both stimulate and relax various systems in the bodies as you work muscles, oxygenate blood, massage organs and glands and then relax. An experience is created using just your body and breath. For many this experience is transformative even if only temporarily.

When I say that yoga works, I mean that it transforms one's primary experience from the external to the inner world. It does so by detaching the inner experience from being a mere reaction to the external world and allowing the inner experience to be a more direct experience of yourself in your true natural state of being. Experiencing your own body through your own senses without judgement or reaction is a powerful and surprisingly novel experience for many.

Although yoga is unique in many ways, its capacity to release you from reactivity is not. Reactivity is what happens when a human being (with an ego) struggles for happiness or joy in a challenging if not downright hostile world. It is also a reaction to the suffering that comes from loss of love, of loved ones and your own fears of mortality.

I think it is important to note that a spiritual practice is not just a temporal release from the pressure of the world but rather a true spiritual discipline also builds inner richness and inner strength. Which are keys both happiness and self-empowerment.

Developing a Personal Creative Vision

2009-12-10T08:37:00.000-08:00

What is the source of meaning in your life? As Viktor Frankl discussed in Man's Search For Meaning, each individual brings or grants "meaning" to their own life. Dr. Frankl gained deep insights into the human condition while a prisoner at Auschwitz.

If one was "lucky" enough to survive the initial selection process at Auschwitz, a short life of brutality, starvation, hard labor and hopelessness was bound to follow. Yet, among this alien world, Dr. Frankl saw hope, love and humanity. While an individual was constantly subjected to the prospects of a random death over which the inmate had no control, the key factors for survival in Auschwitz emerged, which were a rich or strong inner-life and a sense that one had unfinished work to do if they managed to survive.

Dr. Frankl addressed both of these by collecting examples of expressed humanity at Auschwitz and designing lectures to be given regarding his observations in the future after his release. He would imagine teaching his future students and engaging in dialogue with them.

If you were given a finite lifeline, what unfinished work would you want to accomplish?

For many people, this work will have nothing to do with how they earn a living. For some, it will be a modification or refinement of what they primarily do for a living.

Some helpful clarifying questions are:

What are you passionate about?

If you had the power to change the world, what would you change about it?

How would you ensure that your values or perspective or abilities are passed on to others.

Your creation can be a work of art or a fictional story, a business or institution, a book or a movie, a forest or park, a new law, a solution to a problem.

The important part is to have enough clarity to begin to envision (if only in your dreams) a desired result.

As Robert Fritz discusses in The Path of Least Resistance, the more clarity and detail you bring to your desired result the more tension and power you create. When you climb a cliff the rope tightens under the tension of your weight and your progess or lack of progress becomes painfully clear to all.

Many of us use being vague or unclear to keep us emotionally "off the hook" for producing a result. No one wants to fail. Most of the time, we actually prevent failure by avoiding the competition. We do not even enter the race or step up to bat. (Please excuse the sporty metaphors.) I plead guilty to this myself.

So to avoid the pain of failing at something that we put our heart and soul into, we stay vague about what we truly want, keep our distance from the tension of wanting something that does not exist and ultimately guarantee that we will fail just a little bit each and every day.

I want to create, build and lead a successful alternative adult education institution that addresses our spiritual needs, general well being and professional abilities in a holistic way. I have taken some risks and followed up on some of my opportunities to further this vision and yet I have held back and delayed much energy and commitment as well.

What fires you up? What fires you up on an ongoing basis? Of the things you were passionate about as an idealistic teenager or youngster, which of those things still hold interest?

The first step in developing a personal creative vision is looking inward for that spark and then envisioning how that spark would grow if you fed it and breathed your life's energy in to it.

The NFL Tells a Tale of Spirituality in our Society

2009-11-16T17:13:00.000-08:00

The infamous declaration by Friedrich Nietzsche that "God is Dead" is often divorced from the context of Nietzsche's observations. In the medieval European city, the most important physical presence in any city was the Cathedral or Church. It was a physical manifestation of the place of God and religion in the life of the people who lived there.

In the modern city, buildings of commerce had taken the place of the Cathedral and commerce had taken the place of religion as the most prominent driving and organizing force in modern life. In his book, The Gay Science, Nietzsche elaborates that man has killed God by removing God from the center of his life. The truth in Nietzsche's critique is that during the 1900s a preponderance of "modern" people began to live as if God did not matter or exist and their actions showed a belief in materialism as an ends not as a means.

Materialism is the belief that only that which is material or physical is real or should matter and when applied to consumption, that mankind is primarily enhanced through the accumulation of wealth and the consumption and possession of goods. The problem with materialism is that it is partially true; as having some financial resources and goods makes a big difference when one is dealing with the basic needs in life. (See my earlier blog on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in relation to affluence and self-fulfillment.)

What does the National Football League (NFL) in general and the new stadium in the Dallas Metroplex tell us about spirituality in today's society?

Let me digress for a moment. When I was a senior in high school at Kenmore West in a suburb of Buffalo, NY back in 1976, I took a ten week course in Sports Literature. For my final project I wrote a futuristic account of how the NFL had become a religion, its cheers had become prayers, its stadiums had become cathedrals and football games had become ritual public celebrations. I received an A+ on that assignment.

The popularity of the NFL has shown us that we are still fascinated by gladiators competing nearly 2000 years after the peak of Rome, that we still seek a shared ritualistic event and that as our basic needs are met and society has attained unprecedented historical affluence that entertainment, with the power to create an optimal experience, has become a substitute for the transformative experiences that were once provided only in churches and temples or in Rome in the Coliseum.

Everyday life pales against the back drop of participating as a fanatic or voyeur in these large arena/stadium events. We can enjoy and become lost in the experience, even though we know that it is "just a game".

The aura of the NFL should remind us that we are still connected to the brutal and physical nature of life and survival. It also tells us that we seek connection to something bigger than ourselves, we enjoy participating in ritual as a means of connection and that these experiences provide a brief but transformative alternative reality that is powerful.

When fully engaged in one's spiritual path, it is important to stay grounded in the brutal and physical nature of the world. True transformation or enlightenment comes after accepting the reality of human nature and human capacity for good and evil.

When creating from a place of personal vision and self empowerment, we not only have the ability to bring our passion and our values into the tangible world but in doing so, we open the door to creating a powerful experience that creates meaning for ourselves and a connection to others.

Flow: Interest, Intention and Growth

2009-11-12T13:46:00.001-08:00

About 15 years ago, I picked up a book that provided me with great insight into the relationship between challenges and my experience of them. The book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a researcher at the University of Chicago laid out an intriguing case regarding our experience of life or work or recreation. Although based in research, it is written for a general audience.

Flow essentially is a dynamic event that occurs when the following are in alignment:
1) Our personal and specific interests
2) Our personal growth
3) The balance between our current skill set and our immediate challenges

While this underlying dynamic of neither being overwhelmed by too big a challenge nor bored by too little challenge relative to our current capability and capacity is much of the text in the book, it is important not to forget points 1 & 2 above.

The Power of Our Unique Interests and the Forming of Intention

Our interests, while shared in part with many others, are in their totality unique to each of us as an individual. Our interests and our intentions are intertwined and often take turns in the lead. While an interest may be serendipitous, an intention is a conscious choice. So at times our attention and focus is the result of chance and sometime it is the result of choice.

I love maps. As long as I can remember, I have always loved maps. I have collected many maps over the years. I still remember seeing a 70 year old textbook that depicted Oklahoma as the "Indian Territories", when I was 8 or 9 years old. I learned how to make a simple and accurate map when I was 12 years old and working on my first class badge as a boy scout. I took an elective in college called, "The Lure and Logic of Mapping", which I did simply because I enjoy it. I subscribe to a Geographical Information System (GIS) software publication simply because I find beauty in the intelligent maps that are depicted in the colorful publication. There is serendipity there.

I also use maps. I have planned sophisticated and complex excursions for my family, the Scout Troop I was leader of and businesses I have worked for using "real" maps and mapping software. I have created sophisticated statistical and planning maps to explain and explore business models and multi-year projects. Sometimes, I have done this work mostly in my head, because the tools for rendering a map do not quite capture what I have organized in my mental map. I love maps because they facilitate seeing the global view and the detailed view in context to each other and a good map allows you to quickly "zoom in" or "zoom out". There is choice there.

In giving you an example of one of my personal interests, I have easily written more than I intended.

When you begin to apply your unique interests in a purposeful and creative way you have both kept an intention and are well on your way to a flow experience.

Woven throughout my personal map-related experiences is also a tale of personal growth. My personal growth with regards to this aspect of my life is so relatively painless that it escapes my attention unless a take stock of it.

My appreciation of the design, construction, functionality and beauty of maps has grown along with my skill set in using mapping techniques to solve problems and organize complex information.

What passions or interests have you cultivated? How far have you grown with regards to these passions and interests?

When you are purposefully creating a personal legacy, there will be many timeless moments of flow and much growth with no pain. You will get stuck from time to time when the challenges presented by creating or creating your life fill you with anxiety.

Take comfort in knowing that the key to creating and the dynamic of flow only require that you take the next step whether it is working on your skills and resources or breaking down a big challenge into a series of more manageable challenges.

Financial Independence: Tough Times and Bankruptcy

2009-10-25T08:19:00.001-07:00

When it comes to money, I continue to suggest that you read either the book, Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicky Robbins or find the old taped course " How to Transform Your Relationship With Money and Achieve Financial Independence" by Joe Dominguez. Money along with Food are two things that live an emotional life within us that often distorts how we use and respond to them. This distortion leads to us acting in a way that may satisfy an emotion in the short-term but leads us away from what we want.

When you combine the emotion of your childhood regarding money, with the general lack of education we receive about it, it is no wonder that most of us have little to show for the amount of money that has passed through our lives.

The collapse of the real estate and stock markets in late 2008 and the tightening of consumer credit has affected both the overall economy and nearly every household in a significant way. I am in a tight financial position as a result of three events in 2007 and 2008.

1) My divorce settlement was negotiated in August through October of 2007, when the S&P500 peaked and my collective investments were near their maximum value. I agreed to current and near future cash payments to keep as much of my investments as possible. Although my non-real estate investments have bounced back since January of 2009, they are still significantly off their peak.

2) I have been subsidizing college costs for my three children for the last five years and thus spent down my cash reserves and increased my debt.

3) The collapse of the financial markets in September of 2008 caused an instantaneous disruption to the signing of new construction contracts. My primary source of income in 2008 was my position as VP of Finance and Operations for a small green energy construction firm. As the company completed its existing contracts we needed to lay-off nearly everyone and I left to go back to consulting and project management. My agreement had a significant profit sharing structure which was completely wiped out by the Fall of 2008 economic collapse.

In a nutshell, I took a hit which will take several years to overcome, but I am still in a better position than most American households primarily due to the principles in these courses and obtaining an education in how to invest.

Even in a period of temporary distress, the principles of achieving financial independence apply. Your ability to save and invest for the future is the primary lever due to the compounding effect of earning money on your invested money. The relationship between your spending and your fulfillment needs to be examined. Where do you get your morning cup of coffee? How much do you spend a year on it? Can you make it at home less expensively?

Change the word "coffee" to fast food or your favorite convenience or impulse spending item. The point is to either start saving some seed money or to at least begin paying down debt. I would suggest that you do both simultaneously. If you both build a cash reserve and add to the rate at which you pay down your highest remaining interest rate debt, you will both build a cushion in case of a lay-off or income disruption and create more money to build a cushion over time by reducing your outgoing interest payments. (In the current environment, paying off credit cards completely has lead to some people having their credit lines dropped so I would build cash reserves ahead of a complete pay down.)

What if the financial hole you are in is too big to work your way out of it? If your debt from real estate, credit cards, medical bills or the failure of a small business exceeds what you expect to earn in the next two years, you need to strongly look at bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is a legal remedy for obtaining a fresh start in a financial life. The rules are strict and bankruptcy will impact your ability to borrow money for the next 10 years but it can be a useful tool. Companies of all sizes use bankruptcy to secure a new life, when they can not both operate and meet their debt payments.

In many states, bankruptcy will not cause you to lose your home but in others it will. Your 401K and IRAs are protected in bankruptcy, so if they contain most of your savings, those savings will still be there after bankruptcy. One alternative option for eliminating debt that you will see advertised is debt restructuring for credit cards, this can halve your credit card debt but will create income tax liability for the debt that is forgiven as well as damage your credit rating. To see whether bankruptcy may be a tool on your road to financial independence, you will need to speak with a lawyer or financial advisor with bankruptcy expertise.

After two years, your bankruptcy will not affect your ability to qualify for a mortgage. The ten year damper on obtaining consumer credit may be a small inconvenience compared to having much of your income going to debt repayment and depleting your retirement savings.

The methods in the book, Your Money or Your Life, will help you live a life without taking on debt as a means of short-term funding. It is important to remember that even a person of modest means can gain leverage over their financial life. It is also important to remember that "possessing" money is not the goal but rather having that having financial resources supports the goal of living a grounded creative and values based life.

Breathing and Calming the Mind

2009-10-22T10:38:00.000-07:00

Although not a great book, I own an interesting book about working with "dinosaurs" that identifies the reptilian responses behind those difficult people at work. When confronted, a reptile either fights, flees or freezes. Inside our human brain are those reptilian impulses and they are triggered during periods of stress and anxiety.

If you want to read more about the evolution of the human mind in a readable book, I would suggest; Boca's Brain by Dr. Carl Sagan. (Yes, it was written by the "billions of stars" astronomer.)

The reptilian response to freeze, results in us holding our breath when we are stressed or in discomfort. It is not just the breath that is frozen, but rather we have involuntarily contracted most of the muscles of our body. When you are in the midst of a reptilian response, it is difficult to maintain an open perspective, let alone harness your conscience and your values.

Both practioners of yoga and buddist mediation already understand the focus upon and use of breathing in relaxation and meditation. During my training as a yoga teacher, the most difficult work we did was learning and practicing the various types of breathing. It was hard to master and exhausting.

When anxious or upset, taking a breath or two before you speak or act gives you a meaningful pause. You can train yourself to notice when you are holding your breathing. During the next 24 hours, make a mental note whenever you catch yourself holding your breath. When you catch yourself doing this take a handful of slow deep breaths. This will assist you in being responsive to the situation as opposed to being reactive.

The creative stance as I've discussed is a responsive stance. It is driven by vision, passion and values. The creative stance requires taking in the truth whether that truth is pleasant or unpleasant. In the creative stance, what works is more important than being right. So when failures occur and bad news comes in....breathe. As they say in sports, "take a breather".

The impulsive reaction to difficulty or disappointment is reptilian and undermines both creativity and our spirit. When we catch our reaction and add breathing and a pause, we empower ourselves to be responsive. We enable our vision, our passion and our values to shape a response. We can context our action against the desired envisioned result we seek. We can filter our options against the values we wish to affirm.

So have a great day. Take a breath and plunge ahead.

Fear is Self Limiting or Self Defeating

2009-09-28T07:07:00.000-07:00

Whether it is marriage, a career, a business or school; the fear of failure often leads to behavior which short cuts real success and ultimately leads to either to a stagnant mediocrity or a complete disaster.

Between my first post-college job at International Paper Company and attending graduate school at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), I went to Europe for a five week journey. In the second week of the trip, while riding the bullet train from Venice to Florence, I noticed the headlines of the newspaper of a fellow passenger. The headline declared; "Il Tragedio Spazio". It was January of 1986 and later that day, I would learn more about the explosion which destroyed the space shuttle, "Challenger".

The cause of the shuttle failure was quite simple, hot gas from the engine exhaust had leaked sideways against a fuel tank until the fuel in the tank overheated and the tank exploded. Why the disaster happened is not as straightforward.

The shuttle is a highly engineered system and Morton-Thiokol designed the "O" rings that created seals in the engine exhaust system. It had designed these rings to create a seal and maintain it across a range of temperatures, as specified by NASA. The engineers that designed the system knew that at cold temperatures, the rings lost their ability to create a seal as they became hard and brittle.

In the years before the disaster, NASA had fallen from the eminence it had achieved in the 1960s. The shuttle fleet had been prone to both incessant delays and been perceived by the public as expensive and unnecessary. To reinvigorate its image, NASA opened spots on the shuttle to foreign astronauts and representatives of the public. The January 1986 Challenger launch was going to be broadcast to school children across America as the first "teacher" in space was on board and with all eyes watching, it would show NASA to be the competent and efficient agency it sought to be.

As the weather forecast for the launch window became clear and record cold temperatures were possible, behind the scenes the engineers at Morton-Thiokol began to raise warnings. The investigation would show that NASA, anxious to avoid another "delay", had pressured Morton-Thiokol to sign off on the safety of the launch. Within Morton-Thiokol, there had been pressure applied to the engineers to sign-off as well. The NASA administration's fear of looking bad in the public eye, Morton-Thiokol's fear of angering an important customer and the ripple of fear in saying "no" up the chain of command led to a preventable disaster.

Most "fear" based decisions do not lead to war or disaster but they have negative impacts that are tangible.

As I pointed out in an earlier post, failure and learning go hand in hand. Yet we treat failure as something to be avoided at all costs. Those who can not accept their own failures and learn from them are condemned to mediocrity. What should take weeks, takes years or never happens.

Math is an area where I have always been somewhat proficient. Although I struggled with calculus in college as it was boring memorization, I started using statistics as a quality professional and obtained an MS in Applied Statistics. Years later, I ended up teaching three different math and statistics courses at SUNY Empire State College.

My "adult" math students were typically full of fear regarding math. Many had failed math in either high school or earlier in college. Many only took my course because they needed one math course to graduate. After years of teaching in this environment, I realized that I could really help my students, if I could diagnose their specific math deficiencies early in the course. The quickest way to do this was to have the students attempt to solve problems of various difficulties and show their work. No matter how I explained the reasoning and that the correctness of their answers had no bearing on their course grade, there were a handful of students who simply would not do the exercise. They were not willing to expose their deficiencies to me even if it interfered with their ultimate success. Nearly all of these students did not complete the course. The projection of our fears stops not only stops reasonable risk-taking but also stops much growth and learning.

One final aspect of fear in its full expression is cheating. Whether in sports, politics, academics, business or relationships; individuals who let their fear of failure overwhelm their good judgement are incredibly prone to cheating.

When the cheating is ultimately exposed to the public eye as regularly happens, the failure they hoped to avoid is often multiplied ten or a hundred fold. What is often most apparent to outsiders is the sheer stupidity of the "cheaters" actions as the potential rewards of cheating are grossly outweighed by the downside implications of their actions.

In a week or a month, the cheater destroys their reputation, which has often taken decades to build. If others, have been complicit, their individual and corporate identities are quite often destroyed as well.

None of us are immune to fear of failure and I certainly am not. When you sense that your fears are exerting their influence by either limiting your deep desire to act or keeping you yoked to a spirit and wellness destroying situation, you need to step back and get some perspective.

Finding a wise counsel or someone who can be a true sounding board is key. A "true" sounding board will neither let you plunge off a cliff nor will they tolerate excuses that let you off the hook for being a responsible, moral and ethical adult.

I love the Ridley Scott movie, The Kingdom of Heaven, which tells the story of King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem and the legendary Muslim General Salahadin who battle for control of Jerusalem at the end of the first crusade. In the movie their is a discussion between, Balian, the new Baron of Ibelin and one of the Knights of Hospitaller, a religious and military order.

Balian is questioning what he sees occurring and is trying to be a good follower of Christ. The Hospitaller Knight has spent many years in Jerusalem defending the city and helping the poor and distressed pilgrims who go there. The knight advises him as follows:
"Holiness is in right action, and courage on behalf of those who cannot defend themselves, and goodness, what god desires, is here [in your head] and here [in your heart] and by what you decide to do every day, you will be a good man - or not."

Fear of failure not severe moral defect, is the reason many of us fail to take "right action". Courage is ultimately about taking action in spite of our fears not the elimination of fear. Living a meaningful life, also requires living a life of goodness and each and every day is an opportunity to express your values and beliefs or deny them.

As Dr. Shin-Ichi Suzuki (see my earlier blog) reminds us, the only difference between the capabilities of our strong hand and our weak hand is daily attention and practice. Ten years from now, with daily attention and practice, you will have made amazing progress in terms of both overcoming fear and living a life of goodness if you work this path.

You will have also shed much of your self-limiting behavior and created the capability and opportunity to create something of meaning in your life.

Dependency and Reactivity Lead to Disempowerment

2009-09-15T10:18:00.000-07:00

In his must read book, The Path of Least Resistance, Robert Fritz writes eloquently on the difference between the creative stance and the reactive stance. The creative stance is a vision driven, truth telling stance where there is no room to hide from mistakes, responsibilities and whether or not the result is "working".

Vision is a clear and complete understanding of the desired end result, even if it can only be envisioned in the head and heart of a lone creator. (In an organization, there must be dialogue to really share understanding and concrete examples to true up how people see things differently.)

When what exists and what is created is tested against this vision and comes up short, you need to be prepared for disappointment and take failure head on when you come up short. You truly need to learn from your mistakes, by first admitting them and then working through the alternatives to your failed action.

If your efforts shift instead to easing the pain of failure by declaring false victory or creating secondary goals, you have actually undermined your ability to ultimately be successful. America is in the words of Dr. W. Edwards Deming, "looking for instant pudding". Deming worked with the Japanese under the Occupation Forces of General Douglas MacArthur and taught the leaders of Japanese Corporations (Toyota for example) how to manage and deliver high quality products.

This "Instant Pudding" mind set leads to all kinds of short-cuts, cheating, dropping out and blaming others for our own mistakes and failures. Our egos require instant success and our souls require, as John Lennon said, "Instant (good) Karma". We want to both have it or be it all right now.

Many of us would rather give up on our creative vision (a meaningful and compelling desired end result) than deal with the frustration, disappointment and embarrassment of our failed attempts. I have struggled with this myself.

The reactive stance is not vision driven but rather it is driven by negative consequences. In the reactive stance our life energy is not focused on creating but rather on the problems that come our way. Since the problems that come our way, have little to do with where we want to go, they are will never lead us to real progress on creating the desired results. Problems are "like tales told by idiots", in Shakespeare's words, they are " full of sound and fury, yet signifying nothing."

The creative stance can be frightening and requires fortitude, but it is also empowering. Self empowerment and the creative stance go hand in hand. Dependency and the reactive stance go hand in "hand out". When you subjugate your power to determine the path of your own life and seek to hide from or have others mitigate the consequences of your own actions then you dis empower yourself.

In Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton writes about the how the power of money to buy what others worked hard to create has left the leaders of Ingen (owners of Jurassic Park gone to hell) without sufficient wisdom to know what to do with what they've acquired. To paraphrase, Never confuse a giant with someone sitting on the shoulder of a giant. A giant is grown and developed over time and gains exceptional wisdom along with exceptional capabilities. Anyone with enough money or power can sit (if only for a moment) on the shoulder of a giant and wield those capabilities with insufficient wisdom.

When you work from the creative stance you will build a giant in both wisdom and capability.

Searching For Wisdom at the Source: Character & Talent

2009-08-16T09:49:00.001-07:00

In the mid 1990s, I began a more rigorous and purposeful search for wisdom. My search led me in two different directions. One direction was the research being done in the areas of human effectiveness, happiness and fulfillment. I will discuss this research in another post. The other was looking at the words and work of a handful of renowned experts who were still making contributions in their 70s, 80s and 90s. I wanted to learn from people with real experiential wisdom.

My criteria for the list was three fold:
1) exceptional professional contribution in an area of interest to me.
2) age 70 or older
3) availability of writing or interviews where the person discussed both their career and "living their life".
Some of the people on my short list are:

Shinichi Suzuki creator of the Suzuki method of talent education and the Suzuki School in Matsumoto, Japan
Margaret Mead, ground-breaking Anthropologist
W. Edwards Deming, Statistician and Quality Management expert
R. Buckminster Fuller, Architect and designer
Joseph Campbell, Teacher and Mythologist
Mother Theresa of Calcutta, Founder of the Sisters of Mercy

While I will not discuss my entire list nor even everyone I've just mentioned above in this blog, I will continue to incorporate these elders into both my sense of wisdom and the wisdom in this blog on a regular basis.

In exploring options for music lessons for my children, I went from superficial to deep knowledge of Dr. Shin-ichi Suzuki. While Dr. Suzuki (now deceased) is best known for his impact on music education, his work encompassed a new view of education, a new definition of talent and a deep compassion for children and their potential. He developed a parent-child-teacher model that is hard work for the parent, but defines supportive roles for everyone involved in a child's education, that is often lacking in our education system.

Dr. Suzuki's definition of talent was remarkable along two different planes of thought. First was his perspective that talent (the ability to produce a proper and beautiful result) was not something you were "born" with but rather it was something that could be nurtured and developed.

Whether the arts, athletics or academic performance we all too often confuse what is easy to master by a specific individual with talent and what is difficult to master by an individual with lack of talent. This was part of how Dr. Suzuki developed a system which created "world class" musicians at remarkably young ages.

The second plane of thought that was enlightening was the areas to which talent education could be applied and therefore expanded what was considered to be "talent". Dr. Suzuki specifically defined character as a talent which could be nurtured and developed.

His methods not only address learning the correct way to do something but also the way to unlearn incorrect methods or behaviors. When it comes to character development, unlearning improper behavior is often the thorny sticking point. In the United States there is a huge difference between knowing what is "right" or "wrong" and rigorously applying that understanding to our own behavior. It is easy to do the "right" thing when there are no adverse consequences to doing so.

A person, who handles things well in a supportive environment, may or may not possess fine character. That which is most needed by our society though is people who do the "right" thing when it is difficult to do so. Many business and political leaders in the past decade or so have squandered their opportunity to make a difference and their reputations due to failures in their character rather than in their intellect or abilities.

South Carolina Governor, Mark Sanford and New York Governor, Elliot Spitzer both damaged their reputations and families when they seemingly had incredible opportunities to impact the future of their respective states and the possibly the nation. Whether adultery, tax evasion or accepting bribes many of our leaders have failed to develop character in the ways that they have developed other skills and talents.

The Legacy Path, choosing and creating your personal legacy, does not require perfection, but it does require acknowledging ones mistakes and learning from them. One must not distance themselves from the negative feedback or the consequences of their failures. The roots of learning and developing character come from making small mistakes and correcting them no matter how embarrassing or painful. The talent of character comes from daily practice of values within a spiritual path guided by a set of beliefs.

There is a Jesuit motto that I often use; "repetitio est mater estudiorum" or "repetition is the mother of learning". I have added my own corollary to this; "Suffering is the Father of Learning". The real question for us becomes not, will we develop character, but rather how much pain must we endure before we practice the restraint that character demands.

The exercise of restraint to facilitate more powerful and more meaningful action, the acknowledgement of one’s mistakes and failures based on an internal compass that is more sensitive than societies accepted norms and the ability to accept failure with humility and forgiveness and try again without forgetting are key parts of developing the talent of character.

As Dr. Suzuki often said when the musical talents of his students received applause and recognition. The goal of education in my school is not to produce fine musicians but rather fine human beings. Imagine how much greater the impact upon our organizations, institutions and society when those who are highly skilled in performance ability are also highly skilled in personal character.

The Call of the Wild and Recreation

2009-08-02T09:06:00.000-07:00

For whatever reason, I have been spending a lot of time studying both the book and film, "Into The Wild". This is the story of a bright, college educated (Emory University) and relatively privileged young man who died at the age of 24 of starvation in the Alaskan bush near Denali National Park. Christopher McCandless (the young man) was an idealist and had rejected his family and disappeared into the vastness of the American west after his graduation from college.

He spent two years travelling as a "foot tramp", working odd jobs and camping mostly on the fringe of small cities and towns. He made occasional treks into the wilderness prior to his "Alaskan adventure" but did not really do any serious long-term ventures in the wilderness. Although it depicts him kayaking in the Grand Canyon in the movie, if you read the book (Jon Krakauer), you will find that his travels were in an aluminum canoe in the flat lower stretches of the Colorado river and eventually in the Gulf of California.

He read Thoreau and Jack London amongst others, who both championed the wilderness and man's experience of it. Thoreau's approach was based upon his direct experience and philosophical, whereas Jack London wrote romantically about Alaska while living a sedentary life in California. I will write again about Chris McCandless and my take on the lessons to be learned from his life stance and misfortunate accidental death but in this blog, I want to elaborate about wilderness.

Why does this story grasp me? I have always loved the wilderness and the "west". I used to imagine living in remote Canada or Alaska when I was a teenager in suburban Buffalo, NY. My first camping trip to Allegany State Park in 1969 with my boy scout troop was a transformative experience for me. I worked five summers at Camp Ti-Wa-Ya-Ee and attended the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry as way to live and work in the outdoors. My first job after college was in the Adirondacks where I lived for almost six years. Most of my time in real wilderness occurred in the Adirondacks where I hiked, camped, skied and snowshoed. As my economic circumstances improved, I began to travel out west when I could. I have driven and spent time outdoors through out the Rocky Mountain West, Desert Southwest and Pacific Northwest.

The wilderness is both incredibly beautiful and life threatening at the same time. I remember being awake at night in my tent in Yellowstone in the early fall of 1997 and listening to large animals (Elk in rut mostly) moving through the campground at night. This was my first night of camping where all that separated myself from a Grizzly bear was a thin fabric. There was both joy and fear and living in the moment. When you are listening for Grizzlies your mind is cleared of lots of the usual garbage that takes up its time.

In Steven Covey's book, "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", Covey lays out the demands upon our time (and mental energy) on a grid that looks at importance versus urgency. In the quadrant where importance is high and urgency is low, you will find both "relationship building" and "recreation". Covey goes on to describe what he means by recreation and talks about the renewing or refreshing properties of real recreation. I believe that spending time in the wilderness is powerful because of its ability to leave us refreshed or renewed.

In the wilderness, whether it's a desert sky or mountain vista, it is easy to see the world without humanity and modernity. It is easier to see and experience the more elemental or basic needs of living. It is easier to shed, if even for a moment or two, the mental conceptions and burdens that we and others with our compliance have placed upon ourselves.

When you have been working hard at creating and it seems to be getting harder to make progress, it is often time for renewal or recreation.

My friend and business associate Evan Smith, used to regularly remind our clients of Abe Lincoln's wisdom on tree cutting; When you find that the cutting is getting tougher, it is time to stop and sharpen the saw. Do you take time to sharpen the saw?

Avoiding the Truth Undermines Your Ability to Create

2009-07-19T10:22:00.000-07:00

A key ingredient to creating something of enduring value is accepting the truth.

Enduring value is undermined when required things are not done, when things are done incorrectly and when there is dishonesty about either current reality or the desired result.

What definition of truth will best guide the person who wishes to create?

The language that lawyers use to describe the truth in court is inadequate to describe truth in the world. There is a famous story of King Canute ordering the tide not come in. He was the giver of laws and issued an absurd law. In the legal system, the truth is subjected to both the King and the King's law.

In other words, both laws and interpreters of law can easily differ from the reality of the world. This is why the legal system can never find one innocent but rather it finds them guilty or not guilty. The legal system can not find the truth but it can find what is false or not false.

The best working definition for creating is that truth is "what works in the world over time". If you want to know whether your creation is beautiful or functional you must take it into the world and test it.

Many institutions focus so much effort upon their self-interest that they lose the ability to tell the truth over time. They act like a sports team that is defending a lead instead of playing the game. They forget the very things that led to their success and attempt to manage success as if it can be manipulated.

When you create a new medicine, there is a protocol called double-blind testing, that allows a researcher to see the truth when comparing the new medicine to alternatives. The major concept in double-blind is that parties involved in creating and those with vested interests in the results tend to have biases that prevent them from seeing the objective truth.

There is also a great difference between a "long-term" and "short-term" study as the most significant effects (positive or negative) may not appear for decades in a medical study. I am not proposing that the creative person must wait decades but rather that when testing whether your creation is working in the world, one must continue to pay attention to the object created and all its consequences, intended and unintended.

Being honest about the good and bad of current reality and being as clear as possible about the qualities of the desired result are key to empowering the creative process. The "world" is available for testing your creation in many ways but do not expect it to either embrace or reject your creation outright.

Creation is iterative, and your early failures may in fact be the most important lessons in teaching yourself to create. When looking at a difficult task, I like to estimate the number of mistakes (lessons) to be encountered along the way. A long-term difficult project may be a 1000 mistake project. The goal is to make your mistakes early and keep them small but remember that your ultimate success requires the learning in your early mistaken efforts.

The truth does set you free. Free to let go of what does not work and that prevents you from failing in the end.

A Creative Life is NOT a Stress Free Life

2009-06-18T12:42:00.000-07:00

One should never confuse the meaningfulness that a creative life can bring with there being a lack of stress or tension.

There is a famous story attributed to Norman Vincent Peale, where he offered to show a man suffering from anxiety, a place where there were 50,000 people without a worry in the world. He drove the man to a hill overlooking the largest cemetery in Brooklyn. Peale makes the point that no one alive is completely free from stress or worry.

The Buddha's famous saying is; "All Life is Suffering". In that everything you love including your own life will pass away and the loss of those beloved leads to great suffering. The Buddha's advice is to transcend the suffering not to take a pass on living or on loving.

Dale Carnegie's great book; "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living" has sold tens of millions of copies over the past century.

What does it all mean? What does it say about worry and stress?

The act of choosing to create is an empowering act. It is a stark reminder that you are alive and you are not merely a reflection of external circumstances. You can choose to create whether your are strong or weak, rich or poor, healthy or ill. You can choose to create without knowing how to reach your goal or even knowing if your goal is reasonable or reachable.

Making a choice moves you from the dependent or reactive world into the independent or responsive world. In his book, "Man's Search for Meaning", Viktor Frankl speaks eloquently of the difference between a reaction and a response. While he had no control of his environment or the circumstances he encountered by choosing his response to each situation he could affirm his humanity and values. For both punishment and to force compliance the inmates at Auschwitz were periodically lined and counted off. The unlucky in these forced counts were either abused or executed as a lesson for all. Dr. Frankl never used his connections to escape a count-off as he truly believed that none of the prisoners deserved the treatment nor was his life any more valuable than his fellow prisoners. He found peace in accepting his circumstances and choosing an honorable path based upon his own values.

When you choose your response, your actions become the expression of your values, your intelligence, your passion and your creativity. Often, the only difference between a response and a reaction is a brief hesitation but sometimes a the proper response requires much reflection and some soul searching.

As we move from a response to a situation to your response to living a meaningful and good life in this world, we peel another layer deeper into this same onion. A fundamental choice to create or to take a creative and independent stance creates its own supporting structure. Robert Fritz in his book, The Path of Least Resistance uses the analogy of a rubber band to discuss the structural tension formed by the choice to create.

When one fails to choose to create, the stresses and worries of the world exist but lack direction like a loose rubber band. When one chooses to create a desired future result, a structure begins to form along the lines of difference between current reality and the future result. It is as if the rubber band begins to be stretched between your two thumbs. Clarity about the desired results and honesty about current reality support a clear structure and add tension around this structure.

A creative life is a full life in a world of uncertainty. Yet, by choosing to create, we have empowered ourselves to be both more independent and responsive to the world. The structure induced by our choices, our vision and our honesty actually support us by focusing our actions.

When Vision and Spiritual Path Cross: Ethics and Morality

2009-06-09T13:00:00.000-07:00

For those people fortunate enough to find a profession or career that fulfills both their pragmatic need to earn a living and also an opportunity to fulfill their creative vision, going to work each day can become an enriching experience.

In the late eighties through mid-nineties, I was doing road warrior corporate consulting. We were primarily in the field of technological and cultural change in support of continuous improvement. On the technology end, we worked in the areas of Total Quality Management (TQM) and World Class Manufacturing (WCM) but to create the culture to support the changes in decision-making and behavior, we strongly worked on leadership development and team building. We purchased a library of corporate training videos to make points, provide insights and entertain. In this library were several Tom Peters video productions.

Tom (whom I only met once on a flight from O'Hare to Hartford, CT) was a former McKinsey consultant turned author/columnist. His independent career took off when he co-authored the business best seller, "In Search of Excellence" in the early 1980s with Bob Waterman. Mr. Peters gave high energy presentations featuring interviews with business leaders who were doing astounding things. Two leaders that Mr. Peters featured, who profoundly struck my attention were Ralph Stayer, then owner of Johnsonville Sausage and Harry Quadracci, the founder and owner of Quad Graphics.

Both of these business owners had gotten far better results by giving up much of their personal control of the day-to-day operations of their companies to teams of employees. They both focused upon education, personal growth and accountability for obtaining those results. This combination of nurturing human development and holding clear accountability for results is still profound.

Mr. Stayer was fairly philosophical, he said something like this; "never work for someone who has stopped learning and from whom you can not learn something."

Mr. Quadracci was a high energy character and he said it like it was. He said in the video something to this effect. "Have fun and work hard. Whatever you do, be professional about it and never do business with someone you do not like. If you do not like someone, it is because you do not trust them. Sooner or later untrustworthy people will screw you over."

I was lucky enough in the early 1990s to have attended an intimate business dinner with Ralph Stayer, but I never met Harry Quadracci. Their shared belief in people and their potential for both growth and accountability were in stark contrast to a few organizations that I had worked with and for.

One of the toughest situations you will face in your work life is to work for a boss or have a customer that is dishonest or asks you to be dishonest. Even a job that is otherwise fulfilling can become a spirit crushing experience when you must chose between being ethical or moral and doing what is requested by someone who can punish you directly or indirectly.

Ethics and morality when applied require one to take right action and accept the consequences of right action. Most professions have a more codified set of ethics to illuminate specific issues and consequences commonly encountered in that profession. Ethics requires one to honor the spirit of an agreement/requirement and not just the letter of an agreement/requirement. Morality, while more a function one's specific religious upbringing than what one may learn in a civics class, requires one to take personal responsibility for the harm that one does to themselves as well as other people and property.

True legacy requires both ethical and moral action. It raises the bar but ensures the quality and longevity of your creative expression. Many leaders who accomplish results that are transient and quickly disappear have failed in their need to be ethical or moral. In getting to the desired result, they have sown the seeds of the very failure of the result they have sought.

A true historic survey shows that "the ends" never truly justify "the means" unless you give value only to momentary victory and temporal victors. While ethical and moral behavior may not be needed to destroy or defeat, they are needed to build and to govern and during times of change and transition, applied ethics and morality act as a glue to keep an organization or society cohesive and functioning.

When purposefully creating your envisioned product, that chosen and desired result, it is key to remember that the truth will either support you or it will wear at you. Your progress along your unique spiritual path will either empower your ability to create or it will undermine and diminish it.

A Set of Skills for Life-Long Learning

2009-06-02T20:33:00.000-07:00

I taught a course at the State University of New York, Empire State College entitled "Math for Decision Making" for almost ten years. It was the college math course for people who were either afraid of math or had done poorly at math through their lives.

The course began with two primary activities: self-assessment so that students could understand what they knew and what they didn't know and a journal to support the student's development of critical thinking skills.

The self-diagnosis allowed the student and myself to focus our efforts where learning needed to occur and the journal became a shared dialogue between the student and the class that supported engaging learning in a sometimes playful, often creative way. Asking questions and taking risks are two essential elements to learning and yet most of our formal education has discouraged or worse punished this behavior.

We worked on going from asking data and opinion questions to asking critical thinking questions. Critical thinking questions are those which examine the assumptions and "frames" through which we view the world.

For example, several years ago ethanol became a "cheaper" alternative to petroleum for a variety of reasons. A government funded industry grew up around producing ethanol from food products (mostly corn) and as the price of petroleum raced to its peak in 2008, from a distance ethanol seemed to be a solution.
As a fuel, how does ethanol compare to petroleum? It is a less powerful fuel per unit of fuel.
How much energy does it take to produce ethanol from corn? It takes more energy to produce ethanol from corn (when you include the entire cycle of corn production) than it delivers to the vehicles burning it. The entire cycle is grossly inefficient.
Why was ethanol so cheap several years ago? Corn ethanol was cheap because there was a surplus of corn.
What has the use of food for ethanol production done to food costs? As food was diverted to ethanol production, the price of corn, wheat & rice and many other food staples was driven up globally, deepening the woes of the most impoverished people.

If you read or listened to any media stories promoting corn ethanol did they focus on this when congress was setting money aside for this activity and entrepreneurs were seeking investors for new ethanol production plants?

Engaging in dialogue or journal writing and asking critical thinking questions are extremely useful in developing a broad set of learning skills.

The Call: When God Speaks. Do you listen?

2009-05-10T08:23:00.000-07:00

What role does God play in your life? If God plays no role are you an atheist?

When you hear the salutation; God is great! Are you uplifted, do you grimace or is there nothing? Regardless of how you name or describe God or the presence of God, is there room in your life for divine inspiration? Is there a nagging desire to create something beautiful with the precious energy of your life?

My relationship with God is subtle. I neither reject the Catholicism of my youth nor practice institutional Catholicism. I pray on a regular basis but I mostly pray for acceptance of life as I experience it or for God's grace to bless anyone in need. My primary spiritual practice is a devotional path also called a bhakti practice in yoga. A devotional practice serves the purpose reminding yourself that you are beneath god. The focal point of your devotion is either God or a symbol of god's presence in this world.

What inspires and affirms your best self? At times, we are all called, to take risk and action and to expend energy to help or protect. One of the reasons that I related to the Boy Scouts and became an Eagle Scout was that its principals called to my better or best self. It was never about perfection or being a "goody two shoes" but rather about the realization that through daily action that you could be a better person and influence those around you.

If you are an atheist, you may simply substitute the word, self for God or the divine. I say this with no disrespect for atheism. In the future, will atheism sweep away god and the divine?

Everyone of us is called to do more with our lives. When you sincerely practice your spiritual path and focus your precious life's energy on creating something with meaning, you are aware and listening to this call. We are all capable of this but we do not all find it in our heart to do so.

The final note that I would add about answering your call is that you are both with all the world and completely alone, when you take on your call.

In a medieval story retold by Joseph Campbell, the great teacher and researcher of Mythology, related in an interview with Bill Moyers; " ... the holy grail appeared to the knights of the round table. The knights agreed to take upon themselves the grail quest. Yet when they left the round table and entered the forest, they each entered at a different place. For the knights knew that even on a common quest they must follow their own unique path."

Financial Independence: Materialism and Fulfillment

2009-05-02T07:43:00.001-07:00

When creating legacy, financial independence is about resources and means that are focused upon fulfillment as the end result not about the creation of additional material wealth as the end result although this may occur.

Materialism as defined by Merriam-Webster
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/materialism
b) a doctrine that the only or the highest values or objectives lie in material well-being and in the furtherance of material progress

When Madonna sang that she was "living in a material world" and that she was a "material girl". There was no need for a cultural explanation as we live in a world where material well-being, wealth and possessions are how we measure much of our success.

The allure and problem with materialism is that it works in part. Many of the most troublesome difficulties we face are those things that "work in part". The first money and first material possessions that a person obtains have a great positive impact on that person's life. In terms of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs (first published 1943), they are used to meet the survival needs of food and shelter.

As you progress up Maslow's hierarchy to the Need for Love and Self Esteem money matters but increasingly less so. I remember in college being so poor at times, that I avoided dating because I could not afford it. I did not have enough money to take someone out to eat, did not have transportation and was somewhat embarrassed about in the relative wealth of my roommates and friends at Syracuse.

As our spending increases from necessities to comfort items our fulfillment per dollar spending drops off. When our spending moves from comforts to luxuries our fulfillment per dollar of spending not only drops off but can easily go negative. I first came across this concept while taking an audio course, Transforming Your Relationship With Money: Achieving Financial Integrity, Intelligence & Independence by Joe Dominguez. http://www.simpleliving.net/main//item.asp?itemid=930

Joe Dominguez died in 1997, but he formed the not-for-profit educational organization, the New Road Map Foundation with Vicki Robin. They published a book on the course called, Your Money or Your Life. You do not need to be as frugal as Joe or Vicki to enjoy the benefits of the insights and tools offered in the course and book.
http://www.financialintegrity.org/index.php?title=About_the_New_Road_Map_Foundation

My revelation for taking this course was not my experience as a poor student at Syracuse but rather my experience 15 years later when my income moved from $80,000 to $190,000 in a short time frame. This sudden relative affluence was followed by an increase in spending but not an increase in fulfillment.

As your standard of living increases the need to maintain a certain income and the complexity of your life also increases. To maintain my income, I found myself away from home about 15 of the 20 mid-week days of the month. I stayed in nice hotels and ate at nice restaurants with my business partner and clients while my children grew up at home with their mother. I also found myself as time went on doing work that was not fulfilling for people that I would not have spent time with if they were not paying me. (I did do a lot of fulfilling work with a lot of wonderful people but this was not always the case and as the financial pressures of the business grew we took work in a few very difficult environments.)

I began to question the fulfillment that I was gaining from both my spending and my income. In the area of spending, I began to make spending versus saving decisions. If I cut an area of spending then I could capture the savings and then make investments which would provide future income.

I began by measuring and then questioning the amount of fulfillment I was gaining from various categories of spending. Convenience restaurant eating (fast food and similar) was an area that our family had begun to spend a lot of money upon due to the pace of life. The food and experience was not very good but it was convenient. My estimate was that we were spending nearly $5000 per year on this. The fulfillment oriented decision was to only use convenience restaurants once per week and to work out a shopping plan and menu to handle most of the need for convenience.

We were able to implement this, save several thousand dollars per year and gain fulfillment through a healthier diet and saner eating experience around our dinner table. (I am not claiming that our dinner table was sane but it was saner than the same five people eating in a convenience restaurant.)

When you look at costs look at the annual cost of something. Dunkin Donuts coffee on the way to work costs about $2 a cup and 50 weeks times 5 days equals a $500 expense. For any daily business related expense you can use this metric: daily cost times 250 = annual expense. A $4 cup of Starbucks (my favorite) times 250 equals $1000. While I occasionally drink a cup of Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks coffee, I buy good coffee at Costco and make it myself at a cost of about $120 per year. By the way, I invested money in Starbucks in the late 1990's and made a decent profit from other people's coffee spending habits.

If you annualize your spending categories, you can get some insight into how you can transform your spending to create a pool of money for investing. Further blogs will discuss more thoroughly how relatively conservative long-term investments can help you create real financial independence that supports your spiritual path and creative vision.

Spiritual Path: The Real Meaning of Affirmation

2009-04-28T06:46:00.000-07:00

During the past two decades or so, small books of daily affirmations became popular. Saturday Night Live lampooned these affirmations with the Stuart Smalley character played by Al Fraken. The term affirmation has been subjugated to the self-esteem and meditation movement for too long.

When you make a purposeful choice to follow a spiritual path, the term affirmation takes upon itself a very different meaning. Affirmation is transformed from something you tell yourself to how you live when you begin to purposely affirm your spiritual path through your actions each and every day.

While the destination you seek will be a reflection of your specific beliefs and the values you choose to affirm, your progress down the path is a direct function of daily practice.

Dr. Shinichi Suzuki, founder of the Suzuki School of Talent Education had a very simple example he used to demonstrate the value of daily practice. In his book, Nurtured by Love, he spoke of pointing out to his students that they now possessed a strong hand. (For most of us it's the right hand). Then he reminded them that on the day they were born, both of their hands had equal potential and equal ability.

He continued on, that each and every day they had paid more attention to their strong hand and practiced using it to do things requiring both skill and strength. They had developed their strong hand through simple actions and efforts on a daily basis. Today both hands still contained the same potential but the strong hand now had much greater ability as a result of thousands of days of focus and practice.

Although the American branch of Dr. Suzuki's school has focused almost exclusively upon music, the Japanese branch took upon itself a much broader curriculum including mathematics and more importantly character development. To read more about Dr. Suzuki and his philosophy, methods and accomplishments follow this link. http://suzukiassociation.org/about/suzuki/

I will use more examples from Dr. Suzuki in future blogs as I have found his compassion, wisdom and methods to be astoundingly effective in the transformation of individuals and development of true mastery.

One of the simplest decisions that I needed to make for myself was that I would not allow external circumstances or pressures to define how I express my values. Part of my spiritual path was to de-link my experience of external events from my internal sense of self. The de-linking was the hard part and it took years and it took help.

I attended a meeting a few months ago where I was subjected to the angry venting of frustration and some inappropriate statements were made by the frustrated person in front of a group of a half dozen people.

I did not react to the venting nor the inappropriateness of the comments, however I did respond by acknowledging the other person's frustration and then walking back through the process we had all followed together. I did not defend myself. I did not point out the inappropriateness of the comments. I did not allow this other person to dump their anger, frustration and inappropriateness into my soul.

If I have done my best, then I am at peace with the resulting successes or failures. I do not need to react to negative comments made by other people. If I choose to respond rather than react, then I have just a little bit of a chance of checking in to my values and affirming them. You will find no perfection with me but you will find someone committed to being at peace with myself and working on it every single day with small, medium and on rare occaision large acts of values affirmation.

The Search for Meaning and Legacy

2009-04-15T04:39:00.000-07:00

The rapid pace of change and dissolution of traditional institutions has once again brought the question of meaning to the forefront of many individuals who want to live a life of significance. For some that significance has a spiritual texture for others it has a more commercial texture and for many the primary texture is creative. That is, to bring into being something that would not exist without my unique and individual creative efforts.

Regardless of the specifics, significant disruptive events often beget a reflective pause. Sometimes a cold slap to the face is needed to wake one from the living dream of going through the motions. I too, live a typical life. I need to pay the bills and work regularly to meet those obligations. My life flies by a week at a time.

For two decades now, I have pursued wisdom and legacy. I have done this in the face of illness, divorce, job loss as well the successes. I have drawn heavily from reading and research which I will discuss in more detail later.

Twenty years ago, I had the privilege of working as a consultant for three top executives at the sunset of their careers. As their pending retirements approached these three leaders sought to leave a legacy and reassure themselves that the fifty years of working had had meaning.

About six years later I had developed a framework for creating legacy. A brief discussion of this framework follows:
1) Vision: Actively work to clarify and then choose a creative focal point for your life.
2) Spiritual Path: Reaffirm your values in daily life.
3) Financial Independence: Develop the financial resources to fund your own life over time.
4) Appropriate use of Technology: Use technology to solve problems and connect you to others who can assist you in creating your vision.
5) Learning Skills: Develop your own learning skills so you may teach yourself things that no one can show you.

The framework above is much simpler than the work you choose take upon yourself when you choose to create a purposeful legacy.

Joseph Campbell used to point out the hero path in both its universal and unique aspects and in many ways, the legacy choice is a similar path. As Campbell pointed out; when the Holy Grail appeared to the knights of the round table, the knights collectively made a decision to take upon the Grail quest. Yet when the knights left the round table and entered the woods, they each entered at a different place as they each had to follow their own unique path to the Grail.

Vision: Kripalu Construction 2006-2009

2009-04-13T06:40:00.001-07:00

Note: My Project at Kripalu was just featured in an article in the Boston Globe entitled Kripalu Center Dorm Radiates Simple Sustainability.

In 1993 during a workshop on Empowering Leadership, I was working along with my clients on developing a personal vision. There for the first time, I wrote about creating a retreat center. I had never heard of Kripalu at the time. But in 1996, three years later a former colleague from International Paper, Belinda Bothwick became the first outsider to be hired as Executive Director of Kripalu and I eventually received a phone call asking for help.

I took on Kripalu as project, so that I could learn about retreat centers and stayed 3 years, becoming the COO. I left Kripalu for five years and then returned to work upon strategic planning and development of both the operating educational and service businesses and the infrastructure of both the facilities and the technology. Although I resigned my full time position in April of 2008, I have stayed on part-time to complete the following large construction projects which I have been working on for four years. Like all personal visions that are successful, they look now in reality, as I have imagined them for years.

We needed to move a road to accommodate the Annex building and two years ago after the road was moved, I asked the civil engineer to have the building's corners staked out on the ground. After the surveyors put the stakes down, I walked to the stake marking the northeast corner of the building. I moved over a few feet to stand on the spot where one day there would be a beautiful enclosed walkway (slide 13) and above it five stories of bedrooms (slide 20). When I looked out toward the Stockbridge bowl (Lake Mahkeenac) the view was wrong from the one I had visualized from the building plans. I asked the civil engineers to check the stakes and they found out that they were off by seven feet. Only seven feet, but seven feet which blocked the view with an existing building.

This slide show presents two projects and $19 Million dollars in construction I am just completing at Kripalu Center in Stockbridge, MA. The Annex building is an exceptional green building using Integrated Design methodology.

The building has a radiant heating and cooling system for both the building as a whole and individually for each guest room. Day-lighting systems are designed into the building to allow the low winter sun into the building and to block the high summer sun and heat gain. The hallways of the building are "venturi tubes" and will provide passive cooling without wind.

All in All, the building as built uses 40% of the energy of typical new construction of this type and can accept geo-thermal in the future.

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Kripalu Construction 2006-2009

View more presentations from Patrick O’shei.

Ask a Question, Any Question...

2009-02-03T12:32:00.000-08:00

On an endless pursuit of wisdom, in a world that seemingly ignores it.

Ask the questions, and your questions will become the future topics.

My father was a history teacher and taught US History. I grew up reading and had access to a lot of books both at home and in the library. My mother used to take us to the library once a week to exchange books. My education was liberal arts but in the sciences, my BS is in Paper Science & Engineering. I worked for five years and then returned to graduate school, my MS is in Applied & Mathematical Statistics. This gives you an idea of how I scrutinize data.

I was raised Catholic, but would not be considered to be practicing. I believe in God but acknowledge it is strictly a matter of faith. I have studied, to various extents, all of the major religions and many spiritual practices. I read scripture as poetry not history or science. Scripture is full of deeper truth but not required to be factually accurate.

I taught for 10 years at SUNY Empire State College, New York's adult education college for non-traditional college students. I have mentored approximately 200 adults through the process of designing their own individualized degree program. I have taught over 250 adults a course called; Math for Decision-Making which incorporates critical thinking, problem-solving and math skills in working through self selected life problems. I also taught advanced level studies in Technology Management and Operations Management. I facilitated research and debate teams in how to first examine an issue and then debate from an assigned position.