The Impulse

What one can be, one must be

Abraham Maslow

Maslow is summarizing in 6 words the human drive toward “better,” toward being fully human, toward being all that we can be. He said it was as real as our need to breath.

Millenia before Maslow, in 382 BCE, one of the great philosophers, Aristotle, was born; he might be the first person who identified this drive.  He called it entelechia, the drive to make actual what is currently only potential.  Most of us really want to be better, do better, become something more.

Do you realize???

700 years ago…the Plague killed 200 million people in a single year; that is 40% of England’s population.

500 years ago… 3 million people died in France due to famine.

100 years ago… World War I saw 16 million killed and the flu killed 50 million in a single year!

If we heard stats like that today we would be shocked and alarmed.

The world has dramatically progressed in the last 100 years  But that progress is often eclipsed by the reporting bias that supports our evolutionary propensity for tuning into negative threats.  Which means, negative news sells, because it gets attention, which skews our understanding of what is happening in the real world. Which is why it feels so despairing… entelechia has us wanting things to improve….but it is!

Do you realize the per capita income for every single nation on the planet has tripled in the last century? Food cost has dropped 30X?  Not 30%, 30 fold! Transportation hundreds X and communication millions X? 

We could dig into all the interesting changes that have happened in the last 100 years.  Because few stats are short of mind blowing.

But it illustrates the point of this post.  We have a worldview biased to seeing the world as getting worse…when there is hardly one metric where that is true.  

If you didn’t see last week’s Wildlybetter video on three books you must read, go watch it… it is all about this wild improvement in our world.

Over time we ARE improving.  And entelechia is the impulse, the spark the prompt that moves us toward improving.

Which raises a question….are you?

Are you getting better?  

What gets attention grows.  

What gets attention gets invested with intention.  

So where is your attention?  What is your intention?

Where is entelechia prompting you?

This might be a more important question than ever because one of the big areas of global improvement is lifespan.

You stand to be here on this planet longer than any generation, bar the original methuselah generations.

100,000 years ago, cavemen lived til their late 20's. By age 13, humans went into puberty and began having children; by 26, those parents became grandparents and soon passed away.

Lifespan grew to about 35 by the Middle Ages.

In the 1800’s it was around 40.

Today it is around 80 and rising all the time. 

You, on average, have more years ahead than your great-grandparents had on this planet.

What is getting your entelechia impulse to be a contributor and dent-maker?  

What is getting your attention and intention this week? What are your deepest priorities?

To move from the comfortable bayou of the known into the vast ocean of the unknown will take wild courage, friend. 

Rollo May, the 20th century eminent psychologist described entelechia in his book The Courage to Create:

“The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day. These decisions require courage.”

Grab some courage, focus your attention, bring some intention to your deepest priorities, and become all that you can be.

Why We Get Stuck

Over the last several years I have had the opportunity to work in a couple different countries, interact with non-profits, NGO’s, churches, high tech communications companies and coaching clients with even more diversity of background.  I say all that to frame what I am about to say…

...when an organization is stuck, it is usually                        

because the leader of the organization is stuck. 

I realize, in looking back that often I was the guy that didn’t know that I didn’t know…you know what I mean? 

Remember the old Arabic proverb you heard sometime in college?

He who knows not and knows not he knows not: he is a fool-shun him.
He who knows not and knows he knows not: he is simple-teach him.
He who knows and knows not he knows: he is asleep-wake him.
He who knows and knows he knows: he is wise-follow him.

This is why I have to  check in with those in my life and my coach so they can help me see what I can’t see, and help me find out what I don’t know I don’t know.

As long as we constantly identify being stuck as a dynamic out there we can point at, then we will continue to chase our tail never ever getting resolution on the very things we claim we are trying to solve. 

Insert the issue you are wrestling with right now. Repeated efforts to deal with that issue by continual focus on changing something out there first without acknowledging your role, how your level of consciousness impacts it, how your design/contribution to its existence sustains it, will fail.  And those efforts will frustratingly fail over and over and over again.  You know not that you know not that you are the system. 

Changing the system comes first by changing you. 

Blaming is more fun.  Pointing the finger easier.  Scapegoating others reflexive. But owning that I am the system and that a shift in my consciousness and awareness actually changes the system?... that is too powerful for most of us.  But that is the reality of the quantum world we live in. 

When our consciousness changes, a system changes and when I change I can “be” with a system in a different way and hence change it by changing me. 

It applies to parenting, relationships, companies, and churches.  It applies to Home Owner Associations, political parties, church boards, and city councils.

It is one of the most profound learnings I have had in the last several years and it is why personal mastery has become part of the transformational architecture I am developing for those that I coach and the systems I have been invited to help. 

“Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively.  It goes beyond competence and skills, although it involves them. It goes beyond spiritual opening, although it involves spiritual growth. Personal Mastery is a never-ending process.  People with a high level of personal mastery live in a continual learning mode. They never ‘arrive’. Sometimes, language, such as the term ‘personal mastery’ creates a misleading sense of definiteness, of black and white. But personal mastery is not something you possess. It is a process. It is a lifelong discipline. People with a high level of personal mastery are acutely aware of their ignorance, their incompetence, their growth areas. And they are deeply self-confident. Paradoxical? Only for those who do not see the ‘journey is the reward’.” (Peter Senge and Otto Scharmer)

Those that engage in personal mastery know that they don’t know and so engage in the life long process of awareness. I want to be that person and help others into that journey because it is there you find deep reward and life long satisfaction.

TYIR

Every year about this time I set my sights on the year in review trip that I plan in the 2nd quarter each year. Over the last half a dozen years this trip has had me in 6 different countries from the hot summer mountains of South Africa to icy cold snowy but beautiful Finland. While these trips have always been solo events, this year it will be with my son among the salt surf and palm trees of the Baja peninsula. The focus of the trip has been and is always two things…how was this last year and what about the upcoming one?

Socrates said:  ὁ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ. "The unexamined life is not worth living."

One of the themes of Wildly Better this past year has been the danger of skimming through life, of getting caught on cruise control and autopilot only to awake well beyond your exit and then realize 4 years had passed. Many people miss much of life sleepwalking through it.

Part of development, part of the expansion of our awareness horizon, part of the ability to take in wider swatches of life, is by simply being mindful: aware of what is arising within and around you in real time.

And that is the key: real time. Monday morning quarterbacking is always welcome to learn where we misstepped or missed cues. The real juice of development is to live awake and aware in real time and to act in accordance with the big goals in front of you that are laid out and clear.

Enter TYIR.

The Year In Review is an exercise done by most top performers seeking to learn from yesterday with the express purpose of integrating that into action plans of the the next year! I have placed for your download the TYIR exercise I hope you will take some reflective time and do. I suggest doing some silence meditation and then blocking an hour or so to really think about this past year. Only then will you be able to progress to dreaming, ideating and planning the next.

Here's the download:

2017:  TYIR

The Real Benefits of Travel

                                                                                                                       Doha Qatar skyline

I have wanted to do a post/video for a while on the important role that travel has played in my life.  So as I prepare for a trip to the UAE (Abu Dhabi and Dubai) and Qatar, I thought this might be an ideal time to invite into your curiosity some reflections.

The obvious benefits of travel are recreative, rejuvenating and restful.  Yes of course all of those.  But I am on a slightly different glide slope for this one

Let me set the stage with a few lines from a book I read in 2004 that has been pulled off the shelf for a read on the plane some 13 yrs later…

“It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.” 

― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

If you have never read de Botton this is an excellent start.  

                            I.M. Pei Islamic Museum of Art Doha Qatar

I had the opportunity to travel to remote parts of India when I was 17, the first of what would be many trips to that part of the world. I can’t calculate the impact of the trip on my entire life but I can say that even then I knew I would never be quite the same.  

Some 30 countries later, on train, boat, helicopter, plane, horse, rickshaw, and tuktuk my entire interior world has been rearranged, tweaked, enlightened, and infused because of the places, spaces and faces I have had the privilege to encounter.

When we travel we are jolted out of routinized thinking, movement, interaction and eating.  We are arrested by new surroundings, smells, souks and stations.

All of these have a way of getting us out of our little dinky world, but more importantly out of our little dinky thinking that often has us unconsciously assuming my way, my world is surely the way most people live and breathe, right?  It is one of the reasons we made a commitment to give our kids, while they were still young, travel opportunities in different parts of the world: expanding their outer world meant inevitably expanding their inner world. 

You can’t help but think differently in different parts of the country let alone different parts of the world. 

                                                   Taj Mahal Agra

We are told we have between 70,000-90,000 thoughts a day but about 90-95% of them are the same thoughts as yesterday.  Nothing jolts you out of that rut better then a change of scenery. 

de Botton again…

“Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.”

So, can I offer a few things I have tried to engage in my travels?

First, GO PLACES!  - there are 196 identified countries in the world.  If you only stay in one or two it is like reading only a page or two of a book.  Places change us, expand us, infuse us. Sure we have to save, plot and plan.  But read de Botton, part of the trip is the planning and anticipation; that alone has a molding force.

Second, SEE SPACES! - architecture posesses one of the most acute powers for arresting our minds.  Whether is it the Taj Mahal in India, the I.M. Pei designed Dallas Symphony Hall or the Islamic Museum of Art in Qatar, be it St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, or the 46m long Reclining Buddha in Wat Pho Temple in Bangkok, the magnitude of these spaces expand what can be, give you a portal into an entirely different world and open you to possibilities you can’t get from a flat page or computer screen. 

                                                                                                                                                                                     Redwoods California

Third, EXPERIENCE TRACES of the Divine evolving in creation.  The French vineyards of Chateauneuf du Pape, the red dunes in Nambia, the majesty of the Nepalese terrain heading to Namche Bazaar, or the towering Redwoods of northern California. Terrain changes reorient our bodies and spirits in ways nothing else does in the same way. Natural wonders abound in every landscape, mountains, desert, plains and sea.  And when those wonders lodge in us they provoke wonder and curiosity and take us to new creative vistas. I have always returned from a trip more curious, and more creative. And for those of you that gravitate toward water/sea?  There is a reason!

                                                Red Dunes Namibia

Last, MEET FACES - My kids have always been half embarrassed because I talk to total strangers a lot.  This is really an important practice in other lands where their world is so vastly different than mine.  Get good at asking questions, peer into their world, their life, their thoughts their routine.  I had an exercise in a class I took where I had to go spend two hours with someone very much UNLIKE me.  It could have been different in any number of ways.  But the idea was I had to get comfortable with "other." This was valuable simply because you can often have that experience near your home.  Even local travel can change, challenge or invade your current worldview. One of the reccurring thoughts that hits me almost every time I get into conversations with people in a different context is “this is their life, this is really who they are, they are not on vacation..how interesting.”  

Traveling helps me remember how ethnocentric I am, how unenlightened and clumsy I am, how narrow and uninformed I am.  I am sure that will happen again as I venture into a totally different world this week.  But a world of unbelievable vision, architecture, cultural uniqueness and beauty.  There is no doubt my next several weeks have #wildlybetter written all over them.  I hope you are thinking about your next trek… that alone heightens our senses!