The Threat
Transformation scares people. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the act of transformation means:
a : to change in composition or structure
b : to change the outward form or appearance of
c : to change in character or condition : convert
Virginia Satir once said that “the most basic human instinct is not toward survival, but towards the familiar.” People cling to their behaviors and beliefs. To ask a person to change in character or structure presents a threat to their psychic and spiritual survival.
Another Kind of Transformation
Another way of handling change is to transform your energy instead your essential self. Instead of moving your intention towards anger for a wrong done to you, transform the energy into improving the skills of a young person who might otherwise be lined up as the next victim.
Find the positive intention behind the behavior that is pissing you off.
Practice reframing your thoughts. When your current train of thought is not helpful in reaching a beneficial solution, ask yourself if there’s another way to think about it.
Transformation might be dangerous but there are ways of making it work for you.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, or the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.” – Charles Darwin
Specific
Actually, it’s important to set your goals with your “senses.” Another leg of the “Well-Formed Outcome” model is the use of specific language when defining your goals. During the recent training that I conducted at the Leadership School for sergeants in the Baltimore Police Department, having the participants get specific with their goals was one of my biggest challenges. I got responses on short and long term goals like: “I want to get a government job.” “I want to retire and get a different career.” “I want to have the best squad in the city.”
Vague?
There are several problems with being this vague. One is that you have no guideposts or markers to let you know if you are moving closer to or further away from your goal. It’s important to aim for the bullseye and not just in the general direction of the target. Without enough specificity, there is also the danger that you will end up getting things that you don’t want.
Senses
This is the time to bring in good questions and our senses. We experience the world through our five senses. To create strong internal experiences, we also bring our senses into play. We remember things that have a strong emotional impact. Our “servo-mechanism” (as Maxwell Maltz called it) is strengthened by sensory information. So, when setting a goal, ask yourself what it will look like, feel like, and sound like when you have achieved it. Use these same sensory markers to determine if you are moving closer to your goal.
Your Story
The best writers use sensory language to make their stories or information come alive. When you are writing the story of your life, make sure that you use all of your senses so that you can hit your mark. The more you live in the world of your senses, the more the world will come to life for you.
Write to me with any questions. Please retweet this post if you found it interesting/helpful.
Tomorrow, I’ll pick up the thread of “Well-Formed Outcomes.” Notre Dame is playing, so I thought I’d just put up a short post about something that’s been bugging me.
Post Length
Before I talk about the lie of personal development, I just want to note something. I’m a big fan of Seth Godin’s blog and the 300 Words A Day Blog. My intention is to blog more frequently with shorter, more cogent, and pithier posts. Let’s see how it goes!
Personal Development
The concept of personal development presumably carries with it the burden of improving who you are. You need to add things to the existing model of you. Rather than adding things, how about striping things away? How about limiting your media-created desires? How about getting rid of the clothes and “toys” that other people convinced you that you needed? How about getting rid of the “friends” who do nothing but vampirically suck out your energy?
Trust
maybe if we trusted our bodies, our intuition, and our experience, we might find that we have everything that we needed. It’s less about what we should be doing and more about fully focusing on our current experience. As Timothy Gallwey talked about, we need to find a game worth playing and surround ourselves with people who will challenge us to bring out our God-given gifts. Anything else is someone else’s trance.
Are you engaged in personal development right now? What are the emotional and material things that you could give up that might show a better Return On Investment?
Oh, and BTW, I’d love it if you subscribed. Just fill in your name and email in the form. You will hear my dulcet tones on a relaxation audio and receive the personal development classic, (ironic, I know) “An Iron Will” as a an ebook.
Gideon Shalwick’s video blog inspired me to do something other than text on this one. The Shalwick recommendation to do it outdoors took care of my normal problems with lighting and I think I got a lot closer to “The Rule of Thirds” on this one.
If you are self employed you have to worry about a number of things. Take my advice and don’t make it harder on yourself by starting your marketing in the summer -- like we did. If you have children and a supportive spouse, it doesn’t matter when you start -- there can be tremendous benefits to running your own show from the parenting end.
Too many parents scramble to find “quality” time with their children. Being self employed and working from home allows you to be engaged with your children. You’re not forcing things or programming your children to exhaustion out of guilt. I got my first taste of this engagement growing up in the drug treatment center started and run by my parents. We got to experience the fear AND the celebration. We watched our parents handle setbacks and “absorb uncertainty” (Vittorio Cossoni).
Now, as then, there’s the sense that we aren’t living a “normal” existence. What’s more important is that my wife and I feel we are living a natural existence. Our children will hopefully learn the pull of inspiration to go along with the push of motivation. They will know the intersection and the difference between who we are and what we do.
Yeah, certain ducks could have been lined up better but no regrets here.
Happiness is our natural condition. All you have to do is look at a healthy infant to notice that their default state is one of unfiltered joy. As we grow older, we learn to add to our list of needs. Our wants and needs become confused. Eventually, as Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out, “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.”
Our attention has become fractured. We are losing our ability to intuit. We seek increasing stimulation from external sources. When the stimulation is no longer present, when we feel we are not able to meet our “needs,” we pick up the pace or become despondent.
We have to create opportunities for silence – periods of meditation where God speaks to us. This will aid us in understanding our points of individuality and our points of connection. Before we can value our differences, we must accept the things that we have in common. This begins when we seek the answer to the question: “Who am I and why I am here?” I believe that an honest effort to answer that question will prevent the moral nihilism that too many people organize their lives around.
We have the tools for happiness. They can only be accessed when we strip away the extra. They are only effective when we are honest about all the parts that make us who we are. Only then can we discover and work with our real strengths. The world has need of our gifts. They can only be given when we engage in addition by subtraction.
Albert Einstein said: “We can’t solve problems at the same level of consciousness at which we created them.” Yet this is exactly what we do in our efforts at educational reform. There continue to be dueling reports about whether charter schools work any better for underprivileged kids than the regular school system. From what I can tell, this is only a discussion about the best form of palliative care.
I go back and forth on why we do what we do with our children and their education. Is it a desire for social and economic control by our oligarchs? Is it greed? Is it a lack of imagination? A combination, or something else entirely?
This affects us all and I’d love to hear your thoughts.
The Threat
