belief

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

“When I was young I asked my mother, ‘What will I be’”

Doris Day
Que Sera, Sera

We were sitting at the dinner table tonight, eating our Paleo meal of fried whiting, avocado, callaloo (Trinidadian dish), and plantains (roots and tubers are kind of ok), when my son asked what I thought he could be when he grew up. After singing a couple of bars of the song (no one was shocked since I have it on my IPod) I explained that I was was more interested in who he could be.

At 9, he already has peers and others giving him strong hints about their expectations for how he’s supposed to fit in. Dinner time is the perfect time to instill in him his responsibility to be a positive deviant.

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.

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.

You’ve put in a few decades doing whatever it is you do. How does it end? I was prompted to think about this after a longtime friend came by for dinner. We’ve known each other for close to 35 years. We talked about the paths we’ve been on and the paths we see ourselves taking in the near future. We also reminisced about people we know in common.

Retirement
Our dinner guest is pushing hard. She’s one of the women I talked about in my last post who’s always shown me qualities that were missing in many of my male professional counterparts. She got her Ivy League degree but knew that nothing was promised. She’s hasn’t had it easy but she’s embraced “free agency” and works to improve the lives of those around her.

I was taken aback to hear that friends we went to school with are getting ready to head for retirement and quieter climes in the next year. I was shocked to hear recently that the nephew of a friend had put in his twenty years and was retiring in a year or two and was opening a restaurant/bar.
Maybe what happened to me is…

What’s Next
that I share the view of people like Peter Ragnar who believe that a lot of the aging process is mental. I’ve also taken positions that haven’t provided decent retirement benefits as one of their perks – so temptation is less. My ADD also does not lend itself to a hammock. I am also from the Helen Keller school of thought that says ” security does not exist in Nature. Life is either a daring adventure or it’s nothing.” This is part of the manifesto shared by me and my fellow Ronin.

God does not promise security in this life. The author Philip Yancey points out that we don’t get to know God and then do his will – we get to know God by doing his will. Like my parents, I choose to “wear out rather than rust out.” It took me a while, but I realize that my wife’s complaints about our path are mainly pro forma. In many ways she pushes harder than I do. She does this in the face of the paradoxes that come with being a good Christian. The more you do, the more is demanded and gratitude be damned.

The reasons for staying on or stepping off may be the result of evolution, genetics, or something else. Some of us are built a different way. Some deal with the difficulty of the now – they live how they believe Christ lived, and they accept that God will determine the value of all these efforts at some point in the distant future. You are not alone. I respect and admire those who have decided that their race has been run. But there are those of us who are not content with where we are and what we’ve done and we will keep moving. The Talmud, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Bible all recognize that we cannot possibly finish the work set before us – but we will not be excused for not taking it up.