Tag Archives: spirituality

Just to Be Enough

by on January 6, 2005 in Creative, Life, Media

I’m now back to the point where I can blog again. I traveled with my family to my parent’s home in West Virginia and then to Colorado to celebrate the end of 2004 with my wife’s family. Part of my wanted to take my laptop with me, but a more urgent voice asked me to leave it at home. I’m glad I did. I spent more time relaxing, reading provocative works, and most importantly, spending time with my wife and girls. I also started to sketch again – a creative outlet that I left dormant for too long. The challenge will be to continue these new habits as I return to familiar settings.

Off on a tangent…I’m a member of Toastmasters International. Each meeting there is an inspirational opener and for last night’s meeting a fellow coach read an excerpt from The Dance by Oriah Mountain Dreamer. The reading focused on the idea of "just being enough" and I was hit by some provocative questions and thoughts.

Our culture exalts the over-achiever, the individual who painstakingly achieves a high level of self-improvement, the person who rises from a log cabin to public greatness. Its our driving myth of accomplishment and its also a cult. Next time you’re at Barnes and Noble (or better yet, find an independently owned bookstore), take a look at all the books devoted to Self-Improvement. There are so many self-help gurus out there telling us we can be more: more confident, more loving, more outgoing, more wealthy, more thin…well, you get the picture. It’s all about more.

What if you and I are ENOUGH just as we are. Right now. We don’t need to be MORE. How does this change our reality? We have enough love, enough money, enough self-worth. We can stop chasing after the illusion that MORE offers. Our wholesale buying into the ideals of ambition and upward mobility have not led to greater happiness. Unfortunately, for most of us, just the opposite. But like the mouse in the wheel, we keep running forward only to be stuck in the same place we started.

As I further listened to the reading, I quickly wrote a question: is improvement the same as learning? The answer I came to is no. It is possible to accept that we are enough and continue to learn at the same time. Learn more about who we are, not who we should be or who others want us to be. It’s time to just grow to be enough.

Comments on “Spirit in Business”

by on December 9, 2004 in Creative, Work

Yesterday, David Batstone posted a blog entry on Spirit in Business at Worthwhile Magazine and probably spoke for many of us who are trying to help organizations understand how powerful they can be when connecting their actions to deeper principles. He writes about how difficult it can be to get through the front door, particularly when the organization’s culture rewards the financial bottom line over the personnel bottom line. David goes on to say:

I take a broader view of spirit in business. I find it embedded in the relationship that a customer has with a company, that a worker has with her boss, that an investor has with management. The degree to which these relationships, these points of connection, create trust and generate real value, then a company is soulful.

I commented:

I share your same dilemma – you start talking about spirit and purpose in the workplace and it’s often perceived as too woo-woo for the business world. Managers and execs wonder what that has to do with making decisions and execution (those two areas that often define performance). Yet, what holds up those decisions and actions? They’re not made in a vacuum, but come from a personal philosophy that may or may not match the one held by the company.

I like your perspective on spirit as the connection of relationships. And I’d like to add that its also the connection that one has with their work. A person who believes in what they are doing and believes that it is a true display of their unique talents and passions has found the soulfulness of their work.

Keep the faith, David. Perhaps we’ll come to the place soon where the big picture is too compelling to ignore.

And as I thought about this further, I remembered a familiar voice from my experiences trying to grow my practice. This voice reminded me that you have to know how to speak your audience’s language. Talking about spirit may be woo woo at first, but if you put it in the terms of the culture’s preferred lexicon, you’ll open the door to possible acceptance. If you’re speaking to a CEO or Executive Director, find out what’s important to them and use the metaphor and imagery that can speak to that specific individual.

I’d be interested in hearing about other experiences out there in the field.

Is It Luck or Something Deeper?

by on December 8, 2004 in Creative, Life, Media

I discovered this article on creating your own luck in career success and there were some ideas that resonated with me. Rather than viewing luck as a series of coincidences, Susan RoAne, author of How to Create Your Own Luck, believes it is a conscious pattern of thought: "People who create their own luck live large, remain open to possibility, and expect that good things will happen — and they do."

Similarly, in Manifest Your Destiny, Wayne Dyer writes:

The process of creation begins first with desire. Your desires, cultivated as seeds of potential on the path of spiritual awareness, can blossom in the form of freedom to have these desires in peace and harmony with your world. Giving yourself permission to explore this path is allowing yourself the freedom to use your mind to create the precise material world that matches your inner world.

We have the ability to create what we want from our lives. We also have the ability to wait around for things to happen. The choices are all ares to make. What choice do you want to make today?

Creating from Abundance

by on December 2, 2004 in Career, Creative, Life, Media

This week, I’ve been thinking about creating from a mind-set of abundance rather than from scarcity. There’s real power in this, but not always the easiest thing to do. One of my very favorite books is A Simpler Way by Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers and they write:

Life creates more possibilities as it engages with opportunities. There are no ‘windows of opportunity,’ narrow openings in the fabric of space-time that soon disappear forever. Possibilities beget more possibilities; they are infinite.

There’s a certain peacefulness that comes from this knowledge. That the right clients, the right job opportunities, the right career, or whatever it is for us are always out there waiting for us to see them. And they are never alone – we always tend to attract more just like them. It might seem a little woo-woo, particularly in a business setting, but I believe there is a creative force that exists that successful leaders know how to tap into to get phenomenal results in their lives.

So, fellow explorers, any experiences with creating from abundance?

There Is More Between Heaven and Earth

by on October 12, 2004 in Work

It’s a little off of what I would normally post here, but I keep coming back to this story and find myself amazed by what happened. It’s the recent story about the 17 year old girl who drove over her car into a ravine in Washington state. Two things are absolutely miraculous: one, that she survived (we learned today that dehydration may have saved her from dying of a blood clot in her brain); two, and the point of my post, is how she was found.

A volunteer searcher who said she had had several vivid dreams of a wooded area found the wrecked car in the trees Sunday…Hatch’s parents organized a volunteer search Saturday, and that night Sha Nohr, the mother of Hatch’s friend, said she had dreams of a wooded area and heard the message, “Keep going, keep going.”

This absolutely amazes me, as well as inspires me because there is so much that we still do not understand about ourselves as humans and our capabilities. What would you call Sha Nohr’s experience? To me, it relates to a second conception of “intuition.” There is a more rational view of intuition which is the mind’s ability to take various bits of information and fill in the blanks on a subconscious level. But this goes beyond rational. Another view of intuition is that it is an act of receiving information from a deeper level of reality. Deepak Chopra might say that it is communicating with the quantum level, that space which exists between physical reality and the spiritual reality of God.

Now, for the wild leap…how does this alternative view of intuition fit into how leaders operate within organizations? Is it possible for companies to entertain the spiritual dimension of intuition and use it to energize their cultures? What are the thoughts out there?