Being Point

Tag: choice

  • Effective Collaboration Is Critical To Moving Your Vision Forward

    Who do you think with in meaningful and high level ways? What is the nature of that relationship(s)? Are you and they able to be completely and constructively honest as you consider mutual opportunities, issues and problems?

    We can never directly see our own faces nor the backs of our bodies. Each of us has literal blind spots built into our experience of being human. Often, the best way that we have to reality-check ourselves is to be reflected in a literal mirror for physical reflection and / or a “figurative” mirror in the form of another person for feedback about our choices.

    Last week, we discussed trusting. This week, trusting expands into collaboration because trust is an essential foundation for effective collaboration.

    Do you cultivate collaboration? How critical do you consider collaboration in moving your vision forward? What are your conditions for effective collaboration? Are you a good collaborator for others?

  • “As Soon As You Trust Yourself, You Will Know How To Live” ~ Goethe

    After a client meeting this week, a very talented colleague was surprised that I shared an opinion that he said he had not been sufficiently comfortable to share. He said, “I should trust myself more.”

    Goethe said, “As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”

    What are the implications of trusting yourself? Perhaps that . . . you keep your own counsel, you are willing to honor your instincts, you know yourself and what matters to you . . . and you’re willing to take risks to be true to your core values.

    When you trust yourself, courage comes both more easily and more frequently. You’re less willing to be a pleaser and more willing to honor your life with choices that you clearly make . . . rather than those choices that are made for you, either directly by others, or indirectly by inherited belief systems and customs.

    What is the degree to which you trust yourself? Has your ability to trust yourself increased or diminished over time? Who is your best role model for trusting herself or himself?

  • Is Everything In Life A “Get-To”?

    Some say that almost everything in life is a “get-to” because we have free will. That seems true in the absolute sense of the word. From that perspective, most of our “have-to’s” stem from the choices that we “get-to” make.

    For example, most people “have to” work in order to provide for ourselves and our families at the levels that we choose. But to say that we “have-to” make the lifestyle and spending choices that we make seems inaccurate.  Is it more accurate to say you “have-to” send a child to college or that you “get-to” do that?

    Today, as an experiment, view everything as a “get-to” – as a privilege, a gift, a joy, a supreme opportunity. Please do so not in some “rose-colored-glasses” way of thinking, but as an inquiry into your life experience.

    Is your orientation – your habitual way of living – more “get-to” or “have-to”? Don’t judge it, please. Just observe and let me know what happens. Be mindful of how this perceptual shift impacts your results.

  • Privilege vs. Obligation: How Are You With “Get-To” vs. “Have-To”?

    This past Sunday morning, I attended a high-energy Ecstatic Dance event; and when the group of about 125 people was seated in a circle, the facilitator asked each person to meditate for a moment and become aware of a core intention to focus on and nurture in the coming weeks.

    After thinking for a moment, the thought that came to my conscious awareness was that I would like to diminish and / or eliminate feelings of “have to” and replace them with feelings of “get to.”

    Truth be told, most of us are blessed with far more “get-to’s” than “have-to’s” because we have voluntarily made the core choices which have created most of our “to-do’s.” Ironic, isn’t it, that when blessed with the ability to make so many of our own choices, many of us have often felt burdened?

    How are you with “get to” versus “have to”? Which of the two do you spend most of your time doing? Do you feel differently in one mind set distinguished from the other? How conscious are you about the distinctions between the two: privilege vs. obligation?

  • What Are The Consequences Of Knowingly Allowing A Basic To Slide?

    Yesterday, during our call, we discussed making a list of five basics which, if acted upon, would make a huge positive difference in our lives. Today on the call, we are going to discuss the lists of five that participants sent in. What are your five?

    It’s interesting that oftentimes when things are working really well, humans have stopped doing the fundamental things that helped make things work. Perhaps there’s been some sort of mechanism that has had us take things for granted from time to time. Has that ever happened with you or someone close to you?

    Is there anything that you have allowed to slide – any basic – that you know you’ve been allowing to slide, but you haven’t yet reversed it? Some people think that the consequences of not taking corrective action when you know better are even worse than unknowing omission of what we know to be right. What do you think?

  • What About Damaged Or Reduced Potential?

    Often, the word “potential” is tied with superlatives like “unlimited” or “huge” or “fantastic” to inspire or motivate us. POTENTIAL in capital letters with exclamation points!!!

    But how much do we think about “limited potential”? Talents and skills vary among human beings. How about potential? Does it vary similarly? Can it be diminished by life circumstances? Does potential stay the same over a lifetime or can it be damaged and reduced?

    While everyone may theoretically have an unlimited potential for greatness, for example, greatness still seems to be in short supply. The same for common sense: limitless potential for it, yet common sense is not common. So if potential is limited, what is the source of the limitation?

    Let’s look inward. Have you limited your potential for impeccable health, tremendous success, off-the-charts happiness? Do you really have the potential for the world’s greatest relationship, or have you allowed that potential to be damaged or diminished?

    Today, please consider places where you may have been a party to diminished or reduced potential. Perhaps think about how and why that came to be. You might want to make sure that the choice to live below a superlative level of potential is a knowing choice. Perhaps you’ll want to restore your potential?

  • Are So-Called “Best Practices” Really The Best? How Do You Decide What Is The Best Way To Do Things?

    The term “best practices” has become a management buzzword, and it means a specific approach toward a particular field – for example, software development – that is thought of as the best way to do something.

    In the rest of life, we are exposed to lots of ideas about what are the best ways to do things, but most often, there is significant variation in what constitutes “best.”  What’s the “best” way to raise a child, for example, or to govern a country?  Lots of different opinions; aren’t there?

    Raising fruits and vegetables might be less controversial because horticulture is more scientific, but, no doubt, there are gardeners who have individual ideas about what is “best.”

    How do you choose from among differing points of view that hold themselves out to be “the best”?  Since we have to decide what is “best” from a myriad of choices, what are the “best” criteria or processes by which we make those determinations?  What degree of usefulness do you consider the notion of best practices to have?

  • What Are The Best Responses When Others Break Promises?

    What are the best ways to respond to others when they do not keep their promises?  Clearly, responses like anger, resentment and recrimination are counterproductive.  What kinds of positive choices are available?

    A basic first step is to appeal to the core values that may have been the foundation for the promise in the first place.  Appealing to basic values like fairness, integrity and truth may shift the result.

    The desired degree of action about a broken promise is most often a function of its importance and impact.  At their most extreme, broken promises can result in significant emotional distress and other kinds of difficulty.  Yet, the principle of a broken promise can be deeply troublesome even if the issue is primarily one of keeping one’s word.

    How have you wanted to be treated when you have broken promises in the past?  What are the extents to which you have gone to have others live up to their promises?  What are your limits and boundaries about broken promises?  Most importantly, what have you learned about promises and how to engage in productive promise-making that produces great results?

  • Self-Talk Is A Reflection Of Our Perceptions

    How much do you think your inner dialogue has with the results that you produce in life? Have you ever been one of those people who has allowed negative self-talk to run roughshod over your consciousness and become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Or are you a master at only uplifting self-talk as a means of inspiring you to move forward?

    Self-talk matters because it reflects our perceptions. If “perception is reality,” then any perception that you’re a winner or a loser – or anything in between – that somehow gets translated to self-chatter has a tremendous amount of influence over your ultimate experience.

    Among the most powerful things we can do to manage self-talk is to write it down. Take three minutes as an experiment and write down all the positive self-talk and three minutes for all of the negative. This exercise makes your choice making very clear by contrasting what will aid you against what will diminish you. What other ways do you use self-talk?

  • The Freedom To Err Is Fundamental To All Freedoms

    This week, let’s consider freedom in as many different contexts as possible. Gandhi said, “Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.”

    The freedom to experiment, to make choices and to make mistakes is foundational for other freedoms. Dogma opposes freedom. Yet, seemingly paradoxically, there can be tremendous freedom in profound commitment.

    How free are you? Not just in the abstract, but in reality: How free are you to live the life you desire? What impediments have there been to your freedom? Is it possible that the most significant detriments to our own freedom have been self-made?