John Renesch: Exploring the Better Future

The Inverted Corporation: Shameful Organizational Citizenship

I read an article in Businessweek* the other day and learned more in detail about how U.S. corporations are avoiding federal taxes by a process called “inversion” – essentially having a post office box in a low-tax foreign nation as their “legal address” which subsequently means they needn’t pay taxes until they bring the funds back into the U.S.  

According to Americans for Tax Fairness, an estimated $90 billion a year in federal taxes are being avoided due to this manipulation. They further estimate that U.S. corporations are presently holding $2.1 trillion in untaxed profits offshore.

This deferral process can be delayed indefinitely as long as the earned profits remain offshore. Architects of the tax evasion scheme have called it “Flip Flop,” the “Panama Scoot” and other nicknames taking pride in the work they have done in both designing the scheme and defending it against IRS challenges over the past thirty years.

This year, according to Businessweek, “inversions have received more attention than ever, as well-known companies such as Burger King and Pfizer announced plans to change their addresses (Pfizer didn’t follow through).” According to Americans for Tax Fairness, “Burger King’s planned ‘inversion’ will allow the company and its leading shareholders to avoid an estimated $400 million to $1.2 billion in U.S. taxes between 2015 and 2018.”

If this practice is to be made illegal it must be done by Congress. In July, President Obama called the practice ‘an unpatriotic tax loophole’ and urged Congress to put a stop to it.” Businessweek quotes the President: “’My attitude is, I don’t care if it’s legal,’ he said earlier in 2014, ‘it’s wrong.’”

As far back as the 1980s, shortly after the first inversion deal was tested, a congressional committee called the scheme a “mockery” of the tax code. Despite this, corporate lawyers have succeeded in defending this practice year after year against the IRS lawsuits, resulting in more regulations, more laws and more complexity, “each permutation more complicated than the last,” according to Businessweek.

So Congress, can’t you go against all the lobbyists to whom you feel beholding and act in the best interest of your country, and close the loopholes that keep these trillions of unpaid tax dollars offshore? Any good citizen of this country pays their share of taxes to support all the services from which they benefit. This needs to include corporations, who are much bigger lobbyists than any individuals.

Shareholders in these corporations must approve these tax dodges. So, shareholders, if you own stock in a company that is planning one of these inversions consider disapproving it as a good deed of a responsible citizen.

Taxpayers, you are the ones being negatively impacted by this huge loss of tax revenue. Can’t you demand that your Congressmen and Congresswomen take a stand against this unfair evasion of taxes – this wrongful dodge of responsible corporate citizenry? Corporations have lobbied their way into having plenty of advantages already, including “personhood.” Let us require them to pay their share at least in this regard and deliver significant revenue to the federal coffers as well as returning a much needed multi-trillion dollar infusion of capital into our domestic economy.

*Bloomberg Businessweek, December 22-28, 2014, p. 50-53

Wealth Gap Unsustainable: Duh!

A friend of mine with a wonderful sense of humor is planning to publish a book whose working title is The Tao of Duh which will include examples of glaringly obvious, slap-myself-on-the-forehead “ahas” along with many personal witticisms of her own. I love the title (and the author, Leslie Eveland) and am urging her to get it to press ASAP. Meanwhile, I am amazed at how many glaring “duhs” there are out there and how we devour them as if they were not already obvious.

One example: In September 2014, Harvard published a study* declaring that the wealth gap is not only unsustainable but is growing worse. Why does it take a university like Harvard no less to publish something so obvious to anyone who is paying attention to current trends? Why do nearly 2,000 Harvard Business School alumni around the world need to be surveyed on this subject when anyone who is awake and observant of global developments already knows the trends and doesn’t need to read an expensive study to confirm it?

In a 2011 post to this blogsite I wrote about the growing wealth gap since Egypt’s Tahrir Square protests were fresh in our memories. I included the 2007 graph below to illustrate my point:

Even in this seven year old graph, the wealth gap had been widening for nearly thirty years. With the Harvard study just out, I looked for some more current stats and found this Federal Reserve comparison that brings us into 2014:

According to the St. Louis Fed, this graph shows that:

    U.S. economic growth is not translating into higher median family incomes. Real GDP per capita has     increased since the year 2000 [blue line here] while the real median income per household [red line     here] has not, indicating a trend of greater income inequality.

So the gap continues to widen. And like any widening crevasse it will eventually fracture or erupt, leading to a revolt of the disenfranchised, those who wake up to the reality that the scales are tipped to create more wealth for those who already have it. Anyone who has been paying attention to this multi-generational trend knows this and anyone who knows how people respond to mass injustice knows what is possible.

Can this really be news for anyone? Isn’t this obvious – the biggest duh of them all?

As Eveland likes to say, “A duh is not a duh when you don't get it.”

The Harvard study, which received tons of publicity in all major media outlets, was treated as big news. So apparently the media thought it was real news and they weren’t stating the obvious. Clearly, they didn’t “get it” yet either.

What happens when something is “unsustainable”? What happens when something cannot continue? Exploring potential scenarios about what it means is often avoided, possibly because such implications may not only be speculative, but also get really messy. What happens when an established powerful system grinds to a halt? My best guess is chaos of some sort – global system collapse, stock market crash, widespread depression, public demonstrations and rioting, and martial law, to name a few possibilities, come to mind.

Hopefully, there will be a political transformation whereby the injustices will be seen not only as unsustainable but grossly unfair and conscious thought leaders “who get it” will stand tall for large scale reform of the system before mass chaos breaks out.

For my conservative friends, I am not talking wealth distribution; I am talking about restoring our economic system to one that is truly a free market. I am talking about removing all the systemic advantages that have been put in place over the generations by those with power. The supposed “free market” isn’t really free anymore. It has been rigged. People know this; they may be pretending they don’t know this, but they do.

If this kind of courageous leadership does not emerge soon we might not be able to avoid a revolution of a more violent sort – one that could involve riots and bloodshed.

One way or another, there will be a revolution. It could be hard. Or it could be soft. That is our choice. And we don’t need a Harvard study to tell us that.



*Harvard report: "An Economy Doing Half Its Job"

Red Faced Again: A Writer’s Lesson

                                        William James (1842-1910)

Well, it happened again. I discovered a misattribution in a quote I have been using. For an author, this is a big deal, especially if one has been complicit in perpetuating the error! This is the third time I discovered one of these in twenty years, having been complicit on the first occasion, revealer of the truth on the second, and fully complicit in the most recent case. A quick review.

In the early to mid-1990s I was Editor-in-Chief of The New Leaders, a print based newsletter that published interviews, articles and reported stories for business people who were interested in organizational transformation and conscious business leadership. A colleague and good friend sent me a great quote by the newly-elected President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, supposedly part of his inaugural address. It had been published in another journal, one that I admired greatly.

We published it without checking it out any further. Here’s the quote:

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

Soon it was showing up everywhere – other periodicals, websites, and email signatures. Obviously, the world wanted to think Mandela had said this.

Shortly after we published the quote, popular U.S. author and spiritual teacher Marianne Williamson wrote the periodical where we first saw the quote and claimed she had written it and that it could be found in her book, A Return to Love. There it was, published a few years earlier than Mandela’s speech.

The rumors went flying! Mandela supposedly had read her quote during his speech. So, that’s how the misattribution occurred! Clearly, people wanted this fabulous quote to be from Mandela’s lips, even if he was quoting someone.

I wrote a letter to Mandela in South Africa. I sent one copy by mail and entrusted another copy of the same letter to a friend who was going to South Africa and assured me he could get into the President’s office. I received two separate replies from Mandela’s office, each stating that “he never uttered those words.”

So it was all a mistake and no one seemed to know how the mix-up occurred. I suspect there are still people who believe Mandela did speak the words but the truth is he did not. In the next issue of The New Leaders we printed a correction and gave credit to Williamson.

I felt somewhat relieved at our relatively rapid response and personally took on the role of “revealer of the truth” about this quote which I still get to perform from time to time today, twenty years later.

In the second case of misattribution, about eleven or twelve years ago I received an email from a friend and loved the quote in the signature of the email. Here’s the quote:

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive."

The name of the author – one “Harold Thurman Whitman” – was unfamiliar to me. We were in the early years of search engines (the pre-Google era) but I searched for more about this person. The only reference to him was the one quote. No other quotes, writings, books – nothing! However, there were many places where this quote was showing up, almost all of them being executive coaches’ websites.

After playing Sherlock Holmes for a few hours, I discovered the author of this quote – one that has become one of my very favorites – is Reverend Howard Thurman, a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr and one of the first importers of the Gandhi wisdom on nonviolence.  

In this case, I was again the revealer of the truth, not complicit in the misattribution.

A curious thing: the fictional “Harold Thurman Whitman” is still cited on many quote websites and Google gives you over 7,000 references to him!

More recently, in writing an article for a futures journal, I included a quote which I had always believed to be by 19th century philosopher William James. It was one that I had used frequently in the past. Here it is:
"Man alone, of all the creatures on earth, can change his own patterns. Man alone is the architect of his destiny. The greatest revolution in our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives."

Given that this academic journal requires bibliographical notations, I needed to obtain the source for this quote and, lo and behold, after searching dozens of books I discovered this quote is one of the most frequent James misattributions.

According to Wikiquote, a portion of the quote was written by Spencer W. Kimball, twelfth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in his 1969 book Miracle of Forgiveness. But the bulk of the words seem to be fabrications from unknown sources. So clearly in this case I had been complicit in perpetuating the error.

What I am learning as a result of these three experiences is:
1.    People like inspiring quotes and are quick to accept the written word as truth; after all, it wasn’t too long ago when a common belief was that, if it was in print it had to be true; and

2.    Many people (including myself at times) are lazy and don’t bother to check their sources before forwarding or using a quote that reinforces their point-of-view.

Thanks for listening to this self-indulging soliloquy. I know there are writers amongst this blog’s audience so perhaps this may support your own professionalism. I know it has helped mine.

Now where is that humble pie?

Hail the Outsiders for They Could Be Bearing Gold

{This post is a republication of an editorial in my August 2011 monthly newsletter]

The person who discovered it was the Sun, not the Earth, that was the center of our solar system was a mathematician, physician, scholar, translator, artist, cleric, jurist, governor, military leader, diplomat and economist who held astronomy as little more than his avocation! The creator of the most effective treatment for alcoholism was not a physician or a member of the medical community. He was a Wall Street stockbroker. The initial inspiration for the Theory of Relativity occurred to a bored bureaucrat working in a Swiss patent office. The inventor of vulcanized rubber was a partner in a failed hardware store. Successful entrepreneurs usually are people who are outside of the prevailing system of thought - outsiders who see what many insiders cannot see, like upstart Apple seeing what giant IBM could not.

Major changes in science and society are often triggered by people who are not limited by what they know to be possible or impossible.  Often, people who make up a community of interest – whether it is science, astronomy, or medicine – get into a common mindset, what some might call “group think” which limits their fields of imagination and, therefore, possibility.

I contend that the primary positive attribute consultants bring to their clients is not necessarily their experience nor their “secret sauce” process or the methods they employ. Perhaps the most valuable asset a consultant brings to the table with a client is their perspective as outsiders. They have not been immersed in the client’s corporate culture nor constrained by “the way things are done around here.”

People who have spent lots of time in a musty building, often don’t notice the odor. It has become part of their everyday experience. But a new person walking into the musty building can notice it immediately!

Similarly, an outsider can notice idiosyncrasies because they have not yet been desensitized. They can imagine different applications for the enterprise that seasoned insiders just don’t pick up. Apple saw a future for affordable personal computers and PCs in school classrooms – a vision that has come true in much of the world. IBM’s worldview was large computer systems only affordable by large organizations. In fact, the founder of IBM, Tom Watson, allegedly quipped in 1943: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Whether Watson actually said this is debated but it was accurate for another ten years. Think how the IBM culture might have looked at the prospects of a computer in every home if they believed only large computers that rented for $15-20 thousand dollars a month were the market. Imagine how their culture may have scoffed at the silly notion of personal computers promulgated by a couple of kids just out of school working out of a garage.

Like Copernicus who discovered that the Earth revolved around the Sun, not vice versa, like Bill Wilson who discovered how to effectively treat alcoholism, like Einstein who created a new theory that has revolutionized physics, like Jobs and Wozniak who changed the world’s relationship with computer technology, and like Charles Goodyear, outsiders may offer fresh perspectives and possibilities.

What’s the moral to this? Pay attention to those people who are outside the system or just hired or perhaps are friends or loved ones of the insiders – those people who don’t know yet that it cannot be done and may have the truly great idea that could radically transform the system.

Is the World Ready?

“How do you know what the world is ready for?” These are the words of actress Anne Heche from her memoir book Call Me Crazy, a conversation she was having about whether the world was ready for a pair of lesbian actors (at the time she was Ellen DeGeneres’ partner) to come out of the closet.

                                                                              Anne Heche

How many times have you heard the expression, “I guess the world isn’t ready for (fill in idea or issue)”? Most often this conclusion is arrived at by someone who is seeking a rational explanation for why an intended outcome hasn’t been achieved. This phrase has long been used widely to explain unsuccessful attempts to change social systems.

Recently I experienced a surprisingly strong reaction upon hearing a friend speak these words, a reaction I cannot recall having all the other times I have heard the words, or even spoken them myself. Suddenly I was wondering if such a conclusion was a cop out, a consolation fabricated by the egoic mind. Like Heche, I was questioning who can determine what the world is ready for. What degree of audacity would be required to come to such a conclusion?

For anyone not familiar with what I do, let me explain why this subject has me so engaged: my work these past several decades has been advocating a new paradigm for how human beings relate to one another and to planet Earth. I envision a new consciousness – a “new story” - that transcends the status quo and demands a more mature approach to the challenges facing humanity today. It is an approach that includes environmental sustainability, spiritual fulfillment and social justice for all.

One expression of my work includes FutureShapers, LLC, a company I co-founded in 2012 whose mission is to “inspire, support, develop and accelerate the consciousness of leaders in executive positions so their organizations become less dysfunctional, more effective, conscious, socially responsible and life affirming.” In our view, the biggest global crisis is not climate change or population or pollution; the biggest crisis in the world today is that of responsible leadership – what we refer to as “conscious leadership.”

Is the world “ready” to embrace conscious leadership? I know large numbers of people realize the existing paradigm isn’t working for them; and they may not think in terms of paradigms. Large numbers of people are hungry for something they are not getting these days, something they may not even know how to talk about. While they may not describe these missing qualities as I would, phrases like “is that all there is?” “lack of meaning,” “unfulfilling work,” “an inner emptiness,” “yearning to make a difference,” “concern about the future their children and grandchildren will inherit” are usually met with spontaneous head nods. These responses tell me that the world – not our current leaders but the people - is not only “ready” for this change but practically starving for it!

Explaining that “the world isn’t ready” takes the pressure off those who are attempting to make change happen and places responsibility on a not-yet-ready society. It diverts responsibility by telling a different story about why the intended outcome failed. This assertion, while reasonable and logical, is egoic audacity in my view.

While we are on the subject of the ego, I suggest that declaring anyone or any group “isn’t ready” for what one might be offering is another expression of the egoic mind, implying that “the other” is less informed, less conscious, less ready or basically “less than” we. It is another way to feel better than those who “aren’t ready.”

Asserting that the world isn’t ready for what you are offering is disempowering, an expression often based on resignation, sometimes cynicism. Once you make this assertion there is no logical sense for trying to make change happen anymore. This reversion to “why-botherism” would be not only foolish but you could appear crazy.
One of my favorite quotes is from George Bernard Shaw who wrote:

The reasonable person adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to themselves. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable person.

Logic and reasonableness have gotten us into the mess we’re in. Let’s get unreasonable and rattle things up! 

Many of us know that real social transformations most often occur when relatively small groups of committed citizens take a stand for the change to occur. The founders of the U.S. numbered fewer that sixty delegates to the first continental congress. There was significant opposition to the country becoming independent, and this posed real danger and risk for this small band of committed people. 
    
                        

                          Activist “Mother Jones” (1837-1930); Copernicus (1473-1543)

Often, these stand-takers for change are perceived to be radical, extremists and revolutionaries. Mother Jones, Gandhi, Caesar Chavez, Rosa Parks, Gloria Steinem and Copernicus come to my mind. They were willing to be labeled “fools” or “crazy.” Do you remember Apple’s famous commercial that began with “Here’s to the crazy ones”?  The last line in the ad is:

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

So back to my questioning whether anyone of us can determine what the world is ready for, Whether it is voting rights for women, national sovereignty, farm workers rights, civil rights, women’s liberation, demystifying a scientific myth, or a revolution of consciousness - who can claim that they know what the world is ready for?

I believe that the world is ready to consciously evolve and accept our interconnectivity, our collective relatedness, our interdependence, our stewardship of this planet, and a compassionate recognition that the well-being of all of us comes ahead of the selfish wants of any one group of us. This is the stand I need to take, and I make this declaration based on the thousands of conversations I have had with people who know something is amiss.

This animated video, created to accompany a short talk by my mentor and friend, the late social scientist Willis Harman, makes a compelling argument that for any of us to feel secure in today’s world we all need to feel secure. It is time for us to be responsible for everyone on Spaceship Earth.

I have answered the question “Is the world ready?” for myself. I now ask you, dear reader, to answer it for yourself. And, should you agree with me, take your own stand and start acting like it is your stand rather than agreeing with those who have convinced themselves that there’s no sense in trying to change things because “the world isn’t ready.”

Surprise Consequence with National Park Intervention

Thanks to Mac Carter for this film about the return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. We never know what the consequences will be when we do an under-thought intervention in an established complex system. This one worked out pretty well. Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q. Thanks Mac.

                                                            Yellowstone National Park

But complex system interventions do not always go so well.

I am reminded of Chairman Mao’s eradication of sparrows as part of his Four Pest Campaign (also known as the “Great Sparrow Campaign”) in the late 1950s which resulted in the Great Chinese Famine a couple of years later in which tens of millions of Chinese died of starvation. Some estimates go as high as 36 million deaths!

While no doubt well-intended, Mao’s eradication project was meant to eliminate “pests.” But they had not allowed for the fact that the locust population went unchecked by the now-missing sparrows and thus created a huge ecological imbalance. The locus populations ballooned and came back in swarms, devouring crops and leaving huge masses of people without food. So these types of interventions in complex systems don’t always work out so well.

Intervening in any complex system without tons of thought about possible repercussions, and having a diverse group of people involved in the process, is unpredictable and dangerous. Without these precautions, we could be responsible for large scale unintended consequences such as those experienced by the Chinese almost sixty years ago.

Lesson for system thinkers: Never think you know the eventual outcome when you intervene in a complex system; respect living systems and engage them with humility and curiosity; and stand ready to make corrections if things start running amuck.

As Winston Churchill said decades ago, “We have created more complexity than our thinking can handle.”

Howard Thurman: America’s Unsung Hero

Howard Thurman (1899-1981)

Not everyone will have heard of Howard Thurman but he has had much positive influence in the world, especially in the United States. After his 1935 meeting with Mahatma Gandhi in India, he brought Gandhi’s message of nonviolence to the U.S. In my view, one of his most meaningful legacies was his mentoring Martin Luther King, Jr. on the subject of nonviolent social change. 

Thurman was a former classmate of King’s father and so paid close attention to the young King while he was in graduate school, ultimately becoming his spiritual advisor. It is said that wherever King would travel he would always have a copy of a Thurman book with him. In fact, some believe Thurman was the pastoral leader of the civil rights movement. So who is this man who is possibly one of the least-appreciated visionaries of our time when it comes to social change?

So who is this man who is possibly one of the least-appreciated thought leaders and visionaries of our time when it comes to social change?

Born in Florida and raised in the segregated South, Thurman graduated from Morehouse College as valedictorian in 1923 and was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1925. He served as a church pastor and as an academic, equally comfortable in either the classroom or the sanctuary. He also travelled broadly, which included his trip to India to spend time with Gandhi.  In 1944, in the midst of high racial tensions due to a rapid increase in the African American population in San Francisco Bay Area shipyards during World War II, Thurman left his tenured position at Howard University and co-founded The Church for the Fellowship for All Peoples in San Francisco. It was the first interracial, intercultural church to be established in the United States.

In 1958, Thurman was invited to Boston University (BU) where he became the first black dean of Marsh Chapel and a faculty member of the university. While tenured at BU he continued his pastoral duties in San Francisco, where he died in 1981. During his lifetime Thurman authored 20 books.
Another of his legacies is The Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground, located on the campus of Boston University. The Center was founded by Dean Emeritus George K. Makechnie in 1986 “to preserve and share the many legacies of Dr. Thurman, who spent his life working to break barriers of divisiveness that separate people based on race, culture, religion, ethnicity, gender, and sexual identity.”
To close, I’d like to share a quote by Thurman. It was my original introduction to the man and has become one of my favorites:

Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.


[END NOTE: Last month, we celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in the U.S. – a national holiday celebrating King’s life and legacy. Having just drafted this piece, I watched a two-hour special on King on the History Channel. While I was moved to tears at the inspiration he was and the tragedy that ended King’s life prematurely, I never heard any mention of Thurman and the influence he had on this remarkable man.]

Getting High and Getting Low: The Occupational Hazards of Being a Visionary

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world." -  Oscar Wilde

I was recently asked how I was feeling about the future of the world and, in that precise moment, I shared that I was feeling some despair. So I responded honestly. It seemed like a harmless enough comment to me – and quite truthful in the moment. However, the person listening to me interpreted what I told him and concluded that I was deeply depressed – perhaps suicidal - and became very concerned about my well-being. He even called back afterward to “cheer me up” which I assured him was unnecessary. I explained that I was a firm believer in feeling my emotions and, like it or not, despair was a natural human emotion. Avoiding any emotion, even those I don’t enjoy, is not only very unhealthy but leads to denial and all kinds of problems down the road. Besides, emotional repression murders one’s visionary capabilities.

As a futurist who advocates creating a desired future rather than predicting some projected outcome based upon the past, I am used to living with two realities – the one that we’re in and the one I see as possible. I suspect that any visionary knows what I’m talking about here – living with this “delta,” this gap between “what is” and “what can be.”  This would apply not only to people like me who want to shape the future of society but also inventors who are taking on huge undertakings in technology, the creative arts, architecture, community development and other areas of human endeavor.

Anyone who is a serious advocate for major change of any kind needs to feel the emotions that naturally ebb and flow as their expectations go unmet and inevitable reversals occur. This is particularly true in paradigmatic shifts, where old behaviors get really exaggerated as they get close to changing, getting more entrenched than ever as the change appears inevitable.

Depending upon how ambitious the vision may be, a visionary can face public ridicule, peer invalidation, sarcasm, and all sorts of other criticism. We have all heard stories about exceptional visionaries whose ideas were scoffed at in the early stages only to be heralded as mighty inventors or inspirational leaders at a later time – oftentimes after they died.

If one cannot sit with these feelings, in all their intensity, coping mechanisms will usually creep in which can include delusion about the progress being made, rationalization about the status quo, distraction through addictions, or chronic depression. Several people I have worked with in the past hit a wall of despair and chose to retreat to less-challenging tasks. When I asked them why they said it was just too discouraging. In other words, they found it too painful.

Coping mechanisms can poison one’s vision. They relax the tension that provides the energy for maintaining the visionary’s commitment. Or, perhaps better stated, they numb out the unwanted feelings. One needs to know the feelings of disappointment, despair, hopelessness and even powerlessness and be intimately familiar with them if one is going to hold the “space of possibility” for big visions to be manifested. Taking solace in a drink or a stupid TV show might provide some temporary relief from the feelings but it won’t further the vision.

I call these unwelcome feelings “occupational hazards” for the visionary.

Feeling my emotions as deeply as they are in me, neither avoiding their intensity nor wallowing in them for days on end, keeps me in the present – the “now’ – and helps to keep me more authentic. From this place I can be most effective in bringing about the vision I foresee.

Recently, I was asked to describe the future I envisioned if we didn’t choose the “better future” which I write about frequently. I started to describe the future I see humanity headed for unless we make some fundamental changes in how we treat one another and our planet Earth. As I was speaking, I began to sob – feeling a huge wave of despair about what I was describing and another wave of sadness about the collective choices we have made that are leading us to this reality. It was incredibly moving to feel so deeply about one possible scenario for humanity. When I finished, I felt clearer and more energized to continue advocating the positive alternative – the better future which is equally clear to me.

While feeling these “negative” emotions isn’t at all enjoyable, it is absolutely essential if I am to remain empowered about the vision I see as totally possible, despite the course we are on presently. Unlike ‘intellectualized’ emotions (thoughts that sometimes pass for feelings) which cannot be experienced and released, true emotions are part of the human experience. The only unhealthy emotion is an unexpressed one.

Another popular myth about emotions: “expressing” an emotion means dramatizing them or “acting them out.” Wrong! Expressing an emotion simply means feeling it – now, when it comes up - not years later in therapy or exploding inappropriately sometime down the road as something or someone reminds us about it. When one feels rage, it doesn’t mean you have to throw something or hit anyone. It simply means feeling outraged, or fury, or intense anger.

I once told a colleague I was feeling some rage and her face changed noticeably. I asked her what was going on and she confessed that my words put her “on alert” – anticipating that I might be about to have a tantrum of some sort. I explained that feeling outrage was all I was doing and that I had no inclination to act it out. She understood what I told her intellectually but she remained somewhat guarded nonetheless. This was a reminder to me that many people still think “expressing our emotions” means acting them out in some sort of immature or harmful way.

Another myth is that if one allows one’s feelings to surface they may never go away. Contrary to this common belief, fully-experienced emotions can be processed in mere minutes. Once one learns this, and sees how quickly these feelings pass once they are fully-experienced, one cannot help but wonder why we store unexpressed emotions which usually take years to process at later stages in our lives. It is such a waste of energy!

People who claim they don’t allow their feelings to “run them” – who routinely suppress their emotions so they “won’t get the better of them” – are in fact being controlled by their unexpressed emotions. Keeping the wraps on feelings takes energy like storing radioactive rods from a nuclear power plant. Lots of time and restraint is needed to keep the toxicity from leaking out and doing great harm to others.

People who can tolerate big gaps between present-day reality and their vision for the future, without the need to somehow lessen the tension between the two, make good visionaries. Most people won’t deal with this tension and seek to reduce it as a means of feeling “more comfortable” – choosing one of the coping mechanisms I mentioned earlier. Living with this tension between “what can be” and “what is” makes for an interesting life, as well as challenging one, to be sure. But the true visionary wouldn’t have it any other way. After all, it goes with the territory!

While there are the potholes along the road to getting there, the payoffs are incredible when the visions start coming into focus.

Hats off to all you visionaries! May all your dreams be realized.

Twelve Obvious Truths That Were Not Always So Obvious

Recently a group of us were asked to share whatever “obvious truths” we saw in the world. I used this as an opportunity to review my life from this perspective, noting what I had learned over the years and now see as “obvious.” For the most part I was previously oblivious (pun fully intended) to most of these truths, so here are the truths I have learned that now seem quite obvious to me:

1.  Events that I once thought were negative I now see as having a very positive side to them. In the long term, they were very good for me. Not just some of them, but all of them!

2.  I do not have to put up with anything or anyone I find unpleasant; I have a choice in the matter.

3.  The truth really does set you free. It is not just a motto on a building.

4.  Always be current in my communications with anyone I care about; you never know when they may not be around to hear what you have to say. It used to be when someone died there was always something I wished I had said to them. Now all my friends know I love them and we are current with all matters of the heart.

5.  Never pass up an opportunity to give someone a compliment. It costs so little and could make someone’s day.

6.  Worry is a waste of imagination. It is fear of something that hasn’t happened and most probably will never happen anyway.

7.  Forgiveness is a selfish act; failing to forgive only hurts the person holding onto the resentment.  I used to hold onto resentments thinking it would be wrong to forgive, falsely thinking that forgiving them meant making what they did alright. As the recently-passed Nelson Mandela said, "Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies."

8.  To believe one group can have security while others don’t is pure folly. The world is so interconnected there is no way one group can feel secure while other groups don’t, yet we persist in this folly of believing it can (see this video by Willis Harman).

9.  The loudest voice telling me that I cannot achieve what I dream about is usually my own. Thanks to lots of personal development work that healed much of the trauma from my early years, I realized that I was my own worst enemy.

10. There are always choices - no matter what the circumstances, we always have choices; making no choice is a choice of its own. This was one of the toughest insights I had to accept, letting go of the idea that I never had a choice and that life was forced on me.

11. No one can empower me except myself. This flash came to me after hearing for years how employees need to be empowered. As if anyone has the power to give another person the means to become more powerful.

12. Complaining about something without taking any action to correct it is irresponsible; if a condition deserves criticism, it deserves an honest attempt to change it. There is a companion truth to this one: complaining to anyone who has no control over the problem is dumping on them.

There you have it – twelve truths I learned as I matured in my consciousness over the years, most of them learned since I turned 40.

The Serenity Prayer Unpacked

I have known of “The Serenity Prayer” since I was ten or eleven years old, from when my mother joined Alcoholics Anonymous, which was in its first decade of existence. The prayer still enjoys great popularity with 12 Step groups of all kinds as a tool to help people recover from addictions and achieve serenity in their lives.

For the past nine or ten years, I have made this prayer part of my spiritual practice saying it several times a day, either to myself or out loud. For those who are not familiar with the Prayer, here it is:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

the courage to change the things I can,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

I find this powerful prayer so simple to recite yet so challenging to practice. So I decided to reveal some of my personal challenges by dissecting it a bit and taking a deeper peek into my own challenges in regard to acceptance, change and making the distinctions between what I can do and what I can’t. Perhaps my own experience will evoke some insight for you, dear reader.

First of all, I often have trouble accepting things and labeling them as “unchangeable” – things that I can’t change, that is. I am deeply aware that I have the most control over changing myself and the least control over changing others. Despite this awareness, I feel called to do my best to change the world for the better by writing and speaking publicly and starting ventures that may have some influence in making the world a better place. This is my calling. It could be so easy to think some large social problem is beyond my capacity to influence positively, and therefore either ignore it or deny it exists. Yet those of us who live in democracies* all have some responsibility for things that affect us, don’t we? We are all part of a society that played some role, if not by our deeds then by our inaction or silence in allowing the problem to emerge in the first place.

Examples: For me, I know I myself cannot influence the path of asteroids or the orbit of the Earth and I accept that. I know I cannot change global warming by myself but I can still make an effort to influence people who can change things.

Then, the next challenge in the Prayer: having the ability to make change happen as well as the courage to act. Sometimes we can bring about change by being part of a movement, a crowd or community, each doing our part to make change happen.  Challenges do not require us to have all the skills or even all the courage to take them on. Often, large scale social change comes about from the actions of groups of committed people, not necessarily the bravery of one individual.

Examples: Praying for the courage to stand tall for what I know to be the right thing to do for the sake of all humankind, even if it risks provoking the wrath of those who disagree with me, even if they are friends. I pray for the courage to tell myself the truth and not fall into ego-generated grandiosity or fantasy. I pray for the clarity that brings about wisdom.

When friends used to sarcastically ask me if I was “still trying to save the world?” it hurt sometimes. I recognized they saw me as some sort of modern day Quixote, tilting at my windmills, saving my “damsels.” Clearly, they would not waste their time tilting at these windmills nor did they see any damsels in distress. They put their time to a different use.  As I got clearer about my calling and the need to influence change, however, the hurt diminished and I stopped taking the wisecracks so personally. As time has passed, more and more people seem to be recognizing these windmills and seeing that perhaps they are problems.

So now having looked at all of these things – things I can and cannot change - how do I make the distinctions to either muster the courage or accept the serenity, to try to change things or accept them? Where does this wisdom to know the difference come from?

Example: For me, the wisdom comes when I get clearer. I get increased clarity when I tell the truth, as difficult as it may be to recognize, about what I can and cannot do and what I can influence and what I cannot.

Well, “The Serenity Prayer” is just that, a prayer, a request of God as we understand him or her. Once I accept that there can be something greater than my individual will, a power greater than my own willfulness and ego, once I accept that “higher power” I will have opened the floodgates for the serenity, the courage and the wisdom to come through.

*Anyone living in a dictatorship or under fascism of any sort obviously has less control over things. To my knowledge, no one who subscribes to this blog lives in one of these countries. If anyone does and has another point-of-view about this, I would love to hear from them.