Those of us who have been doing transformational work in its various shapes and forms have all faced the challenge of talking about paradigm-shifting, meaningful large-scale change and gut-retching existential reinventions in a way that people can comprehend. There are times when it is like we are speaking a foreign language that people don’t understand.
I have been offering “soft stuff” for the past 30 years, through my writings, my talks, coaching services and the various forms my conscious leadership work takes, most recently offering people the opportunity to commit to their own self-transcendence by joining a FutureShapers Roundtable as a Member or becoming certified to Host and lead Roundtables.
The soft stuff is difficult to quantify, something we all like to do in this materially-oriented society. It is hard to measure, another thing we love to do. In addition, the soft stuff requires deep personal introspection, which can often challenge previously unexamined assumptions which may be difficult to do for people, especially if they are not used to doing such an internal inventory.
Brian Whetten
More recently, I have come to know Brian Whetten, an enrollment coach who works with people who do meaningful work, many of whom are executive coaches or personal life coaches. Whetten has been coaching me and my FutureShapers partner Tom Eddington for several months, and we have learned much from him. As a result of more than ten years of research, Whetten has determined that only 10% of the value in a coaching relationship, for example, comes from what the coach does; 30% of the value comes from the coach’s presence – who they are and how they show up in the relationship - and a whopping 60% of the value comes from the client’s own commitment to the work. I found this to be a major news item! This also applies to people offering soul-nourishing, transformative products and services, not just coaches. He contends that enrollment is the primary tool we have for creating client commitment, where 60% of the client value comes from.
This finding is in stark contrast to selling breakfast cereal or computers where the buyer merely has to say “yes’ or “no.” In this enrollment process, the “buyer” has to meet the vendor half way and put some “skin in the game” themselves in order to receive the most value. At first take, this seems wrong because it goes against all the ideas we are used to as a result of being the target of mass marketers and advertising all our lives. Whetten writes: 'So while we tend to think of [enrollment] as some “yucky” thing we have to do in order to serve our clients, it’s actually one of the most important services we have to offer. And it’s not just about coaching. What we’re talking about is the ability to support people in creating any type of sustained, positive change. Whether you’re a manager looking to get more out of your people, a holistic practitioner wanting to support patients in developing new wellness habits, or a consultant seeking to add value to an organization, if you’re in the business of change, where you’re seeking to make an impact in the lives of others, enrollment is a big piece of your job.'
Enrollment as “one of the most important services we have to offer”? How’s this for a paradigm popper, a mental model-buster, a reframing challenge? Whetten points out that real change – such as that offered by transformational products or services – scares people. He adds that the deeper the changes we want or need to make, the more these scare us. How can we support people in addressing this resistance and creating the changes they most want to make? The most popular approaches to resistance, he tells us, are either “attack” or “avoid” – the former being slick and aggressive sales approaches and the latter being people giving away services and struggling to stay in business.
Whetten writes about a third way, and the way that is the most authentic and effective. He writes: 'The surest way to know if something is a great decision is when the voice of intuition says “Yes,” the voice of reason agrees, and the voice of fear says “Hell No! Run Away!” Our opportunity is to help our clients understand this, help them look for their “Yes, Yes, Hell No’s!” and then help them commit to creating the changes they most want to make. Our opportunity is to help our clients discern the difference between their truth and their fears. We want to listen to their fears and honor them. The voice of fear has a very specific job. That job is not to stop us from taking action. It’s to warn us of a potential danger. When we slow down and honor the voice of fear, without attacking it or avoiding it (which is really just fight or flight – meeting fear with yet more fear) the voice of fear feels that it’s given it’s warning and done its job, and so it quiets down and lets us get on with our goals. It’s the third way of enrolling clients, that’s both clean and effective. Mastering it allows you to turn “selling” into one of the greatest gifts you can offer – both to your clients and yourself.'
A big gap I’m seeing is between what people say they want and what they are willing to commit to; how much are they willing to be changed to attain the level of consciousness they claim to want? I addressed this in my Mini Keynote editorial in August. As vendors, we need to meet our clients and customers midway across the gap between what we are offering and what they want, transcending their fears and others bits of resistance they may be sitting on. If they want what we are offering they must be more engaged than the passive purchase process we use in buying produce, cereal or an automobile.
From my standpoint, the hard part of engaging people is breaking the pattern of “selling” I have learned after a lifetime of being exposed to mass marketing and advertising, and learning to have two-way exploratory conversations, not one-way sales pitches, reciprocal commitments by both parties in the relationship, not “overcoming objections” and tactical presentations.
Another lesson I learned from Whetten is that what we are offering isn’t for everyone. We are not selling cereal. Having a transformation shift is not for everyone! We are offering a transcendent experience that many people yearn for but most avoid. Our offering is for the people who really want it, who are committed to going through whatever they need to go through in order to achieve the level of consciousness they claim they want. They need to be engaged with us! They need to engage their fears as well.
About a year ago I was watching a TV special on Africa and recall the host talking with a Sudanese farmer about a local crisis in the community and the challenges of getting local officials to act responsibly. This uneducated elderly man told the host, “You cannot wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.” Some people are pretending to be asleep. Trying to enroll them is a waste of time; I and my colleagues need to focus on people who really want to be awakened and are not pretending.
NOTE: Here is another website with some of Whetten’s free offers: http://www.sellingbygiving.net/
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Mister Smith is Dead: They Don’t Go to Washington to Serve Anymore
Do you remember the old James Stewart movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”? Probably few of you recall seeing it when it came out in black-and-white in the late 1930s but it has been a popular movie on television for many years, often airing around the holiday season since it evokes sentiments of justice, idealism and good winning over evil. “Jefferson Smith” (played by Stewart) goes to the nation’s capitol to work with his childhood hero only to discover the many shortcomings of the political process. True to Hollywood, good wins out in the end, despite attempts to corrupt Smith at first and then to cover him in scandal.
Stewart and Jean Arthur (lead roles in the movie)
According to the IMBd website, the director - Frank Capra - has “received many letters over the years from individuals who were inspired by the film to take up politics.” The movie surely continues to inspire idealists who want to serve their country through bettering the system from the inside out by enduring all the humiliation of running for office in order to “bring democracy back to the people.”
But the system continuously devolves into gridlock and dysfunction as each new rookie politician succumbs to the toxicity and corruption they encounter in city, state or national politics.
I have been writing about system dysfunction in Washington for several years and have viewed it as a “systems problem,” which I define as “when well-meaning, competent people keep trying to correct the problem and it keeps getting worse.”
The other day I happened to catch an interview of journalist Mark Leibovich on his latest book, This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!-in America’s Gilded Capital. Leibovich is the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, based in Washington. In 2011, The New Republic named him one of Washington’s “Most Powerful Least Famous” people whose “political writing is among the finest and most feared.”
Click on picture to watch video
Leibovich provided a detailed account of how Washington has been grossly distorted by the relatively recent (last twenty years or so) explosion of money in politics, turning the city into “a mecca for glitz, gold and greed” according to PBS. The book is exposing the perverse and pervasive narcissism of Washington’s ruling class, again according to PBS. He spoke about how “money rules the day and status is determined by who you know.”
Watching the interview on TV, what caught my ear was his reference to the “Mr. Smith” movie. He talked about how most of us think people go to Washington to serve the people, like Mr. Smith did in the movie, like the way it is supposed to be in the “greatest democracy in the world.” “However,” he said “now people go to Washington to get rich, to make money.”
While the system is indeed dysfunctional and needs a major overhaul, perhaps even a complete rebuild, people are not as much the victims of “the system” as I have been asserting. Many are. Leibovich identifies a good many from both parties who are contributing to the dysfunction and ripping off “We the People” from what we are entitled to and lining their pockets through greed and more greed.
I am writing this while raw with this new recognition/perspective, feeling more outrage, even at some of my former heroes whose haloes have become tarnished as a result of this revelation. I’m feeling more disappointment, more sadness and more hurt than I ever have over the state of our nation.
As I expressed in my email to Leibovich, my hope is that enough people who can do something about this will become enraged enough to actually do something about it and make it illegal for politicians to get rich at the expense of the people who elect them.
We’re All in This Together!
Willis Harman was a visionary and a strong advocate for human transformation. He taught me much during our friendship, from the mid-1980s when we first met until his passing in 1997. Working with him was a true joy. Knowing him was also a joy. Harman was a strong advocate for the interconnectedness of humankind and gave talks and wrote prolifically about the subjects of “global mind change,” paradigm shifts and human consciousness.
Willis Harman (1918-1997)
For those who may not know who this man was, he began as a professor of engineering at Stanford University where he also started human potential classes, all the time remaining under the administration’s radar. He then went to work at Stanford Research Institute (now called SRI) where he was involved in various experiments and research projects on human consciousness, including remote viewing and future studies work, much of it sponsored by the U.S. Government. In the 1970s he was recruited to head the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), which researches and publishes on subjects related to human consciousness. He remained at IONS until resigning soon before his death. He wrote a number of books, my favorite of which is Global Mind Change, which was republished after his passing.
Several years ago, Global Mindshift (now inactive after making some provocative videos) got hold of a sound recording of one of his short talks and added an animation to the audio, producing a short 90 second video. You’ll find it on the FutureShapers videos page. Scroll down to the fourth video on the page. His words are as pertinent today as they were then: we can no longer fix any one system unless we fix them all; we can no longer have some people having their needs met but not others. My way of saying this is that we all interconnected and “we’re all in this together!”
Modern Day Tyrants – Part Two
[Last month I identified the modern day tyrants as the traders and speculators in the financial markets – those who add no value whatsoever other than generating profit for themselves.This article has been adapted from an article titled “Who Are the Modern Day “Tyrants”? published in the June 2002 issue of my monthly newsletter. This month I will complete my thoughts]
Thomas Paine
These modern day tyrants value short-term financial gratification more than anything else. Their actions are totally inconsistent with a sustainable world in which people are values and life is affirmed. They create no real value in the world, certainly not in the way most of us think about adding value, such as an exchange of something for something else. Their sole purpose is to make a profit, and to do so with the least amount of capital as possible. They do not invest in companies. None of their cash ever owns a stock or allows any company to expand. None of their cash ever creates jobs. They have no loyalty to any cause or group of people (unless it is their own staffs).
Like it or not, traders are driving the “train of capitalism” – the most dominant economic system in the world. CEOs, directors, executives with vested stock and holding options, investment bankers, brokers, and investors of all sizes are merely passengers on this “train” which traders are driving faster and faster. No longer is it sufficient to own a good sound investment in a company that is producing a decent product. These players require minute-by-minute stock evaluations which drive their decisions (often programmed by computer) which in turn has all the rest of us jumping through hoops. CEOs, directors and major investors sometimes think they are in control but the people most influential in this craziness – those who are really pulling the strings and manipulating stock values – are the growing cadre of day traders who are taking bigger and bigger profits in larger and larger numbers in shorter and shorter timeframes.
How many decisions to remain dependent on Middle East oil are influenced by stock values in publicly-traded companies? How many third world cultures have been violated and how many non-industrialized people have been MacDonaldized because of corporate-wide drivers to maintain stock price? How many traditions have been trampled so more growth can be documented in the annual report? How many weapons need to be sold in order to maintain quarterly projections?
How many lobbyists are needed to purchase special tax breaks so stock value will be enhanced? How many short cuts are taken in manufacturing and ethics to save money and increase earnings in order to maintain optimism on The Street?
How many natural treasures are sacrificed in order to enhance projections for future earnings and, therefore, a better price today? How many children are forced into near-slavery conditions so a trader in Manhattan can make an extra million in one day?
I don’t mean to imply that traders are consciously doing something malicious. But they are having a huge negative impact on the rest of us. What is worse is that they are seemingly oblivious to it. What could be even worse yet is that they are not oblivious and simply don’t care!
The time is here for all of us – traders, doctors, merchants, consumers and teachers – to be responsible for our choices and accountable for our actions.
Few people realize that the “economy” that most of us think about (the exchange of real goods and services) is a mere fraction of the amount of financial transactions taking place in the world every day. More than 90% of the world’s economic activity has nothing at all to do with any exchange of value; it is all about trading – betting on fluctuations and making huge fortunes as quickly as possible. The economy that most of us are part of could be compared to the vending machines income as a part of the total gross revenues of a Las Vegas gambling casino. It is part of the total revenue but a very small part.
Like the kings and queens in centuries past, traders are simply going about their lives taking their nobility for granted – oblivious to any negative impact they might be having in the world. But if you accept that we all have impact on each other – and that we have some impact even if we sit in our room every day and “do” nothing – then what is the impact these traders have on the rest of the world, particularly those in other parts of the world, who are so heavily influenced by American capitalism?
Some time back, I saw an infomercial on television that was pitching a system which you could purchase and become an overnight stock trader! Doesn’t this suggest that we are rapidly becoming a society of traders instead of investors? So who has to work anymore? Let’s just sit home and trade all day! There’s no sense working at a job making something that people could use to better their lives. There’s no need to leave the house and sweat for a living building a house or providing a service that people might require. Let’s make a few trades and make a ton of money sitting on the couch. Hey, who needs to work anyway?
[NOTE: John recommends The Divine Right of Capital, by Marjorie Kelly (Berrett-Koehler, 2001)]
Modern Day Tyrants – Part One
[Both parts of this article - Part One and Part Two - have been adapted from an article titled “Who Are the Modern Day 'Tyrants'?" published in the June 2002 issue of John’s monthly newsletter]
Back in the middle ages, royalty was assumed to be either divine or very well-connected to the Gods in what has become known as the “Divine Right of Kings.” Kings and queens could do all sorts of nasty things and everyone excused it as “willed by the gods” or some such rationalization. This was the assumption everyone had grown up with. This assumption was passed on from one generation to the next, one century to the next, pretty much unchallenged. People went along with tyrannical behavior, social injustice, unfair application of the laws, and even tolerated absolute madness, assuming that this was the way it was supposed to be. No one questioned it. Then, one day, someone said – “hey, why are we going along with this?” (Thomas Paine and his crowd) and democracy was born.
Thomas Paine
Once this long-held assumption was questioned and perceived as having no real validity in fact, the divinely-endowed rights and privileges associated with royalty started becoming things of the past.
Today, we have a new class of privilege, a new group of tyrants who only possess the rights they hold because the rest of us allow them to by granting them the same sense of legitimacy that our forefathers and foremothers granted their royalty. Similar injustices and inequities exist in the world because a new generation of tyrants is being allowed to run roughshod over the vast majority. A new “madness” is being condoned by the masses who don’t appear to be challenging the underlying assumption that this is “willed by the gods” and, thus, we think we have no power to change it.
Please notice that I did not say we don’t have the power to change it – only that we think we don’t. Also, let’s see how “tyrant” is defined before we get too far into this. The dictionary defines tyrants as people who are unrestrained by law, who usurp sovereignty and are harsh users of power and authority.
So where do most of these “new” tyrants hang out? Where are most of them concentrated? Where does the most power appear to lie in these days of very complex systems in a globalized world?
We tend to think that the real power resides with our national leaders – like heads of state. Fewer of us realize that the real power these days lies with money and the system in which it functions. Students of systems thinking know that answers to questions in complex problems are rarely obvious.
The economic system has the greatest impact on global society than any other system in the world. Let’s look at what players within the economic system are having the most negative influence. Who are the least restrained by law? Who are the harshest abusers of power? Who are the greatest usurpers of sovereignty?
Are they the Arab despots in the Middle East? The billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet or George Sorros? Hardly. They have too high a profile to dominate the system effectively. If you examined every group of people from the most disenfranchised people to the most opulently privileged, where would you find the ones who have the most negative global impact today?
The people who have most of the influence on the most influential system work behind the scenes, content to simply make scads of money while most of the public’s attention focuses on the faux leaders - like politicians, celebrity activists, CEOs of the large multinational corporations, major investors, religious leaders, and prominent academicians. These modern day tyrants let the faux leaders get on the covers of the magazines and distract attention from them.
The tyrants of today are the people who are engaged in pure financial speculation, without having any loyalty to any person or any organization except making the most money in the shortest time. Traders are like casino gamblers, and their actions wouldn’t be particularly harmful if the winners reaped the rewards from knowledgeable players – where all parties know the rules of the game they are playing.
Today’s stock and option traders don’t add any value except to make themselves more money. They “bet” on upswings in the so-called “market” which resembles a lottery more every day. Companies that do nothing but speculate are out to make as much money as possible without ever really “investing” in anything. Growing numbers of day traders speculate on short-term price fluctuations rather than longer term appreciation. Arbitrages, margins, caps, puts and calls fill their vocabulary, punctuated with Daisy Chains, Double Tops and Bottoms and Day Orders.
[To be continued……Next month I will continue this line of inquiry]
Recognizing Our Uniqueness
In my latest book, The Great Growing Up, I write about holons and how everything and everyone is part of something larger and a whole for something smaller. In a seeming paradox, each holon is also unique. Even “identical twins” are not 100% identical.
I am presently reading Your Unique Self in which the author deftly addresses this parts/whole conundrum for us. Before I continue I want to be clear about one distinction: while our uniqueness is factual, saying we are each “special” arouses the egoic mind and can reactivate the separation paradigm that ranks me versus others, not as unique parts of a larger whole but as my being better or worse than you. Now back to Marc Gafni’s book.
In a section he calls “The Puzzle-Piece Teachings,” Gafni writes: "You are a puzzle-piece. If you try to round out the unique curves of your puzzle piece through meditation or any other spiritual oneness practice, the puzzle piece that is you will simply not fit into the divine oneness. The part fits into the whole through its unique part nature. You are not interchangeable with any other part. Only the puzzle piece that is your authentic Unique Self can seamlessly connect you to the divine one. Similarly, Unique Self is not absorbed in the whole. Unique Self is integrated into the whole, meaning that the part does not lose its integrity as it merges."
Gafni makes one of the clearest distinctions about how our uniqueness is our gift – even our gift to God – so long as it is not confused with “the skin-encapsulated ego” or separate self. As he writes, “The puzzle piece becomes part of the whole only through its unique puzzle-piece nature…. if you are identified exclusively with your ego-separate self, then you think that your puzzle piece is the whole puzzle."
This is where extremism gets loose in the world, when the partial truth becomes the one and only truth and violence results. Discussing this fine line between ego-specialness and our Unique Self is challenging yet Gafni does an admirable job applying his writing skill and brilliance to the task.
Crisis of Discernment: Living in Truth or Living Lies?
Prompted by a lot of what I see in social media, it appears that we as a society are blurring the lines between what is real and what is illusion. If we are intentionally entering into this fantasy, such as playing “Second Life” or other virtual games, or attending a “Harry Potter” movie, then fine. We are consciously choosing to spend time in a mystical, magical alternative reality as a relief from the real world, as pure entertainment or even escapism.
But when we start accepting fantasy as reality simply because it is labeled as if real, we are entering a dangerous world of self delusion. This is when escapism gets dangerous, in my view.
As we have all witnessed in our government leaders, there is a common practice of repeating an assertion over and over again so that eventually enough people believe the assertion is a truth. Paraphrasing Nazi Joseph Goebbels, “Tell a lie long enough and it becomes the truth.” Failing to distinguish between fact-based reality and a frequently-expressed ideology is dangerous because we start confusing the two and begin living lies!
Allowing lies (fantasy) to shape how we live and relate to one another is a disservice to the soul, completely out of integrity with our world. It means living in a falsified reality rather than living in the world as it is. We are culpable by subjecting ourselves to influence by a system we know to be false.
Another example from Facebook: Total strangers invite us to be their “Friends” – not “Connections” as LinkedIn called our virtual assemblage of contacts before Facebook came on the scene, but “Friends”! I don’t know about you but I have pretty clear criteria for who my friends will be.
Another newly emerging example from LinkedIn: People I do not know are endorsing me for skills I don’t think I have. In other words, these “endorsements” are more likely given in order to prompt a reciprocal response, making LinkedIn endorsements totally meaningless, not to be relied upon by any thinking person.
I’m reminded of an earlier confusion with what was true shortly after the printing press made it so easy to publish. One of the phenomena that came to the surface was that people started confusing the truth with what had been printed – as in if they saw it in print it was fact. To some degree that may also apply today.
Confusing the truth with an untruth has already impacted our quality of life. Keep in mind that all of us don’t need to be living lies as long as some of us are. This confuses the issues and restricts progress on matters important for the masses. As long as there is any confusion about any of our global crises, corrective measures are hijacked at worst or delayed at a minimum. Matters such as bank regulation, healthcare and campaign reform, environmental protections and gun control are only five crises that have gotten confused enough to prevent meaningful interventions in the U.S. In some of these cases, delays brought on by confusion can be just as deadly as a out-and-out hijacking.
I am reminded of Rebecca Costa’s conclusions, in her book The Watchman’s Rattle, (see my earlier article on this) as she researched failed empires throughout history. Each empire she studied failed after two changes occurred; first, when collaboration and cooperation turned into gridlock (see Washington as a glaring example of gridlock) and, second, when ideology replaced facts. It seems we passed both these phases some time ago. So can collapse be far behind?
Straddling Paradigms Can Make You Crazy
I recently reviewed Dancing at the Edge: Competence, Culture and Organization in the 21st Century, by Maureen O’Hara and Graham Leicester, for Amazon.com and a short story in the book caught my attention. The story’s punch line points to a conundrum many people are facing today. First the story:
In his book Radical Hope the philosopher Jonathan Lear tells the story of …Plenty Coups, chief of the Crow nation at the end of the 19th century. His tribe [was] coming under pressure from the white man to give up their way of life and enter the reservation. The culture that had supported and defined the Crow nation’s world was threatened with collapse.
Plenty Coups described the transition many years later as follows: “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again.” As one Crow woman put it, in terms that many would echo today: “I am trying to live a life I do not understand.”
How many people today are trying to live lives they do not understand?
I contend that anyone with any awareness knows the old ways are losing ground, credibility, even usefulness while nothing seems to be rising to take their place. We are living in a world where one paradigm is falling away while the new one isn’t fully formed.
Using a physical metaphor, it is like having one foot on the dock and the other on a tiny dingy which isn’t tied to the dock. If you have ever been in that position your know that at some point you either have to put all your weight on one or the other, the boat or the dock, or you will most certainly get very wet.
Paradigm straddling can be that way too. If you remain loyal and invested in the old, you will have trouble with anything that challenges that worldview, precluding acceptance of anything that doesn’t make sense from that perspective. If you try to live in both worlds, it can drive you crazy.
My suggestion is to invest yourself in the new paradigm, even if it hasn’t been fully formed or accepted. Start living from that place and let the rest of the world catch up with you. Remember, the new paradigm of thought doesn’t replace the old one, it simply absorbs it. We can continue using the bits that are still useful and release what no longer fits.
The FutureShapers Covenant: A Sacred Commitment, Part A
Individual and collective commitment to a cause has been at the backbone of all major social transformation – from the founding of the U.S.A. to getting a man on the moon, from changing the public attitude about drinking and driving to the ending of apartheid in South Africa.
Much of our history as human beings was the result of true commitment. However, true commitment is one of the scarcest human qualities today. People say “yes” or make agreements every day that they hold as tentative in their minds, subject to whim and convenience. As a result, we live in a world of empty promises which leads to social cynicism which, in turn, leads to lowered expectations. What people say is often quite different from what people do. As an old saying goes, “We judge ourselves by our intentions while judging others by their actions.” If we judge ourselves with the same criteria – our actions not our words – then we may start to see how culpable we may be in this weakening of our social fabric.
It is so easy to give lip service to doing the right thing, stating the moral high ground, saying what people want to hear, but an entirely different moral toughness is required to keep our word – to do what we say we are going to do. After years of these tentative “commitments” the rest of us have gotten used to people reneging on their promises and not keeping their word. The worst if it? It has become “socially acceptable.”
The dictionary calls a commitment “an agreement or pledge” to do something in the future. A pledge is defined as “a binding promise” or “guaranty.” These hardly sound like casual, half-hearted promises. When one guarantees something they stand to lose something of value. When they make a promise they have given their word. Implied in giving one’s word is a certain sacredness, similar to a sacred oath. This is what FutureShapers asks of Roundtable members: to hold their Roundtable commitment and aspirations as a covenant, a sacred pledge to oneself and the other members.
Abraham Lincoln is reported to have said, “Commitment is what transforms a promise into reality. It is the words that speak boldly of your intentions. And the actions which speak louder than the words. It is making the time when there is none. Coming through time after time after time, year after year after year. Commitment is the stuff character is made of; the power to change the face of things. It is the daily triumph of integrity over skepticism.”
Olympic legend Bruce Jenner states, “Abolish your fears and raise your commitment level to the point of no return, and I guarantee you that the Champion Within will burst forth to propel you toward victory.”
Do either of these quotes sound like idle “indications of interest” subject to the big “if” – if something better doesn’t some along; if I still feel like it when the time comes; if it feels comfortable; if events align so as to make it easy; or if it isn’t too inconvenient? These are all tentative, conditional, and provisional – nowhere near “the power to change the face of things” as Lincoln suggested.
Next month I will finish this thought and include the list of aspirations we ask people to commit to. Check back around January 10th.
Happy New Year, everyone!