GETTING TO YES AND STAYING THERE!

How many of you have gone down a road so long that you think it’s your contribution?

As early as five years old, people asked if I could help with their problems. It wasn’t just children; it was adults, too. Later, I found careers that put this skill to use. One of my bosses once asked me if my being successful in resolving problems was because I wanted her job. Huh?

Yes, but, if you keep on doing the same thing, what do you get? In my case: More problems!

Luckily, what also came naturally was seeing the good in everyone. I see positive futures and how to get there. Mid-careers, I found my true calling as a leadership consultant.

Being asked to help others solve problems did not disappear overnight, and it kept negative world views operational. Leadership development sees what’s working in people and organizations. Helping others to solve problems keeps you seeing what’s wrong.

It took integrity, transformation, and the support of mentors and friends for me to quit this habit. I was like a worn out dog who had given birth to too many litters.

Appreciative Inquiry, a leadership model, has this saying: “What you appreciate, appreciates.” If you’re constantly available to help others solve problems, you’re calling in more problems. If you want peace, then appreciate the peace in the world. You need to "see" what you want and that allows you to build that on that foundation and move into that pathway.

If want more wild horses, elephants and chimpanzees roaming free, appreciate the ones that are. If you want people happy and well, see them happy and well. “What you appreciate, appreciates.”

I’m no longer available for problems. I work with colleagues and clients who say “yes” to living and building on their strengths. It’s a myth that negative images inspire people to fix stuff; it brings people down. Seeing what works inspires action.

Today, someone on Facebook posted a video of Ellen talking with Gladys from Austin, Texas. I laughed and laughed! http://youtu.be/-jeCL9f2NNI. We’re all Gladys; we want it both ways. We want the good stuff while we dabble in the dark and negative. And we lose out on free trips to the Ellen show. 

In my life and work, I’ve joined a myriad of Facebook positive voices that post positive media communications. We’re creating a vortex of good energy to dip into.

There are many doing this; https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=486122528080113 and https://www.facebook.com/iamlivingpositive/info are two. Namaste Global Vision also shares inspiration: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Namaste-Global-Vision/212980952072457

This past weekend, I heard some difficult and sad news. When I shared it with a mentor, she encouraged me to offer my joy in the next days and months. Intelligent lady. She knew I couldn’t dwell on this sadness and be able to shift into my joy.

Monday, I posted this on Facebook:

JOIN ME IN WRITING THIS FUN-LOVING "BLOG" ABOUT JOY AND HAPPINESS.

Two Words. I’ll start.

The next person adds two words.

It posted for three days with twelve contributors:

Me:   I Delight

Tamara:  In Animal’s

Wendy: Loving Expressions

Words: Begin Within

 Debbie: Sharing Gratitude

 Me: For Unseen

Castagne: Bubbles of Joy

Kim:  I Can't Imagine

 Sharon: Universal Peace

 Me: And Yet

Sabia: Love Reigns

  Ambika: Inviting You

Kim: To Feel

Sandy:  The Warmth

Kim: And Power

Merrilee: Of Kindness

Me: That Gives

Kim: Us EVERYTHING!!!! 

Reader, what are your two words? What shift did you make to a positive path?

TRANSITING SPIRIT

Gismo:

I am a sound sleeper when I am nine years old. Yet when our beloved dog, a beautiful brown Cocker Spaniel, Gismo, comes into my room, late one night, I open my eyes. He gently eases his body down onto the rug. Liquid brown eyes gaze into mine. The look of pure love is there. His eyes then take me into deeper shores. Soon after, he exhales and is gone.

I lie there watching him. His big old brown eyes are now forever closed. I watch for a few moments careful to make sure his furry body is unmoving. Where once was breath, now there is none.

I lie there in witness to quiet interlude. I am too young to know those words then. Yet, Gismo’s peaceful dying remains in my heart and being.

Muriel:

I am one day away from boarding a plane for Hawaii. I’m eager for my osteopathic treatment that will help me release the sciatic pain, preparing me for travels. I have been seeing the celebrated Dr. Muriel Morgan Chapman for a few years. I know fully her miracle touch.

Arriving there, I have no time to sit under her sprawling oak tree. The door to her office is uncharacteristically wide open. Slowly, I walk over to it. I find Muriel lying face up on one of her treatment tables. Quietly she says, “I have fallen. I cannot get up.”

She requests me to help her get into her house. While her house is only yards away, momentarily I wonder how I will accomplish this, given my injury. As if on cue, another car pulls up the long driveway and parks. Together we help Muriel into her house.

It becomes clear speaking first with Muriel, and then her daughter, that no one is in place to care for Muriel during this stage of her life. She has cancer and the treatments are no longer working. Muriel is well into her eighties.

My first planned vacation in years is mysteriously rearranged. Overnight, I become a hospice caregiver. My trip to Hawaii is cancelled. I am privileged that Muriel calls on me to stay with her.

What I learn is more than I can convey. After all these years, nothing expresses the level of intimacy, stripped-down core encounter, that we shared. My life is redefined.

There is a quiet hush in the home that governs interactions. My years of meditation barely prepare me for this depth of connection. After all the communication, healing and death and dying training, I am invited to be wholly present. This is practicum. This is raw intimacy. The daily conversations are centered on real life and death concerns.

Every day I watch life around and in me move away from the mundane and into the subtle, still, sacred space. To be sure, there are conversations, dialogues, some easy, some not, risks taken, discoveries made. People daily come and go. We are also down to basics. But another aspect of life ushers itself into view as Muriel lies dying.

Daily, I take leave to drive across a bridge to work midday; it is shaping our letting go. These are not easy moments. One day, just as I am getting ready to leave Muriel’s bedroom, she shifts our dialogue from tentative leave-taking to true engagement.

“Good-bye,” she sings out in that singsong, lilting voice of hers. She is weak, yet her sparkling brown eyes twinkle as I start for the door.

“Good-bye,” I smile at her, singing our new song back to her, my hand slowly waving.

“Good-bye,” she sings out again, as I move into the living room.

“Good-bye,” I intone, voice quivering.

Over and over, our voices are singing out, one to the other, as I walk across the living room. There is no holding back this moment.

Our good-byes continue until her voice fades. I open the front door to the outside. My heart is wet with tears.

These experiences helped me be unafraid of death. They opened my heart. They opened me to deeper love. I know many people are fearful of natural dying experiences. I’ve been witness to traumatic deaths and their impact on families, friends and culture. I wrote this blog to start a new conversation, exploring a comfortable relationship with positive dying experiences.

Dear reader, do you remember when someone you loved died in a natural way and it opened your heart?

LOST AND FOUND

If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to ­music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem.  Open a gap, create a space. Be patient.       
                                                                                        Hilary Mantel                                                                                       
Everywhere, take your time, so you do not give the mind an opportunity to speed up and get out of control. Negative thoughts are fast. Positive thoughts are slow.

                                                                      Eknath Easwaran

    

Have you ever considered that what you thought was missing was not actually missing? That your mind clouded over in anxiety and played tricks on you?

It is faith and peaceful reflection that allow things to be discovered. But the mind likes speed; its’ whirling and spinning out of control. My mind has done this often. I am sitting at my desk. Suddenly I am called out of my office. Or I go take a walk. And when I return, my eyeglasses are not on my desk.

First I feel this mild panic and queasy stomach. “I have no time for this”, my mind shouts. “I’m down to the wire.” My eyes look this way and that. My mind is racing. “I can’t finish this project without them.” My shoulders are rock-like. My limbic brain is on alert. “Code Blue. Code Blue.”

That is exactly what happened to a friend this week when I called her. With very little words from her, “Code Blue” screamed across the telephone wires. I could almost see the veins popping in her neck. “I lost it! I lost it! My report I spent all week on. It’s gone. I don’t know where! I am afraid I left it in that last huge conference room and someone threw it out!” Code Blue. Code Blue.

I guided her in a leadership exercise to reconnect with her document. Her shrill thoughts escalated in and out at a fevered pitch. They forecast doom and condemnation. Her mind ruled out simple solutions. At every turn it thwarted her process.

But she kept at it and her Code Blue simmered down.  Finally, her sputtering mind stopped for a moment. Her intuition said quietly. “It’s not lost. It’s not where you’d expect it.” That intuition saved her a wild trip across four counties to go search in, what likely would be, a closed conference facility. Her intuition said: “Enough, rest, eat. Let go.”

About an hour later, she emailed me, reporting she had found it. She learned something about the tricky mind: it abruptly guaranteed that she would never leave her reports in the place her intuition suggested that she look.

What is lost is not lost. This was certainly so with Buddy, the dog, who was missing for seven years. Mrs. Hartman demonstrates in this positive story what faith in the yet-to-be found can do. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/10/dog-reunited-with-owners-7-years-missing_n_5127079.html?utm_hp_ref=good-news


How about you, reader? What’s your intuition guiding you to discover that you once thought was lost?

BELLISSIMA: READY TO ROCK YOUR SOUL?

We are constantly being asked to turn our faces away from our own internal images of what is right, true and most of all alive for us. The very simplicity of these images may seem to speak against them. We give them away thinking they cannot be reflected by the complex experience of the world in which we have learned to live. But giving them away, we find ourselves strangely empty. Finally, we understand that though the world will never be simple, a life that honors the soul seems to have a kind of radical simplicity at the center of it.
                                                                        David Whyte

No twerking or other vulgarity, no sexy clothes, not even any makeup. Talent and enthusiasm is all this 25-year old nun needs to do to bring a heavily tattooed man to tears, and elicit acclaim from everyone in the studio. Brava!!! Bellissima!    
                                                                       Molly Alexander Darden, Huffpost Blogger

I have a gift and have come to give it to you. Shouldn’t things be that way?
                                                                        Sister Cristina Scuccia

How many of you know that you have something to say and hold it back? Recently THE VOICE has been in my space. First in my own inquiry: How can I give inspired voice to my work and life? More visibility? If living an authentic life, what is my most important decision this moment? What gives it voice? I keep choosing what my heart yearns to hear and needs to express. Amazing.

As I am finding new voice, I receive a happy email from a friend. Did I hear the news of who recently was on the television show, “The Voice”? I had not. Isn’t it fun how the media, instant and accessible, lets us celebrate all the new voices getting out here into our world? Even the relatives of a good friend.

Also recently, another friend and I were knee deep in coaching. When I coached him, I heard my voice come from this deeper place. He realized from this call that his new project was life altering. When he coached me, his integrity flashed across the phone like a laser. “David Whyte’s radical simplicity might be something you want to immerse yourself into. When life throws curve balls, don’t duck.”

For me, radical simplicity is faith in the unseen; the simplicity of “what is right, true and, most of all, alive” in me right now. Turn life’s uh-oh into possibility and promising outcome. Letting go of my firefighter habituation. Radically calling forth riveting surprises to engage a new voice.

Like one of my favorite horses, shaking loose from too much fuss, I was about to step outside for a morning hike. I let the rain nudge me back inside. I asked myself: “Okay, now what? What does my heart most need to hear?” Well I discovered it; The VOICE that rocked my soul. I invite you to listen and be surprised. Lighten your soul and spark your expression!  http://youtu.be/TpaQYSd75Ak Jaw dropping, foot stomping, yes?

GATEWAY TO THE POSITIVE

                                                                                             Photo-Yose-Bierstadt

It is easy to look around and notice what’s wrong. It takes practice to see what’s right. Positive energy heals, conducts love, and transforms. Choose positive energy.

                                                                                                Melody Beattie

                             

Before sunlight can shine through a window, the blinds must be raised.

                                                                                                 American Proverb

“The reprieve from everything negative that these animals offered me was enormous. I was feeling very apart from nature. I had lost my fascination with people. Being so close to the horses and alpacas was really special.”            

                         Lauren Grabelle, quoted in Unlikely Loves by Jennifer S. Holland

This week got off to a blazing start. When I was in Africa, I fell in love with the Chimfunshi sanctuary and I met amazing people, including beautiful ebony-skinned ones. I wondered if, in my lifetime, Hollywood could embrace this beauty. Imagine my delight when Oscar winner Lupito Nyong’o’s moving speech on black beauty went viral, empowering others to step out of internalized racism and into a new standard of splendor. http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/lupita-nyongo-delivers-an-incredible-speech-on-beauty-i-prayed-to-god-for-lighter-skin/story-fn907478-1226846866664 

What allows you to move in positive ways? We are in constant transformation. Let me introduce you to Nick Ortner helping us “tap” our way into transcendent tipping points and to Ryan Eliason, whose mission is: “empower 20,000 social entrepreneurs with mindset shifts and tangible business skills needed to make a positive impact in the world.”

When I need a hit of the positive, I dip into nature’s beauty: flowers, rocks, mountain views. When not writing, working, being with animals or engaged in soulful conversations, I occasionally look to what new offers the television industry has.

My criteria: Is it affirmative? Does it model good values? Is it inclusive? Recently, three shows made the grade: “The Fosters”, “Parenthood” and “Switched At Birth”. They feature families honoring diversity and who are lavish with amends. Actors who might be overlooked are celebrated, with no culture or race upstaging the other. Oscar winner Marlee Matlin shares that in "Switched at Birth," she gets to be herself. It is a beautiful new cultural fabric that we are weaving. We have raised the bar.

Not only did Lupito Nyong’o move me to tears, but also my heart leapt up with a client’s watershed breakthrough. As an activist, my client got caught in a breakdown of “us against them.” Old conditioned bias sabotaged her efforts.

Through her leadership development, this client committed to ending her negative speech and angry outbursts. She cast new stones upon the water. No longer muttering, she is making a solid leadership stand for women caught below the poverty line. Aligned with her values, she teaches organizations to do their leadership development work first. Slow down and do your own work.

We toasted her 20-year project completion that celebrates the feminist movement’s positive impact and her philanthropy on behalf of shared wealth. She offered what helped in 2013: “Many things, equine-guided leadership, a horse named Lilly, meditation and moving up the scale.”  http://namasteglobalvision.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/NamasteDeclaringNewFuture-3%20copy.pdf 

Isn’t it amazing what can we can accomplish in this new movement to step into the positive?

Lupito Nyong’o

CRYING "UNCLE": THE WAY TO BREAKTHROUGH

Things fall apart so things can fall together.

                                                                     Unknown

In the end is our new beginning. What does this mean? It often means when resigned, at our wit's end, we have a chance to breathe more deeply; to walk along the ocean. An “aha” comes. We wrest ourselves from old ways. Yet, we often exhaust ourselves before we surrender. There is a dreadful sense of defeat, having to cry “uncle."

In leadership and organizational development, we as consultants encourage people to declare their blinds spots or breakdowns. Otto Scharmer in Theory U talks a lot about our discovery of the "blind spots" at the individual, organizational and global levels.

When we continue to go about day, continuing the same ideas and methods that we know are not working, we are lost. When we stop to discovery what is our "blind spot," we have the possibility of discovering something we have not seen. Our blind spots are the space from which we generate our action. Our blind spots often are organizational stories, old learning strategies, doing it the same way handed down in our family conditioning. 

The question arises how does one connect with the empty openness of a future as the organization, learning community or personal leadership is falling apart? Surprising, part of that new discovery lies in declaring the blind spot. 

When tooling down the road, have you ever had a flat tire? There was this nail or rut in the road. Your means of being “in action” has broken down. Acknowledging breakdown is the step toward a better future. Why? Because with this flat tire, you realize you are not going anywhere.

Once acknowledged, take notice. What caused the breakdown? Are you and your organization driving too fast? Not checking the tires before you left? Is it your outmoded beliefs? 

Sitting along the roadside, dwelling on bad luck is not the answer. There are lots of steps in between staying stuck and being safely back on the road…and the better for it. How you go about it either generates more breakdown or gets you into genuine breakthrough. I write of having a “do-over” in my blog, Ceremony. It is my personal breakthrough and offers a mapping to a positive future.

What gives you pause to recognize the breakdown? You promised your sister you would not let her down? You have a dream for what the organization's future could be?

Priscilla Stuckey, who wrote Kissed By A Fox, describes her fifteen-year breakdown. An important soul moment goes awry. She writes, "I desperately wanted to find a solution. But in the fifteen years since, I haven't been able to think of one.” Her friend asks a question. The seeming resolution that comes to mind was not enough.

An important part of Priscilla's road to her breakthrough was her courage to not accept a death that seemed wrong to her. Another part was in her admitting her grief and finding ways to heal it.  "My bags of grief, already heavy, sagged even more with the weight...something in the law seemed wrongheaded." This is declaration is her beginning to admit a breakdown. She entreats us to join her in declaring a collective societal disintegration. She writes a compelling book after being led to her own personal breakthrough. In that breakthrough she invites us as readers to see our blind spots with our natural world. 

Wayne Baker of the Center for Positive Organizations says “extraordinary events--positive or negative--are temporary openings for breakthroughs in personal growth, organizational development, and human progress.” Priscilla shows us a positive way to generate communication and world breakthrough. Intrigued? I hope so; her book is a good one. 

Breakthroughs are the revolutionary pathways. They are everywhere. Andrea Chilcote's blog, The Way I Carry Things chronicles her recent breakthrough and invokes us to dare the same.

The world is full of innovative possibilities when we’re stopped in our tracks. What if, instead of staying stuck, you declare a breakdown, see your blind spot and get back on a NEW road to freedom?

Reader, are you willing to stop and invest the time in a leadership process that can take you into the generation of a breakthrough? What is the breakdown then that will you declare right now?

HOW YOU GONNA SING THAT SONG, BABY, IF YOUR VOICE IS OUT OF TUNE?

I used to think vibrations were positive energy.

“Thinking” was the first clue that I was not quite onto the scent of the thing. I had made progress and yet, things kept falling apart. Recently, I worked with this remarkable teacher/healer. Now I’m singing a different tune.

Before one is a good teacher one is a good student, experientially, humbly and ongoingly. If life is a journey, it is worth dipping ourselves into its nourishing waters often, revitalizing, becoming more who we “be”. The journey? Move into light, love and our true vibration. Release the rubble.

When I was five years old, family, neighborhood and community conditioned me. When I went to college, I found new world-views. My journey to freedom began, voyaging into more and more of my authentic self. However, nothing quite prepared me for this cosmic shift, attuned by God’s Tuning Fork, realigning myself into the universal echoing sound. 

Our American culture knows that good practicing cranial osteopaths keep body and spine aligned. A friend trusted her husband when he was racing cars because he kept them attuned to an impeccable purr. When a dinner hostess calls our attention, she taps her spoon on a fine crystal glass. We hear that lilting, lovely tinkling sound. “Ping”. We are each a crystal glass. And before we morph into our “Ping,” we need to attune to the one true sound.

Many of us are mavericks, high-level performers going for the gold. Others do our due diligence on paths to a better life. Sometimes we are moving so fast that what life throws at us lingers inside cellular fissures, repositories for our gunk. This gunk is not in tune. Its jarring vibration rips off our ping. We are not aligned to our one true sound.

What was my vibration in my first training session? Cheerfulness sprinkled with dissonance. Oldie Gunky tunes loitering around. Ancient life impairment causing me to sing off-key. “Phlat” vibrations mixed with honeydew “pings”. But do my work I did, clearing, cleansing, releasing, giving forth, affirming, shifting, singing, warming up the vocal chords, acting in good faith, moving on and into the best that life has to offer.

Tuned up, aligned, new things are happening. Light, happy things. I am now in synch. I dissolve glop into Light. Once I struggled and now I’m free. It’s the resonance of “Ping.” 

People in recent weeks stop me, feeling drawn to me. Old friends wonder what I am up to. Maybe they are seeing a new light in my eyes? “No, it’s your vibration,” she told me. “They are attracted to your vibration.” Thanks to being with one of God's Best Tuning Forks, I am tuned in and turned on.

Don't we all want to be that shiny crystal glass that Pings, calling attention to something grand? With new tools for my journey, I remain in natural vibration. Join me, this grand New Year, in getting your “Ping” on.