Study upon study has revealed meetings are catastrophically inefficient.*
Matthew Syed

The reality, says Buber, is that we live in a “profoundly twofold” world, the realm of I-Thou and the realm of I-It. They are not two worlds. They are one. And they need each other.**
Philip Newell

Confession:
I’m not the best person
to ask about meetings.

If I can get out
of a meeting,
I will.

I’ve learnt
a few things after being in
thousands of meetings:

If you have to lead a meeting
and there is someone present better
at this, ask them to lead…

Don’t try to be a “meeting-person,”
Be yourself and
turn up in your superpower…^

Meetings aren’t bad,
They just lost their way, forgetful
that they are meant to stimulate and organise the new…

If you were out there everyday doing
new things, you’d come to long for a meeting
to bring it all together.

*Matthew Syed’s Rebel Ideas;
**Philip Newell’s The Great Search;
^I found myself to be a much happier listener than speaker – I began to take a notebook to meetings, in which I would mix things that were being shared in the meeting with thoughts and ideas I was reading about and that excited me. If anything pertinent appeared, I would share it.

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Too often we get hung up on how risky it feels, and fail to focus enough on how generous the work is. Generosity is a great antidote to fear.*
Seth Godin

If you’re reading this book, it’s because you sense inside you a second self, an unlived you.**
Steven Pressfield

Generosity is risky,
So are humility and
faithfulness.

Each provides
a path from the familiar
into the unknown.

You are a who and a where,
But a voice calls to you
from your future.

More than a new idea,
It is the
perspective of your soul.

*Seth Godin’s blog: Kinds of courage;
**Steven Pressfield’s Do the Work.

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Ignore all marketing and advertising.
Nobody is pushing what really matters.
Friendships, nature, family, learning, community.
The best things in life aren’t things.*
Derek Sivers

Regardless of your religion or lack of it, every person relies on the Transcendent to provide meaning for their lives. Transcendent refers to that which exists above or beyond. We all need to live for something above or beyond ourselves.**
AleXander McManus

There it is again,
The whisper of a thought
that if we stop to notice it
may grow into a possibility
of somehow making
someone’s world better.

*Derek Sivers’ How To Live;
**AleXander McManus’ FutureU.

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The garden is a meditation practice, that of seeing when it is time for something to die. In the garden one can see the time coming for fruition and for dying back. In the garden one is moving with rather than against the inhalations and exhalations of greater wild Nature.*
Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Self-awareness, humility, and generosity are required for openness and creativity and therefore for impact. We need to take time for rest, refreshment, recovery, and renewal, and to celebrate our victories and honour our losses.**
Adam Kahane

Spring: new energy, beginnings and possibilities,
Summer: focus, flow, I am,
Autumn: fruitfulness, for you, I’m tired,
Winter: hiddenness, reflection, rest.

My favourite is Spring,
But I need each of the seasons–
I need to breathe
in and out.

*Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With the Wolves;
**Adam Kahane’s Everyday Habits For Transforming Systems.

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Our first long-term memories form between the age of two and four. Once we have a memory, we can begin to understand ourselves as a story that is acting out of time.*
John Higgs

You are the only you that has ever lived; you idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all of existence and if you cannot hear the sound if the genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that someone else pulls …**
Brian McLaren

Two and a half years old,
Carrying some jam and bread to his Mummy
who had just returned home after
giving birth to a little boy.

Other memories would follow for me
in the home, at school, work, family –
My story had begun,
But to know my story is not to know me.

Through error and exploration,
I came to realise that I needed
more than a story–
What I really needed was a myth.

There is a temptation to
enlarge my story, to be
known for something,
But not so with my myth.

A myth is not demonstrative,
But it is full of rightness,
is its own reward and aims
to leave the world a better place.

John Higgs’ William Blake vs The World;
Brian McLaren’s Faith After Doubt.

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We should take wandering outdoor walks, so that the mind might be nourished and refreshed by the open air and deep breathing.*
Seneca

The natural world delicately captures our attention with artefacts such as big trees, intricate plants, and small animals…It allows the neural resources that guide our voluntary attention to recharge.**
Ethan Kross

Whether we recognise it
or not,
Outdoors acts upon us
in many positive ways.

I spent yesterday indoors,
And today I must
get out into a bigger,
Less demanding, quieter world.

I have realised
for many years how
“I need a day with fields in it”^–
I-Thou.

Though today’s walk
won’t be through Country,
It will have Big Sky and Budding Trees
greeting me again and again.

*Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic;
**Ethan Kross’ Chatter;
^A phrase I found myself saying over many years.

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Most of us would like to live with wonder, grace and optimism.  Perhaps it pays to practice this in advance. When considering any given moment, is there a glimmer of good worth focusing on, even making a comment about? Our narrative of reality often becomes our reality.*
Seth Godin

Are we waiting for someone
to bring us wonder, grace and optimism?

What if we are
the ones to bring these– the chosen ones?

Perhaps those times
of mundanity, heaviness, and negativity are opportunities?

Better a story
than moving from drama to drama.

A myth, though, is mightier,
And we each have a myth within us.**

*Seth Godin’s blog: Rehearsing possibility;
**Living life as a series of dramas produces fragility, growing stories provides us with resilience, but myths are to do with life’s deep wells of being, developing antifragility – see Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile.

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So the way to live is to ignore everything new.
All of it.
Let the test of time filter everything.
Value only what has endured.*
Derek Sivers

But who you aren’t isn’t interesting.**
Rob Bell

What stands the test of time is who you are.

When I am helping others to identify their talents, we go to the past.

What you have done in the past successfully, intuitively, whilst growing and meeting your needs.

These are the things you can do more of with imagination, innovation, and grace.

I, for one, am glad for you who are and who you will be and become.

*Derek Sivers’ How To Live;
**Rob Bell’s How To Be Here.

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Out of our incompleteness and our disorientation, out of our longing and our wanderlust, arises the motive force of every love and every revolution, of our science and our art, of our creation and our self-creation. Every creative act is an act of traversal.*
Maria Popova

Someday, maybe we will have the courage to add “the communion of sinners,” too.**
Richard Rohr

I do not believe
I journey to become complete
but because I am incomplete,
I do not keep walking because
I want to be found
but because I am lost,
I do not want to come to an end
but to continue beginning;
Perhaps this is
who we are?

*Maria Popova’s The Marginalian blog: Where Love Goes When It Goes;
**Richard Rohr’s The Tears of Things; suggesting an addition to the Apostles’ Creed’s “the communion of saints.”

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To put it another way that only slightly exaggerates, green spaces seem to function like a great therapist, anti-aging elixir, and immune-system booster all in one.*
Ethan Kross

No, he explained, we need the wild places because they remind us of a world beyond the human. Forest, plains, prairies, deserts, mountains: the experiences of those landscapes can give people a sense of bigness outside themselves that has in some way been lost.**
(Wallace Stegner)

Be carried up to the skies,
Listen to the song of the river,
Watch the explorer-insect clamber the flower,
Feel the exertions of the wind–
The wilds are closer than we know.

Even when we think
that nature is doing
us no good,
It
is.

*Ethan Kross’ Chatter;
**Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places.

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