That’s what our art requires of us. We show up and do it anyway, not because someone asked us to but because our persistent heart tells us we must.*
Bernadette Jiwa
The act of change-making is to help people decide that changing their action is exactly what they want to do. Not because it’s important to us, but because it’s important to them.**
Seth Godin
There’s that important word again:
Must, not should.
A must carries you into a day, through
difficulties and obstacles, into
an adventure.
A should from someone else
may get you started but lacks
your persistent heart.
If we want to see change,
There’s no better place to begin than
helping people to
ignore the shoulds and connect to
their heart-must.
(Art is the similar but different way you do something that fulfils you, helps others, and makes the world better in some way or other. What’s yours?)
*Bernadette Jiwa’s The Story of Telling blog: Doing the Work Anyway;
**Seth Godin’s This is Strategy.
THE NOTES (behind the reflection)
I first came across the power of MUST back in 2004 when I asked AleXander McManus what would move an organisation into the future: evolution or revolution. In what I discovered to be Alex’s inimitable way, he replied, “It will come through those who must.”
Must is not only something that pushes you, but pulls you, too, being embodied in your talents cum strengths, energies, and values.
I come across it again in Elle Luna’s wonderful essay and book: The Crossroads of Should and Must.
A Should comes from outside, it is what another speaks to us: You should do this, You should do that, but even the most well-meaning person doesn’t know how this fits with who we are and what we want to do in the same way we know ourselves.
A Must comes from within, our response to a need and our desire to make a difference.
A Should will sometimes get us started, and even keep us in a game, but only a Must will keep its going when the going gets tough without breaking anything inside us.
Change does not come quickly, but takes time – the kind of time that needs us to live and work from our Must.
We are all artists in the sense that there is something imaginative and creative we each can bring into the world.
This can look like what someone else does, but if you get closer you’ll see it’s super-nuanced, emanating from within rather than being copied from without.
A Must will make you better and also those around you – that’s how we know what it is.
It’s not magic, but of we turn up, again and again, we can make something magical for someone.
This is always for someone else– the remarkable and wonderful thing is, we have a whale of a life in pursuit.
THIN|SILENCE 