Manage your weaknesses with boundaries and support while you focus on your strengths.*
Katherine Morgan Scafler

Keep this thought handy when you feel a fit of rage coming on – it isn’t manly to be enraged. Rather, gentleness and civility are more human, and therefore manlier…The nearer a man comes to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength.**
Marcus Aurelius

There are two kinds of strengths and weaknesses.

There are strengths and weaknesses of talent and ability:
Identify what you are good at and develop these–
You have already invested tens of thousands of hours
for them to be so strong.

Perhaps counterintuitively,
You need to identify what you are bad at because
these will rob you of your time, energy, and joy–
Unless you can find a passion for these and are willing to invest
years of practise, they are never going to be a strength.

If you can, stop doing these things,
If you cannot, explore how can you
manage them through your strengths?

There are strengths and weaknesses of character:
We need to work on all of these,
Selflessness, generosity, and wisdom being our goals–
Each orientated towards others, not ourselves.

Humility, gratitude, and faithfulness are always
helpful places to begin.

(Life isn’t simple. What will you add to your plan to further grow in who you are and what you can do?)

*Katherine Morgan Schafler’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control;
**Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic.

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Significance isn’t what we get … It’s what we do for others.*
Seth Godin

With your talents and abilities,
With what you hope for and are capable of,
With your heart,
It’s going to be hard for you to be insignificant.

It’s not about numbers,
Or success as often calculated, but
how you help to make something better,
Somewhere, for someone.

(When you free your imagination
to picture something better, what do you see?
It’s unlikely to come out of the blue
but grow out of your experience.)

*Seth Godin’s The Song of Significance.

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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.

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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.

Strategy isn’t a map. It’s a compass. Strategy is a better plan.*
Seth Godin

Radical engagement involves feeling our way forward to discover, open up, and work with cracks.**
Adam Kahane

Before the certainty of a map
there is a compass–
Trust your insight, shaped
by talents and values and energies;
These will show you the way through
the next-to-nothing
before you.

The most exhilarating experiences in your life so far were daring.
Your proudest moments were overcoming struggle.
The best happiness comes after some pain.^

(Our talents, values, energies, these are honourable, increasing our insight. How might you hone these in the new week?)

*Seth Godin’s This is Strategy;
**Adam Kahane’s Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems;
^Derek Sivers’ How To Live.

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THE NOTES (behind the reflection):
We follow maps, but maps can’t show us everything.
Travelling with a compass and eyes wide open is more valuable.
Talents show up because we have taken the time to play with patterns of skills, a lot – we can accurately identify our talents in thirty minutes – it takes a lifetime to grow them, mind.
Further developing of talents hone them into strengths.
Strengths bring together ability, strong experiences, and passion.
On the other hand, a weakness may be a practised talent, but because our heart’s not in it, the experiences haven’t become more nuanced and flowing.
Values are not goals, but are hopes that are bigger than our lives; we can never achieve them – as we move towards them, they grow bigger.
Energies refer to those activities and spaces and people that send our energy spiking, but we also note when the activities and spaces and people that drain our energy away.
These sharp spikes of energy identify what I call enriching environments that not only do we prefer and grow as a result of, but our talents cum strengths enable us to create them.
The things that make us feel as if we’ve lost all our energy and will never regain it, identify what I name enervating environments; if we were Superman or Superwoman, this would be our kryptonite.
It is super-important to notice these because they sneak up on us– if we cannot escape them, we must learn how to manage them.
The best way to manage is to meet them with our strongest self.
Of course, one person’s enervating environment may be another person’s enriching environment.
All of this – talents, values, and energies – mean that we gain a good feel for where we are and what we must do; we can trust this.
Opportunities don’t appear before us as big open doors and bright lights– it’s more likely an itch, a crack, a glitch in the Matrix, and we have to work with this, but if you have noticed the crack, and trust who you are and what you have, then you will be able to do something,

There is an idea that identity is built independently of relationships, not within them.*
Leslie Bell

Who will we become?
Who will we be of service to:
and who will we help others to become**
Seth Godin

My becoming has been through encounters with others,
Though many develop wary or anxious of such contacts,
The world grows richer as we receive and seek to share –
It has always been so.

(Perhaps reflect on those moments something important happened in your life, noticing those who were close at that time.)

*Sherry Turkle’s iGen;
**Seth Godin’s This is Strategy.

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The stories of gods or heroes descending into the underworld, threading through labyrinths. and fighting with monsters, brought to light the mysterious workings of the psyche, showing people how to cope with their own interior crises.*
Karen Armstrong

Mythological images are the images by which consciousness is put in touch with the unconscious. That’s what they are. When you don’t have your mythological images, or when your consciousness rejects them for some reason or other, you are out of touch with your own deepest part.**
Joseph Campbell

If I were to tell you my myth,
It may first appear as a chronicle
of what has happened to me and
my understanding and response to
the life events I now call home.

My hope is that it might also appear as
my modus operandi, the way
I will continue to journey—
Energy for exploration and transformation,
a strategy for regeneration and creativity.

(How do the stories you tell yourself allow you to create both a centring and an adventure?)

*Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth;
**Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss.

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Your art places you in the world.*
Nick Cave

Learning is a journey of incompetence.**
Seth Godin

First, the good news:
If you have identified your “art,”
You will never be lost,
You know what to do.

But it won’t come easy,
All at once – beautifully completed;
It will mean mess, failure, being ignored.

Be of good heart:
This calls for honing, not giving up.

(Name your “art,” being general at first because it won’t lead to just one thing— then name the possibilities.^)

*Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan’s Faith, Hope and Carnage;
**Seth Godin’s blog: Don’t steal the revelation;
^It is unlikely that your job title describes your art.

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The best way to achieve freedom is to take responsibility for the actions you’re taking. And the best way to be clear that you’re taking responsibility is to highlight the externalities and own them.*
Seth Godin

Living in accordance with your values is never finished, it is a lifelong journey.**
Steven Hayes

More than what we have, freedom
is what we make possible for others, including
Sister Earth.

Values outlast us, and great values
call us into adventures for a lifetime—
The freedom of life-in-all-its-fullness.

(Perhaps take a few moment to write out your values, and reflect upon the adventures they make possible for you – and for others. If you haven’t got the time, what might that be saying about your freedom?)

*Seth Godin’s blog: Embracing externalities;
**Steven Hayes’ A Liberated Mind.

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Time does not pass for the infinite player. Each moment of time is a beginning of a period of time. It is the beginning of an event that gives the time within its specific quality.*
James Carse

A stable, balanced life is a life losing energy – and so is a stable, balanced city.**
Richard Sennett

The finite game has an end, its players
move relentlessly towards it—
Expending their energy.

The infinite game comprises endless beginnings, its players
seeking to be present, surprised, and becoming—
Endlessly regenerated.

(We all have our finite games, but knowing what our infinite play is, we can more generously contribute to the former. What is your infinite play?)

*James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games;
**Richard Sennett’s Building and Dwelling.

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Enough comes from the inside.*
Ryan Holiday

Direct your eye inward, and you’ll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered – Travel them, and be
Expert in home cosmography**
Henry David Thoreau

Others write and thereby forge
spacecraft for journeys of exploration,
Their interior shaped by my daily quietness and journal,
Enabling voyages of discovering and understanding
Through my little charted into interior where
I endeavour to find I am enough.

When I look outwards,
I find I am surrounded
by countless universes of wonder.

(What if you understood your reading or listening to be spacecraft for discovery? How would you shape the interior space for deeper understanding, reflection, and transformation?)

*Ryan Holiday’s Stillness is the Key;
**Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; adaptation by Nicholas Bone.

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