To be fully engaged, we must be physically energised, emotionally connected, mentally-focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interest.*
(Tony Schwarz and Jim Loehr)

We all want to help; it’s a beautiful human attribute.

You may be able to help me, but I’ll come to that later.

We not only want to help each other, but we are really imaginative and creative about how we go about it.

Each of us has just-enough to help another.

We don’t have to have everything, only something that will interact and create something new with the something of the person being helped brings.

Wanting to make our help count means turning up in the best condition we can.

Which is where the words of Tony Schwarz and Jim Loehr help us to see that there’s a lot to be aware of.**

We can hope to be ready for opportunities to help, or we can prepare.

Every day:

Sleeping, eating and exercising well;
Staying with our feelings and exploring them;
Stretching thinking by engaging with new thoughts and experiences;
Connecting with others, the world, our god, and the True Self.

As Simon Sinek points out,

Consistency becomes more important that intensity.**

Developing in these four dimensions is about developing flexibility over rigidity, and is what makes us into infinite players cum helpers, opening more possibilities than we thought were possible.

If I can help you, let me know, but you may also be able to help me.

I’m launching some help for people made unemployed through the pandemic, and am offering an introduction to this on the 21st April.

It’s an opportunity to find out there’s more to us than we know. A way of being more prepared when looking to get back into work.

It would be great if you could help me spread the word.

*From Tony Schwarz and Jim Loehr’s The Power of Full Engagement;
**Check out Edgar Schein’s lovely little book Helping to see how it is an art;
^From Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game.

To follow your gift is a calling to a wonderful adventure of discovery. Some of the deepest longings in you is the voice of your gift. The gift calls you to embrace it, not to be afraid of it.*
(John O’Donohue)

The best way I can describe your gift is as your deepest joy meeting the world’s greatest need.**

We are all participating in an infinite game, though we may be unaware of this.

We are not the originators of the gift.

It has come to us through many others and we get the opportunity to shape it into something that is different.

And we look for opportunities to give it to others.

Helping them to shape their gift …

… and on it goes.

The infinite game asks a bigger question of us.

Not so much “What do you do for a living?”

More “What do you live to do?”

Except the universe can’t ask the question directly.

It asks it through us, its offspring, as we make our way through life.

Erich Fromm touches on this when he writes about hope, how it’s something we get to shape for ourselves and share with others, but neglect:

Whatever we say or think about hope, your inability to act or plan for life betrays our hopelessness.^

I’m not sure which comes first.

Does the gift produce hope?

Or does hope produce the gift?

I put it this way because I think it feels like it’s happening in an ongoing way rather than has happened, rather than waiting to happen.

I find myself wondering, What do I want to be when I grow up?

I’m still on the road, still walking.

Walking alongside any whom I meet along the way and can walk alongside, sharing my gift.

Probably why I’d choose direction over destination.

*From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes;
**This is necessarily subjective; I am reminded that the early Jesuits all thought the thing they were doing to be the most important thing in the whole world: see Chris Lowney’s Heroic Leadership;
^From Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope.

(My first attempt at a doodle for today)

Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.*
(Maria Popova)

Eternal beauty cannot glow here in its full force or purity; nevertheless it is present as a fugitive and awakens our adoration when it is glimpsed.**
(John O’Donohue)

Which did you see?

The ending?

Or the continuing?

Both were present.

The finite and the infinite.

The player makes the game.

*From Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Essential Life Learnings From 14 Years of Brain Pickings;
**From John O’ Donohue’s Divine Beauty

Don’t give them what they want. Give them what they never dreamed was possible.*
(Orson Welles)

Keep asking questions. Colour outside the lines. Draw your own maps. Create your own legends.**
(Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie)

There have been several times I have found myself blown off-course by a life-storm.

I didn’t think so at the time, but now, I’m grateful for being blow off the course I was heading along.

The storms have made it possible to be somewhere I never imagined.

Dave Trott writes of TV and radio producer John Lloyd:

He wouldn’t have done nearly so much with his life if he hadn’t been fired so many times.^

That encourages me.

Take a look around, take inventory of where you are and what you have.

It takes a while to reorientate, but slowly, we figure out where we can head from here.

Let me know if I can help with the journey.

*Orson Welles, quoted in Dave Trott’s One + One = Three;
**Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie, from Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick’s A Velocity of Being;
^From Dave Trott’s One + One = Three.

If we stick to the letter of the law, we don’t have to think. Because there’s risk involved in thinking. There’s nowhere to hide if it goes wrong. But real creativity often comes with risk. So don’t just blindly follow the words themselves. Take a risk. Think.*
(Dave Trott)

[The second industrial revolution] is characterised by the fact not only that living energy has been replaced by mechanical energy, but that human thought is replaced by the thinking of machines.**
(Erich Fromm)

All of us live within systems: multiple systems – systems within systems – and each comes with a script to follow … or not.

The systems become more complex, the scripts more confining.

You don’t have to follow a script, though, you can always interpret it.

Scripts are often finite whilst interpretations are infinite.

Interpretation requires that we think differently, beyond the boundaries of systems, into the adjacent possibilities.

This comes with risk.

There’ll be misunderstandings and criticisms, there’ll be failures and pain, but if we value and trust the small steps rather than the mighty leap we’ll make progress:

We all want big changes, but the best way to achieve this is to start small.  Give love, Take Pride. ^

*From Dave Trott’s One + One = Three;
**From Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope;
^From gapingvoid’s blog: Celebrate small wins.

The more people have to attend to, the harder it is to get their attention. Attention is a precious resource. […] What if instead of showing up to get attention, we showed up to give it, without expectation? Imagine the resources we could build if we spent the majority of our time attending to how we could help instead of trying to be seen.*
(Bernadette Jiwa)

Now I think that what makes you alert is to be faced by a situation that is beyond your control so you have to be watching it very carefully to see how it unfolds, to be able to stay on top of it. That kind of alertness is exciting.**
(Tim Harford)

The thing about giving attention is that it opens us up to more understanding and wisdom.

And we are changed in the process.

Whereas getting attention leaves us with what we have, or not much more. And we remain unchanged.

Giving attention is a risky business, though. We are unable to control our new discovery, appearing clumsy and incompetent in the eyes of others.

We are trying to know something in order to understand it, in order to wisely move it up and to the right.

Pioneers and explorers know there’s always something out there that they don’t know and cannot understand … yet.

They are prepared for things being very messy before they make sense for the majority.

You may have spotted what the real risk, however.

Which is to stay where we are.

*From Bernadette Jiwa’s The Story of Telling blog: Giving Attention vs. Getting Attention;
**From Tim Harford’s Messy.

See, you don’t have to threaten, or restrict or dictate anyone’s choices. If you’re clever, you can just rearrange the architecture.*
(Dave Trott)

That’s the truth of personality. It’s not innate but trained. It can and does change. It can and should be chosen and designed. Choosing one’s way is a primary purpose of our lives.**
(Benjamin Hardy)

How do you stop your child hanging from the school bannister three floors up above concrete?

Dave Trott decided his son wouldn’t stop if he simply told him not to do it.

Instead, he decided to show him how to safely fall downstairs at home, something his son was very much up for – Mum was out.

Wrap your arms around your head and roll into a ball:

And he fell down the stairs.*

“Ouch, that hurt.”*

Trott told his son that was because he hadn’t done it right, so he should try again.

He fell down the stairs a couple of more times.

It never became less painful, but the school reported that his son was no longer hanging from the bannister.

Trott calls this choice architecture.

Design that leads to the choice you want people to make, or not.

Here’s where my mind went when I read Trott and Benjamin Hardy:

Our lives don’t want to leave it to chance.

Or for us to miss the chances and opportunities everyone’s life includes.

Our lives constantly sends us information –

I call these whispers –

So we are enabled to make the right choice.

Not in some fixed, narrowing way, mind.

The right choice opens up more possibilities, so, more opportunities to choose.

The best part is when this happens, we’re designing ourselves.

We’re the origin of the whispers.

And on it goes.

(By the way, I’ve left the doodle for you to colour in with your choice of colours.)

*From Dave Trott’s One + One = Three;
**From Benjamin Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent.

The toll of making change is that you will be changed.*
(Seth Godin)

I may have ideas.
I may feel very strongly about these as they resonate with me
But until I do something with them, they remain invisible and can fade away.

(I have two at the moment that I need to move on.)

The thing about doing a thought is, not only are we are making an idea visible, providing it with an opportunity to breathe rather than expire, we’re also opening it to failure and ourselves to pain.
So we’re able to see how it can be developed and improved.
And also how we can be changed and grow.

What’s not to like?

*From Seth Godin’s Graceful.

When I’m walking, the subconsciousness is able to come to the surface more and it allows me to make magical connections that in my conscious mind I could never make.*
(Pico Iyer)

It is not possible to experience a feeling of control unless one is willing to give up the safety of protective routines […] what people enjoy is not the sense of control but the sense of exercising control in difficult situations.**
(Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)

Taking a walk instead of being tied to your desk may just feel wrong to you. The reality is that your brain may need to take a walk in order to work:

I can only meditate when I am walking.  When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs. ^

There is a letting go of convention when we leave the workplace for a walk, not knowing just what we’ll encounter and find ourselves thinking. Yet there is an artfulness and skill to this as expressed by Iain Sinclair’s revealing:

I have different walks for different questions or problems or ideas that I’m dealing with, a whole chain of maybe fifty different walks that I do for different things.^^

If you have something to do your way, as Frank Sinatra famously sings, then perhaps seeing this way as a path and introducing some walking into may bring just the benefit you need – and, if nothing else, you’ll find yourself smiling at all the sounds and sights.

*Pico Iyer, in his interview with Simon Schreyer: A Friend Afar;
**From Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow;
^Jean-Jacques Rousseau, quoted in Shane O’Mara’s In Praise of Walking;
^^Iain Sinclair, quoted in Geoff Nicholson’s The Lost Art of Walking.

Myths, told for their own sake, are not stories that have meanings but stories that give meanings.*
(James Carse)

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills, we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.**
(Ursula Le Guin)

To provoke is to call forth.

Myths are provocative.

Myths call forth a story from our lives. Not some repeat of the myth, but something that may only find expression through our lives:

We resonate with myth when it resounds in us. A myth resounds in me when its voice is heard in mine but not heard as mine.*

If we want a teacher or guide so we might find our lives and live them large, there are few better than the great stories and myths passed to us.

*From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games;
**From Ursula Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter.