Posts Tagged ‘generativity’
Beautiful New Year Resolutions: Follow the beauty you discovered in 2009?
Posted on: December 13, 2009
New goals to focus the new year
2010 is upon us. 2009 has gone fast. I began the year overloaded. I was stressed out in January and was working hard to limit my goals. That’s the purpose of goal setting, right? To reduce the number of things claiming our attention.
Do you achieve your goals? I sincerely hope not!
In the end, I over-achieved some of my goals and under-achieved others. Why? Why can’t we arrive spot-on?
Because that is not our job. Really it is not.
Events, dear boy, events!
Our job is to respond to events. Events, dear boy, events, as British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once said. Or as the military say, no plan survives meeting the enemy.
Our job is not to press on regardless. Or job is to be aware of what is happening around us, to understand what is valuable, and look after that. We’ve had a good year when we’ve attended to who and what is important.
To be ready for unfolding events, it is a good idea to plan. Plans mean we have information at our finger-tips and we find it easier to read evolving situations and understand what we need and want to do.
A good year is when our goals unpack themselves and we discover what is ‘good and true, better and possible”
But our job is to learn. A good year is a year in which our goals unfold. A good year is when our goals unpack themselves. We come to understand the richness of the world and gaze upon it with respect and more curiosity bordering on reverence, not to forgive its wrongdoings but alive to what is ‘good and true, better and possible.”
So as we open our diaries for 2010, what has changed for us during 2009? Putting aside the farce of bailing out banks to the tune of more than half out annual GDP and politicians who rifle the petty cash, for farce is what that is, what changed for us during 2009?
Looking around the world, what do we see that we never used to see? What poetry & song did we hear this year, yet never heard before? Whom do we know whose style and approach to life we truly admire?
What brings us alive and takes us bubbling with enthusiasm towards 2010?
Take your first small step that may be the giant step needed by mankind
Often what brings the light to our eyes is deeply personal. We don’t want to expose what we love to the harsh glare of spotlights and public scrutiny. What we share is not for the sake of sharing. It is for the sake of nurturing what we feel is beautiful and it is for the sake of encouraging what we would like to see more of.
Of the many beautiful things we have discovered, which are we able to move towards? Which are we able to do more? Where and how can we take part and in the process make them more beautiful?
We may have the smallest role to play in their beauty. But it may be our role in creating a beautiful world. That small step on the edges of our existence may be a large step for mankind ~ if only we would take it.
#1 my career is a journey to find my people
A good performer jumps on stage, looks out at the audience, and thinks, “Here I am!”
A great performer jumps on stage, looks out at the audience, and thinks, “There you are!”
Steve Rapson from Art of the Solo Performer
contributed by DW from Connecticut, USA
and for #2 thru #1001 visit Music Thoughts
- Image via Wikipedia
“As an African-American, I will never forget that I would not be here today without the steady pursuit of a more perfect union in my country. That guides my belief that, no matter how dark the day may seem, transformative change can be forged by those who choose the side of justice.
And I pledge that America will always stand with those who stand up for their dignity and their rights—for the student who seeks to learn; the voter who demands to be heard; the innocent who longs to be free; and the oppressed who yearns to be equal.”
Barack Obama addressing the United Nations Wednesday 23 September 2009
“for the student who seeks to learn; the voter who demands to be heard; the innocent who longs to be free; and the oppressed who yearns to be equal.”
The mission and values of psychologists
In these words, Barack Obama has summed up the mission and purpose of psychologists all over the world most eloquently.
These goals are not just our goals. They are the mission and purpose of other people too. After all, Obama is a lawyer, a college professor and a politician.
But if in what we do, we do not pursue these goals, then we do nothing at all.
The heart of positive psychology and positive organizational scholarship
Barack Obama has said what positive psychologists and positive organizational scholars struggle to say simply.
It is the student who seeks to learn (not the teacher who intends to teach).
It is the voter who demands to be heard (not the politician who intends to tell).
It is the innocent who longs to be free (not the hypocritical who intends to justify).
It is the oppressed who yearns to be equal (not the the powerful who intends to explain).
It matters so much whose perspective we take.
It matters so much who is the subject of the sentence.
It matters so much whose intent we seek to buttress.
It matters so much that we choose the side of justice.
A big crunch and a big bang
Posted on: March 1, 2008
I managed Newtonian physics OK, the stuff you do in high school, but I gave it up before I got to quantum mechanics. I rather suspect that is the same for most psychologists. Around us, our understanding of the world is changing and I wonder whether psychology is keeping up.
Neil Turok, of Cambridge University, won a TED prize this week for his work in mathematical physics and his parallel work setting up the Africa Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Cape Town. Neil was born in South Africa and grew up in exile (is that fair) in East Africa and the UK. So I am motivated to ‘have a go’ and see how much I understand of what he has to say and how it relates to us.
The beginning
Most of us have heard of the big bang. But the problem with the big bang is, what happened before the big bang. Where did the big bang come from?
No beginning
The new theory is that big bangs happen cyclically. They come and go like growth and contraction in an economy. And the big bang is the good part, the part where we expand and be different.
Big bangs are preceded by big crunches, the part signally the end of a phase of contraction in the universe.
Our beginning
So how does this affect us? Is a big crunch imminent? Not as far as I know. As I understand it, we are living in phase when things will go on much as we know them, at least in the grand order of things.
But we may think differently perhaps about our own lives.
A cyclical view of the world considers it quite normal to have good stages in life and bad. To have seasons which are not associated simply with good when you are young and bad when your are old. Bad necessarily precedes good and is therefore one and the same thing. If you want to know how new that idea is in the west, try writing it down in your own words and citing movies and books that illustrate the idea.
A cyclical view of the world suggests that there are many possible futures. We know that. But in psychology we have been trained to predict, in a Newtonian way. If we have these conditions at this time, that is NOW, then this will happen in a few minutes, in an hour, or NEXT. We’ve predicated a whole industry on making these predictions, and possibly a second on promising the world we make them a lot better than we do.
That we have many possible futures means that from HERE and NOW, there are many different routes that we can follow to many different places. Yes, says the classically trained psychologist, but to which one and which one is ‘best’.
To exploit the new model, we don’t ask that question. We ask what are the routes we can follow. Lets just write down the possible routes. Let’s just do that task of showing all the possible ways forward.
flowing motion 
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