Nancy Love’s Weblog

It is great to be at the office early and to have the sun shining in Calgary.  It has been a wet summer here and many people are complaining about the lack of summer weather.

Complaining fascinates me.  It seems to take up time in conversations and to what end?  We can’t change many of the things we are prone to complain about i.e. the weather, the sports teams, the traffic, etc.  What I have noticed is that a complaint is a give a way as to the BEACH – Beliefs, Expectations, Assumptions, Concerns and Hopes – of the complainer.  It tells you what they feel strongly about and what bothers them.  It indicates, if you are listening carefully, what’s missing for them.  Sometimes it is power and control that they are seeking, some control over some aspect of their life.  Other times it is peace and an easy way of being.  Or they are looking to find a perfect world where everything complies to the standards as set for weather, teams and traffic.

All nine of the PULSE BEACHs are identifiable in complaints.  (Power, Peace, Perfection, Connection, Success, Differentiation or Creativity, Detachment, Security and Excitement)  Listen and learn what people are looking for and identify it for them if you can and if it is appropriate.  Watch them think and then smile.  It is a great way to make their day and yours.

Good morning, Calgary.  Enjoy the sunshine.

We are in Paris at the Westin.  A company I will call XYZ Company is here too. I thought it noteworthy enough to comment here on something that I have noticed about the attendees.  There are probably 3-5 hundred representatives or employees of the company here and ALL of them are tall, muscular males.  Gladiators!!!  Interesting …  they fight the management fight. I found a word on their website that describes one of their services that I had never heard before –  “wargaming”.  I understand it to be part of the simulation activities.  hmmmm.

Sooo, I think what they do is create advantages for companies in competitive markets.  The problem is that more and more we need to be collaborative markets where everyone ones if the game is to continue.

I am troubled by the gladiator image and approach.  I think that I may have some ideas from my work that would add value to the management strategies that they have in place but I am not sure they will see it that way.  Given the criteria I saw on their webiste, I am guessing that both gain thinking is not necessarily part of what they do.

Is business still war???  Are we still in deficit thinking mode???

Working together is a simple idea with alot of power in it.  There are ways to have your needs AND my needs met.  There are always ways to identify unique and common criteria for a future together and create a sustainable plan of action. A company needs to reflect the diversity of their clients.  The scary thing is that I believe that XYZ Company does….  CEO’s – the kind that have been raking in bonuses on the backs of little people – also look like gladiators.

I could be dead wrong about XYZ Company.  They are obviously successful. The only hint of a crack in the armour was in the elevators where people were less guarded and seemed genuinely concerned with what was going on at the meetings, with the company and with their clients.  Still hyped on success brings success, they were showing a brave face to each other but the body language when the elevator doors closed was different.

Gladiators, keeping their sponsors happy, going for the kill.

Where are the peace makers???  Where is the diversity in the world of business and in the world of consulting?

You can’t leave the peacemaking to the non-profits.  They can only do so much.  “Love Difference”  for example is working to unit organizations around the Mediterranean.  It promotes intercultural dialogue but the true power of intercultural dialogue is in the business opportunities that are created.

The success stories we do not hear enough about are there.  Volkswagen has built a plant to assemble cars in the middle east on the border between Israel and Jordan.  Workers from both regions work side by side.  When the livelihood of the warring parties is earned collaboratively then a real difference can be seen.  Business has a vital role to play and a very large hammer, economic advantage, to play it with.

Nietzsche said “You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.”  Doesn’t everyone have chaos in their soul? No really?  I need to know.  Is your soul not chaotic?

Mine is always dancing, whirling from peace to fear and back in a rhythm that almost seems predictable.  Not knowing the pattern leads to fear and the downward spin that is lifted to an upward spin by some seemingly random event that is coincidence or not, synchronistic or not.  Hard to tell where it will go next … chaos in the soul ….

What of this dancing star?  The writing is fun and at time I can see the birthing of ideas into words and sentences and paragraphs and chapters and books and I know the pain associated.  I also know the joy of completing a work that has sat on the end of my tongue for many years waiting for my life to find a room for the birthing process.

Our new book, “Princpals: Faces of Change” is out and we sent a press release about it to 30 or so radio and tv stations.  We also ran an ad in a Talk Show Host Magazine.  The interest has begun.  I had an interview this week and have another one scheduled for next week.

This whole education program “Race to the Top” that Obama is implementing is helping us because the book is about principals implementing mandated change in schools and increasing the results on standardized tests.  It is a good book about five different men who take five different approaches in five different settings and get similar results.  Conclusions:  There is more than one way to improve a school.

I love the way the book tells the stories through metaphor and how it emphasises the significant role educational leaders like principals play in the race for the top.  They lead from the hallway and their influence is felt in every classroom.  What they focus on gets done.  What they value gets valued.

It has been twelve years since I went back to school in September, but as schools get ready for the new term, I hope they have the leadership they need to create learning experiences for kids that will make a difference in the lives of the students and in the progress of the country.

Isn’t it interesting when things happen to you  and you don’t have an explanation until something else happens to you?  Ususally that something else is that other people have the same or related experience.  Both of you have meanings that you attach to the event until you talk about it together and then the meaning changes and people stop and consider  …. “Is this an intervention of the divine sort? or coincidence?”  As my friend Carol is wont to say …”Coincidence… I think not!!”

Things that are coincidental in their occurance gain meaning in their sharing. If we were all to share our coincidences what amazing things we could learn about the universe and how it works, about the strength and power of intention and the whole experiment that is the collective consciousness.

I am getting philosophical.  I think it comes from having watched most of season one of “The Big Band Theory” over the past week.  I love Sheldon and the way his mind works or at least the way minds of the writers on the show work. I am certain that the randomness and the synchronicity of coincidental events is potentially explainable.

Diamonds are a girls best friend.  They are valuable and symbolize love and devotion in some cultures.  They are hard and can cut glass.  There is so much about diamonds … their beauty and their strength … that is celebrated in our society.  When we use a diamond shape or a rhombus as it is known in mathematics to represent an idea it has both beauty and strength … cut and brilliance… wholeness.

Integration …. I think that is what I really want to write about here.  When something is integrated …. when it has taken the external pressures applied to it and become a stronger whole … hardened to a brilliance and sophistication to rival any diamond, that is when you know you really have something of value.

Recently my husband bought me a 3 Karate Diamond…. UNCUT.  It is beautiful but not recognizable as the diamonds that we know and tend to value.  A Diamond in the rough.  I was intrigued and pleased and immediately impressed with the metaphor we so often use for people who haven’t quite met their potential.  What potential are you hiding?  What about your neighbour?

Interesting theme that runs through the literature … brain research… psychology….physiology… almost every field of study known to man expresses this sentiment…

I had an interesting experience about 8 years ago when I went to Australia.  My cousin is into geneology and she insisted that I visit another cousin of ours while I was there.  So I looked him up.  He had left Canada for India many years before and had eventually moved to Australia and was living outside of Sydney.  I called and he met my husband and I at the train station.  We had a fabulous visit and near the end he mentioned that he had written a book.  I begged a copy. He only had a hundred or so left and they were tagged for practitioners of something called Colour Puncture.

It was a lucky string of events.  Jack’s book was informative about the rise of the practice of colour puncture which is a healing method using prism of light on acupuncture pressure points.  It was also an enlightening journey for me as I followed the story of his live and that of my family.  Jack’s mother was my grandfather’s sister and so was his stepmother because his dad married his wife’s sister when the wife died two months after giving birth to Jack.  I was fascinated by the book, be colour puncture and the history I found in it.

I could not find practitioners of colour puncture in Calgary which was disappointing.  The good news was that Jack, after our amazing visit, returned to Canada to visit other members of our family.  The bad news is that as he was on his way back to live in Canada, he took ill and died suddenly in Sydney.  He wrote his own eulogy.  I treasure the copy of that I received from his wife.

Further good news arrived recently announcing the publication of his book Osho, India and Me by Jack Allanch.  I have just started reading and I am so enthralled by the wisdom and the humour.  Jack was obviously a very speacial man and I am happy to have been related to him.  I am again learning about  him and myself at the same time.  I recommend the book for anyone who is looking to understand the theme above – We are all capable of much more than we think we are.

Thank you, Jack.

… and you should throw all the paint at it you can.  Danny Kaye said that.  He was a very creative person and so are you.  Throwing paint at this canvas of life can be  a simple as posting a blog, poking someone on Facebook or taking a walk.  Creativity is important and yet we don’t often apply it to our lives.  We get up, get ready, go to work, come home, have dinner, watch tv and go to bed.  Then the next day we do it all again.  What if we did it backwards or what if we didn’t do any of those things one day?  What if we did each of them in a different way each day? 

There are so many ways to live our lives.  Sad and lonely is one.  What about outrageous and happy?  How many other ways can you think of….

” Unless you walk out into the unknown, the odds of making a profound difference in your life are pretty low.”  Walking into the unknown for me is about sociological consideration of the Enneagram.  Going where no writer has gone before is exciting and lonely.  Time to work on the book is crucial for me now.  It is my creative outlet and it is presently trapped inside my head.  I have committed the writing of it to Vancouver.  I hope to have some time there next week to concentrate and to perhaps assign myself a piece of writing that I can accomplish between visits to my office there.

Walk into the unknown and learn from it.  Then it is no longer the unknown but the known and the familiar.  I had a beautiful drive from Edmonton to Calgary this week.  It was foggy.  a mist held over the fields of yellow canola flowers and the full moon lay just above the horizon, shining through the mist.  It was magical.  Later as the sun rose and the fog settled in the hollows around the trees the beauty defied description.  In that 3 hour trip I saw enough majestic and magnificent images to fill a number of coffee table photo books and create an awesome slide show.  I had no camera and so I have memories of beauty that will  stay with me.  Driving through the fog was driving in to the unknown for me.  My truck driver friends and I created a sort of rhythm that kept us on the road and safe in the tentative conditions but the journey revealed such wonderful images that I would have missed had I not driven with them into the foggy highway.

Imagine the beauty around us.  Step into the unknown that it at your finger tips.  Unknowns like the preferences of your mate or the thoughts of your children.  Make a profound difference in your life, one conversation at a time.

Yes…Helmuth Von Moltke had it right.  First ponder…. think about what you want to do.  Think… but not too long.  It is important to consider what you are about to do and the ramifications to be sure but if  you stay with it for too long your courage or your resolve may begin to fade.  Ponder, then dare…. Dare to do what needs to be done, the thing that no one but you can do.

Daring, Courage, Resolve these are interesting words.  Where do those characteristics come from?  How do we recognize when they are needed and, more importantly, how do we tap into the resource at the time that we need it?  People are funny.  They can be daring and courageous and resolute … or not.  What makes for the difference?

I dare to write.  It takes courage to put your ideas out there for people to consider.  What if they are not interested or reject the thought or worse still ignore it?  What is the worst thing that could happen? What if I don’t take the time to provoke a little thinking from time to time?  If only one person considers and is moved to action then this is time well spent.  I hope they will ponder and then dare just as I have.

First I ponder and then I dare.