Yesterday I wrote about time travel, and one of the challenges of traveling backward in time is that we can't change history. While time travel forward does carry some challenges--we don't know what will be possible in the future, by that very "limitation," we are freed to create a world where all things are possible.
Forward time travel is actually something that we do frequently in coaching. Using the vehicle of visualization, we lead our clients to imagine their heart's desire. The imaginings are true in future time. By being able to strip our world of constraints, the intention is set for the future. Nothing is impossible. Marching back to the present--its own version of time travel as we "go back" from future time to today--we can map steps to our intended future.
Just think: all thing are possible. With passenger planes full of AIDS researchers being shot down by guerillas, and yet one more war starting in the Middle East, the weekend that has just passed felt to me like the world was unwinding at its seams. But that is now. I can imagine a world at peace five or ten years from now, and it is so. "All I need to do" is to time travel back to today and do what I must do to set the wheels in place to enable world peace. Nothing is impossible.
When I used to do professional speaking, I would ask my audiences to think deeply about the single most important thing that each of them would have to do to create the world of their desired future. Then I would challenge them to do it...consciously and consistently...until they had changed the world.
The whole world doesn't need to change, I would say to them, just a critical mass to pull the rest of the world with it. Some believe that critical mass may be as small as one percent of the world's population. None of us is superfluous. What we choose to do, or not do, can literally change the world.
I've just finished reading The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster's delightful children's book, which I truly believe cannot be at all appreciated until adulthood, maybe even years into adulthood. In the book the protagonist is Milo, a boy who is sent off on a great quest by King Azaz, who says that there is one thing that he cannot tell the lad until he returns. The secret is that everyone "knows" the quest is impossible, but they don't want him to know until he tries it. Of course, the predictable occurs: Milo accomplishes the challenge through a serious of harrowing encounters with demons. It is only when he returns that Azaz tells him that the quest was an impossible one.
If each of us traveled forward in time and created a world that we'd like to live in, what impossible quests might we take on? As I write, two pictures come to my mind's eye. The first is of Mother Teresa walking onto the battlefield during one of the several Middle Eastern wars that have occurred during my lifetime. It is said that this little sprite of a woman fearlessly walked onto the battlefield, and the guns stopped. Most everyone would have thought that impossible, but she didn't know it was impossible. Like Milo's quest, Mother Teresa's was possible because she decided it was possible.
The other picture that comes to mind is that of Jody Williams, a housewife turned activist, who was appalled by all the people who were killed or maimed by landmines left from wars. For several years before her death, Diana, Princess of Wales, became an eloquent spokesperson for a coalition promoting an international treaty to disable the landmines. Since its enactment, the treaty has been responsible for the disabling of over 46 million landmines. An impossible task? Of course, but neither Jody Williams nor Princess Diana knew it was impossible, so it wasn't.
Instead of calling Forward Time Travel by that name, perhaps the term we should really use is stepping into our ability to make miracles. Whether in our personal lives or on a global scale, when we travel forward in time and envision the world in which we'd like to live in the future, we step into miracles. When we set about doing our parts to make them possible, we become Miracle Makers.
I don't know about you, but I can't imagine anything I'd rather have in my obituary or on my headstone than "She was a Miracle Maker." Today, just as each of us does, I begin etching that phrase by the acts--large and small--that I choose.
Only once have I asked readers to forward a blog post, and that was December's "Could we Change the World in 30 Days?" which launched the Grocery Store Game. Today, I am asking it again. Each of us knows "Miracle Makers" who need encouragement. Each of us knows someone(s) who needs to live in the future where all things are possible so that they can change the world. Please share this post and every bit of encouragement you can render. There is so much we can do...when we choose it.
Showing posts with label making magic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label making magic. Show all posts
Monday, July 21, 2014
Sunday, April 6, 2014
Co-creation in Community
In The Alchemy of Fear I wrote about what I called co-creation in community. What I meant is that a group of people who work together to create something new that none of us could have created alone, but because of our shared commitment to a goal and our varied gifts and talents, we make magic happen...together.
In Leading from the Heart I told about a daily occurrence of co-creation in community that happened at the newspaper where I worked for the first several years of my professional career. In every 24-hour period, people from throughout the building would pull together separately, and somehow every day we produced a newspaper. Although it happened, literally, like clockwork at 1:10 p.m. every day, to me it was always a wonder.
Last week a group of people from my organization, many of whom had never met, assembled from sites all over the country. Together we co-created in community. It had been a very long time since I'd experienced that feeling. Work projects in recent years have almost always been assembled parts of individual work. The knowledge work equivalent of the old assembly line in factories.
Divide-and-conquer is how I used to describe it to my university students when I'd been assigning a group project. "I will know whether you have divided up the work and prepared your pieces individually or worked as a team," I'd say. Yet, in any given semester, rarely would more than one group actually work as a team. And, I did know it. In fact, their classmates knew it as well, but they may not have known exactly what they were observing. The students rated each other's presentations, and, inevitably, the ones that scored the highest were the ones that I thought had worked together as a team--unified in a common goal.
The design project in which I participated last week demonstrated the best co-creation. Each of us brought significant experience in design, but our various expertise was in different aspects, colored by different experiences in different organizations. Although there were a couple people, who tried to divide-and-conquer us, with the exception of one time, we resisted. The resistance wasn't unpleasant, and in fact, it might be more accurately described as persisting as a team rather than resisting fragmentation.
At the end of the second day of design, I am certain that we had accomplished way more than any of us had anticipated could be done in two days. Not only did we get more done, but the quality of the work was much more solid because it incorporated so many perspectives. Often an idea would be brought forth and we would play with the idea, collectively moulding it into something even better. It was the knowledge work equivalent of an old "barn-building," when everyone would assemble to construct a neighbor's barn in one day.
The word "team" or "teamwork" gets thrown around a lot these days: we have discovered the magic of co-creation in community in both expediency and quality. Yet my experience has been that the activities assessed as teamwork are really divide-and-conquer assembly of parallel projects. It happens everywhere: at work, in our families, in community groups, and even in churches.
Co-creating in community is really a sacred thing, touching the souls of those who engage together in making something that none could do alone. Doing so lifts the human spirit. I worked very hard last week, and at the end of the week, I had more energy than on a day off. My spirit had truly been lifted. I am grateful for this opportunity to have been touched by my work with this exceptional group of colleagues.
In Leading from the Heart I told about a daily occurrence of co-creation in community that happened at the newspaper where I worked for the first several years of my professional career. In every 24-hour period, people from throughout the building would pull together separately, and somehow every day we produced a newspaper. Although it happened, literally, like clockwork at 1:10 p.m. every day, to me it was always a wonder.
Last week a group of people from my organization, many of whom had never met, assembled from sites all over the country. Together we co-created in community. It had been a very long time since I'd experienced that feeling. Work projects in recent years have almost always been assembled parts of individual work. The knowledge work equivalent of the old assembly line in factories.
Divide-and-conquer is how I used to describe it to my university students when I'd been assigning a group project. "I will know whether you have divided up the work and prepared your pieces individually or worked as a team," I'd say. Yet, in any given semester, rarely would more than one group actually work as a team. And, I did know it. In fact, their classmates knew it as well, but they may not have known exactly what they were observing. The students rated each other's presentations, and, inevitably, the ones that scored the highest were the ones that I thought had worked together as a team--unified in a common goal.
The design project in which I participated last week demonstrated the best co-creation. Each of us brought significant experience in design, but our various expertise was in different aspects, colored by different experiences in different organizations. Although there were a couple people, who tried to divide-and-conquer us, with the exception of one time, we resisted. The resistance wasn't unpleasant, and in fact, it might be more accurately described as persisting as a team rather than resisting fragmentation.
At the end of the second day of design, I am certain that we had accomplished way more than any of us had anticipated could be done in two days. Not only did we get more done, but the quality of the work was much more solid because it incorporated so many perspectives. Often an idea would be brought forth and we would play with the idea, collectively moulding it into something even better. It was the knowledge work equivalent of an old "barn-building," when everyone would assemble to construct a neighbor's barn in one day.
The word "team" or "teamwork" gets thrown around a lot these days: we have discovered the magic of co-creation in community in both expediency and quality. Yet my experience has been that the activities assessed as teamwork are really divide-and-conquer assembly of parallel projects. It happens everywhere: at work, in our families, in community groups, and even in churches.
Co-creating in community is really a sacred thing, touching the souls of those who engage together in making something that none could do alone. Doing so lifts the human spirit. I worked very hard last week, and at the end of the week, I had more energy than on a day off. My spirit had truly been lifted. I am grateful for this opportunity to have been touched by my work with this exceptional group of colleagues.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)