Category: Awareness
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Emotional Distraction: Why We Project Past Feelings on to Present Moments
Did you know that we, as individuals, families, communities, societies and cultures can be addicted to emotional states? Yes. We can be. And many of us are whether we are consciously aware of it or not. What’s more, we use each other for our fixes. And once we get the sensation that we’re looking for,…
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Fool Me Twice: Why We Believe the Liars That We Know Are Lying
In my experience, it is the one who most vehemently accuses someone of something that’s actually the one doing it—like cheating in a relationship or voter fraud. And also in my experience, the person being lied to is usually the least willing to accept the weight of the revelation. They say that it is because…
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Bring Your Aliveness To All You Do
Right now what makes me come alive is helping other people come alive and helping organizations become spaces for cultivating aliveness among the members of their work community so that they can create products and services the world needs. Because when we bring our aliveness to all we do, it creates opportunities for flourishing for…
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Is This the Face of Fear?
Someone responded to a poem I wrote by saying I was an ignorant religious person, divisive, and a bad writer. I’m not fishing for compliments. So, don’t worry about filling my bucket. Rather, I’m just wanting to look at this philosophically. What I’m thinking about is the question of how or if one should try…
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Conversation Catalyst or Conversation Coward?
Usually I write poems or long blogs to express my thoughts. This time I drew a picture. The point of the picture—if it’s not obvious—is that I think we are at a critical moment in the world when we can choose to be #ConversationCatalysts and foster a #CollaborativeCulture or we can be #ConversationCowards and devolve…
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Mother, Minister, Manager: The 3Ms of Leading People Successfully
As a former pastor, I feel tempted to call these 3Ms of leading people, “The Holy Trinity of Leading People Successfully”. But maybe, I’ll call it the “Wholly Trinity” because when leading people it is best to see us as whole people and that is what the 3Ms encourage us to do. I must acknowledge…
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The Alpha and the Omega: Why Endings Are as Important as Beginnings
Endings matter because the final moments of a group’s togetherness can substantially influence the entire experience. The ending can modify the experience, make it better or worse, embed it deeply in memory or, absent a strong close, can dilute an experience into something that happened, but mattered little. Tim McNamara – https://sweetunrest.com/ending-well-treating-classes-like-gatherings-part-three/ One of the…
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Gender and Pay Equality is Not a Threat. And yet…
Whenever I think about gender and pay equality, I think of my highly intelligent mother who was never treated fairly in any workplace that she ever worked in outside of a family business. And even when she decided to determine her own destiny, by creating her own business, JoSi and Sons, I saw people try…
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Don’t Lose the Vision When You’re in the Valley
Many times in my life, I’ve come to the top of a mountain, metaphorically speaking, only to realize that my journey is leading me to yet another mountain. For years, I’ve tried to articulate this path in a way that is both descriptive and prescriptive for those who may also find themselves on a precipice…
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Diversity and Subcultures: Lessons from the Bronies
Recently, when speaking at a TEDx MileHigh Rethink Event, I shared a humbling experience I had with the Brony subculture back in 2013 that helped expand my awareness of cultural formation and how gathering or collectivizing around a certain set of values helps people transcend divides. Although “corporate culture” has made its way into the…