[Emergence]

Brick walls are fabulous things. They force us to ask better questions, or die in the lack of asking. They force us to be creative. However, I concede, when faced with a brick wall, our usual response is despair, frustration, and in some instances, hopelessness.

I hold the belief that there is no brick wall that doesn’t have a way through. Often it feels the opposite. Impossible, Can’t be done. No way.

We simply haven’t asked the right questions? We haven’t created the way. Yet. No matter how dire the situation, we always have more choices available to us than we are aware. Victor Frankl (author of “A Man’s Search for Meaning”) was faced with an extreme brick wall in the form of Auschwitz concentration camp. While his physical choices were extremely limited, he always had a choice about how he thought and acted within that extreme environment. He found meaning in a situation that few of us could begin to comprehend.

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Beautiful Brick Walls..creating opportunity out of obstacles by asking better questions.

During this last month many clients have found themselves faced with large brick walls. You know, those seemingly massive, insurmountable, indestructible obstacles that regularly appear in our lives?

Some of them are definitely bigger and more threatening than others. However, they are all simply the greatest opportunities to ask better questions and to find solutions that were not available to us before the appearance of the brick wall. This is the principle of emergence. The environmental conditions change and new products and tools are required to meet the change. It is really well demonstrated by the emergence of coaching, a tool that 20 years ago was not in our overt consciousness, and at that time would not have met a need that has now emerged.

For example, I was reading an article this morning by Dee Hock, the creator of the Visa card. Dee Hock started life as a bank manager. Since many of my clients are in banking, his story is appropriate. How did an average bank manger get to create Visa International, a company that espouses no political, economic, social or legal theory, transcending language, custom, politics and culture to successfully connect more that 21,000 financial institutions, 16 million merchants, 800 million people in 300 countries and continues to grow in excess of twenty percent compound annually?

He says the reason is simple. He sat in some very significant questions for many years.
“Why are organizations everywhere, whether commercial, social, or religious, increasingly unable to manage their affairs?”
“Why are individuals throughout the world increasingly in conflict with an alienated from the organizations of which they’re a part?”
“Why are society and the biosphere increasingly in disarray?”

Now these are obviously extraordinary questions. And they are probably questions you have toyed with in your own mind off and on. Dee worked these questions like a terrier. For years. And his answer was that there had to be something fundamental that we were simply not getting. To cut a long story short, he surmised that our institutions and organizations were going against the law of nature. For example, take the human brain, one of the most complex, and still to this day, deeply mysterious organs. Just imagine if we organised the human brain as we do an organization. We would need to appoint a CEO neuron, and Board of Director’s neurons, the Human Resource Neuron department….and so on. Then you must write the operation manual for the organization. If we did this, we would be instantly unable to breath until somebody told you how and where and when and how fast. You wouldn’t be able to think or see. Yet in a world where change is on a path of accelerated acceleration, our organisational systems have really not made much progress in 300 years. They are still largely built around a command and control structure that doesn’t have rapid response time.
From this line of inquiry, an ordinary bank manager created an extraordinary business. (For a great read on this, see his book, Birth of the Chaordic Age).

Brick walls are fabulous things. They force us to ask better questions, or die in the lack of asking. They force us to be creative. However, I concede, when faced with a brick wall, our usual response is despair, frustration, and in some instances, hopelessness.

I hold the belief that there is no brick wall that doesn’t have a way through. Often it feels the opposite. Impossible, Can’t be done. No way.

We simply haven’t asked the right questions? We haven’t created the way. Yet. No matter how dire the situation, we always have more choices available to us than we are aware. Victor Frankl (author of “A Man’s Search for Meaning”) was faced with an extreme brick wall in the form of Auschwitz concentration camp. While his physical choices were extremely limited, he always had a choice about how he thought and acted within that extreme environment. He found meaning in a situation that few of us could begin to comprehend.

Interestingly, many of the people who have been held up as great leaders in the last couple of millennia have come from very humble beginnings. They were nobodies.
Christ, Muhammad, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King. Gandhi was an average lawyer, Mother Teresa, an ordinary nun. Even their ideas were not that unique. Why then did they create such a profound effect?
As Dee Hock says, maybe they were incredibly successful in asking four major questions.
“How were things in the past? What was the history?”
“How are things today?”
“How might they become if we keep on the same path?”
“How ought they to be?”

Then they took how things ought to be and they lived it. As if it were already true. Right away. They didn’t need to wait for someone to give them permission…they created their own permission. And they didn’t waiver. No matter what the obstacle or brick wall. Even to the point of death.

And of course, because we recognised the profound need for what they did, and how they lived their lives, they have become our hero’s.

At no time did Mother Teresa sit down and say…it can’t be done. Brick walls were not even visible to Mother Teresa. If she saw any at all, she dissolved them in a heartbeat. This tiny little woman from Europe moved mountains, and never doubted that she could.

Sometimes we have created our brick walls because we have made poor choices. Or even been unethical. Sometimes brick walls come in the form of a person or people. Usually the brick wall offers us an opportunity to evolve our ways of living and being in the world. Asking powerful questions to get us through the brick wall will ask of us to change. We cannot be the same person on the other side of the wall.

However, life is about eternally becoming. The illusion is that we can freeze anything. The illusion is that we can sit back and cruise. We know this as parents, accepting that the behaviour of our 2 year old will not (for the most part) be same as the child 10 years later. Yet somewhere along the life path, we live from a place that expects your family and friends and work to be the same, year in and year out. Lack of change, lack of movement, is opposite to the laws of nature. It leads to entropy and decay.

Brick walls are designed to cure us of our complacency, and our laziness. They are our greatest opportunity in life.

You gotta love your brick walls.

Oh…and by the way…all brick walls are made easier by seeing them through a different lens. When you next bump up against a brick wall, call a friend, or, even better, a brick wall specialist, your coach. That is, if you want to move through it more efficiently and faster?

Relaunch of Dare to Care

In the next week or so I will be sending out information for the revised Dare to Care program. The program has been extended from a one day to a two-day program, taking participants to another level of awareness around their own ability and skill as a communicator and leader. We have incorporated multimedia into this interactive, dynamic and life- changing program. Stay tuned.

The 7 Pillars of Powerful Personal Presence, A Group Coaching Program

You are invited to attend an informational teleconference call
with Christine McDougall. This interactive meeting will be held by
telephone on:

For Southern Hemisphere participants.
Thursday 26th May at 8 am EST Australian time
And
Thursday 26th May at 11 am EST Australian time.

For Northern Hemisphere participants.
Wednesday 25th May at 6pm EST USA time.
Wednesday 25th May at 9pm EST USA time.

The information call is your opportunity to ask Christine any questions you may have regarding the 7 Pillars of Powerful Personal Presence Program that will begin in June.

The Seven Pillars are.
1. Know Theyself (and you will know the world).
2. Energy Management..does your cup runneth over?
3. Personal Presence.The art of becoming.
4. The World You See. How clear and true is your sight?
5. Your Value? Know it, increase it, and then give it away.
6. Speaking the Radical Truth.
7. And the Buck Stops Here. How accountable are you, and to whom?

Provocative and evocative, this interactive group coaching program will transform and challenge you, asking you to become more.

Please send an email to Christine@syzergy.biz with 7 Pillars in the subject line and we will send you call numbers and participant information.

The Unmistakable Touch of Grace, by Cheryl Richardson

Cheryl Richardson demonstrates personal presence like no one else I have met. She walks into any room and the energy changes in a positive way. I have had the good fortune of watching Cheryl evolve over the last 8 years. I am proud to say she is a role model for me.
Her latest book is a reflection of her beautiful spirit. Titled, The Unmistakable Touch of Grace”, Cheryl has written about her experience of grace in her own life and the lives of her clients. We all face brick walls in our life at one stage or another. This book is a book to reach for to support our graceful acceptance of the slings and arrows of this incredible experience called life. Buy it for yourself and give it as a gift to others. In the reading, you will be touched by grace.