I’ve described leadership as the art of identifying gaps between what is and what could be, and mobilizing others to address them. In the alignment series thus far, I have been addressing the identifying gaps part of leadership in identifying your own gaps for personal development, identifying an aspiration to orient your actions, and identifying […]
The Present Moment Is Everything You Need
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” — Viktor Frankl “Be present now” was one of the maxims I included in my personal operating system a few years ago, and I’m starting to think it […]
Spiritual debt
If we have a short-term cost to cover, we sometimes take on a loan to spread that cost over a longer period, and then make regular payments to pay off the monetary debt we owe. Engineering organizations have the concept of technical debt, where a feature is coded in a slipshod way to get it […]
De-capitalization
A friend recently mentioned the concept of de-capitalization, which seems to be the idea of moving away from capitalism and the “market” as the only way to measure value. This really resonated with me, as a big part of my own recent journey has been to move away from that worldview. When I was deciding […]
Alignment to Reality
“Are you able to be with this exactly the way it is with no agenda to change it?” I learned this powerful question in Steve March’s Aletheia Coaching training, and it continues to knock my socks off as a tool to help me discover when I am not fully present and accepting of reality as […]
Alignment with Aspiration
Find out who you are, and do it on purpose. — Dolly Parton In my ongoing series on alignment, I’ve described how I think alignment can be more powerful than hierarchical power, and why it can be challenging to find alignment within oneself. In this post, I want to expand on finding a purpose for […]
Alignment to Self
Following up on my last post introducing the alignment model, I want to share how this model applies to personal development. When I first met Jerry Weinberg in person in 2009 at the Amplifying Your Effectiveness conference, he talked a lot about congruence, and I had no idea what he was talking about. Admittedly, that’s […]
Alignment
I’ve been developing a leadership and development model, and plan to share it for discussion and feedback over the next couple posts. I’ll start today by sharing my thoughts on alignment. One model I have for alignment is a laser. Normal light is “incoherent” in that the photons are not aligned in phase or direction. […]
Manifesto for a Moral Revolution, by Jacqueline Novogratz
Amazon link Book site and associated online course, which is free if you buy the book. “Whoever you are, and whatever you do, the world needs you to lead. There will be times when happiness may feel elusive and the horizon impossible to reach. But remember that each day, we wake up to another chance […]
Thinking in Systems, by Donella Meadows
Amazon link This is a remarkably readable introduction to systems thinking, a method to understand the inherent behavior of a system, and design appropriate interventions to change what the system is doing. Meadows starts by defining a system as “an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. … […]
