The Frazzled Entrepreneur's Balance Beam

It's All About the Marketing

One of the biggest surprises I got when I started working with entrepreneurs was the shift in perspective that I was forced to take: from speculating that 'marketing' is one of the important functions of an entrepreneur, to recognizing that marketing is the function of an entrepreneur. And this means any and all entrepreneurs, regardless of the product, service, or corner of the market you may serve. In the 21st Century, marketing — and that means all entrepreneurship — has undergone a quantum transformation. Some thought leaders (like Seth Godin, in particular) have recognized this seismic shift, but many others remain blissfully ignorant, doing what they've always been doing and (at least so far) getting what they've always been getting. The question is: for how long?

Let's take the US presidential campaign as an example. Pundits have been speculating all along about why each candidate is getting the popular support he or she is (and also why not). The speculations include racism, sexism, ageism, connections to previous administrations, which special interest groups are encouraged and which have been angered, etc., etc., etc. So far, I haven't heard anybody pinpoint what I think is the most serious difference among the three current candidates: their marketing strategies. So far, at least from what I've seen, only one campaign really 'gets it' and the results are telling.

To be honest, the political marketing shift first appeared with the surprisingly strong candidacy of Howard Dean in 2003. To most of us, it appeared that Dean emerged out of the woodwork. There was all sorts of talk around at the time about how Dean's campaign had become so successful because he was leveraging the so-called 'power of the internet'. Many saw the revolutionary results of this 'new' approach, but missed the deeper implications of what was really going on. The Dean campaign recognized that the internet was not just another 'mass media' taking its place among all the rest. What was happening instead was a transformation in the political market: 'all politics is local' morphed into 'all politics is individual.'

Social networking has become the name of the 2008 game. Successful candidates can no longer focus on just their 'public image' anymore (although it's critically important, as Howard Dean sadly discovered); the focus today has to be on building a trust based on personal relationships. Two of the major candidates haven't yet discovered that, over at least the last four or five years, the playing field has significantly changed. They still seem to be playing the 'numbers' game. Only Barack Obama seems 'hooked into' the social networking world. Since social networking both has roots in interpersonal trust and generates interpersonal trust, it should be little wonder that so many younger people tend to trust Obama the most, and have started acting as his 'friend' — in this case, supporting his campaign.

So now it's time to ask, "Who are your friends?" In your business career, whom do you count among your strongest supporters? Do you consider the people who benefit from your products and services to be names and numbers and 'customers', or are they 'Jack' and 'Jane' and 'Tanisha' and 'Mahmoud'? Are you familiar with each of these people's personality, or just their buying habits? Do you connect with their pain? What have you offered to them as a friend that they haven't had to pay for?

As Godin points out in his latest book, Meatball Sundae, the reports of mass marketing's demise are very premature. However, because of the internet, I believe it's surely coming. The 'new' marketing has arrived, and the 'old' marketing numbers game is slowing retreating into the wings. You need to be aware, though, that this 'new' marketing strategy isn't new at all. It's the kind of marketing that our (great-) grandparents grew up with: individualized and person-to-person. It hearkens back to a time when the grocer knew each of his or her customers and would gladly 'run a tab' whenever there was trouble. That was a time when neighbors showed up and gave something of themselves in response to hardship (without being asked) just because each neighbor was somehow a friend, and would do the same for them.

Technology, that terribly depersonalizing force that molded the industrial revolution, has come full-circle and aligned itself with the Ideals that we find driving the evolution of the universe itself: growth in Diversity, Complexity, Organization and Awareness. Those businesses (and political leaders) that 'get it' and transform themselves will ultimately come out on top (if not today, then tomorrow, for evolution always takes time). Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to embrace it and allow it to transform the way you do business. As always, the choice is yours. Think twice about letting your business, your profession, or your career self-destruct (unlike this message)!

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

Technorati Tags: empathy, marketing, relationships, social, internet, candidate, campaign, customer, friend
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The Self-Delusion of Finding Fault

In the English language, 'fault' embodies an odd concept . . . and a very telling one. At least in this world, whatever happens has at least one cause. Finding the cause of an event lets us in on the inner workings of its process: it reveals to us how something happened, so that we can either repeat or avoid the experience. Discovering causes gives us the opportunity to make changes and, at the same time, to exercise increased influence over the process of change — an influence that we call 'control.' That explains what a 'cause' does; now, what about 'fault'?

Finding fault is looking for more than the inner workings of a process; it wants to know the reason or motivation behind it. It asks for more than the 'how' of an event: it wants to discover the 'why' as well. Finding fault seeks to assign blame, and blame, in turn threatens punishment and generates feelings of guilt and, more particularly, shame. The psychological dragnet that fault-finding unleashes dredges up all sorts of negative feelings and behaviors. Yet, we've all had fault-finding used on us and, as a result, we've learned how 'useful' fault-finding can be as a tool for correcting behaviors that we find objectionable. 'Useful' — maybe — but effective? I think not.

All change has to have a starting point. What's yours? Where are you in space and time right now? More importantly, exactly where are you located on the road to where you want to go? Do you even know where your destination might be? Furthermore, even before you're certain of that, you still have to know where your starting point — your SitzimLeben — might be. Who are you? Where are you? Where are you going? How are you going to get there? And, what resources to you have to use? These are the questions that you have to begin with as you employ the life strategy that I call mindfulness. "The unexamined life is not worth living," said Socrates at his trial for impiety, according to Plato. Likewise, the greatest obstacle to creating a well-examined life is the habit of fault-finding.

How does this work (or, more accurately, how does this not work)? Fault-finding looks to ascribe blame for some real or imagined misdeed. Fault-finding deflects responsibility off the accuser (and onto the accused), and, in turn, it spawns a defensive reaction in the accused in a further attempt to avoid responsibility. Whether you're the accuser or the defendant, the motivation is the same: avoiding (denying) responsibility. The results wind up the same, too: burying the situation in so much confusion (denial and counter-denial, he-said / she-said) that the 'truth' becomes hopelessly obscured. As a result, all change becomes pointless. In this, he goal of this exercise has actually been achieved: to maintain the self-delusion.

There are two signs that you can look for that are infallible indicators that you're allowing yourself to slip into self-delusion: 1) looking to blame someone (or something) other than yourself; and 2) giving explanations or rationalizations for your actions. When either or both of these symptoms appear, you can be certain that you're indulging is the self-delusion of fault-finding (or fault-avoiding). When you think and act from your own integrity, you never need to apologize (find reasons) for or justify your behavior. Indeed, unless someone has administered a date rape drug to you and robbed you of rational control of your mind and body, there's no sense looking to blame someone else.

Here are the lessons you can take away from this: besides having the awareness to recognize the warning signs of self-justification and blame, it's important that you acknowledge that every choice comes with consequences, some beneficial, others harmful. You take your best shot at believing that the beneficial consequences will outweigh the harm; but you accept responsibility for them all. You focus your attention on how things happen the way they do, rather than why. You take your good experiences and build on them while, at the same time, you take your bad experiences and learn from them. You admit your mistakes; you acknowledge responsibility for your instances of bad judgment, you make amends you learn and you choose to change your behavior appropriately. To paraphrase old Socrates, "A life of blame and self-justification, of fault-finding and self-delusion is truly not worth living." How's your life coming along?

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

Technorati Tags: mindfulness, fault, blame, delusion, denial, justification, responsibility, cause, how, why
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Leading the Cultural Evolution

We have come to understand a great deal about the different cultures that go to make up our human family. We've looked at the past and seen the harm that was done by colonial cultural imperialism. We've seen cultures snuffed out by conquerers who had no conception of the loss they were inflicting on the world at large. The perspective of 'is' was buried by that of 'ought' — one value system (what ought to be) was forced upon another (what actually is) without regard for those values or the people who held them. That experience should have taught us that we need to understand thoroughly where we currently are before we decide where we want to go or how to get there. It should have taught us this important lesson, but it didn't. Just look at the West's failed attempts at imposing our style of democracy on the Mideast. Cultural imperialism is alive and well in the 21st Century!

All this should not imply that all cultural norms are of equal value. They most certainly are not. We need to understand, as we deal with cultural diversity, that each one exists at a different place in the overall cultural evolution of humanity. We also need to face the fact that some (perhaps even our own cultures) are in the process of devolving rather than evolving. My cultural guru, Geert Hofstede, calls culture the 'software of the mind': meaning that each culture provides the 'operating system' out of which we evaluate others. As such, it remains a subconscious value system until we explicitly examine it from a scientific perspective.

There's the difficulty. How do you assign value to your own cultural experience while you're in the experience? You require a viewpoint outside of your value system. I've often pointed out how necessary (and how rare) this is: how do you evaluate ('assign value to') your own values? That's not an easy task, but it's also not impossible.

You somehow need to find a super-value system — a source for meta-values: values that override personal or even collective self-interest and provide a kind of universality or objectivity to all your other values. People have tried looking outside their human experience (to divine revelations, for example), but there's no commonality of experience — or of value — to be found there.

I believe that the answer lies in discovering the destiny of the universe; but to do that, you have to look inwardly rather than externally. How do you discover your own personal destiny? Don't you look at the range of possibilities that you were born with and that have developed over time? Don't you focus on your inherent potential and the evolution of that potential into the person you have become to give you necessary indications of where you could be — or should be headed? Doesn't that analysis form the basis for your core value system?

You can do the same thing with our human cultures. The universe had a starting point where all its potential burst into existence. It's had a history — an evolution — that's brought it (and us along with it) to where it is today, and where it will be for many tomorrows to come. Looking at the universe, you can see that its evolution takes it in the direction of greater diversity, greater complexity, greater organization and greater awareness. Our human societies, to mirror the growth of the universe, need also to grow in diversity, complexity, order and awareness. Translating that into cultural terms, all cultures need to be growing in these meta-values: acceptance of diversity and uncertainty, shared authority, cooperation, social responsibility, etc.

That's all well and good, but what's that got to do with you? We've learned that cultures can't be changed from outside: authoritarianism and legalism prove not only ineffective, but they subvert the very meta-values we want to introduce. Your culture can only grow from the inside. Decision by decision, cultural change will come when you personally embrace these higher values and put them to work in your every-day life. It all starts when you change your own attitudes and align yourself with higher principles. Things will start to change around you when you come to terms with the fact that you personally are at the leading edge of the evolution of the universe. Where your decisions take you, the entire universe will follow (maybe not in your lifetime, but you never can tell). Keep that in mind when you make your next decision!

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

Technorati Tags: understanding, value, culture, system, change, evolution, universe, Ideals
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Weighing the Risks of Green

I noticed an odd advertisement in this morning's paper: it was from an energy company called 'Areva' (us.ariva.com). They were advertising energy 'alternatives' that they were offering to the public, only one 'alternative' was mentioned: nuclear energy. This wasn't particularly notable; what caught my eye was that the ad specifically referred to nuclear energy as 'green'. According to those in the know, 'green' energy is derived from sources that are environmentally friendly, renewable and sustainable (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_energy). Evidently, nuclear-generated energy does not fit into that definition. On one hand, there's the issue of the energy used to mine and process the fissionable material and, on the other hand, there's the issue of what to do with the non-disposable nuclear waste.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not opposed to nuclear energy in principle — it's only in practice that take issue with it. In our attempt to solve one set of problems (greenhouse gasses), we're creating others. Once again, we have people in our society who are proposing short-term solutions to produce immediate financial gain. Instead of taking a long-term view using careful planning and in-depth risk assessment, they're using ad-hoc problem-solving. Calling nuclear energy 'green' seems to me to be a perfect example of George Orwell's famous 'double-think'. Here's how George Orwell himself described the concept:

The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them . . . . To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. [Orwell, George (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, London, pp 35, 176-177]

Under the doublethink approach to 'green energy', soft coal would have been 'green' two or three centuries ago. After all, at that time, coal reserves seemed inexhaustible (at least for the foreseeable future). The environmental impact was minor (a little reduction in local air quality, a little scarcely-noticeable soot, few people complaining). The industrial revolution and its economic impact was far too critical to pay much attention to such 'collateral damage.' Perhaps, they reasoned, sometime in the future, people would have to deal with some issues, but, by that time, enough progress would have been made that those issues would easily be solved. . . . Or not.

Whether you want to look at the situation as a citizen of the world or of this country, as an entrepreneur or as a member of a family, the decisions that face you on a daily basis all have the same basic structure: you always have a choice between immediate gain and long-term benefit. If you choose immediate gain, you must also choose not to perform a serious assessment of the risks facing you. Aren't you also indulging in doublethink? Aren't you embracing the immediate lie (it'll be good for me right now; I'll be able to handle the consequences later) while leaving the truth (there are inescapable consequences for every choice we make) behind you in the dust? And, when those consequences finally confront you, how will you feel then: will you accept those consequences as the natural price for your self-indulgence, or will you become angry and petulant, complaining how unfairly you're being treated?

Remember your answer when your standard of living plummets because of soaring energy costs, when property values drop, when taxes skyrocket to attempt to maintain a crumbling infrastructure, when health care is hard to come by, our planetary environment becomes increasingly hostile and 'retirement' is an obsolete concept. Every choice you — and we, your compatriots — face will pave the road ahead that we all must travel.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

Technorati Tags: anticipation, risk, planning, doublethink, energy, green, renewable, sustainable, nuclear
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Who's the Frazzled-est of Them All?

About twenty years ago, a friend and I took a trip to the Mideast, and the trip ended in Egypt — first Cairo, then Luxor, and then back to Cairo again before heading home. Of all the places in the world I've been to date, Egypt has got to be at the top of the list. At the same time, Egypt was also one of the poorest countries I had ever visited. The people had very little. There were a lot of mud-brick houses and a lot of unpaved, dusty streets. In the evenings, the streets were lined with young men in caftans sitting beneath the lamp posts, doing their homework or studying. They had no electricity at home. Regardless of their apparent poverty, the Egyptians, in general, appeared to be the happiest population in the world. They didn't consider themselves to be victims. Life, in its simplicity, was evidently good.

You might think, at first, that people like the Egyptian population who lived in what we would consider abject poverty would be be frantic to achieve a higher standard of living. You'd have another think coming, though. Even I, a stranger among them, could sense their satisfaction with what they had. The poor are generally not the most frazzled. On the contrary: that dubious honor would be reserved for the more successful among us.

What are the reasons behind this rather odd phenomenon? After all, according to Abraham Maslow, the more urgent your needs are at the bottom of his hierarchy (physical needs, safety and security needs, etc.), the fewer resources are available for reaching the higher realms of the hierarchy (like cultural, artistic, creative and spiritual needs). So, shouldn't those who are eking out a subsistence at the bottom of the pyramid be the more stressed-out? After all, their very lives are on the line!

Consider this: once your basic needs have been met, you gain the benefit of having unstructured time that's available for fulfilling your wants. Needs sustain you where you are in life; wants move you forward. Here's the clincher: a want, once it's been fulfilled, becomes a need. Remember that statement, because there's where you find your stressors. The more you have accomplished, the more pressure you experience to maintain your quality of life. To say it in other words, the more successful you are, the more frazzled you become. In this light, your choices become starkly obvious: either deal with it, or simplify your life.

It's been important to me to work as a life coach with successful people, not because I'm an elitist, but because they're the ones who can most profit from my services. As I experienced in Cairo, just because you're poor doesn't mean that you're miserable. Likewise, just because you're successful doesn't mean you're going to be happy. Many times, the opposite is true. You might think of that whenever you're tempted to envy the so-called 'rich and powerful' — those whose success has put them in the limelight. Many are those who can find contentment in poverty; few are those who find it in wealth and influence.

One last story before I go. I had often heard of the 'sword of Damocles,' and I knew it meant an imminent threat, but I never knew the story until this past week. It seems that Damocles was loudly envious of King Dionysius of Syracuse. Tired of his envy, Dionysius seated Damocles in his own seat at a sumptuous banquet held in his honor. But Damocles was unable to enjoy his moment in the spotlight because Dionysius had suspended a sword over Damocles' seat, hanging by a mere thread. He learned the lesson from the King that wealth and power are precarious, and be-frazzlement is often the price that has to be paid for success. That's a lesson that serve us all well to learn.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

Technorati Tags: anticipation, frazzled, success, stressors, wealth, power, contentment, Maslow, hierarchy
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Empathy as a Marketing Strategy

Ever since Facebook appeared on the internet scene, folks have been inventing new ways to utilize the social networking world both for charity and for profit. Then, along comes Seth Godin with his book, Meatball Sundae, pointing out in no uncertain terms that the advent of social networking has fundamentally altered the rules of the game. We need to listen to Seth, because he has a serious point to make: the future belongs (once again) to interpersonal relationships. It's no longer a matter of 'run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.' Fortunately — at least within the world of the web — the black-and-white thinking that winds up separating the world into 'us' versus 'them' is breaking down. The illusion of the 'them' is starting to disappear (in certain contexts).

As a strategy, empathy is based on the conviction that each other individual person is another self just exactly like me. You could look at creating empathetic connections like forming a bond between equals: what I've been calling social economy: I give of my strengths to you to 'supply' for your 'demand' and, in return, you offer your strengths to me to 'supply' for my 'demand'. Of course, the more complex our social interactions become, the possible 'suppliers' and 'consumers' there will be. I fulfill my social obligations simply by showing up and making myself available.

This sounds simple enough, and, on one level it is. At the same time, it's difficult to hold on to the principle that social networking depends upon a bond between equals. As soon as the 'us vs. them' syndrome starts seeping into the mix, you've got issues. For exactly this reason, the 'helping' mentality becomes so destructive: you can't 'help' someone else and maintain any semblance of the bond between equals. That mentality presupposes a social inequality where, on a deeper, more humane level, no such inequality actually exists. The 'soup kitchen' mentality does nothing to improve the lot of either the 'helpers' or the 'helpless.'

When you consider social networking as a marketing tool (using social networking structures to share your products and services), you've got to be prepared to undergo a real shift of attitude. Whether you want something that someone else has (their money) or you have something that you believe someone else needs (your product or service), in a social network that exchange needs to happen from a position of mutual trust. You can't buy or advertise your way to trust. It happens between individuals and over time. It excludes all the many opportunities there are to take advantage of one another, because, once that trust is broken, you'll never get it back to the same extent.

How can you 'give back' to your community without destroying that bond of trust between equals? It's a matter of attitude, isn't it? How can you deal with needy people whose trust has been violated so many times that they have almost none of it left? When we look at those who demonstrate an adeptness at building trust among the downtrodden, what you see is most often people who've put their egos into their back pocket, permanently. And this works especially well for all social networking: humility is as critical for social networking as having a thick skin used to be for numbers-based cold-call marketing. If you're in it for the 'long haul' rather than aspiring to become an entrepreneurial 'flash in the pan', then empathy needs to be your foundational marketing strategy.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

Technorati Tags: empathy, trust, social, networking, marketing, equals, helping
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The Vanishing Common Good and the Vanishing Middle Class

I had a chance to watch quite a bit of one of PBS's series American Experience: The Presidents  on Franklin D. Roosevelt. Not only did it give me a better insight into the man (and his wife and co-theorist, Eleanore Roosevelt), it also deepened my understanding of the social and political climate of the post-crash/pre-war age. Although the American Experience has always been marked by unprecedented opportunities for oppressed peoples, unrestrained free-market capitalism had sliced the population into a wealthy class, a small entrepreneurial class, and an under-class of poor farmers and workers. For all intents and purposes, there was no 'middle class.'

What does that really mean, after all, that the US had no 'middle class'? It meant that many foundational concepts of the 'American Dream' such as home ownership, travel, vacations, luxury items, higher education and leisure time were essentially beyond the reach of the vast majority of citizens. The Roosevelts' huge innovation that they introduced through the 'New Deal' consisted in a series of publicly-sponsored 'safety nets' to give the general populace some insulation from catastrophic events. For the first time in history, the majority of a population could begin to afford some of the benefits that only the upper classes had enjoyed until that time.

Since then, the sacrosanct 'American standard of living' has survived largely as a result of the public promotion of the common good: the minimum wage and occupational safety and health, unemployment insurance, medical and retirement benefits, child welfare and student aid, etc. The most vulnerable of our people (the young, the aged, the unemployed and low-income workers) have been given a reasonable shot at survival. Perhaps we member of the middle class have taken for granted how much our own standard of living depends on the continued functioning of these safety nets.

In one brief expression, I can say that the existence of a middle class in the 21st Century is completely dependent on the public promotion of the common good. Yet, right now, I'm watching the middle class lurch from disappointment to disappointment as that safety net unravels under the guidance of people who seem more concerned for their own wealth than for the common good. You and I are being bombarded with high-sounding slogans about government spending and taxation that are being used to justify the dismantling of the New Deal.

The Savings and Loan Crisis that begin in the US in the 1980's resulted in the largest redistribution of wealth (upward) in the history of the world. The current economic crisis (centered in the housing and mortgage industries) is continuing the trend. The care of our weakest citizens (the poor, the unemployed, the young, the aged, the infirm) is eroding quickly. The theorists are having their way, as the gap quickly widens between the rich and the poor — a gap that used to be filled by what is now a rapidly-shrinking middle class.

What does this have to do with living a balanced life? As 'success' for the majority of us gets defined downwards and the requirements for attaining this 'success' get redefined upwards, each one of us has to cope with increasing stress and anxiety. You have to work longer and harder to achieve less. If you consider 'balance' to consist of meeting your needs (as defined in Maslow's hierarchy) and still having uncommitted resources available for investment in attaining at least some of your wants, you can see what's happening: everything gets scaled down. You have to be satisfied with getting fewer of your needs met, which prevents you from attaining your higher goals, and consequently, you have fewer resources available to move forward.

This country is still a democracy. You still have a chance to stem the self-inflicted bleeding that's weakening and threatening the very life of the middle class. You can recognize the fact that the best way to promote your own enlightened self-interest is to promote the common good actively and effectively. To paraphrase one of Jesus' sayings, 'Whatever you're doing to the least of your brethren, you're doing to yourself!'

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

Technorati Tags: empathy, common good, middle class, new deal, wealth, welfare
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Rehabbing Truthiness

Talk about indulging in newspeak! I hope the title I've chosen for this article leaves you scratching your head just a little. No, Stephen Colbert isn't in rehab and doesn't have an addiction problem that I'm aware of. In 2005, Colbert (re-)introduced 'truthiness' into the English language as a sort of 'alternative' truth. He defined it as a concept that 'felt' true, regardless of the facts. The more I dig into this dichotomy, the 'curiouser' it gets, like Alice's precipitous descent down the rabbit hole. I find that appreciating truthiness may bring us closer to creating and managing life balance than truth ever could. Welcome to the world of philosophical irony!

I've had to expand and nuance the idea of 'life balance' for busy professionals because the challenges involved in a deeply-committed life go far beyond the norm. If you want to excel — to ratchet life up another notch — you've got to be prepared to fine-tune your life skills to avoid being overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the task. Simply making sure that you address the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of your life won't get you to the next level. You need to have a broader and more complex palette to work with, and you have to have a set of strategies that set you apart from the couch potato crowd.

I've learned (and I teach) that life, the universe and everything is not static or even cyclical, but it moves forward in a direction. That direction includes greater diversity and greater complexity. Any workable strategy worth adopting has to take into consideration the growing complexity of your life. Nothing is really simple, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is selling you a bill of goods. The fallacy of simplicity is attractive, but, unfortunately, unworkable. You might even say it's a good example of truthiness in itself: it 'feels' right that life, the universe, and everything should be simple (but it just isn't).

A realistic approach to a busy life has to embrace the strategy I call comprehension. Put very simply, it's the conviction that nothing really is the way it seems. There cannot be an 'objective' truth, because all 'truth' is a dialog between the perception and the perceiver. There's no 'truth' without a perspective, nor is there any without a context. We perceive what we want to perceive; we interpret what we perceive according to our own experiences, and we communicate that to others using our own set of symbols. There is no 'there' there outside of what you perceive there. Does a tree falling in the woods make a sound if there's no one there to hear it? The answer is, 'What does it matter?'

If 'truthiness' is what 'feels' right (contrasted with what you think is right), then truthiness becomes just another layer of symbolism laid on top of the word-symbols you're already using. Isn't there a whole complex of right-brained creative invention involved in sharing communications with one another that goes beyond the left-brained use of our language? It's the whole wide world of political discourse. Doesn't what you don't say and how you say what you say matter just as much as what you do say? The 'language' of poetry and art — a language that speaks to the heart more than the head — doesn't speak the truth; in fact, it speaks with truthiness, telling a story, making a point, that words fail to manage.

The strategy I call 'understanding' is meant to introduce our Western minds to a way of thinking and perceiving that's natural to Asian cultures: that truth lies in action rather than in symbolic communications (whether those communications originate in left-brained language or right-brained art). Whether what you know comes from the 'truth' in your language or from the 'truthiness' of how 'right' it feels (and, quite honestly, you'll have to admit that you can't have one without the other), what you do with that knowledge makes all the difference. That's what really matters. . . . And, that's the truth!

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

Technorati Tags: comprehension, understanding, truthiness, truth, perspective, context, meaning
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Expediency, a Premeditated Catastrophe

Saturday, Craig and I were driving behind an SUV on Delaware Route 1: the main artery along the coast. For some reason, I'm always reading automobile license tags, and this one said "RIGHT". I wondered if this moniker was a commentary on the driver's self-esteem, her politics, or perhaps she thought she might be either 'Ms. Right' or even 'Ms. Right Now'. For some odd reason, it reminded me of the song that goes, "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with." Whether the tag referred to her choices or my choices or even your choices, I can be certain that, for every choice, there are some right options, there are some wrong ones, and still others are the 'right now' ones — the expedient ones.

Consider this: when you're shopping for a gift, when do you buy the first thing you lay eyes on? Doesn't that happen mainly when you're rushed and out of time? And, as the famous Dr. Phil is fond of saying, "How's that workin' out for you?" The old timers used to say, "Marry in haste, repent at leisure." Haste not only makes waste, it also makes you crazy. Although there's almost always an expedient option, it's almost never the best option and, if you think about it, it's almost always the worst option, particularly for someone whose aim is to live a balanced life.

Here's what you can expect from off-the-top-of-the head decisions: first, a mediocre (if that) quality choice; second, unforeseen consequences; third, an error cascade (a series of little issues that compound into a major catastrophe). You can expect eventually to be tossed randomly into a 'crisis mode' that will effect a broad spectrum of areas in your life. All this just from making an expedient choice.

Do you want some large-scale examples of expedient choices gone wrong? That's a tough one, because there are so many examples to choose from! How about the earthquake in China that recently killed tens of thousands of people just because it was cheaper and easier to build substandard buildings? How about the billions of dollars we've been wasting in Iraq because of our involvement in an opportunistic and poorly-thought-out war? Those are just the big things. How much of your life has already run amok because of the expedient choices you've taken?

I don't want to belabor the obvious. At the same time, it's not natural to take time out of our busy schedules to plan, to gather data, to weigh risks, to build working relationships. It feels so much easier to 'shoot first and ask questions later.' What will it take to convince us that consistent success comes only as a result of consistent planning? Certainly, everyone will occasionally experience a random success out of a crap shoot. Sometimes, we'll also experience catastrophic failure in spite of careful planning (although we might question how 'careful' that planning might have been). The lesson we need to learn here comes down to this: if we want to live a balanced life, our goal must be to establish some consistency, repeatability, and (to the extent possible) predictability. All these things derive, not from expediency, but only from careful planning. You can decide right now to eschew expediency. Gesundheit!

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

Technorati Tags: anticipation, expediency, catastrophe, balance, consistency, planning, choice, risk, error cascade
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When 'Spiritual' Means 'Practical'

In the middle of the last century, Werner Heisenberg, in the process of trying to determine the speed and position of an electron spinning around an atomic nucleus, discovered instead that it was a theoretically impossible task. His path to discovery brought him to the realization that his very presence as an observer changed the observation. Few of us reading this are — or will ever be — nuclear physicists. Yet, all of us have to cope with the problem of perspective as we try to figure out what a balanced life looks like to us right here and now. Our observation — our very awareness — of our own balance (or lack of balance, as the case may be) changes the very conditions of our observations.

Imagine yourself on a moving carousel horse. You're going in numerous directions: serially up and down, and simultaneously around in a circle. Some of parts of the carousel travel with you while you merely watch others spin by. At any given instant, where are you? At least on a carousel you can anticipate where you're going to be in the next second. Your motion is hardly random. Even so, by the time you've figured out exactly where you are in space at any given point, you're no longer there. The same thing happens when we try to figure out what 'now' means: the instant we've figured it out, it has already become 'then'!

Let's dig just a little deeper, shall we? We've just taken a quick look at the difficulties we experience trying to navigate through space and time. Even though our senses are attuned to performing this function, disorientation often accompanies on our perceptions. Now, what happens when we try to improve our life balance? Like Heisenberg, trying to focus on the process of our conscious awareness causes us to become unaware of our surroundings. We can't simultaneously exercise awareness and awareness of our own awareness. When we focus on our own process of awareness, we become less aware of our surroundings.

This sounds all very nice and philosophical, but does it have any practical application? Yes, indeed it does! The only practical way to plot our future course around the carousel is to get off the merry-go-round! Only then can we take the stance of an observer of our own process of living life. Can you think of a time in your life when you've been able to spend some time alone with your thoughts (and maybe with a mentor or adviser) to consider your short-term and long-term future? When was the last time you took a retreat from action? More pointedly, have you ever taken a retreat from action into reflection? The world looks a lot different from the sidelines. Of course, while you're on retreat, your life or business could be taking off in unforeseen (and undesirable) directions.

What if you were able to maintain your active role on the carousel and at the same time have a mirror outside the moving system that shows you your exact position in real time? Where can you find such a mirror that allows you to both live your life and stay aware of your position in the stream of its evolution simultaneously? You don't have to look very far; in fact, you already possess the capacity to perform this minor miracle. We call this remarkable (and often-overlooked) ability 'spiritual intelligence.' This remarkable intelligence (which Dana Zohar calls "the ultimate intelligence") enables you to maintain a higher perspective on the direction your life and career will assume without abstracting you from the mix. You're able to see where you're going while you're deciding where to go.

By fully embracing your spiritual intelligence, you have the opportunity to go on a 'retreat' from the daily grind at will. You get the chance to recharge your intuition and your discernment, and finely tune their functions so that your inner guidance system works smoothly and almost effortlessly. By maintaining a conscious contact with a Higher Power (however you choose to define that), your powers of discernment will allow you to cut through whatever confusion, uncertainty and fear that may threaten to paralyze your decision-making capacity. The baffling dizziness that comes from having too many options with too many consequences will begin to melt away as your destiny emerges from the fog in the light of your spiritual focus.

When you begin to appreciate the critical function that spiritual intelligence plays in informing your decision-making capacity, you'll realize that what at first seemed to be at most a marginal concern (if not just an annoying distraction) is, in reality, the most practical of all your core competencies. How clearly you see your way forward determines, to a great extent, the success of your life and career. How much more practical can you get than that? Get oriented: get spiritual!

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

Technorati Tags: discernment, spiritual, uncertainty, intuition, retreat, disorientation, awareness, balance
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