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Sourcing the Sauce

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Great cooking is always about a great sauce.

Some chefs spend days rendering down a stock made from bones, meat, fish or vegetables, spices and herbs. Often they will claim some secret ingredients that bring it all together as a taste sensation.

But the principle is always the same. It is about taking the time to cook something down to its essence and bringing together just the right ingredients. Where an alchemy has occurred in the chemistry of the mingling ingredients.

Mayonnaise is one sauce where a magical chemistry occurs where two ingredients that never usually mix; oil and water, are blended to create something delicious.

If you mix oil and water without any other ingredients no matter how hard you beat them, they will always stay separate.

The trick is using another ingredient, an ‘emulsifier.’ Egg yolk does the trick. It has molecules that can attach to both the oil and the water, bringing them together as one.

Once you have the oil, the water and the emulsifier in just the right quantities, you can blend a smooth glossy mayonnaise.

People are just the same. Some can have very differing beliefs, attititudes, behaviours and views of life that are like oil and water, chalk and cheese. They just won’t mix.

If you want to create a great sauce or mayonnaise with a group of diverse people, what is the emulsifier?

What can weave people together so they can create something delicioius, something that people will desire, something that will inspire?

What ingredient can connect disparate people?

Where can we find a unity in difference?

I once worked with a group of Māori wood carvers. Their work tells the crucial stories and history of their culture and was at risk of dying out. They came from different tribes that had over the centuries often been at war with one another. Politically, there was conflict over which tribes stories and history took precedence over others.

When the carvers got together, they realised that the further back in time that they went, the more unified their stories were. The stories from the beginning of time were the same. The big stories of the universe, and how the earth and people had evolved were the same. They were about humanity, above and beyond tribal differences.

The same can be said for tribes, cultures, societies and communities all over the world.

What is our emulsifier that can join us all? And at the same time allow us to remain unique and distinct, as individuals and as different cultures?

We still want to taste the different ingredients in a great sauce, but we want to enjoy how it all comes together.

Source the sauce.

Know Your Place

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Navigation is about triangulating where you are.

You identify three points, and you have located where you are.

Knowing your Place is also about understanding a trinity of who you are and where you are from.

1. Your place- geographically
2. Your place – where you welcome others
3. Your place- the legacy you create

Knowing your Place also requires another mighty threesome to be in balance; heart, mind and body.

Knowing your place will ground you in every environment and every interaction.

Why is this important?

Knowing who you are and where you are now, where you have come from, and where you are going are critical to effective engagement with others.

Today people want to know your back story, your current story, and the story of the future you are creating.

Knowing your Place is more than identifying with one geographic spot, that of your birth or your upbringing.

A nomad (both digital and physical) can Know Their Place as much as someone who has lived and worked in one place for many years.

It is about a knowing, a belonging, an identification with place, self and others than will ground you.

Most indigenous cultures start from a place of seeking to know your lineage and where you are from. Many consider our lineage to connect right back to the beginning of time and the creation of the planet and universe. And if you are into metaphysics, you can follow your DNA back to when were were an idea for an atom in the primordial soup.

But that gets very deep.

And that is great, because Knowing Your Place is about taking a deeper look at where you fit.

In English Victorian and Edwardian times the phrase ‘know your place’ was to ‘put you in your place’ in a hierarchy or stratified class system. Today we don’t have to do that. We can connect with our natural world, and the nature of our worlds of family, teams, groups, society and people. And take a journey to identify our place.

Our Place.
Your Place.
This Place

Sense of Place.

Place is a many layered concept.

I think of a metaphor for fly fishing. To be a great fly fisher, you work to cast your line to place it gently on the surface of the water. Your aim is to replicate an insect alighting on the surface of the water. The more attuned you are to your environment, the place you stand, the grace with which you move, your attention to the micro world of insects, and movement of current, and wind, the more you will find the sweetspot of place, to replicate the delicate movement of an insect.

A sense of knowing your place is akin to being ‘comfortable in your own skin’ and the world around you. Knowing your place allows you to embrace uncertainty, diversity and change.

Success is About Telling More Love Stories

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Most people would say love stories are about romance, falling in love, boy meets girl, boy meets boy, girl meets girl etc.

Most people also might say that it is mostly women who like love stories.

Chick flicks, romcom, romance novels.

But all the best stories are always about love.

It depends on how we define love, and too often today we narrow it down to romance, sex, food, dogs and children.

The thing is we all love love, even people we might describe as hard, cold or, impersonal love love.

It’s just that too often we judge what love should look like.

Love is about focus and alignment that creates wellbeing and happiness.

When we share stories about what we care about we are telling love stories.

And what we care about might manifest as everything from a nice house and a nice car, to our child, our lover, or humanity as a whole.

It is all about love.

So let your love of what ever your focus is infuse all your communication.

Love stories are always stories of both loss and gain, sadness and happiness, and that is the story of our lives.

Find the heart of what you care about, share that as a love story and you will connect and resonate powerfully with others.

Love Your Neighbour But Don’t Hang Out Together Every Day.

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How do we balance out what we want with what others want ?

Doesn’t this just have to be the biggest question we all face as human beings?

Getting what we want, living the life we want, but getting on with others when they might want something quite diifferent from us.

It happens in families, at work, in politics, in religion, in race, everywhere we interact with others. We are social animals, wanting to belong, and then at the same time we get really annoyed with people and don’t want them around. How contrary!

So how do we work it all out and find the perfect answer?

The first answer is that we don’t. Our lives are perpetually evolving. We have to find beauty in the flaws, the challenges the imperfections and the journey both rocky and smooth. Absolute perfection, absolute order, 24/7 happiness is an illusion.

I’ve got neighbours who are very different from me, but we have got on really well for the best part of 20 years.

We don’t live in each other’s pockets like good friends, but we don’t ignore one another either. There have been times we have hung out a lot, and times where we have not said much to each other for days or weeks.

We have not always agreed on things, and in fact sometimes we have some very different and opposing views on things. But we get on. Some where along the line, we have built a deep mutual respect, a respect of difference, and a respect for what we share in common.

There is a love, and you can say in a certain way, it is an unconditional love, the kind you have in families where you might not get on, might not have everything in common, but you are family, and you love one another.

Seems to me to Love Your Neighbour should come from a place of love, of respect that does not mean going out of your own way to the point you are not doing or living the way you want to.

Loving Your Neighbour is being free to disagree with them, to be annoyed by them, to live a totally different life from them, and not tolerate them out of obligation or avoidance because you feel you SHOULD. It will never work.

So the answer to achieving world peace with a better community of diversity in thinking, lifestyle, beliefs, ethnicity and ability is accepting that we always all be different from one another. And in fact we would probably hate it if we were all exactly the same, surely we would be like robots!

As the great community builder, Peter Block puts it:

” Dissent is the cousin of diversity; the respect for wide range of beliefs.

This begins by allowing people the space to say “no”.

If we cannot say “no” then “yes” has no meaning.

Each needs the chance to express their doubts and reservations without having to justify them, or move quickly into problem solving.

“No” is the beginning of the conversation for commitment.

Doubt and “no” is a symbolic expression of people finding their space and role in the strategy.

It is when we fully understand what people do not want that choice becomes possible.

The leadership task is to surface doubts and dissent without having an answer to every question.”

www.abundantcommunity.com

Stop Thinking; Connect

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I’m hard wired for connection.
All human beings are.
There are invisible threads that link us all.
You can call it energy, in either the scientific or spiritual sense if you choose.
It is elusive sometimes, because it is not always visible to our immediate senses.

But human connection is an energy, and it is a key to our survival.
The crazy thing is we have set up many structures in our world that break that connection.
I blame our big brains. We think too much. We think in the wrong way too much.
We think too much about disconnections;  what ifs, pros and cons, pluses and minuses, right and wrong, etc etc.
We have adversarial debate, politics, legal systems, and hierarchies; a whole raft of structures dedicated to disconnection.
Wrong thinking.
I’ve just started a large new contract and my role is engagement.  Interesting that such a role even needs to exist. How come we all don’t do that naturally in our course of work?
Once upon a time work was all about connection and engagement.
But our big brains got in the way. And we separated ourselves out from others, and got very busy with our thinking, and our modern ways of industry and commerce.
It is just not that hard to find common ground. The trick is to stay there, before wandering off into our disconnected world.
The key to maintaining common ground is vision, a shared vision that is greater than oneself. A living vision is embedded, it resonates without intellectual separation, division or analysis.
It simply is. It is based on the energy of connection, of humanity as a collective whole, inter-dependent, and focused solely on survival as a connection organism, living interconnected to the living organism that is this planet.
Every culture in the world has a story about this planet and our connection to it as one giant whole.
We have the science, we have the spirit, and we have the evidence on every level of our being.
Our problem is our harnessing our big brains for connection, not separation.
This is the challenge of the human condition.

Commit random acts of connection!

Learning to Sip

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My biggest and my only New Year’s resolution is to Learn to Sip.
Yep, to sip every thing. Less gulping. Less gulping of food, drinks, life.
To Learn to Sip will put me living in the moment.
I miss a lot of moments because I am gulping through life.
That concept of ‘being present’ will happen when I Learn to Sip.
I will savour. I will relish. I will breathe into sipping.
I will taste more, food, drink and life.
I will observe more when I sip.
It’s going to be bloody hard.
I love to gulp.  Gulp, gulp gulp, and its all gone and I am not satisfied. Food, drinks, and maybe life.
I don’t want to gulp through 2014. 
Ok, I think I am being a bit hard on myself. Gulping is fun when I am really hungry, really thirsty, and in a hurry to devour life.
It’s ok really. But a bit more sipping would be really great.
Rolling the taste of things around my mouth. And even engaging all my senses in sipping.
Looking and sniffing and touching before I sip. Tasting through the sip, listening to the sound of the sip, and there I’ve done the full sensory experience.
Sipping more and gulping less also means chilling out more. Less is more, yep, yep, yep.
Learning to Sip will get me reflecting and pausing more. Sipping is a meditation.
Maybe it is about a ratio of sipping to gulping, it feels a bit hard to give up gulping completely.
And that is what is wrong with resolutions. They demand you to be resolute. And sometimes we just plain don’t want to be resolute about every damn thing. It’s too hard.
Life is too short. But it will feel not so short if I sip and gulp. In balance. Sipping and gulping.
ore chewing would be good.
Sipping is to pause more. To drink in the world around me. To stop. To siesta.
And to be more productive as a result of sipping.

Immortalising Mandela is the Wrong Thing To Do

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Right now it seems to me that all sorts of people are getting the wrong end of the stick about Nelson Mandela’s legacy.

It’s crazy how we either want to immortalize a leader and have them be our saviour. And it’s equally nuts to critique and analyse, putting him on a pedestal and then pulling him off.
I just finished reading a wonderful and also haunting book about Afghanistan, The Storyteller’s Daughter by Sairah Shah.
She quotes this old story from Rumi, that to me sums up how much we are ‘barking up the wrong tree’ (pardon the pun that will unravel) about wanting complete magic and perfection in a leader.
Once upon a time there was a powerful king, who had a beautiful wife, a peaceful kingdom and riches beyond compare. He thought he had everything, until he heard that in faraway India there was a tree of such wonderful virtue that anyone who ate of its fruit would live for ever. The king became obsessed with this fruit. He sent his most trusted courtier on a quest to find it.
This faithful servant searched high and low for the magical fruit. Some people said they had never heard of it, others mocked him, yet others sent him in the wrong direction.
After twenty years, the man no longer believed that there was any such tree. He decided it was his duty to go and tell this to the king and face his wrath. Before he returned home, he visited an ancient sage, to ask for a blessing.
When the old man heard the courtier’s story, he began to laugh. He laughed, and he laughed and he laughed, until tears streamed down his wrinkled cheeks. When he could speak he said: ‘ Oh, my poor friend ! You will never find the fruit of a literal tree. What you seek is sometimes called a tree, sometimes a sun, sometimes a lake and sometimes a cloud. It is one- although it has thousands of forms. Pass over form and look for qualities. The tree you have been seeking is the tree of knowledge, its fruit is wisdom- and the least of its forms is eternal life.
Of this story, Saira Shah’s father said:  “Stories are like a tree growing on the horizon. March towards the tree, and it will keep you in a straight line. But the tree itself is not the goal. When you reach it, you have to let it go, and pick up another point further on.

Learn Important Stuff By Heart, Google The Rest

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Big data can mean a big headache. It is wonderful what we can do with data in an instant, but how much of all this stuff do we need to keep in our heads?

To learn something ‘off by heart’ means to know something so well you don’t need to refer to a text, notes or any other prompt.
But why do we use the word ‘heart’?

Researchers on Yahoo Answers suggest that:  

The expressions “know by heart” or “learn by heart” stem from the ancient Greek belief that the heart was the seat of intelligence and memory, as well as emotion…and that the expression “learn by heart” was first recorded in 1374 by Chaucer.’

They also suggest that: The heart beats within a person without the person having to think about it. It’s a completely natural occurrence. So to learn something that good is be as fluent as a natural ability.  
I believe knowing something ‘by heart’ refers to the fact we have engaged our limbic brain to learn something, and our knowledge of it becomes something natural.

We have learnt something from a place where heart and mind connects.
We have learnt something in this way permanently.
To embed a vision, a strategy or a goal is to learn it by heart.
We can use metaphor and story, or mnemonics.
But we have learnt it because our heart, our limbic brain is engaged.
It is critical for us to be clear about vision, purpose and associated strategies and goals in order to embed them, so they can be executed by heart.
There are four keys to achieve this:

·      The vision must inherently be about people and the difference we will make for them.
·      The vision must have verbs; people doing things, enacting, enabling, and embedding.
·      The vision must work as a metaphor for all to tell stories about it.
·      Falling in love with repetition. Rather than reinvent, and change, deepen and find      meaning and layers in a vision and its application.

    To be productive and engaged, people must know by heart the vision of an organisation, so it is lived. As for the detail and data,  just Google It !

    Putting the “Pie in the Sky” in Your Mouth

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    Every day we use turns of phrase without a clue about their origin, or what they really mean.
    ‘Pie in the Sky’ has to me always meant something unrealistic, a dream unconnected to reality, unobtainable, and usually plain silly.
    But how did I know that? The image of a pie in the sky doesn’t really make a lot of sense.

    It turns out the origin is in a song written by a man called Joe Hill, a Swedish immigrant in the US in the early 20th century who was union man. 

    He got really upset with the Salvation Army for telling poor and starving workers to have faith in God and Heaven and donate money to the church and not worry about the practicality of getting food.
    This angered Hill, and he wrote this song, The Preacher and the Slave:
    Long-haired preachers come out every night,
    Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right;
    But when asked how ’bout something to eat
    They will answer with voices so sweet:
    You will eat, bye and bye,
    In that glorious land above the sky;
    Work and pray, live on hay,
    You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.
    Now I am not sure whether the Salvation Army heeded his song, but today they do amazing work to feed, clothe and house the poor.
    The lesson to me is stark. If you have a lofty vision, a vision that can seem beyond reach, there must be ways that people can see it being a reality, and it must have some relevance to them. It needs practical application here and now and to meet people’s needs. Bob Norton has devised a Vision Pie about the 11 required elements of a successful vision. 
    In my upcoming book, Love Your Brother from Another Mother, I cover how and why we must show the pathway from Pie in the Sky to Pie in Your Mouth.

    Our Time

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    Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times
    One of our greatest fears is time.
    Not enough, or too much.
    It comes up every day for people in their work and leadership. Most often it is problem number one.
    People are always busy and if they are not, they worry about what they should be doing.
    Time stops being a problem when people are engaged in a vision far greater than themselves.
    Think of a time when you have completely lost track of time. Chances are you were engrossed in some element of your vision, for yourself or for the world. You were fully engaged.
    Time stops being a problem when we embed those memories of those moments when we were so engaged we became lost in time.
    The bigger the game we play, the less stressed we are about time.

    Our vision enables us to navigate time powerfully.

    Worry about time is replaced by clarity.
    We devote time to what will further the game.
    Time is not wasted. We get efficient and focused.
    “ Do not be concerned with the fruit of your action, just give attention to the action itself. The fruit will come of its own accord.” Eckhart Tolle.
    When we are in touch with our vision, it becomes watermarked in every action we take each day; awake and asleep. We live and breathe it.
    Fulfilling a vision with purpose spells an end to Downtime, and being Time Poor.
    Your time becomes your Own Time and that becomes Our Time.
    Our Time is to live and act now with a vision for others; to give and to receive.
    This is Our Time.