Author: The Fullfilment Project

Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

There are two types of integrity. The first means that you do what you say you will do, to yourself and to others. This could be seen as just being reliable, but if it is done as a matter of principle, then, for me, it falls into integrity, rather than reliability.

The second is living by your values and beliefs. This is being kind, even to those who treat you badly. It is finishing what you started, because you always do. It is a path less travelled, but an honourable path to walk down. In a social media filtered, fake it til you make it culture, living by your values and beliefs is unusual, but essential.

Be Curious

George de Mestral, a Swiss engineer, was out hunting in the Jura mountains in the 1940s and he wondered why cockle-burs were sticking to his trousers and his dogs fur. He became curious and took one home to look at under a microscope. He discovered that the cockle-burs had tiny hooks that grabbed hold of the loops in the fabric of his trousers.

He had a light bulb moment and Velcro was the invention that followed. Velcro is taken for granted these days and is used in clothing, bags, tents, travel cots, and the list goes on. All because a man was curious. He could have been angry or frustrated or just found it funny and left it there. When we have a curious mind we make connections, we make inventions and we change the world.

Collaborating With Colleagues

Achieving Goals, Leadership, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

If you work in a role that means you attend meetings, then there may be times when you lead a project or need to get colleagues on board. Take the example of starting a project. There will be a temptation to decide how it will work, what the vision is for the project and who will take on which role, etc. Sometimes it is your role to decide this. Sometimes it is not. However, this advice will work either way. It may also be useful if you are pitching an idea to colleagues too.

Plan Together

A good way to get your colleagues invested in the project is to involve them in the planning of it from the very start. Some things will be decided by circumstances outside the project, but there will be things that can be discussed and planned together.

Highlight Strengths

Many of your colleagues will have skills and experience that will benefit the project. Highlighting these strengths will make your colleagues feel respected and valued. You could start a Skills Bank where colleagues share their skills and experience and it all get collated and shared amongst the team, so each will know who to go to for specific advice. This could simply be a Word document made available on a shared drive, by email or uploaded to Microsoft Teams.

Listen Before You Speak

If you explain the project and tell everyone what you think, your colleagues will be less likely to contribute. However, if you hold off from giving your opinion and wait to hear everyone else, then they will feel heard and you get the benefit of their opinion before you give yours.

Empowering Yourself

The idea of karma is something that often divides people, though many in the western world don’t spend the time to consider its implications, as they are more familiar with the monotheistic religions. I personally do believe in karma and I was thinking about it recently and I had a couple of insights that are relevant for everybody.

My understanding of karma is twofold, my present circumstances are a result of my past actions and my response to my current circumstances will result in my future circumstances.

If you find yourself in a good situation, you could think to yourself ‘I earned this.’ If you find yourself in a bad situation, you could think to yourself ‘I earned this.’ Owning your current situation based on your past actions is powerful. Thinking this way about bad situations could be seen as a negative thinking pattern, but not if you apply the second insight.

After considering your current situation, ask yourself ‘what do I do now to make things better?’ This will mean that you respond to the situation rather than reacting to it. You are asking yourself to put together a plan of action, you are empowering yourself to own whatever situation you find yourself in and move forward. This opportunity is always available, no matter what your present circumstances are.

Finding Your Passion

There is a lot of talk, particularly from motivational coaches, around finding your passion. Some will give the advice that you should do what you love. This is advice I am inclined to disagree with because there is a danger that you will turn what you love into work that you hate to do. There are two other ways to think about this.

Find Your Why

Simon Sinek explained this very well in his book Start With Why. The idea is that once you have figured out the ‘Why’ behind all that you do, the DNA of your decision making and how you treat others, then you can apply this to ‘How’ you live or work and ‘What’ you do, based on your ‘Why.’ This will allow you to be more passionate about what you do because it will be aligned with who you are.

Be Passionate About What You Do

Seth Godin suggests that if we choose to be passionate about the work we are already doing we are empowered by the act of choosing and it is better than expecting the work we do to give us passion. We will be doing what we choose to do, not what we have to do. The narrative changes.

We can then put our energy into making a difference and creating things that were not there before we decided to do them, and we will also be more fulfilled than we would by trying to do what we love.

I feel that both of these approaches are valid and some mixture of the two will certainly be better than doing what you love.

Be A Hero Not A Superhero

I came across this note I made in my journal some time ago and felt it may resonate with some of you.

I was having a dream that felt like it was happening, but I also knew it was a dream. I was part of a team of superheroes trying to stop bad guys doing something bad, I can’t remember what. I clearly remember a lady I used to work with, who has just had her second child with her husband, appearing in a corridor as I was about to go into ‘battle’.

She said “do you have any milk I could borrow.” I stopped and calmly said, “of course, it’s in the fridge down the corridor on the right.” I then joined the other superheroes to save the world or something. The revelation for me is that when I calmly gave my previous colleague what they needed, this was me being who I am, someone who helps others, not a superhero. This is enough for me.

Also, to help others in simple ways can sometimes make us a hero without intending to be one.

Be Unmistakably You

Doing something for the first time is scary, more so for some and less so for others, but it is still scary. So what we often do is settle for copying how it has been done before. We feel safe on this already trodden ground. But doing the same thing as others have done, or are doing, is rarely of significant use of our time; it does not often improve the lives of others, or ourselves.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak took the idea of using a mouse and being able to move things around on a computer screen and put an Apple personal computer that almost anyone can use into people’s homes, where before in order to use a computer you had to learn to code or use the keyboard to navigate through endless DOS menus by picking option 4, then option 23, and so on.

This changed the world. It is not that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were special people, it was that they pushed their thinking until they got to the boundary of what was deemed as possible and stepped beyond it, because it is beyond this boundary that things of use are created. If we do things as they have always been done we never find a better of doing them. I am not saying that you need to be a Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, what I am saying is that what they decided to do was a choice, a choice that we all have.

We often fear the embarrassment and the risk of going first, but those we hold up as exceptional did something new, whether it be Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak or the painter Jackson Pollack or the author Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill A Mockingbird, they had not done what they did before they did it. They were unmistakably themselves, and what I am inviting you to do is to be unmistakably yourself. Not similar to those you wish to fit in with or different from the people around you that you disapprove of. It is to be unmistakably you.

How To Live A Good Life

I have been thinking recently about how we often hide from taking responsibility for our own journey through life. This story illustrates what can happen if you don’t take ownership. It is a made up tale, but it has a good point.

In a valley there was a town that was starting to be flooded. A van pulled up in front of a man’s house and offered to take him to safety, as they were evacuating the area. He said, “No, God will save me.” When the water level rose up to the first floor of this man’s house a boat came by to take him to safety and again he said, “No, God will save me.” When the water level had reached the rooftop a helicopter came to take the man to safety but again he said “No, God will save me.” The man drowned and when he went up to Heaven he got quite cross with God and asked him why he did not save him. Of course God said, “ I sent you a van, I sent you a boat and I sent you a helicopter.

The moral of the story is that we need to take responsibility for our own journey through life, to be our own rescuer. We also need to be our own cheer leader and take that which scares us as a sign that perhaps it is the direction that we should move in; to do the thing that rhymes with our true selves. To do the work of figuring out what our calling is and go all in on bringing it to life. This is the life long work of living a good life.

The Power Of Imagination

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Success

We suffer more in our imagination than we do in reality. This happens to many of us more often than we would like. We look into the future, or the future we think will happen, and we lean towards the worst case scenario. Our brains are wired to do this as a survival mechanism, but it is, I would say, the main cause of stress in people’s lives.

The way to avoid this is to pay attention to our thoughts and find the beliefs at the root of the thoughts and examine them. Most often they will be untrue and if the belief is untrue then some form of the opposite must be true. What then would this look like? If this new belief is true then what actions should then be taken?

Following this process will move you from a disempowering state to an empowering one. If you do this over and over you will change your belief system and the future will look less scary. You will then be able to imagine the future that you do want and how you might act, what you might do and how you might feel.

Your brain does not know the difference between your imagination and reality, so the future you imagine is more likely to come true, because your beliefs dictate your thoughts which influence your actions which cause your results, which reinforce your beliefs, and on it goes. Your future is yours to create.

Dare Greatly

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Success

I would like to begin this blog post with a quote from the American president Theodore Roosevelt.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

I became aware of this quote when watching a talk by Brené Brown. Prior to the recent talk I watched, she did a TED Talk called The Power of Vulnerability, which I recommend you watch. The TED Talk went viral and inevitably the trolls of the internet began commenting with personal attacks rather than listening to the very wise content of the talk. Brené Brown stumbled on to this quote after reading the horrible comments about her.

Since then she has decided that if you are not in the arena getting your arse handed to you, if you are not putting your work out there, then she is not interested in your feedback. What I would like to advocate for you is that you do two things. Firstly, have the courage to dare greatly and secondly, to ignore feedback from those who are not daring greatly themselves.

The Dangers of Seeking Reassurance

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Success

I have been think lately about why we seek reassurance before we step into doing new things or things that have creative risk and something happened to me this week which illustrates my thoughts on this. I work in a contact centre in a business park and walk for 15 minutes to catch the bus home. Now there are two buses with the same number which stop at my bus stop, one of the buses ends part way along the route and the other goes to where I live.

One bus came by so I waved it down to check if it was my bus, but it was the other bus that I needed, which promptly arrived and overtook the bus I had waved down and drove on by. While sitting at the bus stop waiting 40 minutes for the right bus to come by again I was thinking about why we seek reassurance and I realised that what I had done is outsource responsibility for knowing which was the right bus to the bus driver of the wrong bus.

If I’d have taken ownership of finding out which was the right bus, I could have checked the details on the bus stop timetable and compared them to the details on the front of the bus and could have been at home eating my dinner at the time the next correct bus arrived at the bus stop.

This to me illustrates the consequences we pay for seeking unnecessary reassurance that the thing we want to do is the right thing to do. Not taking responsibility for things in our lives, because we are worried about failing or choosing the wrong path is always the wrong path. We miss opportunities and we are left waiting for others to help us, or save us in some cases. No one is coming to save you, you have to save yourself and those around you will support you on this journey.

No one will give you the perfect answer as to what you should do either, because they are judging it based on what they would do, and they are not you. We need to make a choice and go try it, whatever it is. If it doesn’t work and we fall on our faces, we have learned something. The trick is to know that you will always pick yourself up and try again. A bird does not avoid landing on a tree branch because it is worried that the branch may break, if they did they would never land on a tree branch. A bird’s faith is not in the branch not breaking, it’s faith is in the ability of it’s own wings.

5 Rules On How To Build Trust

Trust is one of those things that can be hard to actively create with other people. We have all built trust with those we spend a lot of our time with, whether they are family, friends or colleagues. The longer we spend with people the more opportunity there is to build trust, so we often trust our friends and family more than we do our colleagues. However, trust is vitally important if we are to work and live together well.

Here are a few rules to follow in order to build trust with others.

Firstly, trust must be shared and we must go first. Always doing what you say you are going to do does not make you trustworthy, it just means that you are reliable. We must give people a certain level of responsibility over something important to us and leave them to do it. The more you do this the more the person feels trusted. They will then trust you with something and on it goes.

Secondly, if someone trusts you to do something or to keep something secret, you must do so, every time. This is the second part of the human covenant that is trust. It must go both ways. Over time the process builds strong trust.

Thirdly, gossip is a trust killer. When someone gossips to you about someone else it does two things; you know that they will share other people’s personal lives and their secrets behind their back to gain attention and that they will likely do it behind your back too. If you gossip you will not be trusted.

Fourthly, the giving of trust should not be given regardless of whether the trust is honoured. Sometimes you can trust someone over and over and the person proves themselves untrustworthy. At some point you need to draw a line in the sand and withdraw your trust. When trusting someone begins to effect your wellbeing it is time to withdraw that trust.

Fifthly, all people should not be trusted equally. The nature of human relationships is that each is unique. This involves differing levels of trust with different people. This is normal, and you should not feel that everyone should always be trusted. Trust is an aspect of a relationship and rules one to four should be applied in each relationship.

Rhyming With Who You Are

When we put ideas or thoughts out there into the world inevitably we get feedback from other people. Some think your ideas or thoughts are great, others will think they are not. Often we pin our self worth to what other people think of our ideas and thoughts. This is a mistake, it is giving away our power to others in the hope that they will validate our existence.

Social media is an extreme version of this. Every day people share their lives with followers and ‘friends’ hoping to get a like or a share as validation. What comes back is essentially feedback. If we listen to all of it, then we can become lost in the variety of ways in which other people think we should live. It becomes just noise, like the feedback when a microphone gets too close to the speaker it is linked to.

What we need to do is to provide our own feedback, and follow what is in our hearts. Our ideas and thoughts should rhyme with who we are. Then we will live a life that rhymes with who we are, and this will be a life well lived.

Mastering Your Work

While we work we are often asked by our Manager to complete a Personal Development Plan. This is often limited to office based work, but applies to any field of employment. This can be seen as another task to do or it is seen as a tick box exercise. The PDP is in fact a huge opportunity.

It is an opportunity to actively develop yourself, to take ownership of your career and progress to the level or role that gives you the most fulfilment.

In my opinion your PDP should begin with the values of the company you work for as well as your own values. This is because it is important that these values are compatible. You should include how you learn, how you work and what your skills and experience are. This will give you a good foundation to build your PDP from.

Set short goals, usually weekly, mid-term goals, usually quarterly and long term goals, usually yearly. I would also review your progress against these goals on a regular basis. I will be trying daily reviews at the end of my shift to highlight what went well, what I could have done better, what I learned and what actions I will take from the learning.

I feel that daily reviews will speed up my development and make sure it does not plateau at a low level. Try it yourself and see how you go. If it is too frequent, try weekly reviews. You will not regret it.

Building Self Credibility

Often, without meaning to, we make promises and break them, both to others and to ourselves. It could be that we say we will start going to the gym or that we say we will do a friend a favour, but then don’t.

When we break promises, no matter how small, we lose credibility with ourselves. We start to believe that we are unreliable and slowly our actions follow our thinking and we do.

If, however, we decide to go to the gym and we do it or we decide to get up when the alarm goes off, instead of hitting snooze, and we do it or we do the friend a favour when we say we will, then we will build credibility with ourselves and people will see that we mean what we say, that we are reliable and trustworthy. It is a matter of integrity, because integrity is a verb.

What Can Our Struggles Teach Us?

When going through difficult times, it is important to be grateful for everything that we have, which includes our tough experiences. The valleys we go through serve to highlight the euphoria of reaching the summit of the mountains we climb.

We all have, to varying degrees, the ability to choose how we want to feel, by choosing what we focus on. For example, if we are unwell, do we focus on how that is making us feel or do we focus on still having the ability to do the things we enjoy, even if the illness reduces these options. We all have the ability “…to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” (From Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor E Frankl).

On the flip side the valleys will teach us lessons that the mountain peaks never can. Every struggle is an opportunity wrapped in unpleasantness. Every struggle is an opportunity to learn. I try to be in a state of flow, of effortless action, as often as I can. When I find myself in a negative state of mind or I fail at something and I come out of flow, I now ask myself three questions.

What can I learn from this situation?
Where are the opportunities?
What should I do?

These questions help me re-centre and I then actively bring my mind back to flow. They are also fundamentally proactive, which means negative thinking patterns do not get a chance to sidetrack my mindset. Give these questions a go or come up with your own, you will not regret it.

We Are Connected

It is amazing how connected we all are on our planet. To illustrate this here is something from a TV series on Netflix called Connected that blew my mind. It is in the episode on Dust and how important certain dust can be.

In Chad, North Africa, in what used to be Lake Mega-Chad, but is now part of the Sahara Desert, there are the remains of fish and other creatures, which once lived in the lake, before the area became a desert. The wind breaks up the skeletons into dust which is then carried by the wind up into the atmosphere and it makes its way all the way to the Amazon Rainforest, in South America, where the dust becomes part of the soil.

What is amazing is that the rain in the rainforest washes away most of the nutrients that the plant life needs to grow and survive, but the dust all the way from the Sahara Desert in Chad, North Africa, replenishes it. Around 22,000 tons of phosphorus is deposited in the Amazon Rainforest every year from Lake Mega-Chad, which is about the amount the soil loses every year due to rainfall.

Without this process happening, there would be no rainforest. We are truly, globally connected to every other ecosystem on the planet. This is why when we throw things away, there is no away. We need to look after our planet as well as each other.

There Are No Boxes

Recently, I was watching the first episode of the series Strictly Come Dancing and while one of the contestants, Tom Fletcher, from band McFly, was introduced they showed his wife, Giovanna Fletcher, in the audience. Nothing special about that, but for me two worlds collided.

Giovanna Fletcher presents a Cbeebies (BBC children’s channel) program The Baby Club, which I am very familiar with, having a toddler in my life. McFly is a band I associate with the music of my youth. As a result I put Tom Fletcher in the Pop music box in my head and Giovanna Fletcher in the Cbeebies box in my head.

This was a wake up call for me, that reminded me that in truth there are no boxes in life, everything is interconnected with everything else. This provides an opportunity to remove the barriers that get in the way of creativity.

Nature is more abundant at the edge of one natural space to another, where the jungle meets an open plain, where a river meets the sea, the number of variety of life goes up. When we cross-pollinate areas in our mind our creative output will be more like a rainforest, life abundant.

Taking Ownership of Your Journey

I’d like to tell you a story (author unknown). One day there was a great flood and a whole town was being evacuated. A van pulled up at a man’s house and the driver shout for him to get in as everyone was being evacuated. The man said, “No thank you God will save me.” Not wanting to risk staying, the van driver drove off to safety.

The water began to rise and was up to the man’s first floor window. A man in a boat came by and offer to take this man to safety, but again the man said “No thank you God will save me.” When the water rose up to the roof a helicopter came to rescue the man, who was then standing on his roof. Again the man said, “No thank you God will save me.”

The water continued to rise and the man drowned. When the man got to heaven he asked God why did you not save me? God said, “I sent a van, I sent a boat and I sent a helicopter.”

The moral of the story is that we have to take accountability and ownership of our own rescue and our own lives. We cannot expect others to do everything for us, even God for that matter, if you believe in him. If we are waiting for others to fix everything, we will miss so many opportunities that can lead us to great joy, fulfilment and success.

So, be humble and take offers of help when they are offered to you and take ownership of your life and your life will be exponentially better.

How To Deal With Change

1: https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1249.html

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

– Bruce Lee

We are in a time of the year that we associate with change, the season of Autumn, when we see leaves turn vibrant colours before falling. The Autumn equinox was on 22^nd of September, where the length of the day matched the length of the night and it signals the change from Summer to Autumn. It is the mid-point between the Summer and Winter Solstices. Although change is a constant, it is not so clearly expressed in nature as it is in Autumn.

In day to day life change can be seen when cups of tea or coffee go cold, when children become adults and then become old and the future all to quickly becoming the past. It is a fact of life that things will always change, yet often our experience in life is that some things seem to stay the same. This is usually because the change of these things is slow. Yet over a long enough time-line key features of a generation often seem very familiar. The fashion of today seems a little reminiscent of fashions of the past, which I suppose is to be expected, after-all fashion is an aspect of culture, which defines itself by what has come before, either by being different from it, or being the same as it, and it appears to me that the same fashions come around again every twenty to thirty years, in an ever changing cycle, which goes back again and again to where it came from, though is never exactly the same as it was the previous time, or the time before that. This idea is put well in the book Hagakure, The Book of the Samurai. It says this:

“It is said that what is called “the spirit of an age” is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world’s coming to an end. In the same way, a single year does not have just spring or summer. A single day too, is the same.

For this reason, although one would like to change today’s world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done.”

We often wish that things could be as they were when we were younger, or we wish we could go back to a time in our lives when things were better, but, we always look back at our pasts with rose tinted glasses, and if we did go back, I suspect that it would not be as good as we think it would be, and this would ruin the memory we have of that time. Our perspective of the memories that we have changes too, as we experience new things and gain new understanding of the world around us. This all gives us new understanding of our memories as well, which in turn changes the memories we have. There will certainly be memories from the past 18 months that we would prefer to forget, if we could.

From the perspective of many religions from the East, the present is all that exists, and the past only exists in our present mind, there is only the now, which is itself eternal, because it is always here, yet that which exists always changes in a constantly evolving moment. However, that is not to say that memories are not to be treasured, of cause they are. We all have photo albums documenting our lives and the lives of those we care about. Some of the first baby photos of me that my parents showed to my Wife were those in which I was not wearing any clothes, or I had covered myself in food. Photos are put into albums, not only to be treasured by ourselves, but also so that we can easily show them to other people, and in doing so, share the experiences we had. After-all, life is to be shared, is it not? These moments that our photo albums document are themselves, often, moments of change, the first day of school, all dressed up in our school uniforms, our birthdays, weddings, christenings and so on, these are all times in which we were once one thing and we became another. All very personal moments in our life stories.

On a larger scale, all the changes that occur in the culture around us are a kind of background noise, in comparison to these personal changes that each of us make, or have thrust upon us, each day. For me personally, getting married was not that much of a change, because my Wife and I carried on happily as we did before we were Mr and Mrs, though the wedding day itself was joyous. Becoming a father was much more of a change for me, and demanded a few inner changes to how I saw the world, as well as some changes to how I lived my life, which is continuing to evolve. This is all a natural part of being a parent, as well as wanting our children to be happy and healthy, no matter what changes life might throw at them.

It can be difficult to walk the fine line between fearing change and embracing it, especially after how devastating the COVID-19 pandemic has been in some people’s lives, through losing loved one, losing regular income with the loss of a job or being separated from those we love. We truly do not know what is around the corner in life, but we do need to find balance in all the potential and real chaos. In Taoism, they have the symbol of the Yin and Yang, which is very familiar to most people. It is a circle with one black part and one white part, each of which has a spot of the opposing colour within them. The general principle behind this symbol is that in every good there is bad and in every bad there is good, if you look for it, and that life is constantly an interplay moving back and forth from good to bad and back again. If we understand that this is how life operates, then finding balance to navigate the events of life can be very beneficial. If we put all of our energy into one thing in our lives, even if it is good, other areas in our lives suffer and eventually the thing we are investing our time in stops being so good for us too.

Equally, if we worry about the bad things that are, or might, happen, then our life also gets out of balance. It is like navigating a boat through the waters of our lives, with one leg on the port side and one on the starboard side. If we tip too much one way or another, then we fall in. Finding balance means checking in with ourselves every day to see if we are looking after every part of our lives. Cultivating our relationships, working hard at work, taking care of our family, managing our finances, focusing on our spirituality, etc.

There is another concept you may have heard before, the concept of flow. The state you are in when everything you are doing is effortless and time disappears, because you are fully engaged and really enjoying what you are doing. In Taoist thinking this is referred to as Wu Wei, the art of non-action. To our Western ears this sounds paradoxical, but it has finally sunk in in my head recently and I finally get it. Wu Wei is flow, it is effortless action, it is doing, not worrying or planning or speculating, it is the act of just doing. Put another way, the art of non-action is to embrace flow instead of effort to achieve a result. Living life through Wu Wei is, as Bruce Lee said in the quotation at the top of this blog post, being like water. He said, “Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it.” And with many Eastern things, this is an art more than a science. My advice would be to try to do everything that you are doing with joy, and then this flow state will be more accessible. As Sadhguru, a Guru from India, has said “Anything you do joyfully is always effortless.”

When big changes appear in our lives, the more flexible we are in our thinking, the easier it will be to manage the challenges each big change brings. Some changes are thrust upon us, as we have experienced, they are things that are out of our control, and we have to some how deal with them in the best way that we can, by focusing on what is in our control, which includes choosing to be in a joyful state. These times of major change are times that will test our characters, they will highlight the strengths we have, and tell us how strong we are inside. The paradox of Wu Wei is that being humble and flexible is stronger than being full of ego and rigid when we want a positive outcome.

For those of us that are not strong in difficult times, such as a tragedy or a pandemic, there are others, to whom we turn, that are strong and who support us through these hard times. We all have people like this in our lives, perhaps you are the person to whom those around you turn when they need a strong pillar to support them. If you are such a person I commend you, because without people like you many of us would not be able to cope. However, you also need to have people around you to whom you can turn in difficult times.

At the end of reading this blog post you will get on with the things you have planned for today, the rest of the week, and the rest of the year. The seasons will change from Autumn to Winter to Spring to Summer and back to Autumn again, the sun will rise and set as it has for millions of years and change will continue to affect our lives. How we choose to respond to the changes we each face is up to us, but I hope that most of the changes in your lives are for the better and the changes that are hard to bear are lessened by those around you, those who care about you, and those you care about. These are the consistencies that allow us to deal with the changes that life throws at us.

I would like to end with another quotation about Autumn, by Albert Camus. “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”

Building A Better World

Happiness

“Follow your dreams and use your natural-born talents and skills to make this a better world for tomorrow.”
– Paul Watson

This Summer saw the long awaited 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which was an unusual state of affairs, without the spectators. However, it gave a chance for the people of each country to see their Olympic champions battle it out for the highly held Olympic medals. After the way the 2020 Euros lifted the spirits of the nation, there was a hope that the Olympics could keep the national excitement going. In the end more people watched the Tokyo Olympics than did the Rio 2016 Olympics. Records were broken and Britain came a respectable forth in the medals table, which is all pretty positive. Positivity is in great need after the past 18 months and the uncertainty of coming out of the imposed social distancing guidelines, which has left us all feeling a little unsure how to interact with each other in the new normal.

The Olympics have long been held up as the bastion of sportsmanship, of unity in diversity and of excellence. Curious to see the principles behind the organising of the Olympics, I looked up the Vision of the International Olympic Committee, which is “Building A Better World Through Sport.” A worthy vision, and one which is shown in their Values of Excellence, Respect and Friendship. And this got me thinking about how we can make the world a better place after the COVID-19 pandemic put a pause on much of society’s habitual behaviours. During the pandemic the kindness of strangers and the capacity to care flourished amongst neighbours and strangers alike. The concept of Key Workers redefined for many of us who plays an important role in our society and who does not. There was initially talk about going back to normal after the pandemic, or rather a new normal, and it is this idea of a new normal that I want to focus on today.

If we can better choose how we can interact with each other, how we can live together and how we can connect with each other, then this seems like a good time to do it. We can take up the cause of the Olympics of ‘building a better world,’ but not just through sport, but through how we see each other and how we interact with each other. This thing called life is a shared journey from cradle to the grave, but we are capable of lifting each other up, so we may all live better lives.

To illustrate what I am talking about I would like to share a story I saw online recently about a Police Officer in America who pulled a young man over, as his driving licence had expired. The young man explained that he barely had enough money to pay the bills and his rent and could not afford to renew his licence, due to losing his job. He was also on his way to a job interview, in the hope to gain an income and eventually get his licence renewed. The Police Officer left his own car and drove the young man to the job interview and apologised to the Interviewers as he was the reason the young man was late for the interview. The young man got the job and was able to renew his licence in order to legally drive again. Sometimes kindness matters more than the letter of the law. It also matters more than the prejudices and stereotypes that we all have which prevent us from seeing others as equal to ourselves and therefore worthy of kindness.

It is also important to remember how connected we all are. The COVID-19 pandemic showed how our movement around the world can cause diseases to spread, but we can also share our behaviours, our ideas and our values. Kindness and generosity are also infectious. Mother Nature has provided a way to encourage us to be kind and generous. This is how we thrived as a species, by working together. If we are to be generous or kind to someone else without any expectation in return we get a hit of Oxytocin, which makes us feel good. The person we are generous or kind to gets a hit of Oxytocin as well, which means they will likely go and be generous or kind to someone else that day. Even a person just witnessing an act of generosity or kindness will give them a hit a Oxytocin and will encourage them to pay the generosity or kindness forward. We are hard wired to do this, because we are stronger together.

To further show how connected we all are on our planet, here is something from a TV series on Netflix called Connected that blew my mind. It is in the episode on Dust and how important certain dust can be. In Chad, North Africa, in what used to be Lake Mega-Chad, but is now part of the Sahara Desert, there are the remains of fish and other creatures, which once lived in the lake, before the area became a desert. The wind breaks up the skeletons into dust which is then carried by the wind up into the atmosphere and it makes its way all the way to the Amazon Rainforest, in South America, where the dust becomes part of the soil. What is amazing is that the rain in the rainforest washes away most of the nutrients that the plant life needs to grow and survive, but the dust all the way from the Sahara Desert in Chad, North Africa, replenishes it. Around 22,000 tons of phosphorus is deposited in the Amazon Rainforest every year from Lake Mega-Chad, which is about the amount the soil loses every year due to rainfall. Without this process happening, there would be no rainforest. We are truly, globally connected to every other ecosystem on the planet. This is why when we through things away, there is no away. We need to look after our planet as well as each other.

The environmental movement, which includes Greenpeace, sprung to life after a very special photograph was taken when “Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, Dec. 24, 1968. That evening, the astronauts-Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders-held a live broadcast from lunar orbit, in which they showed pictures of the Earth and moon as seen from their spacecraft. Said Lovell, “The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth.” They ended the broadcast with the crew taking turns reading from the book of Genesis.”(1) As they orbited back around the moon toward the Earth the photo Earth Rise was taken as the view of the Earth in the distant blackness of space rose into view over the surface of the moon, which is seen in the foreground of the photo. The sense that if we do not take care of our planet their is no planet B reverberated through the cultures of the West and the rest of the world.

We have now reached a point where taking a trip up to where the Earth’s atmosphere meets outer space is becoming a reality for those who can pay for it. There has been much debate online about the recent endeavours of Billionaires like Sir Richard Branson to develop “rocket planes” that can take people up the edge of space. Sir Richard Branson was the first to have “…successfully reached the edge of space on board his Virgin Galactic rocket plane”(2) recently. The main argument against such endeavours has been why build a rocket plane to take people to the edge of space on tourist trips when there are millions who are homeless, starving and displaced due to war. There are also issues with global warming. It is an argument over priorities and values, over selfishness and selflessness. Tickets to take the Virgin Galactic up to the edge of space cost up to £180,000, again money that could be spent helping our fellow human beings. I guess the main ill feeling comes from the disproportionate distribution of wealth and the fact that there are billionaires in the world where much good can be done if this wealth was shared. If a tenth of the wealth held by the Billionaires of the world was spent on helping those in need, the quality of life for many would be improved. Access to water, electricity and education, for example.

But we are not all Billionaires, far from it. Most of us have enough to survive and a little bit more to save or spend on nice things. This begs the question what can we do to make the world better? If we are to go back to the Vision of the International Olympic Committee, “Building A Better World Through Sport,” we can think about what Vision we might have for our lives. If your Vision began with “Building A Better World Through…” what would come next for you? I would suggest you build a better world through kindness. Kindness to the environment and kindness to the people we interact with each day.

However, it is not always easy to be kind, especially if we are asked to be kind to those we really do not like. In the Bible Jesus asked us to Love our Enemies? You might not think in terms of ‘enemies,’ but you will have people you would rather avoid, people you dislike. How do we build the capacity to be kind to those people? A good place to start is to work on the prejudices and stereotypes we all have, on the barriers we have that create an us and a them, so we can start seeing each other as human first, and then we can increase our generosity and kindness on a daily basis. The more people we are generous and kind to the more people will do the same for others. And you will feel so good at the end of the day.

Reference:

2: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-57797297

Finding Contentment