By Jim Selman | Bio
Do we have an economic problem or a spiritual problem?
My teacher and friend Dr. Fernando Flores was a candidate for the
Presidency of Chile. In one of his speeches, he declared, “We don’t have
an economic problem so much as we have a spiritual one…we’ve forgotten
who we are…we lack a vision and purpose for our nation”. He dropped out
of the presidential race, but this phrase has stayed with me. I think it
is true of most nations, including our own.
There is a maxim that states, “A vision without action is just a dream.
Action without a vision is a nightmare.” A vision provides a context, a
ground of being for our lives. A vision is not a goal: it is the
organizing principle for whatever goals we may have. A vision is a place
to stand—the future as possibility—a place to ‘come from’ in all that
we undertake.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Fearless Aging
Tagged with:
action
choice
eckhart_tolle
economic_problem
fernando_flores
new_earth
obama
spiritual_problem
vision
By Jim Selman | Bio
Perhaps the most pervasive and omnipresent
aspect of being alive is our moods. We are always in one mood or
another. Moods are either positive or negative and they ‘color’ our
experience of living, affect how we relate to others and our
circumstances, and have extraordinary power to open or close
possibilities. If we examine this phenomenon, we can see that our moods
are portable—we take them with us wherever we go. I can be angry at
home and find that mood affecting me at work or even on the golf
course. Moods are also[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action
Tagged with:
action
choice
commitment
context
future
mood
possibility
resignation
By Jim Selman | Bio
The conventional wisdom in Alcoholics
Anonymous is that alcoholism is a ‘disease’ of the
ego—self-centeredness. Basically the alcoholic becomes trapped in his
or her own point of view and denies any other perspective on ‘reality’.
The alcohol is a symptom of a loss of control and choice—a condition of
cognitive blindness and a self-destructive pattern of behavior. I have
distinguished that culture works the same way. That is, the ego is to
the individual what culture is to an organization or society—a
self-referential structure of interpretation (a worldview) that blinds
us to possibilities, robs us of any semblance of choice, and eventually
results in some form of ‘hitting bottom’. The belief in AA is that no
one really ‘gets it’ and does what needs to be done to sober up until
this happens. The only question is where is the bottom?[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action
Tagged with:
action
aging_population
david_korten
economy
environment
wisdom
 By Jim Selman | Bio
In 1976, I was working with some government
employees in Virginia trying to implement a new system for integrating
human services—a kind of one-stop shop for all the various services
offered at that time. I had just finished the est training the previous
July and was overwhelmed with my own experience and the idea that a
person could transform themselves and their relationship to everything.
Until then, I had bought into the belief that people don’t really
change in fundamental ways, that personalities are fairly fixed, and
that it requires a major crisis to shift our perceptions of reality. It
was during that period that I formulated the idea that[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Leadership
Tagged with:
action
coaching
eldering
management
peter_drucker
tom_peters
wisdom
 By Jim Selman | Bio
To continue our discussion about fear and
how to master it…. There are distinctions between coping with fear,
transcending fear and transforming fear. Coping is our
normal relationship with just about everything in our contemporary
world. Our relationship to circumstances is that ‘the world’ is real
and, more or less, whatever we think it is. We interact with our
circumstances based on our point of view, and our actions reinforce our
point of view. The result is that we participate in the persistence of
whatever it is we are coping with. People with phobias of various sorts typically learn to live[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Fearless Aging
Tagged with:
action
commitment
coping
fear
transcendence
transformation
 By Shae Hadden | Bio
I haven’t lived through the Depression, or participated in a major
global conflict. Compared to many people on this planet, I haven’t had
a lot of difficulties in my life. But the challenges that I have faced
I have been able to survive. If you’d asked me a year ago what made
that possible, I would probably have said “sheer will power”. But I’m a
little older and a little wiser now. And my answer today has a quality
of serenity in it that wasn’t evident back then. Viewing the future as[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Leadership
Tagged with:
action
courage
future
perseverance
possibility
 By Jim Selman | Bio
One of the aphorisms we were given at the end
of the est training in the 1970s was the statement, “Understanding is
the booby prize.” It has taken me most of my life to really appreciate
and mostly live day-to-day with this trueism. In our culture,
understanding is assumed to be more or less synonymous with
‘knowledge’. It’s the point to most communication and a prerequisite
for most commitment. If I have acquired any wisdom over the past six decades, it is this:[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Fearless Aging
Tagged with:
accomplishment
action
learning
possibility
understanding
By Jim Selman | Bio
Think about the positive attributes of
growing older, and ‘wisdom’ will always appear near the top of the
list. Until recently, I had assumed ‘wisdom’ was a kind of ‘right
knowledge’. Every time someone says the Serenity Prayer, I am reminded
of this attribute again.
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot
change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to
know the difference.”
I wonder if I do know the difference.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action
Tagged with:
action
change
choice
judgment
serenity
service
wisdom
By Jim Selman | Bio
The engine that drives the world’s economy
is a principle that is embedded in our worldview—“more, better and
different”. It may seem obvious, but when we think about consumerism,
materialism or alcoholism—or any ‘ism’ really—they are all based on the
idea that if we like something, then ‘more’ is good (and conversely, if
we don’t like it, then ‘less’ is good). Continuous improvement demands
that things get better and better—and ‘more’ better is better than
‘less’ better. At the end of the day, we work hard to innovate and
create ‘different’ expressions of what we already have. These three
perspectives pretty much define our options at every moment. To do
‘nothing’ is rarely considered as an alternative. Experientially, we
cannot tolerate boredom. We’re hooked on change, but the only change we
can relate to is ‘more’, ‘better’ and ‘different’. Remember the axiom,
“The more things change, the more they stay the same…”?[ Read More]
Written by eldering at The Great Turning
Tagged with:
action
change
economy
reaction
worldview
I spent a good chunk of my life learning to be reasonable. In business,
the mantra for any proposal was always: “Is it practical?” It seemed to
me that reasonableness (and its sister practicality) were virtues.
People who were unreasonable or impractical seemed to be
exceptions—they came across as flaky, dangerous, occasionally lucky,
unpredictable, disconnected, loose canons and, above all, they weren't
team players. When I turned 50, I came upon a quotation by George
Bernard Shaw that hit me between the eyes and totally changed my
approach to life and, in particular, my future.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Fearless Aging
Tagged with:
action
commitment
retirement
unreasonableness
|
RSS Feeds
