By Jim Selman | Bio
I work with organizations that are attempting
to change. At the beginning of working with a new client, I point out
what’s missing for any organization that has recurring or seemingly
intractable problems: what’s missing is a different way of observing.
Whether we’re talking about a company, a community or a continent, a new
perspective always gives us an opening to create new possibilities,
have new choices and take new actions: a new way of observing the world
effectively gives us a different future than some variation of ‘more of
the same’. We need to stop asking what the problems are and start
asking why they persist. When we do, we begin to realize that we
have a paradigm problem. Until we deal with that, none of our seemingly
intractable problems—from staggering debt to unending war, climate
change to the underlying causes of the mortgage crises—can be solved.
Albert Einstein expressed this concisely when he said that sometimes our
problems cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we
created them.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action
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 By Jim Selman | Bio
We’ve all experienced a situation—whether in
a marriage, friendship or business relationship—where we find ourselves
thinking about the other person and saying, “I love you, BUT…”. It’s in
that moment we realize a particular behavior of theirs is not
acceptable to us and has become a source of stress and resentment. For
many, resentment almost always leads to a downward spiral of
self-destructive behavior and the eventual destruction of the
relationship. I was coaching a friend recently who is in such a dilemma.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Personal Empowerment
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 By Jim Selman | Bio
New
York is a consumer paradise. That’s one of the reasons it is a shopping
mecca for so many people from around the world. Folks who can afford it
want to have an apartment here, the ‘Big Brands’ want to have a store
on 5th Avenue, and the rest of us want to look in the store windows and
buy stuff. New York, of course, doesn’t have an exclusive on being a
magnet for shoppers—most big cities have their own version of a street
lined with designer stores overflowing with opulent offerings. As I
travel from city to city, I find myself wondering[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Leadership
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By Jim Selman | Bio
As we move into the sixth month of the
‘global meltdown’, it seems like it has been going on a lot longer. I
can hardly remember what it was like when we were ‘high’ on the
prospects of prosperity forever. Like most ‘-olics’, we thought we
controlled something we didn’t control that then began controlling us.
In our pursuit of the American Dream, we somewhere began to get a
little too much of a good thing and became ‘hooked’ on the idea that
perpetual growth would continue, our houses would appreciate forever,
and that expecting a 20% return on our investment was just a matter of
finding the right ‘money manager’ or stock pick. We ‘hit bottom’ when[ Read More]
Written by eldering at The Great Turning
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 By Jim Selman | Bio
A few weeks ago, I posted my musings about
Blackberries and other gizmos that seem to have taken over our minds
and that are becoming the focus for much of our attention (to the point
of almost being amusing to see folks pulling them out). The media has
dubbed these devices “crackberries’ in view of their seemingly
addictive hold on us. Well, in spite of my protests to never get hooked, I bought one and[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Fearless Aging
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By Jim Selman | Bio
There is an inspiring 30-minute speech by Al Gore
challenging all of us and our nation to commit to a 10-year program to
move away completely from a carbon-based economy. The challenge echoes
what a lot of us have been saying for years, but he has developed
sufficient moral authority in some sectors that maybe more people will
listen. Redesigning our energy infrastructure isn’t exactly the same as
going to the moon as he suggests, but there are some powerful parallels. [ Read More]
Written by eldering at The Great Turning
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In the late 80s, Anne Wilson Schaef and Diane Fassel wrote a book called The Addictive Organization.
While I have a very different experience and theory than what they were
proposing, I think their metaphor was perfect. For me, the idea that an
organization or society can become ‘addicted’ is not a metaphor. I
believe, like Charles Horton Cooley, that “Individuals and
organizations are not separate phenomenon; they are the collective and
distributive aspects of the same thing”. The way I express this idea is
that “the ego is to the individual what the culture is to the
organization (or society”). What I am saying is that, from a phenomenological perspective, the ego
and culture are both self-referential structures of interpretation. [ Read More]
Written by eldering at The Great Turning
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By Charles E. Smith | Bio
Explainers Anonymous™ is for people who can’t help explaining they are dedicated victims of circumstance. Explaining,
like taking a drink, need not be not a problem. Telling a story to
entertain or teach is wonderful. Sometimes explanations are really
useful (such as in telling the doctor why your hand is bleeding) or
when they warn you of something (such as in looking both ways before
crossing the street because you might get killed). Sometimes they are
useful as long as everyone understands it’s an explanation—and only one
out of a hundred thousand possibilities.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Retirement
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By Charles E. Smith
Bio
Explainers Anonymous™
is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to help people addicted
to explaining everything. My name is Charlie. I started it.
It began in 1997 a few months after I retired. I woke one morning and said to myself:
"I
now have no work, no place to go, no future source of earned income,
no people telling other people about me. The phone doesn't ring and too
many of my e-mails are ads. I diet until 6 o'clock and then eat like a
pig. I go to the health club, work out and lose no weight. I have lists
full of grand schemes swarming over my desk, but the truth is that
almost nothing is actually going on. My big accomplishment of the day
so far was to take a shower...." [ Read More]
Written by eldering at Retirement
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I like this word. I don't know why…perhaps because it is one of those
words that seems to express itself in speaking of it. The word means
'anxiety'—a kind of generalized anxiety with being alive. The existential philosophers talked a lot about angst. In fact, we
normally associate angst with existentialism—existential angst. The
word is usually associated with a negative mood such as depression or
what Thomas Merton characterized as "the dark night of the soul". I
think that Heidegger talked about it as the inherent tension between
'being' and 'non-being'. I think that angst underlies the 'suffering'
that Buddha associated with human existence and probably is behind the
concept of 'original sin'. Whatever its origins or deeper meanings, it
is a day-to-day practical reality for most of us in our unending quest
to 'get it right' and 'be happy'. There are lots of strategies for dealing with angst.[ Read More]
Written by Jim Selman at Personal Empowerment
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