Ann Badillo Coaching

Trust the Experience Before You...

As our world encounters difficult times, on personal and collective levels, here is a good story from Joseph Campbell to remember:

A bit of advice given to a young Native American at the time of his initiation:

"As you go the way of life,
you will see a great chasm.
Jump.
It is not as wide as you think."

My friend and fellow coach, Edward Santana, dedicated this blog post to my daughter today.

Thank you, dear Edward.

Familiar and Timeless, Peter Drucker’s 5 questions

The nature of business organizations has changed dramatically over the past few decades. Today, employers and employees both understand few show up thinking they will collect their ‘gold watch’ after 25 years of service. Instead, individuals are responsible to carve and erect their career paths.

Individuals need to keep themselves engaged in a work life that might span more than 50 years. And, to do this requires a deep understanding of self.

Peter Drucker said, “Only when you operate from a combination of your strengths and self knowledge can you achieve true and lasting excellence”. This familiar but timeless wisdom holds truer today. So, let’s revisit Drucker’s 5 questions first introduced in the article, Managing Oneself, HBR, 1999:

• What are my strengths? (how do you know, what do you do to strengthen them and how do you use this knowledge to establish, and manage relationships?)
• How do I work? (how do you learn? are you a reader or listener? do you prefer solo to groups?)
• What are my values? (and are they consistent with your organization’s values/)
• Where do I belong? (is my role the optimal, the best fit for me?)
• What can I contribute? (how will I use my self-knowledge and strengths to make a difference in my organization, community, society?)

Without these answers, most people waste time improving skill areas where they have little competence, or try to modify ‘personality’ traits that cannot be changed. Drucker and authors that are more recent advise us to play to our strengths. What do you think? What stories can you share?

Source: Fast Company

 

Joseph Campbell's 12 Stages in the Hero's Journey

Where are you? 

In his book, Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell described 12 stages in a hero's or heroine's journey:

1. The Ordinary World of the hero with its suffering, boredom and neurotic anguish.

2. A Call to Adventure when the ordinary world is no longer endurable and the hero is ripe for change.

3. Refusal of the Call when the hero is scared, even terrified at first, and avoids the challenge.

4. Meeting a Mentor who acknowledges, supports and spurs the hero onward.

5. Crossing the First Threshold when the hero begins to feel really weird, and gets very scared.

6. Tests, Allies and Enemies when the hero feels greater stress and anxiety than ever before, is tempted to pack the whole thing in but finds people who can help, and often a few dangerous ones who can hurt.

7. Approach to the Inmost Cave where the hero glimpses the dark side of his true, hidden self, the side he's always denied for most of his life.

8. The Supreme Ordeal in which the hero attempts to use those parts of his true self that terrified and shamed him before.

9. Reward for Seizing the Sword when the hero slowly discovers new passion and begins to feel a steady, daily glow from harnessing the power of his true self.

10. The Road Back when the hero must adjust his new-found passion to the demands of the ordinary world, a trying time for imaginative heroes impatient with bureaucracies and the tedious people who inhabit them.

11. Resurrection when the hero glimpses his impending death, takes his "What have I done with my life?" exam and grades himself.

12. Return with the Elixir when the hero shares what he's learned with younger heroes and heroines in the ordinary world.

Source

Five Tips for August Renewal

Summer is traditionally a time reserved for relaxing with family and friends.  Summer is also great time in the year to engage in a bit of self renewal, to 'press pause button' and step back from one's daily activities to notice how 2008 is rolling out. There's no better time to recalibrate before the manic Fall starts.

Five Tips for August Renewal

1. Make a list of activities you loved when you were under the age of 25, post your list in a visible place for a few days -- then pick one activity to resurrect and try it on for the month.

2. Take a mini-vacation that requires only a little planning -- make it within driving distance of home and somewhere you haven't been.

3. Take a day long silent retreat in you home -- no email, no phones, no television, just YOU.

4. Scan 2008, looking back and looking at the months ahead -- create two columns on a blank page -- one side for what's working and the other for what needs adjusting -- brainstorm on ways to make small adjustments.

5. Make time for dreaming big dreams without any requirements to act on them --- just allow a bit of space to wander in unknown territory!  Who knows where you might lead yourself.

Source: The Hudson Institute of Santa Barbara

Cycle of Renewal Reading List from the Hudson Institute

I highly recommend this reading list for making the most of each phase in the Cycle of Renewal.

PHASE ONE: GO FOR IT

Allen, David. Ready for Anything: Productivity Principles for Work and Life. NY: Viking Books, 2003.
Block, Peter. The Answer to How is Yes. SF: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2003.
Bossidy, Charan & Burck. Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done.  NY: Crown Business, 2002.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow. NY: Harper Perennial, 1990.
Loehr, Jim & Schwartz, Tony. The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Tim, Is the Key to High Performance and
Personal Renewal.  NY: Free Press, 2003.
Nash, Laura & Stevenson, Howard. Just enough: Tools for Creating Success in Your Work and Life.  NJ: Wiley Publishers, 2004.

PHASE TWO: THE DOLDRUMS
Bridges, William. The way of transition: embracing life’s most difficult moments. Boston: Perseus, 2001.
Bronson, Po. What Should I Do With My Life?  NY: Random House, 2003.
Chodrin, Pema. The Places that Scare You.  Shambala Press, 2001.
Chodrin, Pema.  When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times Shambala Press, 2000.
Viorst, Judith.  Necessary Looses.  NY: Simon and Schuster, 1998.

Thought for the Day

People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life.  I don't think that's what we're really seeking.  I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Joseph Campbell ~ from The Power of Myth

The Dark Night of the Soul

Long before the idea of "mid-life crises" became part of our modern nomenclature, there have been men and women throughout the ages who have undergone some tough, emotional and psychological-and spiritual-crises.

Sixteenth-Century Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross, called this period "the dark night of the soul." Evelyn Underhill, in her 1911 book, Mysticism, said this period of time "is a deeply human process." In this passage, Underhill describes the process:

"The self, in its necessary movement towards higher levels of reality, loses and leaves behind certain elements of its world, long loved but now outgrown: as children must make the hard transition from nursery to school. Destruction and construction here go together: the exhaustion and ruin of the illuminated consciousness is the signal for the onward movement of the self towards other centres: the feeling of deprivation and inadequacy which comes from the loss of that consciousness is an indirect stimulus to new growth. The self is being pushed into a new world where it does not feel at home; has not yet reached the point at which it enters into conscious possession of its second or adult life."
 

clipped from www.eomega.org