FootprintsintheWind.com

For our pluralistic world, where each person is a leader in some aspect of our world, the leadership skill of the 21st century is hosting: inviting the very best of each person. Practice inviting and leading when invited.

:- Doug.

What we can best do for these leaders is not stuff more in their heads but activate their hearts. Even more touch them in their gut, free them to be who they are in their essence and spirit. That we do best not by lecture but by invitation.

:- Doug.

It’s not about money, it’s about conversation because conversation is how we create worlds.

:- Doug.

Are you going to offer these exceptional persons a standard fare of one speech after another (where they hope to come away with one or two good ideas), or give them an opportunity to get work done and make actual connections they can use as a running start back home? Just another conference or make a difference?

:- Doug.

The *only* way to cover all these topics and the 197 truly burning questions these persons are facing in their viscera, and to help them recognize their own resourcefulness, is to challenge them to set their own agenda.

:- Doug.

You have questions and you are already processing them. The time for teaching and filling is soon past—the time for being heard and trying out new voices is upon us. Let us open our ears—and hearts—to ourselves.

:- Doug.

What are you doing? Loving. All times, all ways, all actions: loving.

:- Doug.

We humans are related to one another: we carry each other back together. We carry each other in heart and in action; we bear the seed from our fathers and mothers to our children. We may be simply the conduit for the carrying and bearing, and that may be to say, we are the loving.

:- Doug.

You are the lake; I am immersed; we are together.

:- Doug.

Father implies some relation, some symbiosis.

:- Doug.

Are You and I immersed together as in a clear lake? Are we symbiotic, attached, together?

:- Doug.

If we did things to save taxes we may no longer need those things. This is true these days of estate and inheritance taxes. It is sometimes more true as we grow in age.

:- Doug.

I live in a world of words: of things I think are before me; of actions and movement I think are happening before me. I do my work by moving words around, reorganizing them. I do my work by conversation, some little of it with words and movement.

:- Doug.

Give us conversations whole-finding.

:- Doug.

Maybe there comes a time when the books are no longer efficient means of developing one’s work, and the road then becomes engagement, meeting, conversation, participation in the life with others: do, learn, develop.

I now disagree. Books are ways to expand our contacts, meet new people faster and deeper. But doing the work is the primary work.

:- Doug.

Tennyson Woolf writes that in his group work he works at getting people to let go of having to make a change immediately. That is a hard sell, but a good objective. We are in a too agitated state of mind and that leads to instant decisions and probably the waste that we used to say haste made. What if we reflected more? Would we really be eaten by our competitors? Are they really someone with whom we war, or are they fellow humans who love and deserve to eat? And do we deserve more than we can use when other humans are starving? What are we about?

:- Doug.

What is good? Can we invent more?

:- Doug.

Seeing is an intermediate step to seeing. We see a rainbow. We see a pot of gold, a promise, a loving. Again we see sunlight and water droplets and prism effects. Again we see beauty and colors and colors blending into invisibility. Again we see…. Seeing is an intermediate step to naming, and naming can be an intermediate step to seeing more…if we keep our feet moving.

:- Doug.

What we see enables us to say and to do and to see…again.

:- Doug.

How could we make and take and partake the world of aging for good?

:- Doug.

The idea that we participate in our world and can make of it what we may, and that we can be conscious and on purpose about this activity is evocative for me. It calls out for work on the idea itself and on what we might do with it.

The idea itself: How might we invite others to take part? What might be the methods of participation we could develop, invent?

What we might do with it: What are the activities of humankind that could be advanced? Conversation. Collaboration. Working for good of others (altruism and its science of compassion).

This barely touches these subjects. How might we drill deeper, chance upon cooler waters?

Friend, into our purposeful cooler waters!

:- Doug.

What can we make of the treasures, promises, and possibilities of our aging?

:- Doug.

What is the advancing work and worth of our years?

:- Doug.