life-stances that help you connect to others, community building, aloha
Expectations shape our lives. Expectations are the stories that we tell ourselves when we wake up in the morning and begin walking through our days and nights. They can either help provide the motivation for us to get out of bed or make us want to pull the covers back over our heads. Expectations are the stories into which we fit our actions as we move along our journeys by ourselves and with others to our own projected destinations. Not…
Another IPS (Inner Peace Symptom): a tendency to notice what you are noticing and to ask why you’re noticing it. [Sometimes you notice things that call to your heart and your heart responds by dancing. The best move then is to go do more of that dance….] Have you noticed the latest trend (especially after the pandemic lockdown) toward hugging trees, galaxy-gazing, mooning over wilderness landscapes and generally dissing our man-made constructs and urban follies? Going-Outside-with-the-capital-O has become the new…
And now…we interrupt our regular post-building for an important public service announcement: As Hawaii trudges through the COVID-19 pandemic, PBS Hawaiʻi is reaching into our vast video archive to share pearls of wisdom about living with and getting past adversity. This campaign features brief but potent manaʻo online, on social media and on-air between regular programming. The non-profit, statewide television station, with support from the Kamehameha Schools, are building what they are calling “a community resilience program.” They are calling…
I’ve got some news for you: Just because you are “eccentric” (weird, quirky, odd, freakish, peculiar, unorthodox, unconventional, different…whatever you want to call that thing you do), it does NOT necessarily mean you are a Creative. It does not indicate that you are Innovative and/or a Genius. Got some other news for you: It’s all good anyhow.
It’s a survival thing. When a person is an Outsider — someone who doesn’t “belong” to a group of one sort or another for whatever reason — there is a kind of invisible barrier that rises up between them and the people who do belong to that group. It’s a very real divide. “Same” is good, the prevailing culture code says; “different” not so much. It’s a built-in herd thing, I suppose. Every group has a culture code. Every group…
Consistently over the years, assorted research has shown that job dissatisfaction is a problem for about two-thirds of the people in America. This “disengagement” has wide-ranging effects. Gallup tells us that this job irritant issue has cost as much as $350 billion a year in “lost productivity.” (It can also suck a soul dry, and turn your life into a desert, but nobody scientific ever mentions that.)
We are walking through interesting times, we humans. The world is going through a time of rapid change on a scope that is a mind-boggle. It’s all coming at us at a furious pace as we try to get some kind of handle on it. When our only effective weapons of defense are washing our hands with soap and water, avoiding sneezing and coughing at each other, and stepping far away from one another as the complex constructs we’ve built…
18th-century British textile designer, poet, writer and socialist activist William Morris famously advised: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” It’s become a sort of go-to standard that organizers, minimalists and de-clutterers of every ilk use to look at the stuff with which we all surround ourselves. These days every time you hear that phrase, you can pretty much expect that somebody is going to try to persuade you…
Ahhhh….the “elevator pitch.” One more tool in the marketer tool-box. It says here that in order to be super-effective marketers, entrepreneurs, and hustlers-extraordinaire, it’s up to us to distill an explanation of the essence of our skills, services, goals, background, and even our very own selves into a sparkly speech that lasts anywhere from thirty seconds to two minutes. Then we ask for something.
In 2011, a video of a kid speechifying after learning to ride a bike went viral. His dad “interviewed” him after his accomplishment, asking him whether he had any “words of wisdom” for all the other kids who wanted to ride a bike.
