Category Archives: Wisdom in Action

Giving and Getting

December 22, 2008 Jim Selman

By Jim Selman | Bio

We’re in the middle of the holiday season and, from all reports, we’re buying a lot less ‘stuff’. Yet from where I am sitting, it looks like there is a lot more ‘giving’. I see and hear about more ‘charity’—from giving some paper money to the homeless man we pass everyday to my father’s adopting an out-of-work mother and three children who are members of his church community. A lot of people seem to be generally nicer to each other, which is a wonderful gift anytime.

I suppose you can attribute this kind of mood-shift to the increasingly tough times and say it is just an anomaly of people pulling together in a crisis. On the other hand, however, consider that all this “economic meltdown” news and conversation may be just symptomatic of something much deeper and profound. I think this is the ‘wake up call’ that reminds us how interconnected we all are and that none of us is going to ‘make it through’ this economic storm alone.

We’ve

Wisdom in Action

Coaching

December 15, 2008 Jim Selman

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 there were things that could be managed or taught and other things that could not be managed or taught but that could be “coached”. The difference had to do with how we observe others and ourselves and how we relate to power and responsibility.

This was a time before the concept of organizational culture had appeared in the business lexicon. I don’t think I even heard the word ‘paradigm’ until about 1980 or so. Peter Drucker was about the only popular writer on the subject of management. This was a time when people thought in terms of careers spanning a lifetime and many even expected to work for one or perhaps two companies for life. Tom Peter’s landmark book, “

Wisdom in Action

Link Up, Tune In, Co-Create

December 8, 2008 Jim Selman

By George Por | Blog of Collective Intelligence

Yes!! “Let’s clean up the mess before we die” is the most concise and energizing way to say that we got one more chance to make a difference for a better world. But how can we clean up, in the next few decades, a “mess” produced by the millennia of scarcity, humans treating one another less than equals, unnecessary suffering caused by unwise social systems?

Whether we can or can’t, our best bet is in recognizing that the job of evolutionary janitors is not ours alone. It’s only the multigenerational alliances of pioneers of the change that we need, which will have all the collective intelligence, wisdom, and passion needed to clean up the mess.

What occurred to me is that when I was younger, my ‘work’ or the cause I was working for was something that I was attached to. I mean ‘attached to’

Wisdom in Action

Multi-Generational Collaboration: Shaping Tomorrow, Together III

December 2, 2008 Jim Selman

By Juanita Brown, David Isaacs and Samantha Tan | World Cafe website

Reprinted with kind permission from "Changing the World Together", Spring/Summer 2008 Kosmos Journal
PO Box 2102
Lenox, MA 01240. Subscriptions

Juanita
Brown and David Isaacs are co-founders of the World Café, an innovative
approach to large group dialogue being used across sectors on six
continents. Their award-winning book, The World Café: Shaping our
Futures Through Conversations

Wisdom in Action

Connecting Our Conversations

December 1, 2008 Jim Selman

By Jim Selman | Bio

I came across an article on Becoming Wiser Together by an old acquaintance of mine, George Por, in Kosmos Journal in which he was talking about the idea ‘that the future is already here’ but that we have different sensibilities and awareness of what it is and the possibilities it brings. George has been working for decades on the idea of what some of us might

Wisdom in Action

How Can They Do That…?!

November 28, 2008 Jim Selman

By Jim Selman | Bio

I got another shot of what has been a curiosity to me for a long time: the growing practice of ‘texting’. This practice was highlighted for me when I read that Barack Obama has to kick his Blackberry habit in his new job and again when I was at the theater earlier this week with an audience of mostly 20 and 30-year-olds. Both before the curtain and at the intermission, I counted about 30 folks fixated on their ‘mobile communication devices’. Several were even covertly ‘peeking’ during the performance.

I don’t think I am a Luddite, yet somehow this seemed to me to be not only rude, but also a bit ludicrous. I watched myself falling into a kind of judgmental ‘old person’s’ conversation along the lines of “Don’t these kids know that they are missing the point of going out for a pleasant evening…blah blah blah.” I clearly had a point of view based on my experience of growing up and was looking down my nose at this new practice in much the same way my father probably

Wisdom in Action

Multi-Generational Collaboration: Shaping Tomorrow, Together II

November 27, 2008 Jim Selman

By Juanita Brown, David Isaacs and Samantha Tan | World Cafe website

Reprinted with kind permission from "Changing the World Together", Spring/Summer 2008 Kosmos Journal
PO Box 2102
Lenox, MA 01240. Subscriptions

Wisdom in Action

Multi-Generational Collaboration: Shaping Tomorrow, Together

November 25, 2008 Jim Selman

By Juanita Brown, David Isaacs and Samantha Tan | World Cafe website

Reprinted with kind permission from "Changing the World Together", Spring/Summer 2008 Kosmos Journal
PO Box 2102
Lenox, MA 01240. Subscriptions

Juanita Brown and David Isaacs are co-founders of the World Café, an innovative approach to large group dialogue being used across sectors on six continents. Their award-winning book, The World Café: Shaping our Futures Through Conversations that Matter,

Wisdom in Action

Elder, Elderly and Eldering

November 20, 2008 Jim Selman

By Jim Selman | Bio

I read a nice piece called Welcoming the Approach of the Golden Years by Gary Westover talking about his growing awareness that he has a choice about how he grows older. He can follow the path of his parents and others and deteriorate each year until finally succumbing to dementia or worse. Or he realizes he can see that it is his attitudes and expectations that create the future he is living into and he can look forward to a continually expanding and rewarding experience of living. How we age is a choice and a commitment, it is not a given. He is realizing the difference between being an elder and becoming elderly.

We have added a third distinction called ‘eldering’. Some people love the term and others say it reminds them of the fact that they are getting ‘old’ and with that thought comes the fear of being elderly. This is why there is so much resistance to growing old and people trying to hang onto their youth just a little longer. Eldering is our term for the question of ‘how to’ live to the fullest after retirement and as we enter the last third of life. Eldering is wisdom

Wisdom in Action

Passion and Purpose II

November 14, 2008 Jim Selman

By Jim Selman | Bio

I’ve been thinking about why I’m not generating the kind of passion and purpose that I have had in the past. What occurred to me is that when I was younger, my ‘work’ or the cause I was working for was something that I was attached to. I mean ‘attached to’ in the sense that my point of view at the time seemed to be ‘the’ way or ‘the’ truth and, with all the energy and confidence of youth, I charged the barricades and felt empowered and inspired by