Tag Archives: commitment

Fearless Aging

An Abundance of Choices

By Jim Selman | Bio

There are increasing numbers of theories and formulas for aging well. As far as I can tell, these fall into a number of categories that pretty much all revolve around the central question of “What do you want to do?”  This is not a question that my grandparents spent much time thinking about. Even my father’s generation is more focused on the question of what needs to be done.  The question of  “What do you want to do?” is a modern question that comes with the fact that we have so many choices coupled with a somewhat self-centered fixation on ourselves as individuals—the ‘me’ generation. I know very few people who aren’t working on this question.

For example, consider that in the area of health and fitness alone there are hundreds of diets, exercise regimens, spas, and new age therapies (not to mention the entire medical establishment). How do we know what will be best for us? When you don’t know what to do, you can always hire a coach. The same abundance of options appear in the areas of where we live and our lifestyle. Do you want mountains, seashore, urban landscape? Even on a daily basis, we are confronted with

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Wisdom in Action

Eldering and Volunteering

By Jim Selman | Bio

Tough times can bring out the best in people. In these days of financial, environmental and social challenges, more and more of us are stepping forward and asking “What can I do?” Wherever we look, people and organizations are taking on problems and working hard to create a better world. Older people are volunteering more that ever. From an eldering perspective, they want a chance to make a difference.

People have an extraordinary capacity to go beyond what is reasonable

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Leadership

G-20, Gee Whiz

By Jim Selman | Bio

I am not an economist and I don’t know what to think about all the ‘unprecedented’ claims coming from the joint communiqué of the G-20 summit. I hope it works. But, hey, a trillion isn’t what it used to be! As a guy who has been around enough to be a little bit wary of political claims of bright horizons, I wonder if the world’s leaders are really united to correct past excesses and grease the financial system enough to restore confidence in the future.

After all, isn’t that what this is really about? I don’t mean just the repairing all the economic machinery, but ordinary people’s confidence in the future? Can our kids look forward to having children of their own with some expectation that they can raise them in a manner that is reasonably close to how they were raised? If we believe the pundits, the prospects are grim.  President Obama is doing his usual eloquent job of trying to be straight with the electorate

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Fearless Aging

Nothing to Fear

By Jim Selman | Bio

To continue our discussion about fear and how to master it…. There are distinctions between coping with fear, transcending fear and transforming fear. Coping is our normal relationship with just about everything in our contemporary world. Our relationship to circumstances is that ‘the world’ is real and, more or less, whatever we think it is. We interact with our circumstances based on our point of view, and our actions reinforce our point of view. The result

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Fearless Aging

Fear and Risk

By Jim Selman | Bio

Our relationship to risk and our fears is closely related. Most of our lives we’ve made decisions based on some formal or informal process for assessing ‘risk’. In our conventional way of thinking, this means trying to predict what will or will not happen and with what probabilities based on some scenario or course of action. It is a ‘forward looking’ posture and, as with all predictions, draws on historical data or experience and projects it into the future. In other words, we take our past, project it into the future and then make our choices and commitments based on what our predictions (the past) tell us will probably happen.

Anyone who is even mildly
paying attention can easily grasp that the predictions are wrong more
often than they are right. Particularly now, when the world is changing
around us so rapidly, we can no longer rely on this mode of
decision-making. At best, we maintain the status quo and, more often
than not, we are completely blindsided by something unexpected that
wasn’t taken into account when we were assessing risk and making our
decisions.

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Leadership

Being My Word

By Jim Selman | Bio

I was working with a group of people last week in Mexico. The session was about planning and they chose as their theme for the year “I am my word”. The idea was to emphasize ‘count-on-ability’ and the importance of delivering on plans. I spoke to them for a bit and shared the following reflections.

My work is about ‘Being’. It is an inquiry into who we are as human beings that is grounded in a great deal of theory, practice, rigorous philosophy, biology and more recently in some of the implications of what we’re learning from quantum physics. This ‘ontological paradigm’ claims that whatever ‘reality is’ (including who we are) is a matter of interpretation—and all interpretations occur in language. Language is to us what water is to a fish. It is the medium

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Wisdom in Action

What are you being counted on for?

By Jim Selman | Bio

Russell Bishop’s posting about ‘The Blame Game’ is right on the money. He uses the term “responsibility” as meaning the ability to respond —literally “response – ability”. I share his definition and am always asking people to see that responsibility has nothing to do with causality (as in who did it or who will do it). Responsibility is a relationship to the circumstances, a way of being—a declaration that we always have a choice. Anything we’re not responsible for, we are a victim of.

But there is another term we sometimes confuse with responsibility and it can be an enormous source of mischief in most situations. The term is accountability. Now this word is also often misunderstood as someone’s job description or duty. I prefer to think of it as ‘count-on-ability’, the ability to be counted on for something. We can be responsible for all of it, but we still need to divide the work to be done and count on each other to deliver on what we promise.

The

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Fearless Aging

Worrying

By Shae Hadden | Bio

It’s difficult these days to not worry about something—what with the economic crisis, pollution, climate change, species extinction, resource depletion and the melting polar ice caps, not to mention the innumerable human conflicts on the planet. Many of our conversations revolve around one or another of these topics, or at least are impacted by the larger global issues we all are facing. And much of what I’m hearing in what people are saying is that they are ‘worried’

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Fearless Aging

New Year’s Resolutions

By Jim Selman | Bio

It seems to me that I have been making New Year’s Resolutions most of my life. Like many, I have also been well intended and even ‘in action’ for awhile each year before my list fades into the background; habit or comfort or rationalization takes over and I once again ‘forget’ my annual commitments to personal betterment for another year. At my age I wonder why I even bother to make the list.

I found some of my old ‘resolutions’ from about 2001 the other day. As usual my ‘good intentions’ included weight loss, learning a new language, playing the guitar, exercise, more discipline about writing, a financial goal and some odds and ends related to recreation, meditation and taking more time to just read and relax. It wasn’t a lot different than the proclamations I made in college.

The irony is that, in spite of mostly failing to keep my New Year’s resolutions,

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Personal Empowerment

Resignation

By Jim Selman | Bio

I have said many times that I view one of the biggest threats to our way of life (and at least the medium-term future) is widespread and institutionalized =&0=&. Resignation is a mood that most of us have experienced and many are experiencing today. It is a worldview devoid of possibility. It is the perspective that ‘nothing can be done’ and ‘nothing will really make a difference’. It is giving up, but in a way that justifies and rationalizes that giving up is the rational and reasonable thing to do. The benefit of resignation is that we can stop thinking or struggling.

There is a difference between true ‘acceptance of those things I cannot change’ and resignation. Resignation is not a choice; it is a succumbing to the circumstances and buying into a ‘no possibility’ scenario. I was sitting next to a man last week from Mexico discussing the Mexican government’s campaign against drug cartels. He assured me that all the effort and all the lives that have been lost are meaningless and that corruption and organized crime are a permanent

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