By Ana Lepri
There is a humorous 1-1/2 minute video called Masi, Me Tiro which is winning awards around the world. It has inspired me to reflect on how we listen to others. The characters demonstrate that our listening is often filtered through our personal judgments and preconceptions of others. This filtering limits our ability to listen. We find ourselves reacting to what’s being said and to who we think they are
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
By Shae Hadden | Bio
Traditionally, a generation was defined as the time between the birth
of parents and the birth of their offspring (about 30 years). Recently,
however, a more accurate definition would be a group of people born and
shaped by a particular span of time. The eras of Generations X, Y and Z
span much less than two decades each. And every generation experiences
life from a different perspective including changing societal values,
technologies and
By Charles E. Smith | Bio
Of great influence in my thinking has been The Urban Shaman
by Serge Kahlili King. One of his assertions was that “energy flows
where the attention goes.” My work was always shaped by where the CEO
or the leader was putting his or her attention. My life is shaped by
where I’m putting
I went to an interesting exhibition called “Babylon” at the Louvre* over the weekend. A lot of the explanations were in French, so I am sure I missed a lot of the factual history. What was clear was the mythology surrounding the Tower of Babel that God supposedly destroyed when the civilization became too decadent. As I recall, this account heralds the beginning of disparate languages and the considerable miscommunication that has been going on between human beings every since.
We’ve been
There is value in distinguishing ‘politically correct’ ways to speak about people who might otherwise be ignored in our collective ‘blind spot’. Such speaking can highlight inequity and discrimination and raise our awareness of those areas where our actions and our values don’t line up—where we aren’t walking our talk!
I also think there are areas where nitpicking labels can be overdone and even undermine the point that needs to be made. It’s one thing to eliminate sloppy and pejorative
Most of the attempts to categorize people who are older (“temporally
challenged”, seniors, golden oldies and so forth) are usually attempts
to find a label to make a state or condition that most people relate to
as ‘negative’ seem nicer. Ronni Bennett has some interesting thoughts about language
and how our labels often reveal a lot about how we observe and relate
to others and the world in general. I agree with her that most of it is
nonsense, and I like the term Elder.
When
talk