By Jim Selman | Bio
It seems to me that there are three fundamental relationships that we all share as human beings: 1) our relationship with ourselves and other people, 2) our relationship with our circumstances, and 3) our relationship with time. When we are inflexible or stuck in habitual ways of being in any of these areas, we become trapped in a condition from which we cannot extract ourselves: we are caught in a
Tag Archives: transformation
The Future Habit
By Jim Selman | Bio
It is almost impossible to turn on the television or read a newspaper or a magazine without encountering one pundit, expert or “man on the street” either talking about the future or trying to blame someone for something. Our media commentary is rarely about what is happening now: mostly it’s about what happened in the past or what someone thinks is going to happen in the future. Combine the establishment media with all of the blogging and chatting going on, and it is incredible
Giving Up ‘Giving Up’
By Jim Selman | Bio
My partner and I were recently enjoying one of those lazy weekend mornings just chatting about life in general when we got onto the subject of getting older and how we feel about it all. I made the point that my passion and The Eldering Institute® is about transforming our culture’s view of aging and teaching people that we can change how we relate to the future—and, as a consequence, we can have more choices, more possibility and more ‘aliveness’
“Only God Can Save Us”
By Jim Selman | Bio
It was said that the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s last words were “Only God can save us.” He was, perhaps, one of the deeper thinkers (at least in modern times) on the question of who we are and what is really going on. As far as I know, he wasn’t religious. So what he meant by these words, if indeed he said them, is open to question.
My view is that he was talking about the fact that all human beings live in interpretations of “reality”—cultural and linguistic
Between Trapezes
By Jim Selman | Bio
I think there is a time when we realize that ‘what got us here’ isn’t sufficient to get us ‘where we want to go’. These times are the transition points in life, the points where we have an opportunity to make major choices and embark on a new phase of our lives—to experience a transformation in how we observe and relate to ourselves, other people and the world in general. I can recall having this feeling when I left home for college, again when I got married, when my children were born and at various times when I changed the direction of my career.I think most of us face the hard questions about who we are and what our life is about when we retire. I don’t think you need a special occasion, however, to experience a transformation. A transformational moment can happen anytime we realize that we have a choice we didn’t know we had. These moments often come as a surprise, and are often accompanied with a rush of excitement combined with a touch of terror.
Transformational moments are like swinging between two trapezes:
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
Africa
By Jim Selman | Bio
I am getting ready to fulfill one of my dreams. I have always wanted to go to Africa, but for one reason or another it was always too expensive, too far away or the opportunity just didn’t click at the right time. In March, I will be going and I am both excited and a little anxious since I am not quite sure what to expect. As I watch myself preparing, I realize that the best part of getting ready is that I don’t know what to expect—and that is the good news.
Giving and Getting
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
Coaching
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, “
Learning to Be an Elder
By Jim Selman | Bio
One
of my friends who is about my age has been in a period of deep
reflection and growth. He recently shared that he was moving into a new
space of awareness analogous to the transition from adolescence to
adulthood. He said he was becoming profoundly aware that he has
something valuable to say and that part of his growing older is coming
face to face with becoming responsible for creating a new
‘presentation’ in the world. He struggled