3Q Leadership™ Blog

Look Within – You Are The Secret

June 22, 2011/1 Comment/in 3Q Personal Development, Happiness/by Irene Becker

LOOK WITHIN

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We have a world full of knowledge, full of information but we have lost our human connection, the social and spiritual connection that we need. Intensity grows out of intimacy. Intimacy starts with validation.

Joy starts with each one of us opening our heads and our hearts to what can be in our lives, in our work, in our world. If not now, when?

Most of us wonder why the populations in the world who seem to have the greatest mobility and most material possessions are suffering from the yoke of despair and depression. If you wonder what lack of joy is doing to your life, ask yourself how many times you shared laughter today, or really felt a sense of deep accomplishment and meaning.

What is drying up our joy? There are many things, but one of the greatest joy busters is invalidation. Why invalidation? Because, we are human beings not human doings. We need to be independent and interdependent. We need to feel a sense of love and of contribution. If either are missing we are sad, we are defeated we are joyless.

Invalidation is to reject, ignore, mock, tease, judge, control or diminish someone’s feelings. Constant invalidation may be one of the most significant reasons a person with high innate emotional intelligence suffers from unmet emotional needs later in life. A sensitive child who is repeatedly invalidated becomes confused and begins to distrust his own emotions. He fails to develop confidence in and healthy use of his emotional brain– one of nature’s most basic survival tools. To adapt to this unhealthy and dysfunctional environment, the working relationship between his thoughts and feelings becomes twisted. His emotional responses, emotional management, and emotional development will likely be seriously, and perhaps permanently, impaired. The emotional processes which worked for him as a child may begin to work against him as an adult.

A post Korean war study was done by Major William E. Mayer, the army’s chief psychiatrist. of 1,000 POWS who had been in North Korean prisoner of war camps. The POW’s were not subject to physical torture, rather they were subject to constant negativity, to invalidation that resulted in a 38% POW death rate the highest in US history. Invalidation kills and is one of the most lethal forms of emotional abuse. It kills confidence, creativity, individuality….and if we do not find a way to re-validate our individual and collective lives and to connect with our humanity it will slowly erode all that we have built into a tower of sand.

The solution that we seek in our lives, in our work and in our world does not lie outside us but within us. We each have the power to move past invalidation by igniting the power of our heart to touch our mind and infuse our life and the lives of others with validation and joy.

All the major religions and philosophies speak to a universal code of morals and ethics, a platform of vision and value. This week I would like to share one with you from the Hindu tradition, as it has a timeless message that speaks to us all.

AN ANCIENT HINDU LEGEND

There is an ancient Hindu legend told in India.

There was a time when all men were gods. But they so abused their divinity that Brahma, the supreme creator, decided to deprive them of their divine power, and hide it in a place where it would be impossible to find. The problem was to find a suitable hiding place.

When the minor gods were called upon to a meeting to resolve the problem, they made the following proposition: Hide the power of divinity somewhere in the earth and find it. But Brahma refused, saying, “No it is too easy. Someone will dig into the earth and find it.”

So the gods replied, “In that case, hid it in the depts. of the ocean.”

But Brahma refused once again, saying, “No because sooner or later people will explore all the regions of the ocean. They will surely find it and bring it back to the surface.”

So the gods concluded that they were not able to find a place on land or in the sea where the power of divinity would be safe from man.

Then Brahman said, “Here’s what we will do with the power of divinity; we’ll hide it in the very depths of man himself, because that is the only place he will never think of looking.”

Since that time many has explored the surface of the earth and the oceans depths looking for something that can be found only in himself.”

Joy starts with each one of us opening our heads and our hearts to what can be in our lives, in our work, in our world. If not now, when?

Best and Worst of Times

June 22, 2011/0 Comments/in 3Q Personal Development/by Irene Becker

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The Best and Worst of Times by Irene Becker

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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all doing direct the other way.” Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

It is indeed the best and worst of times. A passage in A Tale of Two Cities, written almost 150 years ago, describes our world today. We have come so far in so many ways, and yet we are ironically on the same page. None of was conceived alone, born alone, nor can we survive and thrive without one another. The human journey has been a winding road, an unfolding movie of the greatest triumph and the most heartbreaking sorrow. We have created, we have destroyed, and somehow we have survived and continued an evolutionary path to greater knowledge than ever before.

Knowledge, science and technology have brought us to the edge of a glass cliff. An exciting, but dangerous place. A different place. As we stand individually and collectively on the glass cliff we are on the cusp of either the greatest economic and social reform ever, or at the decent into the abyss of chaos. It is here. It is now. It is real. Everything is different and will continue to change. What remains the same is the fact that the greatest resource that we have is human capital, and the only way to use our greatest resource is to turn our headlights and our heart lights on.

Quantum physics tells us that a butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo has an effect on the weather pattern in Los Angeles. We may feel that we are insignificant in the greater picture, but if the butterfly has a critical role to play, we too can effect changes every day, every way. Changes that start with how we choose to think act and be. Positive changes that will only be realized when we make a decision, a choice to learn to let go of the ugly side of ego, selfishness and malice that blocks our minds and our hearts and allows us to forget that each one of us is an important link in the greater chain of humankind.

We have the choice every moment of our life to reclaim our power, power that we can only directed and diffused when we make an effort to move past the opaque shield of selfishness, greed, anger and malice that clouds our true power to create value in our life and in the lives of others.

Organizations will have to engage and inspire the human capital they rely on, and we will each have to inspire each other to embrace positive change, to reclaim that power that each of us has to choose to make our best choices every day. The problems and challenges that we face are not due to a lack of knowledge. They are due to a lack of heart. If we continue to make the wrong individual and collective choices, if we continue to act and react with egos that have run wild and consume everything in their path; we will not only fail to create the best of times, but we risk falling into an abyss of chaos from which we may not emerge. If we destroy our fellow human beings and our planet, if we fall into the abyss of destruction it will not be because technology or science let us down. It will be because we let each other down. We each share the air we breathe and the planet that we live on. While we live with a fierce illusion of proprietary rights, we all know that in the end there is no ownership. All that we have in the material world leaves us when we leave this earth.

We have the power to reach past what was and to create what will be. We can seize the present moment, the present tense to affect the best of times for ourselves, our children, our families and our fellow human beings. The best of times means that our basic survival needs are met, and that these needs become the basic right of each human being. The best of times means that we stop killing each other and the planet that we live on and start working together for the greater good of all.

It is time to grow our hearts the way we have grown our collective body of knowledge and intelligence. It is time to stop looking at the differences between us and embrace each other as sisters and brothers in the human chain. Each link is important, each moment cannot be replaced.

If you want to see a positive difference, decide to begin again now. Decide to be the difference. Realize that we are all interconnected, and the little ripple that you make by offering peace and goodwill to another person, to as many people as you can will empower you and others open their hearts and their arms in peace and goodwill to their fellow man. The time is now. Carpe diem

Let Go Of Your Inner Critic

June 22, 2011/0 Comments/in 3Q Personal Development, Cool Tools & Tips, Happiness/by Irene Becker

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LET GO OF YOUR INNER CRITIC

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Our inner critic is the internal voice of negative judgmental self talk. It is the nagging feeling, the inner voice that makes us critical of ourselves and others. It is postulated that our inner critic developed early in life as a mechanism for reminding us of childhood rules and standards that we internalized about how we were supposed to think, feel and behave. We learn to be critical of ourselves as we learn to march to the drummer of others wants and needs, we learn to be critical of others when they do not conform to what we want or expect.

The inner critic speaks loudly in judgment of ourselves and other people. It is a voice that yearns to castigate. It is the voice of enslavement to our egos and to the wants of others. Sometimes our inner critic will leave us with feelings of self doubt; sometimes it will allow us to feel negative and critical of others. When we listen to our inner critic, we listen to negativity that separates us from our best self and also from others.

Our best personal and professional selves come from a place of self love and acceptance. When we can truly love and accept ourselves we can also see those in our world as collaborators on our path of personal learning. Love is a path which brings us closer to the seed of creation and to a place where we can grow, learn and to share joy with others. We are all partners on a human journey, and the greatest challenge in our roadmap to personal and professional success is to cleave to our humanity, to the values of sharing and caring that make us brothers and sisters on the road of life.

Take a day this week to stomp out the voice of your inner critic; to free yourself from self imposed negativity and judgment. Silence all criticism and negativity for 24 hours. Concentrate only on the good in yourself and in others that you meet and interact with. Give the inner critic a day off, and in so doing spend a day with your highest, greatest and best self.