REIMAGINING OURSELVES

Reimagining Ourselves

SALUTATION: 

Greetings New Friends,

In this living loving moment, I invite you to center yourselves in the spirit of an open and shared learning experience. Let us enter together into the realm of a calm, quiet, and open mind.

Please! Harness your mental and emotional energies to complement our time together. Calm your breath. Calm your thoughts. Let us be gardens where ideas form, grow, and flow like the sound of flowers.

Thank you.

It is my esteemed and honored pleasure to share with you some information assets to your unfolding present and your future. As leading thinkers, producers, and authors of our shared now and our shared tomorrows, the moral imperative demands the engagement of dedicating yourselves to the brilliant ideas that will arrive from the fertile soil of your minds. These jeweled illuminations will reveal how you shall contribute to making the world a better place and more secure place through the development of products, services, and environments that cure and heal the ills of planetary life on Earth.

Our shared world awaits the realization of your aspirations, inspirations, and illuminations to re-energize humanity to see beyond the life-threatening trials of now to a new and empowered tomorrow. Inside you are the answers to educate and inform, cure disease, eliminate poverty, enhance health and health care, end homelessness, employ thousands, and meet the needs of growing populations to live in loving peace, productivity, and prosperity. You, each and all of you are urgently necessary.

I want to take a moment to honor the inspiration for this presentation and thank Dr. Shubhi Lall Agarwal, the director of the Internal Quality Assurance Cell for the Atharva Institute of Management Studies in Mumbai, India. She has earned an Executive MBA in Business Analytics and a Ph.d. in Artificial Intelligence. She is fully invested in people and the planet. It was my privilege to be an international guest for her world outreach Live Facebook IT Talks with graduate student, Mr. Shivang Sharma.

It is my high hope to share with you a few thoughts that might help you become the best person you can be as a leader, innovator, and creator in the local and global village marketplace. Our world desperately needs mega doses of the contributions of the spiritually gifted, scientifically skilled, and technologically talented.

Philosopher, Essayist, Poet, and Novelist, George Santayana from Spain left humanity with this comment from his work, the Life of Reason in 1905. He said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Santayana’s words serve as the official launching moment of my time with you.

Everywhere on Earth, there are wars or rumblings of war at the micro and macro levels. At the micro-level, individuals experience internal conflict with themselves and others. Diametrically opposed forces seek to resolve the human condition by seeking the dominance of reciprocal order, the yin and the yang energies. The impulses of our base behaviors and our higher initiatives, our pluses and our minuses war with each other for dominance and control.

It is the same at the macro level. Nations war with each other for power and control. We fight over territory, religion, economics, and politics over who should be boss. World powers like China, Russia, and the U.S. seek to dominate world markets through the strategic implementation of military, political, and economic forces to influence and control the destiny of the entire Earth.

In the next 100 years, I believe that you, the people of India will rise to lead on the world stage. You will rise like cream because you will have internally managed the comprehensive development in all life sectors of the people of your nation. You will be the model for how to eliminate barriers that kept the people from flourishing. You are the plants growing from the seeds of greatness now ready to create and cultivate that future. 

To create this future is going to require a commitment to ideas that serve the many without neglecting the few. I call it REIMAGINING OURSELVES. We will examine four areas:

Authenticity

Value

Collaboration

Life-Long Learning

We are currently where we are because we have imagined it so. If our collective humanity is happy with current world conditions of sickness, disease, poverty, conflict, illiteracy, and power in the hands of the wealthy few, we have but to continue current trends of individual and collective behavior. If, on the other hand, we possess the desire to build a better world by becoming better individuals and better nations of people across the global community, this accomplishment results from building on the foundation of the past instead of trying to revise the past in our self-interests. I want you to know this. People that live in the past get left behind.

REIMAGINING OURSELVES requires a retooling of our thinking and our raison d’etre, our reason for being. Doing so requires a four-pillared platform to individual and collective productivity focused on revising the future, not the past. The four pillars are authenticity, value, building, and learning.

Pillar Number One – Authenticity

To be our authentic selves requires intense self–examination to know ourselves as completely as possible. We must ask ourselves, am I, are we pursuing education to make money or to make a difference in our lives, in the lives of others, and the world? 

Am I following the program of tradition and conformity handed down to me by the expectation of others; family, community, culture, and state? Or, am I, are we following the leading of our minds, our hearts, our natural gifts, skills, and talents to the path that best serves humanity to build a world community living out their faith values of respect and mutual empowerment.

Please allow me to be clear. There is nothing wrong with following the dictates of tradition and conformity over the calling of our souls, hearts, and minds. However, there are associated costs and consequences. The costs require the denial of why you are and who you are.

This denial of your/our/my authentic expression could mean the difference between the cures for disease, a more just economy, a more peaceful world, or a more enlightened spiritual insight. Taking on the influence of others denies the world of your /our/my gifts and potential contributions.

You/we have not come here to be like everybody else. To try to be someone else it is to volunteer to be a slave. No vacancies exist to fill that position. You are here to do what no other person on Planet Earth can do. That job is to be the authentic you. I hope you will take moments to ponder this consideration. Only you can be your authentic self to bring to the world what you are present to bring.

Pillar Number Two – Value

REIMAGINING OURSELVES requires us to know our value. If we are units of spiritual currency, we are limited to the reach of one spiritual unit of currency. Where you, your currency, or your value is missing, contribution to the development of yourself and others has no opportunity to happen.

Individuals and groups clearly aware of themselves and their values possess clarity. Clarity reveals the power and opportunity to pursue the vision that contributes to personal development and be available to assist in the personal development of others. Individuals and groups unclear and unaware of their value have no such opportunity but the opportunity for the exploitation of others who will dictate their value to them. DO NOT allow this to happen to you. I REPEAT. DO NOT ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN TO YOU.

We must know our value and our values, behaviors that are acceptable to us. We must know what is important to us and what we are willing to give of ourselves and our energies to create, build, and produce. You must know what you will do and what you are willing to do. You must also know what you will not be influenced by others to do and what you are not willing to be influenced to do.

Remember this. Richard Grote of Dallas Performance Systems taught that people take you at the value you place on yourself. Respect yourself and your value and others will respect you at the level of value you place on yourself. Demonstrate no respect for yourself and you train others to treat you with disrespect because they learned it from you.

Pillar Number Three – Collaboration

REIMAGINING OURSELVES to revise the future is not an accomplishment achieved alone or in isolation. Creating and building vision demands leaders skilled in human relations expertise and collaboration. These prerequisite skills precipitate the building of power, the ability to act in our self-interest.

Let us use currency as an example of value. I am in possession of $7,250,000. What I possess falls short of the $72,500,000 I need to bring an invention or product to the market.

What do I do? What are my options? I can give up on my vision. I can feel sorry for myself and disappear into the shadows. I can wallow in my sadness and become depressed and dysfunctional.

Or, I can choose to exercise another option. I can develop a plan to invite the public, and potential investors to join me at a public or private event to hear my vision. Organized people and organized money yield power to take action. A compelling vision and a competent and compelling strategy presented with an abundance of passion will attract people that share your self-interest and the money you need to fund your vision.

During the time between being prepared to host your event and the date of your event, it is time to make some new friends and build some new relationships. Allow your energy to become viral in every place you have people’s attention for a moment.

Milo O. Frank’s work, How to Get Your Point Across in the 30 Seconds or Less is an invaluable tool. It requires work but you can distill your message into an exciting filled with enthusiasm 30-second marketing message.

Many know this as the elevator pitch. When you have but moments to communicate, you must make everyone count. Write it. Record it. Practice it. Put it on the back of your business card. Miss no opportunity to share who you are and what you are doing.

 When your big moment comes, it is your moment to shine. Help people know you and how your heart burns to fulfill your vision while creating opportunities for others to share and profit. This is what leaders do. Leaders are high-energy beings that have seen a product or service that will bring value to the lives of many. By doing this, leaders help people share ownership of their vision.

Pitching to 100 or 1000 increases the probability you meet new people, make new friends, and build new relationships with people that catch your vision and share your interests. These will invest in your idea even if they have to do it in groups.

Please be ready, they are going to want to negotiate in their self-interests to help you achieve yours.

Collaboration with others and sharing your self-interests provide a critical element to the growth, development, and successful productivity of self, family, community, organizations, business, and institutions. A skilled human relations tactical strategy proves invaluable.

Pillar Number Four - Life-Long Learning

Information like food requires regular consumption. We can never arrive at a place where we think we know enough. That will make us complacent and place us in danger of becoming redundant and left behind. It will not feel good to realize that our product or service has become irrelevant.

Spencer Johnson’s work of September 1998, Who Moved My Cheese illustrates this perfectly. Two mice held a monopoly on the cheese mining industry. They had been cheese miners all their lives and had taken for granted that their cheese mine would always be viable, able to produce wealth and plenty for them, and all they provided income-generating service opportunities.

The unimaginable happened one day when they went to work in the cheese mines and discovered there was no more cheese. They became confused and angry. They had not planned for or maintained storehouses of cheese to lean on in hard times.

They returned home cursing and complaining about an unknown someone that had taken their cheese and whoever took their cheese had better bring it back. When the news went viral, their families and workers were unhappy with them.

Days and months passed. They continued to go to work. They continued to find no cheese. Every day on the way home, they curse and complained.  

One of the mice decided he was not going to work anymore. Whoever took their cheese would have to bring it back.  He decided to pout, quit, sit, and wait.

His partner decided to he would look for cheese in other places. For the first few weeks, he found nothing but continued to venture out until he noticed a trail of small pieces of cheese.

He picked up all he could carry home and was a welcome hero to many. He told his friend where he had found cheese and he would continue to go there. His friend was unrelenting. He would just continue his pout of sit and wait.

One mouse prospered. One did not. The moral of this story is that we cannot sit comfortably on our accomplishments. The moment we do, catastrophic events can occur and leave us challenged with suffering lack.

Lifelong learning is required of leaders who will make a valuable contribution to the development of our world. Information may be evergreen but it can lose application, viability, and market share through simple influences in the market, like a recession or a pandemic. Our world, like ourselves, is strong and resilient, yet fragile.

Global warming is the evidence. Natural disasters are unrelenting. Where one part of the world suffers a lack of rain, other parts of the world flood.

IN CONCLUSION

If we are to engage the vision of REIMAGINING OURSELVES, to revise the human future, we cannot accomplish the reimagining using old formats for thinking, creating, and building. Our intense self-examination must probe deep within us to become clear about who we are, what we want, and why we want what we want if we are to become our authentic selves. Otherwise, we will be repeats of the past. Our world has had enough of that.

We must know our value and that our contribution to making the world a better place is invaluable. People will treat us with the level of respect, we provide ourselves. We must know our power and value our power.

We must become proficient practitioners of human relations expertise and collaborators with people that share our interests. This will facilitate the development of power for us to act in our interests in collaboration with others.

We must be lifelong learners. We need to keep up with our industry, service, and products continually developing them all not only to remain competitive but also to lead. When we lead and light the way, we become the paradigm shifts after which others seek to reproduce our model in their areas of specialization. Growth does not occur because things are easy but because conditions challenge our gifts, skills, and abilities. For this reason, there will need to be components of our service solely dedicated to reimagining.

REIMAGINING OURSELVES asserts to create the conditions to develop a world-class environment where poverty, illiteracy, sickness, global warming, social conflict, and war cease to exist. If our world is to need superheroes, let us reimagine them in ourselves. We must assert ourselves to this proposition if we are to revise the future in the interests of people and the planet.

Thank you.