A couple of weeks ago I boarded a plane from London to Philadelphia and immediately sensed something weird was going on. Our flight had been delayed for hours by mechanical problems, and I expected everyone, including the crew, to be tired and grumpy. Instead, the flight attendants appeared to have been drinking some sort of love potion. They practically leaped to assist us passengers as we arrived. They smiled into our eyes, joked with us, said things like, “Honestly, if there is anything I can do to make this flight more comfortable, please please let me know!” I’ve always experienced flight attendants as [...]
Why should you care about rhinoceros tracking?
I thought you’d never ask.
At the moment I’m at a South African game park called Londolozi, running a change-your-life retreat for a few hardy souls who’ve joined me from all over the world. They’re here to find or clarify their sense of purpose, so that they can follow it with more energy and less effort. The quickest way I know of doing this is to make them track a rhinoceros.
Like finding your life’s purpose, tracking a rhino can be baffling, discouraging, frustrating, and even frightening. But precisely because it’s so difficult, it can [...]
A friend of mine recently experienced something I call a “life wallop.” You’ve probably had a few wallops in your own life: a relative you funded through rehab calls, high as a kite, asking you for bail money; an elderly parent, lost in dementia, snaps something brutally cruel; you see your ex on a date with your next door neighbor.
“I feel like a truck hit me,” said my friend. “It’s so stupid—I know I should just shrug it off, but I can barely get out of bed. I’ve been working so hard to evolve into a stronger person, and [...]
I always used to tell my clients that if they moved to a new geographic area, they could expect to feel disoriented for about a year. Well, now I’m eating those words. Because I’ve discovered something that wasn’t true when I started coaching. In the past couple of decades, we’ve ALL moved to a new place. THE SAME PLACE!
As far as houses go, I recently uprooted from the West Coast of the USA and plopped to earth “back East.” But I haven’t felt much disorientation. Why?
Because you and I are still meeting where we always have! Here!
As [...]
Most of the time we focus only on what we already believe. Fixated on these ideas, we don’t notice anything that could spark new ways of thinking. Since we evolved to be highly alert to danger and difficulty, we can get stuck staring at them, seeing only what we believe rather than believing what we actually see. This is a recipe for suffering and disaster. But shifting our focus—looking in [...]
Everything we remember is story. “History” is the memory of certain special things, which we all implicitly agree are more important than others. But our culture’s history—even in this, women’s history month—is a story that’s been badly, crudely, massively abridged.
Most of our historical focus is reserved for famous men, and the growing but still disproportionately small number of women who have managed to successfully compete against men in fields we see as significant.
We’ve left out most of the story.
We’ve omitted crucial factors in the equation of feelings, interactions and events that make human life possible. None of us can [...]
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