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Have You Tried Letting the Other Guy See Why You're Invested?

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What If You Let Them See?

Change the World!

His name was Michael. He was all of six years old, and he had a crush on me. That was only right I was his first grade teacher and I had a crush on him and every other kid that sat in the classroom with him.

Michael was a beautiful, logical, and thoughtful young student who liked to help make things go the way they should. I was young enough to think I could control things.

Every time we’d go as a class to anywhere, Michael would somehow end up at the front of the line. At some moment he’d get about four feet ahead of me … I’d make a point of NOT telling him where we were going, but he’d still take the lead.

Some days that bothered me. I thought about what that meant about me, about what that meant about him. Why should I care about a six year old wandering ahead of me? But I did. I wanted to lead the line. It was as simple as that.

One day, I stopped the line. I got down on my knees and looked Michael in the eyes with as much gentleness as I could muster.

“Michael,” I said, “How old are you?”
He proudly replied. “I’m six years and 12 days old.”
I said, “Four years is a long, long time, isn’t it?”
He thought and replied, “Yes.” (Four years measured 2/3 of his life. I had him there.)
I quietly put forth this request. “Michael, you see, I went to college for four whole years so that I could lead the line. Would you let me lead the line?”
“Oh yes,” he answered.

He was generous in letting me lead the line from that moment forward. Sometimes solving a problem is as easy as letting the other guy why we’re invested in the outcome.

Have you tried letting the other guy see your investment?

We can change the world — just like that.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

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If you’re ready to change the world, send me your thoughts in a guest post. Feel free to take the gorgeous Change the World image up there that Sandy designed back to your blog. Or help yourself to this one.

Change the World!.

Email me about what you’re doing or what we might do. Let’s change the world one bit at a time together. Together it can’t take forever.

Beach Art Gallery: Sculpture by the Sea

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by Guest Writers Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh

A special local event each September for the past few years has been the Swell Sculpture Festival http://www.swellsculpture.com.au/ . Over ten days, as our southern hemisphere summer is in the wings, we join the throngs of people studying the sculptures all along the shorefront at beautiful Currumbin Beach.

This year, one sculpture which we both thought rather special was Richard Howie’s Wind Totems, made from oxidized recycled mild steel and recycled hardwood. The turning of the timber was absolutely masterful and the balancing of each work superb. The wooden vanes turned slowly, gracefully in the breeze.

windtotems

We loved the harmony of place, materials, artistic vision and execution. Much simpler than some of the other works on display, illustrating the old expression “art that conceals art”.

It’s easy to find complexity, dissonance and stress in the world today. Works like Wind Totems can encourage us to take the knowledge and skills we have in our businesses and our lives and focus our creative and productive energies in the direction of elegant, harmonious, inspiring simplicity.

The other work that appealed to us and had a fun element was Creation’s Heart by Wendy Johnson & Katrina Kelsey.

creationsheart

What inspires you?

Suzie Cheel & Des Walsh

Have You Ever Used the Power of Being an Original You?

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I've been thinking . . .

about the search for the original idea.

I used to work to find only original ideas. Learning about true originality has be an education in business, self-awareness, and life for me.

True originality –a brand new idea — is rare. That’s probably a good thing too. True originality is expensive and hard to sell.

Original ideas are take time, precious time, to conceive, imagine, invent, and develop. They’re a risk of resources by the very fact that they’ve never been tried before. They’ve never stood a test or built a following.

The more original the idea — the harder it is to explain. Marketing is a huge endeavor — just figuring out how to describe something people have no experience with. How do you relate something that’s never been to what they know? How do you prove the value of something awesomely original?

And if no one has imagined it before me, no one is using Google to find it.

Those times I’ve had what was surely “a never been done before totally original idea,” I realized later that maybe other folks had been there before. Maybe they too had conceived my brainstorm and found that

  • the idea was impossible to execute.
  • it was incredibly expensive.
  • no one wanted to pay for it.

These days “never been done before totally original” ideas doesn’t interest me.

What gets my attention is an “original YOU.”

1216059_flower_illustration

People who know their unique value can bring a unique something to an old idea — they can make something people know more personal, more profitable, and more pleasurable (or less of pain).

Have you ever used power of being an original you?

Liz's Signature

Rules, Negative Data, and Incurable Idealists

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What If Everything We Believed In Isn’t True?

Change the World!

I’m no computer. My operating system was developed at home, versioned at school, and beat up some through the decades and detours I’ve experienced.

Don’t run in the house. Use your indoor voice. Do your work before you play. Color inside the lines. Sit up straight. Be polite. Each basic command was entered in my head. If I do these things, I will operate properly — so they told me.

I also captured information about family and fairy tales, heroes and angels, creativity and planets, inventors and imagination, and artists, and poetry, fairness and ideals. In my life I’ve talked about and witnessed awe-inspiring and wonder-full things. These concepts are in my hidden system files — read-only, undeletable files.

I’m bombarded daily with data. But she is supposed to be your friend. Data. He lost his job. Data. There have been more bombings. Data. Want to make $4000/day online? Data miner. Still data. That’s all it is — data. I don’t have unlimited memory, so unnecessary negative data doesn’t get saved —period.

Some days the data causes my mind to fragment in unfamiliar and unproductive ways.

Bits and bytes of negative data chip away at my world view and therefore at me. The Tigger in me finds myself quoting Eeyore. “Pathetic, that’s what it is. Pathetic.”

What if the world is the awful place that keeps presenting itself to me?

But try as I might, I can’t—still won’t—give up on the world. I still believe in family, and fairy tales, and heroes, and angels, and creativity, and planets, and fairness, and inventors, and imagination, and artists, and poetry, and ideals, and so many awe-inspiring and wonder-full things. They were written on my soul as a child. I can’t delete them, lucky for me. I might have wanted to once, but not now, not again, not ever.

The world needs incurable idealists. We balance out the hardcore cynics. It has to do with joy, and hope, and possibility.

The world needs people who believe in it as much as we need people who believe in us.

As we believe so we become.

Are you willing to believe in a world that works?

We can change the world just like that.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your web presence.

Beach Art Gallery: Sculpture from the Sea

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by Guest Writers Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh

On Tuesday this week we saw something that at first looked like a piece of machinery. When we looked closer we saw that it was part of a tree that had been sculpted by the sea and washed up on the beach.

beachgallery1

On Wednesday “the sea sculpture” was still there and as you can see from the picture it had changed position.

beachgallery2

On Thursday “the sea sculpture” was gone. Taken by the tide on it’s journey to another beach.

Just imagine if this “sea sculpture” could speak, the stories it could tell of the beaches it had rested on.

What would you ask?

Suzie Cheel & Des Walsh