On Friday after a week of rain and no morning beach walks, we saw a piece of boardwalk sitting on the sand. We had last seen this being used as a boat ramp where the sand had been washed away from under the concrete ramp. The piece of boardwalk had been moved or carried 100 metres or more my the tides.
I wonder what stories could this boardwalk tell? – Suzie Cheel
When I was in college, I had a vinyl recording of the London Philharmonic performing “The Planets” by Gustav Holst. On the back of the album cover notes were written on each movement of the music, each named after one of the planets the world knew then and each with a few words of poetic wisdom. Of all of them, I remember only one sentence that has stayed with me for decades now. It was with the movement called “Neptune.” The sentence read:
What the mind yearns for most is not to know, but to believe.
For years I considered it forward and backward. I wondered about it and applied to situations in my life.I asked myself whether knowing or believing was the core of everything. Which defined me? Which moved me forward? In the last few years, I’ve come to see it as it was written and understand this way …
I can know what are my strengths and talents. I can understand with my mind what values and value I bring to the table. But if I don’t believe what I know, I undermine them. If I choose not to see what I see right in front me, if I choose not to know what I know, and instead listen to other voices around me, I’ll never be a work of art, I’ll simple be a mirror — at best a reflection. No matter how perfect a mirror, it’s can be replicated by silvering some glass and placing where I stand. What’s in the room decides what’s in the mirror.
A mirror brings nothing new. A mirror is all give back and no give.
But if I believe in my own ability to see what I see — to look for and find my own world view and experience — then I learn how to believe in what I know. And other people begin to take interest in my thinking despite the curved lines and the flaws.
Art brings a new view. It gives and can give back too.
All true leadership and influence starts with a compelling core belief based in knowledge.
Competence and commitment are the fuel that ignites a call to action.
Stop right now. Ask yourself, what do you know?
What would it take for you to believe that?
Then act on what you believe and know.
You will have your true north direction.
And knowing where you’re is irresistibly attractive.
Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!
The rules, values, and ideas we learned growing up served us in those situations and settings. Some of those rules, values and ideas are universal to humanity, but others were built from the goals people who . Yet we often keep living by those rules long after we’ve left the group, society, or culture from which they came. We still use rules from grade school peer groups to define ourselves and make decisions as adults. The values, rules, and ideas imprint deeper and last longer than the channels for which they were developed to build, serve, and protect.
In my high school, it was a social and a fashion faux pas to EVER wear red shoes. Yet my friends who went to a Chicago high school had never heard of that “law.” It was stunning and amazing that these attractive, fun, funny, intelligent kids could live so effortlessly cool wearing red shoes whenever they wanted. It took outright clear thinking on my part to choose to set aside that rule — The tragedy was that it didn’t occur to me to stop following the red shoe rules until long after high school, long after it was even a remotely useful rule.
In every group, society, and culture that we belong, we use rules, values, and ideas to identify ourselves as members of the group, align our goals and define our roles. We use those rules, values, and ideas to attract like-minded thinkers and to channel our energy in the useful directions. But no single set of rules, values and ideas carries over completely to the next universe of people.
In increments we’ve learned to look outside us — to our parents, teachers, friends, bosses — for answers for the keys to navigate those elusive rules, values, and ideas that define good behavior and outline the clearest path to our success. What meet instead is other people who have also learned to look outside themselves.
The rules, values and ideas we collect over time grow and gather. Each one we add comes from someone else. We keep adding in more to those we’ve picked up and combine them in our own ways to make our own sense. The rules, values and ideas don’t leave our minds when we move on with our lives.
Rules, values, and ideas are like people in the way that few will fit us well-enough to earn the place of a life-long friend.
Who built the rules, values, and ideas that fuel the decisions you make?
If you haven’t named the values, rules, and ideas that are your friends for life, fair chance the answer is: not you.
Every new teacher, location, clan, situation, culture, corporation, church, organization, school, or troop offers new rules, ideas, and values slightly different from the last. Yet no person, group, or association has to live one moment of your life.
Think about that.
It’s your life.
No one has walked a mile in your shoes.
No one knows what you wish in the middle of the night.
Choose your values.
Make your rules.
Have your own ideas.
Be effortlessly cool in your red shoes.
Be your own unique value proposition.
Live your own life.
Are you ready to move the useless rules out of your head and get to a new sort of productive?
Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!
Someone needs to tell the political candidates that personal empowerment is not about power over others. Rather, it is understanding that you are in charge of your own life.
People who are personally empowered know that happiness is an inside job. They donât wait for someone else to make them happy and they can take care of their own needs for affection.
In other words, there is no finger pointing and blaming others for your lack of performance. You are willing to take responsibility for your actions. OK, so now itâs very obvious that most political candidates have no personal empowermentâthey are just power hungry.
I make this distinction between power and personal empowerment because they are two very different things and people often assume that to be empowered is to be powerful.
Wrong.
Empowerment is a process where you do something, reflect on your actions, assess whether you made the right choiceâand whyâand continue on. This progression is a very important piece of the puzzle because personal empowerment acknowledges complete responsibility for self and the choices that are made. It is strong enough to look at itself and say, âBadly done, Emma. Badly done,â and then move on, taking with it lessons learned from the experience.
Personal empowerment is not for wimps. It takes a strong character to look at oneself with honesty and decide what to keep and what to throw out.
Life unfolds in phases. As we look back over time, we can see when we felt empowered and when we did not. Each time period has itâs own characteristics.
We all spent time as students when our lives revolved around classes, teachers, and other students. The academic calendar was central to all of our planning. Life as a student is a unique time.
Similarly, we are always in different phases of life as we mature and circumstances change. Life is a series of interconnecting phases. So when we stop to take that honest look at ourselves, we will be empowered only to the degree to which we understand what phase of life weâre in.
Our life is bigger than a single moment. The things that we cherish, the goals that motivate us, and the issues we wrestle with are connected to the period in which we currently find ourselves.
We feel lack of personal empowerment when we are unable to make choices that are always in our own best interest. Indeed, it is impossible to feel empowered if we cannot identify the issues that hold us back. We feel out of control when we try to live up to the expectations of others. We give power over our life to others when we allow them to define success or achievement.
But when we let others generate ideas and solutions for our issues, we are no longer taking the lead.
We become the ultimate follower when we are no longer the leader of our own life.
As an FBI counterintelligence agent, the first phase of a recruitment operation was to identify the target. This meant collecting as much information as possible about the targetâs past and current situation, as well as aspirations for the future. Every investigation starts with understanding the nature and character of the NOW phase.
Here is a list of typical questions used in FBI recruitment operations to help agents get clarity about the issues and specific needs of the person weâre investigating. These same questions may also help you define the phase of life you are now living in. It is impossible to attain personal empowerment without understanding the nature and character of your current phase of life:
To attain personal empowerment, itâs important to understand the key issues in your life and decisions you are being asked to make during this phase.
What kinds of thoughts, impressions, experiences, etc. came to you during this exercise? What are some key insights in this phase of your life? How do these empower you?
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Author’s Bio:
LaRae Quy was an FBI agent, both a counterintelligence and undercover agent, for 25 years. She exposed foreign spies and recruited them to work for the U.S. Government. Now she explores the unknown and discovers the hidden truth via her blog Your Best Adventure. You can find her on Twitter as @LaRaeQuy
Thanks, Larae!
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Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!
about what we think about ourselves.
You’re not alone.
We’re all afraid.
How often I tell people that — wherever I go.
It seems to be my calling.
And our biggest fear, the one we live with daily doesn’t really sound big enough.
It’s not nuclear war, or terrorists, or even being homeless.
… though we have deep and sincere respect for dangers implied by those and more.
But our biggest fear is more dear and much closer.
We’re afraid of the ideas of ourselves we carry in our heads.
We’re afraid of not being seen, not being heard, not being understood.
We’re afraid of being lost without someone to show us how to find our way home again.
It’s not so crazy when the state of the economy has led us to question everything we’ve learned about authority and trust in leadership. It’s not crazy when we’ve learned to follow paved roads to everywhere we go. It’s not so crazy when we’ve learned what behaviors get us the right kind of attention … or they did when companies still cared about employees more than the bottom line.
The skies might be gray and you should know that.
But that’s a fact … not a mood-setting necessity.
Grey doesn’t have to mean bad times or things to fear.
Face the fear. Acknowledge the reality. And move on.
Put a new idea of yourself in your head.
Decide that people will see, hear. and understand — value the people who do and move away from those who don’t.
Move in the direction you would show your best friend or your child to go.
You’re bigger than the biggest fear.
Let yourself know.
Let the fear pass over you.
Move forward.
Be irresistible.
When I told the story of my mom yesterday, friends and colleagues commented on my courage — courage in telling my mother’s story, courage in putting down my cigarettes, courage in sharing out loud what might be choices that other folks don’t see as I do. I wasn’t afraid to tell the story. I had already lived it. It was true.
The thought kept occurring to me that every time people have accused me of courage has been a time when in my mind I saw no other option, a time when my answer to act was the only right answer I could see.
I don’t know that I know much about courage. Rare has been the moment that I had to muster up the nervous energy to take on a cause that I didn’t believe or to face a giant who would crush me to smithereens.
What I know about in these years of taking on the responsibilities of a family, a mortgage, a business, and decisions that would affect other people’s incomes is more what I’ve learned about fear.
And what I’ve learned about fear is that FDR was right.
And that understanding fear is the key to success in business and in life.
We’re facing times not unlike those that followed the Great American Depression. If history repeats itself, it’s worth paying attention to what happened then, when my dad started his business, when FDR gave his First Inaugural Address and said …
This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itselfânameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
FDR’s words resonate for me. In times of learning to build a business, in past worries of whether I’d be able to pay the rent, fear was the enemy that tried to undo me.
Fear of failure.
Fear of losing.
Fear of doing nothing and doing the wrong thing.
Fear that I might spend a life telling the truth to everyone, but lying to myself.
Fear of finding my best efforts not enough paralyzed me. Fear of commitment enticed me into procrastination. Fear that the world I believed in and the person I was might not exist confused all of my decisions.
Carrying that fear wherever I went was a burden bigger than any one person could manage.
Slowly that fear broke down the integrity of the person carrying it.
Fear made me give away what I valued as if it were worthless.
Fear made me think that givers never get and getters forget.
Survival instinct says if the situation isn’t paying off, it’s a good time to move.
Fear wasn’t getting me anywhere.
I didn’t like where I was or what I saw around me.
I didn’t like the kind of people my fear attracted.
I didn’t much like myself.
I sat down and did the math.
I figured out that fear and trust don’t exist in the same space.
I looked my fear in the face and waited for it to devour me, crush me, embarrass me, or shun me.
It didn’t.
I studied my successes. I saw that I’d never carried fear into my success. I’d always gone in knowing I would be, do, and achieve what was needed to finish ahead. It wasn’t that I was stronger, better, or particularly more clever. It was that it crossed my mind that another option existed, except to come out ahead.
I calmly decided I was better than any fear I could dream up.
I knew that I could out breathe any fear and build something better instead.
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
— the Litany Against Fear from Frank Herbert’s Book Dune:
I don’t know much about courage.
I know enough about fear to watch it, learn from it, and let it pass.
Like the litany says I let it pass over me and through me until only I remain.
Fear can’t stop me from telling the hard truth gently, pursuing a quest I believe in, or trusting in myself.
And I’ve learned to recognize my friends by how fearlessly they won’t allow me to fail.
If “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes” has become a problem in your business or your life, breathe deep. Speak the truth. Trust your instincts. Believe in who you are. And surround yourself with people who will fight you for the right to not let you fail.
Be irresistible. Be fear-less.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!