Ideals in Motion

The Fifth Competency - Inclusion

After the game, the king and pawn go into the same box. ~ Italian Proverb

The final competency necessary for sustaining success in life is the competency of inclusion. This competency is all about my ability to develop, tap into and utilize the power of social networks. Research consistently demonstrates that the value and the power of social networks are irrefutable in terms of enabling change.

When I'm looking at starting over – sustaining success in life – it’s crucial to realize that I'm not going to do it by myself. I have to develop the competency to include others in meaningful ways that support what I'm attempting to achieve. Included in this competency is the ability to develop and nurture effective networks that impact and influence the various core domains of my life - professional, physical, spiritual, intellectual and emotional. These networks will often be comprised of different people.

Therefore, a key question to consider when developing the competency of inclusion focuses on the effectiveness of my ability to deliberately create and sustain high quality relationships over time with a wide variety of different people. Each of us and each of our lives come to be defined by our relationships, the quality of our social networks and our ability to utilize them well.

Sustaining success in life is a team sport.

The Fourth Competency - Practice, Practice, Practice

We learn by practice.

Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. ~ Martha Graham

The fourth competency is practice. Developing the competency of Discernment (as well as the other competencies) doesn't happen automatically, I have to practice this. There is an old phrase that suggests that practice makes perfect. We're not after perfection here, and I actually don't believe that practice does make perfect. I think that practice makes habits. This is the value of intentional practices and intentional practices are where success in life is built.

I am continuously practicing and thus the question is what kinds of habits have I developed? The habits in my life will either support where I want to go or will inhibit where I want to go and may have become stumbling blocks in and of themselves.

When I'm looking at practices and the development of mindful, intentional practices this is a challenging competency because it requires a high state of awareness and discipline. Is what I'm practicing on a daily basis going to enable what it is that I'd like to have from a behavioral standpoint, from an attitudinal standpoint and from an experience of life standpoint? Do my practices provide me the ground from where I may be able to connect more effectively with others in a way that propels me to what it is that I want in my life?

When it comes to developing intentional practices I’ve found it very useful to keep in mind that the way I do anything is the way that I do everything.

Discernment - The Third Competency

“The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.” ~ David Bohm

The third competency, discernment, has its roots in a specific Buddhist tradition that involves mindfulness and is oriented around four levels of awareness .  It is essentially a way of understanding how our perceptions of the events in life actually conspire and are structured to impact what it is that we’re trying to do. The four levels of awareness are:

• Non-distinction
• Distinction
• Evaluation
• Judgment

The base level is judgment. When I'm looking at understanding the competency of discernment, one way that I can look at life is through the filter, or the lens of judgment. This entails seeing things and reacting to my world as if there is either a right or a wrong, or a good and bad in play. It's pretty black and white. As the word judgment would imply there is a values assessment that is made that comes back to right, wrong, good, or bad. Judgment is always used as a way of validating an existing belief system. In the extreme this can be paralyzing as well as exclusionary as there is a polarizing dynamic inherent in judgment. Obviously judgment can be useful as a values clarification tool and as a guidance mechanism for behavior. And, it's important to understand that it’s a first level position.

The second level is evaluation. Evaluation is a little different from judgment in the sense that it's about orienting my world and life views so that I look for value. It's not that I'm looking with the intent of determining whether something is consistent with my beliefs and is therefore good, bad, right, or wrong. Rather, I'm looking for the value in the event. The way I'm defining value is; in what ways can what I'm viewing be utilized? I'm looking for how it can be of value, how it can be useful and of service to something that, ideally, I've identified as being meaningful for me to participate in. The second question that accompanies evaluation is focused on my intended response to an event. Is what I'm about to do generative?  The question is about not whether it’s good or bad, right or wrong but rather is it adding value or taking value away from what it is that I'm trying to have happen – both for myself and for others. There’s a quality to evaluation that is very different from judgment, it's got a much wider spectrum to it that is far more enabling.

Then we move to the third level which is distinction. Distinction is the process of suspending both judgment and evaluation and just observing and noticing life’s events and contents without assigning meaning to them. It's literally an observational state that puts me in the position of actually being a neutral observer. Being in such a neutral position so as to notice distinctions without judgment or evaluation is a practice that expands my overall awareness. The value in this is that an increase in awareness increases my choice making capacity. I am now in a position that, from a resource and capacity standpoint (there are more choices) and from a competency standpoint, literally frees me up to potentially make different kinds of choices than I’ve made before.

The last level is non-distinction. I’ll link this back to the Buddhist conversation around enlightenment. Non-distinction is where I'm approaching all things with a sense of unity and oneness, I and it are not separate. So we don't generally go into a lot of conversation about this with our clients as attaining this level is often a lifetime’s (maybe more) pursuit. And, it is an extremely exalted level of viewing the way the world is structured.

When working with our clients from a competency building standpoint our focus is on the areas of evaluation and distinction. By developing the practice of learning how to evaluate effectively and being able to move into an observational orientation that allows for noticing distinctions that  they haven't been previously aware they are better positioned to have access to resources that weren't noticed before. Starting over becomes a process of developing those underutilized resources. This is about intentionality and mindfulness.

Courage - The Second Competency

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. ~ Ambrose Redmoon

The second competency for sustaining success in life is courage, and when you consider courage within the context of both letting go and learning anew, I believe that thinking of courage as a competency that can be developed makes imminent sense.

To be willing to let go of something that I'm comfortable with, to let go of something that has worked historically for me, there has to be a certain amount of courage there. To trust the process, to be willing to step off the cliff so to speak and leap into that void of no guarantees is courageous.

For adults in particular learning is a challenge requiring courage primarily because of our need for certainty in life. Most adults detest the feeling of being a beginner that is part of learning. I've got four grandkids and I watch how they learn and how they absolutely revel in the learning process itself. What they don't have is something that has worked before, so they are willing to go out and explore and experiment.

As we become adults, we develop models for how to be successful when we get into our organizations, and for when we get into really living our lives. Based on these models we begin to do things, we're successful with them, and we try to replicate those over and over and over again, and learning has stopped. We become preoccupied with questions of right and wrong or good and bad. These questions are always asked within the context of our success models.

Among the things that enable the development of courage are different kinds of questions. Questions like “is what I'm doing today working or not working?” This is a different type of question than one oriented around right/wrong or good/bad. If it's not working then I have the opportunity to do something different. But it will often mean letting go of my historic success model and that is a huge challenge for a lot of folks. In this sense courage has less to do with bravery and far more to do with willingness to learn as a beginner.

Self Awareness - the foundational competency

The first of five competencies necessary to be developed for sustainable success is self awareness. I consider this to be the foundational competency. And for those who would argue 'I know myself completely', I refer them to Oscar Wilde's statement of: "Only the shallow think they know themselves!" Am I aware of what it is that I'm doing from the standpoint of knowing why it matters to me? Why does this matter, what will be different as a consequence of me taking this action? Is that valued and valuable and does it support the sense that I was used well and that my life's energy, which is non-renewable resource, was actually spent in a wise way? Do I have the necessary resources to go to the next level? Am I using my resources wisely?

As you may have discerned there is a lot of questioning that comprises self awareness – Socrates had it right when he said that the “unexamined life isn’t worth living”. This is where inner strength is discovered. Self awareness is an enormously important competency, and is truly one of the core competencies that often most needs to be developed.