Creating with intention
We’re faced with more choices than ever before. With relative ease, we buy new products, find new partners, reroute our goals. We’re impatient and easily swayed.
Yet success doesn’t always land in the hands of the most skilled. The winners are those who push through, stay the course, fall down, and get back up — again and again and again.
Commit to something. Focus your vision and keep going.
Different experiences are necessary for growth. Without adventure, how can you see the world in a new way?
You’re not expected to like everything. The important thing is that you do, acquire more information, and grow.
Have you placed yourself in a new situation recently?
Our steps are easily trackable, our buying decisions traceable with the click of a mouse. We document our lives on film for our friends and the world to see. We post our professional accomplishments on open social networks. We look for validation and response from what we show the world, from names printed in magazines to recognition in the neighborhood coffee stop.
We have unlimited options to conceal our true identity, forsaking vulnerability and connection for a clean, manufactured image. With so many distractions for us to choose from, we can hide from ourselves, busying our focus from concentrating on things that matter and topics we know to be pertinent.
It’s easier to distract ourselves than sit down and get to the real, gritty work.
It’s easy to check email and Facebook regularly.
It’s hard to focus on making big things happen.
It’s easy to sprinkle business cards around a room.
It’s hard to develop meaningful rapport.
It’s easy to leave a meeting without speaking up.
It’s difficult to put your ideas on the line.
It’s easy to attend a party not having learned anyone’s name.
It’s difficult to make intentional introductions.
It’s easy to speak on a panel.
It’s hard to create an experience that changes the way someone feels.
It’s easy to manufacture the same item over and over again.
It’s difficult to create a once-in-a-lifetime work of art.
Seth Godin recently reminded me of questions I can’t afford not to answer:
Each day we have a series of choices that, when combined, contribute to the story we tell ourselves and the world.
One word separates problems from solutions.
It is possible to witness a situation and do nothing.
Or you can let it move you, think of a way to change it, make it better, and improve it from the way you found it.
A few months ago, I found myself in a room with Seth Godin and a small group of eager entrepreneurs. Seth posed the following question:
“Are you so in love with your problem you’re unwilling to try an imperfect solution?”
This prompted me to wonder how many situations I’ve refused to relinquish control, choosing instead to hold out for that perfect, golden answer that would fix everything in one fell swoop. This refuse to settle mantra has gotten in my way and prevented me from taking steps concrete steps of action.
I know I’m not the only one.
Looking around the room that day, every attendee had scrawled their own dilemmas onto scraps of paper. It may come as no surprise that every one of these problems had a solution that another attendee could devise. It wasn’t that any of these attendees were unexperienced, unintelligent, or unmotivated. Quite the opposite.
We come up with hundreds of reasons why we shouldn’t or can’t, so we don’t. We develop relationships with the problem itself, telling ourselves stories that may or may not be true. We believe our inner dialogue (“It just can’t be done.”), electing inaction over failure and fear. Only the very best for our problems, nothing less!
Of course, we’re able to consider another’s issue with relative calm. As outsiders, we lack the emotional connection and historical weight that the owner carries. We use our own fresh eyes to create probable solutions with creativity and ease, even wondering what the fuss was about in the first place.
Then we arrive at our own obstacles (or put them off for as long as possible), and we’re stuck.
I’d like to ask you the same:
At a recent dinner, this was one of the prompts for group discussion. Without hesitation, my mind sounded one clear word.
Harry Prosen defines empathy as “an emotional understanding which allows one as a therapist to resonate with one’s patients in depth emotionally, so that it influences the therapeutic approach and alliance with the patient.”
Yet empathy belongs in more places than clinical environments. We need it in our schools, our personal lives, our government, our businesses. We need to practice it on a daily basis and teach our children to do the same. We must find ways to listen, to converse, and to respond in ways that are considerate and cognizant of the person sitting across the table.
We get into trouble when we are unable to see us in them. This is when valuable information is lost and we lose the opportunity to connect in a new way. Empathy reminds us of our collective humanity.
If you’ve noticed, the best businesses are conducted in an empathic way. The best connections are formed when two parties consider the other’s frame of reference. When empathy is involved, relationships flourish, conversations become meaningful, and solutions address the heart of the real problem.
It’s never too late to learn, and you don’t need a special appointment or degree to practice awareness. Can you bring empathy into your interactions today?
“Empathic connection is an understanding of the heart in which we see the beauty in the other person, the divine energy in the other person, the life that’s alive in them.” —Marshall Rosenberg