Category: Change

What Mindful Courage Actually Is

Getting outside of our comfort zone and getting scared requires courage. In that context I very much like Nelson Mandela’s quote: “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”

This idea is far reaching, because it puts courage in a new light. Courage is not irresponsibility. Real courage requires to understand the risks and taking them by overcoming our fear.

Not so many people are really courageous in this mindful sense. Most people are at best unconscious of risk.

When we are mindfully courageous we do push our boundaries while being mindful of what we are doing, why people around us might be reacting like they do and how we need to respond when unexpected things happen.

Learn to be mindfully courageous!

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Why We Should Be Scared More Often

” If you’re not scared a lot you’re not growing very much. Discomfort is a reflection of growth” – writes Robin Sharma.

Conversely, if we want to grow we need to learn to be scared more often, as we seek to escape from our comfort zone.

Of course the limit is survival, but it is true that from time to time, getting a bit scared by going out of one’s comfort zone is a great feeling to seek.

If it is possible to do that is a secure environment, all the better and it is a great occasion to go even further in discomfort: the best training environments push one to the limits of discomfort.

How often do you seek discomfort and scare?

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How To Make Bold Moves More Frequently

Pamela Slim in her post ‘One bold move‘ advocates making bold moves more often, because while they may fail, they may also release unexpected power and advance our projects.

Her post contains several examples including personal examples of the possibilities offered by bold moves.

It is true that shyness and social conventions prevents us from considering the bold moves that would be so easy to take. The fear of rejection also participates to this avoidance.

Still, not only as Richard Branson says, “if you don’t do bold moves, the world doesn’t move forward“. If you don’t make bold moves, you won’t move forward. It’s all about courage and making them. And we’ll survive anyway, so why not make those bold moves?

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How to Improve Personal Attraction Through our Imperfections and Frailties

Following up from our previous post ‘How to Direct Your Self-Development: Become a Center of Attraction‘, it is useful to reflect a bit more on what makes us an attractive resource for others.

I like particularly this quote by Hugh MacKay, an Australian social researcher: “I suspect the secret of personal attraction is locked up in our unique imperfections, flaws and frailties“. It gives an interesting orientation to the aspects we can consider when we want to develop our personal attraction. In addition to our capabilities and resources, being able to build on our imperfection and flaws is an interesting approach that could be used more consciously.

How can we build on our imperfections, flaws and frailties to improve our attraction? It goes through proper communication and unveiling, which comes to exposing ourselves and taking risks. An interesting way of looking at how we behave socially.

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How To Account for Impermanence in Our Decision-Making

I quite like this LinkedIn post that had some success and widespread readership: “What I Wish I Knew At 22“. It is full of interesting recommendations. One of the main recommendations is about the impermanence surrounding us and the fact that success or failure one day means nothing at the scale of a life.

“There are very few decisions in life that are permanent. Very little in your life will be definitional unless you choose to make it that way. You aren’t defined by your last success any longer than you are defined by your last failure. The only one super-focused on your story is you, so move on and keep going.”

This has an interesting direct consequence in our personal decision-making: as long as it does not kill us (or bankrupts us, which is the equivalent in financial life), decisions can be reversed – and a bad decision is not the end. Therefore, there is no need to agonise over it too long.

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How To Negotiate the Diplomatic Way

I like the famous proverb that states “Diplomacy is the Art of letting someone else have your way“. It is quite an essential quote, that is of course valid in the context of any negotiation.

I like it particularly because of the emphasis it puts on getting the other party finally move in the direction we desire. Of course this might border on manipulation, but still it is an interesting viewpoint to consider any negotiation.

The ultimate point of any successful negotiation should be to seek a win-win outcome, and in that sense, finding a way for the other party to move in the same direction is a given.

The quote leaves open the possibility that a third party might also move in our direction and not directly the opposite party. It is also an interesting strategy to consider in any negotiation.

Quite a wonderful quote that leads to interesting considerations!

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How Experience Allows Us to Tackle More and More Complicated Challenges

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.”

The first part of the quote is well known (and attributed on internet to various other people). What I find interesting is how the second part of the quote complements the first.

What he says is basically that experience comes from living through a number of lessons, and that can’t be fully understood theoretically by for example reading other people’s experience. The interesting part is how he describes that the key to life challenges is to be derived from one’s experiences, and that with experience we can overcome more and more complicated challenges and riddles.

As I become more experienced with things in life, I find more and more challenges and situations that need to be understood. I did not see them before. On one side I see how foolish I could be when I was younger, and and the other side I see how many the secrets of life remain before me, but that I have progressively the resources I need to tackle them. And that’s what makes life so interesting.

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How We Are Not Supposed to Understand Everything

Robin Sharma writes: “It’s human nature to wish for an explanation to everything. We create a mental architecture from the time we’re children and then try to fit the events of our lives into these neat intellectual models. Why? So we feel safe and secure and in control.”. But it does not work that way. We need to understand “we’re not supposed to understand everything“.

This statement is powerful, because we hate positively being in situations where we don’t understand what happens around us. But it happens much more often than we care to admit or even realize.

We need to raise our ability to live with uncertainty and not understanding everything that happens around us. Ancient people invoked gods and demons, we invoke complexity or lack of information, but it is irreducible. It will always be the case. Instead of spending too much time trying to understand what can”t be understood, let’s spend our energy learning to adapt to the unexpected.

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How To Reach the Peace Beyond Right or Wrong

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” – Rumi.

I like this quote because of the peacefulness it inspires. It is a respite from the violence of the ideas of right or wrong.

Right or Wrong, Right or Left, Opposites are the marker of the Industrial Age. In the Collaborative Age with the emergence of complexity, we now understand that the world goes beyond opposites. That richness derives from finding the common ground between what appears to be contradictory at first sight. That contradictions are often only apparent.

Let’s meet on this field beyond opposites.

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How Modern Innovation Needs Proper Maturing and Evolution

The more I delve into startups and innovation, the more I find the central message of the ‘Lean Startup‘ valid: innovative products need to be confronted to reality soonest, and should not be excessively developed in isolation. The Minimum Viable Product is the way. And multiple, fuzzy iterations are required for maturing the product.

Evolution is the way to achieve success

One reason is developed in the excellent book ‘Bootstrapping Complexity‘ by Kevin Kelly in a parallel with nature’s evolution. “The rule for machines is counter-intuitive but clear : Complex machines must be made incrementally and often indirectly . Don’t try to make a functioning mechanical system all at once , in one glorious act of assembly . You have to first make a working system that serves as a platform for the system you really want . To make a mechanical mind , you need to make the equivalent of a mechanical thumb — a lateral approach that few appreciate . In assembling complexity , the bounty of increasing returns is won by multiple tries over time — a process anyone would call growth . Ecologies and organisms have always been grown.”

“Creating extremely complex machines , such as robots and software programs of the future , will be like restoring prairies or tropical islands . These intricate constructions will have to be assembled over time because that is the only way to make sure they work from top to bottom . Unripe machinery let out before it is fully grown and fully integrated with diversity will be a common complaint.” We ship no hardware before its time” will not sound funny before too long”

It is amazing that this message must be reiterated so often to entrepreneurs, in particular those coming from engineering colleges where they have been bathed in industrial age scientism. Of course the thing is to enable iteration while keeping costs to a minimum so as to allow success within a reasonable financing requirement. And it will take time and effort. Still it is a must.

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How Good Visionary Decisions Are In Fact Reflections of Social Mindset Changes

When automated roadside speed cameras were introduced in France a few years ago, the behavior of drivers with regards to speed was substantially changed and the statistics of rod casualties dropped significantly. This introduction did generate some reactions, but overall it was accepted by the population that was fed up with the dangers of automobile driving – there were no massive demonstrations as it sometimes happen in the country.

The key question here is whether the introduction of speed cameras was the trigger of the change (and a visionary act by a leader), or whether it was rather the concrete result of a change of viewpoint by society.

Today with some hindsight the view is rather the latter: this change was probably more the result of a change of mindset (contrary to what the leader in question – who went on to be President of France- would like us to believe!). It might have taken some courage to transform this change of mindset into an actual concrete change, but that was not the source of the transformation.

It is astonishing to find out that many of the key policy changes in organizations or in society are rather the courageous formalization of an already evolving mindset rather than the visionary decision of a single leader – contrary to what the lore tries to make us believe. Actually purely visionary decisions without a background of mindset change is highly suspicious. Good decisions are the formalization of a pre-existing condition.

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How The Fourth Revolutions Leads to Re-Engineering Familiar Objects between Software and Hardware

In this interesting article ‘BMW and Audi Want to Separate Vehicle Hardware from Software‘ we can see that the automotive industry is taking a clear direction: re-engineering the view of the automobile as a system and changing basic assumptions. What Tesla is doing in terms of changing their car behavior by simple software updates is but the start of a revolution.

In a wider sense, the software and network capabilities of the Fourth Revolution will certainly lead us to re-engineer fully a large number of familiar hardware systems. This will create new hazards of course (like hacking) and also a large number of new possibilities that we can’t even envisage today. Changing the performance of what we considered to be fixed capabilities will modify significantly our perception of these familiar items.

In any case it will be a revolution for all of us involved in the design and engineering of these systems, and it just starts now, when we know that most of these items have a lifespan of decades. I can’t wait to see the changes unrolling.

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