Life Audit

So what I wanted to share with you is thinking of a background and that we are victims of outdated models or paradigms or mental models that are so ingrained in us we might not.

Even know that we're having this paradigm or mental model.

And the top left hand side is the picture of industrial aged factory workers who were originally taken out. They were skilled handicrafts, people, artisans doing their work that was very unique to them and them alone. They went into the factory and they were told, here, do this widget over and over and over again and do it exactly like this. And if you add any creative nuance to it, like your special touch, then you are going out of the bell curve and that's waste and we don't want that. The industrial age tried to really reinforce doing it average and over and over again repeating it. Then that merged into our education system where we have standards. We also. You're all parents, so am I, but my children are adults. We rate our children, we grade our children not only children, but adults.

We rank them and we put them.

In categories in boxes. That's why, if you can see the picture here of Lucy and the candy factory. It's just we feel like we're on this treadmill and it's going faster and faster thinking that humans and the social systems that we live in are like a factory, but we're really not. I put this in. This is new from yesterday. I already had it. I think. I recommended this to Sam Todd Rose from Harvard, the Mind, Brain and Education Center. He says there is no average cell, there's no average illness, there's no average cancer, no average person. We're all unique and different and how can we unfold and bloom and bring our unique ess the world in a.

World that thinks of us that we.

Need to fit into this category. And I'm part of that in hr. And that's one of the reasons I want to leave and be on my own, especially at my own age, is I got tired of rating and ranking people and putting them in these nine boxes and these categories and you're a hypo high potential or a lopo or a nopo and it doesn't exist. So this is something that you might want to look into more recommended. But that's the perspective I am taking. Just one more on this is, you know, we don't live in a linear mechanical world. And if you think about it, baking a cake is something that's very simple. You just follow.

The recipe with the ingredients.

You might have to tweak the recipe if you live in the mountains, but this is it. There's something more complicated. Might be building an airplane, but we.

Live in complex adaptive systems.

That's the perspective I want us to take. Whether it is a classroom setting, Jen.

Where you have all the personalities and.

Something could go wrong just because the kid didn't eat breakfast that day. And whether it's wildlife or whether it's children.

And this idea that I learned about.

Came from a book called Team of Teams from you probably have all heard of the word vuca that came from the military. Volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. And that setting with the military found. And by the way, my son is an ex captain officer in the military. He went to West Point, which is very elite military school. And what they trained their soldiers to fight a war that no longer existed. And this book, Team of Teams was saying, wait a minute, we're teaching our.

Cadets how to fight a war. But never have we had to deal.

With the competition or the enemy strapping bombs on themselves and killing, murdering themselves or flying into airplanes. We need a different system. The world is far more complex. So instead of starting at the top with the hierarchy and trying to spread the news down, they created these nodal points, these teams of teams and networks on the ground who knew more about what was going on than at the top. And that's the world we live in. But a lot of our mental models that we're not even aware of or the heroes that we have are outdated. So that's a lot of what the.

Background that I think is really key.

Here and I'm trying to bring that to life. So the title here that I wrote is for us. In these six weeks together we're in search of. I'm in search of like minded people like you who have all been hand selected by friends, by me personally or friends of friends. How do we create a life affirming.

Work in a vibrant life where each.

Of us is elevating our own personal agency, our own personal power and we're evolving our potential, our own potential, regardless of what age we are and the own potential of our children, whether they're our children or our students and the work systems that we are in. So just this is my last theory one and then we get into you. But I just wanted to set it up so you understand kind of the thinking behind this. I am a certified high performance coach, which is the first book here. I have taken influence from it, but not all of it. And the reason why is because it's too behavioral. And I didn't want to come from a behavioral paradigm. That is how you treat rats, train rats, humans. So a lot of this stuff on the top row is around reinventing organizations, conscious capitalism, mindfulness at work, regenerating leadership. One kind of joke I use is regenerating is different from resilience where I.

Buy cream, anti aging cream and it will say to have resilient skin so that your skin, if you put on it like a button, it will rebound and go back to where it is. That's resilient, but really for us. And the word regenerative is when something pushes on us. Whether someone pushes our buttons or Covid happens that we don't just necessarily go back to where we are, where we were. Like people are saying, including myself, and I am the biggest learner here, this is why I'm doing this is that we're not going to go back to oh, I can't wait till we go back to post Covid. We will be different. We will not go right back to where we were. We regenerate into something more and different. And so this is giving us an opportunity to design what is that best future self that we want to create and play on words. Because there is no future, it is only now. So how do we create it? And the other sources at the bottom. The three books are all from Carol Sanford. Sam is studying with her as well. She's an 80 year old woman. And then some ancient wisdom from Gurdjieff. So that's a little bit of the background. I don't want to get into too much of that, but I'm happy to talk about it. However, this is your time. What is my role? My role is really like wallpaper. It's in the background. The focus is on you. And with the thinking that there's no average. Each one of you will, when I ask you questions, you will rate them. Rate them, yes, you will. But you will respond to them in a way that's different and unique for you and where you are in your life. Along the way I'm going to try as much as I to wake up our mechanical thinking. Because I believe that 90 plus percent of the time we're on automatic. We do the same thing over and over again. And so if I can insert little things that will make you say, well, why did she do it that way? You're not supposed to. Education should happen this way, then that is keeping you awake. And I'm doing that intentionally.

So.

My own personal learning growth for our sessions together is to not say, very good. Oh, good answer. I am happy with that. That's my natural tendency. But if I say that, then the paradigm could be that we slip into, I'm the teacher. The teacher has told the student. Your teacher's pet. You gave the good answer. No, no, no. You should not give a damn what I have to say. This is about your own personal agency and not about falling for the assumed facilitator who is the expert. Let's not get into that. I will probably fail numerous times and I will say, great, but that's my learning edge along the way. I'm not a hero. No teacher's pet. So now going to set up the exercise for us. So hopefully, hopefully you all have something to write on a piece of paper or journal. Great. We are going to look at eight components. It's called sometimes the wheel of life. And I'm going to ask you holistically to kind of take an eagle's perspective flying up above and looking at your life in these eight different dimensions. And for you to say where do you want more of or less of on these areas? So this is our first session and you're going to do kind of a holistic life audit that will give you some information around where you need to grow and maybe put some attention, whether it's mindful attention or some behaviors. I'm going to ask you questions around each one of these as we go forward. And I'm going to ask you for, not from my rating you, but for yourself. I have this metaphor of a coffee cup on the left hand side. You're going to rate it a lower number where your coffee cup is empty and a higher number is where you have a full robust cup of chuchi, a cuppuccino. You give your answers wherever you want. There. I'm going to describe what a high full cappuccino would be. Then you'll say, ah, it's more like this or it's more like that or, or you could say I don't like Janet's answer for what she described as a 10. What I would describe as a 10 is this. And that's fine because this is your course. I'm just wallpaper guiding you. Okay, so one other thing before I start the questions is either take one sheet of paper and put a line down the middle or if you can flatten it out, you can have two sides. And. And because I don't believe that our educational systems spend enough time guiding us to self observe and reflect. This is our time together. You can think about these Saturdays or Sundays as one hour, hour and 15 minutes of a spa for our leadership. And we're going to reflect. And you'll put a line down the middle or have those two sheets. One side will be your response and how you will rate the questions. The other one on the right hand side will be any reflections.

Let's say you rated.

I'll make it up a 5 on finances or health. You rate that. Now, what is your thought bubble saying for why you rated that? Take any notes on the right hand side about your reflection, your thought bubble, or you might even notice a whisper of your body giving you some data, some information. Your body could be giving you a tightness in your throat, a knot in your stomach, you feeling some tension. That is information that we don't pay attention to because we're living our lives so quickly. Sam.