The Simplest Thing That Works

Synchronicity?

Link: Earthpages.org - Jung and Synchronicity.

"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous."
Albert Einstein

I've had a strange and wonderful couple of days. I won't go into all the details, but I will offer you one little piece of it: yesterday three different and completely unrelated people, none of whom knew each other, all strongly recommended that I read the same part of the same book.

The article above talks about this phenomenon - Carl Jung posited a principle called synchronicity, which he defined as "meaningful coincidence" or "an acausal connecting principle."

I don't know if you've had this experience, but I often find that when I have a clear intention - that is, when I have a good sense of the future I want to create for myself in a particular realm - events seem somehow to conspire to support me in achieving my goals. Obstacles are removed, resources show up, subtle and not-so-subtle directional signals get posted around my life.

This doesn't really track in the logical part of my brain...but then, I often suspect that logic is the tip of the iceberg of human experience.

Maybe it just comes down to this; that knowing what kind of life you want to create for yourself is a powerful thing.

What do you think?

Joy + Leadership = ?

Sometimes I google things just for fun, just to see what happens.

Tonight I tried "joyful leadership": nothing came up. Does that seem strange to you? It does to me. That in all the millions of places on the net that this phrase could exist, waiting to be found by Google's ubiquitous spiders, it doesn't.

Does that mean no one thinks leadership can be joyful? If so, then I beg to differ. Leadership, as I experience it and observe others experiencing it, is often joyful. It's also challenging, frustrating, exciting, at times demoralizing and just plain hard...but there is joy in it.

When you're the leader, and your team rallies around a common goal to achieve something that's beyond their individual capabilities: that's joyful.

When, as a leader, you agonize over and then make a difficult decision that turns out to be the right thing to have done: that's joyful.

When you invite and challenge someone who works for you to step up into a more demanding role, and he or she does it and succeeds: that's joyful.

When you, the leader, envision a future that others don't think is possible - and your passion and clarity are enough to open their minds, and you work together to make it happen: that's really joyful!

Maybe we think there's not supposed to be joy in leading -- but it's there. And it's wonderful not only for the leader, but for everyone else around her (or him). Go for it.

Take a Break

Link: The Heart of Innovation.

I believe this is the longest hiatus I've ever taken from my blog; if you've wondered where I've been, I just got back from a marvelous vacation. I spent a week in Barbados with my daughter: lying on the beach; drinking far more than is my usual wont; eating fresh seafood -- basically lazing around. And the internet connection was iffy at best, which I took as the universe's way of telling me to chill out. Here's a pic of the beach that was about a two minute-walk from our wonderful guesthouse.

So, here I am again, recharged and ready to go. One of the things I wanted to do when I got back to blogging was introduce you to my friend Mitch Ditkoff's blog. And lo and behold, his latest post is about the importance of taking breaks. Serendipity.

Mitch calls himself the Archduke of Idea Champions, his own company, which he describes as:

a consulting and training company dedicated to awakening and nurturing the spirit of innovation. We help individuals, teams and entire organizations tap into their innate ability to create, develop and implement ideas that make a difference.

I encourage you to explore his blog: Mitch is a wonderful person, an endless font of interesting and worthwhile ideas, an untiring supporter of others' ideas, and the author of the newly published book, Awake at the Wheel.