PURE, delightful, randomness…I sat in front of the television to eat my breakfast and happened on An Apology to Elephants – a documentary on National Geographic.

The film is an unabashed polemic, calling for improved treatment of elephants in zoos and an end to the use of the animals as entertainment, which the film contends must invariably involve abuse. I didn’t see it from the beginning, but I was drawn in somewhere around the “third half”!

This is what I witnessed:

• Elephants swaying in enclosures that were big, but not big enough for these animals that clearly wanted to be free. They moved agitated from one foot to the next with a nervousness that was palpable

• An old clip of a famous elephant being electrocuted by Edison

• Elephants with foot diseases – because conditions were unsanitary

• Chained and roped elephants being brought to submission so that they could be “trained” to perform

• Baby elephants being briskly removed from mothers to start the training process early.

Feld Entertainment, the parent company of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, said the film misrepresented its practices, but I couldn’t help but relate back to how we keep ourselves imprisoned, and how our own best practices for ourselves keep us in a place of always striving – never arriving. I cried that morning – yes for the elephants – but then I realised that I too was an “elephant” along with many others I know except that we are both trainer and animal – SAD!

We force ourselves to operate in well-defined, tight familiar surroundings – not giving ourselves any freedom to express or create. And we wonder why we are irritable all the time, have headaches and are constantly standing in a pool of dissatisfaction. No wonder we’re getting “foot disease.”

Bull hooks are often driven in to the tender areas of an elephant’s body to make it cooperate. Electric shock, whips, baseball bats and pipes are also among the methods used to force the animals to cooperate in training.

Extreme – sure – but what do we do? We are our worst cheer leaders. We never do anything right. We never acknowledge if we actually make progress because it’s not good enough. We brush off compliments and praise from our peers. We claim that we don’t NEED praise we just need to get to the next rung, in the same enclosure, going nowhere really. Tragic that we would imprison ourselves in the name of doing better.

Just as there’s hope for the elephants with folks like Lily Tomlin, educating and encouraging zoos to better care for these animals there is hope for us too. But like the elephants we have been chained in this place for so long that even when set free, or given an opportunity at freedom we can’t move.

We need to retrain ourselves to move a little bit every day. No big massive moves. No thinking too big because that will overwhelm us and freeze our steps.

Maya Angelou tells us that life is an adventure and the sooner we realize that, we will be able to treat life as art. You see most of us keep looking outside for guidance and finding the best way to do this or that; bending ourselves into uncomfortable pretzels that don’t feel right but we press on in the name of perfection and doing it right. When what we need to understand is that we were created creative. Maya says ‘we can invent new scenarios as needed.”

So starting today, pay attention to your inner compass. We all came fully loaded with one. Beware that when providence provides the idea or thought it can vanish in a second never to return so make a habit of writing things down. As you become more self-aware, and as you engage in focused effort you will eventually grow into a free, open space, big enough to hold you, but not so tightly fenced that if you want to expand further you couldn’t easily push through the gates and move on.

Let the captured elephant remind us how we imprison ourselves by limits and wanting to be perfect.

Be guided by these words by Teacher Angelou

Each of us has the right and the responsibility to assess the roads which lie ahead and those over which we have traveled, and if the future road looms ominous and unpromising, and the roads back uninviting, then we need to gather our resolve and carrying only the necessary baggage, step off that road into another direction. If the new choice is also unpalatable, without embarrassment, we must be ready to change that as well.

Be encouraged. You can break free! Just be patient and loving with yourself.

To change ones mind about a person, an approach, a direction means to admit that perhaps we were wrong about the choice we made. Rather than quickly jump off the path we’re on – to another; rather than cut a completely NEW path – we plod on, wanting to prove ourselves RIGHT.

We’re often equally stubborn about how we see other people. We create our own story about them without their collaboration and when they show us a different side to themselves, we make excuses for their behavior versus simply accepting who they are.

It appears that the pain of being WRONG is greater us than the pain we may experience if we simply change our mind.

Do you think your life would change drastically if you weren’t so stubborn about changing your mind?

How much time do you think you spend in the comfort of sticking to your guns?

How much faster do you think you would get to where you wanted to go if you were flexible enough to accept that perhaps THE WAY isn’t working and you need to choose another?

Merrill’s Marauders (named after Frank Merrill) was a United States Army long range penetration special operations jungle warfare unit, which fought in the China-Burma-India Theater of Operations, or CBI, during World War II. Charlton Ogburn, Jr. (15 March 1911, Atlanta, Georgia – 19 October 1998, Beaufort, South Carolina) was a journalist and author of memoirs and non-fiction works. His best-known work was The Marauders (1959), a first person account of the Burma Campaign in World War II. In fact it is from the Harper’s magazine 1957 article “Merrill’s Marauders” that earned Ogburn his book contract. In this article Charles said:

“We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. Presumably the plans for our employment were being changed. I was to learn later in life that, perhaps because we are so good at organizing, we tend as a nation to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.”

Is it just at the national level or is it at also at a personal level that we use reorganizing as a way of appearing busy and feigning progress? A coaching client of mine tells me that when faced with stuff he knows he has to do he usually starts with reorganizing his office. What about you: what do you choose to reorganize before getting started on the important project or having that hard but necessary conversation? The truth is that most of us prefer to linger at the “three to get ready” point and not ever reach to “four to go” where we would actually have to DO something.

In fact what most of us do is ramp up the amount of confusion in our lives just so we don’t do those important things that might prove that we couldn’t really, weren’t capable of or failed at the very thing we said we were passionate about.

According to Keller and Papasan, the authors of ‘The One Thing’ you say:

“You want fewer distractions and less on your plate. The daily barrage of e-mails, texts, tweets, messages, and meetings distract you and stress you out. The simultaneous demands of work and family are taking a toll. And what’s the cost? Second-rate work, missed deadlines, smaller paychecks, fewer promotions—and lots of stress You claim you want more productivity from your work. More income for a better lifestyle. You want more satisfaction from life, and more time for yourself, your family, and your friends.”

But do you really WANT these things? Your choices tell a completely different story. Your choices suggest that what you really want is not to be a failure and not to look stupid. You have two degrees but feel you need a third. Going to school has in itself, become a career for you. Richard Saul Wurman observes in ‘Information Anxiety’, “The same people who would delight in confessing to sexual indiscretions or income tax evasions blanch at the idea of saying ‘I don’t know.’ Instead we all practice the ‘uh-huh and yes’ defense. We all learn how to respond with a look of thoughtful intelligence to even the most incomprehensible information.” You don’t want to appear as not knowing what you’re really doing and so you’ve created a smoke screen of being a “work in progress” – busy but never quite completing anything and actually making REAL progress.

In her book ‘Inspired’ author Marcia Yudkin cautions

“Getting ready keeps you in a safe zone where failure isn’t possible. You have the illusion of progress even while you are simply spinning your wheels. You have the comfort of plausible excuses, such as “I don’t know enough yet” or “I’ll do it after I quit my job.”

If you’re part of the 95% who are kicking up loads of dust getting ready to take action know that you have EVERYTHING you need RIGHT NOW to take that NEXT STEP! You’ve taken countless classes, spent years assembling your tools, created the perfect office space and devoted yourself to the controversies among experts on how to get started.

It’s time for the number four to surface for you as a symbol of progress – “4 to go” that is! Are you ready to make REAL progress in your life?

Posted this quote by Mark Twain on my Facebook page yesterday

The secret of getting ahead is getting started

I even decided to use it as my header on this site.

It’s an exceedingly simple truth yet we spend most of our time ignoring “the start” – searching for THE SHORTCUT. Before we begin we prefer to focus our energies on finding ways to do whatever it is in a very short period of time. We want that “to-do” to be done with – lickety-split!

Yet if we but start, we might find that we already know the what and the how. We might find that we take less time than we thought the task would take. We might find super ideas bursting forth as we start the process.

Rich Schefren tells us that savvy marketers know that our unmet need for speed is an enormously profitable niche. Everyone peddles the myth of instant wins and overnight success. On TV or at the movies we never see the little steps the main characters had to do hundreds of times to actually get the result. There simply isn’t enough time to show it and even if there was – it wouldn’t be as exciting. So they show a character deciding to go on a diet and then cut to the character stepping on the scale 30 pounds lighter. They don’t show the daily routine, the consistent willpower required, or any other detail that caused the achievement.

The search for immediate success forces you to become preoccupied with finding shortcuts. Soon thereafter intelligence gives way to expedience. We confuse speed with progress, adrenaline with purpose and urgency with importance.

Stop craving an “instant life”! Remember The Acme Corporation featured in Road Runner – when Wile E. Coyote produced products instantly that failed miserably?

The consistent search for shortcuts leads to large disabling setbacks.- Rich Schefren

Nothing is immediate. Everything takes time. If YOU want to get ahead – GET STARTED!

We all need to be reminded that once we activate our creative power we can follow through on any plan, idea or purpose.

We need to stop the insane thinking that keeps us constantly looking for more information, wasting countless hours scouring the Internet. Like Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors “Feed me! Feed me! Feed me! Feed me, Seymour” – we have insatiable appetites – letting perfection haunt us. Not raising that next foot until we’re convinced it’s a sure thing. And it’s never a sure thing!

We spend time getting READY to work and talking about ALL the things we have to do without taking any action.

We plan but never follow though

We deliberately let things get ‘out of hand’ and single- handedly sabotage ourselves just to prove some point that we aren’t good enough, deserving of…or “this just wasn’t our time.”

Today I think you – yes YOU! You need to hear these words…simply that you’re capable. Forget all the other toxic beliefs that you might be harboring about yourself. Know that you’re capable and simply take the next logical – no scratch that – TAKE THE NEXT CRAZY STEP! You know the one I’m talking about – Go on…TAKE IT!

When I was a child, I remember both my mother and grandmother giving me a thick, viscous, malt-based concoction on a spoon daily. It was “good for me” I was told. There was no evading it. It was poured and administered – spoon immediately in mouth – I had no choice but to swallow it as quickly as possible and remove any traces by creating tumultuous waves in my mouth, swishing and agitating, with water – a gulp and a frown – knowing that I’d have to endure the same….tomorrow.

My mother said that the crust of the bread was also “good for me” and so never removed it from my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches which I loved.

And so to this day, I still eat the crust first (because in that household there was no getting around NOT eating what you were given lol) off any sandwich that I’m consuming – leaving the delicious center for last.

I didn’t realize that I was already learning a valuable lesson as a young person, that in life you must figure out how to deal with the hand you’re dealt. When you’re playing cards you have no idea which cards are going to end up in your hand. Sometimes they bring you joy and feelings that you’re going to win, and sometimes you just can’t wait for the game to be over.

Our power always lies in how we CHOOSE to respond to the hands we’re dealt.

Will you throw in the towel? Give up? Quit?

Or will you, as Cari Murphy describes in Create/Change/Now, make decisions to use the strength of your character to bravely play out your hand with honesty, integrity and grace?

“Take any two books off your shelf at random. Open each to whatever page they happen to open to. Read the left-hand page of each book. Now ask yourself: How are these things connected? How could they be connected? And how does this relate to my goals and achieving them? Try this for just five minutes a day for 21 days. You’ll find that the process gets easier and becomes so much fun that you can’t stop after just five minutes.”

Today’s inspiration came from a facebook app: What God Wants You to Know. It said:

You haven’t opened all your gifts yet. Your life can be deeper than the ocean, larger than the sky and richer than all the minerals in the earth. You have so much potential. Do everything you dream of. Keep discovering yourself.

Today I encourage you to do just that. Look closely for what SQuire Rushnell calls Godwinks – miniature messages along the way that guide you to use your gifts and to be your best self!

Sometimes it’s easy for us to say “I have no choice…”which (according to Robert Fritz, author of ‘The Path of Least Resistance’) is one of the ways that people avoid or undermine effective choice by losing the potential power of choice – yet choices abound. Even if you don’t SEE the choice – it’s there.

What we call choices though, is what everyone else has done already. We’ve looked to this person, company or that business’s best practices to guide us. Like the investor who wants to be like Warren Buffett, the airline that wants to grow like Southwest, the innovator who wants to be like Steve Jobs. Sure we can learn from others but when it comes to our choices – it’s not about copying – it’s about truly wanting whatever it is you’re choosing.

Which brings us to creating: most of us don’t associate making choices as part of our creative process. In fact most of us don’t think we’re creative. The world to us is divided up into two large groups: the ‘creatives’ and the rest of us. Sir Ken Robinson actually suggests that it is schools that kill our creativity.  “We’re all born with deep natural capacities for creativity and systems of mass education tend to suppress them,” he says. According to Fritz, (whose book I mentioned earlier) – this is largely because choice is not the centrepiece of our education. He says that when the subject of choice becomes a centrepiece of education, then and only then will be begin to prepare our children to create their own futures rather than futures that grow out of how they react or respond to circumstances.

Whenever we’re asked what we WANT to create, we almost always come up with a list of what we DON’T want! In performance reviews when asked what we’d like to do in the future – how we see ourselves growing and evolving – we’re stuck – limited primarily by choices we feel are available/on the table.

The first step when deciding on what we want is to not limit our choices to only what SEEMS possible or reasonable. When we do this we disconnect from what we truly want and settle for compromise.

Next forget EVERYTHING that you KNOW. Stop Workplace Drama Coach Marlene Chism teaches that the three words that put the lid on possibility are “I already know.”

“I already know it’s not possible”

“I already know what he’ll say”

“I already know what she’s teaching in this workshop”

“This won’t work. I already know why…”

“I already know it’s not a good idea”

“I already know the facts”

“I already know that nothing is going to come out of this”

I would also call those three words the ultimate formula to kill any creative seed.

Instead of assuming that you know ask yourself instead “what results do I want to create in my business or life?” Be as clear as you can be because if that vision is not clear you will have little chance of creating what you desire. Don’t let impatience or the underlying belief that it won’t happen anyway prevent you from plugging in details. Again remember that you’re choosing what you WANT not what you think you SHOULD want or what others have at your age etc.

Next you put together the strategic choices that you must make along the way – choices about the actions you need to take, your values and the priorities that will guide you and support your efforts.

But the choice that is going to determine whether you create what you want or not is the choice I want to focus on here because it is THAT important: it is called ‘Fundamental Choice.’ Robert Fritz says that primary choice – is the concrete result that we desire whereas a fundamental choice is about life orientation or a state of being.

Why some people are successful or not, has a lot to do with their fundamental choice. Ever tried to stop smoking for example? If you have never made the fundamental choice to be a non smoker then no matter what system you try to help you quit smoking, it will not succeed. I recently saw an episode of ‘Iyanla Fix My Life’ on the OWN network where Iyanla Vanzant was trying to help DMX establish a better relationship with his son. Xavier – DMX’s son – was clear about what results he wanted. He wanted a relationship with his father that was healthy and CLEAN. By CLEAN he meant that DMX could not use any drugs or else it would contaminate their relating.  DMX, who admitted that he was a coke addict, was not prepared to make the fundamental choice to live a clean life.

Those of us who never exercise our power to choose…to create… live in a reactive-responsive world. We have never stopped to think about making an authentic fundamental choice about our own lives.

Decide today to be the creative force in your own life. This will lay the foundation for everything else. Decide to be true to yourself. Decide to live a healthy lifestyle. Every time you’re at a junction of choice-making – see how the decisions you want to make align with the fundamental choices you have made. You may have to rearrange your life, leave the job you’re in, realize that the position you were after was just a SHOULD and not what you wanted but it will all fall into place.

This journey is improvisational. There are no rule books. You will create forward but create you will.

Making choices will take practice but if you develop your ability then you will make choices that would lead you toward those results you want. Choice is a vital part of your creative process. You are the creative force in your life. You improve your creative abilities by using them. Practice making choices and feel the power of your creative self in action.

1008 represents persistence.

It’s the number of times that Colonel Sanders offered his secret recipe for fried chicken to restaurants in exchange for a percentage of profits.

It was not until door number 1009 that he heard the word he set out to hear: YES!!!

I’ve heard variations of the Colonel’s story but there’s nothing like a number to illustrate how long someone is willing to stay with an idea following a definite purpose: in this case to subsidize what he would receive from social security so that he could enjoy a more pleasant retirement.

Persistence is the 8th step to riches in Napoleon Hill’s famous Think and Grow Rich. He said that persistence was the SUSTAINED EFFORT NECESSARY to induce faith. In my copy of Hill’s book I underlined: if one does not possess PERSISTENCE one does not achieve noteworthy success in any calling.

In thinking about the Colonel’s persistence:

1. He had a definiteness of purpose – he knew exactly what he wanted and set out to get just that
2. He believed in his recipe and knew he had what it took to carry out his plans

I’m sure that there were times that he might have felt discouraged but he kept on despite whatever might have wanted to deter him by making one presentation after another. Lord knows he could have come up with as many excuses matching the number 1008 – why he wouldn’t be successful. But he didn’t give up. He didn’t search for a get rich quick scheme or a something for nothing endeavor.

Finger lickers all around the world are glad that he did not give up.

What is it that you know in your heart that you should pursue, but you think it’s taking way too long to bear fruit?

What would your number be?

Are you a risk taker? Based on a little “test” by National Geographic on line which included a mix of questions such as: would I do drugs other than marijuana and alcohol, punch someone in the face, miss  work, or water ski, to name a few – I’m pretty timid. “You wear comfortable shoes, and you’ve got insurance for your insurance.” Yikes! Yet I have been called a risk taker by mere non National Geographic mortals because I have chosen to eke a living out of life sans having a job.

I’ve often wondered why so many people remain stuck. I’m not suggesting that everyone should leave their jobs and hang out their ‘new business’ shingles. I am talking about stuck as in not taking the necessary NEXT step – regardless of where they might be. In fact – I don’t think we view what we need to do next as a step. This is the problem.

We try to think through ALL the steps that we need to take. Figure everything out. We want certainty. We ask for absolute guarantees before we can move forward. We think and think things through in detail and before we know it – we’re in another year. At a recent presentation a colleague shared, in a similar discussion about NEXT steps, that “before you know it – another Old Year’s Night is here…and then your entire life becomes a series of Old Years Nights.” I read somewhere recently “Talking about WHAT you’re going to do uses energy from that dream. By talking you run the risk of spending ALL the energy you need to put the dream into ACTION.”

Sandro da Silva, a Dutch-Brazilian leadership and performance coach shares this perspective regarding NEXT steps: “Dilemmas are part of a leader’s routine. Should you follow your own gut feeling or should you listen to what others say? Should you offer the market what you want to sell or should you offer what the market says it wants? Should you tell your team members what to do or should you allow them to make their own decisions? As you can see, the questions posed are either-or questions, and choosing one option automatically excludes the other. If you approach your leadership challenges this way (many of us do), you are always confronted with the risk of choosing one option at the expense of the other; this evokes fear in you, and sometimes so much fear that it paralyzes you and disturbs you with anxiety and stress.”

Sandro explains that we only begin to profit when we can see that the two options are only extremes of a continuum. “People feel empowered when they discover that there are many more options, many more shades of grey (50 I have heard), between the black and white extremes they normally see.”

What about habits that keep us stuck? Prevent us from making any changes because we think it’s for the greater good. Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™ warns us that habit can sometimes masquerade as logic and safety. It wraps itself up in politically correct labels and best practices. Habit demands more and more data instead of acting NOW. Habits just may be anchoring you in the comfort zone of today. When we answer to “why we do this?” with “because we’ve always done it this way” then beware – habit might be steering your ship. I asked Kate to elaborate on a phrase she used ‘Habit embezzles the phrase empowerment’ in her blog post titled ‘Change Leaders: The Beloved Bully Is Stopping You!’

She said “Leaders who feel deeply for their people, many times have difficulty leading change. They feel the pain of the employees as they struggle with the change. The result? Some of them pull back and stop leading the change and mislabel that “empowerment”. They have actually said to me, I believe in empowerment and don’t want to push. We then have a discussion about leading vs. pushing. Alternatively, employees who are resisting change do so under inappropriate label – “empowerment”. They often accuse leaders of being too authoritarian and not fostering empowerment.

In truth, habit is stopping the change: The leaders’ habits of wanting to be liked; the team members’ habits of the current way of working. Habit has thus embezzled the phrase empowerment to sustain the status quo.”

And what about the elephant in the room? We continue to live with issues that weigh down on us physically, emotionally and spiritually yet do nothing about them. We either avoid the elephant or we deny that the elephant exists People have been tolerating the issue for so long, you think – who are you to bring it up? So you say nothing. Julie Fuimano, MBA, BSN, RN, CSAC in a blog post aptly titled ‘Is there an elephant in the room?’ says “You’d rather not rock the boat. If you speak up, you are going to have to deal with the ramifications. If the person you are dealing with has a temper, has a need to be right, or is prone to becoming defensive, well, it’s just easier to continue to put up with whatever is bothering you and hope it goes away.”

None of these strategies are working are they? I didn’t think so! You will forever feel discomfort and malaise if you don’t DO something. Not doing turns into self flagellation which never ends in a good place and anchors you further into desperation and despair.

Stop needing to know and instead pay attention. Life is giving you clues ALL the time but if you’re so wrapped up in how things are SUPPOSED to be and in the need for ABSOLUTE certainty before you make your next move, you will miss those clues and instead end up just as this Ancient Chinese Proverb suggests “He who hesitates before each step spends his life on one leg.” Let me ask you this: “What step do you dare take NOW to finding out what’s on the other side?” My friend and colleague Dr. Marcia Reynolds, bestselling author of Wander Woman, suggested I add this “And once you get there – what will keep you from running away?”