Update of Wednesday May 2

I’ve heard from a reliable source that confusion is a sign that learning is taking place. What, then, might be some other signs? Occasional flashes of insight? Strange dreams and sleepless nights? Anxiety? A sense of movement or turbulence? I’m reaching here so I’ll leave it for now, but the point is that learning is not always a tidy or comfortable process. Even when children play (and learn), they set up scenarios involving tension and discord.

Following Dave Pollard’s process of finding your sweet spot is not a quick fix. We are finding that it requires persistence, attention, conversations with other people and repeated iterations, and we are adding our own discoveries and inventions as we grope toward clarity. Even those of us who are quite knowledgeable about our own Gifts (what we’re good at), Passions (what we love to do) and Purpose (what we care about and how we want to contribute) are learning heaps by working through various exercises.

Last Wednesday (May 2) we worked through Dave’s exercise #3 on exploring your Purpose. We all still seem to have plenty more work to do filling and revising our venn diagrams, but meanwhile we are soldiering forward with the process. Another reliable source has suggested to me that it is usually valuable to look ahead to where you want to end up, skipping around or even working backwards sometimes. For our next week’s homework and our next Wednesday session, we will be following both the linear and the holographic (non-linear) approaches.

Homework, for those of you who are keeping up with us, is to complete exercise 4 in Dave’s handouts. This is where you take stock of your comfort in 14 “core capacities” he considers essential to the success of any enterprise - things like Instincts, Communication, Generosity or Facilitation.

And, we came up with what might be a good way to work on that venn diagram: On a bit of wall you often see, put up a big sheet of paper (you can get one from me this Wednesday) with those three intersecting circles on it nice and big. Then, use sticky notes to write your Gifts, Passions and Purpose items and move them around or change them as you like. Use both thinking and feeling to guide you. Give it some time and attention as often as you can.

For this coming Wednesday, we will come with some ideas to explore. These can be as nebulous or defined as you like, and if you have questions about yours, bring those too. We will each take a few minutes to quickly explain the idea and then entertain questions, challenges and suggestions, using the intelligence of the group to discover useful things about our ideas and our ways of creating them. In fact, just talking about things to other people can bring out lots of useful ideas, even if nobody else says a word. In this way, we may be vaulting ahead of ourselves, running before we’ve learned to walk, but I think it will prove to be useful and we’ll certainly be learning tons, if in a confused, messy sort of way.

Some of us have expressed interest in getting our own copies of Finding the Sweet Spot. Since no local bookseller seems to have it, for expediency we might just make an order to Amazon and get free shipping out of the deal. Email me sometime in the next week if you want to do that.

Jill has created a document with resources and links on it. I don’t yet know how to include it in Jordan’s little google cluster of documents, so we’ll have to figure that out in the next few days. This could form the beginning of our own little resource library.

My thanks to everyone for yet another productive session, and for all the ideas that come out of the group!

-cabot