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Why Clarity.....
....and why now?
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Greetings!
We can no longer fathom watching standard definition TV broadcasts. We HAVE to view our sporting events, National Geographic programming and late night comedy in HD -- High Definition.
HDClarity is an e-zine for those wanting to develop more trust, understanding and camaraderie in their work environment, and their life in general. A smoother running team is a more profitable team. They get things done faster, for less cost. If you'd like to discover methods for developing High Definition Clarity in your daily life, please read on.
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"As a kid, I might have been
psycho, I guess, but I used to throw golf balls in the trees and try and
somehow make par from them. I thought that was fun.
"
Eldrick "Tiger" Woods
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The Three Faces of Eldrick
How Tiger Woods is trying to rewrite his
Knower/Judger
Tiger Wood's fall from grace has become the stuff of legend.
It seems the words "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts
absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men," penned in 1887, are
true. Perceived power seems to give people a free pass to do anything they
want.
The name "Tiger" conjures the vision of a dominant, prowling
cat capable of killing and eating its prey at will. And, of course, of mating
with any females in the streak. (Lions have prides and tigers have streaks,
although they are mostly solitary animals.)
Young Mr. Woods, however, was born Eldrick Woods... and it
seems Eldrick used to have fun playin g golf. From age two through his college
days at Stanford he was perfecting his game of golf. In his youth he reveled in
the well-placed shot and put the errant shot in his memory bank as something to
avoid. He played, as they say, for the love of the game. Young Eldrick spent a
lot of time in his Learner/Researcher persona, allowing him to continually
grow.
Somewhere along the way little Eldrick became Tiger,
certainly a more marketable name, and the love of the game gave way to the
result of the fame. Stuck in his Knower/Judger persona, Tiger became driven and
self-critical, knowinghe could do
better, drive straighter and longer, putt truer. We saw him beat himself up
weekly for missing putts and not executing perfect shots.
On April 8 and 9, the golfing world held its breath to see
how Tiger would do. And we all watched Eldrick play two very successful rounds
of golf. I say Eldrick because he smiled. He embraced old friends, and enemies.
He chatted with the galleries. He was having fun. The smile on his face matched the one of his youth. This was a
different person than we'd seen for the past eight or nine "brand--building"
years. It seemed that perhaps he had discovered that there were more important
things in his life than the value of his brand--that his wife, beautiful
children, reputation, and honor had more value than winning, sponsors, and
being a hunk.
On Saturday morning, Eldrick apparently stayed in the rented
house and Tiger teed off. Here was the purpose-driven Tiger we'd been
mesmerized by for years, slamming his clubs and cursing his errant shots. By
Sunday he was describing his fourth-place finish as "unsuccessful."
Functionally he played about the same all four days. The
first two days he was happy with his 69 and his 70. But the third day, as
Tiger, he shot another 70 while the rest of the top players dropped an average
of two strokes. This brought out the uppercase "TIGER" in Mr. Woods. The media
used the euphemism "focused" to describe the angry, self-critical,
tantrum-prone Tiger Woods.
I'm familiar with the philosophy of Zen to which Mr. Woods
supposedly subscribes. It seemed to guide the young Eldrick's growth processes
magnificently. I don't recall an obsession with winning being a part of that
philosophy.
No one changes anything until the pain of leaving it the
same becomes greater than the pain and cost of changing it. It appears Mr.
Woods is teetering on that analysis.
Eldrick or Tiger? Which Mr. Woods do you see as best
representing himself, his family and his sport?
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Hope
 It won an election for Barack Obama. It springs eternal for Chicago Cub fans. I suspect it was heavily involved in the rescue of
11-year-old Nadia Bloom, lost in a Florida swamp for four days.
Stan Grof, MD, PhD, best known for his studies on consciousness
and transpersonal psychology, wrote When
the Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-Ordinary Realitya few years
back. Grof posits that the improbable isn't always so improbable--that when we
let go of our own Knower/Judgerunderstanding of how things work, and of our
judgments about what is and isn't possible, we observe many more "extraordinary occurrences".
We've all had experiences when we've been rescued from a
situation and declared it incredible luck or seen our sports team win by impossible
occurrences.
Perhaps President Obama's election didn't start out as
impossible, and the Cubs may never win a World  Series (which I write as a true
St. Louis Cardinal fan). But the discovery of young Nadia after she spent four
days and nights in a snake- and alligator-infested swamp certainly seems
improbable--and perhaps even miraculous. The sheriff's department was within
hours of calling off the search because the probability of finding Nadia was so
low.
Escaping Hopelessness
I've observed many unusual occurrences in my life, and I've
gained a certain ability to perceive when they are happening. I bet you've
experienced that as well. You've watched a situation that looked, to your
Knower/Judger, hopeless, and you got a strange feeling.
Did you let it in? Did you grant it permission to enter your
realm of possibility? Or did you decide from your Knower/Judger that it was
still impossible?
When we do "let it in," Stan Grof says that we have left our
conscious beings for a moment and perceived the world from a different plane.
When we're open to miracles, miracles can occur. When we're not, they can
happen right under our noses and we'll miss them.
We just don't seem to be capable of turning hope on when we
need it. Or are we?
I've raced with drivers who were unable to connect with this
power and others who could. One would mutter "This is gonna hurt" as the car
became unsettled at 90 mph, and we'd crash. Another would start trying things
to get the car under control with all the confidence in the world that we would
be racing down the road in the next moment ... and we always were. Tim O'Neil,
one of America's premier rally driver trainers, calls it commitment. The first
driver was committed to the crash. The second was committed to the miracle.
James King, the man who wouldn't give up looking for Nadia,
was committed to the miracle. He had a feeling, supported by his belief that
God was guiding him, that Nadia was safe and just waiting to be found.
Hopelessness is when your Knower/Judger allows no room for
the improbable. We couch that feeling in phrases like "get real" or "it's just
the way it is." But every once in a while we experience that prescient feeling,
and it turns out. We set aside our logic and knowledge and projections and
wisdom and we win the unwinnable game. Or we stay on the road. Or we find
Nadia.
Allow room for miracles.
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Getting to the bottom of things
Why do you take the actions you take? While we'd like to
think that we take certain actions because they make sense, that isn't always
the case. In fact, our histories often cause us to act in ways today that make
no sense whatsoever. Listen to this:
The standard width between two rails on a railroad in the
U.S. is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. Kind of an odd number. Why that width?
Well, that's how they built railroads in England,
and our early railroads were patterned after English railroads.
Why did the English build them like that? Because the first
rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways,
and that's the width they used.
Why did they use that width back then? Because the people who built the tramways
used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons. Wagons used
that wheel spacing. They had to because the wheel ruts in the British roads
were that far apart.
So who built those old rutted roads? The first long-distance roads were built by
Imperial Rome for its legions. Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts.
What does all this mean? That the standard width between two rails on a
railroad in the U.S.
is derived from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
(Specifications and bureaucracies live forever.)
So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder
what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the
Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back
ends of two warhorses.
Now the twist to the story.
When we see a space shuttle sitting on its launch pad (for however much longer that may be), there are two big
booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid
rocket boosters, or SRBs.
The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah.
The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit
fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch
site. The railroad line from the factory had to run through a tunnel in the
mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel width is--you
guessed it--about as wide as two horses' behinds, or at least limited by that dimension.
So the major design feature of what is arguably the world's
most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago
by the width of a horse's ass!
It's all quite factual according to Snopes.com. But it's a great
example of how we sometimes do things without even understanding why we're
doing them.
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Archives
March, 2010 Wipe the Slate Clean, Failing Forward, Extraordinary
February, 2010 Getting out of the Triangle, Maybe-maybe not, Who Dat?
January, 2010 Drama Triangle, Blind Side, Summit Review
December, 2009 Red Conversation, Christmas 1914 Truce
November, 2009 Green Conversation, Hate, Jim Abbott
October, 2009 - 6th and 7th Gears
September, 2009 - 4th and 5th Gears
August, 2009 - 1st, 2nd, 3rd Gears
July, 2009 - Frustration, Cotton, Coaching
June, 2009 - Unlearning, Knower/Judger; Learner/Researcher
May, 2009 - Doubt
April, 2009 - Ho'oponopono
March, 2009 - The Sky is Falling
February, 2009 - USAir Fight 1549
January, 2009 - Let Go of the Past
December, 2008 - HDClarity introduction
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There is a clear and present danger.....when you are neither clear nor present.
Saving the planet one conversation at a time,
Kim DeMotte
Power of NO, Corporate CoDriver
kim@corporatecodriver.com
www.corporatecodriver.com
(877) 245-8250
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