"I was thinking about the GPS in my car.   It never gets annoyed at  me. If I make a mistake, it says, 'Recalculating.'  And then it tells me to make the soonest left turn and go back  . . . 'Recalculating' . . . I think that's what we're doing all the time . . . ".   This quote from  Dr. Sylvia Boorstein came across on Facebook the other day.  

  

She goes on:  " . . . something happens . . . and the challenge is:  So do you want to get mad now?   You could get mad . . . you could tell a few people you can't believe what this person said . . . Indignation is tremendously seductive . . . I could become indignant, I could fan this flame of negativity or I could say, 'Recalculating . . .' "  I think she is onto something; here's how I see it..

  

We each have an internal "GPS" that helps us navigate the roads of our relationships - personal and professional.  It alerts us when we need to recalculate.  Our internal GPS works with the same basic questions as the satellite GPS:

Satellite GPS	Personal, Internal "GPS"
Where am I?	What am I feeling? What is     mattering to me?
Where am I going?	Am I on the road to making life    wonderful for me?  for you?
Where are you?	What are you feeling?   What is    mattering to you right now?
What's the best way to get        there?	What's the best way to connect    with what matters to both of us?

That's a lot of information!  When that information shifts, the satellite GPS recalculates.   So does our internal GPS.  Recalculating is necessary when we don't have clear answers to those questions or when, somewhere along the way, we've made some wrong or useless assumptions.

Our internal GPS is especially useful when we are driving round and round on the road of judgment.  For example, consider a judgment like: "She has a very volatile personality."  OR "That's a very volatile issue."   It's a common enough tendency for an individual or a group to try to detour around the volatility or try to avoid it completely in whatever way possible.   Driving "round and round" wastes time, uses up energy and lands us in dead ends.   Recalculate!   The good news is that we as individuals and groups have a chance to recalculate.

In Fearless Conversations we support one another to recalculate -- to input some other information into our internal GPS's  by asking: 
"What actually happens out of which I judge [a person or an issue]
      'volatile'?" 
"What is it that matters most to me about this volatility?"  
"What am I caring about in this situation?"  
"What is it that I really want?" 
"What assumptions am I making that may be roadblocks?" 
"What roads are open to us that we haven't tried yet?" 
 "What do we need so we can try those roads?"  
And then we talk about our recalculations!   We discover "freeways" to connection, cooperation and collaboration that we wouldn't have known about otherwise.   Behind our judgments of volatility  there are always openings for understanding  if we talk to one another and stop driving on a road to nowhere. 

The key is working with what is now -- in the present; don't keep going over the old narratives that  produce the same alienating judgments and block out life-affirming signals.   The more consciousness we have the better able we are to pick up the signals that are out there for us -- not in the past -- not in the future - right now!   We have choice over our internal settings by which we pick up the signals.   In Fearless Conversations we develop the consciousness and the practices that help us to be better able to pick up the signals that support us in connecting with one another. 

The GPS in a car tells us when we will arrive
at our destination. Our internal GPS does the same
when we talk with one another and get on the same
road together.