Word Count: 514  |  Time to Read: 2 minutes  |  SEPTEMBER 2014
The Courage to Begin Again
When I started the "What I'm Thinking About" series last year, I knew that I would be challenged to maintain a once-a-month schedule. How right I was!

It is great opportunity, not illness or crisis, that has interrupted sharing my monthly reflections. More on this below. Let me reflect for a moment on what it takes to "begin again" on a big commitment.

Over the past few months, I knew I "should" pick up the series again but I literally could not create the capacity to do so. After a five-month gap, I was very tempted to let this whole enterprise fade away as a something that seemed like a good idea at the time. Who would miss it anyway?

And yet I knew I had to pick it back up despite my failure to keep to a regular schedule.

This experience has shown me that to take on a big, challenging commitment requires not only the strength to begin but also the courage to begin again after failure. For me, and I suspect for most of us, to begin again after a failure requires even greater courage than to begin in the first place.

I also saw that the courage to begin again - and again and again, is what enables us to take on big challenges where failure is much more likely.

What got in my way?

During the first seventh months of 2014, I had the opportunity to present three different multi-session team building and training programs. This was a wonderful opportunity to pull together much of what I have learned about teams and leadership over a professional lifetime, working in organizations. I will be sharing insights from these programs in future postings.

As many of you know, in the personal domain, Janet and I are walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain, late August through the month of September. In fact, I am putting the finishing touches on this blog early in the morning just before we leave.

  The Camino is a pilgrimage path that has been walked for well over 1000 years. Over a 32-day period, we will walk 430 miles from Pamplona to Santiago, averaging over 14 miles a day.

Why am I walking the Camino? It has to do with being on a journey where the journey, rather than the destination, is the purpose. I have spent my entire life focused on the next destination, next goal, and next objective. 

To be on a journey "for the sake of the journey" is something that I have not explored at this depth.  


I know that what I learn from this trek will find its way into these publications, both directly and indirectly.

Taken together, the demands of regular team-training sessions and going on 10 to 15 training walks absorbed the time and mental bandwidth that might have been available to write these postings. In a real sense, I failed at a regular e-blog because of big, new commitments I decided to take on in 2014.

And so I begin again with this series. I invite you to re-join me on this journey. 

 

Give it a go. 
  

Art