“Unless commitment is made,
there are only promises and hopes;
but no plans.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
I meet with a group of colleagues each month. Recently we were discussing the trends we were personally experiencing as well as those we see developing in our organizations and communities.
Here are some of the topics we discussed. I wonder if you are having similar experiences or have observed some trends we should explore?
• Are you feeling an insatiable fatigue and sense of overwhelm that causes you to resist committing to RSVPing for engagements until the very last minute — if that? If you are trying to convene a group of individuals, are you finding it hard to garner a solid commitment to the activity?
• Is your calendar a moving target of changing commitments? Do you feel like you have lost your full agency over your time? Do your feel the need to be perpetually flexible in how each day will shape up and what commitments will hold and not stay in place? Is your calendar more chaotic than a Rubik cube with moving parts even more complex and quicksand like then before the pandemic?
• Is your email inbox a black hole warping minutes into hours of lost time? Does our dependence for doing work via email or zoom calls contribute to losing one’s hold on the email inbox, fatigue, a lack of time for reflection and integrative thinking, and an on-going sense of stress of never being caught up?
• Do you feeling running away from it all and going ‘whole-hog’ into the pent-up need for a vacation.
• Are you finding yourself saying ‘No’ more often and scaling back on commitments in an effort to find renewal and a clear, intentionality around purpose?
• Have you observed that those around you and even you yourself have lost some fundamental core skills that you used to use daily but now have quietly faded away with low use? In the third year of a new way of working , have you observed any loss of capacity?
• Are you watching the ‘push-pull’ of responses to the political and economic climate with some people choosing to isolate and hoard while others choose coming together with shared resource strategies (carpooling, group purchasing, etc.)? Which is your first instinct? What is the culture of your workplace and what direction are people naturally pulling or pushing?
• In a time of tired, unrelenting changes and challenges what trends/patterns are you experiencing and observing?
• Just as importantly, what is your response to these times of shift?
• What are you holding on to that is true to you?
• In what direction will you lead and travel in your life and work?
I know, that’s a lot of questions. To give you time to consider your thoughts, we’ll pick up the rest of this blog tomorrow.
See you then.
Leslie
““The relationship between commitment and doubt
is by no means an antagonistic one.
Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt
but in spite of doubt.
— Vince Lombardi
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