Today is Thansgiving in the United States. Thanksgiving is a celebration of abundance that comes from a heart filled with gratitude.   Thanksgiving, which occurs in mid-October here in Canada, is a celebration of harvest that is common to both countries, although we don’t have the Pilgrims to thank for our celebration.

The Full Heart is the source of every expression of love, every purposeful act, every generous contribution and all prayers of thanksgiving and worship.  Filled with gratitude for the great gift of life, the opportunity to pursue meaningful goals, and awe at the mysterious world around us, a Visionmaker is moved to match such generosity with generosity.

Where there is gratitude and generosity, there is abundance.  Abundance means plentiful, full, overflowing, affluent, more than adequate. Most people think of abundance as a result of luck, skill or circumstances, like winning the lottery, picking the right stocks, or being born into the right family. Others see it as a cyclical pattern that includes periods of lack and plenty based largely on unfathomable and unpredictable forces.

A Visionmaker sees abundance as a cause rather than an effect and as a natural energy that generates and creates.  It is always present, flowing like a river, searching for any opening to manifest its forms.  Every human being is a conduit for the flow of abundance through acts of generosity.  The great American writer, Henry Miller saw this clearly:

“The one desire which grows more and more is to give…Giving and receiving are at bottom one thing, dependent upon whether one lives opened or closed.  Living openly one becomes a medium, a transmitter; living thus, as a river, one experiences life to the full, flows along with the current of life… ”

 

Miller’s insight about whether one is open or closed cuts to the heart of the matter.  If abundance is the ocean, then generosity is the river of giving and receiving which continues the flow of abundance.  Through full and open-hearted giving, the Visionmaker learns an important secret of transformation: any act of generosity that comes from gratitude always transforms the giver.

Happy Thanksgiving.

© Patrick O’Neill 2008. All rights reserved.

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Yikes!

The ground is shifting so fast beneath our feet that we are being realigned several times daily. Chiropracters everywhere are rejoicing at their good fortune. No one I know dares open the mail from their broker for fear of a trauma-inducing shock.

 Everywhere we are encountering images and messages that induce a state of fear.  The media is especially adept at spreading and profiting from calamity and is doing so now with the economy in difficulty. Fear spreads from person to person like a virus being passed throughout the herd. To weather these times requires a strong constitution, optimism and resourcefulness.

Where does one find qualities that seem in such short supply?  Our source of strength in volatile conditions is the self.  Specifically, we have all been provided with gifts, talents, character qualities, experiences and personal resources, the sum total of which is far greater than the challenges we face. By aligning the will behind our resources, we access personal power. 

Personal power arises from our allegiance to sufficiency over fear. Sufficiency is the recognition that our resources are more powerful than our circumstances. By placing more energy behind our sufficiency and meeting our fears head on, we provide ourselves with a strategic advantage. That advantage is the command of our circumstances and the refusal to allow circumstances to command us.  This is an important and decisive moment in the battle against fear.

Here are 10 ways you can feed personal power:

1. Identify your positive gifts, talents, character qualities, and positive contributions. Make a list, keep adding to it.

2. Monitor your self-talk.  Make sure you are not feeding fear and self-doubt by terrifying yourself with “what-if” conversations.

3. Take three positive steps every day towards a dream, aspiration or positive change.

4. Be creative in meeting a problem, challenge or obstacle.  A defeatist attitude never creates a breakthrough.

5. Ask for help.  You will be surprised at the good will that will come your way.

6. Seek positive influences.  Surrounding yourself with gloom and doom produces more of the same.  Find “can-do” company.

7. Help someone else.  There are people all around us that need support, especially those who are already  marginalized, suffering or at a disadvantage.

8. Seek inspiration.  Jack London points out: “Don’t loaf and invite inspiration.  Light out after it with a club.”

9. Look for the opportunities behind the challenges.  Fear erases creative thinking and reduces our capacity to be resilient and flexible.  By examining a challenge from multiple viewpoints, we often spot leverage points that were not immediately obvious.

10. See the future as your friend. The future is not out to get us.  It is simply a container of time in which we have an opportunity to create and manifest.  Whether that creation is heart-based or fear-based is up to us to decide.

© Patrick O’Neill 2008. All rights reserved.

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     Visionmaking is egalitarian. One does not need any special qualifications, degrees or permissions to be a Visionmaker. All that is needed is the willingness to be used for Destiny’s purpose, the wisdom that arises from the Clear Heart, and the ability to act on that wisdom.

     I was reminded of that many years ago, when I was hired to help turn around a failing manufacturing plant on the south shore of Montreal, Quebec. The plant employed approximately 350 people and was slated for closure if it could not correct its performance. It had the poorest productivity of any of its sister plants across North America and a distinctive set of challenges. Two new leaders were running the plant: one parachuted in from head office to catalyze change, the other transferred in from the U.S. to manage day-to-day-operations. What they found when they arrived was alarming. There were serious conflicts at every level of the operation. Communication was emotionally charged and any cooperation that may have existed previously had been replaced by a desire to pin the blame on someone else.

     As part of the attempt to create positive change, it was agreed that the leadership team conduct a three-day meeting to look for solutions to the plethora of problems, a meeting that I was to facilitate. The meeting took place at a local hotel and was conducted through simultaneous translation, so that the English-speaking participants could communicate with the French-speaking participants. It took tremendous patience for people to slow down, think carefully about their words and listen to others. This commitment to understand, however, was quickly overtaken by old grievances – and by the morning of our third day, not only were things not improving, quite frankly they were worse. People were yelling and pounding the tables for emphasis.

     Fighting a sinking feeling, I attempted to steer the conversation back to the reality that the facility’s past need not be the determining factor of the future. As soon as my words were translated to the group I noticed something very large move in my peripheral vision. I stopped speaking and turned to my left. The room came into complete silence at the sight of a foreman named Gilles rising forcefully from his chair. He was the size of an NFL lineman. I wondered what on earth had happened in the translation that caused this mountain to move. My relatively short life flashed before my eyes.

     Gilles looked at the room for several long, tense moments. Finally, he began to speak. “I apologize for all of the things that I have said and done that caused problems for us. I can see that I have made a bad situation worse. I also believe that if we can put our past behind us, we can work together differently. I’m prepared to do that.”

     Gilles sat down at that point. Those were his first and final words at the meeting. From that point forward, however, the tone of the meeting changed. Suddenly, people were talking about what they would do differently. They began to release their positional opinions and consider what others were offering. Commitments were made and agreements struck. And that facility turned the corner.

     Several years later, the plant was still in operation. All because of one man’s ability to apply what was true, just and lasting to his situation, and to speak from the heart. Gilles created a breakthrough. 

An excerpt from my forthcoming book, The Visionmaker.

© Patrick O’Neill 2008. All rights reserved.

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 “Like all dreamers, I confused disenchantment with truth.”  Jean-Paul Sartre

 

It is easy to become resigned and cynical and lose faith that our dreams can withstand the gunmetal harshness of the world in which we live.  Everyday, we are subject to an onslaught of negative events, images and encounters.  The media provides a steady diet of violence, social and political upheaval and threatening economic news. In the face of such conditions, is it not inevitable to grow angry, depressed and discouraged?

 

These oppressive conditions require the resolve of a Visionmaker to face and overcome. They seek to demoralize us and turn us away from what has deep meaning in our lives– our visions, dreams and aspirations. The Age of Disenchantment may very well be the name given to these times unless we are prepared to take a stand  to counter them. 

 

The Visionmaker draws a line in the sand to combat disenchantment and calls forward all of the personal power he or she possess–that formidable combination of gifts, talents, knowledge, experience and willpower that funds full engagement. Without that irrevocably drawn line we meet disenchanting conditions at a disadvantage. Our lack of commitment renders us vulnerable and no good can come from such a poor leverage point.

 

No Visionmaker settles for the tyranny of circumstances. Ralph Waldo Emmerson hits the nail on the head in identifying the problem: “What is the matter with the world that is so out of joint? Simply that men do not rule themselves but let circumstances rule them.”

 

It is easy to slip into the numbing paralysis of disenchantment.  The world is filled with all the evidence you need to take the plunge.  Disappointment is a normal part of every path. Resilience is necessary to face the trials and tribulations that come from seeing what is true and what is false in the world. Resilience is the ability to withstand and recover quickly from difficult conditions. It is funded by faith in your journey, trust in your own capacity to handle whatever you face, and optimism, the presumption that goodness will win out over time.

 

Dag Hammarskjold, the former Secretary General of the United Nations, offers us advice for those moments when we flirt with disappointment, disillusionment and disenchantment: ”Is life so wretched?  Isn’t is rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddled? You are the one who must grow up.”

 

As Sartre points out, “growing up” requires us to face the world as it is without succumbing to disenchantment.  A Visionmaker sees everything–even difficult and disappointing conditions–as a challenge to grow. It is the only means we have to reenchant the world.

 

© Patrick O’Neill 2008. All rights reserved.

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The election of Barack Obama is a transformational event. Many in the African-American community, and the larger world, believed they would never see this day come in their lifetime.  But come it did, a victory of such decisiveness that there can be no question that a new era has arrived.

Barack Obama may have single-handedly reestablished the belief that possibilities are potent and dreams can be manifest, even in the face of dark times. After eight tragic years of war, economic devastation, a trillion dollar deficit, human rights abuses, and other scandals, the American public hungered for a message of hope and a plan to recover the integrity and dignity of the American dream. Obama recognized those aspirations and with great eloquence, spoke to them directly and repeatedly. The result? A landslide victory.

Barack Obama is a Visionmaker.  A Visionmaker is anyone who takes the purposeful action required to manifest a heart-felt vision in the world. Obama’s pursuit of a meaningful alternative to the status quo and his ability to engage a wide cross-section of the American public in a new dream for their country contributed to massive engagement in the election. 135 million people waited patiently for the opportunity to vote. That’s four times the population of Canada –voting! And, millions of people around the world followed the U.S. election as though it were happening in their own country.

By contrast, Canadians avoided the polling stations in droves this past October, with just 59% of eligible voters casting a ballot. It was the lowest turnout in our nation’s history. Why? An uninspiring appeal to maintain the status quo trumped a poorly articulated green plan that carried economic consequences that no one could explain and few understood.  In the middle of economic calamity no party seemed to grasp the severity of the threat to the livelihood of ordinary people. Nor was there a compelling vision presented that inspired Canadians to be Canadians.  As a result, we defaulted to regionalism and provincialism, primary allegiances that continue to fragment national unity. Or we fell to apathy.

Obviously, fewer of us cared about a “no stakes election”. It cost the Canadian taxpayer $300 million dollars to uphold the status quo and elect a minority government.  Two years ago, 64% of eligible voters cast ballots, and the election came in at $277 million.  That’s almost $600 million dollars spent on the status quo.

What Obama gets that most leaders fail to understand is the power of possibility. “Yes we can” is a bold acknowlegement that the tyranny of the status quo can and must be overturned, which is the work of every Visionmaker.  It is also a call to action that reaches beyond societies’ dividing lines; barriers that previously appeared unassailable and prevented progress from occurring.

In the discipline of Visionmaking– which is the ongoing mission of this website to explore– the status quo is defined as “a state of stasis where there is neither motion or development and where there is no hope of change.”  Of course, a Visionmaker never accepts the tyranny of the status quo.  He or she holds true to the firm belief that anything can be changed, ourselves included. That premise is central to Obama’s promise to America.  It is a promise, however, that will be difficult to deliver given the severity and confluence of problems.

Fortunately, President-elect Obama appears to take it all in his stride.  He displays grace under pressure, displays intellectual curiosity, sound judgment and the resiliency to go the distance.  Add that to what Colin Powell calls a “world-class temperment” and its quite a formidable combination of gifts.

The road forward for the new leader of the free world will be filled with challenges.  But those are exactly the kind of conditions that Visionmakers thrive in. Hopefully, his journey will inspire leaders at every level and in every nation to challenge the status quo with a vision for positive change that cannot be stopped by the resistance of current conditions and circumstances.

© Patrick O’Neill 2008. All rights reserved.

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The world is a mysterious place full of surprises, unexpected circumstances and uncontrollable people and events.  It is a place of no guarantees.  What is to be done about such randomness?

“Be open to outcome, not attached to outcome” is one of the powerful principles expressed in The Four-Fold Way” by Angeles Arrien.  Being open to outcome is the best way we can prepare for the unexpected to happen and maintain a certain degree of detachment.  Angeles defines detachment as “the capacity to care deeply from an objective place.”  Detachment is necessary to weather change, upsets, confusion, or disappointment.

The ability to remain open and not attached requires a recognition that there is always a greater plan unfolding, a plan that we may not understand, but one that we must trust.  Angeles Arrien writes:

“When we find ourselves attached to outcome, our tendency is to control rather than trust. When we are attached to something, we often lose our objectivity about it, and thus lose our ability to do right by it.”

Being open to outcome is an expression of openheartedness and a declaration that no matter what happens, our trust remains steadfast.  We resolve to meet “a disturbance without disturbance”–the definition of equanimity.  We seek to maintain balance and meet these circumstances from a place of curiosity, flexibility and humour, especially when things go wrong.

Curiosity is the strong desire to know and learn.  It is a quality associated with deep engagement that causes us to wonder, explore and follow the call to adventure. It leads to the expansion of knowledge and wisdom.  It also funds the resiliency to learn from mistakes.

Flexibility is the capacity to bend without breaking.  Every athlete understand the importance of maintaining flexibility to support high performance.  It funds the capacity to meet changing conditions and circumstances with fluidity.

Humour shares the same etymological root as humid.  It literally means “to moisten.”  Humour is a gift of insight and is the capacity to illuminate a deeper truth and express that truth through joy, surprise and delight. When stuff happens, as it inevitably will, the ability to maintain a sense of humour is also the ability to keep things in their proper perspective.

By being open to outcome, we are able to maintain a sense of excitement, wonder and deep engagement with life, even when things don’t go as planned.  We look forward to the adventure of living, greeting each day with the enthusiasm of an explorer on an expedition into the unknown.

© Patrick O’Neill 2008. All rights reserved.

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