For those engaged in bringing something new into the world, whether it is a new vision, goal or structure recognizing and following such principles can accelerate your progress.

Here are seven principles of purposeful action:

1. Start Anywhere

Starting anywhere requires us to initiate action. “We are the children of our deeds,” says an old Spanish saying. It suggests that by starting anywhere we transform ourselves through action. Initiating action, we create a path of heart and meaning rather than expecting one to be provided for us.

2. Take The Next Step

After starting anywhere, we need to take the next step. This affirms the principle that each and every step of the journey of meaning is important and transformational. Goethe provides wise counsel on this matter: “It is not enough to take steps which may some day lead to a goal; each step must be itself a goal and a step likewise.”

3. Use Your Resources

Each of us have a unique combination of gifts, talents, knowdge, skills and experiences. They need to be applied if we hope to progress. Our resources are the one thing we can count on especially when we meet uncertainty. And we will.

4. Seek Guidance

Action requires a pilot or it easily strays off-course. Seek out time for reflection and wise counsel from trusted sources. Alone we see only so much. With others we begin to see what is at first might be invisible to our eyes.

5. Stretch Your Comfort Zone

Creative tension is the force that stretches our capacity for openness, creativity and problem solving. It appears when we begin to explore possibilities, and especially when we attempt to bridge the gap between possibilities and outcomes. View it as a form of “therapeutic irritation” because it forces us to stretch, grow, and change in order to act in new and original ways.

6. Be Open To Outcome

“Be open to outcome, not attached to outcome” is one of the powerful principles expressed in The Four-Fold Way, by Angeles Arrien. It is the best way one can prepare for the unexpected to happen with a certain degree of detachment. Arrien defines detachment as “the capacity to care deeply from an objective place.” Openness allows for elegant solutions to problems that we encounter to occur, solutions that  we may not have considered.

© Patrick O’Neill 2013. All rights reserved.

Poseidon conjured the bull from the sea and gave it to Pasiphae’s husband, King Minos, who asked for a sign that Cretans were favored by the gods. Minos was then supposed to sacrifice the bull to Poseidon. He refused to carry out the offering because the white bull was magnificent and Minos decided that he wanted it for breeding purposes. Strangely, he got his wish.

Poseidon wreaked revenge on Minos like a mob boss. He went after generations of the King’s family, turning Pasiphae into a zoophile and the offspring of her union with the bull, into a Minotaur. This appears to have been a reasonably popular consequence in the ancient world, where centaurs, satyrs, manticore and sphinx apparently abounded, the hybrid offspring of questionable moral choices.

Minos decided to enlist a contractor, Daedalus, to build a Labyrinth, a huge holding pen for his monstrous stepson. Each year fourteen young people – seven boys and seven girls – from neighboring Athens were led into the Labyrinth and fed to the Minotaur as tributes in the original Hunger Games. This too was an act of revenge, payback for the assassination of Minos’ son Androgeus who was in Athens at an athletic competition. When the Athenians either refused, or could not identify the murderer, King Minos decided that the penalty should be an annual tributes dinner with the Minotaur.

Enter Theseus, the hero. Theseus’ superpower was wisdom (a state of mind that predictably deserted him in middle age). Theseus decided to solve the problem of the Minotaur’s tribute buffet by volunteering to take the place of one of their number. He was aided in his quest to kill the Minotaur by King Minos’ daughter, Ariadne. Apparently, Ariadne shared her mother’s predisposition to infatuation, falling in love with Theseus at first sight. Ariadne consulted her father’s man, Daedalus, about the specs for the labyrinth. She was advised: “Go forwards and always down, never left or right.”

Like a ninja, Theseus entered the labyrinth at night with the directions, a concealed weapon, and a ball of golden thread. He tied the thread to the doorpost and began stalking his prey. According to legend, the Minotaur was dispatched with a slash to the throat, or was strangled, depending on the source. Theseus, following the thread, retraced his steps and escaped the crime scene with the girl.

© Patrick O’Neill 2013. All rights reserved.

Traveling the path of the heart, however, demands something of us, challenges us to grow into our best selves. It asks us to trust, to use our gifts and talents to serve the heart, not the ego, and to build character on the journey.

It asks that we turn down the volume on the self-critic, to turn away from fears of not being enough or doing it right. Ultimately, it asks us to change.

“For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth.”  – Jesus

Truth seems like a value in decline, associated with an earlier, simpler time when character was a matter of honor and what you said and did was a matter of self-respect.

Daniel Boorstin, the American professor and writer, warns us of the consequences of the decline of truth in modern society: “’Truth’ has been displaced by ‘believability’ as the test of the statements which dominate our lives.”

More recently, the American comedian, Stephen Colbert coined the satirical term “truthiness”– the conscious avoidance of facts, logic, evidence and rational analysis – to describe the same condition.

“What is truth,” asked Pontius Pilate at the trial of Jesus?

It is easy to imagine a combination of skepticism, mockery, resignation, and weariness in Pilate’s tone as he asks one of the most famous questions in history. Washing his hands of the pursuit of truth and his responsibility to uphold it, Pilate becomes the archetype of the weasely politician. His profession has yet to recover.

Jean-Paul Sartre sees a distinction that we would do well to remember in wisdom work.  “Like all dreamers,” he wrote   “I confused disenchantment with truth.”

Like Pilate, many of us struggle to recognize and acknowledge the truth even when it stares us in the face. Seeing what is true can be disheartening. Sometimes it may seem easier not to see at all.

But to avoid looking at what is true is cowardice and comes back to wreak havoc. Those who prefer fantasy or the posture of an ostrich, head firmly planted in the sand, rather than looking at people and circumstances for what they are, participate in their own betrayal.

One has no one to blame but oneself.

© Patrick O’Neill 2013. All rights reserved.

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 three-day meeting took place at a local hotel and was conducted through simultaneous translation, so that the French-speaking participants could communicate with the English-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 a giant – 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 speak from the heart.

Gilles, the giant,  created a breakthrough.

© Patrick O’Neill 2013. All rights reserved.

You see it everywhere: in magazine advertising, television commercials, product placements in blockbuster movies, and in celebrity culture. Advertisers spend an estimated $500 billion dollars every year to convince us to spend ever more money on looking good, impressing others, and being on the “A” list. It is supposed to be the shopping list to a happy life.

In his book “The Fear of Freedom,” Erich Fromm describes the impact of this kind of conditioning: “Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.”

Is this pursuit of material wealth and celebrity making us happier as a society? I don’t think so. As a matter of fact I think it’s having the opposite effect.

GNH

Treating happiness as a measure of development was a radical idea. The President of the International Institute of Management, Med Jones, took GNH a step further and identified seven measures:

• Economic Wellness
• Environmental Wellness
• Physical Wellness
• Mental Wellness
• Workplace Wellness
• Social Wellness
• Political Wellness

These distinctions are useful in that they make an important connection between wellness and happiness. They also uncover a much larger framework for the development of happiness beyond just wealth, sex appeal, and social status.

The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire, developed in the 1980’s at Oxford Brookes University, builds on this view by providing personal measures of happiness. These include: optimism about the future, purpose, the feeling of rest, the ability to make decisions with ease, energy levels, frequency of laughter, relational satisfaction and wellness to name a few.

Our society needs to expand it’s definition and understanding of what makes us happy. Our health and well-being depend on it.

© Patrick O’Neill 2013. All rights reserved.