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Zen (Page 7)

ZL1 participants sitting around table
Making the new Year New

By flipping around our usual way of sensing, including our sense of self, we confound our filters, invert our thinking and let the new emerge. Descartes’ famous dictum, “I think therefore I am” flips around into the spacious truth that when we don’t have to reify a self, we don’t have to habitually think the same thoughts. We can put up different antenna and new music becomes possible.

There Are No Superheroes; It’s You!

There is something slightly magical about mid-winter in the higher reaches of the Northern Hemisphere, the short days and long hours of darkness, with the sun rising around 8.00 am and setting soon after 3.30 pm. Stonehenge lies not far from my mother’s house, where our prehistoric ancestors laid out a ring of stones to celebrate these circadian rhythms.

Hark! Our Better Angels Sing: The Greatest Gift A Leader Can Give

In Lincoln’s first inaugural address, he appealed to the nation’s “better angels,” meaning the better aspects of our character, such as good sense and virtue. Seven score and sixteen years later, in the thick of the Trump presidency, historian Jon Meacham spoke to the battle for our better angels in The Soul of America. He recounts the disparities and triumphs of a nation founded on the declaration that all people are created equal and its unequal efforts to live up to that mighty truth.

Cutting Back to Move Forward

On my kitchen windowsill is one of my grandmother’s orchids. I brought it home after she passed away earlier this year as it wasn’t faring so well without her particular care and attention – I understood how it felt. Although I’m still a newbie gardener and have zero experience with orchids, it started to revive and I felt the joy of her presence again.

How Leaders Can Do the Essential Work of Our Time

More leaders are waking up to the awareness that business cannot continue as usual. Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) have moved from being a UN wish list to being investor requirements for many companies. Sustainable practices have shifted from being “greenwashing” to core strategy. From burning out employees, to drying up resources, to driving away the next generation of customers, companies are realizing that they themselves are unsustainable using extractive practices.

What an Interconnected Universe Means for You as a Leader

String Theory is on the ropes. At least that’s the summary from a recent review of the state of high energy physics and the lack of experimental support for the current ranking Theory of Everything. The Large Hadron Collider, the first of its kind powerful enough to detect the supersymmetry particles required for String Theory to hang together, has found nothing of the like.

I Don’t Know

I Don’t Know

Oct 04 2021

We sat with the ‘I don’t know’ for several minutes, asking how the question left us feeling, a truthful or creative answer, the difference between an alignment or misalignment of head and hara. 

The Most Essential Leadership Skills And How Zen Reframes A Way To Master Them

The Most Essential Leadership Skills And How Zen Reframes A Way To Master Them by Ginny Whitelaw. Originally published on Forbes.com An in-person leadership team…

Intentionality and that Back-to-School Feeling

As an adult I don’t get that automatic sense of new beginnings in a work context every year. January 1st for me is about personal change but I don’t have a career equivalent and there’s no reason why not. In fact, I think it’s crucial and why would we limit this refresh to once per year?