My 20s were consumed with pursuits in the military, police work and university training. That all changed at twenty-nine when I found myself in the audience of a personal development talk and wholly unexpectedly found myself thinking I’ve been looking for this all my life!
I did their workshop. Their next. And yet another. Then I interned with them. I further surprised myself with a prescient awareness that my life’s work would orient around assisting others learn, grow and change.
I never saw this coming. Never.
The right mentors and requisite bodies of work flowed my way effortlessly for the next two decades. My skills and capacities grew enabling me to successfully help others yet meanwhile my own change and development unfolded slowly. My journey has been challenging yet teeming with treasure.
Years after an auspicious meeting in Peru I began working abroad. Now, twelve on and some twenty countries later—totaling thirty-six years of helping others leverage change—I find myself beginning again. What I’ve experienced is beyond words. What I’ve learned is greater than the scope of this bit here. Suffice it to say that it is my role, as with any genuinely aware compassionately intelligent person, to empower ourselves and choreograph our lives in thought and action to counterbalance the forces impeding and diminishing the good, true and beautiful—those taking us off our center, those bent on neutering our creative and productive capacities; those furthering misogyny, escalating emasculation; and thwarting the integrity of all living things. We counterbalance the diminishing forces by genuinely empowering ourselves and by deploying our attentions to growing and changing.
Being kind, generous, gracious and compassionate. This requires becoming personally powerful—genuinely powerful. We are to strongly take a stand. Not in opposition to the loathsome—but rather, a ruthless stand in the center of the Powerful Force that we are. A stand in what we are here to experience and creatively express. A stand in favor of Life and egalitarianism and collaborative cooperation with the long view in mind. And to honor and support the Life Herself.
I love the sea. The out of doors. Black and white photography. Literature. Writing. Exercise. A long time resident of the beautiful Northwest USA–now I am off to Southeast Asia to headquarter my business there.
“Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”
—Mahatma Gandhi