Redefining Failure

The following is an excerpt from David Cameron's e-book, A Happy Pocket Full of Money. It is a great reconceptualizaton of failure and this can help you avoid the fear of failure, a crippling emotion.

Most people have been programmed to fear failure. They give up to avoid failure, or they do not even attempt just so that they may not fail. Failure, however, is an illusion. Begin to see it as an illusion.

Failure, suffering, is an essential component to success. It is what helps you correct wrong thought if you approach it with an attitude of learning. Through failure, you learn how to succeed. By trying and failing, you refine your thought and point it ever closer to success. But this is so only if you do not give up.

Through failure, you get to know success and how to get there. How else would you know what success tastes like if you did not know what it does not taste like? And how would you get there without knowing how to? Think about that.

Failure is an integral part of success. Failure is actually a successive moment that leads to ultimate success. Failure is not the opposite of success, a separate entity from success.

Failure is success, it is the same thing but they are on different ends of that spectrum, the spectrum of achievement. It is just like hot and cold are different ends of the spectrum of temperature, or a thermometer. Failure and success are both different vibrations of the same thing.

Failure is not failure as such. It is only truly failure when you accept it as the end. But if you accept it as a blessed part of the process, a part that helps you succeed further, and know what this further success tastes like, then you can never ever possibly fail, ever. Failure is an illusion. Stop fearing it; love it for the gifts it brings you.

Taken from A Happy Pocket Full Of Money, pages 127 and 128 of 236 www.ImagesOfOne.com

Seeing Destiny in Others

Last November, I attended my first academic conference, the annual meeting of the National Communication Association. If you're interested, they're meeting in San Diego this upcoming November....and as an added incentive, I'll be speaking on Mr. Chavez. ;-)

The presentations were (some of them, anyway,) more interesting than I had expected. I went to one session to hear my brilliant friend, Dennis, speak. While I was there, I heard several beautiful talks on how we can express love through our communication. In one of these, I heard, for the first time, love defined as "seeing destiny in the other."

That was a real breakthrough for me. I saw a practical way to love.

Seeing destiny in someone is to acknowledge his potential for a wonderful and fulfilling life. My mother definitely has always seen destiny, a beautiful and brilliant destiny, in all four of her children. Ideally, all mothers do this.

How wonderful when a friend, or even an acquaintance, sees destiny in us.

What brings this to mind is my reading Christine Kane's two posts on encouragement. She expresses encouragement as seeing the other person capable of merging her dreams with current reality, in some way or another. Being an active encourager is a wonderful way to live.

As you see destiny in the other, your own appears more vividly.

Juggling All the Balls

Life is full of paradoxes; accepting them is a sure sign of wisdom. Today's paradox is focus is needed for outstanding results yet an unbalanced life is unsustainable. Focus and balance: What would Yoda say?

I think the answer is to focus on one thing at a time. I am convinced that multitasking only works with jobs that require no concentration or little creativity. I mean you can put in a load of laundry and then go check on the cooking rice, but then again I have burned rice too many times to count. (The answer to burned rice, by the way, is a rice cooker!)

Julia Cameron writes about a wonderful tool in her book, The Artist's Way. If I were more technologically savvy, I would reproduce it here but my efforts this morning have failed so far. Here is a narrative description.

The tool is a pie chart with 6 sections:

- spirituality

- work

- exercise

- play

- family/ friends

- romance/adventure

Draw a pie with these 6 sections. Although you can change the names of the categories. For example, you could put 'health' instead of 'exercise.' Now, imagine that the center of the pie represents 0, and the outside border of the pie, what you've drawn, represents a number, like 10. Then draw a dot in each pie slice that indicates your strong and not-so-strong areas, rating each from 0 to 10.

Ideally, you would connect these dots to make a symmetrical shape. Probably though, if you're like me, you can now see which areas need the most work.

The good news is the simple visualization of your life like this can help you restore balance. It worked for me. I drew my life-as-a-pie back in March and had two areas that were really low, and one that was much higher than the others. Looking at it 4 months later, I am living a more balanced life.

It's easier to achieve balance at the times of your life when you're aren't involved in a consuming project. But these projects give our life such intensity!

The goal is not to live each day in complete balance. The goal is to achieve balance over your lifetime. The pie can give you suggestions where to focus next.

New Perspective on Creativity

If you're like me, you think being creative is for hobbies and extra-curricular activities, while being proactive is for business. Really think about what it means to be creative at work.

Last night I was reading an e-book, Happy Pocket Full of Money by David Cameron. In one part he was describing the act of being creative using similar language to that usually denoting what it means to be "pro-active."

I first ran into, or absorbed the concept of being proactive when I worked with the Stephen Covey Group in Caracas in the early 1990s. Stephen Covey's first habit of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is simply: Be Proactive. What he means is that we don't wait to live a life of reactions to events, but we design our lives and work to merge our vision with reality.

Being pro-active is really more of an attitude, or way of being, rather than an activity.

David Cameron explained the same wisdom in terms of an attitude of creativity, in contrast to reactivity.

I think this is a valuable insight to broaden our understanding of what it means to be creative. This is on my mind because I'm developing an e-course entitled, "Creative Communication @ Work." My use of the word "creative" really does mean being proactive, not being creative in the sense of sending purple emails or wearing black nail polish to work, although I have no problem with either of these options.

You will not be surprised to know that I like the word, "creativity" much more than "being proactive." The former is much more humane sounding and the latter sounds more like business jargon to my ears. If you tell me to be creative, I'm excited; if you tell me to be pro-active, I feel pressure to perform. Ahhh, the power of words.

Scary Dreams and Other Messages

I think one of the reasons Robert Moss' book, The Three Only Things appeals to me is my limited experience with dreams. I don't know if it's because I usually am totally exhausted when I go to bed at night, or if it's because I haven't considered dreams important, but in any case, seldom do I remember my dreams.

However, during my marriage, and most especially during my pregnancies, I dreamt many times and most vividly that my husband no longer loved me. But the dream that left me the most devastated was one in which my husband's father, with whom I had always felt affection, treated me with total and complete indifference.

I realized at the time that these dreams reflected my fears. I still don't know if they were the fulfillment of self-prophecies, or if they contained warnings that went unheeded. But I do think I should have paid them more attention.

These days I write down anything I can remember from a dream, which isn't much. And just today, I went to Mass with my children, and one of the scripture readings was about God speaking to Solomon through his dreams.

I think there are messages out there for us that we tend to ignore.

Here's an example that was not in a dream: After talking to a fellow grad student last night, I realized how long it might be before I get to defend my dissertation. I was feeling really discouraged on many fronts. And in today's mail arrived a magazine, one to which I had cancelled my subscription months ago because I feared it would distract me from my dissertation.

The subtitle of the magazine in huge letters read: THINK RICH...NEVER GIVE UP. It was the right message, at the right moment. This time I'm listening.

9 Powers of Dreaming

The following comes right out of The Three Only Things by Robert Moss. It is truly a delightful book:

A dream can be an adventure playground, a jungle gym, a night school (and a flight school), a garden of heavenly delights, a place of encounter with the more-than-human, a portal into the multiverse. A dream is a place, as the Egyptians understood very well. It may be a place of beauty or terror. It can be a place of healing, initiation, higher education, and outrageous fun.

If we are losing our dreams, we are closing off worlds of possibility, entertainment, and learning.

Of all the gifts of dreams, for me the most important are the nine powers of dreaming we'll now unfold.

1. We solve problems in our sleep.

2. Dreams coach us for future challenges and opportunities.

3. Dreams hold up a magic mirror to our actions and behavior.

4. Dreams may tell how us what we need to do to stay well.

5. Dreams are a secret laboratory.

6. Dreams are a creative studio.

7. Dreams help us to mend our divided selves.

8. Dreaming is a key to better relationships.

9. Dreams recall us to our larger purpose (30-31).

Kinda makes you want to take a nap so you can dream a little. Wishes for a super Friday!

Batman and I

You may not read Mixonian for the movie reviews but I wanted to share with you my impression of the Batman movie, I think it's called The Dark Knight. It has been a while since I've seen a Batman movie; it's been many many years since my mother pinned dishtowels on my shoulders so I could run around like Batman, Robin, and of course the glamorous Cat Woman. My brother, John Del, played the role of Robin, but now I wonder if he harbored a desire to topple his big sister and be Batman himself!

The scoop is....I didn't like the movie last night. At all. It was too dark, too creepy, and too violent. It put a (temporary) damper on my sunny disposition and I am so grateful to have only paid the matinee price!

My reaction to this movie reminds me of how much our surroundings influence us: the media products we see, the books we read, the music we listen to, the kind of people we hang around with. Studies show that optimistic people are happier and more successful; don't let Batman or the evening news put you in a dark frame of mind.