Moving from Thinking to Action – The Fears and Myths that Bind Us (part 1)
Transformation or Collapse?
Many of us sense that humanity is a a place of act now or die – no exaggeration. Yet, not much change seems to be happening, especially in human behavior.
There seems to be incredible unconscious fears about acting on ideas, and even more about the future that is ours … Just better not to think about that part. Thinking is wonderful, but if it just stays in the mind, nothing new gets created. And I’m not sure that thought is the way out of our misbehavior in a world that is asking for a reunification of its wholeness.
‘Failure’ too is another show stopper. It is so voodoo in most cultures that it freezes people from action, and increases the thinking – It’s safer there. Even the responsibility of success is scary because of the confusion that comes up when we think of having to do the work; for no pay typically. How would we survive?
The essence of personal sustainability emerges in this space and is not being addressed in traditional organizations – even the ones who are attempting to apply sustainability in terms of technical developments. There also seems to be a fear of abandonment and being shamed if acting on their out-of-the-box, culturally unaccepted ideas. I speak from my own experiences here, but this has not stopped me from trying. Not one bit. But I’ll admit it has put me into a horrible place in life, with no ability to make ends meet financially, loss of friends and family, inability to find meaningful work, isolation, and so on. I guess their fears are valid.
Yet: Where are the new heroes going to emerge? I have felt for sometime that the new hero is not “a” hero, but a collective “heronis”. This is my word for a collaborative form of heroism that arises through the integrity of collaborative design. Strangely, very few seem to know how to do this thing called ‘collaboration’ and fall into the trap of linear structured methods of development that depends on singular forms of leadership – truly old paradigm, but still viscerally real in our existing world.
This way of organizing worked in the past, but now it only sets up false expectations based on the idea of a ‘savior’, an idea that is so prominent in all human cultures. The savior mythology for leadership needs to pass out of our consciousness so that a new myth can emerge – a global mythology that reshapes the role of leadership from having power ‘over’ people into power ‘to’ people. Myth is where the unseen directives that influence a society’s way of being come from, and is where we will need to go – if we want to see real change.
More on this is coming – how to move from thinking to action, and how our fears and myths blind and bind us. I plan to move this discussion into the realm of ‘values’ – those tangible tidbits that are visible when a culture’s underlying story (its mythology) expresses itself. They are the bridge from the conscious to unconscious, and have a big role in limiting the emergence of a new creation myth by entangling our abilities to manifest an evolved shared humanity. Vic D. 🙂
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Inquiry: Starting everyone of my questions with ‘open ended’ question words including the 6 ‘W’s: WHY is it this way, WHAT is it exactly, (w)HOW does it work, WHO is involved, WHEN is it enacted, WHERE does it reside or show up. In this way, your research will expand from isolated assumptions into broader understandings and improve data outcomes.
A more challenging but (in my view) more fun part of development, is enabling your research into a ‘social performance’ process for creating social capital and social innovation. This is done through 3 phases as follows (note ‘phases’ are different than ‘stages’):