Things That Work: Simple Ways to Healthier Communities

Wanna Know How a Few Shovels and Wheelbarrows Can Make a Big Difference?

If you haven't had the pleasure of meeting Ted Ernst yet, make a point of following a few of his footsteps and you'll soon know why I consider him to be one of the true points of light in the omidyar.net community.

Back in the fall when we were starting the 1 Tin Cup group, Ted ran a small campaign to raise money to purchase wheelbarrows and shovels for an amazing project in Ghana. The equipment was purchased for a humanist team working on neighborhood clean-ups as part of their Campaign for Non-violence and Fight Against Malaria. The campaign went over really well, and Ted's been able to share some exciting news about the progress!

When something this innovative is this simple, it deserves to be scaled up, and that's exactly what Ted's doing as he launches his next campaign:

http://www.omidyar.net/user/u387024026/news/26/

Please take a moment to click on the link above to read his note, and if you're able, throw a bit of change in the digital spare cup. It's a project that not only deserves support, but serves as a model of how easy it is to start small and scale up, and to know that what you've invested in is something so good!

Evelyn Rodriguez' Crossroads Dispatch on Appreciation and the Self-Actualized Person

I wanted to share with you someone that I find to be a daily inspiration in my own life. Her name is Evelyn Rodriguez, and she shares some wonderful snippets in her Crossroads Dispatches log. She's posted something about "Appreciation", and linked to a wonderful piece on self-actualization. It resonated with me, and I assume if you're here reading this blog, you might be the kind of person who will connect with it too.

Here is a piece from Evelyn's "Appreciation" blog entry from September 3rd:

The characteristics of self-actualized persons are described in Frank Goble's book, The Third Force: The Psychology Of Abraham Maslow (available as an e-book), where he states (via Humanists of Utah):

"They never tire of life. They have the capacity to appreciate the sunrise or sunset, or marriage, or nature, again and again."

If you're not familiar with Evelyn's Crossroads Dispatches, why not take a moment to visit now? You'll find a wonderful, kindred soul waiting there.

ThankFest 2004 ... I Double-Dog-Dare Ya!

I have a thinking infection, and it's driving me crazy.

Since May I've been travelling down one big long serendipity path, and let me tell you: it gets pretty darn hard to shut your head off at night!

A woman named Milli Akinsuluré turned my life upside down in the mid-nineties, and my life has been largely governed by a conscious effort to have happy accidents ever since. This year there's been an explosion of them, and since May, I've met some of the most incredible human beings to ever inhabit this big blue ball we share. There's a little fellow named Stanley Musankwa, who led me to Dr. Tommy Clark, and Kirk Friedrich, and Ethan Zohn. That had me bumping into the ultimate Ambassador of Uplift Kwan, Tom Munnecke, who led me to Jerry Michalski (who else could blow up the first digital brain?), Bob Bilheimer, and now a group of people who are interested in helping individuals find their own power to make good things happen.

While it may sound like a bit of a commercial, I can assure you something far more profound than a 30-second feel good campaign is afoot, for in their presence in this last single week, I've come home.

I suspect this will be the fuel of many more blog entries to come, but, for today, I want to share this single thing:

The First Official

ThankFest

Wednesday, September 1, 2004

24 hours of gratitude in cyberspace

It's a challenge. It's a dare. It's a double-dog-dare! For whatever I can do to convince you of the desperately urgent nature of being thankful for even just one day, I will. As Rick Smolan took up the gauntlet on various 24-hour quests in cyberspace, I invite you to join me on this quest: for just 24 hours, I want you to be the Ghost of Gratitude Past, running through the halls of cyberspace in your socks shouting at the top of your lungs to everyone who will listen and who you know. Tell them why you're thankful. Tell them about some small, insignificant thing that turned out to be the one that changed your life. Tell your teachers, your coaches, your mentors and friends. Tell your children that night as your tucking them in something about them that makes you utterly thankful they're a part of your life.

For 24 hours, join the Thank-a-Thon, because while Wednesday, September 1st, 2004 may be the first official digital ThankFest, I can assure you it won't be the last!

You've got less than a week to get the word out, so get out there. Tell every Who in Whoville that you'll be blogging, emailing, faxing, campaigning to build the troops that will march into the halls of cyberspace and give thanks. Got a blog? Use it? Some other digital pulpit? Preach from it! Whatever you do, take a moment to explain why you're thankful that day.

Need a kickstart? Ideas shared here.

Know people who aren't connected? Have them write it, phone it in, paint it with a fingertip on a foggy window and take a picture to send it in. Help them share it someplace, any place, online, so it can be part of the living tribute we'll be growing in our digital gardens that day.

Then send me the link.

Consider it humanity's family album of the things that change our lives when we simply pause to give thanks. It will be an International Day of Thanks that has a common day each year; a tapestry of gratitude leading to cascades of uplift that will infect our other days.

While we have different days that we pause to celebrate and to be thankful in our various nooks and crannies of meatspace, let this be the one day that unites us without a tragic history, or dogmatic tale to tell, about how and why we gathered to give Thanksgiving a little early this year.

Then on Wednesday, September 1st, 2004, give your thanks, capture it digitally (words, pictures, sound, whatever you're inspired to do), and return here to dive into the portal that will be open to connect you with the digital scrapbook to share your link.

Here's how you return:

http://tinman.typepad.com/dosomething/2004/08/thankfest_2004_.html

Let this be the day that inboxes are swamped with no-spam invitations to enlarge an even bigger organ: our heart.

(Lars Hasselblad Torres, this one's for you ...)

Sue.

Knowing How to Give

Africa remains a central motif in most things that call me. I also I truly believe, as Peter Drucker and Alan Kay both imagine, that "the best way to predict the future is to invent it", and that I think Pam and Pierre Omidyar (founders of eBay) have a powerful candle on this by asking the following question: "How do we get more and more people to discover their own power to make good things happen?"

What a wonderful way of framing the challenge of creating cascades of uplift!

I originally shared this note as part of a discourse on the value of gifts, and how to best use the resources that existed within the "GivingSpace" community that I'm fortunate enough to be a part of. A discourse evolved around the difficult issue of knowing how to give, and why even the smallest gifts can be life-changing. Some members seemed to have some anxiety about what they sensed to be the greater purpose of this group: that if there is a finite amount of energy and resources to be invested by it's members, it seems sensible to direct those in a manner that will offer the best return for the investment in humanity. I suppose I come here with a slightly different way of looking at the potential of this group, and of the capacity of individuals in general. I think that minimum investment and maximum return is a wonderfully economic theory that even I approach the groups I choose to support with. In this case, I think the intention/capacity of movements like "GivingSpace" is not finite, but rather catalytic. It's not a set number of people and resources responding to particular "problems", but rather a group of people who have the capacity to thoughtfully consider and invest in behaviours that will trigger cascades of uplift. If this is true, then the benefit of a vehicle as simple as a mailing list or wiki-based community is that it creates a safe and compelling place to explore the possibilities, apply them, come back and share what works, celebrate it, and spread it exponentially.

I'd hate to think that our capacity might be limited by choosing only a few problems to solve, and the daunting task of trying to determine which of them would be more worth our time than others. I think that our ability to act more as that enzyme will create the kinds of changes that will, in turn, not only solve those big problems, but many, many others along the way. I love the notion of "paying it forward", because it doesn't presume to know what might need healing at any given time. It allows each of us the opportunity to respond to what's important as it presents itself -- and I really DO believe the universe chooses to reveal herself to each of us in different ways as we have the capacity to respond. The goodwill that results is something that I think is terribly difficult to quantify, but terribly important to cultivate.

If the only gifts considered worthy of giving were "the big ones" then there would be monumental giving opportunities missed. The "goodwill" factor, at any level, is such a tremendously powerful enzyme! I can say this because I've lived it, and my life was changed because of it.

Back in the mid-nineties I was at the height of my earning capacity when a colleague introduced me to a friend of his that had to come to Canada from Sierra Leone, West Africa. He had been her Univeristy history professor many years before, and was just back to spend the summer visiting. He said "Sue, this is Milli. She's here from Sierra Leone. She'd like to learn a bit more about technology before she goes back. I thought maybe you might have a bit of time to sit down and share some of what you know with her." This seemed like a simple gift that I was being asked to give, and, in all the glorious colours of my ego, I was thrilled to have been asked to do a little show and tell. It never occured to me to ask her why she wanted to know these things. I just bolted head long into sharing my toys and what I did with them, and telling her why that was so cool. She did seem fascinated, and I was certainly enjoying the chance to show even one more person just how clever I was.

After about 15 minutes, I noticed that Milli had become very quiet. I turned and looked at her, and there were tears in her eyes. She was, infact, overwhelmed with the possibilities, but not for the reasons I was imagining. She said she was thinking about her friends in Sierra Leone, and now understanding how they had been using the internet to tell people what was happening in Sierra Leone. I asked her what motivated her to want to learn more about these things, and she told me that Sierra Leone, a once peaceful and prosperous coastal city, had endured five years of civil war. The rebels had continued to spill over the borders from Liberia, devastating the interior, and butchering whole villages and families for miles around. Many people fled to the areas surrounding Freetown, the capital city. Almost 2 million people crowded the borders in makeshift camps, with terrible living conditions, and resurgences of river blindness, malaria and other illnesses. At times, a pharmacist or nurse would be the only health care worker for 50 miles, without adequate resources to combat the mounting healthcare crises.

She told me about the University that she'd built with her husband twenty five years ago, and how recently the rebels had come when she was away and burned it to the ground, killing and torturing the teachers and students as they went. When Milli returned, she refused to let that be the end of her road. She set to work helping to build orphanages and recovery programs for the huge numbers of children who had watched their entire families butchered before them, and were then hauled off into the frontlines of war. (I remember standing in my son's kindergarten class that morning, looking at 60 other 5 year old children, trying to imagine them being drugged and handed a gun and sent off as soldiers. It was more than I could fathom.) Milli also went to work creating programs for women with AIDS, with the mounting crises that was already at epidemic proportions back then in the 90s.

That summer I gave up my private practice and spent it with Milli. This woman had come to Canada to take back what she could of technology in order to help provide information to the health care workers that were struggling to cope. We spent the summer together, reading notes from her friends on the internet as Sierra Leone had the first democratic election in five years of civil war. The vote ended without a clear majority, and in the two weeks between then and the run-off election, rebels came into the villages and cut off the hands of those who had voted, and burned "NO VOTE" in their backs with branding irons. Two weeks later, people still went out and voted, and restored a democracy again.

After that summer, I couldn't go back to being the person that I was. I'd spent time with Milli trying to figure out how to get internet-based health feeds into Sierra Leone where it took 3 months to get a phone, and satellite feeds gave a window of opportunity for downloading only twice a day. Computers put into schools and libraries were often gutted. The challenges were like nothing I'd ever faced as a community technology strategist. Moreover, I was having a difficult time getting my head around the idea that this woman, by choice, had the courage to return to a place where there was so much fear and uncertainty. The only thing I could connect to was her need to make a difference.

Sadly, I lost touch with Milli after she returned, but what she left me with was a burning need to follow her example in some small way. I gave up my profitable practice and invested myself almost completely in working pro bono for a number of programs around the world, most of them working with kids at risk. While there are days that I think it would be nice to go back to that life where I had lots of money coming in, I wouldn't trade it for the world. Now I sleep very well at night. There's no finer purpose than to be in the service of kids.

Then an opportunity presented itself last winter. My children and I were watching television together. One of the "WorldVision" programs came on, talking about the great need there was in many places. My kids began to ask some hard questions about why some people had to suffer when others, people like us, had so mich more. The program was showing kids from Africa, and my own kids remembered Milli, and asked if that was what it was like where she came from. After a long conversation, we decided to turn to the internet to give Milli a quiet gift. Even though we didn't know where she was, or how she was doing, we knew how important kids were to her. We decided to sponsor a child in Africa. Through the internet we chose a little boy named Stanley Musankwa. He was only 6 years old, so we thought this was a child that we could help for a long time. This would be our gift to Milli. Stanley lived in a village a couple hundred miles outside of Lusaka, Zambia. His father was a peasant farmer with 6 other children. They lived in a mud hut with a thatched roof, and had a difficult time getting by. We're thrilled to have Stanley in our lives.

Stanley was about to turn 7 this May. We'd been giving a lot of thought to what we wanted to do to make it special. We'd sent extra money at Easter so that his family could buy seeds, a couple of goats and some hens, or a plough, to help his father provide enough for the family to eat, but for Stanley's birthday what we really wanted to do was send him a soccer ball.

I have four children. My eldest just his finished his first year of University, and will graduate as a music teacher. My other three children are all soccer junkies, and we live on the pitches spring, summer and fall, so a soccer ball was something they thought every 7 year old boy should have.

Unfortunately, the agency discouraged sending one, because with the hardship in the village they were concerned that other children might get jealous and that it may place Stanely in harm's way.

So I thought if buying a ball just for Stanley creates problems, maybe we'd just have to find a way to buy balls for ALL of the children in the village.

We went out on the internet in search of programs that might already be running in Zambia. I thought perhaps it would be the best way to open a door into Stanley's village so we could share a little soccer with them after all. I was in shock to find that not only was there soccer in Zambia, but that there was an organization that talked about wanting to set up a new program in Stanley's own village of Lusaka. That program was Grassroot Soccer. Ethan Zohn, who won the CBS reality t.v. show "Survivor: Africa", had taken his million dollar prize and started the program with Dr. Tommy Clark, a pediatric intern that had played on the same pro soccer team that Ethan had played on in Zimbabwe several years before. Knowing full well the devastating impact that AIDS had not only on their teammates, but whole villages that had been wiped out, leaving no parents, but this entirely new social fabric of only children and grandparents, both Tommy and Ethan had been moved to find a way to make a real difference.

Having spent time with Albert Bandura, and realizing that, in addition to having to deal with the culture sensitivities in a place where even talking about HIV/AIDS was taboo, they knew they would be challenged to find a way to change "behaviour" if there was any hope of turning around one of the greatest health pandemics of our time. They knew the best chance to do that was through kids. Tommy had been a teacher in Africa and knew this is where change happened. They partnered with the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta to create a program that was accurate and relevant. They worked with Albert Bandura to ensure that the curriculum was both culturally sensitive and worked on creating the kind of change in attitudes that would lead to change in behaviour. They partnered with schools in Zimbabwe to create access to and opportunities for the kids that were at risk. Then they used professional soccer players -- their equivalent of celebrities in our western culture -- to deliver this amazing program through a fun, two-week soccer clinic designed to create opportunities for dialogue and learning in a safe and creative way.

The first year alone the reached 1,500 kids, and many of those children went on to create "AIDS/HIV Clubs" were they continue to talk about the thing that continues to wipe out almost 20% of the population, and how they can be the ones to stop it. They do peer-mentoring, supported by other partners in the Grassroot Soccer network, so the initial education continues to be a lifelong system of support and ongoing learning for these kids. The GRS team is now looking to create community health centers where people can overcome the stigma and go for HIV/AIDS testing, and to continue to get the Anti Retroviral Drugs they couldn't personally afford, and to access a continued network of support. Using feedback from the African players they have managed to increase the number of children that go through the program from 2,000 each year to 8,000 each year, and are looking for new ways of growing the program so that, ultimately, it can reach millions. Johns Hopkins was so impressed by the success of the program that they reached out to the young men who created it and asked them to partner to create similar programs in the U.S., and engage in the creation of other knowledge products and services.
I found this group by accident, because a friend introduced me to Milli years ago and asked me to give her a small gift. This compelled me to sponsor a child years later. Wanting to give him the small gift of a soccer ball lead me to the doorstep of these amazing young men in the service of kids in Africa. That, of course, became my next gift. I've spent the last several months helping them build their financial capacity to continue to grow the program to reach more kids, to build community centers, and to maybe change the course of something that's killing so many people.

Never underestimate the power of one small gift. By accepting the opportunity that you have in any given moment to do something for someone else, no matter how small, there is indeed the opportunity for the ripple effect to lead to changes much bigger along the way.

By the way -- Nike partered with Grassroot Soccer to deliver 5,000 soccer balls to the kids in Lusaka through the WorldVision program that I sponsor Stanley through :^)

Like I said, while there are days that I think it would be nice to go back to that life where I had lots of money coming in, I wouldn't trade it for the world. Now I sleep very well at night. There's no finer purpose than to be in the service of kids, and all because of one small gift.

###

Shortly after sharing this note with the folks in the GivingSpace community, I got a response from a colleague who had been in Sierra Leone for a friend's graduation. Her mother had worked with women with AIDS, and she wondered if she might know my friend Milli. This got me thinking, and actually compelled me to go back out onto the internet to try to find my friend Milli one more time. It only took a day. We've reconnected, and through an amazing series of events and a great deal of serendipity and convergence. I'll write more on this in future entries.

Carpé Diem!
Sue.

Discovering the Cure for Affluence: Giving Gifts that Change Lives

I originally shared these thoughts as an invitation for colleagues in my circle at Amazon.com to consider using the site in a somewhat different way, and to share a couple of my favourite reads on the subject of "giving". It's not that I think Amazon needed more business, or that this was the ultimate way of curing affluence. It was simply a gently poke to provoke people to think about an alternative when it came to the act of giving.

Since originally sharing this article, I've been immersed in an incredible (and at times even frustrating) discourse on the value of particular gifts, and judging the act of giving. I want to continue to share some of the knowledge mcnuggets that have come out of this exploration, because it's made me think more deeply on our individual capacity to invoke profound change where it's needed the most.

For now, let me begin here ...

The Cure for Affluence ...

For $100 I got a killer set of dishes in an upscale designer boutique. They went right beside the other 4 sets that were already in my cupboard. I barely had room to store them, but boy, they sure look great when I'm eating that big pot roast and generating mounds of leftovers.

I had to have them. This set was, afterall, the new line, and it matched the colours of my comfy, middle-class kitchen perfectly. It's not that I'd ever spend $100 on designer dishes for myself, but I was given the money for Christmas, and I really wanted these dishes. Funny thing is, they made me happy for a day, and then I was back to wanting more.

More. There it is. It's that insidious beast of a word that insinuates itself into every last nook and cranny of our lives. We get the next thing on our list, but it's still not enough. More. The more you feed it, the hungrier it gets, until that four-lettered word becomes so big in our lives it almost blocks out the sun.

Feel familiar? Betrayed by that ransom twitching of your skin? It's affluence, a disease that runs rampant through our lives. But not to worry -- I have the cure.

You Know Ya Wa-nna ...

Give an Amazon.com gift certificate to a school:

click here to learn more

Your school library is probably suffering the lean times of small budgets on big diets and the apathy of patrons past. If you're here, reading this, then I don't have to tell YOU about the power of a book. Get in touch with the librarian at a local school, and ask them if the school has an account on Amazon. If not, you can let them know how easy it is to set one up. Tell them about the "Wishlist" function:

click here to learn more

It's the perfect way to invite parents to give meaningful gifts in honour of a favourite teacher at Christmas and the end of the year. Besides, teachers already have too many bath oil beads and coffee mugs, and who wouldn't want their name on a lovely book plate in the front of something that will pass through the hands of legions of children expanding minds instead? Go now. Be daring. Put down that mouse and make the call!

A Philanthroper's Heart ...

"Great opportunities to help others seldom come, but small ones surround us every day". -- Sally Koch.

Oh, what your money can do! I look at my dishes and think of the great, grand, giving things that the money could have done instead.

I could have supplied not one, but two! whole classrooms full of children in a developing country with the books and things they need to learn:

click here to learn more

My gift would have multiplied 10 times to stock two entire classrooms for a year.

The gift is part of World Vision's very special online catalogue:

click here to learn more

where I can choose gifts that change can lives, like hens and a rooster, a dairy goat, piglets, clothing, seeds and agricultural tools. Every gift is fully tax deductible, and there's something to fit every budget.

For my part, I doubled the amount spent on my dishes, sending $200 to be used by my foster child's family to acquire a plough, or small livestock, or seeds or whatever they most needed to thrive. (My 6-year-old foster son's father is a peasant farmer in Zambia who depends on seasonal rain for a livelihood). I can't begin to tell you how much more joy my heart is filled with giving this small gift than those darn dishes will ever bring me in a lifetime.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

"That best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love". -- William Wordsworth.

Skip the flowers, and tell your mom how much you love her by stocking a medical clinic in Africa, where, everyday, mothers carry their sick children for miles only to find out that the doctor has run out of basic supplies:

click here to learn more

Your gift will provide enough supplies to stock a medical clinic serving hundreds of families. When you give this gift (and any other through this catalogue) you can customize a card for your mom to tell her about the people who have received your gift of hope in her name.

If you're aiming for extravagance, skip the fur coat and go to the website above to donate the building of a new home for a family in mom's name. Single moms with children or orphans all alone often live in crumbling huts that provide meager shelter from the elements. Instead you might buy a share in digging a deep-water well to supply safe drinking water for their village, or filling a stable with 8 food-producing animals, or even building a school for an entire village full of kids.

My Fair Share ...

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has". -- Margaret Mead.

Perhaps those lovely dishes in your own cupboard make you think of empty tummies in faraway places. I'd love to donate two oxen and plough to help my foster child's father better cultivate the land, but I can't afford the $700 for the gift. The solution? Buy a share! I can be a partner in the purchase with others. When you can't afford to give the gift yourself, but your heart is aching at the possibility of what that gift could really do, skip sending the chain mail saying Bill Gates is tracking that email and going to make you all rich, and email this guide inviting friends to pitch in ten bucks to help buy that gift! There's a link called "E-mail this guide to a friend" at the top of this page, allowing you to send it along with your invitation now ...

More Cures for a Hungry Heart ...

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world". -- Anne Frank.

Giving is an investment that pays back tenfold, and whose bounty continues to fill your life for years to come. It's contagious. It's transforming. It's the best cure for affluence I know.

Instead of dishes, here's a few things you might consider giving yourself as a gift:

James and Lisa Grace give us a wonderful road map to follow in The Good Deed Guide.

In The Giving Heart: Unlocking the Transformative Power of Generosity in Your Life, "The Works" magazine columnist M. J. Ryan serves up a delicious helping of essays that encourage us to engage in small, practical activities to enrich our own life and those of others.

Other great ways to fight your wallet's "battle of the bulge" are outlined in a handful of practical actions from Laura Klotz' Saving the World in Your Spare Time.

Carpé Diem!
Sue.

Tom Peters on Getting Back to (or arriving for the first time at) Your Authentic Self

This morning I was doing the daily rounds.

There was a time when the headlines from Reuters, AP, et al would have claimed top billing on my home page. No longer. That prime realestate is reserved for the sanctity of RSS newsfeeds from my favourite diaBloggers.

Today I fell down one of David Weinberger's more interesting rabbit holes on "authenticity" vs. "credibility". Inspired by Evelyn Rodriguez's thinking about "credible voice" and "authentic voice" in corporate blogging, David had some interesting observations on this topic (and there were a number of equally thought-provoking comments left in his apron), but what intrigued me most was his reference to one of my earliest mentors, Tom Peters, and an article he had written back in July about what had gone wrong in his life, and how he's been trying to fix it.

I'm sharing this here, because Tom's intimate tale is one of simple things. In the face of tradition-ridden opinions in psychology about what ails us, and how to fix it, Tom had a profound moment of truth. He realized that what worked for him was cleaning out the crap we've been programmed to mask ourselves in, and finding our way back to (or maybe meeting for the first time since we were a kid) our "authentic self".

I first met Tom back in the 80s when I was young enough to think I had the world by the gluteus maximus, and old enough to believe the hard-baked biz philosopher dispensing healthy doses of "Thriving on Chaos" was the one-and-only face of Tom Peters.

I never would have thought this kind of "outing" was possible, and it's about time. I'm sitting at home right now with a blod clot in both my leg and my lungs, for the third time in 10 years, in pretty much the same headspace that Tom was in when he had his "Aha!". That special brand of hell isn't only saved for men, but also for women, like me, who are on a track that often insists we behave in the same "buttoned-up" fashion that took Tom to the edge.

As Tom points out, his way of coming to terms with restoring the balance in his life may not be for everyone, but it's a damn bit smarter than the routes that many of us have tried before.

In terms of our being socially programmed to hide our "authentic selves", I think we need only ask one question:

Is it working for me?

No?

Then better try something else ...

###

A link to the article "Tom's Summer of Soul"

The books Tom recommends from his own summer journey:

Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man, Sam Keen
The Little Book of Happiness, Patrick Whiteside
The Instinct to Heal: Curing Stress, Anxiety, and Depression without Drugs and without Talk Therapy, David Servan-Schreiber, M.D.
The Calm Technique: Meditation without Magic or Mysticism, Paul Wilson
Meditation for Wimps: Finding Your Balance in an Imperfect World, Miriam Austin
Creating Health, Deepak Chopra M.D.
Ultra-Prevention: The 6-Week Plan That Will Make You Healthy for Life, Mark Hyman, M.D. and Mark Liponis, M.D. (Co-medical directors of Canyon Ranch)
A Morning Cup of Yoga: One Simple, Balanced Routine for a Lifetime of Health and Wellness, Jane Goad Trechsel
Freeze Frame: One Minute Stress Management, Doc Childre
The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom
Walden, Henry David Thoreau

The Backwards Birthday Gift

A number of years ago I was travelling through an airport and came across a book. It was about famous women and their moms. I picked it up and opened to a page about actress Jamie Lee Curtis, and was struck by the profound, but profoundly simple, practice she had made a part of her life. Each year on her own birthday, she gave her mother, Janet Leigh, a gift. It was her way of letting her mother know how grateful she was for having not only given her life, but helping her shape it into something wonderful.

It occured to me that this was a marvellous example of the kind of "positive flip" that my friend Tom Munnecke talks about. At a retreat we attended recently our host invited us to consider the power of language in paving the way to more fruitful discourse, no matter how difficult the issue. He talked about the way a group of people, when asked to share an idea where there were opposing points of view, were then asked to argue it using "Yes, but ..." in response. When the group was asked to have this same conversation, using "Yes, and ..." to move it ahead, the results were quite different. The power of a simple language-based approach made all the difference. It took a difficult issue and flipped it over. When framed in a positive way, the results were positive and abundant, and opened the door to further progress and discourse.

Jamie Lee's birthday gift reminds me very much of this idea. Our birthdays so quickly become a time of "entitlement". This is "my" day to be recognized. People are to show me how much they value me and care. And yet, when considered from a personal gratitude point of view, what a wonderful thing they might be! Instead of keeping score, worrying about who might have forgotten, or what a particular gift might say about how much the giver values us, what a wonderful flip it might be to move from greed to gratitude. Rather than receiving gifts on your birthday, why not give them? Giving a gift to your mom on your own birthday seemed like a wonderful idea to me.

At times when we are lowest, and feeling the most needy, the power of giving can be our very best medicine. Never underestimate the cascades of uplift that come from a giving heart.

Sue.

Postcards from Ed ...

A few weeks ago I had the chance to connect with Ed Vielmetti of Social Text. As we were talking over coffee he told me about his own way of thanking the people that come in and out of his life.

He sends postcards.

I got one from Ed the other day. It donned a picture of the local University Stadium, some nice thoughts about having connected, and a thank you for having shared my own thank you idea at the retreat we were at.

I loved Ed's postcard idea. It was simple, and friendly, and resonated with the same, simple, random acts of gratitude that had made my own experience such a rewarding thing.

Ed said he sometimes sends a postcard to someone he's met working behind the counter of a coffee shop, and any number of other people who may share some small space within the corner of his day. It seemed like such a personal way of letting someone know that you were glad to connect, for whatever reason you did. I loved that it didn't have to be driven by a business relationship, or any implicit formal or continued need to connect, and yet it suggested the possibility of a friendly, open door.

I'm going to invite Ed to comment here, because I'm sure he's got a better way of sharing the relevancy of this simple gesture.

So thanks, Ed, for another great elevator that's easy to catch ...

Sue.

An Attitude of Gratitude: A Great Morning Kickstart

I recently attended a retreat where I was inspired by a question that our wise and wonderful leader posed:

"What's working?"

I thought on this for a bit, and listened as people shared some truly astonishing technical feats that created various forms of uplift in the lives of people and the various organizations where they worked and played.

I really wanted to raise my hand. I had something good to share, but it seemed too simple.

I sat and listened a little longer, and was finally inspired to re-evaluate my own criteria for what made something good enough to share. I decided that the fact that it was small and simple wasn't a character flaw, but rather the thing that might make something inherently easy to reproduce.

I finally got brave and raised my hand, and decided to tell people a little bit about how I start each of my days.

The past few years have been rather blue. I've been through a few major surgeries, one that left the lower half of my face paralysed for a number of months, and the other that left me in a great deal of pain. One of my sons had been profoundly ill, cause still unknown, and missed almost half a year of school as a result. In addition, I'd shared a six year journey with my mom as she struggled with cancer, and found myself aching deeply as it came to an end in ways I couldn't possibly have prepared myself for.

I certainly was not in a "grateful" place in my life.

I found the days harder and harder to navigate. I found myself sinking into a well of self-pity, even to the point where I became bitter about what I "expected" from my life. That's when it occurred to me that, the way I'd been living it before this mess was infact the way back out of it.

I had become full of attitude, rather than gratitude, and it took a simple moment of reflection to realize the age old truth of deflecting your attention from oneself onto something or someone else where that attention could be invested in a better way.

So, I turned to the one thing that I knew could help me launch this personal mission of gratitude and hold me accountable: my computer. Each morning when I log on I go to my homepage, which is set at my customized view of "My Yahoo!". Beyond the various newsclippings it has found for the things I am interested in tracking, and the daily recipes and snippets it dispatches, it's first glance is my calendar, and the task list for each day. I've set up a few recurring ticklers to help me organize my thoughts for the day: what am I going to make for supper? have I watered the violets? had I taken a multivitamin? did I update my virus scan program? had I clicked at Care2.com yet today?

These were the things that greeted me each morning, and set the tone for the day.

I decided that something else needed to be added to this list. Here's what I placed at the top:

"Who are you going to thank today?"

It seemed like a simple enough question, but the impact it had on my life was profound.

Each morning I gave myself the task of finding a reason to be grateful. I thought about people that had come in and out of my life the past few days, and others who perhaps I hadn't thought about in a very long time. I thought about teachers who had influenced me, and people who dotted my life's path and shaped the course it would take along the way. I thought about the girl in the coffee shop who had smiled at me and simply said something nice. I thought about the guy in the telephone repair truck who jumped out to open my car door for me so I could get in. I thought about the woman who stood up a city council and talked about why killing the pigeons on the church steps wasn't the right way to go. I thought about my kids, and how their simple, daily examples encouraged me to be curious, and passionate, and hopeful again.

So I started to say thank you, and something amazing happened along the way. People responded and reached back in generous and heartfelt ways. People who'd been feeling unnoticed in their own lives felt appreciated again. People who I hadn't connected with in years came back into my life and enriched it in ways too many to tell. People I'd seen as strangers were becoming friends I'd yet to meet.

The cascade of uplift was profound. This simple thing had not only rescued me from myself, but healed relationships, and cultivated special new ones, and even lead to new projects and opportunities in my life.

So knowing how powerful such a small and simple act can be, I'll ask you this:

Who are YOU going to thank today?

Sue.

Simple Daily Gifts: Don't Let Them Slip Through Your Fingers ...

I wanted to open this space as a means of capturing and sharing some of the marvellous mechanisms of uplift that travel through my life on any given day. Some of them are such simple things to share that it seemed a shame not to. Others aspire to be a more profound elevator for community wellbeing. All are things worth sharing, and reproducing, and celebrating for the ways that they make our lives better somehow.

Considering the fleeting nature of hope, and joy, and the capacity to go forward in our lives in a meaningful way, a little good news with a "do something" kicker must certainly be one bodacious alternative to caffeine ;^)

As my friend Tom Munnecke would surely say,

May Good Things Come ...

Sue.