What do you choose?

I started out the new year in 2010 vowing to live in a place where everyone gets to be right. I decided to stop stepping way up  onto my high horse of a soap box and vilifying those whose opinions vastly differ from mine just because my judgment is that their position is not life supportive. Hey, they think they're right as much as I think I am right.

Right?

How do we find the win/win where everyone walks away with what they want?

This morning I had a conversation with my friend Justin and we realized that we share this goal. So I asked him how he is doing with his and he said "It's on my radar...." and I said "I am not doing too well with it either."

It got me thinking. If we aren't doing well and Justin and I are being conscious and intentional in this and we are failing wildly, is it any wonder things are so messed up?

There was an article in our morning paper today quoting the Dalai Lama's talk in Toronto yesterday. In his global plea for world peace, he said, "At age 75, what I have learned is the power of talk. In the spirit of dialogue, you can't have one side that is defeated and one side wins. Open your heart and consider others."

No one is beyond talking to, he added. Following 9/11 he urged dialogue with Osama Bin Laden urging leaders to understand "what really is his complaint".

Now THAT is truly radical thinking.

Imagine, instead of vilifying those whose positions seem to be polar opposites of ours,  that we open dialogue to truly try to understand what is their complaint.... to listen without judging or making them wrong, no matter how different their position is from ours...to listen to the request under the complaint and not get triggered because the request sparks judgment in us.

Trusting in the best of humanity, I know that every human being craves harmony and peace, to be seen for who we really are, to feel understood and above all, loved for who we really are at our core.

This would be truly radical. I speak as much to myself as I do to you. It is my stretch also, but I know that without setting the intention and making it conscious and intentional, we will never find world peace. We will never be at peace with ourselves because underneath the judgment of others, lies deep within the judgment of ourselves and for the most part, we find ourselves lacking.

I choose to surround myself with love. I choose to find a way to find others right. I choose to step off my soap box and listen to the request under the complaint, especially when I want to judge. I choose to open my heart and considering others.

What do you choose?

Written By Annie Gelfand

© Copyright 2010 Tammy Anne Gelfand.

All Rights Reserved.

If you do what you've always done....

Even though this is a blog about radical change in the workplace, there are so many areas where radical change is essential. I am acutely aware that simply expressing opinion  can be polarizing. With these words flooding my mind for years, I have to believe that they have a purpose yet to be discovered. If you find yourself on the other side of my opinion, I give you my word I will work hard to find you right if you give me that same privilege. 



For generations, our parents and their parents relied upon experts to advise them in areas they didn't consider themselves to have any expertise in, whether it was medical, legal, or  financial advice. What is now becoming clearer to me, is that the legal system isn't about justice, it's about following the letter of the law.  The financial system isn't about helping the consumer build and preserve financial foundations,  it's about preserving the bottom line to look good for the shareholder.  


And the medical system isn't about healing people and preventing illness, it's about perpetuating just enough illness to justify over prescription of medications. It is here where I get caught in anger, feeling helpless and frustrated.


Here is my rant.


If the medical system were truly devoted to healing, the emphasis would be on prevention.  Our health care system would be supportive of  the oldest most ancient healing arts, like homeopathy, botanical medicine, naturopathy and osteopathy. Instead, allopathic doctors call natural medicine quakery and say it lacks scientific proof. We see a system vested in keeping people ill in order to perpetuate their need of expensive drugs, creating billions of dollars of profits for multinational pharmaceutical corporations. These pharmaceuticals are being prescribed daily, and daily it is being revealed that while they may resolve the presenting issue, they also create a multitude of complicated side affects that it's virtually impossible to detect which caused what first.

To quote Dr. Carolyn Dean, MD ND & Trueman Tuck, Rights Advocate, DEATH BY MODERN MEDICINE:

"We must always remember that allopathy is a medical model born of the industrial age and with Big Pharma less than 100 years old. To suggest that the oldest and most used healing arts in the world are secondary to allopathy is not only insulting but inaccurate as well. Traditional methods of restoring and maintaining maximum health, by virtue of their track record of safety and success, take second place to no other medical model."

At her physician's urging, and in order to save my life, my mother took DES (diethylstilbestrol), a synthetic female hormone (estrogen), while she was pregnant with me in order to prevent miscarriage. The drug was withdrawn in 1975, after its dangers to mothers and their unborn children became apparent.

A study of 5,000 women known to have been exposed to DES in the womb conducted by the National Cancer Institute, compared medical histories with a similar number of women who were not exposed to the drug.  The study determined that DES daughters had an increased risk of breast cancer of 40%, but for those women over the age of 40, the increased risk was 250%. (source: http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/articles/00284/des_miscarriage_cancer.html)

"Experts say, the long-term side effects of DES surfacing some 30 years after the drug was discontinued, should serve as a potent reminder of the potential harmful consequences of over-zealous drug promotion and distribution." August 20, 2006, Evelyn Pringle

 

I watched my mother, age 50, take her prescribed Atavan, an anti-anxiety  substance when my father died after a 2-month illness. She took that drug for over 35 years with very little supervision by her physician who also prescribed her numerous other medications for high blood pressure, anti-constipation, anti-depressants, aspirin for her heart, anti-inflammatories for her joints, and more. Because her physician could not spend more than 15 minutes with her in person, I wonder how much time he spent researching the impact of taking all these prescriptions together and what will be revealed in the coming years. My mother was  very obedient and reverent towards the medical profession, as many of her generation were. They were taught that doctors know best and that they are the experts on the human body. With that kind of predilection, how could she not listen to her doctor.

However, it is my belief that the multitude of unsupervised drugs, in combination with her daily intake of one alcoholic drink a day, caused her to have several mini-strokes that her family doctor never detected because of a system so stressed from treating illnesses. My mother was always a difficult person even at the best of times, so it was easy and convenient for my brothers and I (and her doctor) to chalk up her increasingly erratic behavior to just how she was. We later came to discover that she had suffered numerous mini-strokes and the impact of those mini-strokes had ravaged the frontal lobes of her brain, affecting her short term memory and judgment centers.

How could we, as a society, have left healing and compassion and the individual so far behind that it is now easier to ignore challenging behavior than dig underneath to understand it's core cause.

There are no easy answers. What I do know is that before we can build new, we need to understand the old and what we did to get here for we are all responsible for where we are now. My rant is my way of understanding myself in hopes that healing is not far behind.

Written By Annie Gelfand

© Copyright 2010 Tammy Anne Gelfand.

All Rights Reserved.

RCM Manifesto

Current business structures and practices require that publicly held corporations answer to their shareholders. Shareholders want to see the value of their investment consistently grow and as long as that happens, shareholders are happy and so, apparently, is the corporation. Unfortunately, tracking ‘success’ with this narrow and self-interested a focus, can lead to significant negative impact on employees, supply chains, the environment, customers and even, in the long term, shareholders. This form and practice of business is no longer sustainable, as evidenced today by our current economic climate, environmental crisis in the gulf, employee engagement statistics and escalating bankruptcies.

Companies who are proactive, visionary, and responsive and who contribute to the long term happiness and well being of all of the stakeholders in the corporation are thriving. In contrast, the companies who continue to prioritize the bottom line, at any cost, are failing. If we have learned anything from the economic and environmental crises of late, it is that the corporation and its impact on the world  are not separate.

It is time for a radical change[i] in how we do business. In using the word radical, we mean that this change must be intentional and must spring from the root source recognition of our interconnectedness and impact on each other. It must be based in loving ourselves, each other and the world around us. Make no mistake, love is the radical change for love is a radical act. Organizations, as employers of many in our developed societies, need to play a leading role in how we achieve a world at peace and societies living in harmony.

Truly radical change happens over time, even though it might appear, as if it happens without warning. We suggest that the foundation of the change called for now is a shift from hierarchical, control based systems of management, through bosses or managers to a system of wisdom-based self-directed leadership by community, which we have termed “SDL” for Self-Directed Leadership. SDL  defined is self-responsibility, self-accountability, passion, creativity and purpose within the container of our interconnectedness/recognition of our impact on each other, ruled by our mutual respect for life. Our theory is that this will result in greater innovation and fulfillment. Our goal is balance between the self-interest of the individual or organization and the context within which it operates.

As we recognize that what we think, believe, do and say, has impact on our communities and the world, we begin naturally to act with conscious intention in service of

the greater good, and are emotionally rewarded by feeling more fulfilled, healthy and engaged. When our actions incorporate respect for life and each other, when we learn how to listen to each other without the need to make one right and one wrong, when we learn that every voice needs to be heard, when we stand on opposite sides with the objective of finding the commonality and mutual goals, then we will have achieved true democracy.

We propose that our new understanding of the balance in the human motivation system may function as the best model for how to run a sustainably high performance organization.  Develop a balance between profit and responsibility, between the individual and the collective in business, follow and honour the intrinsic needs of the people within the organization and profits will follow. In short;

Structuring the WAY we do business to honour the needs of the individuals IN the business is the best way to maximize profit and minimize, and even eliminate the collateral damage that business has had over the past few centuries.

As we transform the workplace to fully leverage the internal motivation systems we are born with, namely the desire to love and care for ourselves and for our communities, the workforce engages automatically. The organizations that adopt this new way of being will thrive and grow the bottom line to the delight of their shareholders, who may very likely turn out to be their stakeholders. Profits and bottom line success for companies who honour and work with their human systems will far surpass those that do not. The organizations that do not step up will become obsolete. The new generation of employees will not tolerate anything less than an engaging, supportive and fulfilling workplace.

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[i] Radical = root

1. Arising from or going to a root or source; basic: proposed a radical solution to the problem.

2. Departing markedly from the usual or customary; extreme: radical opinions on education.

3. Favouring or effecting fundamental or revolutionary changes in current practices, conditions, or institutions: radical political views.

Written By Sharon Lewis and Annie Gelfand

© Copyright 2010 Sharon Lewis and Tammy Anne Gelfand.

All Rights Reserved.