theology – anthroposophy – world

Why is the weekly review so frightening? I know people who can’t bear to implement a full GTD system because of what the weekly review represents for them.

It’s frightening because it’s time out of life – resisting the pressure of events that carry us through the day.

More important, it’s a confrontation with promises I’ve made myself. If I my GTD system is watertight, then every initiative will have been noted as project. Every next action step will be in there. In the weekly review, I see my promises, and am confronted with what I’ve done with them. Why does this project have no next action? Maybe I didn’t really mean it, that I wanted that to happen. Why has this N.A. been on my list for 3 months? Is it not actually a single action but a multi-step project?Recently, I’ve started trying to integrate higher horizons. I haven’t even started on that audit yet – but I can feel it coming: why does this area of focus not have any projects… Why does this goal not have an area of focus?

Basically, the weekly review brings me into connection with my intentions. Writing a lovely purpose-statement can be just that – lovely. Noting things down on lists can just be displacement activity. Getting everything connected and being honest about my intentions means meeting myself. Just like the Guardian of the Threshold says: until I take responsibility for what I am, he will seem a monster. I suppose I’ll stop feeling frightened of the weekly review when I’m prepared to take full responsibility for every commitment I make to myself and to others. The moment when one has finished the Review always feels a bit like that.

[The words of the Guardian of the threshold]

Yet my Threshold is fashioned out of all the timidity that remains in thee, out of all the dread of the strength needed to take full responsibility for all thy thoughts and actions. As long as there remains in thee a trace of fear of becoming thyself the guide of thine own destiny, just so long will this Threshold lack what still remains to be built into it. And as long as a single stone is found missing, just so long must thou remain standing as though transfixed; or else stumble. Seek not, then, to cross this Threshold until thou dost feel thyself entirely free from fear and ready for the highest responsibility.

From Knowledge of Higher Worlds, The Guardian of the Threshold

I am amazed how clearly Steiner sees the Guardian being connected to our freedom. I am reminded of Bruce Irvine speaking of our profound longing to find something outside of us that is responsible for our experiencing reality as we do; and of the terrifying liberation that comes when we realise that we ourselves are responsible for our experience.

WELCOME TO T-CONSULT – REBEKAHS BLOG – Leaders with purpose.

Otto Scharmer points out, The Indo-European root of the word ‘lead’ and ‘leadership,’ *leith, means ‘to go forth,’ ‘to cross the threshold,’ or ‘to die.’”

Leading means constantly letting go, opening for what wants to come.

Here’s a taster from a really interesting paper by Otto Scharmer:

Leadership is the capacity of a community to co-sense and co-create its emerging future. This shifts our framing of leadership development from the single-person-centric concept to a concept of leadership that is more about “igniting fields of inspired connection and action.” (Otto Scharmer).

The full paper is here.
I don’t think this means that there shouldn’t be leaders – the position of those who see leaders inevitably as tyrants. It is a question of the kind of leadership. If the leader’s role is seen as facilitating the co-sensing and co-creating Scharmer speaks of, his / her strength will be welcome in holding the boundaries and making it possible for everyone to be involved in that process.

Here’s a paper that emerged from a day workshop on leadership on 11th September 2010. Here’s a taster before you decide whether to read a Word document:

Finding out what to do

In the Philosophy of Freedom, Rudolf Steiner describes 3 stages that lead to our doing something:

• Moral intuition
  where we conceive the idea
• Moral phantasy
  where we imagine how it could work
• Moral technique
  where we bring the idea into reality

Thinking and imagining (the first two stages) are gifts of Lucifer, and when we work with them we have to resist the temptations of Lucifer (arrogance, vanity, delusion). Having good ideas tempts us to underestimate the struggle of bringing them to earth. We have to grapple with our own shadow, our fantasies and projections, and we meet the double of pride and delusion.

Making something happen inevitably involves us in human institutions – temporary ones like an ad hoc planning meeting, and / or permanent ones, like a company. For this paper, we will call any grouping of people working towards a commonly-held purpose a system. The moment we are involved in a system, other dimensions of reality come into play with an exponential increase in complexity. Now we bring our own shadow-side into relationship with those of the other people, and they become the objects of our projection and fantasy. We encounter too the being of the group itself, the whole which is greater than the sum of its parts, which in turn has a shadow, an unconscious, and a higher being – the angel of the group.

The moral technique needed for bringing ideas into reality in systems is the understanding of how groups and organisations work. The reality of power and what works unconsciously in groups takes us into the realm of Ahriman. In this realm, we are tempted to become cynical or to despair and give up trying to make our ideas come into reality. When we go through this temptation, we are following Christ in his ‘descent into hell’ on Holy Saturday.

This http://zenhabits.net/email-sanity/ with some refinements is how I deal with email. I’m putting this here because people sometimes ask me.

Having spent the last week tidying out kitchen cupboards and creating order in the house, I was intrigued to find this at the very good Zen Habits blog: http://zenhabits.net/edit-your-life-part-2-your-rooms/.

I’ve been using GTD with increasing intensity since reading this article in 2005. For the last couple of years, I’ve attempted to adopt the standard of Inbox Zero. This is an incredibly liberating strategy of never leaving email in your inbox. You either respond using the 2-minute rule, or you put them somewhere where you’ll return to them at a time of your choosing, ie a folder or label in Gmail. The main thing is, your inbox is a pure collection place, not somewhere to defer decisions about things. If I’ve opened an email, it never goes back in the inbox – it gets deleted, spammed, replied to or deferred. There are 2 risks I’ve discovered along the way:

1. you can get obsessive about checking emails just to get you inbox emptied. That more or less defeats the purpose of the exercise.
2. you have to exercise discipline to look at emails on your action list that you didn’t deal with 1st time round. But that’s the same discipline you need for everything in GTD – it’s even harder to be confronted with the result of an old decision to defer something, than just to get on and do it while it’s fresh.

Anyway, the point of this post is that I’ve returned to a Firefox/Chrome addon called ActiveInbox. This is a way of managing Gmail, which has matured over the years into a real life-saver. I might write more about it later.

“Difficult Conversations“. Full of great insight. You can even have a look inside at Amazon. Quite a few really important things in this. 3 levels of conversation: factual, feeling and identity. Lots of good stuff about transcending blame without saying the bland ‘everyone’s right’!