As I look back on this past week, I see such evidence of how easy it is for our ideas to largely stay disconnected from our actions. I probably had more than thirty conversations with people who were espousing certain theories of action, but were living incongruent with their own impassioned pleas of what “our” conduct should ubiquitously look like. This isn’t the first time that I have recognized this tendency. I wish that I could find in my own life greater faithfulness to my ideas of how I should live. There are moments that somehow I feel justified in expressing outrage with this condition shared by all, and sometimes I do regardless of my consciousness of personal infidelity. My question is what links together intention and right actions that produce results in a timely fashion? In brief: our best effort in every moment. I have heard it said that excellence is doing things a little bit more, a little bit better than I just did it. Think about how different our lives would look as we practiced with a discipline toward just being a bit better than our last effort. As I look at it, the beginning point of improvement is in acknowledging reality as it is . . . even if it is merely the gap between our ideas and our actions. I think therefore I am, or as I act, I am?

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said: “you can’t step into the same river twice.” Although numerically this statement is generally not true, qualitatively we don’t experience the “same” situation or person as we have before. Our confusion with this statement can be found in the word: “same.” It does seem to our minds that we are meeting the same person, or experiencing the same experience as we have before, when we again meet a friend, or reproduce an act multiple times. We do like the sense that the world and ourselves can be controlled and fixed for purposes of maintaining predictability and order. For most of us, this seems to offer us the confirmation of the solidness, or permanence of certain experiences. We like the idea of solid and permanence because they lull us into an interpretation of our lives that suggets a certain standard of safety can be built and maintained. What shakes us is when we encounter a shift in the quality with others, situations, or in ourselves. Likewise, what hurts us is when we are inflexible with our interpretations of others, situations, or even of ourselves that sees us as qualitatively static.

I have to admit that I personally have been guilty of being attracted to this way of thinking and living. The dogma of my life seemed to create a warm nest that offered not only comfort, but also safety. I have too many times locked others, situations or even my ownself into hardened ideas, or labels that created a blindness to deeper and more profound truth of each. My growth, as well as the impermanence of others was not seen because it disrupted the dillusional idea that I could control my experiences. What I thought created safety and strength had the converse effect. The more profound reality was that I was not in a nest that offered the freedom of flight, but a cacoon that imprisoned me, and sought to do the same to others.

The insidious addiction to this false security scarred far too many days and people in my life. I wish that I could go back and reshape the past, but I now know that my past and present are deeply improved by staying alert to impermanence, and the discontinuance of trying to solidify myself and those around me. My longtime hold onto myself as I had constructed myself to be, inhibited me from being open and receptive to the new that was available each moment. When I stopped being obsessed with what I thought was me, mine, or who I thought myself to be, I became awake to the truth that there is no me worth protecting if I lose presence with the “now” and authentic contact with others. I learned that taking “hills” isn’t worth doing if it means that I no longer see the deeper truth of what is emerging every moment.

What is humility but the faithful and honest rendering of truth. . .no more, no less. Why is it that for far too many, humility is about the degredation of ourselves at the altar of social acceptance? What it seems like is that pride is the real hidden god in that matter of not over playing our value within a situation, or group. I have listened to far too many speak of their abilities in ways that sound censored, but are largely that person copping out from facing their fear and practicing life truthfully. The messages of this false humility sounds right, but they are void of a deeper truth that demands full performance by the individual.

I see leaders withold themselves because they don’t want to come across brash or arrogant. I always encourage clients to pay attention to any noise within the system of their actions that reduce impact, but please differentiate between possible noise and fear. It serves none of us to play small. Likewise, it serves no one for us to misrepresent the truth. Let’s just be clear about the fact that misrepresentation of truth can swing either direction, and largely does.

My advocacy is toward an ethic of truth in love. I know that sounds “soft” in corporate circles, but try it and discover not only how hard it is, but how it is also good. Can we please live our lives asserting the truth of what we can do in the situations of our lives? Let the norm be that what is represented is a wholeness that offers clarity of what we are good at doing, and what we are not. It is only as we become honest about both truths - the good and bad - that we provide the situations and people of our lives the greatest contribution that we can give. . .ourselves.

Some days I just want to recoil. I don’t want to be unconditionally present with anyone. I want expediency! I want compliance! I want control! There are days that I feel like I have grown. There are other days where I wonder if the sensation of motion is like you have when you reach for something without taking a step.

Is growing a matter of leaping past my known place? Is it swift and strategic, or is it as Rilke suggests, being something that I just live into? Synchronicity would be nice.

Words never change our lives, but we collect them nevertheless in hope that they might. Experience does not demand alteration, only participation. Desire is empty left alone. As you read the words that follow remember this: If you are to grow to what you believe is true of your own self, then you will have to dramatically change your life. Don’t be too quick to shift to the next idea as if you just internalized the last. Reading and learning do not guarantee improvement; right action does. So the question every time we try something new, or come at things differently is not only, “Is this idea worthy?” but more central, “Will I do something with this idea in a way that is lasting?”

We want to believe that we can make promises to ourselves and to others that provide guarantees of safety, the absence of deep conflict, and ultimately the firewall protection against the dissentegration of relationships. From the earliest days of our lives, we become fiercely attached to an idea of permanence of all that we call good. Our problem occurs when like a trapeze artist we look to take hold of the bar that will move us to the next place while never letting go of the bar that brought us to this opportunity. At best we are left pulled into two directions: one that wants to pull us back to where we have been, and one that is pulling us forward to new places and experiences. This dynamic is no longer the constructive tension that seeks resolution through development or compromise, rather a conflict that pulls us to a divided lifestyle, if not apart.

Maturation as a leader requires personal decisions to expand into the new by releasing the hold of the past. We need to feel the tension or pull toward a preferred future, but likewise, we need to stop being defined by the events, ideas, and in many ways, the people of our past. We need to let go of that which constrains us from a greater wholeness in our personal lives. For many of us, the starting point of this movement is in the conviction that love has a reversible effect on evil or a past gone awry. Yes the sum total of our past takes a second seat to the defining power of love.

I have listened to married couples lament about the failures of the past and hear them conclude that “too much has happened” for them to go on relationally. I have experienced the loss of friends because certain dark spots of experience or exposure became defining. I have listened to leaders describe themselves in limited ways because they let the past channels and territory have navigational controls in the present and for the future. All of these situations are robbed of a greater fullness and vitality that comes from not only search, but a courage that remains open and unconditionally present to the newness of things yet explored, and of a reversible past.

Love offers us all a truth, a tenderness, and a way to see through a static and limited interpretation of ourselves and our experiences so that the past is freeing and the present remains open to all possibilities. Yes we must be responsible for the effects of our past actions, but we also need to be responsible to love’s power to see a greater wholeness that integrates that which is good and otherwise within us. Our addiction to keeping permanent a present good, or in distancing ourselves from our personal experiences with past wrongs, impedes a deepening and transformation that is required for those who want expanding joy, deepening relationships, and reversing a past to free a greater present.

The next time you look into the eyes of a relationship gone bad, a situation that seems impossible, or into the depths of your own soul, choose differently from your norm. Listen to the truths just beyond the well worn words and thoughts of your past. Look to what is there, and has been there for all to see if we let love recondition our viewing lens.