Enjoy Your Dance

February 12, 2019

I love to watch young children dance to the music with great abandon. Unfortunately, as we grow into adults, we rarely get the opportunity to be as free and uninhibited as we were when we were kids.

How do you feel about being you right now? Be truthful with yourself, and think about how much you like yourself right this moment. This article, hopefully, will jolt you into a different frame of mind relative to your happiness and the quality of your life.

I teach many online courses, and deal with students from all over the world. I recall one interchange between a student living in a frigid part of the USA and another student in Hawaii.

At one point, the student who lived in Detroit was lamenting another dreary day, and he had reached the breaking point. His comment to the student in Hawaii was, “Well, I have to take responsibility for my own misery. After all, I chose not to live in paradise.” I immediately wrote to the complaining student reminding him that “paradise” is a state of mind rather than a state of the Union.

There are numerous things that gauge the level of satisfaction and happiness we milk out of living. This article focuses on one’s perception of self.
Most of us are in the middle of a long progression of the days of our lives. It feels like a long time since our days of youth and exuberance, and we have a long way to go before somebody puts us in a pine box. We live each day reacting to the forces and challenges that hit us. Some days are good, and others are less happy.

We are what we are because that is what we have chosen to be. Many people go through life being unhappy with themselves and blaming others or circumstances (like if I only had a smaller nose). We have such a short time on this planet, and it would be smart to be happy with ourselves first and foremost.

Nobody else has to wake up with you and be with you 100% of the time, so if you are not happy with yourself, the quality of your precious life is diminished. Who would be to blame for that? Hmmm…let me think.

My observation of our lives in the grand scheme of the universe and the ages is that human beings are all like little kids. You have to go up only a few miles and look down through a telescope, and you can observe us all dancing around all over the world as we move through our day.

We show up and dance around for a fleeting 80-100 years, and then we are gone. Eighty years in celestial time is hardly a blink. Better make sure you are enjoying your dance.

Our possessions that we covet, our money that we lust after, make very little difference in the end. All that matters is how much of an impact we have managed to have on others, how much love we have generated, and how much we have enjoyed our dance.

What are some of the things that contribute to enjoying your dance? Here are a few examples. (Note, this list is not exhaustive.)

Making a contribution:

We all make contributions, both good and bad. If you have provided one shred of thought that has been recorded and provided value to other people, you have made a contribution. Two shreds counts for double that value, so provide many shreds of value to the advancement of society.

Finding honest love:

If we feel deeply in our soul that we have loved the people in our lives, then we go to our grave reflecting on a life well lived. This, of course, includes family, but it also includes heroes, mentors, classmates, pets, friends, grocers, frogs, lamps, books, and any other person or thing that we truly love.

Believing in an Infinite Power:

Many people think of this as religion, but it really covers the entire realm of spiritual awareness. I do not know about you, but I really do believe that something is guiding my steps at times, and it is not just me.

There have been too many remarkable surprises handed to me in life for me to take credit for thinking them up or for them to be just random coincidences. You can call it what you wish, but there is an Infinite Presence there somehow.

Helping others:

Whenever you give of yourself to help another, you feel great about yourself. That effort is a really good dance in your daily routine. The help can come in any form, and the only criterion is that at that time you were thinking more about the other person’s situation than your own. The help could be financial, physical, emotional, or even comical.

Making something:

To create a thing of beauty, or even ugliness since beauty is subject to interpretation, is a good dance. Some people are really good at this, like my father, who painted over 2000 fine watercolor paintings after the age of 55. Some people create great food or fine woodwork. To shape the elements into a new configuration that has never been done is intrinsically rewarding. Most creations are not marketable, but they are physical evidence that we were around and dancing happily.

Teaching or mentoring:

As we seek to impart some of our wisdom onto other people, we give the gift of knowledge. It is a subset of helping others, but this one is special, because we target the help on an individual who benefits from it.

For a person with great insight and knowledge to keep it to himself really wastes his dance time. I think it is really difficult to mentor from the grave, although some people do believe strongly in doing it or receiving it, which is part of their own dance.

Appreciating what you experience:

This attitude is all about not being numb to the beauty all around us every day. Seeing the small acts of kindness of one person toward another brings us joy. Marveling at the beauty of a flower, the taste of raspberry Jello, or the Bach B Minor Mass provides deep joy, but only if you are awake and paying attention.

Loving what you do:

The ability to look at each day as an adventure into the possible instead of a drudgery of our current agony is what lifts us up. Hope is there when you enjoy your work and your play. There is a choice you make every day as you dance through it.

Those are just eight examples from the top of my head of how to make the most out of your 80+ year dance. Who knows, you might beat the odds and dance until you are older than 100, or you might check out in your 20s.

You will notice the absence of wealth or possessions on my list, because I think those things dry up and blow away very quickly after we stop dancing. In the grand scheme of the world and the eons of time, the only thing that really matters is what you did with your opportunity to dance, not how big a pile of clutter you were able to generate.

Bob Whipple, MBA, CPLP, is a consultant, trainer, speaker, and author in the areas of leadership and trust. He is the author of: The Trust Factor: Advanced Leadership for Professionals, Understanding E-Body Language: Building Trust Online, Leading with Trust is Like Sailing Downwind, and Trust in Transition. Bob has many years as a senior executive with a Fortune 500 Company and with non-profit organizations. For more information, or to bring Bob in to speak at your next event, contact him at http://www.Leadergrow.com, bwhipple@leadergrow.com or 585.392.7763


Successful Supervisor 55 – Your Give Back Ratio

December 2, 2017

All of us receive blessings and good things in our life. We also find ways to give back to others. This article is about making a conscious choice about your give back ratio.

What is “Giving Back”? 

Many people see giving back as contributing to the church, United Way, or some other specific charity. Monetary contributions are just one way to give back to society.  I will outline some other ways that you will recognize.  The challenge is to add up all the ways you are giving back and decide for yourself if is the right ratio for you. 

  1. Volunteering your time

We all have done some service to others in the form of donated time. How do you put a value on that sacrifice? Clearly you could calculate the hourly wage that your employer pays and multiply it by the number of hours you donate to others.  I think that is a little simplistic.

What you need to do is forget about the monetary value of your time but add up the, percentage of how much time you are actually donating to help other people.  It does not need to be an organization, such as the Red Cross. You might be helping to educate youth in a Big Brother Program or serve hot meals to homeless people.

The list of potential ways to donate time is nearly infinite, and you can often lose track of just how much time you are donating.  My advice is to be alert to the level of contributions you make on an annual basis and decide for yourself if you are giving back enough of your time.

  1. Contributing your talent  

When you agree to help an organization work toward the betterment of the community or mankind with no remuneration, you are donating your precious talent for a good cause. It might be as a Scout Leader, or it could be helping with a fund raising campaign.  Whenever you are using your mind to help further the cause of an organization, that is a contribution of your unique and special talent.

Feel good about these contributions and know that they are making a difference in the world.

  1. Helping Others 

Contributions here include visiting sick people or helping in a rehab facility. They also include helping friends and family members manage their way through their own minefields. As you coach others to improve their lot in life or survive a tragedy, you are really giving of yourself with no thought of what you will be getting back in return.

The universe has ways of keeping track of these altruistic activities, and you gain in your personal esteem by engaging in them.

  1. Giving of your treasure

There must be a billion ways to contribute cash to help out efforts all over the world. You may be contributing to save starving children or even animals. You may be giving to your alma matter so that future students can benefit from the education you enjoyed. You may be setting up a trust to help your family members after you are gone.

There seems to be no end to the number of requests to contribute money. The one irony is that when you give to some charities, somehow others find out about it and your phone rings a lot more along with a lot more letters to appeal for your money. You need to establish some kind of formula for how you are going to deal with all of these requests so that you feel good about your giving pattern but are not bled dry.

Putting it all together 

I am not suggesting any particular level of giving to others is the correct one. I am asking you to take a look at your giving pattern from time to time and ask yourself if it is the right level for you. For me, when I did the exercise I found myself dissatisfied, so I made an increase in my pattern of giving back, and now I feel that my level is more appropriate. That review will now become a part of my annual “renewal” process where I examine my life so far and plot my plan for the next year.  I think that is a healthy exercise.

This is a part in a series of articles on “Successful Supervision.” The entire series can be viewed on www.leadergrow.com/articles/supervision or on this blog.  

Bob Whipple, MBA, CPLP, is a consultant, trainer, speaker, and author in the areas of leadership and trust. He is the author of four books: 1.The Trust Factor: Advanced Leadership for Professionals (2003), 2. Understanding E-Body Language: Building Trust Online (2006), 3. Leading with Trust is Like Sailing Downwind (2009), and 4. Trust in Transition: Navigating Organizational Change (2014). In addition, he has authored over 500 articles and videos on various topics in leadership and trust. Bob has many years as a senior executive with a Fortune 500 Company and with non-profit organizations.  For more information, or to bring Bob in to speak at your next event, contact him at www.Leadergrow.com, bwhipple@leadergrow.com or 585.392.7763