Whose life are you living?

This is probably one of the most important questions you can ask yourself. Are you doing what makes you happy, what fulfills and satisfies you?

OR are you living according to what your parents want, what you think you should be doing, or what you were conditioned by education/movies/peer group to believe that someone of your gender/race/social class/background/education should be doing?

What motivates you?

There are two types of motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Those who are extrinsically motivated tend to be driven by grades, external markers of success such as job titles/names of good colleges and so on. Those who are intrinsically motivated tend to be motivated by their own value systems, intuition, and inner drive.

I would theorize – totally unscientifically and purely from my own observations – that the vast majority of people are motivated by extrinsic rewards. Those who are intrinsically motivated are a rare breed. You can spot them a mile off because they are the ones living full out, going for it, taking risks, enjoying life and who are without the shackles of other people’s opinions. You can probably count them on one hand.

The desire for extrinsic reward, validation, acknowledgement and acceptance is deep rooted and ingrained into us from an early age. Through conditioning (at home, at school, through peer groups, and in society at large), where we are taught to respond to other people like the way dogs would to a bone, we come to learn that doing certain things may get us approval while doing others may not. To our ego, our identity, which needs constant stroking and strengthening, approval is safe and disapproval is risky.

As children and adolescents, you may learn that dressing a certain way may make people laugh at you. Therefore, you stop dressing that way. Saying certain things may make your parents angry at you, so you stop saying them. Expressing your true point of view may cause you to lose friends, so we stay quiet. Telling a man or woman what you really want in a relationship may lead them say they don’t want to be with you anymore, so we don’t reveal our true selves in a relationship – instead we put up with what we get even if we don’t want it.

I know because I’ve done these things myself.

People Pleasing

Little by little we start to mould ourselves into what we think will help us gain approval and avoid disapproval. As adults, then (because it is rare to take the time to pick apart the things from the past that no longer work for us), you find that we are still searching for that approval while the one thing we are most afraid of is disapproval.

Going along with the agreement of whatever group(s) you belong to tends to get you approval. As an adult it looks like this: if your family thinks that you should be a lawyer/doctor/accountant/funeral home director, you know that they will look favourably on you if you are one.  Your real wish may be to join the circus or to be a singer, yet you don’t do that for fear of alienating your family. So you go to law school and spend your life daydreaming about your passion, perhaps even doing it in secret.

Perhaps in your peer group, everyone wears high end designer clothes and eats at the fanciest restaurants, yet you desire a life of simplicity and frugality. Rather than telling your friends that, you just go along with them, spending money that you don’t want to or even can’t afford just to fit in.

Look at the advertising around us. Apparently you are not ok if you don’t own X or Y item. Everyone else has one. You need one, the ads scream! You don’t really care for them deep down, but you don’t want to risk being criticized, so you go and buy it anyway. Ipads. Ugg boots. The latest phone. Whatever it is that you need to look cool, like you belong.

This is INSANITY.

And it is the easiest way to end up sad, unfulfilled and despondent. But why do we care about approval so much? Well, the most amazing form of brainwashing we have gone through is the one that says that who you are is based on what others think of you. So if you are approved of, you are good, and if you are not, you are bad. Many of us have such a poor sense of self, from the inside, that we do not know who we are or how to feel about ourselves unless that comes from someone else.

This is not only totally false, it is also antithetical to living a fruitful and fulfilled life. You are fulfilled when you are doing what it is in your heart to do. The world cannot possibly know what that is, so going by what the world says you should do means that you are most likely not doing what it is really in you to do. To be honest, even your parents cannot know what it is in your heart to do. That is something that only each person can know for themselves.

When you start to pick apart the idea of being motivated by what happens externally, you soon start to see how empty it is.

For a start, none of us can actually control how another person thinks. What they think is what they think (coming from their own judgements, opinions, past, perceptions etc) and quite frankly, what they think is their business. Why would you hurt your own life – the one that you have to live every day – to apparently please someone else who does not live your life?

Secondly, you cannot create another person’s state of being, nor can they create yours. In our society, there is this bizarre idea that we can make someone feel something. You cant. You can’t make anyone feel anything and neither do they make you feel anything. This is linked in to the point above: you are not responsible for another’s state of being, nor are they for yours. So, really, the issue here isn’t even what anyone else thinks – it is what YOU think about what they think!

Thirdly, if you are extrinsically motivated, it is very hard – infact, impossible – to find peace. People are notoriously fickle. One minute being a banker is cool. Next minute, being a banker is the worst thing ever. One minute, ipads are in. The next minute, we’re on to the next craze. One minute we love Britney Spears. The next she is the butt of all jokes.

If you want to ensure a life of inner turmoil, follow the crowd, follow the herd and spend your life trying to be secure in a constantly changing sea of infinite opinions. The only people who truly benefit from catching you in this trap is advertisers who prey on the fact that people are motivated by what others think of them.

It’s YOUR life.

Fourth, and most importantly, this is YOUR life. We are all going to die. Every day you are alive is one day closer to your death. It’s not morbid, it’s just reality. Ask yourself what purpose there is to living a life that you think someone else wants you to live? It does not matter what anyone else thinks about what you are doing. It is just what they think. So what?! The only thing that matters is being true to what’s inside you.

What would you be doing today if you didn’t care about what anyone else thought?

Exercise for the day: Do one thing every day that you would do if you didn’t care about anyone else’s opinion. I’m taking this on! Let me know how it goes for you!!

Imagine if I said “I’m a unicorn” to you and then started making unicorn noises and galloping around. You’d think I was pretty strange, wouldn’t you? (and that’s putting it mildly).

Yet, we say other equally untrue and bizarre things to ourselves every day. “I’m not good enough”, “I’m nothing special”, “I don’t deserve the best – I’ll put up with what I have”, “I can’t do this”, “This isn’t possible for me” and so on.

It is actually considered somewhat normal for people to have such internal dialogue, and we all have it to some degree. We don’t consider that it is actually very strange to make declarations to yourself about what you are not; that in saying such things and then acting like they are true, you are basically living inside a self-created delusion, hallucination or illusion.

Every human has intrinsic worth and value. We are precious by virtue of being alive. This is what’s real, even if you don’t feel like that’s the case. Yet, we tend to forget that our feelings about reality are quite different from reality itself. For example, I may feel like a unicorn (substitute unicorn for ‘not enough’, ‘bad’, ‘worthless’, ‘unloveable’ etc) but that does not make me one.

Most of our talk isn’t put on loudspeaker, yet if you listen to many conversations between people, you will hear that the voice of limitation and negation is indeed as outwardly pervasive as it is on the inside.

You may have noticed that it currently sounds something like “I can’t do x because the economy’s bad” or “This won’t happen because of the job market” or “I would do that, but times are hard/I don’t have enough money or time or friends or opportunity”.

All of this is as crazy as the unicorn talk. Seriously.

Why this matters

You cannot live well when you are not connected to what’s real, to what’s so, to what’s actually happening. If you are travelling from London to New York and you are following a route to Sydney, guess what? You won’t end up in New York!

Likewise, if you wish to have a happy, peaceful and contented life, you will not have that by having thoughts about yourself that are far removed from the reality of who you are.

Whichever area of life is not going so well for you is the direct result of the type of inner talk that you are engaged in. It’s highly likely that you may be engaging in some unicorn-talk.

Real talk

We live in an unlimited world, where you can actually do anything. What you are able to do in reality has nothing to do with what you think you are able to do.

People have always thrived regardless of circumstances. What is possible in reality has nothing to do with the economy or the job market or indeed any external circumstance.

The negative views we hold of ourselves are nothing but words and thoughts. Who you really are is not the same as who you think you are.

What you think about life – yes, even your own life – is not necessarily what life is.

Put this into practice! No more unicorn-talk for you!

Here’s an exercise that will help to distinguish whether or not you’re in unicorn land or in reality. (Hint: unicorn-land usually comes with a feeling of constriction, limitation and repression; in reality, there is generally a sense of freedom)

Byron Katie has a system called The Work in which she encourages us to challenge our thoughts by asking 4 questions:

1) Is it true?

2) Can you absolutely know that it’s true?

3) How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?

4) Who would you be without the thought?

These questions will help put you stand in, or return to, reality. Let me know how it goes!!

This year I’ve undergone what I can only describe as a profound awakening.

A year ago, I took The Landmark Forum, a weekend course which transformed my life in ways that I never imagined. For me, it made me see that I’ve gone around my whole life adding meanings to life, and that those meanings – which become the totality of what I think I know about myself, others and the world – have shaped my view. Once I got that they were just my own meanings, and not the truth, I then was free to be present, live in the moment and see life as it is.

This has profoundly impacted how I view my body – I stopped living inside an opinion about my body and began to see it as it really was – my relationships with family and friends, my ability to communicate and listen to others (I listen to them, rather than to my opinion about what they are saying), to connect with people and many, many other exciting results.

Now, this year, as I approach 30, my life has undergone an even deeper transformation. It is something akin to a purification of the mind, a stripping away of the structures of ego and a de-programming of conditioning. It has been exhilarating and… well, odd.

You cannot free yourself from conditioning without questioning the very nature of reality. I’ve been asking some very profound questions about what I have always known and thought to be real and whether or not it really is.

Realization 1: We live in an upside-down world.

My journey has shown me that that pretty much everything that I have been taught to believe is, well, nonsense. We humans are running around on this earth doing things in accordance with an understanding of reality which is, actually, unreal.

This is the reason for so much suffering, disease, war, unrest and upset in our world. And when you think about it, it makes sense: if you follow a map that is inaccurate, you will not end up in the right location. We humans follow a map that leads us, for the most part, to unrest and unease. Seeing that for myself has been a mind trip, let me tell you.

Realization #2: Spirituality is more than a nice idea.

I’ve always been spiritual but I must admit that part of me thought that spirituality was just a nice idea, perhaps something that I could use to feel better about life, and I felt, at times, a conflict between spirituality and the material world. But during this time, I’ve come to see that the spiritual is not a fancy notion, but is really the nature of the universe in which we live. The universe is made up of energy, which others might call spirit, consciousness, or Being. The material and the spiritual are one.

I had to find out more about this, so I began delving into various bodies of scientific work. Wow. Well, there I have found that there is a HUGE amount that scientists know about reality that would give humans such a vastly different understanding of themselves and the universe, yet that information has not been passed on to us.

Realization #3: We are using the wrong roadmap to live

Isaac Newton gave the world a linear, fragmented, absolute, mechanistic view of humanity and the universe which reduced people to limited beings who are separate from one another and from the workings of the earth and the universe. He gave us the paradigm that there is a separation between man and his environment, and that there is an absolute concept of time and basically that past, present and future are real. His view of the world remains the predominant one.

However, since then, Newton’s view has been debunked. It is erroneous, inaccurate and outdated. Einstein – who came quite soon after Newton – realized that rather than living inside a linear, mechanistic universe, we live in a quantum, energy-filled, boundless universe in which we are all part of one whole and that everything emanates from one source.

There is no separation between beings nor their environment. Even more dramatically, Einstein said that there is no difference between the observer and the observed. That is, what anyone sees and experiences is a function of who they are rather than what is.

Yet, we are still living inside a Newtonian-based world and being taught Newtonian-based principles that pervade education, healthcare, society and politics. The funny thing is that even Newton rejected his own idea of the world as being the way that he had described it.

From the idea about what a human being is, to what we are capable of, to how we make things happen, to what the world is, how it works, who other people are it’s all back to front. I’ve come to discover that we live in an upside-down, back-to-front world in which we are literally taught things that are the total opposite of how things actually work.

Realization #4: What I think about reality and what is real are two different things

Our world, for example, is run by the idea of lack and scarcity. We live inside a global paradigm of not-enoughness. I’m not enough, you’re not enough, the world isn’t enough, nothing is enough. We must get, have, be and do more, more and more.

This view is further exacerbated and driven by western consumerist culture which teaches us that we are nothing and nobody until we achieve, own, possess or have certain things – certain things which have been determined by goodness knows who.

However, scarcity is not real. If you look in physical reality, where is scarcity? There are millions of species of plants and innumerable species of animals. It is said that scientists have no idea how many species live in the sea, and that we have perhaps discovered about 10% of them. Inside your body are trillions of cells. The universe has been alive for some 13.73 billion years (at least) and contains an octicillion – yes you read that right – of atoms.

Physics has long known that all matter is energy. (Hence, Einstein’s equation that E=MC squared.) Those who studythe universe have found that the amount of energy in the universe is infinite, and ever expanding. This essentially means – since all matter is energy – that there is an infinite amount of invisible energy which can produce an infinite amount of visible matter in the universe. The universe is a living creative entity that has created, is creating and will create ad infinitum.

Realization #5: Limited senses = a limited view of the world

It is only when we use our senses to understand the nature of our world that we see scarcity. Our senses cannot perceive invisible energy so it looks as if we live in a scarce world, limited by what we can perceive. What we seem not to realize is that our perceptions are not the same as reality. If we live inside perceptions, we are trapped, since your perceptions are inherently limited. This is what happened when people thought that the sun revolved around the earth. They perceived it to be so, but that didn’t mean that it was so.

Realization #6: We see the world we are, not as it is.

One of the key things that I have come to know in the past year, and as Einstein and others have shown, is that the observer and the observed are the same. What this means is that what I see is who I am. The world is not separate from me. I see a world that IS me. This means that each of us lives in a self created universe. When you think about this, it’s not really that radical – place 10 people at the scene of the crime and they will all come back with 10 different views of what happened.

Although this is simple, it is also very profound. Wars would stop if we really understood this. Relationships would improve if we really understood this. Your workplace would alter if we really got this. People only compete with each other because they perceive a world of limitations and scarcity. People only hate each other because they perceive that their own ideas about life ARE how life really is and that they must defend them and hate others who don’t believe the same. Relationships only go sour because we interpret another’s words and actions and them live as if our interpretation of them is what’s true.

If you really understood that you see the world as you are and not as it is, what difference would that make for how you interact with people? or even yourself? Are you seeing what is, or are you seeing your perception? I realized that I lived inside a world of perceptions, interpretations and opinions which had nothing to do with reality, and that for as long as I lived inside those, I’d be eternally misguided at best. Not living in perceptions means actually being awake and being conscious to the fact that I even have perceptions that are different from reality!

An exercise!

This week as you go around, observe yourself. Observe whatever happens around you and then see if you can notice your judgements and perceptions about those things and how they shape how you view and respond to everything around you. That’s all there is to do, just to be aware. For the most part you may not even realize that you have judgements and perceptions – it will appear to you that what you see is just the way it is. But that’s part of the erroneous conditioning.

Let me know how it goes!

It’s time for us all to wake up!!!

Our experience of ourselves and the world is shaped by what we believe to be true about who are are as human beings. There are cultural and societal conversations about what a human being is capable of that we absorb, make our own and live inside of.

Before Roger Bannister ran the 4-minute mile, it was considered to be totally impossible for the human body to even do that. As soon as he broke through what was nothing more than some commonly held beliefs and a widely spoken societal conversation, 6 other people did the same thing that same year. Before him, nobody had been able to do it. This is the extent to which the widely held and popular notions about what it is to be human impact on performance.

We repeat already-existing beliefs about being alive without even stopping to question whether or not they are true. Often we don’t even realize that we subscribe to a paradigm about what it is to be a human nor that, ultimately, we are shaped and limited it.

Just as a fish in water doesn’t know it is in water, the average human does not stop to question what we really know about their own human-ness and whether or not it is accurate or adequate for the lives we currently live and the lives we wish to live.

5 Senses? I don’t believe you, Aristotle!

We are taught, for example, that humans have 5 senses – sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. This is something that Aristotle theorized, all the way back in 350 BCE. Life has come very far since then… what if Aristotle was wrong?

Many scientists know that there are more than 5 senses, including temperature, pain and some others. They think there are perhaps 10, maybe twenty. For the average person, though, even talk of a sixth sense is considered to be a woo-woo, weird, airy fairy phenomenon. But how do we know that humans don’t have thousands of senses? And how might life be different for us if believed that we do?

What if an innate inner guidance system that tells you what to do in each moment was considered to be a normal part of our sensory system? What if it was considered normal that your every thought and word creates your reality? What if part of our sense system was that we sense that we are born with all that we need to be fulfilled in life. What a difference would that make?

I personally have an awareness of aspects of life that comes from way beyond my five senses. I’m very, very clear that there is a whole range of senses that we are cut off from just because we are not taught about them. Yet, they do exist. There are people like myself who experience them regularly, and they do not fit into any already-existing ideas about what humans can sense.

When we operate like our physical body is the entirety of who we are and that our five senses give us the range of what is possible for our lives, our experience of life is very narrow.

Animals can hear lower and higher sounds than humans.There are colors that the human eye is unable to see or even perceive. Right now, we are walking in a field of electromagnetic waves which we cannot sense, but which are being picked up by cell phone towers, microwaves and radio transmitters all around us. Intellectually we know this, yet we do not live like there is more to life than what we may know. We live as though the awareness of the 5-sense, physical human is it.

Why is this important?

What you believe is possible for yourself as a human being gives you the way in which you operate in life. It has an effect on your happiness, the quality of your life, your levels of success, your relationships and, on a wider level, it impacts what’s happening on our planet, how countries and governments relate to each other, how children are taught in schools and how workplaces operate.

I assert that most fear and manipulation comes from believing that we are only physical beings. If you believe that you are just flesh-and-bones, you will be scared a lot of the time, because you will have to be on the constant look out for other people who may be bigger or stronger than you. There’s a quote that says “you are a spiritual being having a human experience” which sounds nice to the ear. But what if that isn’t just a nice thing to say, but is actually much more real than we know?

I assert that the current way in which we relate to our planet (one that I consider to be dysfunctional) comes from living inside a paradigm which holds it true that there is such thing as me, limited human being over here, and it/them/other out there who are separate and different and external to me.

Inside this paradigm we have two options: control them/it or be controlled by them/it. But what if this is just a perception? What if, in reality, we are not separate and are inextricably interdependent and interconnected to one another? After all, are we not breathing the same air?

If we believe that we are separate from our earth rather than a living, breathing part of it, like any other bird, bee, tree or flower, that gives us a particular way of acting towards it. If we saw ourselves not as separate, but as part of the whole, we might also see that this earth provides for us abundantly, it supports us in living and that it has a vested interest in doing so for its own survival.

How we relate to ourselves as humans impacts our day to day lives too. How much of your time is spent doing things in order to effect someone over there? Are there things you don’t do or say? Are there jobs you will or won’t take because of what the world “out there” will say? Well, what if I told you that there is no world ‘out there’ and that the world you live inside of is just the function of the conversations and interpretations that you carry in your head?

Most people carry an implicit idea of how happy they think they can be and what that happiness depends on. Ever seen someone smiling a lot and heard someone say (perhaps yourself!) “what are they so happy about?” We seem not to believe that just being alive can be a source of intense happiness. The consensus is that human being needs something from out there in the world to make us happy. What if this is total nonsense and happiness is not something you find or get, but just who you are?

Who you think you are has an effect on your life

I can guarantee that a world class athlete does not relate to their body in the same way that a normal person does. Someone who is interested in the power of thought doesn’t relate to their thoughts like the average person does. Is this because they have different bodies and different minds, or just because they have a different understanding of what they think is possible with their bodies and their minds?

Who do you think you are? What do you think is possible for you? Why? And how is this impacting your experience of life?

When the ashes clear from this economic Armageddon, the only organizations left standing will be the ones that actually stand for something. Without a purpose that improves people’s lives, and contributes to the greater good, organizations will struggle.

Roy M Spence, from “It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For”

In October, the Aspen Institute will be holding a 1.5 day forum in which business leaders and thinkers will come together to look at vital question: “How do you measure success?”

They will explore some key questions including:

• What constitutes a healthy society?
• How do personal criteria for success influence the way we do our jobs, participate in our communities and view our legacy?

Although the seminar is mostly business focussed, this is a very important topic of discussion and exploration for us all as individuals and as a global community.

One of the most important pieces of self- and societal enquiry that our generation can do is to take a good, hard look at this and to unpack and re-create our notions of success.

We must question, challenge and unpick every idea about success that we have been taught, see whether or not they work for us today, and then create our own.

Without a true, created sense of success – without some kind of guiding principle – we are apt to get lost, caught up in whatever is around us at the time.

Another very important question is that if you don’t really know what constitutes success to you, how will you know when you are being successful?

As I’ve got older, I have noticed that there are a large amount of people who, having followed their parents’ success formula (do well in school, go to a good college, get a good degree, get a job at a well-known company), are deeply dissatisfied with their lives. I don’t know if our parents felt this way too but there seems to be an intensification of such dissatisfaction these days.

And it is not surprising. Our parents grew up in a time when authenticity, personal fulfillment, satisfaction and an holistic, integrated approach to life and the world simply were not part of their equation. Nowadays, we  find that the idea of having a ‘work life’ that is separate from our values and indeed other areas of our lives just doesn’t cut it, especially not when so much time is spent at work and especially not as we wake up to ourselves as multi-faceted beings. For many, success can no longer just be a job title, or a certain salary, it has to go deeper than that.

Although Maslow talked about a hierarchy of needs, in which self actualization was at the top of the pyramid, I believe that he was inaccurate. Every human has a need for self-actualization regardless of their socio-economic status, and it is as important as ‘earning a living’.

I have had to unpack my own notions of success. For me now, success is about how many lives I can impact, how much of a difference I can make, how I touch people and what  legacy I leave – every day. Success for me is about having a life that is truly a self-expression in every single way. It is about having a life that works in all aspects, and about being a healthy, whole being.

If I am a “success” at work, yet my relationships are failing, that is not success to me. If I am not looking after my physical well being yet I can get into any club in New York, that is not success for me. My definition of success has nothing to do with looking good to others, what others may or may not think nor keeping up with the Joneses. Similarly, I have to ask how ‘successful’ I am if I live in an environment in which people around me are not doing well.

Once upon a time, I was concerned with the more superficial aspects of ‘success’. And it was crippling and limiting. Superficial notions of success change all the time, and have little to do with what’s inside a person, and everything to do with external markers. External markers, as we know, shift. If you base your sense of yourself on anything external, you will never have a strong sense of Self, let along experience yourself as truly successful. Any true notion of success must be grounded in all aspects of being, and take into account the individual and the individual’s environment.

This also applies to businesses. Those businesses without a strong, inner-directed sense of success (those motivated by profit alone) are apt to piss off customers, destroy the planet and act against their own self interests in order to maintain a superficial – and ultimately, temporary – sense of success.

Just look at the economic crisis and see you can see what happens when success is measured by a one-dimensional point of view. If success had been based on a triple bottom line –  people, profits and planet – very different actions would have been taken, with very different results with many of the companies that have found themselves in a financial hole. The title of a great book by Roy M Spence says it all: it’s not just what you sell, it’s what you stand for. Substitute ‘sell’ for do/have/own/drive/wear and you get how this translates on a personal level too.

So what do you stand for? How do you personally measure success?

I had a good chat today with Anil Dash, who is an awesome thinker, a  pioneer in the tech world and someone who sees, lives and works on  the connection between technology and culture. He is (among other  things) Director at Expert Labs which is doing some great work  interfacing policy makers with technology and people. At some point  our conversation got to technological advancements.

We have super high speed internet connections, ipads, the ability to converse with people across continents via text, email, Skype, Twitter and so on. We have applications like Four Square, Google Maps and Google Latitude which give precise locations and enable you to track someone down from checking their location on a cell phone. The past 20 years have produced technological leaps and advancements that many of us could not have previously imagined.

Yet in many ways, all of that technology has not made our lives easier. There still seems to be something missing that computers and technology cannot fill.

I believe the next major advancement will not be a technological one. The next major advancement is – wait for it – YOU. Yes, it will be a radical shift in the world’s understanding of what it means to be a human being, to be alive.

YOU ARE THE NEXT ADVANCEMENT. YES YOU! YOU ARE THE ONE YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR!

The next major advancement will be a global shift in consciousness which will see people awakening to the immense power within each of us to transform the planet. Yes, you heard me right. Not the power within Oprah, or Barack, or Bill Clinton. Within YOU.

It will be a right here, right now experience – as in we know that it’s possible for people to make a difference today, not some day in the future. It will be a huge awakening to the reality that anything we want to alter or transform, on any level, starts with each of us. We really are the change we want to see, and each of us has the power to make an immense difference on this earth.

It is already happening, although it has not reached full capacity yet. The recession and environmental issues are causing people to re-examine and reevaluate how we see ourselves and the world. And whether or not we like them, the Tea Party exists for this very reason – for people to take up the mantle and lead for themselves.

This empowerment will cut across class, culture and socio-economic lines. We will come to realize that empowerment has nothing to do with circumstance, with where you live or where you grew up. It will be the realization that from the poorest person on this earth to the most wealthy, within every human is a seed of greatness, a seed of leadership, that only requires nurturing and feeding to come alive. The Hunger Project model – where people are empowered to end their own hunger/poverty/suffering – will become the norm.

EACH ONE, LEAD ONE.

We will realize that we are each a leader, for ourselves, for our communities and for the world. It won’t be left to a  small minority of elected leader to lead, but each of us, as citizens, community members, parents, friends, and people to collaborate, co-operate and to create the world that we wish to see.

Rather than sitting down complaining about one’s boss or workplace, employees will actively work together to come up with solutions and create actions to make their workplace better. Rather than wondering why something in one’s community doesn’t work, people will get together, pool resources and abilities and their vision to alter whatever that issue is.

One thing has become clear to me as I’ve travelled the world and lived in different places: every human has the desire to be healthy, to be happy and to be fully who they know deep down that they are capable of being. It doesn’t matter if you are from Ghana or Germany, Tibet or Timbuktu. That desire is within each of us.

There is, however, currently an anachronistic paradigm in place that says that only a lucky few can have that which is why we still have a world in which a small minority have everything, while the majority live on little. Other erroneous notions like ‘survival of the fittest’ or that getting what you want means someone else losing out are also still in play. With this new advancement, we will profoundly understand the importance of living in a win/win world, where we recognize that we all win when those around us win.

This will be the most fundamental and dramatic advancement of our time. Are you ready to take up your place as a leader?

I found the whole Shirley Sherrod case to be pretty disgraceful to be honest. I’ve written a number of pieces on it for different publications, as well as appearing on the BBC talking about the nature of the media today and how easy it is to score cheap political points by manipulating the media…

Here are some of the pieces I wrote on the case. In the very first piece, which was written before the full video was released, I questioned how we could possibly make a snap judgement based on a short video clip.

As I wrote: “I’m not saying that Sherrod was right. I don’t know. And neither does anyone else – because we haven’t seen the whole video. Until the entire video is seen, it is not possible to garner from that clip the exact context of what she was saying.”

It’s the same thing I said about Sonia Sotomayor and the ‘wise Latina’ comments. Without context there is no meaning. I didn’t need to see the entire video to know that firing someone (or forcing them to ‘resign’) over a short clip was utterly absurd.

In the second piece – Shirley Sherrod Wants To Talk Race With President Obama – I looked at why Obama needed to sit down with Sherrod. If he was willing to have a beer with Henry Louis Gates and the police officer, surely he could take a while to speak to Sherrod (which he did eventually)

In the third piece – The Firing of Shirley Sherrod –  I took a critical look at the whole incident. I looked at what this means about the media (particularly partisan media, such as the likes of Fox News), the state of the nation’s conversation about race (it is distorted) and took issue with the NAACP saying that it was ‘snookered’. No, it wasn’t, it just didn’t check the facts. Unacceptable.

And in this fourth piece – The White House Can Avoid Future Shirley Sherrod Debacles – I look at what lessons the White House can learn from this.

I also think there needs to be movement which encourages the media to reconsider exactly what we are here for and why we exist. We have power and we need to use it for good….On that theme, in The Guardian, I take a look at the ugly media flaws that this case exposes.

“Unfortunately, “journalism” based on the regurgitation of clips, soundbites and inaccuracies has become all too common. Controversy wins the day over facts, and regardless of the cost – which can include damage to the life or career of an individual, undermining the good work of an organisation (as in the case of Acorn) and losing the trust of the public. Indeed, in recognition of the fact that controversy sells, scandals are increasingly being manufactured and manipulated by the rightwing media to push people out of jobs and to scare the government.

“To be frightened of [the unknown] is what sends everybody  scurrying around chasing dreams, illusions, wars, peace,  love, hate, all that. It’s all illusion. Unknown is what it is.  Accept that it’s unknown and it’s plain sailing. Everything  is unknown…” – John Lennon

Children ask a lot of questions. They are always asking. They are  unafraid to say that they don’t know something. It is partly this  willingness to explore and ask that leads to the rapid development and  growth that children undergo in such a short period of time.

Somewhere along the line – as a result of conditioning and having to  pass school tests which punish us for what we don’t know – we come to  believe that asking questions and admitting that we don’t know  something is bad, wrong or a sign of weakness. We stop asking, stop admitting that we have no and instead begin to pretend that we know everything.

We begin to filter the world through what we think we already know. We filter the things we see and hear through what we think we already know, often dismissing or cancelling out those things that do not fit into our preconceived “knowledge”. We react to people and ourselves based on what we think we know about them. We become rigid in our notions about what we can and can’t do based on what we think we ‘know’ about our abilities.

As an adult, knowledge is highly prized, as is planning and strategizing and figuring things out in advance. I can guarantee that most of reasons why you haven’t done many of the things you want to do in life is because of something you think you don’t know. I don’t know how. I don’t know who. I haven’t done it before. I know I can’t do it. These become popular refrains.

The truth, however, is that nobody knows. Your parents didn’t know. Your friends don’t know. Your boss doesn’t know. And anyone who says that they really know something 100% for sure is lying! You cannot know anything for sure in a world that is growing, changing, evolving and shifting every millisecond. Every thing that every scientist knows now is different from what they knew 100 or even 50 years ago. What’s possible today is radically different from what was possible even 10 years ago. We’re all just making it up as we go along.

Fear of the unknown can be paralysing to a human.  Not knowing stops many people dead in their tracks. It has stopped me in the past too. That is, until I started to question the very idea about what we know.

The question I started to ask myself is: what if I don’t need to know anything to thrive in life?

I then realized that everything that  I thought I knew – about myself, others or the world – was actually a hindrance and a limitation. When I took on that I didn’t really know myself, others of the world, not only was I free, but I realized that I had no clue about what I was really capable of!

Think about it for a second. In the grand scheme of things, when you look from the perspective that there are billions of people on this earth, galaxies, universe and planets – what do you really know? We probably “know” a miniscule portion of all there is to know in the world. Knowing gives us a sense of security and certainty, but ultimately it’s just an illusion.

Now for the good news – this not knowing is a fantastic thing! It is not bad or wrong not to know. It is GREAT. Because when we don’t know, we are free to create! We are free to dream. We are free to step forth into our dreams without having what we ‘know’ hinder us.

What we know can only have come from one place – the past. Every single thing that you think you know is either based on what someone told you in the past or some past experience. But today is today. This is here and now. What does any of what you knew yesterday, the day before, last week, or years ago have to do with right here and right now?

Personally, I have healed relationships, grown closer to friends and family, discovered new things about myself, taken on projects and ventures that I would not have tried before – all from letting go of what I think I know.

When you respond to the present based on some knowledge you gained or formed in the past, you are bound to be misguided. Furthermore, if you live your life based on what you already believe you know, you are relegated to repeating what has already happened.

The unknown is a beautiful place. I encourage you to embrace it, step into it and dance in it.

What you know limits what’s possible. When you stand in the unknown, it is then you see that all of life is open to you.