Can anyone deny the truth of this statement? Since the beginning of 2020, everything seems turned upside down. How we shop, how we work, how we worship, how we socialize, how we spend our money, how we view healthcare, how we view (trust) our government, how we view our educational and business institutions.
As just two examples, about 50% believe everything the government, media, and healthcare leaders believe everything written or said about COVID-19 and its dangers, while about 50% of us are deeply skeptical or downright disdainful of the mainstream narrative about COVID-19. Since April of 2021, more than 25 million people have VOLUNTARILY left the workforce (quit or retired.) That is 15% of the workforce. A large number of workers who the surveys show have long disliked their work, disliked the supervisors, disliked their compensation finally “pulled the trigger” and quit.
And business leaders seem confused about why the worldwide delivery of components and final products (the supply chain) has so fundamentally been disintegrating?
Marshall Goldsmith, Ph.D., one of the most respected leadership coaches in the world wrote a best-selling book a few year back, “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There”. The emphasis of the book was to point out that without regularly improving your business and emotional intelligence skills, your career and personal growth will flame out. I’m pretty sure he didn’t foresee what is now upon us.
Not only has the workplace become unpredictable or downright unfriendly; social relationships, even among families, have been severed; schools have become ever more stressful for students and teachers alike.
Only three years ago, once you achieved a certain level of success in your personal life or career, it was possible and quite common for people to lapse into apathy, aloof, indecisive and lacking motivation. In such a short time that has become a recipe for failure.
Albert Einstein famously said, “We can’t solve our problems with the same level of thinking that we used in creating them.” That was considered a nice, erudite statement when he uttered it in the 1920’s. Today it espouses an essential truth. We have massive problems today and can our current crop of leaders raise their consciousness to solve them?
Fortunately, a whole new batch of creative, ethical, energetic leaders are emerging, working to establish a new culture, new opportunity and a better life for everyone. They aren’t the norm yet, but in a decade or two they will be. Life for our entire population will gradually improve for a great majority of us.
This is great news. While research confirms that virtually all of us have some built-in limits to our creating the greatest version of ourselves, these limits are not irreversible. Psychological research proves that every single one of us has within us potential greatness we can’t even imagine, and the tools now exist to make our magnificence manifest in our everyday lives.
The list of people considered failures as children, yet who made exceptional contributions to the betterment of our world is long indeed, and I’ll name but a few: Einstein, Edison, Helen Keller, Picasso, Robert Frost, Churchill, Steve Jobs, Spielberg, Walt Disney, Alexander Graham Bell, Galileo. Greatness is in each one of us, and we now are applying these tools to help uncover that greatness with our clients.
Each of us chooses what we will give to life, and life will give back to us in each measure all that we give to it. We all have free will. Life’s potential going forward is unimaginably good. But there is no room for “fence-sitting”. We either choose to unleash our full abilities (requiring challenging yet inspiring and invigorating work), or we sit by, potential victims as a rapidly shifting and changing world slips right by us. Choose wisely Grasshopper.
We wish for you and happy and gratifying Holiday Season, and a New Year that opens a grand and fruitful new chapter in your life and in the lives of your friends and family.
Tom Searcy, Board Certified Coach
574-850-9912
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