Category: potential

New Release: Positive Cultural Impact

You’re leading a team: could be you and one child, or you and a sales team, or you and a massive corporation or nonprofit institution. In any case, you have a culture you want to build, values to instill. But how?

For the last few months I’ve been blogging less as I was working to refine a concept into a concise e-book which details my formula for making a positive cultural impact in the form of a cycle which I very creatively decided to call the Cultural Impact Cycle.

Graphic4

Last Friday I published this e-book, reasonably priced at $2.99 USD. Here’s the link: How to Make a Positive Cultural Impact.

In a recent discussion with a random stranger, I told the stranger I am a life coach.

“What do you teach people?” he asked.

“Coaches don’t teach… but I’m also a writer,” I said, and proceeded to give him the elevator version of the cycle and the book.

“So, it’s the simple things,” he said.

Yes… it’s simple. The concepts here aren’t complicated. It’s implementation that may be difficult… perhaps even challenging enough you’ll want to work on them with a coach.

There’s more to come. Soon I’ll have a video course available for purchase that includes a workbook and an online forum. In the meantime, you can check out the book itself, it’s a short read at 8,300 words.

Enjoy!

–Adam G. Fleming

Advertisement

Learning to say I have enough

About a month ago an old acquaintance sat down with me and asked what I was doing.

Coaching full time, I said.

How many clients do you have?

Not enough, I replied, feeling like Eeyore again.

Five minutes later, I turned to him and apologized. I’m sorry, that’s a really negative way to look at it. God is providing what I need, when I need it.

I have enough. And I always want more!

Now, “I want more” still sounds like I’m discontented, but that’s not the attitude the statement carries in my mind.

“I want more” not because I’m greedy for the money that a fuller coaching load would bring. It’s because I have time to spare, and there are lots of people to care for. out there I want more, because I have so much more to give.

The Tao Teh Ching says “He who knows when he has enough is rich.”

Most of the people who can read this blog are rich. You have enough.

This change in attitude has been really helpful for my sense of internal peace. Coincidentally (?) within two or three weeks of that penitent moment, I landed several new clients.

You’re Evil! (Or something like that)

My 7 year old son told a friend of ours last Sunday “you’re evil.”

Nice way to be greeted at church, huh? she told me about it, laughing, so I asked him, hey, I heard you said Courtney is evil, what’s up with that?

“Oh,” he said, perhaps worried that he was in trouble, “I was just exaggerating.”

The nature of humanity has long been debated. The debate usually focuses on our nature. We are essentially good, or evil, or neither or both.

A more helpful framing of the discussion is that we are by nature filled with potential. We are set in motion. We make an impact. When we put our minds to it, we’re difficult to stop!

Most of the most evil people we deal with are those souls who go shoot up schools. It’s not unusual for us to say they were “pure evil” but I’d like to observe that often these evil people often come bursting out of a basement where they’ve been playing violent video games and living lives full of quiet desperation born of the thought that they’ll never live up to their potential. If potential is a finite thing, to be used for good or for evil or partly for both (and I’m not sure that it is, just trying the idea out here) if that is the case, they end up using a lifetime of potential in one fell swoop, stealing the potential from everyone else in the process.

The antidote must involve helping young men to recognize that they have potential before they hit the depths of despair. Our society’s mantra “go to school, get a job” is partly responsible. Nobody says “raise tomatoes and pick up trash” or “walk to the beach and paint the sunrise” or any other alternative mantra for those whom school does not come easily. The alternative “sit in basement, play video games, drink Yellow 5” is not building young people. We need to tell people “You’re good because you’re full of potential” rather than “you’re evil” and we need to do it without a hint of exaggeration.