Posts Tagged ‘responsibility’

Crime & Punishment: Prison and change

Saturday, December 12th, 2009

There is a story in the Independent today entitled  “Addict says sorry for car-jack attack”  about a drug addict who hijacked a car and ended up crippling the woman who owned it.  He was sent to jail, as he should have been.  The interesting thing was that he has just written to his victim “After watching the news and seeing your face, I realised it’s time to stop using drugs and change my attitude. Nothing in the past has really given me an incentive to stop, but when you explained what you went through, I wished I wasn’t born.”   It can’t make it up to the woman concerned or her family, but perhaps is the beginning of the Change process.

Until we recognise and own our mistakes, and take responsibility for their consequences, we can’t move forwards.

 

 “There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.”  Denis Waitley

“The price of greatness is responsibility.”   Winston Churchill

 

Tags: , , ,
Posted in General, Personal Change | No Comments »

Night shift and Breast cancer

Monday, March 16th, 2009

The Danish government has begun paying compensation to women who have developed breast cancer after long spells of working nights.  This follows the ruling by the UN agency, International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which ranks night working just one level below working with known carcinogens such as asbestos.

This is a nasty shock for the women who have selflessly sacrificed their night’s sleep to work in this way and must be very frightening.  Apparently disrupted sleep patterns interfere with the production of melatonin, which helps suppress cancer.

So often we seem to find that when we interfere with our natural patterns, drives and rhythms there is a price to pay.  It is important that wherever possible, that business systems honour and utilise these more natural forces rather than trampling over them.  I think that the 21st century workplace needs to get much cleverer about creating more harmony and more sensitivity.  This is one of the more demanding challenges for today’s leaders, because it isn’t covered anywhere in the current tomes and tracts on how to do management!

I’d love to hear of any examples of people or businesses doing this.

“Everything has rhythm. everything dances.”   Maya Angelou

“Rhythm is the basis of life, not steady forward progress. The forces of creation, destruction, and preservation have a whirling, dynamic interaction.”   Kabbalah

PS>> Following this blog I was called by the BBC and invited to discuss this on air, on the World Service program, World Have Your Say.  Listen to the podcast here.  I’m on twice once after about 34 min

Resources:  BBC Story  

 

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Business Change, Leadership | 3 Comments »

Whose to blame?

Saturday, February 7th, 2009

I overheard a conversation the other day.  One of the parties was holding forth about this, that and the other.  I periodically dialled into what was being said as it was impossible to completely blank it out, and whenever I did the same person was still loudly declaiming, offering advice, wisdom and input to all and sundry.  Everyone seemed just the frame to their picture,

A week later I was in the same coffee shop and caught up with the next chapter in this story.  This same person seemed to be feeling upset with a couple of their companions and could not understand what they had done to deserve this ‘treatment’.  From my table it was clear that the one-way nature of the ‘conversation’ was the root cause.  There had been no ebb and flow, it was more like watching someone playing tennis with one of those machines that shoots out balls at you rather than playing with a partner.

It is the hardest thing in the world to look in the mirror and see the cause of our own unhappiness.  I suppose in one way and another we are all the author of our own tragedies.  It takes a brave person who can see this even as a possibility.  However, if there is a pattern that seems to be following you around then the chances are that the common piece is likely to be the cause….

“Look in a mirror and one thing’s sure; what we see is not who we are.”  Richard Bach

“If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ’em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.”  Douglas Adams

Tags: , ,
Posted in Hints, Tips & Techniques, Personal Change | No Comments »

Change is inevitable….. (except from a vending machine!)

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

This captures the feeling that the Universe conspires to shaft us where Change is concerned.  We are ‘tricked’ into a series of changes we never chose and would prefer not to be wrestling with.  I guess there might be a some truth in this, in as much as we never chose some of the macro-events that shape our world, but by-and-large, we get the changes we need for our journey.

So if that great big vending machine in the sky has short-changed you today, perhaps you need to be asking “What can I learn from this?”  I don’t know about you but when I get to the other side of something difficult I usually feel that the race has been worth the candle.

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”  Anais Nin

“They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”  Andy Warhol

Tags: , ,
Posted in Personal Change, Values & Philosophy | No Comments »

Timing is everything!

Monday, April 14th, 2008

I was on a long drive yesterday in conditions that could only ever happen in England, in April! We started off in lovely spring sunshine, and after about half an hour were driving into a sky that was battleship grey, split by forked lightening and soon I appeared to be piloting a submarine! It was just some of the nastiest motorway driving I have done in years. This cycle of sun and rain continued as we drove north and east.

Our journey, luckily, was without incident and we arrived safely. However, we must have past at least 3 accidents en route. Now, I don’t imagine any of those people left home expecting that day to be any different from any other; they didn’t expect to suddenly suffer some mechanical fault, or be the victim of some random idiot, or have their own misjudgement so horribly called to account. The fact is that ‘stuff’ happens, and if our only strategy is to assume that it only happens to other people then one day, who knows, there might be a painful and rude awakening.

Perhaps had each of these people driven just a little faster, or a little slower, they would not have been in Harm’s way. In life, timing is really everything. Things you can get away with one day, you are punished for another; things you are rewarded at one time can later count against you. I hasten to add; I am not just talking about driving accidents, but life in general, and Change in particular.

So, the key is remaining aware and sensitive to your environment; extending your sensitivities and tuning in, rather than numbing out. You have to be responsible for what you are doing rather than switching to ‘cruise control’.

“Life is all about timing… the unreachable becomes reachable, the unavailable become available, the unattainable… attainable. Have the patience, wait it out It’s all about timing.” Stacey Charter
“When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute – and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.”
            Albert Einstein

Tags: , , ,
Posted in General, Hints, Tips & Techniques | No Comments »