Addicted to Ding Dongs

Apparently, we are not just what we eat. What we eat transforms us. Our bodies, brains–our whole system–organizes around what we choose to consume. A recent study has shown that rats fed a steady diet of Ding Dongs develop classic addiction symptoms and behaviors. These include withdrawal and the willingness to endure hardship (repeated shocks) to obtain those precious creme-filled treasures.

Think about what you eat. Vegetarian? A diet rich in meat? You have physiologically, psychologically and existentially organized your self around this choice and this choice now has become a habit, a way of life. This choice is now organizing you.

We are incredibly resilient creatures. Highly adaptive, the wholeness of our being adapts to and adapts us to the life conditions we choose and into we are embedded. And, what we eat seems to be one of the core organizing principles.

So, it’s kind of neat to think that we can choose our addictions. We can choose to overdose on Ding Dongs and their nefarious yellow cousins, Twinkies. We can choose to align our selves with Monsanto and Nestle and shovel down processed foods oozing genetically modified high fructose corn syrup. Or we can organize our lives around thriving and consuming and living locally. Literally, we can become one with land and, through the habits of mind, body and spirit this choice engenders, become closer to each other.

The choice, initially, belongs to you.

Tags: addiction, Ding Dongs, high fructose corn syrup, Monsanto, rats, Twinkies

The Abundance Dynamic

There is a shift in progress.

For hundreds of years we have been living, working, consuming and discarding without much concern for the consequences of our actions. The dominant paradigm has been one of individual, corporate and national profit making and taking. The costs of these pursuits has been consistently and conveniently “externalized”, meaning, simply, that we’ve been ignoring the systemic reverberations of our actions. If you haven’t done so already, watch The Story of Stuff, now.

Generally speaking this is resulting in largely unintended and increasing patterns of environmental degradation, 5 nation-sized gyres of plastic soup in our oceans, a growing number of extinctions or near extinctions,  climate destabilization, crippling trade imbalances, the ongoing accumulation and concentration of wealth and health in small minorities, and the proliferation of re-enforcing systems and structures that, as populations increase, are accelerating these patterns. As populations grow and resources dwindle the consumptive force of this negative spiral is poised to increase exponentially. Accompanying  this tsunami-like increase we’re already seeing rather undignified grabs for resources (think oil–and, more recently, tuna).We call this the scarcity dynamic. We all know how this works. We perceive (correctly or incorrectly) that there is not enough to go around, so we hoard, consume more quickly, things fall apart and we realize the tragedy of the commons.

Recently, though, new patterns have been emerging that demonstrate the transformative power of widening our scope of action, intention and awareness. When we do this consistently and systemically we begin taking ownership and accountability for the impacts and influences we exert beyond the immediate scope of our work, commerce and consumption. We begin to realize that, instead of contributing to the negative spiral outlined above, we can create ripples of positive value in the world around us. We call this the abundance dynamic. And, it begins with a shift from “me” to “we.”

Tags: abundance, climate destabilization, extinction, me to we, oil, plastic gyres, population, scarcity, The Story of Stuff, trade imbalance, tragedy of the commons, tuna

Sustainability: Just Be It

Through our work facilitating leadership development and helping those leaders develop their organizations in sustainable directions we have realized that it is not enough to just learn a new set of tricks, skills or competencies.

In our work with individuals, teams and organizations, the best results emerge when we engender and embed holistic development and change. This means helping clients to “onboard” the skills they need while developing the capacity to sufficiently hold them and effectively employ them in their current and future work contexts.

This requires helping our clients actively cultivate a worldview that is highly inclusive and tolerant of the benefit that multiple perspectives bring and is capable of leveraging them. To accelerate this change, we work with our clients to create an adaptable sense of scope and context allowing them to see and understand patterns at play from the personal to global levels and begin looking at opportunities for leverage and synthesis.

Finally, for people to really engage the world of complexity around them they need similar development within them. Thus, a key element of our work is to generate and hold time and space for reflection that allows people to look within themselves at the changes taking place, and understand and appreciate their own inner complexity.

The shorthand version of this process is BE – SEE – DO – GET. To GET the results that will sustain your organization your need to be generating results that sustain that which sustains us. Simply, we need to DO differently. To DO differently means to SEE differently. We need to develop the capacity to SEE our selves and the world around us as interconnected, interpenetrating systems. To develop that capacity we have to BE differently. We need to become adept at embracing and understanding our inner complexity as well as the complexity that surrounds us and into which we are embedded.

This is hard work. It takes discipline. And, it is definitely not business as usual. Are you ready to…just be it?

Tags: be, competencies, do, get, leadership development, see, sustainability