5 year plan, an update

In August of 2005, I made myself a 5 year plan to quit my job with the State of Illinois Child Welfare system. Wow, what a difference 4 years and 9 months can make! I picked 5 years because of fear, mostly.  I had so many questions about what value I could bring to organizations, where I didn’t have to be chained to a 9 to 5 bureaucracy.  Five years seemed so far out there in the future that the plan could pull me, without pressuring me. So, what’s the status? What’s happened so far?

Well, I’ve facilitated at least a dozen open space events, implemented a unit testing framework at AboutUs.org as a contractor, worked on the community team of AboutUs as a contractor, worked full-time at AboutUs remotely on the community team, in sales, and then in organizational development, moved to Portland to work in the AboutUs office as an employee, and now have left employment altogether and count AboutUs as my first executive coaching client.  I’m currently seeking my second client.  My plan is to become a Gazelles Coaching Associate on June 1st.

So, what’s changed, ultimately?  Well, the fear has been replaced by courage and confidence.  I now know that I don’t need to have all the answers to make a real difference in organizations.  I do have some answers, but it’s much more important to ask questions to find out what people and organizations really need.  Then we’ll see if any of the answers I have fit, or better yet, if the organizations creativity has been unleashed by my questions.

What an amazing ride!

hot dog sutra (or one with everything)

From Rob Brezsny in the Nov ’05 Sun Magazine:

“Make me one with everything,” the Buddhist monk said to the hot-dog vendor who was hawking food near the temple.

The vendor made a frank with mustard, ketchup, relish, and onions.  The monk took it and handed over a twenty-dollar bill.

The vendor stashed the cash in his apron and turned his attention to the next customer.

“But where’s my change?” the monk inquired.

“Change must come from within, my friend,” said the vendor.

art and race

mousemusings (cool stuff even after after months and months in my drafts folder):

[...] At the black console on the second floor of the American Visionary Art Museum, he tries to align his face with a grid that stares back at him from behind the glass-enclosed front of the machine, which looks like a minimalist version of a mall photo booth.He clicks a mouse and a screen shows a grainy black-and-white picture of the 30-year-old student, who has olive skin, a long, rounded nose, large eyes and a full mouth.

Within seconds, the machine morphs his image, projecting color photos of how Hawthorne, who considers himself white, would look if he were Asian, black, Hispanic, East Indian and Middle Eastern. Hawthorne, a fine-arts major at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, W.Va., says he sees a bit of himself in each picture.

That’s exactly what SoHo artist Nancy Burson was going for. [...]

The machine, the artist said, is based on one philosophy: that the similarities between people of various races far outweigh the differences. To Burson, who is white, there aren’t different races, just one — the human race, she said. The best way to show that, she thought, would be to give people the chance to manipulate their ethnicity and see themselves differently, even if only momentarily. [...]

“Somebody [recently] said to me, ‘There’s no gene for race.’ And I said: ‘What? Why don’t we know that? Why isn’t this information out there?’ I thought the information was so huge and I still do, and I don’t think people understand that.” [...]

impeachment heating up?

I rarely, if ever, touch on politics on this site. I have so much work to do internally (personal work) and with those closest to me, that it seems folly to spend a lot of energy on elections or political wrangling, actions that I have found do not lead me to more peace inside myself and better relationships.

That said, I live in Illinois and have just found out, via Wealth Bondage, that a bill in the Illinois House that would initiate impeachment proceedings against GWBush was yesterday referred to the Rules Committee and had 13 co-sponsors sign on (in addition to the 3 initial co-sponors). I understand a similar bill has been introduced in California as well.

What happened on September 11th, 2001?

Many of the explanations I’ve heard from the government for what happened on 9/11 don’t make sense to me. I find the questions interesting and don’t have any answers myself. Here’s an hour and twenty minute documentary that asks some of the questions: Loose Change. I do not find their conclusions compelling. They simply don’t have enough information to draw the kind of wide-ranging conspiricy theories that they do. What I do find compelling, however, is the idea that many, many questions have been swept under the rug, and we may never know the truth about what happened on Spetember 11th.

it’s me :-)

a civilized game

I can’t say that I’ve ever seen a cricket match. But I just read this at Wikipedia:

Test cricket is played between two teams over five days, with three two-hour sessions per day. (Sessions are usually interspersed with a 40-minute break for lunch and 20-minute break for afternoon tea.)

Five days. Breaks for lunch and tea. Amazing. Not so civilized are the matches where one team outscores the other by hundreds of runs. On the other hand, sometimes they come down to a difference of only one. Can someone who understands cricket explain it to someone like me from a non-cricket playing land?

geeky fun (have no fear!)

There are all kinds of geeks in this world. This from the University of Chicago:

PHYSICAL CONSTANT CHEER

Gimme the speed of light ……C
Gimme Planck’s constant………H
Gimme root negative one……….I
Gimme carbon………………….C
Gimme the Bohr radius…………..A
Gimme the gravitational constant….G
Gimme the additive identity of a non-trivial group…O
What’s that spell? ……………CHICAGO!

seek and you will find

I just discovered that I can see what phrases people were searching for when they came to my site from a search engine. They only gave me 30 of 99. Here they are:

• ted ernst
• humanize the earth
• humanize
• tedernst
• free geek chicago
• kameron hurley
• maaskva nashimi glazami
• ted ernst bicycle
• wplicense
• coastal starlight
• maj gabel
• johnny payphone
• adrienne arsenault
• the wooden camera
• earth man and life a meeting point
• miranda mcosker
• simpleinside.com
• president elect george w bush assured the nation in a televised address tuesday
• coastal starlight late
• opendistro
• failure
• blog rose vines
• sidebar restructured text css
• gabel weblog army
• adrienne arsenault email
• wordpress problems
• a gamma secretase independent mechanism of signal transduction
• girl throws three touchdowns
• wiki miranda mcosker
• how old is adrienne arsenault?

I find the list itself interesting. If I think of it, I’ll come back and report on what I find out about the ones that I don’t recognize at all. Feel free to ask about any that interest you and I’ll link to my post(s) that could’ve caught a search engine.

New Year’s Day Puja Party

I’ll be at the Puja Party on New Years Day. Would love to see you there!