Tuesday, October 20, 2009

This video speaks for itself....


As I understand it, a 15 year old wrote this poem as part of a school assignment. Amazing!

Monday, October 19, 2009

Getting Out of the Box

Just finished LEADERSHIP and SELF-DECEPTION...
This book explains how leaders can discover their own self-deceptions and learn how to escape destructive patterns. The 'learning' is woven into a story about a guy that joins a company and, in writing it this way, it is easy to relate to.

Self-deception touches every aspect of life - in fact, it determines our experience of life. It blinds us to:
- the effect we have on others
- a perception of others as they really are
- other corrective feedback from life.

When we only have distorted information about reality, we don’t have accurate information to make decisions. We don’t have accurate information with which to solve problems because we are in effect blind to the true causes of our problems. To the extent we are self-deceived, we are making mistakes.

The book defines self-deception as a kind of "insistent blindness." This blindness puts us "in the box." And when we are in the box not only do we not solve problems effectively, but also we actually create problems for ourselves and others. When we are in the box, we provoke people to resist us.

When we are in the box we have made "The Deep Choice" - THE CHOICE THAT OTHER PEOPLE’S NEEDS AND DESIRES ARE NOT AS IMPORTANT AS OUR OWN.
How do we know when we are in the box? Generally, it is when we are feeling some kind of negative emotion. When we are in the box we are insincere, or we feel angry or punishing, or we try to manipulate or "put up with" people. We are scornful, or suspicious, or judgmental. Guess what? People can tell, at least after awhile, how we really feel about them.

So when we are in the box when we are relating to someone, we are creating a "people problem." And because of self-deception, we don’t know that WE are the problem - we blame everyone and everything else.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Technology Movies

I will be adding movies to my playlist I use in presentations. I use these movies for a College level course I teach along with my Intructional Technology workshops.

Greetings...

This will be my personal learning blog where I will post current readings, articles, movies, and presentations.