mentors | Lisa Robbin Young

Appetite For Distraction?

Posted by LisaYoung in Big Ideas | 0 comments

The title of today’s post comes from something I heard in an audio book by Father Richard Rohr (@RichardRohrOFM) called “The Art of Letting Go“. In it, Richard talked about how we, as a collective society have fared more along the lines of Huxley’s “Brave New World” than we have Orwell’s “1984″. His thoughts circle around how we’ve done ourselves in by our chasing of pleasure, versus being controlled by Orwellian “pain”. Granted, Rohr is a Franciscan, so I expected him to speak to our materialist natures, but this particular part of the audio book hit me hard.

An “appetite for distraction” implies that the more we chase these pleasurable distractions, the less we focus on what really matters – on being our true selves and being able to be present to what life is about in the here and now.

The other morning I was immersed in part of a 40 day & night transformational process I’m developing. In response to a writing prompt about what I believe about my business, I wrote down the following:

Hope Is Not A Strategy (Part Three)

Posted by LisaYoung in Faith |

Continuing down the loop today, we’re going to pick up the “end game” conversation from yesterday and run with it.

Since you’re still in the middle of my end game, you may be scratching your head yet, trying to piece all this together.

This is where Joan of Arc comes in. According to Wikipedia:

“Joan asserted that she had visions from God which instructed her to recover her homeland from English domination late in the Hundred Years’ War. The uncrowned King Charles VII sent her to the siege of Orléans as part of a relief mission. She gained prominence when she overcame the dismissive attitude of veteran commanders and lifted the siege in only nine days. Several more swift victories led to Charles VII’s coronation at Reims and settled the disputed succession to the throne.”

When people quote Joan, often it is “I am not afraid… I was born to do this.” But there are two other quotes that I offer today:

“One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.” (emphasis mine)

“Act, and God will act”

Regardless of your religious persuasion (or lack thereof), you have to credit Joan with an incredibly powerful belief. She knew her end game. She even predicted her own injury on the battlefield.

She knew what she had come here for and to her dying breath, she did it without compromise.

Are you living your belief? In your life, your work, your coming and going, your “rising and resting” as some scriptures would say.

Do you even know what you believe?

Here’s a girl that’s been praying hard for years and finally her end game becomes clear. She figures out the steps in the cycle and makes her move. She achieves her end game.

It’s the same pattern you see in powerful leaders throughout history. The details may be more personal, but the patterns are undeniable. I’ve remarked on more than one occasion about the similarities between the rise of Hitler and one of our more recent presidents. Both were charismatic speakers. Both wrote books about their life that outlined how they’d “change the world”. Both rose to power with a grassroots level of enthusiasm.

Patterns. Cycles.

More recently, you might have heard it called “modeling.” The idea that if you want to be a millionaire, find someone else that has done it, learn from them and model them.

The problem with modeling is that you are NOT them. Your set of beliefs, your core values are probably not the same. Modeling their successes may also mean modeling their failures. Or WORSE.

But finding the patterns… now that’s something that can benefit you. If you want to be a millionaire, don’t just look for one person that’s done it. Look at many people who have done it. What are the commonalities? Where are the patterns, similarities?

Take notes. Lots of them. Then find those commonalities in YOUR life and work.

Then ACT. Take action. Move the ball down the field and see what happens next. See the end game and move relentlessly towards it. If it’s your life’s end game, as it was for Joan, you’ve got to be willing to die for it.

What are you willing to die for?

Are you living that belief?

Hope Is Not A Strategy (Part One)

Posted by LisaYoung in Big Ideas, Faith | 8 comments

It began with a blog post, which led me to Joan of Arc, then twitter, and finally another blog post that led me here.

Lest you think it’s circuitous thinking, give me the next couple of days to bring it into focus for you.

When my uber-helpful coach, Sarah Robinson posed the question “What is Generosity?“, she made the comment that too many people today are touting being generous as some kind of strategy.

I hit reply, almost without thinking and out came this:

IMHO, generosity can’t be a strategy, else it’s not true generosity – or maybe I’m confusing it with altruism. By definition, “Generosity is the habit of giving freely without expecting anything in return.” Any expectation negates the nature of generosity. Generosity is unconditional love in action. It’s not possible if it’s a strategy. Again, “strategy, a word of military origin, refers to a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal.” A particular goal connotes an expected outcome. You can’t have expectation and no expectation in the same gesture.

You CAN have hope. For example, I’m doing this because I want to, and I HOPE that if you like it, you’ll tell people about it. No pressure, no expectation you’ll actually do anything other than receive the gift.

Hope is not a strategy either – at least from what people tell me, but I do a LOT of hoping, backed by action, and it seems to be working for me.

I also cracked that I should probably write a blog post about this, but didn’t feel I had the information to fully flesh out something of value to you.

A day or so later, while clearing off my in-box, I found a story card about Joan of Arc:

“Although she was not educated, Joan was very spiritual, and spent many hours in prayer and in helping others. When she was 13, she began to hear “voices” that carried messages from God. By the time she was 17, she was certain God wanted her to aid King Charles VII of France in his fight against the English. She successfully predicted the defeat in Orleans and was able to pick out the king, who was in disguise.”

Eventually, she was placed on trial, condemned to death as a heretic and burned at the stake.

Later that night, I popped onto twitter, and saw the tail end of a conversation between Sarah, and two of my pals, which triggered this thought in my brain:

Children are “distracted” from the world by their dreams. Adults are distracted from their dreams by the world.

I thought it was kind of poignant, but it felt like one of those timely things to say on twitter that will get retweeted a little and then die. Still, not really thinking much of it, I tweeted it and went to sleep.

Joan of Arc, dreams, visions, faith, hope, kids, all this stuff was swirling in my brain. Somehow it felt like I had been here before, staring at a puzzle with tow pieces still in my hands, not sure how they went together. They were all connected, but I wasn’t sure how.

Ever feel like that?

And then, Les McKeown, smarty pants that he is, made this post that made everything gel. In particular, it was this part of the post that pulled it all together:

“Many child prodigies in various disciplines – notably art, chess and mathematics – appear to be born with a highly attenuated ability to discern intricate patterns.”

Now, I’m not one to call myself a child prodigy. Perhaps that’s because I was fortunate enough to be part of a school program for academically talented/gifted kids from first grade through high school. A program, which sadly no longer exists in my community. I was in a room full of smarty pants kids that excelled in math, music, science, writing, art, etc.

I was not the smartest kid in ANY class, but I was “well rounded”, I guess you could say. I was in the top ten percent in most of my classes. I knew enough to “get by” in every subject, which in that group was getting an A/B average. Seriously, if you got less than a B+, you were usually looked at like an idiot. We all came to respect each other though, because invariably, where one of us was weak, there were others who were strong. And because we were all so socially awkward (think Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network”), we only had each other for the most part.

That’s another lesson for another day.

The point of even dredging up my school days was that the one thing I was better at than anyone else was finding patterns, common threads and other “connections” between seemingly unrelated stuff. I scored exceptionally high on pattern recognition tests, from alpha numeric to shape identification, even when I was young. I could even point out errors in the tests that the administrators didn’t catch.

And since that time, I’ve come to learn that these patterns, connections and correlations exist in nearly every facet of our lives.

We all know that “dumb jock” who ended up being a nobody. Or the cheerleader that got pregnant before graduation. Or the nerd who went on to greatness and was voted “most likely to succeed”. These stereotypes exists because they are patterns.

They are cycles that we can see coming – sometimes from miles away. Like the girl who was rejected from her high school drama club and later went on to be a successful actress. Or the awkward basketball player who went on to become one of the greatest players of all time – after he was rejected by a coach when he was in school.

There is very little in the world that isn’t cyclical in nature. I maintain that if we can’t see the pattern, it’s probably because we just haven’t experienced a long enough cycle to see the full pattern yet.

Think about your favorite stories. What elements of those stories mirror your own life? What elements of those stories are repeated over and over in your life? We can hope it’s the happy endings, but for most of us, we’re caught in the drama of the story.

Hope is not a strategy. Neither for your business nor your life. It’s not a way to get things done – to walk around with our fingers crossed, thinking good thoughts, and offering up wishful “prayers” that our story will have a happy ending.

No you’ve got to DO something. Doing is the strategy.

Many moons ago, I made a conscious decision to ask for what I want. Mom used to say that “the answer is always no if you don’t ask.”

Funny thing about moms, they’re often more right than you care to admit – especially when you’re a kid.

So I started asking. And people started saying yes. Some people say no, but the majority, the overwhelming majority of folks say yes.

I devised a strategy: Ask, with hope.

Ask for that thing, and in doing so, you’re taking action. Take action, and be hopeful about the outcome. Hope, backed by action – or perhaps, action, backed by hope – is a powerful strategy in the world.

It builds businesses. It restores lost friendships, it heals old wounds. It improves lives. It creates new experiences.

It works.

What have you been needing to ask for? Stop asking yourself why you’re not asking for it. ASK for it. Go for it.

Ask, with hope, and watch what happens.