MAWMonday Motivators 06/25/2017

by: Dr. Michael A. Wright In Blog, Coaching Diary

An Honest Global Solution

This week’s motivation begins with a tweet by Gina Humber. Delivered with no photo, animation, fanfare, or ritual, it makes a simple request and asks a simple question. Request: be honest with yourself. Question: are you prepared be part of the global solution. If you have been near me for any period of time, you know I live for these interactions. For me, it is exciting that another person has the audacity, the motivation, and the creativity to dream that the challenges we face can be solved. While others lament the complexity or wallow in the mire of bureaucracy or apathy, I am moved to see people stepping up where they are to stand for authenticity, justice, and the common good.

This week, I encourage you to be another such person. Reaffirm what is unique and terrible about yourself. Those preoccupations and pet peeves. See your unique and terrible with honesty, and realize the transformative energy of facing yourself with genuine eyes. Awaken out of a complacency of conformity and mediocrity to realize a vision for change in the world. I compiled some tweets to help.

1. Fulfill Your Potential

At some point there will be a leap of faith. I believe that to be a fact of life. Anything worth getting will require that you accept a level of uncertainty. Even your commitment to learning more and getting prepared presupposes that the sources you need will be credible and available. But, that’s not the focus of changing yourself and changing the world. The focus is on being–being your best self. Leaping soon extends to flying as you learn the levels you rise to beyond those levels of uncertainty.

2. Self-Confidence

I have never understood the common applications of humility. At once, the term is used as an opposite to pride, arrogance, and boastfulness. In truth, I have concluded that it is only tangentially related to those words. Humility is not a low view of self as it suggests in some dictionaries. Humility is the opposite of selfishness (avarice more specifically). It matters because comparing humility to the other terms makes you think that pride, arrogance, and boast have no place in interactions that change the world for the better. I believe they do. Those words have elements that would be required in self-confidence. Pride in an honest accomplishment. Hubris to trust in your work and ideas when faced with nay-sayers. Speaking up with certainty and conviction when you are being shouted down. You need these. What you don’t need, what WE don’t need is for you to achieve, trust, or speak with the sole purpose of saving and promoting yourself. We don’t need you to seek your own desire for gain at our expense. Be humble.

3. Do What Only You Can

You are a big deal because there is only one you. Too many today escape adolescence without realizing that the pressure to conform and be “normal” was a scam promoted by small minds and fear mongers. Those who dared to (or were supported to) challenge those messages in adolescence were privy to an exceptionally different experience as young adults. They faced exceptionally more difficulty struggle. It is never (not ever) going to be easy to be extraordinary. But, that is the view from one perspective. If you can change your view from small minds and fear mongers to creative souls and difference makers, you will see that the struggle and its products are the point. Don’t create to prove a point. Create to continue pushing the envelope. Don’t respond with words only pointed toward critics. Create products that silence the critics and provide your solution to the world. Do what only you can.

4. Create with All Your Heart

This one is hard for me because I am as guilty as many for fooling myself into thinking that my full heart was in my vision. Longing for completion, achievement, or opportunity is not creating with your full heart. It may involve heart ache, but it is not creating with your full heart. Full heart means prioritizing your creation as first. Forsaking all others, to this one being true. It may be the work of many years, but your creation can never be on the back burner. Never pushed aside in favor of another. You know that it will return to you what you put into it. What you may not know is that you will rejoice in the transaction as you align your hands and head in sync with your heart.

5. The Root Question

SO…at its core we find ourselves faced with one question. As you honestly, faithfully, confidently, do what only you can do, and create, the root question is comprised of two words. Am I? It will serve as a haunting, sometimes threatening, sometimes defeating question. I cannot take away this question about whether you are educated, degreed, credible, cute, tall, healthy, or whatever enough. It will always be there. What I can say every time and opportunity is what I answer to my own question in this regard. I am! I am enough. Enough what? I am. Honestly, faithfully, confidently, do what only you can do, and create. You will change the world. And when asked any version of the “Am I?” question, for example, Are you prepared be part of the global solution? Answer: I am!

Dr. Michael A. Wright received his Doctor of Philosophy in Social Work degree from the University of South Carolina - Columbia. Since 1997, Wright has led MAWMedia Group, LLC, a firm helping individuals and organizations tell stories and translate ideas into capital.