In Vietnam I did see collaboration, the ego had no choice.
Full of expectations, we marry, we work in teams, we build partnership and yet we fail in most of them.
Oh it might not look like we failed; most of us present well and sure know how to look good.
But underneath the surface we are either; martyrs, manipulators, whiners, complainers or passive aggressors, in short we are often unhappy people feeling lonely, because we never learned to collaborate.
Over ten years ago, I looked fine too.
But when you lifted the veil of my charming successful veneer, you could see a different Wilma.
I was a complainer, working in a job I learned to hate.
I had chosen to be rather stuck with the devil I knew, than leave a marriage we were both very unhappy in.
In the end I could have died as stupid as I had become.
I paint a totally different picture of my current life since I have learned to collaborate with people who matter.
And belief you me, collaboration is a totally new ball game you and I have very seldom played.
I am not kidding; this is what the ‘urban dictionary’ has to say about collaboration;
An unnatural act practiced by nonconsenting adults. Worker A: We have no common interests, we don’t like each other, and it irritates us to work together. But we were told by management to engage in collaboration.
Worker B: What a waste of time.
Hmm, does this not resemble marriage and most families as well?
- What is it that we are creating?
In this week’s post Context is King Wilma explained how choosing the context we live in leads to possibilities and being the change we want to see.
She did warn however that we must choose our context very carefully and surround ourselves with talk of abundance, freedom and possibilities and avoid idle talk of lack, duty and what is NOT possible.
We all related to this and shared how we’ve had a context at one point or another in our lives that did not serve us.
Peggy made this comment; “I had this scarcity mentality…and it made me feel and act small and petty. …I have been fortunate to meet and surround myself with people who think in terms of abundance and gratitude rather than lack and scarcity. I can tell you that my life has changed for the better just by changing the context in which I have the conversation.”
Do your conversations have you do life differently?
Wilma introduced another aspect of change in this week’s post Don’t let change in your circumstances fool you.
We were all in agreement that we can be lulled into a false sense of security, thinking that we are changing just because our environment has.
Jodi captured it beautifully; “Wherever you go, there you are” with Lisa, Chris and Nadia echoing the same sentiments.
We realized that change comes from within first and shows up in our daily ongoing conversations that we have with our self and others.
Yet we could see how our conversations can be so invisible to us at times, how life can plod along on auto pilot and as Wilma put it; “life happens to us, rather than us being constantly aware of how we are creating it”
Even this was not enough to change me, it has been the daily conversations that really made me change.
We want to live fearlessly in pursuit of our dreams. Don’t we?
We want to let go of the struggle of daily life. Don’t we?
We want to have our daily lives be different from what we are doing? Don’t we?
How come, being the change I want to see, is not as easy as it sounds?
How come I cannot do things differently and keep doing things I do not want to do?
Because Context is King.
WomenLikeMe on ‘Context is King; How to use it powerfully’ has this to say;
“The context is determined by our daily conversations.”
Huh?
Although we all want to be free from our money worries, although we all want to be free from diseases, although we all want to be free to follow our passion, it is our context -which is our everyday conversations about what preoccupies us in our daily life- that is firmly holding us where we are.
Let me illustrate the power of our context, the power of our daily conversations.
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