The dialogue has continued, leaving us with more questions than answers. We renewed our commitment to vegetarianism – something that had slipped while I was pregnant due to carnivorous cravings, and continued to slide once our son was born because I was just too exhausted to put in the effort. Raised on meat and potatoes, vegetarianism – not just eating pasta and processed soy products, but proper vegetarian eating where you get all of the nutrients your body needs – is not second nature and takes much more effort for me. The first few days of the week went well, but by Friday night I found myself already sweeping this internal dialogue under the carpet, reaching for the emergency frozen pizza stash, and heading back to my comfort zone to engage in another of our favorite Friday night activities – watching TED Talks.

First on the agenda was Bill Gates’ vision for the world’s energy future, describing the need for an all out effort to create “miracles” to reach zero carbon emissions globally by 2050 – the goal he says is necessary to avoid planetary catastrophe. WHAM! – no room for complacency (let alone packaged, processed frozen pizza) in our generation. How are we going to achieve this monumental goal, and how can I, as a non-scientist, even begin to make a contribution that matters? Furthermore, with such huge shifts needed, aren’t my minor changes in eating habits insignificant?

Next on the agenda, Jamie Oliver’s passionate speech about the obesity-related health epidemic in North America and Europe. Double WHAM! My pizza stuck in my throat. Just to be clear, my husband and I are nowhere near obese and eat quite healthfully overall. This talk, however, brought back all of the information that I have – the stuff that I bury when I want to have pizza and coke – on just how damaging it is not only to our bodies but to our environment to eat “mindlessly” from the highly-processed, highly-transported, and highly-chemical-infused products that are now standard in most people’s diets.

Then on Saturday morning I opened my e-mail to read the latest post from a good friend of mine, Laura Mack, on honesty as a core issue in parenting her teenage son. She provided some very sobering statistics about the state of honesty – or lack thereof – with our youth. The thing that was perhaps the most troubling, was that despite the fact that they admit to a high degree of dishonesty the youth in the survey still saw themselves as being ethical and more honest than a majority of their peers.

It would be easy to be shocked at “today’s youth”, but I had to question how different I really am. While I do not lie, cheat and steal in some of the obvious ways these surveys are asking about, like a majority of our society, I lie to myself. While this might seem far less harmful, I am struggling with the dawning realization that this type of lying is perhaps the most harmful of all. It is harmful because the lies I tell myself – or the information I conveniently choose not to see or understand – are what keep me doing what is easy, what is comfortable, what I have always done, and what everyone else is doing. But it is clear from the sources above and many many more that we need to change – that I need to change. Like the woman in The Age of Stupid, (who, after winning the fight AGAINST having wind turbines put in her rural British community because they would ruin the view, enthusiastically proclaimed,  ”of course we must do all we can to reduce global warming!”) I am often unwilling to see my own hypocrisy. She wants to avoid global warming, but not if it ruins her view. I want to help preserve our planet for future generations, but not if it means I have to put more effort into what I cook for dinner.

Perhaps the biggest lie I tell myself is that I don’t know what to do. This is an easy one for abdicating responsibility. I see it in my coaching clients all of the time. When they say “I don’t know”, it is a flag that somewhere, underneath their denial, and buried deep within their fears of change and their desire to stay in their comfort zone, there is a dawning awareness of what they do want and what they do need to do. Saying they don’t know keeps them safe because it gives them an excuse not to act. If they are busy trying to figure out what they want or what they “should” do, they can preserve the illusion of productive action without really engaging in any. So despite my internal voice screaming loudly that I don’t know what to do, that my non-scientist talents are not really going to make a difference, and that the actions of my non-famous self can have nowhere near the impact of Jamie and Bill, I cannot hide beneath the “I don’t know” comfort blanket and still feel good about myself.

So what can I do? One thing I can do is write about it. This, at least, is a start. Maybe, in the same way that this information has inspired me to question myself and renew my commitment to being part of the solution, it will inspire others to do the same. We can’t all be Bill Gates or Jamie Oliver, but we can all do our part. Maybe your part is to find that solution that can take us to zero carbon emissions by 2055. Maybe you will send this link to someone you know and it will give them that little extra bit of insight they needed for the breakthrough. While I am not going to be personally responsible for solving the energy crisis, I can take responsibility for solving my own energy crisis. I can start having the courage to stop burying the truth beneath my comfort zone. I can plug the energy leaks that occur when my actions are not in integrity with who I want to be and what I know I need to do.

This kind of honesty can be hard and sometimes painful on all sides, but what I do know from experience, is that when I have faced the truth, spoken my truth, and been willing to look openly at the truths others are presenting to me, it has paved the way for increased energy, aliveness, creativity, and abundance for everyone involved. I also know that seemingly insignificant actions can spark massive change. Just as Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on the bus became an important symbol of the modern Civil Rights Movement, everything that I say and do, no matter how small, has the power to provide the spark or the tipping point for massive change. As Margaret Mead is famous for saying, ”Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

I would love to have you join me in my quest to live with eyes wide open and head out of the sand and, ultimately to create the “miracles” we need to build a world where we all can thrive. I hope that in sharing our stories – both the challenges and the triumphs – that we will give each other the strength, hope and the inspiration to continue doing our part.

But aren’t I supposed to be the one setting the perfect example of how to do it right – all the time? Aren’t I supposed to walk my talk every moment of every day?

That’s what I used to think. That is the “lie” that I still uncover at the source of my exhaustion when I catch myself yet again trying to be perfect – to hold myself to a standard higher than is humanly possible. It has taken me years to come to terms with the fact that this is actually what makes me good at what I do as a coach, trainer and consultant. The books I have read, the courses I have taken, and the experience on my resumé have certainly contributed to my expertise, but the real learning has come from my own struggles to apply this “book learning” into the real world – starting with my own.

The truth that I can see in my moments of sanity is that, just as a child learns to walk or talk by getting it wrong in a thousand different ways before they finally get it right, I cannot learn to “walk my talk” without giving myself permission to fail at it – repeatedly. I watched my son struggle single-mindedly for months, falling incessantly and getting more than a few bumps before learning to walk at 10 months. Now at 17 months, each day brings new excitement as we try to figure out which words the sounds he is experimenting with are intended to be. His insistent whining demonstrates his frustration that we don’t always understand him, but this doesn’t stop him from continuing to try. On the contrary, it only seems to increase his resolve to communicate.

It makes me wonder at what point we lose the innate sense of capability and potential we are born with as children and become the “grown ups” who see failure, mistakes, and not getting it right the first time as valid reasons to stop trying.

Talking with my coach last night I recognized that, up until about 10 years ago, my child-like naiveté that I could do anything I wanted if I just kept trying was relatively intact. Then, in the first three years after returning home from living in Japan, I experienced a fall from grace. I met with financial hardship, loneliness, and, after investing a huge amount of time, energy and passion in a business partnership with a close friend, the devastating pain of betrayal and the end of that relationship. It wasn’t until last night that I realized how profoundly I had allowed this experience to change me. Despite my deep passion and need for collaboration and partnership, since that failed partnership experience I have shied away from allowing myself this experience in a deep way on either a business or personal level even with my husband.

As this realization sinks in, I find myself asking, “What would my son do?” He has just learned to climb up on the kitchen chairs by himself. Yesterday I saw him looking at the table, strategizing how to get on top of that as well. I fear that it is only a matter of time before he takes advantage of a moment when my back is turned to make his move. What if he gets up there and falls? Surely it will be painful, but will it stop him from trying again? Experience tells me that it won’t. Just six weeks ago he figured out how to climb out of his crib and was rewarded with a substantial bump on the head. Of course we lowered his crib so that he has not yet been able to duplicate the feat, but I regularly catch him trying to get his leg up over the bars to repeat his accomplishment.

As we get older and master more skills, it only makes sense that we will take on bigger and bigger challenges. Like my son, the higher we attempt to climb the greater the pain if we fall. For many, like myself, the memory of a really painful fall makes us shy away from the edge – but at what cost? Last night I began to get a glimmer of the true cost of my choice to “play it safe”  after my own painful falls on my journey to climb to higher levels. It has impacted my energy, my authenticity, my self-expression, my integrity, my financial stability, my relationships and even my health. The person I was before “the fall” ran her life on the belief that fear and passion were two sides of the same coin and that in going in the direction of my greatest fear, I would find opportunities to express my passions in the most fulfilling and lucrative ways. The results in my life and, more importantly, my joy in the process of getting there, validated this belief. The person after “the fall”, runs around wasting tons of mental, emotional, spiritual and physical energy trying to figure out how to make sure she won’t fall before she will even attempt to climb again. As I write this I recognize that, rather than ensuring success when I do make my next attempt, I am defeating myself before I start precisely because I am not starting at all!

So as I look back at those pesky new years resolutions I can see that I have not been giving them my full effort. I have not really committed to them for fear of failure. But I have a choice to change that. I can and I am giving myself permission to keep failing and to be just as “naively” excited about trying the next time as I was the first. I am going to practice being more child-like – more attached to the excitement and sense of possibility of mastering a new skill than I am to the discomfort of failing, however many times and however painfully I need to fail to get there. Rather than allowing my fear of failure to prevent me from trying again, I am going to accept that failure is part of learning. Like my son analyzes the results of each failed attempt at vocalizing a word, adjusts it slightly, and fails better the next time, I am going to stop expecting myself to succeed at each successive attempt and instead only ask that I “fail better” than I did the last time – that I learn something that moves me forward.

I will keep you posted on my journey of “failing better” and staying excited about it and would love to hear about all of your amazing failures as you work towards making the shifts you desire in your life and work for 2010.

The time has come to unshackle myself from the past. My fears of being misunderstood, of being seen as flaky, of having to struggle to get my message out – these are all in the past. What’s more, I can now see that these challenges were rooted in others’ limitations, not in my own. They could not or did not want to hear my message. “Getting it” would have meant reframing their universe and transforming profoundly their ways of being, doing and having in the world. Those who are ready, willing and eager to be transformed are thirsting for messages and living models of having the courage to be personal, spiritual and fully authentic – the only true source of lasting personal, business and planetary sustainability. It is time to stop being “secretly me” and to begin sharing my work – both the work I do at a personal level and the work I do with businesses – on a wider scale.

It occurs to me that perhaps an even more important question to ask myself is how ready, willing, able and eager I am to be transformed by my own work. What is stopping me from fully engaging in my own work to profoundly shift my ways of doing, being and having in the world?

There are two pieces.

One is my fear of being misunderstood. The other is the reality that I am far from being a perfect example of practicing the principles of kyosei and life-work integrity™ that I teach. These two fears work together most obviously in my writing to block me. My fear of being misunderstood fuels my drive for perfection in my writing. This drive for perfection saps my energy as I scramble to try to figure out how to do it right the first time. It stops me from releasing my message out into the world. (Case in point – the three books I have in the wings – 75% written but languishing in electronic purgatory while I attempt to “figure out” the best way to position them in the market.) If I can release my fear of being misunderstood, I can let go of the need for perfection, thus freeing up enormous reservoirs of energy and passion that I have buried in trying to figure out how to get it right.

Of course this is all tied into the need to strive for achievement, recognition, power and status that is the dominant modus operandi of our society. Because we are so ingrained with this belief that more and faster is better, we live in a constant state of not enough (or not good enough) despite the abundance that surrounds us and, in reality, is threatening to bury us. I know from experience that when I manage to step out of this dominant ethic that drives me to push myself to do more, be more and have more I am more at peace. I begin to allow myself the time to re-connect with myself, with nature, and with the wisdom of the universe that is wanting to flow through me to heal people, business and the planet. I let go of my belief that this work is something I “must” do, and open up to it as something that is being done through me. Not only does this drive productivity (as it makes it easier to step into the flow of actions and priorities in each and every moment), it creates more of the results I was seeking (power, recognition, achievement and yes, money) without all the negative side effects.

So, fellow travellers on the path to fostering lifestyles and businesses that offer sustainable health, vitality and prosperity for all, henceforth you shall find on my blog a more balanced mix of my personal/spiritual musings posted alongside the more “professional” ones. I look forward with curiosity to witness the results in my life and my business of no longer being “secretly me”.

I would love to hear your thoughts and comments about the above, and would especially like to hear any success stories (and challenges!) you have had regarding your own journey of expressing your authentic self in your life and work.

With roots in ecology, the literal translation of the word involves two Japanese characters, kyo which means working together and sei which means life – taken together their most literal interpretation is cooperative living or symbiosis. With such energy at it’s root, it is no surprise that much of the most fruitful thinking of how to practice kyosei today revolves around mimicking natural systems in manufacturing, design and other aspects of business.

The twentieth century saw the word begin to be applied to the business environment – most notably by Ryuzaburo Kaku, Chairman of Canon Inc. His goal was to foster the understanding that long-term business success can only be founded upon a respect for the interconnectedness any business has with people, communities and the environment. Kaku defined kyosei as a “spirit of cooperation” in which individuals and organizations live and work together for the common good.

The incorporation of the principles of kyosei into mainstream corporate thought in Japan, however, goes back four hundred years. The earliest thoughts can be found in a document known as the shuchu kiyaku which is rooted in Confucian philosophy. The core tenets of Confucian philosophy underpinning the practice of kyosei are not the exclusive domain of Asian philosophers by a long stretch – to the contrary, they would be considered by many to be universal foundations of common sense and morality. These include such principles as:

• A belief in the principle of reciprocity and abiding by the golden rule of treating others as you would like to be treated.
• An understanding of our fundamental interconnectedness and the fact that our actions have an impact both in local (visible) and far-reaching (invisible) ways.
• Valuing the “middle path”. This may take the form of practicing moderation in personal habits as well as taking only calculated risks in business. It also includes the need to find a healthy balance between self-interest and altruism. As of course, either one (taken to extremes) can be a source of harm.
• Valuing character and virtue of the individual and the organization more highly than personal gain or corporate profits. This principle, unfortunately, seems to be the most challenging to practice as the immediate payoff of the latter is far more tempting than the subtle long-term satisfaction of the former.
• The importance of constant learning and growth - what in Japanese is referred to as Kaizen.
• A preference for simplicity. This preference is linked to a belief that the elegance of simplicity is more likely to bring us into harmony with others and the planet.

In upcoming posts, I will continue on the topic of kyosei with a more detailed look at why it is an idea whose time as come and the stages that individuals and companies go through in building their capacity to fully practice kyosei.

First, the bad stuff. Depression and stress disorders represent the fastest growing category of disability claims. They currently account for more than $9 billion in disability claims, or 30 percent of the estimated $30 billion that disabilities and presenteeism (the problem of employees being at work but not fully functioning) cost Canada’s economy each year (as reported by the BC Business and Economic Round table on Mental Health).

One of the most disturbing things about this increasing trend toward depression, stress and other mental-health related disabilities in the workplace is the fact that, while 80 to 90 percent of people with these disorders can be treated successfully, only one third of them actually seek help.

So what does all of this have to do with networking?

This month I attended the Canadian Mental Health Association’s annual conference on mental health in the workplace where one of the most inspiring and empowering speakers was a tiny, dark-haired, passionate woman in her 50s, Sandy Naiman.

An accomplished journalist, broadcaster, teacher, mental-health advocate and public speaker, Sandy has also struggled with mental illness since she was 12-years old – a journey that has included 20 hospitalizations and four different diagnoses. As I listened to Sandy’s stories, it dawned on me that what had allowed her to create such a successful career, despite a serious mental illness, was her ability to cultivate her network.

The secret to Sandy’s success, however, is the exact opposite of what most people are taught to do when building their network. Sandy was fortunate to have a mother who both encouraged her to discuss her illness openly and not to see it as a defining factor in who she was and what she was capable of.

Sandy became equally comfortable describing both her limitations and her strengths. When she wanted to attend journalism school, for example, she walked into the office of the chairman of Ryerson University’s journalism program, sat down and explained to him that she had a serious mental illness, but that she very much wanted to be in the program. After listening to her story, he admitted her on the spot and later was instrumental in paving the way for her to work at the Toronto Sun.

We can all take a lesson from this when building our personal and business integrity, as well as strengthening our networks. In this day and age, where customers and employers are becoming increasingly suspicious of anything that sounds too good to be true, being honest and open about limitations builds trust.

I believe that it was Sandy’s acknowledgment of her weaknesses that helped to lay the foundation for her confidence in her strengths. In presenting herself as a whole person, rather than hiding her weaknesses, she learned that she was useful and valued just as she was.

The lesson for networking is this: building a strong network that will help you and your business to thrive is not only about promoting your strengths. In today’s economy it can also hinge on your willingness to be vulnerable. Vulnerability builds trust, the key to solid relationships in all areas of life and work – and to high-performing organizations.

This kind of authenticity also builds my confidence and trust in yourself. Seeing that others, with all of their imperfections, have succeeded, provides confidence that you can too.

If we would all have the courage to begin building our networks by presenting ourselves as whole people, with both strengths and weaknesses, it would go a long way to stem the rising tide of stress, depression and mental health issues in the workplace.

And so, between baby coddling sessions, I managed to tear myself away from our adorable new nephew long enough to join in their candid conversations about the lessons of Silicon Valley.

Having lived in Vancouver, my brother-in-law was passionate that Vancouver has all the critical ingredients to become a booming Silicon Valley itself – yet has not developed the spark to ignite the mix. Like the San Francisco Bay area, the Lower Mainland has great universities and colleges, is a great place to live, and has a thriving economy with sophisticated investors ready to go. In spite of this, the leadership and long-term thinking have not emerged to integrate these resources sufficiently to achieve the hotbed of technological business seen in Silicon Valley.

Ultimately, the key ideas that emerged from our discussions were relevant for businesses of all sizes to thrive. Here are the top three themes:

1) Blur the Lines

In Silicon Valley, Stanford University maintains close ties with the venture capital community and encourages research and development with practical business possibilities, spawning such companies as Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Sun, Google and Yahoo!. While the mentality is changing in Canadian institutions about the many benefits (for students, businesses and society) of such collaboration, in the past these links were often discouraged due to an academic purist view that considered research tainted if it was skewed towards business spinoffs.

While scandals in the pharmaceutical industry illustrate the importance of separating research from business interests to some extent, purists often lose sight of the fact that without business-funded research, much of the life we take for granted today would not exist. Rather than advocating all-or-nothing approaches, business, government and academic leaders need to become more comfortable with diving into the gray zone and, in so doing, leverage the highest benefit for the common good.

2) Compete – Together

In a global economy, larger businesses are conscious of the economic necessity of looking beyond their borders in a literal sense. Closer to home, however, small and mid-size businesses need to stop focusing solely on developing internal skills and expertise in order to become more competitive in their industry. They must learn to adopt a wider view and identify long-term strategic alliances by asking which other organizations have a complementary mission, vision, product or service and challenging themselves to think about collaborating to maximize the strengths of all concerned.

3) Be Willing to Fail

The final thing that stood out for me about Silicon Valley was that, while there are many successes, there are even more failures. My brother-in-law had numerous stories of friends and acquaintances on their second or third attempt at startups. In fact, stemming perhaps from a ‘debugging’ mentality shared amongst truly geek entrepreneurs, business failures were considered necessary steps towards success, creating learning to be implemented in the next version – Business 3.0, perhaps?

Entrepreneurial success is not just about good ideas getting adequate funding – it requires commitment, passion and ingenuity on the part of the entrepreneurs to follow through to success. Of course there are those “lucky” ones who were in the right place at the right time, but business success still comes from a unique vision combined with the courage to persist until the dream is realized. In the end, the main source of “financing” any dream is still the currency a person holds in his or her own heart.

Andrea Jacques

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While it is difficult to attach numbers to exactly how much these intangibles impact the bottom line, the evidence that they do can be seen in the fact that all too many businesses, once sold, fail to live up to the performance expectations anticipated prior to the sale. For this reason, many purchasers insist on the owner and other key staff staying on for anywhere from one to three years after the sale.

It can also – as in the case of a colleague of mine with a very successful consulting business – be what limits you from selling your business at all. Despite annual revenues of $1 million, he discovered that his clients were resistant to working with anyone but him as he began exploring selling his business to an associate.

The bottom line is that, whether or not you ever intend to sell your company, understanding and maximizing intangible assets is critical to building a business that is not dependent upon you or any other specific individual in it – the mark of a truly successful business.

An example of this are two good friends of mine, Lawrence and Lori-Ann Keenan, who run a very successful ESL school here in Vancouver. They began the business as a couple, doing almost all of the work – from teaching the classes to marketing the school and everything in between – themselves. After just 10 years, she now works only one day a week, and his involvement with the business is negligible, save for focusing on investing their profits.

What has allowed them to have such freedom is that they have created and continue to refine written systems for everything they do. The importance of creating systems is understood by most business owners, but generally they focus on creating bare-bones systems that reflect simply the “how to” rather than the “how we do it here.” What sets my friends’ business apart and allows their success to continue to grow despite less and less involvement from them are the systems they have developed for instilling a distinct culture and personality into the school.

The school is very much centred around Lori-Ann’s personality. Like her, it is high-energy and fun with a no-nonsense professionalism and a passion for excellence in customer service. An example of one of the systems that sustains this is a weekly high-energy graduation ceremony at which all students are present. This event involves plenty of clapping, singing and general fanfare. Back in the staff room there may be some rolling eyes in the anticipation of this weekly ritual, but once staff step into the limelight to play their part in the celebration, they find it hard not to be caught up in the simplicity and energy of the familiar routine.

Companies like Google have systematized a culture of innovation by requiring employees to spend 20 percent of their time on side projects not related to their daily work. West Jet systematizes fun with their pre-landing jokes – no matter how corny they may be. Nordstrom has systematized customer service excellence through rigorous and ongoing training programs on empowerment and customer service excellence. Southwest Airlines systematizes its culture by training all of its staff in “Living the Southwest Way,” by practicing the three characteristics of having a Warrior Spirit, a Servant’s Heart and a Fun-LUVing Attitude.

All of these are examples of how to build those intangibles into the core operating systems, principles and standards of your business. Not only will these types of systems make your business more attractive to potential buyers in the long run, they will make it more attractive to those employees who are best equipped to deliver on your brand promise, thus attracting and keeping loyal customers. Ultimately these intangibles are not only what drives a strong bottom line, but sustains it over the long term. They are, at the end of the day, where the true value of a business lies and what helps any business owner to realize the full value of the business they have built – whether they sell it or not.

-Andrea Jacques aka. Kyoseigirl

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As I sat reflecting on what had caused this dramatic fall from grace in my own life, I realized that the lessons I needed to remind myself of were the same challenges I see with organizations – large and small – who get caught in survival mode by focusing on dealing with immediate crises instead of cultivating the habits and mindsets they need to thrive.

The Three Keys to Refocus Your Priorities and Create Success with Ease

1) Doing vs. Planning

One of the key causes of my self-inflicted crisis was jumping prematurely into work mode. My partner, Boyan, insists that 50 percent of the time on a project should be spent on research and planning. The “driver” part of my personality is always impatient to get started with what I consider “real work”, yet time and again I have had to recognize that Boyan’s strategy tends to result in faster and higher quality results.

The act of writing this article is a simple example of this process. I spent two frustrating days trying to crank it out before I finally surrendered to some brainstorming and planning with pencil and paper to focus my concept. In the end, the article took an hour to plan and forty-five minutes to write. How much time do you spend planning and strategizing in your business before you jump into action?

Most organizations I know of spend too little time planning and researching and even less time revisiting, following and updating their plans and research to stay on track.

2) Tangible vs. Intangibles

The next trap I had fallen into on the project I was working on was placing more importance on the tangibles than the intangibles. On impulse I decided to spend two days helping create a video on the organization’s vision that wasn’t part of the quote. Even though my inner voice said this wasn’t the best use of my time, it took me an entire day before I understood that this detour would negatively impact both the speed of developing the remainder of the program and its quality.

Small businesses tend to make similar mistakes in their time allocation by focusing too much on systems creation and revenue generation and not enough on the intangibles of building a high performance team, fostering values alignment, creating opportunities for the team to interact socially, and inspiring passion and purpose in their people. These intangibles are important activities that, if not attended to, result in a constant state of struggle.

3) Have to vs. Want to

One of the things I did right to prevent the project from becoming overwhelming was to identify the talents of both my internal and external teams. This allowed me to focus on my strengths, delegate tasks effectively to others who could contribute their expertise, and access resources quickly and efficiently.

Entrepreneurs often lead themselves to burnout trying to assume all the organizational roles. They mistakenly believe there are things you “have to do” in their business. While I agree that managing finances is a necessary role, the person who manages them doesn’t necessarily have to be you. Forcing yourself, or others on your team, to do things that are not strengths is likely draining more resources from your team than it would cost to hire an expert to do the task.

Small and large organizations alike fall prey to the above survival thinking modes on a regular basis. And as I have discovered, knowing what you should be doing is not the same as doing it. It takes constant vigilance to remember what it takes to thrive and to resist crisis-oriented thinking that can get you caught in a downward spiral of struggle.

Andrea Jacques -kyoseigirl

American Prayer – Dave Stewart (Barack Obama Music Video)