Sometimes New Things Are Hard to Name

This is my last pitch! After today, there's no more TURN Lab this and TURN Lab that.?You can register for the TURN Lab by midnight ET today.

One of the most frequent comments we get is, "I still don't understand what this is all about."

My answer is, sometimes new things are hard to name. They are real, but because they are new, we are careful not to break them with the constraints of the old categories. Like my friend Rod Colburn says, "Not everything fits into a marketing bin." Or, as poet David Whyte says, "Don't name your love too early." So I resist to bin the heart of our community or name our love too early.

That being said, this is what this is all about (on this Thursday morning): This is about you walking to your growing edge. That's it. So you can learn to work with the change that is going on in you and around you. So you can be more playful, powerful, and helpful in the world. And when you live, love, and work like that, you get things done, particularly things that matter the most.

So how's that on the ambiguity scale?

One of the most frequent questions we get is one form or another of "Should I do this later?"

That's the question that matters the most, actually. My answer is: Maybe. But that's unlikely. Our problem is not too much action but too much waiting for ourselves or the world to change. I have coached, trained, and organized hundreds of leaders from all walks of life who want to be playful, powerful, and helpful in the world.

Here's what happens:

THOSE WHO WAIT?(beyond beautiful and often necessary human reluctance) develop a vague sense of being victims of their circumstances. Their mind is telling them they are alone and not enough. They live with a chronic lack of time, regrets about the past, and worries about the future. Life feels like besieged territory. They are exhausted by artificial urgency and fabricated complexity. They fear the unknown and cling to the environments, habits, and people they know. They turn life into a strategy and exclude what they cannot control (aka the best things in life!). For most people, this waiting starts in their late twenties and lasts decades. They end up succeeding in getting the things they don't really need and a life they never wanted. I have done this for years.

THOSE WHO ACT?are in a wholehearted conversation with life, curious about the strangeness they encounter both outside of them and inside of them. They learn how to be alone and how to belong. They experience themselves as equal to their most devastating challenges and surrounded by help and allies, both seen and unseen. They learn to imagine what is and practice their becoming. Their lives are hard, like every life is. But they learn to live with a generosity of time, gratitude for their past, and possibility for the future. They act, fail, learn, and lead as they go. Things get easier. They focus on and eventually find themselves living for something greater than themselves. While they still fear the unknown, they also trust that the unknown will furnish them with new energy, new truth, and new joy.?And it does.

That's my pitch.

The bottom line is: You can never do this alone. Nobody can. With others, everybody can.

If the TURN Lab is not your cup of tea, find your cup, your glass, or your pint! Don't wait.

If you resonate with the pregnant ambiguity of the TURN Lab and want to add the wisdom of your heart to it, today is the last day to register.

See you soon,

Samir

TURN Community