Scott Perry's Blog, page 38

Embracing Humiliation

Humility is a paradoxical thing. Claiming to possess it reveals that it is lacking. More than any other virtue, humility is less about acquisition and more about the daily pursuit. And a daily discipline of embracing humiliation is a healthy way to remain on the path.

"I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then I must watch my reaction to it."―  Fr. Richard Rohr, Falling Upward

Humility is not the opposite of hubris. It resides at the golden mean between worthlessness and pride. Humble people possess a rare blend of a lack of self-importance and a firm sense of purpose. They accept their strengths and limitations while employing themselves in the difficult work of making a difference.

The world we live in neither cultivates nor rewards humility. Instead, certainty, judgment, and pretentiousness are celebrated and therefore sought. Our institutions, academic and occupational, nurture this narcissism by cultivating a culture dedicated to acquiring status, possessions, and wealth.

What to do?

Seek and sit with humiliation.

“Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem.”― Thomas Szasz

I know, that probably sounds a bit masochistic. But here's the thing, humiliation can only be experienced if there is already an excess of pride. Humiliation is an invitation to detach our identity from our opinions and return to humility. The virtues of humiliation are worth embracing.

How might a daily discipline of humiliation help you fly higher in the difference only you can make?

Scott Perry, Difference-Maker Coach at Creative on Purpose. 

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What's now? What's next?

If you're reading this, you're an aspiring or advancing difference-maker. What's going on in your endeavor right now? What needs to happen next to continue developing your potential and delivering on your promise in your enterprise?

Here are three questions to help you re-center, re-calibrate, and re-clarify where you are, where you want to be, and how to get there.

What is the difference only you can make, and how do you define it?
Where are you now in this venture, and where do you want to be?
What strategy are you employing to level up by doing the work with and for the right people?

Are you ready to get real about making progress in developing and delivering the work you're meant to do now? Here are three more questions.

Do you really trust yourself?
How are you investing in yourself?
What daily routines and relationships are keeping you on the hook and doing the work every day?

Flying higher in the difference only you can make requires revisiting these questions frequently. Real progress in worthwhile efforts is not a one-and-done exercise. It's like sweeping the floor. You must return to it often.

If you answered the questions above, what did you learn? Much more important, what will you do with these insights?

Scott Perry, Difference-Maker Coach at Creative on Purpose. 

If what you just read resonated, please share it with a friend.

What's now? 🤔 What's next? 🔭

If you're reading this, you're an aspiring or advancing difference-maker. What's going on in your endeavor right now? What needs to happen next to continue developing your potential and delivering on your promise in your enterprise?

Here are three questions to help you re-center, re-calibrate, and re-clarify where you are, where you want to be, and how to get there.

What is the difference only you can make, and how do you define it?
Where are you now in this venture, and where do you want to be?
What strategy are you employing to level up by doing the work with and for the right people?

Are you ready to get real about making progress in developing and delivering the work you're meant to do now? Here are three more questions.

Do you really trust yourself?
How are you investing in yourself?
What daily routines and relationships are keeping you on the hook and doing the work every day?

Flying higher in the difference only you can make requires revisiting these questions frequently. Real progress in worthwhile efforts is not a one-and-done exercise. It's like sweeping the floor. You must return to it often.

If you answered the questions above, what did you learn? Much more important, what will you do with these insights?

Scott Perry, Difference-Maker Coach at Creative on Purpose. 

If what you just read resonated, please share it with a friend.

Witness • Reflect • Invite

How do you provide meaningful feedback that helps others help themselves?

It feels generous to turn on lights and open doors for others. However, more powerful advances are made when switches and thresholds are revealed, and someone turns on lights and walks through doorways of their own volition.

Here's a three-step process to help you stop providing answers and advice and instead encourages you to share insight that inspires those you serve to find their own way into a better possibility.

Witness - notice things, see what others don't see, and do so without value judgment, certainty, or attachment 
Reflect - share what you noticed without expectation or an agenda
Invite - encourage the recipient to take a small step deeper or further into potential with a question, not an answer

Teaching, guiding, mentoring, and leading is not about knowing and telling. How can you serve others more generously with a more beautiful question instead of a well-intended instruction? What happens if instead of a roadmap you provide a compass?

Scott Perry, Difference-Maker Coach at Creative on Purpose. 

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Does fortune favor the bold?

"Fortune favors the bold" (from the Latin proverb, "audentes Fortuna iuvat") may sound like trite or even dangerous advice. Yet, it's a motto employed by military units, family crests, and even universities across the world. It resonates strongly enough with me that I adopted boldness as one of the three words on my decision-making measuring stick.

It might help to clarify that in the original Latin, "Fortuna" refers to luck as personified by a Roman goddess. Boldness, sometimes translated as "bravery," is not recklessness. It's an invitation to forswear cowardice and adopt the courage required to move into something frightening and worthwhile.

The Latin proverb is probably a reworded translation of the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus, "Boldness is the beginning of action, but fortune controls how it ends." In other words, fortune's favor is something that must be earned through a discipline of dauntlessness.

What possibility do you want to pursue but feel resistance or anxiety toward? Maybe that fear is a compass pointing to the very thing fortune is beckoning you to explore and step into more boldly? What happens if you act just half-a-shade braver and take a small step into that potential?

Scott Perry, Difference-Maker Coach at Creative on Purpose. 

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Of Fate, Destiny, and Agency

Fate and destiny are terms frequently confused and conflated. Agency is an idea often ignored and misunderstood. A better understanding of each and how they work together may determine whether your journey as a creative difference-maker is frustrating or flourishing.

Fate is simply what is happening now. Your current situation is what it is and was always meant to be. You can be fate's victim or curator. The sooner you accept, acknowledge, and appreciate what is for what it is, the sooner you can frame or reframe what might be and move on.

Destiny is merely what's going to be. You can't know what that might be with any degree of certainty and or confidence, but passively waiting for it to happen is a recipe for suffering. Destiny rewards aspiration, affiliation, and ascent not by granting desires but by providing lessons.

Agency is just a decision to be an active custodian of your experience, collator of your choices, and champion of your cause going forward. Embracing and engaging your agency guarantees nothing; it's a reward in and of itself. Virtue is not found in the results, it's present in the quality of your intentions and the integrity of your effort

So, time to choose. Are you going to allow yourself to be a victim of fate, a leaf blown about by the winds of destiny, or an active agent allowing life to happen through you instead of to you?

Scott Perry, Difference-Maker Coach at Creative on Purpose. 

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Is life happening to you...?

Is life happening to you or through you?

The victim's role is enticing. When the story you tell yourself is that life is happening to you, you're off the hook. "People and forces beyond my control are conspiring against me, oh woe is me." You might even seduce a few friends and family to take pity or lend a hand.

While a seductive place to hide, the "life is happening to me" narrative is a lie. Yes, almost everything and everyone is beyond your control. Yet, you possess all you need to assume agency over your experience and influence a better 'what's next.'

Frame yourself and your situation without destructive value judgments and devoid of negative emotional attachments. Choose a small strategic step into a better possibility and take it. Amplify a healthier mindset by choosing and stepping with gratitude, grace, and generosity.

Embracing the inherent uncertainty and inevitable adversity of a journey into potential is easier when done with and for others and with appreciation. Life isn't happening to you. It's happening through you.

Owning your journey, serving others, and leaning in with intention and integrity doesn't ensure you'll end up where you wish. However, you'll experience less loneliness and sadness and more joy and purpose as you continue to move toward someplace better.

So, what narrative are you choosing today? Is life happening to you or through you?

Scott Perry, Difference-Maker Coach at Creative on Purpose. 

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All well and good...

The thing about inserting the phrase "all well and good" into a sentence is that it's never the end of the statement. You never see it punctuated with a period. "All well and good" is always followed by "but" and then some contradictory statement.

I hear it most often when colliding with professionals working corporate or other steady paying gigs. "Not dying with the difference only you can make and living your legacy is all well and good for people like you, Scott, but I...[INSERT EXCUSES AND EXCEPTIONS HERE]."

The thing is, almost all of us have responsibilities that require a regular paycheck. People like us engaged in meaningful endeavors done with and for others have mouths to feed, mortgage or rent due, and bills to pay just like everyone else.

The thing that sets people like you and me apart from those not finding fulfillment and making a difference doing work that matters is that we understand the difference between the work we have to do and the work we get to do. We also accept that there's time for both if we're thoughtful and judicious about where we spend our valuable time and attention.

It's not a matter of doing the work you have to do or doing the works you get to do. You can do the work you have to do and the work you get to do.

In fact, you can practice the skills necessary for leveling up in the work you get to do by practicing them while doing the work you have to do. This is what it means to be an integrated human being rather than invite the suffering and shame of pursuing the delusion of "work-life balance."

"All well and good" thinking denies possibility and throttles potential. What are you doing to avoid letting the pitfalls of "all well and good" today? What routines and relationships can you cultivate to help nourish and encourage a mindset for positivity and posture of opportunity?

Scott Perry, Difference-Maker Coach at Creative on Purpose. 

If what you just read resonated, please share it with a friend.

What's work for?

Human beings are fascinating. 

We work. All living things seek and capture energy to produce or accomplish things. This, after all, is what distinguishes living things from inanimate ones.

But only humans endeavor as a means for building identity, forging meaning, and pursuing work's opposite, leisure. Isn't that interesting?

We employ our social nature, capacity for reason, and creative instinct to struggle and strive for sufficiency and safety. Then, as soon as we acquire enough, we get bored. What to do with this spare time? Explore and work new edges, of course! For our ancestors, this ennui sparked interest in and development of amusements and art.

For most of human history, we worked very little to gather the resources required to live. Human interaction was based on abundance, generosity, and cooperation. Work was done in service of cultivating leisure. Shared goals and labor created shared values and beliefs, which in turn fueled harmonious community and culture. Sounds like a pretty good deal, eh?

How is it that we now turn this leisure into work and work into a divisive battleground?

What compels us to fill downtime activities like social media or exercise with performance metrics we work toward? Even more curious, how did our worldviews about work switch from abundance to scarcity, generosity to greed, and cooperation to competition?

I don't have answers to these questions other than to respond with a more beautiful question, "Why are we settling for this state of affairs?"

What happens if we pause, zoom out, and ask, "What's work really for?"

If what we do defines who we are and what it all means, shouldn't we employ ourselves in endeavors that make things better? What happens if we engage in efforts done with and for others and lean into them with intention and integrity? Wouldn't that enhance everyone's prospects and prosperity? Maybe that's the real work? 

Scott Perry, Difference-Maker Coach at Creative on Purpose. 

If what you just read resonated, please share it with a friend.

What's the difference only you can make?

Do you ever feel like you were born to do more than what you do for a living? What's the difference only you can make in the world?
 
Becoming my better self is a journey in endeavors that serve others–husband, father, coach, and community facilitator. Each vocation enhances my life as I elevate the lives of those I do my work with and for.
 
These enterprises are fraught with moments of doubt, despair, and difficulties. I accept that's simply part of the gig. Yet even on the most exhausting days, I am energized. I experience fulfillment and flourishing even on the days I flounder and fail.
 
When I published my first book, The Stoic Creative, I started developing the Venn diagram above to illustrate an easy to understand and execute process for dialing in the difference only you can make. I also call this "the work you get to do" and "an endeavor that matters."
 
The Venn diagram was iterated in both The Creative on Purpose Handbook and Endeavor. These improvements are the result of engaging with hundreds of readers, clients, and workshop participants.
 
My mission at Creative on Purpose is to prevent anyone from dying with the difference only they can make still inside them.
 
Legacy isn't what you leave behind. It's the difference you're making today.

Are you ready to live your legacy?
 
Are you willing to take a small, bold step into your potential and possibility?
 
Join the Creative Difference-Maker Challenge.
 
This 2-hour workshop is being offered twice at a steep discount at the end of this month. This one-time offer includes lifetime access to the replay, a print edition of the repeatable process, and a full month of support.
 
Purpose and passion aren't destinations that reside in any particular work. Purpose and passion come from doing the work right in front of you with intention and integrity.
 
Let's work together to discover an initiative that helps you forge meaning, build identity, and cultivate joy every day.
 
Let's fly higher together in endeavors that make a difference!
 

 
 
 

Scott Perry, Difference-Maker Coach at Creative on Purpose. 

Questions? Email me anytime at scott@creativeonpurpose.com.

If what you just read resonated, please share it with a friend.