Who Do We Choose To Be? Quotes

“The energy now spent on self-protection can be converted into positive energy if we're willing to encounter reality and see it clearly. Facing reality is an empowering act - it can liberate our mind and heart to discern how best to use our power and influence in service for this time.”
― Margaret J. Wheatley, Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity

“You’ve probably also noted the impacts of virtual distraction on your own and others’ behaviors: memory loss, inability to concentrate, being asked to repeat what you just said, miscommunication the norm, getting lost online and wasting time you don’t have, withdrawing from the real world. The list of what’s being lost is a description of our best human capacities—memory, meaning, relating, thinking, learning, caring. There is no denying the damage that’s been done to humans as technology took over—our own Progress Trap. The impact on children’s behavior is of greatest concern for its present and future implications. Dr. Nicolas Kardaras, a highly skilled physician in rehabilitation, is author of Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids—and How to Break the Trance. He describes our children’s behavior in ways that I notice in my younger grandchildren: “We see the aggressive temper tantrums when the devices are taken away and the wandering attention spans when children are not perpetually stimulated by their hyper-arousing devices. Worse, we see children who become bored, apathetic, uninteresting and uninterested when not plugged in.”17 These very disturbing behaviors are not just emotional childish reactions. Our children are behaving as addicts deprived of their drug. Brain imaging studies show that technology stimulates brains just like cocaine does.”
― Margaret J. Wheatley, Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity

“Amid all the information available in our environment, which identity filter(s) do you use? Are you dedicated to popularity, to a role, to a cause, an ethic, a nation, an ethnicity? What identity gives meaning to your life?”
― Margaret J. Wheatley, Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity

“A culture focused on individual freedom can only result in narcissism, polarization, conflict, estrangement, and loneliness. What is the meaning of life when it’s all about me?”
― Margaret J. Wheatley, Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity

“The Dalai Lama’s Principles for Ethical Strategies3   Ensure that compassion is the motivation.   Any problem must take into account the big picture and long-term consequences rather than short-term feasibility.   In applying reason, we must stay honest, unbiased, and self-aware, vigilant to avoid self-delusion.   Stay humble—know the limits of our knowledge and also realize we can easily be misguided in a rapidly changing reality.   The foremost concern is the well-being of humanity and the planet we inhabit.”
― Margaret J. Wheatley, Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity

“Life offers us this great gift of self-organization, how we can be held in the basin of shared meaning and, within that, exercise individual freedom. It is such a shame to waste it on fear and doubt. Or to seek to contain and control it.”
― Margaret J. Wheatley, Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity

“The clear transmission of facts and evidence becomes irrelevant in the hyperemotional space of social media. Facts come from a world external to ourselves—namely, reality. Actually, that’s the whole point. But in the social media world, they are either meaningless or threatening to the self we’re constructing and protecting. The world can’t help but degrade into “It’s all about me.” Deluged with information filtered through the lens of popular self, our internal monitoring causes the world to shrink: Did the news make me feel bad? Turn it off. Did that comment upset me? Blast the messenger. Did that criticism hurt me? Get depressed or strike back. This is the tragedy of self-reference where, instead of responding to information from the external environment to create an orderly system of relationships, the narrow band of information obsessively processed creates isolation, stress, and self-defense.6 Focused internally, the outside world where facts reside doesn’t have meaning. Our communication with one another via the Web generates extreme reactions. Think about how small events take over the Internet because people get upset from a photo and minimal information. There doesn’t have to be any basis in fact or any understanding of more complex reasons for why this event happened. People see the visual, comment on it, and viral hysteria takes over. Even when more context is given later that could help people understand the event, it doesn’t change their minds. People go back to scanning and posting, and soon there is another misperceived event to get hysterical about. One commentator calls this “infectious insanity.”7”
― Margaret J. Wheatley, Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity

“But as people become anxious to be accepted by the group, their personal values and behaviors are exchanged for more negative ones. We can too easily become more intense, abusive, fundamentalist, fanatical—behaviors strange to our former selves, born out of our intense need to belong. This may be one explanation for why the Internet, which gave us the possibility of self-organizing, is devolving into a medium of hate and persecution, where trolls6 claiming a certain identity go to great efforts to harass, threaten, and destroy those different from themselves. The Internet, as a fundamental means for self-organizing, can’t help but breed this type of negative, separatist behavior. Tweets and texts spawn instant reactions; back and forth exchanges of only a few words quickly degenerate into comments that push us apart. Listening, reflecting, exchanging ideas with respect—gone. But this is far less problematic than the way the Internet has intensified the language of threat and hate. People no longer hide behind anonymity as they spew hatred, abominations, and lurid death threats at people they don’t even know and those that they do. Trolls, who use social media to issue obscene threats and also organize others to deluge a person with hateful tweets and emails, are so great a problem for people who come into public view that some go off Twitter, change their physical appearance, or move in order to protect their children.7 Reporters admit that they refuse to publish about certain issues because they fear the blowback from trolls.”
― Margaret J. Wheatley, Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity

“A Warrior for the Human Spirit is a decent human being who aspires to be of service in an indecent, inhumane time.”
― Margaret J. Wheatley, Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity

“We could have been anything we wanted, yet our free-floating individualism has taken us far from community, contribution or connection, the very things that truly give life meaning and purpose.”
― Margaret J. Wheatley, Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity

“Focus on serving others. ... No matter what is going on around us, we can attend to the people in front of us, to the issues confronting us and there, we offer what we can. We can offer insight and compassion. We can be present. We can stay and not flee. We can be exemplars of the best human qualities. That is a life well lived, even if we didn’t save the world.”
― Margaret J. Wheatley, Who Do We Choose To Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity

“We can’t change this world, but we can change ourselves so that we can be of service to this world.”
― Margaret J. Wheatley, Who Do We Choose To Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity

“Wherever you’re working is where you take a stand. You don’t have to go looking for new places, other issues, compelling causes.”
― Margaret J. Wheatley, Who Do We Choose To Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity

“It’s been said thousands of times, in all faiths and philosophies. Know thyself. What may be less clear in these wise expressions is the reason we learn to know ourselves: we develop a knowledge of self so that we can give up the self and serve others.”
― Margaret J. Wheatley, Who Do We Choose To Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity

“The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections”
― Margaret J. Wheatley, Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity

“1. Recall those leaders you’ve most admired, those you were happy to serve under. What were their behaviors? How did you feel working for them? What kind of worker were you, including the quality of what you produced? How do you feel about them now? 2. Recall your own moments when you were proud of the leadership (either formal or informal) you provided to your organization, family, friends, community. What did you do? How did you behave toward others? What were the results of your leadership? Are you still in a relationship with any of these people?”
― Margaret J. Wheatley, Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity