Over the past month I’ve been reading Presence by Peter M. Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers. Those of you who have come to know me – probably realize by now that I’m a pretty obsessive reader. Yet unlike most of what I read, Presence was more like a wonderful meditation that the acquisition of information. It is one of the most important and valuable books I’ve read over the past 5 to 10 years. Over the next few posts I make I’ll try to explain why.

One quote I will probably never forget is “the longest road is often from your mind to your heart.” It will – I hope – forever remind me that more value will always come from love than anything else. How can I do all that I do lovingly. As a serial entrepreneur, I am pretty good at action, criticism, analysis, and creativity. I still have a lot to learn about love. One can of course be lovingly critical or analytical, but somehow the depth of my analysis usually seems greater than the depth of my love.

I was also overwhelmed with the notion of how much of our lives fall with-in the preestablished patterns we seem to follow over and over. Whether it’s how we respond to each other, read the newspaper, participate in a meeting, or watch a sunset, most of what we do, we do as we have done before. Somehow the possibility of doing it differently doesn’t occur to us. Outside our patterns is all the possibility. Whether it’s figuring out how to stop global warming, be a better lover or design a new product, 99% of what is possibility, but yet to be, lies outside the pattern.

If we can slow down our thinking enough to actually watch how we think, become conscious of the generation of our thoughts, question whether there is another way to see what we are seeing, do what we are doing, hold what we are holding, a whole new world opens up before us.

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