Within a couple of days this blog will move to “http://ledeberg.wordpress.com“.

From then on the urls http://www.superblyhuman.be and http://www.superblyhuman.com will redirect you to my new website, currently only in Dutch (English version coming by the end of the summer). (For those of you who are curious: you can already take a look at it here - many thanks to emOy & Notoir for web&graphic design)

The new Dutch website will include a brand new blog (in Dutch).

The new English website (due to this summer) will include most of  this blog’s original posts as well as some brand new ones.

Hope to see you there as well.

Hannes

If you have kids of your own, you know what I’m talking about.

“Poetry matters. Poetry is what elevates the banal and neglected object to a realm of art. It can transform the thing that might have made people fearful into something that invites them to look, and look a little longer, and maybe even understand.”

“It is our humanity, and all the potential within it, that makes us beautiful.”

(Aimee Mullins)

If you care to look and wonder, magic can happen.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have met several people whose lives aren’t exactly what you would call easy. Life has been hard on them. Some of them have lost their loved ones, others have done things to themselves that have left their bodies scarred in more ways than I believed was possible.

Yet all of them had decided for themselves that, whatever was left of their lives, they still wanted to make the most of it.

So we came to meet each other. And time after time again, in between the moments of tragedy, in between those moments of failure and fear for future mishaps, we found small stories that made all of us wonder: “How did that happen? How did you manage to pull that off? How have you managed to get up time after time and to make it to here? Who taught you those things?”

In all of these stories, no prosthetics of any kind were involved. Neither was it some sort of magic. It was a conversation (or a series of them), a moment in which people could reveal some parts of their story that had been overshadowed for years. Stories in which they began to get some hope that things could become better for real.

Over more than a decade now I have wondered about what poetry really means and how it matters. And I think, like Aimee Mullins, that it is something which invites us to look a little longer and maybe even understand.

What I understand now is that poetry itself is not what matters, it is what we have done to make this poetry happen that matters the most.

In that sense, this world is in great need of poetry, since in this world every single day people are doing something valuable, something worth referring to in a way that it invites us to look a little longer and maybe even understand.

via: A Source Of Inspiration

And the more I think about it, the more it becomes clear that this is really at the heart of what I do.

I help people to deal with their challenges by using questions to nudge them to love today what they would like to bring with them tomorrow, so that tomorrow is at least as ok or perhaps already a little bit better than today.

And I continue to do so until the client finds himself at the point that he feels ok with how things are today, ok with his own ability to prepare for tomorrow by paying attention to what matters today.

And that’s it. You can try it for yourself if you like.

Here are some questions to get you started.

1. Suppose tomorrow is a really great day for you …
2. What would tell you this is a great day for you?
3. What would tell others this is a great day for you?
4. How would this also be a great day for others?
5. What would have to be different? What would be gone?
6. What would have to be the same? What would still be there?
7. If 1 is the worst day you can possibly imagine and 10 is that really great day, where would you say you are today?
8. What makes you are already there? What / who has helped you to get there?
9. What will definitely be there tomorrow as well?
10. Suppose within the next couple of days you would find yourself a little bit higher upon the scale. How would you notice? What would tell you that that day is actually a little bit better than today, a little bit closer to that 10?
11. So what could you take care of today so that tomorrow is at least as ok as today, perhaps already even a little bit better?

Feel free to use these questions in your own trainings of workshops, but be kind enough to credit this blog and this work which is to a large extent inspired by the solution focused community. It would be great if you could also refer for example to the work of Insoo Kim Berg and Steve de Shazer. Their work and boldness and joy in life have made a lot of what I enjoy today possible.

Joel Bukiewicz of Cut Brooklyn.

Whether it’s about knives, or about solutions, there definitely needs to be a human element in the making of these things. I love the way these people from @madebyhands have captured this quote by Joel Bukiewicz in this beautiful documentary.

Check out the series at thisismadebyhands.com

How come I meet so many people who are literally sick of being afraid to make the wrong choice in an age of the so called overwhelming abundance of choices, choices which seem to hold some sort of key to personal success and the thrive of passion and excellence? While at the same time they feel like they don’t matter, because this place is going to ruins anyhow (climate, economy, politics, …)?

Why is it that this notion of becoming better, this notion of creating a better world is actually making us feel worse and is keeping us from appreciating what is already there?

Isn’t what is ok today worth taking with you so tomorrow you will still have something to build on?

To tell you the truth, I’ve had it with “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

From now on I’ll stick to “Love today what you would like to bring with you tomorrow.”

“There is an ethic that’s been around since the Industrial Revolution (…), and it’s this: it’s More, Bigger, Faster. That is the ethic we’ve been operating on for an incredibly long time now. (…) But here’s the problem with that. There comes a point when we discover that the resources available to do this, reach a limit.” (Tony Schwartz, CEO of The Energy Project at Wisdom 2.0 2011 – the video of the full talk is at the bottom of this post)

How often do you hear that your employees or colleagues will need more time or more resources to complete what you or others demand from them?

While training people or while facilitating groups in change projects, I hear this a lot, not to say all the time.

People are faced with demands that do not take into account their resources. And that is demotivating.

It is not the increase of demand that will show people the way to new strengths and resources or insights.

Increase of demand is simply an occasion which may lead to that outcome only

• if people can start making progress through the use of resources which are readily available to them,
• if people consider the desired outcome to be realistic and in some way achievable,
• if they understand somehow that failing is an option, although not a preferred one.

Ok, just a couple of quotes here to illustrate my point. The first one is from colleague Paolo Terni (ok you’ve seen him mentioned here before). In “Is Leadership as We Know it a Myth?” Paolo questions some hardwired assumptions about leadership (and influence). The whole post is a must-read if you are interested in boosting leadership in your organization. Here is my favorite part:

The “leader” has something called “influence”, a thing; he has that because of his or her character; the leader can transfer that “something” to “followers”. Wrong, wrong, wrong. “Influence” is not a thing. Influence is a dance where all the parties involved co-construct meaning and negotiate agreements. The “follower” has as much of an active role as the “leader”. Influence is mutual*

This brings me to my second quote, one from Mark Earls (yep, the Herdmeister, also a regular here on Superblyhuman.com). This is what Mark wrote in the aftermath of the Obama Presidential Campaign in 2008:

We follow each other all the time: vertically as in authorities and leaders we chose together but always and more importantly, horizontally in terms of the people we see around us. Copying by another name
Followership, though doesn’t sound that cool in business – as if it’s worth $billions in remuneration – so no wonder business schools don’t teach it but prefer “leadership” instead
Followership doesn’t sound as cool as “influence” – what the singular folk are supposed to do to us.
Followership doesn’t sound the thing for addressing the big issues that we face; bring on individual heroics every time.
But remember that dull and uninspiring ‘followership’ is what got us where we are as a species.

Mark Earls, “Lessons from Obama” at herds.typepad.com

Add this talk by marketing professor Jamie Anderson …

… and you probably understand why at Superbly Human and Ilfaro we have rather abandoned the whole leadership-influence thing and instead decided to dedicate our efforts and those of our clients to

“If one is truly to succeed in leading a person to a specific place, one must first and foremost take care to find him where he is and begin there.”
S. Kierkegaard.

Experience the art of followership for yourself through a Destination Change workshop or Destination Change consultancy.