2009 New Year Resolution Plan

As I write this final blog post for 2009, I am in a place of awe and humility. I am grateful. I have so much to be grateful for and I am enjoying the moments as they string themselves together to create a day of absolute contentment and well being.

Earlier in the day, as I thought about how to conclude the year and as I prepared for my final radio show of 2008, I reveled in all the amazing things that had happened to me this past year.  A few to wit:

• I stepped into coaching full time
• I closed out my law practice
• I feel so much more at peace and in control of my life
• I discovered twitter
• My husband set up my website
• I made phenomenal relationships on Twitter.
• Social networking has become part of my daily habit and joy
• I started blogging for the first time
• I got my blog and website where I want it.
• I have attracted so many wonderful clients.

Overall, I have had a wonderful transition year – it has turned out better than I expected.

As I mulled over all of this, I realized that I am finally living my life, I am not living my future, I am not living my past, I am not living other’s expectations of me. I am not even living my dreams. I am living wonderfully right here and right now.

From this pace of awesomeness, I put together a list of profound steps just for you. These steps, if you follow them closely and review them often, will help you make profound progress in walking in your desires and wants in 2009.

1. Start out with gratitude to take stock of all the wonderful and amazing things that have happened to you this past year.
2. Know the wants behind your wants. For instance, you may want to loose weight but the real reason is that you do not feel attractive that your higher weight and you want to feel more attractive overall.  This is how you honor your wants.
3. Align your wants with your values. Do you understand you core value system? What do you value? Make sure your wants are aligned with the ideals you cherish the most. This is how you effectively set your intention.
4. Pay attention to your feelings. Understand that when you feel bad, it is your emotional guidance system telling you that that the thoughts you are thinking are not serving you.
5. Activate imagination. Use your imagination to experience what you want in the now. Taste, feel, touch, hear, smell and see what you want now. Make it real in your mind now.
6. Activate creativity. Experience your imagination by applying an expressive form to it. Write it out, Draw it out. Sculpt it out. Knit it out. Sing it out. Express it in some sort of art form no matter what it looks like or sounds like.
7. Positive self talk. Make sure that you develop new, more positive mantras in your mind and speak it out loud as well as in your mind. Reprogram your mind. Yes you can.
8. Project this thinking into your future. 10 years from now how would this exercise program have paid off? What will it be like to have a solid ten or fifteen year habit of consistent exercise?  Really tap into that future. Not just a month from now. Now pull that future into today’s reality.
9. Understand what authentic happiness is. It is not a mask to cover up your feelings. It is not just ecstasy. It is your inner being bubbling up from a place of content well being and knowing within you.
10. Now that you understand authentic happiness, follow it. Follow your bliss
11. Then take action. Take inspired action. When you take action, follow this principle: Ready Fire Aim. If you first wait until your aim is perfect, you will not succeed. Go ahead and fire. Your actions will self correct. Remember, forget perfection. Follow passion.
12. As you take action, focus your intention on what you imagine and what you want and bringing it into the present. Your now.

Happy New Year. May all your dreams come true. May you understand that you are the most precious being in your own world. May Peace rule your heart and actions. May happiness be your guide. May love flourish in your life and in the life of your loved ones. Be blessed.

Thank you for being part of my life.

Using creativity to enhance your professional life.

I smile as I write this post. I remember this time last year when  a new client contacted me. I thought it was strange that someone insisted on beginning coaching in the week between Christmas and New Year.

My client Isabel* (not her real name but she gave me permission to tell her story)  is a medical doctor and she had been practicing for a few years. She was in her mid thirties, loved being single and enjoyed all the perks her wonderful life offered her. She contacted me because she was very unhappy.

Her whole life she had pursued her educational goals. The entire time she was in school, she sacrificed and cut corners. She deprived herself of almost everything she wanted as she focused solely on her successful future. From the time she was a little girl, she wanted to be doctor and help women deliver babies. She had grown up on a farm in the Midwest and loved watching her grandfather’s horses and cows give birth.

Now, she ached for something but she did not know what it was.

When we first stared coaching, I asked a lot of questions to get to know her and allow her story to surface. Very soon, she started telling me how much she looked forward to her sessions with me. Then one day she confessed that she felt relaxed talking to me because I had no expectations of her but for her to go inside herself and discover herself. This was a new experience to her.

She said that she felt that her daily requirement was for her to live up to others expectations of her and that she no longer knew who she was or what she wanted.

We worked on reconnecting her to the beauty of her original dream of helping and being part of the birthing process. She recognized that this was her desire to connect with life and its initial process. When I asked her how she could duplicate this process in other areas of her life, she began to explore different ways of expressing the initial stages of life in other areas of her life. She picked up gardening and tried cooking new recipes.

As she made the effort to re-connect with the feelings of her original passion, she remembered that when she was in medical school, she loved drawing in anatomy class. She made the connection that she started drawing things before she could touch them or feel them in the human body. Drawing preceded exploration for her. Drawing ignited the spark of creativity that fueled her passion for the human birthing process.

Over the next few months, she started taking art classes again and now spends her free time drawing her perspective of the birthing process. She made the decision to work less hours to create more space in her life for this passion.

I got very emotional on one of our recent calls because she told me that she had been concerned about a client of hers who was having a difficult pregnancy. One night, when she could not sleep and she realized that the impending labor of her patient was on her mind and she could not shake it, she decided to draw the outcome of what she wanted.

She began to draw the image of the pregnant mom on her bed, legs in stirrup and as she drew the head of the baby coming out of the mom, she stopped drawing. She said she just stayed there with a lot of love in her heart and directed it towards the baby and the mother. She said she practiced a lot of deep breathing at this place of the intersection of her art and her patient care. In a few minutes, she felt her emotions and thoughts move from concern to acceptance of any outcome.

She never finished the painting.

She went off to bed and woke up the next morning and discovered her client was in labor. She delivered the baby in no time with no complications and with an ethereal smile on her face the entire time.

When she called me, she was ecstatic. Somewhere in her, she felt she influenced that birth in a positive way but she was not quite sure how. She was convinced she had added a new layer to her practice.

Science may not be able to prove that she did anything special but what I do know is that my client is a lot happier with this approach to her practice. She loves what she does as she reconnects with the birth of little ones. I believe that she aligned her professional and personal energy with a positive outcome and she got what she aligned with.

The bottom line is that she is experiencing more job satisfaction.

How can you connect with your original passions?

How can you include your own creative skill in your work in a unique way?

For me, I have always enjoyed writing. I did not get much of a chance to do that as a real estate attorney. Now, as a coach, I plot out all my research and teaching tools in writing before I ever use them. I love writing blog posts like this one.

I find that the more I write, the more sensitive I am to my intuition and inner knowing. I experience more feelings of contentment and happiness when I write.

What about you?

Obama’s racial and cultural identity: Third culture kid or African-American?

Barack Obama has said, “I identify as African-American — that’s how I’m treated and that’s how I’m viewed. I’m proud of it.” In other words, the world gave Obama no choice but to be black, and he was happy to oblige.”  I read this quote by a reporter when I googled President-Elect Obama on the issue of race.

What I notice here is that this statement does not say what he thinks about his race. This is an underlying perception about race that needs to be address. We identify race based on how others identify us. Not how we identify ourselves.

I was thinking about this with regards to myself. Truly, if it would not be confusing, I would say that I am bi-racial and bi-cultrually Nigerian American. That language begins to give me a sense of my race versus my culture. There is a difference. Crossing cultures does make you a different person. You cannot deny that it is part of your identity. It just is.

Please note the commentator says “he had no choice but to be black. Why does he not have a choice? Genetically speaking he is 50 percent white and 50 percent black. Why must he fit into one box? Political convenience? I can see that. Maybe it is just not an issue to him. That is Ok too.

This same issue came up for me today as I found yet another wonderful social networking tool – seesmic. Here people record short videos and you respond to them via videos. It is like twitter, except it is a video. This is what I love about social networking as a research tool. I met Andre Keon on seesmic and he is a diversity officer for a county in Minnesota. In addition, his website has fantastic videos on diversity issues. My conversation with him was fulfilling as I told him about third culture kids and cross cultural kids including them in the conversation about hidden diversity.

It was a great conversation and I look forward to more interaction with him. He definitely has a very open and broad minded approach to the “inclusion” issue. I applaud this about him.

What are the cultural mixes in your background? Do you feel more pulled to one than the other? Even if your race is not mixed, maybe your culture is? This is also an interesting diversity piece.

Starbucks Barista’s: Self Leadership and the holiday season

The phone rang very late last night. It was my sister concerned about a high powered friend of hers that she could not track down. She was concerned that she may have lost her job. She said almost everyone she talks to is very nervous about their jobs and the best thing she knows to do is to support them by checking on them.

I love that about her. She has mastered the skills of caring and connecting with those she loves.

Well, this morning, I was at my local Starbucks drive through and they were featuring a new holiday drink. I asked what was in it and they offered me a sample. It was some gingerbread something or the other.  I thought I would get a tiny, tiny taster cup but I did not. Instead, I got a whole espresso sized cup of the drink as its base was espresso. Well, I am not a coffee drinker: I went for chai tea but, if I were, I would have loved that drink. The server at the window told me the name of the barista who prepared my drink and pointed her out to me. I asked them to write her name down and I went to their website and of course, I have not figured out how to give her a great recommendation but I will.

Starbucks may not call it that but they allow their employees to practice self-leadership by giving them the power to make such decisions. It is truly a great innovative company in many ways.

As I did that, I thought, wow, I am hopefully adding to her job security as I do this and yes, that is the type of cheerful, out of the box, customer service focused individual that I would like to put my energy into supporting.

Fast forward to Twitter. I love this social networking tool. I have met some of the most wonderful people on Twitter. I find so many juicy tidbits as we all love to share on twitter. So someone tweeted ( oops, twitterspeak – twitter language) Jeremiah Owyang’s blog and for the first time, I understood the excitement around a tweetup. More twitterspeak. It is where people in the same area that have connected on twitter meet up and get to know each other. Jeremiah put together this tweetup and his authenticity shines through the entire post as it became a way for prospective employers in Silicon Valley connected with those looking for jobs.

This is leadership at its very best so I know he has developed strong self-leadership traits.

What can you do to support those around you that are going through job uncertainty and economic issues? Let us expand the mindset of helping others by giving gifts this holiday season and be creative so that we are helping others in ways that are more meaningful to them?

Gift giving is wonderful and perfect. I am not knocking it. We are all doing it this Holiday season.

However, with others being so concerned about the economy, how do we help them increase their happiness.

I want to know how creative we can all be in supporting others?

Personal Power and Cultural Identity: On Obama

For me, when it comes to Obama and the threats against his life based on the fact that he is an African American male, the issue is not race, religion or politics. Those are just smokescreens. The issue is what you believe defines you. Your definition of yourself cannot come from what other people say about you. Your definition of yourself has to come from the place of knowing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you belong on this planet; it is your right to be here, at this time, in this space. You belong.  Once your sense of belonging takes root in this belief system, and you realize that everyone else also has that right, then you can begin to carve out your life from a place of strength and not a place of fear.

Imagine you wake up tomorrow morning and the world has changed: You may be white and 99% of the rest of the population is black, Hispanic or what ever you do not like. You are still entitled to your space on this planet. You are still entitled to be as prosperous as your belief system allows. You are still entitled to a political voice with your vote if you live in this country. So is everyone else.

The perceived shift of power in the white house does not increase or decrease any other person’s ability or personal power. I do not feel powerless with George W. Bush in the white house because he is a white male from the South! Not one day over the last eight years did that thought cross my mind. I will not feel more powerful as a person because President-Elect Barack Obama will be in the White House. My personal power does not stem from who is in the White House. It stems from the fact that I am here on this planet and it is my right to create my life and live it out from a personally powerful place. I may feel more hopeful when Obama is in the White House because I feel confident of the leadership of this country, but ultimately, my power comes from me.

I do not believe that John McCain has lost any power whatsoever in his life by not winning the election. Instead, he has gained power. Prior to this race, he had never been the nominee for the Republican ticket before in his life. Obviously that became something very important for him. Today, we know that he has the support of 48% of the voting public. That is not a small matter. How can he continue to make himself relevant to the country, even the world? He is obviously still a valuable asset to the world. Think Al Gore! When Al Gore lost the election in 1999, he went on to become an even more valuable asset by following his bliss as an advocate for the environment. His impact continues to be felt around the world. I would not call him powerless!

Yes, the President and his decisions, actions and in-actions, do impact our daily lives and we all experience the effects, especially in the economy. But whether I have a million dollars in the bank or five dollars in the bank, my power comes from me, not my money. Now, it feels better to have a million dollars in the bank. I may feel powerless when I only have five dollars in the bank but the source of my power does not come from a green piece of paper that says $5 or $1 million. It comes from me.

America, can we please dig in deep and find our individual power and from that place, support our national leadership? Please.  Don’t support his race, don’t support his international background, and don’t support the fact that he is a democrat. Support the fact that he is our leader and therefore he has a responsibility to us. Our responsibility is to draw on our personal power and stop making him a scapegoat of our feelings of powerlessness.

To write this post, I sat back with a desire to perceive Obama’s energy and analyze it as a coach. I asked myself, what is the most important thing to me about Barack Obama?  I realized that I admire his focus. He has been very focused throughout his campaign. I also sensed that he keeps his ego under check at all times.  When I say focused, I mean he solely focused on his agenda. His speeches were not filled with just bashing the agenda of the status quo. So during the debates, when McCain would try to push his buttons, I never saw him angry or reactionary. Some say he was vibing cool hand Luke. I say he was focused on what he wants – A better America.

Self Leadership: Race and Culture

Personally, I have never felt that I was a victim of prejudice. I refuse to be victimized by other’s perceptions of me. I have lived in the United States for almost 30 years and I have always enjoyed a very arms length relationship with racial prejudice.  I was never conditioned to be very aware of it and its negative impact because my parents firmly believed in charting out your life on your terms.

Also, frankly, I think growing up in a different part of the world made a big difference for me. Americans have a tendency to define almost everything from a race perspective. This is not the global norm.

Nevertheless, when I listen to my African American friends or even full blooded black Africans that grew up in the US, I feel horror as they recount their experiences. Prejudice and racism truly exist and destroys for many people. In no way, do I mean to discount that fact. For recipients of prejudice, living, surviving and thriving after hate encounters really points to their personal power and resilience.

I have had a pretty good life. I meet many white Americans in my daily life and I cannot say that I have had any major negative experiences in my interactions with white Americans. I also know many white Americans intimately. This is not to say that I have not observed racism, but I was never affected negatively by it. Frankly, I choose to not see it and not be negatively affected by it and now, I am pretty much oblivious to it.

In fact, if the truth be told, there were times that I felt I was experiencing prejudice from a few African Americans that resented that I excelled professionally because I was originally from Africa and they felt that the civil rights movement was about them, not about us transplants. Now, please understand, 99% of all my encounters with African Americans have been very positive and any negative experiences I had were truly the anomaly.

I once worked at a law firm where a long standing 90 year old white male client came in and needed some work done. He was an uneducated white male originally from rural Georgia. He was introduced to me and he said to my face he did not want to work with a “n…..” Yes, the really negative word. I was so amused how easily that word rolled off his tongue. Obviously, it was just a descriptive term for him. There was no emotion behind his words. That was the first face to face encounter with the word with a white person.

I assured him that he should trust my boss’s judgment and allow me to do the work and if I did not do a good job, he would not have to pay. I went on and prepared his will and we got to know each other. I truly was not offended. I just saw him as someone that was conditioned to think the way he did. He was impressed with my work and gave me more work to do for him.

I must say, as I think back to my interaction with him. He may have appeared to be prejudiced based on his ignorance, but he was not an angry person and that may be why I had an easy relationship with him. He genuinely just believed that because I was black, I could not do a good job.

It turns out we lived near each other and we enjoyed a cordial yet professional acquaintanceship. A couple of years later, as I drove past his house I saw a lot of cars there and I could tell something was wrong. I stopped and went into the house where everyone immediately stopped and stared at me. You could hear a pin drop. I asked for him and someone went to get him. Someone asked me who I was and I said I was his lawyer. They all looked surprised, yet relieved.

When he walked into the room, my client smiled broadly at me and opened his arms and gave me a big hug. He told me his wife had died and I proceeded to fuss over him as I asked if he had been taking his medication and was he feeling OK. He introduced me to everyone and eventually, a few of the people I met that day became my clients.

I sat down and shared a meal with him and his family and guess what? They were just ordinary people, sad that they lost the family matriarch, worried about their children and the economy and wanting to live good lives. To this moment, I am certain several people in that room were members of the KKK or such similar group. I could sense it, yet I never sensed I was in danger.

That episode taught me that prejudice is learned and is a defense mechanism to protect what you know and what serves you. Unfortunately, it is a refection of a person’s lack of imagination and adventure. For me, it is poignantly sad to see the person’s energy as that of fear of loss of everything that has defined them. With this understanding, I feel great compassion and empathy for those who use racism and prejudice and hatred as a tool of defense and destruction. I can certainly relate to the feeling of loss, fear and mourning of an old friend – something that has defined you for so long.

Self leaders are not threatened by others and understand that race can just be a physical trait. They question their prejudices and embrace new experiences.

How do you view race?

How do you handle prejudice?

Third Culture Kids love Obama!

I stayed up on November 4th counting electoral votes as I enjoyed basking in the moment of our new President-Elect Barack Obama’s win. Truly, I am happy. I feel a kinship with him on many levels. The feeling that you can relate to someone so visible and iconic is exhilarating.

My mother was a white American. Her mother was Irish American and her father was Jewish originally from Poland. She met my Nigerian father while he was at Columbia University in New York and she ended up moving to Nigeria where she lived for 38 years. Within myself, I feel great resonance for the fact that we both have white American mothers and African fathers that came to this country to study and went to Ivy League institutions and dared to have public relationships with white women at a time when it certainly was not the politically correct thing to do.

I moved to the US from Nigeria when I was sixteen. I relate with many people of many different races and nationalities. I have relationships in many corners of the world and I am looking to establishing even more. One of the things I have written about is the fact that I am a Third Culture Kid. Being multiracial and living in different cultures growing up as a child makes me a Third Culture Kid.

I find the conversation about Obama and race to be very interesting because I do not think he sees himself as others see him. In my opinion, a black man did not win the election. He is multi-racial! Why are we trying to define who he is? He gets to define who he is. I have never really heard him discuss his personal definition of his race extensively. I think it would upset other people if they realized that he may not see his race through the same lens as they do. He may actually consider himself half white and half African – a new spin on the term “African-American.”

As a coach, it is obvious to me that we have underestimated “resonance” in this electoral race. Resonance elected Obama – not race. He resonates with many white Americans, because culturally, he has a significant white component to his identity. Some people may not want to hear that but it is true. And that does not mean he negates his black culture.

He resonates with young people. He relates to African Americans. He resonates with thinking people. As he kisses his wife and kids while on camera, he resonates with family people. Most of all, he resonates with people who are sick and tired of living in a box. He resonates with people who want to live outside the box! Because he is a Third Culture Kid (TCK) he has this innate ability to resonate with so many people on so many levels. Many Americans see a piece of themselves alive in him.

One of the most common traits of third culture kids is that they develop very strong self leadership traits as they learn at a very early age, how to fit in with people that are not like them.

Indeed, Obama is a third culture kids.

Obama and Race

Obama’s historic win as the first African American president of the United States has been on everyone’s mind. The big deal here is that he is an African American.

He may be married to an African American and attend a dominantly African American church but I would argue that he has not always being fully immersed into the African American culture.  We define him as African American but that term does not quantify his personal multicultural, multinational and multiracial being.

As proud as I am about him, I do not want a person in the white house because of their race. I want a person, male, female, black, white, Hispanic, gay, straight or whatever, because of their competency and ability to deliver and make this country the best place on the planet in every way possible. Period. As happy and as proud as I am of him, I voted for him not because of the color of his skin or because I resonated with his family background but because of his competency.

At this point in time, it really should not matter the race or gender of the person in the White House because it should be readily accessible to all competent people and our national competence should look like the constituents of this country in terms of race, gender and all other contributing gactors.

I was really shocked to find out that so many people are reacting in extremely negative ways about our new president elect. There are a lot of viral messages on Facebook and various places on the Internet that are fully expressive of very base forms of prejudice. This is particularly sobering to me as I am reminded of the culture that we do live in.

Why then do so many find dissonance with the knowledge that Obama is now their President? No, it is not because of his race or that he is a democrat. It is because those individuals find comfort in the status quo and they define themselves in relation to that status quo. The fact that this country could embrace change and hope in such a definitive manner is scary to many.

How do you embrace change?

How do you define your own cultural identity?

Have you found yourself feeling prejudiced about something?

What did this election stir up in you?

Midlife Career Change

If you have noticed your inner being screaming at you about wanting to change careers, not just your job, Congratulations!

We humans have wonderful directional emotions that can help us reap fantastic rewards. We just have to learn to listen to those emotions. When your emotions speak to you that loudly, listen to hear clearly what emotional needs are surfacing. You gain great awareness and insight of yourself when you pay attention to what your emotions are saying.

Many midlifers and baby boomers are experiencing yearnings about career changes or have already made the decision to make a career change. There is a reason this time of life is called mid-life. You are half way there, you have worked so hard and you realize you want to capitalize on the lessons learned in the first half of your life to make the second half, happier and more fulfilling.

Career burnout, job dissatisfaction, yearning to make career changes are all indications of your inner being screaming at you that you desire something more congruent with who you have become. You may have decided to make that career change, taken all the assessments available to tell you which direction you should go in, yet you feel hesitant. Something is missing.

The tug of war between job security of your current situation and income uncertainty of a new career can unearth many fears and unpleasant feeling emotions. Perfect! Your emotions serve as a phenomenal guidance system to warn you of potential perils ahead. Planning, creative brainstorming, networking, confidence and determination are all within you to rise up to meet those fears and bypass inertia that can cripple you from making the changes your heart yearns for.

In addition, at midlife it may seem harder to make a career change because you have accumulated responsibilities, mortgages, children, and you have probably experiences a taste of success. Many times, you have also fulfilled that goal that our parents gave us about having a good job.

By asking these questions and taking the time to listen to your inner being’s response, you are creating space in your psyche for the answers to take shape and form and communicate to you clearly what your next step should be.

Is your dissatisfaction an indication that your values are not aligned with your actions?

Do you invest your non-working time in activities that actually feel rewarding?

Are you constantly exhausted, mentally and physically?

Do you feel as if you are a failure although you know that you have achieved success by the standards of others?

The human need to gather

Humans have always fought for territory with the perspective of protecting cultural norms and land ownership. We belong to our land and our land belongs to us. Therefore, traditionally, culture has been geographically tethered. With technology, modernization, affluenza and ease of travel, global nomadic lifestyles are changing the definition of cultural norms.

It is important that we broaden the scope of our understanding of culture and be aware of the limitations we place on people when we define them culturally. When we say someone is black or white, we are putting them in a box that limits our understanding of that person.

In addition, in business, corporations and multinational entities have to move from diversity awareness to multiculturalism and cross cultural inclusion if they want to continue to have substantial global impact.

When we evaluate the cultures of other people and categorize people based on their implied or overt membership in a particular culture, we are choosing to see that person as part of a group as opposed to an individual. When we observe others solely within the lens of their cultural context, we limit their humanness and individuality.

On the other hand, when we observe people solely as individuals and we do not encourage them to connect with others and partially define themselves as part of a larger group, we deprive them of being an active participant in the beauty of collaboration and the depth that the mosaic of culture brings to our daily lives.

The irony of culture in America is that although this is that exceptional environment that first put individual rights and freedoms above group rights, prejudice against groups that are racial and culturally defined continues to be a relentlessly destructive norm.

Humans have an innate need to be part of a group, a tribe that has cultural expression. When we were born, we belong to our mothers, our fathers and our family. Humans are the most helpless of creatures upon birth so our need to belong into a family system is deeply ingrained in our developmental DNA.

Furthermore, throughout our lives, very few in any of us, live in complete isolation. We were created to belong to a group and so expressing and cherishing our individual traits while simultaneously belonging to a group wherein we are productive is necessary for the survival of the human race.

The delicate balance between an individual’s personal expression and that person’s membership in a group is something that is fluid and changes throughout one’s life based on individual experience and age. As children our entire identity is based on our gender, age and the family unit to which we belong. As we grow older, we use geographical location and membership in institutions of higher education or professions to further define ourselves and to set ourselves apart within the larger group to which we belong.

Lack of awareness of this evolutionary pattern can create a lot of turmoil for those in transition. Global nomads and third culture kids in particular have a difficult time navigating some of these membership issues in belonging to these various groups. As a result, they may feel a lack of depth of connection to larger groups as they recognize that they do not belong to any one culture.

For people that feel culturally lost or do not feel a strong connection to any one cultural group, the key is to be aware of where your individuality flows into a group dynamic at any given time. Check in with yourself regularly and give this some deliberate thought. Become more aware and take risks in engaging with mono-cultural people.

Comment on my blog as to creative solutions that you have had in this area.

How did you gain awareness of our individuality versus the group?

How important is it to consciously belong to a group?

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