The Highest Goal
I just read a very good book. It's quite useful if you are looking to find a way to have more meaning in your life. It's also instructive about leadership. In that vein, what I learned was that it is a very good thing for leaders to have experienced where they want to go and come to grips with themselves before turning themselves loose on others.
Below is a summary of the book. I'd suggest taking these ideas back to work and begin charting a better course.
The creativity aspect is valuable as well. In the March Automation World, we're looking at energy--savings, management, alternatives. Jim Pinto has an excellent column challenging readers to figure out ways that they can profit from emerging energy realities. Good advice for any aspect of business--or life.
Michael Ray, The Highest Goal, Berrett/Koehler Publishers
Ray was a Stanford professor and social psychologist who developed course on creativity at the business school.
From Ray:
The premise of our course: We wanted students to experience their inner wisdom and authority and the connection they had with all beings. Students who discovered their essential inner resources and the ultimate purpose of their existence found they could do their work and live their lives in ways that contributed to positive change in the world.
What is the highest goal?
Many philosophical traditions tell us that we have within us amazing potentiality, including that of the whole universe. In one tradition, the saints and sages talk about experiencing this potential as a tiny, shimmering blue pearl of light. They tell us that they gaze at the blue pearl, and it fills their body or it explodes to reveal the universe.
The highest goal is simply to be in this experience of connection or truth (no matter how you refer to it) all the time. That remains a goal, of course, because this is something you spend a lifetime working toward rather than attaining. But your commitment motivates, inspires and guides your journey, and gives you more and more time in this state of connection.
If you live for the highest goal, you are living a life of the spirit.
Steps for the journey to the Highest Goal:
1. Go beyond passion and success. Most of us sub-optimize, that is, we go for the short-term and transitory. Go beyond these lesser goals to use the gift of life you have been given.
2. Travel your own path. Pay attention to your own best performance--the critical incidents in your life--when you feel most your Self, in flow and in tune with the highest goal.
3. Live with the highest goal. Pay attention, ask dumb questions, see with your heart, be ordinary or other "live-withs."
4. Find true prosperity. The more you express and experience your highest qualities, the more you are filled with a rich feeling of self-worth, and the wealthier you will become in the truest sense. Find the prosperity that will sustain you through the ups and downs of life and keep increasing, even through difficulties.
5. Turn fears into breakthroughs. When you have the grounding of the highest goal, you can see your fears for what they are. Learn from them, and turn their energy into breakthroughs and opportunities of the most lasting kind.
6. Relate from your heart. I define compassion as seeing the highest in your Self first and then seeing the highest in others. See others from this perspective, and you begin to change the nature of your relationships for the better and make connections that move you toward the highest goal.
7. Experience synergy in every moment. You can achieve synergy--a much more dynamic state than balance--among the parts of your life by developing organizing structures based on your highest goal and by getting into the flow of intuitive decision-making.
8. Become a generative leader. Generative leaders pass along their experience of the highest goal and ignite creativity in others.
6:11:06 PM 
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