Doing Better (eBook)

Activate Your Power and Potential in Daily Life

PhD John Jay Koriath (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
148 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-8419-4 (ISBN)

Infos

'Doing Better' is for readers seeking a self-help, personal development learning course that will guide them in a life of doing better. Using science, psychology, and the story of a shamanic journey, this book leads the reader to develop 21st century literacy to learn, unlearn, and relearn.

John Koriath is a scientist, psychologist, and traveler on a shamanic journey to uniquely contribute to the fields of learning, healing, and personal development. His endeavors over the past five decades include teaching undergraduate and graduate psychology courses at Arizona State University; conducting psychophysiological research on communication between the heart and brain as a Flinn Foundation Fellow; and creating leadership development experiences for Fortune 500 organizations through Executive Development Associates, Pinchot and Company, and Executive Networks. He also taught leadership and personal development in a pioneering MBA program in sustainable business at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute for a decade. While leading an eclectic career, John has spent nearly 50 years exploring the mind-body relationship and the role of ritual and ceremony in healing through practices of various indigenous peoples.

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"e;Doing Better"e; is for readers seeking a self-help, personal development learning course that will guide them in a life of doing better. Using science, psychology, and the story of a shamanic journey, this book leads the reader to develop 21st century literacy to learn, unlearn, and relearn. Readers are invited to authentically align what they think, feel, say, and do as they learn how to identify their values, manage polarities, and have robust learning conversations. They will learn to tell their story as a mythological emergence of self that brings transformation to humanity. Readers are called to adopt a new mindset and heartset that holds "e;yes"e; as the word in the heart so they can face complexity, embrace empathy, and stay open to mystery. "e;Doing Better"e; teaches people how to live the lives they were meant to live.

Textauszug

Chapter 1

Power and Potential

Doing Better is all about power and potential—the two defining characteristics of leadership. Understanding how to work with the balance of power and potential will make you a better leader and enable you to more effectively invite others to be leaders as well. I believe we all need to be better leaders if we are to fulfill our potential and create powerful global change. To do this, we need to reshape our concept of leadership as part of developing a new literacy of learning. We need to learn that every chair in the room is a leadership chair and treat it that way.

Power can be used and expressed in three ways: power over, power with, and power within. Your personal style of leadership will reflect your own balance and blend of these components and will vary in different situations. Being able to balance the power in any room for productive change is the most important component of effective leadership.

Traditional power structures rely on a “power over" framework, where a designated leader holds power by assessing a situation and making choices and decisions about what needs to be done. Their power rules. Others may or may not be invited to share their opinions or listened to if they do. Either way, the leader holds the power over stakeholders and guides decision-making about what will be done.

A “power with" structure is all about collaboration. It seeks to use the full intelligence in the room to identify choices and make decisions. This structure may include drawing on our own expertise, using the insights of relevant stakeholders, or consulting with an outside expert. The power with approach values a diversity of voices, and the leadership role may be held by one individual or distributed amongst members of the group to maximize impact.

A “power within” structure can be characterized by feeling like you are “in the flow”—a harmonious, synchronized feeling of working together. This results in groups of people feeling connected and being willing to work in a changing balance of leadership structures to serve all stakeholders. This framework creates pathways that motivate individuals to pursue their own potential. Pursuing your deepest potential means finding your calling in life, connecting it with a need in the world, and then using your unique gifts to bring about positive change.

We will explore these leadership structures further, but for now, it’s important to recognize leadership as a power phenomenon in which a blend of power over, power with, and power within meet the current demands of the moment. When used in a healthy way, power paves the way for personal potential to flourish.

Igniting Potential

When I was in the fifth grade, a teacher’s simple observation showed me the power of potential. Mr. Norman Soderstrom wore his hair in a no-nonsense crew cut, with a shirt, tie, and dress slacks to match. As his appearance forewarned, he liked order in his classroom. He was stern and the first male teacher I had in elementary school. I don’t remember much of what he taught me, except that one day he took me aside and told me that I wasn’t living up to my potential. I can’t remember what triggered his calling me out, though I was probably goofing off to make the other kids laugh. What I do remember is how those few words made me feel and the lasting impact they had on me, my education, and my attitude towards learning.

To not live up to my potential was a big thing, and not something I would want my parents to hear. They had lived through the Great Depression, worked the night shift, saved their pennies, bought a house in the suburbs, all to what end? Certainly not to have their youngest son squander his potential. They worked hard so that their sons would have more opportunities in life than they had had, and Mr. Soderstrom’s words brought these family sacrifices into glaring focus.

I don’t know exactly what changes I made in the weeks following this revelation, but I know I got an A on my American History exam and continued to strive for top marks throughout my academic career. I didn’t want to waste my potential! Thank you, Mr. Soderstrom.

Claiming my potential also influenced my athletic life. When I tried out for the high school tennis team, my coach assessed my court skills. He concluded I didn’t have much ability, but I had “sheer gut determination.” I made the team! This lesson taught me that how I came to an event made a difference.

In my senior year of high school, I was offered the chance to do independent study under the librarian’s guidance. I loved the freedom to roam the shelves and read what I chose. I stumbled onto Abraham Maslow’s teachings around self-actualization and Carl Roger’s work with self-realization. These concepts seemed to provide a path to freedom by pursuing development of the mind, a path open to all but not as well trodden as it might be. I was hooked.

I wanted to walk this path and was lucky to have the opportunity to continue to explore it in college, again through independent study. At the time, Heidelberg College, along with many liberal arts schools across the country, was testing out new learning philosophies. My independent learning was part of this exploration.

The head of the philosophy department, Dr. Rudolph Muska, gave me a personally revolutionary book to start with, Think on These Things by J. Krishnamurti. Upon reading it, I became intrigued by Eastern thought, an esoteric subject at the time. It sparked my lifelong interest in the mind-body relationship, world religions, and consciousness itself. My exploration included reading Hesse, Vonnegut, Hegel, Castaneda, and Leopold. Their ideas, combined with my own self-exploration, coalesced in a personal dream to start a learning center called the Human Potentials Institute.

This idea has stayed with me and taken many forms over the last 50 years, tempered and reshaped by my experiences. Doing Better is its most recent iteration, and in some ways a culmination, of that dream. I hope it will serve as a guide to you and others in discovering your personal power and developing and sharing more fully your own human potential. Think of yourself as embarking on a journey in which you see more clearly not only what you are learning but understand better how you learn. I am honored to be your guide and companion along the way.

No Baggage Needed

You can travel light on this journey. The only essential item to bring along is your own authenticity. As Carl stated earlier, none of us sees the world as it is. We see it through the lens of our life experiences, and our life experiences are shaped by the mental models we use to create and filter those experiences. We speak our personal truth and hear the truth of others when we share from authenticity—speaking and listening with the heart.

Authenticity is as simple (and as complex) as keeping alignment between what you think, what you feel, what you say, and what you do. When you live with these elements aligned, you can more readily see your purpose and live in the present moment. It requires courage, but it is something you can depend upon in every moment. One way in which you will know you are aligned is by your sense of clarity. Your head, heart, mouth and hands will act together, increasing your coherence.

Everything you gain from this book will rely on you showing up as your authentic self. Carl tells a story in his book The Dancing Healers that aptly illustrates the role of authenticity in personal development. Fresh out of medical school, he was assigned to the Indian Health Service in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as an alternate way to satisfy draft requirements during the Viet Nam War. He was confident of his Ivy League training and comfortably unaware of the health practices of Indigenous people and the rich traditions upon which they are based.

Early in his training in Santa Fe, he was visiting a patient named Santiago. Santiago was lying in his hospital bed with an oxygen cannula in his nose. He asked Carl where he learned to heal. Eager to impress Santiago with his medical background, Carl recited a list of the Ivy League institutions where he had trained. Santiago nodded and asked if Carl knew how to dance because you needed to be able to dance if you wanted to be able to heal. Carl was unsure of how to reply, so he asked Santiago if he knew how to dance. Santiago got out of his bed and began to move his feet, then his entire body, performing an intricate series of steps. Carl could see the dance was a sacred ritual and that Santiago had performed it for decades. Carl shuffled a few steps by the side of the bed and then asked Santiago if he could teach him to dance. Santiago replied, “I can teach you the steps, but you need to hear your own music.”

To live in your own authenticity, you need to be able to hear your own music.

Those words led Carl to embrace a new paradigm in his journey as a healer. He began a shift from a mechanistic to a wholistic point of view. He realized that there are many ways to heal, each approach with its own framework, and that each called to him to look again at what he thought he knew.

Authenticity allows us to live from the heart. It involves recognizing the unique gifts we bring into this world as a calling, and discovering how to use them to release our creativity and benefit ourselves and others. The world with all its systemic upheavals and disruptions is waiting for us to find and share our deepest truth, to transform the threats that surround us into challenges, and to...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 18.4.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Lebenshilfe / Lebensführung
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-8419-4 / 9798350984194