MAKING ROOM

When people talk about the headlines, repeating facts and figures, globalizing and depersonalizing the issue, all I really begin to hear is blah, blah, blah.

In conversations surrounding the issues of the day, most of us fail to convey what is “meant,” because we are unwilling or unable to speak from the heart.

We love to quote the “experts,” because hearsay is the great distractor. It builds walls to safely hide behind and allows us to avoid the meaningful discussion that insists on uncovering the truth about ourselves and discovering who those around us really are.

Hearsay and gossip are the great walls that divide. They are doors without hinges and dark hallways we enter to avoid being seen.

Our obsession with appearing smart is far greater than a heartfelt passion for others that invests beyond a moment in time. What will change my heart is your willingness to share, through personal experience and example, how you came to your conclusion and how that conclusion has changed your life.

Authenticity shifts every conversation to one that insists on vulnerability and a kind of evolution of the soul.

Changing someone’s mind, or at least achieving consensus, begins with a willingness to tell the part of my personal story that might not have been so perfect or pretty, evolving to a revelation and admission that I may have been wrong.

When is the last time you admitted that you don’t know everything, that you still have something to learn…and even more compelling, that someone you don’t even know, or might not even like, may have something to teach you?

I am on this journey of stripping away pride, making room for something that might be just a little more useful than the need to be right or smart or seen.  In the space that pride left behind is this fast-growing cell that looks and feels a lot like Compassion—an other-focus, and insatiable need to listen to things of the heart.