Day 7 - 60 Day Warn - 7 days gone

Well the first week is gone in a blink of an eye. 53 days to go. And I started the day feeling guilty.

Since I am on a degree committee of one of the current OSR Students, my alumnus Master’s program, I was invited to participate in this month’s session on Appreciative Inquiry (AI). The timing is perfect, since AI is a very life affirming methodology. One is dependent on our personal way of being as much or more than the technical methods involved. This is like getting a booster shot in the arm to what I think is important in the field of OD and to helping others in general. I felt the exercises and readings to prepare for the class have helped me become much more grounded and allowed my thinking to clear up and become more focused than it would have otherwise.

The preparatory exercise was to take a 24 hours period and look at everything appreciate stance no matter how small, like appreciation for the light that comes when we change the switch, the taste of a piece of fresh fruit, the clerk that smiles a greeting, or the color of a flower. Or the second version of this exercise was to look for the life affirming parts of our day; this was the version I did. The outcome was I became very appreciative for all the people that had touched my life or that I have touched their lives over the years. I also became thankful for the many blessings that I have in my life—starting with my wife and kids and extending way out from here. From the standpoint of giving me energy and vitality the class was a great success.

One reason that I wanted to attend was to reinvigorate my connection with the OSR community. This community encompasses all of the past OSR master alumni, the two current classes, and future classes to come. I was able to rekindle some relationships and to build some new connections today as half the participants were current students and half were previous students. From this standpoint it was a great success.

Providing strength for a positive perspective on getting this warn notice was not anticipated. This positive perspective looks at it as opening the door to opportunity—opportunity to create the next phase of my career in way that is more life affirming and better aligned to what is important to me in this phase of my life. This was a mostly unanticipated outcome of the exercise, the reading and the class today.

The guilt comes from questioning whether I shouldn’t be staying home and sending out resumes and scanning all the job ads. Writing cover letters and applying for jobs. Why am I spending time writing blogs, building networks in Boeing to help others, going to classes that will not affect my resume? All this life affirming, phase of life crap is fine to think about buddy, but you need a job. Maybe you should of thought about that sometime in the last the 21 years, now is time for quick action. This was the dilemma playing out I my head. Today, I chose to attend the session and I think the rewards were worth it. I’m sure this dilemma will continue to play out.

InSite group IT People with Warn Notices is at 38 members and growing.

PS - Learning Blogging and making changes as I go. Hope to have this tool down in after some more posts.