There’s a lot to be said about optimism and its power to inspire courage in spite of the apparent odds. It’s an unwillingness to be intimidated.

At the root of courage is commitment to make the difference we want to see in our world.

Working with five teams today in a health care product manufacturing company, it once again became obvious that it takes a lot of ideas to get to good ideas.

That’s what’s so insane about conversations where people spend time jawing over a couple of ideas as if that has any value in the creative process. We need to get how diversity of ideas leads to quality of ideas. Not debate over the one true idea from two or three.

It’s an interesting day to face death straight on, without filters or defenses. Darkness giving definition to light. Death invites us to look at life with full consciousness and take responsibility for the life we have been given.

In my Appreciative Teamwork workshop today, one of the more engaged participants, overtly passionate about new learning, talked about how she spends little time thinking of the past and focuses strongly on her future. She’s a health care administrator and still brings spunk to her world. At 87.

My Zen teachers were fond of pointing out that making judgments is one of the subtlest ways of no longer being in the present.

The logic is simple. All judging is based on comparison, and comparison requires that we leave the present for past or future.

No one can decide for us when judgment works for us and when it doesn’t. When life requires judgment, it works. When we’re making ourselves miserable with judgment, it’s time to be present.

I think we need another way to understand how States live on the continuum between Red and Blue. We need to get over our adolescent penchant for trying to see everything as either-or.

I’m suggesting Purple States.

Purple, the fusion of blue and red, represents transition from one to the other, as well as a healthy mix of the two without declaring a mandate for either. Which leads me to use the blogsphere to officially declare Ohio a Purple State.

My college buddy Al was telling the story last night of a community meeting he had in one of his development district neighborhoods. They were presenting a whole project of new middle and upper income housing right in a neighborhood of poverty and low income folks that would significantly increase the neighborhood’s density and population.

The presentation complete, Q&A opened with total silence, until someone from the back raised their hand and tendered a question: What will they think of us?

People don’t enter dream space with authenticity because a leader has an agenda for their future. People only come together in dream space when they feel invited by their beliefs that an intentional future is possible.

A favorite line (so far) from the emerging “Dream Space” (the book project I’m currently working on)

I am becoming more clear on what I seem to be good at and what I am not good at. More clarity on strengths reveals more clarity on limits. The key is to stick with what we’re good at.

Met up tonight for a bit with the local community of bloggers that I would describe as salty-smart. It’s an authentic community of practice that shares tips, stories, questions, opinions on blogcraft. It’s how I imagine craft guilds first emerged, a community I am happy to be on the perifery of.