I haven’t left this blog for dead but I am currently working on a side project called “My Name is Courage.” I am attempting to face fear a day and blog about conquering fears. Check it out at http://www.mynameiscourage.com

Also I am preparing to release my first ebook in three parts. I really appreciate you’re support and conversation.

Cheers,
Justin

Since owning the Mac I have been experimenting with Garage Band quite a lot (in fact the first night we got it I was up late). The spoken word mix is result of that. Its bit out there and as always it isn’t done but I wanted to release it. I will write a full blog later its just time I release it to the wild to see if it can survive the wilderness.

I am radio from Justin Blass on Vimeo.

A few months ago my friend Benn and I were having a conversation about the power of words. We were both testing our thoughts out on each other, ideas still forming, blunt objects we wielded with caution. We were wrestling with the power of written word and the spoken word. It would seem at least upon first glance that the written word rules our day. Its a timeless, “eternal” offering, that allows the person to move from body to page and for a moment inhabit these small black shapes.



I am challenged by the fact that I can still remember that conversation. I remember how it felt sitting on the couches drinking beer after a hard days work. I remember how it felt sharing our honest, naked thoughts. Disregarded the need to dress up ideas to make them presentable. The conversation hangs with me, the memory now a friend itself, in a way that a book cannot.

This is not to say books are not powerful and that writing does not have the possibility of beauty (I am typing away after all). Words have power whether written or spoken. But I think I far underestimate the power of conversation.

An author I am reading currently says it like this, “Words link spirits.  Reduced to writing and left there, words no longer do what they are designed to do – create and maintain personal relationships of intelligence and love. When a word is spoken and heard, it joins the speaker and hearer into a whole relationship; when it is written and read, it is separated into grammatical fragments  and has to be reconstituted by the imagination in order to accomplish its original work.” (Eugene Peterson)

I am challenged to live both on the page and in the spoken reality. I have tended to find comfort between the lines, encouraged by the page’s patient listening. Perhaps I have missed out on the beauty that gets breathed into each of our words.

When was your last meaningful conversation?

It’s funny what draws our attention? Their “policy”, if you could call it that, of course stands out in the normal two-week model that I believe most people working in the US experience.

I have the feeling a lot of people put their hands up to work at Netflix after hearing this and that alone should say something. If you’re a manager perhaps you just scoffed and shook your head.

Having no set amount of vacation days in the current mode of understanding organisations is very, very scary. Most would believe this would be a fatal decision for a company or organization. And it most likely would be if they would be using one of the popular models.

The problem is once you watch the presentation you realise that their model is step in a whole different direction or maybe better understood as built from a whole different set of assumptions.  They appear to fit more in line with the intrinsic model presented in Drive.  And to be honest a lot us that put our hands up at the beginning might now be ducking in the corner.

Check out the presentation here. See what you think for yourself. Thanks Benn for this link.

Did anyone feel the fear creep in?

I know I did. All the sudden the insecurities can surface. Questions start bubbling to the surface: Would I make it in this model? Do I have anything to offer?

Perhaps even more troubling is the people who are highly motivated are people who care deeply about something. This question is one I haven’t been able to shake: What do I care about?

There is something dangerous about this intrinsic motivation idea, something that cuts behind the cheap vinyl veneer I often hide behind: the world of status quo effort.

That’s when it hit me, I believe: Caring = resistance.

Caring changes things and maybe we have been aware of this and it is why so many of us have stopped caring. It pulls us into action. It often calls us into the unknown, beyond our abilities. It takes us away from the norm into spaces rarely travelled. It argues back against all the voices inside of us that tell us that change is impossible or just too hard.

Unfortunately, from a motivator’s view I don’t know if you can tell people what to care about. It seems to be something we all have to choose. If you’re like me you feel the weight of this day-to-day, where you are repeatedly doing things you don’t care about.  It becomes harder to swim upstream against the river of apathy.

Take an honest moment. Let your inner critic and filter have the next few minutes off. And ask with me, what do you really care about?

For most of us guilt and shame are up there in our top feelings to avoid. I generally run from them with great haste. When you are ashamed of something you’ve done or been caught with your hand in the cookie jar it seems that the sky itself is falling. Do you know the feeling? We lose our ability to accurately perceive the severity of events and we can either turn ant hills into mountains or try to convince ourselves the icebergs are just cubes. Either refusing to address the action that triggered the feeling or making the implications more than we can handle. Anyone with me?

Some of us have been feeling guilty our whole lives and we don’t really know why.

A much wiser friend said that if you are going to grow into a healthy person you must learn to “make guilt and shame your friend.” I am not a fan of this language. It was used by previous generations per say, I don’t really want to go out have a beer and play some pool with my guilt, the idea doesn’t work for me. But once I got past my friend’s language I was stuck. His challenge was this:

What if guilt and shame are not something that is working against you but something that is simply sending you a signal; like a nerve?

I was intrigued. Okay I thought? That doesn’t really change too much I guess. I still don’t like the signal and what really is it signalling?

He continued, “Guilt and shame are the nervous system of our conscience.” Alright so what does this mean? Again seems pretty straight forward.

As I was chewing on it something inside of me started to click:

What if your guilt and shame are simply signals to you that you are not being true to yourself?

What if guilt and shame are the way to keep you on a story arch that is developing you into the character you want to be?

This may not be that ground breaking for you, but I was in the right space for this message. The issue doesn’t lie with guilt and shame even though they may have been our scapegoat for many years now. The problem lies in the fact that many of us don’t know what to do with these signals. We don’t know what were about. We are character without stories.

As a kid we may absorb the collective conscience or story of our family and our culture. But we don’t stay in that world forever. You visit a friend’s family. Go to a different culture. And you start to wonder what do I believe about the world and about myself?

These questions are not easy to wrestle through. It’s like trying to put together Inception after just one watch, there are so many pieces to makes sense of.  Perhaps the reason we run away from guilt and shame is that we have never been able to figure out what we care about. Not what we have been told to care about, but we care about. We will run to avoid the awareness the we in fact don’t really know what were about. We hide in different groups who simply let us be until something triggers this response and then we move on. Or at least I have and continue to.

I am attempting to come to terms with guilt and shame as triggers and develop my conscience built after what I believe. The challenge lies understanding the story I want to live out.

So what about you? Who do you want to be? What story do you want to live out of?

I  was hanging out with a friend not to long ago, who has an iPad for “work.” I was messing around with this giant toy and ended up reading the e-version of Wired Magazine. They had an article from a guy called Dan Pink who had written a recent book called Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. A flag went off in my mind and I thought the iPad may have some use outside giant Angry Birds.

I had recently sat with a group of friends discussing the movement of our tribe. We were sharing stories and casting vision for the future. At some point somebody offered some thoughts in an attempt to direct our thinking that made me wince a bit. The words touched a sore spot from the past, a bruise. I have since forgotten what they actually said but I know the result was a feeling of guilt. In their words I felt the cold snap of the guilt stick used to get me back on page. It is unlikely the person intended to inflict such a feeling of guilt but it got me thinking; is guilt the only way faith communities can motivate? Is this the only way we as individuals can motivate?

And so after reading a bit of the article I decided to pick up the audio book of Drive  and had a listen. After reading a book you realize the the tough work is still ahead of you and my mind is still trying to bring the idea home. But I would love more in the conversation. Check out the TED talk from Dan Pink.

Post thoughts and questions: It has often been said that faith communities tend to mirror the business world and when you chew on the motivation tactics used by many faith communities there is striking similarity. Although it may not be financial gain, carrots and sticks are still the tools of choice for primary motivators.  To some degree I think there are layers (motivation for change and motivation to sustain for ongoing change). Often sticks are used to wake people up from the slumber. Dan in fact is speaking in a way that seeks to inform change by saying one way isn’t actually working. We as people often learn through conflict.  So there is much to land in the art of motivation both in terms of self and communities. So what do you think?

Let me know how you think an intrinsically motivated community might look. How do autonomy and community work together? How does the implication of carrots and sticks change the goals we set and the way we pursue them? Does the role of autonomy, mastery, and purpose change the very language we use when encouraging one another?

My friends and I have been on a journey looking into the practices or disciplines that lead people to experience a more “full” life. Whether it is possible to fill the glass of life to overflow is another conversation. The whole conversation has got me thinking: Have you ever stopped and wondered if you think growth or learning or development is possible? Can you really change or grow into something more than you currently know?

Most of my experiments with goal setting and adding new disciplines in my life ends soon after it begins. The bottle rocket life of goal setting. You get a spark of inspiration and you start letting your dreams fly and take off into them only to see the dream burst into pieces soon after. Leaving you thinking that you are just stuck floating through life without much say in the process. But what if this is the necessary step in pursuing any change in life?

My challenge tonight is to push myself beyond the ashes of bottle rocket dreams. What would it take to pick up the pieces and begin again?

Weeks passed quickly in the repetition of sitting and standing, reading and writing, and irruptions of noise in hallways before returning to their silence. The loop was broken with a letter arriving in the mail, the exam’s results. She felt the warmth leave her skin, as if her body was preparing for shock. As she fumbled the letter open her eyes took in what her body had prepared for; failure. She didn’t score high enough to get into any university. She shrugged it off and immediately slammed the letter down on the table. She ran up to her room and cried. Something inside of her felt colder after that day.

She finished the year and continued on through her last year of high school. She had grown fairly apathetic about school all together. She floated by class to class, moved by the bell like herded cattle, indifferent to everything going on around her. She always snuck out of one her lectures for a smoke. Today was like any other day in the cattle drive. Bell, shuffle, stare. Bell, shuffle, stare. She then came to the unaware lecturer and snuck off when his back was turned to the class. She ducked around the outside of the building and put a cigarette in her mouth and beginning to light it. As she looked up through the smoke her eyes went wide, a teacher was out smoking a pipe. She froze like a deer in head lights.

“Don’t worry. I am not supposed to be out here either.” he said looking out into the trees in the distance.

The girl continued to smoke and lean on the wall attempting to keep her gaze from the teacher but found herself sneaking looks. She thought he was the English teacher that thought the advanced class but she didn’t really know him or if she could trust him.

“So you needed to clear your head too?” he asked breaking the silence that was growing awkward.

She shook her head no, looked at him for a moment and said “I just don’t see a point in keeping the facade. My fate is already sealed.” She found her fingers pulling at the edges of her cigarette pack, she was suddenly aware of her emotion. The teacher no longer stared into the distance but directed his gaze at the girl.

“And why is that?” he said.

“I didn’t get into university. I will most likely keep working the job I got. Don’t see any of this much use there.”

His stare was replaced by a warm smile. In her nervousness she smiled back, but was unsure why he was smiling.

“So what happened,” he said while tending to his pipe, “Did some teacher tell you that you wouldn’t amount to anything?” He read her face for signs and she knew he was doing it. He kept pressing, “Or maybe parents told you that you’re not able to take care of yourself.”

She interrupted his questioning “All of the above. But you forgot to add; bombed your entrance exam.” She no longer looked at the teacher but just stared into the distance feeling the memories of that moment tug at her attention and emotions.

The silence seemed to last for minutes, allowing the thoughts to  grow louder in her mind.

“Your light went out.” The teacher said breaking her trance. She checked the cigarette and looked up at him puzzled.

“Your light.” he said “That fire inside. Some call it hope. That hope you had for doing anything meaningful with your life, it died.”

She looked back out to the distance took a long drag of her cigarette and nodded as she exhaled. “I guess you could say that” she concluded, “My light went out.”

“Who put it out.” the teacher pressed.

“They did.” she responded without hesitating “They are obviously aware of what it takes to make something of your life and concluded I don’t got it.”

“So they snuffed out the blaze.” He summarized.

She nodded and became aware that he cheeks felt flush. She looked away from the teacher and took another drag.

“Have you ever gone camping? Made a camp fire?” he asked.

She looked back at him and nodded.

“If you build a fire, a good one, a real ripper and it pours down with rain. Does the rain put it out?”

“Yeah” she said hoping she was keeping him from making some point.

“What about at home, in your fire-place? What happens then?”

“It only goes out when you stop feeding it.” she said staring back at him.

He smiled took one last puff from his pipe and cleaned it out. He began walking back inside. “Your fire is inside you. No one can put it out. Sounds like you just need to tend to it.”

Phil leans back in his lazy boy rocker and tells me the story of why joined the Pencostal movement in New Zealand. I never would have pegged Phil as coming from a Pentacostal background. “It wasn’t just what you said, it was how you lived,” his words bounced in my head as he gave me his calculated look. I often think he can see right into my head and knows I will be interested in the conversation. “Its stands apart from the Evangelical movement, which says to ‘believe the right thing’; this was a group of people who were asking how to live the right way. That’s why I joined.” He never looks uncomfortable putting his thoughts out there. It’s not just some off the cuff thought either; it rolls out refined from many years of pondering and conversations. I feel I often let thoughts fly widely, spraying bullets frantically into the night, Phil snipes, takes aim and shoots. I let it sink in, his shot intentional or not, was on target. I knew that the thought wouldn’t be leaving me soon. My trance was broken by Phil’s fluffy white dog’s bark at the door. Kobe looks like an oversized dusting feather, not the animal you would picture walking with a trained builder, is another aspect of Phil I could never quite peg.

The thoughts from the conversation have stuck with me and somehow waded their way through the noise. As I was focusing on my work a thought sparked. ”It’s like we think when you die, you float up to somewhere, and there is a single desk on the cloud, a number two pencil and a floating clock. St Peter looks more like that history teacher who used to bore you to sleep and shows up with an exam in his hand. “You have three hours” he says with a look that says don’t waste time wondering about pointless questions. The exam is sealed so you try and open it with the pencil and break it in half, it always happens in the movies.

You look up at St Peter and he just looks at the clock and then back at you. You realize in this moment; your whole life has been one long lesson and now it’s time for the test. You flip open the exam and grab your now half pencil. The first question; “Who was the second son of Abraham?” Not too bad, you answer C, just thankful to see the question was multiple choice. Moving on, “How many beings are in the trinity?” Okay this isn’t so bad. “How many gods do you believe in?” “If one seems to contradict the other which one do you listen to?” “Who should you address your prayers to?” You palms start to sweat. Frightened you realize you are only in the general knowledge section and that there essays coming up; one to write a proof for the necessity for the atonement. You start to look for the door but you’re trapped on this floating cloud. You hear every tick of the clock and you freeze.

I can’t help but wonder if this characterization isn’t at least a little accurate of the picture we have of God. We spent some of the most formative years of our lives thinking that life was about passing examines or training for events. About transmitting information or performing. I wonder if it hasn’t slipped into our understanding of God and life. Many of us got skilled at jumping the hurdles teachers put in front of us only to find that life didn’t just have hurdles, it has all sorts of obstacles, most of which you can’t just jump over. Maybe it’s time we took a step back from following Professor Jesus and possible follow the Rabbi. If you wondering what that looks like, then I would say you starting to ask a good question.

A friend sent me a link today to a RadioLab podcast called “Shorts: Gone.” It tracks a poet’s journal as he traces the last moments with his partner. I was engrossed. Not only have I myself paniced at the thought of death but there was a spark in his words; something I couldn’t shake.  My brain tried to distract itself with other worries; friends I had disappointed or tension that I can’t seem to resolve, but the narrators voice kept pulling at my attention. There was such beauty, pain, and fear in the words of a man watching his closest friend breathe his last breaths. Honesty is contagious. The poet’s honesty spills over into my life and I get caught up in its waves.

I pause for a moment afterwards to acknowledge just being in the presence of beauty. I turn on the title track “Sigh No More” by Mumford and Suns, as I give myself an honest moment. My friend recently gave me the album and it has been stuck in my head since. I would be lost without the patience and persistence of friends. On the ride into work today after a passing conversation with a flat mate I felt my energy and confidence fall out  from under me. Blindsided by a seemingly meaningless conversation and I felt as if the floor dropped out and found myself grasping the floor boards of the speeding bus. As my body moved my thoughts hid somewhere inside. But  I wouldn’t let them hide, I found the thought “I am who they say I am” curled up in the corner of my mind. Living life above a sink hole.

I don’t know about you but I have a problem; untested theories. When I was young I remember my parents telling me I had a knack for reading people. I think it went to my head. Most of us are aware that were communicating a lot more that just our words. Our thoughts and stories spark from our brains to our muscles and our bodies play the puppet to communicate the things inside. Have you ever stopped to realize what people are offering you when they share space and time?

This has often paralyzed me. I began to believe that others know me better than I do and I will one day see what they see. More often than not, I just read their interactions with me and theorize who they think I am, I live out of that crudley drawn picture. The result is feeling complete powerlessness. Inside I am begging others to tell me who I am.  How do you know who you are?

There is truth in the idea of the blind spot,  the “you” others see and you don’t.  However to let other tell you who you are is one step closer to losing yourself completly.  I am in a fight for myself. But as I starting fighting for myself is when I realise I am fighting for you as well. This is a battle of global significance. Respecting yourself and discovering who you are, what you care about, has the potential to enable you to treat others the same. 

 I can’t help but wonder if the reason I have found it so hard to really care for others is because I have never really cared or respected myself? And then I realise that I have been a living cliche.