Leading Your Life: How is the World Broken?

I wrote before about how your mess is your message. One of the ways a lot of people come to develop the interest, skill and passion that evolves into their big contribution(s) in the world, is through experiences (often very difficult experiences) where they’re awakened to a need in the world, or a sense that something is broken in the world. And they become fascinated with working to satisfy that need or fix that brokenness. And it’s through the fact that they’re so attuned to this “broken-ness” that that devote many hours to understanding it and healing it… and it becomes the thing they can help other people with. Their mess becomes their message.

So here’s another set of questions for you to consider this week:

• From your experience of the world, how is the world broken?
• From your perspective, what’s missing in the world?

I found these questions tough, so I started with drawing instead of writing, and then I wrote my answers afterwards. This is what I came up with:

What I think is broken in the world:

• People all have a “light” they’re meant to bring into the world, but they either don’t realize it’s there, or are too afraid to let it shine.
• People create self-imposed prisons with their own limiting thoughts and stories, and they miss out on so much in life – only because of these self-imposed prisons.
• People look away, disconnect, close up, contract, stiffen up and hide, in an effort to protect themselves from pain, but then they also block the opportunities for connection, learning, intimacy, love, and feeling fully alive. And their fixed-ness and closed-ness only brings more pain, because it prevents them from being able to be responsive and change gracefully in the face of difficulties.
• Closing up in self-protection makes people smaller and more rigid in their thinking, which is often the source of further fear and violence and pain in the world.
• Being afraid makes people act scary, which makes other people afraid, and so they act scary too… and then separation, pain, discrimination and violence are perpetuated in the world.

What did you come up with?

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