Circles of influence
There is a connection between an intentional life and a greener world, and this 5 part series explores that connection.
Spend your time wisely – intentionally. One of my pet peeves is the person who complains they just don’t have time to do that thing they claim they really want to do (travel, go to the gym, read more…). Even if you discount the typical 8 hours a day you are required to be paying attention to someone else’s goals (work), and the hours needed for eating and sleeping, that still leaves you around 4 hours per day to do what you think is most important (and yes, if you have children then I should hope they count highly on your list). And that doesn’t even include weekends, holidays, or vacations. I understand that sometimes work or other people’s issues take more time, those hours are not so easily contained. But what really gets me is when it is quite obvious that they really just can’t be bothered to make the effort to make the change they say they want.
It’s easy to make changes in your life. It’s as easy as changing your mind. Start by paying attention. Make that list. Prioritize it. Begin living it. What will you do differently? What are you already doing that you will do more of, allow more time for?
This inward-looking process allows you to create your best life, one that will sustain you as you move forward in the world. One that you can look back on knowing that you really did the best you could. When I speak of the sustainable future, I am thinking of a very grand scale – the macroscopic scale of sustainable in the sense that this planet will continue to be able to support all of us (life as we know it now) – all the way down to the microscopic scale of our own capability to sustain our own selves, our own souls. As an individual, you have complete control only over that microscopic scale.
What about this idea of influence? “Leading by example” is a cliché, but it is absolutely true. Who sees your example everyday? Your children certainly do. Your coworkers, your friends, neighbors… even total strangers. You really never know when someone else is receptive to learning from you, so you are actually teaching (leading) all the time.
Stephen Covey, of “7 Habits” fame, articulated in that book an idea of a “circle of influence.” Place yourself in the center of the circle, then draw concentric circles outward like ripples around a pebble tossed into a calm lake. Each circle includes a larger number of people as it moves away from you – the closest circle representing your immediate family, then friends, then coworkers, etc. In theory I think it is closely related to the “6 degrees of separation” idea. It would be an interesting experiment to identify someone on one of your circles “6 degrees” separated from you. Think of a way that you could influence that person, then see how long it takes for your influence to be felt….
This idea is so basic, so simple, that it is hard to believe that it can work. But there is an underlying physics (so to speak), a natural way of interrelating that totally supports this theory. It is an interesting fact of “natural engineering” – how nature builds itself, and builds sustainability into itself –the notion of interrelated scales, or “scale linking” (term coined by Van der Sym). More on this next time!
