Coach Brizan and Associates

Paul's mysticism was not like the mysticism elsewhere described as a soul being at one with God. In the mysticism he felt and encouraged, there is no loss of self but an enriching of it; no erasure of time or place but a comprehension of how time and place fit within the eternal.

THE MYTH OF POWER

Joseph Campbell defines the function of a mythology as the provision of a cultural framework for a society or people to educate their young, and to provide them with a means of coping with their passage through the different stages of life from birth to death.
Thus, myth has the kind of power that can galvanize cultures and various societal subsets such as teams and leaders into momentary heroes, or developing powerful responses to dealing effectively with many of the issues of life.

The myth of power is a very different matter. This powerful myth is not dissimilar to the myth of instructive interaction wherein we believe that people respond to the instructions in our communication rather than their interpretation of those instructions.

According to George Bateson, "...the myth of power is a myth, which, if everybody believes in it, becomes to that extent self-validating." I find that in our tt culture there is an obsession with smallness and an intense desire to keep down to manageable size anyone who dares to challenge the prevailing order as obsolete and irrelevant.

I thought my diverse ('out of the box') background would bring richness to our leadership class. What I discovered was envy and intolerance. From my training at Sandhurst to my spiritual discovery of stardust, my trouble has been good trouble, but hard when your livelihood is attacked and demolished as fair game. With interpersonal quarrels, performance is compromised and organizational results become confused with personal objectives.

The myth of power is very different from the power of myth.

Neil Giuseppi here's post Richard Jackman inspired:
Post by : David Brizan

Verbing the Noun

We live in a culture in which our narratives are dominated by nouns. So, it feels counterintuitive to "verb the nouns." In particular though you are unlikely to "find" an existing community of "verb loving" doers running the show. They are generally marginalized as "bossy", "not-very-sociable" and so on. I heard an HR head say "...They leave a lot of dead bodies in their wake!"

Unless you have revolutionary blood running through your veins and you have deep pockets, your best bet might be to live with the quiet fervour of your vision of a transformed community of action-language users while continuously recalibrating those linguistic ideals with the cultural reality in which your mission is to be accomplished. That's the best compromise I can suggest.

Alternatively, you could adopt the "take no prisoners" approach of Richard Jackman of the 1990's TCL, and see what gives. Think it through with both people and primary mandate in mind, select a course of action, then go for it!

YOU ARE THERE

I spurted to life
From a prophetic s***m
Now the periphery widens
Like a contagious germ
Out out and up up
Life lives on unrelenting wings
Out and up all things
Up till the core dissipates
With the sum of regretted years
A sudden plummeting of vision betrays
the reality, the regretted fears
Yet in the pursuit of each dream
You are there. How elusive you seem!

For Neil Giuseppi in partial praise of Richard Jackman.

In 2006, I delivered lectures on the subject of CHANGE to various department heads at three University of the West Indies (UWI) Campuses - Mona, Cave Hill, and St Augustine. Upon invitation to deliver the lectures, I was under the impression that the cream of our academic crop would be open to a nontraditional view of the impact of language on paradigmatic shifts in culture, beginning with a frontal assault on the chokehold that the familiar cultural distinctions held on our ability to "see" opportunities for transformation.

I was interested in deep change, and wrongly assumed that our change leaders were similarly inclined. Think again.

The participants, various Deans and Department Heads, were mostly interested in a mildly curious encounter with a Sandhurst trained, New York Certified Public Accountant, who now professed an ability to deliver deep change. A likely story, it seemed.

To my horror, my nontraditional view on change, premised on the work of the evolutionary biologist, Humberto Maturana met a quiet derision, no different than some of the earlier commercial managers/leaders had displayed.

I delivered the lectures, and never heard from the University again. They defended their tradition, politely, and continued their business of traditional education. One of the participants subsequently published an article in the Guardian Newspaper, the contents of which plunged into plagiaristic peeks of my doctoral thesis on language and organizational transformation. I was never cited as a contributor to his essay.

My ability to successfully deliver this work had for more than a decade before been established in the commercial sector, TCL being the primary case in point. But, surprisingly, it was a white American, Tim Nazfiger, encouraged by his ANSA Mc AL CEO, Richard Jackman, who contracted me to deliver a series of transformational workshops to bring the Carib Brewery to dominance in the beverage industry. You would think that such success would have inspired academic observers. Think again.

Dr. Maturana had warned me that human beings, not excluding academicians, are committed to conserve, not to change, as an evolutionary response.

YOU ARE THERE
(A poem by David Brizan)

I spurted to life
From a prophetic s***m
Now the periphery widens
Like a contagious germ
Out out and up up
Life lives on unrelenting wings
Out and up all things
Up till the core dissipates
With the sum of regretted years
A sudden plummeting of vision betrays
the reality, the regretted fears
Yet in the pursuit of each dream
You are there. How elusive you seem!

SOME THOUGHTS ON SPONTANEITY

After graduating from the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, I could not have envisioned what life held in store. An academic life? A poet? A qualified coach? A University lecturer? Certainly not unjust imprisonment. But I was happy to go along with whatever life presented. Later I learned that acting with spontaneity might mean doing something without thinking it through beforehand. This is not the favorite model of good planners. But some philosophers believe that genuine novelty can occur in a world of blind, contingent, mechanical forces. For example, cosmic rays spontaneously scramble the atoms in a DNA molecule and send things off in the direction of the bougainvillea, the orchids or the anthropoids. “The orchids, when their time comes, are no less marvelous for the sheer contingency of this necessary condition of their existence.” So too for us humans: cosmic rays are scrambling the fine structure of some crucial neurons in our brains all the time. How else do we account for a Winsford Devine, Mozart or Vincent van Gogh? Surely not by planning, because no matter how carefully a project is planned, something may still go wrong with it. The poet Robert Burns believed that the best laid plans of mice and men go awry. What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup. And it is way over the rim that spontaneity emerges.

I discovered that to remain open to spontaneity is to deem luck as worthy of determining your fate. In one sense, you pave the way for spontaneity and its various incantations, i.e., luck, coincidence, fluke, windfall, opportunity, blessing, luckiness, and chance. We must follow Freud and deem chance as worthy of determining our fate.

My health coach, Nazeer Sultan, reminds me to remain curious, bending with the creative arc of the Universe toward surprises. This may be the way evolution reminds us of our own foibles, gently tugging us back to laughter, the one remaining effective weapon in our arsenal of survival responses. Mark Twain believed that the human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.

Can you see that all life is a process of creation, destruction, and re-creation? You and I, while mere participants in this relentless march of inevitability, can learn much about spontaneity from such a natural model. Spontaneously.

Rather, in that phenomenal moment, we are dancing in heightened individual consciousness with the blind impress of life. In this dance, we can waltz between domains of empowerment and the familiar fences of social constructs and cultural conduct. No divine insight will nudge us, but we will do best to adopt an attitude of plasticity and be prepared to pounce on opportunities for personal growth and change.

Constructive living is living with the willingness to take on, ahead of time, without knowing what will happen, the responsibility to see that, whatever happens turns out to be the opportunity of a lifetime. This ability to dance with what life presents puts you in the unique position of appreciating your role as the choreographer of your own life in coordination with the choreographer of all life.

The man in the mirror.

Gandhi advocated a model of an oceanic circle of interdependencies, in which interlocking circles work together ecologically, in an alignment of wholes. Genius calypsonian, the Mighty Sparrow, sings magnificently about just such a model in his calypso on our interdependence. He had a vision of an ecology of selfhood. "Without you, there is no me," one line goes. Whatever life is or gives, we are all in it together. We are in the universe just as much as the universe is in us. This is all I mean by an ecology of selfhood. Period.

What you call "I" depends on this ecology of selves, and the social constructs of meaning. Race? Color? In the passage of time, we will grow into a way of seeing that will make our current perspective seem weird and incomprehensible.

Keep looking at the man in the mirror.

While science teaches no moral lessons and provides no spiritual comfort, the beauty for me is that science is riveted to a utility factor and resulting knowledge clings to a consensus in the scientific community, subject to alterations based on future research and new discoveries. Its inventions are redefined in time, so that for example Newtonian understanding of gravity as a force at a distant was reconfigured by Einstein's general theory of relativity and the curvature of space/time.
Most scientific interpretations get superceded in time.
My love of science, even though I am a Leadership and Life Empowerment Coach, is based on my philosophy of pragmatism a la Richard Rorty. There is great value in faith particularly when accompanied by works, but I have a working preference for evidence and experience.
Darwin's concept of the survival of the fittest has been misunderstood to apply to a Nietzschean Superman type, where he was referring to the evolutionary endowment of developing more appropriate genetic strains for species survival.

Both science and religion are social constructs and both have contributed to social progress and social degradation. The question for me is not about their revelation of the Truth (that we can never know) but about the utility of their evidential facts and their values. I judge with one question: What is the impact of any system of thought, scientific or religious, on my ability to show up in the world with maximum empowerment, love and compassion?

PULSE - WHAT GOD IS TO ME
(EAT YOUR CAKE AND STILL HAVE IT)
Coach Brizan

Ordinarily, the word GOD provokes too much mischief. All religions have named and defined this omnipotent, omniscient, ubiquitous spirit differently, teaching their own belief systems, with limited concepts that necessarily fall short of adequately capturing this immensely and indescribably inexhaustible energy source.

While philosophers ponder on the question of whether God made us or did we make God, I think of GOD as the Principle of Unconditional Love and Spiritual Energy (PULSE)

Long before humans evolved and acquired language to facilitate its recognition, this SOURCE was there...there, PULSE-ing. In other words, we “BE” before we acquired language to mess up our divinity. So, meditation is a means by which we abandon language to let BEING reveal its presence to us, and help us recover our cosmic gift.

Having maintained a sustained and committed enquiry into the nature of this Universal and immense cosmic energy source, I declare: PULSE is my God. Caution - My declaration is for me, one man once, in furtherance of my life as an exemplar. I lay no claim to objective knowledge of anything.

I have come to the realization that GOD as BEING is not simply the absence of social constructs but the presence of PULSE - the Principle of Unconditional Love and Spiritual Energy.

This is one of those rare instances when you may eat your cake and have it too.

In the end, when we arrive at our individual final moment, what will matter is one answer to the only question we should have asked all along: "Did I enjoy my life?" If evolution could care, like humans often pretend to care, it would be dismissive of our platitudes and pretensions; no religious matters would matter; it would be both blind and deaf to the objects of our complaints. In the final analysis, you succeeded if you participated blissfully in blissful replication of the species; if you hugged and kissed with deep and quiet urgency; if you laughed violently at how stupid you were, believing in flat earth, heaven, and hell, and all the transient social constructs that marked your ignorance. Evolution trudged on...faithful only to its unname-able mission and leaving you to named distractions. Blissful enjoyment is all that matters.