#5 Act with impact? Work with yourself!
It’s not about knowing, not about the answer. Acting with impact is about asking the right questions and understanding that we are fully responsible for the world we live in. Only then can we create l
If you want to know what you could or should do: Welcome! There’s an easy answer: Shut down your device, lay down all your tools, sit down, and wait. Be patient. Give space, not to the answer, but to the question that wants to be asked.
You make yourself helpless if you believe there’s someone outside to help and guide you. If you want to act with impact, you must take everything to yourself and see it as an expression of your life. Your self is the only gate to the greater one who can provide you with guidance and creativity. You might remember it from the first part of this series: Your consciousness is the key. And it’s a place of solitude and self-responsibility. You have to find your answer by yourself. Or, as Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote: „Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.“1 So, on unfamiliar ground is not about the five things you need to know to be more efficient. It’s about a few principles that might help you understand and gain clarity.
The most important principle is the relation between inner and outer:
How far you can reach depends on your inner order and the quality of your consciousness.
Your outer world reflects your inner world. It points you to the work you have to do.
The work is always from inside to outside.
Now, you can look at this dynamic from various angles:
The first one is personal – it’s all about accountability, self-leading, and the coming into being of your consciousness. It’s about the space you give to yourself to get in touch with you and learn to teach yourself and thrive. It’s the step from an outward-oriented mind, trying to meet every expectation, to a mind grounded in its values, which finds its guidance in itself, in the silent communication with itself, and the universal intelligence, of which the self is only an expression.
The second concerns the fundamental drivers that rule your consciousness and worldview. These are the metaphors and paradigms you live by2. They differ between me and you, but they are not only personal. They are simultaneously individual and social. Through metaphors, your social context has shaped you since the beginning of your life, and you shape other people in their social context. That’s why metaphors and paradigms are central to every far-reaching transformation.3
So, you must explore metaphors and paradigms, how they work, and who they are. You need to understand how deeply they are inscribed in your body and how deeply they influence your daily decisions. By doing this, you can open a space for new paradigms to evolve so that you can act from new premises instead of carrying the old ones with you.The third is all about relationships. Life is nothing other than relationships. Everything happens there: Birth and growth, along with destruction and death. It’s the encounter and its quality that defines what’s possible. And it’s in these relationships where we need to define a different place for ourselves as humans. For over a thousand years, humans (at least in the Western world) have lived by the premise that it’s our goal and our job to control nature. We are at the peak of creation. And that defines all our relationships – to ourselves, nature, and our fellows. But we aren’t the peak of nature; we are just a part of it, unable to survive without all the other parts. And all together, we are embedded in something far beyond us. That is what we have to embody. That’s what Rilke is talking about. If we try to live the question, we accept our boundaries and open ourselves to the guidance of the greater intelligence we are part of.
Lastly, it is about our concrete work and what we can do: Allow nature to regenerate. Rebuild our societies on healthy foundations and principles. Restore communities and overcome the isolation we build into our social fabric. Allow space in all your relationships so that the unknown may show up. As simple as it is, start where you are with what you have. Besides that, there’s nothing else; it’s the best you have and can do. Whatever you are doing, you are always working on all these aspects simultaneously.
And don’t forget: take it from here to take your road. It might be possible that you find something different. And that’s a central part of it.
We’ll start something new next week. In the meantime, I’d be happy to learn more about you. How can I help your work become more far-reaching?
Thank you for your precious being.
Warmly,
Gabriel
Rilke, R.M. & Kappus, F.X. (1954) Letters to a young poet. New York.
Lakoff, G., Johnson, Mark. (2003) Metaphors We Live By.
Meadows, D. (1999) Leverage points. Places to Intervene in a System.