Balancing Rules and Risks

 

Have you noticed how re-directed rules tend to unleash fresh opportunities? It’s much like the flight risks of a baby osprey I observed in PEI this summer. The young bird dipped and dived without hesitation, to simply keep pace with its mother’s lofty exploits. Rather than meet minimal flying standards, the bird soared above its entire fishing village.

How do you stretch your mental wings?  Fly beyond minimal regulations, and innovation moves you upward, much like the soaring osprey.

Fly beyond minimal regulations, and innovation moves you upward

Here are a few mental rules to beat winds of your own upper air:

1.  Risk more – regulate less. Risk on purpose and with passion for a finer future for all. Rather than meet minimal regulations, risk giving, encouraging, and facilitating extravagance in others. Interestingly, your  brain requires dopamine (a reward chemical) to take good risks, and yet dopamine increases symbiotically with each risk you take.

2. Fixate on people around you. Listen with your brain to invite more diverse solutions to pesky problems you or your teams face.  Use personal strengths – to foster talents others possess. I’m hosting  a “Gift-of-the-Magi” event soon to draw out hidden and unused talents of people around me at the moment. What would it take for you to listen more with your brain to facilitate other’s strengths?

Risk on purpose and with passion for a finer future for all.

3. Care and challenge.  Care about others by challenging yourself to see struggles and strengths through their eyes.  To care is to act ethically on each person’s best insights, even those that differ from your beliefs. Did you know that compassion and care come from an intrapersonal intelligence. Or are you aware how this IQ domain increases with each compassionate act?

4. Pull mental power punches. The brain knocks out stress by raising its hormone for wellbeing, serotonin. Even folks who blamed others for their problems in past, can lower stress and transform fault-finding into serotonin’s delightful dividends. Stress simply flees in response to balanced choices that release serotonin’s magical molecules. How so? Watch this!

5. Uncover practices worth cherishing.  Then jump on them. Select top priorities with those around you and then set up a practical strategy to hold yourself accountable to do them. For instance, start a team project daily by trying out possibilities suggested from participants. Each time we act differently, we grow new neuron pathways for more of the same.

Care about others by challenging yourself to see struggles and strengths through their eyes

Unbalanced rules retain a bad rap, and with good reason.  Like I have, you’ve likely experienced broken dictates that reduce you to minimal standards, and tend to rob innovative opportunities.

In contrast, mental alertness prompts you to simply dip and dive like an osprey out for adventure on another fine day.  In response, your brain will begin to unpack new dreams that you and others around you, can cherish.

Worth risking a few dips or dives?

 

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Image credit: thakala / 123RF Stock Photo