Empowering ourselves through becoming a leader of ourselves and searching for understanding.

Many people are currently looking at our complex 1st Century world with high levels of anxiety and even fear. If if we perceive this world as chaotic and out of control we will be ever more anxious. Too many young and thoughtful people are currently feeling this way. There are two major emotions that will dominate our feelings when we look at our world and contemplate our future. One is fear and one is hope. For many this fear is accompanied by a sense of helplessness or even by depression. And becoming depressed can further undermine our capacity to become resilient. We fear the future most when we don't understand what is going on. With knowledge, we become more powerful. If we can understand we can find meaning and purpose that can engender hope and trigger meaningful action to ensure we can survive or, even better, thrive. One of my favourite future thought-shaping devices is the sailor's maxim. If you are in a sailing boat you need to understand what the wind is doing. All wind shifts will simultaneously provide changing levels of threats and opportunities. But even the challenging wind shifts can take you where you want to go if you have the right sailing knowledge and you can use this to take you where you want to go. But you also must also know where want to go! It is a fact that any wind shift will be an ill wind shift to a sailor who has no course' My curriculum of future knowledge can provide similar knowledge to empower you to shape your future and the world's future even if we sometimes find our task to be very daunting. We make decisions both as the manager in each of us and as the leader in each of us. To me, management perfection is the resilient change taker/future taker. Leadership Perfection on the other hand is the purposeful change maker /future maker. Our first responsibility in developing our management and leadership skills is to become an example manager and leader of self. Becoming an exemplary leader and manager-of-self enables us to maximise our self-empowerment to deal with change and shape the future. And the other capability we need to grow to overcome our fear of the future is, to seek to understand trends and what is causing and shaping them. In my previous blogs, I have shown how we can understand how global trends are shaping our global politics. I have described how our political world is being shaped by two opposite reactions to ongoing globalisation and global integration. Some see it as an opportunity and some see it as a threat. This can give us a clear understanding of global ends and provide the meaning and purpose to guide our actions we can contribute to building a future world that is worthy of the best of humanity, rather than the worst of humanity. This worst of humanity group who see global change as a threat is exemplified by Trump, Putin, Orban, Le Pen , the Brexiters , the Mullars of Iran and the Taliban. Note do not mention China. I have a different view of China to many which I will describe in a future blog. Finally a reminder! All of this and more is described in my book which I hope you will consider buying.

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