Purpose

I just read "Heroic Leadership: Best Practices From A 450 Year Old Company That Changed The World" by Chris Lowney.

He is a former Jesuit priest turned corporate investment banker. He describes Jesuit practices of how to become a better leader and one of the practices is to meditate for 5 minutes three times a day.

I wish to record the meat of my meditations...to keep me focused and moving forward.

The first focus is that divine love pours out into the world without end. It is not a limited quantity. This means knowing I and everyone around me is a "loved person of unique dignity and potential...". I don't have to respect the person but I do need to respect their divine spirit.

The next focus is to meditate on my key personal goals. Career, Relationships, Financial, Home.

The next focus is to take stock of my actions thus far in the day to see if they helped me reach my long term goals or moved me in the opposite direction. In the words of Al-Anon or AA, take a "fearless moral inventory" twice a day based on my actions. And if they were in the opposite direction to ask for divine help in moving me in the right direction.

The final focus is a "restless drive to imagine a greater project, or a better way of accomplishing the current problems". It also touches on motivation. What goals motivate you that you would go beyond 100% effort to achieve them. That idea of athletes going beyond what they thought possible to achieve the impossible.

So the meditations are:

-Key goals
-Divine Love
-Fearless moral inventory
-Motivation

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

13 April 2011

I am having a bit of a crisis of conscience at the moment. The realization hit me yesterday and I meditated on it this morning that if I pursue my path of saving lives through better engineering design and using the human factors ideas, I am not sure how much traction I am going to get within the Petroleum industry. And if I can't get traction can I actually get a job doing this. This is part of the meditation and staying focused on the goal and not the issues which come up, but it is really tough when my fear of being homeless and unemployed and unemployable is causing all kinds of sticking points.

LOVE:
The divine loves me and will love me no matter what I do. It is my choice to trust in that love and trust that my best outcome is in their hands. I do what I can do and they will reach the rest of the way to help me. I have to trust that!

GOAL:

For the moment the goal remains the same. Although I do need/want to add something about resilience engineering. This idea that you can't predict how humans will fail, but you can design your system to be as resilient as possible and trust that no matter how humans "mismanage the systems into catastrophic failure" the system will be resilient enough to handle the mismanagement!

INVENTORY:

My inventory today is not trusting enough that my passion and energy is enough to see me gainfully employed before I graduate, so I have a job to jump into as soon as my thesis is done! I am going to turn this over. I can't seem to get the trusting the divine part down. It trips me up again and again.

MOTIVATION:

I am writing this post instead of studying for an exam because the studying is pissing me off and pointing out how much I don't know and how much I am not getting taught. It really does get on my nerves and I end up feeling very stupid. Ah, something else (a digression) to turn over. My feeling stupid if I don't understand something immediately. And then the habit I have of berating myself about how stupid I am instead of focusing on how to learn the material. Oh yeah, that is a good one to turn over.

Ok, motivation, I am highly motivated to learn new things and learn about risk avoidance, risk mitigation and post accident recovery! That has been a staple for years, why am I thinking that will change! Ok, off to teach myself about hydraulic fracturing.
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