Monday, September 26, 2011

BACK TO LIFE!!!

Well, it´s been a while since my last post. I´m still in Colombia but the trip is coming to an end now. Many things have changed and I have a lot of work to do. To start with, please forgive me if you thought I gave up my dreams and abandoned this work. I never did, but the trip was to my inner self like a hurrican. It came and put my entire world upside down, most of the time was an inner struggle that I had to go through in order to get more clarity and let go of so many things. The journey will never stopped, I realised...but the trip made it so evident!!

Anyway...here I am again. When I managed to scape from things and immerse in my world of dream creation, I did work hard. Here are the updates:

  • I made a presentation about the project for a community of social entrepreneurs and innovators in Bogotá. I used the very first draft to have a conversation with one of the founders and got a lot of feedback and hard questions that helped me tons to get a clearer picture of this project. Never got to do the presentation to the entire community, but no need for it yet anyway. I understood that there won't be clients with this business idea. That was probably the highlight from that experience and I'll expand on that when the time comes. I also realized that even if I feel like I understand the BMG process, it has been pretty hard to know what exactly I should say when I am presenting my idea for it to be concise and understandable. 
  • Being an entrepreneur sort of means that I should know about things that I don't. The "mainstream" educational tools to learn about them are not appealing to me. And so I decided to use The Right Brain Business Plan methodology to put together the business model for this project. It has felt like a great complement to the BMG process. It's giving me some balance between too much planning and control, and too much 'dreaming' and inaction. A lot of the process is visual, I've enjoyed it, I've learnt, and I have a folder created by me that makes me feel so connected when I look at it...
  • I hadn't use my BetterMeans account for a while and just recently discovered that the founders had to let it go. It's sad in some way because they have been so much a source of inspiration...Bettermeans has always been in my mind when working on this project, it appears always as both a key partner and the perfect competitor. So I feel some sort of emptiness. At the same time, I've always thought that I had to share this whole project with them, and dream of making them part of the team...so now there is a huge opportunity to do so.
  • Since my post about wanting to start some action right now, I finally had the opportunity to read "The Answer to How is Yes: Acting on what Matters" by Peter Block. One of the main teachings I got from it is: Our culture is obsessed with doing and dismisses deep thought and the time it requires. So, it's not that I won't act now, but it'll take the time it needs to take. In fact, I am already acting by committing to not give up my values and work on this project with that deep commitment. 
  • I also read "A New Culture of Learning" by John Seely Brown. Awesome!!! The main teaching: We need to create learning environments that thrive in change, so  much that we actually have to permanently create change. That teaching stuck with me because it personally feels that most of the movements I've been part of, are more concerned about how to resist, be resilient to, or adapt to change, rather than to create it. From the first perspective, it is about "change is happening to us and I sort of don't like it, what can I do about it??". From the second perspective, it is about "I've been doing things this way and this doesn't work, I'll change it, do something radically different, and learn from the experience" . To me, creating change is the action of human beings. 
  • I discovered I love learning and I want to share that. So it became even more essential to this project. So far, the idea of workshops has evolved to an informal learning community.
  • The membership system I've created makes me feel very proud. But I need to properly get people together to get more feedback. I'm working on that and hope to be very close to have the pieces together by the end of November when the NEH will be celebrating its first year!!!
  • I have to re organize the blog so please ignore all the pages available here for a while. 

Interesting readings I found during this time: