While we have progressed in so many ways, through technology and access to more information, we also have regressed. Everywhere you can see a prevalent energy of entitlement and a lack of accountability present.
In many cases, it feels like we’ve gone back 50 or 100 years from all the progress initially made. Something seems to have shifted through the pandemic, and I feel that two types of people emerged, as a result.
The first type are people who did some deep soul-searching. They leaned into all that shifted and realized they craved something far more meaningful in their lives, as the hamster wheel of busy and the corporate climb of success no longer felt so lucrative. They have been going through an awakening of sorts, and have started to rethink their own living legacy.
The other type seems determined to stay in victim consciousness.
They blame everyone else for their lot in life. They continue to feed into oppressed systems and the energy of separation. All they focus on is how to “get theirs” … often, at the detriment and cost to others.
The sense of entitlement that has arose since has been palpable.
We, as a collective culture and society, desperately need to extend our peripheral sight beyond the “what’s in it for me mentality” and look at the entirety of the world and how we might better show up and serve.
Our lens in which we look at the world truly needs to expand.
We need to broaden our perspective.
With all the overflowing resources available to us, we still are living in a very filtered, myopic, and systemic manner. It’s as if we have blinders on and cannot see that magnitude of possibility around us.
The onslaught of social media, marketing, and advertising is actually keeping us stuck with those blinders on versus providing opportunities to see beyond our own beliefs, conditioning, and programming.
We are in need of a massive wake-up call.
We need to remove our blinders and start noticing the world around, and outside, us. We are so disconnected as a society. We do everything to keep our distance, and to avoid vulnerability and the difficult conversations.
We need to stop being so easily persuaded into living a life of suffering, or one of want and scarcity. We need to stop comparing ourselves against unrealistic expectations and what we think we perceive on socials, where we measure ourselves against an arbitrary metric of success.
When, in reality, what we need to do is remember our own innate value.
We need to remember that we are all part of a bigger cosmic puzzle. That were are here to connect, collaborate, and come together in community. We are wired for connection, and humanity. We need each other.
But, we need to wake up first. We need to extend the scope of what we look at, what we take in. We need to broaden our reach and our perspective. The world, at large, is much bigger than me or you, it’s the addition of all.
We need to take responsibility to heal what needs to be healed, to be accountable for our choices, and to remember who we truly are.
We need to narrow our focus.
We need to focus on what really matters. We need to remind ourselves that we all have a story, a soul curriculum, and that none of us is better than one of us. We need to focus on restoring faith, rebuilding communities, and reshaping what leadership means for our future generations.
First, we need to stop being so distracted.
As Robin Sharma discusses in his work about being world-class, “”An addiction to distraction is the death of creative production.”
Most people aren’t doing highly creative work. They aren’t doing work that fills them up or makes their heart sing. Instead, they fill their days with all the busy, the to-dos, the shoulds, and everyone else’s agenda. Rather, we’re missing key opportunities to be creative, innovative, and imaginative.
We are inundated with so much stuff these days.
The latest show, technology, platform, streaming device, AI tools, hack, and the list goes on. We are being fed mindless and mind-numbing information in mere nanoseconds, where we aren’t even usually really present to it.
We sit and scroll on our devices for hours on end. We stream reality shows and Netflix binge only to wonder what happened to ourday. We wake up, plug in, scroll aimlessly, watching a million Tik Tok videos, create endless tasks for ourselves, scroll some more, then pass out. The majority of our work has little to no meaning, and we just plug away, day-after-day.
It’s like Groundhog Day on repeat. A hamster wheel that goes nowhere.
And, for what? To keep up with the Joneses? To save face? To show up with these idyllic, overly filtered A track of our life? Because that’s how everyone else is choosing to live their lives? Again, I ask … for what?
We are comatose. We aren’t really living our lives, we are just coexisting and mindlessly meandering through each day like little zombies. We watch the hours, days, and minutes tick by. We wonder where the last month or last year went. Yet, we don’t stop the treadmill. We don’t stop the madness.
We just keep slogging away, running in circles, chasing our tails.
Imagine if, instead, we focused only on the things that lit us up. Those things that offered a sense of peace and fulfillment. Imagine if we stopped the narrative and decided to hop off the stupid treadmill once and for all.
Imagine how different your life would be, our lives would be, if each of us chose a different decision. We talk a lot about empowering others. Imagine if we learned to empower ourselves first. Empowerment is an intrinsic choice, as it’s power within. Power within you. Only you can empower yourself. Empowerment is a choice. As is leadership. It’s also a choice.
Both start with each of us choosing to lead ourselves first.
It’s starts with waking up, taking the blinders off, jumping off the damn treadmill, broadening our perspective, and narrowing our focus.
It starts with me. And, it starts with you.