I don’t even know how to make one Kung-Fu movement in real time so why am I blogging about using slow motion Kung-Fu on your life? Because dang if the Matrix movies didn’t put a good visual for us to “see” what is in our heads when we are able to step outside of the realm of our every day lives and look at what is going on … as if it is happening in slow motion.

The levels and leaps we humans are making right now technologically has to be many a Sociologists’ dream. We are moving the game pieces of how we relate and interrelate and effect/affect each other all over the map, under the board, on top of the board and into other dimensions. The argument in my head has never been about how much we are creating but rather the inattention we pay to our intentions. Years ago I worked for a world renowned electroanalytical chemist who was and still is a truly brilliant mad-capped professor. One of the morsels I took away from his musings was how scientists (chemists in their cases) would often times just create to create. He pointed me into the direction of paying attention to who was paying for all the funding so that these chemists could create and left the suggestion in my consciousness that what “we” really needed to pay attention to was who was taking the end results that were being created in the University labs and what was being done with what had been created. It’s many years later and I still remember that.

This morning I coached a technical client of mine about her job and work-life balance issues and I realized that I was hearing from her were the same kind of worries several other technical people in my life were talking about. What seems to be more prevalent today in the work world is that the “who” of the worker is not important but rather the “what” and “how”.

From a business standpoint this does make sense somewhat but I can see where it is getting in the way when the right person for a job is overlooked or underused or misused because their “who” is avoided. My coaching client is very creative AND she has an engineering mind which means that to get the maximum juice from her brain and heart, you give her projects that she can dive into and enough time that she can explore and create and travel and come back up for air before you throw more projects on her. It’s really seeming to get down to fundamental lack of communication with each other in business (probably our homes too if we’re honest about it).

I must be doing some kind of slow motion Kung-Fu when it comes to “seeing” how a person works best and understanding why a team of people is not working well together because it just seems so obvious to me. Right now while we’re just on the tip of the edge of huge technological breakthroughs we can also be creating alongside a whole mentality of how we work together for now and for the future. But we won’t be able to do that if we don’t step back and take a breather now and then and really pay attention to what is going on around us and how we are being affect and our effect on each other.

So pretend that you and I are standing in the middle of a room with bamboo wood floors and we have really groovy silk kimonos on. I just did some kind of fancy arm movement and you did one back in return and now we’re both up in the air circling each other in slow motion….

what are you seeing?