Many of you know Allen Roland’s phenomenal work: the supremely talented author and therapist who wrote the seminal book, Radical Therapy (and a great friend). His very popular blog had a great quote today apropos of the unfortunate situation that Tiger Woods has created.

“The true test of a person’s character is not how they handle adversity. It’s how they handle power.”

Allen’s sentence (and the entire blog) caused me to consider how diversity and power are related. Adversity can cause people to steal and hurt others, and so can power. Both adversity and power can be met with good or poor intentions. I think Allen is right that power is far more likely to test one’s character than adversity.

What is the distinction between your experience of adversity and power as tests of your own character? How have others treated you when they had the power and you perceived you had little to none?

Stay close !

Hutt

P.S.: You can find Allen’s original post here:

http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2009/12/06.html

The link to his blog is here:

http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/

Preparation and practice are fundamental to doing well, yet doing our best doesn’t demand excellence as much as it demands intention to do as well as possible under the circumstances.

Doing our best means engaging a presenting situation with the absolute intention to deliver what is required – for example, the advance intention of shooting the arrow into the bulls eye.  It means not holding back, never giving less than you know that you can, refusing to be a slacker, and always persevering.

Half-hearted efforts are exactly that:  situations where someone has refused to put his whole heart in.  Focus, attention and complete presence are optimal, and living in the moment predicts doing your best.

Thanks to Vince, in our monthly men’s group, for choosing to facilitate last Saturday’s session on “doing your best” – now a great topic for Study Hall this week. “Best” is a powerful (and sometimes loaded) term which means different things to different people.  The word means “superior” and we think of “best” in words like “as good as it gets.”

Yet, there may well be flaws even in anything that may up to that point be the best.  Churchill famously said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.”  He acknowledges its flaws, but asserts that democracy is the best form of government compared to other forms.

The concept of “doing your best” does not mean perfection, but it does imply an advance intention of taking action as “well” as you can.  There’s “best” for the individual and “best” for the group, so how do you reconcile that often different points of view?  How do you feel about doing your best?  What is the appropriate role of comparison in doing your best?

Making promises can be a powerful ingredient of personal growth as long as promise-making is done in good faith with a complete intention to honor the promise.  We’ve talked in Study Hall about the definition of a brand (in business) as a set of promises, and there is similarity in how promise-making affects one’s personal reputation.

The more often we make and keep promises, the greater our reputation for reliability and credibility.

Can you think of promises that you have made that have had you grow beyond what you thought possible?  Have you ever tried to renegotiate a promise when faced with difficulty in delivering? What was the result?

Who in your life has the best reputation for keeping promises? Who has the worst?What did you learn from each person?