Sitting With My Sadness.

Sitting with our sadness takes the courage to believe that we can bear the pain and we will come out the other side.

The last thing most of us want to hear or think about when we are dealing with profound feelings of sadness is that deep learning can be found in this place. In the midst of our pain, we often feel picked on by life, or overwhelmed by the enormity of some loss, or simply too exhausted to try and examine the situation. We may feel far too disappointed and angry to look for anything resembling a bright side to our suffering. 

Still, somewhere in our hearts, we know that we will eventually emerge from the depths into the light of greater awareness. Remembering this truth, no matter how elusive it seems, can help. 

The other thing we often would rather not hear when we are dealing with intense sadness is that the only way out of it is through it. Sitting with our sadness takes the courage to believe that we can bear the pain and the faith that we will come out the other side. With courage, we can allow ourselves to cycle through the grieving process with full inner permission to experience it. 

This is a powerful teaching that sadness has to offer us -- the ability to surrender and the acceptance of change go hand in hand. 

Another teaching of sadness is compassion for others who are in pain, because it is only in feeling our own pain that we can really understand and allow for someone else's. Sadness is something we all go through, and we all learn from it and are deepened by its presence in our lives. While our own individual experiences of sadness carry with them unique lessons, the implications of what we learn are universal. 

The wisdom we gain from going through the process of feeling loss, heartbreak, or deep disappointment gives us access to the heart of humanity. 

Text by Daily Om

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Letting Life Unfold.

Present time can be hard, but life unfolds as it will and the universe will wait as we make our way into the unknown.

Our lives are guided by natural rhythms that are particular to each of us and cannot be altered by force of will alone. Life itself is a journey made up of processes and events that manifest before us only to be swept away when time marches on.

Whether we envision ourselves creating a career, building a family, or developing the self, we instinctively know when the time has come for us to realize our dreams because all that is involved comes together harmoniously. When the time is right, the passage of destiny cannot be blocked. Yet as desperate as we are to touch these beautiful futures we have imagined, we cannot grow if we are not fully present in the evolutionary experience.

The present can be challenging, uncomfortable, and tedious, but life unfolds as it will, and the universe will wait patiently as we make our way into the unknown.

The fate that awaits us is not dependent on our pace, which was preordained before we ever appeared in human guise. Therefore there is no reason to rush through life to reach those pinnacles of development associated with the paths we have chosen.

Enjoying and fully experiencing the journey of life is as important as achieving goals and reaching milestones. There are lessons we can learn during those moments that seem immaterial or insignificant that we cannot learn at any other time.

Appreciating these takes patience, however, because human beings tend to focus on the fulfillment of expectations rather than the simple joys of being.

Like many people, you have no doubt longed for a device that would give you the power to fast forward through certain periods of your existence. Yet haste is by its very nature vastly more stressful than serene fortitude. When you feel yourself growing impatient because the pace of your development is deceptively slow, remember that everything that will occur in your life will occur in its own time. Quelling your urge to rush will enable you to witness yourself learning, changing, and becoming stronger.

There is so much to see and do in between the events and processes that we deem definitive. If you are patient enough to take pleasure in your existence’s unfolding, the journey from one pinnacle to the next will seem to take no time at all.

By Madisyn Taylor

Join the Movement!

Put the Enterprise Collaboration Focus Where it Belongs: The People

#collaboration #crowdsourcing #wisdomofthemany

Companies like Jive, Yammer, Telligent and more promised to take social into the enterprise to drive a long list of business benefits, from improving productivity to fostering company culture, to boosting the bottom line.

Ten years later, Facebook and LinkedIn remain the 400-pound gorillas of the consumer social market, with tremendous growth, engagement and market value.

On the other hand, most enterprise social networks have been acquired and faded into the background as new digital workplace tools proliferated. New collaboration apps, notably Slack, took their place and their cache, although it’s beginning to look as if the newcomers may suffer a similar fate.

Why Did Consumer Social Networks Thrive While Workplace Counterparts Stalled?

One view is that consumer social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn thrived because they focused on people, while enterprise social networks put their focus more on the content being shared. Community forums. Document collaboration. Group messaging. All of these are good things.

In fact, the teamwork they enable is the heart of enterprise social. But these elements alone can’t make a community thrive without an understanding of the people driving it. The stickiness of Facebook and LinkedIn stems from the “network” part of social network: the relationships between people, with their content as a supporting function of those relationships.

To further complicate matters, wrangling all that content has become increasingly difficult. The communication and collaboration enterprise social networks enable provides real value. One company, for instance, found its enterprise community helped reduce the cost of sales by $2 million, while another increased employee satisfaction by 10 percent.

But eventually, like Facebook and LinkedIn, every organization ends up suffering from digital crowding. There is simply too much stuff in too many places for a human brain to comprehend. Searching for information requires an out-of-pattern activity that delays output and pulls our attention in a million different directions. Instead of fostering productivity and harnessing corporate memory, it hinders it. Eventually, this whittles away at any collaboration app’s adoption until the next shiny tool is brought in — only to suffer the same fate as the cycle continues.

Is Collaboration in the Digital Workplace a Lost Cause?

Not at all. To succeed, interactive intranets and enterprise communities must learn from their consumer counterparts and shift their focus from content to emphasize their organization’s greatest asset: its people. While this may sound more philosophical than tactical, it’s anything but. Creating a network based on relationships requires technology that both understands the connections between members of the network and dynamically personalizes their experience based on those connections. As more people and content enter the community, and relationship signals dial up or dial down with each interaction, the network should become even more powerful.

Bringing Graph Technology into the Collaboration Mix

One of the most powerful ways to achieve this is through graph database technology. Amazon Neptune is one example, and describes the concept well: it works “with highly connected data sets … optimized for storing billions of relationships and querying the graph.” When applied to an enterprise community, a graph database enables the platform to go far beyond the relatively simple constructs of “are you a friend/connection? (yes or no)” to understand much deeper levels of relationships, such as:Organization chart relationships.Explicit personal and professional relationships that aren’t hierarchical, with differences between friends, team members, colleagues, mentors/mentees, doctors/patients, etc.Implicit relationships, where commonalities exist between people based on their skills, location or activities, but without formal connections.By putting people at the core of the collaboration experience, graph databases can help enhance and even transform traditional content and collaboration capabilities into a richer set of people-to-people, people-to-content or content-to-content experiences. Take search: When your platform can understand what you work on and who you work on it with, its ability to deliver meaningful results will be dramatically improved. It can parse huge data sets about individuals as well, so it will “know” you too, not just your relationships. Combined with emerging technologies like text analytics and deep learning, that knowledge will enable semantic search that understands your context and finds what you need, when you need it, rather than just processing keywords.Search, of course, is only one example. A people-powered engine can help improve all of the standard enterprise collaboration use cases and makes new ones possible. By intelligently leveraging the connections between people and their work activities, platforms should prevent the creation of duplicate work and enhance commenting, versioning and more. Graph databases can also potentially streamline the chat experience, both within your primary digital workplace and externally, by curating conversations to serve up what’s most important and weed out the rest. 

Finding Knowledge in the Crowd

If I sound excited about these possibilities, it’s because I am. After years of watching enterprise social “innovation” translate to new features that barely move the needle, the technology has finally caught up to the vision. Big data has brought us big opportunity. With the intelligence of a people graph, enterprise communities and interactive intranets can now facilitate true collaboration and connection, and in turn, deliver results around engagement, alignment and retention. The modern enterprise social network will no longer contribute to digital crowding — it will help you find the most valuable people and knowledge in the crowd.