Berens CORE Blog

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  1. A New Year and a New Way of Thinking

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         Wishing you all the best for the new year… As 2018 starts I want to share with you a little history and afew thoughts that inform how we are transitioning into this new year. A Little History… In the 1990’s I presented type information at an ASTD (now ATD) meeting and became known as the ‘type lady.’ At that time, I bristled at the label because this work wasn’t just about type, but it has taken me a while to name what it is about. In the meantime, new trends have emerged using terms like vertical development (transformative with new capacities), horizontal development (refining what already is there), wholeness, self-organization, mindfulness, Holacracy, and more. Now I’m deep into those other trends and am ready to share some thoughts about type and how the ‘type-movement’ can shift in order to achieve its purpose of honoring individual differences. My life work has been around a purpose of enabling contexts where people thrive and are free to be all of who they are. It is one of honoring diversity, which, if not honored, triggers feelings of being ‘less than’ others. From a personal perspective, learning about my type released bound up energy as I had been trying to be someone I wasn’t and felt bad for not measuring up. However, I now see some downsides to the strong categorization focus and stereotyping that often comes with type explanations. It is no wonder I’m encountering more and more resistance to type at the...
  2. I fell and hit my head….

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    On returning from a working trip to Europe, I reached for my luggage piled up on the luggage carousel, pulled on it, and landed you know where and then hit my head on the floor! Ouch! I had been traveling for 20 hours and was a bit foggy to start with, and the decision to quickly grab my luggage was not a good one. I had 3 hours before I had to catch the domestic flight. What was my rush? Well, it was habit and old messages to ‘get my luggage before someone else did.’ Apparently the wheels got stuck and it pulled me forward. Never happened to me before, but it sure has been a pain in the butt, neck, and back. The good news is that it was just a slight concussion and not any brain damage…at least from the CT scan. Now the reason I’m writing you about this is not to tell you about my woes. The reason is to share the lessons I learned afterwards about my own energy. Lessons Learned For a few days, I was tired and disoriented and even a little dizzy, yet, a mere 5 days after the accident I had one of the most energizing 3-hour phone calls I’ve ever had and my energy stayed up over the 2 weeks or so that we worked on it. What was so energizing? I was working with a new colleague, Lesley, whose task was to help redesign and tighten up an online self-discovery...