Tuesday Essay #2: Ka lā hiki ola and Kēia Manawa

ALOHA ~ ~ ~ If you are just joining us, you might want to take a quick look at this month’s publishing schedule to get your bearings. Our value for the month of June is Ka lā hiki ola, the Hawaiian value of hope and promise. You are welcome to just jump in here too: The links within the article will give you any back-referencing I suggest for additional, contextual reading. Right click on them to open in separate browser tabs or windows and you can toggle back and forth in your own mini lesson plan! Welcome! ~ Rosa Say

Kāwili: To mix ingredients.
Ho‘okāwili: To do so on purpose!

I recently had a MWA reader share with me that she makes a habit of mixing up my sentences sometimes, especially when she wants to reposition them for the workplace huddles they do in the value of the month program they have adopted. She admitted it somewhat apologetically, and was greatly relieved when I responded, “Fantastic! That is exactly what I am hoping you do!”

I then said, “I do it too! All the time!” In fact, think about doing it almost obsessively, and you essentially have the business/coaching model for my entire business, Say Leadership Coaching and Ho‘ohana Publishing.

I constantly reposition my MWA chapters to give them the “trading-up context” I need to employ in my presentations, my workshops, and in the articles I share here on MWAC and within other Ho‘ohana Publishing projects. I will take stories and metaphors from one chapter’s value to apply them to another one.

In a very recent example, I pulled The Lesson of the ‘Opihi (page 65) from Ho‘omau (persistence) for a customer service presentation on Aloha and Ho‘okipa (hospitality and customer service). It came to mind for me when my husband gleefully announced that the tide would be at minus .5 on his day off, and then pulled me out of bed at the crack of dawn to go ‘opihi picking with him when the highly anticipated day arrived. He picked; I took pictures, and you can feel free to use the CC-licensed ones in this photo set anytime you’d like to talk about the The Lesson of the ‘Opihi in one of your huddles!

“Repositioning” does two things for me: It makes my own stuff fresh and new to me, and as malleable as a lump of soft clay. [Go back to our Day One Essay if you need to be enamored of “newness” again.] Second, it gets me to own it thoroughly within that new context so that whatever I am presenting will be complete. When you think about it, that process itself is very much a Ka lā hiki ola process: A new day, and the can-do attitude of hiki we talked about last Tuesday.

I have always intended MWA to be a tool kit for you, not an instruction manual.
So kāwili; mix them up. However, ho‘okāwili; mix them up purposefully, and not kapakahi, with confusion.

Now let’s move on with Ka lā hiki ola, our Hawaiian value study this month. It is the value of hope and promise. What is the promise held within today? What is your right now?

Forget 1001 historic sites/gardens/natural wonders/architectural feats you must see before you die.  I’ll tell you the one thing that you really must see before you leave this world  for the next - the here and now.

I’m not talking here of a cursory glance around, so you can check it off that mental list of things seen and done.  To my mind, unless you give yourself completely over to experiencing the moment, this exact one happening right now, it won’t matter if you’re seated outside the Taj Mahal, touring the pyramids by camel, standing at the viewpoint overlooking the steep cliffs of the Grand Canyon or climbing the many steps ascending the Eiffel Tower.  To fully experience life, it must be lived, not measured, evaluated and checked.
—Amy Palko, The One Place You Must See Before You Die
Image also by Amy on Flickr.

Good advice!

Kēia Manawa

If you are following along in your book, Ka lā hiki ola is at the very end of MWA, for it served as my epilogue there.

Let’s look at Kēia Manawa as our second lesson for June within Ka lā hiki ola. From Managing with Aloha (and also kāwili, slightly mixed up!)

“Kēia manawa is a Hawaiian concept that lives within Ka la hiki ola. It means right now. This is the time. This is it. The here and now.

Click on photo for Kēia Manawa at my Flickr page.

Ka lā hiki ola encourages us to make Pono [balance and rightness] today. Let go of yesterday. Give yourself hope for tomorrow. Live again, and live better – start a new chapter going forward.

However, knowing that tomorrow will always bring a new day, secure in the certainty of it, I encourage you to live in every moment, and have the attitude that today is it. Enjoy your present; relish the now. You will feel more alive.

Trust in your instincts, trust in what you know and have learned, and trust in the person you are. Live the day to the fullest, and live it as your day.”

The phrase for today, is Kēia lā.

Kēia means this one, whether it is a day, a moment, an opportunity, a lifetime. Lā is the word for day. How many moments of presence are there in a single day? Well, that is up to you. Manawa is time or moment or season. And it can (remember hiki, from last Tuesday?) be your time.

In MWA I continue with a football kāwili. Another terrific ho‘okāwili mixture (arguably a now-classic one) is that phrase Carpe diem, Seize the day, and the wonderful way that Robin Williams made it come to life for us in Dead Poets Society, pulling his students fresh-scrubbed faces into those of their “worm food” ancestors.

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.”
[direct link: YouTube video clip of Dead Poets Society if it does not show up in your browser or feed reader.]

Tuesday to Tuesday:

So far this month: Ka lā hiki ola, Ho‘ohiki, Ho‘okāwili and Kēia Manawa. Am I teaching you Hawaiian? Yes, and no.

This lesson is also an example of the Key Concept in Managing with Aloha we call creating a Language of Intention for your organizational culture; this coaching lesson is jam-packed with it to get the wheels turning! We will talk about this more in next Tuesday’s coaching lesson, and I hope to see you then.

[A Preview: Next week you will hear me pronounce all of this! But DO NOT let that stop you: DO NOT WAIT. You can read the Hawaiian here for your personal learning within my kaona (storied meaning) and still DO the exercise all in English or whatever your own language for this may be. Waiting is NOT Ka lā hiki ola!]

Meanwhile, here is your Ka lā hiki ola action plan for the coming week:

I. Prepare a Kāwili of your own for Ka lā hiki ola. You now have three MWAC articles to choose from:

1. In our Day One Essay we spoke of newness: Ka lā hiki ola and the New Us.
2. Our first Tuesday lesson was on Ho‘ohiki, and that Can-Do Confidence: Ka lā hiki ola and Ho‘ohiki.
3. And today we saw how Kēia Manawa presents Kēia lā – today, as a time and place we should not let slip away from us!

II. Be creative! Take liberties! More from my MWA Kāwili mixture:

“Ka lā hiki ola places a magic carpet of creativity at the threshold of our new day. Creativity usually finds her opportunity when all the basics are met, but we are still seeking answers, or perhaps need a new energy source to propel us forward.

Sometimes it seems that we are the most creative when faced with the new, such as a new business or a new job, because you have to be creative to bring everything together in the way that works well, like the pieces of a puzzle with interchangeable parts. But then we find a rhythm and we start plugging away, day in, and day out.

Luckily Ka lā hiki ola shakes us out of our reserve and encourages us to be creative again, asking ourselves how we can live in the present and take advantage of this dawning of a new day that’s been gifted to us with more joy.”

III. Present your Ho‘okāwili in one of your workplace huddles. Just as with Robin Williams, it need only last about three minutes. In fact, the less time you take to present, the more time those you work with can use your inspiration for their own hand, foot, and spirit-prints in shaping their Kēia Manawa, their present and right now. Great managers get out of their way at some point!

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may
Old time is still a-flying
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.”
—Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

“Invincible, just like you feel.
The world is their oyster.
They believe they're destined for great things, just like many of you.
Their eyes are full of hope, just like you.
Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable?
Because you see gentlemen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils.”
—Robin Williams as Mr. Keating, Dead Poets Society (1989)

Kēia Manawa: Seize the day, and work on your ho‘okāwili mixture for Ka la hiki ola TODAY! Then, if you would like to study a bit more in preparing for next Tuesday, polish up these two tools in your MWA Toolbox:

1. Read more about D15M, the MWA Workplace Huddle here: For the BEST 15 minutes in the workday, Huddle (link to Talking Story).
2. Read more about the Language of Intention concept here within the MWAC index for it. A good place to start would be with another Talking Story article: The Best, Yet Most Underutilized Tool for Communication There Is.

Comments

[Martin - TheUniversityBlog]

Yes, it doesn't matter what happened yesterday, because you're not getting a second chance. Much better to embrace the new day than to dwell on what has passed.

My whole life had been one big hug to the here and now. Suddenly one day, I was dealt an unexpected blow. The situation grew worse for a few months, right up until the 'make or break' climax.

It could have gone either way. Either detune everything I had been in the past, or wake up with an even stronger resolve to seize the day.

I took the latter choice. I suggest we all make the same choice, no matter how difficult the situation. Yesterday may not make sense, but that's all the more reason to give perfect meaning to the here and now. Without my own personal difficulty, I wouldn't be where I am today. So why dwell in the past?

The time is now. Each and every one of us for the win!

[Rosa Say]

I love this Martin: "one big hug to the here and now"

Thank you for sharing your experience with us, and well done on your choice and your continued resolve!

Great point in your encouragement:
"Yesterday may not make sense, but that's all the more reason to give perfect meaning to the here and now."