Where is this “wellspring?” Your Ho‘ohana and your Sense of Place

ALOHA ~ ~ ~ Have you newly arrived here at Managing with Aloha Coaching? Thank you for clicking in! Each month, we adopt a Hawaiian value to study together in a universal way, thus the tagline you see up top: Value Your Month, Value Your Life. I publish a new coaching essay here every Tuesday. They are essays, longer than most blog posts, and though you can read them through once in less than a Daily 5 Minutes, they are intended to give you a full week’s worth of Ho‘ohana-inspired self-coaching. This month we are learning about Nānā i ke kumu: Look to your Source, Find your Truth. Begin here: Day One Essay for a quick introduction. We’ll wait! Welcome! ~ Rosa Say

Our Value Study: Nānā i ke kumu. This is 1st Tuesday.

Last Tuesday, we defined Nānā i ke kumu through its’ literal root words, Nānā and Kumu.

• We learned that when we string those root meanings together, what the value of Nānā i ke kumu says to you, is that YOU —your mind, body, spirit, your all of you —is your best possible source to respect and honor as your teacher; within you is all the personal truth you need, both source and capacity to learn.

• We learned that Nānā i ke kumu is not selfishness or ego; it is self-attuned learning and living.

We called Nānā i ke kumu a wellspring. Today, where, and exactly what IS this “wellspring?”

Get the most out of Nānā i ke kumu with Value-Alignment

To start, we need to make this immediately personal for you, and the best way to do that is with value alignment. Step one is to know which values you claim as your personal ones.

During the month of September, I offered up a quick values-choosing exercise within our work to write a Ho‘ohana Statement draft for ourselves. If you are newly joining us, or if you had decided that you could not do the full-immersion Ho‘ohana study last month, I would encourage you to just go back to that one part of values-choosing: Read the entire posting titled, Writing a Ho‘ohana Draft part 1: Your Intention and Your Personal Values, and do the exercise.

It will not take you long at all, and most important, it will help you set your intention for the month to come, and we know how powerful intention is, don’t we! Your intentions focus your attentions, and your attention may be the most valuable “transactional currency” you possess.

From our Day One Essay for this month: Nānā i ke kumu: Look to your Source, Find your Truth: “Nānā i ke kumu is a value which brings clarity to your other values: It is a kind of lens through which you can see what most rings true for you instinctively.” “The Nānā i ke kumu reward is one of grounding and contentment; it helps you feel all is right in your world. The value of Nānā i ke kumu asks us to “look to your source, and find your truth” recognizing that Aloha gives us each an inner wellspring; we go to this inner well and drink from it to get healthy in our best way possible, body, mind, and spirit.”

Go to the Well

Let’s get “Go to the Well” to be a short but sweet mantra for us.

Think of a well as a place you go to so you can drink deeply of the most refreshing, rejuvenating water possible, readily available for you whenever you need it. It’s water that quenches the thirst of your source and your truth. What’s in your magic water?

1. Your Personal Values, for they drive your behavior —your best-possible, self-attuned behavior.
2. The truth of your Ho‘ohana, your intention with doing worthwhile, and self-led work (versus the work of someone else’s plan).
3. Your Strengths. Your source and your truth is about what is absolutely right with you, about every strength which individually and collectively help you feel vitally and forcefully strong.
4. Your awareness of all these first three things as solely about YOU as a complete package, and as a very, very good one, and then...
5. Your Connections. Life is not a solo proposition; we human beings were not meant to live alone.

I have long thought of our connections in life as having to do with relationship, with sense of place, and with our profound capacity as human beings:

• We connect with other people (Relationship)
• We connect with places (Sense of Place), and
• We connect with ideas (Capacity). Our ideas stem from many different causes; they come from our intellect, they come from our emotions, and they come from our spirit. They come from the first two; from other people, and from our places.
  (From the Archives: “Inspiration” is ‘in-spirit.’ Thus Inspiration is Aloha, and Palena ‘ole: Discover your 4-Fold Capacity.)

Therefore, to connect with your source and your truth within Nānā i ke kumu this month, you may want to reflect on your connections: Journal about them in your morning pages, or each night with your gratitude journal.

As promised today, I want to talk a bit more about one in particular, Sense of Place. But before I do, let me give the last word on connection to my friend, author Michael Stallard. In the introduction to his book, Fired Up or Burned Out, he writes:

We Must Connect with Others to Thrive

The more we [the principals of E Pluribus Partners] reflected on our own experiences and the more research we conducted about what makes people and organizations thrive, the more [we] became convinced that it came down to this: connection. Our connection with others in our organization keeps us fired up for long periods of time. Connection meets basic human psychological needs for respect, recognition, belonging, autonomy, personal growth, and meaning. When these needs are met, we thrive. Research shows that when connection is present, organizations are more productive, more innovative, and more profitable. Our lives, including the time we spend working, are enriched… conversely, the lack of connection will gradually burn us out. Organizational environments where connection is low or absent diminish our physical and mental health.

—Michael Lee Stallard, Fired Up or Burned Out
(meet Michael at his blog, and do consider getting his book, it’s a gem, especially if you are fired up about reinventing your workplace culture.)

Photo Credit: welly wellly welly welly well on Flickr by 顔なし.

Sense of Place

It will usually surprise people when I say this, yet ironically it may be the best way for me to explain how I view Sense of Place: I do not feel I need to live in Hawai‘i to be connected to my source and my truth.

I can “go to the well” wherever I might be in the world, for my well stays with me —even my place-connection. In contrast to my intellectual sense of reason, I consider my sense of place to be highly emotional, and thus intuitively and instinctively mindful.

Here is a snippet from Managing with Aloha:

When we opened The Ritz-Carlton, Mauna Lani, I had the privilege of attending classes taught by the late Dr. George Kanahele, a highly respected scholar and civic leader of the Hawaiian renaissance of the 1970’s whose Ho‘ohana at the time of these classes—the early 1990’s—was within the field of organizational consulting. The definition he shared with us for sense of place has always struck me as being concisely intuitive: He said that sense of place involves both the feel OF a place, and the feel FOR a place.

In our classes, Dr. Kanahele taught us that place (wahi in Hawaiian) is personally defined for people by their own “locational experiences.” He taught us to open the hotel with a spirit of hospitality that would create fertile ground for our guests to have their own place-connected experiences while they were with us, and in that way feel for themselves what the Aloha spirit was all about. In my mind, he gave us the key to being “culturally correct” in the way we shared Hawaii with visitors.

It was easy for me to identify with what visitors to our islands might be hoping to experience. Getting my sense of place from somewhere new is one of the true pleasures of my life, for it is very strongly connected to both my values and my strengths with learning and process perception. I had written about this in a Talking Story article that remains one I visit often for my own personal pleasure: Places, Feelings and Learning. Learning Serenity:

Every time I go to a brand new place I seem to return home with some feeling for that locale’s sense of place. It’s sort of an invisible, ever-present to-do list which must be checked off in some way before the visit ends. If not, it feels that my time is incomplete there.

I suspect that another scholar nailed the Sense of Place connection we have to our inner source and our personal truth, our Nānā i ke kumu, when he called it Sense of Belonging. His name was Abraham Maslow.

Sense of Belonging

We all need to feel we belong. Do you remember learning about Maslow’s pyramid?

“Sense of belonging” is right in the middle of what Abraham Maslow called our “hierarchy of needs,” as a need which must be satisfied before we get to the goodies of self-esteem and self-actualization. Here is a great picture of the pyramid from Wikipedia:

My Managing with Aloha coaching is built upon my belief that in a thriving workplace, everyone needs to be in the green and blue of the pyramid. EVERYONE. Managers, employees, vendors and suppliers, customers —everyone associated with a business needs to feel that the business “lives” in that green and blue, and by association, they do (or can) too.

However here’s the deal: Maslow’s pyramid works like a ladder or staircase. You can’t reach those blue and green sections at the top until you have the red, orange, and yellow ones to stand on as your solid ground —collectively as as your Sense of Place.

What you NEED is very much a part of that other Nānā i ke kumu word; your bare-bones TRUTH.

Start With Where You Live

I hope my essay today has helped you in two ways: I wanted you to think of YOUR Sense of Place in a much more expansive, capacity-filling way, and second, I wanted you to understand just how important this connection can be for you.

However before you get to ambitious about it, I would like to end with this coaching: Start to understand your Sense of Place connection right where you live, wherever that may be.

Fall in love with your place. Discover its’ magic. Challenge yourself by asking yourself why you are there, and why you stay there, and not to justify it, but to celebrate it. Here is a sample you can look at where I explored my own Nānā i ke kumu connected with my home, my Hawai‘i nei: Looking to the Source of our Hawaiian Values.

Figure out why you belong to your place, and figure out why you thrive there. Figure out why that place, as wonderfully magical as you may discover it to be, would not be the same without you.

You are the wellspring.

Next Tuesday: Our Nānā i ke kumu study continues with Embracing Change and Embracing Growth.

We will Ho‘ohana together, Kākou.

~Rosa

Want to learn more? I strongly encourage you to take the links in my essay first. However I have had some feedback from long-time readers asking me to connect the dots back to some of our older lessons, especially for when my Tuesday-to-Tuesday publishing schedule stretches out for them presenting windows of opportunity for more journaling. This postscript is in response to their request.

Suggestions from the Archives of Ho‘ohana Publishing:

1. Managing with Aloha and Sense of Place
2. On that People Connection: What I have learned from the People we collectively call “our employees”
3. Sense of Place on the Internet: A Brand New Community Ecosystem

Last week, Joanna Young wrote,

Rosa, I so vividly remember the first time I read your writings about looking to your source. It was like being struck by a thunderbolt! So many things fell into place for me then, and it has always seemed to me the foundation of our friendship and collaboration.

This is the posting she was referring to: What it means to “Look to Your Source”

Comments

[Joanna Young]

Fascinating Rosa, and thanks for the further exploration of one of my favourite values.

For me sense of place isn't quite the same as sense of belonging. It's almost something that runs up and down that pyramid because it would include

breath, food, security, health, feeling of feet on the ground, seeing/knowing that the place was being cared for, a sense of wilderness (that one is personal to me), all of which gives me a sense of both connection down to the ground and spontaneity and creativity up and out the way.

It's the opposite of being lost. It's the knowledge that wherever you are (and as you say, that does not need to be place specific) you are present, you are there, you are not lost.

[Rosa Say]

That’s wonderful Joanna, I so admire how you have tuned into your sense of place feeling as not being lost, but being fully present —you can look at it as being fully “connected.” How great to have that feeling at the same time you are in your “sense of wilderness” for I would think you feel braver and less hesitant then. This makes me think of one of the pictures you had shared on your Flickr photostream; I felt a sense of wilderness when I looked at it, but at the same time I felt so drawn into it —and I’ve yet to visit Scotland. It was this one, that you called “Steps Ahead” http://snurl.com/45jx0

Through you, I feel MY sense of place with YOUR place has already begun Joanna! You help me move “up and down that pyramid” quite a bit.

[Roselia]

Ah...sense of place...a place of wildness for me...where I can be natural, instinctual. Perhaps, why I love the outdoors, and the natural world so much...feeling at home in the world, no matter where I am, if connected to that "wild" place within...the Source...the Wellspring. This will be a "wildly" fun month, I can see, Rosa. So grateful I can get clearer about this "Sense of Place" while in this place of transition...even there, I can experience this sense of place. Mahalo nui loa, Roselia

[Rosa Say]

The “outdoors” is so expansive Roselia, and there’s something about the thought of our planetary wholeness; we can step outside anywhere on the earth but still feel grounded to the earth itself. It’s quite cool to imagine that from wherever your feet may stand you could draw a line to every other place on the face of the earth just by imagining you can do so starting from beneath your feet.