Managing with Aloha Coaching

Tuesday Essay #4: Hope, thy name is Optimism

I once heard it said that “hope has nothing to do with what is going on in the world.”

I wish I could remember who had said it. My wish goes beyond wanting any accuracy or context for that statement, and my wish isn’t so that I can give credit where credit is due (though I would like to do that too).  I’d like to say mahalo, and thank them as best I can, for those words have really stuck to the walls of my brain, my heart, and my gut, giving me all the context I need when I think about the future, and how I go forward.

There are two things I know about that great four letter word HOPE. One has to do with Ka lā hiki ola, our value for the month of June, and another with ‘Imi ola, the value of vision and personal mission:

“Hope has nothing to do with what is going on in the world.”

1. Hope for tomorrow, and for each day after that, has everything to do with Ka lā hiki ola’s certainty there will always be the dawning of a new day and the fresh new start it represents.

“Hope has nothing to do with what is going on in the world.”

2. Hope has everything to do with me, and the way I choose to live in the world. With ‘Imi ola, I choose to create my best possible life proactively; I am not a bystander to my own life.

Said shorter and sweeter (now that you have read and learned our previous Tuesday lessons this month):
1. With Ka lā hiki ola, I live today (Kēia Manawa) with the certainty of tomorrow.

2. With ‘Imi ola, I create my own destiny within that tomorrow.

Put those two things together, and HOPE lives within pure, golden, promising optimism, and Hiki nō: Can do possibility.

What a beautiful thing! As beautiful as the dawning of a new day.

I have been sharing a very visible sign of my personal Ka lā hiki ola with you this month:
Photographs taken within my new learning of photography.

Over the past few weeks, I took the pictures that you see here, incredibly excited about them. At first they look like pretty orange flowers, and newly sprouting leaves… okay, so what? The “so what” is that they have come from the wiliwili trees which are fast disappearing in Hawai‘i, and they come from a tree over 400 years old, transplanted from a construction site in the hope of saving it. Over the past year, it has looked like this:

It has been hard to hold onto the hope that the tree was capable of new growth, and the beautiful orange blossoms that once caused invading warriors to think twice about beaching their canoes on an island they had planned to conquer in bloody battles. For as they approached, from their viewpoints still out at sea, the brilliantly blooming orange wiliwili trees (at that time densely grown and flourishing) caused them to think the people on shore discovered they were coming, and had lit massive fires to keep them away. They feared that any arriving canoe would instantly be set on fire and destroyed, and so the warriors turned away, sailing back to the place from where they had come, leaving the people to live in peace.

So is the legend of the wiliwili.

The life within the tree, had everything to do with the certainty that there would be Ka lā hiki ola, and the dawning of a new, and peaceful day for those who lived here on my island home.

What does this have to do with you, and with Managing with Aloha?

Managers are responsible for the wiliwili life force in the workplace.

Managers create and maintain the organizational culture which is like the orange fire of the wiliwili, steward and protector of the hope within that organization.

Managers get things done through the people they manage, people who thrive within the certainty of Ka lā hiki ola, and people who believe that hiki nō, there is Can do possibility in the cool shade of their workplace wiliwili trees.

We have one final week for Ka lā hiki ola. A week from today will be July 1 and I will present a new value for the month of July. What are your keepers with Ka lā hiki ola?

A strategy behind my new publishing schedule here was to give you better focus within fewer postings. Has it worked better for you? Use the coming week’s time to wrap up Ka lā hiki ola and debrief. Will this be a value you now keep as your own?

If you need yet another suggestion, consider this connection between Ka lā hiki ola and the sustenance of your own organizational culture. What needs to happen so that there is always the existence of HOPE in your workplace, a hope that is within the reaches of your Can do possibility?

Consider this as a new Ka lā hiki ola mantra you can share, in telling of the legend that will one day be the story of your workplace as well:

Hope, thy name is Optimism.

You look to me like the noble life force of the wiliwili tree.

Our June 2008 Recap ~ Value theme: Ka lā hiki ola, “the dawning of a new day.”
The Hawaiian value of hope and promise.

1. Ka lā hiki ola and the New Us
2. Ka lā hiki ola and Ho‘ohiki
3. Ka lā hiki ola and Kēia Manawa
4. Say Ka lā hiki ola to make it yours
   Did you listen to our first VoiceThread there?
5. Hope, thy name is Optimism

Tuesday Essay #3: Say Ka lā hiki ola to make it yours

We have a Managing with Aloha Coaching first today! Adding voice to our value of the month study with a web-based software program called VoiceThread.

Think of this as a twofer: Two lessons for your one click to visit with me today!

I have long thought about doing some kind of podcast to offer our current studies of Managing with Aloha on audio. At minimum, I wanted to share the pronunciation of the Hawaiian values and words I present to you. What I love about VoiceThread is the added dimension of visuals, especially since photography is a new hobby of mine.

But there’s much more to it than that; VoiceThread offers the capacity to have you join me with comments shared in your voices too, versus me producing a one-sided broadcast. I think the blend of our voices will be much more interesting, and it will also give you a much better feeling for how our Ho‘ohana Community is evolving.

The second part of the twofer, is that VoiceThread is yet another way to continue Brex, the short acronymn I have been using for our 2008 ‘Ike loa initiative, Brave Experiments in Digital Learning (Full Brex Index.) —‘Ike loa is the Hawaiian value of learning.

So I truly hope you will be brave, and join me.

Think of this as a pilot for us: If it works well I shall continue to offer at least one voice option per month in our new Tuesday publishing schedule here.

The first screen of the VoiceThread duplicates the written part of this posting up to here, (done so you can read and preview it first if you prefer). So when you begin to play it, you can skip to the second screen if you wish to.

If this is the first time you have seen or heard of VoiceThread, click on the links in this written article. I am sending you directly to VoiceThread for the tutorials versus writing too much here, for this IS about digital learning too, and an encouragement for you to get more practice with learning from the web-based source instead of relying on my edited version of the process.

It’s free, and you will find it is very easy to register and get started. For now, the best thing to do is to start with a preview: Just click that play button and listen through it once first; easy as playing a video clip. You can click the images to move them as it plays, without stopping the voice portion.

With Screen 2 I jump right into Ka lā hiki ola, our value for the month of June. What I ask you to do this week is this:

• Number 1. Learn to use VoiceThread as your primary lesson, with a deeper understanding of Ka lā hiki ola as your secondary lesson.

• Number 2. Leave at least one comment for me, and as many as you like! Let’s try this:

• On the VoiceThread itself, comment for us about Ka lā hiki ola, and as my post title hints at, say Ka lā hiki ola at least once to pronounce it, and make the value yours through the embrace of your voice.

• In the written comments of this posting, tell me what you think about VoiceThread as a tool for us in our Tuesday coaching here on MWAC. Tell me a little about your own learning process with it. Share your thoughts if you think VoiceThread has possibilities for you as a tool used elsewhere: We can all learn from you!

Now, to the VoiceThread, and to begin our week 3 with Ka lā hiki ola.

If you are reading this via a RSS feed reader or your email alert, you will probably have to click directly into MWAC to see and listen to the VoiceThread: Here is the link.

I share an invitation for your comments on each screen. Here is a review if you’d like to go back to a specific one: The minutes noted are just for my portion of each section.

Screen 1: Introduction - 3 minutes

Screen 2: 2 minutes
(Correlates to our Ka lā hiki ola Day One Essay: Ka lā hiki ola and the New Us.)

Here is your first invitation to join me within this thread: Let’s focus on the English translation first. What does “the dawning of a new day” mean, or imply to you?

Screen 3: 3 minutes
(Correlates to our Ka lā hiki ola 1st Tuesday Essay: Ka lā hiki ola and Ho‘ohiki.)

Invitation number two: When you think of Ka lā hiki ola as YOUR can-do possibility, what is something you know you can do, and will always be able to draw on as one of your strengths? If that is too personal for you, share an example about the place you work at, and the vision or mission there; what do you deeply believe is possible to be achieved there, and is connected to the work you are employed for?

Screen 4: 5 minutes includes wrap-up
(Correlates to our Ka lā hiki ola 2nd Tuesday Essay: Ka lā hiki ola and Kēia Manawa.)

Mahalo. Thank you for joining me today. Do feel free to leave any last thoughts for us on the VoiceThread.

Aloha from me, until next time, or as you have often seen me write it, a hui hou.
~ Rosa

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.

Ka lā hiki ola and Ho‘ohiki

The first time I went out on the ocean with the Alaka‘i Nalu, I was in seat five of their first and oldest canoe, the seat where the steersman could best keep an eye on me. The canoe was named Ka lā hiki ola, the dawning of a new day.

My kaona (hidden meaning) in that day was that she represented my hope in all we would do together as an ‘Ohana bonded by our Aloha and Mālama for each other. When I climbed into that canoe, I was making a deliberate choice as to what I was going to give my attentions to.

That day figured prominently in my own search for Pono, and it would be a turning point in my relationship with the Alaka‘i Nalu: They didn’t believe I could understand them completely until I had been out on the ocean with them.
—from Ka lā hiki ola in Managing with Aloha

I now suspect that the Alaka‘i Nalu were much wiser than I in knowing that I needed some of that “Can do” confidence in the canoe for myself most of all. It wouldn’t be the first time I had much to learn from my employees, nor the last!

Within Ka lā hiki ola is a little word that is immensely powerful: hiki.

Hiki means Can do.

It implies both possibility for lā, the day at hand, and ability, the ability to ho‘o, make something happen.

Therefore, what Ka lā hiki ola means is that you have the ability to do what it takes to make your life (ola) happen in the way it delivers best possibility to you.

Values are what we lay claim to: We own up to them because we believe in them deeply.

Thus, to lay claim to Ka lā hiki ola as a value is to say you deeply believe you can do whatever it takes to improve your life, your work, your future.

I am quite sure that the bird which labored to build this nest,
never for a moment stopped to worry that it could not be done.

Ho‘ohiki

As we begin our month with Ka lā hiki ola, put that kaona (hidden meaning) of ho‘o, to make something happen, and hiki, your confident knowledge in your own ability to get it done —always Can, and never Won’t— together as Ho‘ohiki, the promise you make to yourself.

The promises we make to ourselves are powerful, for we don’t accept our own excuses. We ‘fess up’ to ourselves more readily than we do to anyone else.

Now think about that dawning of a new day, and the new we spoke of on Day One of this month:

“New” is always so tantalizing, isn’t it. By nature, though some cynics who wax nostalgic will seek to temper our enthusiasm (ignore them!) we know that “new” means a fresh energy of some kind, and the hope and promise of some extraordinary difference.

New is innovative, new is bold; new is never lowly or unimportant.
New is novel, new is contemporary; new is never tired or old-fashioned.
New is new-fangled. New is up-to-the-minute. New is original.
No matter our age, no matter our circumstance, new can always be us.

We can be tantalizing.
We can be fresh.
We can be innovative.
We can be bold.
We can be novel.
We can be contemporary.
We can be new-fangled, up-to-the-minute and original.

We can, and we will.

Until next Tuesday...

In the coming week, consider writing a Ho‘ohiki statement of intention for your Ka lā hiki ola; the dawning of the new day you have the ability to create for yourself.

You can do it as a personal exercise, or you can do it together with your team. I have an example for my company, Say Leadership Coaching, that you can look at as an example: My Ho‘ohiki. It is something I have always publicly published as a public commitment to make good on my own word.

You will notice that it is written as a collection of “we will” statements for me and those I consider to be my ‘Ohana in Business.

If you wish to, use the comment conversation here to make your Ho‘ohiki a public commitment too, for you have the entire Ho‘ohana Community available to support you. If you have written statements like this before and can make suggestions for others, or share your own experience with them, please do.

We can also talk story here about the “New.” What will that be for you, or for your business or workplace? What kind of ability will you be drawing from to feather the nest you confidently create?

---

Mahalo, thank you for reading today.

Our Value Study for the month of June is Ka lā hiki ola. If you are just joining us, you may want to start with my short Day One Essay, Ka lā hiki ola and the New Us, and take a look at our June publishing schedule.

From the Archives:

1. An article I had written for Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching, called On Ho‘ohiki: Keeping your promises;

You should consider your credibility and your reputation with keeping your word to be one of the defining hallmarks of your character.

However life happens. There will be times when you’ve fallen short of delivering on a commitment you made.

What is the best way to make up for it when this happens?
Click to Talking Story.

2. I highly recommend a review of the MWA Key Concept of Palena ‘ole: Discover your 4-Fold Capacity.

Palena ‘ole: Create abundance by honoring capacity; physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. Seek inclusive, full engagement and optimal productivity, and scarcity will be banished.

A New Publishing Schedule for Managing with Aloha Coaching

Ka lā hiki ola is The Dawning of a New Day

Choose This Day as Your Ka lā hiki ola too: Shift with me in the new.

What you read here yesterday is very much a statement of where I am right now, where I want to be and intend to be, and where I hope you will join me.

I have decided on some shift for Managing with Aloha Coaching, and kēia manawa, it starts right now, today.

I love this site and I remain devoted to my mission here, to bring value-aligned living and working into the daily habits of our Ho‘ohana Community one value at a time, one month at a time, whether our practice of them be at work or elsewhere. It is important, and it is my Ho‘ohana.

Yet even that which is important can be too much in our already busy lives, and thus overwhelming at times. My personal and very diligent study of Ma‘alahi (a persuasion for calm contentment) over the past few months has helped me understand that has been the case here.

Our Shift: This will be the new publishing schedule for our value study here on MWAC for the month of June, and each month forward:

• Day One Essay:
  I will continue to present my Day One Essay which announces the value we will study on Day One of the month, no matter what day of the week the 1st may fall on, just as I did with Ka lā hiki ola yesterday, June 1st.

• Value Study:
  Thereafter, I will post just once a week on MWAC, and it will be every Tuesday.

My intention is to concentrate our efforts, both yours and mine, on one posting per week and all the action-oriented follow-up that can come with it to make value-alignment our constant habit.

No more non-MWA extras to this site that will stray us off course:
You can continue to visit as much as you like, and I encourage it, so that we can engage with each other on the value study at hand, versus the reading-only of more frequent updates. I am hoping that from Tuesday to Tuesday we can “live and work” together within the comment conversation of the one posting alone, and I intend to make it rich with the MWA coaching you have come to expect from me.

However understand something: You will never find magic pills here.

For Managing With Aloha to be incorporated into your life, reading is not enough. You must commit to action. My personal goal with MWAC is to nurture a community here eager to support you, a community learning to practice Managing with Aloha, just as you are.

Eventually, my hope is to offer you additional product that up to now has only been shared with those who personally attend my workshops. But that can come later: We still have much we can devote our efforts to here before then, and I am very excited about this new rhythm for us.

This will be our MWAC Table of Contents in June 2008:

• Tuesday 6/3 –-- June Value Post 1: Ka lā hiki ola and Ho‘ohiki

• Tuesday 6/10 –-- June Value Post 2: Ka lā hiki ola and Kēia Manawa

• Tuesday 6/17 –-- June Value Post 3: The Sound of Ka lā hiki ola
  This will be our first Managing with Aloha Coaching VoiceThread experiment!

• Tuesday 6/24 – June Value Post 4: Hope, thy Ka lā hiki ola name is Optimism

Tuesday 7/01 – Day One Essay for July

A Second Ka lā hiki ola Announcement: About Talking Story

I am reviving Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching for the noise of my other diversions, and believe me, as those of you who know me well will attest to, I can be juggling a whole lot of other diversions at any given time! Odd as it may sound, that juggling is actually very ma‘alahi (calming) for me and my brand of contentment.

Here is one example that did not fit in to MWAC at the time I had posted it, but it was a so-called ‘diversion’ that we use quite a bit within our MWA workshops and the SLC coaching programs:

The 20 Benefits of Peer to Peer Coaching (and the MWA Way of doing it)

It is a good article to visit today, before we launch into more of Ka lā hiki ola tomorrow: Are you taking advantage of peer-to-peer coaching? MWAC is here as a virtual, readily-accessible online version, but what do you do every day with your peers at work? You will often hear me say this: Don’t go it alone when you don’t have to, and when it is far, far better not to!

Here is what Raven Young of our Ho‘ohana Community added after she had read about the 20B of P2PC:

“It's easy to look at coaching as a touchy-feely, foo-foo activity that most teams/organizations don't have time for, but you will find that most high performing teams have open, respectful communications that often contain some level of P2PC.”

Mahalo nui loa Raven!

If you click over to Talking Story right now you will see that I have updated both sidebar columns with new links to bring the site back up to date (let me know what you think: I would love your feedback so I can make it as user-friendly for you as possible).

There will not be a set schedule for Talking Story, for diversions do not do well in set schedules! However mission-connected Ho‘ohana does, and so you can be sure that as its critical underlying foundation, Talking Story will be value-aligned with our month here at MWAC.

Tomorrow we start our Tuesday schedule with Ka lā hiki ola and Ho‘ohiki. I hope to see you here then, and working with us for your value-alignment fix in the week thereafter.

We Ho‘ohana together!
~ Rosa

Subscribe to Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching by Email

Ka lā hiki ola and the New Us

I decide on the next value theme for each month quite far in advance, though I normally will not flesh them out in full for Managing with Aloha Coaching until a few weeks out. Often, something exceptionally wonderful happens.

ALOHA ~ ~ ~ For those who may be newly arriving here, to Managing with Aloha Coaching: 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. This is my Day One Essay for June 2008. Welcome! ~ Rosa Say

Day One of a month will arrive within a kind of magic...

The value I had chosen as much as nine months ago has its assigned time arrive in a way that tells me Providence has been hard at work, laboring with diligence on everything else in my life, so that when the value-connected time arrives I will focus intently. Not only that; I will love every second of that focus. I will Ho‘ohana, work with purpose, passion, and full intention.

So it is again with June. Our value is Ka lā hiki ola, “the dawning of a new day.”

Here is the very first thing I want you to know about Ka lā hiki ola:

You can choose to have the “dawning of a new day”
whenever you want to,
whenever you need to, and (this is important),
whenever you decide to.

I have decided that I want and need to choose Today, and I therefore do.

Grab hold of Your New

“New” is always so tantalizing, isn’t it. By nature, though some cynics who wax nostalgic will seek to temper our enthusiasm (ignore them!) we know that “new” means a fresh energy of some kind, and the hope and promise of some extraordinary difference.

New is innovative, new is bold; new is never lowly or unimportant.

New is novel, new is contemporary; new is never tired or old-fashioned.

New is new-fangled. New is up-to-the-minute. New is original.

And here is that extraordinary difference: No matter our age, no matter our circumstance, new can always be us.

We can be tantalizing.
We can be fresh.
We can be innovative.
We can be bold.
We can be novel.
We can be contemporary.
We can be new-fangled, up-to-the-minute and original.

We can, and we will.

We are the Ho‘ohana Community, and we can do whatever we choose to do Kākou ke Aloha, together and with Aloha. This, for example, is a photo about how the Ho‘ohana Community continues to thrive and grow. [A short story about the photo is here.]

Welcome to our new feeling for June 2008: Ka lā hiki ola, the value of hope and promise.

Tomorrow: An announcement about the New MWAC, and how we will approach our value-based learning this month (and until the next Ka lā hiki ola we choose!)

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Living Mahalo with my Dailies

Stephen’s Day

I have an annual ritual for November 28th. It is the birthday of someone now in heaven who was exceptionally special to me, and so in his honor I call this Stephen’s Day. When Stephen died, I decided that I needed to commemorate the day somehow, so I would keep remembering and working on some of the things he had taught me to be grateful for during all the time he blessed my days. Having his birthday fall at the end of November, a month I have always associated with the diligent, focused practice of Mahalo (appreciation, gratitude, and thankfulness) seemed to be an added affirmation.

That affirmation has now become gift. For remember, living within mahalo is living within thankfulness for each element which makes your life precious to you.

Kēia Manawa

Stephen was someone who could focus on the present moment clearly and with perceptive intensity, able to see the everything existing in the here and now. In Hawai‘i we call this kēia manawa, living in moments which seize the day with both hands, with heart, mind, gut and soul. Kēia la; today you own the day.

Stephen was someone who never looked behind him, easily letting things go and leaving the past behind. What was over was done. He was also someone who was never in a rush to have tomorrow come, fully knowing that a single day is never long enough for us mere humans to milk it fully of all its possibility. However have no hesitation or doubt: We were here to try. And try he did, Stephen lived his too-short life in a joyous way that made everyone else feel lucky to be on earth with him.

However Stephen was not obsessive about whatever he chose to do either; in fact, he had relaxing down to an art form. His was a life of contentment. When you live in Mahalo as Stephen did, you die with no regrets.

My Dailies

This is my annual ritual: On November 28 I rewrite my Dailies for the next year to come, starting from scratch and letting my self’s intention do any remembering. My Dailies fill a simple list on a single sheet of paper, and I print a dozen copies, putting them wherever I may need them to be readily accessible for me. The electronic copy goes on my calendar as a daily recurrence for 5am so I read it whenever I first switch online.

On my list of dailies is everything I would want to do each and every day if I could possibly fit them all in.

From year to year my list has gotten longer, though I do stick to my one-page-only rule, and frankly, I have never had a day where I did everything on it. If you add up all the minutes, it probably isn’t even possible.

But here’s the rub: Without my Dailies, I probably wouldn’t accomplish half the things I do each day; I would not manifest as many possibilities as I do, and I would miss opportunities I now see more clearly. Looking at the dailies I have just now written, I usually do achieve the first ten at minimum.

Mahalo for a brand new year to come

Here are the Stephen’s Day dailies I settled on today. Those of you who have read my writing regularly over the past year will recognize the influences :) I’ve added in some explanatory italics and links for you. Values are in bold, and you can find those links in the column to the right.