I just returned from a trip to the amazing Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador, best known as the place where Charles Darwin first developed the theory of evolution by natural selection. Today, 98% of the Galapagos is protected as a national park, preserving the unique species of animals and birds that exist nowhere else on earth.

Because humans are not a threat, and there are no large predators on land, the wildlife has no fear of people. You can walk right up to nesting birds, sunning lizards, or nursing sea lions, and observe them at close range. Among the many animals I got to know this way were the penguins, who swam alongside us as we snorkeled.

If you watch a group of penguins for a while, you'll discover something quite interesting. On land, penguins waddle or hop, sometimes spreading their wing-flippers to maintain balance on their narrow webbed feet. Their lack of grace is frequently comical, and the only way they can travel quickly is to flop on their bellies and slide.

In the water, however, penguins are agile and fast. A diving penguin can travel up to 17 miles per hour. They zipped past us like little torpedoes, leaving streams of bubbles in their wake. Penguins in the water are masters of their environment, while penguins on land are awkward and slow.

The behavior of penguins demonstrates a phenomenon I've often observed in people. Some environments feel natural to us, and when we are in them, we are graceful and adept. But in strange surroundings, we can be clumsy and unskilled. Sometimes we can adapt to new environments, and over time become more capable in them. But not always. Penguins have been spending half their time on land for millennia, and after all that time, they are still more at home in the water.

There's a lesson here for those setting out on their own hero's journey. Your journey may lead you to unfamiliar new environments. By all means, try them out to see if they are a fit for you. You may be pleasantly surprised at how well you adapt. But you may also discover that there are some surroundings where you naturally do well, and others where you constantly struggle.

When I first decided I was going to change my profession to one that allowed me to do more good in the world, I was led to give many talks and workshops in far-away cities. On a typical trip, I would get on an airplane, spend one night at my destination, give my presentation, and fly home again, all within 48 hours. These whirlwind business trips were a challenge for me, but I struggled to adapt. "I should be able to do this," I told myself. After several years of business travel where I got sick, came home exhausted, or suffered from stress and anxiety, I finally realized my mistake. Natural selection was at work, telling me I was not adapted for this environment!

I do infinitely better when I can either sleep in my own bed at night, or spend several days at a destination, becoming acclimated to it. So now when I give presentations to far-away audiences, I either deliver a teleclass or webinar from home, or combine my visit with a vacation where I spend at least three or four days in the area where I am speaking. What a difference! Instead of being an awkward, uncomfortable penguin on land, I become a graceful, at-ease penguin in the water.

Each of us is naturally well-suited to certain environments. But in other surroundings, while we can certainly survive, we will never be at our best. So if you should discover that at heart you are really a penguin, start swimming.

Labels: life purpose

Many years ago, at a challenging time in my life, I had a dream of accomplishing an important goal in San Francisco. At the time I envisioned that goal, I was stranded in Indianapolis with no job and no money. I eventually got to San Francisco, and accomplished my goal. But I had to get there by way of Toronto.

Now a quick glance at any map will tell you that Toronto is not on the way from Indianapolis to San Francisco. Since this chain of events took place in the middle of winter, going to Toronto was certainly not going to bring me any better weather. I didn't have a permit to work in Canada at the time I went there, so it wasn't going to be any easier to find a job, either.

But what did exist in Toronto was one person who I believed cared about me, and another person who I thought would give me some money. It turned out I was right on both counts. I got enough money to rent a room; with a place to stay, I found an under-the-table job; with someone nearby who cared about me, I stuck out the lousy job for six weeks and saved up enough money for a bus ticket to San Francisco.

Sometimes the only way to accomplish what you think is important is by going the long way around.

A friend of mine is stuck in his own personal Indianapolis right now. He has an important goal, one that could possibly impact the lives of many people for the better. And he's determined to reach his own version of San Francisco to get it done. But the problem is that he's afraid to leave his Indianapolis until he has the entire journey mapped out, paid for, and planned every step of the way. You see, he doesn't want to end up in Toronto by mistake.

I understand my friend's fear. None of us wants to make a mistake. It seems like it would be so much safer to plan and prepare for every little contingency before setting out. That way you can avoid making any mistakes, right? Ah, if only that were true!

In reality, leaving Indianapolis before he is completely ready might not be such a bad idea for my friend at all. At least he'll be on the road and moving. He'll learn some things; he'll meet some people; he'll find out what it's like to begin pursuing his goal instead of just dreaming about it. He'll work the bugs out of his plan with some road testing in the real world. He might even discover that some of his goal can be achieved before he ever gets to San Francisco.

When the only way you can figure out how to get from Indianapolis to San Francisco is by way of Toronto, then I say, go that way. If you go the long way around, you are still going. If you insist on staying put until you've planned every detail, you're not going anywhere.

The distance from Indianapolis to San Francisco is 2,272 miles. The distance traveled if you have to go by way of Toronto would be 3,193 miles instead. But the distance traveled if you don't go at all is zero. That doesn't sound like a journey worth planning to me.

Labels: life purpose, social action

March 24-30, 2008 has been designated as Conversation Week by Conversation Café and Global MindShift. This annual event is an opportunity for people around the world to gather in small groups and have meaningful conversations.

I love having deep, purposeful conversations and enjoy being in environments where they can be had. I used to think I was shy because I felt so uncomfortable in many social situations, but then I realized that it was simply because I had never learned to enjoy small talk. What interests me is large talk.

The most important questions for Conversation Week dialogues this year were voted on by 1500 people in 39 countries. Here they are:

1. How can we best prepare our children for the future?
2. What does sustainability look like to you? How do we get there?
3. How do humans need to adapt to survive the changes predicted for this century?
4. How do we shift from "Me" to "We" on both the local and global levels?
5. How can you, as Gandhi said, be the change that you want to see in the world?
6. What kind of economic structures can best support a shift to sustainable living?
7. How should we re-invent the political process so that people feel that they have a voice?
8. What kind of leadership does the world need now?
9. How can we balance our personal needs with the most pressing needs of our community and the larger world?
10. What can we do to reduce or eliminate violence in the world?

It's a compelling list of topics. I was most taken by #5, "How can you, as Gandhi said, be the change that you want to see in the world?" Conversation Week organizers provided some additional conversational doorways into each topic, and for this one they asked: "What gaps do you notice between your 'walk' and 'talk' and what steps can you take towards 'being the change'?"

"What steps can you take?" What a crucial element this question is for a dialogue about change. Perhaps it is my training and experience as a coach (or perhaps this is what drew me to coaching in the first place), but I often feel driven to end conversations by asking, "And what is your next step?" To me, this is how conversations can be not only meaningful, but impactful.

Being in dialogue with others is an essential tool for raising our awareness. Sometimes it is the only way we ever find out what we really think. We make a declaration aloud in response to a question or challenge, and find ourselves thinking, "Yes, of course! That's what I believe to be true."

But as significant as that awareness may be, what often happens is that the moment of enlightenment passes, and we go on with our lives as before. We have a momentous realization, but then don't connect any action to it. And then we forget about it until the next time something or someone prods us into awareness again.

Perhaps one move we can all make toward "being the change" is to add this one simple question to our conversations about how the world should be different: "And what is your next step?" Perhaps if we keep asking this of others, they will also start asking it of us.

Labels: life purpose, social action

Preparing for the Introduction to Social Entrepreneurship class I'm giving this month, I've been researching successful social entrepreneurs. What are the qualities that enable people like Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus to build an enterprise that benefits millions of people?

One essential quality that all these world-changers share is the ability to persist at solving a specific problem, regardless of roadblocks and distractions. Muhammad Yunus began his Grameen Bank with only $27 of his own money, and a staff of student volunteers. He persisted with his idea of providing microcredit to help families out of poverty despite opposition from the banking industry, political leaders who opposed his "capitalist" approach to helping the poor, and religious leaders who disapproved of his lending to women. Today the Grameen Bank has loaned money to 7 million people, reaching 80% of the poor families in Bangladesh. But what that took for Yunus was dedication to the same cause for over 30 years.

There are so many causes that one could choose to work for, and they all seem to need us. On any given day, I find myself drawn to acting on behalf of causes as varied as girls' education, global warming, Barack Obama's candidacy for president, and supporting entrepreneurship in the developing world. Working for the same cause for 30 years seems to me an unreachable ideal. Does that mean I'm not a candidate for social entrepreneurship?

In Tim Ferriss' book The 4-Hour Workweek, he has a powerful chapter on the topic "Filling the Void: Adding Life After Subtracting Work," in which he says, "Everything out there needs help... If you're improving the world -- however you define that -- consider your job well done... Find the cause or vehicle that interests you most and make no apologies."

I'd like to change one word of Tim's advice. Instead of "the cause," make it "a cause." If I, or you, or anyone can be a serial entrepreneur, we can also be serial social entrepreneurs.

For David Bornstein's book How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, he interviewed Fabio Rosa, who has been working tirelessly to bring electricity to rural Brazil since the early 1980's. He asked Rosa why he continues to do this work, and Rosa responded, "I am trying to build a little part of the world in which I would like to live."

Yes, there are many causes to serve and limited time to serve them, but for each of us there is a little part of the world that we can help, sometimes by contributing five minutes and sometimes five years. Dedicated people like Yunus and Rosa can inspire us, but their shining example shouldn't deter us from casting a little light of our own.

Labels: hero stories, social entrepreneurs

During Barack Obama's victory speech after winning the South Carolina primary last night, among the signs waving in the audience was one that read: "Got hope?" Hope has been a strong theme in the Obama campaign: "choosing hope over fear" and "the power of hope to imagine, and then work for, what had seemed impossible before." Obama's focus on hope as a catalyst for action is what first drew me to him as a candidate.

I've been thinking a lot about hope lately as a result of reading Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism. One of the book's self-assessments allows you to determine your personal "hope score." Not too surprising to me, my own hope score was fairly high.

According to Dr. Seligman, no other single score is as important as your hope score in determining your level of achievement and happiness in life. Simply put, people with a high level of hopefulness believe that their actions can make a difference, and therefore, they act. But people who feel hopeless also feel helpless. Since they believe that nothing they do matters, they choose to do nothing.

Seligman has been studying hopefulness and helplessness in the laboratory since 1964, and what his experiments indicate is that both are learned behaviors. Whether the lab subjects are rats, dogs, or humans, if they experience too much powerlessness in a particular area, they become hopeless and stop trying. But the good news is that the reverse is also true. When people or animals believe that their actions do make a difference, they become more hopeful, and try even harder.

Seligman's experiments also suggest that hopelessness and helplessness coincide with severe depression. Hopeless, helpless people become depressed. Depressed people become hopeless and helpless. And again, the reverse is true. People who regain hope are no longer depressed. If Seligman is right (and he has many years of statistical studies backing up his theories), hope is not only an antidote for depression, it's a vaccination that can prevent it from occurring.

The key to developing hope, according to Seligman, is changing your "explanatory style." Finding temporary and specific causes for adversity and disappointment is the art of hope; believing in permanent and universal causes is the practice of despair. His experiments show that if you can learn to change the way you explain negative events and conditions, you can become more hopeful.

A hopeless person says, "my candidate never wins" (permanent), so he stays away from the polls. A hopeful person says, "my candidate lost the last election" (temporary), but campaigns for his candidate this time. A hopeless person tells herself, "the whole country is a mess" (universal), so she thinks there is nothing she can do to change it. A hopeful person tells herself, "our health care system is a mess" (specific), so she advocates for health care reform.

People become hopeful because they tell themselves they can make a difference. And hopeful people take action. Hope is the stuff that positive change is made of.

In Obama's words: "...hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it."

How about you? Got hope?

Labels: social action

Last January, I issued a challenge to readers of this blog and myself to commit one heroic act in 2007. And I made a commitment to my own heroic act: to launch or join a project in support of educating girls in the developing world, and contribute enough of my time and energy to send 30 girls -- a classroom full -- to school. I'm proud to say that I achieved this goal.

In June, I founded the Send Girls to School Project to spread the word about the amazing impact girls' education has on global poverty, supporting five different nonprofits that help girls attend school around the world. As a result of this project, enough donations were made to Educate Girls Globally, Room to Grow Girls' Scholarships, and Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED) to send approximately 40 girls to school for one year in India, Southeast Asia, and Africa. (If you made a contribution after hearing about this project, please stop by the Report Card page to let me know.)

A totally unexpected result of this project is that it inspired a song! Singer-songwriter Lisa Safran wrote They Just Need School after learning about the project, and you can listen to it on the Send Girls to School website.

If you made your own resolution to be more heroic last year, how did you do? In my steps to becoming a hero, "take action" is #3, so it's okay if you didn't get quite that far. Perhaps you made progress on step #1, "develop your heroic qualities." That, too, is a heroic act.

Labels: heroism, social action

This holiday season, consider using your gift-shopping dollars to help make the world a better place. By purchasing gifts from fair trade organizations, social enterprises, nonprofit cooperatives, and other worthy causes, you can give a gift to the people on your list and to the global community at the same time. In what has become an annual feature in this blog, here are some suggested ways you can make a difference with your holiday shopping.

Ten Thousand Villages - Purchase fair trade housewares, jewelry, accessories, and other gifts from artisans in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. For the women on your list, check out the Vintage Appeal collection. For men, see the ideas on their Gifts for Him page.

Handmade Expressions - Choose from socially and environmentally responsible products from artisan cooperatives, including eco-friendly journals, shopping bags, tote bags, and purses from recycled materials, cloth dolls made from scraps, and jewelry created from locally sourced materials.

BuyChange - Select gifts from four different social enterprises that sustain worthy causes: Arghand Hand-milled Soap from Afghanistan, Food from the Hood Salad Dressing from South Central Los Angeles, Mr. Elliepooh Elephant Pooh Paper Products from Sri Lanka, and Hagar Handbags and Accessories from Cambodia.

A Greater Gift - This program of SERRV International provides development assistance to low-income micropreneurs and helps them market their products. In their online store, you can purchase jams and jellies from Swaziland, olive oil from Palestine, wild rice from the Native American Ojibwe tribe, tea from Nepal packaged in a satin brocade bag, and much more.

Palestine Children's Welfare Fund - You can purchase beautiful handmade embroidery crafted by Palestinian women in refugee camps. Your purchases help to support these women and their families, who have very few options for earning a living. Stop by the ConnectHer project to find out how your shopping dollars will help more women micro-entrepreneurs get started.

Heavenly Treasures - Help people break the cycle of poverty by purchasing handicrafts from livelihood projects in 11 countries around the world. Check out the banana bark holiday ornaments from Kenya, wool slippers from Kyrgyzstan, and silk scarves from Laos. If you're in the Los Angeles area, visit their retail store in Glendora.

Aid to Artisans - Buy jewelry, accessories, home decor, and crafts from this project to help artisans in the developing world learn business skills and find markets for their products. You can also find some ATA products at stores like Crate & Barrel and Pier 1 Imports.

iGive - If the wish lists of your loved ones include items from name brand merchants like Apple, Best Buy, Gap, or Harry & David, you can make these purchases and still make a contribution by shopping through iGive. Participating merchants will donate an average of 1-5% of your purchase to the cause of your choice. Since 1997, iGive has raised almost $3 million for charity.

JustGive - For the person who has everything, you can make a gift in their honor with a charity gift basket that donates the amount of your choice to a selection of charities in support of a single cause. Choose from causes like Support Women of the World, Create Peace for All, Plant Trees, or Provide Shelter for Animals.

For even more suggestions, check out my 2006 guide or 2005 guide to find sources for gift baskets, baby clothes, organic cotton clothing, bath salts, pet gifts, soup mixes, chocolate, and much more. Build a better world with your purchases this holiday.

Labels: social action, social entrepreneurs

The hero's journey can be a lonely one. But does it have to be? Or in fact, do the heroes who ultimately succeed in their quests do so because they were willing to seek out -- and accept -- a considerable amount of help?

In Joseph Campbell's writings about the hero's journey, he describes numerous helpers the hero may require along the way, including mentors, spirit guides, allies, and rescuers. In stories about heroes from mythology, fiction, and real life, the role of these helpers is significant.

King Arthur had his mentor Merlin and the aid of the Knights of the Round Table. Luke Skywalker had the guidance of Obi-Wan Kenobi and the companionship of Han Solo and Princess Leia. Lance Armstrong became a champion cyclist because he was mentored by Chris Carmichael, survived cancer with the assistance of Dr. Steven Wolff and cancer nurse Latrice Haney, and built his cancer research foundation with the help of Kristen Richard, who became his wife. Successful heroes have help.

If you are setting out on a quest of your own, you may already know that you need guidance and support, but where can you find it? One approach I always suggest to fledgling heroes pondering this question is immersion. If you stand outside the new world you want to enter, it always appears mysterious, and usually frightening. You don't know where to go or who to talk to, and because you aren't talking to anyone, you think you are alone with your goals and dreams. But once you take one small step into that world, you immediately make contact with like-minded people. The trick is to be willing to step in before you have it all figured out.

When I first decided to help entrepreneurs become more successful in 1992, I had no idea how to go about it. I didn't know anyone else who did that kind of work, I had no mentors or guides, and no one to help me. If I had stayed in that isolated state, I wouldn't have lasted 15 weeks in my new venture. Instead, it's been 15 years. The reason I've ultimately been able to help so many people with my work is because I've had a lot of help myself. And I found that help by immersing myself in the world I wanted to enter -- before I felt ready to be there.

What this means on a practical level can be any number of activities, for example, attending meetings of like-minded people, reading books about related people and projects, surfing the web to find out who is doing what, taking classes related to your goal or dream, and asking others for ideas, resources, and connections.

One of the most helpful steps to me personally turned out to be getting on mailing lists. Receiving newsletters and announcements from the people and organizations already in the world I wanted to enter introduced me to new possibilities, suggested places I could go and people I could meet, and made me feel as if I was a part of something.

If you are looking for mentors and allies for a social action or advocacy project of your own, the organization FLOW has developed some effective models for connecting people with similar ideas. In San Francisco, New York, and Austin, they've been holding regular "Activation Circle" gatherings to bring together people with a shared vision of "liberating the entrepreneurial spirit for good." And on Nov. 30 in Austin, and Dec. 7 in San Rafael, they are hosting daylong events for that purpose.

I'll be attending the San Rafael event, where the morning will be focused on a particular theme: supporting women entrepreneurs in the developing world. In the afternoon session, attendees will have a chance to interact with each other about the topic of their choice related to any social enterprise, in an open space setting. After attending a session like this in October, I walked away with a tall stack of new contacts and possibilities for my own projects.

One of the fastest ways to end your quest to make a difference before it starts is to believe that you're the only one on that particular journey. If you want to have a successful mission, start looking around for who else should be on your team.

Labels: heroism, social action, social entrepreneurs

Recently, I've been exploring the issue of the necessary conditions for people to become entrepreneurs. For me, this is one aspect of a larger question -- what enables people to take action on the change they wish to see in the world?

At an Empowering Women Entrepreneurs event last weekend, I learned that in the developing world, one of the obstacles to successful entrepreneurship is the expense and difficulty of legally starting a business. In Honduras, for example, to open a legal sole proprietorship requires 169 steps, 270 days, and $3,765 U.S.

The interesting fact is that all this doesn't stop entrepreneurs from getting started in Honduras. Instead, they go underground. Up to 89% of all businesses in Honduras operate extralegally. Doing business in this underground economy has many problems. Entrepreneurs have no access to capital, so they can't expand. Businesses can be shut down arbitrarily by the law or local bosses. But despite these difficulties, new underground businesses get started every day.

This phenomenon isn't limited to the developing world. In the urban centers of North America, underground economies thrive. In Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh describes how conventional business owners -- not just drug dealers and prostitutes -- operate in the economic underground. Self-employed mechanics, food vendors, painters, hairdressers, and more are all operating outside the law and without participating in the tax system.

When people are unable to participate in the legal economy because the cost of entry is too high or their path is blocked due to racial, class, religious, or gender barriers, it doesn't stop them from entering the economy. They just create their own.

When I was a street kid in the 70's, I lived in this twilight economy. Money changed hands, products and services were obtained, people worked in exchange for compensation, but no one I knew had a paycheck or a business license or paid taxes. I used to look at the straight world -- the one where people had jobs and stores and checking accounts -- and think that was the real world. People like me, without an education or the right connections or respectable resumes, didn't have the price of admission to that world, so we stayed in our own.

But in an environment where more money changes hands under the counter than over it, isn't that where the "real world" truly lies? In an economy like that of Honduras, there are clearly more people participating in the shadow economy than in the legal one. In the U.S., no one knows how many people make a living in the underground economy, although the number of illegal immigrants alone has been estimated as high as 20 million. Estimates of the monetary size of the U.S. underground economy suggest that it is equivalent to 9% of the legitimate economy, which would make it about $1 trillion per year. That amount seems pretty real to me.

In the 1999 film The Matrix, the transformative moment for the central character, Neo, is when he discovers that the world he has been living in -- where residents have homes and jobs and businesses -- is all an illusion perpetrated by evil machines. The real world is one where a ragtag band of dropouts struggle for survival, fighting against the machines that dominate the planet. This real world exists, quite literally, underground.

In the surface world, Neo is a person of no importance, and feels lost and alone. But in the underground world, Neo becomes a hero and a leader to his people. For Neo to make the transition from the false surface world to the real world underground, he first must be able to see through "the matrix" projecting the false images. But once he does see the real world, the false one no longer deceives him. He can (literally) see right through it.

So what do underground economies and The Matrix have to do with taking action to change the world? Simply this. If you look around you at the world you believe you live in and think you don't fit in, or feel excluded from participating, or you don't have the price of admission, find another world. It's probably already operating right under your nose.

There is a back door into almost every line of endeavor you can name. If you believe that door exists, and are willing to knock on enough doors to find the right one, you can gain admittance. You can start a business with no capital, operate a nonprofit without registering one, or get a job as a researcher without credentials. I mention these three examples because they are all things I have personally done at one time, but many more examples exist.

To set up the necessary conditions for you to take action, perhaps you need to forget about whatever you have been led to believe the real world looks like. Instead, seek out people who are already doing what you want to do, connect with others who themselves have felt disenfranchised or excluded, locate the community where at last you feel welcome. Wherever that is, for you, that is the real world.

Labels: hero stories, heroism, social action

In the latest edition of Heifer International's World Ark magazine, I first learned about HeroRat, a project launched by the Belgian research organization APOPO. HeroRat trains rats how to detect buried landmines.

Even if this isn't an issue that would normally attract your attention, you should pay a visit to the HeroRat site. With photos, videos, cartoons, really cute graphics, and even a video game, it's one of the best fundraising websites I've ever seen.

Why landmine-detecting rats? Here's the story in a nutshell. Every 20 minutes, a civilian is hurt or killed by a buried landmine in war zones around the world. Metal detectors are slow and tedious, bulldozers don't work on uneven terrain, and mine-detecting dogs can set off the mines.

Rats, on the other hand, have a great sense of smell, are easily trained to do repetitive tasks, are inexpensive to breed, feed, and transport, and they are too light to trigger the mines. One trained rat can clear 100 square meters of land in 30 minutes. At the HeroRat training center in Tanzania, hundreds of rats are being trained to detect mines, then sent where they are needed around the world.

Of course, the real heroes here are the people that came up with this brilliant concept: Bart Weetjens, Christophe Cox, and Mic Billet, now APOPO's chairman. They first began exploring the problem of land mines in Africa in 1995, and persevered for many years to find funding and a solution. The first team of HeroRats completed their training in 2004. You can read the full story here.

If you adopt a HeroRat for as little as 5 euros per month (about $7 USD), you'll receive emails from your rat, pictures of your rat in action, and an official adoption certificate, all of which I'll bet are every bit as cute as the website.

Labels: hero stories, social action