Marjorie R. Barlow, Ph.D.

What a beautiful word–”vacation.”  We are going on vacation.  We will vacate our house for a short time.  Our daughter, Anna, will house sit, making it possible for us to leave.  We are going to relax, rest, reinvigorate, renew, restore, replenish, and all those “re” words that mean making a new start.  To get away, to let go of the daily work routine, to have a change of pace, and to refresh ourselves in mind, body, and spirit–that is what vacation means to me.

My first husband, James Robinson, was a hard working man who did not take vacations.  He worked after his day’s work, always having a second or third job.  He taught school and he coached tennis and football after school.  After his day of teaching and coaching he came home to take up his carpentry tools and work on our house–the one we were building at the time.  I, too, was workaholic and some would say that I still am workaholic, if they didn’t know how much my work is like high play.  James and I enjoyed our achievements.  We were thrilled to build the next house, have the next child, earn the next degree, or help with the next church project.  I suppose we were really busy but it didn’t seem so at the time.  It was the way we lived.  I thought it was the way to happiness.  We were very much into delayed gratification.  We would have taken a vacation eventually, had he not died.  So, I think of James and his short but jam-packed life today as I am planning this trip to New Mexico with Paul.

When Paul and I married, we took a trip.  We came home and gathered up the four children and took another trip.  We were married four weeks and the University sent Paul to a meeting in Oklahoma, so we took the children on another trip.  We visited Paul’s family in Nebraska, which meant trips at Christmas.  We took vacations in the summer with trips to Disneyland, Normangee and other points in Texas, Lake of the Ozarks, and Alabama.  These vacation trips are still lodged in my family memory bank as high points in our life together.

My parents were hard working, too.  Daddy farmed and was a carpenter and Mother was a school teacher.  Both were active in church every Sunday so they rarely took vacations.  I remember two trips as a child.  One was a trip to Ruidoso and Cloudcroft, NM and the other was to Weslaco, TX in the lower Rio Grande valley.  They moved to Weslaco, living there more than twenty years. After their retirement, they moved again to Kingsland, TX.  My Mother referred to their life in Kingsland as “Paradise.”  With their newfound freedom from daily jobs, they bought a travel trailer and took many well deserved vacation trips.   Each summer, after they harvested the garden and canned or froze their year’s crop, they would hook up the trailer and take off on their vacation.  They enjoyed being gone for two or more weeks, took hundreds of photographs of many places in nature, like Yellowstone park.  They loved to go to Colorado, where the weather was cooler than central Texas.

Our vacations have taken us to France, to Egypt, to Alaska, and many states.  Afterward,  I am ready to set new goals and create more possibilities.   Whenever I take a few days away from my work and the daily routine of our home life, I come back home with new energy, and refreshed mind.  I am looking at the possibilities for our week in New Mexico.   I plan to explore Ruidoso Downs, the horse racetrack that has always been closed when we went there for our winter ski trips.  We might take a side trip to the Iris Farm, and we will surely have one meal at the Lodge in Cloudcroft.  We always enjoy shopping in the small town dedicated to tourists.  The candle store, the French restaurant, and all the fun places where we have had great family times since we first went in the 1980′s are on my list of things to do.   I have left lots of open time for walking, talking, reading, games, and naps.

Vacation is pronounced “vay kay shun” and it derives from the latin Vacare, which means “be free or empty”, this is the same word we get vain from too.  Wikipedia’s etymology says: In the United Kingdom, vacation once specifically referred to the long summer break taken by the law courts and, later, universities—a custom introduced by William the Conqueror from Normandy where it facilitated the grape harvest. In the past, many upper-class families moved to a summer home for part of the year, leaving their usual family home vacant.

These words–vacant, vain, vacation– suggest absence, self-serving, through taking a trip to somewhere else.  Sooooo…….We are going to take a summer vacation.  I am hoping our home will not be vacant.    I trust that this will facilitate the grape harvest.  See you after Labor Day!

CANCUN SPEECH TO LATIN AMERICAN DEALERS MEETING

March 29, 2011

Good Morning!  What is the greatest resource on Planet Earth?  Oil?  Gold?  Coal?  Gas?  What is the greatest resource at Interface?  Yarn?  Nylon?  Machinery?

People are the greatest resource on this planet.  At Interface, we are building a Strengths-Based Culture through our people and for our people.  We follow a formula:  TALENT (which is your life-long pattern of thoughts-feelings-behavior that can be productively applied) multiplied by RELATIONSHIPS (your friendships) and RECOGNITION (attention paid to what you do that is good) coupled with EXPECTATIONS (clearly set and positively designed in accord with your talents)….all of those factors will equal positive employee ENGAGEMENT.  Employees who are engaged, working at what they do best will bring about engaged customers and engaged customers bring bottom line profit.

Donald O. Clifton was the CEO of the Gallup Organization and in his earlier years he was a colleague of my husband.  I learned from him this approach to human development.  Don said many times,   Isn’t It Strange how Kings and Queens and Clowns that caper in sawdust rings….and Common People like you and me…are builders for eternity.  To each is given a bag of tools, a shapeless mass, a book of rules, and each will build, ere time has flown,  a stumbling block or a stepping stone.

We want to be stepping stones to all our employees.  What would happen when we shine our light of our attention on what people do that is right instead of catching them when they are wrong?

To define these terms:  What do we mean when we say you have Strengths?  We mean that you have the ability to provide consistent, near-perfect performance in any given activity.  TALENTS are those recurring patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behavior that can be productively applied.  Adding skills and knowledge to talents brings you to your developing strengths.  SKILLS are the capacity to perform the fundamental steps of an activity.  Knowledge is what we know, either factually or gained by experience.  We have now reached almost all Interface employees with the Clifton Strengthsfinder, assessing what their top five signature themes are.  A SIGNATURE THEME  is simply what we refer to as strengths.  Each employee knows what their “top five” are.  How many of you know your top five themes?

Since Relationships and Recognition are so important, I want you to think about the best recognition you ever received.  Turn to your neighbor and share that honor.

You are very different.  You are a unique, never before born, individual with talents  that are yours only.  No one else is like you.  Turn to your neighbor and tell each other, “I am different..  You are different.”  “I am unique and you are unique.”  “I am significant and you are significant.”

What you believe about yourself, others, and the world is unique to you.  Beliefs are those things that we are certain about.  I tend to want to examine my beliefs constantly.  I think that when we settle into certainty we have stopped being curious and likely have stopped our growth.  I trust more a questioning and curious mind.  So Beliefs can change and beliefs can be examined.  Beliefs lead to the way we think, which is just the words and pictures in our minds.  Thoughts that we think a lot become our beliefs.

Feelings are our energy in motion—emotion.  I now have reached a new concept or belief.  That new concept is that feelings are a guidance system.  When they are positive, we are on our Strengths Path; when they are negative, we are being signaled that we are “off path” or off track.  So feelings are much more than our energy in motion, they serve as a guide much like an EGS in our car.  Am I saying that we can all have positive feelings?  Yes.  In fact, I have been studying Happiness for five years now.  Everything I have read and my own life experience tells me that Happiness is a choice.  JOY is our birthright!  Therefore, when I am experiencing negative emotion, I am not in my path of Joy, which is the path of Strengths in action.

AND, the good news is that this clock of awareness I am showing you with Beliefs at twelve oclock, thoughts at three, feelings at six oclock and behavior at nine—is a simple metaphor for our entire talent bank.  This clock represents the patterns of our lives—our beliefs-thoughts-feelings-behavior will show up again and again in fractile waves that seem to us to be unavoidable.  Yet, I am here to tell you both the good news and the bad:  You are the owner of and responsible for each of these four constructs.  You and you alone own your beliefs-thoughts-feelings-behavior.  In childhood, you were dependent and may not have had choices because you needed to survive.   But here today, in this moment in time, the greatest news of your life is that you can take charge of this clock of awareness.

Your talents, your strengths are real.  They can be developed further and higher through skills and knowledge.  Each year, I pick one of my top five themes to emphasize and expand.  It is our nature to expand and grow.  The great truth is that what we focus on becomes reality.  What we think about will expand.  What we pay attention to will show up in our life.  Basically this means that our relationships are the guiding force for our positive growth and expansion.  I tell people that I have been married to the same man for the last 47 years.  Yet, every morning when I wake up, I have a new husband.  (Someone said, “You go, girl!”)  True, he is the same person in body-mind-spirit.  I have the choice of seeing him through fresh eyes.  When I see through renewed eyes, I see his worth; I focus on his goodness; and I am therefore in a happy state.  There were days, months, even years when I focused on his mistakes and his flaws, thinking that he would improve if I just nagged long enough.  The greatest discovery I ever made was that whatever I focused on in him seemed to get bigger instead of diminishing.  So, I now shine my light of awareness and recognition on what is good about him and — that’s how I have a wonderful new man in my life every day.

This is the same process in every relationship.  At work, it is the same —  what you notice will get bigger.  This is WHY we are building a strengths based culture.  The culture is made up of individual people like you and me.  We are the stepping stones instead of the stumbling blocks for each other.  If we select people for talent and we manage that talent to grow into strengths, then the pathway to profit is assured.  For, it is proven, statistically in thousands of organizations that engaged happy employees will foster engaged customers who trust us and want to do business with us.  Put that together with quality products and a vision of environmental sustainability that is actually true—we are on the way to zero footprint by the year 2020—it turns out that bottom line profit comes about.  There was a question when Ray Anderson, the visionary man who is the founder-leader of Interface, when he had his spear in the chest epiphany and decided to follow his conviction, leading his company into environmental sustainability—he asked “Can we do well by doing good?”  Today, that question has earned a yes answer.  Interface does very well by doing good.

I offer you a simple way to stay on your Strengths Pathway.  These words, LIVE-LAUGH-LOVE; LOOK-LISTEN-LEARN; LIBERATE YOUR TALENTS; AND LEAVE A LEGACY are a quick reminder of how to live your Strengths every day.  So, when I wake up in the morning, I am aware of being alive, of existence itself and I am grateful for the opportunity to have another day on this wonderful Planet Earth.  I have learned the value of laughter.  When we did Yoga Laughter, you had the equivalent of a short cardio workout, and we relieve ourself of the dangers of stress when we lighten up and laugh a lot.  Love has four rungs on a ladder—Eros keeps our species alive; Agape means we can actually choose to be friends with former enemies; Philea means family love; and Caritas is the ultimate unconditional love—charity.  So, each day I have a chance to practice love on all four levels.  To observe in a benign, non-judgmental way means, for me, that I choose to look at my life and my world; to listen accurately and not take personally what is said.  This is my way of remaining helpful; and learning is one of my top five strengths so I feed that hunger every time I learn.  I believe that learning comes best through experience.  Liberating our talents is the goal of management in the Strengths-based culture.  To liberate one’s own talent and be free to be transparent, to be engaged, to be happy, to be one’s true self is the ultimate freedom.  We will do a legacy project today and you will give in that caritas type of love.  Leaving our legacy is our best gift to the generations to come.

Consciousness can expand.  Your spiral of growth means that from a state of automatic reaction to the outside world, you can become aware of yourself in the world, which leads to your awareness of your world.  Awareness is the door to growth and leads to awakening to life—to your true worth, your strengths path, and to the path of joy that is your birthright—feeling truly ALIVE is the best of every day.  Breathing in and breathing out, we feel our aliveness and become fully present in the now moment.  It is through this spiraling consciousness that we can begin to recognize that we are ATTRACTING what we experience; we ALLOW or accept what we have attracted and eventually we reach that ultimate expression of who we are—our AUTHENTICITY.

I want to tell you about one of my daily practices, which I do as part of my own Strengths Pathway.  Growth for all of us is an ongoing possibility.  We are not done yet.  We are not finished in our development.  You can continually expand your Strengths by adding more skills and more knowledge.  This practice I tell you about is one of the ways I stay in the mode of Strengths development.  It keeps me positive and it awakens my creativity.  Every one of my “top five” Strengths are part of my consciousness expansion and my body-mind-spirit development of this one individual.  You will enhance your own Strengths development and contribute to the Strengths-based culture through daily practices that focus on yourself and your evolutionary growth.

Early mornings at our home, we read, we journal, we meditate, and we do Qi Gong.  In that exercise, we face the eight directions and my own thoughts go to these ideas:  In the Southeast, I know I exist and I SHOW UP; in the northwest,  I know I am a woman who has compassion and caring therefore I LISTEN UP; in the southwest, I remember that I am creative and I OPEN UP; in the northwest, I think about our evolutionary journey as humans and I GROW UP; in the west, I think how life doesn’t need to be tragic, so I determine to have fun, laugh, and LIGHTEN UP; turning to the east, I am reminded of my love of learning and I think how I can WISE UP; to the north I remember my mission is to love and I know that I can LINK UP; to the South I review my work and I OFFER UP my contribution to the day.

I would remind you of your life and your meaning in this world at this present time.  I encourage you to continue your development and help your friends and family to follow the Strengths Path.  Positive Action and Awareness Transforming Humanity!

My teacher, Dr. Jean Houston, wrote a lovely poem with which I will end this speech:

You are More You Are More

You are more than you pretend to be

You are more than what most eyes can see

You are more than all your history

Look inside and you will find

There’s glory in your mind

Come be the kind of person you would be….

You are more than what your parents bred

You are more than what your teachers said

You are more than what’s inside your head

Be Aware!

You are more than what your leaders say

You are more than how you earn your pay

You are more than what you seem today

So drop that loser’s mask

You’re equal to the task

The question you should ask is who you are…..

You are more than what the preachers shout

You are more, come let your spirit out

You are more, your soul should have no doubt

Arise, become awake

With every breath you take

The person that is YOU within, will ache to be….

You are more than cell and blood and bone

You are more than just your name along

You are more than all that you may own

Look around you everywhere……There’s something that we share

The magic in the air…is you!

You are more than some statistic chart

You are more than the sum of all your parts

You are more inside your heart of hearts

You know that it is true

This being that is you

Has miracles to do    Believe!

Everybody stand

Take someone’s hand— and say with me,

WE ARE MORE THAN WE PRETEND TO BE……

We are more than what most eyes can see……

we are more than all our history…..

We WILL be the kind of people we can be!

“You have come here to be in community.Tribes were also formed into communities.These three days away from your regular, normal life are dedicated to creating something for the future that wants to emerge.You will be a part of a community of people who have talents, skills, and knowledge.Individually, you hold great promise; collectively you can change the world.You can become a culture of collaborative creatives.The C words, Community, Collaboration, Creativity, Circles, Change, Curiosity—form the structure for this brief experiment in social sustainability that will mark this moment out of time.

Picture in your mind a clock.I use this as a metaphor—your clock of awareness.Beliefs at 12:00; Thoughts at 3:00; Feelings at 6:00; and Behavior at 9:00.Beliefs are what you are certain of.If I am certain that the earth is flat, then my thoughts will be fearful of the edge beyond the horizon.My feelings of fear will be followed by behavior that says, unless I am Christopher Columbus, I cannot go to the edge without falling off.When we are absolutely certain, we will limit our flights of fantasy and our creativity will be held within tried and true belief structures.If we are in awareness and willing to be courageous enough to test our beliefs, then we will expand into the unknown, testing the limits and following imagination out to the edges and beyond.

So, our beliefs are what we are certain of.Our thoughts are just the flow of ideas, words, chatter in our minds; feelings are our energy in motion and behavior is the words we speak, the tone of voice we use, our facial expressions, body postures, gestures, and movements.

There is both good news and bad news in this concept:You and you alone own your clock of awareness.You cannot own it for someone else and when you allow them to be in charge of your thoughts-feelings-behavior, then we have “co-dependence.”Little creativity is possible in such neurotic relationships.

And, we are here to use our talents in the interest of creativity—new ideas—new possibilities—new structures.Outside the box, pushing the limits, stretching beyond the edges is the invitation.That means you will probably need to feel safe with each other, feel free enough to express your thoughts and feelings, and able to collaborate to greater and higher possibilities.We are moving beyond previous limits.

I believe we evolve each generation.My generation, the “Veterans”, evolved our forebears who were from the roaring twenties.Believe me, they talked about my generation with the same skepticism that we now hear about the “Millenials.”What if the Millenials are actually evolving the Generation-X folks; what if the Gen-Xers are evolving the baby boomers and what if the boomers are evolving the Veterans?Maybe we can be more optimistic if we recognize that we stand on the shoulders of what has gone before and the big C is CHANGE?

I am reminded of Ilia Prigogene who won the Nobel Prize for his theory of dissipative structures.He said as old structure die away, new ones form, transcending the old ones.Transformation brings something better.Also, when you hear Dayna explain the perspective of Biomimicry, I feel sure you will see possibilities for this future we keep talking about—it wants to emerge!And we can help.

Two things from Albert Einstein:First, he spoke often of the power of imagination, so we invite your imagination to flourish here these hours we are together.Second, is Einstein’s “Circle of Known.”This genius man implied in his teachings (which often bordered on spiritual ideas)  that if all we know could be contained within a circle, then our interface with the unknown would be equal to the circumference of the circle.As we know more, the circumference increases.Therefore, the more we know, the more we know we don’t know.I am encouraged that the more I age and the more I learn, the more I realize I really know very little!To stretch beyond the known requires the C of CURIOSITY.Curiosity and Creativity go together.They are ingredients in our two day quest.The more curious you are with open minds, open hearts, and open wills, the more likely your creativity will flow.

How then do we collaborate and create this future that wants to emerge?How do we stretch to the edges and beyond?How can we come together with inspiration and imagination?  What if all of us knew what our Strengths mean and began to work in alignment with those Strengths?  What if we had relationships that recognized us when we were productive, setting expectations that are in accord with this future that wants to emerge.  How do we stimulate, inspire, and collaborate toward something unknown that will be good for our future?

Start by recognizing your own talents and then by recognizing the talents of others. Your talents are the patterns of thoughts-feelings-behaviors that were formed by the time you were in your mid-teens.You have added skills and knowledge to them.And, you can still grow these themes.The top five on your name tag represent the gifts that you bring to this community.

Eventually you will have smaller hunter-gatherer groups, forming your core Circle.In those Circles, you can use and acknowledge each others’ Strengths, forming relationships that will create a new identity for the collective—your team.Circles work best when there is a leader in every chair.Your individual leadership shows up as communion through conversation, inviting all the minds to participate.You will come together, with attentive listening as the means of building toward a combined, wholistic effort.You can become more than the sum of individual parts.A circle of people with talent, a stated purpose, and willingness to contribute creative ideas, coming together for a reason—a purpose—a goal, can make history—notable and useful history—spiraling toward the good–for life on this Planet.Through your dialogue, you will express yourselves and who knows what will come forth?

Claiming your genius, accepting your original vision, and noticing your incredible determination is really all you have to do.Then, circle up, invite your creativity to “show up” and let the collaboration begin. Any resistance, contrast, or obstruction is an invitation to expand the dialogue.Expansion is the way.Diversity provides more strength.

A concept we follow here, in the Strengths Based Culture we are co-creating, is the “dipper and the bucket” theory of Don Clifton who authored the Clifton StrengthsFinder, from which you received your top five themes.You have an invisible container, a bucket, in which is stored your positive emotion.Every one of us also has a dipper.Our perception—untrue—our myth is that we can dip from someone else’s bucket and fill our own.The bottom line truth is that that only way we fill our bucket is to fill other buckets as well as our own.This invisible bucket inside each one of us is the prime source of creative energy.Rarely can we collaborate, create, or become a community with negative emotion.Blame, judgment, faultfinding, criticism, actually put a damper on creativity.So, shine your light (your awareness—your attention) on what is right; help prevent bucket dipping; give recognition unexpectedly; open your mind, your heart, and your will; making some new best friends in the process.There will emerge this unknown future that wants to come forth.A Future that wants to emerge will not be a negative future.Your focus on the industry you serve will help build a sustainable future. Your ROI will elevate.Your own individual radiance, unique only to you, will be visible through enthusiasm, energy, and creative action. We invite you to Show Up, Listen Up, Open Up, Grow Up, Lighten Up (this will be fun), Wise Up, Link Up, and Offer Up.

For……..

You are more than you pretend to be.

You are more than eyes can see.

You are more than all your history.

Look around and you will find, there’s creativity in you mind!

We will be the possibilities we can be.

You are more than what your parents bred,

You are more than what your teachers said,

You are more than what’s inside your head.

You are more than cell and blood and bones

You are more than just your name alone

You are more than all that you may own

You are more than some statistic chart

You are more than the sum of all your parts

This person that is you has miracles to do

BELIEVE

ARISE

BECOME AWAKE

With every breath you take

The creative spirit in you will ache

TO BE!

(say with me)…..We are more than we pretend to be

We are more than what most eyes can see

We will be the creative Community we can be!

Stand up.Choose a partner and face each other:

Say simultaneously, with gestures to match the words:

“You are a genius……..I am a genius”

You have original vision…..I have original vision

You have incredible determination…..I have incredible determination”

These are the concepts for making these next days a real fun time.Nature creates by playfully mucking about and you are here to have that kind of fun.We begin by getting to know each other through a circle game we play called, “Who’s Here?”  (I learned this from Don Clifton, also.)

Groups of five with five things to talk about:Each of you will have app. two minutes to tell these five things:1) The name you like to be called; 2) one turning point in your life; 3)one past success; 4)one future plan; and 5) your hot button—what motivates you and gets you into your best creativity.

Written at 6:00 p.m. on October 13, 2010

Three subjects that reveal a person’s strengths in action:

I.  Memories from the past that are satisfying.  This includes actions, achievements, relationships, skills, or knowledge.  Ask, with what am I most satisfied or what makes me most proud?

II.  What energizes me in the present?  What gets me going?  What inspires me?  What motivates me?

III.  Looking to the future, what feels good?  Like waiting for the gifts that come at holidays, think about the desires you have.  This includes things you want to have,  achievements you still want to do, or the positive qualities you want to be.

I have noticed that people who grow their talents into real strengths can talk about all three of these subjects with positive emotion.  I have also noticed that people who look backward to the past with regrets or needs for vengeance seem to be filled with negative emotion.  And, the ones who look forward to the future with worry or anxiety feel bad, too.  The only place we are actually happy and full of joy is right now.  The present moment is where life takes place.  Awareness of our past or future in positive visions, thoughts, and imagination is the best way to be in the path of Strengths in Action.  Living in the Strengths Path will bring you happiness and joy.  And, it can happen right now!

We cherish our mornings here at 686 Clear Springs Hollow, Elm Grove Subdivision, Buda, Texas.  Today, we had broiled grapefruit, an apple, coffee and tea and the weekly bowlfull of vitamins and supplements.  Then we have the luxury of reading to each other as our choice of starting the morning.  Today, we are reading from these books,

• Inspiration: Your Ultimate Calling by Wayne Dyer
• The Third Jesus by Deepak Chopra
• KickAss Creativity by Mary Beth Maziarz
• Dementia Beyond Drugs: Changing the Culture of Care by G. Allen Power, MD
• Reconnecting With Nature: Wellness Through Restoring Your Bond With the Earth by Michael J. Cohen, Ed. D.
• The Fred Factor by Mark Sanborn (thanks to Elaine Mayfield for finding this little jewel)
• Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin

Someone asked me, “Do you really read all these books?”  Actually, my Daddy asked me that in the 1970′s when he saw the new bookshelves I built in our Kingsville home, and their burgeoning load  of books.  My answer was then and still is that they are like good friends.  Some of them I cultivate, others I get to know lightly, and some I move away from without ever finishing.  So, from my past book collections, I gathered readings on learning theory, brain theories, many forms of psychotherapy, and ultimately have meandered my way toward positive psychology, Strengths Development, Quantum theories, and consciousness.  Out of these readings have come new ways of thinking.  So, as I learned from Joseph Campbell, I accepted my right to “follow my bliss”.  I learn what I am curious about; I pursue interesting theories until I am satiated or reach my own level of competence; and along the way, I have these bookshelves full of great old “friends.”

I used my new I-Pad on our train trip recently, enjoying Pride and Prejudice (free download) and feeling good about not turning on the overhead light as all the other passengers slept and I enjoyed my book.  Not sure that I still don’t want the feel of holding a printed volume but with the Kindle, I-Pad and other digital means, perhaps I won’t need to keep building more bookcases?