Transformational Rot
Fundamentally there are only two types of people: Dull & Alert.
One places trust only in the tangible, the other invests in the intangible.
Dull businessmen, for example, are those whose desire is solely to make money.
Alert businessmen are always striving to create a market. They strive to call out and create from nothingness what they have already visualized. They’re fulfilling a purpose.
Making money for this type is a result of an action not the purpose of it.
Dull organisations trust only the tried and tested formulas. Often no longer even comprehending the purpose of a system, or rule, it is enforced nonetheless. They are best described as people who see rules as a process of limiting and disabling.
This type usually sees only what cannot be done.
Alert organisations continually seek innovation and are flexible. These adapt processes and change rules to fit the current context and need. These view rules as existing for our enablement. Not to restrict but to facilitate.
The dull individual is consistently living in fear. Scared of outcomes. Wanting to live off and consume in comfort what they now have free access to. They tend to overly protect and control.
Anything that needs “Purpose” typically wearies them.
Alert individuals live in hope, seeking avenues of self-expression. S/he is that parent who suffers in silence allowing the child to take that ‘risk’. S/he is that boss who sets up subordinates for success.
(Or have you not experienced that person who continually sets you up to fail?)
The Dull typically mistrust, even as the Alert invest in faith.
The easiest differentiator is that the one ‘writes you off’ the other strives to offer you a second chance.
Honestly I haven’t met any person who is at either extreme and perhaps we’re human because we all have some of this & that.
The point I want to make is that there are only two directions or planes that we operate from.
One spirals down the route of Bad Worse Worst. The other is on the trajectory of Good Better Best.
The majority of us are perhaps neither currently at the Worst we can be, nor are we at our Best. The question is: which trend or direction is governing our lives currently? Not how we were in the past but how we are today.
Transformational Rot shifts us from the trajectory that enables growth to the slide that causes regress.
Organisations, families, individuals who are victim of Transformational Rot, struggle to be “as good as we once were “ deluding themselves by trying to make incremental changes.
From being at a position of ‘Worse’ an incremental change only makes you less worse…but less worse is still bad.
Remaining on the slide of being bad only causes you once again to regress to becoming worse. You felt good about yourself because you had made a small change, but until that change is transformational it does not shift you from the slide to the trajectory.
Because you feel good about yourself for a while but cannot experience lasting change, you tend to begin to blame external circumstances (mostly other people)
Here’s a simple law that you’ve often witnessed: A dog returns to its vomit.
Until the Dull embrace Transformational Change, consciously and visibly, they act exactly like the dog.
Returning to, and consistently finding, what they detest.
Our incremental changes are like the dog retching. We want to get rid of what of what we detest; of what is harmful to our system…. Yet end up by licking it all over once again.
Transformational change is not in attempting to vomit less.
It’s not about learning to cope with that which we detest, or tolerating what we hate.
It’s about putting doubt to the sword. Gaining clarity, living by conviction. Freeing ourselves of procrastination and double mindedness.
Hurling ourselves – with a viciousness that is even holy – at that rot that’s robbing us of our potential.
Here is a mantra that might help make the change: “Accept everything. Tolerate nothing.”