Last week, we successfully released CEEK’s new book, Navigate Chaos. Hopefully, you picked up a copy and are benefitting from the valuable stories, research, and questions posed. This week, we’d like to share one final excerpt from the book that offers the potential to maximize the impact it can have on you and your colleagues.

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

~ George Bernard Shaw

Through Navigate Chaos and the excerpts I’ve provided on this blog, I share my doubts, fears, insecurities, failures, discoveries, aspirations, and triumphs in my pursuit of healthy balance, personal fulfillment, and professional success. My hope is that you are able to relate to some aspects of my story in a way that helps you in your journey.

If my stories, life experiences, failures, and successes were of value to you, consider for a moment that your stories, life experiences, failures, and successes may be valuable to others. In the spirit of George Bernard Shaw’s quote, I encourage you to share your adventure. It’s through shared ideas and knowledge that we can exponentially transform the minds of individuals and the culture of organizations in a way the promotes personal fulfillment and professional success. That is the very intention of Navigate Chaos.

One of the best and most productive ways to share ideas and knowledge to the benefit of yourself and others is by engaging a small group of trusted friends and colleagues to participate in this journey together. Just as vacations can be more fun and memorable with people you love, so too can the journey inward be more enlightening and meaningful when you bring others along with you. The journey to the authentic self can be difficult. Yet, when it’s done in the company of others whom you trust enough to be vulnerable in front of, the learning can be exponentially greater, the realizations fundamentally deeper.

Even if you have already considered the questions and activities suggested through these excerpts, I encourage you to engage a study group of friends or colleagues as a means to better understand the material presented here and in the book. Finding others who share your innate curiosity can enable the group to plumb the depths of issues and collectively lift everyone to greater heights of understanding. Below are some suggestions on how to get a study group started and what to expect.

1. Recruit up to six people for this group but no more so that everyone has a chance to participate in each meeting. (Fewer people is fine, too.)
2. As a group, decide on a timeframe for completing the book’s activities together. Be sure to give everyone sufficient time to read the chapters, answer the questions, and do the deeper dive activities.
3. Meet on a recurring basis to discuss what you learned from each chapter, and to share insights, lessons, and observations regarding the questions to consider and deeper dive activities.

The critical component of this group is listening. The point is to share your findings with the group and listen to the others as they share. Learning comes by listening to what others bring and incorporating what makes sense into your psyche. Discussions are encouraged. Just remember that no one is in the group to fix someone else. That behavior is strongly discouraged.

Understand that someone might drop out. It happens. The goal is to be kind, understanding, and reflective. There’s no one right way to do this process. Allow the group to develop a flow of its own in your collective efforts to CEEK a Better Way!

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