People often ask me why this book is called “The Churning”. I tell them there are three reasons.
The first is the churning that is happening all around us: the changes that are happening in politics, the economy, society, and technology, and of course in the environment. Together, these have created a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. This is the outer, physical churning we face.
The second reason is the inner, emotional churning that we can sometimes experience as a result: the feelings of loss, uncertainty, anxiety, and even fear that can so easily arise when so much change is happening all at once, and which can make us feel churned around like a sock in a washing machine. This is our inner, psychological and emotional churning.
And the third kind of churning is the type that turns cream into butter. Because the fact is that change is nothing new, it has always been with us**. All that is different today is the scale and rate of changes we are facing. So the third kind of churning is the churning that makes us stronger and more valuable
If we can learn to develop new attitudes to change, along with new tools, techniques, and skills, we can learn to handle even this higher rate of change. And we can start to use the challenges we face as opportunities to become clearer about what matters most to us and more able to achieve that.
With the right attitudes, skills, tools, and techniques, we can use this time of change as an opportunity to ‘churn’ ourselves from the ‘cream’ we are today into whatever type of ‘butter’ we most want to become.
We can churn ourselves to become stronger and more valuable: antifragile.
How much outer churning is happening in your world? How much inner churning is that creating, both in you and in the people around you? Are you using this as an opportunity to churn yourself from cream into the type of butter you most want to become?
(**The ancient Hindus described this same process in the legend of The Churning of the Milk Ocean.)
Adapted from Inner Leadership: tools for building inspiration in times of change.
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