Successful Living: Generating Intimacy and Community
We often confuse successful living with the content of success. We confuse the stuff of success for the nurturing soil out of which it grows.
How do we know success when we see it?
It’s in the taste and the feel and the pulse of one’s life—it’s in the inspiration and confidence that comes with more richly participating in life, and adding value to a larger framework of relationships, rather than being pushed along by it, or constantly trying to manipulate it toward narrow aims.
Success is a dynamic coordination of social presence, a way of effectively speaking and coordinating action, and it’s expressed through the alignment of our words and deeds with a world we are committed to inventing and co-creating with others.
Success is the weaving of meaningful relationships—with our environment, our friends and family, and our global neighbors, who challenge our provincial world-views.
The integrity we forge, and the far-reaching bonds of intimacy and trust we build through delivering on our sincere commitments, produce abundant value and purpose.
And it is value and purpose—the hallmarks of a well-designed life—that give us inspired reasons to wake up in the morning, and generate stability and joy in our community.
The language of success begins with powerfully embodying what we want to be, and holding fast to that commitment. When we commit to living successfully, we more clearly know what to do, and only then, acquire the means to do it. When our talents and commitments add value to an interdependent whole—rather than deplete it at the cost of narrow aims—we have generated “abundance,” plain and simple.
We can achieve material success, and yet remain plagued with worry, fear, and hopelessness.
Why?
Because force—the self-directed impulse to consume and acquire goods—is empty when it is not nurtured by a context of intimacy, and when it comes at the expense of the environmental and social whole that supports our endeavors.
We can buy a new home, but remain lonely and alienated. We can get that promotion at work and yet feel stuck in a colorless world.
Why?
Because we have not generated sufficient intimacy in our lives, and have not sincerely commited ourselves to cultivating a framework of emotional and intellectual support.
It’s by generating fulfilling and intimate relationships that we resonate with joy, which is the music of success. When we alienate ourselves, we narrow our possibilities, and when we maintain an “us vs. them” mentality, we increase the probability of devastating conflict and emotional pain, and this generates mad and violent worlds.
Let’s powerfully transform our way of being, and cultivate a ground of successful living—one woven out of our commitment to mindfully reinvent what it means to succeed and take greater responsibility for both our own lives and for our global family.
Let’s empower ourselves to align our way of speaking—the commitments and interpretations that articulate our life-possibilities—with the way we want to exist.
So what’s stopping us?
What are you willing to sincerely commit to, and what are you willing to do to transform the force of your life—the drives and impulses that charge your actions— into enduring power and lasting integrity?
–May this disclose a space of rich creativity and inspiration, and may it illuminate what was always there to begin with: infinite abundance!
Please share our blog with anyone who desires abundance, community, and intimacy in their lives.
© 2016, Ideal Coaching Global, Kevin Perry, Bettie J. Spruill
