2012 VISION

While making my annual Happy New Year calls to some of my friends and colleagues, one call in particular was so powerful, that it will literally define my own plan for 2012, and hopefully influence others as well.

During our conversations, my friend, a consultant, is writing a paper on how manufacturing impacts the environment. She has allowed one of her employees to read it as a run thru. The employee had told her that one of the sections might alienate some of her targeted readers. She explained to me that she didn’t to alienate anyone, so she was considering rewriting that particular section to “pull the reader forward” through it. I thought to my self “Wow, not only is that a powerful and insightful change to make, but the expression ‘pull the reader forward’ alone was a light bulb moment on it’s own”.

After our call, I could not get that phrase “pull them forward” out of my mind, and so I began to explore a larger ramification have how it could be used. After looking for the right word, I found two definitions for this great idea.

The first definition was engineering in nature. That definition was two-fold, the first referring to “the relationship between what is being pulled (the drive member) and the surface on which it moves”. The second was “the act of drawing or pulling”, and “the state of being drawn.

The second definition was medical in nature. That definition called for “ the deliberate application of prolonged pulling, as resistance, to relieve pressure.”

When I read this, I felt as if I had hit the jackpot, which had eluded me all month, and knew this was going to be THE turning point, and my mind exploded with fresh ideas and new possibilities. The word of course is TRACTION.

MOVING FORWARD

During the winter months watching the TV we all see the cars and trucks slipping and sliding on the snow and ice covered streets in of some of our cities. The vehicles are either unable to move at all, spinning in place, or moved in ways not intended by the drivers, unable to brake or steer, usually crashing into another vehicle or going off into the ditch, all due to the lack of traction. Both of these are the exact opposite of what the driver wanted. As I pondered these observations, I decided that this is the exact same things that happened in people’s everyday lives. They have no traction in their personal lives, and in their careers. There may be ‘actual’ movement, but they are possibly unable to ‘positively control’ their forward movement.
Traction problems occur in adverse conditions. In driving, the loss of traction occurs when the interface between the tire and the surface is disrupted. When it occurs, this disruption can have disastrous affects. This is so on vehicles, and in life. Both can be corrected, and prevented.

These “ultimate interfaces” where traction problems may occur, exist everywhere there is contact between two points. Some important examples you may experience are, Husband/Wife, Parent/Child, Boss/Employee, and Business/Client, all inseparable, all in contact. This “ultimate interface” is the space in which all the action takes place.

We all know that there are different tires made for different wheels and different needs. Trains have steel wheels for steel track, Jeeps have oversized tires for the mud, and a forklift has padded tires to operate indoors. The common denominator is in choosing the correct tire for the surface it operates on. All of us have seen Indy cars change their tires in the middle of a race to accommodate rain, or we have put chains on ours tires to operate in the snow. An important point to realize here is that the tires that are used for a particular job are not a coincidence; they are designed, engineered, and chosen for a specific environment. This is important to consider when you are making choices in your own life where good traction is necessary to move in your desired direction. The decisions are made and the correct product chosen, knowing that good TRACTION is a necessity.

In medicine, traction is used to relieve pressure, or stress off of a bone so it can mend properly. This is accomplished by using weights to pull as resistance, eliminanating the stress on the bone. The weight acts as a counterbalance placing the bone in optimum conditions to heal. I believe this same mechanism can be harnessed in your personal life as well, with a small leap of thinking, so keep an open mind.

Keeping this counter-balance idea in mind, and knowing that many people are feeling a great deal of stress in their lives, its possible that exercise is a form of TRACTION to stress. If that’s possible, then creativity is a form of TRACTION to blockage, training is TRACTION to doubt, and that a plan is TRACTION immobility, ands so on.

I will not distract you with technical definitions, or discussions of tires or medicine. This is an exercise using simple language and concepts; to discuss the difficult and serious situations many of us are in today. Everyone knows what a person means when they say “ I need to get some traction in my life”, or “I can’t seem to get any traction in my career.” All of these conditions can be corrected now, and prevented in the future by making better decisions in creating your own TRACTION.

I will explore this idea of TRACTION all year. This will be a two-pronged approach, beginning with regaining traction after loss, and then holding on to it, once achieved. This approach will always be grounded to my artistic roots of art, books, music, TV, and movies where all people have overlapping experiences, then use them as material to create traction propelling us forward into the pragmatic world we all live. Lets all “pull ourselves forward” this year, in the direction we choose.