knowledge

This article takes a look at how one badly injured man survived a day and night in a wild life park where he was surrounded by lions, elephants and hyenas. I, for one,learned a lot from his experience. I hope you will too.

In 2004, Greg Rasmussen, a British born pilot, was tracking a rhino in a Zimbabwe national park. He was using a light plane which went into a wind spin and hit the ground.

He could not shelter in the plane because petrol fuel was leaking and there was risk of explosive fire. His goal was to survive until help could reach him. Greg told the story of how he achieved that goal to Richard and Judy of ITV Channel 4.

Greg was severely injured but not dead. He was also dehydrated; he had not been able to get a drink at his last petrol stop because the pumps were not working properly. He was like a thirsty man alone in an ocean of salt water and sharks.

But his ‘ocean’ was a wild life park full of wild animals including lions, hyenas and elephants. The sun set at about 6 p.m. Greg faced a long night. No rescue attempt would happen until daylight.

Fortunately, he had some experience of wild animal behaviour and knew that animals in the wild have a special form of self-defence.

They wait until the attacker gets close and then make a sharp, sudden noise. This can, if they are lucky, frighten the predator away.

The timing must be correct. If the noise is made too early it will not frighten the attacker. If it is made too late, you will probably be already half-dead.

As Greg lay in great pain on the ground near his plane, he heard the sound of the footfall of a lioness moving towards him with her cubs through the brush. A lioness who has her cubs with her is far more dangerous than a lioness on her own.

The soft coughing sound of the lioness came closer - ooogh! ooogh! ooogh!.

The lioness moved to within about a metre and a half of the terrified Greg - the length of a sofa away. He could see her silhouette.

At this point, he hammered on part of the broken wind screen of the crashed plane with other parts of the plane that he had been collecting for this purpose.

The lioness was startled and took off.

Greg’s knowledge of animal behaviour had probably saved his life and the fact that he was thinking all the time: “What can I do to deal with the problems I face?”

He later used the same strategy to frighten off some elephants who could have trampled him to death. There were also hyenas about!

Greg needed belief and a passion for life to keep him from giving up:

“Mentally, to stay alive, I had to tell myself all sorts of lies that they are going to find me. You’ve got to be so positive in this situation. However hopeless the situation seems, you’ve really got to say ‘They are going to find me’ because otherwise I’ll give up.”

Greg had to make a decision early in the incident whether he wanted to live or die. He thought about his passion for preserving the African painted dog and his program to educate children about
conservation which was just about due to start.

This passion helped him achieve his survival goal by giving him a powerful reason to live. An exciting goal in life can help the old and injured to stay alive.

Two hours after sunrise, the next day, his luck changed and he heard the sound of airplanes and then of human voices. He had survived.

Knowledge, positive thinking, belief (even if it was based on ‘lies’) and his passion for the survival of the painted dogs had helped him achieve his own survival. The same qualities can help any of us achieve our own most prized goals.

About the author

John Watson is an award winning teacher and fifth degree black belt martial arts instructor. He has recently written several books about achieving your goals and dreams.

One of these can be found on his website at http://www.motivationtoday.com/36_laws.php

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Tags: belief, goal achievement, greg rasmussen, hyenas, knowledge, lioness, passion, positive thinking, survivalbelief, goal achievement, greg rasmussen, hyenas, knowledge, lioness, passion, positive thinking, survival

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I’m thinking today about thinking. Interesting concept, huh? How often do we really stop and think about the way we think? How might the way we think about things really have an impact on the way we see the world?

I’ve been listening to Wayne Dyer and also to Deepak Chopra recently, and they have been talking about how our beliefs really do shape our reality. Deepak, who is a medical doctor, was telling a story about a fellow doctor friend of his who was a heavy smoker (this was a few years ago when many more people smoked). Deepak said his friend was always coughing and Deepak suggested that he get a chest X-ray just to make sure he was OK. His friend refused. One day Deepak said his friend was coughing profusely, and Deepak dragged him in to get a chest X-ray and it revealed a coin-sized spot on his lung. Deepak said within a week his friend was coughing blood, and within a month he died.

Deepak went back and checked in his friend’s medical file and found an X-ray that had been taken five years before and there was the coin-sized spot - no different than it was on the last X-ray. What Deepak concluded was that his friend didn’t die of cancer, but died of the diagnosis. What he knew of cancer was that it was a death sentence and he proved himself right. Wow.

If we can start to see that whatever shows up in our lives is a result of the way we are thinking, what would that mean to the voices in our heads that are masquerading as the “victim” and the “villain”?

I don’t know about you, but this shift in my thinking has caused an amazing shift in the way the world is occurring to me. When I started thinking about this, I discovered that I don’t have any negative friends; I don’t have depressing conversations with people; I don’t really have too many complaints in my life. At first I thought that was just a lucky phenomenon until I started examining the work I’ve been doing on myself over the past couple of years. I started noticing that as I shifted my attitude, things started shifting around me. Now I look for positive things in my life and that’s exactly what I see.

On the one hand it seems almost amazing … but on the other hand, isn’t this the way it should be for all of us? Shouldn’t life be wonderful and peaceful and supportive of us? Wouldn’t that be a better space for all of us to exist inside of? What would you be freed up to be if you didn’t have the worries and stresses in your life?

I met a new friend a couple of weeks ago who told me that she has worked hard all her life to save money. In her words, she said she has been a “hoarder” and one night she figured out that she had enough money socked away so that she could live for the rest of her life without working. Wow - that’s pretty freeing! She went to sleep that night with all kinds of exciting ideas in her head … and then she bolted awake three hours later and went back to her checkbook and discovered - to her horror - that she had the decimal point in the wrong place, and she wasn’t financially independent like she thought she was three hours earlier.

The good news is that during those three hours of freedom, she had all kinds of new thoughts about how she would live her life without constraints - and she remembered what they were. Nothing had changed in the universe in those three hours - but in her mind they had and her thought process allowed all kinds of new energy into her space. Although she didn’t have the money she thought she had, she still had the ideas and the thoughts and she committed to staying on that path and living that way in spite of the reality. And she’s seeing a lot of those ideas come to fruition in her life just because she intended them.

What are your thoughts producing in your life? Where might you be able to see something different by thinking it that way? Try it - and let me know what shows up in your space!

Jodee Bock is a life purpose and career coach, speaker, facilitator, and trainer. She works together with people - individuals and teams - who want to practice “riskful” thinking as opposed to merely “wishful” thinking. Together Jodee and her clients co-create a roadmap that works backwards from what they would like to become and set up a plan to transform their knowledge into action.

In addition to her coaching and facilitation, Jodee is available for keynote addresses, and develops and delivers customized workshops and seminars. She is a certified Job Relations trainer for manufacturing environments, and also a certified Accelerated Innovation trainer and coach with SolutionPeople (http://www.solutionpeople.com).

Jodee is a co-author of the book “Don’t Miss Your Boat,” and her own book “The 100% Factor: Living Your Capacity” will be released this fall.

For more information, check out her website at http://www.bocksoffice.com or her blog at http://youalreadyknowthisstuff.blogspot.com.

Tags: belief, Inspiration, knowledge, Positive Attitudebelief, Inspiration, knowledge, Positive Attitude

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Knowing is not understanding. There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.

Charles F. Kettering

I came to know about Charles Franklin Kettering from a late night radio show that found me sitting in a scientific laboratory at Harvard University’s School of Public Health. At the time I was the weekend supervisor of the Monkey Nursery there and worked from noon to midnight every Saturday and Sunday. I had dropped out of college in my junior year and had spent a few years working as an actor and a carpenter before I found this job which I took initially because it interested me and would allow me copious free time during the week. It soon inspired me to return to school and pursue a degree in Anthropology.

I was in charge of the infant monkey nursery, surrounded by rooms full of baby monkeys. There were certain times during my twelve-hour shift when I would have some free time to study, listen to the radio or read. On Sunday night there was a radio show produced at Wayne State University in Detroit and re-broadcast by one of the Boston area college stations that I always checked in with to see what was on. There were only a dozen or so programs in the series and they would repeat them over and over to fill the time slot. Nine of the programs were pretty standard educational fare and I don’t remember them at all. The other three changed my life in a fundamental way.

These were actually antique recordings of an address that Kettering had given at some commemoration or dedication ceremony toward the end of his career. He was then one of the few surviving members of a group of entrepreneurs and inventors that changed life for all of humanity in the latter part of the industrial revolution. Here was a man who was responsible for the electric cash register, the diesel locomotive engine, the electric starter for the automobile, safety glass and probably the most profoundly influential of them all, the discovery of Freon gas for refrigeration and air-conditioning. This great technologist spoke mostly not of moving industry and wielding power but of making people’s mind grow by paying attention to their hearts.

He told the story of his first professional job as a recent college graduate. He was schoolmaster in a turn-of-the-century one room school house. One of his youngest pupils was a first grader who had already had a difficult experience in school. Although she was obviously bright and could already read at a high level for her age, she could only do it with the book held upside down. Her previous teacher had insisted that she learn to read the “right way” and refused to let her read upside down. Luckily she kept reading and only learned to hate the teacher.

When Kettering came on the scene he sized the situation up in much the same way he approached all of the other problems that he solved in mechanics. chemistry and electronics. First he understood the whole problem. It turned out that the little girl had spent many hours with her grandmother who was unable to hold the little girl on her lap and read to her in a more standard way so she would read to her by placing a book on a stool in between two chairs that faced each other and would read to her as the girl looked on upside down. Kettering knew from this that the girl was smart and motivated and could adapt to any condition. He hit on a plan that worked perfectly with no emotional damage or condemnation of the child. He merely borrowed a music stand from someone in the community and placed her book upside down in front of her. Since when a book is mounted upside down this way, it is 180 degrees out of the usual reading position. Kettering then turned the music stand’s music holder 5 degrees clockwise every Monday during the school year. As the year progressed, the girl found herself reading at 175 degrees out of the usual then 170 then 165 etc… By the end of the year she was reading just the way everyone else was and Kettering had done it without making her feel as though she was different, strange or wrong. He honored her as an individual at the same time he was correcting her because he followed his own admonition to understand the the problem deeply enough that the solution became obvious. This was an example, he said, of “letting the problem be the boss”.

The trouble that most people get into when they run into a problem they have never experienced before, he explained was they immediately try to fit it into what they know. The more educated and expert the person the greater is that tendency. Kettering advanced the idea that true solutions to problems come not from trying to fit every question to the answers you already know but from meeting the problem on its own ground and letting it teach you what you need to know to understand it and solve it. Once, Kettering said, you let the problem be the boss and do not try to bend it to fit your small view of the world, you begin to grow in power and ability.

I was captivated listening to Kettering talk because he had clarity of expression that perfectly reflected the genius of his insight. He made you feel as though his understanding was your understanding. Somehow I felt that this very practical man was so clear and so pragmatic that he paradoxically was talking in a perfectly spiritual and transcendent way about these quintessentially down to earth matters. He offered a glimpse into the core of our relationship with the real world and because of this he was seeing too into very fiber of the order of the universe.

I looked forward to these programs and must have heard each one of them a half dozen times. I read as much as I could find about Kettering in the library too. I took him and his philosophies to heart and he became one of my life’s heroes.

He was also an anti-authoritarian of the purest kind. Another story he told was about another speech he had given before an august assembly of academics. They had gathered to honor Kettering, Edison and a few other of the great inventors of that time. Kettering told how he had gotten up and explained to the academics that the kind of education they prized and awarded advanced degrees to was the antithesis of the kind of training that wqs needed to produce more innovators like the ones gathered there for honors. He related how his group of engineers had been struggling to find the right gas to serve as a refrigerant for a cooling system that GM had commissioned him to develop. They worked by their own methods for some time time with little success. Then Kettering took things into his own hands and told them to pack their things for a working retreat. Once there, he had them draw a graph of all the molecular formulae they had tried so far on the wall. The graph included the composition and the refrigerant properties of each gas. As they filled in the graph, it became apparent that there was one spot where all the properties of the other molecules seemed to converge to point toward the most efficient refrigerant. Kettering pointed this spot out and was immediately told by one of his sliderule wielding engineers that they had suspected that there was a molecule that would fit there for some time but that they had not tried to produce it because according to their calculations, the characteristics of the molecule would be unstable and unusable. Kettering insisted that they try it anyway and Freon gas was discovered. Freon served for many decades as the best refrigerant known. It made possible food preservation and shipping as we know it as well as air-conditioning and many medical and scientific research techniques that have saved and enriched un counted lives.

Kettering would often call meetings at which slide rules were strictly forbidden. He insisted on re-training all engineers with advanced degrees who came to work for him. He did this because he was the all-time professor of considering every possibility. He considered advanced degrees to be the warning signs of mental deficiency. After all, time after time, PhDs and engineers with advanced degrees had looked at his projects “logically” and told him that the things he proposed were “impossible”. To Kettering, “Logic is a system whereby one may go wrong with confidence.”

Kettering spent his life astride the no man’s land between belief and knowledge. There is a prejudice today that knowledge and belief are mutually exclusive. He knew that they were much more powerful in combination and that the truth of things can most nearly be approached by using them together.

By far the most lasting and powerful thing I learned from those old lectures of Kettering’s was his ability to acknowledge mystery and unpredictability while still having faith in an orderly and lawful universe. He, as did Newton and Einstein, knew that there was more to this Universe than any human can understand. His approach to problems was to learn what they had to teach him until they became solutions. As Kettering put it in his plain and firm way, “It is not what we know that is important, it is what we do not know.”"

Jerome (Jerry) Gould is a writer and speaker who has a growing reputation for helping others to find and appreciate what is sacred in their lives and the world around them. He lives in Newton, Ma. with his wife and the two of his six children who are still at home. His blog http://alittlepileofseeds.blogspot.com/ is a popular source of inspiration and spiritual insight. His other web site http://home.comcast.net/~littlepileofseeds/ promotes his book which tells the story of how he recovered from a terrible childhood trauma to develop a powerful tool that others have used to recover from their own traumas.

Tags: belief, boss, creativity, invention, inventor, Kettering, knowledge, problem, solution, Technologybelief, boss, creativity, invention, inventor, Kettering, knowledge, problem, solution, Technology

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