On development

Veröffentlicht in: Allgemein, English | 0

In my blog I present my work. In addition, some stimulating thoughts on development and empowerment are shared, to counter conventional negative-focused reporting by conventional media – mostly rendering helpless – with hopefully enlightening impulses.

 

Development postulates that there is something to be developed. This which pre-exists, I call potential. Development describes the process of bringing potential to ones awareness and thus making it utilizable; a resource. Existing potential is – in contrast to a resource – not automatically utilizable. Often we do not even know the potential we posses.

Some potential developes itself into a ressource over time and life maturation. As an impatient person it was wonderful to discover that patience arose by itself with maturity. In the rushed times of ours, patience is a wonderful ressouce!

Critical life events can shed potential to light; critical life events, which cannot be met with an already developed set of skills. If certain behaviour does not bring about a desired outcome, we eventually adapt our behaviour. Often such behavioural adaption happens without us noticing. Thus said, the mentioned patience can become a resource, when growing older simply means loosing the energy to constantly recall in life.

In addition to behaviour and behavioural changes, we can find great potential in our way of thinking. As we can adapt our behaviour based on our will (the will precedes action), we can experience our thinking as a resource by changing our attitude. Instead of being imprisoned by a crisis, we think crisis as an opportunity; an opportunity for the development of potential, which then can reveal itself as a resource. Such path embarks with our thinking!

In Chinese writing, the characters used for crisis are two together: that of danger (wei; on the left) and that of opportunity (ji; on the right) (see Fig.).

Having said this, we do not have to wait for critical life events. We can tackle the development of potential in wise foresight. We then do not have to anticipate a crises in order to prove newly allocated resources, but may be confident that – when necessary – we can extended our scope of action. Such developed resources – besides trust – give a sense of security and encouragement.

The herein described, applies as much to personal development (called empowerment), as to the development of communities (called resilience).