thanks to audiosparx.com

We often think of blue as a color of melancholy. Why, I do not know, but I could guess that it might have something to do with the way we miss our true, fully expressed selves when we fall prey to the forces of fear and doubt. And there is no way we can recapture the full expression of our uniqueness as long as we allow others, outside of ourselves, to define us as individuals. We are people, not sheeple, and when we act like only followers to others, we contribute to the demise of our own true spirits. So a Blue Alert seems frightening as well as sad, perhaps, at this time of wide-spread disempowerment.

Are we afraid of our courage, of what it might demand of us? Or are we afraid that if we abandon Red and Orange Alerts and look to Blue ones, that we’ll lose the energy that adrenalin stirs up in us. Adrenalin is a strong drug. Combine it with the steady drip of daily atrocities we feed upon from media, and there is a nasty high that keeps us sleeping in a sense of false safety.

I’d take the Blues any day over oblivion of the mind. Blue Alert then, bring it on.

thanks to laptopskins.net

If we had the joy of responding to a national Blue Alert, we might find ourselves voicing our most positive thoughts, giving our most constructive gifts, and singing songs of compassion and optimism. All this, because knowing ourselves fully, we would have no need to project our self-judgments onto others. Indeed, we would have no self-judgments, just self-acceptance and self-responsibility––without the extra onus of shoulds, of course.

In Blue, we would trust our intuition and thus, know much more about what is really going on in our world, both naturally and in our shared interests as people. With intuition alive, Blue is about flow, about ease and effortlessness where the old adage “no pain, no gain” is shown to be either a falsehood, or a profound lack of imagination.

Ah, Blue! So, how do we institute the national Blue Alert?

thanks to art.com

So what would it be like for us to respond openly and fully expressed to a blue alert? Instead of cowering and worrying, might we feel our boldness? Might we dare to envision, not what those other guys say we should envision, but the full technicolor visions that surprise us in our night time dreams, only these, fully awake?

This depends to a great extent on how closely acquainted we are with our self. (selves?) So take a look. What do you know about you? What do you really know about what makes you tick in your own unique way? Have you even stopped to ask that question?

We find that those who do stop to ask are often very surprised by the answers that emerge.  Oh, I need lots of alone time! Or, gee, it is very important for me to be around lots of people lots of the time. The truth is that when we look at ourselves through enough different lenses, a completely new picture of identity takes shape. And from that picture, our authentic hopes and dreams find new viability. Our choices become more deliberate because they are coming from a place of true understanding about uniqueness. Our moves become bold, truly bold in the sense that they are a perfect reflection of who we are inside instead of being just a mirror of the culture around us.

More musing on blue alert tomorrow!

Thanks to w3.org

What if we agreed as an American people to only respond to a blue alert? What would a blue alert look like? I’m thinking a societal mood that is cool, smooth, refreshing, renewing and cleansing. Wouldn’t that be terrific?

I can tell you, the Whisperer voice within each of us would just love blue alerts. Time to wake up to possibility thinking. I wonder, though if we would know how to handle that.

With the great industrial age, came educational systems designed to have Americans fit neatly into assembly lines and, later, corporate cubicles. So, we have been trained from early childhood to reference the world around us for our view of reality, our motivation, and our sense of approval.

In the industrial age, such education was appropriate as people migrated from farm work to factory work. We chose to conform in order to progress, but America is no longer an industrial nation and fast devolving as a corporate nation, as increasingly, cubicles are emptied here and filled over seas. Having lost the spirit of individualism that once had us following our dreams of freedom across oceans and prairies, we don’t seem to know who we are as a people and that is largely because we no longer know who we are, nor what we want, as individuals.

So what might we discover in the wild blue yonder blue alert state of possibility thinking?

It is very common right now to find people completely out of touch with the destructive messages coming from their Inner Critters and that makes Critter Crunching very difficult. Wonder why it is that there’s such a fog?

One thing that Allan and I see all of the time these days is that  Inner Critters are  not so much veiled by denial, as they are cloaked, like the Enterprise in Star Trek. We see this cloaking happen when the alarm level inside is at yellow or orange. When it is at red, there’s enough fear and doubt to pierce the cloaking device, but orange and yellow levels just kind of dance together and make us humans numb.

So when we’re listening for those Inner Critter voices, it is important to be very vigilant, very perceptive and willing to allow that there may be unrecognized fear and doubt on the scene. A place to look is toward the kinds of moves we’re making. Barely Moves and Background Moves almost always indicate unrecognized fear and doubt. When we get numb, we are likely to get lazy and just kind of out of sorts.

Tomorrow, more in the Whisperer end of the rainbow.

thanks to dcprosportsreport.com

How did you do in our self-reflection exercise? Did you remember to notice the difference between the Inner Critter and Whisperer voices in your head?

I can tell you that I noticed some Inner Critter chatter about how I write this blog. It went something like this: Every time you get away from telling your personal story and start sharing about the meat of BoldMoves, you get so darned serious. Lighten up Shayla, or you’ll lose folks.

When I let my Whisperer voice come through however, it sounds more like this: Somewhere in blog-land, there is a perfect blend between conveying important information and being light and breezy in my delivery. I’ll find that place––that perfect blog voice––one of these days.

In the meantime, let’s do one more day of just listening for those other two voices, the Critters and the Whisperer, and let’s see if we can wrest the microphone from you-know-who, hand it to the Whisperer, and turn up the volume.

Catch you tomorrow!

I’ve suggested that the alternative to a fear and doubt-based culture is that each of us as individuals turn away from media (and other agents of fear-mongering) and turn inward to a deeper understanding of who we are as unique individuals. Again, this solution is a simple concept, but acting on it is not necessarily easy to do. So, where do we begin?

By developing a skill of self-reflection that is completely foreign to most of us. We have been trained to look outward, first to our parents, then to our families, churches, schools, bosses, government leaders, etc., etc. When the picture we see outside ourselves is bright, we can feel peaceful and hopeful, but when the picture is dark, we feel fear because we instinctively believe that we can never change those threatening people and things that are outside of us. We become numb or we become hopeless, and then we are truly at the mercy of anyone who wants to use our fear against us. The fear cycle grows in power.

What we can change, is inside of us. There is a great deal involved, but the first step is very clear. Begin with the simple exercise of noticing who has the microphone in our head, our internal voices of fear and doubt (Inner Critters) or our internal sense of possibility which in BoldMoves Country, we call the Whisperer because in most of us, this voice has atrophed so much from lack of attention that we can only hear it as a whisper if we hear it at all.

Give it a try. Just for today, listen to the messages you give yourself. Do you judge you? Do you shame you? If you do, you are in league with your Inner Critters. You are allowing internal fear-mongering. Notice, and you have the first powerful step to looking inward where what you see really matters. More tomorrow!

theinvisibleagent.wordpress.com

Thanks for Amanya’s comments bringing attention to the role that media plays in keeping America hostage to fear and doubt.

Most of us over forty gave our power over to media decades ago when we bought into Madison Avenue’s version of the American dream. In so doing, we traded the power of self-determination for the power to purchase neatly wrapped and branded merchandise. Now, the picture we’re shown by media has changed from visions of a bright future to a nightmarish present. Be afraid of the economy, we are told. Be afraid of global warming. Be afraid of natural disasters. Be afraid of those other guys, those immigrants, those terrorists, those political leaders––red, blue or green, those people of a different color––black, white, yellow, red, brown. Be very afraid of those financial hooligans, those bankers and brokers, those scammers and spammers.

Still, we continue to buy in with dwindling discretionary income while our Inner Critters feed on frustration we increasingly feel because we can no longer really afford to shop our way to fulfillment. And here’s a very odd and interesting point. One might assume that with all of this fear and fear mongering, we would be reacting, but instead we have simply grown numb. Deadened by the din of both Inner and Outer Critters, we are resigned and thus lacking the adrenalin and focus needed to stand powerfully as a society for a more positive expression of life. We are experiencing stalemate in every power structure we have created, government, politics, economics, education, business, you name it.

So, how do we revive the American spirit that so positively influenced the entire world in the mid-twentieth century? How do we restart the engines of national pride and productivity? There is a way, and the answer is simple, but not easy. We reclaim, for our own use as individuals, the attention we currently give to the 5,000 or so carefully produced messages we now receive everyday from media. We turn off media and focus our attention inward. More on that next!

As a society, it is time for us to come out of denial on a critical issue.  In America we have been afraid––afraid to shop, afraid to travel, afraid to invest, afraid of losing or never finding a job, afraid of breathing the air, afraid of drinking the water, afraid of any tiny change in our routine because it might open the door to a tornado of change that will decimate our lives completely.

No wonder we have been afraid to change something as far reaching as our health care system. We’ve been afraid to take our vacation time, afraid our children will be kidnapped at the mall, afraid of crack houses in our neighborhood, and on and on and on.

In Bold Moves language, we’ve been a society in the grips of Inner Critters, those pesky internal voices that have us justifying, every moment, why we dare not make any move at all. So, we the people haven’t had access to the kind of drive, daring and conviction that had our forebears boldly building the U S of A.

It’s time for a change! In the coming weeks in this blog, we will take the covers off fear in America. We’ll examine why it has been so difficult to see it for what it is. We’ll move past the notion of living life defined by alarm levels red, orange and yellow. We’ll explore soothing blue, grateful green, and vibrant violet, colors that aren’t even represented on the scale we’ve been using to measure our mood as a nation.  Stay tuned as we examine the full rainbow of possibilities.

InnerSpace - From indabamusic.com

I must admit, I’m having fun now. This Executive Summary is like the wrapping and bow on a present and I just love playing with that stuff because, basically, I get to tie it anyway I want. It’s the big picture, bold statement stuff meant to inspire and incite action. So, here are the next two paragraphs:

Pond Productions, LLC, offers an entrepreneurial venture to capitalize on the need that Americans (and other peoples) have to explore their final frontier, inner space. We make it both affordable and accessible to do so via our powerful distance learning system the Jump To Action program series.  Proven to re-constitute self-esteem, ignite personal effectiveness, and maximize ease, grace and balance in life, the program has been tested in a variety of environments over sixteen years time, concluding in three years of beta development as a web and phone-based resource.

With the excellent foundation we have laid and the funding we now seek, we intend to become the Nintendo of personal growth providers. Our current system of down loadable tools will morph, first to full web-based interactivity, and ultimately into a game-based phenomenon––think one-powerful-step toward the first actual holodeck.

Are you with me? Let me know by leaving a comment – see the link to the right below.