 Theodore had great hopes for her relationship with Milton. She could catch pictures how they would share in life. She wanted to be with him in every sense, but she hesitated. How much did she really trust herself? Was she letting her fantasies drive her, or was her attraction to him the result of subtle understandings of real potentials? The cost of being wrong could be high, so she decided that caution was required. Her approach would involve a high level of self-control. We are now ready to address what may well be the most appealing part of our study, and it is our personal empowerment as individuals. To this point, we have been assuming people as the unit of agreement, the unit of ownership in the nation, the economy, or some other corporate entity. This is partly because that is where we developed our understanding of empowerment, a study of our knowledge of how we get things done. As you remember, we started with the understanding that almost everything that people accomplish is a group effort. It was in shared purposes that bring us to agreement or an employment to what others value as a basis for our teamed and organized efforts. Indeed, we accomplish little as individuals. We do invent, initiate, and do art. But almost everything else blossoms only with the inclusion of others in the effort. For our deeper understanding of our potentials and limitations, we need to again challenge our cultural orientation. This time, we challenge the very concept of human identity. We face a subtle and pervasive cultural orientation to our disempowerment as individuals. It is even more damaging to our ability to get things done than our reliance upon modern leadership to serve us. It even sets a limit on our ability to come to agreement, a limit we have yet to address. With orientation to performance, to getting things done, we enter into a focus on accomplishment instead of on what we do. And yes, that cultural orientation goes even to us as individuals. We have addressed our freedom, our ability to choose based on our personal sets of value and of cause. We have identified the need to invest ourselves, our personal commitment, in order to accomplish what we most value. Are you ready for the shift? What about setting yourself on both sides of every personal issue? It is recognizing that this is personal with each of us, and there is no less effective way to do anything than to take sides with each effort trying to contain what the other does. We often call it self-control, but even that is like a half-truth of feudal governance working for the benefit of peasants. The idea that some part of you will assume mastery over the other parts of you is a pervasive and disempowering part of our culture. The more you try to work with this concept, the less you will be able to accomplish. Can't quite grasp the reality of this? Well, here we go, the intellectual part of you controlling the human animal, the alter ego and balance with the ego. Consider the very concept of self-control. Can you even bear to recognize that it is checks and balances applied within yourself instead of paralyzing government? It is paralyzing you. All these are concepts that deny the human unit that is you. And as we have performance knowledge to guide our accomplishments in the work environment, we also have technical expertise that professionals apply for individuals. Psychiatric medicine recognizes multiple personalities as mental disease. It is, in its aggravated form, it is totally debilitating. Yet, there it is for us in everyday living with self-control presented as the right thing to do and certainly the right way to do things. We do things as a unit, not as an internal collective. We decide things as a unit, not as a group decision. We value what we seek as a unit. We value what we have to commit to seek a result as a unit. And there is only one you. You do not have to accept mental illness, deciding against yourself or preventing yourself from doing what you decide. When you do decide to seek what you value, it is your decision as an individual. Our decision may certainly be complex and conditional, but our decisions are individual decisions. There's no second you, no other you to be considered. Our performance orientation just starts with the general rule that there is no less effective way to do anything than to divide and compete. It is as true for you as an individual as for our corporate gatherings of people. The more you divide and compete within yourself, the less effective you will be. The less effective you are as an individual, the less people can trust you. It hampers your social performance potentials as well. If you cannot find unity within yourself, you know your commitments will suffer from your own indecisions. We have the tools for performance. Just try to address performance in terms of some part of you. There is no separated producer part of you. Neither is one part of you a customer. No part of you gets to value what the other parts of you generate, defining it all as waste. Whatever some internal part of you produces is going to be waste. The damage of dividing against yourself is hard to even describe. You can waste most of your life trying to resolve an internal conflict. And worse still, it is a conflict only as you make it one by the way you approach your potential unity. You are a unit. Even more on point, you are an operational unit. You are not even divided when you fill different performance roles, as in being the owner of the economy, the customer who receives from the economy or the operating unit within the economy. You are the same person no matter what role you fill. The difference in your viewpoint, your orientation to the situation at hand, it is not who you are. A potent definition of waste is trying to benefit yourself as an owner at the expense of yourself as a customer or a performer. There is only one you. The more you can keep that focus, the greater your empowerment. You do not get to make different decisions as an owner of the economy than you do as a customer, as there is just one of you. One unit of humanity, one sense of what you value, and one sense of what it will cost you to reach what you value. To be empowered as a person, we are going to have to deal with our cultural insistence, one that denies even the possibility of our coming to agreement within ourselves. It is insistence that the ego can never agree with the alter ego. It is insistence that the intellectual you must be in conflict with the animal you. Can you hear the message? You have to do the right things limiting what your ego does, mastering over the animal in you. And then our culture insists that we concentrate on doing those things the right way, on following the pattern that is set before us as an efficient way to win over those contrary parts of ourselves. We are always being warned. These are harmful parts of yourself. They will hurt you if you let them, damage your relationship with others. They will cripple you if you ever let them gain the upper hand. But then you have the witness of the dark ages, the time when one part of our human civilization was indeed set in authority over the rest. It was a time of no progress, a time when little was accomplished for anyone but the aristocracy. We are urged to accept a new dark ages into ourselves. Is there really some benefit in this? The answer is that conflict creates drama, not performance. There is human interest in the complexity that is achieved through internal conflict. There is a level of entertainment. That may be of some value to you, but it will not provide empowerment. The answer is in the entertainment value of people who are complex and internally conflicted. But they will not be effective in getting things done. For your personal investment, our human unit investments, it is the value of freedom, the value of having choices and choosing to invest ourselves where the cost of the investment seems most reasonable in light of what we would accomplish by our expenditure. There probably will be times when the entertainment purpose, the drama, can be enjoyed. There are other situations where we will have something valuable to accomplish and our attention set upon gaining the valued result. Value is not what is right or wrong, it is what you value and what you must commit to gain it. Value is your personal determination and incentive for your personal decision. I would also urge a second look at cost of unity in light of our cultural norm, at least for now we have a cultural orientation to internal division and potential internal conflict. This will be the norm for others and will certainly have effect on us as part of this same culture. It is a threat of rejection from leaders who are told that their privilege is not valued. The reaction from the privileged leader is likely to have some level of hostility in it. In a light manner, openly claiming the benefit of unity can gather hostility from those who accept their value in internal balances and self-broken resolution of internal conflicts. In our business history, the leader reaction to production areas becoming remarkably more effective was quarantine. It was erecting a barrier to the very concept of performance responsibility. When you resolve your own internal divisions and become empowered as a human unit, it will not be hidden. You are just not compelled to otherwise advertise it. The change to be accomplished on a cultural level should be an intentional investment and one based on what you have chosen to commit in order to gain the result of cultural reorientation to performance. In the larger world, we live in a reality where our history is written in divisions and conflicts and revolutions and wars. We have addressed this indirectly in terms of nobody ever really wins a war, everyone who engages in a war ends up losing. In performance terms, the only rational conflict investment is protection from those who would waste their own wealth and lives to harm you. Application of investment is stymied immediately. There is nothing of value in conflict actions that come to the people. The only value is the negative, easing of the threat that someone else is willing to waste their own time and effort, wealth, and lives of people in order to damage you. It is the political statement of the ultimately wasteful nature of political conflict. Our history of political waste is presented to us as something to be valued, to be cherished. And in so many other forms, performance orientation, with focus on the value you and I receive, is immediately countered to what we are presented by political leadership. The waste of war is in resources, time, effort, the lives that are expended in conflicts simply because of the ultimately hostile goals and objectives of other political leaders. Through our division into internal competing camps, we waste our own resources. Internal conflict has no valued product. The time and effort associated with the conflict is time and effort expended without any valued product. Division against yourself as schizophrenia is an incapacitating mental disease. As human beings, we are units, individuals, not collections of elements intent on overcoming each other. That has to be taught to us. Lessons in incapacity. We have to be taught to waste our life energies trying to hold ourselves in check for the benefit of… and then you realize that the hostility toward other people, the need to protect, is also largely learned. We stoke it with every lesson about how others are a threat to us because they have other hostile goals and objectives. We are in a time and place where we have a culturally determined waste. It is social political, it is personal political, and it has been internalized for each of us as a cultural lesson. The threat is real, but it is not inherent in humanity. People doing wasteful and harmful things to protect themselves or to reduce those threats is also real. War is real, hostile competition is real, personal conflicts are real as they are divisions we have allowed to form within us. The purpose of this course is empowerment and it is most certainly not limited to overcoming and bettering others. For us, empowerment is a choice, a personal freedom to choose when and where you will invest what you have to gain what you value. In this lesson, the focus is on you as a unit of humanity. One option is self-maintained internal conflict that consumes your time, effort, and attention and provides you nothing. The alternative is focus on your internal unity as a person with those same resources now available to invest elsewhere. The lure of the first is that of fitting in with our culture and society. The promise of the second is an increased ability to get things done, even if it is a challenge to our culture and society. You are being offered freedom to manage what change seems appropriate to you. There are many opportunities available for you to exercise your freedom and you are the only party in interest. Your choice will continue to be yours. You are empowered to choose when and where each option is applied and that is a most personal freedom. And as in so much of what we study in this course, there is the value we as humans put in inertia our resistance to change. We have been acclimated to internal competition approaches as part of fitting into our culture and there is a cost in any change. You are being offered freedom to manage what change seems appropriate to you. It is an investment potential to shift your own orientation to best meet your purposes. There will be a personal cost in assuming intentional management of your own person to accept the freedom and empowerment that is offered by performance orientation. If you choose to manage that personal change, it is going to cost you some time and effort and your personal investment should start with a valued result that you are to receive from your change management effort. Performance orientation involves a counterculture action on your part and you are otherwise free to pursue your own benefit. What we need to initiate change management is something to accomplish through the efforts we can direct. In the case of personal division and internal challenges, we are most obviously the only party in interest and there is great value in personal empowerment. But then the cost of change and the cost of managing changes is also real as in our empowerment of citizens, we need somewhere to start, some place of investment where that value benefit is so great that personal commitment is personally justified. As in that wonderful teaching platform of the human family, if you enter into conflict with other family members, there is no win for anybody, there is just cost. Family only becomes real for adults when they work to avoid conflicts between themselves, to avoid doing things that will set them against each other. Performance potential arises from being able to act as a unit. So what is it going to cost you to learn not to fight with yourself but to simply make the best decision you can and be prepared to continue or change it as a situation demands? With performance orientation, which is a choice, you can be the decision maker and the one who receives any beneficial or harmful result. There is no blame, no internal challenge, only the reality of your choice and your reception of results. We call that learning, education, it is learning from experience as well as from what we receive as intellectual training. Of course our cultural orientation tells us that we are already free to learn this if only we commit ourselves to it, but performance does not follow. The intellectual us learns, the animal us does not and the conflict just grows. The ego rejects it then the alter ego takes it in as a new value. We are taught to accept the conflict in place of our unity, but there is just one of us and we do not have to war against ourselves. We can learn to assimilate, train and having absorbed what we learn into ourselves can go forward and use it as seems appropriate to us as a human unit. Any internal conflict produces nothing of value but sets us to consume our life energy and contest instead of accomplishment. It is your life, your energies, your time and your attention and when we address internal efforts you are the only party in interest. Your freedom of choice is that of investing in yourselves. The only one who really has any say in this is you and you are free to accept or reject the changes on your personal decision. Again, change is a cost. The investment is not as great as for an adult who has established greater personal inertia. The value of any accomplishment is likely to be greater as it becomes a part of who you are. If this seems a little repetitious and more a matter of alternative perspectives of the same material, it is intentionally so. We are addressing a matter of culture and we receive our culture into ourselves. It effectively becomes part of us. Even this rather minor change can incur a significant personal cost, both direct and indirect. Yes, it is pretty obviously a good investment for almost all of us. The larger challenge is that we are human and have been taught that even such obvious investments are to be divided out between our internal parts and argued from different viewpoints. We are taught that any change, even one for the better, is going to start an internal contest. That is the mentation we have absorbed as part of our culture. And this freedom to choose, this empowerment is going to be approached as a cost. It takes positive decision and commitment to change management to set anything in motion. All that we have been studying comes to focus here, our personal decision. We have technical guidance for making decisions. You, as the customer of your choices, are the only one who can evaluate what you receive. And as a result, can only have value as you receive it. It is all about you, you as a unit. John finds Marcia attractive. He feels the urge to ask her out, but he is shy. Marcia hadn't really been focused on John, but finds him interesting. Does John try to overcome his shyness? Guess what? Only one decision is required, one investment to be made. It has nothing to do with John's shyness or his urge to take action. In performance orientation, the investment is what he expects as an outcome from what he is willing to commit. All the worry and angst associated with internal competition just take time. Focus away, delivering him nothing but drama. I suppose it could be entertainment for some people, but otherwise has no value. The only significant cost here is in John's decision process. His internal choice in approaching the options available. With performance orientation, he is empowered to make the decision based on his best expectation of cost and benefit. A much simpler personal effort. If he chooses to ask her out, he is empowering Marcia as well, offering her a choice. And her choice is also simplified by the same. If she wasn't that interested before, she probably wants to find out what she can about him from her friends, so she can empower him with an I'll have to get back to you response and can empower him with a certain time. Whether they go out or not is really not the shared value. It isn't having a shared choice. It isn't the very act of John's decision having potential consequences that both John and Marcia might receive as valuable. The performance orientation remarkably simplifies the decision process. It eliminates much of the waste that is urged upon us by our culture. It promotes decisive action and learning from that action. The power of the black box is its focus on performance and it is the same level of focus on all human performances. In the case of personal decisions, you are the decision maker and you are the customer. You are the one who makes the decision. You are the one who expects to receive what you value as a basis for making that decision. The entire performance cycle is within you and the enhancement for internal application is that only what is visible on the black box diagram can be effective. It is your choice. It is your action. The result, whatever that may be, is yours and it only has value as you value it. When it comes to that specific value cycle, everything else is waste. There will be no value in producing it or expending your time and effort upon it. It is your investment and your decision and it is singular. There is no confidence. There is no coming together within yourself to find some general consensus. There is just you addressing that cost. You recognize for accomplishing something you see as valuable. And yes, I am not equating the cost you expect with reality. We already know that the real cost is likely to be twice as great as what seems a reasonable expectation. We will also be working from an expectation of value, a belief in how you will value the result that you see as reasonable for making the commitment. And there is even more when we address what has value to us. There are values we share as humans and one of these is interpersonal trust. It is an expectation of what some other people will do because they share a sense of value. Look again at John and Marsha and that John's simple offer. It is an offer to share what he values. It is of such expected value to him that he made the decision to ask. That level of commitment, even to some unknown response, demonstrates a sense of value in sharing something. It is not just that, but that it involves empowering Marsha, recognizing her as an independent decision maker, and gifts her with the power of a choice that she would not have had. That is personal value for her, no matter how she responds, even as she refuses the offer it is a gift to her. Refuse may disappoint John, but it still builds a trust relation. It arises from our consistency as human beings. Unless she indicates otherwise, he has increased trust that her later response would be the same. They have a basis for mutual expectations and that has been shared. They have an interpersonal agreement of sorts on how they will react in the future. It establishes a level of trust where they are likely to be more comfortable with each other. To put it simply, there is no personal downside to seeking agreement with other people. The challenge will be in isolating oneself. We are social beings and there is personal value for people in most common interactions. Isolation disempowers the one who accepts it, and it denies potency to others. Are we going to make errors, cause hurt, or discomfort? Of course we are, especially if we accept empowerment. We will make errors because we will actually be doing things. Success is not assured, nor is our personal sense of value the same as what other people value. The good thing about personal empowerment is learning. It involves investing in ourselves and our ability to get things done. It makes us more valuable when we learn from having our expectations not be realized after we make the commitment. We learn from when our expectations are met and we do not value it as we thought we would. That is part of human life, like a baby spilling peas from the spoon as he learns, a baby finding out that he does not like peas when he succeeds. Both are empowering. Another useful concept for personal empowerment is ownership. It is ownership of ourselves. It is rejection of slavery with performance orientation, slavery is where others make decisions for you. Humans are born effective slaves to their parents, with the care of adults making all decisions for each of us. As we grow, we mature into freedom. We learn to make our own decisions in accord with what we learn. We call it emancipation when we are recognized to be independent, which is equivalent to being free. It is having personal choices and determine what comes to us. That is the opposite of slavery. Slavery is recognized when someone is owned by other people. Ownership gives rights to make decisions for others. As an adult, you will generally own yourself. As to your internal decision process, you are the only party involved. You own yourself. The choices for your investment are your choices. The results you receive are your results. That is ownership in a very real sense. Much of what we gain from our culture is lessons that accept us as isolated units. And that we are to enter into contest and conflict with others. This is the same human culture that teaches us that we are to recognize the divisions within us and find ways to best accommodate their conflicting guidance and value systems. The culture is ours too. It is a human product that has elements that disempower people, that isolate people, that urge conflict and competition. These disempower people, they are waste. With performance orientation, we can see that the investment is ours to make as individuals. And it is ours to share as corporate humans. We are the source of potency, not the subject of the potency of others. Where we exercise our choices, we are empowered. Where we exercise those things on which people agree, we are empowered. And we empower each other. And empowerment begins with that simple understanding that you own yourself and will do what you decide to do on your own evaluation of costs and benefits. Others who might interfere with this are not going to empower you or accept you as the owner. The power is already yours because you are a human being. You have the power to identify and work to eliminate the waste that is daily urged upon us all.