 In this lesson, the empowerment is, as in many other lessons, empowerment by having the option of performance orientation. We have a cultural norm that disempowers, and it is what we often term self-control. The performance alternative is more properly addressed as self-management. The difference at first glance seems more rhetorical than actual, but it is a most significant difference. That difference is between control and management as we have learned to see it in authority-based management that would run things, and performance-based management that has something to accomplish through those who are managed. This lesson is focused on empowerment of the individual, on gaining valued results through what each of us does. It is that same shift we addressed as to corporate efforts. Control is addressed to running yourself, to limiting what you do to those right actions and to doing them the right way. Self-management is technical support for accomplishing what you value. It is focused on results, not on activities. Our culture at the time of this recording is one of contest and conflict, one of achieving power in terms of authority or influence over others in relation to their ability to direct or interfere with what you do. On the personal level, it is built on you and not you distinctions. This is debilitating, disempowering on every level. The time and effort and other resources you commit to overcoming each other does not produce anything of value for you or for others to receive. The best available result is that you can deny others the ability to interfere with what you choose to do, which only happens when you direct or interfere with what others might choose to do. To put it simply, that is within the definition of waste. This cultural direction would apply to us as persons has denied the unity of the person in favor of approaching each of us as a collection of conflicting internal elements. The disempowerment effect of this orientation is legit. It comes in a spirit of internal division so great that the more we try to work with it, the less potent we become. Are you a citizen of the United States? If you try to get an answer to this simple question from those who fully embrace our current culture, you are likely to get an answer that the person is one quarter Indian, one third Asian, and the remainder far Eastern Mediterranean stock. Till you try again, are you a citizen of the United States? I suppose so, but I'm also a citizen of the world. Are you a man or a woman? I'm biologically a man, but also recognize my feminine side, I don't oppress anyone. The cultural confusion is incredible. For our performance alternative, you are a unit, an individual, not some collection of parts that are somehow forced to coexist within you. You are not parts clamoring for dominance over each other and negotiating with each other for corporate decisions. Self-management begins with you as your own resource, the unit that will do things to accomplish what has value to you. In the terms of what we have addressed in this course, all those supposed divisions are inside the black box. They take no part in accomplishment of anything that has value to you, but are distractions from your true ability to get things done. The more time and attention you give to internal divisions, the less you should expect to accomplish as a person. The more confused you become internally about what you will do, the less I can trust you to commit to anything, the less valuable you become to others. This extends to being part of corporate humanity. The less you can be trusted to act as a unit, the less your efforts will add to corporate accomplishments. And you are again reminded that we accomplish very little as individuals. What is perhaps more valuable than even being aware of the alternate potentials is the recognition of your ability to manage yourself, to so support your own efforts that you accomplish what you value. The value is in freedom, and that is the most personal freedom to proceed with accepting and working the best you can with our cultural orientation to division, or to accept your unity and act on investments you make. It is a question of value and a personal orientation with the vision provided the choice on which investment you will make is one of accepting the cultural orientation with the waste that is inherent in that approach, or to accept the cost of change in orientation. What choice? It will involve commitment of time and effort to internalize a new orientation that may differ sharply from those around you. The change in benefit is real, as is the required commitment to accomplish what you value. That is a choice now set before you. A culture built on division is also built upon waste. What we share with each other is our being human, a part of the same cultural unity. Focusing on every difference, every trait you might not share with others, every ancestor's origins accomplishes nothing. It disempowers you as a member of humanity and it disempowers you as a unit of humanity. The reality of your being human is not really in question as in your sex or where your parents and grandparents were born. These are facts, not divisions that make some people more or less human than others. The reality is also that we have a culture that insists on disempowering us, on keeping our attention on every difference between us and them that might set us apart. Set us in contests against each other or set us into hostile confrontations. Just how far has this cultural madness gone? Perhaps the best statement is, us young folk and them old people. So how different are you? The answer is that you cannot be different because there is only one of us. But seen at two different times in our human lives, the choice is yours. You can be a human being or you can put the bite on yourself as an older person to pay for what you want right now. You can go into debt now to ransom your future. That is a choice. Our culture does not see that as a choice, but as seeing to your welfare by seizing what you value from them, old folks who are earning more than you do. Being willing to sell your own future into slavery requires a certain level of insanity. But it is culturally okay in our us and them environment so people can even get wealthy by taking advantage of this cultural nightmare. What you gain in this lesson is a better understanding of your ability to invest in yourself for what you as a human being value. Finding your future to have a little bit more today is a rather obvious challenge for one who realizes that they are the only party at interest. Your performance investment is not how you are treated. It is what you accomplish by the person you are. You have the option of investing in yourself, of entering into intentional and effective management of yourself as your only true resource. You can empower yourself by choosing to promote your performance as a human unit rather than as a collection of traits and divisions. And this is most definitely an investment. Choosing to be powerful in terms of being able to accomplish more of what you value will take up your personal time and effort in redirection. It involves losing your ownership of this divisive cultural orientation which is ours and undertaking the effort to replace it with a performance orientation. That cost is both personal and is real. I personally see it as a most appealing reason for commitment but I am not a decision maker for you. With performance orientation you are the only one who can assume that cost to gain what you expect to value. It is all about you. How much is it worth to you to focus on your accomplishments instead of how much influence and authority you gather over others? As a student, you are already in a time of change and maturation, learning how to address the world we live in. The alternative performance question, the one discouraged in our culture, is whether being more effective in gaining valued results will also increase your ability to gather influence and power over others. My personal opinion is that it will, and that is founded on our performance history, is recognition that the introduction of performance management in production areas is still with us today even though it has been maligned and denigrated ever since it was initiated. Reality does not answer to personal beliefs and orientation. As students, you are in a time of change and learning and the cost of the change is going to be much less than it would be for you to learn this 20 years from now. If you are to make the investment sooner, it's probably better investment than later. And this is pretty basic material. Accepting yourself as a human being rather than some collection will have a significant impact on how you learn to deal with others. If you are confused about who you are, there is a certain amount of comfort in dealing with others who are just as confused. That comfort may be of personal value even though it accomplishes distraction instead of results. The alternative of accepting yourself as a unit with all that same complexity being inside the unit that you are may hamper interaction with others, but even there we recognize the ability to accomplish things as value in itself. During this course of study, I promote the investment and recognize that almost everyone will accept such reorientation as they personally value. We are individuals, each of us with our own orientation to our own world, but we are all still human beings. In that, we will always have togetherness. Our cultural urge to division does not affect what is real. In taking this course, you are already investing the time, effort and attention necessary to capture the benefits of conscious awareness of just how powerful you are as a human being. This is no course in tucking away vast amounts of knowledge and no course in practicing useful processes to hone your skills. Its focus is on supporting your future investments in whatever you value. It is a course in tapping into what it means to be a civilized human being. Its suggested use as a course for later teen years is part of this. In these years, we are coming to a close on living process of growth and increasing capacity. That begins with birth, the time we all start our separate existence. In the beginning, you are an effective slave to adults, growing and learning our processes where you develop the ability and capability of becoming independent. The investment at this time is in recognition of adult independence, being dangled before you by civilization, a reward for taking the final steps to self-reliance upon your own competence. It is here with your change still in progress and with culture focused incentive before you that the investment is most certain in value and effect. This is the right time to learn to get things done. It is that huge step beyond what our current culture would offer and it is both personal and social. In true performance perspective, this course can now be addressed for what it accomplishes for you. What is the result of completing this course of study that you can receive in value? In that orientation, now preferred in our culture, the answer is damages. There is no marked increase in your knowledge, just a few almost random truths. There is no skill that other people are going to pay you to use in their chosen projects. There is, to the contrary, presentation of challenge after challenge to upset what our culture has been focused on passing to you. Learned discontent, learned disruption to everything that people have valued in the past. There is a learned distrust of leadership, even if it is only there to provide for your welfare, but then we have the intrusion of reality into this ready-made evaluation of what the course does for you. What indeed does little for you, it rather provides a new opportunity for you to invest in yourself and to invest in your society. It brings awareness to your voluntary ownership in and authority over all those who would continue to rule over you. It promotes a further investment in yourself. It awakens you to the power that is most certainly yours as a human or in a corporate society, a corporate economy, a corporate nation, and a corporate humanity. It is a good time to address this as your whole adult life is dangled before you, encouragement to put forth the effort to complete your transformation from a student to an adult human being. It is a good time because the process of empowerment that just began with your birth is nearing completion. Your intellectual abilities are mature and you can grasp the wonder of being human and being simultaneously educated, formed, and freed. It is also good because your studies as youth are not yet over, but receiving the vision of performance orientation here, your newly discovered potential for inner unity and social impact will also serve you in gathering every element available through education that you can value. We have been widening your options for expenditure of your time and effort, opening the value of personal choice to address investments in yourself. Instead of coming out just a well-educated and effective individual, you have the capacity to come out a well-educated and effective element of humanity in which you share ownership. There is no change unless something is changed. There is no empowerment without either the disclosure of new potency or rejection of what disempowers. This work involves the most serious and intentional change. It is a most personal change in the understanding that this change is in your freedom as a human being. It is a change in what you can see and understand concerning humanity, both personal and social. Unconscious change is in recognizing most clearly that you are engaged in an investment in yourself. It is the acceptance of a cost in your time and effort in order to promote a change. That value is an expected personal and social empowerment. The change in your viewpoint, and most especially the loss of personal comfort in the simple continuation of the way things are, is one huge change. It is intentionally urged upon you as the cost of empowerment for immediate value that you can receive that choice is yours. The intended effect of this course is giving you choices that you would be unlikely to have without the special attention and orientation provided. Consider the real foundation for our ability to come together. You are human. It is just as true for others in the class. It is just as true for your parents, it is just as true for me. It is even true for our leaders. The welfare and comfort of human beings is our shared concern. The ability to value personal freedom and prosperity is essentially universal among us. The urge to trust relations and value of our interaction with others is likewise inherent in being human. One of the more important aspects of these lessons in performance is that our power is both personal and social. When we truly empower others by joining them in seeking for human value, we are also empowering ourselves. Truly benefiting one another is the source of our human capacity to get things done. Authority-based organization is human and often has aspects in the family roles that people assume. But it is not a necessity for getting things done. Slavery has aspects in the family roles, especially as youngsters, and we know that it is less effective than other approaches when it comes to adults. The application and acceptance of our divisions as major elements in our civilization has disempowered all of us. These are not just good ways of getting things done, and are effective in preventing performance improvements. We now continue in a culture that isolates people, and that brings people together only to compete with each other. It is a damaging culture, and it disempowers us all. It is a culture of winners and losers, where even the winners are isolated and set against others. We are presented with the differing damage between capitalism and socialism, and urged to take sides. We are presented with the differing damages between one world leadership and national leadership. Such things are based on what people do, and not on what people value. What we value is not likely to ever be achieved without seeking results instead of worrying over the various processes. What we have presented in this course is that this cultural orientation is not only damaging, but is your property. How much you let the damage continue is subject to your own individual and corporate decisions on what is acceptable. Any time and anywhere and by whatever means you come to agreement with the other owners of our civilization, you can direct such changes that seem appropriate to you. What we can agree as direction for action will become the instructions our leaders will take. And our great potency comes from a clear and abiding focus on people as the only part of your interest. The us and them corporate approach is learned. It can be unlearned. Part of our learning is the cost of change, and it is a human cost. What you will do as to any change is a matter of your personal investment. One of the more important redirections for your empowerment is focus on what you can both receive and value. Instead of what activities you might undertake or what processes to use to get there, we come to agreement most easily to get value that we receive. The accomplishments that we can value, the value of results that come to us. And this is the source of your massive empowerment. You do not have to do it alone. You do not have to gather adherence to face off the powers that be and overcome them. Competition always destroys empowerment. If you value what human beings value, then you can find agreement on that value. It does not matter if leaders oppose you because they are not a separate party in interest. They have families of humans. They have friends who are human. What has value to humans will have value to them as well. And all the cultural divisiveness and disruption lessons that urge them to resist what they value will become disempowerment for them as individuals. If they are not agreed within themselves, their own potency is likely to fail. You are not alone in your humanity. Power is not the real challenge that comes from having so many directions. The challenges are in the breadth of the disempowerment that has been accomplished and the sheer number of performance improvement directions that can bring you to agree. Our study of management, getting things done through the efforts of others, is a partial cure. It is how we get things done. It is management as a separate task that gathers and supports the efforts of many to gain a result that all have reason to value. And when the value result is clear, it shouldn't matter all that much whether you are in management or the function is being performed by others. The time and effort that any person commits to the specific change effort is personal with the individual. You get to manage your own level of commitment to change efforts. The value is not even in being personal. It is that you have the choice. You are to be free and to help others find their freedom. There is value in specific changes but that pales next to the value of finding out how wonderfully you are connected to others. A shared freedom that has always been yours. It is your source of value in result to empower yourself by aiding others in seeing just how powerful they really are. Growth can be most uncomfortable like a baby with erupting teeth. It can even be painful. In this course there is that sort of pain. It is not from something that hurts you but from seeing how our culture has limited us personally and that we have capacity to change this. Others who are taking this course share this with you. They too are coming to realize their own human empowerment. Their own ability to step into shared ownership and learning to enlist others for accomplishing what we all can value. And then it is the consistency of human performance. To become this social power you have to accept your own empowerment. The personal empowerment that is not only your own by right of being human. It is yours by owning yourself. It is yours by learning to do personal performance management. Learning to see what you value clearly and gaining good expectations of what changes you would put in place for your own empowerment. Even that is potency seeing that the choice is yours alone. It is a choice that is set before everyone who experiences this course of study. It is a choice as it is human and it will be a matter shared with each other. Coming to you and your later teens it is also a new educational tool. One that is adult in every sense of the word. It is yours as an individual maturing human being in full expectation that it opens a whole new educational potential for you. It provides purpose to honing communication skills. It provides incentive to think clearly and most consciously about what you pursue and the actions you choose to take. And doing it where others are also receiving the experiences of these lessons. It just emphasizes that you do not have to be isolated in your efforts. There are others who will value your success, your personal and interpersonal successes. What you receive in this course of study is technical support for being effective. It is support in investing yourself in ways that empower you and everyone who will join with you in your chosen commitments. You are a human being, a unique part of humanity. In this you are also independent even though you are also called to recognize the same humanity in others and to see that they are also independent units. It is our humanity that provides the ability to deal effectively with each other. It is our consistency and wants and needs. It is our common culture that provides experiences and lessons that make us enough alike to be trusted in many ways. Our humanity is the source of our power and we more discover it than we come to empowerment by what we learned. I am not here to solve this puzzle of our individuality and social reality but rather to help you be consciously aware of the human potency that is so obviously set before you. Of even greater import you the unit can be aware of what you can accomplish both as an individual human and as a member of humanity. To this we add that you can have some effective self-management tools to apply to enhance even this vision when it comes to investing in yourself. There is the black box that aids you in seeing what does serve your purposes. There is the concept of waste addressing interferences in your ability to accomplish what you value. There is the understanding that waste can be eliminated without any loss and valuable result that you do accomplish. And finally there is freedom. There are opportunities choices that you can make places to spend your focused time and energy that will almost certainly increase your potency as both a person and as a part of humanity. And that is personal freedom. The choice is uniquely yours. The costs of benefit of various options are most personally yours. That empowerment is yours and yet it only becomes truly potent when it was shared with others. Other human beings who have the same general options and often a shared sense of value in what we as a corporate body are able to accomplish. The amount and direction of freedoms offered to you are generally the same as are offered to others, to your classmates, and even to those who have not passed through this course. The ones who have experienced performance orientation will share a few understandings of value with you that others will not. But still you now have some basic tools to call even the stranger to take part in empowerment. The choice of when to offer these lessons to you was mine, even though your time to accept them is yours. I chose a time when you have grown into near adult capacity and are experiencing some of the adult constraints as most uncomfortable. It is also a time when you have adulthood dangled before you as incentive to assimilate all that you can into your potential toolbox for living. With the lessons provided, the option to invest in yourself is likely to take a huge surge and even that to pale in your ability to invest in your own, even though shared, ability to get things done through agreement with others. The knowledge and techniques I have presented for your assimilation and use are already yours. The empowerment by discovery only awaits your choosing when, where, and how you will choose to apply yourself to the various options that are so personally yours. You see many directions where waste can be eliminated. You see many directions where there is value for you to receive as the ultimate owner of humanity. These are basic and they are important and you're being able to see what you were missing before taking part in this study is a sure indication of the value you have already received. What remains as lesson materials will be focused on the investments themselves, on what technical support I'm able to provide for your applications, your choices, your investments. This is what I offer in presenting this course, an investment that you can make in yourselves and in shared investments with others. Even more in accord with performance orientation, this is an ability to accomplish what you value to best assure that you invest yourself to the effect that you are able to see and in accord with who you are. It is not the course materials that will empower you, it is you who are already empowered.