Inspirational Insights Podcast - Insight To Action

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The Intuition SeriesHow does your high-speed cognitive process work?“I don’t trust my intuition. It’s been wrong.”“Intuition is fear.”“We want rational decisions, not something intangible.”There is a reason why intuition can be wrong and a reason why it is not fear or any other emotion. Intuition is a cognitive process that runs at high speeds so you can make life-saving decisions BEFORE you are cognitively aware. That’s life-saving insight First Responders rely on. So do repeatedly successful entrepreneurs. Intuition utilizes your subconscious processor and is mashed up with bias (cognitive distortions), unhealed emotional wounds, beliefs, and other distortions, hence the confusion. Whether you believe or do. not believe in intuition, the info in this video will help you recognize your greatest asset when working with dynamic conditions, high stakes, insufficient information at speed. Your life might depend on it. Get full access to Navigating Uncertainty: Visionary Resilience at dawnajones.substack.com/subscribe

Being triggered is a positive signal that there’s an emotional wound buried in the subconscious, needing your attention. Behind fatigue is a lot of overwhelm and energy bound up in carrying unhealed emotional wounds and generational trauma around. Clear those energetic triggers to regain usable energy and emotional freedom. The horse in the background gets triggered but, unfortunately, can’t apply self-directed solutions like readers can. Releasing decision fatigue and reframing overwhelming powerlessness into forward steps requires expanded self-awareness and action. Reactivity converts into unflappable growth.In this video, I cover the steps to:Deal with the emotional reactivity where your brain fires out of protection. Box breathing is one tool. Included in this podcast interview are instructions on box breathing. Clear the emotional energetic charge so you retain the memory but not the emotional wounding that goes with it. Therapy is one option. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, my go-to is Emotional Freedom Technique because it is science-backed, self-directed, and works. Get started using Brad Yates, Manifest Portal (Devi), and Julie Shiffman. If you’re ready to clear up stored emotion from your body’s hard drive (subconscious), you can start immediately. Why wait for spring?!Clearing trauma and old emotional wounds is an insurance policy against chronic illness while providing a sense of control over fatigue and the overwhelming consequences of global events. Why?In my experience, dealing with overwhelm is a lot easier using your subconscious with its outrageously fast processing speeds. Clearing out the closet of old energies gives you more resources to work with. Applying the oxygen mask allows you to focus more clearly on what is going on around you. Without context awareness, you can’t see what’s coming next, much less respond to it effectively. Considering the world that emerges is a direct function of the health and well-being and decision-making consciousness of each person and the collective, this personal development and expansion is critically important. Thanks for being a future-shaper!! Note and Disclaimer: What I write about it is based on my personal transformation, professional experience and research into the intersection between science, the power of the human spirit and the fringe of discovery. It does not supplant or replace conventional medicine or other sources of personal development. Navigating Uncertainty: Visionary Resilience is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Navigating Uncertainty: Visionary Resilience at dawnajones.substack.com/subscribe

Reflections surfaced while I was trooping around snowshoeing on Hollyburn Mountain and thinking of my subscribers, some new (thank you!), some loyal (very grateful), and all who are paying attention to what is going on in the world. More aggression in the global arena, deceptive accords (peace, truce or not), can hurt your heart. Home base is your personal spirit and joy. In this short video, I name a few simple practices to boost your personal spirit in the face of the news and other emotional distractions.Your mindset is directly impacted by your self-awareness of the context and its effect on your emotions. This makes awareness critically important because it triggers action to intentionally process your emotions and regain clarity.Core to well-being and personal growth is having a sense of control, a face-forward outlook on life, and the initiative to grow, so you can hack resilience and build feel-better emotions.None of us can face the world with courage without the inspiration of others who are taking on the difficult conversations that are critically important for breakthroughs.People like Garry Turner, whose conversations on the masculine-feminine dynamic invite self-situational awareness on what is going on for you, what is going on face to face, and what is going on in the wider environment (context awareness).Dark feelings, triggers all provide openings for personal development.When the going gets tough, the tough get growing. Get full access to Navigating Uncertainty: Visionary Resilience at dawnajones.substack.com/subscribe

Full disclosure, I have never been laid off, but I have fired clients who were using my work to ‘control’ employees and “bring them into alignment”. After personal losses and life’s interruptions, I began to notice a pattern in my experience. It is not necessarily linear but can be. Your heart energy is your compass, and it needs deliberate care to respect the more intense emotions that accompany loss. It is also a great way to stay aware of what charges you and what depletes you. If you’ve lost your job, feel a need to reinvent yourself, or realize that there is something deeper emerging from within, then the steps I’ve outlined here will help you hone in on what you need to respect and listen to as you process and reinvent. Thanks for reading Navigating Uncertainty: Visionary Resilience! This post is public so feel free to share it.Given the ridiculously high disengagement statistics, reinventing yourself is timely. Doing it while moving through fear (financial, and more), brings you face-to-face with your commitment to You. I work for myself, so if my work is unfulfilling, it is up to me to change it. Staying aligned with my purpose has been a bumpy ride and no less challenging than a company like Patagonia has experienced through its growth and commitment. Over thirty years, both internal catalysts and external conditions have propelled me into new territory. It hasn’t always been successful or smooth, so I began taking notes, hoping that my experimental process would help someone willing to accept full responsibility for their well-being and destiny. “It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.” - Ralph Waldo EmersonIn moving through fear and doubt, there might be temptations to take the well-worn road of depression and other mental health side trips. Dark emotional places serve as a signal that you’ve fallen into a pit. Commitment and compassion will get you through any trials. Not easy, but necessary. The world needs your full talent now. Biologically, repression of expression creates depression or aggression. Any time I see people shooting other people, it tells me that the pressure has become too great and the violence too easy. Nothing about self-collective leadership is easy peasy. Commitment is essential. So is reflection, stepping back, observing and noticing the pressures you’re responding to. Your heart will tell you what is next, after you’ve done some emotional release work and given yourself the space to recover. As we move from individual to collective leadership, the personal work you do directly informs the quality and frequency of the collective. Exciting times. Please post comments, or questions and share this with someone who needs to know they are not adrift in the open ocean nor are they alone. Navigating Uncertainty: Visionary Resilience is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Navigating Uncertainty: Visionary Resilience at dawnajones.substack.com/subscribe

Our connection to nature is captured in appreciation for the journey these birds make. This is a group of stranglers; the bulk of the migration has passed. They flew overhead yesterday while I was playing with my grandkids. Every time I see a flock like this pass overhead, I am in awe of their navigational instincts. These are Canada Geese, one of three or four species that migrate south along the Pacific flyway. They will cover 3200 km to 5600 km, depending on their starting point (2000 to 3500 miles), flying from Arctic Canada to the southern U.S. and Mexico for the winter. With flight speeds of 64 km to over 100 km per hour (40-70 miles per hour), a built-in GPS and navigational devices, they face every obstacle humans have created, plus those the weather presents. After wandering the world for two years, the first thing I did on my return home was go camping in a cow pasture because my father and mother were banding birds. Crouched down in a slough, overhead came a flock of Canada Geese honking and flying low. I could hear their wings whistle as they passed overhead. And I cried from the joy of their presence.Navigating Uncertainty: Visionary Resilience is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Nothing is quite as spectacular as the flight and migration of birds… a journey that has been followed for possibly 50 million years according to the fossil record. Hummingbirds lay an egg the size of a pea. Their migratory journey covers 3200 km (2000 miles) and fits easily in the palm of your hand. You can’t handle them without risking breaking their wings. And yet they make that flight distance. Their metabolic rate is so high that at night they go into a state of hibernation. Photo: Edgar T. Jones Our technological ambitions look small next to the magnificence of small birds on big flights or larger birds on group flights. Get full access to Navigating Uncertainty: Visionary Resilience at dawnajones.substack.com/subscribe

When strangers from the city step onto a farm, they often see disorder—muddy kitchen floors, grass growing in ditches, animals or birds that poop and have no character or personality. It looks messy. But to the person who tends the land, that same scene is alive with relationship—a quiet understanding between humans, animals, and place. Without that bond, decisions are clinical, missing the big picture, and limited by what is perceived as possible from that worldview. For instance, the virologist who was interviewed by CBC along with others presented the challenge of testing the ostriches from a technical point of view arguing that the birds were too strong, fast to be tested. No one considered, at least that I saw, recognized that the farmers could have done the testing because they had raised the birds since birth. The ostriches knew and trusted them. The decision was sourced in a worldview that was missing the reality of the relationship and farm life.Relationships is the basis for understanding complex interactions. Oversimplication is easy but misleading. That gap in understanding shaped the fate of 317 ostriches in British Columbia. The cull revealed more than the tragic, unethical, disconnected method; it exposed a deeper divide between how caregivers, scientists, and government officials see life. This video takes you onto a farm, where the connection between you and the animals you care for leads to cooperation, after trust has been established. To a city dweller, animals are animals. Objects. Edible objects. To anyone working with a modicum of sensitivity and consciousness, they are sentient creatures who understand much more than you think they do. The other day, while leading one of the stallions in, I told him I’d be walking him in. Usually, he runs himself in. I’ve learned that if I don’t explain what is happening, he makes his own decisions, like pulling a 100-pound bale of hay off the stack. We cooperate. It didn’t start that way. Boundaries needed to be set on my part. The sum total of how we see and interpret the world is captured in your worldview, individually and culturally. Consciousness is when you are aware of your worldview and able to observe how it differs from the worldview of others. Shifting perspective and empathy are the two metaskills that illuminate the source of conflict or tension. With tension as your signal, you can ask questions with an open mind. I had a lovely conversation on worldview with Kathy Jourdain on the podcast. Understanding worldviews can reduce polarization and bring people together to reach some level of cooperation in solving a complex problem. If you missed it, listen here. Navigating Uncertainty: Visionary Resilience is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.https://embed.acast.com/5a6fab1455cdce603414631c/6385025a1c0715001196cadcUnderstanding worldview opens the door to greater understanding. Without it, decisions are made that lack humanity and any ethical integrity.The daily news is full of opportunities to practice spotting the source of different perspectives. As a consciousness shifter, recognizing when you’ve just stepped into a different world, provides a fresh context for how you process your experience and make decisions. J.K. Rowling knew that when she created the world Harry Potter lived in. The world we live in, is still being shaped and formed in everyday decisions, and in the decisions that tilt toward affirming life, or killing it. Thanks for reading Navigating Uncertainty: Visionary Resilience! This post is public so feel free to share it.Reconnecting back to life sustaining wisdom means being humble enough to know that how you or I see the world, is not how it is from many other points of view. I love the work this musician (Plume on YouTube) has done to discover how sensitive animals truly are. Animals respond to the emotion you bring and their experience. Plume sings to a shy OkapiEnjoy! Get full access to Navigating Uncertainty: Visionary Resilience at dawnajones.substack.com/subscribe

After three sports-related head injuries, one subarachnoid hemorrhage, financial loss, loss of housing, and other setbacks, I began to process difficult experiences as a learning lab for resilience, to stay in alignment with my purpose and what has meaning. It occurred to me that my experience might help others. In this video, I share what I observed, the steps I wandered (or staggered) through to process various life experiences, recover, and move forward. Disclaimer: This is not professional advice; it is personal experience. Because I am a process nerd and specialize in transforming life’s experiences into value, making sense is combined with the steps I used to guide myself into new territory with confidence. My hope is/was that what I experienced would have value to others navigating the messy middle between one state of being and the next. Feedback is welcome. There’s more to come. The inner work is becoming increasingly essential if we are to collectively work with high uncertainty while redirecting leadership decisions toward a life-affirming understanding of system relationships. Navigating Uncertainty: Visionary Resilience is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.One more simple step not in the video:Be in awe with life. Every morning! For me, lately it has been the massive flocks of geese flying south. Canada geese, Snow geese, White-fronted geese in formation or not. These are Ross’s geese from my father’s photo collection and a book that never got published. Above the deafening manmade noise is the subtle sound of wings riding the slipstream following the bird ahead. Their trip is not as long as other species, only 4800 km (2 - 3000 miles). Still, pretty impressive! Thanks for reading Navigating Uncertainty: Visionary Resilience! This post is public so feel free to share it. Get full access to Navigating Uncertainty: Visionary Resilience at dawnajones.substack.com/subscribe

In the upcoming episode with Garry Turner on the Healthy Masculinity podcast, we talk about how horses sense your emotional state. What is unsaid in the video is that the simple act of listening with the intention to understand changes how people feel. Nick Zeniuk, former Ford executive and my mentor in 2007-8-9 understood the sensitivity of horses and how they express themselves. It is particularly valuable when moving through times when it seems easier to rely on mental will over sensing your environment. Moving through uncertainty with confidence draws on universal principles and meta skills of consciousness. Four universal principles from cultural anthropology have guided my facilitation and leadership self-work…* Pay attention to what has heart and meaning.* Show up and be present. * Tell the truth without judgment.* Be open to outcome, not attached to it. Thanks for reading Navigating Uncertainty: Visionary Resilience! This post is public so feel free to share it.These four principles look innocently simple until you put them into practice and observe yourself in action. Even listening comes in categories: connected listening, active listening, and empathic listening, for example. Intention guides focus in my experience. With the surge in layoffs, companies deferring to AI instead of engaging their people, self-knowledge will fuel resilience and visionary leadership. These principles help, along with awareness of your inner and outer emotional world. Will post the interview when it is released. Navigating Uncertainty: Visionary Resilience is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Navigating Uncertainty: Visionary Resilience at dawnajones.substack.com/subscribe

This is the pony. In the video you see only her butt so this photo shows her front end. She has one eye and two sides. In this story, I share how a six-year-old decided brushing one side was good enough. It is something that everyone does occasionally. Perceive through a narrow ‘Me’ lens and forget about the purpose - why you are doing what you’re doing. In this video, I share how the six-year-old’s actions and motivation mirror those of anyone whose focus is on ‘Me’ and not on why. The value of paying attention to what you focus on is one of the most powerful ways to maintain your well-being, oversee organizational change, and teamwork. One simple practice with infinite value for leaders leading their lives with consciousness, self and situational awareness. I mention a podcast I did with Richard Sheridan where we go into detail on focus, outcomes and the rigour associated with being clear about what you’re aiming to achieve. That link is here. The Business Value of Joy! Get full access to Navigating Uncertainty: Visionary Resilience at dawnajones.substack.com/subscribe

Working with the uncertainty presented by housing costs, cost of living, global conflict and loss of biodiversity demands a change in how we think. We are trained to think linearly. But the world runs on inter-relationships. I’m back on the horse farm. In this video, I talk about eco-systemic thinking as it applies to farm life and purpose-driven focus on relationships, going beyond cause and effect versus the ingrained linear thinking that dominates.I also cover the tips for working with uncertainty, which may be a partial repeat from a previous post, but it is worth repeating. None of what it takes to stay well in today’s world is a one-off checklist. Finally, I’d like my subscribers to know that I’m pausing for a month for a digital detox. Will resume and return with lessons from nature, and more skills and stories from a life of travel, that inform and support full flourishing humans. Get full access to Navigating Uncertainty: Visionary Resilience at dawnajones.substack.com/subscribe

What if companies engaged their people, replacing fear of losing control with a focus on health, well-being and high value contribution? According to Perplexity.ai, it would add $9.6 trillion to the global economy. Worse, 27% of managers are disengaged. So why isn’t making an engagement a priority happening? I gained insight when a colleague who consults within US companies mentioned that, post-COVID, he was hearing executives say they could hardly wait for this engagement fad to be over. Hopefully, that’s not a popular view, but if it is, then fear of losing control over others, rooted in emotional insecurity, lies at the source of failure to adapt thinking. Could replacing emotional insecurity with emotional mastery be the highest leverage step toward well-being and resilience? Thanks for reading Navigating Uncertainty for Radical Action! This post is public so feel free to share it.Dan Szuc and Jo Wong run a UX consultancy out of Hong Kong. Aware of space, place and interaction, and grounded in theatre production and education, they observed how interactions are driven by culture. Make Meaningful Work has templates for observing micro action in place. Their cultural work involves paying attention to what is going around, widening the lens, opening the aperture to capture the bigger picture. How about treating culture as a theatre production?The live stream is on my YouTube podcast channel. This is a 5 minute overview of the discussion. I have questions. * How can workplace cultures be moved from process-driven to being aligned in personal and organizational values, when decision-makers fear loss of control? * How can there be movement toward high engagement and company resilience when there is habitual avoidance of discomfort? * What if asking and having challenging conversations deepened skillsets, engaged creative thinking, and connected decisions to consequence, meaning and purpose? In 2024, the Edelman Trust Barometer reported an innovation crisis. Innovation reverted to tweaking what existed, skipping the opportunity to rethink and delete processes that worked against company viability. That’s not innovation. More like retrenching to the familiar and bypassing the value of uncertainty for leadership and growth. If there is a simple way to illuminate possibilities, it would be to observe where the focus is going and make an intentional decision to take action and move forward. At the end of our longer discussion, Jo Wong closed with: “ You have power. Just be more aware of it and be more intentional about how you frame things. The mindset and attitude can affect your choices.”Find Jo and Dan’s book on Amazon, and their work on the links below. Subscribe to their newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/make-meaningful-work-7327884648296972288 https://www.makemeaningfulwork.com/ https://www.apogeehk.com/ https://www.makemeaningfulwork.com/books https://www.amazon.com/dp/173792823X?ref_=pe_93986420_774957520 https://www.makemeaningfulwork.com/about Get full access to Navigating Uncertainty: Visionary Resilience at dawnajones.substack.com/subscribe