“Excuse me?” I turned to ask the woman behind me. I was getting my things together to leave a meeting at my church. The meeting was one on prosperity, and this woman came up to me, surprising me again with:

“I said, you are a thought leader for thought leaders!”

In that moment I was inspired. A new process for my consultancy was born in that short sentence. At the beginning of the meeting we each were asked to introduce ourselves and state in a few sentences what we did and what we want to create for ourselves. In my case, I was thinking ahead of a session with a firm in Chicago that asked me to help them create a blog. I positioned the session with the firm as a means of demonstrating globally that the firm was a thought leader in its field. So in my introduction I said the usual, that I take the vision and strategy of an organization or individual and lead processes for discovery of hidden opportunities for that vision and strategy to be implemented or take form. This time I added that I want to take this further and assist people in their becoming thought leaders in their field.

I instantly saw the process in my head. It was magical for me. A perfect demonstration to me how inspired knowledge is triggered by unexpected events in our lives. It is my task, and I propose all of us have this duty, to be open to everything that is happening around us to receive inspiration. This is awareness!

I went to the firm to teach “blogging” and began with the exercise I am going to briefly describe to you. The head of the firm was pleasantly surprised throughout the process and later exclaimed, “This is wonderful!”

You, too, are a thought leader! Let me prove it to you. What follows is a brief step by step process that will lead you to the same place of inspiration that I and the firm in Chicago experienced.

• Step 1. Go to a place where you can be undisturbed for an hour. Take with you paper, pen (not pencil!) and a stack of Post-It notes. Be sure you are at a desk or large table with a lot of clear space.
• Step 2. Clear your mind and focus. Take a few deep breaths. Now, on one sheet of blank paper, write this across the top, “What activities do I enjoy the most?”
• Step 3. Begin to freely write down everything you love to do, putting only one item on a single Post-It note. Do not edit anything, and do not censor anything. Write everything down regardless of your hesitation to write it. Put each Post-It note on the table so that you can see each item clearly. For example, I might list Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts, read Think and Grow Rich, listen to Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, brainstorm for people, conduct choirs, conduct orchestras, listen to Michael Hoppe’s “Majestic Land,” go to coffee shops and write articles, etc. It is good to list individual book titles or magazine titles as well as “read books.” Do not hold back on anything that comes to mind.
• Step 4. Take a moment to pause and reflect. See if anything else comes to mind. Look around the room and see if anything catches your attention for any reason. If it does, then begin Step 3 again and list what comes to mind as a result. When you reach a point of no more free responses, you are complete. If you listed specific book titles, you might create a Post-It note for what the book represents to you. The point is to expand your list to more choices for Step 6.
• Step 5. Categorize/sort your items. (If you have fewer than ten activities, skip this step) Take your Post-It notes and group them if possible. Physically collect similar notes and group them in a way so that the table becomes a categorized view of your activites. Create a new Post-It note for each grouping and give that group a new label representing that group. For example, I listed “conduct choirs” and “conduct orchestras” so I would group them and label the group “conduct.”
• Step 6. Select only 5 Post-It notes. You must only choose five activities. All others will be set aside. If you have fewer than five, you must reduce your list to three. I know this is difficult but you must force yourself.
• Step 7. Set the discarded activities aside. Take your five and put them across the top of the table, but give yourself room for another exercise. List all of the things that come to your mind that these items remaining have in common for you. This is another free listing. No censoring. If it comes to mind, list it.
• Step 8. When you are complete, again group the responses if you can. Review the list, and for one final review, group them again.
• Step 9. Force yourself to choose ONE response from Step 8. JUST ONE!
• Step 10. Add the result from Step 9 to the responses from Step 6. Review your results. Reduce all of the remaining notes into one final Post-It note. I know this is difficult, but this is a time to face your passion – your leadership – and own it!
• Final Step. Take the result and fill in the blank with that result: “I AM a thought leader in _________ !”

What was your result? Were you surprised?

How do you feel at this point? Write it down!

I personally have shared this exercise with several people at this point, and the results are always unexpected. My preferred word for this is INSPIRED.

YOU ARE AN INSPIRED THOUGHT LEADER!

In the past two years, I found myself in situations that allowed me to face directly challenges where I had to make choices. Many of the choices were painful and emotionally draining. I cannot tell you how many times I felt more like screaming and running away rather than facing these challenges. Today, I see how these situations were the greatest gifts I could have ever been given.

Today as I revel in this beautiful energy, I can tell you that there is nothing more painful than not honoring and participating – feeding – one’s passions. So much of the difficulty and conflicting experiences I have had were directly the result, in my judgment, of not allowing myself to express what matters to me most. It took a huge wakeup call for me to realize the truth of what was happening. And I created it!

I received a wake up call! It is not important to this story what that call was. What is important is that I was able to work through that experience by following my own intuition and inner wisdom. I had all of the answers within. I had the ability to work through a process that totally transformed my experience with almost instantaneous results.

You, my readers, will begin to see the results of this experience in the next several weeks.

My passion is music and knowledge. I love creativity and expressing my creativity. I love teaching – teaching people how to tap into their own creativity and inner genius and expressing it.

In the next several weeks you will see on this blog and my web site interviews with those people I am honored to have in my life that I view as masters at creating a passion filled life. These people have integrated who they are as individuals into their professional lives in such a way as to inspire me and others.

I will also begin to publish eBooks with the processes I referred to that will help you tap into your own passion. These processes allowed me to discover for myself what I have successfully done for others and organizations. These processes will allow you to discover:

1. What your passion is
2. What is missing from your life that is causing pain, depression or perhaps conflict
3. What inherent or innate skills and knowledge do you have that can be integrated with all aspects of your life
4. How you can integrate your passion into all aspects of your life
5. How you can take this discovery and transmute the low times of your day into the high points of your life

This is a form of personal knowledge management. We all have a vast library of information stored deep within our minds, our life’s experiences, and background. It is my wish to lead you along the path that I have followed over the past several years – one that can be truly rewarding, life changing, and transformative.

I am reminded of my childhood, the vacations at Grandpa’s house, where I and my sisters would ceremoniously take walks with Grandpa to the Creek, where we explored what we imagined to be the great canyons and cliffs surrounding the roaring river. The walk down that alley to the creek was certainly a bus ride – Grandpa was always in control. But when we arrived at the creek, we were on our own to explore to our hearts content. Our imaginations were wild with adventure. Climbing down from the street down tot he water was like Tom Cruise on the cliff in the beginning of the Mission Impossible movie.

Back to the present. While exploring informal learning with blogs, wikis, and Web 2.0 technologies, I am pondering how innovation fits into the picture. True, just as we explored the creek at my Grandfather’s house, we were innovating in terms of our own personal experiences. However, I am sure that many other kids visited that same creek, climbed the same embankment. I am sure that our adventures and imaginative play was original, maybe not, but there is no documentation of our experiences, or theirs, to know.

The creation of new knowledge is my passion. How it is created, how the experience of innovating can be recreated, and why it happens in defferent situations fascinates me.

The technologies we are exploring in our Unworkshop3 are innovative in themselves in their application to learning. These tools are certainly instruments for transfering of knowledge between bike riders as well as bus riders. Unlike other tools for learning, blogs and wikis certainly make the process of moving tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge more easy and accessible (if not entertaining).

I am offering my readership to participate with me in my exploration of innovation in this technological paradigm. Can it be that innovation can be enhanced in this process? My wonder is that maybe it will have to be redefined. Honestly, I am finding that these questions are in my head, but i don’t understand why yet. And this is why I am inviting others to participate – I am exploration my own personal awareness here. I cannot put my finger on the question I am wanting to ask…or answer for that matter.

My mother is now a retired teacher from the high school in my home town. At the time of the story, the high school was a seven building campus, all located on the same lot of land. A new science building was being built on a new parcel of land across the street from the main campus. The superintendent (my mother’s boss) was under fire because he refused to allow sidewalks to be built. Parents and board members were concerned that the students would be able to safely navigate crossing the city street in the short time they had to get to the new building from their classes.

The summer ended, and the building opened on the first day of school. One temparary path of wood chips to each of the entrances was provided. The rest of the lot was sodded, but no other landscaping was done.

One month after the opening of school (and the new science building), the school board met. The superintendent invited parents, the architect and landscaper to the meeting. Upon the opening of the building, the superintendent relocated the meeting to the grounds of the new science building.

When the meeting recongregated at the grounds of the new building, the superintendent simply asked all there to look at the ground. They discovered that paths had been worn into the ground in an intricate, simple design of straight lines that directly connected many buildings of the main campus with the new building’s entrances. Also, they discovered a now grass-barren area off the side of the building that resembled a courtyard. The superintendent ordered the architect to build the sidewalks where the paths were and to create a courtyard.

Allow me to first say that I know that there are many versions of this story in circulation. I don’t know if the superintendent knew those stories when building this building. However, what I have stated is fact. He would not allow permanent sidewalks to be built until the students themselves created their own paths to the building. He allowed the students to discover their own paths to the knowledge. The students created their own user interface!

This true story serves as a powerful metaphor for me on so many levels. As a professional in designing and building web applications for the distribution and acquisition of information, I always keep this metaphor in my consciousness.

When I am asked to build a new tool, or to design an interface for an application, I first examine all aspects of the users. Who are they? How do they do what they do now? I spend time with the users and examine how they accomplish their tasks now. In two cases, I rejected the project because I saw the project proposal as an example of building a sidewalk without paths defined (the sponsor wanted to tell the users how to do what they do).

An example of how innovative this approach can be: My manager asked me to automate an emergency contact list our organization relies on. It currently existed as an Excel spreadsheet that was updated monthly. My task was to create a web based tool that allowed searching, updating and creating of new contacts on the fly. I asked my manager how he wanted to use the application, and how he wanted the application to be used. They were two different things, as it turned out. He thought about my question, and later came to me with a new specification for the project. He wanted me to design the application/tool so that he and the users could find a person by a) whom they report to, b) what they did in the organization, and c) by their location in the building. Once the application was implemented, it soon became widely used throughout the organization, even though it was designed with our specific division’s purpose in mind. But that one simple question instigated curiosity and innovation where it did not exist before.

In summary, I am paying more attention to the paths I follow and create in my life. As I mature in my profession, it is my focus to find and discover paths engraved in the ground, rather than to blindly and arrogantly build concrete sidewalks.