10 Practices to Uplift Yourself

Do you ever feel as though you have parachuted onto an alien terrain? Do you ever get the feeling, captured by Einstein, who said, “A thought that makes me hazy: Am I or are the others crazy?”

It’s not just the crazies. With escalating geopolitical, economic, and technological trends all around, you get the sense that we are entering a new phase in planetary and human affairs, one filled with exceptional and unprecedented challenges and opportunities. But legacy institutions are incapable of addressing their magnitude and existing tools are insufficient to meet the complexity of the problems. The geo-political, economic, and social systems are ill-equipped to address them, and their response capacity is inadequate to facilitate resolutions that create new futures. This scenario sets the stage for both disruption and innovation.

We humans call ourselves the sapient species, but discernment is not prevalent and wisdom is rare. The challenges we see today reflect our lack of development and the opportunities we may miss if we are not open to seeing them.

In my work with senior teams I encounter very smart people, leaders who are the best in the world at what they do. Yet they are the first to volunteer that, despite their smarts, they are as fully capable of producing collective stupidity as they are of generating collective wisdom and breakthroughs.

As a species, we are prone to producing collective disasters. But right there, nestled inside our dysfunction, hidden next to the absurd and the insane, are game-changing insights and breakthrough possibilities—if we look for them.

Here are ten practices to help you produce extraordinary breakthroughs.

© Aviv Shahar