Wisdom at Work

Shift A Proven, No-Nonsense Way to Achieve Outstanding Results Coming to Coconut Grove in June


We humans are energy beings composed of one energy vibrating at four different frequencies ranging from the invisible to the visible.

Spiritual – the highest vibration, invisible and quantum. We experience it as: intuition, trust, faith, compassion, inspiration, forgiveness

Mental - a little denser than spirit, but still invisible. We experience it as thinking, ideas, strategy, plans, structure, organization, focus, clarity

Emotional - denser than mental with visible patterns. We experience it as joy, sadness, excitement, fear, urgency, wonder

Physical – dense and visible. We experience it as material, objective, substance - force, hard work, practice, skill, grounding

We are all of these, all at once, right now. Not either one or the other, not when we die, but all, right now. In business we tend to use two and ignore two. Which do we use, which do we ignore?

The shift is about moving from experiencing ourselves as bodies with brains, to experiencing ourselves as energy beings with four aspects. It’s about shifting from using two and ignoring two, to using all four; from playing with half a deck, to playing with everything we were born with.

If the four aspects are understood to be on a continuum, instead of a pyramid or dichotomy, shifting is easier. Mindfulness makes one aware of when to shift. Any pain or dissatisfying performance can be a cue to accept responsibility and shift, rather than as a reason to blame, criticize or stay stuck.


During the Shift Workshop participants will:

--Experience wholeness –all four aspects

--Use the Shift concepts to increase access to all four aspects

--Learn how to use mindfulness as a trigger for shifting

--Learn how to shift to the continuum from the dichotomy or pyramid

--Learn how to shift from being stuck to flow

--Explore applying the Shift technology to important, real life situations

--Practice shifting

--Develop life plans using all four aspects

My wife and I divorced over religious differences. She thought she was God and I didnj't.

I don't suffer from insanity: I enjoy every minute of it.

I work hard because I don't know any better.

Some people are alive only because it's illegal to kill them.

I used to have a handle on life but it broke.

Don't take life too seriously: No one gets out alive.

You're just jealous because the voices only talk to me.

Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.

Earth is the insane asylum for the universe.

I'm not a complete idiot. Bome parts are missing.

Out of my mind. Back in five minutes.

NyQuil, the stuffy, sneezy, why-the-heck-is-the-room-spinning medicine.

God must love stupid people; She made so many.

The gene pool could use a little chlorine.

Salt, is another huge problem for Australia’s soil, Jared Diamond says in Collapse. Just as the first farmers were not aware of the nutrient poverty in Australia’s soils, so they were not aware of all the salt in the ground.

In southwestern Australia’s wheat belt, the salt in the ground comes from its having been carried inland over the course of millions of years by sea breezes of the adjacent Indian Ocean.

In southeastern Australia, another prominent wheat belt, the basin of Australia’s largest river system, the Murray and Darling Rivers, lies at such a low elevation that it has been repeatedly inundated by the sea then drained, leaving much of the salt behind.

Another low-lying basin inland, was formerly filled by a freshwater lake that did not drain to the sea, but became salty by evaporation like Salt Lake in Utah and the Dead Sea in Israel, and eventually dried out, leaving salt deposits that were carried by winds to other parts of eastern Australia.

Some Australian soils contain more than 200 pounds of salt per square yard of surface area. Salt is easily brought to the surface by land clearance and irrigation agriculture, resulting in salty top soils in which no crop can grow. More about Australia, Monday; tomorrow: Friday Funnies.

Jared Diamond says in Collapse that a second economic consequence of Australia’s low soil productivity impacted agroforestry - tree agriculture. Most of the nutrients are actually in the trees themselves, not in the soils. Therefore, tree growth rates and yields have been uneconomic. In fact, Australia’s leading native timber tree, the blue gum of Tasmania, is now being grown more cheaply in many overseas countries that in Australia itself.

A third consequence involves fisheries. All of the nutrients in rivers and at least some of those in oceans near the coast, come from the soils drained by the rivers and then carried out to sea. Because of Australian soil’s productivity, rivers and coastal waters are also relatively unproductive, with the result that Australia’s fisheries have been quickly mined and overexploited, just like the farmlands and forests. Today, of nearly 200 countries in the world, Australia has the third-largest exclusive marine zone surrounding it, but ranks only 55th in the value of its marine fisheries and the value of its freshwater fisheries is negligible.

Another aspect of soil unproductivity is that the original settlers were unaware of the problem. When they arrived and encountered magnificent extensive woodlands that included what may have been the tallest trees in the modern world – the blue gums of Victoria’s Gippsland, up to 400’ tall, they were deceived by appearances into thinking that the land was highly productive. But after loggers had removed the first crop of trees, and after sheep had grazed the standing crop of grass, settlers were surprised to discover how slowly the grass and trees grew back.

The original settlers, as well as some people today, were quite slow to realize that the land was agriculturally uneconomic. In many areas, farmers and pastoralists had to abandon the land after making large capital investments in the form of homes, fences, buildings, wells, and roads. From early colonial times and continuing today, Australian land use has gone through many such cycles of land clearance, investment, bankruptcy and abandonment.

In Collapse, Jared Diamond points out that low average productivity of Australian soils has had major economic consequences for Australian agriculture, forestry and fisheries. The nutrients present in arable soils at the beginning of European style agriculture were quickly exhausted. In effect, Australia’s first farmers were inadvertently mining their soils for nutrients. Since then, nutrients have had to be added artificially in the form of fertilizer, increasing costs compared to more fertile soils overseas.

Low soil productivity means low growth rates and low average yields. Therefore a larger area of land has to be cultivated than in other countries to obtain similar yields. So fuel and maintenance costs for machinery also tend to be relatively high. An extreme case of infertile soils occurs in southwester Australia, part of Australia’s so-call wheat belt and one of its most valuable agricultural areas. Wheat is grown on sandy soils leached of nutrients and essentially all nutrients have to be added artificially as fertilizer. This makes the “wheat-belt” a gigantic flowerpot in which, just as in a real flowerpot, the sand provides nothing more than the stuff, the medium, that holds the plants.

As a result of the extra expenses due to disproportionately high fertilizer and fuel costs, Australian farmers selling to local Australian markets sometimes cannot compete against overseas growers who ship the same crops across the ocean to Australia, despite the added costs of that overseas transport. For example, it is cheaper to grow oranges in Brazil and ship the resulting orange juice concentrate 8,000 miles to Australia than to buy orange juice produced from Australian citrus trees. The same is true of Canadian pork and bacon compared to their Australian equivalents. So why do they persist?

In Collapse, Jared Diamond says, “Still another virtue of Australia as a chapter is that it illustrates strongly the five factors whose interplay I have identified throughout this book as useful for understanding possible ecological declines or collapses of societies.”

First, people have had massive impacts on the Australian environment. Second, climate change is exacerbating those impacts. Third, friendly relations with Britain have molded Australian society and shaped its environmental and population policies. Fourth, though Australia has not been invaded by outside enemies (bombed but not invaded) Australian perception of actual and potential overseas enemies has shaped its environmental and population policies.

Fifth, Australia also displays the importance of cultural values - including some imported ones that could be viewed as inappropriate to the Australian landscape - for understanding environmental impacts. “Perhaps more than any other First World citizens known to me,” Diamond says, “Australians are beginning to think radically about the central question: which of our traditional core values can we retain, and which no longer serve us well?”

Three features of the Australian environment make it extremely susceptible to human impacts: soil quality, water availability and distance, both inside and outside the country. Though water shortage and deserts are the qualities that first come to mind when thinking of Australian environmental problems, the quality of its soils have caused even bigger problems than has water availability.

Australia is the most unproductive continent: the one whose soils have on average, the lowest nutrient levels, the lowest plant growth rates, and the lowest productivity. That’s because Australian soils are mostly so old that they have become leached of their nutrients by rain over the course of billions of years. In fact, the oldest surviving rocks in the Earth’s crust, nearly four billion years old, are the Murchison Range of Western Australia. A sustainable economic system and sustainable cultural values would take cognizance of these facts.

If you've ever worked for a boss that reacts before getting the facts and
thinking things through, you will love this!

A large company, feeling it was time for a shakeup, hired a new CEO The new
boss was determined to rid the company of all slackers.

On a tour of the facilities, the CEO noticed a guy leaning on a wall. The
room was full of workers and he wanted to let them know that he meant
business.

He walked up to the guy leaning against the wall and asked, "How much money
do you make a week?"

A little surprised, the young man looked at him and replied, "I make $400 a week. Why?"

The CEO then handed the guy $1,600 in cash and screamed, "Here's four weeks'
pay, now GET OUT and don't come back."

Feeling pretty good about himself, the CEO looked around the room and asked,
"Does anyone want to tell me what that goof-ball did here?"

From across the room came a voice, "Pizza delivery guy from Domino's"