Harvesting the Power of Fortuitous Encounters

train station platformWe have all had the experience of experiencing an event, one that was not planned, that just happened, and when you look back on it, that experience was the beginning event of a big learning process for you. You turned a corner on your reality, starting with that event, and you have never been the same.

What are a few of your fortuitous encounters? What lesson and life saga did they begin for you, now that you look back at them? What is there for you to harvest?

One of mine includes the barbecue party—we have a lot of those in Kansas City—I went to on a warm summer evening over 20 years ago, where I first heard about Frederic Hudson, my mentor on human development for the next 15 years. I was on a deck of a home in Johnson County, Kansas, in the evening sun. Sixty days later I found myself in Santa Barbara as he was forming what would became the Hudson Institute, www.HudsonInstitute.com, now a thriving learning community, coach training, and education center.

Another was the day I first saw Patricia, the woman who would become my wife, in an office of a seminar company where we were both employed for a time. She had on a blue dress.

I remember the deck at the barbecue. I remember Patricia’s blue dress. That is how it works. That is the power of memory. The images, when I dwell on them a bit to savor them, activate energy. If I care to, with a bit of reflection, I can harvest the whole experience of the growth that began in those moments. The energy and the lessons come back to me to own and hold. My soul distills it all somehow, and I am enriched and wizened by what I recall.

What can you savor, what lessons learned and energy infused, this day or this week, that will sustain you in what you are needing to confront at work or at home?

My friends Larry Spears and Paul Davis have written about these events in their book Fortuitous Encounters. Look for it when it comes out. I will let you know when…they don’t have a publication date for it yet.

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