Cristina
Andersson & Collin Hansen
The Winning
Helix
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Introduction |
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Hello again!
This
is the introduction to the book. Reading this you will understand why I
needed to write about winning and learning. Cristina |
Introduction
A person who wishes to live a good life and be successful in his actions lives in a quandary. The messages different teachers and gurus are offering can be quite contradictory and ambivalent. How to manage in a world where many prevailing truths should be taken into consideration and one should simultaneously be able to make his own decisions and take responsibility for his life and actions?
The capability of the brain is immense, but can it really deal with all the information and guidance that is constantly offered to it?
One of the main paradoxes I find very hard to live with is the paradox of letting go and to achieve. Many spiritual gurus advise that letting go and surrendering to the now is enough, or that one should trust his strivings to God who will take care of everything.
The requirements of the working life are however getting tougher and tighter. We should be all the time achieving more by being more effective and more creative. We should also be able to perform more action without aimless hustling, meaning that we must be able to increase our ability to simultaneously plan and act and reflect.
A Finnish actress described beautifully how her acting took a fresh start after years of personal crisis. “One day I decided to start practicing and studying. I worked really hard and God saw my strivings and gave me an opportunity to show my skills.” The actress’s thought is very close to the idea of this book: “when you prepare by learning the right things and with hard work, you will arrive to the edge of a challenge, where you can show what you can do, and you can let winning happen for you.”
“I will study and prepare, and someday my
opportunity will come. Abraham Lincoln”
This book combines the “letting go” and the “achieving with hard work” in a process where “peak-performance” and “zero-performance” are seen as parts of the same continuum. The keywords for the book are:
v winning
v the action-learning process
v peak-performance
v transition
v shift
v energy
Winning; a controversy or a driving force?
A negative
attitude towards winning begins nowadays already with small children. In my
homeland,
Competition, I believe, is a part of human nature and culture. Competition is a place where people come together to enjoy and measure their skills. When the natural and healthy ways of competition and winning are depreciated the children and youth compete in unhealthy ways like “being the coolest” in their domain of interest, be it clothes, life-style, money, or extreme experiences..
Children love winning. I have two sons and when they were small the best way to get them to do something was to ask “who will be there first?” or say “I bet you cannot do this”. Luckily my sons went to a Waldorf school where they had a lot of opportunities to creatively express themselves using their innate talents in arts and sports.
When winning is denied from our children they will not learn to lose either. The world is not, however, always righteous. The market driven economy and the working life, is full of competition with winners and losers. A young adult will confront the competition the latest when he for the first time tries to get a job or to find a place to study -- only a few are selected.
The working life demands winning from its employees daily, the companies are striving towards excellence. How can these people help their companies to win if they are taught that there is something wrong with winning? How can these people enjoy their work if they feel that it is bad to aim for high goals and challenges exceeding all previous achievements? Everybody appreciates the win-win situation, but how can a win-win situation be born if the stakeholders don’t know how to win?
“The
spirit, the will to win, and the will to excel, are the things that endure.
These qualities are so much more important than the events that occur.”
Vincent Lombardi
Winning and success
During the time I wrote this book I had a mentor with whom I could discuss everything that the writing process brought into existence. We had very interesting discussions about my choices for terminology. Especially the words “winning” and “fighting spirit” irritated my mentor tremendously. She said that those words lead into bulldozing and harming other people. Though I explained my point of view and she hers, we never found an accord.
My mentor was absolutely of the opinion that the word “winning” could and should be replaced with “success”. I don’t agree. In a race there can be many who succeed, but only one winner. The email inquiry revealed that there are many people who say they are not interested in winning and that they hate competition. It is hard to say whether this is true for everybody – someone might for fear of disappointment avoid situations where winning is an option.
The email inquiry revealed, however, that there are people who love to win and take part in events where they have a chance to win. The pursuit, the preparation and excitement culminating in a winning feeling, the “YES”, were the main reasons why these people wanted to experience winning. These people were also disappointed if they didn’t win, but many of them had learned how to deal with losing – better luck next time!
Some answers to the question “what is winning”:
To be the first
To be the best
To reach a measurable goal
To achieve a goal, be it state of mind, battle,
competition
To win oneself
To win others
To make things click
To see connections between different things
To learn
To confront courageously a conflict and sort it out
To negotiate a good deal
To succeed with a challenge
To exceed the own limits
To conquer something that is difficult
To grow as a human being
Many of these can be signs of success too, but I believe that the winning feeling is more than success, it is the feeling when a person can for a moment feel like a king and let the vanishing thought: “I am the only one in the world who did this” hover in his/her mind.
Winning is confronting ones own uniqueness and power and, for a moment, to feel really special. Those moments are the rosebuds of life which sweeten our memories with overpowering scent.
What kind of people win?
Everybody can win and everybody can find a forum where they can win, if not elsewhere then in a lottery or a crone-carrying competition (Finnish specialty) or they can have their names in the Guinness book of world-records.
True, successful winning requires of a person passionate will to learn and improve. A one-time winner can emerge by coincidence, but to be a winner with great and long-term success can happen only by intensively and persistently striving for better learning and action and by manifesting the true potential and talent.
Learning Process
Although the word ‘winning’ is highlighted in this book; the real issue is learning. Winning is a result of successful preparation, which is a learning process.
I avoid using words like “professional” or “competent” because in my mind those words refer to something static – something that is achieved and to be maintained. The process nature of nearly everything is to me closer to the truth and my ideals than a rigid system that doesn’t leave space for emergency and creativity.
I have studied a lot. University, two minor exams in economics and marketing in a business school, huge amount of courses, seminars and different training programs; business, arts, national economics, languages, etc. I have also learned a lot, yet I was always bothered by a certain lack of a system; a process that would have provided me a personal and coherent framework to place the learned material within. I felt that most of the training programs provided a discrete set of teaching episodes rather than a consistent continuum of learning.
On the other hand I lacked a system to learn as well. I was convinced that the system was embedded in those programs – I didn’t even know that I was missing something. Yet I learned a lot. I have been taught by great experts and teachers with tremendous wisdom – the lack of system was in me, not in them.
Nevertheless the need to understand learning and its process quality has driven me to write this book; to express my knowledge and experience in this field. I have soul of a teacher and a teacher wants to teach.
I want to express my gratitude to all greats of education with J.H. Pestalozzis’ words from his book “Schwanengesang”:
“Try everything, keep what is good and if there is something better
growing within you, add it in truth and love to what I have in these pages
tried to give you in truth and love.”
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