Time to Explore

No doubt your Board of Directors loved all of the hard work you did to prepare – the favorite things, the skills and interests, what you are not – and had a lot of great ideas and comments and insights into who you are and how you can be in the world.

And they all talked like mad people and you took notes and when it was over, they all thanked you and clapped their (virtual) hands on your shoulders and said keep in touch and hung up the phones/left the bar/went home to their Happy Versions O’ Them, and there you were with a scribble of words on a yellow pad and no earthly idea what to do next.

You don’t even know if it was helpful, do you? Not yet. It will be.

Welcome to exploring, the second phase of Re-versioning.


Explore without goals

Exploring always seems like the most “fun” phase of Re-versioning. But in fact, it’s difficult. And it’s not always a good time.

True exploration shows us places we’ve never seen, plays sounds we’ve never heard, prompts emotions we’ve never felt.

When we’re in it, it seems like it has absolutely no shape or form, no rhyme or reason, and yet here we are trying to make something new of ourselves and not even sure if it will work, much less if it will result in something wonderful.

But we have to be lost to explore, don’t we?

Yes and no.

When we’re lost, we have no idea where we are and we want to be Somewhere Else and we can’t figure out a) where Somewhere Else could possibly be, and b) how to get there.

When we explore, we have no idea where we are either. But we don’t care. Because it’s pretty danged interesting right here and now. And the point is to follow our noses/stick to the hunches/trust in our instincts (read “interests,” “skills,” “abilities”), and See What Happens.

Fruitful explorations, in Re-versioning, come when we explore without goals. It’s not exploration if we know where we’re going. That’s called a vacation.

Exploring doesn’t always mean experiencing new things. It means seeing familiar things with unbiased, unassuming eyes. It means really looking. Really listening. Really experiencing.

We explore when we let our natural curiosity, passions, and interests sway our actions and draw us to experience things in a new way. When we don’t expect anything out of the experience.

There’s only one rule in exploring.

We have to show up.

We have to be there. We have to pay attention to our ideas, thoughts, emotions, to the world Out There and the world In Here. So we can answer the one, truly, bottom-line, important question to this whole process:


What is the world asking of me?


Believe me, the world is asking. There’s so much we all need to do, and we can’t get it done without every one of us sticking our talents and skills and loves and passions into the mix and helping out.

That doesn’t mean you follow someone else’s exploration into the latest Most Important thing, whether it’s global warming or poverty or education or (or.. or.. or). Not that those things aren’t important. They are. But the real question is, what is the world asking of each of us, specifically, given what we each know and love and believe in?


Ask the right questions

I believe there are ways to ask the world this question and get an answer that makes sense. In fact, asking the right question is important, because if we ask (and then answer) the wrong question, we may end up rejecting a part of ourselves that the world really, really needs to have.

My Board Member Jim Kenefick introduced me to www.asmallgroup.net. It’s a group of people in Cincinnati, including the urban poor, who are committed to restoring and reconciling Cincinnati. Their number includes Peter Block, a biz guru who is also a citizen of Cincinnati and, in an interview on the web site, said a couple of key “grown up” thoughts (I paraphrase):

- We are inclusive, and put people in charge of their own futures.

- We declare that we are responsible for this world, and we will stop being victims.

- We are the cause as well as the effect. There is no one to blame.


I took that to heart in Re-versioning. And after a little thought, I asked myself three questions that seemed to be the right ones:

- What makes me feel most whole? Most purposeful?

- What have I done that I do well, better than anyone else?

- What does the world need from me today?


I think of these questions as a set of interlocking rings, one for each question, like this:



The intersection in the middle, the place where all three of the answers converge, is what You 2.0 will be.

The “next” won’t end up being specific, like “Get a doctorate in physics from Yale University.” (Although that would have been a fun “next,” I think!)

The intersection can provide a bit of guidance about what “next” might entail. At the risk of sounding uppity, here’s what I found in the intersection of my three circles/three questions – what I needed to do next:


Guidance. Wisdom. Kindness. Compassion. Strength. Direction. Ideas. Beauty. Laughter. Confidence. See, look, feel. Observe. Experience.


It sounded pretty pretentious, when I first wrote it down – it still does, if I think of each of those things as the Be All And Do All For The World.

But when I think of those things in terms of who I am, of what I can do, I know there’s a little of each of those things in me, in little areas, in what I can offer.

Of course, “next” needs a structure. I had no idea how that would happen. Or when that would happen. But in the spirit of exploration, I decided to just sit with it for a while. And let all those “next” things talk to one another and work things our before they turned to me to say, “Hey.”