This past week was a quiet, slow day for Project FORWARD, so not a lot of updates to announce.
I recognize this stage. It's the doubt stage. It's not doubt in the project itself, but doubt that anyone has the mental and emotional availability to care about it.
So of course, me being me, I go ahead wondering what it is that folks care about nowadays. Do they care about things in a not-so-distant future or the day to day tasks - and struggles - overwhelmingly occupies most of their time?
Does climate change matter?
Does Peace matter? Education? Culture? Hope?
These are CONCEPTS, or rather concrete processes that live in the background collective conceptual realm. Most of us only care about it when we are directly affected by. The more we are affected, the more we care. The less we are affected, the less we care.
This is really a natural behavioral trait stemming from our survival instincts, so how can we bring something conceptual on the survival radar of our consciousness?
Can we do it without marketing gimmicks? Can we do it without applying manipulative techniques? How?
Of course, there are many answers to this and AI would instantly come up with a bunch of “ideas”, but on a human level, as directly as possible, how can I invite caring, so that care becomes actionable support?
The obvious gateways are reach and trust.
Reach, because a message nobody hears or sees is an invisible call in the dark.
Trust, because a concept comes into direct contact with our comfort zone protected by our beliefs and our personal scale for what is valuable and what is not.
Reaching requires lots of money to push a project to the forefront of a gazillion other digital blasts of information bombarding us daily. Alternatively, reaching could use the social networks of like-minded people; in other words outreach through word of mouth.
Trusting requires interest first, transparency second, and open communication next.
Trust is the hardest to accomplish with intangible ideas and concepts such as this project.
Trusting requires time - a pause in our rush and run through daily life in order to analyze, assess, and then take a step into a new direction, or at least a temporary stop for long enough so we can have an experience of the thing we were called to trust.
So really, pausing is what emerges as the main obstacle to trust, hence new connections and new directions.
How can we pause? More importantly WHY don't we pause for long enough to invite new ideas, new people, and new experiences into our lives?
FOMO might be the culprit.
Fear of missing out.
To pause is to take time away from our personal rush and offer it into the unknown, unsure of the benefits we could collect on if we did pause for something other than our own immediate goals.
Fear.
Ultimately and unfortunately, fear is a massive force driving us busy, often into exhaustion, always into isolation - and fear loops right back into survival.
I know the power of the survival instinct. It can literally hijack imagination and common sense. At its extremes, it provokes anger, depression and even desperation. Ironically maybe, I believe that our survival instinct can even neutralize hope.
Hope is exactly what Project FORWARD is all about. Project FORWARD is a statement that we are much more than our instincts, and that vision and imagination are powerful forces in the service of humanity.
So, will you pause to give Project FORWARD a deeper look, to ask questions, to engage in conversation?
Share this post