Our Nautical Charts – ElPropósito3 min de lectura

In a sea of opportunities, how do you know which one is best?

Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash

Life often hands us opportunities that are hard to turn down. When a decision carries a heavy emotional load and takes far more effort than usual, we’re facing a big challenge and need tools that bring peace of mind. This pandemic, like any crisis, will surely bring all kinds of opportunities along with crossroads. Here’s how to face them and come out ahead.

On a normal day we make many decisions. Some are automatic (what to have for breakfast), others take a little more thought (choosing a book, lending someone a hand), and some call for deeper awareness. Those are the ones that reach our minds, touch our hearts and can unsettle our peace. They tell us that once we decide, we’ll probably have to leave our comfort zone, and that’s where uncertainty begins.

A key part of any decision is separating the facts we can verify, our intuition and our worries (which usually show up as beliefs). With each in its place, we can sense how well an outcome might go and where it might lead. Of the three, beliefs tend to eat up most of our thoughts and energy and slow us down.

You can hold an opportunity in your hands and gauge its odds by sorting facts from intuition and getting past your beliefs. One more element is still missing: whether the decision fits the natural expression of our self-fulfillment. When the road forks and one path lifts us up to be better people, better human beings, that’s usually the one to take.

Nautical charts have long guided sailors. Follow them to the letter and they’ll usually get you from point A to point B. Our minds can draw countless charts in a second, and in that same second send us down a route that brings us right back where we started. The charts that get us from A to B, and end each voyage with far more wellbeing, calm and peace, live inside us. How do you use your own nautical charts?

Warm regards and all the best,

Rodrigo Baccaro

P.S. This week’s VELA:

• What I’ve been Viewing: Food Fair 2020, Technology in the Food Industry. A series of projects by students at Universidad del Valle de Guatemala. I’m proud of their proposals, which put their knowledge into practice and offer solutions to the country’s biggest challenges.
• What I’ve been Listening to: Career Reinvention, from the Dear HBR podcast. With the opportunities that may open up after COVID, this episode is worth hearing for the main elements that can support you in reinventing your career.
• What I’ve been Reading: How our projects shape our personalities, and how we can use them to remake who we are. A wonderful article. What stood out for me is how clearly the projects that challenge us define who we are.
• What I’ve been Learning: Christensen Center for Teaching & Learning. A valuable resource, especially for those of us who love teaching with the case method.

Finally, I invite you to follow the SmartWebinars series we created with Zamorano graduates and the support of AGEAP Internacional. Our panelists have brought a lot of value, and if you missed any, the link to all of them is here.

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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