What The World Needs Now

                                               Oggebbio, Lago Maggiore, Northern Italy


What if there were a perfect society that could only produce the happiest, healthiest, most loving people you could ever imagine you’d want to be around and spend time with, even create your own life with or alongside?

What would that society look like? Who would those people be?

Decades ago I attended one of the most awe-inspiring and powerful talks by any person I’d ever heard speak. His name was Huston Smith, a scholar of comparative religion born in China, educated in the US, now 96, and author of the most popular introduction to world religions ever sold, The World’s Religions.

He had the rapt attention of his audience with his penetrating exploration and thinking on a larger scale than most of us usually do. He helped plant the seeds in me for the questions I just asked you.

What Smith said was that through his travels and studies he discovered that world cultures could be grouped into three distinct groups, each with a primary cultural characteristic. One group he identified as the West included the US, Canada and Europe and promoted the development of the individual as the most important characteristic; the Far East including China, Japan and similar societies emphasized the greater good of the group; and India had traditionally pursued the inner world of spiritual development.

He proposed that we take each of these characteristics and blend them into a unified whole that would support the full development of individuals and utilize the power of cohesive and harmonious groups and teams to create a greater good for all.

What brought that long ago lecture freshly back to mind for me is the experience I am now having with a wonderful group of Japanese culture changers at a nine day training on Lago Maggiore in northern Italy, a training created by my colleagues Janet and Chris Attwood, co-authors of the NY Times best selling book, The Passion Test: The Effortless Path to Discovering Your Life Purpose.

Not long ago, I had coached a Japanese man who translated The Passion Test book into Japanese and is now himself a best-selling author of self-empowerment books in his country. Through the Attwood’s focused efforts, the Passion Test and associated processes and tools have quickly become recognized as a beautiful way to capture the best characteristics of both West and East underpinned by the Attwood’s life long commitment to inner development as an important basis for individual achievement, human liberation and social transformation.

As this group from Japan opens to receiving the training and support to become powerful national leaders in Japan and Europe, I am touched to my core by these men and women sharing their discoveries about themselves as they go deeper and deeper into what may have held them back, release that and fully claim the unique gifts they each have to offer the world and each other as team members working intimately and effectively together to inform, educate and move their society in the direction of fulfilling it’s greater destiny.

And I am struck by our shared humanity across cultures as I live and work here for this time in a country full of passionate people, the Italians, whose language I am learning to speak with another people’s language I’ve never had much exposure to at all, Japanese and it’s beautiful pictographic form of writing. The gracious and highly skilled Japanese interpreters for the group are true bridgers of worlds for us as we travel through each other’s inner territories together experiencing laughter, tears, closeness between us as individuals and a feeling of unity that is powerfully palpable.

Indeed, I believe I've begun to do more than hope for or imagine that society I asked you about.

I am living in it. And it is about go viral.

Come join Randy Crutcher, EdD, a transformational life coach and organizational consultant, and friends for a powerful daylong workshop in Albuquerque, New Mexico, November 4 called Purpose, Passion and Possibilities for Professionals.  Or find out more about the life changing, game changing Passion Foundation Coaching Package you can access from any where in the world. Visit www.quantumleapcoaching.org