How so absolutely real is that!  After visiting India and Nepal, and being immersed in the experience of other cultures brought “the experience of being alive” up front and personal. I saw and felt both the rawness of poverty co-exist alongside the comfort of wealth, and latest mobile technologies being used along side women filling vessels from community water pumps.   It’s those in-your-face contrasts that jolt us into the fullness of being alive.

If we don’t experience the fullness of life personally, we can vicariously.  We see more and more reality TV shows in the US which expose us to aspects of life that maybe outside our own experiences.  For example, where bosses are going undercover into the trenches to experience what it’s like to work in their own companies outside their board rooms; where couples race around the world and experience many difference cultures and environments;  where cooks initiative food revolutions to expose school kids to food that is different from their regular, routine food in the hope to introduce healthier diets that will create greater awareness of what it takes to live a healthier life style, free from fatal diseases associated with obesity.  And there are so many others that open us up to the fullness of being alive.

Awareness is the first step in any change.  If we can suspend judgment and see others as they are, it opens us up to seeing the wholeness of life with an appreciation of difference and what it could be like to be in someone else’s  shoes.  With such awareness, we begin to expand our own perspectives and the experience of being alive, and with that, comes the principle of Ubuntu – I am because you are.

My dream for a more equitable, loving world, where communities can sustain themselves, women increasingly take public leadership roles, in the home, in business and governments, children are literate, and wealth is more evenly distributed is being realized bit-by-bit.  This bit-by-bit phenomenon is growing.  Social entrepreneurs, who believe in patient capital, participatory leadership and mindsets, and social media that instantly spread messages, are powerful facilitators of this positive, equitable trend.

If you too embrace the “fullness of being alive”, with optimism, hope and possibility, how is it showing up for you?

It’s a year since the iPad came on the market. At first, I admired it vicariously via my partner, who is an early adopter with most things technological, especially computers, cameras, music and bikes.  Once I got my fingers on it,  (I did resist for a week or so), I changed to “I want one.”

Since then, I am increasingly loving my iPad.  It goes where I go: into every room in the house, the car, the plane, the boat, the doctor, the dentist, the hair salon, the beach, the park, the local coffee shop, bars, restaurants, and workplaces, of course.  My iPad is with me, everywhere.

What makes it so valuable to me and why do I love it?  It’s what I am able to experience with the iPad (location agnostic) that makes it so amazingly worthwhile to me.  In one year, the quality, standard and variety of applications that are coming to market beyond games and utilities (that are okay on smart phones) have made the tablet form a superb tool for engaging with content across the world, from boardrooms to schoolrooms, from hospitals to coffee shops, from beaches to office blocks and wherever else it works for you!

If you don’t yet own one, please just read down the following list and imagine how awesome it is to experience all of the following activities with one single, simple, elegant device – and remember, you are not constrained by location!

• You read books, magazines, newspapers, emails, text messages, business documents.
• You watch films, videos, YouTube, TV
• You write poetry and stories
• You doodle
• You draw pictures and shapes
• You listen to music and speech and radio
• You play games.
• You touch, reposition, re-order objects and images
• You annotate copy
  
• You edit text
• You record voices and sounds
• You access information and resources in your world, your immediate environment or across the world
• You take photos and video
• You participate in virtual meetings and web conferences via Skype
• You learn new facts and gain knowledge from global sources
• You develop awareness from new connections
• You laugh
• You gaze in wonder
• You reflect on ideas
• You create and develop your own thoughts
• You connect with people through social media
• You share what you want with others

And, you can do so much more, so easily, so effectively, so efficiently, so enjoyably, so consciously.  You can have all this functionality, utility, fun and enjoyment on a device that is totally unobtrusive and mobile!  That is why it’s extra cool!

I am so convinced that applications on tablet devices, (specifically the iPad over the next couple of years while other operating systems and manufacturers come up to speed) will continue to be the leading and most innovative tool for connecting people with content, ideas and other people,  allowing for increased participation in meaningful, developmental ways. I’ve witnessed the faces of children, professionals, the sick and elderly all light up with interest and curiosity when offered an iPad to interact with. My delight and commitment to sharing good content and experiences through this medium has me now developing apps to help bring about transformational shifts at personal and community levels.  Embracing Change is my first application in partnership with Polymash Digital Arts.

In my next post, I will share some of my favorite apps and some of my learnings along the way, and in my third post on this topic, I will share my excitements about developing applications in the learning and development space.

First time, we were at dinner with a couple when their three year old pulled out the iPad, tapped into one of her favorite apps and was immediately engrossed as she tapped, swiped, dragged and, from time to time, sat up, tilted her head confidently to reflect on the objects she was engaging with.  Her fullest absorption in her iPad totally attracted the attention of older people in the restaurant,  amazed at her competence with the tablet device.

Next day at a friend’s house for dinner,  their 3 year came up to the table with her iPad, opened the Netflix app, picked out a movie she wanted and downloaded it and started to watch it without asking help from any adult.

Earlier that day, I had offered my iPad to a three year old and she immediately took it out of my hands with a big smile, and started tapping and dragging and swiping, immersed in the content, participating in the cute animations and sounds that delighted her.

As described in Huffington Post this week,

“The iPad’s sensitivity to touch preserves the intimacy of the magazine-reading experience. It also puts the reader in control. You are the navigator. Because the content is non-linear, interesting connections become possible and immediate. ……..You can venture as deep into the experience as you like….[this] digital technology has enormous potential. It brings a new dimension to our storytelling, making the experience more immersive than ever. It’s exciting to think about where it will take us.”

I am very caught up in this new way of experiencing content, as a consumer and now as an author and content creator.  My first app is about to be launched.  Called “Embracing Change”, it’s a self development app that takes readers on a personal learning journey following the Appreciative Inquiry framework.  As a learning and development professional, I  advocate using all the tools we can, in all the ways we can, with as many others as we can, to create the best experience learning experiences we can.

In the tablet format, content, theory, charts, images, interviews come to life, in fullest color and sound with the consumer interacting physically as well as cognitively and emotionally.  No wonder kids love the aliveness of this new form factor.  It’s playfully engaging.  And as adults, we, too can we re-connect with our inner kid, as we discover what it’s like to  interact with content in this immersive, engaging way.

It was the “old days”, when life aboard a luxury liner in first class was still akin to what you read about in novels at the beginning of the last century and what we see in movies, such as the Titanic:  opulence, elegance, indulgence, style and sophistication.  I was 7 going on 37 – full of romance and imagination.  I was a princess in my own mind afloat this luxury liner setting out in the Pacific Ocean, crossing the Southern Ocean,  the Indian Ocean, up the Suez Canal into the glistening Mediterranean Sea.  I was 7, which I have since learned is a significant age in human development.  It sets the psychological thermostat for how you internalize beliefs about yourself and your relationship to others and the world.

So that how “change” started for me.  I was princess, aboard a luxury liner, afloat on the widest and deepest oceans, discovering a plethora of amazing realities and an abundant, cornucopia of choices.   I believed I could do anything.  I was Eliza Doolittle of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion aka My Fair Lady. You know the story.  Professor Higgins made a wager that he could transform a young street flower seller from her lowly beginnings to an elegant sophisticated princess, and more importantly have English aristocracy believe it to be true.  We know the outcome of the story – he won his wager.

That’s the magic.

When you believe it, you see it. I believed I could swim across the pool on board that liner, and I did – I almost drowned, but I told myself I would do it and I practiced and practiced by swimming from corner to corner in that pool, lengthening the distance every time until I could swim the distance without having to reach out and grab the side of the pool.  I swallowed a lot of water in the process, but I did not give up.

My love of exotic foods happened in the magnificent dining room of that liner – I learned to love pepper and other spices.  I relished experimenting with food, especially if it were grown up food.  The pepper mill was a new discovery for me as was as Parmesan cheese.  I would ask the waiter to give me copious amounts, as it was so sophisticated. I wasn’t satisfied until my mashed potatoes were totally bespeckled with black pepper.  I learned myself into what I believed myself to be and desired to be.

Fast track to now – decades later. Here I am.  When people ask me my nationality, I say I’m a global citizen. My love of diversity and charting new territory has continued to grow. I consider myself very privileged to be alive today.  In fact, I say, we are the privileged generation.  My start in life was unique, just as all of us have had our own unique beginnings.  I’ve been through lots of change. Just as all of you will have been through lots of change.  Some of the changes I engineered myself, and some I would not have engineered for myself.  The common thread in all these changes: I faced them and embraced them.

There are many other facets to embracing change generatively, and I’d like to name one: the anticipatory principle -  cultivating the ability to hold a vision of the future that we want for ourselves, others and the world at large puts us in the starting gate.  To embrace change we want to be part of is to see it first in our imaginations.  I did as a 7 year old, Henry Higgins did it for Eliza Doolittle and you can do it for you.

Let me conclude here with a favorite quote about what change means to me:  ”I embrace emerging experience.  I participate in discovery.  I am a butterfly.  I am not a butterfly collector, I want the experience of the butterfly.” William Stafford. 1914- 1993.

How important?

To be doing something you are good at and having fun and involving others in co-creating fun.  That’s participation, collaboration and engagement and playing to one’s strengths!   The New York Times is talking about Matt Harding who seems to have fun doing what he’s really good at.  The article brings attention to a number of the positive attributes that living in 2010 is all about: having the internet to share one’s own creativity; involving our global village life-centric ways that unite us through music, laughter, activity, play.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY

“However you interpret it, you can’t watch “Dancing” for very long without feeling a little happier. The music (by Gary Schyman, a friend of Mr. Harding’s, and set to a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, sung in Bengali by Palbasha Siddique, a 17-year-old native of Bangladesh now living in Minneapolis) is both catchy and haunting. The backgrounds are often quite beautiful. And there is something sweetly touching and uplifting about the spectacle of all these different nationalities, people of almost every age and color, dancing along with an uninhibited doofus.

Children, not surprisingly, turn out to be the best at picking up on Mr. Harding’s infectious vibe. There’s frequently a grown-up, on the other hand — especially one in the front row of a crowd — who tends to ham it up and make a fool of himself.

The other remarkable thing about the “Dancing” phenomenon is that it is, to a very considerable extent, a creation of the Internet. It doesn’t just live, so to speak, on the Web; it was the Web that, more or less accidentally, brought it into being.”

The citizens of this planet reached a tipping point in just about every domain, resulting in more people speaking up for greater compassion and understanding across cultures;  workers and shareholders alike calling for greater transparency and integrity in financial markets;  consumers are seeking products and services that conserve our natural resources and health.

Alongside these positive seismic systemic shifts our communication channels and flows have become easier, faster, more far-reaching, collaborative and compassionate.

Out of curiosity, and in many cases, necessity to make sense of our world, more and more of us are connecting to people of other cultures in far lands.  We find these connections as sources of great innovation and inspiration which in turn reconnect us with our own creativity and imaginations.  Social media, including networks, wikis, blogs, podcasts, video and Twitter bring us together as one world.

We self-select into on-line communities where we are finding mutual interests, shared passions, connection points and a sense of belonging.  Our films and entertainments have become increasingly multi-and cross-cultural.  We laugh and cry together.  We celebrate our global humanity.

What are you hearing, seeing, feeling, thinking that gives you excitement and hope that we are becoming more conscious of world that can flourish for all?

The National Insitute for Play defines play “as a state of being that is intensely pleasurable. It energizes and enlivens us. It eases our burdens, renews a natural sense of optimism and opens us up to new possibilities. These wonderful, valuable qualities are just the beginning of what play is.

Scientists – neuroscientists, developmental biologists, psychologists, scientists from every point on the scientific compass – have recently begun viewing play as a profound biological process.

They are learning that play sculpts our brain; it makes us smarter and more adaptable.  For many animal species it has evolved over eons with result that the most advanced animals play the most i.e., play is more central to their development. Humans are the biggest players of all, specially designed by nature to play throughout our long lives.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHwXlcHcTHc

Take a look at Dr Stuart Brown from the National Institute for Play talking about “Play” on Ted.

Go and find that old frisbee, the hoola hoop or the roller blades.

Play and enjoy!