Typhoon Haiyan Relief Fund @F-L-O-W

Hi,

I’m writing to you on the eve of experiencing the largest super typhoon ever to strike land with confirmed winds of 315 kph [195 mph], which is beyond category 5 hurricane.  Me, I skirted the typhoon’s destructive force because I had at my disposal all the latest technology and enough money to move quickly — the sad part, those least equipped, and enabled suffered most and will suffer for months and years.

Let me explain.

For a lot of people, their entire well-being is wrapped up in the stability provided by a bamboo house and while it might seem like not much to us, it’s everything to these large families. Reports I’m receiving from our network are that the destruction at this level in the path of this Super Typhoon is abnormally bad.

Right now, I am trying to get money for rice, drinking water and medicine to those in our network who have been hit hardest. Fortunately, I was able to get money out ahead of time to some and we gave good advice about preparedness, so most of the MyPALs in our network have drinking water and stocks of food, but so many don’t around them.

I know I can’t do much, but I going to try to do what I can and I need your help.

I have a program coming up called DESIGN @F-L-O-W, as a part of my 2013 Leadership Series, and normally we charge $197 for the recordings for these programs and $297 for the live program, but in light of what is going on, I will offer the live program and recordings for a donation of just $50 USD, so you can help me help them.

I’ve also instructed our team to make my recordings of Living at FLOW available to you at no extra charge if you will donate between now and December 1.
 
While the need will go on for months and even years in some cases, people will NOT be able to recover from this as the house they had was either built years ago or supplied to them by previous generations, we can help a little now, with some things.

Many lost productive items, boats are damaged, fishing nets and cages, crops were wiped out and animals killed, and worse, now people are getting sick already from the exposure to the 24 hours onslaught. If you haven’t seen the graphics, this STORM at one time was 2000 km [1200 miles] wide and would cover the entire continent of Western Europe. That’s how big this thing was and for 24 hours, people felt hurricane-force winds.

One of our MyPALs told me that they had lost all their ability to think because of the battering and many people are nervous wrecks because of the amount of time under “fire” they were huddled in houses that disappeared around them… unlike me, in a hotel safe on the periphery.

Visit HERE to read more about the devastation in the Philippines.

Please help me and pick up my recordings or live program this next week on DESIGN @F-L-O-W. It’s based on my latest book and I can show you a lot about why we need to shift our thinking now ahead of the coming tsunami of complexity that is bearing down on all of us.

I know these are trying times, but please take out your credit card or send money through PayPal to help me get some needed supplies and offer them hope for the future.

Thanks so much for supporting what we do @F-L-O-W and we wish all of you the grace which surpasses all understanding during your journey in life.

Sincerely,

Mike R. Jay, Developmentalist

P.S.
For those of you who might be unfamiliar with my work, I want to say a few words about what I’m up to @F-L-O-W.

For more than 25 years, I’ve been a professional coach, and have served clients in more than 45 different countries in more cultures than I can understand. This is possible because I developed a process, over time, which looks through content, context, conditions, code, and culture into the core of who people are and what’s next for them developmentally.

Finding ways to scaffold this developmental next step has been key in my approach and it’s still working well in the face of accelerating complexity.

Working across the world has taught me that you can’t teach pigs to sing—it doesn’t work and it annoys the pig, so work where people are and stop pretending about what you want reality to be and learn what it is.

In this process, I’ve written a number of books to record my own passages and have dug in and learned what I have to learn—what people have to teach me—about my own development and that has not always been an easy process, or a successful one!

What I have realized lately is that we are nearing a wall called “limits to growth” most characterized by a 1970s Systems Dynamics Model facilitated by Jay Forrester at MIT.

This model is pretty simple and so far, a crystal ball for what is occurring and essentially it’s this: if we keep going where we’re going, we’re going to lose half the people on the planet within the next 100 years.

Now, while I am a bit of a futurist, I’m more a nowist and that is why I have come with my work to you to offer you solutions that will buy us time in this process of life, liberty, and happiness.

My work in the past decade and the book reflecting my reality @F-L-O-W is the best process I can offer the world at this time, to:

1) decelerate the speed at which we are approaching the ‘wall’, and
2) to buy time for technology and morality to help us out—its that simple.

I don’t know the answers.

I do know some of the questions @F-L-O-W and my next program is an attempt to offer you some ideas about how design and designers can begin to guide things in a direction to accomplish these simple goals… decelerate the growth of consumption individually, and find another answer besides “growth and more” to the good life.

I have a free introductory call where I’m going to discuss a particularly interesting practical topic of how to design roles at work to reflect the design principles in my leadership formula @F-L-O-W. This will give anyone… coach, consultant, manager, leader insight into why we design roles and how to begin to design more complex roles using meta-systematic (system to systems) reasoning and modeling.

Please join me for DESIGN @F-L-O-W, where I’ll walk you through my thinking about these five ideas in design:

Identify what you are wasting now!
Identify what makes you happy.
Identify right consumption.
Identify right levels of success.
Contribute!

My hope is that you will pick up an insight which can help you live happier with less, and work with me to lessen the acceleration of consumption, and the focus of all our resources on more, growth, and consumption.

Less of the wrong things is more, more of the right things is less!

Click HERE to donate and support our work in helping people who are suffering around the planet.