Adam’s Note: There are a lot of reasons why we need to move into Heartspace today, and this is one of the most vital!

Giving Up Our Power

The idea of disengagement is another way we give up our power.

For the last 25 years, I’ve been working with organizations around the world on the idea that we can engage everyone, everywhere, all of the time. Unfortunately, I’ve found a twisted idea at the middle of this work in schools, community groups, government programs, and elsewhere: If people aren’t engaged in what we want them to be, in the ways we want them to be engaged, then they’re disengaged, and disengagement is bad, bad, bad.

This is a misconception because when people aren’t doing what we want them to, the ways we want them to, for the reasons we want them to, it doesn’t make them disengaged; it makes them engaged in ways we don’t approve of.

This leads politicians, teachers, parents, employers and others to establish paternalistic beliefs about the people they seek to serve. The unconscious opinion they’re projecting is, “If you’re not doing/thinking/saying/making what I approve of, then I don’t approve of anything you’re doing. You need my approval.”

This is giving away our power.

The danger in this is getting turned up by the roles of AI throughout our lives. However, AI isn’t the only thing we give up our power for, and if we see it as the only “all-powerful” threat towards our personal engagement, we fall into the very trap we should try to avoid—attributing a god-like status to a thing outside of ourselves.

After my experiences, I have come to believe that we need more than a convenient and well-timed strategic shift to stop this. Instead, each of us must act immediately, absolutely, and urgently to regain individual authority within ourselves and throughout our own lives. That’s why, starting here and now, I’m teaching about Heartspace: The Engine of Personal Engagement through the new Personal Engagement Institute.