Raise me up - Don't bring me down!

I had a great meeting with a good friend today. We both agreed that we are really really good idea men - we just need limitless bucket of cash and a staff to make the world a better place. And we're gonna try to figure out how to do it without the cash, but the staff would be very helpful.

We both used to be in the head-hunting business. that's a business where one day you are the person improving some one else's life with a great opportunity and the next you are just trying to talk them into doing what you want them to do so you can get a pay-out. At times it felt really good and other times it felt.....less than good.

Ultimately though we saw ourselves on par with the likes of Jerry McGuire. We were Talent Managers for free-agent engineers. We would befriend-sell-collect and move on to the next one. We often dreamed that the job was more important than it was and that we were making a bigger difference than we were. I guess on some level we were like the kid on the beach who is throwing sea stars back in the ocean. There may be too many sea stars to save them all and have an impact on the total population, but to the one he throws back it makes all the difference in the world. I guess that's what we did.

Well, my friend wants to take that to the next level, he wants us all to be throwing sea stars back in the ocean, making a difference one life at a time if that's what it takes. And he's going about it in a great way. He wants to, heck, he has introduced a new phrase into our lexicon for us to use as often as possible. I challenge you to use this whenever and wherever you can. The phrase is "Possibility Advocate". Let that sing in for a sec.

Okay, don't think of it as just a catch phrase, or a definition, but think in terms of the opposite of a Devil's Advocate. Think of it as a way of getting people to expand their horizon's from being a nay-sayer or a skeptic to one who is a yay-sayer or a ...whatever the opposite of skeptic is.

He tells a great story about how we are born, how the odds of us coming into being who we are are a one in millions chance. Without being crude (and to avoid getting another blog post pulled for content) he talks about how the one "seed" among millions elbows it's way to the front of the pack, swimming harder and faster than all the other to make to the egg for fertilization. We can all identify and picture that image......and then he spins it on its head in a way that made me jealous that I hadn't though of it first.

What if, he tells me, what if it wasn't about elbowing to the front of the pack. What if the pack knew that that particular seed had the best chance of success, what if the pack knew that that seed needed to fertilize that egg to insure a good healthy outcome. What if the pack was....pushing? What if it was supporting? What if it knew the possibilities and was advocating the best one? What if?

So my friend, Virgil Robinson, founder of http://www.possibilityadvocate.com/ would like you to use the phrase and adopt the idea that you can be a "Possibility Advocate" in your daily life. Whether it is encouraging a kid to tie their shoes or raise their hand in class, or to solicit more brainstorming in a conference room, or to give anyone an encouraging word so that they can see and have more possibilities to chose from, be the yay-sayer, be the "Possibility Advocate".

Virgil wants you to use it and I count myself as lucky to be one of the first few among what will hopefully be millions pushing him toward success.