Conduits of Autonomy

Possibilities
Surprising openings because willingness is an enabler.
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Diverse possibilities can arise when you are open to them. That possibility may emerge from within as a thought or impulse, or appear around you as a chance encounter or a strange coincidence. Unless you are willing to be surprised and welcome the unexpected, then such events will just pass you by.

Capability
Innocent affirmation and positive openness.
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At the moment you took up the challenge, you judged that you were capable of success. That must now be taken for granted and, without being arrogant, you must simply affirm your capability both to yourself and others. If real doubt settles here, you should consider modifying the challenge or even withdrawing from it.

Assistance
Self-examination.
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No one but you can know whether you are inhibiting yourself, becoming reluctant, shutting off, or allowing negative thoughts to intrude. By being aware that negativity is a possibility, you can act swiftly to check its cause and validity. Sometimes you can then switch it off.

Temptation
Surrender to fantasies and impulses.
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A sense of energy and positivity must be preserved and focused on the challenge. Temptations like arrogance, fantasies of superiority, impulsiveness, rescue wishes, and wild-goose chases will diffuse energy and weaken creativity. Such states need to be firmly resisted and rejected.

Possibilities
Meaningful goals that energize you and invite action.
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Values intrinsic to the challenge should provide a deep source of satisfaction in regard to the use of your time and resources. The articulation of a feasible purpose should lead to a burst of energy, determination and relevant activity. If it does not, then the purpose is faulty, perhaps in its construction or timing.

Capability
Imaginative flexibility.
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Development of goals is an imaginative process. Normally you should be envisaging many more goals than can be pursued at any one time. Some purposes will be mutually exclusive. Often subtle adjustments to goals can make a big difference to your handling of the challenge, or to the attitudes of others involved.

Assistance
Mental exercises.
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Purposes should hang together, but there are many ways for this to occur. To get a feeling for the future, it is helpful to imagine a variety of outcomes and means, to envisage how alternative attitudes of others can be handled, and to consider different social scenarios.

Temptation
Process replaces outcomes and expedience betrays values.
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Because goals invite action, expediency can supervene. If that means your priorities are ignored, then you are being led away from your goal. Values make a crucial contribution to your energy, your positivity, and your social support. So their betrayal is dangerous.

Possibilities
Connection and resonance for yourself and with others.
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You develop your thinking by talking about it. Most people only know about what you are doing based on what you say, and their participation depends largely on what they understand. If communicating is sparse because you do not make the effort or are worried about what others might think, possibilities are blocked out. If you do not listen to yourself or others when there is a response, then you are actively blocking yourself.

Capability
Mental clarity in your writing and in the stories you tell.
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Your clarity reveals your grasp of reality. You will often only know what you think when you write it down: so documentation is a useful discipline. Simplicity and brevity are essential for yourself and for others. So, no matter how complex the issue, reduce it to a few key points. Weave these points into a story to make it easier for others to follow your thinking.

Assistance
Focused dialogues and general discussions.
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Talking with others—whether they support, oppose or are neutral—is valuable. Criticism should be viewed as a gift because we often do not ask ourselves the right questions. We don't even follow our own trains of thought through to their logical conclusions. On some matters, we may not even know what we will say until we say it.

Temptation
Rejecting criticisms and obfuscating difficult issues.
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Objecting to criticism from others may be natural, but it is not to your advantage. You can rarely change what others think and say in private, so it is far better to encourage and welcome criticism and then learn from it. Personality differences should not be allowed to cut off the flow of communication. Hiding behind jargon, cliché, ambiguity or obfuscation is foolish because that deadens interactions and kills the creative flow.

Possibilities
Intuitions that make a difference.
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Once you are engaged in a challenge, your thoughts will turn to it more or less continuously. You will find yourself mulling over problems, or appraising situations, or planning the next steps, or imagining how best to talk to someone. In addition to such mental activities, you will start getting ideas and intuitions that seem to come out of the blue. This is often how you get breakthroughs in the toughest problems.

Capability
Personal maturity.
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The amount of experience that you have developed during your life and career affects how you address your challenge. Certain tasks demand a certain degree of technical-professional experience and personal maturity. A persistent deficit in emotional maturity (as expressed in impulsiveness, emotional outbursts, and a failure to appreciate the experiences of others) may not affect the handling of challenges which are primarily technical or theoretical.

Assistance
Trusted advisors and mentors.
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Because so much is going on internally, it is usually valuable to find someone with whom you can discuss issues. This assistance focuses on modulating your rational and emotional responses to situations. You must be able to trust the advisor. Counsel is generally more targeted and balanced if it comes from someone who knows the social terrain and who has handled similar challenges.

Temptation
Over-valuing experience, wallowing in emotion or becoming superstitious.
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Experiences can devour you and distract you from the challenge. So being aware and attuned is not the same as being self-indulgent and self-pitying, or engaging in blaming and complaining. Uncertainty often opens the door to fantasies. Although there is no role for superstition or magical beliefs, they cannot be ignored entirely if they are culturally embedded.

Possibilities
Stages that make a difference.
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Successful handling means moving through a series of stable states that take you in the right direction. Ideally, the stage once reached is like a ratchet serving as a new higher base for further progress. In more complex challenges, you must consider the underlying social, personal, technological or other forces that affect stability.

Capability
Balanced open-mindedness.
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Often there are diverse views about what is happening and what is possible. If you view things from various perspectives and minimize bias, you are more likely to aim for changes that matter or can trigger other developments.

Assistance
Dedicated facilitator.
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The hardest issue in generating change involves handling oneself or other people who actively oppose the change due to existing views and interests. Resistance to change can be reduced by using an outsider to act as an advisor or mediator, to sound out views, or to assist you to reflect or discuss in a group meeting.

Temptation
Clinging to a comfort-zone or creating disruption for others.
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Change is hard: learning is often required and new methods may be needed. So personal change may be implicit in rising to the challenge. Sometimes you may be tempted to make a headlong dash that ignores others and just causes general disruption.

Possibilities
Knowledge that makes a difference.
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It is impossible to proceed without gathering relevant information. The challenge in this regard is determining what is relevant. Going with trends and exploiting events makes progress easier, so these require noting. If specific knowledge is required, then that may add significantly to the time-line or even rule out the challenge.

Capability
Ordinary reasoning abilities and relevant expertise.
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There is a need to value knowing and knowledge, but no requirement for an academic orientation (unless the challenge is within academe). The application of common sense, simple rationality and relevant expertise should be sufficient.

Assistance
Experts with specialist knowledge.
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Expertise is so crucial and diverse that you must find one or more others who are immersed in particular features of the work, and then tap their knowledge.

Temptation
Allowing your biases or an aversion to knowing to hold sway.
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The main danger is an unwillingness to know in detail because of the implications for what you might have to do or how your relationships might be affected. Biases also need to be kept under control.

Possibilities
Happenings that make a difference.
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Any relevant action will cause a variation in the situation. This can then be used to bring about more relevant changes. The better the situation is understood, the easier it is to trigger progress via relatively small actions.

Capability
Ordinary activity and executive skills.
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Everyone has a capacity to act. However, we are all limited by task complexity, either in terms of specific skills required or in terms of the way we can take factors into account.

Assistance
Skilled practitioners.
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Experts who have the necessary skills and are willing to step in can be invaluable. Sometimes they can watch over you as you perform the procedure, ensuring you do it correctly and advising where you need to adjust or get more practice. Sometimes they may choose to do it for you.

Temptation
Avoiding action, using habits, pure expedience.
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Operating on automatic can never release creativity. It is natural to want to avoid an activity that is difficult or new. Acting expediently (i.e. doing what is easy and convenient without much thought) or simply doing what you are good at, even if it is irrelevant, do not enable creativity.