My Love Of Music

Anyone who has spent time around me knows how much I love music . . .  and they also know that I am notorious for singing the wrong lyrics. haha  I'm not sure why that is but I seem to misunderstand song lyrics more than your average person and then I sing the wrong lyrics so loud and proud that friends are often hesitant to inform me of my errors. 

It has happened for as long as I can recall, so it has been an ongoing joke with family and friends for decades. Usually when I find out what the correct lyrics are, I nod my head and I think to myself, "Well, that makes a whole lot more sense." :-) 

For that reason when I saw this meme, it of course gave me quite a giggle - although I will say, I never misunderstood these particular song lyrics (I may start singing them wrong now though just for fun because this picture really cracks me up.)  haha 

It is also a well known fact that my connection to music goes much deeper . . . I often wake up with songs playing in my head that are a message from my guides. Additionally, I have received premonitions through song lyrics for decades. There have been quite a few cases where I had huge emotional reactions to songs in elementary school, without understanding why, yet upon listening to those songs as an adult, I was able to finally make sense of my emotional reactions. It was only in hind-sight that I could see that I "understood" a whole lot more about the Universe and what was to come when I was a little girl than I ever thought was possible.

Well last week I learned that my misunderstands extend beyond lyrics. The other morning I woke up hearing a song playing in my head and when I got on line to find out who sang it, I stumbled across some other information about the "song" that I had never known!  It started out as a jingle for Coca-Cola!! I was stunned because I had always assumed it was already a song - one that Coca-Cola borrowed for their ad campaign but from what I was reading - it seems I had in backwards. So apparently, I don't just get lyrics wrong - I don't know "music history" very well either.  :-) 

At any rate, here is what I heard playing in my head when I woke up that morning. Maybe if enough of us sing these words every day and/or hold them in our hearts, we can create THIS world to live in . . . I'm game to give it a try. Are you? 

I'd like to build the world a home

And furnish it with love

Grow apple trees and honey bees

And snow white turtle doves

I'd like to teach the world to sing

In perfect harmony

I'd like to hold it in my arms

And keep it company

I'd like to see the world for once

All standing hand in hand

And hear them echo through the hills

For peace through out the land

(That's the song I hear)

P.S. - Back to the topic of me being notorious for singing the wrong song lyrics . . . I share this in case anyone reading this needs a giggle. 

Today, I had my old iPod playing with earphones while I worked in the yard. I was having a great time, enjoying every single song that came on because - after all - the iPod DOES have 900 of my most favorite songs ever!  LOL  So Pat Travers starts singing "Is This Love" and I got to the part of the song where he sings, "We'll share the same room, yeah and jump rope by the frig" and I thought to myself "hmm, now that doesn't really make a lot of sense does it?" But that's what I have been singing since the early 80's!! 

When I looked up the lyrics, I had quite a good laugh . . . The actual lyrics are "We'll share the same room, yeah! - for Jah provide the bread." Anyone want to guess how long it's going to take for me to retrain my brain to sing the correct lyrics? I might have to stick with the incorrect lyrics. LOL

Is It Time to Change How We Work?

When I saw this meme today, I literally laughed out loud! Oh the memories it brought back of my senior year of college, when over 50% of our grade was dependent on the big “group project.” Back then, every single class I had was using this method, so basically ALL of my grades were dependent on how well the project team worked together in every one of my classes. They ranged from “Super fun” to “I think I am going to cry in my beer”–with the latter being a great source of frustration and exhaustion.

Given how much it bothered me, I bent the ear of more than one college professor that year (and in the years that followed) about my strongly held belief that if you were going to make so much of a person’s grade dependent on how well their team worked together, then there should also be classes offered that were specific to how to work productively as a team. Most of the time they would shake their heads and give me a response that was equivalent to “Changing a college curriculum is about as easy as getting a gigantic ocean liner to do a 180 when it’s a few miles away from shore.”

 

When I got my first job out of college and was involved in the Process Improvement initiative (Total Quality Management), this topic came up once again. Process Improvement teams were formed based on departments, management teams or representatives from cross-functional groups but no one was there to help them work together as a team. Improving a process then became a fun and easy activity or a goat rodeo, depending on the personalities of the team members and their ability to communicate effectively. (This was where my passion for the human side of Process Improvement originated). 

 

When our internal training organization was preparing to roll out Quality Management training, I kept pushing for things that were quickly ruled out by the more senior people involved. For instance, I wanted to let actual teams sign up for a training class together so they could work on their specific process during the class and get support from the trainer / facilitator to implement the concepts real-time. I was told we couldn’t do that. No matter how much I pushed, I was told over and over “We just don’t do things that way” and “Sign ups would be a nightmare . . . it’s quicker and easier to just put everyone through the training and they can bring the tools back to their individual departments.”  My repeated attempts to question the “norm” did nothing, as they just kept shaking their heads as if to say “Alas, she’s so green . . . someday she’ll understand that isn’t how things work in the corporate world.”  LOL

 

I share all of this now, not in an attempt to shame colleges or internal training departments (and given that I began working as a outside consultant almost 30 years ago and have been out of college longer than that, for all I know, things HAVE changed in that regard). I just have this growing sense that the time is NOW to come at this with even more passion and more conviction. The time is NOW to call out the things that aren’t effective and create new ways to get things done. Not to tweak existing ways but to come up with entirely new ways of working.

 

I know I am not the only one thinking this. Based on the articles that show up in my newsfeed, clearly there are others sensing this need for change. Conversations I have had with my Linked-in contacts are proof that many of them are already attempting to implement new ways of working in their current positions and they are finding great success with these new approaches. 

My hope is that by shining the spotlight on this, even more people will begin questioning if there are better ways for us to run our businesses. Quieting the voices that say, “This is how we’ve always done it” – could we think more broadly and more deeply about how we’d like to work? Could we reimagine how we partner with our co-workers? Our customers? Our suppliers? Could we find ways to work where everyone feels valued and appreciated? Where everyone enjoys what they are doing so much that it no longer feels like "work?"

 

If we gave ourselves permission to look at things with both humanity and effectiveness in mind (in the absence of all limits) could we tap into brand new ideas that could completely reshape the way we do business? My belief is that we absolutely can—the question really comes down to “Will we?”