Wholeness Healing Center

How Many People Does It Take to Make a Difference?

I, again received another Compendium book this year the companion book to 5:Where Will you Be 5 Years From Today, which I reviewed in a previous article.  This book is also interactive, with thought-provoking quotations and spaces to write your answers as you reflect.  As I used the new year to return to the other book, to measure and reflect on my answer, my growth and change, this too will become a scale of sorts, to allow me to compare what I wrote this year with my thoughts and feelings next year.  It also has prompted me to look at my life and what I can be doing, what contributions I can be making.

The book is comprised of thought-provoking questions (What does a great life look like?  Which path of service is yours?  How will you give something beautiful to the world?) which then allow you to reflect on your life.  The book goes from studying your personal wishes, hopes, goals and dreams to the impact you’ve had on others, to the goals of people you hope to influence.  You are asked to identify your heroes and how you could be more encouraging to others, to become a hero to someone else. In one section, you can identify your concerns and your strengths as you then are guided into how you can use those to help others in the upcoming years.  “Everybody has a strength to share. If we tap into that – if people can find ways to contribute whatever their particular unique talent or gift is, then that really can change the world.”(Bill Shore, founder Share Our Strength).

Achieving clarity about yourself, your job, your personal values, and your goals invites the reader to get very specific about future possibilities.  Stretching oneself, realizing we only have so much time to accomplish our dreams, and then listing the people in our circle whom we hope to touch almost forces one to really be discerning about where you are, right now, in this  moment, and that what it is that you can do.

“To make a difference is not a matter of accident, a matter of casual occurrence of the tides.  People choose to make a difference.” (Maya Angelou).  The challenge then becomes to look at your strengths and how you can use them to make a difference.  We often fall back on the fact that we are “just one person” but this book reveals some of the accomplishments, major and minor, that “just one person” was able to do.  And in doing that, with the otivation and the knowledge of all you have to offer, the reader is then able to formulate a mission, a path of going forward.

This coule be a “fast read” if a person chooses to hurry through it.  But if one takes the time to reflect, write, dream and focus, and then plan for the future, this is something the reader, who then becomes the writer, can use to formulate a mission, or as a springboard to really making a difference. “here is the test to find whether or not your mission on earth is finished:  If you are alive, it isn’t” (Richard Bach) Get this book, get to reading and writing, and get to your work!

Zadra, Dan & Yamada, Kobi. (2009). 1: How many people does it take to make a difference?  Seattle, WA. Compendium, Inc.