A selfie is a portrait, a snapshot, that you take of yourself. Sometimes the picture captures a part of you. That part of you may only represent a moment in time. You may even think that an old photograph of you doesn’t even look like you.

Tools like the Enneagram, the StrengthsFinder, and other personality and gifts inventories are like snapshots in time; selfies. In some ways they are like artificial change experiences that we set up to understand ourself.

The ‘Selfies’ conversations are personal stories about how these tools have helped us with insights into our ‘self’ and have led to Growth Opportunities (GO).

This happens over time in a self-reflection loop. Insight does not come from the analytic tool itself but from the experiences we have in daily life when we examine our personal circumstances while hearing the echo of the distant voice from the insight tools applied to the moment we are in.

The idea of our three conversations spread over six weeks is to have a reflective experience over 40 days that originates from our daily milieu and is inspired by the periodic conversations.

Another feature of ‘Selfies’ is to expose the selfish. Our reflection into our Self is helpful, but we also use the tools to understand the Self of the Other. By Other, we mean the people that haunt our daily lives, intimately, and those that are the Strangers. Every encounter becomes a moment in which to pause and see the Self of the Other.

A third related feature of ‘Selfies’ is that seeing and encouraging the development of our Selves happens in the context of community. Our gifts are not something we alone have but our gifts become gifts when they are given.

The purpose of our conversations is to help one another discover, develop, and deliver our gifts in community.

Our modalities are: 

3 gathered conversations over the course of 40 days. 

Second, engaging in daily personal reflection when we are not gathered but ‘scattered.’ This can be periodic weblog reflections, dyadic/triadic cafe encounters, or journaling or meditation practices, which you find are part of your personal habitual style.

This means thinking about your gifts and those of others with daily intentionality. It is the daily practice of I spy with my little eye…

The basic agenda for our conversations might look like:

Welcome

Intro: Theme (video)

• A backwards reflection on what we talked about previously

• A story about one person’s experience with the Theme

• Group reflections and discussion on the theme

• How do we build these insights into our daily lives

• (Testing the tools, anyone?)

• A peek forward to the next theme

• Closing insights

You do not need to be available to all of the discussions to join with us. Nor do you need to “take the tests” to participate. We can cover these ideas in other ways — in-person discussion, email, text messages, video chat, etcetera.

We look forward to building and sailing this ship together. Bon voyage.