Ho‘ohana! Everything you need, you have.

Today, as I reached into my mailbox with great happiness over the March delivery of O The Oprah Magazine, it occurred to me how my life’s timeline has looked like a changing evolution of magazine covers … for instance, there were my Vogue days, breathtakenly replaced by Bride, which was followed by the housekeeping storyboards of Better Homes & Gardens, and then the only thing I had time to read for a while was Parents, with the occasional craving for National Geographic.

Most of the past decade was faithfully given quite devotedly to Fast Company magazine, with Real Simple mixed in to help me keep my sanity. Since its’ 2000 debut I have collected every single issue of O The Oprah Magazine. If I read no other magazine but one, it’s O. Hmmm, maybe it is an age thing since Oprah and I share the same birth year (she’s 3 months older :-)

If Managing with Aloha were a magazine, I’d hope it was the one you watched for in your mailbox. That’s not a part of my publishing repertoire (yet?) so we do it the blog publishing way. Oprah has her monthly themes, and we have our Ho‘ohana.

I have barely read a few pages, yet I am loving this months’ issue of O The Oprah Magazine, because it is on Authenticity. “The subject is … Becoming Yourself.”

Perfect timing, for we have devoted February to our theme on Aloha, A Celebration of Who We Are, and now we are just three days into Ho‘ohana, Love Your Work! There is a formidable pairing between aloha and ho‘ohana, ‘formidable’ in that we are unbeatable people once we have it as a truth for ourselves; it’s a pairing which gives us integrity and intellectual honesty. Does who we are match up to the work we do? Are we authentic?

LOVE this quote from the O Calendar for March;

“Authenticity and subordination are totally incompatible.”
—Jean Baker Miller

Understand those words and live them. When you are authentically YOU, you lift yourself up to a place that subordination to anything, ANYTHING, is impossible. Grab hold of that concept for your own well-being.

Everything you need, you have within you. I happen to call it your aloha.
Everything you need to do, you either choose to, or not. I happen to call it your ho‘ohana.

Make your life and your work personal.
Make your life and your work personally real.
Make your life and your work really authentic.

“Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep… They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.”
—Father Anthony de Mello

Well now, we who live, work, manage and lead with aloha are not “most people” are we!

Ho‘ohana! It is our value for the month of March, 2007:

• Ho‘ohana: Love Your Work
• Aloha, A Celebration of Who We Are