Impacting the World from the Inside Out

[00:00:00] Hello everyone. This is Işıl. Thank you very much for joining this conversation. Today it will be me and I am going to talk about something that is really important to me, and I believe it's important for all of us. So the title of this podcast is Impacting the World from the Inside Out.

[00:00:26] I will be starting with a little story, how I came into this initiative that I'm going to talk about. I haven't shared the name because I wanted to create suspense and I wanted you to be interested so you would come and listen and search for more information. I got to know this initiative through a friend of mine, a colleague, coach colleague of mine from UK, Vicky.

[00:00:57] She had shared the invitation on LinkedIn. And already the name caught my attention. I looked for more details on the website of this initiative, it was actually a summit and I fell in love with the idea. And going through this summit, a full day summit, listening to the speakers, working with people on the call, I felt very connected, very inspired, very motivated to go on this journey to work more and to give what I have: put my talents, put my time on this initiative. And that's what I want to share with you today. This recording is part of my effort to make this initiative more known and to invite you also to take part. It's quite I think easy to get started with this initiative and all of us should do that. All of us would benefit from getting our hands dirty and participating in this initiative and the world would benefit from it as well.

[00:02:08] I will give the name of this initiative very soon, but first let's talk about what created this initiative, what was the need for it.
[00:02:18] You know United Nations and you know how the world is developing. We are experiencing war and we have wars and conflicts in many parts of the world. There is a climate crisis that needs our immediate attention. Right now, I'm in Munich and the temperature is incredible. I am sweating right now. It's very hot and it will continue to be hotter the years to come.

[00:02:52] What we hope to do is keep the increase of the temperature in a limit, but we have to all act. Our leaders have to act and, commit to their promises. We have famine, we have health problems. We have inequality, gender inequality, wealth inequality. So the world is experiencing many, many challenges, and complexity and the speed of these challenges are getting more and more.

[00:03:28] So United Nations had created an agenda called 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. And it was adopted by all United Nations member states in 2015, which provides a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet now and in to the future.

[00:03:52] And as part of this agenda, there are 17 goals, which are called Sustainable Development Goals. And in short SDGs. You can look into the details of these SDGs, but they really address a range of social needs, including education, health, social protection, job opportunities, while tracking climate change and environmental protection.

[00:04:20] But unfortunately..... the deadline of these SDGs to be realized is 2030, but the progress towards realizing these goals, SDGs, have been quite disappointing. And the reason is that we lack the ability to deal with complexity. It's difficult to deal with increasingly complex environment and challenges. Good news: we can develop these capabilities because we have the elasticity, the ability to learn, the ability to develop. And if we gain awareness of where we're at and what are the skills that we need, then we can start developing them.

[00:05:08] A group of people who were upset, I would say, by the low development towards SDG and who understood that there are the needs to develop the inner skills, our personal ability to deal with complexity so that we can achieve these sustainable development goals.... these initiators came up with levels of goals, internal goals, that helps us to support sustainable development goals.

[00:05:47] These are called Inner Development Goals, which is the name of the initiative: Inner Development Goals, in short IDGs. They were developed with input from experts in psychology, sociology, adult development, organizational development systems change. And they are really complete, giving a holistic view of what we internally need to develop so that we can be the best support to our world, to the humanity, to all the beings in the world and we can keep our world existing and flourishing.

[00:06:30] The current iDG framework, Inner Development Goals framework has five categories and 23 skills. These skills are especially important for leaders. The leaders of our countries, big organizations that are actually moving the change, leading the change, leading the big decisions, but they're important for all of us.

[00:06:57] This is the opportunity for us to accelerate Sustainable Development Goals and create a prosperous future for all humanity. I am quoting a lot from the website of Inner Development Goals. Please check the website. If you google Inner Development Goals or IDGs, you will be finding this information and I'm going to put the links in the website uniquecareersuniquelives.com and in any place that you are seeing this recording. You can also check innerdevelopmentgoals.org for details and sdgs.un.org for the goals that are sustainable development goals.

[00:07:48] I am really inspired by these goals and these categories. There are five main categories. There are 23 skills, so that I thought about sharing these skills with you, but you would be bored. If I talk about them, if I read it would take a lot of time. It's not the best approach. I believe you can, if you are interested, (please be interested), go to the website and check these skills. But I'm going to talk about the bigger framework. So there are five categories. The first category is called Being: Relationship to Self.

[00:08:23] The definition that IDG website has shared is "cultivating our inner life and developing and deepening our relationship to our thoughts, feelings, and body help us be present, intentional, and non-reactive when we face complexity." Here, bam! It's already connected to our inability to deal with complexity. First, we ground ourselves in our being. We develop this relationship to ourself, our thoughts, feelings, and body, so that we are grounded when we face complexity and we don't act in a reactive way. We don't fight or flee or freeze. We ground ourselves, set an intention and act when we face complexity.

[00:09:18] The second category is called Thinking: Cognitive Skills.

[00:09:25] IDG website shares this definition: "Developing our cognitive skills by taking different perspectives, evaluating information and making sense of the world as an interconnected whole is essential for wise decision making. Here, you can see the ability to think of the whole and the interconnectedness, the aspect of the complexity that things are interconnected and that there is so much information, and we can develop the ability by taking different perspectives and kind of deciding which of the information is actually true and important, and which is not true and not contributing, and then making sense in the moment of our world, of what's going on, of the complexity, of the change at any moment. So this is how we can develop our cognitive skills, the thinking category of Inner Development Goals.

[00:10:35] The third is called Relating: Caring for Others and the World. The definition is appreciating, caring for and feeling connected to others, such as neighbors, future generations, or the biosphere helps us create more just and sustainable systems and societies for everyone. I think this is very clear in the way that it's defined that we are relating., We are caring, we are in relationship by appreciating, by recognizing their presence and doing something for them from a place of compassion, from a place of supporting and helping.

[00:11:21] The fourth skill category in Inner Development Goals is called Collaborating: Social Skills. And the definition is "to make progress on shared concerns, we need to develop our abilities to include, hold space, and communicate with stakeholders with different values, skills, and competencies."

[00:11:45] As you see here, there is a invitation for more inclusion: to include different concerns, ways of being, values, skills, competencies. So we develop being with each other and make progress on shared concerns, doing it together, collaborating.

[00:12:10] And the fifth and last category of Inner Development Goals is acting: driving change.

[00:12:18] " Qualities such as courage and optimism help us acquire through agency, break old patterns, generate original ideas, and act with persistence in uncertain times. That is what we all need. I was today reading the progress on SDGs, Sustainable Development Goals, and I started feeling an immense weight on my body, a pressure and sadness.

[00:12:51] And then I remember this goal, Inner Development Goal of optimism, being able to trust that we can do something about it, that we can change things and acting with courage and perseverance. Today, this call is an act, I don't know if it's a courage, but it's an act from me to make the Inner Development Goals more known.

[00:13:21] I have talked about five categories of Inner Development Goals and there are 23 skills under these categories. Please, if you are interested, if you listened this far, go and check the website innerdevelopmentgoals. org, this is a nonprofit initiative, to see the details, the 23 skills that are underneath. And I ask you to reflect on these skills: where are you at in these skills? What seems to be for you areas of development? How can you bring more awareness about your usage of these skills in your day to day life? What actions can you take to practice these skills more? I ask you to talk about the Inner Development Goals, bring into your life, bring into your communities, bring the conversation into your workplaces, your families. Maybe you can invite HR department to include these Inner Development Goals as part of the development plans in the company. Maybe you can include Inner Development Goals as conversations in schools. Make this goals part of your life and live these goals. And if you want, and I would love that, engage.

[00:14:52] There are right now hubs all over the world of Inner Development Goals. I am part of the Munich hub and we talk about how we can bring these Inner Development Goals more to our lives, more to the companies, how we can make experiments with these Inner Development Goals, to live these goals so that we can impact the world from inside out.

[00:15:23] Thank you for listening to what I had to share. I have made use of the information on innerdevelopmentgoals.org. Next stage, I aspire to interview one of the leaders or stakeholders of Inner Development Goals initiative, and to learn more about how they develop this, what we can do individually, what are now the practices that prove to be success that can inspire us, but also inspire companies and maybe bigger organizations to implement and get ideas, how they can implement these.

[00:16:04] I hope to have people on board, to interview them. And I would like to also bring these skills The Inner Development Goals into conferences. So if you know any conference, if you have any contacts, let me know. I want to use all the channels to make these goals more known and so that we all implement these goals.

[00:16:28] All this information I have shared with you. You can find on the website of the podcast, Unique Careers, Unique Lives, the website's name, the link is the same uniquecareersuniquelives.com. I am grateful for your presence and I'm looking forward to talking to you soon. This is Işıl closing. Take care.