A Green Belt is masterful in the use of their time management systems.
It truly seems to others as if nothing falls through the cracks when dealing with a Green Belt. Requests big and large are never forgotten. Email never languishes unreturned. They hit deadlines without seeming to break a sweat. They don’t have moods that prevent them from doing what they said they would do.
Users at lower levels imagine that the Green Belt must be stressed out managing the volume of things that they are able to handle. The truth is that the Green Belt is better organized, and therefore more at peace than others could ever imagine.
At one level, the Green Belt’s reliability and trustworthiness comes from the quality of the time management practices they employ. Their capture points are impeccable, and they always have one nearby. They empty them religiously. Their schedule looks crazy to the outsider, as it is filled with different time demands, both personal and business-related. The multiplicity of lists they employ looks like a maze. All in all, the intricate system they have built gives most other professionals who get to see it an instant headache.
Underlying these practices is one basic way of being that a Green belt has committed to, and their time management system is actually merely a single avenue of fulfillment.
A Green Belt operates as if their word is their bond.
They operate this way in life while they know that they cannot possibly keep their word perfectly, and that life (especially here in the Caribbean) is filled with mishaps, accidents and miscues that prevent everyone from keeping every promise perfectly.
They know that at some point, their own death will interrupt whatever promises they have made to those who are still living, and to themselves. They may not make it to see the birth of that grandchild in 2 months time. They may not get to visit the Grand Canyon, or the Louvre in Paris or the Great Wall of China like they had promised themselves.
However, even though they know that they cannot possibly keep all their promises, they wake up each morning relishing the opportunity to see just how well they can live each day, and that living well means keeping their word.
When someone is keeping their word, they rarely break it, but not out of guilt or obligation. Instead, they know that when they keep small and large promises to themselves and others they are engaging and using that same creative power that lies behind the existence of all things. At one point, nothing existed, and in the next instant… it did. All that bridged the gap was some the manifest Word of some Force or some Being.
Green Belts relish in overcoming the thoughts, feelings, tiredness, hunger and other inner obstacles that might get in the way of them keeping their word each day. They invite life to send its worst, most adverse circumstances just so that they can stand fast, and do their very best to fulfill their promises. They work with others who are less determined than them, for the opportunity to share the experience of surpassing the odds of succeeding, even when the odds are worsened by inner turmoil, fatigue or doubt.
When the time comes and it is prudent for all concerned for a Green Belt to deliberately and openly break a promise, or give up on a goal, they approach the failure with reverence. They will have exhausted all practical avenues. They know that there are consequences to be addressed, amends to be made and a responsibility to take, because each and every promise is a sacred trust, held by the maker and the receiver. The breaking of a promise is a serious, and delicate business, not to be undertaken lightly.
To a Green Belt, a time management system is an essential tool for honoring their word as their bond, maintaining their own sacred link to the creative force behind the universe and ultimately taking care of as many people in their life as they can.
Their time management system helps them:
- capture every small promise they make to every single person, or to themselves
- schedule the trip the dentist without overlapping with the birthday dinner
- put in time to prepare before the weekly meeting
- be reminded to pick up the kids from the party
- to pay bills on time
- in fulfilling their department’s strategic plan
- keep their body in the best physical shape
- include romance in their lives
- be trusted by family and friends
A poorly run system means that their word is unreliable and unworthy of trust. A well-run system allows them to feel at peace each morning when they wake up, realizing that they have another day, and another chance to align themselves with the power that holds everything together, rather than with the random disorder that allows everything to fall apart.
This random disorder is what the Novice is subject to, often without knowing, and they suffer the consequences of lives in which they relate to their word, and to their promises as unimportant.
Obviously, a Green Belt’s system is not for a Novice – it cannot be. In the 2Time Management system, each level of mastery possesses its own practices, and its own levels of awareness and one must progress through the Belts at exactly the speed that it takes, and at no other.