Recently I held a VisionScaping workshop with Vistage.
Vistage are a peer learning group that seek to inspire a new level of leadership through direct strategy, learning and implementation.
My session is called “The Art Of Realising Your Vision”,
Together we create a vision of your future in acrylic on canvas.
Something really quite .... inexplicable happened in the art workshop I ran with a Vistage Group on Tuesday (12th December).
What do you make of this?
Mike Hine was just sharing what his painting was about. Take a close look at the second picture and you’ll see the numbers in the top of his painting... 12:12.
“What’s that?” someone asked.
“It’s the time I ran my Iron Man race in. 12 hours and 12 minutes”.
(He had ran this a few years back... it was a moment he felt truly alive.)
“Wow!” Louise said... “And it’s the 12th Of December today! 12:12!”
(So... that’s a coincidence right?)
Louises jaw drops. She covers her mouth... “And the time is 12:12”!
I couldn’t believe it. I thought she was joking..,until I had enough presence of kind to screenshot my own phone having taken a picture of him at this precise moment.
Take a look at the left hand picture... and look really closely at the time it was taken.
This is the EXACT time he said the words “12 hours 12 minutes”... 
I crudely calculate that the chances of that moment of the “12:12 synchronicity”... Where Louise pointed out that it was 12:12 on the 12th of the 12th month... when Mick revealed that he ran the Iron Man in 12 hours 12 minutes is..
1:31,536,000.
This is how I calculated it:
There are 1400 minutes in a day. There are 365 days in a year.
It’s fair to say that I run workshops all over the world, and that could happen most days of the year, so this moment could have happened in any one of those minutes, on anyone of those days.
Ive included 60 minutes variance in what time Mike could have completed the Iron Man... anything from 12 hours to 13 hours. What do you think to that Mick - is at that an accurate assumption?
If so:
1400 x 365 x 60 = 31,536,000.
The odds of you being struck by lighting TWICE in your lifetime is 1 in 9 million.
So - what do you make of that?
I was was really struck by the how the whole group... including me, handled this moment.
We pretty much acted as though it didn’t happen. Some were incredulous? Some were trying to calculate wether it was possible. I’m still trying to calculate its utility.... If this is true.. how is it useful? Is it useful? Should it even be “useful” If not.. what does it point to?
Or.... am I blowing this all out of proportion?
I once heard that a paradigm is like a set of cultural antibodies. The job of those antibodies is to maintain that which is “normal” - and filter out anything that we would consider... “abnormal”. I like to think that my sessions challenge other people’s paradigms. (I think speakers can quietly take refuge in that kind of thinking.)
But I actually feel out of my paradigm comfort zone with this! This happened “outside” of what is ordinary.
That is why I’m taking the time to write to all of you about this... So I don’t lose it.
Finally - the term “Synchronicity” was coined by Carl Jung.
As I understand it, his realisation of this phenomenon occurred when he was in a therapeutic conversation with a client, and they revealed that in a dream, they had seen a scarab beetle. Precisely at that moment, Jung saw a scarab beetle on his window.
Although hard to define... a synchronicity is something like “causally unrelated events occurring simultaneously, which have a similar meaning.”
In this case the numbers 12:12...
So - I ask again - what do you make of it?
Or is this all just a waste of time?
I have to rush back to my busy day - as I’m sure do all of you!
:)
To your inspiration... and to the challenging of our paradigm....!