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Every Worker, A Game Designer – Part 4 of Every Job, A Game

2012-01-15T21:48:00.002-05:00

Dignan, in the book, Game Frame, that these posts have been based on, talks about the process for designing a game. They are:
1) choosing an activity, or mastery focus area
2) creating the player profiles, or motivational description of the players
3) choosing the interim and ultimate objectives of the game
4) choosing the mental, physical and social skills to be learned and improved in game play
5) choosing the resistance, balancing between boring & demoralizing
6) choosing the resources

7) defining the skill cycles, or the rounds in which actions are taken and feedback obtained

8) choosing the interim and ultimate outcomes which provide feedback

9) play, test and polish to refine the game

Dignan cites David Cook of Spry Fox as proposing that “Any activity can be turned into a game: 1) if the activity can be learned, 2) if the player can be measured, and 3) if the play can be rewarded or punished in a timely fashion. You read this and immediately get the possibility that “all is a game” if you want to see it that way.

It occurred to me in looking at these design elements that much of this design has already been done for me in my job and organization, and that a game of sorts is to understand how it has and is being designed on an ongoing basis. Additionally, it occurred to me that there is an internal game which coincides with the external game of my work that I have the power to design and play to personal and organizational benefit. In fact, the more than my personal game can coincide and integrate with the organizational game, the more potential benefit there is for both of us. I might also find that these games are not integratable which is also an important signal to be acted upon.

Dignan says that “Achieving this requires examining the structure of our own activities and experiences in more depth than ever before. This process of observation and inquiry is the precursor to design. Indeed, to reshape the world around us—our workplace, our schools, our homes—we must become behavioral game designers.” In gaining confidence as a game designer, I recognize my role in creating good games not only for myself but for my team, my organization, my industry and my customers so that we collectively can heal the world.

May we all be better game designers and players ongoing. :-)

Building Blocks of the Game Frame - Part 3 of Every Job, A Game

2012-01-11T22:43:00.005-05:00

In my first post in this series I suggested that we, and our work, can benefit from cultivation of a more gameful approach to work. In this post, I want to expand on this approach and its implications.

In his book, Game Frame, Aaron Dignan, talks about the the Game Frame, the building blocks that make up any game. Game designer considers these and so should we as we redesign our work as a game.

These building blocks are:

1) activities, or mastery focus areas,

2) player profile, or trait-based player descriptions with motivational clues,

3) objectives, or short and long term goals towards which effort is directed,

4) skills, or special mental, physical & social abilities necessary to win a game,

5) resistance, or forces of opposition (chance, puzzles, novelty, levels & competition) which create tension and interest in any game,

6) resources, or spaces & supplies we acquire and use to win a game,

7) actions, or move available to us in a game,

8) feedback, the game’s response to a player’s actions,

9) the blackbox, or the rules engine containing information about interplay between actions and feedback in the game, and

10) outcomes, or positive & negative results occurring while in pursuit of game objective

At first, I found this list overwhelming, but on further meditation, realized that all this has been going on within and around me my entire life and I have been good at playing most every game I have found myself in. I had not been savvy enough to see it in the context of a game though. I further get that seeing all this as a game: 1) lowers my blood pressure & frustration level, 2) improves my focus & persistence and 3) allows me to win more of the games I create, and even those others create for me. (Remember my prior post on games we play: Win The Game You Are Playing, Even If You Lose The Game Others Are Playing.)

When I assume that all these elements are part of the game, I am less caught off guard and frustrated by them. I pay more attention to how I need to learn and adapt. I do so more quickly, thus creating a competitive advantage for my self and my team. Truly my work becomes a game and I an ever more skillful player. That said, PLAY ON!!!

A Gameful Mindset CanTransform Your Job - Part 2 of Every Job, A Game

2012-01-06T21:59:00.001-05:00

Continuing my Work as Games riff, I was really struck in my reading of Dignan’s, Game Frame, by the characteristics which make games irresistible. Games:

1) demand participation, a thing we all know we want/need more of at work,

2) can be played again and again, without a loss of enthusiasm yet with increased learning,

3) are understood through play, not work, you hear that, not work,

4) can happen anywhere, and I don’t know about you but work happens everywhere for me,

5) give us purpose, and I find more and more of this in my work as I age,

6) allow us to solve problems, that thing I personally live for,

7) give us control, that thing I am trying to live less for but which I still enjoy having,

8) show us progress, especially needful in the “grind”,

9) prompt risk taking, that thing we need to get more comfortable with,

10) let us face our fears, that thing we need to face more and indulge less

11) give us glory, that thing we love, if not live for, and no you don’t have to admit it,

12) shift time, as in “time flies when you are having fun”,

13) bring us together, and what else is work if not “getting together” for better or worse,

14) facilitate transferable development, a too little recognized phenomenon, and

15) represent what could be, that think we are all interested in creating.

On reading this list in Game Frame, I immediately see how a “gameful” approach to work would be transformative for me. I figured, why only play games when I am off work when I could benefit from the enjoyment of such play most all the time, with just a twist of perspective. I think, YES, these are all things that I crave and work for, but if playing a game provides this inherently, what an incentive to play a game, and especially at work where I spend most of my life!

Every Job, A Game; Every Worker, A Gamer - Part 1

2011-12-31T20:41:00.003-05:00

I recently read the book, Game Frame by Aaron Dignan, a great read about game design with a nice slant on how one can better enjoy their work if they take a gamer’s approach.

Like anything in life, there are situation and then there are the stories we tell about them, and most of life’s experience is the story we tell regardless of the situation. Seeing work as a game is just a “story” alternative we have, and I have to say that my work is relatively more enjoyable and less stressful seen through the lens of a game, versus a job.

Dignan talks about the games as “structured and challenging systems that makes the process of learning rewarding, enables deep engagement, provides a sense of autonomy, and asks us to be heroes in our own stories.” (Read my post Every Worker, A Hero, for more insight on this last point.) Dignan says that games “force us to face facts, press on, and earn our way into the standings by completing tasks that match and then challenge our level of skill.” Games are good for us in that they teach us, allow us to develop new skills, new information and ultimately to master information and situations. The coolest thing about playing games, is that we are “playing”. You ever notice that, in our language, we rarely "work a game", nor do we "play a job"? No, we play games! :-)

A “gameful” approach to work enables our seeing the “game” in our work, and with it, new opportunities and approaches for learning, engagement and mastery. It also allows us to see many of the difficulties of work more positively as pushing us beyond our comfort zone as a meaningful challenge which purpose is to make us more masterful. It is interesting how at work we hate this pushing but in a game we relish it. Dignan says, “Some people do take low-challenge, low-control situations and turn them into wonderful experiences rich with engagement”, “creating a satisfying and escalating challenge instead of waiting for one to be given to them, and this approach literally changes their lives.” This possibility intrigues me and is one I reach for as I have worked to cultivate more and more of a “gameful” approach to my work allowing me to work less and play more. And we all know that play is healthier than work, and further is its own reward.

I invite you to take a read of this book, or maybe just the blog posts, review and videos about it and its author, and to join me in better enjoying and performing the game of work. I am convinced that our selves, our families, community and the world will all benefit from it.

Every Worker, A Hero!

2011-09-11T12:50:00.003-04:00

Work is challenging and we all are the hero in our respective work roles though we rarely think so. For years I have been a fan of Joseph Campbell, the famed mythologist, and his theory of The Hero’s Journey. The Hero’s journey identified a pattern of progressive stages in cultural myths and stories which is fairly applicable to every life, career, job and project. This cycle is seen in epic lives and stories we all know like that of Jesus, Moses, Buddha, Prometheus, Oriris, Luke Skywalker of Star Wars, Frodo of Lord of the Rings, and even ourselves if we observe closely enough.

In the Hero’s Journey, which is divided in to three phases of departure, initiation and return:

1. The hero is leading an ordinary life when circumstances take a turn which call the hero to a quest.

2. Initially the hero is hesitant to accept the quest but alas does not resist.

3. On starting the quest, the hero finds mentors and helpers along the way to advise and assist.

4. As a part of the quest the hero faces ordeals and obstacles. The hero also discovers powers, within and without themselves, some resident and others obtained along the way which enable triumph.

5. By and by, with patient persistence, the hero wins the object of the quest along with the experience and benefit of overcome ordeals and newly discovered and obtained powers.

6. The quest object obtained, the hero is faced with a decision of whether they will return to the ordinary world they lived in before the quest began to bless the community with the experience, powers and questions object they have obtained. And so the cycle starts over again.

With reflection, we could all identify that at any given time, we ourselves are in some stage of this hero cycle in every areas of our lives, careers and jobs.

I have always found this reflection helpful as stories and myth are how human cultures makes sense of chaos whether in the form of success or failure, ease of difficulty, blessing or curse.

Seeing myself as the hero in my own life, career and job, I continually recognize quests I am called to, mentors and helpers given to aid me, ordeals and obstacles, powers and experience I am given to develop during my quest, and the decision and obligation to continually reinvest the fruit of my quests back into the communities I am a part of.

Seeing this cycle is the path all heroes have tread both humbles and encourages me as I see that as they have triumphed in the their circumstances so can I as I patiently and persistently make good use of every resource and opportunity every quest presents. Reflecting on the hero's journey also lends context and perspective to my present challenges and difficulties and reminds me that this too will pass, both success and learning, and that my job as hero is to be committed to and prepared for every next stage of this cycle.

So, shall I encourage us all to reflect on how we are all heroes on our respective life and career journeys and how the world relies upon and is blessed when we step us to the hero's potential in ourselves.

Everyone A Tool in the Hand of Providence, and especially in Tough Times

2011-08-21T19:31:00.003-04:00

Reflecting on how tough times are and how they might get even tougher has me in a more grateful mood than ever for what is still being provided in the midst of this toughness, as well as what I can provide to help those who need provision. In my pondering, it hit me that everyone of us is a tool in the hand of Providence, equipped to provide for others out of our talent, networks, expertise, etc., and that it is in this provision that we sustain our lives.

From this perspective, I realize that Providence is always at work, not necessarily in ways I expect or desire, but at work nonetheless. I see every opportunity to provide as my being handled by Providence to bless someone, and everything and one I am provided as coming from Providence, especially those things that & people who are challenging and unexpected.

It seems to me that if there is any silver lining in tough and scarce times, it is that it calls us to be less independent and more interdependent, less entitled and more grateful, less impulsive and more mindful, less fickle and more resilient, all things that are good for the soul and relationships and which I imagine cycle back to good times in time, and makes for a greater degree of good times even in tough times.

I think that when we are not sufficiently mindful that we are all tools in Providence’s hand, we worry too much about if we will be provided for, and we are too self-absorbed to provide where we have opportunity to. If we had more confidence in this idea, we could worry less, be less self-absorbed, and by extension put more of our time and energy in figuring out how to better provide for one another.

As times get worse and institutions we have grown accustomed to providing for us, like government and corporations are less able to do so, we are going to have to figure out more and more how to provide for each other. Let’s not allow fear (from inside or outside) of this daunting change to twist us in ways that we do not remain open to Providential Innovation.

It is also worth remembering that the best provision is not money, but time, attention, encouragement, referrals, advice, research/insights, all intangible things which when handled and combined well, converts itself into many barterable currencies that sustain us.

Finally, look to provide for others individually and in groups/networks, as well as in volunteer roles as well as for income.

Here's to being the sharpest and most proficient tools Providence wields!

Everyone A Pawn on Someones’ Chess Board

2011-07-17T10:04:00.002-04:00

As I continue to enjoy my evolving “big picture, middle age mind”, or so I have read, I relish the analogy of life’s relationships as all occurring on myriad overlapping chessboards. I further note that on every chessboard, both mine and those of all I am in relations with, I am a piece, sometimes queen, a few times king, most times pawn, and when in the zone, knight. :-) This consideration has caused me to meditate more and more on the reality that I, and so we all, am a pawn on every someones’ chessboard that I engage with. Everyone has an agenda for me. I play a role of getting everyone who values me something they want else they do not value me, else they probably do not perceive themselves as even being relationship with me, despite the fact that I might perceive otherwise based on my own chessboards.

Acceptance of this reality helps me to better tolerate being manipulated and used, sometimes even betrayed, by others. With this understanding, I am able to take all this less personally knowing that this is the nature of things. I can even have compassion on the idea that everyone is mostly just moving me around, sacrificing me, advancing me, promoting/demoting me, etc., in order to win some particular chess game they are playing against someone else, or maybe even themselves, or worst yet, me. Additionally, I work to understand what piece I am, queen, knight or pawn, and with this understanding to be the best piece I can be, as I understand I should, in order to help people win their (legitimate) chess games.

This is most challenging when you find yourself simultaneously a black and white piece on a board where 2 people are playing against one another and you want both of them to win. These paradoxical situation definitely require thinking beyond a zero-sum paradigm.

So remember, we are all pawns on someone’s chess board and may we have the grace, wisdom and guilelessness to be the best pawn possible in on every board we are being played in order to manifest the Great Commandment of “love” in the world.

Some good reads that compliments this one I wrote awhile ago are at http://www.delicious.com/cadelarge/wiseworking_games

Happy checkmating to you!

Being Proud of our Work Without Being Prideful About Our Work (or Ourselves).

2011-05-15T08:42:00.004-04:00

Recently I taught a Natural Gifts workshop and the question of feeling pride as a barrier to using our gifts came up. When this question comes up, and it is common, I like to draw the distinction between two oft-confused ideas, proud and pride.

When we are proud of our work we do better with our gifts we have been "given", though when we are prideful, we do worst with gifts we think we "have" of our own virtue. This is a key difference. When we are "prideful" about our gifts, we tend to hedge, procrastinate, and engage, and more readily resort to defensive reactions.

Proud is rooted in the idea that I have been given a gift and I have a responsibility, as a steward, to make best use of this gift in order to manifest the genius of the giver, first God, then our families then our communities. Pride is rooted in the idea that I am self-made & cultivated and that I can use my gift, or not, based on my own selfish ends. And, yes, I am suggesting that not using our gifts out of fear, laziness, perfectionism, even out of a sense of humility, is a form of selfishness resulting from our failure to get past our own self-absorption to recognize that the "givers'" need for what we have to offer is more important than our need to be safe from looking bad.

When we work from a position of "proud", we are:
1. confident, not so much in ourselves as in the "Giver" and "givers" who have developed our gift in us, though self-confidence should grow over time,
2. persistent, committed to sharpening our gifts over time despite opposition, mistakes and adversity , with a sense of hope in future mastery
3. assertive, looking for opportunities to offer, and offering, our gifts, and yes, even in the face of rejection and (seeming) lack of appreciation
4. mindful of the Source and sources of our giftedness, a antidote to pridefulness, which proud always has the potential of easily converting itself into

When we work from a position of "pride", we:
1. lack confidence and then overcompensate for such lack by being brash, defensive, procrastinators, quitters, etc.
2. lack persistence, assuming that opposition and adversity are the normal weather of getting anything done, and hope in the idea that time improves whatever we practice consistently, for good and for neglect
3. envy others' gifts, believing that what others have been given is innately better than what we have been given, misinvesting energy that would be more productively spent "sharpening our own saws" (Covey)
4. blame others and circumstances for our neglect in developing and offering our gifts, seeing opposition and diversity as a insurmountable unfair impediments, which they are not
5. are unmindful of the Source and sources of our giftedness, and thus succumbing to pride think we are the source, and usually an inadequate one at that.

Clearly, we need more proudness and less pridefulness in the world. The world is starved every time we choose pride over proud. Let's study today to act of maintaining a greater stance of proudfulness, versus pridefulness, in how we go about offering our gifts in the world.

On Strength

2011-03-14T03:39:00.004-04:00

Throughout late 2010 and into 2011, I have been making a study of Servant Leadership, as described by Robert Greenleaf, in his audiobooks, "The Power of Servant Leadership", and the book, "On Becoming A Servant Leader". Servant Leadership is defined as a philosophy and practice of leadership which gives priority attention to the needs of colleagues, reports and those they serve, with an emphasis on stewardship of organizational resources, use of informal (influence) versus formal (authority) power, and development and cultivation of the qualities of listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, growth and building community (Wikipedia).

This leadership approach piqued my interest as it aligns with second half life and career goals that have emerged for me in the last few years as an alternative intention to that of ambition, advancement and material growth for its sake. Servant leadership has proven to be a satisfactory paradigm to balance these primary drives of my earlier life and career.

In my readings I have been particularly intrigued by Greenleaf's concept of Strength defined as the ability to: 1) see a choice of aims to pursue, 2) to select the right aim, and 3) to responsibly pursue this right aim over a long period of time (Greenleaf, On Becoming a Servant Leader). Successful development of strength is relevant to one achieving their best potential in healing the world. It requires: 1) knowledge regarding one's choice fo aims, 2) judgment and wisdom in the selection of the right aim, a highly subjective matter, 3) discipline and discretion to pursue a chosen aim in a responsible manner and 4) patient persistence to carry on pursuit of chosen aims for a long period of time. This definition acknowledges the blessing and challenge of choice we have as to how we put our gifts to use. Greenleaf goes on to talk about the development of strength as an ethical imperative and even suggests that one who does not acknowledge this imperative in their own lives is ethically inadequate. Yikes!

This concept of strength resonated with me as it is summed up, in many ways, what my life, in retrospect, has been building towards though I did not realize it so cohesively as when I read it. This concept is also what my life continues to be about in my management and educational pursuits.

These musings take me back to a blog post I wrote in 2007 called, Evil as a Key to Career Satisfaction. As I think of this and that topic in tandem, I realize that a worthy aim is addressing some form of evil in the world. The trick then is to 1) select the right evil, 2) to pursue it responsibly (avoiding the corruption of that evil, or others) and 3) doing so for a long period of time. The difficulty and challenge of doing this is certainly an environment for building strength over a lifetime.

I write this to encourage us all to commit, and daily recommit, to a stance of pursuing our lives and careers from a position and intention of (developing) strength.

On Strength

2011-03-14T03:39:00.003-04:00

On Second Thoughts

2011-02-06T14:17:00.001-05:00

While having a good discussion with a good friend on yesterday we got into the issue of our propensity for negative self-defeating, horriblizing self-talk. We delved into the topic of the need to move beyond those first negative thoughts to "second thoughts" where we challenge the first thoughts for their validity with an eye to rejecting and reframing them when appropriate to do so.

This we called, "Getting To The Second Thought". Its an excellent mental practice, good for reprogramming those tapes we have inherited through both nature and nurture. These tapes were intended to keep us from "getting too big for our britches" and worked too well. The result being that we too often undervalue our gifts, competence and influence talking ourselves out of much good we might do. We also devalue others and their intentions resulting in lots of lost opportunities for trust, cooperation, understanding and peace.

At the end of this discussion, my friend and I both recommitted to this practice of not stalling out on our first thought but moving on to the "second thought" where we right-size that first thought for benefit of the relationship with ourselves and others. And yes, we encourage you to do the same.

Be well and blessed.

Musings on Our Daily Bread

2011-01-30T08:21:00.002-05:00

The Lord's Prayer, a popular passage of the Bible, asks that we be daily given our "daily bread". In my morning meditations today, I considered the question of what is my "daily bread". I have, since childhood when I first learned this prayer, always though of it in purely material terms; food, shelter, clothing, etc.. This morning it occurred to me that my "daily bread" is more those physical, spiritual and relational gifts that are provided that allow me to get my daily bread, as well as to enable and provide other's daily bread. This realization then led to the question of how well I use my "daily bread" to get, enable and provide daily bread. Hmmm.

Further consideration pressed me to inventory all the skills, relationships, knowledge, and wisdom I have to leverage, and all the needs, problems, dilemmas and evils in the world I can leverage my "daily bread" inventory on, in exchange for my "daily bread".

So often, we have enough "daily bread" but 1) we discount what it is, 2) we don't know who most wants to buy it, 3) we are unskilled in how to sell it, and 4) we can be lazy about continually improve it. I am convinced that we if we were more aware and skilled on all these points, our self-esteem, value to others, sense of purpose and meaning, and ability to provide for ourselves and others would improve, and not just materially either.

May we become better at using and offering the "daily bread" that we are all daily provided.

Waiting (Well) At Work (& Elsewhere) For What We Want

2011-01-02T21:45:00.002-05:00

The last 2 years has put me through a difficult and edifying exercise in patience that has left me, well, more patient. I want to share it with you here as well as the list of lessons I learned in hope it will be helpful to you in your own trials of patience at work, as well as in other areas of your life.

In brief, I had a situation at my job where I deserved a promotion based on my performance relative to the requirements of my position, and I had been repeatedly passed over. Some of the reasons for this were known and others not but that is less the point than that at the end of the day, I was not promoted because, I believe, my maturity was more important than a promotion.

Its difficult to bear with not getting something you know you deserve. It hurt my ego, and in this case, my pocket. It was embarrassing on some levels (said my ego which is is embarrassed whenever its expectations are not met on its timetable). It was unfair on other levels (said my ego which is far from omniscient). I believe (and especially in retrospect) it is what was ordained for me though.

During this time of waiting, I persisted in working to understand why the promotion was delayed and doing those things required to obtain it. I was angry, and tempted to a poor attitude, but I was continually reminded by Psalms 75.6-7 that promotion comes not from the east or the west but from the Lord, by Jer. 29.11, that God knows the good plans He has for me, by Galatians 5.22-23 that the Fruit of the Spirit is patience and self-control (temperance), and by Romans 8.28 that all things work together for good. I am happy to say that recently my patience was rewarded with a promotion, and more importantly with the lessons below. Trust me when I tell you that the lessons are far more valuable than the promotion, though the promotion is not bad.

Lesson #1: God promotes, not our management (Psalms 75.6-7). I was angry with my management but was continually reminded that if there was anyone to be angry with it was God and that I should avoid the habit of being angry with people for situations that are ultimately out of their control but rather follow through with passionate detachment to do what I had been hired to do.

Lesson #2: Look to make longer term spiritual gains, when taking short term ego & material losses. In this case, I have gotten a result of a promotion but also another degree of spiritual maturity. In the short term, I lost money, but gained temperance, patience, perspective and a renewed confidence in God's plans for me.

Lesson #3: Align your story with God’s. Our wishes are not God’s command. So often we are frustrated by the story we tell ourselves about what we see of our situations. We forget that the story we tell is optional, either positive or negative, and that we never see the whole story. Sometimes waiting saves us from unseen grief and unwanted situations we cannot foresee. I found that telling myself a story of God’s benevolence and protection, rather than neglect and unfairness, helped during my wait. If we believe God loves us, we have to then work at telling loving stories to ourselves and others. We have to align our stories with God’s Word and not with our ego.

Lesson #4: Longer waits yield greater appreciation and maturity. Enough said.

Lesson #5: Behaving wisely while waiting provides advantage. Such wise behavior is credited to David in 1 Samuel 18.14 and a good model for us to study and imitate. When David was not getting what he wanted from Saul, he conducted himself in a manner which maintained goodwill and which God use to turn the king’s heart his way (Proverbs 21.1). We create the same effect when we do the same. Doing this yielded the result I wanted and an improved relationship with my management, I am happy to say.

Lesson #6: Make good with what we have versus what we desire. Luke 16.10-12 says that if we cannot handle a little, how will we handle a lot. So often we desire more money, status, titles, responsibility, etc., but are not handling what we have as well and gratefully as we could. I believe that waiting, challenges us to make better use of what we already have. In these cases, it is good to take stock of what we have, being more grateful for it, and making the most of it.

When in the midst of waiting these lessons were not apparent to me. It is mostly after the fact that they have occurred to me. I hope they are helpful to you in whatever situation you are waiting, whether at work, at home, in some relationship or otherwise.

Do You Know What (Control) Dramas You Are Starring In?

2010-12-25T07:43:00.001-05:00

Control Dramas is a great concept I picked up in my reading of Redfield's "Celestine Prophecy". While it has its detractors, the idea of control dramas has helped me engage in better constructive conflict, at work and elsewhere. Fundamentally, and I paraphrase, control dramas are ways we learn to gain energy (and good feeling, at least temporarily) in our interactions with each other. Redfield identifies four control dramas we engage in:

1. interrogation which manifests as judging
2. aloofness which manifests as being withdrawn and enticing people to draw us out
3. pitifulness (a.k.a. "poor me") which manifests as guilt-inflicting self-pity and even helplessness
4. intimidation which manifests as being threatening.

We know all these dramas in ourselves and others. We know how they are used to be influential, gain control, and to manipulate situations and others. We all have our favorites which work for us. We are skilled at our favorite control dramas' use, and often unconsciously. Those around us know our pet dramas also, for better or worse. Same as we have our favorite dramas, we are susceptible to certain styles which particularly push our buttons, and manipulate us into emotions and actions we regret and are often embittered about.

Control dramas have their usefulness when used consciously from a position of strength, competence and good will. They also do much damage to ourselves and our relationships when used unconsciously, without warning and for selfish ends. We unconsciously engage in these dramas and then wonder about the suboptimal quality of our relationships. Control dramas are not evil in and of themselves. One can use their dramas to be quite effective.

I am prone to interrogation (judging) and have damaged many of the relationships in my life being this way. This is a blind spot for me that I have fortunately gotten feedback on and work to moderate, hard as that is. More and more I work to consciously warn others about my interrogative tendency and ask for their cooperation and patience. I witness that with this communication more, not all of my relationships are better preserved because of the transparency of acknowledging my tendency. Such acknowledgement also puts me on notice to be present, to breathe, and to curb my own drama.

Another drama I can slip into is "poor me", when I am tired, feeling unappreciated and feeling treated unfairly. With mindfulness, I have gotten better at catching myself in this drama and pulling myself out of it. I also have a number of mental, physical and relational practices I use to recuperate from these type dramas. Its hard practice but it improves with practice.

When I practice being interrogative and pitiful, I improve that. When I bring a better intention to my interrogating, converting it to genuine & patient curiosity, and shun pitifulness for a possibilistic, proactive approach to life's uneven treatment of me, I improve that. Its all about what you practice.

May we all become more familiar with our control dramas, the effect they have and master them to serve and love versus self-serve and control. After all, I must master my drama and not let my drama master me, eh? :-)

Be "Unclear but Learning", But Not "Confused", Even If You Are.

2010-11-27T09:28:00.003-05:00

Words create worlds. The same way that God created the world by His words, we do the same. It is that image of God in us. Taking this to heart, I have lately vowed to eliminate the word "confused" from my vocabulary in favor of "unclear" and "learning". I find the former stressful, disempowering and disheartening, and the latter at worst resilient & hopeful, and at best calming & empowering.

The fact is that I work in, and with, many truly "confusing" scenarios that take a lot of energy, concentration, patience and collaboration to resolve. In these scenarios, I need to conserve every ounce of energy and resource I have to get the outcomes I am shooting for. When I take a stance of being "unclear" or "learning", I create a world that will be cleared up with persistent patience, and that will yield learnings that will have benefit going forward. These words settle me down and refocus me on the task at hand leaving more energy for resolution with less lost on tantrums, woe-is-me-ing, and fretting.

This "unclear but learning" space is very different from a world where I am confused. Some might say this is frivolous wordplay but I challenge you to trade these words in your internal and external talk. You will be more energized and so will those you collaborate with.

Write to tell me about it when it happens to you.

My Day At TEDxPhilly!!!

2010-11-19T07:54:00.003-05:00

Fab day at TEDx Philly! Well worth investment. Excellent speakers and topics! Philadelphia's Kimmel Center, a perfect setting! So inspiring, so emotionally moving, so intellectually challenging, such a great chance to network with kindred souls, ideophiles and world-changers, actual and aspiring!

My favorite speakers (http://tedxphilly.com/speakers) were:

Chris Lehman talking about schools training for life and citizenship more than just for work. (http://www.scienceleadership.org/)

Simon Hauger talking about project based education and students who innovate better than corporations and major universities and his desire to buildwww.workshopschool.org

Jay Coen Gilbert talking about B Corps (Beneficial Corporations) as distinct from C or S Corps (http://www.bcorporation.net/)

Nic Esposito talking about Urban Farming, Food Security and local Economic Viability (http://phillyrooted.org/)

Stanford Hamilton talking about links between music education and life achievement and moving me to near weeping tears with a live performance of his Philly Youth Orchestra (http://www.stanfordthompson.com/heart.html)

Key next steps are:

1. Lobby my local legislator about B-Corporation legislation.

2. Make time to educate underskilled, underemployed people I know about Urban Farming as an educational and economic opportunity

3. Make time to restart my piano lessons to I can be a jazz pianist by 55.

4. Find a way to support project-based education as a sponsor, coach, mentor, etc.

Key takeaways were:

1. You have to remember that you are an artist - Aptowicz. Budget, time, money and energy for this.

2. The world is no place for rest but for effort - Mutter

3. Nothing is denied well directed labor - Mutter

4. Schools should teach how to learn, live and to be citizens, not just how to work. - Lehman

5. Lehman's points: 1) ask questions, 2) seek answers, 3) build real stuff, 4) share and 5) change the world

6. Presently, humans are the most environmentally just and humane we have been in the history of the world (paraphrase) - Nic Esposito

7. We need to move from owning means of production to owning means of existence - Nic Esposito

8. We are moving from 20th century shareholder capitalism to 21st century stakeholder capitalism - JC Gilbert

9. We must harness the power of business for the purpose of civil society - JC Gilbert

10. We must bridge the curiosity gap in children, (and ourselves) - Stanford Thompson

11. You cannot teach critical thinking without critical conditions - Azeem Hill, W. Philly student & X Prize Competitor

12. New term of the day - "data exhaust". We all have it.

13. Our innovation birthright can reverse itself and become someone else's. (paraphrased) - Evan Malone

14. Hackerspace is the recreation of the future. - Evan Malone

It was certainly a productive day indeed! And one more bucket list item is marked off. :-D

Wrestling with Angels To Get Our Blessings, New Names (& Limps)

2010-11-07T16:42:00.004-05:00

Most of my life one of my favorite stories have been that of Jacob's wrestling match with the Angel (from the Christian Bible). For those unfamiliar, the long story short is that Jacob was up one night preparing to save his family from his brother, Esau, who he believed was going to kill him. After his preparations were done, and while Jacob was alone, a man, some say an Angel, others God Himself, picked a fight with him. They fought all night and we know Jacob gave Him a run for His money because He could not get out of a hold Jacob had him in, even after knocking Jacob's hip out of joint. The ensuing negotiation, where Jacob stated famously, "I will not let you go until you bless me" resulted in Jacob getting a new name (Israel, because he successfuly overcame his struggles with man and God), a blessing, and a limp from that dislocated hip.

The connection between this story and my own life hit me like a bolt of lightning this morning during my devotions as I pondered how well am I wrestling with Angels in my life?. Isn't life, work and family, a continuous wrestle with man (and yes, God, though we often do not see it that way) to gain a blessing, spiritual and otherwise? The problem is that we too often do not see it that way.

How often, when attacked like Jacob, do we not wrestle well and hold on to the situation until we get the blessing the situation holds for us? How often do we let opportunity go in our impatience and impersistence, and by doing so lose our blessing and our new name?

We have all sorts of wounds and limps from these wrestling matches but do we have have the blessings which should go along with those limps? Do we have the blessing but simply have not acknowledged it? Hmmm.

Take stock (with pride, though not hubris) of the limps and the blessings you have received in your wrestles with man and God in the context of your work. Take this story and its lessons into those present and future situations where you will have to wrestle with Angels and make sure you hold on until you receive your blessing, your new name, and yes, your new limp.

Wrestle well with your Angels today!!!

Since Work is Long, also Make it Meaningful!

2010-11-01T20:44:00.000-04:00

So it would seem that our work hours are not going to get any shorter either at work or elsewhere. Some would say, taking a longer historic perspective, that they are in fact shorter than they used to be. That's not making us feel better though. Let's face it, life is work.

So since we cannot shorten our work hours, I submit we should focus on transforming the quality of the work we do in those hours. This is in our control even if the other is not. We have so many opportunities to do this every moment. We can do it in the attention to detail and the crafts(person)ship we bring to our tasks, in the compassion and empathy we bring to our work relationships, in the the celebration of good result, and the gathering of learnings from unexpected results. The point is that with proper attention, compassion, empathy, celebration and learning, we can significantly raise the quality of our many work ours. Since this is our life (literally), why not live as high quality a work life as possible. This does not come natural but can be learned with patient, persistent practice, and to our benefit and all those around us.

Bring this greater quality to our long work hours requires:

1. slowing down our attention, if not our pace

2. being passionately detached and you can read more about this at my blog post on this topic

3. being deliberate in "starting with the end in mind" and being mindful to celebrate when that end is reached

4. valuing effectiveness in our work at least as much as efficiency.

As you take these steps, take time to reflect on the meaning your work is making in terms of your ability to:

1. provide and model for your family

2. improve the lives and wellbeing of your customers

3. develop your own character, reputation and skills.

Good "quality & meaning making" to you!

Yammer: Twitter Inside the Enterprise

2010-10-24T11:54:00.002-04:00

For the last year I have found the Twitter-like tool, Yammer, a productive tool in my work at Novo Nordisk. Yammer is used for private communication within organizations or between organizational members and pre-designated groups. Anyone with a company email address can join the Yammer network for that respective company. I recommend this video to get familiar with Yammer.

In ways, I did not initially intuit, Yammer has benefited my work. It is not just a pasttime but a results driving tool. Here are a few examples which I hope you can also realize in your own work.

1. Meeting fellow employees with common interests. I have met more fellow employees with common interests via Yammer in a year than I could have met otherwise. We have thousands of users in my company though the 1/9/90 rule is at work as usual, where 1% originate posts, 9% comment on posts and 90% just watch. This is not a problem just a reality.

2. Researching relevant topics and projects throughout the organization. I have had several situations where I have found out about relevant projects going on in other parts of my organization via a Yammer post, or I have posted my interest in a certain type of project or resource only to have someone read it and answer. Yammer has saved me time and ignorance in these instances.

3. Locating & sharing organizational expertise. By posting requests for certain types of expertise, I have also gotten good answers and connections via Yammer. Additionally, I have been able to lend my own expertise to fellow employees both actively and passively via my posts which tend to focus on social media, Health2.0, storytelling and CRM.

As you can see, Yammer is not a waste of time but can be used to enhance your performance at work. I encourage you to join Yammer at your respective company and to benefit from as well as contribute in all the ways I have described above.

Passionate Detachment: A Paradox Worth Practicing

2010-08-31T10:24:00.005-04:00

This paradoxical idea of “passionate detachment” was introduced to me years ago in my readings of Carlson’s “Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff”. I call it paradoxical because I had been raised to understand that being passionate required being overwrought and stressed out as a sign of caring. I am so glad to be rescued from this approach. With time and consistent practice at cultivating this approach, I have learned to be driven with less (dis)stress, and to be committed without being bound or feeling put upon.

In a nutshell, passionate detachment is an approach to life, indeed work, which focuses on “right execution” of the process more than the outcome. One learns to enjoy the journey confident that the journey, pursued with the right spirit, will get us to the right destination, even when that destination is different than what we had originally envisioned at the outset.

I find that in this “state of grace”, I have more energy for coming up with creative solutions as less of it is tied up in negative emotions and speculations. I find that even when I do not get the outcome I envisioned (which is never guaranteed), I am more aware of the learnings the experience yields and I can take solace in a process well executed. Either outcome, these learnings make for continuous improvement and self-development, less of a negative emotional, psychological and relational toll on myself and those I lead.

The Price is Not Too High, The Value is Too Low: Part 2

2010-08-17T06:40:00.002-04:00

Recently I have been reviewing this post I wrote in September 2009 as I am working on 2011 business plans where I work, and wanted to further elaborate on this topic, at the encouragement of my boss. :-)

In these austere times, "no price too high, but value too low" this mantra is all the more critical as everyone is crying "low and lower price" while not really asking enough about "what is the value?". This lack of asking makes it all the more critical that we who are seeking funding & resources be better than ever at articulating the value we will deliver. I had a great discussion with my boss about this matter and he challenged me about a few things that stick with me:

1. Lead with the deliverables, not the resource request. So often we are preoccupied with what we need to get a job done (the resources) and neglect to clearly define and articulate the outcome we will create (the deliverables). We fail to understand that the investor is most interested in the outcome. For success, we have to learn to think as much like the investor as like the performer who converts resources into outcomes. As we transform our thinking in this way we will improve our proposals with better linkages between deliverables and resources, and as a result, improve the "hit" rate on our requests, whether it be for budgets, jobs, relationships, etc..

2. Focus on value-added activities & drop the non-value-added "busywork". So often we get caught up in the "urgent and efficient" elements of our to-do lists to the neglect of the "important and effective" elements of the same lists. In reflecting on this admonishment, I have to remember the 80/20 rule; that 20 percent of our effort gets us 80 percent of our outcome. Where we invest effort has a lot to do with the outcome we get, for better and or worse. If we are neglecting the investment of that 20 percent in important and effective effort, our outcomes will suffer. Another element of this dilemma is that those things that are most important and effective, are also most challenging to us and thus invite procrastination (see my earlier post on this topic). This tendency toward the urgent & efficient, and avoidance of the challenging is something to watch and to be disciplined against in order to deliver the value that warrants the higher price we all like to charge.

Laying Bricks or Building Cathedrals: Which are you doing at work?

2010-08-08T10:55:00.001-04:00

One of my favorite parables is that of the brick layer and the cathedral builder. Its a popular tale told in many places. In summary, it relates the tale of man who when walking past a construction site asked the builders what they were doing. One said, he was laying bricks, a second said he was feeding his family and a third said he was building a cathedral to the glory of God.

What is poignant about this story is the different attitudes that each builder brought to the same task. This difference in attitude is one we see everyday, and which we hopefully check on and struggle with regularly. In our work, we all are laying bricks (of sorts) but do we only see our work as laying bricks, or only as providing for our families, or do we see it as something larger which is achieving an important end for the glory of God and the good of the society? If not, we should search and embrace that deeper meaning and purpose that is available in any work if we search it out and embrace it.

On my toughest and most frustrating days at work, I find that reconnecting to the cathedrals I am building, restores and encourages me to recuperate and recommit. I further find that as I am now firmly in the second half of my life, and everyday reminds me of my inevitable end, it is all the more critical that I spend my life energy on cathedrals and not brick walls. To this end, I inventory my activities frequently and seek to shed those which are only brick walls (to me) so that I can put more of my energy into those cathedrals I want to leave the world with.

May we all take time today, and frequently in the future, to identify the cathedrals we are building in our work, and to avoid those endeavors that are only brick walls.

Blessed building. :-)

Topical Twittering: My Alternate, & More Valuable, Approach to Twitter

2009-11-27T10:24:00.004-05:00

As many of you know, I have been a productive user and advocate of Twitter for quite a while now. I find Twitter invaluable as a teaching, research and networking tool. I have always used it more for professional, than for personal uses.

Initially, I approached Twitter by following individuals I knew or who were followed by people I followed. I have to say, though, that over time I have evolved towards following topics using twitter keyword search and hashtags. This approach allows me to avoid the clutter of irrelevant tweets of those I follow and to isolate those relevant tweets related to my personal and professional interests. For instance, I have saved searches for storytelling, taoism, knowledge management (#km), mindfulness (#mindful), etc., and whenever anyone on Twitter (whether I follow them or not) tweets using these words or hastags, I pick it up. I further follow hashtags of conferences and educational events of interest, i.e., #fdasm, #health2con, etc., as these allow me to gain perspectives & ask questions of conference attendees & interesteds before, during and after the event.

This topical approach has allowed me to get more out of every minute I invest in Twitter, as well as to build a more relevant network of tweeters with common interests. I would not have met these relevant tweeters just by following those who follow who I follow. (Say that 10 times.) I find that I rarely look at my general timeline anymore as I focus my Twitter time on my search & hashtag feeds.

Yes, I know I am missing the serendipitous aspects of Twitter which occurs when I read random Tweets by those I follow. The fact is that this is still available to me, as I have not unfollowed those I follow. My follows and my searched feeds, allow me to have the best of both worlds when I choose to have either or both. Ah, I love Twitter! The world's "stream of consciousness" at my fingertips!

PS - Additionally, I recommend Tweetdeck for laptop and iPhone, as the best way to organize and track your relevant Twitter feeds. I also recommend you use relevant hashtags in your tweets to assure they get picked up by those who care the most about the topic you are tweeting about.

Beware of doing what makes for success even when it no longer does.

2009-11-17T08:36:00.008-05:00

I believe that everyone is doing what they believe makes them successful. Over time, we have all learned what will make us successful, at any given time, through a process of trial and error, reward and reprimand. In this way our being, thinking and behaving at work is shaped. The dilemma is that sometimes we are doing what made us successful, not what will make us success.

That we do what we believe makes us successful even when it no longer does has 2 fundamental implications:

1. It explains much often odd and dysfunctional behavior we display and witness at work. While it may not reveal precise reasons for why we operate as we do, it does provide a consoling explanation that calls for a measure of compassion and empathy in how we deal with ourselves and others. While you may not appreciate a person's reasoning or actions, you can hardly blame anyone for doing what they believe will make them successful. The trick is to be aware of those ways of thinking and acting that we believe make us successful, and to be open to feedback (a relatively passive approach) that may suggest we need to add new ways of being, thinking and acting that will allow us to be even more successful.

2. It calls continually into question if our present being, thinking and acting are sufficient to make us successful now, and in the future, as in the past. When this implication goes unexamined we can find ourselves failing today with thinking and actions that were only useful in the past. The trick here is to continually get the feedback and insight (a relatively active approach) we need to understand what's useful and what's obsolete as it relates to our future success.

Though difficult, I encourage us to take these two questions to heart and mind when in the heat of work as it is in this heat that we are most prone to mindlessly fall back on practiced habits whether they are any longer making us successful or not.

The Questions We Ask: Keys to our Greater Contribution & Relevance

2009-11-02T21:04:00.003-05:00

We live in such an answer-oriented culture that we forget the value of our questions and how they can contribute to our contribution and our relevance, not to mention our development and the success of our endeavors. I learned once from a mentor that the chief indicator of the quality of consultants is often the quality of the questions they ask. The questions reveal the level of experience and wisdom of the one who poses the question. It elevates the potential and quality of the project. It expands the scope and bounds of our, and the team's, thinking and action.

I have learned, over time, that in situations where innovation is critical, where new unprecedented paths are being created, new questions are more critical to success than old answers, and that new questions yield better and more relevant answers and results.

Often we find in our work that we have stakeholders who do not, or no longer, value our contribution. Rather than fretting or being resentful, we should take time to examine the relevance of the questions we are bringing to the party in the interest of that stakeholder.

Sometimes we do not know new questions to ask, suggesting we have become stagnant and have stopped developing ourselves, and are then unable to develop those around us. We are trapped in a box we need to take time to break out of. Here is where the practice of Covey's 7th Habit of "Sharpening the Saw" is in order. If you find yourself in this state, I encourage you to cultivate new relevant questions via:

1. Broader and different exposures to new ways of thinking and perceiving. Social media is a huge opportunity aiding this exposure, for its potential to facilitate talking with/reading/watching/listening to diverse and relevant collaborators and colleagues. Being active in relevant professional associations also assists this exposure.

2. Gaining deeper insight into your stakeholders interest. Story listening and ongoing direct questioning aids this. People love to talk about and tell stories about their interests and problems. Be available to actively listen with an ear to uncovering needs you have the resources to meet.

3. Correlate your exposures to your stakeholder's interests to pose questions that add value, even when sometimes, you do not have the answers.

4. Persistent in co-creating answers to new questions with stakeholders. The newer and more radical the question, the more initial resistance and opposition you should expect. It is only a test to be passed. Pass it.

As you practice these steps you will find that you grow, as well as your stakeholders, as well as your value proposition.

How Death Impacts My Work

2009-10-18T07:08:00.007-04:00

So I just learned yesterday that my grandmother, Grace Brown (1925-2009) passed away. Rest her soul. Such news sends me into reflection about death, and the legacy of the deceased as well as the one I am creating. It occurs to me that the preponderance of the legacy we leave when we pass is rooted in the work we do while we are here. In this I mean not only "what" work we do, but also "how" we work, where the "how" far outweighs the "what" in importance.

I know that as I have crossed into my 40s I think more than ever about death and legacy and "how" I work is becoming relatively more important to me than "what" work I do. It's occurred to me that after 25 years of adult work, the basic tasks of work will not differ much for the rest of my life, but more largely the context and the character of my work.

Because I will not be able to work or, for that matter, live forever, I pay more attention to both. While death is a tragic thing, at least for those of us left to witness it, its sober and courageous contemplation can enrich and lend much purpose to life (and work) as few things are valued that are taken for granted as permanent, whether that is a job or a life.

Having witnessed the passing of another dear life, whose work, by the way, will be sorely missed, I take away the following insights:

1. I should work everyday as though it is were my last and bring every appropriate and relevant energy, grace, skill and authenticity to every task and interaction I encounter.

2. I should keep a perspective of "passionate detachment", especially when work becomes difficult and frustrating, knowing that everything I am accomplishing, or not, is temporary in occurrence. None of it will last forever either way, and thus I should not be too proud when successful, or too distraught when unsuccessful.

3. I should work for outcomes I truly care about in the world, that go beyond paying my bills, as work, paid or non-paid, is the primary tool we are given for making our mark on the world. Let's assure that mark is the one we intend to make.

4. I should work (and I mentioned this earlier in my posts, Honoring my (Working) Mothers on Mother's Day and What Africa Has Done For My Work.) to honor those who have taught me, through instruction and modeling, to work from my earliest youth to now.

Certainly Grace Brown, my grandmother, left her mark on me in this way. From toddlerhood, when I first detected her loving existence, to last Spring, when I last saw her, I recall her as a diligent woman, always applying her energy to some task related to the care and comfort of our family. It is to this recollection that I dedicate this post and my life of work. I am so glad that she got to see the results of her hard work in my own work and life and that I got to express my appreciation for her love and example to me.

So as we sit today preparing to reenter our work worlds on tomorrow, or maybe you did not even get to escape this weekend (I know I did not), take time to courageously reflect on death and let that reflection enrich how you go about your work as it is truly the stuff of our legacy. :-)

The Importance of How We Show Up!

2009-09-22T07:12:00.002-04:00

In our last post we talked about the importance of showing up and how such is 90% of life. This post I want to carry that logic forward with the idea that while showing up is important, how we show up is critical to the success of showing up itself.

Sometimes we are discouraged by the results we get when we show up not considering that how we showed up damaged our result, or kept us from benefiting from the result we got. (Is that proper grammar?)

I know that I struggle with this and as I have paid more attention to how I show up, I find I consistently have to commit to these "hows":

1. patiently persistent knowing that things take time, especially with people, and that any showing up is just the latest in a series, not the last, and so I chip away at barriers and put another arch in the bridge with every showing up

2. ready to add unique value from my "value toolbox", not battling to add value that someone else already is, but to be non-redundant in what I offer thus saving myself the angst of defensiveness and turf battles

3. enthusiastic (spirited & engaged), knowing that in that state of being, I dance with God, my allies, my competitors and the emerging situation to pull off the best possible performance

4. mindful of my own biases and tendencies, productive and not, regarding people and situations, so that I can apply the best, and discipline the worst, thus maximizing my contribution to progress

I am sure I can name more but I have places and people I have to show up for here shortly. :-)

Be well and by all means, add to this list by commenting at www.wiseworking.com.

PS - Also, please subscribe to WiseWorking's Facebook page (http://tinyurl.com/l78hoz) or Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/wiseworking) if you use these social media services.

Thanks!

The Importance of Showing Up!

2009-09-06T16:57:00.007-04:00

Woody Allen, the famous movie director, is most often attributed with the quote, "90% of life is showing up", and of course we know that the other 10% is followup. I have been thinking lately about those areas of my life where I am not showing up, and I am not even talking about how I show up. That is a topic for another post.

So often we take ourselves out of the game before we even start playing. We allow the risk of failure, or being embarrassed, or laziness, perfectionism, etc., to get in the way of our showing up when typically the worst thing that will happen is that we will learning something valuable.

Showing up takes many forms. It does not even always take alot of time and energy but it does take courage.

Its initiating that conversation about an opportunity you are only dreaming about but which you want to come to fruition.

Its making time to do research and then sharing your findings, verbally and in writing, to benefit others interested in the same type of opportunities.

Its volunteering your present expertise in a different project context in order to gain first hand experience with a potential opportunity.

Its offering your inquiries & insights in a social community, analog and digital, focused on the type of opportunities you are interested in.

Its rethinking and reengaging with that relationship or project that you failed with the last time you showed up.

In the interest of balance, we need to consider that being finite humans, we cannot show up for everything and everybody, thus it is important to be wise and selective about where we show up. Show up for those people and engagements that truly align to your deepest, critical values and priorities.

Take time today to consider where you have not shown up but need to for this is truly 90% of life. In some future post, we will ponder the topic of how we ought to show up.

The Price is Not Too High, the Value is Too Low

2009-09-01T06:38:00.002-04:00

In a world of "Everyday Low Prices" when the goal is to assure that every transaction is a bargain, like with anything, we can take this to an extreme where we transact for bargains that ultimately deliver shallow and inadequate value. In our work, we are all required to convince someone to purchase something of value from us (time, knowledge, contacts, outcome) at some price (salary/wages, fees, attention, membership). These are the elements of transaction. As you know, much haggling occurs in the transactional process as we weigh and negotiate to assure the lowest price for the highest corresponding value. We err when we allow these negotiations to focus too much on price (the more tangible and quantifiable element) rather than value.

The utterance, "that price is too high" is frequent but the fact is that people pay whatever price is asked for what they value and sometimes they will pay extra and brag that they did so; just look at military, legal services and luxury goods transactions. This "price too high" utterance is sweet in the mouth but bitter in the ear. When encountered, our opportunity is to detect and devise value propositions that warrant the price. Note that often the price does not have to change as much as the perception of the value being offered for that price. Unfortunately, we do not instinctively go for the "value build" because of its greater difficulty versus price lowering. We miss the point that the difficult has the advantage of not being easily imitated and by getting good at value building, we gain a significant competitive advantage in all we do.

When faced with the response, "the price is too high", whether we are talking about money, time or the risk of being trusted to get a job done, it behooves us to think first about what value justified the price, and if we have articulated this value thoroughly and compellingly enough. Such thinking better connects us with the valuable outcomes of our work taking us beyond a task to a valuable outcomes orientation. This is critical in an age where employers are more readily hiring for outcomes than for the completion of tasks. When developing your "value build" story, think not only in terms of what value is gained if your price is paid but also what is lost if the price is not paid. When articulating value, also remember there is more to it than money made or saved. There is time saved, service levels guaranteed, knowledge and experience levels leveraged, relationships gained, repaired and sustained, processes made more efficient, downtime reduced, projects well managed, etc.. Build value on as many dimensions as possible in order to warrant as high a price as possible.

So, let's begin to practice this different approach of looking for the "value build" when asking for others' investment in our work.

Thanks in advance for comments and further insights on this topic.

Translating Fear of Wrong Decisions to Learning From Wrong Decisions

2009-08-23T14:17:00.003-04:00

Yesterday during my morning walk, I was reading, yes on my iPhone, a Daily Om newsletter on Self-Determination. In reading, I came across a sentence that alluded to how we are stopped by the fear of wrong decisions. I know this is a common barrier for me, having been raised on the sanctity of right decisions, and the utter sinfulness of wrong ones. This is also a habit I witness overwhelmingly in my coachees. This fear of wrong decisions is a problem when taken too far, and especially when it robs us of learning and the opportunities that learning takes advantage of.

With adequate time to reflect, I think you would agree that there has been a rare decisions made which did not have a risk of being wrong, yet, we generally have made the decision, reaped the benefits of its rightness, and the learnings of its wrongness without the world or our lives coming to an end. In situations where we procrastinated endlessly, we neither benefited or learned from our procrastination. I acknowledge here that sometimes the best decision is to sit tight but even in those cases, we should decide deliberately, and without fear, thus reserving our energy to better adapt to and learn from whatever happens, right or wrong.

As I have more and more decisions behind me in life, I have have developed confidence in this method of investing my energy more in learning from, and adapting to, wrong decisions than in fearing them, as they are inevitable. I am not perfect at it but I improve with every mindful decision. I encourage this perspective in you also.

Remember, every decision has a risk of right and wrong in it. Celebrate the right and learn from the wrong, but do not be paralyzed by fear of the latter.

Watching our Work!

2009-08-15T19:52:00.010-04:00

Coming up on three years in my present job, I recently took inventory of my accomplishments of the past 3 years. This was not an easy or pleasant process but I found it insightful and encouraging once done. It occurred to me that I need to do this more often and possible more in real time than periodically. The fact is that we do our work too much in a mindless, for granted mode. This leads to our losing touch with it's purpose and effect in the world which can lead to feelings of disconnection, ennui, frustration, and waste. I know because I struggle with this, but also because I see this so often in my coaching, and particularly when I am asking about work histories as a part of the resume development and interview preparation process.

Too many are unfamiliar with, and unappreciative of, their work even as they do it. I say that work consumes entirely too much of one's life to justify this type disconnection and mindlessness. I think methods of mindfulness, appreciative inquiry and reflective writing can stand us in good stead in this practice of watching our work. These methods that help us to be present, curious and accountable in our work.

As I watch my work, it occurs to me that all my work can be nicely divided into 4 categories: tasks, relationships, collaborations and results. Tasks are what I do, relationships are who I know, collaboration synergizes the first two, and results are what the first 3 produce. These categories are useful as a framework for watching one's work, and even for planning improvement in my work from moment to moment, whether in my paid work, non-paid volunteer work, housework, family work or self work for that matter.

I mean to suggest here that we can 1) derive more meaning and enjoyment from our work, 2) a greater ability to articulate the process and results of our work and 3) purposeful development in our work if we were more mindful and appreciatively curious about our work and what we wanted it to produce in the world.

I encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity to watch your work. And, yes, please share how it benefits you.

Do It Anyway!

2009-08-10T07:12:00.003-04:00

I have been thinking alot this week about the Ten Paradoxical Commandments by Keith Kent. These commandments are encapsulated in a poem, Anyway which I have pasted below. I also dig the musical adaptation of this poem by the Roches from their album Zero Church. Take a read.

Anyway by Keith Kent

People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self centered

Forgive them anyway

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives
Be kind anyway

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies
Succeed anyway

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you
Be honest and frank anyway

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight
Build anyway

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous
Be happy anyway

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow
Do good anyway

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough
Give the world the best you've got anyway

You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God
It was never between you and them anyway

This poem moved me because it speaks to many of the paradoxical elements of work, indeed of life. It encourages us to do right and well for Purpose's sake regardless of others' action, inaction, support or opposition. So often we allow our motivation to be tied to others. We renege on obligations to pursue our purpose because others react in neutral or negative ways.

This poem reminds us that in our work we should expect opposition, jealousy, destruction, selfishness, betrayal, unreasonableness, illogic, ulterior motives & enemies. This being as it is, we should not allow any of these barriers & violations to distract us from our purpose. Weshould do what we are here to do ANYWAY! That's rich! It reminds me of a favorite Biblical reference, Colossians 3:23-24: Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. A more liberal, secular translation might say, work as though I am working for the Purpose at hand knowing that such achievement is its own reward.

Take stock of purposes you have given up on because of barriers, violations or opposition. Recommit & get back in action on these purposes ANYWAY!

Don't Call The Game Before Its Over

2009-08-03T12:28:00.002-04:00

This week I want to encourage you to play the game until its over and not to call it lost before it is over. This is something I see too often in my coaching. People who bail out of an opportunity psychologically and emotionally before they do through research and get advise, who won't apply for a job they because they are not 100% qualified (when no one every is), who won't stay focused through an entire (multiple) interview because they anticipate that they will not get an offer, who lose raises, better assignment & promotions in organizations because they will not do research and lobby for the opportunity. I like to advise these individuals "not to call the game before its over". So many of life's opportunities are lost due to such lack of discipline and persistence and over use of negative speculation.

I will be the first to admit that even I do not always take the advice I am giving here. I will further admit that some games do need to be called before over if you judge you are too far behind in the score in order to put that time and energy into other games where you have an chance of winning. The fact is that you can only play so many games simultaneously well, and that you cannot win every game. That said, I believe we can win more than we do with more emotional, psychological and relational discipline & persistence and less negative speculation. One is never relieved from the task of judgement & risk-taking.

Over time, as I have grown and matured, I have become relatively better at "playing through to the end of the game". Below I share a number of devices that help me when I am up against my own fatigue in the middle, or even at the beginning of a game.

1. Emotional mindfulness is needed as most bailing out happens first at an emotional level which affects our thinking then our actions. Being aware of my emotional states at the time I bail out helps me to better diagnose what is going on and to recommit. I have to continually remind myself that feelings are not facts.

2. Regain perspective by testing reality with others is a critical use of my mentors and colleagues. I can be prone to being myopic and overwhelmed at times and losing both big picture and long term perspective relative to my goals. Running situations by trusted advisors to test my view of reality is a big help which helps me to remember why I am really playing the game and why I need to stay committed to finishing it.

3. Recommitment to love and fearlessness is important because we are always operating from one of these positions or other. Fear is negative, selfish and exhausting. Love is positive, service-oriented and energizing. When I am ready to bail out for no good reason, I know that I have disconnected from love and plugged into fear. I also know that I have a choice to reverse this connection.

4. Be patient & persistent as every game is longer and takes more effort to win than initially envisioned. With this in mind, I learn not to be surprised or demoralized when this fact presents itself.

5. Research the game I am playing, its players and rules, so that I can get better at it knowing that no one is good at any game at the beginning but anyone can get good with good observation and practice. This occurs through the methods of reading, case studies, networking, role-playing, shadowing, etc..

6. Access the resource needed to finish the game is critical as we can often find that we did not know of al the resources we needed when we started playing. This is part of research and learning, not an excuse for bailing out. As we learn, we adapt to get those resources we find we need whether they be education, experience, time, relationships or even money. I intentionally put money last because we often think it most important when in fact it is least important as the aforementioned resources are what get you to money.

7. Overcoming the barriers to winning as this is the essential element that makes a game a game. If we have an intention of love, it can also be the most satisfying element of playing any game. It is critical to understanding and anticipating our internal and external barriers to winning and planning for how we will overcome them as a part of the suggestions mentioned earlier.

So, let's look at the important games we have called too earlier, meditate on the methods mentioned above, and recommit to winning those games. And yes, please do share how this works for you.

Moonlighting: Unidle Hands in the Evening (and on the Weekends)

2009-07-25T09:49:00.005-04:00

One of my favorite Bible scriptures is Eccl. 11.7, "Sow your seed in the morning, and at evening let not your hands be idle, for you do not know which will succeed, whether this or that, or whether both will do equally well."

I like scripture's admonition to avoid idle hands in the evening as you never know if evening and weekend activities will become as successful as what you do during the day. This lack of idle hands during the evening (and weekends) is what we call "moonlighting". I am often dismayed by the amount of spare time people invest with life activities that neglect the development and contribution of their gifts. Days, then weeks, then months, then years, then decades, go by sometimes and they cultivate the easy habits of acquisitiveness and consuming rather than the more challenging and rewarding habits of developing and contributing. We then wonder why we are poor in talent, achievement, pocket, relations and impact.

We are all gifted but like with faith, gifts are dead without works (practice). Having witnessed such lost opportunity, I often urge my coachees to spend more of their evenings, weekends and and days, if they are unemployed, working on projects that use and cultivate their talents of delight. I encourage them to to do this on a volunteer or paid basis, and to put this experience immediately on their resumes as it helps them qualify for better opportunities in their present and next jobs. Such investment also plants the seeds of possible businesses that generate alternate streams of income.

I stress the importance of starting immediately and committing to practicing consistently over time in order to develop a level of mastery and a good reputation among the customers of their gifts. I relate how I started teaching when I was 27, and career coaching about the age of 35, on a moonlighting basis. In the 16 and 8 years I have been practicing these in the evenings on weekends, (and even within my day jobs), I have gained a degree of mastery, a reputation and an alternate stream of income. This moonlighting has allowed me to contribute my talents of delight, teaching and coaching, and provided me with more pleasure (and income for that matter) than the easier tasks of acquisition and consumption of entertainment, sports, shopping, etc. that too many of us are too prone to using our evenings and weekends for.

Let's all heed the admonition of Eccl.11.7 and consider how moonlighting can enhance your career and life. And as always, please do share examples of how you have used moonlighting in this way if you have.

Being Confidently Unsure

2009-07-13T15:45:00.000-04:00

We all profess that we do not know everything. For sure, there will always be instances where we are asked a question that stumps us. That said, I think its important to remember that there is a difference between "not knowing" and acting as though we are "incompetent because we do not know". The former is reasonable and proper, the latter is unnecessary and potentially damaging.

A mentor once taught me that "you do not need to know everything as long as you know who knows, or where the answer can be found." Consideration of this axiom is critical if you want to develop the ability to be "confidently unsure". Often I encounter people who don't know something, which is one thing, but then they are viscerally ashamed and unnerved by the fact that they do not know as though they additionally lack confidence in the fact that they are resourceful enough to find the answer. This always tempts me to doubt their competence. I wish that this person were more skillful in: 1) simply expressing that they do not know, 2) expressing why they do not, 3) assuring me they will find the answer, and how, and 5) engaging me in a collaborative discussion about my suggestions for how they might find the answer.

Understand that as say this, I have compassion as this is hard-developed skill on my part. I internalized from my upbringing that I should always know the answer to every question, and that not knowing was a sign of stupidity or laziness revealed as a lack of preparation. I have matured to understand that this is not the case, though I still struggle with this at an emotional level at times. I have learned to reframe to understand that "no one has every answer but everyone has almost all the answers" and that it is better to maintain the posture of the "curious student" who can learn more than the "incompetent" who should have known it all.

Additionally, I now accept that those who think I am stupid are going to think that no matter how many answers I can produce. They will even make my correct, answers out to be wrong because they are not into giving benefit of any doubt. That is more about them than me. These types will always be with me. It is part of being in the world. It is just a test that can be passed, so its good to let this go.

So all that said, let's study to be more "confidently unsure". If you do not know, own up to it. That is a part of your humanity. Assure people you can find the answer and even collaborate with them to get suggestions on how you might. This is a mark of resourcefulness, a key success skill. Be accountable to find the answer in the timeframe and format you committed to. Do not vaccillate, dissemble, give shaky body language, be overly apologetic, or self condemning. Doing this inspires others to worry about whether you can find the answer. Even if you really cannot find the answer after all your searching, you can confidently own up to that by being ready with an explanation of all the methods, contacts and resources you used in trying. This shows the effort you put in and will often trigger some memory in the person you are engaging which then helps you do get closer to an answer.

Be confident even when you are unsure!

We Can Make It, But Not Alone!

2009-06-26T20:39:00.014-04:00

Over many years of working and coaching, I have grown to appreciate more and more, the importance of cultivating and participating in networks and communities of interest and practice, both formal and informal. I am also concerned with how often I see such networks and communities underestimated and neglected by those I coach. There is a Bible passage which accentuates this point. Eccl. 4:10, For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. Its so plain, there is really not much more to be said than that.

In a career, it is important to understand the networks and communities one can cultivate and be a productive contributor to. You will notice that I stress contribution here as too often we are not able to benefit from networks and communities when we are down because we did not contribute anything to them when we were up. This is difficult for many people because they lack a sense of what they have to offer and/or fear being taken advantage of if they should offer. Though everyone has something to offer, knowledge of such and willingness to get past our fear and ego to offer, is a challenge we must all grapple with. I believe that if we viewed networks and communities as insurance policies (of sorts) and development schools (for sure), we would grapple less and contribute more. Again, so much is about how you see it.

All along a career path, we need people to refer and vouch for us, to advise and train us, to encourage and push us, to pull us up when we have breakdowns and setbacks. Such accountability partners are critical to our reaching our potential. I have achieved so much more in my own career than I had originally conceived I would because of the networks, communities and accountability partners I have been exposed to. I am grateful for this and I am more willing all the time to give what I have gained back to these contributors to my success. It good not to forget where we have been as we may be going back down that way any day now.

When we contemplate our giftedness and how we will contribute it in the world, it is important to remember that any gift disconnected from a network and community that needs it will remain relatively undeveloped and fruitless. As we understand and develop our giftedness, we must commit to contributing it to networks and communities that value it. It is with, and through, this network that we: 1) make contribution, 2) receive support and encouragement 3) gain development opportunities and 4) earn compensation, both monetary and non-monetary.

So I end as I started. We can make it in the world and in our careers, but not alone.

Delaying Gratification: Key To Success & Antidote for Procrastination

2009-06-14T03:58:00.005-04:00

As a career coach, you can imagine that the questions of attaining success and overcoming procrastination come up a lot. I would dare say that the former is the primary reason people approach me and the latter is a primary barrier to the former.

For years I have subscribed to the idea that procrastination can be attributed to perfectionism in that we delay in starting things because we fear we cannot do them perfectly. Lately though I have appended this impression with the thought that procrastination can also be attributed to an unwillingness to delay gratification. This came to me while recently contemplating my past readings of M. Scott Peck where he talks about the inability to delay gratification as a barrier to maturity and the TEDTalk presentation by Joachim de Posada where he asserts the link between delayed gratification and life success.

As I ponder these discussions and thought about my own struggle with procrastination, I realized that every time I procrastinate, I am filling that space with some activity or thought that gratifies me more than the activity or thought I should be more committed to doing NOW. An example for me would be catching up with friends on FaceBook when I should be working on the manuscript of my first WiseWorking book. It is not that catching up on FaceBook is bad but that it is inappropriate at the time that I had budgeted for writing my book. A time for every activity and every activity in its time. It is ultimately my unwillingness to delay my FaceBook gratification that results in the procratination that results in my book not being completed.

What gratifications are you prioritizing today which are resulting in procrastination about other critical life goals you have? Identify these gratifications and box them within certain time frames in your week that allow you to enjoy them with they growing like weeds in to other time periods during your week when you should be pursuing critical life goals like developing a new skill, cultivating a relationship, exercising, studying, volunteering, etc.. This is where your future success lies and procrastination is the barrier so practice delaying (not eliminating) gratification in order to stop delaying reaching your success.

You Can't Sell What you Don't Have. Sell What You Have, Not What You Don't!

2009-06-07T18:24:00.004-04:00

One of the most common and consistent phenomenon I come across when coaching people is the tendency to be more articulate about their deficiency and lack of qualification, experience, education, relationship, etc., than about their abundance of the qualification, experience, education, relationship, etc. they have. It is as though they imagine that their lack and deficiency is what I want to know about when I, much like their potential employers and clients, are not interested either. I tell them that, "you cannot sell what you do not have" and I encourage them to stop talking about their deficiencies, to reframe, and then to tell me about their abundance and giftedness.

This demand is most always met with false modesty, blank stares, perplexity, etc.. I do not marvel at this. I am patient with it. That said, I discourage it as unproductive and useless in the game of inspiring the confidence in others that yield job and project offers, and ultimately a meaningful career. Instead, I encourage and challenge my coachees to identify what they have to offer rather than what they do not. I then refuse to accept any self-deprecatory or apologetic statements which highlight their deficiencies rather than their abundance.

Certainly there is a time and a place for talk of deficiencies, or areas of development, but not before, or more readily than, the conversation about areas of giftedness and strength. Remember that few others are likely to have more confidence in our gifts than we and that, most are more willing to remember our acclaimed deficiences, especially when we highlight them, than to guess at our strengths, especially when we do not articulate them well. Most importantly, remember that we ourselves are the most influenced audience of our own speech and thoughts, and as such, we do ourselves the greatest disservice of all when we continually sell ourselves what we do not have versus what we do.

Here I need to invoke one of my favorite quotes, "Watch what you practice as everything improves with practice."

Be well and sell what you have.

Planning Your Life Mission: The 1 Hour Workshop

2009-05-24T23:09:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I spent an hour with a group of single young people aged, 18-24, talking about the importance of their understanding, planning and following through on their Life's Mission. I also offered a process for how they might to this planning and follow through. I am including the discussion guide I used in the link below.

Singles @ Csc Making Your Plan (For Slide Share) 5 22 09

View more PDF documents from Craig Delarge.

I recorded the session and you can download it at: files.me.com/cadelarge/nvqphr.mp3 .

The point made in this session, and some came up serendipitously, were:

1. Ride the horse (opportunity & situation) you are on rather than wanting/praying for another,

2. Show up for the course that God has signed you up for. Don't sleep in,

3. Because life is full of breakdowns and broken commitments (in ourselves and others), cultivate a habit of "recommitting" to service,

4. That emotional intelligence and maturity, and especially courage (the ability to act in the face of fear), are critical projects in achieving one's life mission,

5. That careers are prepared for, as much as they are planned,

6. That feelings are not facts, so we must watch against feelings as a sabotaging factor in pursuing our mission,

7. That the care and feeding, not killing, of enemies is a key skillset in pursuing mission,

8. That it is as critical to love oneself, as to love your neighbor, as you cannot care for others best if you are not caring for yourself well,

9. That you can achieve your mission, but you cannot achieve it by yourself. Missions succeed in communities,

10. About the importance of going for breadth and variety of experience early in your career to create foundation and choice later in your career, and

11. That it takes 20 years to create and overnight success and that this day's discussion was only first of a running discussion I hoped to have with these young people, individually and collectively over the next 20 years as they plan and execute their life's mission.

It was a good and blessed time.

Its Not "Either/Or" but "Both/And"!

2009-05-16T19:09:00.006-04:00

In my coaching practice, with myself and others, I often come across what I call "either/or thinking" where one sees that they have too few and mutually exclusive options available to them. Such an approach puts us in a box, overly narrows our sense of realistic possibility, discourages us, and keeping us from our potential.

A good mentor of mine once taught me to practice an alternative to "either/or" thinking, which she called "both/and" thinking. Such thinking considers many options and considers that most options have the potential to be taken in combination with, or in succession to, other options. This thinking broadens our sense of possibility in the present, and in the future. It also encourages and draws us toward our full potential.

Getting from one way of thinking to the other requires the habit of reframing. A few good examples of reframing to "and/both" thinking, I can readily recall are:

Once in a workshop I was asking a young lady about her career aspirations and she related that she wanted to be an auto mechanic and a writer. She lamented that these aspirations confused her as they were unrelated. She felt torn because she saw them as an "either/or". I helped her to reframe to understand that they were in fact a "both/and" as the auto (correction: transportation) industry made huge use of writers spanning from technical to journalistic to marketing. She was stunned as she had never thought of these as possibilities. This reframe allowed her to see the broader number of possibilities available to her in her areas of passion, auto mechanics and writing.

In a recent phone coaching session, I talked with a communications professional looking to apply her talents in a similar role, though different organizational setting within her present industry. Unfortunately her selected role/organization/industry "value contribution target" is shrinking in number. She saw that either she would nail a job in her selected "value contribution target", or she would be locked out of all desirable options. In our further discussion, we were able to jointly reframe in such a way that we expanded the scope of the target industry in a way she had not thought about. Breaking out of this industry box brought on an "and/both" epiphany for her as she understood that she had too narrowly defined her "value contribution target". She left our conversation energized and more hopeful about her career search possibilities.

Personally, I had been plagued for many years of my career with the dilemma of my simultaneous desire for the scale of Corporate America and the freedom and nimbleness of entrepreneurship. I used to burn up a lot of unproductive energy performing in one environment while pining away for the other. I am thankful that I have reframed this from an "either/or" to a "both/and". I have learned to perform as an "intrapreneur" who helps healthcare corporations venture into the use of new media & marketing communications models to service their and their customers' interests. This role has been an "and/both" situation for me. I had not so much planned this as stumbled into it as I have worked, over years, to pursue my passions and continually rediscover my "sweet spot" within the organizations I have worked for.

So as you go about your life, watch this tendency to put yourself in an "either/or" box and practice reframing to keep yourself progressively more in an "and/both" frame of mind.

Please share examples of where you have been successful with this reframing and be in touch if you need assistance with this for yourself.

Honoring my (Working) Mothers on Mother's Day.

2009-05-09T13:59:00.003-04:00

In honor of Mother's Day, I have been thinking about the influence of my mothers in shaping me as a worker. I have several mothers, my natural mom, my godmom, and 3 grandmothers, 2 of which survive to this day.

My earliest memories of my grandmothers is seeing them working, one worked outside the home, as a visiting nurse, and the other in the home as a housewife. Both always diligent, good at their respective crafts, make a contribution, not griping but committed to doing what they did well. I'm always inspired by them when I consider the decades of work they have put in to build our family, and in an age of racial and gender discrimination. Over the years of my career I have had many talks with them about their work and my career and witnessed their pride and amazement at opportunities I've gotten. I have always been struck by how it never occurred to them, in their time, to go to college, or to work in a company or industry with a well plotted career track, or to expect promotions every few years, all things I, too often ungratefully, take for granted. After these discussions I am always 1) humbled by the thought of how they have done so much in their lives with so much less than I have, 2) motivated to honor their work in my own work, 3) proud of the progress we have made as a society in allowing more opportunity for more of our members today than we used to, 4) grateful for their example which has helped me to get to where I am in life, and 5) challenged (if not shamed into) being ever more grateful for all the blessings of my work and career.

Now my other mothers, natural and god, were the mothers who made me work in addition to being good models of work. I can barely remember a time in my life when I have not worked. My mother always had work for me to do and while I have not always been happy about it, I see now that this has been one of the influences that has most contributed to my success. Her regimen provided discipline for me, tied up time which if idle might have ended me up in irreversible trouble, developed my skills, cultivated my work ethic, attention to details and project management skills, instilled confidence in my ability to learn and to overcome adversity, and put me in a habit that has made all the difference in my life and that of my family. I still often reflect on my first day of work (outside the house) when my mother stopping me at the door and reminded me to, "make sure you double check all your work and that you do a good job.". I also recall the day when I thought I was visiting my god mother to relax away from my parents only to find that I, along with my god siblings, were being enlisted to do Spring Cleaning. Painful, at the time. :-)

So on this Mother's Day weekend, I take time to reflect on the best "work" learnings I have gleaned from my mothers:

1. Plan your work well. Think about what you need to do before doing it. Plan ahead and do not wait until the last minute.

2. Double check your work. Pay attention to details. Your work reflects you and its your reputation. When you do your work, do it right!

3. Keep your word, period. (By the way, you were not given a choice of giving your word or not and you were expected to keep it whether you cared to or not.)

4. Take advantage of every opportunity. Collectively, they made me to understand that I come from a family of "survivors" who know how to make "something out of nothing", how to overcome any adversity with God's help, how to see opportunity that all around me where others may only see problems.

5. Remember your work builds on the hard(er) work of those who have come before. Everytime I reflect on my mothers of crueler past generations, I am grateful to them for bearing the hard(er) work that makes my work today relatively easier.

6. Enjoy your work today because you will not always be able to. In my recent visit with my octogenarian grandmothers, I note that they both bemoan the fact that age has robbed them of their ability to work as easily and as much as when they were younger. This reminded me that everything I have I will lose one day and that I must enjoy what I have today all the more because of that.

These insights and experiences of my mothers have made me the professional I am and I am eternally grateful to them for that. I write this because I want my children, extended family, bosses, reports, and organizations to understand how my mothers have benefited them also. :-)

So on this Mother's Day, reflect on the influence your mothers have had in shaping you into the worker you are and be grateful while expressing such gratefulness to them, whether they are still with you or not.

Happy Mother's Day!

Maintaining Your "Sweet Spot" in the Midst of "The Restructuring"

2009-04-26T16:26:00.008-04:00

So by now most of us either have been or know someone who has been swept up in "The Restructuring" "The Restructuring" is the change going on in the job market where one year you are relevant and needed in a given organization and then suddenly not. Such restructuring does not mean that you are not valuable but that the "sweet spot" where your value is relevant has shifted. Such a shift happen in the context of organization, industry, network, problem set, geographic location, etc.. Wherever the shift occurs for you the point is that you have to stay nimble and aware so you can migrate your value to the new sweet spot that every restructuring" naturally creates. Too many of us believe our value is in a job, title or organization when, in fact, our value is in our education, experience, skills, networks and knowledge. That value creates what we need, in terms of money and other benefits, when matched to a need that organizations and customer have. This intersection is what I refer to as the "sweet spot".

I have been getting lots of call from colleagues lately asking for insights on how to recapture their "sweet spots" in the midst of "The Restructuring" and here is what I have given in the way of advice:

1. Reorganize your resume around skills versus jobs. We have been taught to organize our resumes by job, but the fact is that skills and results are more critical these days than a list of jobs and responsibilities. Job-based resumes make potential employers work too hard to find your value. Organize by the skills from target job description you are applying to so you are pinpointing your value against what the employer is specifically looking for. Use the job responsibilities from the job chronology of your resume under relevant skill in the skills section of your resume and include results with as many of those responsibilities as possible. Include your job chronology in a section of your resume after your skills and results. This is a very difficult exercise but it will make your resume stand up and sing while also preparing you to interview better as you will have your skills and results top of mind.

2. Look for projects in addition to jobs. The employed, even temps, get jobs faster than the unemployed. Its an unfair bias but one nonetheless. When restructured, stay employed, even if self-employed. Often when an organization does not have a job for you, they can offer you a project as a contractor. Go for jobs, but do not neglect projects. Until you get a job, projects get you income, keep you in circulation, and put you closer to a job than those who are unemployed otherwise.

3. Identify what you have of value and give it away relentlessly to those who value it. Know your gifts, resources and value. Know who values your gifts and resources. Get good at matching the two. Be a go-giver.

4. Be relevantly differentiated. Know your unique value proposition (UVP). You must stand out in the crowd. If you are not differentiated on the basis of your UVP, you are lost in the memory and perception of others. People must know you as a above average provider in the area of your competence. You must learn to communicate this, and to those who care as well as those who know those who care. This is called "Personal Branding" and is a critical skill in today's career market.

5. Be relevantly ubiquitous. When you nail down your UVPs, be everywhere that UVP is relevant. Meet the other experts. Offer your expertise and service in those relevant communities of practice. Speak at relevant conferences and forums. Write articles & comment on blogs, book & videos in the area of your UVP. Engage in online forums where relevant discussions are going on. Do research which adds to the field of knowledge. Develop your thought leadership! Practice the "go-giver" principle! Remember the greater blessing of giving! As you do this, you will tip into the projects and jobs you desire in the area of your UVP.

6. Cultivate your referral network. Who you know is important, but the network of those you know is even more so. Know who in your network knows who, and what organizations they are associated with. Ask for connections and referrals, more than for jobs. People can offer more of the former than the latter.

Please feel free to comment adding other suggestions you have in addition to these for how we can all stay nimble and in our "sweet spots" during this current "Restructuring".

Knowing & Telling Your Value Story

2009-04-12T22:07:00.003-04:00

Recently in my "Natural Gifts" class, I engaged my students in a discussion about their value at work. I asked them if they understood the value their respective jobs contributed to the organizations they worked for. I was not surprised to see the blank stares. Unfortunately, this is too often the case. Most of us do not give thought to this question day to day, nor are we able to articulate our contributed value to our management, peers, reports or prospective employers.

I challenged each of them to consider why their organizations should not get rid of them and what would be lost if their jobs (or they) were eliminated. This is important and critical! I explained that every role in an organization must:

1) generate revenue or savings of time, money or relationships,

2) reduce/control costs, or

3) improve effectiveness or efficiency of processes or relationships.

If we do not know and cannot talk about our value in these, or other terms, we are in trouble in organizations of today, whether public or private sector, for profit or non-profit, or management or non-management.

To avoid this trouble, it is critical that we know our value in all the organizations we are members of, and that we are able to tell a compelling story about this value. This makes our present positions more secure, and in the case where we have to go, we are able to better conduct "value conversations" which open the door to our next opportunities.

For more on this, read my past blog post, Interviews As A Value Conversation.

My Unintended Social Media Education Strategy?

2009-03-29T07:42:00.007-04:00

You might be familiar with the idea that very action has an unintended consequence. Well, this week I discovered another of mine when a connection on LinkedIn asked me about how I went about managing my presence in social communities. I had not really given this much thought until I settled down to answer this question.

In past posts you have heard me allude to social media as me "graduate school class", "community center" and "a training & development tool" and this value continues to grow for me as both give and receive value in these venue. I find, owing to how I am "fearfully & wonderfully made" (Ps. 139:14), that I am a natural teacher & student. As such, I am gratified to use social media as an extended and ongoing university where I can exercise this role within a broader community.

Below is the reply I wrote to my inquiring LinkedIn connection. It is round about but I hope it helps you in some way as you too think about how you can leverage social media for your own purposes whether university, employment office, corner (like in the old neighborhood) where you enjoyed good times with friends, etc.
_______________________________

My social media methods include:

1. blogging on www.wiseworking.com, facebook.com, www.eyeforpharma.com and twitter about the topics of meaningful working & careering, social media, health games, healthcare marketing, etc., all topics I am passionate about,

2. keeping and sharing my delicious bookmark links (which autofeed into Facebook and Plaxo) up to date with just about everything I am researching online,

3. keeping status updates in Facebook, Linkedin, Plaxo and Twitter (which autofeed into my Plaxo newsfeed) with just bout everything beneficial I am thinking or research and doing so from my laptops, Blackberry and iPhone,

4. joining relevant communities and subgroups in Facebook, Ning, CollectiveX and other relevant social communities online, and keeping these lists as delicious bookmark lists by interest area so I can find them easily. (Here is an example of what I mean for mental illness: http://delicious.com/cadelarge/mentalhealthcommunity),

5. making relevant counter comments with resource links in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & Plaxo and using my delicious bookmarks as a way of being able to very quickly find these resources,

6. posting relevant content on my SlideShare and YouTube Channels which I then feature as blog posts. (See http://wiseworking.blogspot.com/2009/03/finding-your-natural-gifts-1-day.html and http://wiseworking.blogspot.com/2009/03/storytelling-critical-success-factor-in.html),

7. keeping a collection of all my portfolio pieces at http://delicious.com/cadelarge/cadelarge_portfolio for easy reference and sharing,

Read the following and email me to discuss further if you like:
http://wiseworking.blogspot.com/2008/01/on-using-wwwlinkedincom.html

http://wiseworking.blogspot.com/2009/01/facebook-community-center-graduate.html

http://wiseworking.blogspot.com/2008/07/on-using-twitter.html

http://wiseworking.blogspot.com/2008/08/on-using-delicious-social-bookmarks.html

http://wiseworking.blogspot.com/2008/08/ipoditunes-training-development-tool.html

_____________________________________

By the way, all this seems to be a collection of disparate activities I enjoy more than a strategy until I wrote it all down and looked at it. Again, I hope this is beneficial to you. As always, if you have additional strategies you use, please comment here to help others who are working to figure our how to benefit from social media.

Storytelling: A Critical Success Factor in wise working?

2009-03-22T09:29:00.003-04:00

While in my Design Management MBA graduate program, I cultivated an interest in storytelling and how it works in personal and organizational relations. I subsequently completed my master's thesis in this area, exploring the question of whether storytelling is a critical success factor in (client/consultant) relationships. Recently, I has the occasion to present this research at the Drexel University i-School, I thought you might enjoy seeing the video of my lecture as well as the slides which I used.

The video can be found at: http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/video#56

The slides are below:

Storytelling Dissertation Slides 2 24 09 (For Drexel I School)

View more presentations from Craig Delarge.

A few important takeaways from this talk are:

1. We use stories to make sense of experience, indeed the world revolves around stories and we underestimate this to our disadvantage.

2. Stories are an important tool in educating (transferring knowledge), influencing the culture of our relationships & organizations, managing conflict, communicating vision, demonstrating leadership and establishing brands (especially your personal brand).

3. Storytelling is an art form we should all study and strengthen as anyone can learn its use and its ill-use damages us and our relationships with ourselves and others.

4. "Story listening" is at least as important as storytelling as it offers a window into the world of others and improves our ability to empathize with and serve others be that at work, home or otherwhere.

5. Stories can be used as an "evidence of service". Often our lack of knowing/telling good stories about our contribution keeps us from achieving many of our goals at work and in our careers.

6. Storytelling can be risky requiring sincerity, empathy, thought, planning and an understanding of the audience. Study storytelling and your audience so that it does not backfire on you.

There are many good books on this topic but the most broadly comprehensive I have seen is Denning's, "The Leader's Guide to Storytelling".

As always, I would love to hear examples of where you have used storytelling to advantage in your wise working.

Cultivating Customers versus Employers

2009-03-10T08:19:00.003-04:00

Recently in a session of my "Finding Your Natural Gifts" class, the topic of new workplace paradigms came up. One of the point we discussed was the need to get better at gathering customers versus employers. Most of us were raised on the idea that we need to get a good employer who would pay us well enough. This idea is becoming less relevant as we see a shift towards intermittent versus lifeling employment where we are as secure as our latest project & results, reskilling is necessary on an ongoing basis and one's network is as at least as important as one's company.

I once worked for a man who told me that I should cultivate customers & clients more than employers as there is safety in diversity. His point was that if I am fired by 1 employer I am in a jam but if I am fired by 1 of multiple customers, I have other customers to tide me over until I replace the one I lost. His direct point is that it is better to be a business owner than an employer. For those of us who prefer to be employees, there is an indirect point and that is that even with one employer, we need to develop diverse groups of customers within, and without, our employer organizations. The word customer derives from "custom," meaning "habit"; a customer is someone who frequents a particular supplier to the point of it being a habit. We should ask who is in the habit of coming to us for value?

We need to constantly assess our value and who values it. Every person who values our value is a customer, whether an individual, group or oganization. When discovering these customers, we need to plan how we can get to know and serve these customers. In getting to know them, we need to design and offer increasingly better solutions they value, and in exchange for this value offered, we need to derive the incomes of attention, word of mouth and money. It is this cultivation of customers that gives us the diversity that represents security in these turbulent economic times.

Take this to heart and mind and do share how you are acting on this insight.

Finding Your Natural Gifts: The 1 Day Workshop

2009-03-01T07:59:00.006-05:00

Twice a year I teach a one day seminar at my church, Christian Stronghold Church, in Philadelphia, PA. It is an abridged version of a 12 week course I teach in our Church Bible Institute. It is called "Finding Your Natural Gifts: Becoming A Maximum Income Earner".

This workshop examines how we are all gifted but largely ignorant about, and in denial of those gifts. It addresses the importance of connecting our gifts to some need in the world as a means of earning a maximum income both in financial, social and spiritual terms.

It calls the student to engage in a series of personal and social explorations from Kise, Jones & other sources, to search out, identify and act on their life mission which is tied to Bolles "3 Pillars of Mission", namely, 1) talents of delight, 2) places & settings of appeal and 3) purposes that resonate.

The explorations are related to one's interests, personality, values, natural aptitudes, learning style, life narrative, passions, priorities and barriers. With every exploration, one gains a richer picture of who they are, how they are gifted and what they have to offer in exchange for income.

This workshop is always a tremendous blessing to deliver and has never ceased to teach me something new about my own giftedness in the close to 8 years I have been teaching it.

Below are the slides from this workshop. Enjoy and please reach to me if you want to discuss further:

Finding Your Natural Gifts (1 day seminar) 2 28 09

View more presentations from cadelarge. (tags: career gifts)

Volunteering as a Path to a Better or Different Career.

2009-02-22T06:05:00.001-05:00

Earlier this week, a Facebook colleague, messaged me to ask how he might help out more in the community and asked for some suggestions and this is what fell out of me in a stream of consciousness. I thought it would be helpful to you.

1. Start with a faith community you are member of if you are. This is way of investing where you can also get help when you need it.

2. Focus on problem or evil you have passion for. I do lots of career coaching because I fear the evils of poverty and meaningless work.

3. Invest $ in enabling the volunteership of others. I invest in World Vision and tithe at my church for over 20 years now as this enables others.
4. Consistency over time is more important than lots of time at any given point. I have been a volunteer career coach at my church for over 6 years now.

5. Look to serve on a board given your high education and skill level. I serve on a local NAMI board as my son is mentally ill.

6. Engage children & family to multiply the effect as well as to model this life habit for them. I have created skill & resume development opps for my daughter as she works with NAMI and in ministry in our church

7. Volunteer in areas related to your personal and professional development to kill multiple birds with 1 stone. I work at social media, communications and leadership development in my volunteering which I take back to work.

I am a proponent of volunteering as a way to 1) build skills & experience, 2) grow your network, 3) obtain references and resume entries, 4) experiment with career options. I am always amazed at how much my coachees either neglect volunteering as a career opportunity or they volunteer and do not see it as a part of their career.

Please share examples of how you have or plan to use volunteering as the path to a better or different career.

Every Word & Thought Into Captivity (Discipline)

2009-02-07T17:54:00.002-05:00

I often think about how as God formed the cosmos by His Words, so we form our "personal" world, and in the case of leaders, the "society" by our words. It is important to note that I am talking about words, whether they be thought, uttered or acted. All three forms of words, create the world. One can even say that the world, as we know it, is in such sad shape as a result of our undisciplined and unskillful thinking, speaking and acting.

One of my favorite scriptures in the Protestant Bible, though not used nearly consistently enough by enough Christians, is 2 Corinthians 10.5 which says, "Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ." When applying this scripture to the point of creating a productive and whole life work, and by extension society, through disciplined thinking, speaking and actions, this scripture continually instructs me that whenever I have a thought that is not aligned with the spirit of love, (w)holiness, grace, compassion and other positive values that are consistent with Christ's model and God's knowledge, I am to bring it into captivity. That is, not welcome and accept is as truth, or even tolerate it as benign, but take it into custody and exile it. I am reminded what when I do not do this, my mind, and eventually my speech and actions are then captivated by all sorts of undisciplined and counterproductive themes that result in the creation of a world that neither I, nor my neighbor, wants. A world that we can see all around us everyday.

In my daily observance of myself and those I coach, I see the consequences of our not being mindful of the need to bring every thought into obedience to the Truth, and the painful realities it creates both in our inner and outer worlds. And all because we underestimate the degree to which the thoughts we accept as truth impact the words and actions that create the world we live in. Whatever belief system you are loyal to, I think here we have a universally useful admonition to be disciplined in our thinking, words and actions to assure we are creating the world we intend, versus the one we might unintentionally produce otherwise.

Assuming Innocence: My Relationship Salve & Blood Pressure Medication?

2009-02-01T18:57:00.005-05:00

About a year ago my boss introduced me to the idea of "assuming innocence". It is another term for "giving benefit of the doubt" and being a sucker for words, I immediately jelled to it. I like it because it called out for me how much I and those around me assume guilt so often in our relations with others at work and elsewhere. The disposition of assumed guilt or innocence is indeed an indicator of the level of trust in relationship and where guilty assumption exists there is work to do.

I find that in practicing assumed innocence as a default, I:

1. check up to disprove the information that would seem to make one guilty and do not assign guilt until the information cannot be disproven,

2. find it easier to approach people in the spirit of good will and "win/win" which in turn makes it harder for others to be defensive, and especially when they (or I, for that matter) are at fault,

3. am less likely to spin off (in my mind and emotions) into any number of negative speculations and conspiracy theories that naturally accompany "assumed guilt" yield a benefit of clearer mind, relaxed body and lower blood pressure,

4. am making steady deposits into the "emotional bank accounts" which underpin "hi-trust relationships" that I will have to draw against in times of inevitable, though constructive, conflict.

I call assumed innocence my "relationship salve" because it does what salves do, it heals. It is my "blood pressure medication" because indignation over assuming others are guilty is the one thing that raises my blood pressure from moment to moment more than anything else. I am sure this attitude will save me dozens of relationships and dozens of thousands of dollars over the rest of my life. It will also improve my chances of making millions by way of strong productive relationships and good cardiovascular and mental/emotional health over the rest of my life. Talk about attitude as medicine!

FaceBook: Community Center & Graduate School?

2009-01-25T18:04:00.001-05:00

By now most of us know Facebook (FB), the popular online social community, is beyond early adoption and into the mainstream as an social phenomenon. For some it has become a lifestyle. When you hear about FB, you typically get the impression that it is just a place where college kids and young professionals hang out to meet and exchange pictures and gossip about friends and friends of friends. That was certainly my impression when I joined simply because it was the only way I could contact my daughter who I had just left at college.

As my use of FB grew beyond tracking my daughter, I have come to find FB to be an effective community center and graduate school for me. Its an effective community center because I spend more time with more people exchanging ideas, opinions, advice and encouragement about more topics that are relevant to my life and career than at any other time in my life. Its an effective graduate school because this community has exposed me to more people with more diverse expertise talking about more diverse views and topics at a more substantive level than since I was in my graduate school cohort. It is a true "Salon", and not in the get your hair done sense either. Specific personal FB benefits have been:

Richer relations & understanding of those I work, worship and live with as I see other dimensions of their personalities and lives through their status updates and posts (the areas of FB I pretty much exclusively use). Some of the best experience of community in my life these days is in the hourly banter of talented hard-working colleagues posting "status updates" where we share in the angst and joy of our work and empathize/encourage one another, often humorously. Indeed every challenge, and work in this case, is lightened when shared.

Connections to experts and authorities who are filling out many aspects of cultural and historic literacy that I missed along the way and who I would not have had the occasion to meet except through friends' posts.

Exposure to world views and opinions that are rounding out my knowledge and perspective of the world and maturing my philosophy on many topics as I take time to comment & ask probing questions on the many posts related to issues that resonate with me or that I realize I need an education on. I have at time engaged in rich debates about complex issues with friends and friends of friends that have spanned days and dozens of posts and counter posts which have left me at the end of an emotional, psychological and intellectual roller coaster and richer for the ride!

Exposure to organizations and causes that resonate with me but which I did not know existed, like the fact that the Global Slave Trade (Human Trafficing) is resurgent around the globe and even in the US. FB not only exposes me but then gives me the means to voice my support, connect with those working on these issues, and to contribute my time, money ideas or talent to the degree I choose

FB, used appropriately is indeed a tool that can enrich one's life, enhance one's education and expand one's footprint in the society and on the globe. As usual, its the craftperson's skill with the tool that makes the tool useful or not, not the tool itself. I encourage you to continue to learn to be skillful users of social media tools to shape the lives and society you most want.

Please comment to share your methods and experiences with work-enhancing applications of FB.

Be well! And to you who have called or written to hold me accountable for more regular posts, THANKS! I needed the kick in the seat of the pants. :-)

What Africa Has Done For My Work.

2008-12-20T13:23:00.005-05:00

My wife and I just returned from our first visit to Egypt and Ghana, West Africa. In Egypt, we cruised the Nile visiting many temples & tombs from Aswan to Luxor and witnessed the progressive innovative & engineering progression that is the Pyramids from dirt piles and steps in Saqqara to the Great Pyramids in Giza. In Ghana, we visited friends in Accra, a child we sponsor through World Vision in Saboba and slave castles in Elmina & Cape Coast. It was an amazing trip and has certainly left an impression on me that will impact my work for time to come. Here are my observations!

1. Happiness Is Not Made Of Stuff - When in Ghana, I witnessed an economy transitioning from agricultural to pre industrial lacking many of the conveniences I take for granted like running hot water, centralized convenience stores, big box retailers, trash pick up, broadband in every home, spacious and pristine homes, easy credit (debt), numerous (and big) cars, etc., yet Ghana is one of the happiest nations on the planet. My Ghanaian friend reminded me that what they have going for them versus the US is that they have "no debt" and "each other". This jolted me as we spend lots of time in the US working to get and keep our stuff while others have less stuff but have each other (family & community). I have to admit that I am not disavowing my stuff outright but I am changed by this insight and committed to moving more and more toward a relatively stuffless, yet more relationful lifestyle over time.

2. Our Work Affects The World's Problems Via Solutions & Investment - Our visit to Saboba, in the bush of northeast Ghana to visit World Vision and our child, Nakoja Lampo, reinforced for me the importance of my work in tackling the world's problems and the impact of my income invested in programs that tackling problems I care about. During our visit, we saw well drilling projects that are eradicating typhoid and guinea worm, lake irrigation projects that enable the cultivation of crops during dry season, school construction that is bring literacy to communities and Mringa tree cultivation and education projects which are providing alternative pharmacological resources to these communities. We experienced the appreciation of World Vision, Nakoja's family (of 2 parents, 5 siblings, grandparents, uncles and cousins) and even the village regent and elders for our contribution and visit. We saw first hand what a little investment over a long period of time can do for many in need. This motivated us to consider how we might do more both qualitatively and quantitatively in our work and investments to affect those problems in the world that we care about. When I go to work and invest my pay check, I see this connection more now than I did before the trip.

3. I Am Grateful And Challenged To Be Less Wasteful - Nothing reinforces who you are more than visiting someplace else and while I am proudly African-American, my visit has reinforced that I am truly more American than African. I am simultaneously grateful for the wealth of America and ashamed of how I waste that wealth. I am challenged to do more with what I have and to complain less about what I do not having seen what more the Egyptians and Ghanians get done with their relative lack of material wealth and convenience.

4. I Value More The Way Others Get Things Done And How Much Can Be Accomplished With Less - In further consideration of my last statement, I admire the economy and ingenuity of the Egyptians and Ghanaians as I witnessed people getting on with their lives and quite productively, less daunted by their poverty than I expected and more industrious than too many Americans I know. Again, leaving home opens your eyes to the value of how others get things done. I am not saying that other places are relative heaven, but I also observe that they are not always in as much relative hell as we might think they are.

5. My Work Must Honor The Suffering & Hope Of My Ancestors - Visiting the slave castles of Cape Coast & Elmina in Ghana were moving for me as you can imagine. I walked through the dungeons and pitch black prison areas that were the last destinations of my ancestors before coming to the Americas. I also walked through the infamous " Door of No Return" that led out of the castle onto the beach and the slave ships. During this visit and since I reflect on the journey that started in those dungeons which has led through many generations of brutality, hardship and discrimination to my life and work. I recognize that through all those generations my ancestors were working and hoping for me and I have to feel some obligation to upholding, advancing and rewarding that hope in how I conduct my work and the impact it makes on the world. In this way their suffering is not in vain.

6. Society Can Achieve Anything When Pursuing God & Immortality - Visiting the ancient temples, monuments, tombs and pyramids of Egypt amazed me for their innovation, engineering, design and attention to detail. An underlying principle in all this work seems to have been the pursuit of God(s)' favor & protection and their own immortality, or at least that of their leaders. It occurred to me that we are not so different in our own pursuit of God and immortality as manifest in our work. Our work, and its contribution to this consumerist society we inhabit in the West, is by degrees the same pursuit to appease our God, our puritan work ethic, our capitalist/socialist aspirations, our families and ourselves. In this we seek a degree of immortality in what we produce for others to consume as well as in what we consume. I love to identify these parallels in culture and history whenever I travel. Though culturally different, we are not as different and evolved in some areas as we might think, eh? I think this point speaks to the merit of good work being about someone/thing larger than ourselves. With this merit, we can indeed achieve the seeming impossible, together.

You can see the pictures from our trip at:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=46283&l=9c155&id=519408279 & http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=45573&l=3cb78&id=519408279

Where There Is A Flood, Build A Levee!

2008-11-25T09:34:00.005-05:00

An abundance of supporters, skeptics and detractors is a part of life, whether in general, in our networks or in the organizations we are a part of. We lose energy, time and relationship in life through our lack of attention to supporters versus skeptics and detractors, as well as our lack of skill in learning from, and converting these latter, to supporters. We too often default to feelings of shock, anger, fear and betrayal when encountering skeptics and detractors. Meanwhile these encounters are always, I repeat ALWAYS, opportunities to develop and sharpen our selves and our execution, regardless of other’s intentions. Remember, no one, or few, persons can ruin a career.

When coaching on issues of skeptic and detractor management, I like to use the analogy of levees and floods where skeptics and detractors bring on floods, and we have to commit to being the levee architects who protect our reputations and objectives from these floods. Our levees are built of our reputation & kept promises, value propositions & value contribution, resources & relationships, as well as those supporters and champions who are willing to vouch for the aforementioned to our skeptics and detractors.

I coach that floods are inevitable and so must our building of levees be to combat them. The higher the flood, so much higher must be the levee. Some would say that the levee cannot be high enough.

Mantras that have helped me stay focused on “levee building” versus “flood fretting” over the years are:

Circle of Influence versus Circle of Concern from Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”

Lead from any chair you find yourself in from Zander’s “The Art of Possibility”

The fact that you can only sell what you have, not what you do not have so stay focused on value you have, not value you do not. – my own mantra

Relentlessly know your value, add value to others, and seek value others have to add to you. – again my own mantra

As I have observed this positive focus and practice in myself and others, I have witnessed seemingly hopeless situations, relationships and projects salvaged and succeed. So remember, the flood is coming so keep on building that levee!

The Nature of Communication is Miscommunication

2008-10-08T09:14:00.003-04:00

Since communications is my gift and profession, you can imagine that I spend a lot of time thinking about and observing it. One of the best insights I have received recently about communications is that the nature of communication is miscommunication, that most communication is misunderstood even as we assume, and others acclaim understanding. I believe this is the underpinning of most frustration, and every sort of conflict, in life.

The problem is that we start from a false assumption that we are completely understood when we communicate. To add days to my life, I have started to assume that

1. most of the time I am misunderstood and that I will need to communicate multiple times and through multiple means and formats before I am completely understood, and even then I will need to check back to make sure that understanding has not faded with time.

2. I must communicate to every one of the 5 senses as best as possible.

3. I must seek feedback from the audience and hope they tell the truth (as they usually will say they understand even when they do not either because they are embarrassed or because they truly believe they do).

4. I must use facts, pictures, stories, etc. to get my point across.

5. miscommunication, and thus gaps in understanding, exist until I see my communication manifest in action

6. understanding will take longer than I expect, but I will patiently persevere to stay engaged in communication until I am understood.

7. understanding is progressive and evolving versus instantaneous despite the rare occasions when it is.

8. I must be open to the (rare) possibility that my communication is misunderstood because it is false which would mean a need for me to change my communications. :-)

My parent raised me (and so I raised my children) on the idea that "said once is said enough", and that if the communicatee does not get it, shame on them. While this philosophy may work to justify the communicator, it does not make for the most effective action in the world. I deem that though my parents meant well, this is an idea whose time is past.

We all have to choose how effective we want to be and much effectiveness starts with how we approach communication. So remember, communication is miscommunication by its nature, and the superior communicator (and communicatee) is the one who accounts for this factuality in their communications.

Good luck with your reduced miscommunication! ;-)

Deliverables: An Alternative View of Value Presentation

2008-09-29T08:22:00.003-04:00

While at a networking dinner last week, one of our participants talk about the increasing importance of “deliverables, deliverables, deliverables” when demonstrating your value to present or pending management, clients or stakeholders. While I know this intuitively, how he said it struck me anew and started me thinking about how this is applied.

In my career, I have migrated across multiple philosophies when it comes to presenting my value. Early on, I emphasized tasks, technical skills & education, then track record, projects and results, the latest is management & leadership skills, and I wonder if deliverables is next. To clarify, these migrations have not meant that I do not continue to use elements of the former approaches but that what I emphasize primarily has changed.

As I ponder this emphasis on deliverables, I see that it has implications for how I can restructure my “elevator pitch” and resume as well as how I brand myself in my organization and network. The chief implication is that I will review my career primarily for the outcomes it has produced with a secondary emphasis on how those outcomes were produced though this cannot be entirely forgotten. As I inventory these deliverables, I will look for trends and categories among them from 1) a quantitative and a qualitative standpoint and 2) a project/technical and people/team/organizational standpoint. I will look for trends in my paid as well as my unpaid work, and my work as well as my play. The point of this is to enable a confident presentation of those outcomes I am “most effortlessly best” at producing in the world. All of this insight will not end up on any 1 of my resumes but the exercise will enable me to better understand and present the value that I can produce, whether it be to present management and stakeholders, or God forbid, post-layoff, to a new client.

So, I invite you all to take the time to engage in this “deliverables” exercise and even to use the “comments” field of this post as a way of sharing the outcomes of your personal research. I will certainly publish my results in a later post in this blog space. Stay tuned.

Finding (Making) Time for Online Communities

2008-09-20T17:35:00.009-04:00

Any of you who know me know that I am a gregarious person, and that since the inception of online social communities, I have carried my gregariousness online. I am an avid user of Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter, and when they relevantly email me, CollectiveX, YaHooGroups and GoogleGroups, all related to my professional interests.

When I tell people about this practice, or encourage them to do the same, I routinely get the reply, “How do you find time for that?”. The fact is that I have reduced or eliminated other less valuable activities on my schedule, like watching TV, reading books/newspapers, sitting wondering..., etc., in order to make the time for these online communities as we only have so much time in a week.

The fact is that I get a lot of "smart" work done in online social communities. It occurred to me that my online communities have started to become my surrogate cell phone, magazine, newspaper, book club, classroom and conference where I have information and people, known, newly known and nearly known from all over the world on my computer (and iPhone) screen teaching (and learning from) me about the topics and issues we find relevant to our professional development and functioning. We inform one another and then help one another better understand and apply what we are informed about. It is not much different than the communities of students, worshipers, professionals, friends and family that I have used all my life to develop myself and serve. They are just online (more accessible and varied) and self identified (more helpful), making it easier for me to find more of them and get (or give) what I need faster. This greater value added more than justifies the smaller amount of time (per unit of education) it takes me to get it.

Some common benefits I gain from my online communities on a daily basis are:

1. news about industry, technologies, opportunities, people, etc.,

2. meeting and staying in touch with people who have relevant experiences and relationships,

3. assistance with research to find resources, information on trends, etc.,

 
4. sharpened perspectives as I engage with others to challenge and educate they and myself about many relevant topics and issues related to my work and life.

Like with every enjoyable thing in life I have to be disciplined and practice moderation so I do not go overboard, and yes, I could use these communities more for personal entertainment than for professional edification but if that were the case, this post would be irrelevant, right?

So if you need more of the benefits I list above in your professional life, think about building your network and involvement in professionally-relevant online communities. I should disclaim that I have not gotten good at this overnight. I have been building this skill set progressively over a number of years.

Please comment to pose other examples of benefit, objections or questions.

Opportunity: Who’s Pursuing Who? It or You?

2008-09-12T21:43:00.005-04:00

Yesterday while doing research on LinkedIn.com I answered a question, (and I paraphrase), “How do you pursue opportunity?” with the reply that I believe opportunity pursues me. As I pondered my reply it occurred to me that over time I have transitioned from a scarcity mindset that dictates opportunity be pursued toward an abundance mindset that dictates the opposite. I believe that opportunity pursues me and my job is to choose which opportunities I will allow to catch, though not kill, me.

This response surprised even me as it has been unlike me to think that way for most of my life. I realize that the cultivated attitudes of abundance and gratitude have reframed my world in a way that I see opportunity all around me all the time. More opportunity than I can take advance of. Opportunities to learn and teach, to serve & graciously receive, to earn & contribute, to live well & responsibly prepare for death, to laugh, & when appropriate, cry.

To counterpoint, one might say that they do not have as many opportunities available to them as others and that would be true. I do not have as many opportunities available to me as others also. That said, I can do far more with the change in my own pockets, than with the billions in Ft. Knox not available to me. My point is that whatever opportunities are available to me, however few, I do better to let them catch me and use me for good than to run from them so they catch someone else instead.

I have found over time that as I have been caught by opportunity, more opportunities desire to catch me so much so that now I do have to run from some opportunities being as I am a finite human with finite time and energy. The advice I would give to anyone who thinks they have too few opportunities is to let the few opportunities you have catch and prepare you for the larger and greater opportunities you want.

To be more concrete,

if you want to get a better education, take advantage of the opportunity to expose yourself to the subjects you want to be expert in, connect with people who are better educated in the ways that you aspire to be (The internet & iPods make this easier than ever. See my blog post about using your iPod & iTunes as an Educational Tool,
if you want a better occupation, serve and volunteer in ways that allow you to start developing the skills, experience and contacts that would qualify you for that occupation,
if you want better relationships, commit to training yourself to be a better relater and do the (temporarily) painful, uncomfortable and frightening work of diversifying the company you keep so that you have more instances of good and different relationships over time as first you, and second, the company you keep changes over time

I could go on but you see my point. I hope you can begin to see that opportunity is always pursuing us but we are often too picky or fearful to allow ourselves to be caught.

May we be caught and used by every good opportunity available to us today and everyday.

Take It Educationally, Not Personally

2008-09-04T21:45:00.002-04:00

Work is full of judgments, assessments and feedback. When these are different than what we expect it can be hard not to take it personally. One of the responses I have been working on since reading Ruiz’s “The 4 Agreements” and his admonition “Not To Take It Personally”, is to take it educationally. What I mean by this is that while I can avoid not taking feedback personally, I should not let it go so much that I do not learn from it.

This shift of perspective allows me to gain benefit from all the feedback I get however fair, unfair or painful I may think it, whoever it comes from, in whatever situation it comes. This benefit is rooted in the "learned balance" of knowing what part of feedback to take and which to leave. Knowing which is in my control and which is not. Knowing which fits who I am (and can be) and which does not.

So as we daily are judged, assessed and given feedback, let’s stay committed to resisting defensiveness while embracing what we can learn about ourselves and the situations we must learn to be effective in.

The Progressive Power of “Will Continue”

2008-08-27T15:29:00.004-04:00

Some time ago I wrote about the power of the word “yet” and its ability to keep us working towards those outcomes we hope for. Recently, it occurred to me that the words, “will continue” are similarly powerful for their ability to reflect the progressive nature of those outcomes we are working toward.

So often in my talks with coachees, I hear statements like, “I have to start...” about projects or tasks that they need to perform, when in fact, they have already started and what they are really referring to is the need to take the “next”, not the “first” step. The language of “repeated first steps" can be demoralizing over time because it rob us of the credit and good feeling of being “already on the path”. This language comes from a stance of discredit and I encourage my coachees to drop it in exchange for the progressive language of “will continue”. This statement recognizes that though I am not perfect, I am consistent and faithful. I may not have reached my goal but I “will continue” towards it patiently and persistently until I reach it. This is encouraging and empowering language.

So the next time you catch yourself saying, “I have to start...” or “I never...”, take stock of whether these statements are really true or just reflections of your habit of discrediting and denigrating your past and present progress towards your goals. If they are, then reframe that language to “I will continue”. Do this no matter how long ago in the past you last took a step along that particular path.

Remember that life is a series of simultaneous paths we follow, and the greater crime is that we do not walk them, not that it usually takes more time and effort than we initially envision to walk them.

Now let's "continue". :-)

On Using delicious Social Bookmarks

2008-08-16T12:14:00.002-04:00

I have for the last few months been introducing a number of the social media tools I use which help me with my "wiseworking". This post, I am talking about the social bookmarking. There are a number of services that allow you to do this. I use www.delicious.com. Social bookmarking is a service/technique which allows you to keep the bookmarks of websites that you now keep in the web browser of the various computers you use in one central space on the internet. The benefits of social bookmarking are varied:

It provides one central respository for all your bookmarks that are scattered across many different computers. As long as you have an internet connection and can get to www.delicious.com you can add new bookmarks or access those formerly bookmarked.
It allows you to tag, or categorize to multiple topics, your bookmarks making finding them much easier then in traditional bookmark lists.
It allows you to connect to people, in the delicious network, who have also bookmarked the same website. This is the “social”, and consequently the most powerful, aspect of social bookmarking allowing you to build your network of “experts” and “interesteds” in a given field, and of course you can extend your own thought leadership as you post sites in you areas of expertise and comment on them.
It allows you to easily share lists of bookmarks within a topical area with your network. I typically share my delicious bookmark lists with colleagues, coachees, students, readers of my articles, etc., which I construct whenever I am doing any sort of research.

I have found this technique of social bookmarking a tremendous timesaver as it allows me to: 1) store websites I am interested in quickly without the anxiety of forever forgetting them and 2) retrieve many relevant websites I have forgotten about as they are stored under the tags that are relevant to me.

Experiment with this technique and let us know what you think. If you are already a user of social bookmarking, please educate us further.

Dealing with the Enemies that Priorities Breed

2008-08-08T05:15:00.004-04:00

Competence creates success. Success creates demand. Demand requires prioritizing. Prioritizing creates friends and enemies based on yes or no. There are ways to be at peace with these enemies though.

The better we become at being and doing our gifts, the more our being and doing will be demanded by others. Because we are finite, this will require us to prioritize, either proactively or reactively (and hopefully we learn to prioritize proactively). This prioritizing requires saying “no” in word and deed and “no” always carries the risk of creating enemies. This fact scares us which is one of the reasons so many of us reactively prioritize, creating even worst enemies than if we did so proactively. (See my post, “No: The New Yes” for more on how to do this.)

When we proactively say “no”, even those enemies we create respect us, and very often grow to be our friends if their hearts and minds were in the right place to begin with. If they were not...well, my grandmother taught me that the person for whom everyone is a friend has no “real” friends at all. Also, there is an Afghan proverb (actually on one of my t-shirts at www.wisetees.com) which says, “It is easier to wage war with wise enemies than to be at peace with stupid friends”. All this said, there are ways to be at peace with those enemies that prioritizing breeds, and if not at peace with them, at least at peace with ourselves:

Proactively practice the “No” Formula so that people understand that your prioritizing is about a greater good not a lesser evil.
Don’t take others displeasure so personally. Most people get over it eventually. Read Ruiz’s, The 4 Agreements for more insight on this.
Always be open to forgiveness & reconciliation. This is necessary in the times when you fail on #2 and assumes that eventually most people will get over it and be willing to reconcile.
Consider your enemies’ point of view. This is not about agreement or capitulation only about compassion and empathy, the 2 things that most people want even more than to be agreed with.

I could go on but these 4 are difficult enough to execute consistently that we will leave it here for now. As you master these along with use of the “No Formula” you will be amazed at how your confidence, respect and results grow.

Be well and please do share other productive strategies you are aware of for dealing with enemies.

iPod/iTunes: A Training & Development Tool?

2008-08-01T07:10:00.003-04:00

By now, only the most die-hard of Luddites do not own an iPod. That said, I am amazed at the number of people iPod owners I question who tell me they do not use them regularly. Often, these individuals tend to think of the iPod as a device for the consumption of music and completely overlook its uses for the consumption of educational content. I have to admit that most of the use of my iPod is for the consumption of audiobooks from http://www.audible.com/, and relevant educational podcasts and college courses (in audio & video) from http://www.itunes.com/.

I get amazed and thoughtful replies when I communicate this iPod use behavior to others and I am immediately I am asked when I find the time to listen or watch. The fact is that I consume this iPod content consistently throughout my day during mindless and transition periods like: 1) my commute, 2) doing chores that do not require intense concentration, 3) falling to sleep (where the iPod sleep timer comes in handy), 4) washing up and dressing in the AM, 5) working out, 6) walking between meetings, 7) waiting for impunctual family and friends, 8) sitting in the barber’s chair, etc.

As a matter of fact, I attribute much of my increased patience and quality of life to this habit as I can always put on educational audio to soothe my annoyance with “otherwise wasted time” when my loved and esteemed ones are late. Because I am edutained, I can better flip my perception and see their lateness as a gift (sometimes).

Rethink the use of your iPod as an edutainment tool to advance your personal training & development. Please write to suggest good educational and development materials you consume on your iPods.

PS - My favorite iPod content is:
http://www.audible.com/ - one of the largest audiobook libraries on the internet; after 5 years of use I have a library of over 600 books here
TEDTalks - http://www.ted.com/ - inspiring speaker on technology, entertainment & design; - find in iTunes Podcast Store
http://www.audiodharma.org/ - find in iTunes Podcast Store
BusinessWeek CoverStories - find in iTunes Podcast Store
WGBH Morning Stories - - find in iTunes Podcast Store
NPR - - find in iTunes Podcast Store

On Using Twitter

2008-07-15T23:07:00.000-04:00

Recently at the prompting of a consultant I am working with, I expanded my productive use of social media beyond my usual fare of www.linkedin.com, www.facebook.com, www.del.icio.us.com and www.plaxo.com to include www.twitter.com. Twitter, on which one tweets or twitters, is a social media service based on the premise of one communicating (in mini-blog posts of less than 140 characters) “What Are You Doing?” to their “followers” as often as they like all day.

Now when most professionals hear this premise their immediate response is “I do not not have time or interest in letting others know what I am doing all day long”, and I agreed until I started using the service. I was informed, and subsequently found, that while most of the tweets on Twitter are rather mundane, there are “twitterers” out there, that can be found using Twitter’s keyword search, who are a running wealth of relevant information in knowledge areas that are relevant to both my professional and personal life. There are also some twitterers whose lives are humorous and entertaining by degrees. Aside from individuals, I also found that there are organizations that twitter like the BBC Worldwide (bbcworld), pharma giant Novartis (novartis).

I have found the use of this service beneficial as a running information service, like an alternate type of RSS that is authored by individuals versus websites. For instance, the other day, I received insight into the blow by blow proceedings of a healthcare conference from a twitterer I follow, complete with relevant URL links that afford me more indepth research if I am interested.

On the flip side, I have found that my own twittering has benefited me in: 1) allowing me to compile a running diary of my own activities, insights and perceptions throughout the day, 2) contributing to the community of individuals who are “following” me as they are interested in the same things I am and 3) expanding my network beyond that I have gathered on the services I already use.

For some, this will be yet another overwhelming item they have to attend to in their busy day, and this crowd would stay away, but for those who want to offer knowledge to a “community of interest” as well serendipitously gain the same, I recommend you try this service out. Let me know what you think when you do and feel free to follow me at "cadelarge" if you do.

Time: What Are You Making With Yours?

2008-07-06T18:17:00.004-04:00

“I don’t have time” is fast becoming one of the great mantras (and excuses) of this present age. The fact that there is a touch of truth in every lie is definitely the case here. The truth is that we have time and we don’t. The lie is in why this is the case. We say that we don’t have time (because of factors outside of us in our environment) and that is partially true because time is what we “make” more than what we have.

We have all been given the same 168 hours per week, something we can only say about time as we are all given different amounts of money, talent, relationships, knowledge, etc.. This equality is one of the reasons time is one of the most important resources we have, and what makes what we make with time, a most critical activity of life.

The fact is that everything we have from how we think to our possessions to our careers to our relationships, we have made with the time we have been given. This then obviously begs the questions of: “what time are we making and what are we are we making with that time?”

This first question is one of priority. When we say we do not have time for something we are really saying it is not a priority, and often this is justified as most of us are pursuing too many priorities to begin with. I begin to learn this lesson on September 11, 2001 when the events of that morning stopped me dead to refocus in order to make time for informing myself and to see about my community. It was so striking to me how quickly so many important things could become not so. I learned that for the rest of my life, I have a choice to make time for what is important to me because we only ever have time for what we make time for.

This second question is one of focus. It is difficult to maintain focus on what is important in the midst of all the urgent and unimportant things that come up continually. It is easy to use time to attend to the urgent and unimportant while neglecting the making of those memories, relationships, education and results that are truly important to us owing to a lack of focus. A critical factor in making “what’s important” with the time we make is learning to say no to the urgent and unimportant, and if this is a challenge for you see my earlier post, “No: The New Yes”.

Take time today to consider how you prioritize and what you make with your time. Are you making important results, relationships, memories, people, objects, etc. with your time or are you making procrastination, worry, poor plans which lead to urgent emergencies, focus on unimportant issues, etc.. As we take more responsibility for making time for what important and making what’s important with that time we make, we can move from a posture of “ I do not have time” to “ I make time for what is truly important to me”. Now isn’t that a better more powerful way to approach life? I do and am interest in your replies, pro and con.

Enthusiasm: The Dance that Attracts Investment

2008-06-28T18:15:00.001-04:00

Enthusiasm is an interesting concept that is often overlooked and taken for granted when we think about work, and the necessity of gaining investment at work.

Over years of coaching this concept has come up for me twice in compelling ways. The first is in a workshop I teach called "Finding Your Natural Gifts" where I use a book, LifeKeys, which in one of its sections considers the fact that enthusiasm is derived from the Greek, "en theos", and suggests the ideas that when we are enthusiastic we are in a dance with God. The second was in Paulo Coehlo’s book, The Alchemist, when Santiago, while working for the crystal merchant comes to understand, “There was a language in the world that everyone understood, a language the boy had used throughout the time that he was trying to improve things at the shop. It was the language of enthusiasm, of things accomplished with love and purpose, and as part of a search for something believed in and desired.” Ever since reading this book, this quote has become a mantra for me.

Work, among many things, is a process by which we seek investment from others in order to achieve mutually desirable outcomes. Everyday my management, my team, my stakeholders and I seek investments of time, attention, money support, etc. in order to simultaneously achieve many organizational, group and personal outcomes we all have. As there are an infinite number of investment requests being made of a finite pool of investment resources, it is critical that we “show up” with every investment attracting resource we can garner, and enthusiasm is one I think we give short shrift to.

I have witnessed enthusiasm as an investment decision tie breaker many times. Being enthusiastic does not require that we break out the pom-poms and cheerleader routines but it does require that love, purpose, belief and desire, "the language of enthusiasm” is consistently evident in how we “show up”. When it is evident, people will be more interested in investing their time, attention, support, etc. in those outcomes we seek to bring into the world by way of our work.

Everything Comes To Pass ...

2008-06-21T23:53:00.001-04:00

I first heard this interesting double entendre during a Buddhist lecture on impermanence. On further research I found it is attributable in its entirety, Everything comes to pass; nothing comes to stay, to Matthew Flickstein in his book, Journey To The Center.

This saying always struck me funny for its 2 part meaning. First, everything comes to pass that is meant for us, and second, everything comes to pass (away) and will not stay forever, if even a long time. I ponder this a fair amount lately as it reminds me to enjoy everything I have because one day I will lose it; it will pass away. My position, my possessions, my relationships, my health and eventually my life will all pass away and be lost to me. This is not something to fret over but to use as an impetus for cherishing everything and not taking for granted anything.

Being human, loss is painful to me, particularly when I have lost what I worked to acquire and especially when others lose it. I am prone to anxiously fret, to take loss personally, to become conservative and overly cautious for fear of loss. Clear seeing and remembrance of this proverb reminds me that the energy of anxious fretting, taking it personally and cautious and extreme conservatism is better converted to mindful appreciation and conscious enjoyment today of everything that comes for tomorrow the same everything will pass away (and my worrying and fretting will not delay this inevitability).

I find that it is better to welcome and cherish the things that newly come to me (change) than to mourn too long over those things that pass away, whether they were pleasurable or painful. It is easier to do this if I truly cherished, savored and enjoyed what I had when I had it. If I spent the time of possession despising the responsibility of having it then I am more regretful when it passes away because I realize I had lost an opportunity. I will also add that we should not procrastinate in enjoying what has come to you because we never know how long we will have it. (See my post: Transformation of Accepting Change, for more on this).

This insight in hand (heart and mind), let’s resolve to give up the delusion that everything (or for that matter, anything) comes to stay, and instead set our energy to enjoying everything while we have it and before it is lost to us.

If I am humble ... Part II

2008-06-16T08:37:00.004-04:00

Since writing the original "If I am humble" post on this topic of professional humility on April 20, 2008, I have mulled over this topic more, particularly in light of a few challenging work scenarios I have had in the last year, where I have had to listen non-defensively, put my egoistic view in better perspective, patiently persevere in the face of others' displeasure, and, most importantly, humble myself to be response-able to difficult, though constructive, feedback and direction regarding a new unfamiliar situation I found myself in. I realize, in retrospect, that humility saved me in this situation where extreme pride would have destroyed me. I see, on reflection, that humility offered me several advantages in this situation:

1, the ability to accept my blind-spots that were being pointed out by others,
2. the ability to admit to myself and others where I was mistaken and need of development,
3. the ability to offer compassion and forgiveness to the fallibility in myself and others, and
4. the ability to be grateful, graceful and hopeful in difficult, complex and seemingly unfair circumstances.

These advantages have allowed me to gain clarity in confusing situations, to rebuild damaged relationships, to reshape distorted perceptions and to get derailed endeavors back on track. The more I practice with this character trait of humility, I am convinced that it is a key to many seemingly insurmountable problems and barriers.

This is an invaluable insight as I face more and more seemingly insurmountable problems and barriers, for myself and other, as a function of my growth as a team member, manager, leader and coach.

Remember, if we are humble, we cannot be overcome!

The Stinkiest Manure Can Build The Strongest Plants

2008-06-08T08:06:00.004-04:00

A year ago I moved in to a garden district of Philadelphia called Chestnut Hill that is just bustling with every kind of tree, bush, plant and flower. More than at any other time of my life I have been intimately witnessing how vegetation behaves throughout the 4 seasons of the year. This spring, while observing the generous use (and peculiar odor) of manure all around my residence, it occurred to me that this awful decomposition of nature is also one of the building blocks of the strongest and most healthy plant life.

Well, as in nature so in life because the immediate next thought for me was that in my life the strongest and healthiest aspects (plants) of my character have been born of the stinkiest, most difficult and unpleasant situations and people (manure). I did not wish for this manure in my life but it has had a fertilizing effect nonetheless, and in retrospect I am thankful for it. This retrospective has caused me to be more tolerant and even grateful for the present fresh manure in my life, which by the way is laid at my root in all seasons of the year, not just the Spring. I take this attitude because I know that with the right combination of other elements, i.e., patience, persistence, lovingkindness, etc., this manure will further strengthen the plants of my character.

Take a different look at the manure in your life today and see it as "character fertilizer", not only as the s*#t it also is.

Getting Good at Being In A Bad Mood

2008-05-26T09:04:00.006-04:00

It has been said that moods are like the weather, one moment sunny and the next rainy, and all completely out of our control. That said, what is always in our control is our response to our moods. So often we, and those we work with, take the opposite view and do lots of damage to relationships and productivity when in a bad mood.

A mark of emotional intelligence and maturity is that we come to respond graciously to our bad moods rather than using them as an excuse for being ungracious. This is an especially important point for leaders as their moods very much affect, and can even become, the weather of the teams or organizations they lead.

Here are a few things that have worked for me as I continue to practice “being good at being in a bad mood”:

be conscious of and take responsibility for proper response to your moods,
be appropriately transparent about your mood with yourself and others so all know what they are dealing with as a means of reducing stress as there is a positive correlation between peak performance and lack of (di)stress,
model “good mood response” for those you lead as a critical development practice as it will pay dividends for them and those they lead, and
be patient with your moods and work to “do no harm” as they are always temporary, like weather itself.

Giving Ourselves (& Others) Credit

2008-05-18T12:17:00.005-04:00

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Giving Ourselves (& Others) A Break. This week I want to address a corollary and complement to this prior premise, “Giving Ourselves (& Others) Credit. Right after giving one a break, I think we most neglect giving credit (and some credit is almost always due).

Giving credit involves acknowledging and taking stock of what we have gotten done versus what we have not, or have yet to. In my personal and coaching experience, I think that this lack of giving credit is one of the most detrimental issues we deal with when working towards goals. We often forget or belittle what we have accomplished as though it did not take skill, knowledge and discipline to get to where we are. We sometimes act as though what we have was given to us, and that we are inadequate to get what we need in the future. A little conscious thought often proves this premise wrong. The fact is that “I can because I have”.

Our fixation on “discredit” discourages. Balancing “discredit” with “credit” encourages, that is, “give courage”, (a.k.a. “proacting in the face of fear”). Examples of the need for "giving ourselves credit" are: 

when we are going for a Master’s degree, and we discount that we somehow figured out to get our Bachelor’s.

when we are going for a job offer and we discount that we got the interview, and when for an interview that we built the resume and network to get the invitation to the interview.

when we are laid off, and we discount that we got the job we were laid off and can get another.

when we are on bad terms with others, and we discount that we have built and rebuilt relationships in the past and can do it again with care, patience and persistence.

when we really blow a task or project, and we discount that we have been successfully bouncing back from such mishaps since pampers and cradles to our ultimate benefit.

This practice of “giving credit” not only encourages us, but calls us to reflect on what we have accomplished and yields recollection of lessons learned which point to how we can better execute what is yet to be done. Adopt this practice of giving credit to encourage yourself & others.

Work: Service or Slavery?

2008-05-11T15:32:00.005-04:00

Work is difficult chiefly because of its propensities for mind-numbing boredom, overwhelming challenge and difficult people (including myself). When I see these difficult elements of work as adversaries controlling and besting me, I feel I am an unwilling slave trapped and unable to escape. When I see these elements as an opportunity to change and shape the world in beneficial ways, I feel I am a willing servant. I often, in recentering, recall that the difference between these 2 feelings, servant or slave, is in the attitude I bring to work and my willingness to see myself in the situation as an unwilling victim or a willing proactive leader. The latter is encompassed in an approach to management called "Servant Leadership”.

When I choose to be a servant leader, the difficulty of work is more bearable and certainly more satisfying. The perceived difficulty of work is also lessened over time as I am more influential and impactful, able to shape relatively more situations in a form that is consistent with the change I want to see in the world.

It is common that in the process of working, we slip automatically into a slave mentality but the beauty of being able to choose is that we can, with practice, become more automatic at slipping back into a servant leader mentality. Both are difficult but one more satisfying.

Choose service today!

Giving Others (& Ourselves) A Break

2008-05-06T19:16:00.002-04:00

In every interaction, an impression is made for better or not. Unfortunately, we as human beings, are wired for the detection of the negative, allow negative impressions to emerge and stick more easily than positive ones. We often continue to judge a person (and ourselves) in a certain fashion even though they have changed for the better. I find this is one of those things we are prone to doing to others and hate the most to be done to us. We overlook and discount even small improvements in others, especially if they let us down. We, correspondingly, suffer with those who won’t acknowledge the small improvements we make day by day. In essence, we don’t give a break and we don’t get a break.

As with most interpersonal situations, it takes wisdom, judgement, skill and risk taking to know when we should give a break and when not. The fact is that there are ways to acknowledge the improvement in others while also protecting ourselves from their sometimes slow progress. It is usually not an all-or-nothing proposition but it does take a deliberate and conscious effort. The next time you are faced with the risk and threat of another’s repeated offensive or dysfunctional behavior, give them a break. Do this by:

catching them doing better, and most importantly, acknowledging their “better going”
exhibiting courage to engage them in crucial conversations (Read book of this title by Patterson) to help them toward realizations intended to effect positive change.
modeling (being) the change that you want to see in them versus participating in the undesirable present state
giving the same amount of grace you would want to receive when they disappoint because everyday we do
proactively choosing your own response to others rather than reactively letting others choose your response for you.

In doing these 5 practices as it relates to others, note that it is probably most important to do these practices to (for) ourselves, as truth be told, we need to give our own selves a break more than anyone else.

If I am humble, I cannot be overcome.

2008-04-20T06:09:00.004-04:00

One of my favorite sayings ever is, “If I am humble, I cannot be overcome”! (I cannot remember the source and I assure you it is not me.)

For a number of years now, this saying has sustained me in situations where I have felt unfairly treated and been tempted to be prideful, defensive and resentful. In those situations, this saying has reminded me that my ability to handle myself well is helped or harmed by the degree of pride or humility I bring to it. Pride tends to cloud my perspective. Humility tends to give clarity. I find that humility is in effect an antidote for undue pride and defensiveness.

When I am humble, I am able to, at worst, see the logic in difficult and unfair situations, and at best, I see the lesson for my own development in the inflicted unfairness. Humility (by the way, not humiliation) gives me the ability to benefit from the lesson while letting go of the pain and resentment the lesson inflicts and tempts me with. It is in this “learning” and “letting go” that I overcome (or benefit) in every difficult and unfair situation that life gives me.

As we practice humbly learning and letting go, a seemingly impossible exercise which improves with practice, versus pridefully defending and holding on to resentment, we mature faster, are more resilient, gain more substantial relationships, and enjoy a better mental and emotional health.

This is one of those practices who short term difficulty is well worth its long term benefits.

Failure Needs No Plan

2008-04-08T21:04:00.006-04:00

In the book, Think & Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill talks about the idea that “failure needs no plan”. This double entendre has always intrigued me. It single handedly expresses two meanings: one that one need not plan to fail, failure is the default occurrence when one does not plan, and second, failure needs us not to have a plan in order to occur. One might say further that “failure and the lack of a plan tend to go hand in hand". :-)

This said, while planning does not guarantee success it results in a higher probability of such. Additionally, I believe that even a failed plan yields more learning (and a corresponding greater chance of future success) than a mere failure that occurs as a result of no planning at all.

In my coaching as well as in my own life, I see the stark manifestation of this saying on a regular basis. After poor thinking and a lack of persistence and patience, the lack of a plan is probably the greatest barrier to the achievement of our potential. For this reason, we should be committed to planning as, at best, it yields success and at worst learning. Below are a few “ponder points” to use as you plan for your own success.

Remember that every plan must account for barriers and setbacks. Factor them in and do not be shocked when they occur.
Consider how easy it is to be more committed to others' plans than to your own. Be at least as true to yourself as to others and seek synergy between your plans and those of the important and significant others in your life.
Prepare plans B, C and so on (what we call contingencies) as no plan A executes as originally planned
In planning, discipline yourself to enjoy the process of planning and execution as much as the destination for while the destination is in the uncertain future, the execution is always in the present moment. When you practice the disciplines of “staying present” and “passionate detachment”, you get a reward every moment as well as the reward of satisfaction with the outcome you get whatever outcome that may be. “Chop wood, carry water” for those of you familiar with this Zen maxim. :-)
Remember that a good plan excellently executed is better than an excellent plan poorly executed.

That is all I can think of for now but please do add other “ponder points” on this topic.

Valuing The Givers More Than The Gifts

2008-03-30T21:15:00.001-04:00

Every gift comes from a giver. Every giver wants appreciation for the gift they give. We err in giving more appreciation to the gift than the giver, whether God, our parents, spouses, children, family, managers, colleague, etc..

I believe this happens because of the human penchant for the new and the easy. You see, we can get new gifts more readily than new givers, and gifts are easier to relate to than givers. Additionally, the consumer-industrial complex gives us many brands as alternative to human relationship and we take up this bait too often.

Though gifts are often newer and easier to relate to, it is the giver of gifts, their continuity and their lack of cooperation (with what we want), which matures us most and which is most satisfying and beneficial to learn to master.

Relationship is a major point of life and the chief vehicle of our personal maturity and growth. This latter point is one of the reasons we often gravitate towards brands and away from deep human relationships.

Understanding this, and its implications for our maturity, we should study to be more appreciative of the givers of the gifts in our lives more than the gifts they give, no matter how much grief and pain they may cause us. in fact, the more they inflict, the more we should appreciate them as this is indeed the sure (if not fast) track to our maturity.

PS - I recognize that they tone of this post is a bit pessimistic. I am due for a vacation which starts later this week. I want to balance it by acknowledging that most gifts we receive are quite positive creating an excellent basis for being that much more appreciative of all those who gives us our gifts.

The Power of “Yet”!

2008-03-24T20:03:00.006-04:00

Lately I have discovered the word, “yet” as an inspiring and hopeful word. In my coaching (and in myself), it is quite common that I hear regretful declarations of projects and tasks not done, people not related to, jobs and promotions not obtained, etc..

Increasingly, when I hear these declarations uttered, I verbally tack on the word “yet”. When I do this, the person making the statement usually blinks in confusion, then recognition as these 3 letters instantly transform their perception from regret to possibility.

You see "yet" opens up the back end of any final declaration transforming its meaning to a non-final possibility. If I say, I did not succeed in (you fill in the blank). That can always be changed to, I did not succeed (yet), meaning that I still may. That I still may reenergizes with the possibility that if we persevere, plan and persist, success is still a possibility, however we define it. Of course, sometimes we need to change the definition of success, but that is a discussion for another day.

Remember when tempted to declare an endeavor final, consider that it may “yet” be.

Consider the Unrealized Tragedy

2008-03-16T21:31:00.003-04:00

As human being we are wired for noticing what goes wrong, and to a greater degree, what may go wrong (though it usually does not). It is this hard wiring that makes us good planners and survivors. Like all else in the cosmos, when taken to an extreme, this inclination is unhealthy. Balance is needed.

This balance is aided by the consideration of the “unrealized tragedy”. The “unrealized tragedies” are all the things we anticipate and expect to go wrong which do not. It is the plan B that was not needed, the conflict that did not happen, the delay that did not occur, the good health, and even the life, that got extended, whether that be an organization or an individual. These are all points for gratefulness and affirmation. It is these “unrealized tragedies” that give us the evidence that, more often than not, things do go well. This is particularly important to meditate on when in the midst of a bad day, month or even year.

This meditation calls to mind the scripture, Psalms 91 which alludes to the many tragedies that regularly happen in life but which “shall not come nigh thee”. I am moment to moment grateful for these "unrealized tragedies".

I find that in my daily rush of planning contingencies and losing peace and sleep over "potential tragedies" I cannot anticipate or plan for, considering the “unrealized tragedies” of my past and present, helps me to keep things in perspective.

How You Use Your Reasons Determines Whether You Get Results

2008-03-10T22:30:00.003-04:00

An axiom I picked years ago when going through The Landmark Forum is that “In life, you always get one of two things, either a result you want, or a reason for why you did not the result you wanted”. This has always stayed with me.

One way of looking at this axiom is that excuses and results are enemies and that to befriend one is to make an enemy of the other.

Looking deeper, the fact is that sometimes, all you have are reasons (as none of us succeed all the time). The point to be taken from this, though, is related to how we use our reasons. Do we use them as excuses, or as learnings that move us closer to the results we are aiming for?

When you consider those instances when you have not gotten the results you wanted, what have you been most prone to do with the resulting reasons? Have you used them as excuses, or as learnings? The way to know that you are doing the latter, and not the former, is that you stay in action towards your desired results getting smarter and closer all the time.

Take time today to consider what you are doing with your reasons, and especially in those areas of your life where you are most dissatisfied with your results. You will find that you need to make changes based on your learnings. Of course, if you are not interested in changing, you will likely just continue to use your reasons as excuses.

Either way, you will have your results or your reasons.