As the years of my life have marched by, one of the lessons I have always been challenged by, is asking for what I want. I have to push myself to practice asking for just about everything, and I’ll bet you do too.
Even though I know nearly everyone else in the human race has the same challenge with asking, it doesn’t make it any easier for me.
We have to be brave, stick our necks out, and ask for all sorts of things. Asking invites nourishment. As a mother, I taught my children to ask, and ask assertively and without apology, as a survival skill they’d need when speaking with intimidating adults. Choosing the right words, and articulating our asking helps us be clearer about what we think we want, or might need.
Fact it, people don’t always know what we want, and they can’t read our minds. (Believe me, your boss really, really struggles with this… happen to watch Undercover Boss on CBS last night?)
More often than not, people will surprise you by simply saying “Okay, sure, I can do that.”
Ask, and it shall be given to you;
seek, and ye shall find;
knock and it shall be opened unto you.
For every one that asketh, receiveth;
and he that seeketh, findeth;
and to him that knocketh
it shall be opened.
—Matthew 7:7-8
So here goes… an asking which concerns the care and feeding of Talking Story.
Your RSS reading of the blog (via something like BlogLines or Google Reader, or the Alltop Leadership aggregator) is a wonderful start, and I thank you for deciding to subscribe at all, with the number of choices which are available to you. However in today’s offering of a gazillion blogs and websites, the care and feeding of Talking Story requires even more.
Please consider switching to an email subscription
As a writer who blogs, I feel so acknowledged and appreciated by you who subscribe to Talking Story via email: It tells me you don’t want to miss anything, affirming the effort which goes into publishing the blog, and encouraging me to continue.
Email subscriptions (Click here to get yours) also help you share Talking Story posts with others more easily, so that we can spread the Managing with Aloha mission here, and invite more voices into our conversation. You can print the emails you receive, to talk about workplace concerns in your huddles and meetings. You can forward the emails to whomever you feel the subject matter will be of interest to that particular day: Doing so lets them know you are aware of their challenges or opportunities, that you were thinking about them, and that you care enough to reach out and make the effort. It’s a win-win!
Please click in!
Even better? It is so great when you have an email subscription, yet click directly to the blog to read my post here, immersing yourself in the full “online experience” that email programs and workplaces can firewall out. Even if you choose to silently read and not comment for some reason, your clicks will tell me you were here, and I will know.
Do you know what really sets my heart on fire, and encourages me even more? When we talk story in the way the blog platform makes it possible for us to do so, setting an example for managers in the brave conversations we will engage within here. As you know, I feel we don’t talk story enough in our workplaces; it’s another challenge we need more practice with.
Clicks are the care, and comments are the feeding.
Another thing to remember, is that as the author of Talking Story I start conversations, but I am not always the one to finish them. The email alert you received will never reveal the comments which have been added by others in our Ho‘ohana Community (like this particularly generous one yesterday from Rich). When you are interested in an on-going conversation you can also subscribe to it individually, making it easy to follow along as things progress.
Come talk story here on the blog, won’t you?
That wasn’t so bad! You can practice this too. Use the comments of this posting today to ask me, or others in our Managing with Aloha Ho‘ohana Community, for what you want.
Mahalo nui loa, thank you so much. Good people that you are, you made this pretty easy for me!
Well I must confess e-mail subscriptions don’t work for me. I like to read blogs when I’m reading blogs, in a reader.
But I will always comment, and am glad it sets your heart on fire :-)
.-= Joanna ´s last blog ..7 Ways to Stay Connected to Confident Writing =-.
Ah Joanna, you are one who has the “clicks and conversation” part nailed where email isn’t a necessary part of the process, so yes, you are one who sets my heart on fire :-)
What I find is that RSS faithfulness has ebbed for many as a good reading habit since social media pushed it down the pecking order with our attentions, and I admit, I am one of them. Admittedly, there is a bit of “be like me so we communicate in the same way” in this posting for me. I very much appreciate you being here as you are, your way.
I have two kinds of subscriptions – one with google reader and the other ones with iGoogle. Talking Story is on iGoogle, and everytime I see that there is something new I hop over and read the blog here.
Regarding asking you what I want: I sometimes find it difficult to read posts on this blog which are very business- and manager-orientated. Maybe you could offer more support for your non-business readers? Help them to get the essentials out of those posts, to make them useful for them, too.
.-= Ulla ´s last blog ..Living Here and Now =-.
Wow Ulla, you have a double-dipping into Talking Story with the Google suite; thank you! iGoogle was not something I kept up with when I switched from pc to mac computing this past November, but what I did was bring my blogroll back on the Talking Story sidebar, and that has helped me see when you and others I read have something new.
Good feedback in your asking Ulla, mahalo :-) Figuring prominently in my Take 5 for 2010 is my focus on serving the Alaka‘i manager (the manager with a calling for Alaka‘i managing and leading), however there is no managing or leading others without the foundation of self-managing and self-leading, so I will continue to have that woven into the whole. Your asking does have me thinking about the ways I can better articulate the “universal” part of our values discussions too however; will work on it.
I have two kinds of subscriptions, the ones I keep in Google Reader (that will most often be neglected) and the ones I have by email. I deliberately choose how to subscribe to a blog, and I’ll switch whenever necessary.
The Google Reader subscriptions are there for when I need inspiration or something to read, but they often fill the gaps or just get scanned. The email subscriptions “creep in” on between my email, and I keep up with my email pretty good. So a blog needs to earn its place in there ;-) (you’re on email since yesterday).
Oh … and for as what I want – that was what you were asking at the end – I want to inspire others to learn and laugh. My blog is one of the platforms to enable that. Come visit me (pretty please?) :-)
create connections with people
Thank you so much for giving me one of your email deliberations! I have fallen into the same habit Lodewijk; my reader (still using BlogLines) is getting ignored for weeks at a time. In addition to what we’ve been talking story about here, I find that Twitter and my Tumblr dashboard follows have antiquated my reader too, for I follow links that others I admire (and know to be like-minded) will recommend. I have gotten much better about my productivity habits connected to email, and like you, I keep up with it well without having it distract me much, and also act on it in a more useful way (an ongoing project which got dramatically better when I discarded Outlook forever in favor of GMail.)
Thoroughly enjoyed the conversation we had while reconnecting on Twitter, and I learned from it; did you catch my JJL-connected mahalo to you in yesterday’s posting? As you say, bloggers (and all authors for that matter) do have to earn our attentions and that is what I feel my renewed commitment to “one place as true blog — here at Talking Story” will help me do. I realize what I am asking of readers: As I mentioned to Ulla, I am also using earned and/or rotated spots in the Talking Story blogroll to help me read/select — and you are there too Lodewijk! — and I will ask myself, How did they earn that spot with me, and can I translate what they did into my own self-coaching as a blogger?
Taking off my blogger hat, and putting my reader hat back on, all of this really does go back to selecting what we read, and using it better, shaping our personal habits intentionally (came up in yesterday’s talk-story too with Dave). There is a great blog post up right now at Rands in Repose about the hierarchy of data —>> information —>> knowledge —>> wisdom and A Story Culture.
Blasphemous and contradictory as this will sound at first, I have always loved the reasonableness of our Talking Story comment culture, and that I don’t get an overwhelming amount of comments (yesterday and today is admittedly unusual)” I do read a few blogs via RSS because I do not sync with their comment culture, and I only wish to read the posts. I am increasingly aware of readers who feel that way about Talking Story regardless what I think or try to present, and thus my asking today included my urging for clicks, i.e. “I was here Rosa! Just not a day I choose to speak up.”
Hello Rosa,
Thank you so much for your blog. I am a new leader (Clinical Supervisor) and am trying to learn so much. I live in the Marshall Islands for 5 years and the aloha spirit speaks to my heart. It is such a gentle and respectful attitude. I hope to learn a lot from you and learn how to treat my co-workers the aloha/mahalo way. Mahalo, Loretta
Aloha Loretta, thank you for reading, and welcome to our Ho‘ohana Community of Managing with Aloha practitioners! Your intention counts for so very much, and while there are ups and downs in any managing career, I am sure the journey ahead of you will prove to be very rewarding. Please know we are all here to help and encourage you.