Rapid Fire Learning.
Tracking 5 things we have learned each and every month opens up even more capacity for us, amazing creatures of abundance and growth that we are.
Learn 5 New Things About Walking.
If you aren’t in good health, well, the rest of this is really a moot point. Walking works wonders for your mindfulness too.
So with a 5 year birthday coming up for Talking Story I have been wracking my brain thinking about how to celebrate. I thought about doing a forum or festival, about interviewing some of the good folks in our Ho‘ohana Community, and about having a huge Managing With Aloha book giveaway (MWA will be 5 in November), and I may still do a few of them later.
For it then occurred to me that as boring as this will initially sound, I really should celebrate with a in-depth clean-up here, bringing Talking Story to better integrity, so it can dwell in the place of honor it rightly deserves.
As of today, Talking Story will no longer live on the coattails of Say Leadership Coaching as www.sayleadershipcoaching/talkingstory.
You will find Talking Story at its brand new home on TalkingStory.org
If you are a Talking Story subscriber you need not do a thing: I will be rerouting you to the right place with tech-magic. However do click in so you can see the new site at its web-based home!
I have brought back our original Talking Story banner, designed for me by Christopher Bailey.
I still have a lot to do
Think about your garage (where the car no longer fits) or that junk drawer which doesn’t close anymore, or that extra deep walk-in closet which you seriously think of as more valuable than the kitchen sometimes. A blog which has reached its 5th year is sort of like the digital equivalent of those things. Just as you’d never show me that walk-in closet of yours, I would never show you the inner workings of Talking Story hidden behind the scenes right now, quite sure I would shrink in embarrassment —and I’m short enough!
Yet it works.Talking Story is the true glory of what a “digital Ho‘ohana closet” looks like.
And boy, it has worked hard. Talking Story has been the place where all other sites now a part of our Ho‘ohana Publishing ‘Ohana were born as an idea, and then became prototypes, and then spun off on their own like internet sitcoms looking for their own e-Emmy. Talking Story was the FIRST, and from here would come what I now think of as our Ho‘ohana Community ecosystem, and our web-world Sense of Place:
Not to mention that Talking Story has been a learning place for and about apps like LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter, my Tumblr lifestream at Ho‘ohana Aloha, and just about everything Brexy I did (Brexy = Brave Experiments in Digital Learning… remember that?)
And who knows what might be next. Because of Talking Story, I do know there WILL be a next something.
So mahalo nui for understanding my seemingly boring decision. I am not going for fancy appearances, but for a totally cleaned house Talking Story can live in going forward, both inside and out, for after all, it serves us so extraordinarily well.
A few final words from Brexy
If you are meeting her for the first time, Brexy darling is my inner geek. She is currently sitting a bit cross-eyed at the complete revamping I did with our Talking Story categories, and she is trying to put the right posts in the right place… she will be there for a while, and we thank you for your patience as the entire digital closet gets cleaned up. It will likely take several months.
To those who have linked to Talking Story over the years, I am so so sorry, but there will be broken links when I close the old site down in a month or so. I will probably sink my Technorati ranking like a lead balloon with this change, and I need to start praying to the Google gods, but hey, still a young one at 5, right?
Ho‘ohiki e ho‘omau: I promise I will make it up to you! We will only get better from here, from there is so much learning still ahead of us.
Now if you’re still reading this via RSS or email, click into TalkingStory.org and have a look: The old girl has a new lease on life, and she still delivers there, hard at work at her Ho‘ohana.
Life is good. We live, work, manage and lead with Aloha,
Today my message to you is simply this: You can learn to love your birthday ”“ and love it a lot. You can learn to celebrate it “out loud” just like I do, saying mahalo, and living in thankfulness for the magnificence of your life, best gift imaginable.
UPDATE: Being it is Thursday, the day I am expected to post at Say “Alaka‘i” I continued the birthday theme there as well – love the thought that the world conspires to celebrate with me!
Here is a slightly edited version for those of you who prefer the Talking Story email subscription:
One of the very best things about having a job in Hawai‘i ”“ any job, paid or unpaid ”“ is that we like making a big deal out of people’s birthdays. Hawai‘i workplaces do birthdays with true Hawaiian style flair and celebration. There are leis, long lunches, shakas and smiles, and of course cake laden with candles; we have ice cream of every tropical flavor imaginable (the combo of Kona Coffee Ice Cream and Lilikoi Sorbet is the best! With haupia cake…mmm). Most of all, we have laughter and tons of hugs.
Where does our “eh, no shame!” attitude about birthdays come from? It’s got to be the Aloha.
We in Hawai‘i love Ha‘aha‘a, the value of humility, and we talk about it often, however Aloha helps us keep from being humility-sabotaged. We can completely bypass any feigned humility and go straight to our Aloha and the value of Mahalo, living our lives in a manner of thankfulness for all who have made us who we are, and who have helped shaped the life we celebrate on the yearly anniversary of our birth.
Great managers celebrate their people, and if you are the steward of any workplace culture ”“ in fact, any gathering culture of our community at all, not just workplaces ”“ I encourage you to make a big, big deal out of the birthdays you know about (and make sure you know about all of them). Birthdays contribute to the health of workplace culture in a hugely beneficial way.
Take my birthday off? Nah.
I freely admit that I was never one to take my birthday day off when I was in corporate life, even when I could. I loved being around the people who were so much a part of who I was. I didn’t worry that my being there added some pressure to others to celebrate with me, for it seemed far worse to deny that celebration, and pretend my birthday didn’t matter. In my beliefs about ‘Imi ola (creating our best possible life) birthdays were reckoning points with how well I was doing with both crafting the course of my life, and saying thank you to those who were such a big part of it. To deny my own birthday and not recognize others within my own awareness and gratitude seemed narrow-minded and disrespectful.
When I became a manager, it didn’t take long for me to better understand that acknowledging the birthdays of my staff was very, very important to them too: They needed their day to loom large in my recognition of how vital they were to every single effort we would think about and then labor on.
The Birthday Brigade
And birthdays make recognition so easy for everyone to participate with and join in on: The scheming with surprises and celebrations is half the fun of it. At one hotel I’d been with, we had an official “birthday brigade.” They took care of organizing a monthly birthday potluck which we all looked forward to; they took over the employee cafeteria for the day and even our Executive Chef would admit he could never duplicate such a onolicious spread. Actual birthday days were celebrated with leis, a special parking spot, banners and balloons, but each month they were newly original, for membership on the Birthday Brigade rotated throughout our staff: Last month’s honorees became next month’s brigade. You can imagine the joyful competitiveness of it all, yet everyone loved it. To be off on your birthday was to miss out big time.
The first year I was self-employed I hadn’t built my business to any notable size yet, and after a working life in the corporate world I felt a bit out of sorts when my birthday approached. Luckily for me, I had friends and family who knew that Hawaiian Style birthdays didn’t need workplaces, and I’ve never felt that apprehension again.
Learning to Love our Birthdays
If you haven’t guessed by now, today, April 23rd is my birthday. I now have this double-dose of birthday goodness. For the past few years I’ve learned how to celebrate the day virtually too.
This year I am staging my own party at Joyful Jubilant Learning, and you are all welcome to join us there: Learning to Love our Birthdays. In the post there today I talk a bit more about this notion of getting rid of humility sabotage. I go even farther, and ask for a very specific gift!
This is the first time I am celebrating my birthday here at Say “Alaka‘i” and so I must end by saying this: Mahalo for being part of my life now. You too are in the design of my ‘Imi ola, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to share my mana‘oon Alaka‘i with you.
Let’s talk story:
Tell us how you do birthdays! There is so, so much more to Birthday Aloha, Hawaiian Style!
Give each other your ideas, share your stories… any truly memorable birthday come to mind for you?
Any thoughts to share? Comment here, or via the tweet-conversation we have on Twitter @sayalakai.
Thursdays just got different. You can now be sure to find me right here, at home with the Ho’ohana Community on Talking Story!
Several of you have fallen into a habit that’s been a result of one of mine: Each Thursday, you’ve looked for my management and leadership column on Lifehack.org, expecting to find me there first, and here second. And you’ve been right in your expectations.
Back in September of 2005, I had the honor of being Leon Ho‘s very first guest author for Lifehack.org, when lifehack was a pretty new word. I remember explaining it on www.managingwithaloha.com in an effort to understand it better myself, for Leon was more sure about me fitting in there than I was!
Iâ” ™ve been reading Lifehack.org for some time now, and I have found that Leon does a terrific job at aggregating a wide spectrum of resourceful lifehacks for us; he provides managers with a great service. I am most appreciative of this wonderful opportunity heâ” ™s given me to share with a larger audience the tenets of Managing with Aloha which add richness yet more simplicity to our lives. As I said in my first post, ultimately, everything is personal, and that includes work.
Leon insisted that the site needed to have a management and leadership thread through it, and I clearly remember him rejecting my first submission because I tried to be too much like him, mimicking what he was already writing there, when he wanted more of me being me!
My first article at Lifehack.org became 5 Things Employees Need to Learnâ” ”from You. Since then, I have written 77 more, and Leon was right: They have all been about management and leadership, and the readers there have welcomed me warmly. I am very, very appreciative to every single reader who gave me the feedback I needed to write better, and to be a better management coach online.
Fast forward nearly two years, and Lifehack.org has grown to be immensely popular, with nearly 45,000 Feedburner subscribers as I write this. Leon has continued to hold high standards, and his stable of authors are recognized as some of the most respected – and most prolific – writers online. So my decision will surprise many of you, and believe me, it was a difficult one to make, taking me quite some time to come to it.
Yes, it is October 1st, and yes, this is not my normal Ho‘ohana essay for the first day of the month. It will be posted tomorrow, for today, I have a very important announcement to share with you.
JJL ‘06 has the distinction of being the 9th Forum we have done as the Ho‘ohana Community of Talking Story and Managing with Aloha, and we, both contributors and readers, have fallen in step in a certain pattern of mutual respect and support. Yet this time, something was different.
This time, when the forum drew to a close with September 2006, we wouldn’t be quite the same.
I wasn’t alone in sensing the air was charged with a new energy. To the contrary, several of us felt this stirring, and very quickly began to realize it would change us.
Yet even though they couldn’t see where they would land, the vast majority of The Several jumped in with both feet. They felt perfectly at ease with knowing that when they did land, they’d be hitting the ground running, they’d be in great company, and they could learn to navigate wherever the next road was leading. That was all they needed to know. Of that, they were sure.
That Place of Knowing and of Practiced Believing now has a name, and a new place it will be calling home. It is called the Joyful Jubilant Learning Network, a place where the Ho‘ohana Community will now welcome others to jump in, land well and hit their own ground running in the arms of virtual collaborative learning.
JJLN will welcome you at midnight tonight (Hawaii time.)
