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How to Fill up by Spilling

March 12, 2012 by Rosa Say

I’ve finished reading How We Decide, and the book I’m reading now is An Everlasting Meal, Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler. It’s one of those books that aren’t to be denied (nor should you). Rave reviews kept turning up across the world of my web browsing, seeming to ask me, “How about now? Are you ready for me yet?”

Go get a copy of your own. This book is a gem, and I recommend it highly. I’ll be buying it by the case so I can gift it to everyone I know.

The book feeds your soul as much as your tummy, probably more so. It’s a well-seasoned weaving of “philosophy and instruction into approachable lessons on instinctive cooking.” — that comes from the book jacket, and it’s a good description. The book appeals to those who aren’t chefs, but want to come to a good partnership with cooking because they like good food and want to eat it without too much fuss and bother. Respectfully and knowledgeably, yes. Professionally and elaborately, no.

That’s me, through and through. I know my kitchen intimately mostly because of keeping it clean; from a culinary perspective it feels like a foreign land even though I somehow raised a healthy family with its help.

But before I go too far down that rabbit hole, this post isn’t about cooking, or even learning to.

How to Build A Ship

Author Tamar Adler writes;

“There are times when I can’t bear to think about cooking. Food is what I love, and how I communicate love, and how I calm myself. But sometimes, without my knowing why, it is drained of all that. Then cooking becomes just another one of hunger’s jagged edges. So I have ways to take hold of this thing and wrest it from the jaws of resentment, and settle it back among the things that are mine.”

The chapter that begins with this paragraph is called “How to Build a Ship” and it’s about how Adler gets her inspiration back when it has momentarily slipped away.

As a quick but helpful aside, Adler says she has two loves: food and words. Her chapters are evocative in their announcements: “How to Light a Room” is about how herbs perk up food. “How to Live Well” is about understanding how wonderful the lowly bean can be. “How to Make Peace” is about how rice and ground corn (grits in the South, and polenta in Europe) are pacifists, because they “fill bellies and cracks in our meals, and they fill the cultural divisions in our appetites, which really, in the end, are the same.” This chapter got its name from a quote attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who is best remembered for his novella The Little Prince:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood, and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

So Adler takes his advice, and does just that for us, as her readers and hopeful voyagers. She explains how she gets her love of cooking back when she needs to, and guess what? It’s the shortest chapter in the book (at least as far as I’ve read). It’s because love has a way of sticking around, staying close to you.

How to Weave Cloth Without Thread

For me, weaving is about making learning relevant and useful; a beautiful cloth can be anything you want it to be, and mine is Managing with Aloha.
[We talked story about it here: Learning and Weaving: The absorption benefit of your Personal Philosophy]

When I read Adler’s “How to Build a Ship” I couldn’t help but think about those of us who are managers, and how often — much, much too often — we’ll “drum up people to collect wood” or “assign them tasks and work” when we should be teaching them “to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

I think Adler is right about her hunch that we have to fall in love again:

“My answer is to anchor food to somewhere deep inside you, or deep in your past, or deep in the wonders of what you love… I say: Let yourself love what you love, and see if it doesn’t lead you back to what you ate when you loved it.”

For her, it’s about the eating experience as much as the cooking experience. It’s about being where food has made everything surrounding her more vibrant and alive.

The question I have for you then, is this: Exactly what is the managemeant experience that will continually refresh your own inspiration, always helping you get your mojo back?

To put it more simply: When are you completely, and beautifully, in love with being a manager?

If you rewrote Adler’s chapter for the work you do as an Alaka‘i Manager — for your Ho‘ohana — what would you call it?

How to Fill Up By Spilling

My choice would be “How to fill yourself up by spilling” because of the spirit-spilling of Aloha. Spirit-spilling is what the beliefs I hold within my Alaka‘i calling are all about: Alaka‘i Managers are those who help people work from their inside out.

When I have been able to do that for someone, I feel full. I’m tremendously full, feeling nourished and satisfied. I feel healthy, and as alive as I have ever felt.

If my day falters in some way, I’ll usually get my inspiration by learning from people, willing to accept whatever they choose to share with me. It’s my quickest way, and it’s virtually guaranteed.
I get my continued energy in creating partnerships with them, or some other weaving (making the learning personal, relevant, and useful).

I count my successes as the people I’ve left behind better than I found them. To see them grow, or irrevocably identify their own strengths, knowing that I helped in some way, is extremely rewarding to me.

Recalling my ‘how to’ (to relight the fires of inspiration) gets easy for me to do, because all I have to remember are names. Faces, and the little details of people’s stories will come flooding back into my consciousness, and I begin to smile, I just can’t help it.

Then The Craving ever-beneath The Calling begins all over again. I want to be part of more stories, and so I get on with my ‘ship building.’

Loving this book!

I’ll leave you to think more about your own ‘how to’ with a final quote from Adler;

“So I listen hard. I listen with the purpose of remembering. And this digging into sounds and into days I have heard and felt roots future meals in the unchangeable truths of past ones.”

“Let smells in. Let the smell of hot tarmac in the summer remind you of a meal you ate the first time you landed in a hot place, when the ground smelled like it was melting. Let the smell of salt remind you of a paper basket of fried clams you ate once, squeezing them with lemon as you walked on a boardwalk. Let it reach your deeper interest. When you smell the sea, and remember the basket of hot fried clams, and the sound of skee-balls knocking against each other, let it help you love what food can do, which is to tie this moment to that one.”

When has being a manager been its very best and most beautiful for you?
What do you remember about it?

How will you do it again?

Huddle up

April 29, 2011 by Rosa Say

When you look at this picture, what do you see?

Café Il Mondo Pizzeria

I see a place of great potential, possible anywhere you can surround a table, any table, with some chairs. With any seats at all… we seem to sit on overturned buckets and coolers quite a bit here in Hawai‘i!

I see the possibility of sitting down, and having all kinds of talking story discussions. I see having coffee. I see breaking bread. I see tearing out flip chart pages, and laying them flat where everyone can keep drawing on them, and keep talking about their images, words and ideas.

I see Wow! Projects starting to happen in a very natural way, pulling in the participants they’re meant to pull in, and others too, people pulled into the action by the energy magnet you have created… chairs get kicked back at times like those. They get pushed away so people can stand as their excitement propels them to their feet, and so more people can get closer, standing side-by-side, and not behind the gate-keeping protection the chair may have started with. A comfort zone opens up. It doesn’t matter if you were there in the very beginning, or jumped in later.

But there has to be that beginning. Someone has to start.
Why not you?

Don’t waste the potential of any table or circle of seats you have in your workplace.
Use them today.
Invite others to convene with you, to converse. To go wayfinding.

Do it right now. Why wait?

Ideas are fragile, and inspiration is perishable.
Conversation is easy.

Having their Morning Coffee

Your Edge comes from your Inconvenience

March 7, 2011 by Rosa Say

The short post which follows, originally appeared on my Say “Alaka‘i” column for the Honolulu Advertiser in October of 2009. The context then was slightly different; as I recall, we were in battle with mediocrity at the time. However having an edge applies to our recent discussions as well. I thought about it when writing up The G in Goals stands for Greatness, which I ended this way:

If you think Goal Setting is boring,
do what you must to light your fire with it again.

But first… by way of intro, and in keeping another recent reminder within sharp focus…

Getting “all fired up” is a Clearing

One way to light your fire, and challenge your most brilliant self, is to “Burn Your Boats” ~

“I’ve never forgotten the story of the famed explorer Hernando Cortés. He landed on the shores of Veracruz, Mexico, in 1519. Wanted his army to conquer the land for Spain. Faced an uphill battle: an aggressive enemy, brutal disease and scarce resources. As they marched inland to do battle, Cortés ordered one of his lieutenants back to the beach with a single instruction: ‘Burn our boats.’ My kind of guy.”

“Challenge serves beautifully to introduce you to your best — and most brilliant — self. How fully would you show up each day — at work and in life — if retreat just wasn’t an option?”

—Robin Sharma, The Greatness Guide
(which I highly recommend: One of the most dog-eared books I own)

Too extreme?

Well then, what does it take for you to choose action? Goals are actions of the Hernando Cortés variety: They explore, but they also seek to conquer something.

You may have noticed that fire is a highly visible, hot emotion metaphor for me. Burning, not destructively, but as in having a “burning Yes!” as opposed to a wimpy, unemotional decision.

Another morning for the Keawe

Where I live, on the Big Island of Hawai‘i, brush fires are more common than we would like them to be, but the wonderful thing is that they don’t leave lasting scars behind. In fact, they clear: After a fire, the green shoots emerging from the ground are so life affirming. Fresh. New. Exuberant. Growth happens where it would never have began without that fire, and it happens quicker, for the fire didn’t take everything: It left behind both space and nutrition.

Fire Remnants Green after the fire

So how do we bring those lessons back to us, and understand what motivates us, freshens and renews us, particularly in setting challenging goals, and then, as managers, helping others do so?

January Wildflowers

Well, another way to light your fire is to make things inconvenient for you, just like our Big Island wildfires temporarily do, blocking the main highway. Consider with me, how…

Your Edge comes from your Inconvenience

I have noticed something about the workplaces I have visited recently. Managers are playing it safe, and that’s bad news for all of us. The inventive, edgy work borne from fresh ideas doesn’t happen where managers play it safe.

How often do you seek out those who aren’t on your radar, engaging them in conversation?

How often are you deliberately working on what is completely inconvenient and out of the norm for you?

How often do you push yourself to do the things you don’t like to do, arriving at those places which fall out of your comfort zone —and then staying there long enough to learn a new m.o.?

Make no mistake about it: Any edge you gain in today’s highly competitive world will come from your inconvenience.

I realize that this goes counter to what so much of management is all about. We managers work to make everything comfortable and predictable. We smooth ruffled feathers. We eliminate variance. We knock down barriers and obstacles. We spend considerable time and effort paving over the bumps in the road, and tending to the peace and order of the workplace landscape so that everyday work gets done with some kind of productive regularity our stakeholders can count on.

Well guess what. That’s what everybody else does too.

And remember, even A Copy of the Best is Still a Copy.

Hard as it may be to maintain peace and order, you can’t pat yourself on the back once it’s done and stop there. If you do, you’re the same as everyone else, and you won’t be anything special because you didn’t go the distance.

At first this sounds like a leadership concept (and it is), but it’s about Alaka‘i management too, for when we manage we channel available energies. If you are only working within your own comfort zone, you are missing the catalytic disruption which you can harness, and there is a LOT of energy available in disruption, waiting for you to channel it more productively.

Breakthrough-your-business Word for the Day: Disrupt (link to Ho‘ohana Aloha)

Let’s go back to the questions we started with:

How often do you seek out those who aren’t on your radar, engaging them in conversation?

How often are you deliberately working on what is completely inconvenient and out of the norm for you?

How often do you push yourself to do the things you don’t like to do, arriving at those places which fall out of your comfort zone —and then staying there long enough to learn a new m.o.?

Go spend some time on the wild side: Any edge you gain in today’s highly competitive world will come from your inconvenience.

There’s a fringe benefit too: You’ll never be bored.

Find your Blue Flame Inspirations: There’s no refrigerator space for inspiration.

Dangerous? Risky? Perhaps, but as the saying goes, you go out on a limb because that’s where the sweetest fruit is!

Peach Profusion

There’s no refrigerator space for inspiration

January 30, 2011 by Rosa Say

Here’s a new habit to groom for 2011, our year of better habits:

Make space for inspiration, and not in your refrigerator.

Add it to your language of intention.

It’s become my way to remember something I originally heard from Jason Fried of 37signals, when I heard him say in a podcast that “inspiration is perishable.”

You can’t bottle up inspiration. You can’t put it in a ziplock, toss it in the freezer, and fish it out later. It’s instantly perishable if you don’t eat it while it’s fresh.
~ Jason Fried

So true!

Inspiration is fragile and fleeting, and so you have to capitalize on it, and optimize it when you can whenever you have that chance. To simply capture it, say in a written note on a scrap of paper, or in a voice memo on your phone, usually isn’t enough for it to survive as true, earth shaking inspiration. You’ve let the moment pass, missing that window of opportunity where there was something more. You edited something which should have been allowed to run rampant for a while longer. Rampant, wild and free.

You can’t refrigerate a blue flame without smothering it.

The best possible time for inspiration to hit you, is when you have space in your life — in the day to day living of your life — to stop everything if you have to, so you can focus on that inspiration and nothing else. If it’s an idea, you can milk it for all it’s worth while your inspired thinking about it is shiny and new, fresh and still untapped of its greatest potential — however you usually get that full blown release to happen.

Some people need to talk it out, which is great, for it becomes this twofer where another person can get inspired too. Me? I have to be able to write it out, writing through a complete mindsweep until I feel mentally exhausted, but never spent, for those are the times I’m most energized and feeling like I’m on fire, and burning as hot and bright as I’ll ever burn — it’s the blue flame stuff: In most fire (because it can depend on the fuel too), the blue flame is the hottest, with the potential to tip into dazzling white fire, and it burns most efficiently.

So ask yourself this: When inspiration strikes, what do you do? Can you always do it? What must you change, from however your work atmosphere now exists, to make space in your day for your inspiration to run rampant, and for however long you need it to?

The part about making space in your day is important: KÄ“ia lā — it’s “about today, the here and now.” You can’t instruct your inspiration to only come around on weekends, or be satisfied with it only showing up once a month or so. Daily inspiration is what’s ‘Imi ola, and living your best possible life.

And have you tried to track it somehow, so you know when you’re likely to be inspired? It’s habit learning you have to incorporate into your trusted system or Strong Week Plan; you simply must. Books for example, always do it for me, somewhere within their once, twice, or third time coming.

It feels so delicious, to indulge in your inspiration!
I genuinely wish you blue flames, run rampant space, and no refrigerators.

Beverly Hills.ish

The most unexpected triggers can inspire you.

It was this Beverly Hills.ish looking car for me a few days ago.

Sweet, sweet ride.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Archive Aloha: Here’s a Take 5 of related postings:

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  5. Feeling Good Isn’t the Same as Feeling Strong
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