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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

The G in Goals stands for Greatness

March 3, 2011 by Rosa Say

And the M in Manager stands for Matter. Make a difference.

Our talk story this week started with a deadline many managers share, and our wayfinding to make the best of it brought us to goal setting.

That’s a happenstance I’m pleased with, for goals is the stuff of ‘Imi ola — creating our best possible life.

Love this passage from Robin Sharma in his book, The Greatness Guide:

I know what you’re thinking: “Robin, give me a topic that’s fresh and original and challenging. Why are you writing about goals? We know this stuff. It’s boring!” Few success practices are as important as articulating your most closely held goals and then reviewing them daily. Getting masterful at setting and then considering your goals on a consistent basis is essential to a life of greatness. And yet, guess what? Most people don’t spend more than an hour a year doing this. It’s true: People spend more time planning their summer vacations than they do designing their lives.”

Comfortable

I admit to you that I’ve had my ups and downs with it too. Goal setting is hard, especially the kind of goal setting that Jim Collins explains as BHAGs: Those Big Hairy Audacious Goals you know will cause your life to shift in a way that will change you at your core forever.

Managing with Aloha was the achievement of a BHAG for me, and now, 7 years later, I’m still seeking my next one.

I’ve had much more success in helping my employees and customers set their goals, guiding them and supporting them, than I’ve had with setting goals of my own.

However I keep trying, for the evidence is crystal clear to me:

I feel alive, attentive and accomplished when I’m focused on a goal, even a small one.

When I ‘take a break’ from goal setting I’m fully aware that I’m stalling. I feel directionless and unsatisfied about a lot of things, not just the lack of a new goal.

When I help others with their goals, I’m working on my own how-to-achieve-them mastery too: It all counts.

When I recognize my next BHAG cresting over the horizon, I’ll be ready for it.

Wailea Horizon

So please. Don’t succumb to giving lip service to goal setting.

If you think it’s boring, do what you must to light your fire with it again. Get it to work its magic for you personally, and as an Alaka‘i Manager who matters in the lives of other people.

Here’s more help from Joshua Becker: How to Fulfill Dreams

“Setting your goals is a bold play for your best life. Setting your goals is an act of heroism because you are reaching for the potential that has been invested in you.”
— Robin Sharma

Weekend Project: Hō‘imi your Trusted System

February 20, 2010 by Rosa Say

Preface: Hō‘imi means “look for better and best” and is defined here:
The 3 Secrets of Being Positive

Dip into the Talking Story archives, and you’re likely to find several posts on productivity studies which I had done within a learner’s obsession I’d had with GTD: David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach to stress-free performance.

Initially, GTD appealed to me as a great companion to my earlier learning of Stephen R. Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People; it fortified and revitalised those lessons-learned for me with how habits can put us on auto-pilot in a good way.

Get lazy

I still refer to GTD often and with confidence, for there is a wealth of productivity “stuff” to be learned from David Allen, who amuses me in the way he will repeatedly say,

“I’m lazy and I don’t want to think about anything more than it deserves.”

How’s that for a statement perfectly in tune with weekend living? He recently repeated it as the opening line of his last newsletter. Allen goes on to explain,

“So my quest became to find the best and most efficient ways to think about things as little as possible. What I found was that by asking a few clarifying questions, and putting the answers in a trusted system, I was able to use my mind more creatively and more strategically for the kind of stuff that really did deserve my mental horsepower.”

Reflecting back on it, if I had to reduce everything I have learned from GTD into a single useful take-away statement, it would be that of which he speaks: GTD has taught me to capture my stress-free performance answers in a trusted system. My answers. My trusted system.

Strengthen your trusted system

What does this have to do with our current-to-February theme? (February’s Strengthening. We know it as Love.)

When you have a trusted system for your own personal productivity, a system which perpetuates what works best for you, and which discards everything else, you are strengthening your system of self care.

You can work on the goals which set your heart on fire (and express your spirit of Aloha), because you’ve already done your very best work on the most important project of all: You, and how you operate —your strengths, your values, and your trusted systems of well-being.

Consider what falls within ‘discarding everything else’

I devoted part of yesterday to working within my own trusted system, capturing my answers, and discarding everything else: It was a day I had calendared in my Strong Week Plan for reviewing my Project List for 2010.

I tumbled the brain-writing captured in the table below at one point of my review, as a reflection on my Mahalo, the Hawaiian value of thankfulness. (To any of you GTDers reading, think of brain-writing as a contextual mind-sweep.) I was appreciating what I have managed to do right thus far in 2010, instead of beating myself up over what I still needed to improve upon. In other words, I captured some of my answers:

A TRUSTED SYSTEM EVERYTHING ELSE
Accomplishment Busy-work
Chic, custom-fit design One-size fits all (which usually doesn’t, and is never very flattering)
Useful bits Irrelevant bits
Essentials only Extras and clutter
Captures your needed attention Sources of procrastination
Batches work Scatters work, or needlessly duplicates it
Creates “flow” Conducive to interruption
When auto-pilot = learned When auto-pilot = consumed
Designed to work efficiently Designed to work “pretty” or riddled with “should-ing”
A blend of low-tech and digital Stubborn about “system purity”
Conducive to thinking Conducive to distraction
Energy-efficient or even energy-exponential Drains your energy or wastes it
Cheap (i.e. inexpensive) Costly (in numerous ways)
Your “burning YES” What you haven’t said “NO” to yet

Oooh…
and I MUST point this out as a connection to The 3 Secrets of Being Positive:

I am evangelizing batching work more and more every day. Batching is the only work-around I know of, where we can successfully apply our “multi-thinking” to our “multi-tasking.” A good way to tackle more batching is to separate the tasks within your work into low-tech, mid-tech, and high-tech (own it as  your tech: Comfy with My-Tech GTD).

Messes can be pretty

‘Ike loa: Look over that list again from the viewpoint of how much you learn when your trusted system becomes one of your Wow Projects!

“We all need systems installed into our days to ensure consistency of results, order and superb outcomes.

Success doesn’t just occur: It’s a project that is worked on each day.”

—Robin Sharma, author of the book I reached for most over the last year (besides Managing with Aloha :) The Greatness Guide

One of the things I learned in my trusted system, was to embrace my messiness when looks messy actually means I can see everything better. For instance, I no longer use liquid paper in my check register or personal journal, because I want to see what I crossed out, and/or quickly recall why I changed my mind. Strikeouts have become my friend;  so much so that I even use them digitally now! Used to be, I wanted everything to be pristine clean and match; now I realize how useful it is to see my dog-eared, annotated pages, doodling and all, and the ink color-coding which looks like pre-school play to the untrained eye.

Just one no.5 Brush

I’ll bet you already have the makings of a trusted system within your personal productivity habits, and that you do know of your “good bones” in your success structures. Have you ever stopped to articulate them, and value them, so you capture your answers with the work you’ve done on a system which you continue to place your trust in?

That’s the weekend project I suggest you tackle if you haven’t other plans. You will find it a fabulous way to set a better course the rest of the year to come, and it might just become your passionate flare-up for February!

What can you share with the rest of our Ho‘ohana Community about your trusted system of personal productivity?

How is it connected to your feelings of well-being, and your ‘Imi ola, your best possible life?

How has your trusted system helped you give movement to your big ideas?

Footnote: If this doesn’t appeal to you, last weekend’s suggestion might!
Weekend Reading: Let’s go Blog Rolling

Kukupa‘u: Be Enthusiastic!

January 8, 2010 by Rosa Say

“E kukupa‘u ana no i kāna hana”

Put all you have into your work;
Kukupa‘u, with great enthusiasm, with might and main.”
—Pukui Elbert

Be excited that it’s Friday.

Friday, and not the day before the weekend, because working on Friday rocks too!

My favorite book in 2009 was an impulse buy while trolling a bookstore, killing time: A paperback that I have turned to daily because it makes me feel so great about being alive, and being able. It’s the kind of book I wish I’d written, and I still hope to write one day, but if that day never comes, I will still be very happy with this one by my side: The Greatness Guide by Robin Sharma.

Here is a great way to approach the day: It’s Aloha Friday, Pō‘alima

From page 78:

Be Wildly Enthusiastic

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is due to the triumph of enthusiasm.”

Samuel Ullman observed: “Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.”

Enthusiasm matters.

The people I love to be around are generally those that have a simple, heartfelt quality: They are enthusiastic. Wildly so. They are open to life. They are curious. They love to learn. They smile when they see me. And they have a lot of fun. Play hard, or don’t play at all.

Today, show up at work with all the enthusiasm you can genuinely muster. Be outrageously energetic and madly alive. See the best in people. Go the extra mile to delight your customers. See the opportunity for learning and personal evolution amidst a seeming setback. Embrace change as a chance to grow. Have a laugh with a teammate. Tell your loved ones you adore them. Spread some passion. I’ll be the first to agree that you can’t control what happens to you each day. But with an abundance of enthusiasm, I have no doubt that whatever the coming hours bring, you will handle them with grace, strength, and a smile.

Be outrageously energetic and madly alive.

—Robin Sharma
(I took the liberty of adding the links to others in our enthusiastic Ho‘ohana Community :)


Dragon Boy Tru, by Bren on Flickr

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