“Chaos is the primal state of pure energy for every true new beginning.” – William Bridges

Making a transition is an inside out job, William Bridges’ work with corporations is very effective at helping professionals and teams understand this process. He explains that change happens to us, while a transition is how we process it internally. If you understand this then you can help yourself and your team move from stuck to thriving, and know that it is all in perfect timing.

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“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not a truth.” – Marcus Aurelius

I feel grateful and fortunate to have numerous friends and colleagues to bounce ideas off of and that I almost always get a wide range of opinions about what to do. One of my biggest realizations was that their opinions are just that, and not facts. This can be challenging because often their opinions conflict or are given with a lot of strong justification, but I have learned to take in the information as data rather than fact and then come to my own conclusions. Even knowing they have my (or the business’s) best interest in mind, their opinion is not fact and may be way off for me and my situation.

In my negotiating workshops I explain how important it is to gather as much information as possible about the other person or business. Some of that information is based on opinions, for example: “Their business is not doing well so there is no way they are going to give us a price decrease.” I’d ask for some facts to back up the business results and then ask about their cost/margin calculations and overhead so that more information can be used to create possible alternatives versus assuming their position or an opinion that was expressed by someone on the team.

In coaching, I try to avoid giving my opinion at all. But, that is sometimes exactly what a client hires me for, based on my background and experience. If I do give my opinion, I make it very clear that it is just one point of data and that their best solution will come from gathering data from multiple sources and then listening to their internalGPS!

How do you process others’ opinions or give yours in a productive way? Please share in a comment so we can all thrive more.

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Sometimes, in my preparations to give a speech, I catch myself in a spiral of concerns about whether the audience will like my points or if what I’m saying will resonate at all or if the information I share will be relevant enough for them and on and on. In the best of times, I catch the spiral before it goes too far down (it is never going up) and shift into reminding myself of other speeches that have gone very well and that it is really none of my business to be concerned with their reactions or judgment. My focus is on understanding the group’s needs from the meeting planner/coordinator and then taking the time to prepare a great speech that meets those needs.

You will thrive more if you first clearly understand the expectations of your assignment or project and then do your best to meet them. Your work may include asking for feedback and many other steps. Avoid projecting into the future and guessing about how you will be judged about the results. The more you can focus on doing your best in the current moment, the more the results will take care of themselves and the more productive you will be.  

Here’s to more thriving and less being stuck in judgment from others this week!

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I worked through a stressful situation with a client once that I could empathize with all too well. It was her pile. The pile itself was not the cause of her stress, it was all of her thoughts about the pile. “What is in there that I should have taken care of?” “How am I going to deal with it if I am late on something in that pile?” “What problems are lurking in that pile that I have ignored?” We talked through those underlying fears and then I asked her how she would feel if the pile were just gone. The big relief was obvious in her voice; she was being weighed down like that pile weighed a ton!

We talked through what she needed to do to get rid of the pile and keep it from coming back. She came up with a plan to allocate 15 minutes each day (her schedule was very full) to going through the pile and just listing what was there and then to start working the list. Of course, the list helped reduced the stress a lot because most of it was her imagination of what could be there. Your imagination is very powerful, both for the good and the bad. She then took additional steps to get rid of it and avoid it coming back in the future.

One of my “piles” right now is purchasing a new laptop and transferring everything from my current older laptop. If you love playing with technical things then this is not a stress pile for you; for me it is a small one that I just need to get done (that fear of my current lap top crashing lingers in the back of my mind and sometimes my imagination makes it into a much heavier pile).

Is there a pile of some sort in your life that is weighing you down? Take a minute and imagine how it will feel when you are rid of it. What small step can you take toward removing your pile to thrive more this week? Go do it.

photo credit to rosipaw via Flickr creative commons 

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Follow these steps to shift those energy sapping habits into more thriving:

• Awareness. Start noticing and being aware of what you are doing and how it makes you feel. For example, does your morning routine energize you or have you rushing into your vehicle in a frenzy that leaves you shouting expletives at other innocent drivers during your commute and arriving at work with a scowl?   
• Pick One. After you become aware of those sapping activities or habits, pick one. Only one so that you can focus on it. One of my examples: I routinely became frustrated every morning when I rifled through my sock drawer to find the color and pair I wanted to wear. It was dimly lit in my bedroom and the drawer was a jumbled mess.
• Change It. Consider how to change that one thing to eliminate the sucking of your energy. In my example, I organized my drawer with shoe boxes (for dividers), threw away the old socks and put a lamp by my dresser so that I could see better.
• Check In. Did your change(s) work? You may need to experiment with a couple different ways to shift your habit or activity so that it is working for you. Forgive yourself along the way if you start sliding back into that old habit or don’t make the change as quickly as you would like.
• Celebrate. Notice and appreciate each time you make a change in your routine that is helping you thrive. Enjoy something fun to reward yourself.
• Pick Another. Now pick another one and follow the whole process again.

You can change your life for more thriving one small step at at time. Believe me, it works!

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Shift to Guilt

Yes, guilt is actually a good thing sometimes. It is much more productive than the whole shaming thing. I love Social Scientist, Brene Brown‘s research (her TED talk linked); her  years of research shows that using shame never works to change behaviors. Your own or anyone else’s. So, if you are tempted to post a list of the lowest producers or worst sales numbers or lowest anything for anyone, stop! It will just entrench people in their shame and make their production worse. On the other hand, if you can shift them (one on one) to see the behaviors that led to the low performance and feel some guilt around their actions or mistakes, then this will help make some changes in behaviors. It is a shift from, “I am a bad person” (shame) to “I am a person with a bad behavior” (guilt). Brene Brown’s research also shows that people who consistently thrive have have more guilt than  shame.

Focus on Learning & Strengths

What good can come from the mistake or if it is in past, what good came from it? There are always things to be learned from those horrifying errors in judgement. And sometimes it is your over doing of a strength that then became a weakness that partially caused the problem. How can you ratchet that strength back a bit so that you turn it back into a good thing? What will you do differently next time? This shift in focus leads to gratitude for what you have gained and that you don’t have to make that mistake again, now that you learned from it!

Talk About It

If you can share your mistakes, talk about what you learned and use this to help make things better for yourself or for your organization then you have dissolved those feelings of shame that keep you entrenched in re-living old mistakes (and keeps you unproductive). Successful change and thriving happens through discussing your own and empathizing with others’ mistakes. Individuals and businesses get into a downward spiral of trouble by keeping quiet and burying mistakes. It takes some courage to start the conversation, but it is well worth the effort; just be sure the person you are sharing with will be focused on moving forward and not judging you (and entrenching you in more shame).

Think about a mistake you made; how you can use these tips to shift it into a pivotal point for more thriving?

A professional Coach is a great resource for having these conversations to move forward; call me if you get stuck!

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“If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.”  – Daniel Goleman

In my coaching, I have found that people are hungry for this skill and too often we have not developed it enough in ourselves to be able to model it well. Consider how you can continue to grow your empathy skills for more thriving this week.

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 “I have decided to stick with love; hate is too big of a burden to bear.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

In order to thrive, I need to choose love over hate. Especially when it appears that the person or group is more deserving of hate. Our great stories of revenge do not support this view, it takes courage to go this way. It is an act of bravery to face hate or betrayal with love instead of more hate and revenge. Love still means justice for those who have committed crimes and of course this is critical in order to hold people accountable. It is just the way the justice is done that makes the difference. This love approach can also make a big difference in the workplace. Firings and Lay-offs done in a more loving way can result in employees who do not necessarily hate the company or manager that delivered the bad news (and minimize the risk of workplace violence). If I go after the competition with admiration for their tactics that took my customers away then I can open up to more creativity to make my company better in the end. If I become mired in hating the competition then my creativity is squelched and they have even more opportunities to take my customers away and my business suffers.

Love is the way to go. Come from a place of love when you are working with your colleagues and you will accomplish so much more. When I am clear on my boundaries and I can walk away from a work or personal relationship that is not working for me and do it in a loving way, then I do not bear the burden of holding on to hate and resentment.

Love is the only choice if I want to thrive. Spread the Love on this Happy Valentine’s Day!

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As we go into 2013, looking back at 2012, was it worse, better or the same as 2011? Hopefully better. What steps will you take now so that a year from now, you look back at 2013 and say, “Wow, 2013 was even better than 2012!”

And keep in mind, thriving and getting better are not linear, but more of an upward spiral as Stephen Covey defined so well in his classic, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” You may go down into “worse” and then hover around “same” before you move up into the “better” range. So, measure over a year versus a month or week and don’t get caught up in a really bad day (or week or month) and then give up.

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“It is not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials.” – Bruce Lee

In my Coach training I went through a process of looking at all the things during my day (both personal and work time) that I “tolerated.” The challenge was to come up with 100 of these things that did not add to my day or things that got in the way. I’ve realized over the years that this exercise is not a one time thing; maintenance is required. And it is doubly important during the annual holiday season. It is easy to get caught up in all the things that I feel like I “should” do in order to really celebrate the season!

In work environments with clients I see this happen on projects; it may be a habit of the culture to over complicate the problem or miss a simple solution. Sometimes stepping back or asking another person to look at the project can give a new perspective and eliminate some of the complexity.

“I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all encumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run. ” – Henry David Thoreau

Right now, I have had a kind of forced simplicity in my life as I take care of  Walt, while he is in the hospital and out of state from my home. It is amazing how little I actually need or have to do in order to still thrive and “find where my roots run.” Sometimes, adverse events allow us to simplify in profound ways and for this I am grateful. We are handing out holiday candy cane kisses to the nurses here and this made me think of the KISS term that inspired this post.

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