Tag: reframing

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Wear Life Loosely and Still Meet the Deadlines

I love Bernie Siegel’s advice to wear life loosely.[1] It’s a way of being that speaks to my soul and releases what feels like my creative best.

I’m happiest when I can wrap the magnificence of life loosely around my shoulders like a comfortable, old shawl – and tackle head-on whatever comes my way. I’m a bear to myself and others when I can’t.

I can’t fully define what it means to wear life loosely, but I sure know how it feels. Calm. Exhilarating. Productive. Joyful.

Wearing life loosely involves at least three things for me:

1. Mindfulness: being in the moment and enjoying it totally, without feeling time or performance pressures

2. Playfulness: a lighthearted approach to whatever I’m doing that includes a sense of appreciation and wonder, a willingness to impishly push boundaries and rules of restraint, and plenty of giggles

3. Feeling responsible for only myself: a release from excessive worries and fears for others and the world – real and imaginary.

Although it may seem paradoxical, I work very hard at staying loose. Living life loosely does not come easily, but everything seems to work better when I can.

I grew up in a hard-working, blue collar family. My father held two – sometimes three – jobs much of his life to make ends meet, and I had my own high-top stool in his basement workshop from as early as I can remember to help him however I could. My mother was disabled and rarely left our home – and I assumed adult caretaking roles at an early age.

I came by responsibility, intensity, anathema to wastefulness, and a predisposition for over-achievement honestly: I know how to take care of people and business and myself and get things done. I’m not complaining – that’s something of which I am proud. But I carry a legacy that must be managed: the inner child only runs free when everything is in order.

Wearing life loosely reminds me that perfect order is never arriving: a life mantra of que sera sera is more realistic.

How do you wear your life? Is its mantle loose enough for you to achieve your goals with ease?

Get looser and laugh about it:  Laughter and humor are keys to the good life. We all need to laugh more. It’s just that simple! Laughter and humor augment our creativity and productivity, and there’s ample evidence they are good medicine, too.

Humor, for example, gives our creativity a perfect workout. It employs many of the creative right brain’s most powerful attributes: understanding situations in context, getting the big picture, combining different elements in new alignments, and adding surprise and novelty.

Researchers have used humor as a measure of managerial effectiveness, emotional intelligence, and innovation – and those who use it well score high on all three.[2] Humor can reduce workplace hostility, relieve tension, communicate difficult messages, and lessen status differences.[3]

Humor cushions the most stressful bumps in life. Mark Twain once said, “Humor is the good natured side of a truth.” He demonstrated this in his famous response to news accounts of his passing away: “The news of my death has been greatly exaggerated.”

Humor encourages us to take ourselves less seriously – and that is especially important in situations involving difficult people or problems.

Above all, humor is a way to illuminate and break frame – to demonstrate that any one take on a situation is limited, arbitrary, and open for deeper investigation.[4]  After Churchill lost the 1945 election to be Prime Minister, his wife Clementine suggested it might be a blessing in disguise. Churchill replied, “That may be, but I wish it were not so well disguised.”

So laugh a little – or a lot. Laughter releases nature’s pain-reducing, relaxation-promoting chemicals called endorphins. You know what tickles your fancy: humor books, corny jokes, movies, improvisation games, comedy tapes, time with witty friends. Engage and enjoy!

Laugh with friends and colleagues. You’ll connect in deeper ways and both benefit from the body’s release of the bonding hormone called oxytocin.[5]

How do you wear your life? Is its mantle loose enough for you? What adjustments do you need to make for a good life? To meet those deadlines with productivity and grace?

[1] Bernie S. Siegel (1998). Prescription for Living. New York: HarperCollins.

[2] Daniel H. Pink (2006). A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. New York: Riverhead Books.

[3] Fabio Sala (2003). “Laughing All the Way to the Bank.” Harvard Business Review (September, 2003).

[4] Lee G. Bolman and Terrence E. Deal (2017). Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice and Leadership (sixth edition). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/Wiley.

[5] Amit Sood (2013). The Mayo Clinic Guide to Stress-free Living. Boston, MA: DaCapo Press, p. 243.

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Your Leadership Matters: Start by Building Resilience

The Leadership Professor announces her new blog, Your Leadership Matters.

She brings wisdom and strength from a journey rivaling that of Odysseus and celebrates new understandings garnered through her travels. Our current times require nothing less than high-impact leadership, and The Leadership Professor stands ready to serve as your guide so that you can rise successfully to the challenges ahead.

Leadership is all about making a difference on things that matter and the world a better place for us all. It comes in many forms and shapes – from creating and managing complex systems that do justice to employees, local communities, tasks at hand, and the environment to naming the injustice in an observed micro-aggression at the local supermarket against someone deemed different.

We all have opportunities to lead – whether we sit at the head or the foot of the table. The trick is to be ready when opportunity calls. So, where do we begin?

In my work, people regularly ask what it takes to lead well. The list is long, but at the top is resilience.

Resilience is the ability to adapt and strengthen in the face of challenge, uncertainty, failure, or trauma. It is a learned skill that builds with use. It includes steps like:

  • recognizing you always have a choice in interpreting and responding to events (even when you feel you don’t)
  • learning to keep things in perspective – for most situations, good enough is indeed good enough
  • looking for creative ways to make challenges work for you (and not add to your burdens)
  • practicing new behaviors and responses, and
  • reflecting on how well all this is working for you.

Think about a recent situation that was deeply challenging for you.  How well did you stay centered and focused? Agile and creatively flexible?  What made the situation so challenging for you?

How, for example, did you frame the event? Disaster? Opportunity? End of the world? Intriguing fun? Bump in the road? How did your framing fuel your energy and reactions?  Enable you to see and understand what was really happening for you and others? How quick were you to think of creative options to make the situation work (beyond blaming others, remaining perplexed, or expecting others to fix things – and getting mad when they didn’t)?  How easily did you let go of any angst or anger?

Do you see any similarities between your strategies in that situation and in others at work or at home? 

We can never control the demands of others – and as much as we’d like demanding others to make the world right or simpler for us, they often can’t or won’t.  But we can control how we understand and respond to their demands. And sometimes just remembering that is enough for us to take a step back and a deep breath, to recognize that we have control over how we interpret events despite our frustration, and to think creatively about how to turn a crummy situation into something good – or at least something manageable.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Professor of Medicine Emeritus and founder of the Stress Reduction Clinic at U-Mass Medical Center, has a wonderful reminder about life: You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.

That spirit, sense of personal agency, and confidence are at the heart of leadership effectiveness – and make for a happy professional (and personal) life.

It’s easier for some to approach life and work this way than for others – genes, early life experiences, brain wiring, past trauma, and educational experiences make a difference. The good news: wherever we start, we can all get better.  Being resilient lets us live more complex, global lives gracefully; and it’s less costly to body, soul, and relationships.

Resilience at its core involves learning to “wear life loosely”[i].  We’re more creative problem solvers when we do. How do we build the capacity to wear life loosely yet productively? As someone for whom resilience did not come naturally, I’ve studied and thought deeply about that. Five suggestions from my work:  

Start with what you know you can control or change – you. It is easy to hope that others will change. We know from research that’s a common, first response for us all. But you have the best control over the process when you focus on changing yourself, your response, your way of framing the situation. This is not to say that you should cocoon, pull back, withhold your preferences or observations, or refuse to engage challenging others or ineffective situations. It is more a question of how, when, and why you do that work – and a reminder that you stand a better chance of influencing others when you know what you want and when you are trying patiently and openly to make things work.

Embrace your control over your full range of choices and options.  It’s easy to feel stuck – as if there’s only one way out or only one way to understand a sticky situation. It’s always harder to think of options – so much of life rewards us for being on automatic pilot. Resilience comes from being a stronger, more deliberate, and broad thinker – no one-trick pony – and from having the confidence in knowing that you are.

How do you develop those capacities? Practice them. Be playful. Take a minute now and then to ask yourself questions like, So what else could I do now? What other options do I have? How else could I respond? What else is possible? Why else might others be acting as they do? Once you get into the hang of it, these kinds of questions become second nature. They also enable you to see a broader and richer world.

Learn to reframe. That means being able to stand back and look at a challenge from multiple angles and perspectives before jumping to the conclusion that you know what’s really happening (for you and others). This is especially important when you feel high stress, anger, anxiety, or other deep emotions.

If I tell myself I’m stuck, I am. If I say that I’m lost or overwhelmed, I will be. When I see an opportunity, it’s always there.

When driven blindly by feelings, we react. It may feel good to vent, but to what end? Professionals have confidence that they know how to respond. The difference between reacting and responding is huge. What are the stories that you tell yourself in the face of frustrating or over-whelming situations?  Try an alternative framing. You’ll see your mood lighten and options grow.  

Accept: not everything is equally important. This may sound trite, but think about how often you have gotten yourself into a major stew over the small stuff.  We do it all the time.

Despite what you may have been told by well-meaning grammar school teachers, not everything is worth doing well – and some things are not worth doing at all.

Sure there are consequences to your choices. Choose to not do something, and you haven’t done it. This is where knowing yourself comes in.

What’s really important to you? Where do you not want to miss anything or make a mistake? What are the issues or areas where you can cut yourself some slack? Be less perfect?  Punt without shirking your responsibility to self or others? 

That’s the essence of managing work-life balance and overload – and you hold the key to that.  As you climb in responsibilities, you will never be able to do everything – and you’ll never be able to do all that you do perfectly.  How can you learn to accept that in yourself?  How can you use the supports and resources you have to share the load? Build networks of trust? That’s not easy for people with high expectations and needs for control, yet it’s essential.      

Laugh.  A good sense of humor is mandatory for resilient leaders – and that means laughing at yourself, your mistakes, and your foibles. It’ll help keep things in perspective – and you’ll have a grand time.

Onward!

[i] B. Siegel (1993). How to Live Between Office Visits: A Guide to Life, Love and Health. New York: HarperCollins.

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Take a Fresh Look at What You Do – and What You Could Do Differently

I like this post from Ken Favaro on the HBR blogsite.  I repost it below.  We’re always chasing new, new things when sometimes looking for creative ways to approach, manage, reposition, and understand our core business can make all the difference.   Enjoy – and take a fresh look at what you do and what you could do differently. Onward! 

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Organic Growth Is the Underestimated Opportunity

9:22 AM Wednesday September 14, 2011
by Ken Favaro

Sooner or later most companies find themselves struggling to produce growth. Often it’s because their business models have run their course (Yahoo!), or they’ve been overtaken by competition (Kmart), or they are being hit particularly hard by a stagnant economy (any durable goods company).

When this happens, they often react in unproductive ways. Some scramble to imitate successful strategies launched by competitors, like Microsoft did with its giant investment in Bing or Coca-Cola with its foray into energy drinks and waters. Some go for "game changers" — giant acquisitions that they hope will change their growth trajectory and how investors perceive them.

Others double down on their most loyal customers on the theory that they can build on an already strong market position and emotional connection. And all too many try to work their way out of the problem by launching multiple growth initiatives with the hope that a few of them will stick.

Most of the time, these efforts fail to reignite growth. So why pursue them? One explanation is that companies systematically underestimate opportunities for organic growth that are hiding in plain sight. We know of one business that had both a dental hygiene and retail battery business but missed the opportunity to combine those technical capabilities. Instead, they let a small startup develop the first low-cost electric toothbrushes.

Why do companies so often miss out on these opportunities? A big reason is that they often focus their organic growth efforts on their most loyal customers. But these, by definition, offer the smallest opportunities for organic growth because you already have most of their business. The big organic growth opportunity is with non-loyal customers who freely and frequently switch between competitors. For example, half of Starbucks’ customers buy only 40% of their coffee from Starbucks — they get the rest from places like Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonald’s. Getting more business from non-loyal customers is an enormous organic growth opportunity that is hidden in plain sight for most companies.

Focusing too much on traffic and cross-selling often goes nowhere for the same reason. I know of one giant retailer that was struggling to grow on a same-store basis. The problem was it was looking in many of the wrong places. The emphasis was on increasing "foot traffic" in the store and "crossing the aisle." It turned out that providing more value within categories — such as offering a greater variety of sizes or fashions in the women’s apparel aisle and more service for electronics customers in rural areas — offered greater opportunities for growth from existing customers, many of whom were also buying at other chains, did than increasing traffic or cross-selling.

Companies can ill afford to make these mistakes. Today’s business leaders have never faced the sustained headwinds we will see over the next decade, including chronic unemployment, the specter of stagflation, and the Great Deleveraging of governments and their citizens. The next decade will present a far more difficult environment for growth than the one we saw in the past three decades.

The good news is that most companies have a big opportunity of organic growth sitting in their core businesses.The opportunity is usually enough to double the top line over three-to-five years. But two-thirds of that opportunity is almost always found in only one third of the business. It takes faith and determination to find it. It is often hidden in less loyal customers, in how customers behave (not in what they tell you), in value propositions that are not fully delivered, and in markets that cut across the internal boundaries of companies’ own organizations.

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Raise your Joy Quotient (JQ): Step III – Look Around with Different Eyes

The final step for raising your joy quotient is a variation on the old adage, bloom where you are planted.

Life doesn’t work such that most of us can pick up and find new opportunities to express our evolving talents. And sometimes we can find ourselves far down a path that seems, if anything, to be leading us further away from where we hope to be. But that doesn’t mean that we’re stuck in a joyless work life. It means that we’ll need to look at our current situation with different eyes to discover the untapped opportunities or experiences that can build toward others we want.

Part of this is attitude adjustment. Feel stuck and you are. See yourself as wasting time, and you will. How can you find ways to make the most of what you have until you go?

The other part is building your capacities for creative visioning and for recognizing hidden opportunities in everything you do. Where you are may be exactly where you need to be to fine-tune skills, get valuable experiences, or establish professional networks and supports.  Are you taking full advantage of all this?

Are you, for example, thinking about your current job in too limited a fashion? Are you really as constrained as you feel? 

Can a job that now uses too little of your true talents be redesigned?  Enriched?  Are there other opportunities in your organization that you want to alert folks of your interest in? Can current networks be used to enhance your reputation in other areas? Can volunteer opportunities at work or outside help you make progress toward your new goal?

The ability to look at the potential in events and situations and to see how they can be leveraged to help achieve your future plans can reframe a dead-in now into an important stepping stone for a brighter tomorrow.  There’s great joy in that.

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Resilience 101: How to Build it

If resilience is an essential leadership skill, as I discussed in an earlier post, how do we build our capacity for it?  As someone for whom resilience doesn’t come naturally, I’ve thought deeply about the question.  Five suggestions from my musings:   

Start with what we know we can control or change – ourselves. It is easy in frustrating situations to hope that others will change. We know from research that’s a common, first response for all of us.  But we have the most influence on the change process when we focus on changing ourselves, our responses, our ways of framing a situation. This is not to say that we should cocoon, pull back, and not express our preferences or work to influence challenging or ineffective situations for the better.  It is more a question of how, when, and why we do that intervention work – and a reminder that we stand a better chance of influencing others when we know what we want and when we are trying patiently and openly to make things work.

Embrace our control over our full range of choices and options.  It’s easy to feel stuck – as if there’s only one way out of a sticky situation or only one way to understand it.  It’s harder to think of options and alternatives.  Resilience comes from being a stronger and broad thinker – no one trick pony – and from having the confidence in knowing that we can, even under the most stressful of conditions.

How do we develop those cognitive capacities? Practice them. Be playful. Take a minute now and then to ask simple questions like, so what else could I do now? What other options do I have? How else could I respond? What else is possible? What are five different reasons to explain why someone is now acting as he or she does? Once we get into the hang of it, these kinds of experience-broadening questions become second nature.  They enable us to see a bigger, richer, and brighter world.

Learn to reframe and do it often. Reframing is the process of standing back and deliberately looking at a situation from multiple angles and perspectives before jumping to the conclusion that you know what’s really happening (for you and for others).  Reframing is an especially important skills when we feel high stress, anger, anxiety, or other deep emotions.  That’s when we regress to our most primitive thinking and knee-jerk responses. 

If I tell myself I’m stuck, I am. If I say that I’m lost or overwhelmed, I will be. When I believe there is an opportunity, it’s always there.

When driven blindly by feelings, we react. It may feel good to settle, vent, or blame, but for what purpose?  Professionals have confidence that they know how to respond. The difference between reacting and responding is huge.  It’s the stuff upon which great careers are made.  What are the stories that you tell yourself in the face of frustrating situations?  Try an alternative framing, and you’ll see your mood lighten and your options grow.   

Need a primer to enhance your reframing skills? Try Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership by Lee Bolman and Terry Deal. Expanding the frameworks that you bring to make sense of social settings gives you a leg up in perfecting your reframing skills.      

Accept the reality that not everything is equally important. This sounds trite and obvious, but think about how often you have gotten yourself into a major stew over the small stuff.  We all do it — and more often than we like to admit.

Despite what many of us have learned from well-meaning teachers and sports coaches, not everything is worth doing well – and some things are not worth doing at all.

Sure there are consequences to our choices. Choose not to do something, and you’ve missed an opportunity. This is where knowing yourself comes in.

What’s really important to you? Where do you not want to miss out or not make a mistake? What are the issues or areas in your life where you can cut yourself some slack? Let go? Be less perfect?  Punt without shirking your responsibility to others?  

That’s the essence of resilience and the key to managing work-life balance and overload – and you hold the key to all that.  As you climb the hierarchy with increased responsibility over your career, you will never be able to do everything – and you’ll never be able to do all that you do perfectly.  How can you learn to accept that in yourself?  How can you use your supports and resources to share the load? Build networks of trust? Delegate? That’s not easy for people with high expectations  and needs for control, but it’s essential.            

Laugh.  A good sense of humor is mandatory for a long life and a strong career – and that means laughing at yourself, your mistakes, your flat spots, and your foibles. It’ll help keep things in perspective – and you’ll have a better time.