The Big Chill

Earlier this Summer a golfer in Florida named Chris Kennedy threw a bucket of water on his head and dedicated the exercise to ALS and challenged his opponent to do the same or make a donation. On July 29^th a former Boston college basketball player named Pete Frates who has ALS himself got the Ice bucket challenge going more officially.  Unless you have been on some media-free sabbatical, you have likely heard of this. The challenge suggests that those “nominated” must either dump a bucket of ice water on their head (video-taped and posted on Facebook) or donate $100 dollars to ALS research. Most people however, seem to be opting to do both. This charitable campaign has swept all social media channels enlisting the support and participation of politicians, musicians, actors, sports figures and average Americans resulting in the donation of over 88 million dollars to the foundation responsible for researching a cure for this little recognized disease.

At last estimate over 3 million videos had been posted on social media channels.  Personally, I was a bit skeptical about it's worthiness but I was taken with the significant amount of donation money pledged and felt compelled to participate and to both dump the bucket and make a donation myself.

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), often referred to as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, is a lethal neurodegenerative disorder affecting 30,000 Americans. As with any sweeping social media trend, many nay-sayers are questioning the wisdom of wasting water and insensitivity of impersonating pain when there is so much real suffering in the world. But the real question for me is Why? I think it’s wonderful that such a large sum of money has been raised to address what appears to be a horrible disease. And the increase in awareness is incontrovertible. 

But Why? What inspires so many to participate? Why has this effort found such widespread support and traction?

We can turn to the study of positive psychology to find theories as to why the exercise in giving has had such appeal for us all:

• A Harvard Business School study showed that “donating to charity has a similar relationship to subjective well-being as a doubling of household income”.

• As study by scientists from the University of North Carolina and UCLA found that participants whose happiness was driven by giving to others rather than by self-gratification experienced reductions in the biological markers associated with increased inflammation which is linked to diabetes, cancer and other conditions.

• A 2013 study led by Dr. Suzanne Richmond of the University of Exeter Medical School found that volunteering was connected to lower rates of depression, higher reports of well-being, and a significant reduction in mortality risk. Those who volunteer live longer.

I think on some fundamental level we know what is good for us and we are drawn to activities of giving. Considering this natural instinct coupled with our desire to be part of something larger than ourselves and to have lasting influence on the world we live in, there really is no surprise that this campaign has gone so incredibly “viral”. 

Over the past several weeks I have also been struck by the passing of Robin Williams.  In an effort to shake my sadness about this loss, I read an article by Sarah Allen Benton in Psychology Today about his death and loss generally.  I loved what she wrote so I am quoting her directly here. She writes:

“the sudden death of a well-loved person awakens us to what’s meaningful in life. We see with fresh eyes how important they’ve been to us. We’re reminded how precious life is.  Affirming life means creating a society where we safeguard our own and each other’s health- and work cooperatively toward resolving issues that threaten our collective safety and well-being”.

Perhaps the recency of his suicide has nothing to do with the success of the social media campaign for ALS.  But in some small way the ALS bucket challenge has allowed us to join forces in just this way. In “and work cooperatively toward resolving issues that threaten our collective safety and well-being”. 

So, boldly, with buckets and checkbooks in hand, and with our sense of humor intact we move “head- first” in the direction of collective healing.

image credit: Time.com

You've Got Mail

When email first showed up in 1993, it was incredibly exciting!  The notion that we could transmit our thoughts to one another in an instant and stay connected so effortlessly was nothing short of life changing!  How is it that today email has become a blight eroding our productivity and causing misunderstandings; compromising foundations of trust with a single keystroke “send”.

We have ventured so very far from the romantic notion of late night heartfelt disclosures of Joe Fox and Kathleen Kelly as they traded emails in the 1998 Romantic Comedy You’ve Got Mail.  Their relationship deepening each time the familiar proclamation resounded,  “you’ve got mail”. Screenwriter Nora Ephron had us believing that the gateway to our once broken hearts could be opened in the anonymity of this remarkable relationship catalyst. We were “all in” as the heroine of our tale Kathleen Kelly made her tearful declaration that   “All this nothing has meant more to me than so many somethings”. 

In Arianna Huffington’s best selling book,Thrive, she cites a 2012 McKinsey Global Institute Study that found that the average knowledge economy employee spends 28 % of his/her day dealing with email- more than 11 hours per week.  Email has become a very significant share of our daily communication.

As anyone in a business environment using email would attest, relationships are far from enhanced by this tool.  In my conversations with my business clients, they often share stories of how email does a lot more harm than good when it comes to our professional relationships.

7 Ways Email Damages Our Professional Relationships:

The CC! Email invites premature escalation.  It is very easy to include a higher level party in the Carbon Copy “cc” or worse yet, the blind copy “bc”.  Whatever happened to resolving conflict directly and one-on-one?

The Masterpieces!  Email allows us to pontificate as messages become well-crafted masterpieces of opinion; since there is  no possibility of contrary points of view being expressed.  Email is a one-way communication method and that never invites collaboration.

The Nerve!  Most people feel much more comfortable saying things in email that they would never say in face-to-face communication. They can avoid taking responsibility for the reaction of others, because they don’t have to witness the response.

The Threads!  The dreaded email thread. The email thread describes when someone decides along the way in an email conversation to copy someone new, who now has access to the entire “thread of conversation”.  Messages easily and often find their way to new recipients without the author having any knowledge or intention.

The "CYA!"  Putting something “in writing” makes it more official, formal and lasting.  This breaks down trust and transparency in email communication. This formality makes us more guarded and less willing to show our honest vulnerabilities.

The Intrusion!  There is an expectation of an instant response, which has us all "glued:  to our devices. Sit in a coffee shop for a few minutes and observe the lack of human connection. We are all tethered to our smart phones, heads down, checking social media, texting one another and emailing.  My children have even texted me from upstairs and I will admit, I have texted them back rather than walk up upstairs.  Alas, we have lost something in our personal lives too.   

The Abyss!  The sheer volume of emails most of us receive makes it nearly impossible to consistently respond in a timely manner.  Important issues are buried in a landslide of irrelevant issues and spam; everyone trying to get their issue noticed first.

American author Gretchen Rubin said  “Technology is a good servant but a bad master.” There is no doubt that technology has enhanced our work lives and our lives generally.  But the dangers of email communication can outweigh the benefits when it becomes an excuse to avoid the genuine and meaningful connection that can only be established in face to face interactions with one another.

Every now and then an email does turn up that can enhance our professional relationships, like the ones that say “cake in the conference room at 2:00. J

imagecredit: Thoughtcatalog.com 

Unwritten

I love the song titled Unwritten by Natsha Bedingfield the lyrics read “I’m just beginning.. the pen’s in my hand… ending unplanned”.  These lyrics are a great introduction to a TED Talk I recently watched titled  the Psychology of Your Future Self, delivered by Dan Gilbert, Harvard Psychologist, and happiness expert.

If you haven’t discovered TED Talks, you really must. They are short video lectures and they are delivered by great thinkers and amazing speakers.

This particular TED Talk discusses the inevitability of change in our lives and its impact on our perception of ourselves. Here is the link: http://bit.ly/1r9P0QR

According to Gilbert, we are all changing in significant ways all the time.  We are constantly being shaped by new experiences.  “Time is a powerful force that transforms our preferences. It reshapes our values and alters our personalities. We seem to appreciate this fact, but only in retrospect”. Only when we look backwards do we realize how much change happens in a decade. Therefore, people overestimate the stability of their current preferences and vastly underestimate the change they are likely to experience in the coming 10 years.

He says “We are walking around with a misconception that our personal history has just come to an end…  That we have just recently become the people we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives”.  This got my attention, because I have been feeling just that way. Could it be that everyone else is feeling this too?

Gilbert suggests that our ease in remembering and our difficulty in imagining leaves us clinging to the assumptions of our past and completely underestimating the potential and likely change that is waiting for us all just around the bend!

I believe that a fear of change and a strong devotion to our past can limit our growth and potential.  So, it seems to me that our best and only strategy is to learn to let go of the past and to cultivate our ability to imagine a new and undiscovered future.  

Here are my three favorite ideas for letting go of your past… taken directly from an article by Cat O’Connor titled 10 Tips to Let Go of the Past & Embrace the Future.

Meditate. Find stillness, breathe. Meditation is action. Our mind is much harder to still than our body. Our lives are busy and fast paced, filled with external noise and distractions. Clarity comes from quiet. Meditation, even in small amounts, will make room for the next steps.

Understand. Take time to reflect on your own history as a third party looking in without judgment: simply observe. Understand that you are not your past. Understand that the situations and patterns and people in your life created your experiences, they didn’t create you. Knowing and understanding your past and some of your patterns will help you to recognize why you hold on to and repeat self-destructive behaviors. Understanding creates awareness; awareness helps you break the cycle.

Accept. Accept your history and the people that have been a part of your history; accept your circumstances and remember that none of these define you. Acceptance is the first step to letting go and setting yourself free. Carrying bitterness, anger or animosity burdens no one but you.

And here are three more ideas for opening your imagination…From How to Exercise an Open Mind, from WikiHow

Reflect on your own belief system. Every decision you make in life is based on your belief system. To open your mind, start to list your fundamental beliefs, and for each one ask yourself why you believe it. Then ask yourself whether you could imagine being you if you didn't exactly believe it anymore, but believed something marginally different. 

Pick a belief a week and work at it. Ask some really good friends what they believe and how they acquired their beliefs. Understand this: your belief system is absolutely unique to you; your friend's belief system is unique to them. An open mind is comfortable with differences and with using a variety of lenses to view an issue.

Push the limits of your body. By using your body in new ways, you can learn more about yourself and expand your mind.

Walk backwards through your whole house for a completely new spatial perspective (being careful not to trip over anything or fall down the stairs). Learn to do a handstand, take martial arts classes. Try some Zumba classes or learn a break dance move. Can you touch your toes? Work on it. Try skiing, snowboarding, jet skiing, hang-gliding, parasailing, surfing, and anything else that pushes the limits of your comfort zone!

Stimulate your eyes. Go to a cheap or free art gallery. Even if you think it's bad art, it can still be thought-provoking and introduce you to people with different tastes than your own. Watch movies or shows in genres that you don't normally explore. Immerse yourself in horror, anime, documentaries, stand-up comedy (Eddie Murphy, George Carlin, Louis CK, etc.), or anything else you haven’t gotten around to trying (and potentially loving). 

Dan Gilbert summed it up best by saying that   “the person you are right now is as transient, as temporary, and as fleeting as all the people you have ever been.”

So in the words of Henry David Thoreau, "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams and live the life you imagined…".

No! On second thought, let’s go even further and live a life we have NEVER imagined!

image credit:dreamstime

Trading Competition for Collaboration: 7 Steps to Successful Negotiations

In any professional relationship, or any relationship for that matter, we need to manage the give and take.  Because we rely on and benefit from one another in specific ways, we have certain expectations.  Professionally speaking, we participate in organizational roles and customer relationships that require us to provide for one another and to resolve differences when this symbiosis isn’t working. On a personal level, the day to day challenges of sharing our life with another requires that we negotiate frequently with both conviction and compassion.

This topic often shows up when I am working with clients who participate in work that requires cross-functional cooperation.  That being; the shared responsibility for outcomes. In other words, one might describe their work as “My result is impacted by the accountability and engagement of others, when they slip up it affects my success”. Or, “I simply cannot make this happen without the contribution of others”. When we break it down that way, it could describe any relationship; whether it’s a colleague, a partner, a boss, a customer or even a family member, so little of what we accomplish impacts only ourselves.

I think the key to this mutual success in these negotiations lies in leaving the competition behind in the interest of cooperation.  Competition can be incredibly healthy when it drives our motivation by inspiring us to strive for more aggressive achievements, but it can also be incredibly destructive when we become preoccupied with being right and approach shared endeavors as individual sport.  

Art Markman, Professor of Psychology at The University of Texas, in a recent article published on FastCompany.com, describes the problem with competition in such situations. “Most negotiations are part of an ongoing relationship. If both of you treat that negotiation as a game in which for each point one side wins and the other loses, then you leave that negotiation with the joy of your victories and the sting of the defeats. That means that you will enter the next negotiation wanting to correct the past wrongs and to build on past successes. That can make later negotiations more intense as each side tries to avoid the mistakes of the past.”

This “scorecard” mentality creates a vicious cycle that will surely distract and erode the relationship and all future mutual outcomes. 

Here is a conversation model that will inspire collaboration and take competition out of the mix:

1. Identify shared goals or outcomes.  On a very basic level we want to know “what’s in it for me?”  Expressing that you share the same desires is a great place to start this conversation. Choose a point of alignment or agreement as your starting point.  Is there a shared commitment to a particular outcome?
2. Reinforce the shared responsibility and the unified front. Anchor new ideas expectations or requests on universally accepted assumptions, values or beliefs. "We both know how important this is".  Or "neither of us wants to suffer the consequences of this not going well". "We are in this together”.
3. Reflect on past successes.  This creates an expectation that success can be achieved.. after all, we have been there before together.
4. Seek to understand divergent goals, needs and expectations. Look for underlying concerns expressed and unexpressed. Demonstrate concern, this doesn’t mean you have to agree.
5. Ask for what you need to be successful. Be specific.  Link your request to outcomes; positive if you get what you need, negative if you have less than what you need.  Embrace a “help me to help you" mentality.
6. Negotiate levels of commitment. Be clear about what is negotiable and non-negotiable.  Best to spend some time thinking about this before this conversation.  If you cannot get full commitment on a "must have" expectation, ask the other party if they would be willing to agree to a short-term commitment or a trial basis.
7. Reinforce with anticipated pay-offs. Close with optimism and make everyone feel great about what was achieved.  This is a good way to minimize the sting of concessions that were made reluctantly in the course of the conversation.  You don’t want any second thoughts after the meeting to undermine your successful negotiation!

Achieving buy-in and collaboration is really about inspiring others, or in the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it”.

image credit: dreamstime.com

The Present

"Yesterday's the past, tomorrow's the future, but today is a gift. That's why it's called the present”.

I have always liked this quote by Bill Keane.  This week I have been reflecting on the necessary balance between planning and pursuing our goals with deliberate intention and the need to be fully present in the moment, suspending our expectations long enough to accept what life has to offer even when it is completely unexpected or asks us to consider a whole new way of imagining our direction.

I believe both are very important.  In my discussions with clients about careers and their own journeys I am often struck by the wisdom of the random coincidence in providing a new perspective or in supporting a secret wish or desire.  Regardless of your religious or spiritual beliefs, one would have a hard time denying that life has remarkable way of pointing us in the right direction, if only we pay attention.

Whether it’s in our personal lives or in our professional endeavors, we often find ourselves in exactly the right place at the right time.  Or when someone we haven’t thought of in years materializes and their purpose in our lives becomes crystal clear.  The potential for transformation in each new day is nothing short of profound if only we stay open enough to read the tea leaves in our cup. 

In order to do this, we need to stay mindful. “Mindfulness” is defined as "the intentional, accepting and non-judgmental focus of one's attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment".  In order to do this well, we need to stop long enough to observe and interpret what is happening around us.  

In a recent article published in Health.org in collaboration with Harvard Health Publications the benefits of mindfulness were discussed particularly pertaining to well being and physical health.

Mindfulness improves well being

• Increasing your capacity for mindfulness supports many attitudes that contribute to a satisfied life.
• Being mindful makes it easier to savor the pleasures in life as they occur, helps you become fully engaged in activities, and creates a greater capacity to deal with adverse events.
• By focusing on the here and now, many people who practice mindfulness find that they are less likely to get caught up in worries about the future or regrets over the past, are less preoccupied with concerns about success and self-esteem, and are better able to form deep connections with others.

Mindfulness improves physical health

If greater well being isn’t enough of an incentive, scientists have discovered the benefits of mindfulness techniques help improve physical health in a number of ways. Mindfulness can:

• help relieve stress
• treat heart disease
• lower blood pressure
• reduce chronic pain
• improve sleep
• alleviate gastrointestinal difficulties 

Practicing mindfulness and staying present and in the moment isn’t easy.  We need to resist the temptation to multitask and to over-direct our lives. 

Because the origin of mindfulness is rooted in Buddhism, the suggested practice of mindfulness recommends that we make time for daily meditation.  Although meditation offers us remarkable benefits when it comes to our clarity and well being... 

there are several mindfulness practices that you can easily bring to your daily habits: 

• Allow yourself times for reflection daily.
• Explore conversations with people you encounter.  Listen to the perspectives they bring and ask questions.
• Observe the “outside” and “inside” world with friendly curiosity.  On the outside, this means not resisting things that may seem uncomfortable and allowing yourself to explore them without resistance or preconceived filters.  On the “inside” this suggests that we observe our own emotional responses and notice those emotions without allowing them to take hold or to hijack our ability to stay open and focused on the “now”.
• Keep a loose hold on your goals. Challenge your goals with “what if” questions.  Imagine what would happen if completely unexpected occurrences challenged your assumptions about your life today.  Entertaining these notions will stretch your boundaries and your comfort zone. 

I will finish here with a quote by author, Joseph Campbell who says “We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us”.

 imagecredit: dreamstime.com