Surviving in a culture obsessed with emotions
 

Have you noticed that the ‘appropriate’ question to ask someone today about a proposal is, “How do you feel about that?” Not, “What do you think of that?” or “Do you have any ideas on that?”

At least on this, US, side of the Atlantic, we live in a culture that is increasingly driven by feelings and emotions. Feelings are everything; thoughts are relegated to the second rate, suitable only for those poor people who haven’t yet ‘got in touch with their feelings.’

In a culture that extols feelings as the central concern in life, the result is not just a roller-coaster of ups and downs. It becomes almost impossible to discuss anything rationally, since you cannot dispute how someone else feels—however irrational or neurotic you think those feelings are. “But that how I feel,” becomes a simple way to end any argument, leaving things unresolved. Suggesting that any feelings are inappropriate, even silly, is dismissed as ‘unfeeling’. Empathy is promoted over reason, logic and even truth.

It’s high time for a little relief and a practical guide to coping with feelings in ways that don’t turn them into mad tyrants, personally and within any group.

The truth about emotions

Emotions happen. They are natural and inevitable. Neither statement makes them correct or the thoughts they produce true. Paranoia is not thinking, rationally and with evidence, that people are out to get you. It’s feeling they are, regardless of likelihood or any evidence to the contrary.

• You can neither force yourself to have ‘suitable’ feelings nor prevent ‘unsuitable’ ones from arising. Feelings cannot be controlled directly by any act of will.
• Feelings do not last, unless you work at keeping them alive. They always fade over time unless they are constantly stimulated, usually by imagining the original event again and again.
• Feelings, in themselves, are morally and ethically neutral. They just arise, whether you want them to or not. Feeling guilty about them is pointless. Questions of right and wrong are involved only when you act on your feelings, seek to stimulate them or deliberately keep them alive.
• Feelings need to be accepted, but not automatically believed or followed. Since feelings are merely an inevitable part of life, the only rational response is acceptance of their existence, followed by rational consideration of whether to do anything they suggest.

Danger! Emotions at work.

I encountered a situation this week where someone I know almost caused severe damage to his business by giving in to a temporary burst of negative feelings about a supplier. It was all sorted out in the end, but the trust between them has been damaged for some time to come. Worst of all, there was no real basis for the emotional outburst, other than frustration with a bad economy and fear that someone might, in some unknown way, be making things worse than they need be.

How many working relationships are damaged, even destroyed, every day by emotional outbursts? How many people nurse hidden feelings of anger or resentment, allowing them to poison their actions and make their own lives miserable? In the typical workplace, how many problems are directly due to jealousy, malice, fear or personal feuds? Yet, far from considering how to minimize such a potent source of workplace disruption, people equate authenticity—being who you are—with giving full rein to almost every passing emotion.

“All you need is love,” sang The Beatles. Sadly, it’s not true. Love is another feeling. A few moments with any divorce lawyer, police officer or paramedic will provide more than enough bitter evidence of how easily and frequently it dies, then metamorphoses into hatred.

Handling emotions sensibly

Ultimately, you are responsible for your actions and words, matter how you feel. Why allow feelings to provoke you into saying things you will soon regret? Why let your feelings—temporary and irrational as they are—push you around or lead you into making unforced errors?

Why wait to do something necessary until you feel like it? If it needs to be done, do it, regardless of how you feel at the time. Waiting to ‘feel right’ is the cause of most procrastination. Commonsense should tell you that, since you can neither produce a feeing by an act of will, nor prevent one, how you feel has no relevance to what you should be doing at any point in time.

Feelings happen, just like the rain falls. Getting mad at the rain won’t make it stop. Feeling guilty about how you feel won’t do anything except add guilt to the feelings you already have. Feelings should be left alone to rise and fall naturally. What you should be looking at is whether that feeling is pointing to something you need to do.

If you feel bad about something you said, that feeling may be pointing to a need to apologize. Think about it. If you feel good about a result, maybe you should be thanking everyone who helped you. Think about that too. If you feel unhappy, consider what may be causing it. If you feel excited, think about how you might use that energy in a positive way while it lasts.

Psychologists warn against repressing feelings. That means trying to pretend they don’t exist. It doesn’t mean you should not suppress—refuse to act on or encourage—feelings that are unhelpful or inappropriate. You aren’t responsible for the feelings that come to you, but you are definitely accountable for how you respond to them.

That, I think, needs careful and ethical thought, not goo-ey slogans about love. Barely a hundred years ago, ‘sentiment’ was viewed with considerable skepticism and distrust. It almost became a term of abuse. Maybe that went a little too far, but we surely don’t need to go to the other extreme and glorify emotions for their own sake.

Technorati Tags: emotions, feelings, relationships, responsibility, accountability

(This is a guest article by Jonathan Littman, Co-Author of I Hate People!: Kick Loose from the Overbearing and Underhanded Jerks at Work and Get What You Want Out of Your Job)

When historians finally get their hands around the lost decade that wiped out our 401k’s, looted our nation’s treasury and battered our economy, they will likely arrive at a simple conclusion: Playing nice was bad for business.

The last administration sold itself as the “let’s be nice to business” school of thought. It was a philosophy that spread throughout entire industries and our greater economy.

Nice was a forced smile, a phony front for those who wanted to put one over on everyone else. Most of the seemingly nice results generated by all this nice turned out to be frauds. Those generous mortgages peddled to new home-buyers blew up into balloon payments that rendered thousands bankrupt and homeless. Wall Street was nice to investors for most of the decade, delivering fabulous returns on investments nobody understood—until the bill for the bad mortgages came due.

Bad investments had been stacked upon bad investments in this nice new financial instrument called the derivative that nobody understood until it helped to wreck our economy. The nice, regular returns offered by ‘Mr. Nice’ himself, Bernie Madoff, was a gigantic Ponzi scheme that cost investors $60 billion.

“Don’t trust the smile of the crocodile . . .”

During the orgy of niceness, those entrusted with policing the purveyors of phony nice were way too nice. The SEC and FBI were incredibly nice to thousands of scam artists who went on a financial crime spree. Accounting firms were nice to lots of companies that didn’t really earn money, or ship as many products as they said, which ended up costing lots of jobs.

It was a genuinely nice age to steal billions from everyday Americans and corporate employees.

At the pinnacle of our nationwide nice delusion, two advertising agents wrote a sugary 119-page treatise called: “The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World With Kindness” It was what everyone wanted to hear. Donald Trump (a client) loved it. The book became a Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestseller. It was in short, a very nice time for business.

How quickly the herd changes direction

Nice is now a four-letter word. Companies have been falling over themselves in trying to prove that that they are no longer suckers and anything but nice.

Top corporations that have had strong fiscal quarters, or even increases in earnings, have coolly laid off thousands of workers. Smaller firms have even boasted of record earnings—while announcing massive layoffs. Those banks handed the free lunch of our billions of tax dollars have not been very nice to individuals and businesses desperately in need of loans. Congress is on the verge of making it nearly impossible for anyone under 21—young workers and college students struggling under debt—to get a credit card.

The New Nice is Mean.

Today, thousands of corporations are marching in lockstep to prove how nice they are to their company bank account, which has the trickle down effect of being mean to the people who do the work. Firms are paying employees for four days a week but demanding that they work five. They’re slashing benefits and perks. They’re laying off men and women by the thousands.

They’re being nice about it.

Consider Microsoft, which recently put out an official e-mail from CEO Steve Balmer, announcing the firm was “Eliminating additional positions across several areas of the company. While job eliminations are always difficult, we are taking these necessary actions in response to the global economic downturn.”
See how nicely they did it! They’re only eliminating positions. No talk about firing people.

Mean is the New Nice, and just as the age of Phony Nice ruled America for nearly a decade, we are now headed for some Serious Mean.

Don’t worry. They’ll be nice about it.

Jonathan Littman is co-author, with Marc Hershon, of I Hate People!: Kick Loose from the Overbearing and Underhanded Jerks at Work and Get What You Want Out of Your Job and the business blog, IHatePeople.biz. A contributing editor at Playboy, he co-authored The Ten Faces of Innovation and The Art of Innovation. For more information please visit www.IHatePeople.biz

Technorati Tags: corporate attitudes, macho management, making money, mean bosses

Have you noticed how often people label themselves?
 

We all understand the problems caused by labeling others: stereotyping, racial profiling and all the evils of mindless prejudice. But what about self-stereotyping? What about the way people ‘profile’ themselves? “I’m just not that kind of person,” we say. “I’m not the thoughtful type.” “I’m not good at organizing.” “I have trouble with relationships.” “I’ve never been good at schoolwork.” “I’m not up to that. I’m more of a hands-on person.”

Yet, just as the labels we apply to others can prevent us from seeing them clearly or appreciating their strengths and value, so the labels you learn to apply to yourself will limit and block your understanding of your own strengths and potential. They will hold you back and limit your sense of what is possible for you.

All labels come with values and beliefs about what you can do and what you cannot—and need not even try. They prescribe the things you can do, say and develop in your life. Worst of all, they give instant reasons why you are different from the rest of us. Peeling off those labels, replacing them with words that create space for growth to opening your mind, is a powerful way to change your life for the better.

It’s worth looking at some typical self-applied labels and seeing what they might really mean and how hanging onto them could affect you.

• “I’m just not that kind of person.” What kind of person? A statement like this manages to combine self-stereotyping and stereotyping of others in a mere seven words. How can that be helpful to anyone? Suggesting that there are ‘kinds of people’ reduces us all to categories—including yourself. Surely there are just people? Why should there be types, except to save us from seeing them as individuals?
• “I’m not the thoughtful type.” Can you think? Then you are. This is mostly a feeble excuse for not making any effort to consider things carefully, while shifting the blame for all the consequent mistakes onto something convenient, like your genetic make-up.
• “I’m not good at organizing.” Another feeble excuse, usually for a combination of laziness and the pleasure that comes from letting someone else organize for you. Everyone can organize. All it takes is effort and care. If you claim to be a poor organizer, what you are really saying is that you cannot be bothered to make the effort and you don’t care anyway. If that’s true—and why not?—just be honest and say so.
• “I have trouble with relationships.” You and the rest of mankind. Is that any reason not to try and get better at them?
• “I’m not very good at tough decisions.” No one is. That’s why they’re tough.
• “I’ve never been good at schoolwork.” I have heard this excuse so often. What it really means is that the person cannot be bothered to try to learn anything new. The fact that you weren’t good at school—perhaps 20 or 30 years ago—has nothing to do with it. There could have been all kinds of reasons for that, from adolescent rebellion to lousy teachers. Why let it limit you today?
• “I’m not up to that. ”Afraid. Can’t be bothered to try. Dishonest too. If you don’t want to do it, say so. Don’t invent a catch-all excuse that implies you’re being prevent from trying by anything other than your own choice.

Even supposedly positive labels can be limiting. What about these?

• “I’m more of a hands-on person.” This usually means you would like someone to tell you what to do, explain exactly how to do it and then take the blame if it goes wrong. If you have hands, you’re a hands-on person. If you’re only a hands-on person, that must mean you don’t have a brain as well as hands. Come off it. It may be comforting to pretend you can’t think for yourself, but it’s never true.

• “I’m just a regular guy.” Define irregular. Does this mean you don’t have three legs, nine eyes and hail from the planet Zebran? We’re just about all ‘regular’ men and women. What this near-meaningless phrase usually represents is simply getting your excuses in first.
• “I’ve done pretty well, even though I never had any formal training.” Means: “I do as well as I can without trying to learn anything more, challenging my current ideas or working at getting better. Luckily for me, experience has taught me to do some kind of half-decent job without making any greater effort, so I leave it at that. This allows me to forget that I can find some training, improve my education or even read a few good books on the subject any time I want.”

It’s well worth taking time to sort through the automatic labels you apply to yourself without thinking. Are they true? Are they even helpful? What if you took off any label that’s limiting you and making you feel stuck?

A label is a kind of permission slip. With it, you can do some things, but are prohibited from others. Without it, you cannot even start. Let it go and the sense of burden it causes will fall away.

Taking away every self-applied label lets you find the room to experiment, to try things out and play with fresh ideas and wider possibilities. It also takes away some of your inner critic’s most effective fire-power—and that has to be worth a great deal.

Technorati Tags: stereotypes, self-limitation, inner critic, low self-esteem, holding yourself back

(This is a guest article by Richard E. Goldman, Author of “Luck by Design: Certain Success in an Uncertain World”)

Do you want to decide right now that you’re going to be successful; and that you’re going to be able to handle that success when the time comes? “Ha!” you might say. “I should be so lucky! I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.” No. If you want to design your own luck and put yourself on the path to success, start planning for it now. The graveyard of successful people who didn’t know how to handle their success is already brimming over. There’s no need for you to join them.

Do you always seem to have a bad boss or never get a break at work? It may have something to do with what you are presenting to the world. Your outer working life has to reflect your inner organization. Make sure that you have your personal values and ethos in order, and then take them to the workplace.

The reality is that there are no bad bosses, there are no bad breaks and there are no victims—unless you choose to become one.

Take a moment to re-read that paragraph. It’s easy enough to read, but understanding the content can take a lifetime. Give yourself an advantage and contemplate it now: what you bring to your work makes all the difference.

Understanding true success

Maybe a good place to start is to articulate what success isn’t. It’s not a big house, a fancy car, or a bunch of bling. It’s not the American Express platinum card or the limousine. Success isn’t easy, and once you have it, there is no guarantee that you’ll keep it. So prepare for success by accepting that success does not equal significance or security. Success is, quite simply, peace. Peace of mind that you’ve done the best that you can. Peace of heart that you are part of something—perhaps a family—whose members support you, love you, and will always be there for you.

Is success giving your all? Is it doing your best? Is it getting the job done? Again, it’s none of the above. Success is much more about the journey than the end of the road. It’s about the experience of your passion. It’s the satisfaction you can get from planning and then doing, and then watching the seeds of your planning and doing take root and create something that wasn’t there before. Real success is the ability to embrace the discoveries and enlightenment you encounter along the journey in whatever it is that you do. Crossing the finish line is inconsequential.

The road up the corporate ladder can be so consuming that you miss your original goal. You push and push to get that next raise, that next promotion, and one day you turn around and you’ve lost touch with yourself—and in many cases, you’ve lost touch with your family and friends too. You don’t always need the next toy, that bigger house, or that office with the big window and great view. None of it is worth it if in the process you lose sight of who you are or lose your connection with the people most important to you. All of that is a danger if you subscribe to the theory that success equals money.

You probably aren’t going to be the Big Dog

Just as money doesn’t buy happiness, if you think being the Big Dog will bring you happiness, there’s another bubble to burst. All too many people want (or at least think they want) to get to the top.

The numbers are always against them. By definition, there is only one captain, one quarterback, or one CEO and a limited number of teams and companies. There are leaders and there are followers. For the vast majority, the question is, how can you be a good follower and still have that role be consistent with the rest of your life? How can it be consistent with your values and your dreams? If your values and your dreams are more important to you than a title, then it should be pretty easy to accept that you’re not going to be the CEO.

Here are some tips on being a great follower:

• Recognize that being a follower is not a failure—it’s a function. A necessary function, just as every other part of a team.
• One day, you probably are going to be a leader, just not the leader. If it’s your project, then you’re the leader.
• You can be a follower without abdicating yourself. It can even help you in defining yourself—a terrific lesson in learning how to put your ego in neutral.

Leadership is all about perspective

Leadership is mostly a matter of perspective. Are you always looking up the ladder to see who’s above? Do you look at the rung you’re on to see who else is there? Or are you looking at the rung below? Instead of worrying where everyone else is, try to reconcile yourself with the possibility that you are in the right place, making the absolute best of the resources you have available to you on that day.

It’s clear that the work part of your life is often going to take center stage. Once that you’ve entered that arena, the next hurdle is management—both management of yourself and yourself as a manager. One day, somehow, some way, you will be called upon to manage. There is no time like the present to start preparing.

If you truly want to experience the peace that comes from being a real success on your own terms, make better
decisions, trust your intuition and live with integrity, start today. Start designing your own luck, so you can lead the life you were meant to live.

When you sit down and think about your life, think about this: the question is not what or why, but how are you going to live? A fulfilling life is passion driven and a big part of that life derives from the work that you do. It doesn’t matter what the work is. What matters is the passion that you have behind it and that you put into it.

Richard E. Goldman, author of “Luck by Design: Certain Success in an Uncertain World”, started working on the sales floor of a small clothing store with annual sales of only a few hundred thousand dollars. Over the years he helped grow that one store into the emerging and now omnipresent Men’s Wearhouse. By the time Goldman retired, there were 680 Men’s Wearhouse-affiliated stores across the United States and Canada, with annual sales in excess of $1.27 billion.

Goldman has also been a quiet force in business, education, and volunteerism. His luck—luck that he has actively created—has expanded his life in ways and directions well beyond anything he might have imagined as a child in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. You can read more of his story at www.richiegoldman.com.

Technorati Tags: leadership, being a follower, integrity, authenticity, true success

Why doing what we are told is so often a poor idea
 

Looking around, the evidence that conformity has brought us nearly to economic and financial ruin is overwhelming. Yet people still do it. I suspect it’s a much more common way to behave than its opposite—being independent and non-conformist—even here in the ‘Land of the Free’. So there has to be a reason, since the benefits of making your own decisions and choosing your own path through life are both obvious and logical.

Thinking about it, I find four reasons for the rampant conformity in our society and business world. None of them are good, but all are understandable in human terms. Maybe, by listing them and discussing them in depth, it will help people see that they are neither necessary nor desirable—even for ‘respectable’ people like you and me.

1. We are raised to conform and follow orders, so many of us get to like it.

From our birth, we are surrounded by people telling us what to do: when to eat, when to sleep, what to wear and how to behave. From parents, through other older family members, schoolteachers and anyone in charge of an activity we took part in, there is always someone who claims to know what’s best for us and is ready to make sure we do as we are told.

In fact, one of the earliest lessons we learn is that being loved and assisted by others—an essential requirement for any child—depends pretty much on doing what you are told. When, like all children, we try a little rebellion, we discover punishments can go beyond mere withdrawal of approval on a temporary basis. A small number of people refuse to follow this system, but most find it quickly becomes ‘normal’.

There’s another benefit too: it saves us having to make our own decisions and live by the consequences. By doing what we are told, we can shift responsibility for mistakes onto someone else. The excuse, “I was only following orders” probably began with the person who loaded the Ark and didn’t have the wit to make sure the two houseflies were trodden on by the elephants.

2. We tend to trust what the biggest crowd says is right

You would think we should have realized long before now that fashion is an extremely poor guide to sensible living, but no; we still rush to jump into every type of nonsense, rather than risk feeling left out. If the current recession should cause people to re-assess any of their beliefs, it is surely this one. Every cycle of boom and bust arises directly from the tendency people have to follow a crowd. There’s a famous book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. It was written by Charles Mackay (1841-1889) and quickly became the classic work on popular manias of all kinds, financial and otherwise. If you haven’t already, read it.

Democracy may be based on following the wishes of the majority, but that is not a good guide in other areas of life. The government of a country needs to be based on making sure minorities and individuals, be they rich aristocrats or party members, can’t hi-jack the levers of power for their own purposes. In most of our personal life, we shouldn’t want to be part of the majority—we should want to stand out in some way.

3. We put far too much trust in ‘experts’ and authority figures

Nice, respectable people—like everyone who reads this article, naturally—don’t question authority or cause trouble. That’s why we do what officials of all kinds tell us to, from the police to the tax man. We are also brought up to respect obvious ‘experts’ like doctors (never mind that many are paid by drug companies to prescribe specific drugs or write papers proving they work), lawyers (who are never, of course, motivated by sordid motives like money), pastors and the clergy (I’ll say no more) and even media types and self-appointed gurus.

This deference to authority quickly spills over to include almost anyone who seems to know what they doing when we don’t. We therefore trusted bankers, mortgage ‘experts’ and financial advisers to look after our money. Look where that got us.

4. We are nearly all creatures of habit

Why do people buy the same brand for decades, despite evidence it costs more than it should and is no better than any of the others—even worse? Why do people drive to work by more or less the same route, at the same time, each day? Why do they watch the same TV channels, take the same type of vacation and spend their weekends doing the same things?

Why do organizations persist with products long after they have started to lose market share? Or follow approaches to management that have been in place for decades? Or refuse to change the way they operate until competitors force them to?

People frequently know what they are doing isn’t effective, healthy, logical, or even remotely sensible, yet they still do it. Why? It feels comfortable. They’re used to doing it that way. That’s the way things are done around here. Besides, many are terrified of change—usually because they’ve never done it except in the most dire emergency.

If you don’t use a muscle for years, or ever, then suddenly do something that demands you put some strain on it, it’s going to hurt badly. If you never change willingly, it will hurt terribly when you do. In both cases, it’s not the new activity that is the problem; it’s the total lack of use that went before.

Why you shouldn’t conform for the sake of it

• Making up your own mind ‘exercises’ your mental muscles, keeps your mind fit and encourages you to stay abreast of events. If you need any of those facilities (and you will), it’s better to keep them in trim than suddenly find they’re too rusty to work.
• There’s really no evidence that anyone knows what is right for you better than you do. After all, you’re the only one who knows what is going on inside your head and what matters to you most.
• Nearly everyone who is eager to tell you what to do is coming from their agenda, not yours. They want you to do what suits them. You probably ought to do what suits you.
• Following fashion and obeying orders without question leaves you wide open to manipulation and fraud.
• If you want to get on in life and do something important, you won’t do either by being like everyone else. The word ‘mediocre’ comes from the Latin word ‘medius’, meaning ‘in the middle’. No one ever stood out by fitting in.
• Being a conformist blocks any change until it’s too late to change easily or in your own time. Conformists go through life experiencing periods of monotony, interspersed with crises when they frantically try to find some one to tell them what to do as their world crashes around their ears.
• Organizations that follow ‘industry best practice’, benchmarking and other mechanistic ways of making sure they stay with the crowd, lay themselves wide open to being wrong-footed by any competitor willing to do something new and different.

If we learn nothing else from our recent brush with economic chaos and disaster it should be this: do what everyone else does and you’ll end up where everyone else is—in the ditch on the side of the road, watching the tail lights of the new leaders speeding into the distance.

Technorati Tags: conformity, obedience, control, following the crowd, fitting-in

The secret to enjoying what you have lies mostly in letting it go
 

Our human tendency to want to possess things has been a source of trouble from dim antiquity. As soon as we have something pleasant, we want to hang onto it—to catch the butterfly of joy and pin it onto a cork slab along with the rest of our collection. The fact that we can only do this by killing it never seems to occur to us in time.

I awoke the other morning from a delightful dream and, of course, spent several moments trying to hold onto it. That’s when it occurred to me that, even if I had been able to do so, what would have been left was an empty shell, devoid of life and the capacity to grow.

The damnable urge to collect things

This tendency to grab and hold on—to acquire for the sake of acquisition—is just as clear in the workplace. People grasp at bits of knowledge and hug them to themselves. Maybe they hint that they have them—few collectors can resist the tendency to brag about what they ‘own’—but they are careful to keep everything to themselves if they can. In the process, their knowledge goes from being ‘live’ data that could lead to action to dead information that serves only to bolster its owner’s ego.

Managers try to amass patronage and influence, building up a web of political power with little or no idea what they might use it for except making them feel big. CEOs and corporate boards leap into mergers and acquisitions, despite the high failure rate, because . . . well, it’s what ‘big cheeses’ do and they don’t want to be left out. In their private lives, they collect art, or yachts, or huge houses they cannot possibly need—all the while amassing a vast store of dead ‘stuff’ that serves mostly to display their importance to other dead-stuff collectors.

What happens when you let go?

For a start, you no longer need to worry about protecting your collection of data, influence or rare Persian carpets from decay or theft. You are also freed from the notion that all this ‘stuff’ must not be used. It took so much time and effort—not to say expense—to gather together, even the thought of using any of it becomes intolerable.

Whatever you have can be used freely, or even given away, because there will always be more. If you don’t need to ‘own’ it, the supply of interesting and potentially useful information in the world is infinite. It’s the same with influence. Using it for a good purpose will quickly bring you more. Even something in finite supply, like great art, can be enjoyed by anyone willing to step inside a gallery and concentrate less on wishing they owned what they find, than on enjoying it for its own sake.

The poet William Blake expressed it best:

“He who binds to himself a joy
Does the wingéd life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.”

Holding onto a corpse is bad for your health

In the world of work, kissing an achievement as it flies into—and out of—your life lets you taste the pleasure, then leaves you free to pursue the next one without looking back. Enjoying the success of a project, then letting it go, frees you up for the next set of tasks.

Many organizations develop toxic environments because the people within them are grimly holding on to decaying achievements from their distant past. They cannot change, because their energies are directed to what once brought them success—even though it is now dead and poisonous. Marketers keep trying to resurrect a dying flagship product line, rather than admitting they need something new. Old products are given a quick surface skim of polish and sent out yet again, though the public are already aware they are little but walking, painted corpses.

Instead of recognizing that new times need new approaches, leaders too keep repeating what worked in the past—usually until it destroys them. The business schools too—who surely should know better—base their teaching on old, discredited theories and case studies from decades ago.

Let it all go. Stop clinging, even to the best of it. When the butterfly of success and joy flits into your life, enjoy it for what it is without thinking about possessing it. Let it live to produce a new generation of similar joys.

No one ever found their collection of preserved butterfly specimens producing eggs or caterpillars.

Technorati Tags: letting go, living in the moment, enjoying what comes, giving up possessiveness

“There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: impatience and laziness.” ~ Franz Kafka
 

The other day I was speaking with a neighbor—a single, 50-something woman who’s a high-level executive for a Fortune 50 company. She was coming home from work, carrying some packages. At the end of our conversation I said, “Enjoy your evening.” She replied, “Oh, I will. I have some delicious take-out.” Perhaps feeling this remark needed some context, she added, “I have some good stuff in the fridge, but these days the microwave just takes too long.”
 
Impatience is a familiar topic. At work, it causes people to be abrupt with colleagues and customers—cutting them off, interrupting them, and pushing them away if they don’t get to the point quickly enough. It makes us more prone to giving up too quickly on tasks that require focus and concentration; more likely to try to save time by cutting corners, being unethical, or not acting with integrity. It leads to increased stress, burn-out and anxiety. It even contributes to today’s obsession with being in control. If you have to rely on others, they may take too long.

We’re all in a hurry. Why?

There’s plenty of evidence that impatience causes us to spend inordinate amounts of time and energy repairing, re-working and re-doing what we did when we were impatient. Sadly, we live in a culture of ‘hurry up’—of fast-food, immediate gratification and impulse purchases. We act as if delay spells d-e-a-t-h. We’re like sharks who have to keep moving to get oxygen into our lungs.

But why are we in such a hurry to get to the next thing? What’s the rush? What happened to taking time to enjoy things fully? What happened to patience?
 

No time to breathe

This obsessive need to be somewhere else has created a joy-less life for many people. They can no longer find any meaning or interest in where they are right now. Happiness is always somewhere else; somewhere away ‘over there’ they must rush to get to. In their obsession with dropping this to get to that, they create a life filled with haste and empty of pleasure, joy and happiness. They’ve become so conditioned to being impatient they cannot settle, breathe or be at peace. They must always hurry on their way to the Nirvana they seek. Sadly, of course, they never get there. 
 
Instead, they race through life, giving up the capacity to experience happiness in the moment. They live in a constant state of frenzy and frustration. What they seek is always ahead of them—always just out of reach, however fast they run to catch it—like the cartoon donkey chasing a carrot being dangled in front of its nose by the rider on its back.
 

How to improve your patience

• Be aware of your feelings of impatience. Sense where and how they show up. Then allow your impatience. Don’t fight it. Don’t judge it. Don’t tell yourself a story about it. Just allow it to be.
• Breathe deeply into your belly. Feel your feet on the floor and, if sitting, feel your butt in your chair. Allow the floor to support you; allow your chair to support you. Breathe deeply.
• Send your breath to any areas of discomfort in your body. Don’t try to make anything happen. Just send the breath to the areas of discomfort.
• Notice your experience and as you do, time will begin to expand a little, then a little more, and a little more. As you watch yourself in this experience, the discomfort, the agitation and the impatience itself will begin to dissipate.
• See what replaces the impatience. As your feeling of impatience subsides, you’ll fine an opportunity to experience an inner OK-ness, right here and right now, in this moment. There’s no need to be somewhere else.  Patience has arisen in this moment.

Impatience is an ego-mind quality. The mind always needs to be “somewhere else.” Patience is a heart quality. The heart is just fine, right here, right now. This capacity to be in the moment brings focus, clarity and discernment. It is a state of responsiveness, not reactivity.
 
What does patience mean to you? Has it taken on a negative connotation? When you hear the phrase, “Be patient,” how do you feel? Do you dislike waiting? If so, why?

“Learn the art of patience. Apply discipline to your thoughts when they become anxious over the outcome of a goal. Impatience breeds anxiety, fear, discouragement and failure.” ~ Brian Adams

Technorati Tags: patience, being in the moment, enjoying life, relaxing

“What distinguishes our age from any other is not the world-flattening impact of communication; not the economic ascendance of China and India, not the degradation of our climate and not the resurgence of ancient religious animosities. Rather, it is a frantically accelerating pace of change.” (Gary Hamel, The Future of Management.)
 

(This is a guest article from reader Bay Jordan)

Even our recessions come faster and threaten to hit harder than anything we have seen to date!

Hamel’s statement, made before the current recession, is fundamental to his case for a new management approach. He argues the historical management model is outdated and wonders why the views of senior executives are granted a “higher co-efficient of credibility” than the convictions of mid- and lower-level employees. It’s a fair question. Why should organizations give so much weight to the views of those furthest away from the customer, with “most of their emotional equity invested in the past?”

The pace and severity of this recession seems to reinforce the view that large companies have borrowed their change model from “poorly governed third-world dictatorships,” as Hamel claims. Certainly, the scale of layoffs and the reluctance of executives to give up their high salaries and perks, highlights feudal ideas still embedded in modern management practice.

Is productivity so important?

Hamel’s solution is more proactive management systems. He believes employees need more thinking time. “Too much of what gets done in most companies is a response to some already pressing issue,” he writes. “There’s no slack, no space for improvisation and no way to defend projects that are not already useful.”

This is entirely logical, but it presents a massive challenge to conventional organizations. It runs entirely counter to their traditional focus on improved productivity and presents massive logistic challenges.

If you consider the pattern of the typical working year. there are never 365 days available for work.

• We take two days off per week (Saturdays and Sundays) for 52 weeks per year (104 days), which leaves only 261 days.
• Paid holidays entitle us to a further 20 days off , which leaves 241.
• There are 9 public holidays a year, which leaves 232 days for work.
• In most organizations in the UK, you can take three days or less sick without a doctor’s note, although not more than three times a year. Factoring this in removes a further six days, leaving you with 226 days a year for work.
• Assuming a work day is eight 8 hours, actual time spent working accounts for the equivalent of 75 days (226/3).
• Now subtract 30 minutes for lunch each day, and another half an hour for tea/coffee and nature breaks, and you lose a further nine days (226 hours/24)—which means you have only 1,584 hours (the equivalent of 66 days) available for actual work in a year.

This is the UK figure and may vary slightly from country to country. However, it does not include time spent in meetings, or training, or even—perhaps even more significant—answering emails. My estimate is that that the average person is likely to spend considerably less than 1,500 hours actually working in any given year.
Reckoning like this makes me how much time there actually is for any proactive work of the type Hamel is recommending. Nevertheless, he gives good examples of companies that have successfully adopted such practices.

We now know how little time in hours the average person has for productive work. given this, you have to wonder how companies laying off people due to the economic climate can hope to compete effectively. Are they saving themselves, or are they sabotaging their own efforts? In a workforce of 100 people, around 150,000 man/hours of working time is available each year. Lay off 10 people, and you cut away 15,000 man/hours—not just 10% of the headcount, but the equivalent of 62.5 working days.

So are are such organizations effectively committing suicide? One thing is for sure—if they wish to thrive they need to rethink their strategies.

Saying good-bye to command-and-control

For me, this starts with changing the attitudes to people. Traditional, command-and-control’ management is built on the premise that people are costs, and that the organization is paying for their time.

This accounting convention (for that is all it is) ensures that, despite the ubiquitous cliché that, “Our people are our greatest asset,” few organizations see their staff that way. As soon as business falls off, they begin throwing their supposedly most important asset, ignoring the long-term damage this causes to their business, to the people made redundant and to the wider economy as a whole. They don’t just discard many potential hours of available work, they discard unknown quantities of know-how and experience. It makes no sense.

Valuing people and putting their value on the balance sheet is the only way to overcome this traditional mindset—one that still shapes most organizational behavior, no matter how good people’s intentions, or how often they make pious statements about the worth of employees.

Finding salvation

We cannot persist with ‘business as usual’ and avoid sabotaging our future and risking corporate suicide. Only getting away from the old-fashioned, accountants’ attitude to people as costs can offer salvation. Here’s what we should be doing instead:

• Recognizing an organization is the sum of its parts and empowering the people who are closest to the customer.
• Using greater engagement to stimulate a more productive and happy work environment and improve the customer experience.
• Reducing the supervisory burden that comes with command-and-control working and the time and effort it consumes.
• Making it easier to create shared values and embed a culture of continuous improvement.
• Lessening the effort expended on improving productivity by artificial means, and focusing instead on using all the time and people available in the most useful ways we can think up.

What do you need to run a successful organization? People, time and money. If you throw people and time away, as many organizations are doing right now, how long will you have even the money, since it is the other two elements that produce it. All that will be left is borrowing—and we all know where that has taken us.

Bay Jordan is the founder of of Zealise Limited, a company helping businesses develop human capital management strategies, based on the ideas contained in his book “Lean Organisations Need FAT People.”

This followed his recognition, after nearly 30 years in financial management and consulting, that, no matter what the investment in systems and technology, business is ultimately all about people. He has just published his second book, “A Feeling of Worth—a manifesto for mending our broken world.”

Technorati Tags: change, corporate culture, command-and-control, accounting conventions, business attitudes

Who are you when no one is watching?
 

Your character is your internal guideline: a moral compass that operates 24/7. If you leave it alone, it always points to true north. A flawed character has been tinkered with, like fooling with the odometer of an automobile, while retaining the appearance of authenticity. The direction in which it points has been shifted to something more acceptable and less likely to provoke an uncomfortable conscience.

Along the main road where I run in the morning, there is a side street through a winding residential neighborhood. If you turn right onto that side street, you can take a useful short-cut. But there is a sign just before this side street that reads, “No right-hand turn between 7:00 and 9:00 am.” You can’t miss it.
 
From time to time, I stop at this intersection to watch what happens. Recently, in one 15-minute period (7:40-7:55 am), eleven cars came by—and seven made an illegal right turn.
 
What piques my curiosity is what these people are thinking—assuming they are—as they make that right turn. What are their rationalizations and justifications for breaking the law?

 
One definition of character is who you are at 4:00 am in the dark when no one is watching. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.“ How we act in the world—even while driving—reflects character, or lack of it.
 

What twists character out of true?

Mostly pride, an inordinate sense of self-esteem, which morphs into hubris, an exaggerated sense of self-confidence. When this happens, people lose respect for others, for rules of right conduct and doing what they should, especially if it is inconvenient.

“. . . the thought manifests as the word; the word manifests as the deed; the deed develops into habit; and habit hardens into character. So watch the thought and its ways with care, and let it spring from love born out of all concern for all beings . . . as the shadow follows the body, what we think, so we become. (The Buddha)”

With pride and ego in charge, thinking becomes progressively warped and self-centered. Your character—your moral compass—gets twisted out of line. Gradually you become more self-serving, more self-centered, egocentric and uncaring about others. From this place, it’s easy to circumvent rules and fall into inappropriate, even illegal, behaviors. The justification becomes it’s OK as long as you don’t get caught.  It’s all about you and what you want. 

Making the illegal turn at 7:45 am

 You can imagine the excuses:
“I’m late for work.”
“I didn’t see the sign.”
“I had a spat with my spouse and was distracted.”
“A friend said it would be OK.”
“I have an important meeting to get to.”

Does it matter? I think it does.

Integrity and courage are the foundations of character. Once you start taking ethical short-cuts, even when no one is watching, you twist your character out of true. The toothpaste is out of the tube. If you compromise your values like this, it is well-nigh impossible to regain your integrity. Besides, in the long term, moral short-cuts and cutting ethical corners—‘turning right at 7:45 am’—find a way to catch up with you.

Blaming and deflecting responsibility

Blaming and deflecting responsibility are now art forms in our culture. Our obsession with blaming others, while excusing ourselves, is an indication of how much we’ve become a nation of narcissists, victims and adult-age children, using the adult form of “my dog ate my homework.”

It won’t wash. Emotionally mature adults make conscious choices and accept responsibility for them. As Helen Douglas said, “Character isn’t inherited. One builds it daily by the way one thinks and acts, thought by thought, action by action.” 
 
We all face ethical challenges every day. Our character is tested when we make split-second choices about what to do and what not do. The next time you come upon the sign that says, “No right turn between 7:00 and 9:00 am,” and it’s 7:45 am with no one in sight, where will your character be? 

“Character is the foundation stone upon which one must build to win respect. Just as no worthy building can be erected on a weak foundation, so no lasting reputation worthy of respect can be built on a weak character.” (R. C. Samsel)

 
Here are some questions for self-reflection:

• What blocks you from acting with integrity?
• Do you believe you have character? What would others say?
• Have you lied, cheated or stolen recently? How about running a red light, a stop sign or a sign that says “No right turn?” What was your rationalization or justification?
• Do you use a different measuring stick to judge your behavior compared with how you judge what others do?
• Who are you at 4:00 am in the dark when no one can see you?

Technorati Tags: ethics, business ethics, character, values, integrity, authenticity

Caring is a good thing—but only if it is done by degrees to preserve your sanity, your marriage or your job.
 

Is it possible to care too much for the occasion? Is it possible to bring so much energy to a discussion or debate that the right solution gets lost in the drama? Do you bring the same level of energy to things that really matter to you as to those you could just let go? I am all for caring, but there is a point where caring too much creates unnecessary angst for everyone.

The ‘Circle of Care’ was created out of a discussion with a good friend of mine about how much should you care about a situation, and how much energy (if any) should you exert to try to resolve or debate an issue.

She claimed to have two positions—she either cared passionately or she couldn’t care less; there was nothing in between. Yet the ‘couldn’t care less’ position was not a good place for her. By nature, she is such a caring person that position was only a way to protect herself. She still cared, so the careless pose was not real. It did not bring the release from anxiety you should feel if you honestly did not care one bit.

We jokingly talked about creating ‘levels of care’ so that we could look at a situation and evaluate objectively how much energy we would allow ourselves to exert in caring about it. So the Circle of Care was born and, while it does have some cynicism built in, it can be useful in a pinch when you find you are becoming emotional and no one else seems to share the same level of concern.

When muscles are popping out on the side of your neck as you try to convince the team that Monday should remain Chinese-food day and everyone else wants Indian, you have to ask yourself if this is the hill you want to die on.

Understanding the Circle of Care

The Circle of Care is inclusive and gives you a wide playing field. It is a great screen to let you determine if the issue is really and truly important, or whether is it something you can and should let go—in a matter of a second or two.

There are times when you should go to the mat for an issue, and there are times when it should never have featured on your radar. Time is precious. Only what matters most is worth your energy.

Sometimes going to the mat is what must be done. There are also times when supporting someone else’s decision, even if it is opposite from yours, can be liberating—when an attitude of ‘I could not care less’ is exactly right.

I am not claiming that I have found the universal solution to knowing when to care and when not to, but it has certainly been fun applying this notion to situations.

The Circle of Care is made up of five levels:

1. Level 1: Care Passionately—This is critical for you. You are willing to go to the mat for this issue and may be willing to die on this hill to defend your position.
2. Level 2: Care Enough to Influence—This is an important point. You are definitely willing to debate its merits and argue passionately, but civilly, about it. You may not be willing to die on this hill, but you’ll fight your ground.
3. Level 3: Care Unless Career Ending—A somewhat important issue, but you are not willing to make this the issue you are known for. You’ll argue for your point, but tread lightly and generally give in with a good grace. You will only fight if losing might end your career.
4. Level 4: Care, But You Can Release—You can go either way. You may enjoy a debate, but you can live with and support the outcome whatever it may be.
5. Level 5: Realm of Careless—You don’t care at all, so why are you in the debate? This is not an issue for you. Move on and be grateful you have not been sucked into the vortex of extra worry.

As you can see, although there is nothing scientific about the Circle of Care, it’s still useful. It can talk you down when you are about to escalate the argument on an issue that is either not that important or you have no control over. Instead of rushing to the barricades over every little disagreement, you pause, think about it, breathe slowly, then decide what you want or what, if anything, you can do.

The Circle of Care in action

This past weekend, the Circle of Care saved my date night (Don’t get jealous, we are just trying to keep up with President Obama and the First Lady). We made the decision about the movie we were going to see without the normal drama that goes with selecting the right one.

Typically, selecting a movie is a major debate that can get a little ugly—but not this time. I put myself in the ‘Care, but I could release’ space, so we selected an excellent movie, enjoyed the evening and are still married. Go figure.

Hail to the Circle of Care!

Karen Senteio is a business and life coach and president of VERVE. She has over 20 years experience in developing and coaching individuals and groups to achieve personal success and work-life balance. You can visit her web site at Verve and contact her at Karen@vimandverve.net

Technorati Tags: caring, prioritizing, staying balanced, saving energy, stress, being yourself