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

“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

Most leaders act as if creativity is a disease they hope won’t affect their part of the operation. Why?
 

There seems to be no end to the number of situations where organizations claim to want something, then act in ways that make it clear they don’t. This thought came to me again as I was musing about some more management basics.

Take creativity. If the best things in life are free, as the old song has it, the best things in work—the creative activities that employees tend to enjoy the most and find most satisfaction in doing—seem to be regarded by many bosses and organizations as unnecessary. That’s certainly true of innovation or thinking for yourself.

Making the sale is important. Completing that report is said to be essential. Checking your data is ready and submitting it on schedule will earn you a friendly nod from the boss—at least if it’s done right—and a furious dressing down if it’s late and there are mistakes.

But, despite all the claims to the contrary, you will find that corporate life goes on very smoothly if you never have a new idea, never display any imagination, never produce anything creative, and never question the established ways of doing things. Perhaps you won’t be regarded as brilliant, but you’ll be seen as ‘a safe pair of hands’—which is almost certainly better, if you want to be promoted.

So which is right, the value organizations say they put on creativity, or the value demonstrated by the actions of their executives? Words are cheap. If there is a mismatch between what someone says and what they do, it’s usually best to believe the action represents their true desires.

“Just do as you’re told and don’t get fancy!”

If you ignore what and leaders corporations claim, and look purely at what they do, you have to reach the conclusion that creativity is not only treated as unnecessary, it is often actively resented.

Creativity messes up the schedule and interferes with the smooth progress of routine. In the short term, it doesn’t make money. More often, it requires additional expenditure. It doesn’t cut costs (at least in the short term again) and it doesn’t show up as an asset on the balance sheet.

The very people who claim to want creative subordinates—the executives—are typically those who are most irritated when creativity intrudes on their neatly ordered day. As those with the most to gain from preserving the status quo, they are least happy to see it challenged. To parody the words of the Church of England wedding service, “What I, in the past, have put together, let no man put asunder.”

“Not another weirdo!“

There’s another problem. The people most likely to produce creative ideas are often on the edge of acceptability.

Many creative people don’t restrict their questioning and innovations to workplace issues. They don’t fit in with corporate norms. They’re untidy, they don’t dress well, they don’t spend time socializing or brown-nosing those above them. Even worse, they keep asking difficult questions and are often visibly unimpressed by the answers. They waste time thinking when they should be taking action, and wanting to change things when they should be humbly obedient.

Most executives will put up with a great deal from people they think they need badly enough. Many up-and-coming macho managers are arrogant, pushy and not very trustworthy, but they get away with it because they ‘deliver the goods’. In an emergency, creative people will be also accepted easily; but once the emergency is over, it’s not unusual to find the organization starts re-applying pressure to force conformity to various petty rules and expectations.

“Who’s in charge here?”

Command-and-control, macho management and creative thinking don’t mix. The essence of creativity is individuality. The essence of control is doing everything my way—or else.

In conventional management thinking, all the emphasis is on doing things quickly, cheaply and predictably. The ideal is to establish a set of systems and procedures that require little or no maintenance. Once you have set up them, you leave well alone. Doing anything else increases costs—and cutting costs is usually seen as the best way to ensure profits. In fact, in the ideal management world, you would become the lowest-cost (and highest-profit) producer by establishing a mechanistic, take-it-or-leave-it system in a monopolistic environment—rather as Microsoft has been attempting to do for a number of years.

Creativity and innovation mess this up. If your competitors shift the nature of the business in their favor—as they will certainly try to do—you have to fight back to undermine their attempt at industry and world domination in the same way. But once you have done that (if you can), it’s time to put away the creative ideas (and people) and get back to business as usual: repetitive, predictable and smoothly profitable.

If you must retain some creative people, the simplest way to keep them out of the way until you need them next (hopefully, not for a long time), is to put them in a separate building on another site and try to forget about them.

Turning the tap off

Most organizations today are actively resisting creativity, not promoting it. The current economic crisis gives further evidence of this. Faced with the breakdown of existing systems, executives are making enormous efforts to put the status quo back into place—to go back to business as usual—where they should be using the opportunity to re-think the fundamentals of their business models.

They want creativity to be like water: something you can turn off when you don’t immediately need it, but which will be there to turn back on when you do. Since it doesn’t work like that, they try to spend as little time, attention and money on it as they can most of the time—then complain loudly when they need innovation and it’s not available in an instant.

They also want creativity only where they want it (which is safely away from affecting them) and nowhere else—least of all where it might require them to do anything new, or where it might show them up for being ineffective and out-of-touch. Like all aspects of change, it’s fine when it affects someone else and damnably infuriating (and quite unnecessary) if it might affect me.

The conclusion that best fits the evidence is that creativity and change mostly come about in organizations in spite of those in charge, not because of them; and that all the talk about needing creative people who think and ask questions is just that—talk.

Depressing, isn’t it?

Technorati Tags: creativity, change, innovation, new ideas, fresh thinking

Working Your Daydreams for Ideas and Solutions

(This is a guest article from Amy Fries, author of Daydreams at Work: Wake Up Your Creative Powers)

When do you get your best ideas? When you’re sitting at your desk striving for an answer, or when you’re doing something off-task like driving, walking, or puttering around the house? Though many of us have sensed the connection between daydreaming and creativity, recent scientific studies are combining with an abundance of anecdotal evidence to establish that when daydreaming we are in our most creative state of mind, tapping into and connecting complex regions of the brain.

On the surface, daydreaming seems like the antithesis of “work,” yet it’s at the core of our most important type of productivity—creative problem-solving. Daydreams are not just wishful thinking. They are the nursery for ideas and our best mental state for tackling complex problems.

Visionaries of every sort, from Einstein to Walt Disney, credit daydreams as the source of their moments of insight. Some of the most innovative companies in the world feature programs that give key employees the time and space to think creatively and daydream. Google offers a 20% program, 3M has a 15% program, and Gore & Associates (Gore-Tex) features “dabble time.” All three companies credit these programs as the source of their most successful products.

“. . . for a daydream believer . . .”

While many of us can see the relationship between daydreaming and creativity in the arts and even science, we’ve been slower to come around to its usefulness in business. Say the word “visionary” however, and people understand how having a vision—a mental image or plan—can help start a breakthrough company or service.

A “vision” is just an upscale word for “daydream” and “visionary” an upscale word for “daydreamer.”

I know all the work and focus must follow to have an idea come to fruition. I am not against focusing in any way, shape, or form. But the original idea and the motivation to fulfill that idea are born in a daydreaming state, and we do our most creative problem solving when our mind wanders.

Why daydreaming Is the most creative state of mind

• While daydreaming, we can envision—we can see things, people, and events in our mind’s eye. This ability to simulate the known and unknown is an unrivaled creative skill, available to you only in a daydreaming state. While daydreaming, you’re able to see the see the big picture, something you’re unable to do when locked in the tunnel vision of focus.
• The daydreaming mind is completely uncensored, which gives you the freedom to explore a wide—and sometimes wild—variety of options without an internal critic hovering. It’s the brain’s own critic-free R&D time. This freedom to explore and take risks with your thinking are key to innovation.
• You are able to free-associate when daydreaming, making seemingly random connections, which in turn enable you to come up with novel solutions. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of struggling to remember a name or word, and you can’t get it despite focusing on it. Suddenly it will come back to you when you’re doing something off-task like walking to your car. That’s free association at work. In fact, the ability to make new and inventive associations, as we do in a daydreaming state, is so valuable to creativity and problem solving that computer scientists are incorporating the ability into software programs. One such program is called Daydreamer for its ability to free associate in its down time.
• Recent studies using brain scans show that while daydreaming we are using the most complex regions of the brain, tapping into stores of knowledge and experience unavailable when focusing on one thing only.

The truth about creativity at work

The new economy demands it. Global competition and the fast pace of technological change have left many of us scrambling. In addition, we’re become much more of a thought-based economy than a widget-based one. Such an economy has a voracious appetite for ideas and innovation.

None of us can rest on our laurels. It used to be a person worked their way up the ladder, starting as an apprentice and eventually becoming the wise elder of their trade. Now we all have to scramble just to stay relevant. Those who want to be ahead of the curve have to be visionary. Those businesses or individuals lost only in the tunnel vision of task will be left behind.

Encouraging creativity is good for attracting and retaining quality employees—always an issue, even in this bad economy. Encouraging your employees to think creatively also helps to ensure that ideas stay under your roof, instead of having them take their ideas somewhere else or start a competing business.

Ideas for sparking creativity in the workplace

• Tell people you want their ideas. Give them some amount of time and space to think creatively and daydream. Instead of fearing that you’re losing an employee’s clocked-in time to creative thinking, look at it from another angle. You are gaining much wider access to that person’s creative energies by encouraging them to explore ideas whenever the inspiration strikes. Offering up as little as thirty minutes a week could send a powerful message that creative thought is valued, not viewed with suspicion as time-wasting.
• Ask “what if” questions and encourage speculative thinking.
• Accept risk and a certain amount of failure. I believe it was Edison who said, “to have one good idea, have a lot of them.”
• Provide a forum for sharing ideas. Give feedback on what you hear.
• Get rid of your old-school ideas about daydreaming, and start doing it. Go ahead. I’m giving you permission. Among the many benefits of daydreaming is that it’s fun—and we can all use some of that.

Amy Fries’s new book Daydreams at Work: Wake Up Your Creative Powers (Capital Books, 2009) shows you how to tap into your daydreams for ideas, energy, solutions, and motivation for both work and life.

Amy is a writer and editor whose articles have been published in newspapers, magazines, and trade publications. Amy began her research into daydreaming and creativity while working on her masters at Johns Hopkins University. To contact Amy, visit her website and click on the contact form ( www.DaydreamsAtWork.com).

Technorati Tags: creativity, innovation, coming up with ideas, daydreaming, finding new ideas

(A few days ago, I published an article I had written on ‘Delusional Optimism’. This guest article from Karen Senteio takes a very different view on broadly the same topic.)

Hope in a Prison of Despair by Evelyn De Morgan (1855–1919)

‘Hopetimism’. Don’t bother to look it up in the dictionary. It is a word made up just for you.

The good thing is that we are all born with hopetimism; it is a matter of finding it and putting it into practice. Hopetimism allows you to believe and belief is the catalyst to action.

Learning to listen to your own needs

To reacquaint yourself with your hopetimism, you need to spend some time to learn to hear yourself. We are all going, going, going so much of the time that we do not hear ourselves when we are crying out for a break, self-care or love. We needed all these as children and were not shy about asking for it. We cried for them, yelled for them and even threw tantrums for them.

As we grew up, we were conditioned to think we did not need these things. We suppressed our desire for them and they were replaced by stress, anger and pessimism. We did not know this was happening; we just attributed it to life. Now, here we are in the midst of global uncertainty and a host of other issues and we are exhausted with worrying about it all. There is a difference between being informed and knowledgeable about things and being completely consumed by them. We can choose consumption or Hopetimism. Chose hope. Believe me, it is difficult to hold onto hope, but try.

Looking through the eyes of hope

Looking at a challenge with the eyes of hope is far different than looking at it with hopelessness. With hope, you are firing on all cylinders, creative, happy, ready for the risks and challenges that you will encounter. You have vision and can see a positive outcome. You are not derailed by the hurdles or naysayers. You expertly navigate around them determined to succeed. Hopetimism sits differently in your mind and attracts positivity to it.

I confess that sometimes anger and negativity gets the best of me and I can get quite Grinchy (green fur and all). What is different now compared to a couple years ago is that I can snap myself out of it. Before, I would let self-limiting doubts cloud my thinking. When your eyes and heart are clouded with pessimism and negativity, you give up to soon, abandon your dreams or doubt the dreams of others.

This low-energy thinking does not serve you. It is not worthy of you. Opt for Hopetimism. It will sit comfortably in your heart and keep the doors of opportunity open.

Some quotations that help explain ‘hopetemism’ for me:

“The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.” (Barbara Kingsolver)

“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops
at all.” (Emily Dickenson)

“Hope is always available to us. When we feel defeated, we need only take a deep breath and say, ‘Yes,’ and hope will reappear.” (Monroe Forester)

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: optimism, hope, moving on, being positive

Awareness is the ‘secret sauce’ of personal change
 

Most people experience problems in their life at work and at home—it’s part of the human condition. Awareness is what allows you to see either what’s creating the problem, and what you can do about it, or recognize there is nothing to be done and you have to put up with it. Each has its value.

Somewhere around 99% of people live on autopilot in a world of routine with a static level of awareness. Because they currently face no drastic changes, and feel they are moderately successful as they are, they continue to do what they do now, in the way they presently do it. Any counter-productive and dysfunctional behaviors they have—and they will have some, we all do—are ignored.

They are blind to what is going on. Their attitude limits even necessary change, let alone new information or new experiences.

Their awareness has come to a standstill.

The 1 or 2% who are proactively seeking greater awareness don’t wait to be forced into change. They go to meet it. They read, attend classes, welcome new ideas and perspectives, try new things, seek out others different from themselves and look for challenge and stimulation.

As they do this, their awareness expands. They aren’t so focused on ‘me’. They stand at a higher point on the mountain, more able to see how their past has created their present and how their present is creating their future.

How does awareness work?

As you increase your awareness, you will gain clarity on the patterns of cause and effect in your life. You’ll understand how effects flow from internal beliefs and assumptions about reality. Many people discover what they thought was reality is just an effect of what they believed was true—not reality at all. A deeper awareness lets you grasp how your thoughts, actions and beliefs combine to create life’s experience through an ‘internal’ reality that determines how you feel, how you behave and how you give meaning to whatever happens ‘out there’.

If you do this, you’ll give yourself much more choice over what happens in your life. Awareness creates choice. As you watch your thoughts, feelings and what they lead to, you’ll learn how to take more control over them. Life won’t just happen to you as you bumble along. You’ll become an active partner in bringing it about.

The downsides of being unaware

Being unaware and going through life on autopilot means carrying your past into your future—repeating the same patterns more or less blindly. People who are unaware have no grasp of their internal map of reality. They live unconsciously. They carry forward the bad along with the good and never know why.

If you aren’t aware of the may links between your internal map of reality and your behavior, you have no choice in how you behave—no awareness of the consequences of thoughts or actions. You’ll repeat self-limiting ideas and behaviors over and over again—even those you know are self-destructive.

For the unaware, all this is happening on autopilot. They are unconsciously self-selecting the people, circumstances, events and interpretations that allow it to happen, while unconsciously rejecting everything that may point to the contrary.

Awareness is not the same as knowing

Being aware of what is going on in your mind is not the same as knowing that you do something. This is important. The unaware know they engage in self-limiting and self-sabotaging behavior, but they don’t stop because they can’t grasp what is causing it to happen. They may want to change—desperately—but feel it’s not possible.

Awareness is seeing that what you do ‘inside’ creates an outcome— and seeing that while you’re doing it.

Take belief as an example. A belief is a thought you think is true. To feel secure with that ‘truth’, your mind locks into an unconscious circular pattern of perception and thinking that goes like this:

This is true for me and I want it to stay that way, so I’ll unconsciously behave in a way that allows my belief to be right. I won’t notice how I focus first on people, events and circumstances that act as confirming evidence. I’ll unthinkingly treat those with different ideas as jerks, so I’ll be able to ignore them and continue to attract people and circumstances that support my pre-existing belief. Should that fail, I’ll blindly interpret my experience in a way that makes me right; and if I find there are still numerous interpretations available to me, I’ll unconsciously chose the one that supports my belief.

If you become aware, you’ll notice this as it’s taking place—which means you’ll be able to intervene and turn into another direction. Those who are unaware only grasp what they’ve done after the event. It’s that, “Oh no! I did it again!” feeling. By then, it’s too late., even if they are able towork out what caused the problem.

Awareness comes with a cost

The usual upshot of becoming more aware is that you discover what a good deal of you have taken for granted to be ‘true’ is illusion. If you cannot face this, as many cannot, awareness is not for you.

Becoming aware also takes effort, purposefulness and consistent practice. Only if you choose to pay the price will you experience a world where self-limiting and self-sabotaging thoughts are caught before they inflict any more harm. A world where you can let go and suffer less pain, since much of it is caused by trying to hang on for dear life to old ways. A world where the causes of anxiety, stress, depression and a host of other negative feelings are made clear and open to change. By coming to terms with the cause-and-effect nature of life, you’ll be aware of how your internal state affects your experience and make more conscious, healthier choices.

A strategy to gain awareness

Here are some practices to support your capacity to become more aware.

1. Daily meditation.
2. Spending ten minutes several times each day observing your internal pictures, scripts and dialogs, and noticing how they affect your experience. Play back the ‘tape of your day’ in the evening. Re-visit an experience or two and observe how your internal patterns affected the outcome.
3. Explore your internal state when you experience strong feelings. What goes on in you at those times? What beliefs, thoughts, feelings or emotions fuel the fire?
4. Practice, practice, practice. Practice will make you, if not perfect, much better. You’ll discover a new ‘you’. You won’t create self-sabotaging states and more without seeing what you’re doing.

Observing your unconscious internal processes with an active curiosity lets you discover what doesn’t serve you. When you let go of those self-limiting and self-sabotaging thoughts, you’ll experience a fresh sense of aliveness and enthusiasm. All that’s needed is a deep awareness that your life doesn’t have to be this way.

Here are some questions for self-reflection:

• How well do you know yourself? Are you aware of your thoughts and emotions? Do you see how they automatically produce your experience?
• Do you feel uncomfortable with anything that does not conform to your current beliefs or ideas of reality? Do you unconsciously search for ways to prove these existing views are right? What if they aren’t?
• Are you open to discovering new possibilities and insights about yourself? Are you willing to give up any belief or premise that you find is no longer serving you? Where might that take you?
• Would you say you are more or less self-aware than you were last year, two years ago, or five years ago? Remember, awareness is being conscious of what’s happening deeply inside you when it’s happening, not just knowing more about yourself after the event. Are you growing or standing still?

Technorati Tags: awareness, change, growth, testing your beliefs, finding new ways, coming alive

Change is all around us. We are facing a critical point in how we conduct business. Has anyone noticed?
 

Our dependence on technology-driven growth, our obsession with efficiency and with mechanistic organizational designs are dysfunctional in a business environment characterized by instability, limited resources and economic uncertainty. Yet the need for change seems to be falling on deaf ears. The people in charge prefer the status quo and reinforcing the very things that aren’t working. They can’t wait to get back to ‘business as usual’. The only change they want is to go into reverse.

The challenge for organizations today is to carry out a redesign of their business models that allows more people to contribute. That sees business less as a mechanistic entity of processes, procedures and outcomes, and more like an ecosystem: part engineering, part quantum physics, part psychology, part biology, and part neuroscience.

Adaptive strain and adaptive change

In engineering, ‘adaptive strain’ occurs when tension within a structure produces conflicts that cause destabilization that can only be resolved through a process of ‘adaptive change’—moving from the present equilibrium to another stable state in a dynamic way.

In the world today, we are witnessing this initial destabilization. Yet the move to adaptive change is anything but natural and fluid. Though we need it to survive, those in charge are unable—or unwilling—to create a new steady state. The result, if this continues, can only be breakdown.

When destabilization occurs in business, which is where we are now, fear and resistance take over, all but blocking change. There is no automatic, natural adaptation that allows resilience until a new equilibrium can be found. People are too afraid of the unknown future. They dig in their heels and cling to the status quo. In place of a natural shift to a new state, we are stuck in disorientation and ambiguity, trapped by our fear of loss.

Into the belly of the beast

Perhaps this type of radical change and transformation can only happen when you ‘hit bottom’, in business as in the rest of life. A painful journey through the ‘belly of the beast’ brings you finally to a place where intuition, creativity, ‘right knowing’, ‘right understanding’ and thus ‘right action’ arise.

This journey is neither quick nor easy. You must remain in the ‘belly’ long enough to absorb and metabolize the chaos that exists there. There is no quick fix. Only there, in the turbulence, will you discover the insights and strategies that lead to the kind of fundamental re-design necessary to re-establish connectedness between the procedures and structures of organizations and the psychological and personal needs of the people who inhabit them.

No transformation can happen until leaders recognize their dysfunctional ways of leading and managing—not just in their business models and processes, but in their personal style and character too. Sadly, it seems many businesses are continuing to choose ‘business as usual’, not seeing that it must lead back to the same uncertainly, apathy, turbulence and cynicism as before.

In this time of change, we are all called upon to recognize, and own, our dysfunctional behaviors—our avoidance of risk, the refusal to trust that makes us untrustworthy, our fear of change and ambiguity, our obsessive needing to be ‘in control’. It is these behaviors that sabotage teams and organizations; that add stress to already stressful situations; that undermine performance and sap productivity. Until we enter a conscious process of self-reflection—a journey into the belly of the beast—we will be unable to move away from the status quo and establish the dynamics that produce successful change. We cannot leave it to our leaders. All organizational members have to experience this journey, if they are to contribute what is needed to the carry the change process to completion.

Making a start

It’s a big belly down there. There’s room for everyone. If we stay caught up in resistance and denial, change cannot happen. Only when we choose to take on the journey, seeking out how our dysfunctional behaviors prevent change, can we engage in the change process. Once this happens, the organization will move from being just a mechanistic entity to being a living organism.

The road to adaptive change begins in small, incremental ways: changing your assumptions, altering your world view, making a different decision, creating a fresh strategy. It’s here that we must willingly choose to look inside and explore what threatens our self-esteem and confidence. Here we must face our fears of change head-on. It’s here that we can eliminate self-destructive and self-sabotaging patterns and engage in new behaviors that offer better support for ourselves and the organization.

If we refuse to take this inner personal journey, and stay focused on getting back to business as usual, we will be unable to adapt. Instead, we will choose failure. Preferring the devil we know to the devil we don’t, we will find only a false sense of security. In bolstering what is preventing change, we will assure the breakdown we fear so much.

Here are some questions for self-reflection to start the change process:

• How do you deal with an uncertain future? Do you hang on to your beliefs, world views and assumptions at all costs? What would happen if you let go?
• Are you and your organization facing up to the strain of adapting to turbulent times? How are you doing? What more is needed?
• Are you focusing only on the transactional (mechanistic) aspects of your business? What about the human, transformational aspects?
• Are you and your organization using outmoded models and tools to adapt to change? What is needed instead?
• Have you, personally, experienced the journey through ‘the belly of the beast?’ What was that like for you? What did you discover about yourself as a result? What changed?
• How do you, personally, deal with change? Honestly?

Technorati Tags: change, transformation, coping with uncertainty, facing up to turbulent times

How you handle the bad stuff will determine how you (and your career) come out of this recession
 

If you allow your hurt and anger to take away your personal power—if you become so fixated on what is wrong ‘out there’ in the corporate world that you ignore what you can do ‘in here’ in your own life, the chances are that you will emerge from the recession badly wounded, even crippled. There’s a better way, but it takes courage and a willingness to let go of even the most righteous anger.

All too many people are having a bad time in organizations today. It’s not just the endless cost cutting and lay-offs, it’s the deep sense of hurt and loss as hopes and expectations are destroyed. It’s the pain of losing your trust in the future and any confidence that you can, some day, reach your career goals.

The cruelest hurt of all is our collective loss of belief that things will get better any day soon. As even more stories emerge of wild risks, corporate malfeasance, narcissistic leadership and staggering greed, it’s hard to know what normal is, let alone when—or if—we will ever get back to it.

So many hurts and losses at one time are hard to bear. Some people become depressed. More get mad, for anger has a quality of energy that makes you feel that you’re doing something. To sustain your anger, you also need a specific target. You have to be mad at someone or something. That’s why people are looking around for scapegoats to carry the blame for all this disappointment and unhappiness. Surely there are plenty ‘out there’ in the business world? The greedy executives, the conniving politicians, the sly and dishonest financiers, the bankers using tax-payer dollars to pay themselves big bonuses. Take your pick.

Never mind whose fault it is

I want you to consider how powerless you make yourself whenever you focus on the causes of your hurt ‘out there’ and ignore the sources of healing and progress inside yourself.

It’s so tempting to excuse yourself from any part in what has caused your hurt and pain. It’s even true, for the most part. My point is that it isn’t helpful. Justified or not, the time you spend inside your head, imagining what you would love to do to the guilty parties—if only you had the chance—takes you even further way from what you might be able to do to help yourself emerge from the chaos more or less intact.

Can you change Wall Street’s greed and obsession with short-term profits? Can you change corporate attitudes and destroy macho management for good? Can you kick-start the economy or stop people being thrown out of their homes and jobs? Can you even change the executives in your own organization into people who care more for their employees than their own bonuses and stock options?

It’s hopeless, isn’t it? What about people closer at hand?

If you spend your energy acting out your feelings and venting your anger on someone you can get to—maybe your colleagues, your friends, or your family—all you’ll do is alienate people whose help and support you’ll likely need. Nothing else will have changed. You still have the hurt you had before— but now you have given the people close to you a reason to feel mad at you as well.

A friend of mine has a compelling way of putting this: “Whatever you resist tends to persist.” If you direct your anger at someone, they fight back, turning a one-time hurt into an on-going conflict. If you blame impersonal forces, they catch your attention again and again, until it’s easy to believe they’re behind every pain, loss and insult. The more you fret and fume about ‘them’, the more power you give them over your life. Do this long enough and you’ll be helpless.

You can always do something. Just be sure it’s what will help most.

Whatever happens, you still have the power to choose your response. If you can’t change ‘them’ and their actions, you can still change your own.

To survive the bad times, the trick is to modify the responses and attitudes in your mind and heart, regardless of what the world does. Since what happens in your life is a blend of chance, outside events and your reactions to both, changing how you react will always affect the outcome—maybe not completely or instantly, but certainly.

The next time something or someone seems to be hell bent on messing up your life, try stopping and asking yourself these questions before you go any further:

• “What have I done (or not done) that has contributed to this problem?”
• “What have I been avoiding that I should have faced up to long ago?”
• “What am I postponing that I know I should have done by now?”
• “What am I blaming on others that I know is down to me?”
• “What am I going along with that I know I should refuse?”
• “What am I agreeing to that I know to be false?”
• “What am I accepting that I know is selling me short?”
• “What can I do about the things I’ve just discovered?”

No guilt. No regrets. Just clarity.

The purpose of this exercise is to break through your automatic habit of pushing blame ‘out there’, so you need to approach it in a spirit of curiosity, with a genuine interest in the answers. Don’t add to your guilt or try to beat yourself up over what you find. Guilt is a worthless emotion; beating yourself up changes nothing.

When can you see clearly what changes to your actions or attitudes can help resolve the problem, or find a way through it, you can take appropriate action. As long as you stay helpless, fixated on what ‘the other guy’ did to you, you’re held fast in pain and loss. Let go of your anger, your resentment and all your other baggage and move on.

One thing has grown exponentially during this recession—the amount of synchronized whining. It’s everywhere; in the media, on the web, around every water cooler. Don’t join in. Focus your energy on the positive task of confronting and acknowledging the setbacks and exploring fresh ways to move forward. Don’t let anger and scapegoating make you helpless. Change what you can and work with what you cannot. If you do this honestly and objectively, you will be surprised just how much falls into the first category and how little into the second.

Technorati Tags: change, moving on, surviving the recession, getting back on track, positive action, facing the future

Ideas for Rebuilding Your Life and Career
 

(This article appeared in the last Slow Leadership newsletter. If you would like to receive future articles like this, please use the links on this page to subscribe to future issues.)

How can you move on when it seems nothing and no one will give you a break? As unemployment grows and new jobs attract thousands of applicants, is there any way to keep yourself feeling tough enough to bounce back?

One of the first casualties of tough times and adversity is self-confidence. It’s hard to believe in yourself when you have lost much of what achieved over the years and attempts to start again are met with rejection.

You cannot change what has happened, but there are ways to help rebuild your confidence as a prelude to rebuilding everything else.

These are some of the most useful ones.

• Slow down. It’s tempting to rush into finding a way back to where you were, but is that the right place to be? Losing what you had gives you the opportunity to try something different—something that might suit you better and give you greater happiness. It’s well worth careful thought.
• Lighten up. It’s easy to fall prey to melodrama. The media, in particular, love to dramatize, turning every problem into a crisis. Don’t join them. If you take yourself and your difficulties too seriously, they’ll look so big and scary you will feel defeated before you start.
• Things are rarely as bad as they seem—or rarely as good as either. We can all imagine unending horrors ahead. It really doesn’t help.
• Accept your fear. The more you obsess about your fears and try to fight them, the more power they will have over you. if you can accept that you are afraid and move on, their power will grow less. Curiosity is the great antidote to fear. Fear shuts you down. Curiosity opens you up. It’s better to try things in a spirit of frank curiosity, even if they don’t work, than to allow your fears to freeze you in place.
• Remember that failure won’t kill you. Nobody likes to fail, but it happens to everyone sometime. Your dreams may be looking sick, but they are not dead. There’s always a chance to start again or move in a different direction. Of course, if you sit around and do nothing, while complaining how badly things are going for you, you’re stopping yourself from taking that chance. In coping with adversity, we are often our own worst enemies.
• It’s not just about you. What undermines self-confidence as much as anything else is embarrassment. You imagine that others are thinking badly of you. In reality, the world doesn’t revolve around you and most people don’t care about what you do. They are far too busy worrying about themselves and their own lives. Simply accepting that one fact can free you from an enormous burden of worry. No one is watching you all the time, nor judging your every move, so you’re free to get on and sort yourself out in your own way.
• Stay realistic in your outlook. Positive thinking is simply one way of looking at things, as is negative thinking. Neither, on its own, gives you an adequate picture of what is happening. Like day and night, life and earth, you cannot have one without the other.

Adopting a relaxed and realistic approach to life—neither seeking to be positive nor negative, but accepting the way things are—can be wonderfully liberating. Trying to be positive all the time leads to false consolations and hopes. Being negative and pessimistic produces depression and alienates others. As so often, the middle way is what you should strive for.

Adversity is the mother of change

When things are going well, we have little incentive to change anything. We are too comfortable. But when they go badly, it’s worth reflecting that maybe they weren’t so great in the first place.

If you can see your present troubles as the crucible in which a new life is being formed, you can focus on how that should turn out and stop worrying about what went before. Just deciding what you want out of life, then focusing on trying to make that happen, will give your self-confidence a boost.

Start today

My final piece of advice is this: do something right away. It almost doesn’t matter what. Few things build competence more than getting something done. Few things undermine it more than doing nothing. Work out what is the next most obvious thing to do and do it. It’s that simple. Keep doing that, over and over again, and you can achieve almost anything.

Technorati Tags: adversity, moving on, building a new life, self-development, resilience