Have you noticed how coffee and chocolate is becoming as pompous and snobby as wine tasting used to be?

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; as most of us will have bad memories of huge catering tins of icky powdered instant coffee in our respective workplace tearooms and were glad to see even fast food joints like McDonald’s embrace fresh ground coffee and barista-trained staff.

Taking a coffee break means that it’s no longer a stroll past the cubicle farms and stationery cupboard into the kitchen. We now take orders from our workmates and leave the building to the decent café across the road that, like Cheers, now knows your name and exactly how you like your coffee. The place can also function as an impromptu meeting room for those times you want to discuss something away from the office, or as a little ‘treat’ to staff for a job well done. Read the full story

How many times have you regretted an impulsive action — but realized the error too late?

Where’s there’s conflict to be resolved, a problem to be solved, or a dilemma to be unbundled, how often do you jump in, right away, with a quick solution, answer, or retort? How often have you found that, after jumping in like that, you maybe didn’t get the whole story or see the complete picture? What you did or said missed the mark because you hadn’t taken the time to understand fully enough first.

How often in such situations might you be hearing, but not listening?

One reason people have a tendency to jump in is because their minds are working at 90 miles an hour. They’re hyped up, used to making judgments on the fly, wrapped in their preconceptions and assumptions. “Quick! There’s no time. Get on with it!” So they plunge ahead, seduced into making judgments that are too often misguided, off-putting or simply wrong.

“Listen to understand before being understood” is a principle that is bandied about in the ‘effective listening’ literature. We all say we ‘get it’, yet nothing changes. Nearly everyone seriously over-estimates their capacity to listen. Ask almost anyone and he or she will claim to be good at listening. If that were so, many of the problems around us would disappear in an instant. The truth is that rather few people listen properly before reacting. Read the full story

Life in the 21st Century should be getting easier to manage, not harder.

Photo credit: Littledan77

The traditional image of the sun-bronzed, ‘no worries’ Australian has become more of a myth than a reality in the past few years. Instead, our working hours have increased in line with jobs being vacated but not filled and employers expecting overtime as the norm instead of the exception. All of which is leaving us with less time for home — but still working harder to pay for it — and virtually no time or energy for meaningful relationships, family, friends or hobbies.

For most people, the main source of relaxation is to slump on the sofa with wine, chips and bad TV for dinner — only to wake up the next morning with the remote control imprinted on our faces. The day starts again when we leave for work in the dark. Sound familiar to any of you?

This gloomy way of living and working has been examined by Clive Hamilton, Director of the Australia Institute, who found that if the average Aussie worked the same hours as the average worker in other industrialized nations, we would be able to take the rest of the year off from the 20th of November. When you consider that the average number of hours worked per week also includes part-time work — with Australia having the second highest proportion of part time workers in the world — the picture looks even worse. Read the full story

What does managing your boss mean — for both of you?

Successful leadership is a two-way process. As much as the supervisor thinks he or she is in charge of the team, those same team members affect their leader’s decisions and actions in a thousand ways. When the process works well, the result is beneficial for everyone. When it breaks down into resentment, distrust and a mess of hidden agendas and false communications, it produces misery as well as lowered performance.

Everyone who has a boss needs to know how to manage upwards. Managing the boss is a set of skills every subordinate needs to learn to be happy and successful. Poor leaders may believe that they are calling all the shots and need no nudges and assistance from below, but this merely proves their arrogance and blindness to reality. A major part of the definition of most truly disastrous bosses is that they try to control everything themselves and never listen to their subordinates. If you are unfortunate to work for one of these, the only sensible course of action is to get away as quickly as possible. That boss is hell-bent on self-destruction and will take you down as well, if you’re still around.

Unfortunately, there are as many different outlooks, attitudes and responses amongst bosses to being managed from below as there are bosses themselves. ‘Boss-ology’, the art of managing upwards, isn’t based on any simple set of one-size-fits-all rules or guidelines. To be effective, it needs careful study of the boss him or herself, the circumstances, the organization’s culture, and — not least — some insight into your own motives and purpose in wanting to influence your boss in a particular direction. Read the full story

Do we need to be jugglers rather than tightrope artists?

We’ve published many articles on this blog about work/life balance, so it’s interesting to see a rather different idea being suggested by Joan Borysenko on The Huffington Post (”Busting The Balance Myth“).

Her main point is that balance isn’t always possible. There are too many things to be done. Maybe there is no way to organize your time so that everything stays ‘in balance’. Trying to do so may be chasing an unattainable idea and creating a problem that isn’t really there. Ms. Borysenko writes:

Juggling requires maintaining your center. The idea is to stop managing life so much, and begin managing yourself. Long ago I learned that it’s better to prepare the speaker than the speech, particularly when I’m well acquainted with the subject matter. If I meticulously outline a lecture, rehearsing the points as I get ready to begin, I’m likely to lose my center. But if I chat with the audience first, put myself at ease, or take a few minutes for some deep breathing, the talk always goes more smoothly.

Read the full story

Photo credit: Kevin Rosseel

When people get mad with you, they often tell you to “grow up.” Well, you have no real choice in the matter. Each day you are a day older — a day more more ‘adult’ — whether you want that to happen or not. But is being an adult always such a great thing?

Children have most of the fun. They’re encouraged to play and to learn, two of the greatest sources of excitement and pleasure that there are. Adults are expected to give up play in favor of ’serious things’ like work — which usually means doing things they don’t want to do, at times when they don’t want to do them, for people they don’t much like, in return for a level of payment they don’t believe is adequate. Read the full story

Six Ways to Boost Your Long-term Prospects for Success and Happiness, Starting Today

Photo credit: Gabriella Fabbri (www.i-pix.it)

The US government is giving away millions of dollars in handouts in an attempt to stimulate economic activity. Fine. We all like to get money from Uncle Sam, but even a handout on this scale cannot provide more than a temporary sense of satisfaction. What each of us needs is to put together our own, long-term stimulus package, made up of actions that will add to our potential for enjoying life far into the future.

Here are six suggestions to include in your personal ’stimulus package’ — six simple ways boost your prospects for career success, enjoyment of life, and personal happiness.

1. Long-term success and satisfaction are nearly always best found in doing work that you love. It’s not always easy to discover what that may be, but it’s well worth the effort to try. Take the time to think about what is most enjoyable in your life; what you look forward to in whatever you do today; and what you maybe day-dream about doing, if only it were possible. Then make a firm effort to find ways to incorporate as many of these sources of enjoyment as possible into your life on a regular basis; some through work, some through things outside of work. If nothing succeeds like success, nothing produces success like loving what you do.
2. Many platitudes have been wasted on looking for greater satisfaction from your life. I suspect the best answer is the simplest: you’ll get most satisfaction from spending your time on things that make you feel good about yourself and what you have produced. Giving the quality of your life a boost will raise your spirits and improve your well-being. And quality of life doesn’t always depend on money. Sometimes the richest people have lives full of wealth, yet seriously deficient in true quality. Real quality of life comes from living according to your deepest values. Do that and you cannot go far wrong.
3. Your mind is a precious asset that needs stimulus to keep it vibrant and alive. If you let it become slack or dull, you cannot hope to be happy and successful. Your personal stimulus package should therefore contain ways to keep your mind alert and your thinking fresh and powerful. Reading is one of the best approaches, along with learning additional skills and adding to your knowledge on any topic that interests you. Don’t just enjoy things passively; get involved, research, explore, become a minor expert. If you find yourself slumped in front of the television, numbing your brain with the mental equivalent of the worst junk food, get off your butt and start giving that mind a work-out. Few things will pay you back more handsomely.
4. In your package, you should also include ways to stimulate your creativity. Ask questions. Try new things. Explore the unknown. Challenge yourself to come up with your own answers, instead of accepting what others tell you, no matter how expert they are or how much authority they are said to have. The truth can stand up to any amount of challenge, while half-truths, myths, and downright deceptions will all crumble sooner or later.
5. Plenty of evidence exists to prove that physical fitness plays a major role in personal well-being. You don’t have to become a fitness fanatic, or spend hours at the gym. Just get sufficient exercise appropriate to your age and circumstances; add enough sleep (many people are chronically sleep-deprived); and don’t make your physical state worse through drink, drugs, or constantly over-eating.
6. Last, but far from least, slow down and make time for the little things of life than can transform any day. Take the time to admire the beauty all around you. Spend quality time with friends and loved ones. Learn to appreciate art, or music, or nature. Make something beautiful. No life can be satisfying if it is lived in such a headlong rush that you are scarcely able to notice what happens between waking up and falling back into bed, exhausted, at the end of the day. Are you in such a hurry to meet death that you cannot spare time while you are alive to enjoy to the full whatever life has to offer you?

There you are. Six simple elements of a stimulus package you can give yourself — a package that will provide a massive, long-term boost to your life, success, and career satisfaction. What better way could there be to beat today’s economic gloom?

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Much of today’s anxiety comes from the belief that there is a right answer to be found for every question.

‘The Last Judgment’ by Hans Memling
Wikimedia Commons

You hear it on all sides: people asking themselves, again and again, “What do I do now?” The question isn’t the problem; it’s the feeling that, somewhere, there has to be a single, right answer — and that you ought to know what it is.

There have been many articles pointing out the down-sides of perfectionism: from a pervasive sense of low self-worth, because you didn’t manage a perfect job, to repeated nagging of others to produce the perfect piece of work you have in your mind. Yet perfectionism isn’t, I believe, the major difficulty people face. Most of us can easily accept that we aren’t perfect, and never will be.

Belief in one right answer

What eats away at the back of the mind is the belief that there’s a right answer to every difficulty and we ought to know what it is.

Management’s cry of, “Don’t bring me problems, bring me answers” is the most obvious version of this insidious belief; a statement superficial to the point of silliness — and totally self-indulgent.

We would all like others to bring us nothing but answers to our difficulties. Of course we don’t want to hear about problems we haven’t yet found for ourselves. But the world isn’t like that, for all our bluster. The truth is simple: many problems don’t have answers — or, if they do, no one knows what they are.

Sometimes, it seems, any answer will do

Mankind has always tried to make more sense of the world than it actually presents. From myths to folk-beliefs, history is full of attempts to find simple answers to what worries or frightens us.

Storms can be both terrifying and dangerous; it must be angry gods throwing their weight about, so pray or offer sacrifices to them. Some people are luckier than others; they must have someone, or something, helping them, like a god or guardian angel. The innocent suffer sickness or disaster; there must be a reason in their past to make sense of the “punishment” they are suffering — they are paying for the sins of their ancestors or former lives.

Science itself is not free from this way of thinking. One of the strongest motivations behind much research is the belief that there must be a logical reason for everything we observe. Given enough time and effort, we will surely find what it may be.

People and ambiguity

People hate ambiguity and fear uncertainty. They long for clear, comprehensible answers; not more unintelligible questions and random observations. They pay lip-service to the idea that many things in this world happen randomly, but don’t want to believe it, so they try to find reasons for everything. And, since most prefer simplicity to complexity, they look for easy answers, however complex the question.

Want to prosper in this life? Just believe it strongly enough and it will happen. That’s “the secret” being sold on various web sites. Want to be the kind of leader who gets results? The answer’s simple: just demand them from your subordinates. Hell, it beats thinking and maybe accepting that neither you, nor anyone else, can produce what you are seeking.

Doing the best you can

In many ways, there is a simple answer to just about every problem: you do the best you can with what you have.

I’m not suggesting you don’t try to find an answer, if one exists, or seek new ways of doing things. If you’re a scientist — or have a bent that way — doing the best you can may mean precisely that.

What I am suggesting is that the belief that there must be an answer, and we ought to know what it is, is a false belief. There may be no answer. There’s certainly no guilt in not knowing what it is, especially if no one else knows either.

Go easy on yourself — and everyone else too

Once you accept that doing the best you can is all that is required, you are freed from most of the guilt and anxiety that goes with expecting a “right answer” to be available. You are no longer tempted into the self-righteousness some show as they try to force their chosen answer on everyone else. It’s hard to be a bully, a martinet, or an over-demanding boss, if you accept that people cannot rationally be expected to do more than one thing — to keep trying to do their best in the circumstances.

Best of all, realizing this prevents you from turning into the kind of insensitive, endlessly-demanding, thoughtless bastard that seems to be the role model for all too many leaders today. If all you do is ask people to do the best they can, you can stand alongside them, helping and encouraging, instead of setting yourself above them to pass judgment on their failings, while you yell for more answers.

So go easy on yourself, and everyone else. Do the best you can with what you have and be content with that. In reality, you have no other option, saving giving up — or running around in a froth of yelling and shouting for an answer that isn’t there.

The plain truth is that it’s up to us to handle our world, whether in our workplaces or anywhere else. If you give up the belief that there’s a right answer always there to be found, you can stop wasting energy beating up on yourself or others when you don’t find it.

Who knows? Maybe some of that saved energy will allow you to get closer to the only practical solution there is for the problems that matter most: to go on doing the best you can with whatever you have — and hoping it will be enough.

Technorati Tags: performance anxiety, demanding simple answers, workplace anxiety, knowing what to do, doing the best you can, self-worth, passing judgment on others, demanding too much, false expectations, management myths, finding the right answer, how to lessen your anxiety, contentment, finding satisfaction, doing your best, ambiguity, living with uncertainly, randomness, accepting reality

Is there a difference between passion and purpose? How do the two connect?

Photo by ‘emmip’ (Morguefile.com)

There’s much discussion these days about passion and purpose in the workplace.

Passion is energy — emotional, physical, mental, psychic and, often, spiritual — that drives you and supports you to engage in, and focus on, specific efforts — sometimes purposeful, sometimes not.

The two faces of passion

When connected to purpose, passion supports you to engage in your purpose during the day; to be a continuous learner, to strive towards self-actualization, and to look for ways to improve what you do and how you do it.

Yet, passion can also be self-limiting, self-destructive, self-sabotaging, and hurtful to others. It depends on how you chooses to channel it. It seems that some people feel their passion allows them to be disrespectful.

For example, some “passionate” folks dress up and go to sporting events to engage in harassment: uncivil and disrespectful and hurtful behavior in the name of “I’m really passionate about my team.” Colleagues at work can unfairly judge others — even act in ways that include bullying, gossip, rudeness, and disrespectful talk about others’ perceived lack of skills and talents — in the name of “I’m really passionate about what I do and so why do you have to be so stupid!”

Of course, people can equally be passionate about coming home at night and binging on alcohol, food, or chemical or non-chemical drugs.

What is your passion directed to?

Passion is energy. Is your passion positive, supportive of your self, others, and humanity? Or is it negative, self-destructive, or harmful?

Being passionate does not automatically make you humble, emotionally intelligent, good at relationships, able to act with integrity, honest, skilled, or talented. Passion is just energy.

Purpose gives passion a ‘raison d’etre’

Without purpose as an anchor, passion has no guidance system. Without a purpose, people often feel disoriented and unhappy.

In my years working as a coach, I’ve always been curious about people who study hard for a profession — then end up hating what they are doing, locked in a ‘mid-life’ crisis by age 30.

In some of these cases, they entered their profession or career area because they were directed there by someone who suggested that their personality pointed them in a direction they should follow. “You’re going to be really talented in [fill in the blank],” they said. “Your assessment indicates to me that you’re best suited for [fill-in the blank].”

These people let others define their purpose in life. It rarely works like that.

Purpose needs ‘heart’

What outsiders cannot measure is ‘heart.’ Heart is the focal point of purpose, not the mind, not logic. Heart takes no notice of what’s fashionable at the moment, or people say you should do — especially when that is based on some abstract assessment of ‘inclination.’

As a result, some people never discover the truth that purpose is not a career area or expertise. It can be manifested by working in any career area, so long as you have a heartfelt passion for that endeavor.

Two lawyers, two IT professionals, two managers, two bloggers, for example, can both do the same thing. Yet their energy, their engagement, their true love of the work will not be the same. Their joy of work and sense of inner peace and well-being depends on whether or not they are “on purpose.” One of them has their heart in it; the other maybe just muddles through, with an “ugh” at every turn.

Are you disconnected from passion and purpose?

When you have your heart in your work, meaning abounds. When your life is ego-driven — all figured out in their mind, with no ‘heart’ for what you do — meaning is likely to be trumped by unhappiness and a sense of disconnection.

What are such people disconnected from? Their heart and sense of purpose; their True and Real Self, their Essence. The ego mind, with all its objective logic and assessments, cannot point the way to purpose.

As usual, here are some questions for self-reflection:

• Are you following your life’s purpose? How do you know?
• How did you arrive at doing the work you are doing? Do you feel purposeful in doing it? Do you feel passionate about what you do?
• Why are you on the planet? What is your purpose in life? What is the legacy you’d like to leave behind? What gets you out of bed in the morning?
• Can you think of three things you’re passionate about? How could you express this passion in your work and career?

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In a world addicted to admiration of strong leaders, some kinds of weakness are even more essential

Photo by Roswitha Schacht

A thousand business books tell you to identify your strengths and weaknesses. So far, so good. But the implication that follows — that you should follow your strengths and either avoid or overcome areas of weakness — may not always be correct, especially when it comes to discovering the truth about things.

Dictionary definitions often approach the notion of weakness though absence: absence of strength, firmness, vigor. That’s our first clue to situations where weakness becomes an asset and strength turns into a drawback.

Another clue comes from the idea of weakness as fragility: something that is easily bent or broken; something liable to fail under too much pressure or strain.

None of these definitions sound as if they might be hiding something desirable. Maybe that’s why so many people quickly pass them by and hurry on to dwell on strength, firmness, and power as the only source of leadership qualities.

Patience. The answer lies, as so often, in the context.

Food for thought

The context in which weakness truly shines, in my opinion, is that of thought, opinion, and belief. Read the full story