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

Making interactions work when the stakes are high
 

According to the joint authors of a new book—Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler—“crucial conversations” are the kind of tough, day-to-day interactions with people in which the stakes are high, there are conflicting viewpoints and emotions run deep and strong.

The trouble is, while you can anticipate many of these conversations, they can also occur when you least expect them, whether in the boardroom or by the water cooler. Handling them well can transform businesses and careers, strengthen teams, increase productivity and all those other good things. Doing it badly . . . well, I’m sure you can fill in the blank.

Looking back on my own career, I can think of a good number of times when I fell into a crucial conversation unawares and came out of it covered with both confusion and another, brown substance I shan’t name here. That’s why any help on doing better seems to me to be worth considering.

In their new book, “Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High”, the authors present the fruits of a study based on more than 20,000 people seen in hundreds of organizations during the past twenty-five years.

Their aim was to identify the skills and techniques that are used by people who are masters at influencing others: people who routinely hold crucial conversations and hold them well. These people, they write, “. . . are able to express controversial and even risky opinions in a way that gets heard. Their bosses, peers, and direct reports listen without becoming defensive or angry.” 


The authors also explain the dynamics of what goes on in people’s minds when they’re confronted by difficult conversations; then present specific techniques for clarifying objectives, staying focused on goals and helping other participants do the same. This process, they claim, enables people to keep their emotions in check even when angry or threatened, to find out what others are thinking, and to resolve problems before they explode.

As a taster, the publisher has given us permission to reproduce a short questionnaire from the book. It seems the skills required to master high-stakes interactions are quite easy to spot and moderately easy to learn, according to the authors of “Crucial Conversations”. See how you think you would fare and whether you might benefit from their suggested approach.

STYLE UNDER STRESS TEST

Instructions: Before you start, please read through the following points.

1. Relationship. Before you get started, think about the relationship you want to improve—with your boss, coworker, direct report, friend, or family member—and keep this relationship in mind.
2. Circumstance. Next, think of a tough situation—one that you might have handled poorly or avoided altogether.
3. Apply. Now, with that situation in mind, respond to the following statements as either true or false.

Scoring

Score 1 point for each false answer, then tally up your number of points. This is what they indicate:

© 2009 VitalSmarts. All Rights Reserved. VitalSmarts, Crucial, Crucial Skills, and Style Under Stress are trademarks and Crucial Conversations is a registered trademark of VitalSmarts, L.C.

Technorati Tags: crucial conversations, handling stressful discussions, influence, keeping calm, defusing conflict

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

Cutting the ‘overheads’ in your life and career will be the best way out of current problems.
 

Can you imagine someone waking up one morning and saying to themselves, “My life is far too simple. It’s high time I complicated it more”?

Now may be the time to do some serious ’spring cleaning’ to get rid of anything that you don’t need any more and which may be holding you back. Not only will it make your life simpler and less costly of time and effort, it will also help you focus better on what is most important in moving forward.

Do one thing at a time

I was one of the first to point out that so-called multi-tasking, which was once all the rage, is guaranteed to make you less effective. I won’t go over the arguments again, since they have since become commonplace. But it is worth pointing out that many people would benefit from taking some time to sort through their priorities and decide which one or two are worth following.

I do mean ‘one or two’. The more priorities that you have, the less any of them are truly priorities. If you have six priorities, even if you put them in order, how many are you able to work on consistently for more than an hour or so in any week—maybe in any month? How much priority is that?

Often the best way to make you life simpler and more effective at the same time is to choose a single priority, devote enough time to working at it to have an impact and get it done before moving on to anything else.

If, for example, you want a better job—or a new job—in current circumstances, and that is truly a priority for you, trying to handle other things at the same time will make it much less likely that you will get what you want. It will probably mess up whatever else you tried to do at the same time as well.

Omit everything unnecessary

Our lives are like ships at sea. In time, they become encrusted with barnacles and other attachments, each one slowing progress and adding to the effort it takes to move forward.

From time to time, they need a good scraping to get rid of all these ‘hangers on’. Most of us have half-completed projects, partial ideas and once-important activities that we hold onto—usually because, like lost puppies, they look at us with big, pathetic eyes whenever we think about letting them go and we can’t quite bring ourselves to harden our hearts and walk away.

The trouble is that we never bring any of them to the stage where they might add something useful. They are perpetually ‘in progress’, never ready for use. Instead of adding anything useful to life, they hang around the edges, begging for attention and never leaving us alone.

Everything extra you carry drains energy, time and attention from what matters most. Get rid of it. You’ll be glad you did.

If you aren’t going to do it, forget it

All those things you are intending to do, but have never got around to doing, another common source of extra ‘weight’. If you are honest with yourself, you know that you aren’t going to turn them into action. If you were, you would have done it by now.

I mean those expectations you formed once, long ago, and still carry about with you. Those plans you made, but never acted on. Those achievements you boasted you would deliver, but which proved more difficult—and far less interesting—the longer you lived with them.

I’m often amazed at how many of the so-called failures people feel bad about were never more than pipe-dreams. How often the gaps that depress them are only there because they made a statement of what they would do and could never bring themselves to admit it was a crazy idea, best set aside.

Life will bring you more than enough genuine failures and problems. Don’t add more by clinging to silly promises, just to avoid the embarrassment of admitting to a mistake.

Spring cleaning time is here

Spring is the traditional time in many cultures to clean the house and get rid of all the mess and dirt that built up in the cold days of winter. It’s a good idea to take the same approach to whatever has built up in your life between the red-hot times of the former boom years and the bitter winds of recession that have come around since.

If you want to see any tiny shoots of hope that are appearing in the gloom, you won’t do so if they’re covered with ’stuff’ you no longer need.

Get to it!

Take some time out to put your life and career in order:

1. Limit yourself to a single priority (two at most) and focus on getting that done before thinking about anythingelse.
2. Dump whatever threatens to distract you from that aim.
3. Decide what is necessary for you and dump all the rest. Be brutal. We all carry around far more than we will ever need.
4. Clear out all the half-completed projects and ‘things you will get around to’. Let them go. If you were ever going to do them, you would have done so. You haven’t, so you won’t in the future either.
5. Lighten your load by cleaning off what has got stuck to you and is slowing you down. Don’t allow anything to waste your time, attention or energy, just because it’s there.
6. Do it now. Procrastination is what produced most of the rubbish. Don’t wait another day.

Technorati Tags: change, cleaning out your life, making a fresh start, simplifying your life, simplicity

Why is being transparent so challenging to people?
 

All conscious, healthy relationships thrive on the basis of trust, integrity and transparency. Transparency itself is about truth-telling. That means being open, honest and sincere in putting yourself ‘out there‘. In many ways, the essence of truth-telling is being comfortable in your own skin.

Being transparent allows others to see you as you truly are. It collapses any gap between who you say you are—the face you show to the world—and your true self. The more you lack transparency, the wider that gap becomes. If this happens, other people will be suspicious and no longer trust you. They will only relate to you at arm’s length. You won’t be seen as trustworthy or credible.

Transparency seems simple, but it’s not easy for many.

If transparency has such benefits—and is so important to successful relationships—why do so many people resist it? To see further into the problem, we need an answer.

Children begin life behaving with complete transparency. They share their thoughts and express themselves without reserve. They are open about how they feel at all times. But before long, they encounter a strong message, first from their parents or immediate caregivers, then from the rest of their extended family, their teachers and other authority figures. The message is simple. Such openness is not acceptable.

“Don’t say such a thing,” adults tell them. “You’ll only cause trouble.”

The same message is repeated again and again. If you display your thoughts, feelings and beliefs openly, you risk being judged as ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’. To fit in, you must hide them behind a socially acceptable mask, like everyone else.

Over time, the belief becomes hardwired in your brain—a belief that transparency is too great a risk. That’s the belief most of us carry into adulthood. To be seen to have value and worth—to garner the recognition and approval we all want—you need to give up your individual voice and hide your truth, your ideas, your thoughts and your feelings. So you become quiet and passive. You tell ‘white’ lies to fit in. You try to deceive yourself and others by putting up a front to hide behind. In place of transparency, you learn to practice ’spin’.

Mired in this state of insecurity, people go through life afraid, playing the game to win approval; locked in the belief that you cannot do, think or act as yourself without risking being ridiculed and shamed.

Transparency at work.

In transactions at work, people are made to feel like children. They face policies whose actions remind them of those reactive, judgmental and critical parents who criticized them for their childish transparency. So they hold back. They give in to authority. They shut down.

Transparency becomes too scary a proposition. Most employees are reluctant to discuss their thoughts and feelings about the organization’s plans, policies or procedures. Even if what they could contribute might be important, they keep quiet. They know their input will not be welcome.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

Only by being transparent—allowing your true voice and feelings to come out—will you become authentically alive and secure in your own skin. Only by fostering transparent relationships—relationships that produce trust and lead to real connection—will you be able to find the courage and steadfastness to speak your truth without being caught up in fears about what others think about you.

Transparency is the only route to knowing who you truly are. If you aren’t transparent to others, you cannot be transparent to yourself. And if you are not open to yourself—to all of yourself—you cannot mature into the complete person it is in you to become.

“You are the lens in the beam,” said former UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold. “You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does. If you seek yourself, you rob the lens of its transparency. You will know life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency; your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end and remain purely as a means.”

Here are this week’s questions for self reflection:

• Are people aware of the motives beneath your thoughts, words and actions. Are you?
• Can you admit it, openly, when you don’t have an answer, or feel afraid or uncomfortable?
• What stories do you use to rationalize and justify your lack of transparency?
• Does the standard of transparency by which you measure yourself differ from the standard of transparency by which you measure others?
• Do you demand openness and transparency from others, while remaining opaque yourself?
• Would you describe leaders and managers in your organization as open in their dealings with you and with one another? How does this make you feel?
• Can you envision a life where transparency is an everyday operating principle? What would that be like?

Technorati Tags: truth-telling, authenticity, transparency, being open, honesty, trust

“But there is no one but us. There never has been.”
 

How do you move on when you feel you have lost who you are and your survival is at stake? When your belief that if you worked hard and obeyed the rules you would be safe, proves false?

In my local paper recently, I saw the story of a sixty year-old woman weeping on the steps of the courthouse where she was going to ask for food stamps. She was laid off after a new, younger manager bullied her by taking away her existing assignments and denying her the tools and information she needed to do new ones. Now, too young for retirement or social security, she needs to go to the government to ask for help. Still sobbing, the woman said she was glad she had no family left to see her reduced to begging.

The article was written by an unemployed minister, who tried to comfort the weeping woman by telling her that she was skilled and talented and there would be another good job for her in the future. That she would be able to put this painful, humiliating time behind her. Then the author ended her article by praying that these well-meant lies would be somehow turned into truth.

Where do I start?

I believe we must all start where we are—in pain and beset with grief, anger, and fear. From there, we must confront the voices in our head that tell us some deficit in us alone, some lack or hidden misdemeanor, is the true cause of our suffering.

As Annie Dillard writes:

There is no one but us.
There is no one to send,
Nor a clean hand,
Nor a pure heart
On the face of the earth,
Nor in the earth
But only us,
A generation comforting ourselves
With the notion
That we have come at an awkward time . . .

And we ourselves unfit, not yet ready,
Having each of us chosen wrongly,
Made a false start, failed,
Yielded to impulse
And the tangled comfort of pleasures,
And grown exhausted,
Unable to seek the thread,
Weak, and involved.
But there is no one but us.
There never has been.

Once we understand our own grief and vulnerability without blaming ourselves, we can understand that everyone is weak, confused and exhausted. There is no one to rescue us and give us back what we have lost. Once we know that there is no one but us, we can begin to move on together to build something new and unexpected out of our lives.

Regaining our curiosity

One way we know we are moving on is when we begin to be curious again. Grieving gives way to an interest in what life has left to offer; and that interest triggers creativity and internal resources that up to now we have stored in our subconscious because they didn’t fit into the ‘real life’ we’ve lost.

As adults, our curiosity and creativity are like the serontinous cones that grow on jack pines. It takes the heat and destruction of a raging forest fire to melt the resin and release the seeds. By burning away other plant life, the fire creates the perfect conditions for the next generation of pines to grow.

In 1988 a massive fire destroyed over a third of Yellowstone National Park. The loss was devastating. It was said that the park would not recover from the fire for generations. But what has been observed in the aftermath is that, after a few years, the grasslands have not only returned to their pre-fire appearance, but the post-fire grass provides better nutrition to the herds grazing it. New forest growth and vegetation have provided naturalists and tourists an opportunity to see the beauty and resilience of the forest as it heals and rebuilds itself.

Curiosity and creativity hold within them the conditions needed for engaging once again in rebuilding our lives in the aftermath of destruction.

This I believe.

Technorati Tags: moving on, starting again, overcoming loss, dealing with pain, finding a way forward

Many people shy away from change because of the pain they associate with failing. It doesn’t have to be that way.
 

As we try to pull ourselves out of our current problems, it’s clear that we are all going to have to make some significant changes. The chances are that you will fail in at least some ways in your first attempts.

That’s part of the natural learning process. If you let this put you off, you’ll remain stuck where you are—miserable with what you have, but afraid to change it in case that makes you feel worse.

What’s the way out? Is there some way to lower the risk associated with change and reduce the pain of failure? Part of the good news is that those usually go together. What reduces one often lowers the other as well. The other good news is that the solution—or a good part of it—is in your own hands.

What causes the pain?

• Losing face. We don’t want to look stupid or have others laugh at us. We would rather stay where we are that risk being seen to have tried and failed. The truth is that it isn’t that big a deal. What are a few sniggers compared with days and hours stuck in a job you hate? Besides, most people are so wrapped up in their own concerns any attention that pay to yours will never last long. Let them laugh. If you stop caring, it can’t hurt you.
• Perfectionism and unrealistic expectations. It’s easy to set yourself goals that are so ambitious you will never reach them. That sets you up for failure before you start. Perfectionism causes people to devalue their achievements, simply because they can imagine something better. To fail at some unrealistic goal is a self-inflicted wound. Baby steps, repeated with perseverance, will take you further than leaping headlong into the quest for some imaginary perfection.
• Unwillingness to let go and escalating commitment instead. How often have you wondered at someone who is obviously backing a losing strategy, yet refuses to give up? What about the person, or business, that pours more resources into a project that has already consumed more that it will ever be worth? In truth, we all do this. Knowing when to let go is a precious gift. So is the courage to do it. Too many people respond to failure by increasing their commitment in the hope that, somehow, it will all come right if only they spend a little more. It won’t. You’re compounding your losses and doubling your risks. Investors are advised to set a specific level in advance at which they will cut their losses as a means to get past the emotional urge to try just a little longer. That’s good advice for the rest of life too.

What drives up the risk?

• Having an ‘all or nothing’ attitude. This goes with perfectionism and unrealistic expectations. Most success comes mixed with a little failure. If you seek only unblemished achievements, you’ll go on looking. Be grateful for what you can get and make the best of it.
• Changing too much too quickly. Couple this with escalating commitment and you have the perfect recipe for disaster. There’s only so much change any of us can handle at one time. Going beyond this makes no sense, however tough it makes you feel at the start. Accept your limitations happily. They’re usually there to prevent you from messing up more than you can handle.
• Failing to stop and think if what you are changing is the real problem. It’s common to find people have jumped into a commitment to change before thinking about it properly. Then they don’t want to lose face by backing down. The old military adage that time spent in reconnaissance is rarely wasted is worth remembering. Don’t make a move until you are as certain as you can be that it is going to address the real problem.
• Following fashion. Just because ‘everyone else is doing it’ doesn’t make it a good idea. Most fashions are based on little but gossip and people’s fear of being left out of something. To go back to investing for a moment, the advice that it’s a poor idea to be buying what everyone else is buying makes sense. Doing that pretty much ensures you’ll pay over the odds. Fashion may sound important, but it never lasts long enough to be worth paying much attention to.

Handling rejection

You are going to experience rejection. Dealing with that can be a painful process too. There’s nothing worse than feeling you’ve truly given your best, only to find the other person wasn’t impressed. With so many people chasing every job, and more trying to find ways to get out the rat race altogether, rejection in the job market is inevitable. If you set up your own business, many people will reject what you have to sell. The trick is learning how to handle rejection and use it as preparation for another opportunity. I know it’s easier said than done, but the alternative—giving up—is usually worse.

• Don’t get mad. That is going to increase the chances that your response will be strong on emotion and short on common sense. It’s easy to burn your bridges for the sake of short-term satisfaction and get a reputation for being a hothead. Anger is a poor adviser.
• Pay close attention. People’s typical response to rejection is to shut it out—to close their ears and block off the source of pain. Bad idea. Even rejection and failure—especially those two—can be useful if you are willing to learn from them; and learning starts with listening carefully, so you can understand why things didn’t turn out the way you wanted. Just because the message hurts doesn’t mean it isn’t essential to your future success. Too many of us condemn ourselves to repeat our failures because we won’t pay attention to what is causing them in our own behavior.
• Let go and move on. Don’t tie up your time and energy in going over and over the rejection and the hurt it caused you. That won’t change anything. The minute you fail, or suffer rejection, look for the next positive step you can take towards your goal and take it right away.
• Don’t give in to desperation. Other people can ‘smell’ it and will write you off before you open your mouth. Despair is the ultimate ‘sin’ against yourself. Once you give in to it, there’s nowhere else to go. Life is never as bad as it seems—and never as good either. As my great-grandfather used to say, “It will all be the same in ten years time.” If you look what has happened with that in mind, you’ll get the hurts in perspective.

Change is essential and natural. It always comes with some risk and pain, but it doesn’t have to be so much that it prevents you from doing what needs to be done. By addressing the risk and pain openly and directly, you can nearly always take steps to minimize them. It’s also worth remembering that you may get as much pain and risk, or more, from standing still.

Technorati Tags: change, overcoming rejection, dealing with setbacks, handling failure, moving on, finding success

The way leaders describe the people below them reveals the kind of leader they are.

(This article arose from a reader’s comment on an earlier article. I want to thank the commenter (SMG) for the inspiration. If you would like to suggest a topic for someone here to cover, please use the “Suggestions?” tab on the right side of the screen, or send us a comment.)

Listen carefully. Your manager is telling you how he or she sees your relationship. What we call things tells the world the hidden truth about how we think. In the world of work, the language leaders use to describe their subordinates reveals the true nature of the relationship between them—the hidden dynamic underneath any surface politeness.

Why do some leaders describe the corporation as a family? Why do others use sporting terms (“We’re a tightly-knit team”); or military jargon (“This is D-Day. We need maximum effort from everyone”); or even religious terms (“I want everyone singing from the same hymn-sheet”)?

I don’t think it’s chance. What’s in your mind unconsciously expresses itself in the words you use—something Sigmund Freud pointed to many years ago that has passed into the language as the term ‘Freudian slip’.

Some more examples of significant leadership terminology

• Macho language and sayings come naturally to macho leaders. You often hear them talking about subordinates who “can’t stand the heat” or describing their own role as “kicking butt.” They love winning, in any forum, so they slip just as easily into the terms you would expect of any ultra-competitive situation: “winning is all that matters,” “I’m only interested in results,” or “he (or she) was never a contender.”
• Command-and-control autocrats love to use fighting terminology. If you hear expressions like “being in a fire-fight,” “taking out the bad guys,” or the need to “come out swinging,” you know you have a leader whose mind sees the world as a series of fights to be won and enemies to be vanquished. To natural fighters, winners are heros, losers are beneath contempt.
• Speed freaks betray their obsession in rapid delivery and characteristic language. They constantly urge those around them to “cut to the chase,” “hit the ground running,” “give me the bottom line,” or “expedite” things. Nothing annoys a speed freak more than being asked to be patient or take time out to listen when there is action to be attended to.
• ‘Greed freaks’ always want to talk about money and rewards. They want to know “where the leverage is” and “what’s in it for me?” They demand to be told the benefits before they will listen to anything else. Discussion bores them, but they will spend hours poring over spreadsheets and projections. They also expect everyone else to be motivated solely by cash and are bewildered when they encounter anyone who is not.
• Habitual talk of teams, liberally laced with sporting terms and analogies, reveals the leader who sees him or herself as somewhere between team captain and coach. That gives the leader license to bully or weed out ‘weak links’ in the team, throw tantrums on the sideline, shout out playing instructions all the time, expect everyone to accept that he or she knows the game better than they do, and determine the ‘game strategy’ the whole team will follow without question.
• Patriarchs (and matriarchs) describe the rest of the organization as a ‘family’ and handle them accordingly. Like genuine family relationships, this can be two-edged. For every set of loving, caring and supporting ‘parents’, there will be the demanding and dysfunctional ones who try to control every aspect of family life, use guilt as a weapon, demand obedience at all times and treat unapproved behavior as the tantrums of naughty children, to be punished ‘for their own good’. Few people can be as simultaneously cruel and sanctimonious as a domineering parent.

I could list other examples, but I’m sure you get the picture: habitual patterns of language reveal any leader’s assumptions and their attitudes to the supervisory relationship. What you say shows how you think. How you think determines what you do.

Since these relationships are inevitably reciprocal, macho leaders demand timid, compliant followers. To a macho leader, anyone who won’t be led is a rival and a threat. Patriarchal leaders need to see themselves as the ‘fathers’ of a business ‘family’, so anyone who opposes them is going to be treated like a naughty, rebellious child in need of a healthy dose of discipline. Autocrats need disciplined followers who react to orders with a salute and cheerfully sacrifice themselves when called upon to do so.

If you want to know what your boss really thinks about his or her subordinates, all you have to do is listen carefully.

Technorati Tags: leadership, management attitudes, managing your boss, managing upwards, working relationships

Finding out what makes you unique and important to others will reveal your way forward.
 

Can you find some compelling points about you that differentiate you from everyone else? If you take a little time, I’m sure you can. Each person is unique. Everyone has some strengths, even if they aren’t the ones they would like to have. This exercise is vital to show you how to move forward, away from today’s problems, with a reasonable assurance that you can be successful.

There are many ways to set about this process, from highly structured questions to sitting and thinking about it. Here are a few that fall somewhere between these extremes. They’re structured enough to be useful to people for whom simply sitting and thinking is likely to result in a brain that goes in every direction except the one they want; and simple and open enough to encourage creativity and break out of rigid patterns of convention.

1. Find a useful image or metaphor to get you going.
   To stimulate your thinking, imagine yourself as an animal, or a machine, or a business providing a service. If you were an animal, what would it be? What is that species good at? What strengths does it have? Can you find the same strengths in yourself and maybe exploit them in similar ways? If an animal image doesn’t do it for you, try seeing yourself as machine (What would it make? How would it do it?) or a business (What would its brand be? What customers would it serve? What would it offer them?). The point is not to find something ‘deep’ or clever, but to open your mind to possibilities you may be overlooking.
2. Ask your friends to describe you honestly.
   Don’t fish for compliments; they won’t help, unless they are genuine. Don’t get mad at what people say or try to defend yourself. Just listen. What you want are more objective views about yourself and what you offer the world than you can get from staying inside your own head. You know what you have in mind; others may seem the same behavior, or hear the same words, but interpret them differently. This is useful information. It might show you how to use what you do today to better effect.
3. Try unexpected combinations of known strengths (or a strength and a weakness).
   Again, what you’re looking for is to jolt yourself out of the normal rut of thinking. Many successful businesses have been formed by taking separate activities and combining them in a new way. Once it’s done, it seems obvious. Before they did it, no one thought of it. Think Google linking their expertise in on-line search with advertising to use thousands of blogs like this one to deliver targeted advertisments, automatically, in a way no print outlet can match.
4. Try taking something you feel strongly about, but has no link to the world of work, and imagining how you could turn it into a career or a business.
   One unique set of factors that you always have is made up from your likes, dislikes and passions. Most people lay these aside when they go to work and become the neutral people employers prefer. What if you didn’t? What if what you offered the world was you: with all your passions, interests, quirks and oddities. How could you make that interesting? How could you turn it into something other people would pay for? If you’re wild about Nature, could you turn that into something that would combine with your background as an accountant? If you love hiking, how could you use that to make you stand out amongst all the other cogs in the corproate machine you work for?
5. Throw the ‘vehicle’ into reverse.
   What might be needed to go in exactly the opposite direction to the one that seems most obvious and natural to you? For example, if you assume success demands hard work, try considering how things would be if success was measured by how little work you could do; if working hard for long hours was a sign of failure. How might this feel? What would be needed to be successful on those terms? You don’t actually have to do the opposite of what you have done until now (though there’s no reason why that shouldn’t be an option). All you are doing is forcing your mind away from biases that may be hiding important truths.
6. Find an approach to work and life that doesn’t appeal to you—or that you think is useless—and list all the reasons why it’s really the right way forward.
   If you’re conservative and conventional in outlook, explain why being adventurous and liberal would be better—and vice versa. Again, you don’t have to put what you find into practice. Just making yourself think positively about something you automatically avoid can free up your thinking and generate fresh ideas.

We all know that we’re unique, we all feel unique, yet smother our uniqueness to conform to the expectations we imagine the world has of us. Doing so makes us expendable—easily swapped with any other ‘worker’ with a vaguely similar set of skills.

You won’t build a satisfying career and future through being the same as everyone else. Nor will you rebuild your dreams and find your path out of the economic downturn that way. This is the time to recall that being unique is what makes you important as well.

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Technorati Tags: change, personal growth, finding your path, moving on, facing the future, recovering from recession, rebuilding your career

Change is here. Much of what we used to think, believe and feel may no longer provide the support we need.
 

The current financial and economic crisis will most likely be long and protracted. For millions, navigating this crisis will be a life-changing experience. How will it change their lives? How will they choose to face this journey? These two questions urgently need answers if we are to move on in a positive spirit.

Many believe their views of how the world is, how it should be, and how they are in it, are so correct that they never need changing. Yet everything is always changing and the current crisis is a huge tug on our sleeve. Our old thoughts and paradigms may be inhibiting natural growth processes. If we do not change our thoughts about ourselves and about life, we may not be able to sustain growth and development.

The times call for taking a serious step back to reconsider and challenge ourselves to see life from different perspectives—to enlarge our vision and to rediscover or re-create ourselves. Now, more than ever, we need to allow ourselves to be open. If we remain mired in a mental and emotional status quo, the most likely result will be more pain and suffering.

How can you approach change?

Change is a choice. You can approach it with a positive attitude, seeing the experience as an opportunity, or with a negative, resistant attitude that it is “being done to you.” Whether you respond positively or defensively is a function of how you view life. Are you resilient, seeing tough times as a learning experience; or do you try to escape life’s challenges? Most people are not naturally resilient. That too has to be learned and, more importantly, practiced.

We are all facing hard choices, large or small. Once again, how people approach these choices will determine the degree of well-being they experience. If they see life’s challenges as opportunities to grow, well-being will be a part of their reality. If they see themselves as victims, the chances are that well-being will be overshadowed by anger, depression and disharmony.

Fear and anxiety are everywhere too. Some people are dealing with their emotions, perhaps with support. Others are acting them out through drug or alcohol abuse, infidelity and gambling. Still others are in denial—hoping that the problem will go away if they don’t acknowledge it.

Self-awareness and self-responsibility

Those who face the crisis head-on will find an opportunity for the type of exploration that can lead to extraordinary personal growth. Many are already taking a serious look at life by asking themselves questions like these:

• What’s most important in my life? What activities have I been engaged in that are not making appropriate use of my time and energies?
• Has my self-worth been defined by my net worth? Have I been overly consumed with money and material possessions?
• Am I exacerbating today’s pain by refusing to make hard decisions or by staying in denial?

Being open to change is empowering and that’s why you might want to consider some at least of these action steps:

• Make an effort to see the big picture and where you can fit in. What needs upgrading or downsizing? Who needs to be in your career and social circle in a supportive way?
• Let go of the need to be in control of everything. Consider the steps you need to take to move forward and what knowledge, skills and abilities will help you navigate rough times. Create an action plan and pursue those steps one at a time.
• Explore who you are, inside and outside of work. Pursue those skills, interests and activities that will support an honest and realistic self-image, not a fake and phony “you.” Spend time in self-reflection, exploring your attitudes and emotions. Which patterns are supporting you and relieving stress? Which are contributing to more upset? Which reflect positive self-management and which don’t?
• Explore any stories you are telling yourself that point to doom and gloom. Are these stories true or are you using them to rationalize and justify denial? Be honest. Are you refusing to take a risk and see what’s possible out there?
• Do you need to re-prioritize your life? The universe often acts in ways that appear strange according to our idea of how things should be. Life’s challenges and struggles may not give us what we want with our ego-minds, but what we need to become more compassionate, humble, ego-less and emotionally mature human beings. Through a process of self-discovery, we may perhaps for the first time in our lives understand the true meaning of “less is more”.

Here, as usual, are some on-going questions for self-reflection:

• What thought and behavior patterns are supporting you—or limiting and sabotaging you—as you navigate these rough waters? What support do you need right now, and from whom, to help you cope and move forward? What steps are you taking to get this support?
• What are your greatest fears? What decisions are you avoiding or resisting? Why are you in denial? Are you allowing a victim mentality to keep you from positive action? What defense mechanisms are you using to resist change?

Technorati Tags: change, new priorities, dealing with tough times, facing the future with confidence, developing resilience, self-development