What if Time is On Your Side?

Do you ever find yourself in a place where, despite your best efforts, nothing seems to be working out the way you want it to? 

Maybe you have an amazing idea that you just can’t seem to get off the ground. Perhaps you’ve made progress toward a goal and suddenly feel stymied or unable to gain the resources or support you need to move forward. You might be navigating some kind of transition that has you wondering whether that next thing for you is ever going to materialize.

When obstacles seem to be coming from all directions and you keep running into walls, it’s easy to lose hope and become consumed with frustration.

Sometimes it seems the only options are to throw in the towel or buckle down and try harder. We are conditioned as a society to do the latter, and sometimes that is what it takes to bust through the barriers that confront us. But when you continue to run into setback after setback, it may serve you better to stop for a while and survey the territory before proceeding — as what you thought was a frustrating delay is actually integral to getting you where we want to go.

There is a part of you that knows exactly what you need to do to succeed in any given area – a part of you that has knowledge of a bigger picture and all the moving parts necessary to bring your grandest goals and visions to fruition.

This wiser part of you knows exactly what you need to do (or not do) to yield the best results. It communicates in nonlinear ways — through feelings and flashes of insight that leave your logical mind wanting more details. And it rises above the noise in your head when you are consciously present.

To tap your sager self, you must learn to become attuned to what’s going on in this moment, trusting that amid frustrating delays and setbacks something advantageous may be happening. Tuning into it could allow you to move beyond resistance and frustration and gain clarity on what needs to happen next.

When I was writing The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader, I hit a wall and forced myself to write despite my lack of inspiration. Before long I realized that I simply couldn’t continue and took a break. I ended up throwing away everything I made myself write under my own duress, as it was flat, mechanical and uninspired. I replaced it with stories about the previous months’ experiences, which turned out to be quite relevant. As I wrote, the words seemed to fly onto the page, and I was back in my flow again.

You too may need to experience something that is integral to the next phase of your greatest vision, goal or project. So, when you feel frustration, look beyond what appears to be limitation to perceive the gifts it is bringing you. It could be the very springboard you need to get you back in your game.

Gripped by Fear, Anger or Frustration? Get Back into Your Right Mind

 

We’ve all been there… someone says or does something that triggers you – or things take an unexpected turn for the worse and you can’t help but react. Your heart begins to beat wildly, your breathing gets shallow and choppy, and your body tenses up.

It’s called an amygdala hijack. And it literally disables your rational mind – the part of you that makes decisions, controls your reactions, and allows you to problem solve.

Though the physiological symptoms may only last for seconds or minutes, your ability to think clearly may be reduced for hours. And the thoughts and actions you’re likely to take in its grip could prolong a state of fear, anger or frustration for hours, days and even weeks.

This is because the aperture of your lens becomes so narrow that you’ll only perceive a small fraction of the entire picture. In this state, you’re likely to…

…put your attention on what is wrong, rather than what is right.

…spend more time and energy on describing, complaining about, and magnifying the problem than finding the solution.

…be more concerned with what you can get rather than what you can give.

…focus more on what’s out of your control than on what you can influence.

…feel helpless rather than hopeful – and act in ways that lead others to feel that way too.

But each of us has the power to turn that around.  And doing so is an act of leadership – regardless of your job title, industry or profession. Here are three simple steps you can take:

1) Take some deep breaths.Get oxygen flowing back into your cells. Remember that inspiration is the act of drawing in not only air but also new and creative ideas.

2) Ask yourself a question that moves your neural activity back to your prefrontal cortex, the part that allows you to think deeply and make good decisions. A question like, “What do I really want?” or “What could I do to make things better?” will help you get back on the right track.

3) Choose curiosity over judgment. While judgment narrows your aperture and keeps you in a fixed position, curiosity opens it and allows you to get unstuck.  Your lens zooms OUT rather than IN, allowing you to see possibilities and solutions that can move you forward.

4) Notice anything you may be thinking that could be shutting you down or causing more stress – and challenge it.  Ask yourself, “Is it really true?”.  Rather than paying attention to what your eyes are showing you, get curious and ask, “What am I NOT seeing?”

As you take these steps, you’ll become more connected with the wiser, calmer part of yourself that can rise to your challenges with courage and grace. And you’ll hold space for others to do the same.

Could There be Clarity Hidden in Your Chaos?

Ever have a stretch where work (and life) is filled with unpredictable twists and turns, inexplicable delays, and random disorder?

It can be frustrating, unsettling and unnerving.

Our nature as humans is to seek meaning in the things that happen to us. But when there is no logical explanation, we are left scratching our heads wondering what to make of it.

If you’ve ever driven by a construction site and wondered what was being built, you may have noticed the same kind of disjointed activity… people working diligently, each focused on their own specific task… steel girders, half constructed walls, and unidentifiable objects at various stages of completion.

Upon first glance it likely appears chaotic and messy.

But amidst the sawdust and cement blocks, something pulls it all together. Though you may not know exactly what the larger plan is, over time the construction starts to take shape, and you begin to recognize a room here, and another there. Soon you can start to surmise the purpose and function of each room.

As the walls are plastered and paint is applied, the appearance becomes neater. And suddenly, it is completed in all its glory – a stunning compilation of raw materials, sweat, and focused action.

Perhaps we too build things in this way. It is nice to know in advance exactly what we are building. But at times things may feel chaotic, disconnected and random. We have some experiences that uplift us and others that disappoint. Often, we are without an explanation of why certain events and experiences are taking place.

But maybe underneath it all, there is a larger plan at work.

One that will reveal itself over time. As we undertake each new experience, another wall is constructed, and a new room is being built.

What if we were willing to experience our lives with the same wonder and curiosity with which we look upon that building undergoing construction? And what if we were able to engender that same enthusiasm and optimism in everyone around us?

Are you willing to entertain the thought that somewhere within you, there is a perfect blueprint of everything your life and your leadership will bring about?

And can you delight in the mystery of its gradual unfolding?

 

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.” -Antoine de Saint-Exupery

 

But what if you could?

 

Do you remember what it was like to be unconstrained by the world’s limitations?

Maybe you were a young child, wanting to fly to the moon or discover buried treasure. How long was it before the people around you compelled you to be more “practical and realistic”?

They didn’t mean any harm.  In fact, those people likely had your best interests in mind.  They wanted to help you learn the rules for engagement in a world of challenges and limitations – to keep you from experiencing pain and disappointment.

Chances are you do that for your own young children.  I know I did.

But over time, the rules for engagement can become more constraining than they are empowering.  Especially when those rules don’t really apply the way they used to.

Have you noticed that many of the old, ingrained ways of getting things done and achieving success are no longer effective, or even relevant?

We are all experiencing it – on both an individual and a collective level, in our homes, our communities and our organizations.  And we need to find a better way of dealing with these emerging challenges and opportunities.  To do that, we must transcend old, well-worn, even tried and true methods that just aren’t working anymore.

The time has come for us to access the creativity, ingenuity, curiosity, and wonder of that little kid that knew no limits and had the willingness and determination to blaze a new trail.

As trees and flowers all around us burst into bloom with the emergence of spring, we can allow creative energy and inspiration to move through us as well.

In nature and in our own lives, the old must give way to the new. Trees lose their leaves and flowers and plants that have been pruned proliferate with an energy and vitality that wouldn’t have otherwise been possible.

What old beliefs and assumptions in your life and leadership need to give way to what is blooming within you?

The next time your great idea or inspiration is met with inner skepticism or restraint, notice what you are believing and ask yourself if it’s really true. Stay with it and see if you can find a way around the things that would otherwise stop you in your tracks.

We are all the pioneers and architects of our own lives and now is the time to go beyond what we previously thought was possible and do the things we’ve been capable of all along.

“Nothing else in the world…not all the armies…is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”- Victor Hugo,

Here’s to your success!

 

Can you slow down time?

 

What if you could slow down time? 

If you’ve ever had a great massage, a decadent vacation or a fantastic meal, you may have consciously savored each moment or morsel in such a way that allows you to enjoy every second of the experience.

While you may not have actually altered time, being intensely present does seem to allow you to expand your experience of each moment in a way that connects you with the sublime.

Contrast that to how you have felt at the end of a long day.

While stuck in traffic, sitting in meeting after meeting, or getting a cavity filled, perhaps you’ve found that you can disengage altogether and occupy your mind with other things. And when you do, time may seem to speed up. The whole experience can become distant and a bit blurred.

You can drive all the way home and not be able to recall a single landmark you passed along the way.

Knowing we can slow down or speed up time for ourselves may be interesting.

But what is even more intriguing – and somewhat unsettling – is the thought of how much of our lives have been spent somewhere between these two extremes, on a kind of auto pilot.

• How many times when talking with someone has your mind been somewhere else – reviewing your “to do” list, rehashing something that just happened, or even determining what you want to say next?
• How often have you foregone the moment unfolding before you because you were fretting about the past or worrying about the future?
• How many missed opportunities have we all had to be truly present with each other, listening intently and holding space that allows others to feel seen and heard and valued?

What if we lived more often with the intention of not wanting to miss a thing?

• How much more trust could we inspire and cultivate?
• How much more effectively could we create and innovate to meet emerging challenges and opportunities?
• How much more of our very selves could we bring to everything we do and everyone we are with?

Imagine how much better our world could be as a result.

Perhaps as we become more aware of the degree to which we are really showing up, we can begin to gauge how much of our lives we are truly living.  And then we can consciously create and enjoy lives worth living and organizations worth working for.

Fear or Love… What’ll it Be?

 

When it comes down to it, there are really only 2 places you can come from in an organization (or in life). One is fear and the other is love.

You’ve likely seen what fear looks like in organizations… competitiveness, silos, lack of trust, hidden agendas, showboating, cutting people down, insensitivity, judgment, conformity, negativity.

You’ve probably also seen what love looks like in organizations (though people don’t refer to it as love)… the passion of doing work as its own reward, pursuit of excellence, collaboration, lifting people up, trust, teamwork, compassion, respect, individuality, service to others.

Leaders are like transformers. When I worked in the utility industry several years ago, I learned that transformers are devices that change the voltage of energy – either increasing it (stepping it up) or decreasing it (stepping it down).

Leaders who come from a place of fear tend to perpetuate and amplify fear. In my experience, it’s rarely their intention to do so. They are usually more unconscious than anything – and acting from a place of self-preservation. Their focus is on limitation, doubt, threats that are coming at them, and things that bring them down.

And as the saying goes, where the focus goes, the energy flows.

Leaders who come from a place of love focus on something entirely different. It’s not that they don’t feel fear. They just intentionally, deliberately shift their attention to align with what they most want to move toward (versus away from).

• Instead of fixating on what they fear, they focus on what they want – and how to create it.
• Rather than getting frustrated by what they lack, they determine what they can give.
• When they get bogged down by limitation and doubt, they lift their sights to the capability of and confidence in themselves and others.

Leaders exist at all levels of organizations, regardless of title or position. Some of the most extraordinary leaders have no title at all. But they are powerhouses of possibility. They lift others out of fear and give them something meaningful to work toward. They can be in the presence of negativity and still radiate optimism and confidence.

They can literally transform the energy in an organization.

When a leader helps another person shift from fear to love, miracles happen. People are infused with energy they didn’t know they had. They see openings where they previously only saw obstacles and find solutions to problems that seem insurmountable.

They create brightness that illuminates the darkness and helps others find their way through the thickest of mires. And when the pockets of light begin to multiply, an entire culture can shift. What was once deemed impossible becomes entirely achievable – and even probable.

So what’ll it be… fear, or love?

Make the decision today to be a transformer that creates more of what you most want to be a part of.

Want some support infusing more love into your leadership or organizational culture? Email me. 

The Secret to Success No One Ever Talks About in Business

 

I filmed this week’s video 13 years ago but didn’t share it widely back then because I wasn’t sure it would be perceived as relevant to business executives. All these years later, after conversations and work with thousands of executives, I’ve realized that not only is it fitting, but that its relevance transcends time, industry, vocation, and position.

I can say that definitively because it is about one of the most fundamental forces leaders and organizations can harness and nurture within their organizations (and themselves): the undeniable, irrefutable and universal power of LOVE.

While it’s not likely something you’ll learn about in business school, or see on a job description, or even hear talked about all that much, you’ll feel it in the organizations that have sustained success over the longest periods.

It’s shared by their employees, their customers, and anyone who interacts with them or their people. It leads to repeat business, recruitment and retention of the best and brightest talent, and performance at the highest levels.

It is the one thing that grows the more that it is given (and received). It pulls people out of their slumps, gets them to believe in themselves and each other, and leads them to find the strength and resilience they need to overcome any obstacle.

This force draws people in and opens them to new possibilities. It transcends fear and allows them to feel safe, to unearth their greatest potential, and to connect more deeply to others.

Utilizing and perpetuating love doesn’t require an advanced degree, decades of experience or a formal title and yet, it is the one thing that has allowed the most influential leaders of all time create monumental leaps of progress – by inspiring the human spirt to go above and beyond what we previously thought possible.

It’s as powerful for communities as it is for companies and the individuals within them. And it is the one thing we all have the ability to generate regardless of our circumstances, experiences, limitations or doubts.

I would venture to say we need it now more than ever – and we must each take the opportunity not only to seek it, enjoy it, create it, and share it, but also to BECOME it.

It’s NOT business as usual…

 

Great organizations are not created accidentally. They are a product of conscious intention and deliberate action shared by leaders at all levels, regardless of formal title or level of responsibility.

So often people feel they’re at the mercy of their circumstances at work – the one arena they spend more of their time in than any other. It’s not uncommon for people to feel lost, misunderstood, overlooked or undervalued.

Work can feel like a never-ending series of boxes that need to be checked and a perpetual exercise in firefighting. Competition, office politics and inflated egos can shut people down, take the wind out of their sails, and lead them to feel powerless and unimportant.

But in great organizations these things are not the unavoidable byproduct of “business as usual”. Dynamics that keep people feeling trapped in auto-pilot, stunt their growth, and ultimately breed toxic cultures are carefully monitored and proactively addressed.

There is a spirit of solidarity and shared leadership that unites people in the face of challenges that would otherwise tear organizations apart.

A client I had the privilege to work onsite with a couple of weeks ago is a perfect example.

They are the kind of organization that makes you feel good the moment you come into their presence. The energy they share is dynamic and alive. People go out of their way to care for each other and are invested in each other’s and the organization’s success.  They have one of the lowest turnover rates in the industry and they attract the best and the brightest.

Their CEO came to me over seven years ago, expressing his desire to create a vibrant culture of inspired leadership.

It’s not uncommon for executives to bring programs in-house for their people to attend. But the most exemplary organizations begin those initiatives at the highest levels.

This wasn’t an initiative that would be arbitrarily rolled out. Instead, the C-level team insisted on experiencing the Pinocchio Principle Unleashed program starting with themselves – going through it together.

They knew that to create the kind of culture that would become infused into every level of the organization, they had to become living models of what they themselves were learning and hoped to see develop in their people.

In the years that followed, they’ve continued to enroll small groups of their people through the same program and taken deliberate steps to ensure the learning is reinforced and integrated into daily conversations and ways of doing business.

By practicing real leadership from the top down, they’ve nurtured it from the bottom up as well.

Working with clients like these to achieve unprecedented results by igniting the power of their people is one of the things I love most about my work. Message me if you are interested in creating a vibrant and inspired culture in your organization.

Why is this happening?!

 

I recently designed and delivered a workshop for one of my oldest clients to address something that will be as relevant in 5, 10, or 20 years as it is now and impacts us all personally and professionally every day… “How to Survive and THRIVE in Turbulence, Transition, and Transformation”.

We all have a wealth of experience working through each of those things because they come at us regularly. And the more we do, the better we get at handling them. If you look back on the most challenging times of your life, when you were pushed to your limit (or beyond), when the rug got pulled out from under you, when something came at you that you had no idea how to handle – despite whatever doubts or misgivings you may have had, you got through it.

And you learned a thing or two in the process. Though those times in your personal and professional life are often things you may rather forget, there is much to be gained in realizing just how much they have taught you – and perhaps to consider that they may be preparing you for something greater.

We all have our unique personal and career paths. And we have within us everything we need to reach our fullest potential, which exists within us as seeds that wait for the best conditions to sprout.

Some of our seeds will be like that of the lotus flower. They’ll remain dormant in the mud for years, until the time is right for them to grow roots and to shoot a stem upward toward the light, followed by exquisitely vibrant flowers and leaves.

If the lotus flower can bloom so beautifully from
the thickest and deepest mud, perhaps so too can we.

What’s interesting about creating a vision for something you want to achieve is that life has a way of delivering to you the exact combination of experiences that will prepare you to step into that vision and become the person who can make it real.

Some of those experiences we wouldn’t choose for ourselves.

Many of my executive coaching clients can’t help but ask, “Why is this happening to me?”. And they often tell me months later that without those experiences they initially bemoaned, they wouldn’t have had the strength, stamina, insight, or the ability to accomplish some of the very things they are most proud of.

Consider for a moment the stuff that is being thrown at you – difficulties that threaten to drag you down, turbulence that threatens your stability, and curve balls that keep you on your toes. And remember two things: (1) You have everything you need to rise to those challenges and work through them in ways that allow you to prevail, and (2) In the process of doing so, you’ll continue to develop the strength, resilience, and confidence to rise to the heights you most aspire to.

If you’re interested in one-on-one personalized leadership development or would like to bring a custom-designed workshop into your organization, message me for more information.

Never forget YOU are the hero of your own story

 

“Sometimes I just want my life to be more like a fairy tale.”

One of my workshop participants once told me that. And I could relate.

What she meant was, “I wish that I didn’t have to deal with problems… that things would always go my way… that life could be about riding into marmalade sunsets through rolling fields of daisies.”

I couldn’t help but remind her that even the best of fairy tales has conflict and peril and villains and crisis.  If they didn’t, no one would watch (or read) them.

Because they would be pretty boring.

In fact, the arc of most of those stories involves a character that sets off on some kind of journey or quest to find that things are not as easy as initially thought.  An unexpected setback puts the hero on her heels or knocks her down altogether.

She has to pick herself up, dust herself off and persevere.

It is only a matter of time before she faces another more difficult challenge. But she’s learned a thing or two from the last one.  And she relies upon that experience and that wisdom to get her through this one and the next… and the one after that.

Life is like that too.

The major difference between a fairy tale (or an action/adventure movie) and real life is that when you’re watching the character in a story, you are safe in your seat.  And when the peril is your own, you’re in the thick of the action – unsure of what will happen next and whether you’ll come out alright.

But this likely isn’t your first rodeo.

You’ve been through a challenge or two yourself.  And lived to tell about it.  Like the hero in those stories, you too have gained wisdom and insight and strength along the way.

Rainer Maria Wilke once wrote, “The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”

What if the very experiences you have had over the course of your life occurred in perfect order to prepare you for what you would experience in your future?