How to start a new habit.

/in , , , /by

How to start a new habit.

Assess the quality of your life by looking at your habits. If you want to change your life, change your habits.

Here’s seven keys to changing a habit:

  1. Articulate your why. Create a compelling reason to change a habit or create a new you. And be sure the change is right for you.
  2. Think carefully before you make this agreement to yourself and scrupulously keep the agreement. Integrity and self-respect trump any result you gain from the habit.
  3. Start with one habit at a time. If you chase two rabbits, they’ll both get away.
  4. Start small and be consistent. It’s better to have a small success than a big failure. If you’ve never exercised before and you want to change this habit, don’t start by purchasing a gym membership. Start with a five minute walk every day.
  5. Let go of results. This sounds counter-intuitive but it has made a profound difference for me. Whether you are starting a habit of practicing guitar, reading books, or exercising, go for a set time each day and let go of what it is supposed to look like.
  6. Be specific at first and progress s-l-o-w-l-y. If you start walking 35 minutes/week (5 minutes/day), then increase no more than 10% per week. Next week you’ll be walking 37.5 minutes (5 min, 22 seconds/day). Within a year, you’ll be walking effortlessly for over an hour a day and loving it.
  7. Find an accountability partner – someone who will support you and help hold you accountable for keeping the promises you have made to yourself.
  8. Enjoy the self-respect that comes from the integrity of keeping a promise that’s important to you – and experience radical change in your life.

Journalling – How To Get Going And Keep Going

/in , , , , , , /by

Journalling – How To Get Going And Keep Going

Connection to others is critical in good leadership and starts with connection to yourself. Journalling is a great tool for self-connection.

Here are some guidelines to get you going and keep you going:

  1. Buy a nice journal. I love a good leather-covered one I can feel proud to write in.
  2. Have a regular time to write – in the morning, at the end of the day, or, for example, every Sunday morning as you reflect on the past seven days and the week ahead. I like to spend five minutes journalling when I first come in the office, before I turn on my computer. It helps me connect to myself before the barrage of the world’s demands start hitting me.
  3. Experiment with structure. Sometimes journalling is a brain dump, a process I learned from Julia Cameron. Her journalling method is three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing. Other times I use a structure of a) How am I feeling? (Including wins in the past 24 hours, lessons learned, and glitches); b) How will I show up today? c) What am I grateful for?
  4. Write less than you think you “should.” Like exercise, it’s better to have small consistent successes than big failures. Two or three sentences is great while you’re getting into the habit.
  5. Don’t show it to anyone. You aren’t writing to impress anyone. It won’t be graded. It is only for you.
  6. Don’t sweat it if journalling doesn’t work for you. It isn’t for everyone. There are lots of other tools for connecting with yourself.

The Myth Of A High-Functioning Team

/in , , , , /by

The Myth Of A High-Functioning Team

In forty years of doing this work, I have never come across a dysfunctional team. Every team has elements of disfunction and elements of health and falls somewhere on that spectrum. There is no formula. No template.

I have seen teams that are achieving incredible results that would fail dismally in terms of measuring up to what experts would describe as a “high functioning team.” And I’ve seen teams that can check off all the “High Functioning Teams” boxes but are still failing miserably.

This can also be said for leaders and individuals. There’s no blueprint. From our research and observation, however, six actions will support the health of any team:

  1. Know your why. And make sure everyone is clear, inspired and aligned with that purpose. A clear purpose leads to clarity about how much trust, engagement, and accountability you require.
  2. Connect contribution to purpose. Every team member needs to know that they made a meaningful contribution.
  3. Get the right people on the bus. You can’t train for character or chemistry. You can’t make a good hockey team out of a bunch of tennis players.
  4. Get clear about what you expect from each other. Ambiguity leads to mediocrity. Be sure to include, in the expectations, how you can best support each other.
  5. Turn expectations into agreements. Hold each other accountable for delivering on the promises you make to each other and to the people you serve.
  6. Stay self-aware. Be open for feedback. Keep learning. A team that learns together stays together – or at least stays engaged.

If you are interested to learn more about building a healthy culture, join us for this month’s complimentary webinar: https://lnkd.in/d37Prt4a

 

Four things to remember when leadership feels hard.

/in , , , /by

Four things to remember when leadership feels hard.

Leading – whether in your family, your team, community, or company – is like life: it’s hard at times.

When you decide to step up and stand for something, you open yourself up to be attacked, dismissed, criticized, silenced, and sometimes even assassinated. It is not uncommon to bear the scars from your efforts.

Leaders represent change, and with change comes loss, fear, confusion, and anger. And those brave enough to go against the crowd risk backlash. Change can make people cruel: empathy, compassion, and grace are often sacrificed when craving order. Irresponsible scapegoating of the authority figure is certainly unfair, but it comes with the territory.

Leaders are also always letting someone down. Somebody’s bound to be disappointed in decisions that are made, and stepping into leadership means shouldering the agony and aspirations of a community.

So… when leadership feels hard, here’s a few things to remember:

  1. Remember that hard comes with leadership. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would be leading. Once you understand and accept that leadership is hard, then it is no longer hard, because it no longer matters. You are on a more important mission than being comfortable.
  2. Ask yourself, “Is this a good hard or a bad hard?” Good hard means you are pursuing a worthy cause and accepting that obstacles are a predictable prerequisite. Good hard means your heart is open and you feel the pain of the people you serve. Bad hard means you have lost contact with yourself, others, and the vision.
  3. Preserve a sense of purpose. When you cannot find the inspiration and when discouragement and despair emerge (that only later are recognized as seeds of creativity) you just have to keep walking. It doesn’t have to be fast or spectaluar, but just keep stumbling forward toward the cause that you believe in.
  4. Find a life practice. To sustain your energy, every leader requires a daily practice – a habit that connects with and taps into the power of the life force that runs through us. A life practice is anything that you do over an extended period of time that consistently and reliably deepens the connection to your experience and expression of being alive.

What do you keep in mind when leadership feels hard?

Does the word accountability have a positive or negative association for you?

/in , , , , /by

Throughout my career, accountability has been a central focus of my research and teaching. Here are ten things I’ve learned about accountability:

  1. Accountability is the ability to be counted on. Never make a promise you don’t intend to keep, and when you make a promise keep it, whether you feel like it or not.
  2. Think carefully before you make an agreement – then painstakingly keep the agreements you make. It’s much easier to say no upfront than it is to get out of an agreement that you no longer want to keep. And when you say yes, follow through.
  3. It’s easier to see a lack of accountability in others. It’s a lot easier to be mad at someone else for being late than to be mad at yourself for not showing up on time.
  4. Accountability is the cornerstone of self-respect. No one takes pride in doing something easy. Keeping a promise always leaves you feeling better about yourself. And when you respect yourself, you earn the trust and respect of others.
  5. Accountability inspires others. Accountability is usually used to hammer rather than inspire people. When properly understood, accountability is meant to create safety, alignment, and trust. It’s inspiring to be around people who can be counted on. You’ll get much further building accountability with a flashlight rather than a stick.
  6. Accountability is about ownership. Blaming and finger-pointing are all symptoms of a lack of accountability. Decide that all blame is a waste of time and your life will change forever. Accountability is ultimately about looking in the mirror.
  7. Accountability is about growing up. There’s a difference between maturity and aging. All beings grow oldbut growing up is the duty of human beings.
  8. Accountability requires a recovery plan. When you can’t keep a promise here’s a three-step recovery plan: a) Let your creditor know as soon as you know if your agreement is jeopardized; b) Negotiate with your creditor to minimize damages and re-commit to a new agreement; 3) Learn from your experience so it doesn’t happen again.
  9. To avoid downstream problems, get the agreements right. The vast majority of accountability problems stem from a lack of clear agreements and understanding the consequences. Courageous conversations upstream will prevent problems down the line.
  10. Accountability lies at the core of leadership. If you want your best people to produce results, stay engaged, be inspired, find value in coming back to the office after working from home, and be loyal, it all starts with a well-designed and delivered accountability process.

Fears, Trust, And the Human Experience

/in , , , /by

When our daughters were much younger, we went on a family “adventure” to the Fantasyland Hotel in West Edmonton Mall and took in a ride in the submarine. After boarding, the hatch closed, and as we “descended,” the guide began safety instructions. The moment she said, “if any of you get claustrophobic…” I immediately started hyperventilating. My heart was racing and felt like it would explode. I was nauseous and dizzy. My lifelong fear of closed spaces took over and I went into a full-blown anxiety attack.

My family knew what was happening. Chandra got the guide’s attention who helped me ascend through the safety hatch. I climbed out the escape trunk, got into a row boat in the middle of a mall in six feet of water, and was escorted to back to pier.

We’ve had lots of good laughs about it all over the years. But underneath the humor, there is a deep respect for each other in our family. We all understand that anxiety is no laughing matter.

A few years after the submarine incident, we went caving in Northern Utah. We all knew this would be a challenge for me. I sweated it for weeks before we got there.

At Timpanogos Cave, I learned we would be 90 minutes in a confined space. “You don’t have to do this, Dad,” my young girls kindly said. The first thing I did was tell the guide, Royce, about my claustrophobia. He looked me right in the eyes with kindness and care that I’ll never forget. He gave me the flashlight and said, “Come right up front, right beside me. We’ll get you through this. You aren’t alone.”

I did get through it. One step at a time. With the love and support of my family and Royce, who guided me, not just through the cave, but to a newfound bravery and courage.

At the end of a tour, Royce shares his passion and love for these magnificent caves and offers a challenge:

“Most of us will never discover a cave, but each of us has an opportunity to discover something that we truly care about, something that we love. It might be music, mathematics, art, dance, languages, science, athletics, neighborhood parks, or a million other things. Just as our lives are better today because of the Timpanogos Cave Committee, the challenge is for us to use our energies and talents so that one-hundred years from now, life will be better for people and for this planet because we were here.”