Power is Derived By The Power of Your Attention

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Whatever you focus on will grow. In other words, focus on what you want. If you are married or in a significant relationship and you want it to grow, put your focus on what you love about your partner. If you want your workplace to be a better place to come to work, focus on what you love about your job and where you work. If you want a better life, focus on what you are grateful for.

If you wish to change some aspect of your life, this power of focus can also relate to your habits. Tie your attention to the solution, not the problem. Shift your focus. If you have a bad habit when you come home from work, such as overeating, find a good habit that will replace it. If you have a good exercise regime or practice, but go through your day dreading it, shift your focus. See it as an opportunity to experience the power of your body.

If you aren’t enjoying your job, before you think of leaving it, discover a higher purpose for your work and shift your focus from misery to possibility. Tap into your potential and end the cycle of drudgery and pain in your life. The joy of that possibility can imbue your day. In the end, it is all a matter of where you place your attention.

If you want to know what motivates employees, ask them.

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When I was in Maine recently I was speaking to some hotel and hospice executives. We were discussing a recent interview I did for the National Post (the Article, entitled, Motivating Alberta’s ‘entitled,’ Workers appeared in the Financial Post on Tuesday, March 19). We were discussing how to retain employees in a labor market where the unemployment rate is low. In Maine, as in many other states, there is a shortage of nurses. Many hospitals are so desperate for nurses, they are offering them a sign-up bonus, cutting them a cheque for upwards to $1,000 for simply signing up for a job. Unfortunately, the technique is backfiring as many nurses take the cheque and bolt to the next hospital.

We discussed the importance of applying Ken Blanchard’s old and faithful model of turning the organization upside down. When you put the customer and the employee at the top of the organization and start working for them, you soon realize that all the intelligence, good ideas, talent, resourcefulness, and brain power for solving organizational problems are not found at the executive level. When requested, they are found  at the front-line, with those who are taking care of the customers. One hotel executive pays his best employees to periodically go off-site for a weekend to a think tank for better customer service. We explored asking employees, including new or even perspective hires, “What could we do to get you juiced about coming to work here – so that every day you jump out of bed eager to get to here?”
We recognize that for many employees and perspective hires the immediate answer will be, “more money.” So let’s start by talking about more money. Find the dollar amount they are asking for and play out the movie. If every employee started out being paid what they wanted, that would not serve the employee, because the business would soon be out of business and they wouldn’t have a job. But what if you could work with the employee to reach the point of earning what they deserve and what they are asking for by creating enough value for the company and the stakeholders that the company serves. Then we can start talking about what really matters to people.

There will always be some employees who are driven only by money. I don’t work with companies that pay to keep these kind of people. I also don’t think we take the time to listen – really listen – and understand what matters to people so that we can form a win win partnership instead of parent/child power and entitlement relationship.

I came back from Maine inspired to have new conversations with my staff and with those good clients that I serve. We are all in need of new conversations in the workplace. While we obviously can’t give our employees everything they want, extending some trust that they know something worthwhile goes a long way.

I’d love to hear your experience with asking employees what motivates them, listening carefully to their response, and negotiating for a win win partnership.

An a completely unrelated topic, I have been too busy to write about my experience in the North West Territories with a group of great community leaders. We had a two-day retreat at Blachford Lodge, 1/2 hour flight from Yellowknife. I wish every Canadian could experience the North. These were amazing authentic leaders who gave me a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. I am a better person for having spent two days with them.

What Are You Dedicated To?

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It’s been said that you can be world class at everything if you spend 10,000 hours practicing. That’s  3 hours a day for ten years, give or take a few days. What that means is that every person could be world class at something ten years from now. For some, it could be an olympic athlete. For others, a world class musician or artist. Some will be dedicated to their health or their wisdom, in order to remain a vital, contributing person as they age. Some will dedicate their lives to writing, speaking, or learning to communicate to impact others in a positive way. Others will be dedicated to a spiritual practice, community service, or  a cause beyond their own self-interest. Some are dedicating their time to parenting. And others will become world class complainers. Have you ever met a world class complainer? It’s a person who has spent three hours a day for the past ten years complaining. If you spend three hours a day watching television, you will be a world class television watcher, and if you watch the same shows during that time, it’s likely that no one else in the world will know more about those shows than you.

Years ago I memorized a quote written by the nineteenth century poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose words continue to inspire me:

“The heights by great men [or women] reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.”

I don’t think he was talking about distracting yourself by surfing the net at 3:00 am. He was talking about being dedicated to something.

The question is: What are you dedicated to? Where are you investing your time? What difference are you making in the world through this dedicated effort? Is what you are dedicated to inspiring you? Engaging you? Making a contribution to others? Do you have a vision that awakens you, that gets you up early or keeps you up late? What if you set a worthwhile ten-year vision to dedicate your life to? It’s never too late to consciously dedicate your life to a vision that inspires you. You are going to be ten years older in ten years anyway. Why not dedicate yourself to a worthy cause in the process? You can be interested in something, but that is different than being dedicated.

Hurriedness, Kindness, And Organizational Health

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I was driving to a meeting a few days ago when I noticed a young woman, with two children in the back seat of her car, stopped on the side of road attempting to change a flat tire. Ordinarily, I’d like to think that I would never pass someone by like this without stopping to offer assistance. But not that morning. I was late for an important meeting with a client. Torn between two conflicting values, accountability to my client, or compassion to a stranger, I quickly made the choice to pass by this woman in need. Accountability won out. I kept my commitment to be on time and kept feeling guilty about it all day. I have since come to an important realization: I’m not as compassionate when I’m in hurry.

Over the past few days, I have spent some time researching the effect of hurriedness on one’s level of kindness. What I found is a classic social psychology study, conducted by researchers who were interested in how situations affect people’s helping behaviours. John Darley and Daniel Batson, psychologists from Princeton University, studied a group of theology students who had to listen to a lecture on charity, and who then had to move, one by one, to a nearby building. On the way, they met an accomplice of the experimenters.  This person was down on the floor, pretending to have fallen and hurt himself. Most of the students helped him. But when they were pressured and had to hurry from one building to the next, the Good Samaritans among them reduced radically. One of the priests, in his hurry, even stepped over the unfortunate crying actor and headed straight for his destination. We really are not as compassionate when we are in a hurry. We are kinder when we have more time.

One of the indicators of organizational health is kindness. It’s a sign of a healthy environment when people feel cared for, when they feel supported, when they feel acknowledged, respected, and appreciated, even in small ways. How is the level of kindness in your culture? How are hurriedness, pressure, and demands affecting people’s level of compassion? How is the hurriedness, so prevalent in today’s organization life, affecting your culture’s health and the well-being of your workplace?

What if we all slowed down and took time to be kind? Would we actually be less productive if we created a compassionate place to work?

Easter… A Time For Reflection

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Easter, especially in recent years, has been a time for reflection for me. A time for taking inventory. A time for letting go. A time for renewal. A time for resurrection.

As we grow and evolve, things in our lives need to die to make room for something new. Hanging on too tightly to our old ways of thinking, our old familiar patterns and habits, our possessions, our achievements, our accumulations, blocks new growth.

Death is a part of life. It’s integral to the human experience. When we resist death, we resist life and can’t live fully. Death, letting go, surrendering to what is, is all part of living authentically with richness.

I have been taking an inventory of what I’m letting go of these days:

  • I have experienced the death of two close friends and a family member this past month. Grieving is not easy, and it is necessary.
  • As my business grows to a new level, I am letting go of my need for control. In the past, I have had a strong need for independence and the accompanying illusion of control. When I work alone, I avoid some hassles that come with collaboration, but I can’t take my business to a new level alone. I need others. I am letting go in order to make room for new relationships. It’s not easy, and it is necessary.
  • I am letting go of my need for certainty, and learning that uncertainty is a necessary ingredient to a full, rich life.
  • In grief, new, enriched relationships are born. Letting go of my belief that my security lies in my external world, my need for control, independence, and certainty, means that inner peace, new connections, new opportunities, and a renewed life emerge. In letting go I learn to trust at a new level. New resources arise.

Letting go isn’t complicated. It’s a simple decision.

What are you letting go of these days? What is emerging? What is calling you?

Finding Balance And Health In Your Culture: Wisdom From A Yogi

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Did you ever have a bad day where everything seemed to go wrong? Although our tendency is to blame something in our external environment, it is the state of mind that you bring to your work or your life that determines whether the day is “bad” or “good”. You can train your nervous system to be depressed or angry or pessimistic, just as you can train yourself to be hopeful, loving, and optimistic. That is, you can teach yourself to let life get you down or choose to use whatever life sends you to find a lesson that will move you forward.

The same is true with cultures. Have you ever been in an environment that is not as productive as it could be or living up to it’s potential? How often have you been in an organization where you found that there is far more talent, brainpower, wisdom, and resourcefulness than the job required or even allowed? Just as people can be ruled by emotions, cultures can take on an emotive “state,” because cultures are made up of people.

Culture is essentially an interplay of energy and yoga, the practice of moving into stillness and focusing your energy, can be instructive in understanding organizational culture. According to yoga there are three basic qualities or energies: rajas, tamas and sattva. Rajas is the energy of action, change and movement, while Tamasic energy is associated with a state of inactivity and inertia, heaviness and darkness. Sattva is light and uplifting and indicates a state of harmony and balance.

In order to find balance, we must start on a journey towards sattva. We do need rajas and tamas energy, but in their proper proportion and at their proper time. If we didn’t have rajas we would not have energy to move towards sattva.  If we have only tamas, we become “lazy” and never get anything done. However, we all want more balance and harmony in our lives, both corporately and personally, so we must ingest more sattva both mentally and physically.

In Yoga, as in life, the greatest obstacle to our growth towards a state of sattva is the continuous fluctuations of our minds.  The mind is always busy and it can flow in two directions – upwards towards sattva or downwards towards negativity. Patanjali, a great yoga sage from 200 BC gives a simple method for turning to sattva. He says when negative thoughts are encountered we must immediately replace them with the opposite positive.  Simple, but not easy! This is a practice of the mind. It is hard work and takes practice!

This has many implications for corporate culture.  We must not entertain negative thinking.  Gossip, slanderous talk and negativity of any kind work to undermine a positive mental framework, and makes most of us ineffective and generally miserable. A first step, and something infinitely practical is to breathe. A simple practice of mindful, deep breathing can be performed in any office, anytime of the day, in any meeting, at any moment, and thankfully it can be instituted without scrutiny or negative consequence.

We all make a difference to the environments we live and work in. Having ways to connect with sattvic energy can be a way to positively impact those around you. A healthy, balanced culture starts with you.

Note: Thanks to Jeff Lichty, my Yoga teacher (www.ashtanga-yoga-victoria.com) for writing this article with me!