by Jane Perdue | Character
A lovely reminder attributed to Charles Osgood about our responsibility to “just doing it” to kick start your thinking!
That this was something somebody would surely have to do.
There was a most important job that needed to be done,
And no reason not to do it, there was absolutely none.
But in vital matters such as this, the thing you have to ask
Is who exactly will it be who’ll carry out the task?
Anybody could have told you that everybody knew
Nobody was unwilling; anybody had the ability.
But nobody believed that it was their responsibility.
It seemed to be a job that anybody could have done,
If anybody thought he was supposed to be the one.
But since everybody recognised that anybody could,
Everybody took for granted that somebody would.
But nobody told anybody that we are aware of,
That he would be in charge of seeing it was taken care of.
And nobody took it on himself to follow through,
And do what everybody thought that somebody would do.
When what everybody needed so did not get done at all,
Everybody was complaining that somebody dropped the ball.
Anybody then could see it was an awful crying shame,
And everybody looked around for somebody to blame.
Somebody should have done the job
And Everybody should have,
But in the end Nobody did
What Anybody could have.
~Charles Osgood
Image source: morgueFile
by Jane Perdue | Character
A parable to make us ponder:
A pencil-maker told the pencil five important lessons before putting it in the box:
1) Everything you do will always leave a mark.
2) You can always correct the mistakes you make.
3) What is important is what is inside of you.
4) In life, you will undergo painful sharpening which will only make you better.
5) To be the best pencil, you must allow yourself to be held and guided by the hand that holds yours.
————-
We all need to be constantly sharpened.
This parable encourages us to remember that we are special and have unique talents and abilities.
Only you can fulfill the purpose which you were born to accomplish. Never allow yourself to get discouraged and think that your life is insignificant and cannot be changed.
Like the pencil, always remember that the most important part of who you are is what’s inside of you.
More thoughts on leaving marks
It is the individual who knows how little they know about themselves who stands the most reasonable chance of finding out something about themselves before they die. ~S.I Hayakawa
Unless we can bear self-mortification, we shall not be able to carry self-examination to the necessary painful lengths. Without humility there can be no illuminating self-knowledge. ~Arnold Toynbee
Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering. ~St. Augustine
We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us. ~Jean-Paul Sartre
Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves. ~Henry David Thoreau
The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us. ~Quentin Crisp
There’s a lot of fear connected with the inner journey because it penetrates our illusions. Taking the inner journey will lead you into some very shadowy places. You’re going to learn things about yourself that you’ll wish you didn’t know. There are monsters in there—monsters you can’t control—but trying to keep them hidden will only give them greater power. ~Parker Palmer
Image source: morgueFile
by Irene Becker | Character
Want to be have more resiliency? Be happy? Have more success?
Here are ten steps you can take to make those three things—resiliency, happiness and success—happen.
10 simple steps to resiliency
1. Know and understand what you really want, and use it to build your self-confidence and self-esteem from the inside out.
We are socialized to have goals and objectives, and even core beliefs and values that are often not our own. The journey to really HEAR our own voice, tap into our true purpose, get rid of false core beliefs and replace them with our true core beliefs and values is the road to building true potential, success and happiness.
2. Be the promise manager and CEO of your life.
Do what you say, come through with the promises you make. Do not make a commitment that you cannot fulfill. Get rid of relationships with toxic people and frenemies who cannot ever really be trusted and whose values do not align with yours.
3. Lead with your strengths.
Develop the whole brain thinking, emotional intelligence and spiritual strength to optimize your strengths while transforming stressors, changes and challenges into solutions that empower yourself and others.
4. Fail forward.
Learn to use failures and challenges to build resiliency and a positive sense of self. That’s right, practice seeing your failures with new eyes. Eyes that can help you use those failures and challenges to move forward faster, better and with greater confidence.
5. Take your ego out of the equation, stop personalizing.
Refocus on your goal, your objective and your values.
6. Cultivate humor and optimism as often as you can.
Take time each day for a good laugh. Yes, laugh it up. The research is in, and it is conclusive: laughter not only connects you with others, but it also helps strengthen the immune system and helps you tap into your right brain—your creative, communicative side. Find a way to incorporate humor and laughter into your day.
7. Take ME time—reflective time.
One of the most important things you can do is find a window of opportunity each day to have ME time. Time that you spend with yourself, cultivating your relationship with YOURSELF. Me time is time when you need to nurture yourself, feel lovable and do something that helps you recharge, reconfigure and reboot your mind, body and soul.
8. Build constructive discontent—your ability to stay grounded in the head of an argument, and to feel unpleasant feelings and not be held hostage by them.
That’s right, you can learn to develop your ability to feel an emotion and not be held hostage by it by learning to step back and ride the wave, by becoming the participant observer and letting the emotion pass by, just watching and refocusing on your true goals and objectives.
9. Stop reacting—start responding.
No matter what happens, you have the choice to be the cause or the effect. When you react, you are been the effect; when you respond, you are being the cause. Developing your ability to respond is a learned skill that grows when you develop critical competencies like constructive discontent.
10. Find your happiness set point—your “J” spot (joy spot).
Recapture the child and heart, and start to re-discover what really makes you feel happy and fulfilled. Once your survival needs have been met, material acquisitions are terrific, but they cannot and will not create sustainable fulfillment. Only you can work to re-discover what your joy factor—your happiness set point—is by doing things that will help you nurture and sustain your love of self from the inside out.
Today’s guest post is from Irene Becker, who was the first female CEO of a Canadian steel company and is now an author, consultant, and speaker. Through her work at Just Coach It, Irene’s passion is helping people work, communicate better, lead smarter and be happier.
by Jane Perdue | Character
Betsy was credibly confused. She wanted to give her boss, Florence, the benefit of the doubt, but it was so hard to do!
In nearly every monthly staff meeting as well as in their infrequent one-on-one sessions, Florence had assured everyone on the team that she valued them both as individuals and for their work contributions.
Florence’s words sounded so good, and she sounded so re-assuring and caring when she said them.
Betsy wanted—with all her heart—to believe Florence’s words were true.
Yet, as much as she was loathe to admit it, it was becoming harder and harder for her to ignore the small but persistent voice in her head that whispered, “Florence says all the right things, but her actions contradict her words. There seems to be a gap between what she says and what she does.”
Betsy’s concern had gone into hyper-drive earlier in the day when a colleague forwarded an email Florence had sent to the department head.
In that email, Florence detailed her plan for setting up the conference the department head had requested. Not once in the message was anyone else named. Anyone reading the email could easily conclude that Florence had created the entire plan herself. In reality, Florence had done very little work in preparing for the conference. Betsy and two co-workers had done nearly all of the heavy lifting.
Betsy had lost count of the number of times Florence had passed off work done by a direct report as her own. When Betsy or someone else in the department had asked Florence about it, her answer was always that “she had been in boss mode when she wrote the email and forgot to mention other names, but, hey you folks know how much I value you. I tell you all the time.”
Betsy just wasn’t sure Florence’s professed care was there anymore—or if it had ever been there at all.
Do you have a say/do gap?
Are you a boss? Worried that your team might view you like Betsy views Florence? If so, take a moment of “say/do” self-reflection time and ask yourself a few questions:
- Am I certain there’s complete and total alignment between my words, my actions, and my values, each and every single time I speak and/or act?
- Do I sometimes parse my words and behaviors to be politically expedient?
- Has anyone on my team, a peer, or my boss challenged me for behaving differently than I spoke?
- If I have been called out, did I deny their claim? Offer an excuse? Valiantly accept their censure?
- Do I regularly call out people on my team when there’s a disconnect between what they say and what they do?
- Have I ever questioned my own boss about a real or perceived say/do gap on their behalf?
- Do I hang around with leaders who are known for their upstanding character or those who are comfortable talking about reducing expenses over lunch at the most expensive restaurant in town?
- Am I known for being credible? Sleazy? A straight shooter? Or one who bends in the breeze?
As Bill George writes in True North,
Leadership is not exerting power over others or exhorting them to follow you. Rather, it results from your example of empowering others to step up and lead. Leaders do that by learning to lead themselves, becoming self-aware and behaving authentically.
As leaders, we’re often rewarded for being doers; so it’s occasionally good, no, great, to hit the personal pause button and re-assess if we’re really on the right track or just telling ourselves that.
What say you?
Image source: morgueFile
by Jane Perdue | Character
My reaction to the request was immediate, visceral and not pleasant. Why on earth would the workshop facilitator ask the group to split up by gender?
This wasn’t fourth grade phys ed where sex and strength would play a role. My paradigm: leadership knows no gender distinctions, so why was this necessary?
My mind closed. I didn’t hear the first instructions. When everyone stood up and grabbed their chairs, I had no idea what was happening.
I blindly followed the woman next to me across the room and added my chair to the circle of women’s seats, still fuming at the gender division.
There must have been directions to think about something, given the silence and pensive expressions. After several minutes, the facilitator for the women’s group opened the floor for comments.
The deeply insightful and moving comments offered by the first two, then three, then four female participants set me back on my heels. This was meaningful stuff. My pique at the-girls-versus-the-boys separation was petty.
Because one of my personal hot buttons (women’s issues) had been hit, I had rushed to judgment, failing to seek first to understand. Fortunately, I only lost five minutes of what turned out to be an extraordinary two-hour exercise.
My humble pie lessons
1) Be curious. Gather information objectively. Understand what’s being asked and the context in which it’s being asked.
Be curious, not judgmental. ~Walt Whitman
2) Hot button or not, extend the benefit of the doubt. Presume good intentions, not ill.
Perhaps the greatest charity comes when we are kind to each other, when we don’t judge or categorize someone else, when we simply give each other the benefit of the doubt or remain quiet. ~Marvin J. Ashton
3) Check your personal filters to make certain your own assumptions aren’t blocking the way for all the facts and/or data. I leapt to the top of the ladder of inference in a single bound!
Don’t make assumptions. Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life. ~Don Miguel Ruiz
4) Listen actively and with empathy to what’s being said. Assure that what you are interpreting is really being said. Focus on the speaker, not what’s swirling in your brain.
You can hear without listening, and you can listen and not hear. ~Daniel Barenboim
5) Be humble and look for lessons to be learned!
True merit, like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes. ~Edward Frederick Halifax
Image source before quote: Dreamstime
by Jane Perdue | Character
Rachel had made one of her dreams come true.
She had spread her writing wings and created a blog. She added a new post almost every day. She was thrilled to have an outlet to share her views on networking. After a few months had passed, she had gained a large group subscribers and a roster regular guest bloggers.
Rachel had long been a fan of, and email correspondent with, a fairly prominent author in her genre.
Rachel asked for my opinion as her friend. She wanted to know if she should she invite the author to write a guest post.
My counsel: go for it! Jump off the cliff and see what happens. Worst case scenario is the author saying no. She asked others for their opinion on what to do. Everyone told her the same thing—she had nothing to lose and everything to gain by taking the risk and making the ask.
Rachel went for it.
Two months later, the daily email notifications of posts to Rachel’s blog stopped. Why? Rachel had lost her mojo. Why?
She had extended the guest post invitation to the author. He turned her down. He told he had reviewed her blog and found it “to look too pretty, too girly for him.”
The word “pretty” was an arrow through Rachel’s heart and spirit.
For someone of the author’s caliber to use “pretty” as a descriptor meant to Rachel that she wasn’t fulfilling her mission to provide useful and meaningful advice. She believed she had failed, so she quit writing. She said she didn’t have a clue for how to reclaim her blog writing mojo. And maybe didn’t want to.
What Rachel needed was resilience—the ability to rebound after setbacks and look forward with optimism and hope.
Life is full of road blocks, adversity, loss, rejection and other obstacles.
If we’re passionate about something, a huge part of making that something a reality is the going over, under, around or through those obstacles; resiliently bouncing back and trying again whenever a new stumbling block appears in our path. Because they will.
Nothing can sabotage winning, except for fear of losing. Success usually lies just beyond failure. ~Mario Cortes
How to up your resilience quotient
1) Reach out to others
According to the Mayo Clinic, “being resilient doesn’t mean being stoic or going it alone. In fact, being able to reach out to others for support is a key component of being resilient.” Do what Rachel finally did to increase her resilience—reach out to others, express what you’re thinking and feeling, and devise a plan to get back in the saddle.
2) Try again
Psychologists say resilience is a learned skill. When things go wrong, try again. Then try again if need be, just like you’d practice any new skill until it becomes second nature. Creativity expert Ken Robinson points out, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”
3) Have a calming chat with your inner critic
In situations like this, your inner critic is probably working overtime. Through 15 years of study, Martin E.P. Seligman, author and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, “discovered that people who don’t give up have a habit of interpreting setbacks as temporary, local, and changeable.” Heed what the inner voice is saying, yet exercise control of how much power you give to it. You control whether or not the inner critic halts you in your tracks.
4) Focus on learning
Look for the teachable moment. We’re quick to call ourselves failures when things don’t go right on the first try. Cut yourself some slack. You’re learning and probably developing strengths and abilities beyond what you initially imagined. Explore what worked well and what didn’t. Rachel began her blog to gain writing experience, and that’s where she needed to focus.
5) Identify lessons to be learned
Look to the past to learn lessons, yet make sure you don’t get mentally and emotionally stuck there. Studies have shown that how one thinks about setbacks impacts their coping abilities. Rather than dwell on what went wrong (someone declining an opportunity to write a guest blog), look for the successes (starting a blog and rapidly gaining subscriber’s in Rachel’s case) .
The most important lesson to learn is to not give up entirely. That’s truly when you do become a failure.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear. ~Mark Twain
What say you?
Image source before quote: Gratisography
