Because we are fallible to start with, how can we best manage ourselves in an environment rife with temptation so that we can accomplish our important personal and professional goals?

The nub of the problem is that the part of us that identifies and desires the longer term goal is constantly trumped by the lure of the immediate.  New Year’s Resolutions feel great – we really do intend to meet our commitments successfully, but it is really hard to pass up chocolate mousse now in favor of being thinner sometime in the future.  In the battle of Now vs. Future, Now wins hands down.

One successful approach is to reframe the battle from Now vs. Future to Now vs. Now.  We have to give the long term battle such powerful emotional impact that it is more compelling than the short term win.  There’s a fantastic Radiolab show on this topic that I highly recommend.

Years ago I worked with a talented writer who was not writing.  In fact she spent her time doing just about anything but write.  She helped friends move, baked cakes, volunteered her time—anything but sit down at her computer and work on her screenplay.  Nothing motivated her to get past her block until one day I said:  ‘what non-profit would you HATE to give your money to?’ She selected a neo-nazi organization.  I then asked her to mail me a check made out to that organization for $5000. We then made a deal:  if she had not written a draft of her screenplay in 30 days, I would mail her check to the neo-nazi group she abhorred.   She got the draft done in 3 weeks, emailed me a copy and I cut the check in two and mailed it back to her.

This either or scenario – the screenplay or money to Neo Nazis – focused her mind.  Now the choice wasn’t bake a cake or write the screenplay.  We had fashioned a choice that was so emotionally loaded that writing the screenplay was truly her only option.

So next time your own worst enemy is you, consider creating a compelling choice for yourself.  The choice can be draconian or delightful—but whichever it is, it needs to be meaningful and powerful enough to help you take the immediate action that enables you to achieve your goal in spite of the myriad temptations that surround us daily.

One of the casualties of sound overwhelm, is the death of good listening.  Almost for survival, we sift and parse and ignore sound that we feel is unimportant to us.  Sometimes we’re filtering out the very information we need to pay attention to!  But leaders who successfully harness the skill to truly listen– even in a world of too sound, information, connectivity etc. — win the race for  inclusion, alignment, solution and intelligent action every time.

Beyond the obvious good listener golden rules which we have all learned countless times in professional development workshops– you know the ones I mean: don’t interrupt, repeat for clarity, listen for meaning below the words– I want to focus here on some less conventional ways for us to simply get back to appreciating what it means to be able to hear the world around us.

When we listen consciously and with intention to the world around us we get to live more fully.  And as a nice bonus, we’ll have better and more productive conversations as well.

So here are just a couple of practices you might include in your life to dynamically grow your ability to hear more. They come from a man named Julian Treasure who has written a book called Sound Business and whose Ted Talk on the subject of the impact of sound  is fantastic.

1. Practice silence. Sit in silence 3 or 4 minutes each day.  Try to find a spot at home where you won’t hear the phone, won’t see your computer screen etc.  Sit still and appreciate not needing to communicate, reply, or have a swift answer.  Breathe and slow down.

2. The Mixer. When you’re in an environment with lots of sound– pleasant or not — consciously see if you can pull the sound-scape apart by identifying some of the distinct sounds you are hearing.

3. Savor. Enjoy the mundane sounds in your world and try to savor them– the sound of your dishwasher, the fountain outside your office building etc.

4. Intentional Listening Perspectives. You have a lot of choices about how you will choose to listen.  Actively or passively, critically or empathically, reductively or expansively.  So choose the listening ‘posture’ that serves you best in the particular conversation.

5.  RASA-  the Sanskrit word for juice or essence.  This acronym proposes four key behaviors to employ in any conversation that is important to you: Receive, Appreciate, Summarize and Ask.

Sound is not the same as noise. It is possible to appreciate the soundscapes of our world and also to find ways to control the noise pollution in our day to day lives  so that we feel  less inundated.  Controlling overwhelm enables us to be really present for the conversations that matter to us both personally and professionally.

I expected to get notification in a couple of months that my chair was ready and would be crated and shipped and that would be that.  Instead, the artist, Kelly Hawk, emailed me, introduced himself and began sending me photos of my chair in progress– the wood for the headrest, the slats, the choices of wood that he recommended and beautiful details of how the chair will look.  I get a progress report from him every four or five days and I have never felt so delighted in a purchase, so eager to see and welcome the finished product, and most germaine to this blog post, so inclined to hire him again.

Kelly made a personal connection just because that’s how he works.  In the best sense of the word he takes things personally.    He even offered to deliver the chair personally (he lives in Washington State and I’m in Los Angeles!) if I would pay for gas and split the cost of a motel with him.  Needless to say, this guy goes the extra mile, and I am a raving fan.

I think the question for each of us is how to incorporate Kelly’s natural gift for deepening connection so that our staff and our customers begin to incorporate us into their lives because our connection to each other has meaning to them.

We can share our process, we can share something of ourselves, we can reach out to learn more about those to whom we provide service or product.  The more consistently and creatively we are able to bridge the anonymity that so often prevails between customer and company, the more likely we are to truly distinguish ourselves to our public and create raving fans and customers for life.

That last comment just about sent me over the edge. I did a quick scan of all the things I do during my day that I would prefer to jettison. I located my self-righteous hat, noticed how perfectly it fit, and launched my return volley—steam rolling easily over his yearning for unstructured time: “You’re being ridiculous. All you have to do is 15 minutes a day—it’s not even going to make a dent in your summer.” And then, my very grown-up kicker: “And do you have any idea how many things I do every day that I’d rather not have to do?” Impressive parenting, don’t you think?

“YOU’RE NOT LISTENING TO ME, MOM!” he yelled.

Well, that took the wind right out of my sails. He was right. I took a deep breath, locked my tongue safely behind the gates, and went beyond hearing his words—I tried to listen to what was beneath, and we found our way to a compromise that was OK all around.

Have you ever noticed how many people listen with their mouths?  they think they’re listening, but really what they’re doing is waiting for a break in traffic — a pause as you catch your breath — to pull onto the conversational highway and join the flow.

Most of us listen superficially — we get the gist and not the heart of what’s being said.  We focus on what we’ll say as soon as it’s polite to interject, and then we launch into a similar story about us!  ‘Oh yeah– that reminds me of the time’, or ‘you think you’re stressed out, you wouldn’t believe my day.’  Other times when we’re hearing something tough to swallow or uncomfortable, we take it personally, get defensive, judge, disengage.

“Don’t interrupt, it’s not polite” may be the only entry many of us have in our ‘good listening’ rule books. It’s the easy default—we think we’re doing a pretty good job since we’re ‘letting them talk.’ But, in the same way elevator music can never hold a candle to the real thing, lite—listening fails to deliver too.

Here are a few tips to helping you become a better listener.

• Be Curious. Get details. Ask provocative questions that allow the speaker to share himself. Go beyond the surface, dig a little deeper. Expect to walk away with a treasure—something you didn’t know. Your questions and probing let the speaker know you’re interested and allow him to explore his own experience more deeply too.
• Stop taking care of their feelings. If someone is expressing a powerful emotion, let him. Instead of trying to solve the problem, or take care of the feeling, just listen. Lean in, make eye contact, turn off your brain and open up your heart. Your partner will feel heard and truly understood. Not everything needs to be fixedÖor can be.
• Let go of your agenda. This is a really hard one. Even if the conversation is uncomfortable and you hate what you’re hearing; even if what you’re hearing is absolutely ridiculous and patently absurd; take a step back and see what you can from the other person’s eyeballs. Throwing verbal grenades at each other as you each defend your respective turf gets you nowhere fast. And anyway, there’s always the outside chance that you’re the one who’s ridiculous and absurd.

Here’s an exercise that gives a playful twist to the “walk in the other guys’ shoes” challenge. Next time you’re feuding with a friend, a colleague, a lover or a child try opening up your ears by moving your legs first.

When you are having trouble hearing what’s being said, sit in the other person’s chair, literally. Get up, walk over, ask them to swap seats with you so you are literally sitting in each other’s places. Enjoy the tentative smiles that emerge as you maneuver your bodies into the other person’s worldview and show your commitment to exploring his point of view.

Once you’re seated and comfy, take a breath and see what things feels like from over here. Continue the conversation/argument/battle from this perspective — i.e. inhabit the argument/discussion as if you were the other person.  If you can let go of being ‘right’ for a few minutes, you will hear and understand a lot more—guaranteed! And so will they.

I couldn’t have been more mistaken.  The ‘class’ was to be taught just for the alumnae, and the teacher, a brilliant Chaucerian scholar,  had clearly spent hours thinking about how we alumns could dive with her  into Troilus and Cressida and The Canterbury Tales, and about how she could impress us with her wit and erudition.  What she should have spent some time thinking about was who were these 35 – 60 year old alumnae gathered with her, what did they know or  even vaguely remember about Chaucer, and what would create a powerful learning experience for them.

But she hadn’t done that homework.  Instead she focused entirely on who she was, how much she knew, how she could wow us with her nuanced reading of the lines and how beautifully she could read the poetry in middle-english!!  I felt disappointed, disengaged and the stirrings of anger as well.

She hadn’t a clue that no one in her audience knew what she was talking about until one of us paused her and reminded her that many of us hadn’t opened up Chaucer for 25 or 35 years, and we could probably use some context.

I saw her face fall as she realized the error she had made.  For a moment she was quite flustered and then she gathered her wits and  revamped on the fly. The balance of her talk was absolutely fascinating.

Being savvy and thoughtful about your audience is a critical leadership skill.  Who is in the room?  What do they know already?  What do you want them to know when you’re done speaking?  If you don’t know much about your audience, go talk to a few of them before you present.  This is a simple way to gain perspective on how to shape your talking points.

In addition to knowing who is in the room you need to know how they listen too since people listen for very different things:

• Listeners who are primarily data driven will be evaluating your presentation to see if it is grounded in the appropriate facts and figures.

• Audience members who look first for structure want to see how all the different aspects of your talk fit together.

• The people who are listening for your vision want to know where your ideas will lead the team, the division or the company.

• And, finally people who focus on human dimension want to know where they — and everyone else — fit in.  Why should they care about what you are saying?  Where does it touch them? How will they benefit or be disappointed?

The successful speaker assumes all four types of listeners are present in every audience and finds ways to address these disparate needs.

Let’s say you run IT for company and are talking to your team in your weekly staff meeting.  It is appropriate and expected that you will drill down into the data in a language that you share with your team and at a level of detail which is essential for team clarity.

If, on the other hand, you run IT and are asked to speak to the senior management team about your  strategy for the coming year,  you will want to first provide a high level overview of your strategy so that everyone in the room knows what you are talking about (don’t leave them trying to fathom Chaucerian middle-english!).  You will want to share sufficient data about your strategy to be credible but not nerdy, you will want to make sure that the structure of your presentation adds up neatly with no loose threads or irrelevant asides, and you will need to address the human impact of your IT strategy.  By reaching out to the four kinds of listeners, you have the opportunity to inform a diverse audience and keep them curious and engaged.

When leaders fail to think about who is in the room and what will they want to know, they have lost a key opportunity to connect, inform and align.

Gremlins are sneaky. They persuade us that their ‘voice’ is really in our best interest and show up with a myriad of limiting messages that if heeded, prevent us from stepping into our greatest potential.

“It’s not worth the risk—you know you never do well in high stress situations, it’s not the right job for you” says one gremlin. If you listen to this voice, you rationalize reasons not to stretch, not to change, not to risk—not to put your hat in the ring, for example,  for that amazing job.

“Money is for saving, for your future, for your retirement.” This gremlin goes nuts when you want to spend your money for fun or even for education to advance your career.  He wants you to work, work, work and watch that bank account grow. He’s so overwhelmed by security issues that listening to this voice will keep you toiling in the mines, a Cinderella whose prince will never come.

“Just keep your head down and your mouth shut. No one cares what you think anyway.” This voice keeps you invisible in your job, unable to add your perspective especially if it is a dissenting one.  You will never be promoted if you listen to this gremlin. And most critically, no one will ever really know who you are, what you think, what you bring to the table.

There are as many gremlin messages are there are humans– no two gremlins are really identical. They’ve forged their identities along with us as we’ve grown—taking their scripts from what our parents, teachers and society at large may have drilled into us. They encourage us to make choices based on what others want, or what will be easiest. Powerful gremlins cause us to settle for what we have and to give up on our dreams. They can become so powerful that it becomes almost impossible to distinguish between the gremlin’s voice and our own true desires.

The trend to capitulate to our gremlins is so overwhelming, that without some kind of structure for support, it can be almost impossible for us to stare down our vocal inner critics and keep our vision for our life, our career, our business in clear sight. That’s where coaching comes in.

Meeting Your Gremlin!

Take the time to get to know these self-defeating voices—when do they show up and what is the consistent message you are hearing from them.  This process is the first step toward defusing them of their power. You will start to notice your own response patterns in certain situations when your critic is vocal and loud,  and then you will begin to be able to separate out whether what you are saying is really what you want or whether it is in fact that old inner voice trying once again to hold court.

It is quite useful to personify your gremlins.  You might name them, describe them vividly, even draw them!  Identify the language of your gremlins so that when one shows up,  you can immediately say ‘oh, that’s that same  gremlin message I always get in this kind of situation.’ and then you can talk back!

Let’s say you have an inner voice that thinks it is keeping you safe each time a new work opportunity comes up with phrases like:  “don’t even try—you won’t get the gig and you’ll feel so bad” or “the competition is out of your league, don’t even think about it.”  Notice this fearful part of you and say back (either inside your mind or even aloud!) “I get it that you’re worried about me, but I’m going to give it a shot.  And if I don’t get it, I’ll be OK.  No need to worry.”

In other words, calm down the part of yourself that is agitated so that the gremlin voice is muted and you can think clearly about what is best for you.  Every single one of us has a voice or two whose message is not in our best interest.  Our inner voices keep us small, limit healthy risk-taking and diminish our opportunities.  But the inner critic can be quieted with practice so that you are running the show instead of your fear.

Have some fun with the meeting and greeting and silencing of your gremlins. Be creative and playful. Get good at noticing when your little monsters make their appearance. Notice them, quiet them then ignore them, and take the action that is in your best interest, not theirs!

The young boy was curious, and yelled out “Who are you?”
An answer came back immediately – “Who are you?”

“I admire you,” yelled the young boy, curious to see what the stranger would say.
“I admire you” came the quick reply.

The young boy began to get annoyed. This was no kind of conversation. Why wouldn’t the stranger show himself? “Coward!” he yelled at the top of his lungs.

“Coward” came the stranger’s swift response.

The young son was perplexed and looked to his father for help. “What’s going on, Dad?”

The father smiled and tousled the hair of his beloved child. “Pay attention, my son,” he said and cupping his hands over his mouth yelled, “YOU ARE A CHAMPION!”

“YOU ARE A CHAMPION!” the stranger yelled back.

The young boy was surprised but still did not understand and reached for the warmth of his father’s hand.

“People call this an ECHO,” explained the father. “But really this is LIFE.

“It gives you back everything you say or do. Each person’s life is simply a reflection of his actions. If you want more love in the world, create more love in your heart. If you are on a running team and want more speed in the team, improve your own skill-become a faster runner.”

“Oh, I get it,” said the young boy. “If I want Billy to stop hitting me, I have to stop hitting him back. Right?”

“Life will give you back everything you have given to it,” his father replied with a smile.

“Your life is not a coincidence. It is a reflection of you!”

————————————————————————————————————————————–

During the last month the issue of responsibility has come up with a number of my executive coaching clients. We have explored what it means to be responsible for the life each of us is creating and what it means to be responsible for the mistakes each of us makes along the way. For some of us it is easy to lay blame outside of ourselves when things go awry. Others take responsibility for problems that are not ours to solve, hanging our energies on other people’s emotional coat racks. For others, the challenge lies in learning to take responsibility for our own abilities and gifts—we play small and we play it safe.

We can only expect back what we put out. Like a mirror that bounces our image right back at us, so it is with life. Where we lay blame, anger and resentment are sure to come home to nest. When we play small, opportunity will pass us by. When we spread joy, it finds a clever path right back to us.

If you’re curious to connect the dots between what you give to the world and what’s showing up in your life, you’ll need to cultivate the courage and clear sightedness to look hard at the truth. This is not always easy! We’re all quite accomplished at noticing what’s not working in our lives, and a lot less skilled at tracing the responsibility back to ourselves.

You can get help here by soliciting feedback from those who will with honesty tell you what they see.  If you are leading a team and the morale is poor– first look to how you are leading and behaving before you look to blame other divisions, strained resources, insufficient head count.  If your business is suffering, look long and hard at your strategy and its implementation– before you take the easy road of blaming a weak economy and tighter wallets.  If you have watched while colleagues are promoted as you languish in the same role,  you may need to self promote and network much more meaningfully.  You may also need to look long and hard at the level of your contribution.  Are you going the extra mile?

I invite you to take a look at your own life and see if there are a few dots you can connect. Take a look at the area of your life that presents the most consistent struggle, and see what part your actions play in the story.  And then take a look at the area of your life that provides the most consistent joy, and connect those dots too!

Sometimes people take intentional actions that are heroic. You may have heard, for example, of these amazing kidney transplant stories where one person gives a healthy kidney to a needy stranger and then a friend or family member of that recipient donates to another needy and unrelated patient.  These virtuous circles have exceptional impact—the lives of multiple individual’s lives are saved and their ‘debt’ is repaid by family or friends who pay it forward by giving a kidney to another needy person.  Some of these kidney swap chains have begun 4 or 5 years ago and are still going strong.

This is a big gift!  And not all of us will choose to take an action of such enormity.  But there are still loads of other ways for each of us to create joy, change lives, grow the careers of others, or lend a hand to someone who needs some help.  Mainly we need to adopt a mindset of service to others and let go of worrying about how we will benefit from our efforts.

In the corridors and offices of our companies, there are a myriad of ways to change lives and the most satisfied and beloved men and women I have coached find ways to incorporate  high impact actions regularly.  Your own creativity and gifts will guide how you choose to make a difference, but here are some easy ways to get going:

• Introduce a talented junior person to a much more senior individual ensuring that the senior person really takes note.  Help both see how they can be of help to each other.  Do not hoard your senior level connections.  Spread the wealth and enable unexpected outcomes and partnerships to emerge.
• Mentor a new-hire with the kind of commitment that brings them on board assuredly and successfully—go the extra mile.
• Praise accomplishments publicly and authentically.  Never take credit for the work of others.
• Give away a juicy assignment to someone who needs visibility and opportunity.
• Take an interest in your staff’s kids.  Connect them to interesting internships by opening up your rolodex and making a few calls.  Remember how hard it was for you when you first started?
• Step in and help someone who is stumbling—even if it is far from your job description.  When someone is in harm’s way do not sit back and watch the looming train wreck.
• Promote staff as soon as they are ready– even though it may leave you short-staffed and their talents may be in the service of a competing department! You can never grow yourself by holding another back.

Every time you become intentional about having powerful and positive impact on another person you have the opportunity to start an amazing ripple of change and confidence in the life of another. Their newfound opportunities have impact on their home lives as well as their work lives.  And when people experience this kind of generosity of spirit they are likely to pay it forward:  your initial action may have an unexpectedly long life cycle.  And though you may never be able to connect all of the dots, they are connected.

It is free and easy to make a big difference so give your help generously and leave a big footprint as you move forward in your life.

Intuition  is a natural gift and we all have it though for so many of us the muscle is somewhat atrophied. When we are operating synchronously with our mind and our gut, we navigate through our lives from our truest centers and make better decisions for ourselves and for our organizations.

“People with high levels of personal mastery do not set out to integrate reason and intuition. Rather, they achieve it naturally—as a by-product of their commitment to use all the resources at their disposal. They cannot afford to choose between reason and intuition, or head and heart, any more than they would choose to walk on one leg or see with one eye”—Peter Senge

Sometimes what we know but can’t prove is the most critical information for us to trust and to share. Yet we undermine our intuition all the time. Maybe it seems too ‘new agey’, or we decide we’re not intuitive, or we don’t see the link between intuition and productivity and maybe most importantly, because intuition leads us into the unknown, it can be quite scary to pay attention to our intuitive hits.

One of the many shortcomings of operating from fear is that it holds us trapped in the realm of the predictable. It’s tough to be open to startling new ideas that fly in the face of convention. Intuition can give us access into what might be so that we are not stuck forever with what is. So much creativity and invention come from letting go and getting curious about an idea that seems preposterous, from following an inkling, a hunch.

When the steam locomotive was new, for example, a breakthrough in technology made it possible for the engine to exceed 30mph. With speed of 40mph in sight, a debate broke out—even in the medical literature of the time. One learned doctor said that it was common knowledge that the human body would explode at forty mph!

If you’re curious to create a ripe environment for your intuition, the most important thing you can do is to create time each day when you slow down. Intuition cannot compete with the velocity of your thinking mind. It will be trumped every time by your analytic brain. I ask my executive coaching clients to make daily time for quiet. Whether you can carve 10 minutes or an hour each day,  go quiet. Turn off your phones, your pager, you email alerts, your kids, your staff, your boss…

Once you are quiet and your mind is calm, here’s a great exercise: Pose a question to yourself of significance. Maybe it’s a goal or a problem or a challenge. Close your eyes and notice what images, thoughts, ideas, impressions and emotions flow through your mind. When you’re ready, jot down what you remember. You may have an immediate insight or it may come in time. You may get a piece of information and need to ask yourself another question. Use this practice to develop your intuitive muscle. Over time you’ll get better and better at noticing and valuing the full spectrum of information that can help you make the very best decisions for yourself.

But scientists are discovering that our mania for optimizing our output by doing everything at once is creating a real problem– sometimes a fatal one (think texting and driving)– for our brains.  They are finding elevated stress and rage in adults and learning problems in children.

And if that’s not enough to make you pause, scientists are also finding that our efforts to do many things at once often make us LESS efficient!  A study showed that people distracted by incoming email and phone calls saw a 10 point drop in their IQs which is the same as losing a night of sleep.

Doing several things at once to save time is a form of self-deception.  The problem is that the brain can’t actually cognitively handle multiple thinking requests simultaneously, so its best solution is to switch rapidly between one thing to another.  We are not expertly juggling weird amalgams of tasks, instead we are more like a high school kid frantically trying to clean up the illicit party before mom and dad arrive– race to the kitchen scrub a little at the counter, race to plump the pillows but ignore the coffee table mess, race to eliminate the beer bottles, where’s the Fabreze?  oh no, there’s their car and the house is still a chaotic mess!

We think we are getting more done.  But because our brain is switching chaotically, urgently and agitatedly between tasks,  in fact our productivity goes down by as much as 40%.  (An American study reported in the Journal Of Experimental Psychology found that it took students up to 40% longer to solve complicated math problems when they had to switch to other tasks!)  When we try to multi-task, we are essentially interrupting our focused thinking on a continuous basis and losing time and productivity in the process.

If you’re reading this blog and thinking– yeah, yeah, but I’m better than the average bear at multi-tasking, take this little test to pit your brain against the challenge: Check out these ball players and see how well your multi-tasking skills stand up!

Multitasking might also be taking a toll on the economy.  One study by researchers at UC Irvine monitored interruptions among office workers and found that workers took an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from interruptions like phone calls, or answering emails and return with focus to their original task.

If you are running a team or a company, give good thought to enabling your staff to have uninterrupted time to get work done.  Constant interruption erodes productivity and likely caliber of product too.

And for each of us reading this information, see if you can find ways to allow yourself to complete one important task and then move on to the next.  Stirring pasta and reading the paper– no problem for most of us.  But writing a presentation while shoe-horning a key conference call into the same time slot does not set your brain up for success.

People who have chosen to practice ‘single-tasking’  report they will never go back.  They feel happier, calmer, more productive, less stressed and prouder of their work.  Sounds good to me!