Be Real
The concept of grasping and experiencing the genuine and authentic part of life can seem increasingly more elusive with hyper-mobile societies and the advent of generative AI and deepfakes technologies, among a dozen other trends. Many of us run faster and harder in most every area of our lives than ever before in human history. The best deep and meaningful connections and true community requires an intentionality and a reduced speed that is in a state of friction with much of what surrounds us culturally and technologically. Despite all of those headwinds, my sense is that being real and authentic is worth the fight and effort. What does it take? Her are some practices to keep in mind and continually practice.
Seek to give attention more than seeking it.
Let others know they are important.
Discern when others are being genuine or just masking and manipulating.
Your own skin feels great on you, not uncomfortable.
What you say and do demonstrates trustworthiness.
Seek out simplicity of needs over the complexity of wants.
Mature EQ enables you to manage critique and feedback whether on target or not.
Aware of strengths and blind spots while avoiding both arrogance and self-depreciation.
Consistentcy is a hallmark behavior.
Making Bank
Most people work hard in life to make the investment and effort to be successful at any number of things through time, energy, resources, and perseverance. There are times we look back at all the work and can still be unsure of our progress and question its value.
A powerful mindset to explore is to orient your mental posture towards having confidence that what you have done so far has been banked, meaning it’s there, it counts, and is a compounding investment. This perspective frees you up to turn 180 degrees from assessing and critiquing what’s already done and recast your focus on looking ahead and moving towards what’s next, leveraging what’s in the bank.
RPM’s
If you are the type of person who likes to create checklists as an execution guide for your day, week, or even your life, here are some targets to incorporate into your behavior patterns, professionally and personally, to keep moving the needle.
It’s really about the RPMs. In this case we’re not talking about “Revolutions Per Minute” but “Resonance Per Moment”. Creating harmonization across all you do and invest in yourself is what builds up the amplification and impact of who you are.
Try these:
Learn something
Teach something
Inspire others to keep going
Take the best risks
Manage change well
Make decisions you can feel good about
Do work you are excited to do
Performance Killers
Toxic leaders don’t foster performance, they undermine it.
Toxic leaders breed inferior work, break down collaboration, impede ownership, and extinguish purpose and engagement.
Toxic leaders generate a constant hum of incivility that breaks confidence while creating increasing resentment and unrest.
Toxic leaders’ behaviors dismantle others from the inside out.
Toxic leaders take away agency and violate the physical, emotional, and psychological experiences of others, diminishing and assaulting professional and interpersonal identities.
Toxic leaders exert control and violate boundaries that result in repeated and unilateral damage.
Toxic leaders are grifters, conmen (and women) who spin up operating realities that are untrue and distribute conflict and fear to empower themselves instead of others.
Toxic leaders are abusive, but the abuse too frequently goes unrecognized as such in professional spaces.
Respect ALWAYS generates the best results. When leaders uplift and support others for the greater good, they inspire true leadership and foster a culture of trust and empowerment.
Interviewing Is Story Curation
When an organization interviews a candidate for a job opening the interviewer is most often focused on a candidate’s skills and experiences. It’s too seldom understood that the most valuable and impactful interviews go beyond these basic components to include a greater sense of the candidate’s professional story, inclusive of their values and motivations. This means asking better questions and practicing much deeper listening and conversational reflection and mirroring.
A more powerful wheilding of the interview process can be found in exploring the intersection of the candidates professional and personal story arc and the organizations own story and narrative direction. To capture that value, the interview must move beyond a skills and experience inventory and inspection approach to venturing into deeper waters.
Much like a movie director pulls the context and meaning out of a script to transform it and create an impactful experience on screen, interviewers can work within a larger frame that creates a broader landscape for both the candidate and the hiring organization. It allows both parties to attain better clarity and a sense of the potential opportunity related to joining into one another’s stories. In most organizations, there is room to develop interviewing skills to be more impactful and foster the benefits that come from becoming intentional story curators.
The Practice Path
It takes exposure and interaction with your own experiences to drive elevating your abilities and developing your craft in your own unique way. Putting in the repetitions of doing the work is the only sustainable path and it’s not a quick shortcut scenario.
A well-known quote from Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers: The story of success says, “Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.”
Take heart in the process along the way and realize that investing in yourself has a compounding effect on the value you offer and your own satisfaction and confidence of doing what you do well in the service of others.
Calculated Risk
Any given day that you make the intentional choice to open your mouth to share thoughts, ideas, understanding or insights, is a calculated risk. You can potentially be seen as wrong and misunderstood or you can be right on the money and positively impact any number of others.
What is your own risk-reward scenario?
Keeping your mouth shut will offer zero gain but saying something can create an opportunity that you may be unable to see completely but potentially realize unharvested value.
We all like clarity and guaranteed outcomes but the uncertainty that resides within some degree of unknown chaos is where the opportunity lives. Taking the occasional leap is good for the mind and body. It’s how you develop demonstrable competency and foster your confidence.
Taking that calculated risk is the only path to the payoff of trying, learning, growing, and generating positive change in yourself and others around you. Your life is a living, active, and flexing container. Don’t mistakenly treat it like an infrequently visited wing at the museum.
Looking For Lighting
Take one minute and reflect back to time when a number of things came together unexpectedly to significantly change how you were approaching or thinking about a given topic or situation. These moments can often be personal and can occur anyplace at any time. All it takes is the right mix of new ideas, coinciding events, and timing to trigger a shift that changes everything.
When you reach a breakthrough event, things shift significantly. How you see things will change and it can potentially be uncomfortable but exhilarating at the same time. Vibrant growth professionally or personally will share this hallmark. A key thing to remember is that these breaking change events in your experiences are unique to you and an important part of creating your own story, impacting others but more importantly you.
It’s next to impossible to conjure and engineer these events on purpose or put them on a schedule, but there are things that can be done to create a more optimized environment with favorable conditions. Similar to how we can’t control the weather, yet with some insight on how weather systems organize themselves, we may be able to see an opportunity to increase the likelihood for lighting to strike, but in a positive way.
· Look for opportunities to foster spaces for growth breakthroughs.
· Create calm opportunities to think, reflect, learn, and reduce unhelpful noise.
· Take in a variety of perspectives related to “active zones” for exploration and opportunity.
· Connect to communities that are characterized by expansion over contraction thinking.
Look for lightning and you may find things get really interesting in a fantastic way.