Archive for the ‘risk’ Category
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
This week’s Thursday Thanks goes to Pam Slim and Escape from Cubicle Nation. Pam is a great coach, with a great niche: helping corporate refugees to escape cubicle hell and start their own businesses. She is also incredibly sweet, when she was in town for a conference, she met with me for coffee and gave me bucket-loads of great free advice on the coaching biz. Lastly, she wears great Southwestern jewelry, and I appreciate that because I do, too (but hers is better)
If you are yearning to be free from corporate serfdom, check out Pam’s site, her book, her classes, everything, and she will get you on your way!
Tags: career, change, clarity, leadership, success, thanks, trust
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Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
Many of my clients come to me for help with time management, staying calm under pressure, so they can show up powerfully and boldly as leaders, and I help them to do just that…and right now is one of those times when it is also necessary for me to step up my game, to improve my systems, to take some risks to wade into the pool of resistance and just get things done. My clients can tell when I am walking the talk, and when I’m not, so I do this for them as much as for me.
Tags: accountability, career, change, clarity, failure, leadership, priorities, productivity, purpose, risk, self-aware, success, to-do
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Thursday, August 19th, 2010
A colleague once told me that the key to writing productively is to be able to write “a shitty first draft.” Why? Because creating something that is already perfect takes a lot of energy, and it’s slow and painful, when it works at all, and it often doesn’t. Getting interesting but imperfect ideas out, modifying the content, then revising for flow, editing for style and punctuation, and tweaking it one last time, actually goes a lot faster because you are only focusing on one aspect of it at a time. Typically, we only see the finished product, and it is usually quite good. We don’t see the numerous revisions that brought the product from “interesting” to “good” to “amazing.” We don’t see the overflowing wastepaper basket that made it possible. Whether we are writing a report, designing a process flow, creating a marketing program or whatever, we get much more done if we allow ourselves to let go of perfect and create great stuff which we will rework later.
Read Round I of this series here ROUTINES
Read Round II here PAIN & GAIN
Read Round III here ACCOUNTABILITY BUDDY
Read Round IV here LEAN ON YOUR VALUES
Read Round V here PLANNING & TRACKING
Tags: creativity, failure, innovation, leadership, perfect, perfectionist, priorities, productivity, risk, self-aware, success, systems, trust
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Thursday, August 19th, 2010
Today I would like to thank Seth Godin, author of Lynchpin, Tribes, Purple Cow and many other wonderful books on life, marketing, art and courage. His writing is easy to read and inspiring. He has a knack for creating and articulating powerful concepts that speak to the front brain, while addressing the fears and dreams that swirl in our emotional core as well, presented in brief, clear language and metaphor. I love his work and my life is enriched by it. Go buy his books, you will be glad you did!
For last week’s Thursday Thanks on Morgana Rae of Financial Alchemy, click here
Tags: clarity, creativity, emotions, failure, innovation, leadership, risk, success, thanks, to-do
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Friday, August 13th, 2010
Jason Seiden has a great post here about low-hanging fruit. Basically, he says, low-hanging fruit is uninspiring.
‘I go apple picking every year with my family, and every year, I hear the same refrain: “Daddy, I want that one, up there! Can you put me on your shoulders? Pleeeeaaaase?” My kids don’t want to pick low hanging fruit, they want to pick the best fruit, wherever it happens to be on the tree, and—no surprise here—it usually ends up being up near the top, where fewer people can reach.’
I gotta agree, and yet that is a phrase we hear in meetings all the time, it seems to be code for “what is easy? what is low-risk?” Yet the easy, low-risk stuff is seldom the good stuff. Anyway, great metaphor for how corporations think. I don’t know about you, but I want to feel inspired, and climbing to the top of the tree for the big juicy apple is more inspiring than looking at low-hanging fruit (that others have probably already passed up…for some reason).
’nuff said, carry on, and be inspired and inspiring!
Tags: creativity, failure, innovation, priorities, risk, success
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Thursday, August 12th, 2010
OK, this is another new series. Every Thursday, I will say thank you to someone, at least one someone, who has been particularly helpful or generous. This week’s Thursday Thanks goes to Charmed Life Coach Morgana Rae (on FaceBook here), for
1> Administering a much-needed a**-kicking when I was whining about struggling with marketing;
2> Giving me A TON of great ideas on how to market my services;
3> Just being an amazing coach and awesome person. She has helped a lot of people create wealth for themselves, doing it her own magical way.I have read a lot of her stuff, it’s great!
Thanks Morgana, for all of the help, and for inspiring this new series of blog posts.
Tags: clarity, emotions, failure, leadership, listening, productivity, systems, talent, thanks, trust
Posted in change, leadership, risk, thanks | 1 Comment »
Friday, August 6th, 2010
I admire Seth Godin for his ability to make the abstract real and the opaque clear. I found this nugget on his blog today, entitled “Every Monster Has a Big Shadow.” It is short, so I will reproduce it in its entirety, and I encourage you to go to his blog and read more of his work.
Every monster has a big shadow
That’s what makes it a monster.
In fact, when you look the monster in the eye, when you calmly and carefully inspect the actual monster, you discover that he’s not so bad after all. It’s just the shadow that’s scary.
When in doubt, ignore the shadow.
So much of the work we do is learning to engage the Monster, which is real, finite and can be defeated, instead of the Shadow, which is illusory, infinite, and unbeatable. Choosing the right target gets you most of the way to victory.
Thanks, Seth!
Tags: clarity, emotions, failure, leadership, risk, success, trust
Posted in leadership, productivity, risk | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010
In this post, Steve Pavlina extols the virtues of procrastination, basically saying that there are times when your brain is trying to tell you that what you want to get done is just not meaningful. Fair enough, I have seen plenty of job-seekers procrastinate months away because they are going after a job they “should” want, not one they actually do want. So, Steve has a good point.
The flip side is that often we procrastinate because the thing we want to do is SO important that to actually undertake incurs the risk of failure, and failure at something important, something approaching a heart’s desire, really hurts, much more so than failure at something trivial, so we do the trivial, not the profound. Perverse, I know…
So how do you know? Ask yourself, what would I do if I knew I couldn’t fail? That gives you an idea of the direction you want to go, now is that the direction you are actually heading? If so, unto the breach, dear friend, if not, time to rethink life’s priorities.
Tags: career, clarity, emotions, failure, leadership, priorities, productivity, purpose, risk, success, to-do
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Thursday, June 17th, 2010
I stumbled on this great article at random and found it quite interesting, since it deals with saying NO and setting boundaries, something I have struggled with. Anyway, I can’t add to the wisdom in it, but I will give you the highlights:
We are raised, the theory runs, in one of two cultures. In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything – a favour, a pay rise– fully realising the answer may be no. In Guess culture, by contrast, you avoid “putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes… A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.”Neither’s “wrong”, but when an Asker meets a Guesser, unpleasantness results. An Asker won’t think it’s rude to request two weeks in your spare room, but a Guess culture person will hear it as presumptuous and resent the agony involved in saying no.
Self-help seeks to make us all Askers, training us to both ask and refuse with relish… But Guessers can take solace in logic: in many social situations (though perhaps not at work) the very fact that you’re receiving an anxiety-inducing request is proof the person asking is an Asker. He or she is half-expecting you’ll say no, and has no inkling of the torture you’re experiencing. So say no, and see what happens. Nothing will.
I like this because it is a personality type tool, which I just plain enjoy, that puts a very useful and pragmatic spin on a common problem.
Tags: clarity, conflict, emotions, listening, risk, self-aware, trust
Posted in conflict, leadership, listening, risk, type | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, June 1st, 2010
I mention this today because I see it as a problem,not because I have a solution…yet. One of the biggest “learnings” that many people need is to take calculated risks. Too many people think that if they kep their heads down, do what they are told and avoid making waves, they will be “safe,” whatever that means to them, and that life will be smooth, if not exactly memorable. Perhaps this was true 50 years ago during the heyday of “The Man in The Grey Flannel Suit,” but it is not true today. Regardless of your talent, performance, and savvy, you are one crazy boss, one merger, one bankruptcy at the parent company, away from losing your job. So, first, why not do what you really want? You can’t buy safety, so don’t sell your soul.
Next, the safest thing to do is to take calculated risks. Stuff may blow up, of course, but it may blow up anyway, and at least you are more in control this way. The alternative is what I call “defensive singing.” In the church where I grew up, everyone just sort of muttered through the songs, quietly, because no one wanted to noticeably sound bad. The result was really uninspiring. Is that your company or department? Many years later, I went to a church where a handful of individuals really sung loud and hard. Someone wold occasionally scrape a note, but no one cared, and the overall effect was really inspiring, uplifting music that made church much more enjoyable for me (and I went more often). Is this what you want your department or company to be? I do. Bottom line – if you avoid taking risks and avoid making mistakes and “sing defensively,” not only will your life be less inspiring in the moment, but the “product” will be less memorable as well, and therefore, you will face greater risks of having your product canceled or dropped or re-org’ed. You make the call. I know what I like to listen to.
Tags: career, change, creativity, failure, perfectionist, productivity, risk, success
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