10 Things Great Teachers Might Say About Our Current Situation

I have to admit to you that I have really been conflicted during this current COVID 19 crisis. My conflict really pulls on me because of two very strong values that I hold:

1. Human Health

2. Maximizing Wealth

Many of you know that many years ago I chose a career change. Before entering the world of leadership development, I spent many years in healthcare. My undergraduate work was in pharmacy, and after passing the state boards in Illinois, I went to work for Family Drug Stores in Decatur, Illinois. I worked as a retail pharmacist and a Long Term Care consultant. I really enjoyed those days of listening to people and helping them use medicine to live healthy and productive lives. So, modern western medicine means a lot to me. It has shaped many of my core values.

These health care values really drive my paying attention to what medical experts have to say., such as listening to epidemiologists talk about how to “flatten the curve” for Coronavirus. I check the news every evening to get more information on both a vaccine against Coronavirus and a treatment for COVID 19. Actions such as social distancing and wearing a mask make total sense to me as ways we can help to save lives and not overburden our health care system.  All of these align with my value for proper societal health care.

All of this is in total conflict with another value of mine; maximization of wealth. 

I love it when people work hard and are rewarded for it. I celebrate people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. They had an idea, took a risk, worked hard, and have made a pile of cash. Good for them. (I also have a strong value for giving back and I trust these three have done that the right way). Hard work and ingenuity are the engines of capitalism and I strongly applaud these. If you are working hard, have an idea, take a risk to implement your idea, then I will celebrate you too. Your wealth creation and generosity are two things that can really help you to live a meaningful life. 

Current Crisis

I think it is pretty easy for you to see the conflict I am feeling. Perhaps you share these values and are experiencing similar feelings. On the one hand, we have to be concerned about our health. We have to not only be self-referential but we have to care about those who might be at greater risk than we are. And this current health crisis has put 30 million people in the United States alone out of work. Many of them in the travel, entertainment, and food service industries which hit my hometown of Orlando really hard. 

Where do you turn when you have a values conflict? How do you resolve issues like the one I am experiencing?

My experience is that far too many of us turn to our emotions to guide what we are experiencing. The problem with this is that our emotions are meant more to be a thermometer than a thermostat. Emotion is to inform you so you can make a decision to act. We can get into a lot of trouble if we allow our emotions to have too much input into the decisions we make.

In addition to what I am thinking myself, I like to turn to others to see if there is anything I can learn from them to help me resolve my conflict. I have learned a lot from many of you who read this blog over the years, so turning to friends and colleagues is one place I seek information. 

From time to time I also like to turn to the great thinkers of the world to see if I can glean any wisdom from what they have written in the past. Not about Coronavirus, of course, but more in general about learning in crisis. 

With that, I present you with 10 quotes from some of the greatest teachers from philosophy, religion, and psychology. I thought it might be kind of interesting to get some 30,000 foot perspective on learning from crisis. 

It has struck me that all the misfortunes of men spring from the single cause that they are unable to stay quietly in one room. ~ Pascal

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The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet. ~ Aristotle

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The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. ~ Bertrand Russell

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Who among you can add one day to his life by worrying? ~ Jesus of Nazareth

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Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. ~ George Santayana

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Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as his successes. ~ John Dewey

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The mind is the effect, not the cause. ~ Daniel Dennett

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To understand is to perceive patterns. ~ Isaiah Berlin

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Hope and fear cannot alter the season. ~ Chogyam Trungpa

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The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
~ William James

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And if I might include one more (consider it a bonus) from a modern-day philosopher on investing and human behavior:

When forced to choose, I will not trade even a nights sleep for the chance of extra profits.
~ Warren Buffett

At the end of our current crisis, I think it might be the philosophers who have the most to say about the conflict in values I am experiencing.

Are you experiencing any similar conflicts? If so, let me know, I would love to hear more about your story.

You Need This More Than Toilet Paper During The COVID Crisis

The famous UCLA basketball coach, John Wooden, has been quoted as saying, “Whatever you do in life, surround yourself with smart people who will argue with you.”

What kind of impulse control does it take as a leader to not only surround yourself with smart people but to listen to them even when they don’t agree with you?

I think in life it would be so much easier to surround myself with smart people who think just like I do. Life would roll along and I would seemingly have a lot fewer problems. Except then as life rolls along, I would not get a very clear picture of reality.

 If I am honest, in many organizations I have the chance to study and observe the following:

• Hire really smart people

• Spend a lot of money training them on skills and the culture of the organization

• Then they tell them HOW they want things done, instead of WHAT it is they are to do

• When the person does not do exactly like the person in power mandates, we claim they are just a poor fit

• The employee comes to us with a different idea or a different perspective that flies in the face of what we think, and then that really smart person we hired initially, all of a sudden has become clueless.

• Then we ask this person to leave or we put them in a job where we don’t have to hear them nearly as often.

True wisdom is about managing your emotions so that you are able to listen more intently to understand where this smart person you hired is really coming from.

In no way am I advocating that you have to listen to these smart people and then automatically align yourself with their perspective so that everyone feels good.

No!

However, listening to other perspectives is a core component necessary to make wise decisions.

Wisdom In Leadership

I would argue, and have in many other writings, that wisdom is a central and yet often ignored element in leadership. Effective leadership behavior fundamentally depends upon a leader’s ability to solve complex social problems.

It is not hard to argue that the complexity that exists because of this global pandemic is causing massive social problems. You can find a list of those social issues in any newspaper or internet article since March 15, 2020. so I am not going to spend time listing them here. Some of them are quite serious and deal with actual issues of life and death. Others are much more trivial, such as my local Publix being consistently out of toilet paper when I go shopping. 

I am not much of a philosopher and do not have any formal training in the discipline. That stated I think history is going to really look back on this current crisis, along with our ability to solve some really complex social problems and ask, “Where was Wisdom?”

I know I am not the first to write it, but, toilet paper…please. If we can not figure out with our advanced supply chain knowledge how to get basic things like toilet paper, where are we really as a society?

As you contemplate this for yourself, do not fret nor feel too much shame. The question has really been asked since the beginning of time. All people whether ancient or civilized have wrestled with this idea of wisdom.

• The ancient Sumerians, whose writings served as the foundation of both Greek and Roman cultures asked this kind of question.

• Early Egyptian writings which were the precursors to the Hebrew writings that make up the Old Testament in the Bible lamented about wisdom.

• In the Old Testament, the most famous wisdom book might be the Book of Proverbs which laments; “Some people laugh about wise words. A person like that does not love someone saying, ‘You are doing wrong things’. (S)he will not go to wise people (Proverbs 15:12, Easy English Version).

• Of course, the ancient Greeks were known as lovers of wisdom:

• Socrates “…if he was the wisest person, it was because he did not think he knew that which he did not know."

• Plato. According to Plato scholars, he saw the true mark of wisdom as “the very character of the person as it was revealed by the person’s deliberate choices and dispositions"

• Aristotle saw the mark of wisdom as prudence; The very character of the person as revealed through individual choice and disposition.

• Saint Augustine was the first to blend the practical prudence of the ancients with the belief of and obedience to an all-powerful, all-knowing God.  Augustine argued we must vigorously desire wisdom to obtain it. He was passionate about the hope in the possibility of obtaining wisdom and that our desire for it must be found in faith in God.

• More modern-day researchers have defined wisdom as “a special kind of real-life process that is accomplished after a person cognitively makes an unusual integration, embodies his or her ideas through action, and hence brings forth positive effects to both self and others.”  

Wisdom Calls

As a leader during these difficult days, can you hear wisdom calling you? She is! (Most texts give wisdom a female persona).

Can you hear her? What is she saying to you as a leader in your organization? Are you taking the time to listen?

I love the imagery in the ancient book of Proverbs where Wisdom takes on human character and is seen in the street calling out, “How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge?” (Proverbs 1:20-22).

The call to wisdom implies the capability to be able to implement right judgments in life. This wisdom calling has actually been studied for as long difficult decisions have existed.

It is my hope for you as you make difficult decisions during these days that you will indeed be wise. That you will listen to too advisors. That you will delay your impulses. That you will stop and think. That you will be compassionate and to not think of yourself as better than others.

I will be talking more about this idea of wisdom in my Facebook live event on Thursday of this week at noon eastern time. I hope you can join me. If not, there will be a recording available for you to watch when you have time.

In addition, I put together this tool to help you think about some core fundamental elements of wisdom. Feel free to download it. There is no cost. I hope it helps you in your organization and in your life to make wise decisions.

Unprecedented...Really?

I noticed something about the conversations I was having with my clients last week. I was repeatedly using a word that, until recent weeks, I don’t think I used all that much.

Unprecedented. 

The word means “never done or known before.”

On one hand, there are a lot of specific things I am experiencing for the first time. 

For example:

• This is the first global pandemic I have been through in my lifetime

• According to the Wall Street Journal on April 16, 2020, over 22 million people sought unemployment benefits

• People are wearing masks at the grocery store

• It is hard to purchase paper towels and toilet paper

• A drop of 2997 points in the Dow Jones Industrial Average

• I can’t fly to Peoria and have coffee with my mom at her kitchen table

• I can’t fly to Ohio and hug my two grandbabies! 

All of these seemingly unprecedented events were starting to cause me some stress. I could feel it all building. As I would think about the pandemic and the many people dying, I get a little stressed because I don’t want to get sick and die. I go to the grocery store and see all the people wearing masks and I can not buy paper towels and I get a little stressed.  When I read the news at night, half of the stock market pundits say the market is going to recover and the other half say it is going back down. This uncertainty adds stress.  I can see my two precious granddaughters on FaceTime, but I cannot hug them…wanna talk about stress?!

Pretty soon, I can feel all of this stress adding up. I can actually start to feel the weight of it all. I think it is starting to affect my mental game, my positive attitude, my overall optimism.

Then it hit me like a blinding flash of light, what I know about stress is killing me.

That last statement might seem a little odd, but hang with me. I want to unpack it with you.

Henry Thompson, in his book, The Stress Effect, draws this conclusion, “When stress increases, cognitive and emotional intelligence are compromised. Perception changes and, in many cases, become less accurate and more biased.”  When complexity increases and our control decreases we do not see things as they really are and we mentally run to our familiar comfort zones.

And if that is not enough the Mayo Clinic cites body, mood, and behavioral effects like headache, anxiety, and overeating, along with stomach upset, feeling overwhelmed, and exercising less.

Like you, the last two paragraphs were not new information for me. I know that stress affects my decision making and I know it makes me anxious and causes me to feel overwhelmed at times. I also know that if I let myself slip, I will take on other unhealthy behaviors like overeating and sleep difficulties. 

What I know about stress is indeed killing me.

As I was feeling the weight of all this stress, I came to realize that I needed a very different response. So, in my journaling this morning, I spent some time just writing and trying to figure out all this seemingly unprecedented stuff, and the stress it was causing me.

Out of nowhere, another blinding flash of light: is this event that we are experiencing really unprecedented?

Just Hear Me Out

At first glance when thinking about the impact of Covid-19, there might be an argument for describing it with the word “unprecedented.”

I don’t ever remember not being able to go out and have dinner in a restaurant. Certainly, that has never happened before in my life. From my very first memories as a kid growing up I could go into Steak and Shake with my Aunt Betty and order a fried egg sandwich on white bread and those classic french fries.

But as I was thinking about this micro event of dining in at Steak and Shake back in the 1960’s, it really isn’t the dining in the restaurant, but more about my ability to have control to do what I want, when I want.

Yet none of us always gets to do what we want, when we want.

Is this unprecedented feeling I am having really all that unprecedented? Or is it a lack of control I am experiencing in the moment?

I have been pretty open in this column, and in my conversations with my clients, and even on the Facebook Watch Parties (sign up for my next one here) I have been hosting about how I am starting my day. In fact, just yesterday I was on a coaching call and a client said to me, “So, Scott, tell me how you are starting your day?”

Here is what I told him:

• I am walking the dog

• I am exercising

• I am having coffee and reading my Bible 

• I am spending some time in quiet reflection and meditation

• I then go into my office and start working

Then I told him I am really digging this routine. One thing I did have to change was looking at the news. I open the Newsfeed on my iPhone and skim the headlines to see if there is something new or breakthrough that happened overnight. Then I close the app.  I don’t want to infect my day with a bunch of news I already know is bad.

Why am I telling you all this, you might be asking?

The Point

Today I am in my morning routine and reading my Bible and one of the verses in the study I am doing is Ecclesiastes 1:9 which reads, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

I really had to stop dead in my tracks.

How could something be unprecedented and yet there be nothing new under the sun?

While the microcosm of what we are all experiencing right now might be new, the lack of control we are experiencing certainly is not.

The inability to control our situations or our circumstances is not new. For centuries, people have had to adapt and change because of what is going on around them. And for centuries, these events have been stressful.

What I am asking myself is, “Do I have to succumb to the stress of the situation?” 

What I know about stress is killing me, and if I don’t change something, the stress just might do me in.  

I will have a free tool for you to download after my Facebook WatchParty event this Thursday at noon Eastern time.  I hope you will be able to join me!  I have a very special guest who will join me to help us continue this discussion around stress. See you Thursday!

5 Strategies to Be Resilient in Stressful Times

I don’t know about you, but this last week was a tough one for me. Not hard in a physical way, but more just feeling the weight of what is going on in our world.

Anytime I go through a tough time in my life I am always looking for lessons that I can learn.  I really think it is during the tough times in life that we can learn the most about what we need to do to live in wisdom.  Last week I wrote quite a bit on the subject of Fear and Wisdom. If you missed it, you can grab that blog by clicking here.  I also did a free tool download to help you make wise choices in your life and if you missed that tool you can click here for the free download. 

One of those tough lessons for me happened early in my college career. But I have to give you a little historical context for it to make sense. 

In high school, I loved chemistry. I really think it was a combination of my teacher, Mr. Valosio, and being able to have a Bunson Burner to play with during the labs. Chemistry just sort of made sense to me for some odd reason. It was fun because all the known elements in the universe were pictured on a poster behind where Mr. Valosio taught. All you had to do was combine two or more of them and “Bam” you had something like water. Combining Carbon and Hydrogen gave way to the very backbone of all life.  Again, I know I am weird, but I just got into it.  

Hence, like almost anything you enjoy spending time doing, you tend to do pretty well at it. My high school chemistry grades were always pretty good. Just to be clear, my grades in other subjects were not always as good as chemistry, which I think puzzled the guidance counselor when I was making applications to college. She could be puzzled, I really didn’t care, I just liked chemistry.

So when I went off to college and was in Chemistry 101, the lectures were really quite boring. I had already learned everything the professor was talking about, so I decided that attendance at that 8 am class every Monday thru Friday was…well…optional. No one took attendance. There were 400 kids in the lecture hall. I already knew everything they were talking about, so I decided an extra hour's sleep never hurt anyone.

The first test came around about 3 weeks or so into the semester.  I went to class that day to take the test.   

You couldn’t tell by the grade I got — a “D.”

Mr. Valosio would have been so disappointed in me. I was so disappointed in myself. I loved chemistry. How could this happen?

Part of the deal in Chemistry 101 was if you did not get an “A” on the first test, you had to make an appointment with your lab instructor to go over the exam. So I did. 

I walked into Professor Brown’s lab and showed her my test. It was embarrassing for me. Her first question for me cut right to the point.  “How much did you study for this test,” she asked?  

“I didn’t” was my honest reply. I proceeded to tell her I had all this stuff in high school and I already knew it…Her second statement cut right to the point, “Obviously you don’t know it” she said.  “I recommend you find some discipline in your life, Mr. Livingston, or you might just find yourself not a part of the Drake Pharmacy program much longer.”

Some very well-timed words from professor Brown. Quite a stressful moment for me in my young college career.  But one I learned from.

5 Strategies for Being Resilient in Stressful Times

I think anytime we go through something difficult, it is all about learning. In order to learn, we have to develop some resiliency.  As I reflect on the conversation I had with Professor Brown back then, it would have been easy for me to just quit. Pharmacy was a difficult major. No one would have blamed me and I am sure I could have done something that would not have required an 8am class every day of the week (which I had, by the way, for every semester except one my entire college career).

I know things are tough for you right now.  Tough maybe not physically, but for sure emotionally. Everyone is experiencing this COVID 19 in a unique way.  So I thought perhaps some strategies might be useful as you navigate these difficult times.

1. Reframe the context. Most of us are sheltering in place these days. Instead of a burden and feeling the heaviness of being at home, why not make the most of it? My wife and I are taking the opportunity in the evenings to connect with some old friends over FaceTime.  I have one client whose family cooked dinner together over Zoom. They all had the same ingredients for the meal and they talked to each other while they cooked, then ate dinner together.

2. Choose your focus.  I am really trying to limit the amount of time I am looking at the news. I am addicted to the story; the epidemiology, the race for a vaccine, the updates on treatments, how it spreads, the whole thing. What I have to do is choose to only look at the news once a day. I do this in the evening after I finish working. I choose to start my day reading scripture and listening to an inspirational or informative podcast. I want to be in the right frame of mind when I start working.

3. Find the good.  There is a lot of seriousness these days. People are dying. People have lost their jobs. Businesses are going under, some to never return. A lot of seriousness. But just because something is serious doesn’t mean we cannot find the good. I am not saying there is something good about someone getting sick or dying. I don’t want you to think I am that dark or so optimistic that I don’t live in the real world. What I am asking you to consider here is whether in the midst of all of this, is there something good?  I had a client tell me the other day that he no longer has a 1.5hr commute, so after work, he and his 10-year-old daughter are going for a walk. Now that is a commute that has value!  How can you find the good in what is happening in your world?

4. Helping or Harming? Consider your thought life.  Are my thoughts and emotions helping me or harming me right now?  I was reading the news the other day I started to get a bit anxious about the impact that COVID 19 might have on my business. What if my clients started to close? What if there was not enough business when things returned? None of that thinking was helping me. So I sat down and wrote out a one-page plan on what I need to do to stay engaged with my clients. If you really are in danger, it is helpful to be afraid. If you are really not in danger, then a plan is a much better idea.

5. Make stress your friend.  We all have stress. If you are feeling it, then it is trying to communicate something to you.  If you are feeling cooped up and it is stressing you out, then go outside for a walk. I know its raining, who cares, take an umbrella. If you are feeling lonely, like most of us are these days, then pick up the phone and call a friend. You have friends. If you don’t have a friend, pick up the phone and call me. My point here is that your stress is telling you something. Look it straight in the eye and do something productive and positive that will help to make it go down. 

You don’t have to do all 5 of these. This is not a list of steps to walk through. If you are feeling stressed, pick the one you think might be the most helpful.

I picked up the phone after my meeting with Professor Brown and called Mr. Volosio. He talked some sense into me. I thank him to this day for helping me in my time of need and for graduating from pharmacy school. 

Next Steps

If you are interested in learning more about these 5 strategies, I’d like to extend an invitation to participate in a (4) session development opportunity, facilitated by me, utilizing Facebook’s video streaming platform. I guarantee there will be no sales pitch or advertising - just content. You can join one of them or all of them, as each session is independent of the others. Join as many as you would like. I would love to have you!

All you need in order to participate is a Facebook account (free to create if you don’t already have one) and a desire to connect and learn. Over the 4 weeks, I plan to cover topics such as:

•  “5 Strategies for Staying Resilient During Times of Ambiguous Change”  

• “What You Know About Stress is Killing You” 

• “Making Wise Decisions in Scary Circumstances”

• “Leading with Emotional Intelligence When Stress is High”

To begin, simply CLICK HERE and request to join my private Facebook group. All content will be facilitated within this group each Thursday at 12pm Eastern Time for 4 weeks, beginning Thursday, April 16th and ending Thursday, May 7th. 

If you know of a leader who might benefit from this opportunity, feel free to forward them this email. I would love to connect!

Is it Fear or Wisdom?

To say there is a lot going on in our world right now is likely the understatement of the year!

I find myself going from big picture, what is happening across the world with Coronavirus, to the minutia of checking my bank account daily to make sure I have the funds I need to pay my staff and business partners.

Thoughts like:

• Will this be over and will folks be back to work by the end of April? If so, I think I have the resources to weather that storm. The fact is, I have more than enough to make it through April, so should I be generous to others who are really struggling. 

• If this current crisis goes through May, my retained earnings should be enough to carry me through, but maybe I should back off my generosity a bit.

• If my business is not as interrupted as others, what should my response be?

• If my business tanks because of Coronavirus, how should I respond?

• Is this an opportunity to launch into some new areas of work I have always thought about but never really had the time to focus on?

I am sure you are evaluating your work, and, for that matter, your personal life as well.  

• Some of you have fallen in love with working from home and are trying to think of ways to approach your boss to lobby for a more permanent home office deal.

• Some of you can’t wait to get back to the socialization of your team; this working from home is driving you crazy.

• Some of you thought your house was maybe too big for the number of people who now live there, only to find your college kids all came home and now you actually could double your square footage and still be cramped.

• Some of you had been thinking about giving up your gym membership to save money only to realize you would now pay double just to go workout with a coach.

• Some of you have learned to order your groceries online and just drive up to have someone load them in your car.

One thing is for sure, Coronavirus will cause many of us to rethink portions of our lives, and that is not necessarily a bad thing.

As we rethink our personal and business lives let’s make sure we are doing it with wisdom and not out of fear.

What is it that you are afraid of? If I do not have any retained earnings in my business and if I am not getting any new work, then I should be afraid that my business might not make it. That is legitimate fear. Those are the facts.

How This works with Leaders

When I am coaching clients and we are trying to discern whether something is wise or not we always look at the facts. 

• Not what I emotionally want the facts to be. 

• Not the longing desires of my heart.

• Not what it would take to please the person I am trying to impress.

• Not irrational propaganda or rumors I might have heard.

No! What are the facts?

When I ask the question “What are you afraid of?” I get back answers like:

• I don’t know

• I am not really sure

• That _________ could happen if the stars align exactly right across every galaxy in the universe.

That is when I know we are dealing with a fear or an anxiety that is not going to help us make a wise decision.

As I am thinking about my own business and how I am going make it to the other side of Coronavirus, I am looking at how long I can pay everyone and what kind of new business I can bring in. I am putting those numbers in a spreadsheet, just like I always have, and I am pulling out my journal and I am reflecting on what those numbers are telling me. 

If my fear is an overarching, overwhelming sense that the world is collapsing, that is not helping me. We need to make decisions not on what I emotionally project might happen, but what the facts are telling me. I have developed a flow chart - if this happens, I will do A. If that happens, I will do B. The decision is already made and is informed by the facts of the situation. 

What I am trying to communicate here is if you are trying to discern between fear and wisdom, the facts of the situation are your friend.

Here is a little checklist you can use to discern if your decision is full of wisdom or full of fear. If you use this list you will most always end up with a decision that is much more wise than it is fearful. I used this model years ago when I wrote my dissertation on wisdom and am so thankful for Dr. Vern Ludden who conceptualized it way back in 2009.

• Start with what you THINK the facts are

• Think CRITICALLY about the facts

• How do these facts AUTHENTICALLY align with your character?

• What have been your past EXPERIENCES with these facts?

• As you REFLECT on these experiences, what are the facts telling you?

• Do you have the COURAGE to put the facts into action?

• Have you pressure tested the facts with a larger COMMUNITY of advisors?

• What did the above DELIBERATIONS tell you about the facts?

• As you COLLABORATE with others do you get a positive impression about the facts?

• Some of you who bring SPIRITUALITY into your fact discernment will call upon God to show you direction

Now you are ready to EVALUATE what you THINK the facts are.

Using an informed process like the one I outlined above can help you decide if you are using wisdom in your decision making, or if you are subjecting yourself to irrational fear or anxiety.

I wish you and your family all the best as you navigate this current crisis.

Every Leader Needs to Acknowledge This One Thing Right Now

I LOVE MY TEAM’S AMYGDALA!

Let me explain why...

These are for sure some crazy times we are living in. I just spoke to my neighbor, Bill, who is almost 80 years old at the mailbox. “I have never witnessed anything like this in my life,” Bill told me.

Then I called my mom, who is 83, and asked her, “Mom have you ever experienced anything like this in your life?”  “No, I do remember your Aunt Betty telling stories of when she was a baby (Aunt Betty would be 98 this year if she was still with us) of being quarantined with your Grandmother because she had developed a case of Scarlet Fever.”

So, unprecedented for sure. And full of emotion for all of us and the people we lead on our teams.

My daddy always told me there are 3 situations where I needed to be really careful when making decisions:

1. When I had been drinking. 

2. When I was in a heightened emotional state.

3. After a significant loss.

I think the first one is self-explanatory, except on occasion I will get a call from a client who has said something or done something or punched something when too much alcohol was involved. I have witnessed first hand at least 5 people lose good careers over too much wine or whiskey at a company dinner. 

Now, on the heightened emotional state, I am pretty sure this was a warning from my daddy about being with a girl. However, with the current state of affairs in our world, are we not in a heightened emotional state? Fear and panic have gripped our society. 

I was listening to a podcast of Dave Ramsey the other day. For those of you who do not know Dave, he is famous for helping people get out of debt so they can lead generous and giving lives.  A lady called in who was 67 years old, along with her 70 year old husband. They were frightened by the “crashing” of the stock market and sold everything they had invested. Please try to resist judging these souls. I am sure we all have opinions about if they should be in the market, or if they should have sold or not. Fine, you can have your opinion, but I was stunned by the emotion and lack of logical, rational thinking that had overcome them.

Fear and panic will cause all of us to do things we normally would not do.

Here is a short video where I explain, in very simple terms what happens in your brain when this is going on.

The final situation we leaders need to recognize are times of significant loss.  

In my younger days I used to do some counseling type work at the church we went to. Often times we would be called to provide support to someone who had just experienced the loss of a spouse or loved one.  In our training, we learned to listen to them and help them unpack their feelings. In addition, we were to encourage them to not make any significant decisions for about a year. People need time to grieve the loss and they need time to process what has happened to them. We tried to help them form a plan for moving forward day to day without making any big decisions that would be life-changing. 

You may know some people who have experienced a significant loss right now. Many of us know people who just 3 short weeks ago had vibrant careers but are now being laid off or furloughed. With that in mind, I wanted to give you some ideas to help you connect with the emotional moments we are all experiencing.

3 Strategies To Love Your Teams Amygdala

1. Find ways to reduce or eliminate unneeded stressors. You may have someone who needs to go comfort a spouse who just lost a job very unexpectedly, and your policy doesn’t allow for something like this.  It is time to put relationships and people ahead of policy. Or someone might be working from home and their internet speed isn’t high enough for quality HD video. This is not the time to call them out and create stress because of petty items. 

2. Choose leadership strategies that engage the Neo-Cortex. Remember the Amygdala is the strategic inflection point if good, creative, and reflective thinking is occurring, or if the person is going to be in Fight/Flight/Freeze mode. Here are some ways to help engage the thinking part of the brain:

   1. Tell Stories - Rather than give orders or lists for people to do, engage them in a story and remind them of how their task is helping the organization or the customer during times like this. Stories calm people down, help them think about the characters, and engages their personal creativity.

   2. Be Optimistic - Optimism is not pollyannaish, it is being hopeful for the future. We all know this virus is going to be short-term. In 10 years we will look back and likely be critical of many things we did in the moment. Help your team have hope for the future. We are all going to ride on airplanes again, and stay in hotels, and go on vacation again. Sure, there might be some short-term adjustments for all of us, but the future is bright for your company. You are in a storm right now, but storms do not last forever.

   3. Express Gratitude - At the beginning of every day let’s thank people for being on our team. And make it the last thing we do at night. Thank them for coming to work (even online). Tell them how important they are to the organization.  How much you appreciate them.  Gratitude that is real and heartfelt calms things down and helps people pull through tough times.

3. Give Them A Plan. A few years ago, my good friend and colleague, Dr. Tim Gardner, and I wrote a one-day training called: What You Know About Stress Is Killing You. (The title is meant to be cute and is not a typo). One of the most important things you can do as a leader right now is to sit down one on one (social distancing rules apply) and help them identify places they are stressed and to help them write a plan that would alleviate the stress.  Once it is written down, they can cognitively focus on what to do. Sure, it might feel a little directive, and it is!  If they are stressed and the amygdala is preventing clear thinking then a written plan to follow is just what the doctor would order.

It is my hope that these strategies might be useful to you. If you are a leader of leaders, why not sit down with your team and go over this list? Talk about how they can help their team perform under such trying and difficult times.  

If I can help, please do no hesitate to call or write.  If you think a workshop on emotional intelligence or stress would be helpful for your team, I would be happy to do this for you. We can do it online in a day or take an hour each day, whatever might work best for your team structure.

Best Hopes,

Scott

The Paradox Parable of the Called Leader

Once upon a time right around now, in an organization not far from here, sits Hero, the leader of the whole thing. She is not having a very good day, although both the quantitative and qualitative metrics upon which her performance are measured look good. No, let's not fool ourselves, the numbers are actually great. Hero is in her element. She loves her role and she is really good at it. She has found her niche in life. Some of the articles she read recently in Scholarly Organization Journal would say Hero has found her calling. 

By all accounts, Hero should be having a very good day. Indeed this should be a very, very good day. 

She has a late meeting with an influential member of the board of directors, Distance. Distance oversees the selection, compensation, and retention of the executive team. The relationship Hero has with Distance is a good one, even though Hero has never felt like the relationship was that close. In fact, Hero has only ever met with Distance in board meetings and on executive retreats. She was really looking forward to finally meeting one-on-one with Distance and aligning goals for the upcoming year.

Yes, it really, really should have been a good day. 

Hero, even started her morning with 15 minutes of quiet reflection using her favorite bible verse as the focus of her morning contemplation. She turned in her bible to Proverbs 3:5-6 which reads “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding, in all your ways acknowledge him and he will direct your path.”  Because of the complexity of her organization, Hero often finds herself turning to her spiritual connections for wisdom in decision-making.  Since she often feels the magnitude of hundreds of people whose lives are impacted by her decisions, connecting with her spiritual nature helps her to realize that she is not the center of the universe. Hero remembers attending a conference where she heard a speaker* say, "Humility is like a sock with a hole in it, it's realizing what is not there that really matters."

As Hero sat in quiet contemplation what really jumped out at her in this morning's reading was the instruction not to lean on her own understanding. This was quite a puzzling paradox. The instruction seems to say that Hero should not put her trust in or be supported by the structures of all that she had learned over the course of her 50 some odd years on earth. 

As Hero focused her attention on these words “lean not on your own understanding” her mind started to drift….

          I have always felt my business and my life are solid. My marriage of 30 years to Loveofmylife is rock solid. As for the workplace, I  have been complemented by Boardchair that I show excellent critical thinking and a strong ability to discern between very viable, but distinctly different options when a decision is needed.  My experiences have been formed from a very good academic pedigree that lead to an excellent job right out of school. Each opportunity I have been given in life seemed to build perfectly as a jumping off point for my next career opportunity.  I really can’t believe it, here I sit three years into this leadership role really trying to fully appreciate what I have accomplished…no that's not right, why do I always do that? It is what the team has accomplished. If it wasn’t for their hard work and dedication to the mission we would be nowhere. 

As she sat and stared at her journal where she keeps these reflective thoughts she got an overwhelming feeling of gratitude and appreciation for who she is and what she has been able to accomplish.

Then Hero remembered the words of her Coach who told her that when journaling, if her mind wanders, she should come back to the thought she was reflecting on, Lean not on your own understanding.  She even remembered proper meditation technique. A good day, are you kidding? 

Yes, this really should have been one of those.

Now time doesn’t allow us to tell you in any detail about the excellent workout that Hero had that morning, nor the healthy breakfast she enjoyed (perfectly balanced between carbs and proteins). We just really don’t have the space to discuss her commute to work where it seemed like she was the only person on the road, and not one car pulled in front of her to cut her off. Not one. When does that ever happen?

We wish there was time to tell you about all the productive meetings Hero had that day, the 20-minute nap she enjoyed in the afternoon, and the very productive afternoon session she had with her Coach. Time and space just don’t allow. Sorry. But all that aside...

Really and truly this should have been a perfect game of a day.

Oh yeah, Hero got in a 45 minute Hot Yoga class before her meeting with Distance. 

Good Day? Ha. 

And yet, to quote from one of Hero's favorite childhood books,

 “This is an awful, no good, very bad day.” 

You see, Hero had her late meeting with Distance, who told Hero her services were no longer needed by the organization. The board wanted to go a different direction. Sure there was certainly acknowledgment of all her positive results. Distance thanked her for all her effort. But in the end, the board decided they needed a new focus and direction (it is highly recommended, that if this was a real organization, who had a real board who made decisions like this, and who issued real stock; that you sell as fast as you can.)

Distance said the announcement would be made in 2 weeks and that they would like to throw a party for Hero. Yes, you read that right, the board fired Hero and wanted to celebrate it.  "Who does that? “Hero asked her Coach when she called to provide the update on her meeting with Distance, 

Indeed, this was not a good day. 

"But one day does not a life make. Nor does what happens on any single day ever define us. It can have an impact for sure, but is in no way a full picture of who we are". —Coach

Now if Coaches are good at one thing, they are good at asking the right question at the right time. They are not very good at providing quotes to be used in a blog post.

Hero’s Coach sat with her in silence as Hero contemplated this day that should have been so good and yet felt not that way at all.

“It's not if something bad might happen in your life but when." Those are the words Hero spoke that broke the silence that enveloped the coaching session (they are also words that will end up some day in a blog post, quoted by Coach.) “The real question to be answered is, How am I going to respond?”  Coach knew what Hero was saying, that leaders are often defined by their resilience in the face of setbacks. Having a positive optimistic long term outlook is what trust is all about.

And now you know why she is my Hero.

*This quote is from Dr. Jay Wood, author of Virtue Epistemology, taken from a lecture at Indiana Wesleyan University. Hero hopes she heard this as the speaker intended.

5 Tips Based on 15 Years of Working from Home

We are all entering some very interesting times as knowledge workers. The Coronavirus pandemic is causing many of us to rethink assumptions we never thought we would have to consider.  As a result, many of you who have maybe worked a day or two from home now and then might find yourself working from home for the next several weeks.

This is especially true as schools decide to move to online formats and are requiring students to stay home, forcing many workers into new scenarios that they have never faced before when it comes to working remotely.

There is some good news in this. A Harvard study in 2019 stated that people who can work from when they choose were 4.4% more productive than those who had fixed, rigid work requirements.  I actually was a bit shocked and thought this might be higher, but my fear is that not everyone who does choose where they work from follows the same discipline they would in an office environment. 

So, I thought I would give some of my thoughts on how I have navigated these “free to choose your workspace” waters for myself (although for some this may be a forced free choice).  

These are not based on any research. I will typically spend several hours researching and crafting a blog post, but this post is different. It is just my opinion.  What I write may not fit you or your style, and that’s okay.

1. Guard Your Attitude Against Loneliness.  I am starting with attitude because many of you really enjoy the social aspect of work.  If you had a question about something you were used to popping your head in someone’s office to get an answer  When you are working from home, the feeling of loneliness can be very real.  I like to intentionally schedule meetings early in the morning and in the late afternoon that have a “check in” social component to them.  I always have a cup of coffee (you substitute your social non-alcoholic beverage of choice) in the morning and my seltzer water (love that fizz) in the afternoon. There is something that just feels social for me about sharing a beverage with someone while we are talking.  I also try, if at all possible, to do these calls over video chat.  I just love Zoom, it is so easy to use and within 30 seconds I can schedule the meeting, put it on my calendar, and send the invite to someone.  

2. Carve Out Dedicated Work Space. I realize this work from home scenario many are facing may not have given you time to put together a complete dedicated office with a door and a desk and comfy leather chair. You really don’t need all of that, anyway, but you do need a place that is going to be your designated work space. It is important that you dedicate that space and that it is not in front of the TV while Fox News broadcasts all the latest scare news. Having a dedicated space will tell your brain this is now where you work. If you can avoid it, try not to make the kitchen table your office, because this is likely grand central station in your house, if it is at all like mine, and it is really hard to have meetings and concentrate with a lot of traffic. 

3. Keep Your Routine. If you are used to being at the office by 7:30am, continue to get up at the same time. If you shower in the morning, then by all means continue this habit. Get dressed like you are going to work and be at your desk by 7:30am, ready to engage.  What you may find is that when you don’t have the 15 or 30 or 60 or 90 minute commute, you can put that time to good use and start that book you have always wanted to get to but just never had the time.  If you eat lunch, take a lunch break. You can still schedule lunch meetings if you want, just warm up your soup or make your sandwich and do the meeting over video conference.  One thing I find about working from home is that I have to get up and take more frequent stretches and walks.  I try and keep them around 5 or 10 minutes, but I try and get up at least every 60 to 90 minutes and stretch.  Then, end your day when you would typically leave your office.  Pick up your book and do another chapter to account for your commute.  When you are finished working, then close your device and be finished.  WARNING: Working from home is not a time to sort of work while you clean the shower that has not been cleaned in a while. Your organization is still expecting full work productivity. Don’t fall into the trap of half-working half-whatever else needs done. 

4. Communicate Expectations.  Most people who you work with will understand that everyone is in a new normal. Your family and friends may not. They may see this as, well, mom and dad are home, so it must be like the weekend.  I have found it really important to communicate with my wife that when I am working, it is like I am not here. Now, if there is an emergency, then by all means come get me. But this should be more rare than a total eclipse of the sun. If you clearly establish boundaries I think you will find you will be just as, if not more, productive. Running out of Mac and Cheese or toilet paper has to wait until you would normally get home to resolve the issue.  I have found that a kind word like, “Is this an emergency or can it wait until I am finished working” works well for me and helps establish appropriate boundaries.  

5. Pay Attention to Habits. You are in an interesting space of getting to form some new habits. For this, I think we do turn to the research. Wendy Wood, in her book Good Habits/Bad Habits, reviewed 64 studies and found that for some behaviors, people’s actions aligned with their intentions. For example, if they intended to get a flu shot or enroll in a class, they did as they intended. The stronger the plan for these one off type things the more likely they were to do them. But for other behaviors and actions that are repeated more often, intentions didn’t matter that much. Things like taking a bus or recycling, for example. People might want to recycle, but turns out that intention doesn’t matter that much. Persistence and the formation of habit have little to do with will power or the mere desire to accomplish.  What is needed is repetition of the desired behavior. So, as you think about working from home, put all your good intentions aside and practice what it is that you want your behavior to be.

I hope you found this interesting to think through as we all navigate these most difficult of days.   If you know someone who is going to be working from home why not forward this post to them and encourage them to sign up for the blog?

 If you have ideas on how to be successful working from home, please send me a note with your thoughts. I promise to give you credit for your idea if I do a “reader’s hacks” type post in the future.

Best Hopes,

Scott

The Battle Rages Between Impulse Control and Rationalization

So I am flying home from Chattanooga last night after working with one of my favorite clients. It was a good day of coaching, working with this firm to help grow their leaders for the next level of leadership.

I got to the airport around 5:15 for my 6:08 flight to Charlotte, then home to Orlando, arriving around 10:45pm.  Everything was on time and I was really relaxed and feeling great. A little hungry, but since I had about 90 minutes in Charlotte (CLT), my plan was to stop and grab a salad in the terminal. I have really been focused on staying healthy since Christmas and the diet and exercise plan really seemed to be working for me.  As I was reflecting on this plan, I received an alert over my phone…

Delayed flight to CLT now departing at 6:35pm.  No problem, still time to grab a salad and make it to my gate on time.

About 10 minutes later, another alert: Delayed flight to CLT now departing at 7:04pm. My timeline for having a relaxing salad in CLT was shrinking as I was down to about 40 minutes to connect to my Orlando flight. 

I can still do it. I might have to grab the salad and eat on the plane but this night would not be the first when I would have to do that.  

It was interesting, I could feel the tension mounting and the stress increasing as my timeline slowly slipped away. About 10 minutes later a flash came across my phone:

Delayed flight to CLT now departing at 7:25pm.

Well, I just missed my flight to Orlando. I knew there was another flight after mine and I have pretty good status on the airline I was flying so I was sure they would rebook me. 

I was feeling pretty sorry for myself at the time. It is funny how  I had gone from this happy, self-actualized human being to anxious and self-centered in under an hour. Just because a circumstance that I could not control had changed.

So, realizing that I was not going to get my salad in CLT, I walked over to the little cafe in the Chattanooga airport, pulled myself up to the bar and asked for a menu. Here is the conversation that ensued:

Bartender: “Want anything to drink?”

Me: “No, I am really trying to limit my alcohol, especially during the week…”

Long pause

Me: “but since my flight is delayed, I will have a beer.”

Bartender: “16 or 22 ounce?”

Me: “16…No, make it a 22, what the heck! Who knows how long I will be here.”

Bartender: “Sounds good, now what do you want to eat?”

Me: “I will have the Chicken Club with Extra Bacon”

Bartender: “You want a side with that? You can have a salad, fruit, or kettle chips.”

Do I really have to tell you what I said in response to his question?

What Happened

As I was reflecting on what happened during that very short amount of time it really hit me: My emotions got the best of me.

I started feeling really sorry for myself. I was feeling lonely and anxious and disappointed all at the same time. Lonely because I was going to miss seeing my wife who would be long asleep by the time I got home. Anxious because I was not confident my flight was actually going to leave Chattanooga at all that night. Disappointed because I had intended to make a great, healthy choice for dinner.

Then, while sitting at the bar, as these emotions took their effect on me, I lost my Impulse Control. 

Oscar Wilde wrote in Lady Windermere’s Fan, “I can resist everything except temptation.”

Impulse Control is an ability to delay or resist an impulse or temptation to act. It entails avoiding rash behaviors and being compromised in decision making. People who display Impulse Control are self-aware when they are frustrated, lonely, anxious, or disappointed. Those with Impulse Control can delay gratification and are not slave to the emotions that stimulate poor decisions.

Grace is realizing that humans make mistakes, forgiving themselves, and getting back to the habits they know are in their best interest.

Of course, I had the kettle chips for my side. 

The next night, Kim fixed a very healthy salmon salad for us and all is again well with the world. 

My Take-A-Way

Even though I coach and teach emotional intelligence, I still have these moments, especially when I am feeling lonely and disappointed, where I act out of my norm and display lower impulse control than I normally would have. The point is to find these emotional tensions and to recognize them as triggers so that the next time I have a flight delayed (not if I have a flight delayed, but when it happens, because it will happen again) and I am feeling lonely and disappointed that I recognize this. I need to pick up the phone and call my wife and talk to her so I don’t feel lonely. Realizing I am still going to get home safely and not to be so disappointed, it is only a matter of timing and an hour or two at most.  

If I can show Impulse Control in the moment, then I can delay my gratification.  Not so that I will never have a Chicken Club with extra Bacon, Kettle Chips, and a beer, but that I choose when I am going to have these things and that they are not a default pleasure for me.  

These default pleasures rarely if ever really satisfy.  It is better to plan and anticipate to enjoy the things you like rather than use them to cover some emotional wound that really isn’t that bad to begin with.

I also think it is really important when we notice these things, that we forgive ourselves and rather than beat ourselves up or throw in the towel or have a bunch of shame around it, we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, forgive ourselves, and put a plan in place so when it happens again we are ready to have better Impulse Control.

How Grateful Are You...Really?

The emotion of gratitude has received a lot of positive press in the last few years. 

Whether it is the popular Brene Brown talking on the relationship between joy and gratitude Or The TEDxSF talk by Louie Schwartzbert on Gratitude which has over 5M views.

However, after talking with my good friend and Pastor, Ken Bish, I think I have a brand new appreciation for this powerful emotion.

Ken shared his thoughts with me from his journal recently. I share his post below with his permission. I thought it might give you a chance to experience this emotion for yourself. 

Gratitude

How do we express it?  How do we make it sincere?   

If we are not careful, a form of expression that we express as gratitude is really either appeasement or manipulation.   Appeasement is originally fleshed out as a child when we are told, “Now you tell Mrs. Jones thank you for making you that lima bean casserole.”   So we learn to say thank you to placate others.   

Or we are told by others, “Oh, you are so great.  You are the best at ….”   Then the request comes, “can you do this for me?”  Because of that, we guard ourselves against giving or accepting gratitude.

Yet we want to express it but are uncertain how to genuinely do so.  I find myself in that spot right now.  I am honestly at a loss for words.   

The reason Ken is at a loss for words is that he has Liver Cancer and is in need of a transplant to save his life.

Ken’s Story

On Sunday, January 19th we rushed to Tampa General Hospital as we were told a liver was available and I was wheeled into surgery on Tuesday, January 21st.   

At times modern medicine makes us think surgeries are commonplace.  Yet it is almost impossible for me to fathom that a group of medical personnel has successfully removed a liver from someone who had just died and exchanged it for my cancerous liver.  How do I say thank you for that?  

As I said, I am honestly at a loss for words.

The doctors continue to tell us that I am doing exceptionally well.  That causes me to think my rubric for “doing well” is much different than the doctors.  

Prayers are appreciated for pain relief, being able to sleep and for overall healing.  The doctors tell us that the first 3 months are very important in terms of my body not rejecting the new liver.   The great news is we are on the right track!

I have so many people to thank. The medical personnel many of whom I do not know, along with my family and friends.  At this point in my early healing stage, simply talking has been extremely exhausting.  (I know what you are thinking:  Ken Bish cannot talk?  That is like Beethoven not being able to compose or Michelangelo not being able to paint or sculpt but that is for another post.) 

 I have listened to every voicemail; read every text, and considered every post.  Every one of them.  Please know that as I have read each one, I have intentionally thought back to a time God used you in my life and gave thanks to our Creator for you.  Each and every one of them. 

That is how I have chosen to express my gratitude.  I have sincerely thanked God for each of you. 

Finally, please hear these last two words which come from the depth of my heart:  “Thank you!”

Thanks, Ken for your courage and willingness to share your story and to model for so many of us what it means to be grateful.

The Power of Gratitude

I think you will agree with me that Ken has a lot to be grateful for. I mean, come on, a liver transplant. Really! Of course he is grateful.

As Ken continues to heal and be thankful, I think we all have this powerful spirit within us. To be thankful. To be courageous. To celebrate.

You do not have to have had a liver transplant to be thankful and experience gratitude.

I, for one, am grateful for you. Powerfully thankful for the people who have crossed the path of my life. You have added more joy to me than you will ever know.

Ken, I get it I think. Grateful to God for just one more day to be able to be in relationship with other humans. Thanks, my friend, for your courage.

Have you ever been surprised by this?

This is my third and final post in a series on the emotion of surprise. If you missed the first two, you can click here to catch up.

To be surprised by something is to have your attention shifted from one sense of reality to another. 

In organizations, it is popular to say that feedback is a gift. I have even said it myself! And, it is true…feedback is a gift. Sometimes, however, that gift is not appreciated at the time.  Sometimes feedback is like a good stew, and it has to simmer with the rest of the ingredients in order for us to be able to appreciate the overall flavor.  It takes time.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know my favorite book on the subject of feedback, is one by Douglas Stone and Shelia Heen; Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well.

In their work, Doug and Shelia say feedback includes any information you get about yourself. It not only includes what gets ranked, but what gets thanked, commented on, and invited back or dropped. It can be formal, informal, direct, or implicit. It can be blunt or baroque (I had to look this word up if I am honest), totally obvious or so subtle you’re not sure what it is.

I think you can feel the complexity as Doug and Shelia unpack the idea a bit.

The other day my wife said to me from the kitchen, “Are you still in your office working?”  What do you mean am I still in my office working? Was my thought. Are you checking on me because you know how important this project is, or was that a passive-aggressive way to say stop working and come spend some time with me fixing dinner?  Are you excited about the project I am working on because you know how good it will be for the business, or are you sick of me spending so much time working and you want me to spend more time with you?

Now that is complex!

“Are you still in your office working?” Seven simple words. It could be she has just lost track of me and wants to know where I am. It could be that she has about had it with my “work ethic” and is going to make me choose between work and her.

She simply said the words, I am the one who is in the process of assigning the meaning to the words. 

Measuring the Tone of Feedback

I think feedback takes on this tenor. So many times we get feedback like, “Jerry takes a long time to get to the point.” This could mean I appreciate his level of detail, or he needs to be more concise. 

The deliverer of the feedback has an intention for sharing, the receiver of the feedback is impacted.  However, these two things, the intention and the impact, do not always come together.  

This is why feedback needs to be a conversation. It has to be reserved for those times when the intention of the deliverer and the impact it has on the receiver can be aligned.  If there is not time for the alignment, much like putting on a new set of tires on a car without balancing them, they might roll but the ride will be rough and you will not get as good of gas mileage as you would had you taken the time to align the tires from the start.

My Feedback Gift

At Christmas time every year, my mother-in-law gives my wife and me a card.  That is no surprise.

The cards are beautiful expressions of the season of Christmas and come complete with words from Hallmark where the important words are underlined and circled. In addition, there is a handwritten bible verse along with some personal expressions of love and gratitude.  These cards are priceless. I really cherish the thoughts and the sentiments that are shared.

The surprise this year is that in the card my mother-in-law did an acrostic of both mine and my wife’s names.  I know you know what an acrostic is, but just in case, it is where the first letter of each line spells out a specific word. 

In the card was our Names:

S

C

O

T

T

&

K

I

M

M

I

J

O

Then what she did was to put a word that described us next to each letter. Now I am not going to share what was written for each letter. But I am going to share two of the letters in my name. To me, they were very interesting because they represented feedback on how I show up.  Also interesting because in my mind some contrast is present.

C-Candid

T-Tolerant

Here is the thing about surprise, what did she mean when she put candid and tolerant together?

Candid, am I too forthright with my opinion? Usually, candid means truthful and straightforward, but it could also be hurtful if not accompanied by empathy.

Tolerant, am I too accepting of opinions I do not agree with? Or am I patient with people not like me?

Norma’s perspective of me is that I am both candid and tolerant.  This is just such good feedback.  I think what is needed is to sit down with her over a hot cup of tea and explore what she means by this so I can make sure I am showing up as intended….honest, caring, and compassionate.

Surprise: A Requirement for Getting Unstuck

Last week I wrote a bit on the emotion of surprise and the value that a professional coach can bring to an organization.

This week, I want to give you a specific example of how using the emotion of surprise can be a valuable tool to have in your tool belt as a coach. 

A Story

I am currently working with the most amazing individual. Super talented. Highly prized by the organization. Gifted with skills in finance. Gifted with people.  

There is just this one thing that is constantly nagging, pulling this leader down into the depths of almost despair. It is noticeable by me and by others I have interviewed in the organization.

This leader shows up in the dumps, a little bit like the fictional character Eeyore from Winnie The Pooh. Eeyore, who is famously known for saying things like, “It’s not much of a tail, but I’m sort of attached to it.”  My client would say, “I did the best I could with the time I had."

Eeyore: “If it is a good morning, which I doubt.”
My client: “I will have to wait until the end of the day to tell you if it was good or not.”

Eeyore: “Thanks for noticin’ me.”;
My client: “It was nothin.’”

 The conversations are always a bit on the negative side.  When we talked about this, the client’s reaction was “I’m just trying to be humble. I really don’t want to be seen as bragging, taking credit, or a know-it-all.”

Then came this, “Dr. Livingston, you are one of the smartest people I know, I hope you can help me with this.”  

The Surprise

"I understand your desire to be seen as humble,” I empathized, “it is really a noble character trait.”

“Although I have to say if you think I am one of the smartest people you know, you need to get out and meet more people. I know it feels to you like you have a sense of inferiority and you are positioning this as humility.”

Then I asked the surprising question, to try to help get the leader unstuck: What if this inferiority you are feeling is a facade that is really masking a deeper felt (sometimes unconscious) sense of superiority?

Long pause…..deafening silence….almost a full minute.

"What do you mean?” the client asked.

What if this Eeyore facade is really masking what you really feel, which is that you are pretty good. Is it possible you do not want to be seen as arrogant, so to guard against this you show up as what you are calling humble, but is actually experienced by others as inferiority.*

Long pause…More deafening silence….felt like an hour.

“I have never really thought about it that way before. I don’t know if you are right or not but it is interesting.”

Coaching goal accomplished.  

By bringing an element of surprise into the discussion, the client is now unstuck. Since a safe space had been created with the client, and an air of trust existed, the element of surprise was a great emotion to lean on.  

As an external coach, I don’t need to be right.  In my mind, it is not about being right or wrong, it is about helping the client to get unstuck and move.

Often times, the emotion of surprise is useful as it jars the client from what they are seeing or experiencing into a new reality.  

As an internal coach, consider cautiously using this technique, because of the need to have a longterm relationship. However, I do think it is possible to be used from time to time to help a person get a glimpse of a different reality.

---

*The theory I was using here was not out of left field. While I didn’t need to be right, it is at least important to be grounded. According to Dr. Aqualus Gordon, "While not necessarily evidence of a full complex, examples of this inferiority dynamic are observable when we do things like:

• Reject praise we duly deserve.

• Fish for compliments via self-deprecation (e.g., humble-bragging).

• Or portray helplessness during situations in which we have power.

The client was rejecting praise and did show up as helpless when in complete control. So this was a risk worth taking in my mind to help the client get unstuck.

A Surprising Thing About Coaching

Surprise is an interesting emotion! Unlike disgust, which always carries a negative theme, and happiness, which emotes such a positive feeling. 

Surprise is an emotion that can go either way, positive or negative, and can shift from negative to positive in the blink of an eye.

Here is what I mean:

“Surprise, you are getting a raise!” Unexpected and positive. How fun!

“Surprise, we are downsizing and your services are no longer needed.” Unexpected and not so fun.

I can even recall when my wife Kim told me we were going to have our third child around 27 years ago…”Surprise, I am pregnant!” I think were her words. 

“Holy Crap!” Unexpected and a feeling of fear, replaced in a nanosecond by the feeling of overwhelming joy. “Really, that is amazing!” followed by an unexplainable feeling of love and closeness with my spouse.

Surprise has a way of intensifying our other emotions.  According to Ingred Fatell Lee, author of the book Joyful: The Surprising Power Of Ordinary Things To Create Extraordinary Happiness, surprise acts like a magnifying glass for joy by giving the tiny pleasure heightened significance.

Surprise is one of the six primary emotions identified by psychologist Paul Ekman and is so necessary as a human because it can quickly divert our attention from one thing to another. Surprise is a kind of a warning signal to say “Hey, pay attention to this new thing, that other thing you were concentrating on needs to be deprioritized and this new thing needs some focus.”

Surprise ranges in intensity from amazement to a mild distraction.  

I Was Surprised

I was recently having a conversation with a friend who was trying to get a better idea of what my coaching business was all about.

“Tell me what you do again?” he asked.

“I help people get an idea of what their leadership looks like,” I told him.  “By using some assessments, and interviewing people they interact with, I give them a mosaic of what their leadership looks like. I then come alongside them and help them make any changes they see in their approach.  In a nutshell, that is what I do.”

“And they pay you for that?” He said to me, rather surprised!  “Sounds like you get paid to be people’s friend.”

Interestingly, I had just read an interesting and quite provocative article by Christopher Shelly titled “A Friend Officiated Our Wedding And Now My Husband’s Dead.” (Isn’t that title a bit surprising?)

Here is a link to the article if you are interested A Friend Officiated Our Wedding And Now My Husband’s Dead. It is about a 4-minute read but in case you don’t want to click through, here are the highlights…

To save money this couple….

• Hires a fried to do their wedding. It is a disaster, but they save money.

• Hires a friend to cater the reception. It is a disaster, but they save money.

• Hires a friend to fix the transmission in their car. It is a disaster but they save money.

• Hire a friend to do open heart surgery on her new husband….

I think you can see where this is going.

I heard Dave Ramsey, the author of Total Money Makeover, say one time, “If you own a $200 car then you can afford to try and fix it yourself. If you own a $20,000 car then you probably should have a professional work on it.”

Can you coach people in your own organization? Sure you can! And I would even argue that a culture of coaching in an organization is a very positive thing. 

But, when you need a professional, hire one. 

A Strategic Piece of Advice for When You Receive Critical Feedback

One of the most difficult things any of us can experience in our organizational life is to receive critical feedback.

So often we speak as if like feedback, we value feedback, we even welcome feedback.  I worked with a client a number of years ago who’s mantra was "We are a feedback-rich environment!"

But let's be honest, most of the time this desire for feedback is because we want validation that things are going really well. 

Do we have the same reactions however when the feedback we receive is more critical? Is there a best way to respond when you are given feedback that your performance is not up to standard or that your behaviors are not valued by others?

Misaligned Expectations

I had a client call me a few weeks ago and he was audibly frustrated when I answered the phone. We really didn’t even exchange any pleasantries like, "How are you doing?" to start our conversation.  He just dug right in…

“Scott, you would not believe my boss and what she just did! We have been working really hard all year to deliver on a really important project for one of our top internal customers.  The project has gone well overall, the client has been very pleased and there have been zero complaints, and we are even under budget. When I sat down to review the project as part of my performance review, my boss acknowledged my hard work and then said I would be getting an average performance rating. Average! I can tell you my performance was anything but average!”

 He said that he just sat there just stunned and ask himself, "How could anything on the project went any better? Average performance? What do you have to do to get a top performance recognition around here?”

He told me that he was so emotional that he couldn’t even hear anything else his boss was saying to him. All he wanted to know was WHY she felt this way. Was she paying attention at all? 

Receiving Feedback that Feels Critical

I think there are times in our corporate lives when we receive critical feedback that is not intended to be harmful but it sure feels like it is to us.  

I said to the young man on the phone, “It sounds to me like what your boss is saying is that your performance is like that of most people in the organization and that means that it is good enough that they want you to stick around for the near future.”

That went over like a ton of bricks.

“Scott, you have no idea how hard I worked, how many hours, what we did to make that project happen on time and under budget.”

“I am sure I don’t understand the details, but I am wondering if you are hearing the message your boss is trying to send. She is saying well done, but since you are expecting to hear 'excellent,' and you are not, what you are hearing is 'bad.'”   

Then I said, “Are you sure her message to you is BAD?”

I don’t think he heard my question because he was still so fired up that he said to me, “All I want to know is WHY she feels this way."

“That may be the wrong question,” I said,  “I think what you want to really know is HOW you could do better next time to get the rating you are expecting."

When we get feedback that feels critical in nature, our natural urge is to defend ourselves. We can’t help it, it is part of our hard-wiring. The goal as you work to develop yourself as a leader is to overcome these natural defense mechanisms and develop new response mechanisms so that you can learn and grow.

Your Experience

Have you ever experienced this? I mean, worked really hard on something, poured your life into it, thought you were doing really well, and then suddenly you are confronted with the feeling that what you are doing isn’t really good enough?

If you have been in an organization long enough you no doubt have experienced this type of misaligned expectation or critical feedback. The feedback may not be critical in the sense that it is mean or demeaning, just that what you are doing or working on has some room for improvement.

Strategic Advice

Here is what I want to encourage you to do when you feel like you are receiving Critical Feedback.

1. Step back and try and not take the criticism personally.

2. Take a deep breath and let go of the negative, defensive feeling.

3. Change your WHY to HOW. Focus on what your improvement needs to be rather than have your boss defend their position.

In the end, your supervisor feels how they feel, and there is probably little you can do in the moment to change his/her mind. The question is less about WHY they feel the way they do and more about WHAT you need to do differently and HOW you can make changes for the future.

A Vaccination for Leadership Failure

Who wants to fail as a leader? No one.

None of us wakes up in the morning and says, “Let me see how I can totally screw up the thing I am working on today."

And yet…Here is my story.

4 Things to Look for in Wise Counsel (2)

A number of years ago, I had been a fairly successful sales professional and tapped for a management development program. The company I worked for was growing like crazy. Most people spent less than 2 years in this program before they were tapped for their first management level job. I thought I had arrived! Look at me! Watch me climb! Nothing will stop my career! These were all thoughts I had at the time. I was on top of the world and it felt great.

My wife and I moved from my sales territory in Decatur, Illinois to the corporate headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana. Our family consisted of my wife and I along with our 2-year-old son Zach, and a precious baby girl due in about 6 weeks. The plan was to be in Indianapolis for less than 2 years before our next move into my first management level job. So, I did what every person with a dream, a wife, and 2 young kids does….

I went out and bought a 2 seat sports car.

I rationalized it by telling myself, "Hey, we already own a minivan. No problem."

Fast forward 5 years later. That's right, my 2-year window for promotion had gone to 5! The company hit a tight spot. No one got promoted for 3 years beyond my 2-year window. And on top of the career slow down, my wife and I had another baby boy! We were now a family of 5, with a minivan and a second car that is a Mazda Rx 7.

Great car, yet totally not practical when my wife took the minivan to go shopping one Saturday and left me with the 3 kids and a couple of friends kids. Scott and 5 kids on a Saturday morning, normally not a problem, until Zach comes out holding his hand over his eye and blood dripping down having just been whacked on the head with a toy by one of the other kids.

Question: How do I get 5 kids and me in the Rx7 and to the hospital to get Zach stitched up?

The Lesson

There is an ancient Proverb that says “Before his downfall a man's heart is proud."

I will admit it. I was full of pride. Proud of my career. Proud of my family. Proud of how I had achieved.

What is the problem with pride? It blocks your vision of reality. As leaders, we puff ourselves up for everyone to see.

What are some things that feed our pride as leaders?

1. People come to you for decision making.

2. People look to you for safety (job security).

3. People look to you as an expert in your field.

4. People feel comfortable knowing you are there.

5. You make people feel they are important.

6. You give people a feeling of optimism.

7. You give people a sense of hope.

8. You are near the top of the food chain.

9. People seek your advice and counsel.

10. Your opinions are sought and considered.

The great writer CS Lewis says that the problem with your pride is that it is in competition with everyone else's pride. Pride at its very root is competitive. “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man,” according to Lewis.

More money. Bigger house. Better looking. Smarter. Prettier wife. More loving husband. Most successful kids. Harder worker. Coolest job.

The problem with pride is not the metric, but what we do with it. It is in our nature to compare. It is how we know where we are. The problem with pride is an inability to be content and a desire for control. It is a scarcity mentality that says “for me to be up in life, you must be down.”

This is a lie.

Great leaders find ways for everyone to be up.

What I have learned over the years is that when I begin feeling like this, full of pride, I better watch my next step.

The Vaccination

When things go wrong, we begin to think about treatment. Treatment is about fixing the problem. Vaccination, however, is about prevention.

Treatment in the medical world is meant to help you recover from something that has happened to you. A vaccination is meant to prevent the disease in the first place.

The second part of the Proverb I mentioned above states, “but humility comes before honor."

Being humble. Putting others ahead of your pride. Being modest in your opinion of yourself. Thinking of others as better than yourself is one way to overcome pride.

The question I have been asking myself is, are there any strategies for preventing pride in the first place?

How can you vaccinate yourself against pride that often accompanies Leadership?

Here is a shot in the arm that can help you prevent Leadership Pride. This might sting a little, but here comes the needle...

Seek Wise Counsel.

That didn’t hurt too bad, did it?

Looking back on my story, I really should have sought wise counsel about buying that car. Not only was it impractical, but the assumptions I used to frame my reality regarding my career and my family were askew. They just were not based in reality. Just because the business was in an up cycle didn’t mean it was going to stay that way forever. Some wise counsel at that time could have been just the vaccination the doctor would have prescribed to prevent me from making such a poor decision.

There is another Proverb that says “Without counsel plans are frustrated, but with many counselors, plans succeed."

As you are thinking about getting wise counsel in your life, what should you look for? Here are a few things I have found as I have researched the topic:

4 Things to Look for in Wise Counsel:

1. Experience. Why not ask someone who has been down the road what the path looks like?

2. Impulse Control. Look for someone who is not going to be swayed by your emotional rationale. You do not want someone who will agree with you all the time. You want another perspective on what reality looks like. A person who is patient enough to hear you out.

3. Courage. Having an ability to disagree with you is paramount to you being able to learn and grow.

4. Empathy. Someone who can see your perspective even if they do not agree. Empathy differs from sympathy in that the empathic person will ask the hard question when it is in your best interest. The sympathetic person will just agree with you in whatever state you are in.

So often in leader development, we screw up and look for a treatment remedy for what has happened. Why not look to prevent these potential failures in leadership by vaccinating yourself against tragedy? Seeking wise counsel may be one good shot in the arm for you as a leader.

Homework

Look for a leadership decision you have coming up. Seek out some wise counsel. Lay the topic out for those you are seeking input from, without bias or telling them your preferences. Consider what they say to you before you act.

2 Minute Read to Improve Your 2020 Vision

When I was a kid my mom would tell me I needed to eat more carrots to improve my vision. If I wanted to be able to see with clarity, her wisdom of the time was for me to crunch on a few orange root sticks. Mom’s advice, while heartfelt and well meaning, did not ultimately keep me from becoming farsighted and needing sight correction to be able to see clearly.

Many of us will get well meaning advice as we approach the new year, reading and listening to experts drone on and on about goal setting and how you must have a goal if you want to accomplish anything.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with setting a goal, it can be a bit meaningless if not aligned with the vision of who you want to be as a leader. 

Envision Your Future You As A Leader

As the calendar changes from 2019 many of us will  begin tithing about what we want to accomplish in 2020. Most of us will make some kind of resolution to make a change as the new year rolls in.

A resolution is “a firm decision to do or not do something”.

Like you, In the past I have made many types of New Year’s Resolutions:

• Personal: Eat right, exercise more, and lose 10 pounds

• Professional: Increase sales by 20% by becoming more customer centric

• Family: Become a better listener when talking with my wife

• Spiritual: Read through the Bible in a year

All good stuff. I am sure many of you are making resolutions and talking with your friends and family about them over the next few days.

I thought I might challenge you to add a category this year. In addition to your personal, professional, family, and spiritual resolutions, think about a resolution to improve your leadership. Envision yourself becoming  the leader you want to be in the future.

Leadership

Here are 10 Ideas to get your thinking started on what you could resolve to do or not do in 2020 when it comes to your leadership.  I pulled this list from some of our more popular blog posts we have done over the years.

1. Reflect on being a great leader and what is keeping you from being great.  Who among us doesn’t want to be seen as a great leader? And yet, so many of us have some barrier that we just don’t want to see or do anything about. 

2. Work on your values before your vision.

3. Spend less time working and more time thinking. This idea runs counter culture to our “doing” mentality. Perhaps you need to work less and think more to enhance your ability to lead. 

4. If you were a brand (like Kleenex or Toyota), what would your value proposition be?

5. Who in your organization do you need to network with. 

6. What piece of FeedForward advice do you need to seek out? In our organizations we are so good at feedback. We just love telling people what we observed them doing.  Why not start a culture of FeedForward? Perhaps we could all get a little better at offering some solutions in addition to what we see in others that we don’t like. 

7. What cycle of negative thinking will you break this year?

8. How are you resting in the middle of your work day? Studies are showing how important rest is for leaders to maintain their effectiveness. How are you cycling your work to maximize your performance?

9. Take your emotional intelligence temperature. Are you able to choose how you react or are you “slave” to your knee jerk reactions?

10. Whatever change you make, put a plan in place to sustain it and get some coaching to keep you accountable.

I am looking forward to being with you on your leadership journey. If there are subjects you would like tackled on these pages just drop me a line. i am happy to do the research and write about what interests you.

My prayer for you is that you have a productive and effective leadership year.

Blessings to you and your families.

PS. If you know someone who might be interested in growing as a leader, why not forward them this blog and have them sign up? It’s free and easy and we guarantee they will gets tons of value.

Give Me 1 More Week and I Will Improve Your Stress Resilience - Making Stress Your Friend

Since this post will hit your inbox a day or two prior to Christmas, I am going to keep it relatively short.

Over the last few weeks I have been working through a series on describing the habits I have noticed over the years of stress resilient people. You know the types, it seems like their world is caving in around them and yet they have an ability to remain cool under pressure. If you’d like to catch up or review the previous posts, you can find them by clicking here.

If you don’t want to click back and forth, I will give you the first 4 steps in improving your stress resilience:

1. Come to grips with the idea that bad stuff is going to happen to you. You are not immune to adversity, and there is no vaccine. Reframe your attitude from “Why did this happen to me?” to “Why not me?” Adversity is as much a part of life as joy.

1. The second lesson I have learned about being more stress resilient is when you are undergoing adversity, to carefully choose where to focus your attention. When things come into our lives that don’t go the way we want them to, we are meant to learn something from them.  But we can get so wrapped up in the wrong little details, or in the emotions surrounding the event, that we can miss the learning. Choose wisely where you focus your attention.

2.  The the third observation I have made about people who seem to have high stress resilience is they have an ability to find the good in the circumstance or the people. How they frame life seems to be very appreciative.

3. The fourth thing that I have noticed about people who are resilient in times of stress and ambiguity is that they can answer one key question for themselves. The question is this: “Is what I am doing helping or harming me?”  Our focus as leaders needs to be on the kinds of things that will actually help me instead of making my “stress hole” even bigger.

My perspective

The final post in this series is the most important of all. The reason is, for example, you can do your best to ask yourself, “is what I am doing helping or harming me?” which is the fourth suggestion I made to improve your stress resilience. And indeed, if you focus on this question, your resilience to stress should improve. 

However, what I have observed is people who ask themselves the question, “Is what I am doing helping or harming me?” will work really hard to convince themselves that the harm they are actually doing to themselves is not really hurting them. 

This is why human connection is so important in creating stress resilience. In one of the most impactful studies I have reviewed on the subject of stress resilience actually has to do with living longer. Poulin, Brown Dillard Smith (2013) out of the University of Buffalo monitored participant mortality and time to death for 5 years by way of newspaper obituaries and monthly state death-record tapes.

Mortality revealed a significant interaction between helping behavior and stressful events. 

Specifically, stress did not predict mortality risk among individuals who provided help to others in the past year, but stress did predict mortality among those who did not provide help to others. 

Bottom line is, creating human connection and helping others can help you live longer.

And not just creating human connection, but when you do, listen to those who you connect with. 

Story

My wife and I were back home in Peoria, Illinois this past weekend to celebrate Christmas with my mom. It was a really nice weekend connecting with mom and my siblings. We spent the afternoon together on both Saturday and Sunday. At the end of our time together on Sunday, my wife and I went to a Christmas show at one of the local churches in town. ‘

When we went into the church the weather was a bit cold and the sky was overcast.  About 2 hours later when we came out of the show, there was about 2.5 inches of snow on the ground and near blizzard driving conditions. It took us quite a while to get out of the church parking lot, and once we got on the main roads they were snow packed and very slippery to drive on. 

I have been driving on snow and ice since I was 14 years old in my dad’s old pickup truck, usually in a parking lot somewhere just to get some practice. So, I know how to drive in pretty treacherous conditions.

However, about 7 years ago my wife and I got out of the midwest snow belt, and moved ourselves to sunny Florida.  Not much snow to drive through in the Sunshine state! 

Needless to say I was a bit nervous driving, not as much for me, but as we made our way back to where we were staying there were cars all over in ditches. The result, no doubt, of forgetting the important rules of driving on snow and ice. My nerves had more to do with not knowing the skill level of other people driving then knowing myself what to do and not do. 

It was all a bit stressful, to say the least.

I was really glad I had my wife along with me because her human connection really made me want to make stress my friend and listen to what my body was telling me. Having Kim in the passenger seat next to me heightened my own sense of self-awareness and self-preservation. 

I could feel the stress with every quarter-mile that we drove. Sometimes the back end of the car sliding, sometimes the front wheels just not get anyone traction on the wet surface. Feeling the stress and embracing it helped me in the moment to realize this was not a time for heroics. Not at all a time to “see how fast the car could go” or “how close could I get to the car in front of me.” My stress was actually my friend in that it was telling me to keep a safe distance from other vehicles. 

I also really tried to listen to my wife as she became my copilot, searching for the best route for us to take and making sure I was still on a drivable road surface.  I think so many times we get into stressful situations and our knee jerk reaction is to just bear down and do it all ourselves. This is a time, when you are making stress your friend, to really listen to others.

This listening can really help you answer the question “Is what I am doing helping or harming me?” If I am willing to listen to others input then I am less likely to make a mistake; convincing myself that something that is really destined to harm me will help me.

My Top 5 Ways to Improve Your Stress Resilience

In summary here are my top 5 ways for you to improve your stress resilience

1. Come to grips with the idea that bad stuff is just going to happen to you. 

1.  Choose where to focus your attention.

2.  Find the good in the circumstance or the people. 

3. Ask Yourself; “Is what I am doing helping or harming me?”  

4. Make Stress Your Friend

Now go out there and have a stress free Christmas and a very happy new year!

Give Me 3 More Weeks and I will Improve Your Stress-Resilience: Find the Good

Over the last few weeks, I have been working through a blog series on describing the habits I have noticed throughout the years of stress-resilient people.

You know the types, it seems like their world is caving in around them, yet they have an ability to remain cool under pressure. If you missed them, you can find the first two posts in the series here.

If you don’t want to click back and forth I will just give you the first steps in improving your stress resilience:

1. Come to grips with the idea that bad stuff is just going to happen to you. You are not immune to adversity, and there is no vaccine, per se. Reframe your attitude from “Why did this happen to me?” to “why not me?” Adversity is as much a part of life as joy.

2. The second lesson I have learned about being more stress-resilient is when you are undergoing adversity, carefully choose where to focus your attention. When things come into our lives that don’t go the way we want them to, we are meant to learn something from them. But we can get so wrapped up in the wrong little details, or in the emotions surrounding the event, that we can miss the learning. Choose wisely where you focus your attention.

These two posts lead me to the third observation I have made about people who seem to have high stress-resilience;

They have the ability to find the good in the circumstance or the people. How they frame life seems to be very appreciative. Before we unpack this, let’s go over some data on the topic just to cement the need.

Coping Successfully With Stressful Life Events

There is a really good chance, even if you are someone who is fairly stress-resilient, that as you are reading this, the person on your right AND the person on your left is not so good.

A recent (2013) survey of adults and teens commissioned by the American Psychological Association showed 65% of people said managing their stress is very or extremely important (I found this a little lower than I would have thought), but just 38% said they do at least a good job of managing stressful situations.

So, we as humans think something is important and we recognize we are not very good at it. And for way too many of us, that is where the story ends. But not for people who are more stress-resilient. And it turns out that for most of us, it can be a simple shift in perspective.

Lets examine the most prevalent emotion people experience in stressful situations…Anxiety.

There is data to suggest that 1 in 5 Americans will suffer from a diagnosed anxiety disorder in a given year. Anxiety is the most prevalent emotional stress response.

A common definition of Anxiety is "…facing an uncertain threat.” We see something in our future, either real or perceived, that we don’t know or understand as going to do us harm. A situation or a context like this will cause us to feel anxious.

Our anxious feeling is telling us something about our uncertainty in the situation and often gets compounded by other negative thoughts or emotions until we get ourselves so worked up that we can not even remember what the root cause of our anxiety really is.

A Personal Story

Let’s play with this definition for anxiety a bit and see if we can build some stress-resilient muscle in the process.

I’ll offer up a personal story as a frame for our learning.

This time of year always creates a bit of an anxious time for me as a solopreneur. Many of the coaching and training engagements that have been running in 2019 will be coming to an end. Many of my clients are changing approaches in how they are using services like the ones I offer.

I can become anxious about where my business is going to come from in 2020.

5 Things to notice in this short story.

1. The main character in the story is me.

2. The story I created in my head is that business is uncertain (see the definition of anxiety).

3. The story I created has a threatening tone (see the definition of anxiety).

4. The timing context of the story is a perception I am feeling.

5. Clients are changing so that means they won’t need me any longer.

Being Stress Resilient

People who are stress-resilient have adaptive resources in both cognitive and emotional arenas to be able to handle the story they are perceiving.

One of the most important adaptive strategies is to find the good in the situation.

I know what you might be saying because I have said it myself…”What could possibly be good about losing clients or business in 2020?” Frankly NOTHING! But we are not working at the right level to deal with the anxiety. There is nothing good about losing business, feeling rejected, or having to experience lean times in business. Please hear me; I am not one of those Pollyanna overly optimistic leader development guys. You know the type, they just don’t seem to live in the same world as I do when it comes to being anxious about losing something important.

What I am advocating for here is letting go of the outcome.

Since what I am projecting in my stressful and anxious situation has not happened yet, there is time for me to do something about it. In essence, I need to Find the Good in the inputs that will ultimately drive the outcome.

Focus on Quality Inputs

If I can let go of the outcome, just for a moment, that is causing my anxious feeling and focus on Finding the Good in the inputs, will this lessen or eliminate my anxiety?

That becomes the central question for people who have the ability to be resilient.

What I am going to do is to Find the Good in the 5 elements of my short story above and see if I feel less anxious. Here they are repeated with a reframing of each of them to find the good:

5 Things to notice in this short story.

1. The main character in the story is me. This business has never been about me. It is about the clients I serve and the good we do for them. Part of my work here is to get the story off of me and to focus on those I serve. In doing so, my needs, whatever they are, will be met.

2. The story I created in my head is that business is uncertain (see the definition for anxiety). Business is complex, it is not uncertain. Now more than ever in recorded history organizations need leadership development. My clients are good people who can use my objective perspective on developing leaders in their organizations.

3. The story I created has a threatening tone (see the definition for anxiety). The threatening tone I am picking up is one of perceived loss. That this loss will mean a loss of income, so I won’t be able to meet the needs of my business. I may have to close my operation and do something else that I don’t love near as much. I hope you see in this how a threat can cycle down into a negative vortex of things that are so far from being real at the moment. But this vortex of fear can become paralyzing, and none of it is real. The good in the story is for me to get excited about some of the plans I have for 2020, rather than how I can make my reality less horrible than I am seeing it. I want to be excited about the opportunities I have and not just see how I can squeak by.

4. The timing context of the story is a perception I am feeling. Coming to an end feels like such a threat. While I do have some engagements that are ending; 75% of my business comes from existing clients. So that I may have individual clients that will rotate off my schedule, but that does not mean that my relationship with the organization has to end. The good in this is that nothing is ending, it is just an opportunity to start over and learn something new.

5. Clients are changing so that means they won’t need me any longer. My clients are changing. Fact. But this does not mean they no longer need a service like the one I provide. Change doesn’t have to be a threat. It can be a golden opportunity. I need to become curious about what life is like for them and find additional ways to partner with them using the services I provide.

So, there you have a nice little reframing exercise.

Step 1. Don’t focus on the outcome

Step 2. Focus on the quality of your inputs by finding the good in your story.

Spend some time with this little exercise. If you are feeling anxious about something, write it down. Then find the inputs and turn them from negative toward the good. See if this helps you become less anxious about your situation.

I love feedback, so if you try this I would love to hear your story.

Give Me 4 More Weeks and I will Improve Your Stress Resilience

Last week I began a series describing the habits I have noticed throughout the years of stress-resilient people.

You know the types - it seems like their world is caving in around them, yet they have an ability to remain cool under pressure.

To recap, the first step in improving your stress resilience is:

Come to grips with the idea that bad stuff is just going to happen to you. You are not immune to adversity, and there is no vaccine. Reframe your attitude from “Why did this happen to me?” to “Why not me?” Adversity is as much a part of life as joy.

The second lesson I have learned about being more stress-resilient is to carefully choose where to focus your attention in times of adversity. When things come into our lives that don’t go the way we want them to, we are meant to learn something from them. But, we can get so wrapped up in the little details, or in the emotions surrounding the event, that we can miss the lesson.

Last week I wrote about losing one of my biggest clients, quite unexpectedly, and really through no fault of my own. I had been teaching for years in their company’s management development program. I would do some work with emerging leaders; helping them define their leadership principles as well as teaching other leaders the importance of self-awareness and emotional intelligence. I did this work for over 7 years and got great reviews every time we did a class. Then, I got a phone call that the company was reorganizing and they were not sure how they would be approaching training in the future.

So in one phone call, I lost one of my biggest and best clients. At least, I lost that opportunity with the client in a very ambiguous sort of way.

According to Pauline Boss, author of Ambiguous Loss, “People hunger for certainty.” We all like stability and to know, or at least to have the idea that we know, what is going to happen in the future. So, according to Boss, “…uncertainty makes ambiguous loss the most distressful of all losses…” This is because the loss is often very confusing. People can actually become immobilized by not being able to make sense of the situation. In my case, it was tough, because I always held a belief that if you did a great job for a customer, work would always follow. And while I think the basic tenant is true, there are just things that happen in business that are not in my control.

Second, the ambiguous loss felt very much to me like it was irrational. How could they no longer love me? How could such a great company no longer invest in leaders? As I thought about all of this, my mind became fixated on the loss. So much so I was starting to get physically exhausted. By focusing on the wrong part of the loss, I was losing my perspective.

My Intervention

I was telling this story to my coach during one of my monthly sessions with him. After our session, as I am prone to do, I sat and summarized the coaching in a journal I keep. Here is my entry:

-Don’t lose what you have to what you lost!

-What do I need to be learning through all of this?

At the same time this loss was happening to me, I was teaching a group of doctoral students at Indiana Wesleyan University.. I had been reviewing an article by Lila Davachi, Tobias Kiefer, David Rock, and Lisa Rock titled Learning that lasts through the AGES.

AGES is a 4 part acronym:

• Attention is critical.

• Generating insights takes time.

• Emotions govern.

• Spaced learning sticks.

Here is what I learned from each part of the AGES Model during my stressful time:

Attention is critical and I needed to focus on the customers I am still able to serve. Just because I lost this one thing should not affect how I serve those I am still blessed to work with.

Generating insights takes time. I have a tendency to want to rush things. If I am going to learn from this loss, I needed to give myself some space and realize that time does have a healing component to it.

Emotions govern and I get to choose how I feel. Sure, I was going to miss these great folks I had worked with and to some degree, I mourned the loss. And I am also joyful that I have other clients and in fact, I have been able to keep relationships with many folks at this company. So it turns out I really didn’t lose them, the work there just changed for me and looks very different.

Spaced learning sticks. I needed to process this learning over time and in chunks. You can not learn everything you need to learn all at once. Spacing things out, keeping them fresh in your journal, will really help you maximize your learning.

Summary Thought

For those of you wanting to improve your stress resilience, one of the most important points is to carefully choose what you will focus your attention on. You get to pick. You can focus on the pain and stay there. You can focus on how you were treated and dwell.

Or

You can appropriately accept and mourn your loss, and then focus on all the good things you still have.

Choose wisely.

That last thought actually will be the focus of next week’s post…Appreciate the good.

See you next week!

The Secret for Being Stress Resilient | Part 1: Getting A Grip

Spoiler Alert.

Over the next 5 weeks, I will be writing on the idea of becoming more Stress Resilient. I thought going deep on one particular topic might be kind fo fun, so let me know what you think about the series format! I hope you enjoy it, but if not, I’d love to know that as well.

So many of the clients I am working with these days are undergoing very fundamental changes in their business models. How they used to do things even two years ago are being drastically altered by changing customer demands or big shifts in market dynamics.

One of the things I have noticed when changes like this occur is the desire people have to go back to the way things “used to be.”

There is something innately comforting for us all in the known, even when the known is not our most desirable state.

Many years ago, I used to get on an airplane and fly across the country to teach a one day class in a management development program. I really loved the experience and developed many great relationships along the journey. The travel was hard. Exhausting even. But there was real comfort for me in getting on a plane on a Tuesday, flying all day. Then teaching all day on Wednesday. Spending the night in a hotel and flying home on Thursday. This work ended up taking 3 days for one day of actual work. And I loved it! No matter how hard it was, or how tired I got, I loved the work.

My wife would often say things like, “Why do you do that to yourself? Why don’t you find a client who is local so you don’t have to spend 2 days on an airplane for one day of work?”

Sometimes the truth really hurts.

Did I listen? Heck NO! I kept getting on the airplane. I loved this client. My wife could tell, so much so that from time to time she would suggest we move to California.

Then all of a sudden, it was all gone. The company reorganized how they were doing their training and the work I loved was no more.

All of that comfort was gone. All of those great relationships vanishing into thin air. All the fantastic people I was able to interact with and learn from…poof. No more.

All of this happened over the course of a single month.

Lesson 1

After I got off the phone with my client who explained to me that they were moving in a different direction with how they were going to train leaders my initial reaction was, “Oh no! Now what am I going to do?” I think this is pretty typical for us as humans during times of change or ambiguous types of loss to get self-referential and concerned for our own well being.

I can remember not knowing what to do exactly. I had an appointment with my coach the next day and planned to talk it through with him at that time. So, in the meantime, I did something that made me feel good, I went and worked out. I thought a good cardiovascular workout to the point of exhaustion was just what I needed to clear my head and think about what my options really were at the time.

I made it to the gym and got on the treadmill and my trainer Thomas said this to our group: “This is going to be a rough 23 minutes on the treadmills today. You are going to have increases in the incline of the treadmill every 2 minutes. I want you to start running at a push pace and maintain that pace as long as you can as you ascend.”

Then the gold came out of Thomas’s mouth, “This is not going to be easy, but as the climb continues I want you to envision: Your Future You!”

That is exactly what I needed to hear. I finished my workout and when I got home I went straight to my journal and wrote:

Adversity doesn’t discriminate. It happens to all of us as humans. It is really part of the human condition. I need to better understand that shit happens. I don’t want it to happen but it does.

Then I started to do something that I work with my coaching clients all the time - I reframed the adversity.

I started with “why not me?”

Look, I had a really good ride with that client. Almost 10 years and we really had a fantastic relationship. It was really awesome. Now they are doing things differently, and so I need to do things differently as a result.

WHY NOT ME?

This is exactly what needed to happen in order for me to start doing some things I had wanted to do all along.

The climb is not going to be easy (now my trainer Thomas is in my head), and I need to start to design my Future Me!

How about You?

Are things changing really quickly around you? I guess you can just sit there and take it and let the chips fall where they might, randomly without much of your input. You could bury your head in the sand and hope that the change that is happening doesn’t see you and just passes you buy.

Or, you can sit down and start to design your future you.

I wonder when you get to your future what your future you will say to your past you who decided to take the bull by the horns and create its destiny?

The other thing I would like to add is just a thought for all of you who are leading others through times of change and ambiguity.

And that is, in order to reduce stress, an important leadership challenge is to reduce follower uncertainty. Part of your job is to make the change as transparent as you possibly can. Even if you have to say you don’t know, be authentic and do your best. People still need a feeling of security, even when you don’t have the answers.

I believe that in a dynamic environment, leaders can reduce this uncertainty by continually communicating and reinforcing five key questions for the organization: who we are, what we are doing, why we are doing it, where we are going, and how we are going to get there. Answering these questions for followers can tap into some basic needs that influence human behavior.

If you don’t know what to say, then maybe just articulating some answers to these questions might be helpful.