Out with the “Old”, In with the “New”
2012 is now officially here. Welcome!
The Washington Post publishes a list of what’s “out” and what’s “in” each year.
This year Apps, Hoarding, Greek yogurt, Google+, and “How I Met Your Mother” were listed as out. What’s in are Naps, Cleaning, Icelandic skyr, Pinterest and “Happy Endings”.
We just started using Goggle+ and now it’s out? What is Icelandic skyr and Pinterest?
A List like this causes us to go find out what’s “new” and decided if we want to keep the “old” or change and get with the times. So we ask you ….
What’s on your “Out” list?
What’s on your “In” list?
It seems we have to let go of something to let something else emerge. It’s hard to let go of something we are comfortable with but as the New Year begins we encourage you to think about what you need to let go of, do differently or change to allow the emergence of something new in 2012. Maybe it’s a belief, a habit or a behavior that just doesn’t work any more or it could be something you have never done but something tells you this is the year to try it.
Whatever “it” is, let go of the “old” and make room for the “new” is our message to you this first Monday of 2012!
Mary Anne and Theresa
Goodness Abounds
If you haven’t seen, I AM, a film produced and directed by Tom Shadyac, we’d suggest that be on your list of videos to see. It’s a great “paradigm shifter” as we turn to a new year. The film begins by asking “What is wrong with the world?” The director turns to experts all over the world to find answers to this question. In his search he finds many undeniable truths in nature and in human beings that suggest, even prove, that we, humans, are hard wired for cooperation and goodness. It’s not what’s wrong with the world but what’s good with the world and guess what, I AM . . . YOU ARE . . . WE ALL ARE!
As you end 2011 and prepare for 2012, here are some questions to guide your reflections:
What is good about your life?
What contributions will you make in 2012?
How will you grow and develop this new year?
What will be your legacy for 2012?
We wish for all good health, happiness and prosperity in this new year!
Mary Anne and Theresa
Best Reads of 2011. What’s on your List?
The annual list of Best Business Books 2011 is out by the Harvard Business Review. There is something for everyone so we thought we’d share the list with you.
Click here to read the short synopses of all the books.
FYI – You will need to sign up for the free Newsletter to gain access.
What have you read this year that was inspiring, informative, transformational?
Share your favorites with us and our Facebook community.
“If you aren’t learning something new every day, you aren’t growing!”
Mary Anne and Theresa
A Fresh Perspective Helps Everyone
If we work with people long enough, we tend to form certain beliefs, assumptions and biases about them that sometimes can hinder our ability to be objective when working with them. Let’s look at some examples of this:
A manager who has worked with an employee for 18 years still tells the story of 5 years ago when he had a “difficult’ time in his life and his work was negatively impacted. The manager holds off on giving him work for “fear it will set him off again” or believes he can’t handle anything new or different.
An employee gets emotional at times and so a manager sees the employee as sensitive and tempers everything to avoid getting the employee upset.
Employees experience a manager as hyper-critical — always seeing the bad and wrong — never the good and even though the manager has worked really hard to see the good and what’s right, employees still feel “on egg shells” with the manager.
Neuroscience teaches us that we develop “grooves” or neural pathways that get built over time and form “automatic” and repetitive beliefs, responses and behaviors. No wonder we lose our objectivity! In working with employees and managers, we’ve seen it sometimes challenging to change how you see, respond to and work with others. But the good news is that these neural pathways can be altered or we can just hop off one pathway and create a new one but what makes us want to? That’s the question. It is “comfortable” knowing what you get when you work with someone but this week we are challenging you to see your co-workers, employees, managers or, even, family members in a different way. What are you not seeing? What holds you or them back because of how you “see” each other? What are the possibilities and opportunities being missed because you or the other has a limited view of who you or they are?
Here’s an exercise to try this week …. Tell us what happens on our Facebook page.
Relate to everyone you encounter this week as if it is the first time you are meeting them.
Be curious to learn about them for the first time.
Notice something “new” about them.
Pay attention to the assumptions you make about them.
Try something new with them and see what happens.
Mary Anne and Theresa
Take a Trip with Us
Time seems to fly by, yet it is often marked by special occasions. Our annual Enneagram Conference is held each Fall and it is one of those “special occasions”. It’s lovely to be able to share time with fellow Enneagram teachers, and the actual conference is always superb.
This year Theresa and I headed to the West Coast to an amazing place called Asilomar, near the Monterrey peninsula. Unlike us, we arrived a day ahead of time and so had time to take the famous drive along the coast to Big Sur Mountain. It is a drive along a windy road that borders many times on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Every turn is a new vista that is more spectacular than the last. We had a blast and stopped for lunch at Nepenthe, which not only has an incredible view but healthy and delicious food.
The Conference Agenda was full of learning but one of the highlights was David Wythe, our keynote speaker. As usual, Helen Palmer and David Daniels shared new research and findings and they received a standing ovation from all of us for their contributions to the study of the Enneagram in the Narrative Tradition.
Here’s a short video that our colleague and friend, Leslie, created about the conference. We thought you might enjoy it as you start your week.
Hope is Not a Strategy
This is the title of a sales book that is about how to win complex sales deals yet the title lends itself to so many situations that we thought we’d look at it as this week begins.
“Hope motivates virtually all human activity. Hope is the powerhouse internal trigger that automatically helps determine our decisions and our actions.” (The 7 Triggers to Yes, Russell Granger)
In interactions with others, hope is powerful… hope that another will change their behaviors or attitudes, or hope that a prospect will buy something from us, or hope that the client will send the payment so that you can make payroll or pay the bills.
Hope, however, without action, is not a strategy, it’s just a thought!
If you hope a prospect will buy your product but you don’t follow your sales process,
then hope is not a strategy. If you hope that the client will send the check and you don’t pick up the phone and call to ask where the payment is, then hope is not a strategy. If you hope that an employee shows up for work on time, but you don’t have a conversation with the employee when he/she is late, then hope is not a strategy.
Discovering what you or others hope for is powerful, but without action behind it,
the result is often disappointment.
What do you hope for this week?
What action will you take to turn your hopes into reality?
Make it a week filled with realized hopes!
Mary Anne and Theresa
Take the First Step
Recently, we were privileged to spend time with David Wythe, a poet, storyteller, and business consultant. Not only is he very charming (with a British accent) but incredibly gifted in his ability to capture the human spirit and story in poetry.
In his poem, Start Close In, he begins:
“Start close in,
don’t take the second step or the third,
start with the first thing close in,
the step you don’t want to take.”
Don’t we always want to hurry to the end result, skip past the painful stuff to get to the good stuff?
Wythe urges us to slow down and deal with the “real” issue first. He gives us some clues how to do this. His poem continues:
“Start with the ground you know,
the pale ground beneath your feet,
your own way of starting the conversation.”
“Start with your own question,
give up on other people’s questions,
don’t let them smother something simple.”
There you have it, start with what you know, start with yourself, don’t look outside yourself or to others, rather, take time to find you own answers within. It is way too easy to pull out a book, or search the Internet, or call your friends and ask them what to do …. what is called for is to stop all the doing, slow down and listen to what you are saying, feeling, wanting or know to be right for you.
Take time this week to breathe, listen and, in the silence, you will find your answers.
Take the first step … not the second or the third … just the first.
Mary Anne and Theresa
What’s your Organization’s Compelling Story?
I (Theresa) just finished reading High Altitude Leadership by Chris Warner and Don Schmincke. What an adventure that was! Chris Warner is the founder of EarthTreks, a Maryland-based rock climbing gym and mountaineering company and Don Schmincke is founder of SAGA Leadership.
Readers are held breathless in Chapter 1, titled, Fear of Death, by the very first story told by Warner about an expedition he led to K2, the world’s second-tallest and arguably most dangerous mountain located in Pakistan. Readers experience the expeditions and then Schmincke relates the incredible stories to what it takes to be, in their words, a High Altitude Leader. The book highlights eight dangers that prevent people from reaching the highest levels of performance.
I am not a mountain climber and venture to say I never will, but the courage, guts, humility and perseverance displayed in these stories on the highest mountaintops in the world speak of the incredible possibility of the human spirit. Whether on the mountaintop or in the meeting room, the qualities that it takes to be a great leader are quite similar.
The authors say that what gets in our way are “fear, selfishness, tool seduction (have to read the book to understand that one), arrogance, lone heroism, cowardice, comfort and gravity.” What helps us overcome them is a compelling saga, a “story or drama that inspires passion for a strategic result, a passion that overwhelms the selfishness common in humans.”
We all have a story to tell. We all have something we are trying to achieve but this books urges you and your organizations to think bigger, riskier, and most of all, more compelling… reach for something bigger than you, better than everyone else and then go for it!
Do something “to die for” this week!
Mary Anne and Theresa
Words of Encouragement and Inspiration for Leaders
For Leaders
by John O’Donohue
May you have the grace and wisdom to act kindly,
learning to distinguish between
what is personal and what is not.
May you be hospitable to criticism.
May you never put yourself at the center of things.
May you act not from arrogance but out of service.
May you work on yourself, building up and refining the ways of your mind.
May those who work for you know you see and respect them.
May you learn to cultivate the art of presence in order to engage with those who meet you.
When someone fails or disappoints you, may the graciousness with which you engage
be their stairway to renewal and refinement.
May you treasure the gifts of the mind through reading and creative thinking
so that you continue as a servant of the frontier where the new will draw its
enrichment from the old, and you never become functionary.
May you know the wisdom of deep listening, the healing of wholesome words,
the encouragement of the appreciative gaze, the decorum of held dignity,
the springtime edge of the bleak question.
May you have a mind that loves frontiers so that you can evoke the bright fields that lie
beyond the view of the regular eye.
May you have good friends to mirror your blind spots.
May leadership be for you a true adventure of growth.
Make this week be filled with leadership moments that count!
Mary Anne and Theresa
Don’t Forget to Tell the “Why”
“No matter what business you are in, everyone in the organization needs to know why.”
Frances Hesselbein, President, The Drucker Foundation
