Do You Come "Batteries Included"?

This past week I spent a day in New York, NY at the East Coast HQ of Google participating in their ThinkHealth event. During this event I had the pleasure of seeing the presentation, The Reimagination of Healthcare, by my good industry colleague, Steven Krein of StartUp Health. During this presentation, he introduced this idea of "batteries included"an analogy that applies to people who give versus drain energy from a situation. He talked about how badly we need people in our lives and businesses who come with batteries included. He also challenges us to be people who come with our batteries included. 

In our lives and work we are moment by moment faced with challenging situations. We are also all experts at identifying how and why challenges can/will NOT be overcome. When we stay in this posture and do not proceed to the second thought related to how we can/will overcome challenges, we have our batteries strapped on.

So ask yourself the next time you are in that interaction that is challenging, or tackling a challenge, consider if you are "batteries included", or if you need to go back home and get them. :-)

Thanks again Steven for a great new concept to live by.  

Everyday Greatness

Yesterday I spend a day with a few hundred men at my church at our annual Men's Retreat and one of the topics which came up for consideration was how we as men achieve greatness everyday in our missions to be all that God is calling us to be in this life time. Surely there are as many answers to this question as there are pairs of ears to hear it. As I sat and meditated on this, my own answer emerged and I'd like to share it here.

1. Practicing the Great Commandment as stated in the Bible, to love God, self, neighbor and enemy. Its seems to me, and I have increasing personal experience to confirm this, that an intention of love in all actions does as much as anything to bring out our unique greatness as anything else. It overcomes inappropriate ego drive, hate, fear, undue selfishness. 

2. Resisting comparison as this practice robs all perception of greatness of its effectiveness as one's greatness is one's unique posture to occupy in the world and if you use a comparative definition another's will always seem to overshadow your own. Knowing my own posture and cherishing and being satisfied of the unique greatness of that is critical to showing up as great everyday. I recommend my prior post on this topic at, http://wiseworking.blogspot.com/2008/01/self-comparison-better-than-other.html.  

3. Developing mastery, a practice of operating at a level of high creativity in a space of one's natural giftedness for purposes that benefit one's self, network, community, society and the world. I highly recommend Robert Greene's lecture on this topic at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sYmQFPXmJA.  

4. Practicing patient persistence as achieving greatness as a result of practicing the first 3 points requires patient persistence. This path is not easy and continually dis-courage-ing, one must cultivate a commitment to proceeding with patience and not prone to giving up knowing that greatness is a journey more than a destination and that at anytime we are great, if only in the eyes of our mothers, and have the potential to achieve even greater degrees of greatness. I recommend my prior post on this topic at: http://wiseworking.blogspot.com/2007/11/patience-persistence-2-practices-worth.html.

So here is to our showing up and acknowledging our greatness everyday.

Lessons from "The Trip to Nowhere"!

This past Christmas my wife and I finally got around to striking another item off our "someday maybe" list by taking the vaunted "Trip to Nowhere". 

The Trip to Nowhere: The Game:

To topline it, this endeavor involved getting up the morning after Christmas, packing (overnight) bags, donning layers (against the winter cold) and going to the airport with no clue of where we were going. Once there, we use an iPad app, Airport Zoom to randomly pick 6 cities, Roulette style, we would target for a one week vacation. The city to which we could get the first affordable ticket is the one we would go to regardless of location, climate, interest or attractions.The point is that we would be together on an adventure. The fun is that we would not know from moment to moment what we would need to wear (we resolved to shopping for any needs we detected upon arrival), where we would sleep (we booked rooms the afternoon of most days), where we would eat (we scanned Yelp's "Best Breakfasts" list every AM after checking the weather), etc. As you can see, based on one's perspective, this can be seen as a lot of fun or a lot of di-stress.

We ended up in Los Angeles (Santa, Monica, Santa Barbara and West Hollywood) for 5 days having the most fun and, at times avoiding the biggest arguments, of our lives. On this trip, I learned a number of things anew that I work to practice as I realize that really if we are perfectly honest and conscious, every moment is potentially a "trip to no where" as joy and tragedy are always simultaneously at the doorstep. 

Lessons from the Trip:

So here is what I learned:

See the Unplanned as Fun!: The unplanned nature of this trip is what made it an adventure. It was a good break for hyper planners like my wife and I. We learned that the thin line between fun and di-stress is how you look at it and what you call it. The body experiences the same emotions either way. The common element in any fun to di-stressful situation is SURPRISE! I have decided to practice seeing surprise more often as fun than as something to be distressed about.

See the Partnership Potential in Conflict.: The nature of the cosmos is conflict and this nature can be particularly painful in relationships, and even more so in unplanned contexts, like a Trip To Nowhere. We were continually tempted on this trip to tip into tiffs over complications caused by the fact that it was all unplanned. We had to continually submit to the better temptation of remembering that we were partners on an adventure, and in that see how partnering resulted in more creative solutions and meaningful outcomes that would have been missed if we had succumbed to an adversarial stance. I have decided to bring this set of eyes and ears to every conflict in my life. I am sure my glasses and hearing aid will fail me sometimes but even a less than perfect execution of this lesson will result in a greater number of excellent results than otherwise.  

Be  Open To Options & Shape It As You Go With It.: You can imagine how: 1) sitting in an airport during one of the busiest travel periods of the year with no reservation and no option to return home (that was one of the impromptu rules of the game) and hoping you can find 2 seats on a flight to a randomly selected city, or 2) sitting on a beach in a rental car in Santa Barbara (which we found out is a top LA Metro holiday vacation location) discovering that all the hotel rooms in town are gone, can be interesting. I learned though that by staying alert in the moment with a relaxed focus and avoiding "horribilizing", we were able to see options that we would normally have missed, to get cooperation from people who normally would not have  cooperated and to: 1) enjoy those circumstances that were other than what we have hoped and 2) better influence and shape those circumstances that came closer to what we had hoped versus not. This practice of openness and shaping were newly "a-ha'd" for me and my practice is renewed as I see that even not getting what you want can be enjoyable, and you can get what you desire more often when you stay open to shaping what arises in the moment.

Do It While You Can.: While on and after this trip, my wife and I realized that there would never be an ideal time to take such a trip, and we felt extremely blessed that we were willing to make the time, courage and means to do so. This is true of so much in life. There is most always a reason not to and more often we need to make the reasons to do it while we can. The news teaches us daily that there is no guarantee that we will get to do it later. So as the Charle Parker composition instructs us, "Now Is The Time".   

Pack Lean & Plan for Every Climate.: So one of the peculiarities of this sort of trip is that you do not know where you are going to end up as you must go where the available airline ticket leads. We did not know if we were going to end up in Alaska or Jamaica. We packed light, with overnight bags, and wore layers so we could shed for the Caribbean, or bulk up for the Arctic. This seemed to me to be a metaphor for life itself. As I mature, what I have accumulated materially and otherwise feels heavier and heavier. While one cannot make it in the world with no luggage, I am cognizant of the need to be more choiceful about what I keep in my luggage and the size of my bag. I also have to be ready for the most frigid and balmiest of situations, using them to  cultivate the confidence to know I can shed or get what's needed in any situation that arises.   

So there you have it, one of the most adventurous and instructive vacations of my life. Though apprehensive, I am glad I followed the lead of my lovely bride who tookk me into and through it. 

Responsiveness is Better than Perfection

The last few years this mantra has come to be a signature one in my working with individuals and teams. Many of us are groomed to achieve perfection, and many of us have made good lives for ourselves striving for this illusion. The illusion is fine, I suppose, if you can do so productively. What I see though, is that most do not chase this illusion too productively. Or maybe a better way of saying it is that most could be more productive if the toxic energy of self-condemnation resulting from a lack of perfection, were converted to the energy of self-encouragement, compassion and persistence resulting from a spirit of responsiveness. 

I see responsiveness as a good alternative to perfection for a few reasons:

1) Its Achievable as responsiveness to ever changing requirements, environments and situations is achievable whereas perfection is not and especially given its subjective nature.

2) Its Adaptive as responsiveness does not presume the achievement of perfection but instead continually adapts to new requirements of change to achieve the best productive goal from moment to moment. 

3) Its Positive as responsiveness consistently sets up an open, alert, hopeful, generally positive outlook regarding the next steps. This is energy is light, fluid, fun, more prone to hatching the next creative solution versus the relatively heavier, condemnatory, often stagnant and guilty energy that comes with an expectation of perfection.

Now for those of us who are addicted to the requirement of perfection, take a read at my WiseWorking post, "The Perfect is The Enemy of the Good". I think it important that we understand that giving up perfection does not mean that we cannot be excellent. I even submit that we can be more excellent if we strive for less perfection, and truth be told, the world does excellently  with more excellence than with any perfection.

Workshop Slides: Social Media for Professional Use

Here is a link to slides from a workshop, "Social Media for Professional Use", I developed and delivered recently. I developed this workshop for those who avoid social media because they only think of it as a personal hazard and waste of time and fail to use it for all the benefits it can bring to their careers and education.

Enjoy and I hope this is helpful to you. I am interested in your thoughts on this topic and please do share with friends and colleagues.

Silent Retreats: Taking a vacation to your Self

Imagine. 

Imagine committing yourself to 3 days, or even 1 for that matter, where you exist in silence. 

You do not speak. (You might even hang a sign around your neck like I do noting you are "observing silence".) 

You do not check the media. 

You restrict your sensory input to things natural and developmental at the spiritual, psychological, emotional, physical, self-relational and non-commercial levels of life. 

You restrict your activities to sitting, meditating, walking (preferably in nature), contemplating, exercise and reading or listening of a spiritually self-developmental nature. 

This is my own version of a silent retreat and I do them at a retreat center or at home.

On a whim I did a 2.5 day silent retreat at Pendle Hill, the Quaker Retreat Center in Swarthmore, PA, USA last year and to great benefit. I am doing another this year as part of my late summer vacation. 

Contemplating these retreats are painful (for my ego) owing to the privation of my regular ego-sustaining activities related to work, social relations, the media, etc.. That said, my soul loves them as its normally neglected “Small Voice” gets to be center stage for a while. I call these retreats "vacations to my Self" because they induce, after about a day of ego craving (akin to going cold turkey), a certain monastic state where I feel myself going “internal”, “dropping down”, re-attuning (some would say re-atoning, or re-at-One-ing, get it!) and reconnecting with my self and my Self. In this space, I experience healing (from the cuts and bruises of being in the world), connection (to the Essential Wisdom that it takes to be better when I reenter the world) and rest (that I so need and have neglected on a daily basis when I was in the world).

All during this time, the ego fights to assert itself telling me that the world may end if I come away from the news, email, the internet, conversations with family, friends and colleagues, etc.. I am amazed at the degree I believe this and I admit, as I am human, that I do let those most important to me know I am reachable once a day via SMS and I do check once for about 5 minutes in the evenings. And yes, I set a timer to assure its only 5 minutes. :-) One must remember that the Sabbath is for me, not me for the Sabbath. That allowed, those who know me know that I should have dropped dead from being away from my internet connection and SMS the 23 hours and 55 minutes between those checks but alas I survive, even thrive, after a day or so. I can tell you that one of the great benefits of such a retreat is reconnecting to the premise that while the world may want me, it does not need me. This humbling premise is good for health and perspective.

I intend to continue to engage these retreats multiple times a year and for greater lengths of time over time. I recommend them and would love to chat about your own intention and experience in this area if you care to share. You know where to reach me at craig@wiseworking.com.

PS - Here is my delicious book mark list on this topic if you want to read more: http://delicious.com/cadelarge/silent_retreats.

Mini Book Clubs: Subject Matter Expert Speed Dating?!

I recently experienced an efficient and productive encounter at the request of a good colleague, Madelyn Blair of Pelerei. On a periodic basis she summons 3 colleagues to a half hour-ish book club where we each take 5 minutes to discuss the key takeaways of a book we've recently read and then the group spends 5 minutes asking a few questions and engaging in a mini discussion about the book discussed. The books are typically related to a topic relevant to the group like say storytelling, knowledge management or creativity. 

At first I thought this format wouldn't be useful due to its brevity but I have to say I found it refreshing in its brevity. We got on the teleconference, got to it with little rambling, pontificating or editorializing (which can be the drawback of longer book club formats), made our points, asked our questions, received our benefit and bid ourselves adieu until next time. It was also a great way to meet new interesteds in disciplinary areas of interest and without consuming too much time. It struck me as a form of speed dating with subject matter experts. ☺

This mini book club approach is quite interesting and I look forward to doing this regularly and encourage you to explore the same for yourselves.