We really do want to know!  We only received a few replies last time and know that the rest of you can’t be THAT happy all the time. What seems to keep you from being as successful as you want? Your response will help us  provide you with tools, insights, and information that you can use to solve real problems and ultimately, lead and live more brilliantly.

Speak your mind in the comment box below. You might even feel better and we will definitely appreciate your input!

You know the scene. Outnumbered and surrounded by bad guys, Bruce Lee composes himself, takes a stance, and then elegantly kicks ass until he’s the last one standing.

No, I’m not suggesting that we embrace violence to solve our problems. The message we can take from Lee and all great martial artists is this:

If you want to be more effective, do less.

The prevailing quality in the movement of gifted martial artists is efficiency.

And who couldn’t use some of that?

No Nun chucks Required.

You don’t have to enter a dojo to learn the lessons.

Be Your Own Sensei:

When you become an objective self-observer you’ll notice how you waste mental and physical energy on futile efforts like worry, resentment, and anger. Just sitting at your computer, you may notice a clenched jaw, shallow breathing, hunched back, and strained eyes.

Noticing the wasteful habits is challenging since they are so deeply ingrained in our bodies and thoughts. Unwinding the habits will take attention and practice.

Find a Sensei:

To shed the waste more efficiently, get a partner. Great teachers come in many forms including coaches, trainers, body workers, and cognitive therapists. A couple of years ago, I found the Feldenkrais method to help me relieve pain. Every week my practitioner Sonja Sutherland, also an Aikido black-belt, helps me re-educate my nervous system with what seem like simple, inconsequential, movement instructions. As I try to execute her instructions, the A-student inside me struggles to move as far as I can, putting lots of effort in. Her constant reminder is “do less.” The new movement only works if I do it without any struggle. When I insert struggle, I short-circuit the goal.

Do Less, Be More:

What if we went through our days without the wasted effort? If we moved between meetings, task, and errands without wasting energy on worry, resentment, tension, or comparison? What if we were more focused on the task or person in front of us, instead of lamenting about the past or worrying about the future? What could we achieve by bringing more being to our doing?

It seems a worthy quest.

Moshe Feldenkrais on his goal with the method

“To make the impossible possible, the possible easy, and the easy, elegant.”

“If struggling were the way to get there, we’d all be there by now.”

Victoria Castle The Trance of Scarcity

The Annoying Side of Mindfulness

When we become self-aware, able to see ourselves as a neutral third party, we notice certain deeply ingrained ways of thinking and being aren’t working.  Recently, an incredibly insightful client described his underlying story as “danger is everywhere.”

And I thought, Welcome to the club.

I dub the “danger is everywhere” condition (that plagues us all to some extent) the Jason Bourne Syndrome. If assassins are hunting you because you are a rogue government experiment, it comes in handy. For the rest of us, it’s a bit much. Call it a hold-over from our reptile brains. Once effective at keeping us alive, our fear sensors are too tightly wound for life in peaceful, developed countries where we have access to food, clean water, and healthcare.

So we learn to fear our boss, our colleague in marketing, operations, or sales, our clients, our future, the dentist. Some of our fears are grounded. Many are not.

Escape

1. Identify your fears: brainstorm. Try to bring a sense of lightness and capture them all: big and small.

2. Identify the big ones. Circle the 2 or 3 that really have a hold on you.

3. Notice what behaviors you take as a result of these fears.

4. Validate or invalidate the fears. Some you will immediately invalidate (e.g. I am not being chased by secret operatives). Others may be less obvious. For example, How likely is it that you could lose your job? How serious is the symptom you’ve been feeling? You may need investigate, seek data and opinions.

5. Replace the invalid fears with new stories. My client decided to replace, “My boss will think I’m nuts” to “My boss wants to help and can handle someone else being human with her.” So far, he has not been eaten.

Get Help

Sometimes, we discover that the fear was illogical yet we continue to feel it. In some cases, the fear is so deeply entrenched that no amount of mindfulness seems to help.

After my daughter was born in 2007, I developed a deep, terrifying anxiety that she would perish. It didn’t make any sense yet it was there. And I did not seek help for a very long time. Eventually, my body rewired itself around the anxiety and learned to stay on alert. Subsequently, I did not sleep deeply for over a year.

Finally, I sought help and found two practitioners who partnered with me to heal my very unbalanced neurochemical and endocrine systems so that I feel more like my old self. And I now sleep — much better than Jason Bourne I suspect.

“Fear is the expectation of pain, so its opposite is the expectation of pleasure. The world is what you think it is.”

- Serge Kahili King, quoted by Victoria Castle

Book: The Trance of Scarcity Victoria Castle

A few years ago, I gave up the practice of making New Year’s Resolutions, thus giving up the sense of failure and accompanying guilt that rolled around mid-March. Maybe you are one of those people that always keep your resolutions. If so, stop reading. If not, don’t despair: you are entirely normal (unlike those other freaks).

Blame it on the Brain

Here’s neuroscientist Jeffrey Schwartz’ explanation for why we so often fail to meet our goals:

“Change is pain.”

“Trying to change any hardwired habit requires a lot of effort in the form of attention…which leads to a feeling that many people find uncomfortable. So they do what they can to avoid change.”

So, it’s not entirely your fault. Your brain is set on protecting you from discomfort. The result: you further cement hard-wired habits.

The good news: you can become the boss of your brain.

First, you have to better understand your specific resistance to change. For this, we can look to the amazing work of two researchers, Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey. In their book, Immunity to Change, they describe how each of us has a sophisticated, often subconscious, system of practices, fears, and assumptions that keep us locked in place and thwart our attempts to change.

They write: “The most reliable route to ultimately disrupting the immune system begins by identifying the core assumptions that sustain it.” Examples of big assumptions include:

• People are less capable than I (so I won’t delegate or will force people to do things my way only)
• People are not to be trusted (so I withhold information)
• If I speak my mind, I will be eaten (so I keep my mouth shut and my contributions locked in my head)
• ______ is evil (so I lose all compassion and curiosity, diminishing any chance of having a rewarding relationship)

Once the assumptions are identified, you can begin to test their validity.

Dangerous Assumption

It Works

In 2010, I began using their simple Immune Identification process with private clients and workshop participants. In one team offsite, a VP stopped me at the break after about 45 minutes with the process and said “I’ve been to a lot of these meetings and I have never seen people learn so much about themselves and reveal so openly as I just witnessed.”

Whether you want to change yourself, an employee, or an organization, begin by discovering the change immune system, or risk wasting precious energy and resources for short-lived improvements.

A Gift

Given that I could not find a concise handout in their book or website, I developed a brief set of instructions (with sample) based on Kegan and Lahey’s work that I use with success with my clients. If you’d like a copy, send me an email to denise@brillianceinc.com with subject Change Immune Instructions and I’ll send it promptly. No strings attached, no need to trade anything. I welcome any success stories.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Fragmented Attention

Perhaps you’ve heard: we are the most distracted humans to have walked the earth. And apparently, being distracted— fragmenting yourself so that no one thing or person gets your full attention—has damaging effects on your relationships, results, and stress levels.

I’m not sure what’s more annoying, being distracted or being told that I need to stop being so distracted when at this exact moment, my phone is ringing, my email just binged, my kid needs to be fed, the laundry is in a mountainous pile, my proposal is jammed in the printer, the dentist keeps sending me escalating reminders that I am past due for a teeth cleaning, and the dog is looking at me forlornly.

So what’s a person to do? I know that yoga and/or mediation help increase calm and focus. Which sounds great assuming the yoga teacher does laundry, fixes printers, walks the dog, and cleans teeth.

Focus 101

Until then, here’s a primer for attention challenged ones comme moi:

1. Decide that you want to give this moment (person, task) your full attention for ____ minutes.

2. Turn off and reduce distractions: close your laptop, turn off your phone, put a do-not-disturb note on the door, put the papers on your desk to one side, write a list of things you need to remember/do (writing it down frees up valuable brain space).

3. Breathe deeply.

4. Practice being in one place, doing one thing.

5. When your attention drifts, recall your commitment, breathe deeply, and return your curious attention to the person/task.

6. Reflect. What was gained from this exercise? What’s in it for you to increase your ability to feel settled and focused?

7. Repeat 342 times per day.

The Upside of Focus

Despite our best attempts to multitask, we really can only do one thing well at a time.

By learning to give more of your full attention to the important work and people around you, you’ll find that conversations and tasks are more efficient, with fewer mistakes and misunderstandings, potentially leaving you time for things like yoga, family, or cleaner teeth.

“Be here, prepared to be nowhere else.” (Susan Scott: principle of a Fierce Conversation).

Indulge in the Moment this Holiday

I hope this primer serves you this season, when we have an opportunity to escape from some of the sources that pull on our attention. Even so, it’s not easy to let go the impulse to check email, voice mail, and fragment your attention.  If you are a leader in an organization, know that when you become more focused (or fragmented), those around you do as well. May you reap many awards from indulging fully in the moment.

“I’d had enough so I threw the blackberry out the car window.” An inventive client who shall go nameless.

In the overwhelm of working and raising twins (now 9 months old), I realized I needed to do something to resource myself in order to keep myself sane. I can juggle a lot but the more I learn about the brain and how “multi-tasking” is really doing two things poorly at the same time, I am starting to give into the idea of doing just one thing at a time.

The notion that you don’t have to do it all, that you can start small and do just one thing appeals to me personally and is something I have “known” for a long time as a coach. We all just need reminders once in a while.

The reminder:
My reminder to focus on one thing started when reading a newsletter I subscribe to about neuroscience and mindfulness by Rick Hansen. His newsletter is titled “Just one Thing” and in it he suggests a simple practice each week “that will bring you more joy, more fulfilling relationships, and more peace of mind and heart.” And who doesn’t want that?

In my coaching I also follow Marshall Goldsmith’s approach of asking leaders to focus on just one behavior to change over 6-12 months. Just one thing. Even if there are many areas that could be developed, pick one and you are more likely to really shift it sustainably. And as a bonus it will have a cascading effect on other behaviors you also have wanted to address.

Prioritizing

Doing just one thing has also helped me with prioritization. My friend Kirsten Mahoney who coaches people to have more balance in their lives has a great “sticky note” exercise in which she recommends that you write the three most important things you need to get done on a sticky note each day. Even if you have 25 things to do, gaining that clarity helps you prioritize and plan your day. It is also satisfying when you accomplish your sticky note goals.

I have modified the practice to identify one thing in each area (one thing that will resource me mentally and emotionally, one thing for work,  and one thing I want to accomplish on my personal to-do list).

The practice:

I ask myself what is just one thing that I can do for myself each day:

• What one thing is most important for me to do for myself mentally and emotionally?
• What one thing is most important to me to accomplish at work?
• What one thing is most important to me to cross off my personal to-do list?

The one that has the greatest impact on my life is the one that resources me mentally and emotionally. Sometimes it is taking a walk, listening to a podcast that lifts my spirits and makes me laugh (Wait, wait, don’t tell me), picking up the phone to talk with a friend, asking for help (really hard to do but so darn worth it!), taking 10 minutes of silence (or 20 when I am ambitious) or simply stopping to stretch and breathe.

Bonus!

I find just doing that one thing gets me started and, like focusing on one behavior to change, all sorts of things cascade from it. The peace of mind and satisfaction I gain by getting that one thing done, gives me the motivation to move on to other things on my list. And if I don’t get to all the other things, I know I at least hit my most important goal in each area. Most importantly I did something for myself that allowed me to bring more to the rest of my life.

• What one thing can you do for yourself today?
• What one thing is most important for you to do today?

Hint: it is helpful to write your sticky note the night before – it lets you sleep more soundly knowing that you have a plan for the next day. Also, if you do that one thing before you even open your email, you have a much better chance of getting it done.

Can you recall a team off-site meeting where real conversations happened and real work got done? Where everyone felt that the time was well spent? If you are lucky enough to recall such an experience, you probably worked for (or are) a courageous leader.

Without leadership courage, department meetings are one-way talk-a-thons. Any inclusion is for appearances only. Silence or corporate nods stand in for meaningful conversation and buy-in. Disagreements are avoided or presumed non-existent. Agenda is king. Participants extract their souls from the meeting to cope with the tedium.

When you inject leadership courage, you increase the likelihood for meaningful exchanges of divergent opinions. You might even achieve real buy-in, make important decisions, and move forward confidently and aligned.

You CAN Handle The Truth

I recently had the opportunity to facilitate an amazing three-day conference for roughly 200 division leaders. The Senior Vice President was new to the job and to me: I had no real sense of his style or his tolerance for ambiguity and truth.

I wanted to create a venue worthy of the participants and the thousands of on-the-job hours sacrificed. Rather than talking heads preaching from the pulpit, I wanted real conversations that would deliver 199 views of reality to the leader.

I proposed a ludicrous idea: provide Audience Response Keypads to permit each participant to respond instantly and anonymously to provoking questions.

He courageously agreed without hesitation.

Not sure what we kind of feedback we would unleash, we publicly committed to asking the questions and revealing the answers instantly.

Imagine a new leader laying out a vision for change and then asking publicly,

“How clear was my vision?”

“How urgent do you believe this is?”

“To what extent is this rubbish?”

And not just asking for the sake of appearing inclusive, but asking and revealing each anonymous response.

After two days of inclusive conversations, he asked one last courageous question: “Do you believe that we should move the department in this strategic vision? Yes or No.

Keeping in mind that responses were anonymous, what percentage do you think responded “yes”?

87% said “Yes, we believe this is the direction we need to go.”

Imitation Courage

Too many new leaders mark their territory by making sweeping changes and overhauling organization charts rather than invest in the hard work of listening, learning, and leading.

A recent HBR study confirmed that while most new leaders prioritize organization overhaul, only a small fraction of those efforts improve performance, and most reorganizations actually harm performance and crush morale. You know; you’ve lived it.

True Courage

Authentic courage doesn’t swagger, but is humble. A courageous leader asks hard questions, listen to all inputs, learns, and adapts based on new information. The courageous leader doesn’t worry about looking all-knowing. Real courage apologizes when it makes mistakes. Real courage says something like: “I know that many of you want me to tell you exactly what we are going to do differently, but I won’t. I won’t because I don’t yet know. I can tell you that it will take all of us to figure this out together. I am committed to holding a vision, removing obstacles, gaining support, and helping you do what you do best. Someday, we might find it necessary to move some of the organizational boxes around, but that will be much further down the road and only when we are clear how it will facilitate decision-making and serve our vision.”

The root of the word courage is heart (from Latin cor, French coeur): The state or quality of mind or spirit that enables one to face danger, fear, or vicissitudes with self-possession, confidence, and resolution; bravery.

Before you summon your team to the next retreat, find your courage and create a venue worthy of your talent.

And hire a great facilitator.

1) Your brain would like you to know that it is overworked, and
2) Your brain would like a coach.

Your Brain is Overworked
You are asking too much of your brain. More specifically, your prefrontal cortex, that evolutionarily youngest region of our brain– the part responsible for higher thinking like prioritizing, categorizing, and strategizing–could use some support. And it’s no wonder: If you think of your whole brain’s information processing power as equal to the milky-way galaxy, the pre-frontal cortex can handle only about a cubic foot of that information. So, the part of your brain that distinguishes you from the animal kingdom and gives you your smarts, is akin to a Texas Instruments calculator (from 1980) embedded in an IBM supercomputer.

And for most of us, the prefrontal cortex is powerful enough to operate efficiently for about ninety minutes a day.
So, if you are wondering why, at the end of a long work-day you feel weary, and like you accomplished too little, it’s not you…it’s your brain. And because our to-do lists are only getting longer and more demanding, and our distractions increasing, we try to supercharge our brain with caffeine, exercise, ginseng–all of which may help–temporarily.

Here’s a short list of Indicators that Your Brain is Overburdened

• You misplace your keys, pen, etc, only to find it in plain sight (or in hand).
• You send off an incomplete email, or copy someone by mistake, or regret sending while angry.
• You bring your bad mood with you to work or home and smear it all over innocent bystanders.
• You fail to manage your time so that you get the most important things checked off your list.
• You get easily distracted.
• You forget why you are at the grocery store.

If you experience no symptoms like the ones listed above, please email info@brilliance.com and let us know what you are taking.

Optimize Your Brain

Fortunately, you can do a lot to positively affect performance in your fragile prefrontal cortex.

• Prioritize early: Do the your most complex thinking early in the day

• Limit distractions: Turn off some of the myriad electronic sounds competing for your attention

• Eat: Give your brain the glucose fuel it needs (and bring chocolate to your next meeting)
• Write it down: Put your thoughts on paper to free up space in your crowded brain
• Do something novel: Raise your dopamine levels by watching a funny video or reading a blog
• Take a shower (or go for a walk, etc): 90% of 6,000 people surveyed said they did their best work OUTSIDE the workplace
• Talk out loud to a human…which brings us to the request from your brain

Your Brain Would Like a Coach

The simple act of speaking to another person helps your brain clear through the clutter and achieve clarity and insight. Your “coach” doesn’t need to be a certified professional. Your brain wants someone who will listen, hear, and offer a different point of view. If you have someone in your life who does this gratis, keep him or her close. According to David Rock, author of Your Brain at Work, a person who sees things that you can’t, and offers up their observations and insights is “like having a bonus prefrontal cortex.”

And who couldn’t use a spare brain?

Questions for Transforming a Trusted Someone Into Your Coach

• What am I not seeing?
• What’s the silver lining? What good can come from this?
• What assumptions am I making?
• How do you see the issue?
• What would you do if you were in my shoes?
• What have I missed?

In summary (your brain likes summaries), your brain is overworked and underpowered for what you ask of it. While there are a number of ways to rev it up, the best may be to talk aloud with another trusted human being (unfortunately, dogs proved insufficient in Brilliance Inc. testing).

Quotes and Quips:

The Hazards of Mutitasking: Even the brain of a Harvard graduate can be turned into that of an eight-year-old simply by being made to do two things at once. (from Your Brain at Work)

Blackberry and the Brain: A 2005 University of London study showed that having any communication device on nearby reduces its owner’s IQ 15-20 points.

Stay tuned for future Ignite issues and blog posts about optimizing and leveraging your brain.

In the Next Issue:  Inspire Others to Change…Without Annoying Them where we continue our conversation about the brain and reveal the real path to change yourself and others.

The Statistics in this article were sourced in part from a presentation by David Rock at the South Bay OD Network Conference in November, 2009, hosted by Oracle Corporation.

Our thanks to Risë Venditti for loaning us her prefrontal cortex in refining this article.

More Resources:

Your Brain At Work by David Rock

Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

Neuroleadership Institute and Blog

David Rock Blog

Relationship is the grease on the wheels of business. When you have it, all else flows more smoothly and efficiently. Without it, everything takes longer: communication is stilted and unclear; miscommunication leads to re-work; efforts to save face or deflect blame distract precious energy.  Yet, often we neglect true team-building, thinking that it will steal valuable time from “real” work.

Relationship Pyramid

At Brilliance Inc., we liken the work process to a pyramid, with relationship at the foundation. Sure, you can flip it and try minimizing relationship while you focus on results, but like a spinning top, it’s unsustainable. And the resulting poor outcomes will only further damage relationships, bringing about a need for major intervention and leadership acrobatics. Meaning you’ll have to allocate intense resources to rebuilding relationships that may or may not be salvageable.

Here’s an overview of the discreet steps that lead to outstanding results. We call it ROAAR™.

Foundation Level: Relationship
-    Trust and mutual respect exists.
-    People appreciate, recognize, and leverage each others’ differences.
-    People communicate with candor and clarity.

Level Two: Objectives
-    Goals cascade from a Corporate vision and objectives, down to each team and individual.
-    Team and individuals goals are derived inclusively in robust conversations
-    Outcomes are clearly defined and realistic.

Level Three: Agreements
-    Roles and workflow handoffs are clear.
-    Team members debate until real agreements are reached.
-    Team members decline requests that they are unable to meet, then negotiate, remove roadblocks, and prioritize.

Level Four: Actions
-    Task assignments are aligned with strengths and passions
-    Team members put a clear plan into action or recalibrate as new information is gathered.
-    Adjustments are made based on learning acquired from the first stages of the plan which allows members to act skillfully on a larger scale.
-    As roadblocks or problems occur, team members surface them to leadership.

Level Five: Results
-    Results meet or exceed expectations.
-    When results fail to meet expectations, a blame-free analysis seeks to understand causes.

Meanwhile, Back in the Real World
When we present this model in workshops and ask participants, “How far back does root-cause analysis go in your company?” without fail, they’ve told us that when things break, they and their leaders look to the “Act” level first: “Who did (and didn’t do) what?” This shallow analysis creates a witch-hunt mentality where people scramble to get their stories straight and avoid having the blame fall on them. The ensuing self-preservation efforts divert valuable resources away from developing products and services that create loyal customers.

Futility of Fear

And for those who still aren’t convinced—those who think that results happen because you hold people “accountable” and “hold their feet to the fire”—you might be surprised to learn that the environment of fear that you are creating is counter-productive. In short, when people are in fear mode, they become stupid.

It’s true. If your goal is to drop the average IQ of your company, then treat people in a manner that ignites their fight or flight instinct. If you still doubt, just Google “Amygdala Hijack” and learn all about how to lower your competitive advantage and create a hostile workplace.

Identifying and Fixing the Problems: No Witch-Hunt Required

For those courageous leaders who would like some help with effective blame-free analysis, we offer our this complimentary ROAAR™ Analysis Model. This root-cause analysis starts by looking to the foundation (Relationship), then moving up the pyramid, reviewing each factor until sources of breakage are identified and addressed. The primary goal is to learn and prevent future breakages, while increasing trust and capability.We’d love to hear how it is useful to you and welcome your feedback, ideas, and comments. Click here to download a copy.

Other Thoughts & Inspirations

Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long by David Rock

“If you don’t make failure acceptable, you can’t have original and unique.”
~ Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO Dreamworks

“Without relationship, you start at zero.”
~ Kofi Annan

“Clarity about whose head will roll when things go wrong.”
~ Accountability, as defined by Susan Scott in the new bestseller Fierce Leadership

Note: The metaphor of the relationship-based pyramid was inspired by our dear friend Peter Vultaggio, principal of the Lumi Company and brilliant trainer, coach, and business leader.

Little did I know that the content would become so personal to the Brilliance Inc. team. Since our founding 2008, we’ve had the luxury of proximity. We could brainstorm around the same pad of paper or flip chart, share challenges and successes across the table, strategize and debrief meetings in the car pool lane.

And that luxury is about to become history as life takes us in different geographic directions.

So here are some reminders that I offer to myself, my team, and any of you who are charged with achieving great things with others at a distance.

Working remotely can feel like you are isolated on an island. Not entirely a bad thing at times, but posing real challenges. In order to truly feel like a cohesive team and exceed your goals, you need to build sturdy, reliable bridges. In our program, Communicating Across Networks, we focus on three of the most important links.

Bridge #1: Connection

Relationships and trust are critical to any high-performing team. And if you’ve ever been new to a team, or worked on a team with low trust, you know how much extra effort it takes to get stuff done. When teams have trust, benefit of the doubt, a sense of humor, and true connections, mistakes and misunderstandings are merely speed bumps. Without trust, mistakes become mountains, where people play a version of corporate musical chairs to avoid sitting in the blame seat. Strong relationships can be forged and maintained regardless of geographic location. But it takes intention, skill, and constant awareness and effort to do it over phone and email.

Bridge #2: Clarity

Misunderstanding is common. And when communicating across networks, misunderstanding seems to be the NORM. Communications via email and text, even in the same language, can require translation. I can relate to George Bernard Shaw’s quote that “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place”.

In the age of texting and shorthand communication, it can be tempting to assume we understand and move on. Clarifying your statements, assumptions, expectations, requests and intentions becomes even more important when you can’t infer from someone’s body language or tone.

Bridge #3: Commitment

Ever wrongly assumed that silence meant agreement? Tasks fail to get done when we presume commitment that isn’t real or when we don’t clearly grasp someone’s full workload. Clarifying who’s doing what by when and with what support, will help strengthen the other two bridges (connection and clarity). It takes courage to admit that one is not committed to a task.

Best Bridge-Building Behaviors

Key behaviors help create effective, engaged, dispersed teams. Perhaps the most essential are these:

• - Assume positive intent in others
  - Be curious and seek to understand
  - Display authentic, appropriate humanness (e.g. admitting fear or fault)
  - Adjust to the audience (tone, content, speed, medium, approach)
  - Offer clear, requests, statements, declines, opinions, praise, and feedback.
  - Recognize and appreciate differences

Here’s to the team (mine and yours)!