While I’m not a big believer in New Year’s resolutions, I like the idea of resolving, this year, to change the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.
At the end of the book, I found a pearl of wisdom spoken by a minor character named Bast:
Everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.
Bast then goes on to illustrate about how the story we tell ourselves can change (I choose to read this excerpt with the implied broad sense of “beauty,” and even so wish the example were a different one):
If you tell [a shy girl you love] she’s beautiful, she’ll think you’re sweet, but she won’t believe you. She knows that beauty lies in your beholding…But [you can] show her she is beautiful. You make mirrors of your eyes, prayers of your hands…It is hard, very hard, but when she truly believes you…Suddenly the story she tells herself in her own head changes. She transforms. She isn’t seen as beautiful. She is beautiful, seen.
So often we cling fiercely to limitations that are far past their expiration date.
We can resolve this year to start to believe the stories that the people who love us most tell us about ourselves.
Stories about being worthy of love.
Stories about being truly, deeply beautiful.
Stories about what we can accomplish: the book we can write, the new role we’re ready for, the strengths we have that come so easily to us that we ignore them.
The biggest leaps I took in 2018 were possible because I believed, even if just for a moment, the kindest, most generous stories that people who love me told me. These stories were sometimes spoken out loud and sometimes reflected powerfully in actions.
All of them helped me see myself in the kinder light reflected in the mirror of their eyes, rather than the harsh glow of self-criticism. And I’d think, “Maybe they’re right. Maybe that is in me. Maybe.” That was enough to imagine bravery. That was enough to begin.
As we look to 2019, let us remember to believe those who see in us more capability, bravery, and potential than we see in ourselves. And let’s remember that one of the greatest, easiest gifts we can give is to be positive mirrors, by reminding others of the beauty that lies within them.
Ken Ravizza in the Chicago Cubs dugout. Photo copyright Steve Green/Chicago Cubs via The New York Times.
Ken Ravizza, who brought the practice of sports psychology to professional baseball, recently passed away at the age of 70. Ravizza began this work four decades ago at a time when talk of a “sports psychologist” would cause chuckles in the locker room. Today, thanks to in no small part to Ravizza and others he worked with and influenced, nearly every Major League baseball team has a director of “mental conditioning,” and players are increasingly evaluated on six skills: running, throwing, fielding, hitting for average, hitting for power, and psychological resilience. Ravizza’s last job was as an assistant to Chicago Cubs Manager Joe Maddon in the years the Cubs won the World Series.
What did Ravizza do that was so special?
According to Chad Bohling, the first sports psychologist hired by the Yankees, “Ravizza was skilled at taking generic concepts in psychology and applying them to high-level athletes in a manner in which they could understand.”
Put another way, Ravizza’s gift was not as an inventor of new psychological concepts, nor was he necessarily on the cutting edge of psychology itself. Rather, he was a teacher and a translator, taking the best that field had to offer and bringing it to a new audience to help them perform at a higher level. Ravizza knew how to make simple but profound concepts, like “forget your last mistake” and “stay in the moment,” tangible, sticky, and therefore impactful to the players.
Two Ken Ravizza vignettes:
In 2004, when working with a slumping Cal State Fullerton team, Ravizza gave each player a tiny toilet small enough to fit in their gloves to remind them to flush away anything that was in the past and let it go.
During spring training of 2015, what would become the Cubs’ championship season, he, according to the New York Times, gathered the full team on the field “where he had lined up 162 baseballs, plus about a dozen more, and separated them with seven bats.”
The objects represented the number of games the Cubs would play over the course of the season, including the playoffs, and the bats divided them by months.
The message?
‘How long the season is, yet how individual it is and how each game means something’ said Adam Warren, a Yankees reliever who spent the first half of that season with the Cubs. ‘For an athlete, it’s easy to say ‘forget about that’ or ‘focus on the next pitch’ or ‘one game at a time.’ But if you have something visually that you can see that symbolizes that and resonates, it’s going to stay with you as opposed to something you hear and then forget about two minutes later.’
What a perfect summary of our jobs as creators, authors and sense-makers in our fields (let alone as managers, coaches, and leadership trainers), and a great antidote to the ever-pervasive “I have nothing new to say.”
What Ken Ravizza models is that, to be impactful, we needn’t be in the business of inventing brand new ideas that no one has ever thought of.
Rather, our job is to take our dedication to something we believe is important—for example, the mental game in baseball—and became highly skilled at selecting the most important concepts, ideas and insights that we have access to and to translate themin ways that players (our tribe) can hear them.
I’m reminded of one of my first full-time jobs, working at IBM to partner with U.S. public school districts to support their adoption of new technologies. Every time I and my IBM colleagues showed up to speak to school administrators, one of the first questions we were consistently asked was, “are any of you educators?” Why? Because they wanted to know, “are you one of us?” Or, more specifically, “are you close enough to being one of us that I should believe that you understand our context, and believe your application of these ideas to our reality?” Because if not, then I’m going to tune you out.
With this lens, we see what are two most important jobs are as creators, neither of which is “creating absolutely brand new things.” Instead, we must:
Become “one of us” to the tribes to whom we are speaking, a practice of self-authorization that grows out of the way we show up, how consistently we show up, and the clarity and generosity with which we share our articulation of the ideas we believe need to be translated to this audience. Most important is, like Ravizza, speaking in a language this tribe can hear—the first indicator of whether we are ‘in’ or ‘out’—and using a form of communication that is meaningful to them.
Effectively tell stories, like the one with the 162 baseballs and the 7 bats, in a way that can be heard and remembered. This is what allows lessons to penetrate the psyche of those to whom we are speaking. We can choose to use physical objects—tiny toilets, baseballs and bats—or vivid, concrete stories. But no matter what the medium, our job is to speak in ways that engage, in ways that are easily remembered and repeated, so that our audience can tell themselves and others those stories again and again, long after we are gone. Our job is to leave behind, in the form of these memorable stories, tiny mementos of our message.
This view is a chance to free ourselves from the terror of the blank page—whether a page we are trying to fill with a blog post, an article, a video draft, a speech, or our story garden for a training session—by reminding ourselves that the question we have been asked to answer is not “how do I say something that no one could find if they Googled these ideas after the fact,” but rather, “what, of all that I have been exposed to, are the most important ideas, concepts and frameworks that I can understand, process and translate to generously support the people to whom I am speaking.”
New ideas are a dime a dozen.
Ideas that land in a way that people can hear, remember, digest, practice, and internalize…those ones are priceless.
I’ve tried a thousand times to have a consistent, useful To Do list.
I’ve written them by hand in notebooks. I’ve tried fancy project management apps like Trello and Asana. I even almost settled on various paired-down “it’s just a list and nothing else” softwares like Teux Deux, Remember the Milk or Wunderlist.
But eventually, each of my To Do lists fails, and I end up abandoning it.
The problem, I realized, isn’t the interface, it’s the list itself. My To Do lists do a terrible job distinguishing between important and urgent, and between simple and complex. In the end, some combination of three things ends up happening:
I prioritize small things that are easier to check off the list, at the expense of the “real stuff.”
The important things languish…
…or they get so big that they don’t make sense on the To Do list
The result is a doubly whammy of decreased output: a persistent pull towards the simpler, less-important tasks; and a growing To Do list that is either stale (stuff that rolled over week after week for months) or overwhelming (long lists of complex, insurmountable tasks).
Eventually I give up on the list, and the software, revert back to a hodgepodge of solutions.
Lately I realized that what I need isn’t better software, it’s a better list. I need a Must Do List: a things-that-absolutely-must-happen-this-week list.
Here’s how it works:
Find a window at the start of your week, either on Sunday night or, better, Monday morning when you’re fresh and thinking clearly and broadly. Jot down the first 1-3 things that come to mind that feel like they’re going to be most important in the coming week.
Look at your calendar for last week and for the coming week, as well as whatever communication tool (email, Slack, etc.) you use, to orient yourself to the flow of meetings, deadlines, and communication.
Write your Must Do list, a short list of important things that really, truly, must get done this week. You’re allowed an absolute maximum of 10 items on the list.
Use the list all week, and return to it on Friday afternoon to see how you did.
Here’s the important bit: your Friday afternoon job isn’t simply to look over the list and roll things over to the following week. Your job is to evaluate what did and didn’t get done, and then, seriously and intentionally, figure out what happened: was your judgment off on Monday morning about your must-do’s, or did your execution and time management slip during the week?
Now do it again for the following week.
The result of all this isn’t just more efficiency. It’s creating a practice through which you improve both at identifying and executing the things that must happen to move your important work forward.
While on the road last week, I did a pretty good job of meditating each night. I’ve found this is the best way to overcome both jetlag and the buzzing distraction of being on the road.
Most nights, I did one of the guided mediations on my Insight Timer app. Near the end of my trip I found a guided meditation by Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn.
“OK,” I thought, “this is going to be some serious meditation!”
The foundation of this meditation, in the words of Thich Nhat Hahn, is the breath, and is paying attention to it by thinking, “When you breathe in, know that you are breathing in. When you breathe out, know that you are breathing out.” He must have said that fifty times in the meditation.
Really? I’ve done lots of meditations where I count my breaths, or focus on a thought or an emotion or an object. But “I know that I am breathing in?” Something about that from the great Zen master wasn’t what I was expecting. Still, I went with it, and the meditation turned out to be quite nice in its simplicity.
I didn’t think much more about it until today. I was walking from my parked car into the supermarket, needing to grab one last-minute item quickly for some houseguests that were coming over for Memorial Day. Conscious of time, I had a moment when I thought, “I know that I am putting the parking ticket into my back left pocket.”
Now, this may not seem like a big deal unless I say out loud that the supermarket parking ticket is the bane of my existence. Between getting my kids out of the car and making sure that they’re not endangering themselves in the parking lot, half the time I seem to misplace that ticket or find it in a pocket despite having no recollection that I’d put it there.
And today, while I wasn’t trying to do anything different, I knew exactly where it was because I was fully present to what I was doing in the moment I put it into my pocket.
When we lose a parking ticket, it’s pretty clear that we weren’t paying attention to where we put it when we got out of the car. In most other situations the feedback is a lot less obvious – how often have I thought, “what went wrong in that conversation was that I wasn’t paying attention to what was being said to me while it was being said?” How often do we actually notice that what’s missing isn’t the right analysis or people being aligned to the same goals, it’s simply that we, or the people around us, aren’t present to the conversation that is happening right at that moment?
I for one almost never notice it. I also am almost never just doing the dishes when I’m doing the dishes, I’m almost never just walking down the street when I walk down the street, I almost never am just saying hello when I meet someone.
Almost never, but not never. And that’s a start.
My ask of you today isn’t that you’ll share this blog post or talk about it. It is that you, before jumping to the next post or email, stop for a second and, for five (just five!) breaths, know that you are breathing in, and know that you are breathing out.
If it helps, imagine that you are joining thousands of other people who, right about now, have also reached the end of this post.
When we coach in a professional setting, it’s easy to focus on the giving of advice. After all, “coaching” feels like the preferred activity of the coach.
Just as helpful, though, is sense-making. Most bright, skilled people will know what to do if they can figure out the situation they’re in. So, rather than, “you might want to do this,” a more useful approach as a coach is to say things like, “I’ve seen this pattern before, this is how to make sense of it, these are the twists and obstacles that might be coming next.” This way, the person being coached is being made aware of her biases, or omissions, or wishful thinking, and is shored up against her inexperience facing this particular situation.
Also, by sharing “here’s what I think is going on” rather than “here is what I think you should do,” you shift the locus of accountability back where it will have to be in the long-term: with the person being coached.
Underpinning all of this is a quality that cannot be faked or glossed over: seeing someone, fully. This is the heart-felt activity of appreciating someone for who they are, seeing their full person, and, having seen and understood that, standing firmly beside them in their corner–not at the expense of anyone else, just with them.
Most folks can count on one hand the number of people with whom they feel fully seen, and increasing that count by one is a deeply powerful, validating and human stance to take.
Oh, and don’t forget, if you have employees, teammates, colleagues or classmates, you have already donned the hat of “coach,” even if you can’t see it yet. It will be a bit easier to carry that mantle when you remind yourself that there are lots of ways to be useful beyond simply doling out advice.
One of the best, most under-utilized ways to give leverage to a fundraising team is by creating fundraising products.
That’s products, not programs.
Nonprofit fundraising is a constant uphill battle: to raise enough money, and to raise the right kind of money. And since most philanthropists choose not to give when they believe there’s a risk they won’t have an impact (“people look for any excuse to avoid giving a donation and then rationalize their skinflint behavior to avoid feeling selfish” says HBS professor Christine Exley), nonprofits respond by creating projects.
Project-based fundraising can work, but just as often it pushes an organization off mission; or it doesn’t provide enough money to pay staff and keep the lights on; or it obliges the organization to keep a program going when it’s not working; or it results in an organization that is so constrained in what it must deliver that it never creates new things.
The better solution is to create fundraising products.
First, some definitions.
Think of a program as an existing, understood and defined set of activities. The activities-based orientation lends itself to highly-specific budgeting, and setting expectations around “we will do these specific things in this way at these times.” Uncertainty is low, as is freedom.
Conversely, a fundraising product is a narrative that sits comfortably between “fund our entire organization” (unrestricted giving) and “fund this set of activities” (a program). It as an initiative around which you create a compelling narrative, one that mobilizes a set of people to make something (new) happen.
Some of the ingredients in a successful fundraising product are:
A defined total fundraising amount (e.g. a few million dollars)
A compelling narrative that clearly connects the dots between the funds being raised and the change that will result, and an underlying business logic (this one’s up to you)
A minimum threshold for funders to participate (“our core group will each give a minimum of $250,000 over three years”)
Clear roles for the funders in the co-creation of this initiative: how they will help shape the initiative, how information will flow to them, exclusive opportunities to come together as a group and with your team/the people and organizations you’re investing in. (e.g. you’re creating a virtual board for the initiative)
The beauty of this approach is that it empowers both the organization and the funders, plus it gives the fundraiser the tools she needs to mobilize more capital: the bigger story has been created (narrative), there are a limited number of seats around the table (scarcity), the fundraise for this program will start and end (deadline), there is a defined funding amount to be part of that group (dollar thresholds), and the role of the philanthropist in the work that will unfold is well-understood (membership in a group).
When done right, a great fundraising product supports everyone’s success: the funders (who get a real hand in creating and accompanying something new and meaningful); the fundraisers (whose effectiveness you’ve just tripled); your organization (which will get the flexible capital it needs to do something important); and your beneficiaries / customers (who are more likely to participate in an offering that, by design, can flex to suit their needs and feedback).
I’ve written before about the situational leadership framework, a model of both learning and coaching that helps make sense of how new skills are acquired, and the adaptive role managers must play in supporting their teams.
The four roles managers can play are:
Directing: tell people what to do, how, and when (S1)
Coaching: guiding, advising (S2)
Supporting: nudging along a skilled person on a task that they might not want to do (S3)
Delegating: they’re off and running (S4)
From the perspective of the team member, there framework has a simple 2×2 of skillfulness and willingness:
Unwilling and unable (S1)
Unable and willing (S2)
Able and unwilling (S3)
Able and willing (S4)
Though simplified, this is a nice shortcut for framing our development of different skills and the kind of support we require: how good (or bad) am I at doing this new thing? And how willing (or unwilling) am I to do the work?
Recently I was watching a squash coach teach a high backhand volley to a teenager. The coach explained the principles, gave some specific pointers, and then demonstrated. His synchronicity from seeing the ball to the energy he transferred from legs to torso to shoulders to racquet was a sight to behold. Pow!
Then the teenager stepped up, got fed a high ball to hit, and…barely connected. It was a jumbled mess, all wrist and arm going every which way, with the contrast to what he’d been shown all the easier to see from outside the court.
And what did this experienced coach say, seeing this mess?
“Great job!!! Nice work.”
I kept on waiting for the “and…” or the “but…” because there were a hundred shifts that were required.
And then I realized what I’d just seen: the teenager had just shifted from S1 to S2, had just gone from unwilling to willing, and, since we have loads of time, and since sustained motivation matters much more than skill today, the right response is just that.
I applaud your willingness.
I stoke the flames of your belief in yourself.
I encourage you without reservation.
The technique you’re trying to build…that will come later.
Right now, at the start of this journey for this skill on this day, my job is to say “Yes!”
Conversations about team and organizational culture can easily go off track, veering into a messy mixture of behaviors, culture, values, strategy, and attitudes.
To cut through it all, I’ve had success with the following: ask each member of the team to imagine they are interviewing a candidate they would like to hire. Have them describe to this candidate what it feels like to be part of this team: how do we behave, what does it feel like, what are the words that jump to mind?
The answers you’re looking for are tangible, simple:
“We move fast.”
“We are collaborative.”
“We talk a lot.”
“We have fun.”
“We are always thinking three steps ahead.”
“We have a plan.”
“We are disciplined.”
“We listen to everyone’s voice.”
And then you also want people to think about and tell you: what are one or two things that are missing from our culture that would help us be more effective?
To avoid anchoring (having the first, loudest, or most senior person’s voice determine the direction of the conversation), have each person write down their answers first. Then read them out, one at a time, and see where there are similarities and differences.
I’ve found that this is a nice way to cut through the noise, helping teams to zero in on who we are today and who we’d like to be tomorrow.
It was a cold, cold holiday break, and I spent a lot of quiet time with my family.
I found myself actively appreciating the good fortune of having a warm house to sleep in in the face of brutally cold nights, and reflecting on the little things that fortify me, help me refuel, and make me feel fully alive.
Life is full of ups and downs, of intense periods and periods of renewal–it can’t all be about time for reflecting, relaxation and recovery.
But it is worth noticing these small moments, for they can easily be built in to even the busiest of times.
A good night’s sleep.
Preparing a meal with my kids.
Driving on a sunny morning to play a game of squash.
The calm I feel after a yoga practice, or 15 minutes of meditation.
Curling up with a good book.
Witnessing the moment when someone discovers they can do something they thought they couldn’t.
When snow just starts to fall.
Laughter.
Here’s wishing you a 2018 full of small, and big, moments of joy.
(and, to all you email subscribers, here’s wishing that you got this post safe and sound from Feedblitz. If anything seems funky, please let me know. I’m working on it.)
