I met a woman who had recently moved from an African nation.  She bemoaned her lack of community here in Australia.  She said – all that we do here in our new life is work to live, live to work, work work work, we have no time for community, for the things that matter.

This got me thinking - given so many of us are spending so much time at our work, could the organisations we are working in provide a sense of community? What kind of organisation?

When Harley-Davidson turned 100 in 2003 it celebrated over 14 months culminating in “a million bikers” roaring into the company’s headquarters.  Despite their diversity, Harley riders have something in common: a fanatical dedication to their Harleys.  Is this a community?

The more I have worked with and researched what a community is, I believe it comes down to 3 keys.

These keys can be applied to any community that forms around any shared focus – cultural, theme, geographical, organisational.  For an inclusive community to grow and flourish these 3 things are paramount:

{disclaimer: not a definitive list, simply a place to begin the conversation.}

Empathy

Being able to ‘walk in another’s shoes’ is basically impossible.  Knowing what it is like to be say brought up in another faith, another socio-economic group or race is nigh on impossible.  Being able to actively imagine what that must feel like, to be in a state of openness to stand under (understand) another person’s experience holds the beginning of a truly compassionate community.

Take a moment to imagine how it is for another person – whether that be the CEO, or whether you are the CEO.  I wrote about the power of imagination in empathy in a previous article HERE.

Empathy is the key to building great relationships and is the cornerstone of any community.

Communication

Stories are a key medium for communicating corporate myths. (Boleman, Deal 2008)

I wonder if you could be a fly on the wall in any conversation happening around your organisation or community; what is the theme, underlying vernacular or energy of the discussion?  What are the mythical stories of the organisation that creates the tradition, the loyalty or lack of it?

To be of value, communication by its nature needs to imply honesty.  It needs to be trusted.  It needs to be imbued with empathy as an overarching force, and it needs to be communal, shared and reciprocated. 

Here is a bit of a list of what ‘good’ story-telling might look like in a community that is an organisation:

• Communicating who you are – everyone within the community feels safe and secure to be ‘seen’ truthfully and as they really are
  
• Communicating who the company is
  
• Transmitting values – do my values match what the organisation ‘stands for’?  Can everyone in the organisation align with the values of the organisation?
  
• Fostering collaboration
  
• Stopping the gossip – when stories are actively communicated, less Chinese whispers are possible
  
• Sharing the knowledge – what works, what doesn’t, what’s been tried, what’s been successful
  

Participation

Communities are not inactive.  They require the action of participation, or active participation.  Good communication and empathy by themselves will not engage employees as members of a community. It’s probably one of the topics that have created the most rhetoric in management theory.  How do I create a culture of ownership, engagement and participation? We know that participation is a powerful tool to increase both morale and productivity…but how do we foster it? If we look at other communities we might be able to get a bit of a clue.  Effective communities are groups of people motivated around a shared passion. At work, are we motivated by the pay check or are we motivated to make a difference.  I think its got to be a combination. It is not real to think that we can foster participation by passion alone.  The reality is that most people are motivated to work to keep a roof over their heads.  (see another article here) Topics I believe work to foster active participation are things like egalitarianism, diversity, team focus, job enrichment, values alignment (real not tokenistic)…among many others I am sure….again not a definitive list but a beginning of a conversation.

How powerful it is to become aware of understanding the things that we can influence & change in our lives and working on them, and stopping wasting time on worrying and wishing about the things we don’t have influence over.  I heard Rosie Batty speak this month.  She recently lost her young son in tragic circumstances.  What is incredibly powerful to me is her attitude. Her focus is so much on what she can have influence on...not trying to wish for a different past.  She cannot change that.  What she has realised is that due to her position, she now feels able to have a broad influence on the topic of family violence and she is listened to by people in positions of influence like politicians.  She used words like: “I have nothing to lose”, “my voice is all I have”. She is one of the most proactive people in the face of adversity I have met.

Steven Covey in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, talks about a circle of influence.  Proactive people are aware of what is inside their ‘circle of influence’ and focus on them, instead of spending time on their ‘circle of concern’ which is full of “if only’s”!

When I look at my life objectively, there are places I have influence and places I wish I had more influence and there are places I have great concern for and know I have no influence in.  I am working at growing my circle of influence, and having ‘influence’ in the areas I can – which is mostly within myself.

I’m reminded of the AA mantra ..

‘God grant me the serenity 
to accept the things I cannot change; 
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.’

This has been around for such a long time and has had such a strong positive impact on many people’s lives. 

Do we need to have tragedy in our lives to become proactive about anything?  What does it take for us to believe that we actually have a wider circle of influence than we think?

Steven Covey wrote before the advent of blogging.  With www and all that comes with the cyber space that we inhabit, there is so much more opportunity to expand our circle beyond our physical world.  My actual physical friendship circle is probably around 100, however who I can have ‘influence’ on is way smaller. My cyber circle is larger, therefore so is the potential to influence on a wider scale.  Oprah Winfrey’s circle – just on face book alone is over 10million. Not to say all these people are part of her circle of influence, but there is that potential. It is possible today to build our influence exponentially. 

My hope for the future is that more and more people who are lead by their heart expand their circle of influence into the ‘power’ circles that make decisions of law, rules and regulation in our world and with their ‘influence’ helps the world evolve into its positive loving potential. 

Competence

I have discovered a debate.  A what comes first – the chicken or the egg kind of debate….and it’s to do with confidence and competence.

My premise has long been that confidence is a state of mind.  So I can be confident that I can do something before I know that I am competent at it.  I think that is why I have often thrown myself in the deep end with things.  I can see myself achieving at new things, before I am proved to be competent at them.  I see confidence as the first step to achievement and what follows on the path to becoming competent or capable is learning.

For me there is a difference between being able to say – ‘I know I can do that ‘(confidence) to saying ‘I understand how to do that and I have the experience that proves it’ (competence).  There is a balance needed and to succeed at something there’s no doubt we need both, confidence and competence.   

Last month I wrote about confidence and explored the development of trust – personal trust – that can overcome fear. Confidence is something that is drawn out and encouraged into being, tricks of trade can be learnt, however authentic confidence is found through personal development.

With competence, I believe the learning happens on a more cognitive and practical level – with acts of perceiving, knowing, experiencing and remembering.  This enables us to move from understanding, to knowing, to embodying processes, actions and ways of doing.

Competence requires flexibility, emotional intelligence, self awareness and resilience.  It is wholly experiential.  I can study ‘how’ to play basketball, but until I get on a court and practise, then I can be as confident as I like, but I will not know that I am competent.  Experience brings the theoretical into reality.  I have observed this sitting beside my 17 year old as he learns to drive. 

So building BOTH confidence and competence is a key for success, however I believe it helps to start with confidence. It’s the chicken and the egg thing again.  I do think that having a confident attitude to start with enables a whole lot more opportunity for development of competencies.  Take someone like Richard Branson – here is someone who is the epitome of confidence, someone who only develops competencies after her has chucked himself in.  I like his four top competencies in business:

• The ability to identify appropriate growth opportunities
  
• The ability to move quickly
  
• The willingness to give day-to-day management control to relatively small operating teams. 
  
• The ability to create and manage effective joint ventures
  

In my life I can translate these into:

• Ability to see opportunities 
  
• The confidence to take them up – say ‘yes’
  
• Willingness to delegate and not be in control the whole time
  
• The ability to create, develop and maintain relationships
  

Fine competencies for a balanced life I would say.

Building core competencies in presentation skills and public speaking is the focus of the second ‘C’ , COMPETENCE : The Art of Effective Speaking.

 In this one day seminar we extend your competencies in;

• Voice Projection
  
• Developing audience rapport
  
• Microphone and video techniques 
  
• Impromptu skills 
  
• Framing
  
• Practice
  

http://www.imaginalhouse.com/the-three-cs-of-presenting---one-day-workshops.html

I wanted to sit down and write some pearls of wisdom about confidence.  So I sat down and stared at the screen for what seemed like ages.  I wrote some stuff and then deleted it.  I wrote about other stuff.  Then I did other stuff.  Facebook had some interesting articles.  I needed to connect with new people on Linkedin.  Then I had a lightbulb moment.  I was feeling under confident about writing about confidence.  I was doubting myself.  I was not trusting in my own ability and my own voice. I was hearing the voice of my critic and imagining negative responses before I had even given myself a chance.

So, as is quite often a human condition, I am taking a look at confidence from the negative premise of under confidence and fear.  I want to really look at that fear though.  What is it when fear gets in the way of confidence?  Is it possible to be confident and fearful? 

I looked up our thesaurus (the one we all share online) and it threw up some antonyms – opposites – to look at:  afraid; cowardly; depressed; doubtful; fearful; indefinite; meek; pessimistic; sad; shy; timid; uncertain; unsure; weak.  Fearful was there as is afraid, so yes it would seem that fear is thought of as an opposite of confidence.  Then, as is my want, I looked up fear.  What struck me was the word TRUST. 

Trust forms part of a definition of confidence as much as it is an antonym for fear.

For me trust is the real key in understanding and embracing my confident self.  Trust is so often used in a sense of me to another.  I trust you to repay the debt, or to look after my children, or to let myself be seen by you.  How is that relationship changed when it becomes a matter of self-confidence, or when the trust that is on the line is a trust in myself?

As we age and mature there are certain things that become potential scenarios for how the relationship develops with ourselves and how that manifests in our confidence to be in the world.

A series of small successes can allow a more positive attitude and instil more confidence in my abilities.  A series of small failures can undermine that confidence and create a vacuum.  So there must be a role for resilience.

I believe the key to resilience is knowing where to put your attention.  If you are constantly listening to that voice in your head that is talking you down, telling you that its not possible and not worth it, that its too risky and that you are never good enough anyway so why would you try, then chances are you will begin to believe these things. 

Confidence blossoms when we begin to put our attention on what is working, and listening to the coach rather than the critic.


Merryn

The path to compassion and empathy

I’m a huge believer in the power of imagination. A healthy and positive imagination is one of the paths to a life of awareness, fulfilment and freedom.  With imagination comes freedom of choice with choice comes personal power.  Imagination puts us in the driver’s seat of our own lives. What it does even more than that is foster empathy.  Empathy is not possible without imagination.  We need to be able to “walk in another person’s shoes” in order to get a sense of what they might be experiencing.  We can only do that in our mind’s eye.  We will never be really able to live another person’s life. It will always be coloured with our own sense of the world. 

A few years back Australian Greens Senator Rachel Siewert had a go at living on the income of the dole (or Newstart allowance).  She did it for one week to get to understanding of what it might be like and in a bid to attempt to persuade other sides of politics to raise the allowance by $50 per week.  She wanted to get a feeling of what it might be like to have to budget down to the cent.  Of what it might be like to have to prioritise paying for food for the kids over paying the rent. What she got was a sense of temporary discomfort.  She would never really understand what it would be like to be born into a family that had no sense of being able to move beyond the dole, no sense of the generational poverty that many people live with.  She may have however, been able to stimulate her imagination enough to start to develop some empathy for them.  At least she gave it a go.

So what does it take for us to truly have empathy, or to truly imagine what another person’s life is like? 

We are certainly not being given many positive role models from our political leaders in Australia in empathy at the moment.

The veil of secrecy surrounding the asylum seekers plight at the hands of the Australian government is testament to that.  There is no imagination at work here.  There is no compassion and there is no empathy.  There is abuse and there is vilification.  There is injustice and there is downright anti-human behaviour.

As the world is getting smaller from some perspectives – we can be in touch with other people so easily; we can see through the power of video and interact through social media. It seems to me that the chasms between the haves and the have nots and the righteous and those without rights has grown to the point that we are blinkered to even start to understand what another person is going through, let alone open our hearts to have compassion, let alone imagine how that might feel enough to have empathy.

I’ve never been homeless.  I have never had to flee from anywhere for fear of my life.  I have been in a couple of hairy situations, but I have always thought that the county I lived in and the system that I lived under supported at least my rights to be alive (if not my right to marry, but that’s another story).  I can, even if only slightly and a little bit, imagine what that must feel like.  I can’t imagine what it must be like, but I can imagine how it might feel, and I strive to do just that.  I want to actively stimulate my imagination.  I want to stretch it and exercise it, bend it and grow it.  I want to expose myself to many different people so that I can inform my imagination with more 3 dimensional tactileness.  I want to expose myself to new things, to different things, to other opinions, to other adventures, listen to stories and join in on conversations about topics I know nothing about.  I want to grow my imagination – not for me – but so I can grow my empathy, so that I can make more of a difference.

"You’ve been criticising yourself for years.  Try approving of yourself and see what happens." Louise Hay.

 How does behavioural change really happen?  We are so conditioned to believe that to make adjustments and grow ourselves we have to find the things that we are ‘bad’ at, or that are not working for us and do less of them…easy isn’t it?  We spend such a lot of our lives being down on ourselves, and criticising our every little action.  How’s that working out for you?  Not so great?  Are you still down on yourself, still doing those things? What if we started focusing somewhere else?

Our attention is one of our most valuable assets. Did you get that? Attention is one of our most valuable assets. Whatever we give our attention to is what will grow and flourish. So if we are focussing on what we are doing wrong, then chances are we will see more and do more of that. Hang on…wasn’t that supposed to help us do less??  I suggest not. If, on the other hand, we choose to give our attention to what is already working for us and focus on that, then chances are we will find ourselves doing more of that…and maybe even enjoying ourselves in the process!

We are all motivated to be competent and to become more competent.  A feeling of competence contributes to our well being.  But how is this best developed?

In corporatesville, there is a thing called the Pareto principle.  This basically says that 80% of my income is coming from 20% of my customers; So – If you focus your very valuable attention on the 80% of your customers that is giving you only 20% of your income and try and grow them, there is a real possibility that the 20% that are your loyal clients or customers and your real bread and butter are going to lose out.  So spending less time on focussing on what is not working, and more time on making the 20% more prosperous, could that take less effort, be more profitable and perhaps be a good strategy?…yes?

The same goes for personal development.  Let’s look at this from a public speaking perspective. I am wanting to be a great public speaker. If my valuable attention is where I perceive my downfalls are – counting how many times I say Ummmm, focussing on how nervous I am, the stain on my shirt from lunch etc,  then I will no doubt finish the presentation knowing that I said Ummm 12 times, that my hands shook and that the stain is still there.  I will walk away with that as a focus and as the relationship that I have just built with my audience; all of that attention that I could have been giving to them, not me.  

How about I change that around?  The feedback is that I know I am good at some things, like building rapport, eye contact, and storytelling.  So if I can change where I put my attention and start focussing on more of what is already working for me, then I can start to build my relationship with myself and my audience from a positive perspective.

Constructive criticism is often ‘back handed’ compliments, designed to undermine our self value.  Think about everything that happens in a sentence before a ‘but’.  I loved your presentation, but I think…..Did I really love the presentation?  What happens after the ‘but’ is going to be the thing we listen to the most.  We love to hear negative things – we have heard them all our lives and that is what we are used to.  It comes down to self-esteem.  We all seek to verify our own perceptions of ourselves, so if we have low self-esteem we will look for the criticism and be comfortable/comforted with that.  We will often not believe a compliment when it is paid; not even receive it, let alone believe it! Negative events have a greater impact on your brain than positive events do.  This is because negative events pose a chance of danger and we become hypersensitive to them at the level of instinct, the spiral is that we then have a hard time seeing, hearing or feeling positive.                                                         

We tend to focus more on what they think went wrong or what we did badly. We are very quick to criticise ourselves and need to be encouraged to see the positives first.  If we focus on the negatives first, we will have a really hard time giving ANY attention to the positives.

Powerful change can be achieved when we focus on identifying what is already working.  What are your good and great attributes?  Celebrate them and then apply them and grow them. 

Once again…in corporatesville… the phrase for this is called Appreciative Inquiry. It is about building on the strengths to transform an organisation.  According to Peter Drucker of the Drucker School of Management, change comes from an alignment of attention on strengths that makes a systems’ weaknesses irrelevant. I believe this applies in a similar way to personal change.  Elevate your strengths and your perceived weaknesses become irrelevant.  Enquire of yourself – what is already working for you? Now work to amplify that.

Your ATTENTION is POWERFUL. Choose what part of your experience you want to see more of, focus on that, and more of it will flow into your life. Guaranteed! 

It is not the horse that draws the cart, but the oats. −Russian proverb

http://youtu.be/QzW22wwh1J4  for a cute look at Appreciative Inquiry

The Happiness Wheel

I used to believe the adage: if you need something done give it to a busy person.  Actually I have changed my mind.  I want to change that to:  if you want something done give it to a happy person. 

I know it’s a cliché, but I do have to say that leaving my ‘real’ job and designing my own life has been a boon.  Not that I want to encourage anyone else to throw themselves off the fiscal cliff, I know it’s not for everyone. However, there is something to be said about taking risks – and making happiness choices.  Knowing, that I want to look back on my life proud of the risks that I took and happy to own the choices that I made.

So what is the key then?  There are a heap of ‘happiness tests’ online that you can take just to make sure you are as happy as you feel (or as sad as you suspect!).  I’ve done a few and have not really gained much insight to be honest.  There are also plenty of stats to let us know that most people rate family and relationships as the key element in their happiness levels – above everything else.  For me that is not the whole story and there has to be a balance.  I have one of the best and happiest relationships and family situations that I know of – well, in my social circle. Yet, when I was unhappy in my work, I was gut wrenchingly unhappy and that affected every aspect of my life.  So I don’t really go for the idea that if I’m happy at home I will be happy in my whole life.  Being unhappy in one thing most definitely influences happiness levels in everything, and can colour every aspect to the point where unhappiness reigns.  Unhappiness can sneak up on us unexpectedly and in any aspect of our complex lives.   Awareness is key.  Self awareness and constant assessment.

 A tool called the wheel of life is a useful thing to take a look at and can help with the assessment of the balance: http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newHTE_93.htm .  It’s basically a tool that is useful to measure the elements of your life and how you feel about them.  Things like family, relationships, career, money, health, exercise.  You can map them out and take a look at how you see yourself right now and then look at how you would like to be – you at your happiest.  It’s good to see if there are niggling, bordering on unhappy aspects – and then jump on them and turn them around.  Sometimes that means doing something radical like leaving a job or a relationship, other times it might just mean taking a walk around the block, writing that letter or getting that hair cut.  Whatever it is, sometimes making the small adjustments can make all the difference.  Sometimes the bigger the unhappiness is the harder it is to see, bring to light and begin to change. How are things with your health, your relationship, your friendships, your work.  What are the aspects of your life that you value enough to be part of the wheel?  Add them in and give them a thoroughly good looking at.

One of the best tools I have found to bring real happiness in and to help move through to happiness decisions is just being present in my life.  What if nothing changed?  The grass is not always greener.  The point is that that grass is someone else’s lawn and will never be mine. Can I feel happy to love my life right here and right now, being totally present with where and who I am right now?  When I can say yes to that, then I am able to hospice what I want to let go of and midwife what I want to birth.