THE PREPARED MIND: The 7 Step Guide to Training Your Mind, Like A Craftsman

[Article originally published on Medium] The feelings we have about something motivate the involvement that leads to our ability to develop a feel for something. Feelings also contribute to complication and emotional intensity.

The wrinkles of life make us emotional. Nowhere is this most acute than when we are learning something new.

We don’t like to admit it, but we are all emotional beings. The goal is not to overcome emotions. The goal is to manage them and make them work for you. Steadiness occurs when we seek neutrality, avoiding high highs and low lows, no matter what happens, no matter how much external events may fluctuate.

Craftsmen and women at their practice understand what it means to manage feelings as they gain a feel for their work. When they are engaged in their work and in harmony with their medium, they enjoy what many refer to as a meditative state. Time slows down. Choices that were absent before suddenly appear.

It’s the kind of peace that comes with the absence of extreme emotions.

What follows are the 7 steps you can take to achieve this state, so you can focus on learning to learn well, rather than fighting the anxiety, frustration, or boredom that inevitably comes with the repetition when learning something new. The craftsman learns to evolve those emotions into an alert, practiced skill of anticipation as they

STEP 1: FIND CALM

“It is in your power to withdraw yourself whenever you desire. Perfect tranquility within consists in the good ordering of the mind, the realm of your own.” - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

A 1949 fire fundamentally changed the way we approach fighting fires. Everyone ran away from the fire except a more experienced foreman, Dodge, who instead ran into it.

That takes nerve.

Like Dodge, we must prepare ourselves for the realities

of our situation, steadying our nerves so we can apply our abilities creatively when unique problems present themselves.

STEP 2: MANAGE YOUR FEELINGS TO GET THE FEEL OF YOUR WORK

“Of all the important pieces of self-knowledge, understanding how you learn is the easiest to acquire.” ― Peter F. Drucker, Managing Oneself

Even though pilots fly for a living, they can be overcome by anxiety. The same is true for first responders, ER staff, race car drivers and astronauts. In fact, these professions are trained not to panic.

When we make mistakes or something doesn’t go according to plan, we often trade in our well thought out plans for a good old-fashioned meltdown.

When we actively manage our feelings, we acknowledge that they are present but can be challenged and channeled. Only then, can we get back to the business of developing a feel for our work.

STEP 3: GAIN PERSPECTIVE

“The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one’s reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child. Love, being dependent on the relative absence of narcissism, requires the development of humility, objectivity and reason.  

I must try to see the difference between my picture of a person and his behavior, as it is narcissistically distorted, and the person’s reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs and fears.” ― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

Our first reactions are never our fault. They are simply, our reactions.

Sometimes in minutes, sometimes longer, changes in perception occur when the situation itself has not changed, but our understanding of the situation changes. The facts haven’t shifted, but our context has.

As our understanding changes it’s time to question our initial reactivity, our reptilian impulses. This takes strength and is a muscle that must be constantly developed.

STEP 4: SEE REALITY CLEARLY, BUT HOLD IT LOOSELY

“Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.”― Lewis Carroll, Alice In Wonderland

Craftsmen and women work with “what is” before them and do not “spin the facts.” The clay might be too dry. The wood might be wet. What to do? How to remedy those situations?

To learn, we have to detach from reality a bit. We abstract problems to simplify them and in doing so, engage our imagination.

By imagining what might be against what is, we lose direct experience, or feel, of the particulars. Loss of this proximity to reality can engage our creativity for new solutions.

We can do this for anything that stands in our way, seeing

things as they truly, actually are, but with enough flexibility to engage alternative realities of what might be.

STEP 5: SEEK TENSION BETWEEN FAILURE & FAME

“Let difficulty transform you. And it will. In my experience, we just need help in learning how not to run away.” – Pema Chödrön

It’s important to note that we choose how we’ll look at things. That means that we have to limit and expand our perspective to whatever will help us remain neutral in feeling, in order to get the feel of our work.

Not to be confused with “faking it until we make it” which denies our feelings of anxiety around under-performance, it is a form of selective editing in order to properly orient ourselves to the task at hand.

STEP 6: SHOW UP

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” – Pablo Picasso

Day in and day out, find a way to love the grind. Embrace the continuousness of your work by noting that the many small, incremental improvements add up to substantial change over time. This leads to “good change.”

Showing up when it is difficult takes heart, a long-term view, and stamina. It takes hard work to make the vision you have in mind a reality.

STEP 7: SEEK & FIND PROBLEMS

“The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers. – Eric Fromm

Only when you show up for work you choose to labor over deeply can you begin to embrace the discipline of anticipating mistakes and stopping them before they happen.

Working with craft requires distinct attitudes and capabilities of solving the problem at hand, but also the intellectual vision and insight to find new problems. Seeing what is missing involves the application of ingenuity.

Stability has provided the conditions for us to think of organizations of all types as machines. That thinking enables us to move forward with the certainty of predictability, reliability efficiency, and productivity. We update, copy, scale, and own them. We think of organizations as having parts and concentrate efforts on making them operate ever more cheaply.

This model works, until it doesn’t. Natural resources are finite. People burn out. Markets get over-saturated.

Given the amount of change with which we are forced to reckon, the flaw in this approach is that our perception of problems remains predefined. But there is growing momentum in the belief that business is not an independent machine. It is a living, breathing network of people, interacting with supporting networks, and dealing with ongoing, adaptive crises. This requires us to move forward in the face of great uncertainty.

Business as usual, with its dependency on scarce resources, is a dead end. This means that business as unusual will not feel natural at first. We might even need new words to describe it. We will need to reinvent what it means to lead or to work in an organization.

We have to create for ourselves the firm foundation that enables us to question constraints we see today, engage with risk toward opportunities, and take the leap. Like a craftsman, we will need to create new tools to contend with problems as they present themselves.

We must learn to improvise, because there are no manuals or operational excellence department for the crises we encounter today.

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Everyone suffers setbacks: an injury, untimely surgery, a death in the family, a promotion that didn’t come.

Everyone has dreams: that book you want to write, business you want to start, that job you want to go after.

There are no dead ends.

Our most painful or long-lasting experiences, our unfinished projects are hypotheses. They answered the initial question of “what if” and can be used in your next experiment.  

Flipping your perspective—seeing through negativity, pain, perceived failure—toward opportunity and learning enables more opportunities, solutions, and creative thinking.

Returning toward what you know, doubling down on old approaches—rarely provides you more options. Perhaps sometimes. But now? Not anymore.

Go, try something different. Try something special.

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If you find yourself blaming your (mental) tools, do something about it. Learn about mental models, learn from how Craftsmen talk about how they learn and get better at what they do and more importantly, take ownership. Moving forward requires change but change by itself does not mean that you are moving forward. As Socrates said, “The un-examined life is not worth living.”

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Christine Haskell, Ph.D. is a leadership consultant and adjunct faculty at Washington State University. She helps busy leaders take responsibility for their learning and development. She writes on the topic of “Craftsmanship and The Future of Work.” sharing lessons from master craftsmen and women on personal and professional mastery, is due out late 2019. Sign up for her (semi-regular) newsletter here.

US study of diversity being valued versus considered

[ from The Pew Research Center ] Three-quarters of Americans agree it is important for workplaces to promote racial and ethnic diversity, according to a study published by the Pew Research Center today.

The response doesn’t vary too much by race, with 81% of black Americans saying it is very or somewhat important, 73% of whites, and 75% of Hispanics. Yet while it appears that most Americans support diversity, the Pew study suggests the support doesn’t actually extend to action to ensure that it increases.

Just 24% of Americans said a person’s race or ethnicity should be taken into account alongside their qualifications in hiring decisions in order to increase diversity. Nearly three-quarters said only an applicant’s qualifications should be considered in hiring—even if it meant less diversity.

On this, a racial divide emerges: 78% of white Americans believe only qualifications should count, compared to 54% of black Americans. More than two-thirds of Hispanics also said only qualifications should count.

This disconnect can be seen at Microsoft, the world’s most valuable company. It has a compensation plan for executives linked to diverse hiring, but some employees took to an internal message board to denounce it as discriminatory, Quartz found. “As long as we give more money and higher annual reviews explicitly for NOT hiring/promoting white men and Asians, this will continue to be a serious problem at the company,” one comment read.

The wider implication of the Pew study is that most Americans believe achievement in their education system and the labor market is sufficiently based on merit. That’s despite evidence to the contrary.

An analysis by the New York Times in 2017 found that black and Hispanic students were more underrepresented at top colleges and universities in the US than they were 35 years earlier, even after decades of affirmative action. The roots of the problem extend to an inequitable and segregated school system. A report by the US Department of Education in 2014 found that schools with lots of students of color tended to have less access to advanced courses (pdf) such as AP subjects, fewer experienced teachers, and limited access to resources needed to provide a high quality education.

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Christine Haskell, PHD has built her practice on credible, published research and data. In the Research Series, you’ll find highlights, shareable statistics, and links to the full source material.

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GOOD HUMANING: Start in your own backyard

Photo by Annie Spratt

It’s so easy to comment on other people’s yards, isn’t it?

But insight, the kind that broadens who I am as a human being, is gained internally, first. Starting with my own weeds of pride, aggression, self-denigration, etc. is where I need to begin. The trick is doing it with compassion.

If I were tending a garden, I would see these weeds for what they are. I would be more neutral about tending to them. They grow, I tend.

What would it look like to understand them with compassion?

Compassion is the ultimate and most meaningful embodiment of emotional maturity. It is through compassion that a person achieves the highest peak and deepest reach in his or her search for self-fulfillment. --Arthur Jersild

That gives me something to strive for, the well-tended garden—but doesn’t show me how to be compassionate toward myself. Seeing the flaws is not the problem, it’s treating them with kindness, being the wise gardener to the garden plot.

A well-tended garden needs

…to be embraced for the kind of habitat it is.

…to be tended, with neutrality. (weeds grow, some weeds are noxious)

…to know that all habitat needs good stewardship.

…imperfection is part of the process of growth.

…supportive friends, coaches, therapists, partners help to tend, tend, tend.

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This post-series is about trying to anchor my experience by exploring within and reminding myself about what it means to practice "good humaning." It's about moving forward imperfectly. To follow this thread in my posts, look for these tags: #NotesFromMyYogaJournal

GOOD HUMANING: DON'T CHOKE YOUR DREAMS

A primary principle of Buddhism is the idea that one’s self-absorption leads to suffering. When we hold our focus lightly, we are happier.

My grandfather had a similar piece of advice when giving me pointers on my non-existent golf game, “Hold the club like a small chick, never squeeze too hard.”

I think of that often, as I try to loosen my grip on goals or beliefs I might be holding too tightly.

…getting out of debt.

…publishing “on time.”

…reaching my “number.”

…believing that I am right.

I know that when I hold on to any of these goals too tightly, I am holding myself back.

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This post-series is about trying to anchor my experience by exploring within and reminding myself about what it means to practice "good humaning." It's about moving forward imperfectly. To follow this thread in my posts, look for these tags: #NotesFromMyYogaJournal

The prepared mind: How to Approach Craft

The Prepared Mind: How to approach craft

READING TIME: 8 MINUTES

Photo by Franck V.

This past weekend, I attended a conference focused on one of the latest buzz terms “transformative tech.” I’ve been tracking them since they started and it appears to be nice marketing to VCs for—you guessed it—tech, but specifically tech “for mental health, emotional well being, and human flourishing.” For this group, there needs to be electricity, or a battery involved so the work of teachers, coaches, seekers, etc. are not emphasized.

One of the speakers was extrapolating on how one day, we will have tech that “gets us to flow” or “helps us jump quickly to a meditative state.” This is not the first time I’ve heard this idea being discussed and I listened intently, thinking through the potential consequences of what amounts to “skipping the [learning] journey” of learning and moving right into integration.

Learning, the kind that moves us forward in our lives and work, is fraught with struggle. There is struggle to accept a new idea, reason with it, and integrate into a new, broader understanding. Reasoning is a skill that is in precarious decline as reliance on data increases. What depth of experience (and insight) might be lost if technology could help us avoid the ungainliness, awkwardness, anxiety-prone beginner’s mind of a new idea or activity? What would be lost if we were able to skip important phases of developing mastery?

In an age obsessed with tech, repackaged ideas, and Instagram soundbites, some of the great tech thinkers get lost to history. I’d like to share some learning from the great Richard Hamming. Hamming was an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer engineering and telecommunications. He programmed IBM’s calculating machines. He was involved in nearly all of Bell Laboratories' most prominent achievements. After retiring, Hamming took a position at the Naval Postgraduate School and devoted himself to teaching and writing books. He delivered his last lecture in December 1997, just a few weeks before he died from a heart attack on January 7, 1998.

You can see it here. I call out some of his major ideas as they relate to my research on Master Craftsmen, how they get better at what they do, and what we (in tech and in business) can learn from them.

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How to Work With Craft In Whatever You Do

Insight, skill, or the state of consciousness gained by daily, deliberate practice, are rarely handed to you on a silver platter. Einstein argued that genius was 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. Picasso referred to “inspiration [existing] but needs to find you at work.” While we can acknowledge that luck plays a role, we often use that as a crutch to avoid doing what we can do to intelligently prepare for opportunities. Perspiration and work are, in my opinion, integral to effective integration.

We only get one life, “and it seems to be it is better to do significant things than to just get along through life to its end,” writes Richard Hamming in his 1997 book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn. The book and his 1986 lecture, 'Luck favors the prepared mind', You and Your Research, explore how we do great work. Specifically, he refers to “Nobel-Prize type work.” Nobel level work raises the standards of what we thought possible and teaches us to think in new ways. In many ways, Nobel prize winners are the craftsmen in their respective fields.

From cooking to coding, there are methods to engage in order to do something with Craft. That’s how LEAN, DMAIC. 6Sigma and my other methodologies came to be. There are also mental disciplines we can learn for more effective thinking. But, where to start?

Hamming suggests that preparation is what separates the good from the great. This means the way you live your life—the extent to which you intelligently prepare—makes a huge difference in what you can accomplish.

As human beings, we tend fixate on what we can see with our eyes. We think focusing on the concrete is being objective. It’s how we rationalize. When we look at transformations in other people’s lives, we see good luck, natural talent, unfair advantage, or the right connections. We concentrate on the visible signs of opportunity and success. We do this with organizations too — and it’s an illusion. 

The key to any change is insanely simple. Stop fixating on the external and focus on smaller, internal changes. It is the difference between grasping at an illusion and immersing yourself in reality. Reality is what transforms you. 

The major objection cited by people against striving to do great things is the belief it is all a matter of luck. I have repeatedly cited Pasteur’s remark, “Luck favors the prepared mind”. It both admits there is an element of luck, and yet claims to a great extent it is up to you. You prepare yourself to succeed, or not, as you choose, from moment to moment, by the way you live your life.

Hamming, Richard R. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 209)

Luck is always part of the equation. Philosophers, political theorists, and strategists have long acknowledged the large role that luck plays in every aspect of our lives. Even Nicolo Machiavelli, the cataloger of each and every lever that a prince can pull in the pursuit of power, acknowledged that “I believe that it is probably true that fortune is the arbiter of half the things we do, leaving the other half to be controlled by ourselves.” What was true in Italian politics centuries ago is just as true in management today.

Yet if life were all about luck, the same people wouldn’t repeatedly do great things. Galileo Galilei did many great things. So did Newton and Einstein. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos have been successful in multiple sectors. The list goes on.

When someone repeatedly achieves greatness, it is because they prepared in advance to recognize, work on, and fill in the blanks when necessary. This is the essence of intelligent preparation and the foundation of deliberate practice—greatness is a byproduct. So often, in the attempt to optimize and recreate, we forget that.

Intelligence comes in many forms. A lot of the time it’s not easily recognized — a lot of people who repeatedly do great things were poor students. IQ does not ensure academic success. Being smart is nice but it’s better if you know how to apply your knowledge.

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Believe that you are capable of doing work that matters.

How you regard yourself and your ability to contribute determines how you experience the people in your life, the work you choose, and the tactics and strategies you choose to solve problems.  

With the belief that you can do work that matters, why is that most of us spend time on work that doesn’t matter?

…direct observation, and direct questioning of people, shows most scientists spend most of their time working on things they believe are not important nor are they likely to lead to important things.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 210).

If what you are working on is not important and aligned with your values—and a lot of what you are working on, what you are saying and what you are doing isn’t either. Think about that.

Is health important to you? When was the last time you invested in it?

Are relationships important to you? What do you do to invest in them?

Do you value the process, really? When was the last time you valued, really valued the many, many small decisions that enable you to achieve the results you are after?

The question you need to ask yourself if why are you not working on and thinking about the important problems in your area? How can we expect to achieve great things if we are not working on the right problems?

Be willing to be an outlier. 

Think of this as confidence meets courage. You might look like an idiot because you are doing something new. You might not be immediately understood by those around you because you are challenging the status quo.

[Claude] Shannon had courage. Who else but a man with almost infinite courage would ever think of averaging over all random codes and expect the average code would be good? He knew what he was doing was important and pursued it intensely. Courage, or confidence, is a property to develop in yourself. Look at your successes, and pay less attention to failures than you are usually advised to do in the expression, “Learn from your mistakes”. While playing chess Shannon would often advance his queen boldly into the fray and say, “I ain’t scaird of nothing”. I learned to repeat it to myself when stuck, and at times it has enabled me to go on to a success. I deliberately copied a part of the style of a great scientist. The courage to continue is essential since great research often has long periods with no success and many discouragements.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 211)

Embrace horizonal goals. 

You have to see excellence as a pursuit not an outcome. This isn’t as easy as it sounds but it as an essential feature of engaging in Craft.

Without such a goal you will tend to remain three degrees off course. You will be headed in the right direction, almost. Three degrees seems small, but that is when you stay the course and say to yourself, “I’m ok, I can still see the hill I’m headed toward.” It isn’t until twenty years later that you realize something isn’t right. You can no longer see that hill. The cumulative effect of being three degrees off course for a long period of time means that it’s either time to backtrack, make a pivot toward that hill, or try some other approach to get you back on course.

…with the goal of doing significant work, there is tendency for the steps to go in the same direction and thus go a distance proportional to the number of steps taken, which in a lifetime is a large number indeed.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 211)

What most people think are the best working conditions, are not—learn to dance between failure and fame.

Constraints can lead to innovation. But constraints is just another word for reality, or the lack of the ideal (budget, resources, environment, or other qualities you are seeking). The feedback of reality in order to keep your feet planted on the ground.

Age seems to have the effect it does. In the first place if you do some good work you will find yourself on all kinds of committees and unable to do any more work. You may find yourself as I saw Brattain when he got a Nobel Prize. The day the prize was announced we all assembled in Arnold Auditorium; all three winners got up and made speeches. The third one, Brattain, practically with tears in his eyes, said, “I know about this Nobel-Prize effect and I am not going to let it affect me; I am going to remain good old Walter Brattain.” Well I said to myself, “That is nice.” But in a few weeks I saw it was affecting him. Now he could only work on great problems.

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.

Work with your door open.

I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing – not much, but enough that they miss fame.   

People who do great things typically have a great drive to do things.

…most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, “How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?” He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, “You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.” I simply slunk out of the office!

Focused investment of only one hour a day can double your lifetime output. 

Intelligent preparation is like compound interest, the more you invest, the more situations you can handle, the more you learn how to do, so the more you can do, etc. The advantage of investing in just one hour a day to learning new things is an overlooked gem hiding in plain sight.

This isn’t about who works the hardest but rather who focuses their limited energy on the right things. Learning things that (1) change slowly and (2) apply to a wide variety of situations could be a better use of time than learning something incredibly time-consuming, rapidly changing, and of limited application.

Hamming dedicated his Friday afternoons to “great thoughts.” Setting aside time to think is a common characteristic of people that do great things. Not only does this help you live consciously it helps get your head out of the weeds. The rest of us are too busy with the details to ask if we’re going in the right direction.

Consider that advice against a well-intended behavior not truly lived. Google’s 20% time was eventually abandoned. Only about 10% of Googlers were using it. But that didn’t matter much as long as the idea of it exists, according to Google HR boss Laszlo Bock in his new book, "Work Rules!"

Tolerate ambiguity.

Believe and not believe at the same time. You have to believe that where you work is the best place in the industry, and capable of improving.

It took me a while to discover the importance of ambiguity. Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started. It requires a lovely balance. But most great scientists are well aware of why their theories are true and they are also well aware of some slight misfits which don't quite fit and they don't forget it. Darwin writes in his autobiography that he found it necessary to write down every piece of evidence which appeared to contradict his beliefs because otherwise they would disappear from his mind. When you find apparent flaws you've got to be sensitive and keep track of those things, and keep an eye out for how they can be explained or how the theory can be changed to fit them. Those are often the great contributions. Great contributions are rarely done by adding another decimal place. It comes down to an emotional commitment. Most great scientists are completely committed to their problem. Those who don't become committed seldom produce outstanding, first-class work.

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Still Interested? Check our my Hamming compendium.

Transitions

Photo by Holger Link

Not in his goals but in his transitions man is great.  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Last week, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel at a local tech event on the topic of career transition. People are still writing to me about how much they enjoyed the session, which is both gratifying and humbling. Because of the level of interest, I thought I would share some of the key takeaways so others could benefit.

I’m often asked for book recommendations and I covered two main ideas from William Bridges 1980s book Transitions. People are often surprised by by the titles I promote . It’s not that I don’t read current information, but if it’s not adding a ton of new perspective, I stick to solid classics—and this book, in my opinion, should be in everyone’s business book library.

First, I think it’s important not to use the terms “change” and “transition” interchangeably. 

Change is situational. It is the external event that is taking place, a new strategy, a change in leadership, a merger or a new product. The organization focuses on the outcome that the change will produce, which is generally in response to external events. It can happen very quickly.

Transition is the inner psychological process that people go through as they internalize and come to terms with the new situation that the change brings about. The starting point for dealing with transition is not the outcome but the endings that people have in leaving the old situation behind. Getting people through transition is essential if the change is actually to work as planned.

This is when, with virtually every project at any level, we often find ourselves thinking: this would be such an easier process if the people weren’t involved!

Second, a process change is always accompanied by a psychological process. The psychological process is often accompanied by challenging emotions like confusion, ambiguity, and distress. We often confront because Western culture offers few rituals or rites of passage to mark us through whatever stages we find ourselves in, people often try to skip from the loss and pain of an ending directly to a new beginning, marked by enthusiasm, hope, and acceptance.

Related to this point, there is a wonderful passage in the book that I read to the group, which I’ll share here:

We usually fail to discover [the need for rituals] at an ending until we have made the most of our necessary external changes. There we are, in the new house or on the new job or involved in the new relationship, waking up to the fact that we have not yet let go of our old ties. Or worse yet, not waking up to that fact, even though we are still moving to the inner rhythm of life back in the old situation. We’re like shellfish that often continue to open and close their shells on the tide-schedule of their old home waters, even when they have been transplanted to the laboratory tank or restaurant kitchen. —William Bridges

Photo by chuttersnap

That image, of opening and closing to tides (environments) experienced in past roles is a very visceral one for many, including myself. We’ve been where the waters are warm, cold, nurturing, and inhospitable—leading us to seek the right “climate” for our needs. But do we react well when we get there, or do we bring old habits, information, or practices with us, closing us off to opportunities in the present.

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The panelists spanned multiple sectors from non-profit, technology, healthcare, and gigging. Each person brought vulnerability and truth to the conversation as they shared their career paths with the audience. Their bios are here, and worth a look.

Rebecca found her way through constraints. Her partner’s role took him out of the country, she followed seeking alignment with her skills in a new industry. Constraints can yield inspiring journeys and force us to tap into creativity we didn’t know we had.

Blair sought to gain greater depth as a physician by exploring it through other functions: policy, research, teaching, and business. Depth, the ability to gain deep perspective from multiple sides of a problem, helps people gain great insights that help lead industry thinking in new directions.  

Dan’s background in education and his volunteer interests in teaching led him full circle after a career in enterprise technology. Sometimes it’s possible to link our career expertise with something we’ve been nurturing on the side.

Amy’s path was largely intuitive, following her pleasure and the kinds of projects they sparked her deepest curiosity, from writing copy for Bing’s Search page (those juicy images with interesting factoids, that was her!), to a Jungian based Fairy tale Factory helping people learn to tell stories, to writing and advocating for a broader spectrum of male fashion at Nordstrom, to her current copywriter role at Microsoft. Sometimes we can see a direct line to where we are going, sometimes we can’t—but there are no dead ends. Everything we do is in service to the direction we are heading.

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In each case, there was a “breaking point” or a “crisis point” where an inner voice was starting to express itself. Was this the climate in which I want to stay? Am I willing to hide the biggest piece of who I am or what I have to offer in order to fit in? Are these the kinds of politics, or is this the kind of game I want to play?

At some point, our true selves come to save us from ourselves. They help us make the decisions we need to make, suffer the distress and ambiguity of change, and lead us toward our pleasure. All of the panelists, whether they designated these phases rituals or not, took time to discover what they really wanted. They considered their unlived life and weighed the consequences of going the course. And, they created a passage. They went on sabbatical, or sorts, even if it was just the week between jobs, to provide a clearing for what lay next.

They made space for a new beginning.

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Christine Haskell, Ph.D. is a pragmatic researcher, coach, and consultant focused on helping busy leaders take responsibility for their learning and development. Her book Craft Your Life, sharing lessons from master craftsmen and women on personal and professional mastery, is due out late 2019. Sign up for her (semi-regular) newsletter here.

Best Practice Series: 10 rules for story telling for deeper engagement, start with yourself

This week I’m captaining and moderating some panels for an event that is growing in popularity here in Seattle - Women in Tech Regatta, founded by Melody Beringer.

The term vulnerability is used a lot at the start of every talk, and is one of the defining characteristics of the conference. The term risks being overplayed against the backdrop of popular self-help books. But when people pause long enough to tell stories about real difficulties and struggles they have had in their careers—that kind of authenticity gives the audience pause. Some of the stories I heard in previous years, from senior leaders, both shocked and inspired me—so much so I’m getting involved.

The lesson here is that you don’t need to be a panelist at an event to share deeply and connect with people. That kind of engagement is needed at all levels of the organization, all the time. It takes practice. You need to practice stillness to find the stories you want to tell and you need to recruit witnesses to hear them. This is something I’m working on myself as I craft my own message about my work.

Photo by Nong Vang

10 Rules For Story Telling For Deeper Engagement, start with yourself

While the environment contributes to the tenor of a conversation, how you show up in that moment matters, whether you like it or not. It’s the difference between a hurried, canned, recited speech, or a speech by someone who is present, pacing well, and feeling into their words.

Effective leaders know that telling a story is the most effective way to connect with people—whether it’s one-on-one or a full room. Here are ten things to consider when you are looking to engage.

1. Use stories selectively. Stories activate the listener’s imagination and emotions by conveying a real or imagined human experience. That is their particular strength and limitation. Use stories for what they’re good at and don’t overload them with data, analysis, opinions, argument, etc.

2. Listen before you speak. Know your audience and what it cares about. You can be challenging if that is what’s called for, but people are more likely to pay attention to what you have to say if you begin by acknowledging the realities of their situation. Good storytelling is a two-way process.

3. Aim carefully. Think about the point you want to make and what effect you want to your story to have and choose a story that illustrates your point in action. An audience works out the point of a well-told story for themselves because it gives them a vicarious experience for their imaginations, and emotions to work with.

4. Make it personal. The story does not have to be about you. In fact, it’s often more persuasive if you make someone else the hero or heroine. But you do need to find a personal connection with the story, which might reveal your part in it or be as simple as letting the audience know how you are touched, inspired or affected by the events you have recounted.

5. Make it real. Stories are always about particular characters doing something specific at a certain time in a particular place. They are essentially about how characters meet the obstacles that thwart their desires. Bring your story alive with concrete descriptions, 3D characters, dramatic moments, humor, and passion.

6. Learn the story, not the words. Avoid the common error of killing a story by writing it out or reciting it from memory. Make sure you know how the story works: the sequence of events and key turning points and trust your innate ability to find the words. Practice telling it aloud and get feedback from a colleague.

7. Connect with the audience. When you tell your story to an audience, use eye contact, both to see and be seen. Your relationship with the audience moment by moment is your best support, even if you are nervous. The power of your story comes as much from your mutual connection with the audience as it does from the words.

8. Use simple language. The ear favors informal, straightforward language. If the audience has to spend its energy untangling complex sub-clauses and trying to make sense of unfamiliar jargon, it won’t get the point. Tell the story in your own words and avoid clichés like the plague (for real).

9. Let the story do the work. Do listeners the courtesy of allowing them to make sense of your story for themselves. Resist the temptation to tell them its moral or what it means. Tell it with conviction and it will stand for itself.

10. Remember we are all storytellers. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and always have been. There have been civilizations that have flourished without the benefit of the wheel, but none has ever been devoid of stories or storytellers. If you can tell a good story, you’ll always have a willing audience.

Good Humaning: Between joy and pain, pick patience.

Whatever happens today, or in my life, I can’t give way to reactivity.

Patience and compassion with where I am at lay the foundation for a healthy perspective.

/This post-series is about trying to anchor my experience by exploring within and reminding myself about what it means to practice “good humaning.” It’s about moving forward imperfectly. To follow this thread in my posts, look for these tags: #NotesFromMyYogaJournal

Do I need an MBA? Book recommendations for those looking to continue learning

THE MBA HANDBOOK

Getting an MBA is an expensive choice-one almost impossible to justify regardless of the state of the economy. Even the elite schools like Harvard and Wharton offer outdated, assembly-line programs that teach you more about PowerPoint presentations and unnecessary financial models than what it takes to run a real business. You can get better results (and save hundreds of thousands of dollars) by skipping business school altogether. 

Josh Kaufman founded PersonalMBA.com as an alternative to the business school boondoggle. His blog has introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to the best business books and most powerful business concepts of all time. Now, he shares the essentials of entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, negotiation, operations, productivity, systems design, and much more, in one comprehensive volume. The Personal MBA distills the most valuable business lessons into simple, memorable mental models that can be applied to real-world challenges. 

About the Author

Josh Kaufman is the author of The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business, an international bestseller with translations in 12 languages. Josh specializes in teaching professionals in all industries and disciplines how to master practical business knowledge and skills. Josh's unique, multidisciplinary approach to business mastery has helped millions of readers around the world learn essential business concepts on their own terms. PersonalMBA.com hosts over 50,000 readers every month, and has been visited over 2 million times by readers all over the world since its founding in 2005. Josh's work has directly saved prospective business students millions of dollars in unnecessary tuition, fees, and interest by providing an effective, affordable, and debt-free method of learning fundamental business principles.

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THANKS FOR THE FEEDBACK

A significant improvement on their initial book, Difficult Conversations, coauthors Stone and Heen have spent the last fifteen years working with businesses, nonprofits, governments, and families to determine what helps us learn and what gets in our way. In Thanks for the Feedback, they explain why receiving feedback is so crucial yet so challenging, offering a simple framework and powerful tools to help us take on life’s blizzard of offhand comments, annual evaluations, and unsolicited input with curiosity and grace. They blend the latest insights from neuroscience and psychology with practical, hard-headed advice. The authors point out that the real focus should be on receiving feedback (creating a pull instead of the push attitude). “Creating pull is about mastering the skills required to drive our own learning; it’s about how to recognize and manage our resistance, how to engage in feedback conversations with confidence and curiosity, and even when the feedback seems wrong, how to find insight that might help us grow”.

About the Authors

Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen are co-authors of the New York Times Business Bestseller Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, Principals at Triad Consulting, and have been teaching negotiation at Harvard Law School for twenty years.

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THE HIGH GROWTH HANDBOOK

High Growth Handbook is the playbook. Warning about playbooks: they work for certain circumstances. I caution people using playbooks that are designed to do things like “turn a startup into a unicorn” because I think that is a snake oil pitch and generally bad advice. However, playbooks are helpful for navigating complex challenges that confront leaders and operators in high-growth startups. Playbooks are helpful to the effective diagnostician, covering key topics like the role of the CEO, managing the board, recruiting and managing an executive team, M&A, IPOs and late-stage funding rounds, and is interspersed with over a dozen interviews with some of the most influential leaders in Silicon Valley including Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Marc Andreessen (Andreessen Horowitz), and Aaron Levie (Box).

About the Author

Well-known technology executive and angel investor Elad Gil has worked with high growth tech companies like Airbnb, Twitter, Google, Instacart, Coinbase, Stripe, and Square as they’ve grown from startups into global brands.

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THE MESSY MIDDLE

No matter what it is you’re trying to create or transform, the myth of a successful journey is that it starts with an idea, followed by a ton of hardship, and then a gradual and linear rise to the finish line. But no extraordinary journey is linear. In reality, the middle is extraordinarily volatile — a continuous sequence of ups and downs, flush with uncertainty and struggle. Every advance reveals a new shortcoming. Your job is to endure the lows and optimize the highs to achieve a positive slope within the jaggedness of the messy middle — so that, on average, every low is less low than the one before it, and every subsequent high is a little higher.

About the Author

Scott Belsky is an entrepreneur, author, and investor. He is currently Chief Product Officer at Adobe, serves as a board member to several early stage companies, and is a Venture Partner at Benchmark, a leading venture capital firm based in San Francisco. He was previously the founder and CEO of Behance, a leading online platform to showcase and discover creative work. He is also the creator of 99U, Behance's think tank and annual conference devoted to execution in the creative world. Belsky is the author of Making Ideas Happen and coauthor of the 99U book series.

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STUBBORN ATTACHMENTS

If we want to continue on our trends of growth, and the overwhelmingly positive outcomes for societies that come with it, every individual must become more concerned with the welfare of those around us—and in the world at large and most of all our descendants in the future. So, how do we proceed? Cowen, in a culmination of 20 years of thinking and research, provides a roadmap for moving forward. Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals argues that our reason and common sense can help free us of the faulty ideas that hold us back as people and as a society. Cowen’s latest book, at its heart, makes the contemporary moral case for economic growth and in doing so engenders a great dose of inspiration and optimism about our future possibilities.

About the Author

Tyler Cowen is the Holbert L. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University and also Director of the Mercatus Center. He received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1987. He was recently named in an Economist poll as one of the most influential economists of the last decade and several years ago Bloomberg Businessweek dubbed him “America’s Hottest Economist.” Foreign Policy magazine named him as one of its “Top 100 Global Thinkers” of 2011. He also cowrites a blog called Marginal Revolution, runs a podcast series called Conversations with Tyler, and has co-founded the online economics education project, MRUniversity.com. He has published several books including the New York Times best-seller, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, and The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.

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THE DREAM MACHINE

At a time when computers were a short step removed from mechanical data processors, Licklider was writing treatises on “human-computer symbiosis,” “computers as communication devices,” and a now not-so-unfamiliar “Intergalactic Network.” His ideas became so influential, his passion so contagious, that Waldrop coined him “computing’s Johnny Appleseed.” In a simultaneously compelling personal narrative and comprehensive historical exposition, Waldrop tells the story of the man who not only instigated the work that led to the internet, but also shifted our understanding of what computers were and could be.

About the Author

M. Mitchell Waldrop is a freelance writer and editor. He earned a PhD in elementary particle physics at the University of Wisconsin, and a Master’s in journalism at Wisconsin. He was previously a writer and West Coast bureau chief for Chemical and Engineering News and senior writer at Science, editorial page and features editor at Nature, and worked in media affairs for the National Science Foundation. He is the author of Man-Made Minds (Walker, 1987), a book about artificial intelligence and Complexity (Simon & Schuster, 1992), a book about the Santa Fe Institute and the new sciences of complexity. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, Amy E. Friedlander.

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MEASURE WHAT MATTERS

General Electric, Microsoft, Google. All of these companies have championed the idea of data-driven decision making by monitoring OKR, Objectives and Key Results. In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Everyone's goals, from entry level to CEO, are transparent to the entire organization. OKRs surface an organization's most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They keep employees on track. They link objectives across silos to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost retention. In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.

About the Author

John Doerr is an engineer, acclaimed venture capitalist, and the chairman of Kleiner Perkins. He was an original investor and board member at Google and Amazon, helping to create more than half a million jobs and the world's second and third most valuable companies. He's passionate about encouraging leaders to reimagine the future, from transforming healthcare to advancing applications of machine learning. Outside of Kleiner Perkins, John works with social entrepreneurs for change in public education, the climate crisis, and global poverty. John serves on the board of the Obama Foundation and ONE.org.

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THE REVOLT OF THE PUBLIC AND THE CRISIS OF AUTHORITY IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

In the words of economist and scholar Arnold Kling, “Martin Gurri saw it coming.” Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age—government, political parties, the media. The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how insurgencies, enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere, have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. Originally published in 2014, this updated edition of The Revolt of the Public includes an extensive analysis of Donald Trump’s improbable rise to the presidency and the electoral triumphs of “Brexit” and concludes with a speculative look forward, pondering whether the current elite class can bring about a reformation of the democratic process, and whether new organizing principles, adapted to a digital world, can arise out of the present political turbulence.

About the Author

Martin Gurri is a geopolitical analyst and student of new media and information effects. He spent many years working in the corner of CIA dedicated to the analysis of open media. After leaving government, Gurri focused his research on the motive forces powering the transformation and has churned out countless articles, studies, and blog posts on the topic including co-authoring Our Visual Persuasion Gap (Parameters, Spring 2010). His blog, The Fifth Wave, pursues the themes first elaborated in The Revolt of the Public.

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GET TOGETHER

Although communities feel magical, they don't come together by magic. Get Together is a guide to cultivating a community—people who come together over what they care about. Whether starting a run crew, helping online streamers connect with fans, or sparking a movement of K-12 teachers, the secret to community-building is the same: don’t fixate on what you can do for people (or what they can do for you). Instead, focus on what you can do with them. In Get Together, the People & Company team provides stories, prompts, and principles for each stage of cultivating a passionate group of people. Every organization holds the potential to build and sustain a thriving community. Get Together shows readers how companies and customers, artist and fans, or organizers and advocates, can join forces to accomplish more together than they could have alone.

About the Authors

Bailey Richardson, Kevin Huynh, and Kai Elmer Sotto comprise People & Company, an agency that helps organizations build communities. They’ve supported the creation and ongoing care for communities of investors, entrepreneurs, teachers, caregivers, dog-walkers, power users, runners, surfers, and more. Bailey brings her expertise as a storyteller and researcher. She helped shape the communities around Instagram, IDEO, and Pop-Up Magazine. Kevin breathes strategy and structure. He advises groups that build empowered communities and in the past operationalized CreativeMornings, rolling out events to 100 cities. Kai focuses on how true communities fuel growth for companies. He helped pioneer Facebook’s growth discipline and launch Instagram’s business internationally.

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Living With Craft Is Not A Luxury. It Is A Discipline.

The way craftsmanship is portrayed today is completely and utterly backward. First, craftsmanship as a concept is almost exclusively referred to as a calling. The not-so-subtle suggestion is that those who haven't heard the call, have no Craft. And the even less-subtle suggestion is that while we should be finding our purpose in life, everything is laden with meaning. The idea of craftsmanship has been so fetishized, there’s even a parody about making toast.

Which brings me to the second way that the current portrayal of craftsmanship is backward — it’s characterized as a luxury. This means both that the practice of craftsmanship is something we are occasionally allowed to indulge in luxury and that craftsmanship should feel like a luxury. Whether it is buying local from the butchers, dairy farmers, or bakers at the local farmer's market, or buying well made products from tailors and tanners--only a certain segment of the population participates. When we spend more time talking about the craftsmanship behind well-made leather boots than we do about how well made boots perform and enable us getting out into nature enough, we’ve wandered pretty far from anything that can be remotely considered craftsmanship.

While Craftsmanship is definitely fueled by purpose and unfortunately a luxury to some, true craftsmanship is a discipline. It is a way of being in the world, where how you approach life and work is a form of elevated, personal self-expression.

Genuine thinking and self-expression happens through doing and repeating—craftsmanship requires effort. The craftsman’s muscle memory is inscribed with the discipline of being in deliberate practice. This notion of craftsmanship is not a call to the return of overt craftsmanship (of the leather apron variety) to consumer culture.  It is a call to finding your Craft – through grit, resilience, tough-mindedness, a deep and personal understanding of your priorities, and a respect for both yourself and the people you choose to surround your life with.

Living with Craft is:

• Turning off the TV instead of watching another episode of whatever you are watching because the alarm is going off at 5am so you can get to the gym.

• Declining a second glass of wine when you're out to dinner. It might even be declining the first drink and opting for water.

• Maintaining boundaries by saying “no” to the thing you don’t want to do or the person you don’t want to see, even if someone is going to be angry at you.

• Maintaining financial independence.

• Doing work that matters.

• Letting other people take care of themselves.

Working with Craft is:

• Choosing work you want to labor over.

• Maintaining fascination with your work by reflecting on and approach it from various angles.

• Maintaining boundaries by saying “no” to things that take away from you continuing to develop skills and experiment in your Craft.

• Maintaining a unique perspective.

• Making deliberate choices in both life and work that will help you advance in your Craft.

• Surrounding yourself with people who nurture and stretch you.

Looked at this way, craftsmanship is actually kind of boring. It is about showing up, day in and day out – whether you get a result from your labors or not.

Craftsmanship is a discipline, because it takes discipline to do the things that are good for us instead of what feels good in the moment. It takes even more discipline to refuse to take responsibility for other people’s emotional well-being. And it takes discipline to take full and complete responsibility for our own well-being.

Craftsmanship is not something you do once in awhile when the world gets crazy. When you get the boss from hell, or a deal doesn't work out, or you've had a long day of meetings – you don't escape your life to go make cheese at the base of a fjord (yes, more than one client has had that fantasy!). It’s what you do day in and day out that matters. It’s taking care of yourself in a way that doesn’t require you to “indulge” in order to restore balance. It’s making the commitment to stay healthy, engaged by what you do, and finding meaning in your work as a regular practice.

When you truly find work you choose to labor over, you are actually in a much stronger place to help others, give back, and mentor. You will be a happier parent, a more grateful spouse, a fully engaged colleague. Those who take care of themselves have the energy to take care of others joyfully because that care-giving doesn’t come at their own expense. And those who take care of themselves also have the energy to work with meaning and purpose toward a worthy goal. Which means they are also the people most likely to make the world a better place for all of us.

I help individuals and teams engage in and connect more deeply to their careers.

Are you looking to restart, transition or up-level your career?