by Caroline Leach | Jul 5, 2016 | Leadership, Learning, Work/Life
Need a simple hack to motivate yourself to slog through your email backlog?
Here’s a great one from author and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charles Duhigg: as fast as you can, write a one-sentence reply to each message.
But don’t send them right away.
Just read and write a sentence in response that “expresses an opinion or decision.”
And if you can exercise control over the situation in your response, you’ll be more motivated to continue, Duhigg says in his book Smarter Faster Better.
Then you can can go back into your draft messages and add the rest of each message – salutations, specifics and signoffs.
This is a terrific example of two ways Duhigg says you can generate motivation.
The first is to “make a choice that puts you in control.” And “the specific choice itself matters less in sparking motivation than the assertion of control.”
The second is to “figure out how this task is connected to something you care about.” If you can “explain why this matters, then you’ll find it easier to start.”
Duhigg’s book is full of fascinating science behind motivation, teams, focus, goal setting, managing others, decision making, innovation and absorbing data.
You’ll learn “the secrets of being productive in life and business” – not only for yourself, but also for your colleagues and your kids.
If you’re looking for an interesting and insightful summer read, this is one to download on your mobile device or pack in your beach bag.
by Caroline Leach | Jun 4, 2016 | Change, Learning
Here be dragons.
It’s been more than 500 years since Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo was the first European explorer to navigate the coast of what’s now California.
Yet dragons in the form of swells and currents confronted me every time I went stand-up paddle boarding this spring and contemplated venturing beyond the marina.
The conditions were never right. Or at least that’s what I told myself. The waves were too big. There were too many big boats coming and going. I didn’t know how to navigate the open ocean.
Yes, as a kid I’d made it though the shark level of YMCA swim classes. I still remember the trauma of having to do a back dive to pass one of the classes. And yes, time proved that I was correct that I’d never, ever again need to know how to execute a back dive.
But fast forwarding to the present day, it was getting a little boring paddling around the Redondo Beach marina, as scenic as it is. I mean, how many laps can you paddle back and forth past the sea lion barge before you want to venture further and try something new?
So my husband and I decided on a three-pronged approach. We’d take another lesson to get some coaching. We’d go in the early morning, when the water was calmer. And we’d be prepared to fail – in this case, to fall off our boards.
Here are three things I learned from this today.
- Take the counterintuitive approach and relax. This is similar to when your car skids and you need resist slamming on the brakes. Instead, you should just lift your foot off the accelerator and steer into the skid. It’s not the intuitive approach.
“Paddle boarding is a weather sport,” our instructor from Tarsan Stand Up Paddle Boarding reminded us. So you have to go with the conditions. Move with the water. Stay relaxed.
And that’s the last thing I wanted to do. But breathing, focusing and staying in the moment helped. Before we knew it, we were past the small swells at the breakwater and out into the ocean. We did it. Amazing!
- Try something, see how it works and adjust the approach on the fly. Our instructor gave us a few strategies. Stay low, with your knees bent. Kneel on your board if you have to. The paddle is a great stabilizer, plus it floats (who knew?). And think of your paddle as an extension of your arm.
Try leaning left. Leaning right. Padding straight into and over the swells. Wiggling toes when they go to sleep. Trying something to see what happens. Adjusting the approach as needed.
- Go further every time. The best way to make progress is to keep pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone. Just try something new and see what happens.
It doesn’t matter if it’s your career, your family or your hobbies. More often than not, it will be like today – much easier that anticipated (or dreaded, in my case) and a whole lot of fun.
And who wouldn’t like more fun in their life?
by Caroline Leach | May 30, 2016 | Corporate Communications, Learning
Thrill your audience. Spark engagement with your ideas. Transform people’s views of the world.
That’s the promise of TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking, out this month by TED curator Chris Anderson.
And it’s also the new bar in public speaking. It’s no longer acceptable to under prepare, to meander or to bore your audience.
With so many people taking in a steady diet of TED talks to enlighten, educate and entertain themselves, the bar is sky high for anyone who speaks in public.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a keynote speech for an audience of a thousand or a tabletop presentation to your colleagues. Using the strategies in TED Talks will help spread your ideas.
Elements have come in handy for me in everything from town hall meetings and operations reviews at work to city committee meetings and inspirational talks in my community. Not to mention a decade of writing speeches and presentations for C-level corporate leaders.
Speaking effortlessly ties into my recent posts on grit and on sprezzatura, the art of making the difficult seem easy. In his book, Chris Anderson does a terrific job of outlining the hard work it takes behind the scenes to give a compelling talk. One that might change the world.
Take openings, for example. You have to grab people from the very first sentence. The opening words or a talk are similar to the way you need to think about headlines, subject lines and the first line of an email message. You only get a few words to pique people’s interest, or cause them to tune out.
This month I was presenting to a live and web-based audience in a town hall meeting. The topic? Our team’s annual scorecard – the priorities, initiatives, metrics and targets we’re striving for this year.
It had the potential to be boring. How to capture people’s attention? For that, I turned to the chapter on “Open and Close: What Kind of Impression Would you Like to Make?”
According to Anderson, “you have about a minute to intrigue people with what you’ll be saying.” He encourages readers to “script and memorize the opening minute.”
Here are 4 ways he offers to start strong:
- Deliver a dose of drama. Anderson suggests asking yourself, “If your talk were a movie or a novel, how would it start?”
- Ignite curiosity. Here you can ask a surprising question or give a little illustration that piques an interest to hear more.
- Show a compelling slide, video or object. These capture even more attention when you reveal something surprising about them.
- Tease, but don’t give it away. “Channel your inner Spielberg” and imagine what will make your audience want to learn more.
So how did I start my scorecard talk? My current work focuses on metrics and measurement. But numbers alone wouldn’t engage or inspire my colleagues.
I thought about how to link it with our bigger purpose. At our annual leadership kickoff meeting, our technology leader talked about the magic our team creates every day in marketing a storied, nearly 140-year-old company.
And there it was – the dramatic contrast of measuring magic.
“If you think you can’t measure magic,” I began, “I’m here to show you how we’ll do just that.”
Yes, the opening may have given too much away. But when a few people mentioned the magic reference to me later that day, I knew it had been a good way to start.
Equally important is how you close. And everything you do in between. I’ll explore those in future posts.
For a spine-tingling close, check out Brené Brown in her TED talk, The power of vulnerability.
by Caroline Leach | May 29, 2016 | Learning, Social Media, Work/Life
If you’re gritty, should you let it show?
That was the essential question in The Atlantic‘s article this month, Is Grit Overrated?
In it, Jerry Useem applies Angela Duckworth‘s research on grit to our careers.
Grit, the persistent pursuit of a passion, is key to accomplishment. Yet most people would be happy not to know how hard you worked.
Useem cites research by Chia-Jung Tsay of University College London. It showed that people prefer perceived natural talents over those whose striving and hard work is more apparent.
Why? Here Duckworth has a best guess. It’s that “we don’t like strivers because they invite self-comparisons.” And we can often find ourselves lacking.
Or perhaps it’s because the effortless and frictionless experience is desirable in all areas of our lives. This is especially true in the customer experience with our favorite brands.
Think of the level of technology we interact with on a daily basis. The networks that carry our communications. The electric and computing technology that fuel our cars. The social media that connect us around the globe.
We want and expect an effortless experience. Every time.
In addition to the complexity of our lives that demands an effortless experience, history and human nature play roles. “Make your accomplishments appear effortless,” is one of The 48 Laws of Power that Robert Greene penned.
Greene cited the Japanese tea ceremony and the contributions of Sen no Rikyu in the 16th century. The art of the tea ceremony was heightened by its seeming effortlessness. Showing the effort behind the work ruined the effect.
Greene also drew from the Renaissance court writings of Baldassare Castiglione, author of The Book of the Courtier in 1528. Castiglione advised members of the royal court to carry out their duties with “sprezzatura, the capacity to make the difficult seem easy.”
He went on to write, “practice in all things a certain nonchalance which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless.”
In our world of social media, where people appear to live perfectly curated lives, this takes some reality checks on the back end.
When the actor Rob Lowe took his oldest son to college, he advised him beautifully when his son expressed doubts about his ability to succeed. Lowe describes this in a tear-jerking chapter of his book Love Life.
“Dad, what if it’s too hard for me here?” his son asked. “None of the other kids look scared at all.”
The elder Lowe’s response is something we should remind ourselves of every day: “Never compare your insides to someone else’s outsides.”
As you pursue a passion with perseverance and balance it with the appearance of effortlessness, remember this: It takes tremendous work behind the scenes to accomplish anything great.
Don’t ever give up. Keep your grit to yourself. And make sure your children understand the hard work that happens beneath the surface.
by Caroline Leach | May 7, 2016 | Change, Corporate Communications, Learning, Social Media
Did you catch two great books that came out this month? Grit by Angela Duckworth and TED Talks by Chris Anderson were both released on May 3.
More to come on TED in a future post, and for the 6-minute version of Grit, watch the TED talk. Dive into Grit the book for more on the science behind the concept. This answered 3 key questions for me.
First, what is grit? Duckworth defines it as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” More than talent and intelligence, grit is what ultimately makes people successful in achieving their goals.
She said in her TED talk that “Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint.”
Are you curious to see how gritty you are? Test yourself on the Grit Scale.
Second, what can be life-changing about grit? You don’t have to possess natural talent or off-the-charts intelligence in order to do great things. In fact, “natural talent” may simply be the outcome of a lot of hard work behind the scenes that ultimately comes to appear effortless.
If you have passion for something and decide to persevere no matter what, you have an excellent chance of achieving your goal. So says the science in Duckworth’s studies.
Third, what does this mean for your life? It means you don’t have any excuses. You can no longer say you don’t have what it takes to accomplish a goal in your area of passion. You have to own up to the fact that you didn’t work hard enough.
Does that mean you should never throw in the towel on something? Of course not. There are times when you need to cut your losses and move on. Just don’t do it too soon. Give yourself time to move beyond the inevitable period of being bad at something new, with thanks here to Erika Andersen.
How has grit made a difference? A few years ago, my daughter was struggling in her first AP class in high school. She missed the deadline to level down to a regular class. A few academic advisors later told her they could move her to a lower class and suggested that she avoid future AP courses.
To my surprise (and delight), my daughter said no. She wanted to finish the course. And finish she did. She eked by with a passing, but not great, grade in the course. But she got a qualifying score on the exam, one that will give her college credit. And she went on to take other AP courses, with better grades and better scores. All because she chose to persevere.
You’ve probably faced times like those in your life and your career. I can think of more than a few. When launching a new way to work with social collaboration a few years ago, I had moments of terror. How would we do it? How would we manage through the inevitable mistakes? How would we make it successful?
The day our beta test launched, I decided I would start a blog. The purpose? To create a safe learning environment for others. To role model the use of the new platform. And to learn by doing so I could advise other leaders on starting their own blogs.
It wasn’t easy, admitting what I didn’t know. Making mistakes. Asking the community for help in how to perform seemingly simple functions, like creating hyperlinks. Or launching a project on Social Media for Innovation in partnership with Gerry Ledford of USC’s Center for Effective Organizations. But that’s how I learned.
A fierce level of tenacity existed among the people on my team at the time who were leading the project – Michael Ambrozewicz and Thyda Nhek Vanhook. And we had tremendous colleagues in our I.T. organization, starting from Frank Palase to Brian Ulm and many, many others.
How did we do? I knew we’d achieved success when people started talking about the platform in meetings. When I’d walk by a conference room and see a platform screen displayed on a monitor. When I worked with our CEO to launch his leadership blog. And when nearly 90% of our employees were using the platform to do their daily work more efficiently.
In those moments when you want to shut down and walk away from a seemingly unsolvable problem, what works best is to do the opposite. Take some kind of action. Any action. Get feedback from others. Adjust your path. And keep moving forward.
How do you persevere on your most important goals?
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