Discovering Values, Motives, and Life Goals

Want a better life?

More Happiness?  More Well being? How do you get yourself motivated today to improve your life?  How come no one ever taught you this before?

Let me share a secret with you. A secret that the most accomplished people already know.  A secret to living the good life that no one has taught you before.

Archer woman aims her arrow at the target

What is that secret?  — Motivation always starts by deciding what interests you. We call these interests your “Values.”  Set a goal to accomplish something new in that area and you will attain more of whatever you value.  It is a magic formula that really works!

Values + Goals + Action = A Better Life!

Most people want more out of life than what they are currently getting.  But they may be afraid to dream of anything important out of fear that they won’t get it and then will feel disappointed. If you know your values you need never fear again. Values and Goals naturally lead to action. Repeated action leads to results. You naturally move toward what you value. Pura Vida!

Let’s put it in action right now.  Try the following exercise —

 

Exercise Step One:

Take out a sheet of paper.  Write a list of everything you value.  It may take several pages but it is good to get it out on paper where you can look at it.  Consider what you value in the different areas of your life:

  •    Personal Emotional and Mental Self,
  •    Family and Spouse or primary relationship,
  •    Friendships and Community relationships,
  •    Career and Financial,
  •    Spiritual life
  •    Possessions and living quarters,
  •    Physical condition and health, and

You can add any other area that is important to you.

Our values are what motivate us, they are what we think is important – what we value. Sometimes they are the things that excite us and sometimes they scare us. But they are never boring.  At the Weekly Wisdom Game we cherish learning about a person’s values.

Exercise Step Two:

Write a Goal or two that moves toward what you value.  Just a little one. Small steps lead to greater things.  It is better to make goals so small that you can do them right away and in one event.

Tiny goals organize our actions so that we move toward a better life.   Consider whether you would benefit from having goals to improve in the areas of your values?  When we define our values and work toward improving them, we are working toward Virtues. Virtues are the values that make us better people.  We want to be Virtuous people, right?

When you know your own values and virtues you can more easily stay focused, and you will find many ways to accomplish goals that satisfy your values.  If an action doesn’t serve your values, make you a better person, why would you do it?

When you know another person’s values you can be of better service to them.  You can help them in ways that support their values. You can show them how a proposal you are making helps them satisfy their own values.  You can motivate them to take actions in service of their values. You can convince them to do things that are important to do. At the Wisdom Games this last weekend we learned how to discover another person’s highest values. Values are the key to motivation, influence, getting going, and building trust.

Be aware that there are two types of Values.  Those you move away from and avoid and those you move toward.

The first are the important negatives in life that make us afraid or worried.  We protect ourselves by avoiding them. We need a few of these in our lives. As an example we all have a value for Safety.  We avoid danger. It is important to know our negative values so that we can quickly make decisions to avoid them when we have to make a choice.

The second type of values are the ones that we move toward.  We want more positive values in our lives because they are our desires and help us fulfill our physical, emotional, and social needs.  An example of a “toward” value is Love. Most of us want to move toward more love in our lives.  By listing our positive values we can set goals to take action and move toward fulfilling those values.

 

Take Action Now — Tiny Action!

Look at your list of values and pick one or two that are most important to you. Choose your highest values and decide to do something to make your life better starting today, starting right now!  Set a small goal that relates to your highest value. Try to find the smallest, next step that you can take right now. Or set a specific appointment with yourself to take this first step toward your goal and your value as soon as is physically possible.

This is the principle of taking lots of Tiny Actions. These are easy to do because they are so small. But you will feel good about accomplishing them, getting them out of the way, and getting the ball rolling.  Then you can do another action because each one is so easy. Do a number of these and they add up quickly. Your life will thank you for it.

 

You Deserve to Live a Happy Life

I know, easy and great, right?  Why didn’t anyone ever already teach you this stuff?

Happiness doesn’t come so much from momentary pleasure, or from doing activities, or attaining possessions. Happiness comes more from working toward achievable goals that serve your own personal values.

If you know your values and do a little work on them every day, you will be feel satisfaction along the way.  And that will make your life happy. Exciting to begin with!

As you achieve the goals you set, you will see that they move you toward the things you most Value, and that will make you even more happy.  Even more exciting!

Finally, (and this is the best part!)  the most important happiness comes when you look back on your life and realize that you have lived according to your values and achieved many goals that made a difference.

 

Learn A Lot More

If you would like to Play the Game of Life at a higher level every single day, please consider coming to join us at The Weekly Wisdom Game.

A community of mutually supportive, emotionally intelligent players meets every Saturday in San Pedro area of San Jose, Costa Rica to support one another, do community service, and learn skills and games that grow our ability to live the good life of well being.

Please come join us!  We need people like you with good Values!

 

To Register and save your space at The Weekly Wisdom Game:  http://wisdomgamecr.com

For more information LIKE our Facebook Page:  https://www.facebook.com/WisdomGameCR

 

Body, Mind, and Spirit— Excellence!

Growing your excellence is a whole body, communal experience.

When you think…

Wow, I did a pretty good job on that,” how do you feel afterwards?

Or consider the thought, “You know, I’ve been pretty lucky.”— a warmth automatically spreads across your chest and shoulders and flows upward into your face as a little smile.  We just can’t help it.

Thoughts Create Our (emotional) Reality

Thoughts, actions, and emotions all seem like different, independent phenomena, but they are automatically interrelated for us most of the time.

For example, if you have a negative thought like, “I just don’t think that I can do it,” suddenly you feel a lot smaller and less capable than you did before that idea came into your mind.  You contract a little bit. But if you think, “At least I know that I have people who love me,” suddenly it causes a positive emotion to rise up in your body, you expand again, and feel able to move on to the next challenge.

If a coworker says something critical to you, a part of you interprets that thought and thinks, “That is not good, not what I want people saying about me.” Then you might feel angry You become more contracted in your body, and your shoulders drop and your posture slumps.

 

Feelings Also Constrain Thoughts

It works the other way too. Feelings lead to thoughts and behaviors, just a thoughts lead to feelings and behaviors.

If you are feeling angry, you tend to have angry thoughts.  If you are feeling sad, you tend to have sad thoughts. If you are feeling happy then little negatives don’t affect you as much unless you take them in and begin to ruminate on them. Then it can change your mood, if you are not careful.

It has been said that,

People are just about as happy as they expect themselves to be.

This is true. You have more effect on your own happiness than you probably realize you do.

Most of the time we think that our emotions just happen to us.  We act like we have no control because we are not conscious of the thoughts that create them.  And once we are in a particular mood, we tend to get stuck there for a while because our subsequent thoughts are constrained by our emotions.  Happy thoughts don’t come to us when we are in a bad mood. Creative thoughts tend not to come to us when we are not curious.

But Behaviors Also Change Thoughts and Feelings

Now, if you study yourself carefully, you can see by observing your own experience that behaviors also come from thoughts and feelings. If you are angry or frustrated, (feelings) you are more likely to think negative thoughts and communicate in negative ways (behavior).

Changing our behavior also can change our thoughts and feelings. For example, when you are feeling sad or frustrated you might go for a walk or go to the gym. What happens then? Your new behaviors help you get out of the negative state of mind you were in and you come back feeling differently, thinking differently, and communicating differently.

This is why the old advice says,

Before you respond in anger, stop, take a deep breath, and count to 10.”

The breath and the mental behavior of counting begins to change your emotional state and gives you the space to reconsider how to better ask for what you want, rather than striking out with an angry communication.

So we can see that our emotions affect changes to thoughts and behaviors. Behaviors affect changes to thoughts and emotions.  And thoughts affect our emotions leading to our behaviors. The body-mind is one big interrelated system where different subsystems mutually affect changes in one another.

Thoughts Emotions and Behaviors make up a cybernetic system that constitutes the whole human.

 

So What?

It is important to recognize the differences between our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in order to grow ourselves and become the best human we can be. Otherwise we walk though life on automatic pilot not realizing the patterns of internal experience that create our circumstances. We suffer, but we don’t realize why we suffer and don’t know what to do about it.

We have to wake up to the causes of our suffering.  By becoming aware of these structures inside ourselves and others, we can discover how other people create their suffering and how they create their excellence. We can copy the excellence, and grow ourselves in ways that we might never have thought about on our own. This is the essence of modeling our heroes and role models.

Every result we produce in the world, whether good or bad comes from our habitual patterns of emotions, thinking, and action.

The results you produce in the world are manifested from the structure of you internal sequences.  The road to improvement starts with learning to clearly see your own patterns.

This is not a new idea, but a forgotten one.

Learner, Know Your Self,” and “To Thine Own Self Be True

are ancient sayings that most people don’t fully understand today.  All growth starts by knowing where we are coming from. Unfortunately it is not easy to really see ourselves clearly. It takes effort. So we must love our growth and desire to become better at who we are. If we love our mediocrity, if we accept being average, then there is no hope for us.

 

Fe practices Body-Mind-Heart Juggling

 

How We Create the Results We Get

Every result you have in your life comes from behaviors and communications that are based in these habitual sequences of thoughts, emotions, and actions.  Whether you are achieving mediocre results in your life or excellent ones, the results you are getting come from the things you do, think, and feel. Whenever any result shows up over and over in our experience, whether good or bad, it is an indication that habitual patterns are at work creating that regular result. Experience has an underlying structure.  Only when we do something novel, something different, something random, or something creative does a new result arise.

It is important to see these patterns so that we know what needs to change. Wisdom Game player, know thyself!  The road to excellence starts with learning to see yourself and others more deeply. Discover your thoughts, emotions, and actions.

 

The Juggling Exercise

This past Saturday at The Weekly Wisdom Game we used juggling to help players learn to recognize and differentiate their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors by intuitive self observation. This exercise starts to balance and connect our conscious minds with our bigger, more pervasive, intuitive unconscious body-mind.

Players were asked to take a tennis ball and toss it from hand to hand in a continuous, rhythmic pattern. Tossing the ball back and forth and making the tosses graceful and regular takes some conscious concentration at first.

Then we asked the players to continue tossing the ball, but to look outward so that they were only watching their hands with their peripheral vision. It doesn’t take long for a graceful balance of body, mind, and emotion to develop when we put ourselves into a repeating pattern like this that challenges our consciousness and uses both sides of our brain. This is a “flow state” where we are at the edge of our current level of capability. At this point most people report that they “get into the flow” and feel a sort of pleasure at using their whole body-mind up to their challenge point.

Any time that we make a mistake, like dropping the ball, we reframe that as a learning by saying to ourselves “great learning” or by taking a bow and saying out loud, “Ta Da!” as if we meant to make that mistake. No behavior is really a mistake unless we don’t remember to stay relaxed, curious, and in learning mode. We refuse to let our body and emotions systems contract because we know every mistake leads to correction.  By staying in this frame of mind, learning begins to occur automatically through our unconscious intuitive mind.

Once people could easily toss the ball in a regular pattern and feel the emotional flow-state take over their whole body, we practiced asking ourselves three questions to help us learn to self observe our mental, emotional, and behavioral patterns:

 

  1. What am I doing right now?— We wait to allow our intuitive minds to answer this question rather than our conscious-mind quick answer.  Perhaps it says something like, “I am juggling,” or “I am tossing the ball from my left hand to my right hand,” or “I am standing here practicing.”  Whatever arises from the intuitive mind is honored and respected without critique or judgment.  We just notice.
  2. What am I feeling right now?— We wait to let our body respond, and we notice the emotions we are feeling.  It might be curiosity, or joy, or frustration. Whatever we are feeling, we pay special attention to our body and try to notice where we are experiencing the center of that emotion. “Where is this emotion centered in my body?”  How big do I feel it?” and “Where are the boundaries?”  “Is it radiating outward, or inward, or steady?” “How is it changing over time?”If we don’t feel like we are having an emotion right now, like we are simply neutral, we still feel into our body’s sensations and notice whatever we can about where the body is loose and relaxed and where it is tight. Elegance means only using the muscles we need and letting the others relax.
  3. What am I thinking right now?— We observe the thinking and storytelling part of our mind. “What thoughts come up?”  “Making judgments about anything or anyone right now?” “Are we totally present to what we are doing or are we thinking about the past or the future right now?” We observe where our mind goes and how our thoughts are congruent or incongruent with our emotions and behaviors. We are developing the skill of just observing whatever is happening without judgment. We are building a part of ourselves that becomes a non-critical observer.

We encouraged the Wisdom Game Players to practice this self-observation juggling exercise at least once or twice per day and notice what they discover and what things change over the week while they do this practice.

As we get good at seeing our own behaviors, thoughts, and feelings, we begin to notice that they tend to come in habitual sequences that repeat and create our whole lives’ experience and the results we get in the world. This provides the magic information we need to be better at helping ourselves and others grow the sequences that make their lives better, and change the sequences that create negativity and suffering.

This is the start of truly being empowered and able to respond in better ways that improve our lives, and the lives of those in our family, work, and communities.

 

Let’s Play Together!

I hope that if you find this exercise interesting that you will join us next Saturday at Republic Space on the second floor of Edificio Sigma, Torre A at around 9:15 AM. We have camaraderie, coffee, cake, and a great time playing games that lead us to live better lives of Wisdom.

To Register and reserve your space at the Games: http://wisdomgamecr.com/
For more information, here is our Facebook Community Group: https://www.facebook.com/WisdomGameCR

 

Winning Emotions for Business Success

As Dani learned, stunning eyes, a great smile, and an excellent service are not quite enough to make you a successful entrepreneur or small business manager. You also have to have guts!  

Dani and Keith build a Circle of Determination

Getting past those fears that stop you from being great.

Success comes from gaining the fearlessness to try experiments, learn from mistakes, and face criticism from friends and family who mean well, but fear for your emotional and financial safety. It is not easy starting your own business facing fears like these. If it were, everyone would do it.

 

Feel the Fear But Do It Anyway

This past weekend at The Weekly Wisdom Games, we helped one of our players, Dani, face her fears and begin to get past them and into action.  

Every new business owner, or even new manager, faces doubts and emotional uncertainties. However, the people who are successful don’t let fear stop them from acting. The fastest and surest way to win at the game of life is to try an action and then learn and grow from the results. Sometimes you get what you want, but most times you keep making adjustments as rapidly as necessary to achieve the results you are committed to.

 

Powerful Intention Is Emotional

The Weekly Wisdom Games this weekend was about setting your positive intention and moving toward it. By the word “Intention” we mean your aim or goal or plan, and the emotional set that affirms your commitment to that goal. Our game players discovered that intention is more than a mind game; there is a strong emotional component to the determination to getting your desired outcome.  

If you don’t have the right emotional mindset, attitude, and mood, then it is difficult to muster the courage to face what you fear and do what you have to do to feel the fear and do it anyway.  

 

Jedi Entrepreneur Tricks

To strengthen Dani’s toolkit for facing her particular challenges, we built her a
Circle of Determination.”  This is a cognitive-behavioral technique that uses stimulus-response conditioning to provide new pathways in the mind and emotional sets in the body.  

Then we created a performance state of excellence exactly in the contexts where Dani needed her powerful positive emotions so she can successfully face her challenges. For Dani, her challenges had to do with fears of friends thinking and saying deflating things to her as she makes the move from the safe environment of working for other people to the exciting but risky environment of being her own business owner. She wanted more determination, more strength of commitment, and more fun and playfulness so that she can respond positively and creatively when criticisms come up or when she feels at risk personally.

We had her access memories of times when she was feeling powerfully committed and doing the hard stuff. We asked her to feel them really strongly, as if she were back living that memory in her body again right now, at this instant. Then when Dani could really remember and feel the positive emotions fully in core of her stomach and chest, we had her carry those positive resources into her “green Circle of Determination” by stepping forward into the circle she had imagined. Each time she stepped in to that circle, we showed her how to ramp up the emotions so that she was beaming with energy and empowerment.

After just a few repetitions of this, the pattern was set— her mind and body had learned to associate that imaginary green circle with those positive powerful emotions. We could see the change on her face and in her breathing and posture when she stepped into her Circle of Determination. Her demeanor was so different, so powerful, and so joyous.

 

Programming the Future

Next we had her imagine some situations where she might like to use this Circle of Determination to successfully face challenges and take productive action. Each time she thought of a situation that in the past might have stopped her, we had her step forward into her imaginary circle and feel all those positive emotions and imagine taking action without regard for fear or concern. This was a sort of mental rehearsal that helps to program the behavior to occur more automatically when we face similar real-life situations.

We could see that this had a powerful effect on Dani. She is an extremely competent professional with a lot to offer her clients. Her courage to face each learning experiment and grow through it to success will make or break her entrepreneurial adventures. While most new businesses don’t make it, with the right attitude Dani is off to a great start, and her commitment to do whatever it takes to learn to be her own boss puts her on the right footing.

 

Not Just For Entrepreneurs

If you, like Dani, have a project that’s really worth creating in the world, you might enjoy coming to play Wisdom Games with us each Saturday. We are a group of consciously-minded players who use games and exercises to grow ourselves and improve our communities. We would love to have you join us!  

 

Wisdom Game Meetup Registration:  http://wisdomgamecr.com/

WisdomGameCR page on Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/WisdomGameCR

 

 

 

 

The Quality of Your Objectives Makes or Breaks Your Project Success

Ryder Schmidt, a promising young civil engineer working on water resources projects, is involved in hydrologic and hydraulic studies that focus on floodplain and stormwater management.  He had proven himself able when it came to technical activities on assigned projects, and he had hopes of moving up in his company.  Then he got his chance.

Ryder Schmidt Hydraulic Engineer

But Rider was quickly overwhelmed by his new job position as team project manager. There is so much to take in and stay on top of when leading a team, ensuring effective communication and coordination between all the architects, engineers, developers, contractors, and clients.

His habits still focused primarily on the technical problems, but now he was having what seemed like the same people problems occurring over and over.  As with many people under pressure, his tendency was to blame the other team members, but his boss pointed out that he was responsible for the ultimate success of the project.

Ryder’s new job was stressing him out.  And he knew he needed to focus on people process in addition to the content of his project, but his old work and thought habits were difficult to change.

To better manage people, we coached Ryder to become aware of the process of his and his team’s behavioral habits, not just the content of his projects.  This can be a tricky distinction for engineers to see and understand because engineers are typically so good at visualizing future creations in their mind that they expect that everybody else should already do things exactly the they imagine they will happen.  This is a sort of “mind-reading” and “projection” onto other team members.  It is a hazard of being so good at manipulating images in your mind’s eye.

The poor results Ryder was getting came out of the way he habitually used his brain.  To choose to do things in a different way, Ryder first had to focus his awareness on how he was producing the consistently poor results. And he had to understand the habitual sequence his brain used to automatically produce those poor results.

Beginning to learn to recognize and express his own desired objectives in a clear, detailed, and positive fashion, his people were able to collaborate to make sure his vision was in line with their own.  This may seem obvious, but in 15 plus years coaching Engineers and Scientists, we’ve learned that it is not as easy as it sounds.

Ryder learned a set of well-formedness conditions for communicating his goals, which allowed him to test his peers and team members’ understanding against his own pictures for success — a sort of failure mode and effects analysis but on the human factors affecting his project.  This proved to be incredibly valuable both to him and his team.

Organizing around “well-formed objectives” helped him both communicate more clearly exactly what was expected of his team and check to make sure that all of the key stakeholders shared the same vision and consensus about the steps that the project would entail.  This brought out problems for discussion a lot earlier in his projects when they were less critical (and less costly) to deal with.

With a lot of practice Ryder became a master of bringing his projects in on time and within budget.  Of course that allowed him to progress in his career.  But Ryder said that the biggest advantage came from knowing he could calmly handle any project with minimal stress because everyone was on the same page and working together to make him and his projects a success.

If you think you may be having similar communication problems on your team, you may benefit from learning to apply the well-formedness conditions to the objectives your team has to discuss.  To find out more join us for one of our weekly work sessions.  We do practice exercises and learn practical skills that help make you a super project manager.  Call +1-512-507-5464 for an invitation to join us.  We’d love to help you accelerate your career forward to new levels of successful leadership.

 

Setting a Fire for Technical Leadership

Leadership is about making happen something that both yourself and others find important.  It is about getting from where you and your organization is right now to someplace better you both want to be.  To do that you have to get good at discovering where everyone is right now and where you all want to go together.

 

Leaderahip Cycle

You have to coordinate shared agreement about what you plan to achieve but also about exactly where you are right now and what is important about where you are going and how you will get there.  To be a good leader you need to learn to be great at evoking responses from yourself and other people. This is more than traditional communication skills, it is tracking everyone’s thinking and emotional reactions as well and being able to use those to get the responses you need.

Learn how to ask the types of questions that will help people discover the details of this process.  You need a procedure for determining exactly what success will look like and how you will recognize success when you achieve it.  You need skills to align people’s thinking and actions so that they work in a coordinated way rather than at cross purposes to one another.

You need the ability to ferret out what makes people think and act the way that they do so that you can predict how to best use them and work with them in a synergistic way that brings out their excitement and engages them in the collaborative work you need performed.

Leadership is about getting from where you are now to a better place by coordinating a like-minded group of specialists.  You can learn this.

The first skill set that must be mastered is the capability to define the current state of affairs and compare them to a description of a desired state.  And learning to make your goals a reality always starts with you proactively deciding on what you want for your team that will make a noticeable difference.

The better you are at envisioning and articulating a future that appeals to the values you and your bosses hold the more people will want to align with you and follow your lead.

 

These are the Leadership Skills I am thinking about this week.  If you feel ready to take the leading role, let’s talk about sharpening your skills in these areas.  Drop me a comment, or give me a ring: 512-512-5464

 

 

 

Engineering People Can Be Tricky

Designing a solution takes time, mental power, and effort.  To engineers and tech people this is obvious when talking about physical reality.  Building a new product or solution you start by analyzing what you are trying to accomplish.  Then you you research and design the new product to meet those specifications.  Finally you convert those designs into a set of processes that build and deliver the needed solution in an efficient manner.

Checking system tolerance

People engineering uses feedforward and feedback to maintain system control and stability.

Scientists, engineers, and tech people are good at this sort of work.  Unfortunately, it is not just THINGS that need to be created.

In fact, I don’t know about you but on the technical projects I work on, problems are about people as much as about things.  Human solutions are generally necessary before engineering solutions will actually work.

Think about the people issues you have to deal with every day.

  • Bosses that never listen to your good ideas, or
  • executives who randomly change the goal or interrupt the project or
  • make promises to customers with deadlines that no one could keep.
  • Subordinates that want to “fix” things without understanding why you’ve done it this way for the past 6 years.  Or
  • bosses who don’t know how to let go, who hover over you or nit-pic constantly so that you don’t have a chance to do your job.  Or on the other hand
  • bosses that you only hear from when things go wrong.

Individual contributing engineers and techies tend to be passive responders.  But leading technical teams means looking around at what needs to be done and taking a proactive action to move the team and the organization forward through solutions to these problems, toward the goals that it doesn’t even know it has yet.  And that means selling those ideas to others.

Do you know how to do people engineering?  Can you elaborate the technical specifications (values) of your top team members?  Do you recognize their process tolerances?  How often do you need to run quality assurance samples on your best colleagues, and the least experienced?

People are not really machines.  But they are systems with consistent patterns of inputs and outputs.  You can learn to engineer people systems, but you have to adopt variation control procedures and feedforward mechanisms.  Otherwise people systems go chaotic.

Making the change from individual technical contributor to team leader starts with upgrading yourself.  Take a hard look at what you do and do not understand about leadership.  Now is the time.  There are skills, behaviors, distinctions, and ways of measuring performance in dealing with people just as there are in engineering and technical individual contributor roles.  Be honest with yourself.  You went to school to get the basic ideas and vocabulary of engineering, science, and technology.  But you have learned your profession on the job.  Self study can take you a long way when you are ready to learn how to lead others.

 

A Call For Honest Conversation

I would like to hear from you what differences you have noticed between engineering systems and engineering people.  What is similar?  What is different and difficult?

If you want to learn then you are going to have to be honest and admit what works and what doesn’t yet work for you.  Let me hear your thoughts.

 

 

 

Happiness Doesn’t Come From Getting What You Want

Goals_Happiness

Most of you know that I am an expert on motivation and leadership, and the communication skills that leaders use in leading teams and helping gain alignment, commitment, and motivation in team situations.  With this background my friend Russ Taylor asked me to comment on Dan Gilbert’s work and its relation to the NLP idea of “Well Formed Desired Outcomes.”   He asks,

What would you say is the significance of this data for outcome-based change processes, or even on the ultimate value of change as a goal?

And points to Gilbert’s TED talk:

             https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy

 

Hey Russ,

Thanks for the note.  Great TED talk.  I have been thinking a lot about happiness and NLP’s concepts of “Well Formed Desired Outcomes” recently in relation to the “well lived life.”  Here is a summary of my thoughts:

First of all, the word “happiness” is a bit confusing because we have only one word for three different underlying concepts.

The first is immediate pleasure, which we call happiness.  For example, “Yum, that is a good ice-cream cone.”

The second is the experience of being fully engaged in a challenging and interesting experience that we feel is meaningful.  As Csikszentmihalyi‘s research shows, we experience these as “flow” states where we get so involved that time seems to fly by and our sense of self seems to merge with the activity we are involved in.  These states are very rewarding, and we think of them as happiness or sometimes bliss, but when we are in them, we are too busy to think about the pleasure we are deriving.

The third experience we call happiness is the pleasure we derive when we look back on some experience or period of our lives and consider how we were living according to our personal values.  This “narrative happiness” describes past experiences in terms of a coherent story.  If we feel we met our values, we feel we were happy.

It is this third type of happiness that is the subject of narrative rewriting, reevaluation, and the “synthesis of happiness” that Dan Gilbert is talking about.

Gilbert and Wilson’s research is important and sheds light on the exaggeration of choice and the illusion that if you get what you want you are going to feel happy.  I don’t think it is surprising anymore that this is not the case.  In fact, setting desired outcomes, like any other expectations, is a surefire way to create suffering.  Think of what the Buddha said.  If you could live totally in the now with acceptance for all that is as it is, then you cease suffering.

This does not mean that all choices are equal, or that freedom of choices is of itself, bad.  Only that if you think that happiness comes from what you get, you are likely to be disappointed.  Some quote I once read seems right to me, “In the end we are about as happy as we set our minds to be.”  (Abraham Lincoln?)

Nevertheless, we are still outcome driven creatures at all levels of experience, from the micro, “I think I will adjust the temperature by opening the window,” to the macro, “I want to be a doctor when I finish school.”  Achieving goals has little to do with happiness, and lots to do with effectiveness, which has something to do with the first two types of happiness but little to do with the third.

The couch potato might not be happy, but that is not because he or she doesn’t produce results, but because when he looks back on his life, he has neither a narrative that satisfies his values, nor the experience of flow states that come when we are fully engaged in an activity that we find interesting.  Doing nothing, and having no goals, however, may lead to the immediate satisfaction when we feel the relief of stress that comes from relaxing, and the immediate pleasure that comes from programmed entertainment, but it doesn’t lead to feelings of long-term fulfillment.

Now if your choices are constrained by circumstances, you may later synthesize happiness by coming to the conclusion that you did what you could with what you had, and in that sense you did your best and lived the best life you could.

But if you perceive that you have choice and don’t make use of it, that is a prescription for regret and lack of happiness.  Though sometimes this regret and happiness is ameliorated by addiction to mind-numbing alternatives like TV or drugs.  Many people have given up hope for any good life.  They try to “get by” with diversions, distractions, and dissociation from life.  But surly this “coping” does not constitute the good life.

On the other hand, setting goals and going after them doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness either.

Perhaps a better approach is to set goals for effectiveness sake, rather than with some expectation that we are somehow going to be happy when we achieve them.  For example, “well-formed desired outcomes” are more useful as communication tools for coming to a shared understanding and a consensual set of agreements between people than they are for generating happiness.

On the other hand, recent research about goal setting has suggested that if you want to be happy AND effective, concentrate your immediate attention on the process rather than the end goal.  (This idea is not new to Buddhists however)   The attitude that comes from taking up the challenge to continually improve your performance at the tasks we are doing leads not only to Flow States (Intermediate happiness) but to long-term happiness based upon narrative review.

When I teach about goals these days, I still teach the Well Formed Desired Outcome Frame questions as a way to build a shared goal between two or more people.  I think it is important, for example, to be able to think in sensory grounded terms about how you will know if you achieve a goal.  And stating goals in the positive so that you are moving toward some target rather than away from some fear is still a useful distinction.  As are ecology and timeframes and all the rest of the well-formed outcome criteria.

But I also teach about the difference between “Ends Goals” and “Means Goals.”  Well-formed Means Goals provide the distinctions for determining whether your performance is improving or not.  When you pay attention and challenge yourself to improve, and when you have a sensory-based measurement that provides feedback about whether you are or are not improving, you are very likely to go into one of those blissful “Flow States.”

By concentrating on the process you are doing and its improvement, rather than the end goal, you find yourself enjoying your task, and you are likely to improve in ways that are meaningful to you and meet your personal values, and so you feel the bliss of being “in the flow.”  Later when you look back on your improvements, you feel that you were meeting your values and so you experience long-term narrative happiness.

Oh, by the way, this is also the path toward excellence of performance and expertise.  Do it for 10,000 hours and you will become one of the more skilled in your field.  But that can’t really be your motivation if you also want to be happy.  But by focusing on the path, the happiness takes care of itself.

That is what I am thinking.  What are you thinking about goals, happiness, and effectiveness?

 

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If you would like to learn more about using Goals to structure success and effectiveness or Mindfulness practices to connect with deep happiness check out my Course Offerings Page or consider the possibility of treating yourself to one-on-one Coaching.

 

The 5 most common misunderstandings (Part 2)

In a survey of communication problems across 34 Engineering and IT projects the following five categories accounted for practically all of the communication breakdowns and confusions that affected project delivery schedules or costs.   Do any of these sound familiar from your experience?

  • Assurances Problems
  • Meanings of Goals Poorly Defined
  • Hidden Information
  • Micro Management / Under Feedback
  • Why don’t they care like I do?

In the last post we looked at the importance of getting clear about over promises up front.  It is so important to get in the habit of delivering on what you say you will deliver.

In this post we will look more deeply into Goals and the meanings people make up about them when they are poorly defined.  In each future post we will take on another of these five types of mistakes that create so much havoc.

Although they may sound common sense, mastering each of these will solve the majority of misconceptions, miscommunications, and costly problems that Engineering, Science and Technical Leaders must deal with.  There is no substitute for quality communication and shared understanding to accomplish and succeed where others fail.

Number 4:  Goal Definition Misperceived

Team members (customers and development, suppliers and production) don’t have a shared understanding for goal they are trying to accomplish or create.  It causes a lot of stress if you have rugby players on a soccer field and the customer thinks they paid for an American football game.

Recommended Solution:  The effectiveness of communication is proportional to how “grounded” in tangible, shared reality you can make it.  Models, mock ups, and prototypes help customers to visualize whether you have understood what they are requiring.   But many times the problem is created by talking abstractly about the future goal.

Listening for abstract and intangible descriptions and asking the questions to specify any fuzzy details can make a huge difference.  Try asking,

  • How specifically do we see that going?”  and
  • What specifically do you mean by…?

These two questions, and variants similar to them, are the ones that superior Engineers and their leaders seem to use a lot to drive down to the important details.

Practice intentionally over-using these for a week and you will begin to see the advantages in tangible clarity.

 

Next time we will look at how and why hidden agenda and people’s ability to fool themselves gets in the way of success, along with what you can do to deal with it.  Until then figure out how you are going to practice these seemingly simple questions each day.

 

 

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Where to Start When Your Leadership Stumbles

To Get Where You Want to Go, We Always Begin by Recognizing Where You Currently Are

 

One marketing division of an international pharmaceutical company that I worked with, “off-shored” the development and maintenance of their marketing relationship database to India.  The requirements were shared, but they were not tied to specific test plans.

When the multimillion dollar system was delivered, independent verification from the company’s distributors, who would be the users in the field, indicated that the system “worked as designed” but that the design was not practical or useable in their day-to-day operations.   The project was mothballed without final implementation.

Have you seen a project that turned into a learning opportunity  like this before?

Poor leadership is the most common reason for major business mistakes like this.  There is always a specific individual who is responsible for the Leadership of the team, so even little communication breakdowns point back to poor leadership skills.

Leadership comes down to standards, values, negotiation rituals, goals, and human beings.

 

YOUR PURPOSE AS A LEADER 
Your purpose as a leader is to coordinate the interactions and efforts of a group of people to achieve valuable results that the individual persons who make up that team could not achieve by themselves.

Each individual offers their unique skills.  But to create a synergistic effect that generates valuable results in an efficient manner requires your serious coordination.

You put the goals and standards you negotiate or dictate to your team in place to constrain team behaviors so that results are measurable and therefore manageable.

The rituals you establish with your team will determine your effectiveness as a unit in the larger organization.

The way you treat your people will determine whether your team will find their work meaningful, useful, and fulfilling, so that they will become delightfully engaged and give you more of their best.  Or whether they will obligingly provide only the minimum necessary to get by and reserve their best ideas and effort for after work.

 

PRAGMATIC SHORT EXERCISE FOR LEARNING
Consider taking five minutes right now to write down what you consider to be your team’s:

  • members
  • values
  • goals
  • standards of practice
  • key processes
  • key measurements

When you put these down on paper (or the computer), you will find that more details will come to you than if you only did this exercise mentally.   These emergent details are the “little devils” that you will want exorcise or negotiate with to resolve the issues you’re facing.

That is why a leader needs to take a step back and clarify his or her thinking on a regular basis.  It is the leader’s job to understand the overall  team scope, boundaries, and interfaces within the larger system that is your parent organization.  But your range of influence is primarily within the details of your teams specific processes and procedures.  As Marshal McLuhan said, Leaders must learn to

think globally, and act locally.”

Let me know what you are thinking in the comments discussion (see the green tag), or to engage me directly, give me a call.

Keith W Fail
512-507-5464