A few years ago my good friend Tom Carroll did a nice interview of me for his podcast about my mentor, another Tom, Tom Best. Recently it came to my attention that I had never posted this on my Tech Leadership Skills site.
Here it is for those who are interested:
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.
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 —
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
“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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ancient wisdoms resound down the ages to modern times with ideas that we should reconsider in our modern life. Last Saturday at The Weekly Wisdom Games, we played a game based on an old Hawaiian La’au Lapa’au (traditional Hawaiian medicine and spirituality) practice.
Hawaiian Po’okela Kahuna La’au Lapa’au, Papa Henry Auwae
For more than 600 years Hawaii was isolated, which gave this society the chance to explore the self-reflective mind. One of their important discoveries was the mind that the West has yet to fully appreciate: They knew that emotional mind supersedes logical thought. Although we don’t usually realize it, we don’t have enough willpower to override our emotions; instead, we must befriend our emotions.
We can use our minds to guide our emotions if we treat our emotions as we would an honored member of the family. To this end, Hawaiian herbal practitioners taught a breathing practice called “Piko Piko” breathing.
To Hawaiians, the center of anything is the piko. The belly button is a piko, and the center of the taro leaf where the stem connects is also a piko. The Big Island of Hawaii itself is seen as the belly button of the world. They also believed that every human has two pikos, the one at our navel and the other at the crown of our head.
The Wisdom Game players learned to place their bodies in a comfortable, balanced position and were told to begin to breathing deeply so as to allow their bodies to relax into comfort and mindfulness of their breathing. Each in breath, we placed our attention on our lower piko (the navel) and imagined bringing in “life-force” energy, called “mana” from manawai— all the world of the surrounding oceans. Filling our breath all the way up to the top, we imagined our bodies being filled with living energy up to the crown of our head. With each exhale, we let the living energy wash away any tension, tightness, ache, or pain throughout our whole body.
After three or four of these deep cleansing breaths, the game master directed us to fill our bodies with energy on the next breath all the way up to the top and then hold our breaths for just a few seconds. During this pause we were directed to think of one thing we were grateful for. It could be something we wanted more of, or something that we were grateful was not currently occurring. In the Hawaiian language this state of thankfulness is called O’mahalo.
When we had firmly in our minds an image of what we were feeling grateful for, we were directed to place our attention on the second piko at the center of the crown of our head and then forcefully exhale sending our breath and our energy out that piko, rushing up toward the upper world (or heaven) as a rush of emotional release and an energetic gift of thanks to the Hawaiian god Lono and the ancestors, the Amakua. We repeated this simple practice three times, until it became a single unit of behavior, a sort of naturally good habit.
It was amazing to see how magical the changes were that came over the faces and bodies of all the Wisdom Game players as a result of doing this very old practice. It provided a practice we can use for pausing when things are not going as we might like, to take stock of what is happening in our bodies, and then redirect body and mind to a completely different emotional place. So simple. And so profound.
These little “micro rituals” carry great wisdom that we can learn from and use today to make our lives, and the lives of those we interact with and love better.
Consider doing this process each morning while your brush your teeth for a week or two. Print this out and put it on your mirror for guidance:
After practicing this for a few days, consider the places in your life where you could benefit from applying a new habit like this. Perhaps you can imagine how different you might feel if each time a family member “got your goat,” you took three deep piko breaths and sent thanks up to heaven. What if each time someone cut you off in traffic, you reframed that as gratitude that you were not just killed, and alternated breaths between the piko in your bellybutton and the one in the crown of your head. Pick your own most common frustrations, of course.
Life is too short to waste time on so much negativity. We all have a right not to be negative. Based on the wisdom of the ancient Hawaiians, we have one more tool we can use to quit being a victim of our habitual emotions and choose to drive our own minds, rather than letting them drive us.
If you like games that grow your skills in life or would like to know more about the World’s great Wisdom Practices and Traditions, come join us each Saturday for a fun way to meet people, practice your English and learn something that will make your life better. That’s what we are about at The Weekly Wisdom Games. To register: http://wisdomgamecr.com/
Last week’s Weekly Wisdom Experience installed new emotional reactions to making mistakes. We converted frustration into mindful self observation and curious learning. It is only failure if you don’t keep learning and trying something new.
This personal practice created a great quick change in most of our participants. But at the Weekly Wisdom Game we believe in stacking multiple realities one on top of the other so that while people are learning from one game, another subconscious game is also being demonstrated and practiced.
Participants played a round-robin version of the children’s card game Memory or Concentration where you win by remembering and turning over two cards that are the same number value. If the cards match you (or your team) gets to keep the trick so that once all the cards are collected it is easy to tell who learned the fasted and had the best memory.
It’s a simple game with lots of easy fun. But we juiced it up a bit by playing as teams and supporting one another with positive and corrective reinforcement. When people turned over cards that didn’t match, their teams reinforced that it is okay to make a mistake by enthusiastically saying “Great Learning!” and patting their mate on the back or giving them the fist bump or high-five or thumbs up. This set a tone of excited playful positivity.
When a teammate turned over two cards that matched you can just imagine how excited the verbal encouragement got. “Way to go!” “Awesome job!” “Now we are rolling!”
While this was an exaggerated experience to help people install these new habits of positive reinforcement through repetition and emotion, this is the sort of reinforcement that most of us long for in our teams at work and in our home life too.
Imagine how responsive your spouse might be if you cheered them on when they tried new experiments. A little crazy playfulness helps keep your relationship fresh. We all like to know that we are loved enough that making mistakes is not going to break the relationship. Positive reinforcement for learning reframes what normally would be a frustrating experience. If we let the frustration gets too high, we usually just give up. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly and correcting until we get the good results we desire.
The thing to remember about reinforcement is that it shapes behavior best if it is:
We rarely need more punishment because as adults we already know how to do too much of that for ourselves.
Helping others to celebrate learning when things don’t go well and celebrate success when they do is a quick way to build stronger friendships at work and help the team learn positive habits of interaction that lead to more successful results. Who doesn’t want that?
If you like embodying wisdom in fun and playful ways, we would love to have you join us next Saturday if you live close to the Central Valley of Costa Rica. http://WisdomGameCR.com If not, consider how you can find a fun way to practice giving supportive feedback and reinforcement this week. Knowing is not enough, only practice makes progress.
Recently I’ve been working mostly from Costa Rica. Settling into the Central Valley has been a blast for Laraine and me. We’ve started a weekly gathering called the Weekly Wisdom Games to get together with people and play games that involve Stoic Philosophy principles, NLP, and Cognitive Behavioral strategies for making work and life better.
This weekend’s Weekly Wisdom Game focused upon quality of thinking and quality of emotional reactions and how the quality of our lives is based in the quality of our habits of being.
Have you ever noticed that when you make a mistake you respond with quick emotional contraction and say negative things to yourself inside your head? (or outside). Damn it! Most of us do.
These micro bad habits are left-over artifacts from growing up and being judged by other people while we were just trying to learn how to be humans. They are not very useful and they tend to build up into frustration which actually makes it harder to learn and perform better. Most of us know that we shouldn’t beat ourselves up, but we can’t seem to stop ourselves.
So we played the simple card game of Memory or Concentration that helped us install a better cognitive response strategy. We replaced the emotion and trash talk with the words “Tadaaa!” and a overly dramatic theatrical bow. Each time a player got a response that was incorrect in the game, they said out loud, “Tadaa!” and took a bow. The other players responded by saying “Great Learning!”
It wasn’t long before people were having a raucous fun time and were automatically replacing the negative feelings with positive playful feelings of learning.
It is not enough to know that it helps to be positive. We all already know that. In order to change our natural reactions we have to wire the new mental/emotional/behavioral sequence into our bodies and minds through repeated practice until it becomes a good habit. That is what playing Wisdom Games is all about. Learning can be fun and easy when it leads to new automatic behaviors.
If you are in the central valley come join us next Saturday. http://WisdomGameCR.com If not, why not get your own group of players together and help your brains slip into some habit that is a little more comfortable.
When Jiménez hired Stephen and his two friends to work in his new printshop, he was excited to get an experienced printer who already knew both how to run the offset press and who was also really good at helping customers discover what their print-runs needed to look professional. The other guys, while less experienced, could learn a lot from Stephen. Everything seemed great for the first few months and the founders were glad they hired well. But after Stephen started taking on ordering responsibilities things seemed to change.
First he purchased so many boxes that they had to store a year’s supply which they didn’t really have space for. Annoyed by this mistake Jiménez spoke with Stephen and asked him to be more careful about making inventory decisions. They were already stretching the budget too far considering that business was not growing as fast as they had hoped with that corporate franchise shop that had moved in just 2 blocks from their location. So Jiménez explained to Stephen that he needed to pay more attention to the bottom line and take responsibility for profits not just ordering. Jiménez told Stephen, “You can talk to me any time if you are unsure. Call me.”
Then a couple of weeks later Stephen got an offer to pick up some boxes of special weight paper at a discount and ordered those without asking. Now this really irked Jiménez. Hadn’t he told him to check in on the big decisions? This time he let Stephen have it. There would be no third chance. After all Jiménez had his money on the line for this business. He was the boss. Stephen needed to get on board or head on down the road if he didn’t like it.
When Stephen went to work for the small print shop they had just opened and the owner asked him if he knew any friends who might also join the team. Stephen was proud to invite his buds to join the team because he felt like they were going to help build a great business. All went well for the first few months. But then Jiménez, Stephen’s boss, seemed to change, became a jerk. Was it stress? Or was Jiménez just an inexperienced boss?
Jiménez had asked him to take more responsibility and so Stephen did and he managed to get a decent discount on supplies by making a bulk purchase on paper that they were going to use for sure. But Jiménez was such a control freak that he got angry that Stephen had made a decision without his approval. And after having asked him to be more of a manager over the other guys.
Does this scenario sound familiar? I’ve seen similar situations hundreds of times. When I got asked to consult with this small business the two men were each sure that the other was the jerk. Communication was strained and both were having thoughts that the other was wrong, maybe stupid, and certainly unwilling to listen to common sense.
We don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t know what the other person knows. We think we do because we assume that they know what we know. So often we assume that they are seeing things the same way we are. That they have the same goals, the same expectations, the same reactions and judgements that we have. But they don’t.
Each of us perceive the world through the filters of our individual personal experience, aims, personal values, and habits of thinking. No two people live in exactly the same world. That is what makes coordination of effort so difficult. This is the number one task of every manager and every member of every team effort, whether they are the “official” leader or not.
This skill is a learnable. Rather than imagining that you understand another person’s way of thinking you can learn how to recognize when you are using imagination to fill in what you can’t be sure of, then ask appropriate questions or at least calculate the risk of moving forward without knowing whether you have shared agreement or not.
There are exercises you can learn to do where you step into the shoes of another person and discover what you do and do not know for sure. You can step out of your own way of thinking and take on another person’s model of the world. Then you can use what you learn by stepping into their perspective to communicate about the differences you discover so that you can clarify and set shared expectations and goals.
This is like sports team members who practice together so that they can run plays so efficiently that they work as a team rather than a collection of individual members thrown onto a field together. When you understand the thought patterns, emotional reactions, values, habits, and goals of the other members of your team you develop what they psychologists call “theory of mind.”
We have all seen loving couples who have long been together get to the point where they can finish one another’s sentences. When a relationship works well they recognize not only their similarities but their differences and they learn to expect what the other person is most likely to do. But on a team you are working with people who are a usually very different than you. These differences can make the team stronger since division of labor is why we form teams in the first place. But our differences also challenge us to work together in predictable ways.
Start by learning how to describe your own patterns of thoughts and reactions. Then compare those to the people you work with and learn to predict the different strengths that other team members bring to the team. When things are not working you can do an exercise that will help you discover how their perspective differs from your own.
After observing your own thoughts, emotions, driving values, goals and expectations, then step out of those for a moment. Change locations in your actual physical space and leave all of those ways you are behind in the place where you were sitting or standing so that you can come back to them in a few moments.
Now move into another physical space that in your imagination represents the other person or persons you are struggling with. Step into or sit down into this new space as if you were sitting down into the other person with all of their roles, habits, tasks, values, goals, thought processes, emotions, ways of holding and using their body, and even whatever you know of their history. From this new perspective try to see the situation from their eyes and hear what sorts of things they may be saying in their own head. Note what feelings they are likely having. But hold all of this new information tentatively until you get a chance to communicate with them and ask questions to verify your theory of their mind.
Once you have experienced the situation from inside their moccasins, then step up out of them and move to a neutral place and make a note of all of the ways that they perceive things differently than you do in that first position. From this more objective perspective you can look back and forth between your original perspective and the perspective you imagine that the other person experiences.
Having made this comparison you can act like a movie director and imagine what information each of those two other perspectives needs in order to come to a shared set of expectations and a shared agreement or commitment. Having planned those it is time to get back together with the real person and check out your imagined theory of their mind and see how accurate your guesses were.
This mental exercise may sound like a lot or work at first, but it get easy once you’ve done it. Don’t just think about it. Try it for yourself now. Knowing about a mental skill is not good enough. You must practice it a few times so that it wires new neural pathways of possibility inside your brain. We already know too much stuff that we don’t bother to use. So try it now.
Now by asking questions and clarifying expectations you can work to achieve a shared set of expectations. This will make their actions less frustrating for you when you experience their differences. And it will help create a synergy that produces quality results. Your team will begin to play more like a team and that will make the workplace a more positive environment.
Once I taught this processes to Jiménez and Stephen they became intrigued by all the differences in how they were seeing each other’s perspective. They began regrowing their partnership based relationship and promised to help one another explore both of their perspectives each time they worked together.
Their shared vision for the company grew and they gave their local competition a run for the money because they begin to be know for being more efficient, making fewer mistakes, and delivering higher quality work than their competitors. Most importantly they found a way to come back to mutual respect for one another and that made their organization a much better place for people to work.
Engineering mindful self observation and mindful other observation
As engineers, it is not the technical problems that drive us crazy. It’s the miscommunicated requirements, the broken commitments, the capricious change requests that make us insane. If everyone just saw things the way we do, wouldn’t everything be so much easier? But they don’t. We’re all different, so we have to compensate for what looks like, from our perspective, other people’s’ “idiocy.”
Poor communication is the cause of most team problems. And that is what we should expect. You were hired for your engineering and technical prowess, not public relations or customer service skills. But if we are going to get through this together and make the project a success, we are going to need to become better observers and better communicators. Surprisingly, that doesn’t start with communication though. It starts with detailed mindful observation so that we can tell when things go off the rails. You can’t fix a problem you don’t see!
In 27 years of running team based projects and coaching project managers, I have come to the conclusion that getting good at this stuff is up to each of us, individually. Observing our own internal and external changes in behavior makes it easier to notice those changes in our team partners. Being able to read their unconscious micro expressions is the most valuable tool in establishing effective communication. It makes it possible to recognize when the words a stakeholder is saying do not reflect what they are actually thinking.
For example, being able to predict that a person is becoming angry, annoyed, tense, tired, motivated, excited, or any other intense emotion, gives you a chance to decide how you want to respond to these stressful situations. You might ask more clarifying questions, take a break to reset emotions, or steer the discussion toward a more detailed description of requirements or commitments, for example.
Observing your own behavior and managing it is different from observing someone else’s. If a manager has just “jerked your chain” for the umteenth time by changing work-product specs while demanding that the deadline must stay the same, it is valuable to observe yourself becoming frantic, so that you can calm yourself before your emotions affect the way you communicate to that manager, or to your subordinates who count on your support.
Careful observation of another person increases your ability to respond respectfully to their mood, when you can read the clues to their emotions. The best professionals depend on this skill to time critical communications so that they are more likely to elicit the responses they need from their bosses, peers, team members, and customers.
We all try to predict how others will respond. But our theory of their minds is only as good as our ability to understand our own mind and notice how other minds differ from us. That is why we must start by studying our self. The Buddhists call this “mindful self-observation” and it is easy to describe but can be difficult to do. We all have a tendency to get so caught up in what we are thinking that we forget to notice that there is an “us” who is doing that thinking and feeling. This is where mindfulness training can help.
Begin by trying to notice what goes on with you at all times. Start with low risk situations and exercise your awareness for short periods like say 4 or 5 minutes at a time. Watch how your own mind works. Not only your responses to yourself, but your responses to others. I like to do this at meetings when I am not the person leading the discussion.
Notice when something triggers an emotion inside you. Notice how you evaluate it as positive or negative, how it is being triggered, what behavior does it manifest in you, and ask yourself, “Is this the behavior that I want to represent?”
If not, determine what you want instead, and take steps to change toward a more appropriate response. Avoid “judging” yourself. Notice what makes you happy or sad, and notice what happens in life that prevents you from being present in the situation before you— what throws you back into memories or forward into future hypothetical possibilities?
The main function of this personal observation is to improve communication between you and your team and to better understand your own attitudes, feelings, and habits of thought.
Researchers have shown that much of communication is nonverbal. To understand another person’s nonverbal behaviors it is paramount that you really understand your own. Then you can pay attention to another person’s body language, understand better how they are reacting, and respond with choice to their total communication. Instead of just the words that they use. Mindful self observation is the beginning of this self understanding.
Once you can watch your own behavior, you can practice keeping up with the content of a conversation at the same time.
Then it is time start to study the other person’s facial gestures, body language, hand gestures, posture, movements, etc. These are almost always outside of the person’s conscious awareness. So if you can keep track of your own inner responses while tracking the person you are communicating with’s non-verbals, you will be lightyears ahead of them in project discussions and stakeholder negotiations. It can begin to look almost like you can read minds. What you are really doing is picking up on their nonverbal micro communications.
For example, there are many ways to say “yes”. Depending on the pitch, tone, rate of speech, and the volume of the way it is said, the word “yes” can mean “yes,” “YES!”, “no”, “maybe”, “I don’t know,” “probably,” etc. Perhaps they shake their head slightly “no” while saying “yes.” People regularly change their outside expressions before they are consciously aware on the inside. This allows you to respond to their experience even before they are fully aware of it themselves.
Learn to watch for the following personal observation clues:
When you learn to pay close attention to not only what a person is saying but also to how they are saying it, as well as their outer behaviors that are accompanying their words, you become a powerful force for communication clarity. Like all worthwhile skills, it takes some practice. But as a super-observer you improve your chances of guiding your team and the projects that you take on to real success.
If you find this interesting and would like to learn more, please get in touch. We offer hands-on, experiential workshops to refine your team and management skills, and we specialize in working with technical people and engineers who never wanted to learn this fluffy stuff but were so good at what they were doing that they were asked to lead others. Call or WhatsApp +1-512-507-5464
Every frustration you experience on an IT, Telecom, or Engineering project will either be a communication that didn’t get across right, a goal or task that didn’t get completed according to plan, or an expectation that you didn’t manage and so didn’t get set correctly.
Negative experiences come from a few key areas
Communication requires all the people to come to a shared understanding. Do you know how to make certain you both understand the same thing? Questions.
Tasks and deliverables are the goals that drive a project plan forward. Do you know how to know in advance whether you are on plan or not? Questions.
Expectations are the mental projections that accidentally occur when different parties think they understood the same thing but didn’t. Do you know how to make sure that everyone has the same expectations? Questions.
Questions like:
There is a science and algorithm to asking the right question at the right time in the right order. There is a reason why the “Why?” question is left out of this list. If you would like to learn to be a better team member, learn the algorithm behind questions like these, and you will increase the efficiency of your team 10 fold.
And the nice thing about questions is that if you know how to match the project leader’s temperament you can ask them nicely without having to be the project manager or executive sponsor. Even the newest coder can ask an “innocent” question that can get the team meeting or project back on track.
If you would like to learn more about asking excellent questions check out Genie LaBorde’s book, Influencing With Integrity. It is a classic still worth the read because most leaders still don’t know about it.
