Book Review-Emotional Awareness: Overcoming the Obstacles to Psychological Balance

Robert Bogue July 20, 2013 1 Comment

I mentioned during my review of Emotional Intelligence that I had listened to an audio book version of Destructive Emotions – a conversation with the Dalai Lama and Daniel Goleman. Emotional Awareness is a similar book – in fact Paul Ekman, this book’s author, was introduced to the Dalai Lama by Daniel Goleman.

Paul Ekman’s CV spans 14 books and he’s well recognized as the authority on how emotions are shown in a person’s face. When I was writing my review of Emotional Intelligence , I saw this book and realized I had to read it.

A Different Kind of Religion

I’ll expose that I have a great deal of ignorance when it comes to Buddhism. However, one of the things that struck me in Emotional Awareness was the Buddist concept that “If our findings – through investigations, through experimentation – contradict Buddhist ideas, then we have the liberty to reject the old ideas. That is the Buddha’s own words.” Having been raised in Christianity and with good Jewish friends, I am used to the belief that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. Muslims believe that the Qur’an is the unaltered and final revelation of God. In that context, a religion that is based on the continual refinement of understanding is quite different.

The conversations between the Dalai Lama and scientists aren’t a new thing. As mentioned, I heard Destructive Emotions some time ago. The curiosity, openness, and desire to learn in Buddhism are things I find that most branches of Christianity struggle with. Perhaps Christianity’s desire to insist that all we needed to know was written in the Bible is why we struggle with our emotions today.

Thinking, Emotions, and Moods

Clearly we think. We’re constantly processing a stream of information that’s bombarding us (See The Information Diet). However, the question becomes how can we determine what’s a thought and what’s an emotion. A great deal of the book is spent talking about how to differentiate between a thought and an emotion – and how emotions form. Ekman draws our attention to the fact that most emotions have a signal. They let others know what’s happening inside us. Emotions are also not swayed much by our consciousness – at least not initially. Moods are a persistent attitude that the person may not be aware of – in fact, a person may not even be aware of what caused the mood.

As discussed in Thinking: Fast, and Slow, sometimes we aren’t aware of the tricks that our mind plays on itself. This concept is revisited here from the perspective that emotions can block information which would contradict the emotion being felt. During the “refractory period”, we literally cannot take in information which contradicts the emotion. If you’ve ever been speaking with someone who is telling you that they feel unimportant and uncared for – and wanted to smack them because they are important and you are listening and caring for them at the very moment that they’re complaining about it – you know what I mean. There are times that you simply cannot see the trees (what people are doing) for the forest (how you feel.)

The Afflictive Nature of Emotions

Buddhist thinking includes the idea that emotions are either afflictive – negative or bad – or non-afflictive. However, in the conversation between Dr. Ekman and the Dalai Lama, they talk about how emotions are also afflictive or non-afflictive based on their appropriateness for the situation and how they are used. I’ve mentioned in my review of Emotional Intelligence that the one thing that I know I got out of Destructive Emotions was the concept that anger is disappointment directed. Anger is technically categorized as an afflictive emotion. For instance, Anger might be afflictive if you’re disappointed because of unrealistic expectations but non-afflictive if you’re angry at the plight of abused children.

When someone does something truly evil, anger is an appropriate emotion. If you didn’t feel some anger at an injustice it would be difficult to have the energy to do what is necessary to prevent the injustice from happening again. To feel nothing when others are suffering is its own problem.

From my own point of view, emotions are energy. In fact, when I talk about the Rider-Elephant-Path model from The Happiness Hypothesis (and Switch), I talk about the emotional elephant being the powerhouse that gets things done. Emotions drive us. The dimension for measuring the impact of an emotion is what you do with it. If you use a competitive nature with your dad to drive you to excellence in all you do – then it can be a good thing. (This is Dr. Ekman’s story.)

Distorted Views

Bonds that Make Us Free, Leadership and Self Deception, and Anatomy of Peace talked about “boxes” that we get in and how those boxes distort our view of reality. Conceptually we’ve all got ways that our perception doesn’t match reality. Beyond Boundaries talks about the distortions of reality that we create to sustain ourselves in unhealthy relationships – and how determining what those distortions are is pretty difficult. It’s not a matter of whether or not we have distorted views. It’s a matter of how many we have, and how much they impact the way that we interact with reality.

One of the touching vignettes in the book is the scenario of Dr. Ekman’s daughter asking the Dalai Lama why it is that the people we love are the ones that hurt us the most. His answer “Because you are not seeing them realistically. Focus on their clay feet. If you will accept their imperfections, then you will not be so disappointed and angry.” In this answer is an awareness of our distorted view of the world – and our desire for those we love to be perfect. However, that’s not realistic for anyone.

Pride and Attachment

One of the distorted views that we all have is of our own self-importance. Humilitas spent a great deal of time on this topic – including talking about what percentage of people felt that they were above average at leadership (70%). Just as Humilitas shifted my view of what pride was, so too did Emotional Awareness. The Buddhist idea of pride as an afflictive emotion is really “deluded pride.” That is to say it’s OK to be proud of what you’ve accomplished – but not to the point where it makes you think too highly of yourself. It’s not pride itself that is the issue, it’s the delusion – or distortion of it – that is the problem.

Consider for a moment, a positive form of pride discussed, that is the pride that you feel when someone else, such as a student, is successful. This is a healthy pride that is non-afflictive (non-damaging) – honestly, it’s a great feeling. It’s the same feeling that some parents feel to see their children succeed. I use caution here because some parents project themselves into their children’s place, thus increasing their own self-pride.

Embedded in this discussion is the concept of attachment. Buddhists are taught that attachment is an afflictive emotion. However, it’s more about the degree to which someone is attached. Attachment in the Buddhist sense is about over-possessiveness or control. Attachment is the basis for compassion – something deeply valued. It’s appropriate to have a level of attachment to your family or even your things. When you’re attached to your things that is good – when you’re attached to other peoples things you’re experiencing covetousness.

Judging Actions and Motivations

Much of emotional awareness is about monitoring the game that’s happening inside of people. Dr. Ekman spent years studying the face so that he could see the emotions that people were experiencing, only to realize that you can become aware of someone’s emotion but not why the emotion is there. B. F. Skinner and the behaviorist psychologists would be disappointed that we’re focusing so much energy on trying to understand and define things which cannot be directly measured. It’s so much easier to measure what someone did – or didn’t do. It’s also much more difficult to figure out why they did – or didn’t do – something. It’s too difficult to separate one set of motivations from another.

However, there’s a certain component of how we respond to our emotions that are influenced by our motivations. It’s based on the person that we want to be. If I simply tell you that I shot someone dead you have no way of making an accurate interpretation of the behavior. If I committed one of the all too common tragedies shooting innocent victims that’s one thing. If I premeditated and then killed a “rival” that’s another. If I killed myself in defense that’s still another. Finally, if I killed to protect someone else that’s another thing. So the motivation of the behavior – which is impossible to verify – is sometimes more important than the behavior itself.

Compassion and Forgiveness

As you might expect from a book with the Dalai Lama, compassion is a big theme. There are conversations about how compassion is neither an emotion nor a mood. Ekman speaks of his fourstep model for compassion:

Emotional Recognition – Recognizing the distress of others
Emotional Resonance – Feeling what the other person feels
Compassion – An attempt to relieve the suffering of the other person
Altruism – An attempt to relieve the suffering of the other person – at some level of risk to yourself

Dr. Ekman quotes Kristin Monroe about how people who are altruistic have a tendency to not see any other options. That is that they say they “had” to save the child from the burning building or that they “must” help others.

A lack of forgiveness, resentment, is a barrier to compassion in all its forms. Resentment is like a corrosive agent. Forgiveness is the gift that you give yourself to be free of the corrosive control that resentment has over you. Forgiveness isn’t about condoning or supporting the act that someone has committed. Forgiveness is about releasing the resentment that you feel towards the actor. Forgiveness is a fundamental step to working better with others.

Suggestions for Working with Others

The distinction between the act and the actor, between the problem and the person, is essential to being able to forgive and free yourself from burden. It’s all too easy to get wrapped up into demonizing a person for the things that they’ve done that we don’t like. However, this demonizing is at the heart of every great holocaust. In order to commit such unspeakable acts it was necessary to make the people be non-people in their mind. The more we confuse the act with the actor the more difficult we make the process of forgiveness and the more difficult it is to work with other people.

So separating the act and the actor to facilitate forgiveness is the first suggestion for working with others. The second recommendation, meditation, is more paradoxical. In a sense, we’re saying don’t work with people to learn to work with people – however, there is a purpose. Meditation allows you to become more aware of who you are and your emotions. You learn to recognize your emotions more clearly and more quickly. You also learn how to quiet them more quickly. Through meditation, you can become adept at reducing distortions in conversations because you can collapse the refractory period after an emotion has occurred.

I found the book to be a wonderful journey between a great scientist who has spent his life trying to categorize and define emotion – to define its roots – and a spiritual leader who is concerned with enlightenment. There is so much for me to learn from a spiritual leader like the Dalai Lama and so much to learn from the great research that Dr. Ekman has done. If you’re interested in learning more about how you can improve your Emotional Awareness – you’ll probably find the book interesting – I know I did.

Book Review-The Me I Want to Be

Robert Bogue June 29, 2013 No Comments

When an author practically opens the book talking about being called out by his wife for not really doing what he said he would do, you know that it’s going to be an authentic look at the author himself, his struggles and growth. John Ortberg shares his struggle to become more connected and supportive – and when he isn’t connected and supportive — his wife calling him on it.

Becoming The Me I Want to Be is perhaps the most challenging task that we face as humans. I had the pleasure of hearing John speak at the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit. He’s a senior pastor and author of several books – including The Me I Want to Be.

Rules and Pharisees

Many of Jesus’ confrontations were with the Pharisees. They were the righteous group of Jesus’ time. They had created a set of rules to live by, layered on top of the biblical teachings. They were frequently questioning Jesus about his behavior and that of his disciples because they weren’t following the rules that were created by the Pharisees. The Pharisees were great rule creators and, to a lesser extent, followers. They were so focused on the laws and their rules that they sometimes forgot the reasons that the rules existed in the first place.

While Jesus did make progress against the Pharisees, most adults who grew up in a church setting have been judged or condemned by someone because they didn’t follow every rule – or they didn’t fit the mold. It seems that even today we equate spiritual maturity with rule following. Instead of focusing on cultivating the right hearts, we’re more concerned with whether folks are following the rules than where their hearts are.

The problem with rules is that they often lead to unintended consequences as discussed in Diffusion of Innovation. Edward Deming said that you get what you measure. That is, whatever behavior you choose to measure will be a powerful motivator and because of that you will get more. However, sometimes you get more of what you’re measuring to the detriment of other factors. Consider for a moment a manufacturing environment, where you can get metrics on speed of production, number of defects, and number of accidents.

If you press for the speed of production, you’ll invariably drive up your defects and perhaps even your number of accidents. If you measure scrap, your production speed will likely go down. This is the reason that instead of individual metrics, most organizations have gone to a balanced scorecard for their measurements – they measure all of the outcomes and describe the relationship between them that they’re striving for.

Rules have no clean counterbalance. For instance, the rule that you can never work on the Sabbath becomes an issue if doing so would serve your brother. The Jesuits had it right when they focused on values and principles rather than on rules. (See Heroic Leadership). You have to have principles to live by – not rules.

Ortberg describes a situation where ink marks on walls would result in demerits, so his friend would chip off the paint – for which he did not receive demerits. The system created by the rule for no ink marks created the unintended consequence of slow destruction of the room.

Failure to Thrive

Ortberg asserts that perhaps the largest mental health problem in our era isn’t depression – it’s a failure to thrive. That is that many people are walking around in a fog not able to clearly see their mission or purpose. They are stuck in a cycle of meaningless existence and are yearning to have meaning in their lives, but they’re not sure how to get it.

In medical terms, a failure to thrive is an assessment that a baby isn’t growing at the rate that would be expected. They’re not gaining weight when they should. They may be still growing at some rate. There’s no obvious and urgent issues to their health – they just don’t seem to be growing at a rate that is normal.

Thriving individuals, on the other hand, exude confidence and an unmistakable energy that cannot be quelled. They don’t serve out of obligation but instead out of opportunity. They love that they’re allowed to be a part of life and to leave their mark on the world in small ways as well as big ways. That attitude of thriving is essential to changing your worldview.

Attitude

There are lots of places where you’ll hear that attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference. However, Ortberg’s example for this is amazing:

Excerpts from a Dog’s Diary:
- 8:00 am — Dog food! My favorite thing!
- 9:30 am — A car ride! My favorite thing!
- 9:40 am — A walk in the park! My favorite thing!
- 10:30 am — Got rubbed and petted! My favorite thing!
- 12:00 pm — Lunch! My favorite thing!
- 1:00 pm — Played in the yard! My favorite thing!
- 3:00 pm — Wagged my tail! My favorite thing!
- 5:00 pm — Milk bones! My favorite thing!
- 7:00 pm — Got to play ball! My favorite thing!
- 8:00 pm — Wow! Watched TV with the people! My favorite thing!
- 11:00 pm — Sleeping on the bed! My favorite thing!
Excerpts from a Cat’s Diary:
- Day 983 of my captivity. My captors continue to taunt me with bizarre, little dangling objects. The only thing that keeps me going is my dream of escape.

Of course, not all dogs or cats feel this way. However, the contrast in the way the day seems based on attitude is unmistakable. You can choose to feel like today is the next day in your servitude, bondage, or oppression – or you can choose to see the day in the best possible positive light. Perhaps petting a dog will help with that.

Some of our attitude is driven by our mood – our core makeup. One of the ways that Ortberg explores this is through the Enneagram.

Enneagram

Ortberg spends some time on the Enneagram as a way of looking at yourself. I won’t revisit the content that I reviewed in Personality Types – Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery. There are a set of strengths and weaknesses that are associated with each type. I’ve added them to the following graphic with the number and descriptor from the Personality Types book and the name used by Ortberg. (The Enneagram has several different variant names for each of the nine personality types.)

Living Fully

No matter what personality type you are, the final point from The Me I Want to Be that I feel is worth pulling out is that there’s a general encouragement to live life to its fullest. From the casual remark that the ancient Greek language didn’t have a word for boredom, to the awareness that “when you practice hope, love, or joy, your mind is actually, literally, rewiring your brain!”. One of the suggestions for how to live life more fully comes from an awareness that it is through our relationship with others that we are made happy. “What distinguishes consistently happier people from less happy people is the presence of rich, deep, joy-producing, life-changing, meaningful relationships.”

Give The Me I Want to Be a read, and become what you want to be.

Book Review-Extraordinary Minds

Robert Bogue June 24, 2013 No Comments

While reading Mindset, I stumbled across a reference to Howard Gardner’s book, Extraordinary Minds, that intrigued me. It said that “exceptional individuals have ‘a special talent for identifying their own strengths and weaknesses.'” On the basis of that reference, I decided to pick up and study Extraordinary Minds: Portraits of 4 Exceptional Individuals and An Examination of Our Own Extraordinariness. The idea that extraordinary people really are introspective and have a good sense of who they are permeated the book. It was a recurring theme, no matter which of the four great minds Gardner was discussing.

The Extraordinary

Gardner grouped the extraordinary minds he researched into four categories and used four examples to expose how he saw the four categories: Mozart, Freud, Virginia Woolf, and Gandhi. The four categories of extraordinary minds are:

Master – An individual who gains complete mastery over one or more domains of accomplishment. They reach the pinnacle of their respective domains.
Maker – An individual who creates a new area of study and exploration. They may be a master in a domain – but they create a whole new area or category.
Introspector – An individual who explores his or her inner life to new depths including daily experiences, needs and fears, and the operation of their consciousness.
Influencer – An individual with the primary goal of influencing other individuals.

Gardner uses Mozart as the prototypical Master, as he effectively mastered several subdomains in music, making it effectively impossible for others to further extend the domains. Freud is the prototypical Maker who created a new area of psychoanalysis. Virginia Woolf is the prototypical Introspector, having written and lamented about the human condition. Gandhi is the prototypical Influencer through his quest for non-violent resistance.

Becoming Extraordinary

It’s good to know who was extraordinary to use them as sign posts for where our lives might go, but if we decide that we want to try to make our own lives more extraordinary, how do we encourage it? Let’s take a look at some of the concepts that Gardner believes lead to being extraordinary.

Building on Gifts with Practice

There’s some level of debate about whether folks are inherently endowed with skills in a certain area or whether they develop skills as they practice. Gardner doesn’t argue that there’s evidence that supports that deliberate practice leads to extraordinary skill. Malcom Gladwell covered this in Outliers, as have many others. If you practice for 10,000 hours – or sometimes quoted as 10 years – in a deliberate way, it’s likely you’ll become a master. Gardner disagrees by saying that if you didn’t have some natural skill you wouldn’t have practiced for 10,000 hours.

In an interesting twist, Gardner quotes Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as a contemporary and a colleague. It was relatively straightforward to me to take Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow (see Finding Flow) and say that it’s possible that early experiences allowed extraordinary people to enter flow very easily. This, for me, answers Gardner’s objection that our skills are deterministic, because we get an inclination from our parents. I believe we get a relatively random inclination through conditions being present to create flow – and once the foundation for flow is created, extraordinary individuals simply fall back into the pattern of flow again and again.

Deliberate Practice and Ownership

Whether we are endowed with gifts that we must deliberately practice to hone into mastery or not, it’s clear that deliberate practice is a requirement. However, what is deliberate? To answer this, I need to share from my world.

Many years ago (15) I purchased a Dr. Who pinball machine. It was a sort of gift to myself for getting my “final” home. One of the things about the game that I like is that it’s wildly progressive. You have to do something to get the next thing to light up (or accelerate) and then there’s another, etc. The premise is that there are seven areas of the board and that each of the 7 doctors that you can get make it easier to complete each section. Early on into owning the machine I started deliberately practicing shots. There’s an upper loop that can only be reached (effectively) by a side flipper. Getting the ball to that flipper is in itself a challenge. So I deliberately (and relentlessly) practiced shooting the ball up to the side flipper and then flipping it into the upper loop – over and over again. This is deliberate practice. I was trying to refine one small aspect of this skill. I wanted to be able to complete the upper loop (which, incidentally, controls a playfield multiplier so it’s important to overall scores.) While I was doing this practice, I virtually ignored my overall score.

I certainly can – and do – play for points. I work on just increasing my high score, however, it’s the times that I’m working on specific shots that I know I’m being deliberate about my “practice.” I don’t ever expect to be a pinball wizard, however, it is fun for me to be able to see my goal of developing mastery work on such a small and measurable scale.

In our daily routine we sometimes get into the grind and fail to be cognizant of our experiences. Sometimes our managers beat us down to the point where we just start executing. In an old article titled “Exploring Execution vs. Ownership” I talk about the differences between execution and owning your world. It’s this owning that drives you to deliberate practice. It’s the owning that helps keep us trying to become better. Consider that Daniel Pink in Drive said that we need only three things: mastery, autonomy, and purpose to be motivated. The only way to be a master is to practice deliberately.

Reflecting and our Self-Awareness

The quote that I opened this post with speaks to the ability for extraordinary minds to be self-aware. They’re aware of their own strengths and weaknesses. This was said multiple times in the book and certainly more of the prototypical Introspector, Virginia Woolf, but Gardner points out that all of the extraordinary minds had to reflect on who they were. Gandhi said about himself, “I am an average man with less than an average ability. I admit that I am not sharp intellectually. But I do not mind. There is a limit to the development of the intellect but none of that of the heart.” Mozart said “I am no poet. I cannot distribute phrases with light and shadow; I am not a painter. I am a musician.” Townsend and Cloud indicate in Boundaries that sometimes defining what you aren’t is as important as defining what you are. (However, I’ll suggest that knowing what you are is still more important than what you are not.)

The pinnacle of introspection (in this group), Virginia Woolf, said, “How queer to have so many selves. How bewildering.” This is a strong statement about how deeply she had looked into herself. She didn’t discover a single view of her personhood – she had discovered multiple facets and perspectives on who she was. She looked beyond the pretty veneer and the tired simplifications. I identify greatly with Woolf’s observations as I seek, in some small way, to understand myself. I see that I have multiple facets to my world as well.

I vividly remember some of the responses from folks as they learn that I occasionally do standup comedy. It’s not that I’m good at it, mind you – simply that it’s an aspect of who I am. It surprises people. I have mentioned before that I’m a private pilot, which also generates some odd responses. However, I see all of the facets of my personality, and the core values they express, as interesting parts of the whole me – a whole me that I continue to seek to integrate into a whole picture, like putting together a mosaic.

Reframing Failure

Gardner says that extraordinary people frame their failures in a positive light (sometimes too positively). I’ve mentioned previously about Thomas Edison and his famous quote “We now know a thousand ways not to build a light bulb.” This is something that is key to becoming extraordinary: reframing failures as learning experiences. Every major extraordinary mind that Gardner studied expressed some level of failure. I purchased a Successories motivational poster about Abraham Lincoln and perseverance some time ago for my mom who was at the time struggling with some challenges. It’s bizarre to realize how, arguably our greatest president, was a “failure” at so many things in life. (This doesn’t even mention the fact that his wife was widely regarded as one of the most difficult first ladies in history.) However, like many extraordinary people, Lincoln framed these as setbacks, not as failures.

Recently, a high school friend and I were talking. She was telling me that I never failed. After I fought back the laughter I asked her why she thought that. She was talking about my career and avocations. I had to remind her that I’ve been fired from a job. I’ve had all sorts of setbacks and projects that I’d consider to be failures. It’s not that I haven’t failed. It’s that I’ve not stopped trying to fail – faster and more often. That sounds odd – but in the context of knowing that the only way to hit a homerun is to get more times at bat – I want to try to do more and that means more failures. President Nixon (whose failures are apparent) repeatedly emphasized that a person is never defeated when he loses, but only when he ceases to struggle. Extraordinary minds don’t count failure as defeat, rather just another loss to learn from.

Fathers and Foundations

As I’m writing this on the heels of Father’s Day, I found it particularly interesting that some of the great figures in politics and religion had missing, absent, or ineffectual fathers. They had developed their own “normal” based on their own self-analysis. In some ways this was clearly good. However, in others, such as the case of Bill Clinton, some aspects of normal weren’t desirable. Gardner makes the point that the Extraordinary are not just those who have made great contributions to history, but also those who have done great harm as well. I wouldn’t suggest that any parent should shirk their responsibilities for the possibility of creating an extraordinary child – there’s no way of knowing if this would work or not. Nor would you be able to determine whether the extraordinary would be of the good or bad sort. More than that, however, I think that to dodge that responsibility would be to miss out on one of the greatest gifts of life – connecting with a child.

People or Objects and Creating or Destroying

Gardner asserts that extraordinary minds choose to work with either people or objects, and they choose to work either by creating mastery in an area or by creating new areas. I’ve adapted this last bit slightly into saying that they’re destroying. While this is a rather violent interpretation, some of the ways that we can create new areas is very disruptive. For instance, I live in Indiana, which issued bonds for the development of a canal that was ultimately replaced by railroad tracks – bankrupting the state. The creation of the railroad was a good thing that ultimately destroyed the canal shipping trade. With this change of wording, we can place Gardner’s four ideas into quadrants like this:

So an influencer is about creating with people. The Introspector is about destroying people – or in this case the false masks and views of the Introspector themselves. I believe that introspection is largely about destroying our false selves. The Maker is about destroying the established norms for an area – creating a new normal and a new field of exploration. The Master is creating new perfection with objects. This model is admittedly a bit strained to make it fit, however, ultimately it seems to match the way that the extraordinary minds choose to work – whether consciously or not. It also opens us up to the idea that extraordinary minds – even the good ones – aren’t perfect.

The Pitfalls of the Extraordinary

Even if you’re a Master like Mozart, a Maker like Freud, an Introspector like Woolf, or an Influencer like Gandhi, there are parts of who you are which aren’t perfect – there are ways in which you’re tormented and ways in which you struggle. This is an essential part of the human condition but it seems like extraordinary minds get a double dose of struggle. Here are a few ways how that happens.

A Point Off the Curve

Gardner makes a point that most high-IQ people struggle through their lives. Children with IQs above 180 are not a happy lot. They’re misfits. They don’t have things in common with others their own age. Sometimes they have severe social and emotional problems because they’re isolated not -, in their physical being but in their ability to relate with others. We’re created to connect. Without the connection, we become mentally and emotionally sick. Gandhi struggled with his wife, and his relationship with his son, Harilal, was an unmitigated disaster. Einstein was described in a newspaper headline as “EINSTEIN = GENIUS MINUS NICENESS”. Not exactly the glowing reviews that you would hope to hear about two of the greatest minds in history.

Tortured Existence

Virginia Woolf is the best example of a tortured existence. Mental breakdowns and constant bouts of depression ultimately ended up in Woolf taking her own life – however, she’s not the only one. Mozart was known for the struggle between pleasing his patrons and exploring his musical interests. Gandhi has tortuous failures and agonized over missing his father’s death. It’s painful to realize how torturous their existences were, however, it’s equally torturous to realize that they had people who were close to them that were also tortured through their care for, proximity to, and relationship with these extraordinary minds. Each extraordinary mind kept close confidants, people whom they leaned on to reflect themselves and to provide both intellectual and affective (“I love you unreservedly”) support. Unfortunately the close relationship often caused the extraordinary minds to inflict unintentional and underserved pain on their confidants.

Tearing Down the Monuments

One aspect of the torture that extraordinary folks feel isn’t based on their inner world, but is rather based on how the world sees them. Many extraordinary people are not recognized in their own time. Further, after their great accomplishments they’re often followed by leaders who dismantle – intentionally or unintentionally – the great work done by extraordinary minds. Most of us have seen something that we thought was precious torn down. Perhaps it was a fence that was built, a car that was purchased new and finally had to be hauled away, or something else that we once loved but that someone else didn’t appreciate. Extraordinary minds have the gift of creating things that are great. Churchill lead Britain through one of the toughest times in history only to be replaced shortly after World War II.

There’s a torture in knowing that you’re doing something great that others don’t recognize as such – and there’s a greater torture in seeing your great achievement torn down by someone unable to replicate it.

Effects and Skills

If you became extraordinary in some way, how would you know it? What special skills do extraordinary minds possess that most of us do not? Let’s take a look at a few.

Timing of Disagreements

George C. Marshall, ultimately General Marshall, was known to make his voice heard in times and in places where most others would have expected him to be immediately escorted out of the finely adorned offices he was in. However, he wasn’t. Gardner supposes that it is because Marshall (and other Influencers) have mastered the facts of the matter and can contribute substantially to the resolution. I expect there’s a certain amount of truth to this. I’ve witnessed what happens in a meeting when someone is able to succinctly and directly identify the core problem and provide a simple, straightforward resolution. It’s like someone suddenly evacuated all the air out of the room. Everyone has to pause to see what just happened. I would add, however, that there’s a beauty to this timing – a beauty that is held by those who are courageous about communicating their feelings. Certainly it’s possible that communicating clarity about a problem is the wrong thing to do, however, in my experience it rarely is.

Extraordinary minds, in my opinion, have the clarity to see the situation and, equally clearly, can see when the timing is right to share the clarity they’ve divined.

Courage to Have Others Hold a Mirror

As mentioned above, extraordinary minds have a keen sense of themselves, including both their strengths and their weaknesses. This doesn’t come accidentally. It comes with purpose through reflection and introspection, as well as through having others reflect back to you what they see. Extraordinary people are able to develop a network of confidants that will tell them the truth about their situation – whether or not it’s good to hear. The criticisms leveled by contemporaries and competitors have, at their heart, some level of truth. Extraordinary minds tend to evaluate what is said of them and incorporate into their awareness those bits of truth that are covering the barbs of the javelins that others throw. They invite others to help them see themselves better.

Nobility of It All

To the extraordinary mind, being extraordinary is ordinary and normal. It is funny how, in the mind of an extraordinary person – whether well-known or not – the things they do are normal. And this is normal when viewed from their perspective. Of course someone would save a child from a burning home – because that’s what you do. Of course, you would give your time to help someone move – whether you know them well or not – that’s just what you do. Extraordinary minds have their own distorted sense of their world. While those distortions can be bad – they can also be very good as they seek to be nobler, more just, and more compassionate than the rest of the world really is. You may just notice an extraordinary mind by the fact that they do the extraordinary with the absolute air that it is normal.

Conclusion

Extraordinary Minds seeks to illuminate what we’re capable of as humans and encourage each of us to do what we can to achieve greater things. It does this in two key ways:

Big ‘E’ and little ‘e’ – Just because someone isn’t famous or glamorous, doesn’t mean that they’re not extraordinary. Though few of us have the drive to become the kind of Extraordinary like Mozart, Freud, Woolf, or Gandhi, we have in us the capacity to become a Master, a Maker, an Instrospector, or an Influencer.
Legacy – If we consistently do the things that we need to do in order to become more extraordinary, we’ll leave a legacy, whether or not anyone ever recognizes us as extraordinary.

Pick up a copy of Extraordinary Minds – and see if you are or can be.

Book Review-Changes that Heal: How to Understand Your Past to Ensure a Healthier Future

Robert Bogue June 17, 2013 No Comments

Sometimes clarity comes in the most unlikely places. It’s often hard to realize how much impact having a clear understanding of who we are and what we believe in can have on our professional lives. As many of the book reviews lately have been about personal growth, I’m including a review of another book that I read for personal development that can be applied to business as well. Many of these book reviews are building to a post that is in my backlog that needs some foundational underpinning which is found in the references I’m now reviewing.

As the Train song Bruises says, “We’ve all got bruises.” We’ve all got things that have happened to us that we need to heal from. So when we’re talking from the perspective of Changes that Heal: How to Understand Your Past to Ensure a Healthier Future, we’re talking about things that we can do that will help us heal from the hurts of our past. Changes that Heal provides some specific, practical guidance on how to move past your hurts and reach a place of strength.

I’m constantly reminded in my consulting practice about how personal hurts, injuries to self-esteem, value, and appreciation, ripple through meetings as one person triggers another and a simple misstatement of words becomes a full-blown disagreement or a knock-down drag out fight; all for a misspoken word and an old wound.

Four keys

In Changes that Heal, Henry Cloud, who also co-authored Boundaries, says that as children of God we start out life incapable of doing the four things that God can do:

Bond with others – To connect in a meaningful way with other humans
Separate from others – Learn when and how to be apart from others
Sort out issues of good and bad – Identify what is good for us and bad for us
Take charge as an adult – Be in peer relationships where you have to take responsibility appropriately

In fact the book is laid out along the lines of these four things – after the topics of grace, truth, and time are covered.

Grace, Truth, and Love

There are enough songs about love and its power that you don’t have to read 1 Corinthians 13:13, “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”, to realize that love is what it’s all about. As I mentioned in How to Be an Adult in Relationships, however, in the ancient Greek in which the New Testament was written, there are three words for love. One of the challenges that we have in communicating in English is the lack of precision when we speak of love. We’re not clear what exactly we’re talking about. Love is one of those words, like trust (See Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life), that is difficult to define. In fact, many of us believe we know what the definition is – until we try to define it. Cloud’s approach to defining love (Agape) is to say that it comes from the components of grace and truth.

Grace itself is a particularly difficult word to explain. It’s difficult because it means so many different things to so many different people. Grace can be elegance in motion. Grace can also be a blessing that we do not deserve. It’s often used in conjunction with the word mercy, but mercy refers to (in terms of How to Be an Adult in Relationships) acceptance and allowance for someone or something that temporarily fails to meet a standard. Grace is, however, a blessing on top of mercy. Grace is free and unmerited favor. It empowers the person to make a change – a radical change. Cloud discusses grace as the relational aspect of God’s love. It’s how we’re connected to him.

According to Cloud, Truth is the structural component of God’s love. It is the structure that life hangs on. Truth is the definition, the standard, the boundary. Truth is fact. It gets past perceptions (in as much as we humans can) to define what is good and what is bad.

Both grace and truth are necessary. The structure needs to be malleable – it must allow for grace. If you’re required to be at work at 8AM but your car breaks down, you have both the truth that you weren’t there and the grace that you will keep your job – and perhaps not even be docked the time that you weren’t there. Only grace doesn’t have any standards. Truth has standards which no one can meet all the time.

Cloud asserts that the major barrier to growth is guilt and that grace and truth are so powerful because they help to address this barrier. Grace says that you don’t need to feel guilty because not only are you forgiven but you are blessed in spite of the transgression. Truth holds up the mirror so you can see clearly how your behavior isn’t right. I don’t agree with Cloud that guilt is the barrier, I think it is shame.

Sidebar: About Guilt and Shame

There’s a lot of confusion about guilt and its relationship to shame. Cloud doesn’t specifically address this relationship but because Cloud feels so strongly about how guilt is a barrier to growth, I’ll say that I don’t believe that guilt is the barrier to growth – I believe that the barrier to growth is shame. The distinction is that guilt is negative feelings about something you’ve done. Shame is feeling bad about who you are. One focuses on the action and the other on the actor. Guilt says that wewish we hadn’t done something. Shame says that we wish we weren’t the way that we are.

Guilt is normal. It’s expected. It’s changeable. You can change your future state by not doing the action again. Shame seems more permanent. Shame is about the character of the person and feels more condemning and harder to change. Of course, we learned from Mindset that we are changeable. However, shame makes you feel powerless.

It’s a Process and it Takes Time

More than any other part of Changes that Heal, the chapter on time seems like it’s the obvious thing that people miss. If you’ve ever seen the Selective Attention Test you’ll understand how sometimes we can get so focused on one thing that we can’t see the obvious. (I won’t give it away if you haven’t seen the video.) I feel like in my world I see people all the time that get so focused on their pain – and making it go away NOW(!) that they forget that getting into their problem took time and so will getting out of it.

I took a trip to Mt. Rushmore via private plane with my brother and a good friend of mine several years ago. When we took that trip, numerous things went wrong and we never got some of the end experiences we wanted – although throughout the trip we were constantly reminded that it was about the journey. Some of the feeling that it was about the journey was seeing a museum named Journey. Some of the belief that it wasn’t about the destination was hearing every Journey song known to man. However, the message was loud and clear that our schedule and our plans weren’t the only option. We learned that we couldn’t control our schedule. We couldn’t control the time aspect of our trip. Things were going to take what they’re going to take.

The trip was a flying trip, as I mentioned, so I think that a flying analogy may help to understand what Cloud is saying. He’s saying that change is a process – which you have to work on yourself before you can work on your relationship with others. So thinking of a plane, you have one source of power – the engine and the propeller it’s attached to. All you can do with the engine is make the aircraft go forward. You can’t generate lift directly.

When you’re on the runway cranking the engine up to full power and you let off the brake, the airplane starts to slowly move forward breaking the bonds of inertia. It takes a relative eternity as you accelerate towards the end of the runway. As more and more momentum builds there are a set of secondary forces that start to take over. Air over the wings starts to generate lift. You’re still applying power to go forward. More and more the plane gets lighter on the tires. Once the forward momentum gets high enough the lift force generated exceeds the force of gravity and the plane takes off.

The airplane didn’t generate lift directly. It generated forward motion and allowed the air – the invisible presence around us – to generate lift. The motor in the plane isn’t capable of lifting the plane directly. It doesn’t have the power to pick the plane up – it only has the ability to move it forward. It has to allow the air to do its job of creating lift.

The interaction of these forces is important because people want to soar – to escape the pull of their past. That isn’t what has to happen first. What has to happen first is you have to break free from the inertia. You have to work on yourself, on healing, and on growing. You have to generate forward momentum before you can fly.

Healing is a process. You don’t walk into a hospital and instantly get healed. Wounds heal over time. They may scab over. They may hurt every time you bend or move for a while. Eventually, over time, the wound may disappear completely or leave a permanent scar – a place where you are reminded of what has happened even if it doesn’t hurt any longer. We can’t short circuit the healing process. People who try to run or do activities before it is safe to do so often create more damage than the original injury. They’re trying to short-circuit time, and that doesn’t work.

I was watching a video series where James McDonald was delivering content from his book Lord, Change My Attitude: Before It’s Too Late. In that discussion he mentioned that people come up to him and tell him that they want his life. They as how they can be like him. How can they get the same things that he has? He relates his feelings as they say it. Did they want the years of struggling? Did they want the long hours of studying? Did they want the hardships? Clearly they wanted what he has now – success. However, he didn’t become a success overnight. You can’t become successful overnight either. You have to struggle through years of obscurity. You have to anguish over hard issues. You have to experience pain and growth. Cloud quotes an old proverb “The longest distance between any two points is the shortcut.”

One final, corporate example before we leave this critical section on time. Sometimes business pundits talk about Walmart‘s “overnight” success. The problem is that Walmart languished for years before the explosive growth began. Not to say that it wasn’t profitable or that it wasn’t growing – but the explosive growth, the real momentum, took time to get started. It took time to get the model right. It took time to get the right people on the bus. (a la Jim Collins’ Good to Great)

No matter what it is in life, it takes time to get it right. There are no shortcuts. There are no microwave ovens on life.

Emotional Attachments

As I’ve mentioned before, we’re social creatures – us humans. We’re designed to be connected to and connected with other humans. However, sometimes we forget this is a fundamental part of our human nature and it’s possible for people to isolate. Here are three stages of isolation:

Protest – We protest the lack of relationships (or appropriate relationships)
Depression and Despair – We feel like that we’re a fault somehow, as if we’ll never be connected to others
Detachment – We give up. We block out our needs for connection with others. We deny an essential part of ourselves

In our society, we have more and less acceptable forms of detachment. An alcoholic is not lauded for his love of alcohol. However the workaholic is praised for his productivity. Anything that keeps us from connecting to others is a barrier between us and ourselves.

Defense and Moving In

Sometimes the biggest challenge to working on an issue is getting past the defenses. Some of the defenses that we have against seeing our own limitations are so powerful that they deny reality. They prevent us from realizing that we’re using defenses. It becomes our greatest challenge to see ourselves with integrated self-images – to recognize ourselves for both our good and our bad qualities. Here’s a list of common defenses that we all use:

Denial – It’s not just a river in Egypt. We simply deny that we have any problems. We’re focused completely on the fact that we’re without fault – or at least this fault.
Devaluation – Yes but… The love and connection that is offered to me is devalued so that it doesn’t count. The emotional isolation I’m experiencing isn’t my fault because the connections that are being offered to me aren’t valuable.
Projection – This is the act of taking your feeling and ascribing it to someone else because you don’t want to own it. “I’m not angry; you’re angry – and it’s making me angry.”
Reaction Formation – This is saying that I’m the opposite of what I’m really feeling. Instead of saying I feel sad I say that I feel happy.
Mania – I’m hyperactive but disorganized.
Idealization – I visualize myself as perfect. I believe that it’s impossible to have a fault because I’m perfect.

By contrast, here are the things you do when you’re moving into the wound and the process of healing:

Realize the Need – I accept that I have a need be bonded and attached to others.
Move Towards Others – I recognize that I have to move towards others – not expect they will always move towards me.
Be Vulnerable – I must be vulnerable to get close to others. If I live behind impenetrable walls no one will ever be able to get close.
Challenge Distorted Thinking – I recognize that my perception is distorted and that some thoughts and feelings distort it further. (See Bonds that Make Us Free, Leadership and Self-Deception, and Anatomy of Peace for more information.)
Allow Dependent Feelings – I have to allow a level of attachment to another person to be connected to them. I must care about them.
Become Comfortable with Anger – As I mentioned during the review of Emotional Intelligence, Anger is disappointment directed. I can use anger as a tool to better understand my relationship to others.
Be Empathetic – I need to share (or mirror) others’ thoughts, feelings, and emotions to truly connect with them.
Rely on the Holy Spirit – I have insufficient power on my own, but through the Holy Spirit, I can do all things.
Say Yes to Life – I must internalize that to be fully alive is to be connected with God and others.

Don’t Think about Polar Bears

There’s a funny little trick that happens when we focus on not doing something. We end up reinforcing what we don’t want. We do it by keeping the very thing we want to avoid in our heads. The heading for this section tells you not to think about polar bears. You’re not supposed to remember that they’re big, white, and live at the North Pole. However, just by reading the words polar bear you thought of one. The more I tell you why you shouldn’t think about polar bears – because they’re evil, or they’ll make your toes turn white, or whatever, the more you’ll think about polar bears.

Jonathan Haidt discusses in The Happiness Hypothesis that holding on to a negative thought is a difficult process because the very act of monitoring what we’re thinking requires that we think about the thing we’re trying to prevent thinking about in the first place. A more effective strategy is the strategy discussed in numerous books including The Information Diet, Introducing the Psychology of Success, and How Children Succeed — that is to think of something else. The research upon which all of these books draw was around delayed gratification and whether children could not eat one marshmallow for a few minutes so that they could have two marshmallows later. The most successful groups for the marshmallow test distracted themselves. They didn’t worry about thinking about the marshmallow, they simply focused on other things.

Sometimes we get so caught up in trying to not think about the past, to avoid the time and place that we were hurt, that we focus energy remembering the event we’re trying to not think about. You may find that focusing on healing and on other things can be therapeutic.

Fences with Gates

There’s an old saying in computer security that the most secure computer in the world is locked in a vault in Fort Knox, turned off, and unplugged. That’s true. It’s completely secure. And equally useless. You can’t be in a relationship with someone – and therefore learn from the experience – if there’s no way to get to you.

Relationships are a delicate balance between allowing people in to help you and allowing too much so that they will harm you. Cloud suggests that we need fences with gates. That is, we need to have boundaries and we need to know when the boundaries aren’t necessary. We need to know how to let the right things in – and keep the wrong things out. We have to have permeable boundaries.

The book Beyond Boundaries discussed protective boundaries and defining boundaries. Defining boundaries are the fences. Protective boundaries are the gates. Deciding when and where you need them is the key.

If you’re thinking that you can get by with only boundaries, and that you don’t need to know anything about permeability or gates, consider that the only sea in the world which has no outlets is called the Dead Sea.

Fail Small, Fail Often

I love Mythbusters for more than just the explosions. I appreciate that they frequently do their experiments in small scale before going to a large scale. This allows them to fail more often – which on the surface seems to be a bad thing. However, failing more often and quicker in the small scale means that the large scale experiments are more likely to be successful. That’s an important aspect of their success at testing myths.

For myself, I had a friend say to me that I never seem to fail. After the long pause followed by a roar of laughter, I commented that I fail all the time. They didn’t believe me, but from my perspective, I do fail all the time. Different marketing approaches fail. Different product ideas fail. Different development spikes fail. However, these all fail and I learn from each failure – and I don’t do it again. I believe my friend was trying to say that, like Edison, I keep at it until I get success.

In order to succeed you have to be willing to fail. You can’t know if you’re able to ride a bike until you take the training wheels off. You can’t know if you can do it on your own until you’ve had to do it on your own.

Skills for Becoming an Adult

I would be remiss to not share the 10 skills that the book calls out for becoming an adult. They are:

Reevaluate Beliefs – I reevaluate my beliefs based on what I know. Humans are lousy at reprocessing what we know when our awareness and values change.
Respectful Disagreement with Authority Figures – I acknowledge and accept my disagreements with authority figures – and choose healthy ways of dealing with them.
Make Your Own Decisions – I don’t allow others to make decisions for me – I own my own life.
Practice Disagreeing – I need to accept that disagreeing with others is natural and healthy.
Deal with Your Sexuality – “‘Children don’t talk about sex’, but adults can. Stop whispering!”
Recognize and Pursue Talents – I will practice the skills that I’ve been given – with acceptance that failure is a pathway to growth.
Discipline Yourself – I will be responsible for my own discipline.
Gain Authority Over Evil – I have the ability to resist evil and temptation.
Submit to Others out of Freedom – I will submit to others out of love and respect for them.
Appreciate Mystery and the Unknown – I recognize that I’ll never know everything. I’ll accept that there are things that I cannot know.

In Conclusion

We’ve all been bruised. We’ve all been hurt – and we’re all going to be hurt again. We must accept that we must take responsibility to create the Changes that Heal in our own lives.

Book Review-How to Be an Adult in Relationships

Robert Bogue June 1, 2013 No Comments

It seems like nary a week goes by that I don’t think “When will that person grow up?” This happens to me both in my personal – and my professional life. It’s hard to see how the book How to Be an Adult in a Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving could possibly have professional value, but it does. No matter how much we might try to keep our personal lives and personal health outside the office, it leaks in and changes our ability to get things done. At the core, How to Be an Adult in Relationships speaks of five A’s which David Richo believes we all need. They are:

Attention – Consciousness of the other person and their needs
Acceptance – Accepting the other person’s reality as theirs, even if we don’t agree
Appreciation – An attitude of gratitude for the other person
Affection – Demonstrating love for others (in whatever way they can receive it)
Allowing – Permitting the other person to live their life without our attempts to control

Of these, affection is the trickiest one for me since it relies on being able to be affectionate in a way that the other person can accept. Gary Chapman’s book The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts is a classic work that exposes that people have different ways that they receive and give love – and that some ways are more impactful than others. We often associate affection with the kind of contact that high-touch folks like myself enjoy (i.e. snuggling), but it could just as easily mean acts of service.

Dependence

A key part of Richo’s argument is that you should not get more than 25% of your nurturance from another person. I’ll admit that this is perhaps the hardest thing that I had to come to grips with in the entire book and I wanted to argue against it until I took a step back. Even in the best relationships you should still have other activities – activities that you enjoy outside of the relationship. You still have work, from which you, hopefully, derive some value from beyond a paycheck. As I started thinking about all of the different ways that someone could be nurtured through their lives I began to wonder if 25% isn’t right.

In truth, I don’t know what the right answer is and I don’t think Richo does either. The point being made – and it’s a good one – is that you cannot rely on a single person to give you everything you need. Not only do you need to seek out others, but you also have to work on self-care as I mentioned in my review of Beyond Boundaries. Self-care, taking responsibility for nurturing ourselves, is equally important as relying on other people because other people are going to let us down and we need to know how to accept and allow that.

Staying Too Long

How do you know whether someone is just going through their own time of need and doesn’t have anything to offer for the moment or whether a relationship is critically flawed and cannot be repaired? That’s a difficult if not impossible question, but it’s a question that deserves an answer. We’ve all stayed in relationships too long – both personally and professionally. We’ve lingered in a dating relationship because we wanted the attention. We’ve stayed at a job too long because we couldn’t get up the courage to start the job search process again. We’ve stayed in a job role because the organization “needed” us to stay there – even after we knew that it had become soul crushing for us.

In some cases our reality distortion (See Beyond Boundaries) causes us to delude ourselves into thinking it will get better. We decide that instead of a permanent issue it is only a temporary thing. That it’s not really as bad as we think. We apply full cognitive behavior therapy [CBT] (see Redirect) to ourselves and try to sooth the pain that we feel at the loss that we know needs to happen. If we’re particularly good at CBT, we’ll delude ourselves to the point that there’s no longer a problem.

Love Confusion

Love is a tricky thing – particularly in English. The ancient Greek had three words that are all translated into love: eros, philos, and agape. Eros is romantic or sexual love, philos is brotherly love (and where Philadelphia gets its nickname as the city of brotherly love), and agape is God’s love. If you just start with this, is there any wonder that there is some confusion about what we mean when we say love? We all know what we mean when we say “I love you” to our parents or siblings. However, the same three words mean something completely different when expressed to your spouse.

However, the different types of love aren’t the only issue we face when talking about how we love. Another issue is how we define love. How do you know when you’re in love? Is it the time you spend together? Is it the butterflies in your stomach? Perhaps it’s the warm feelings you get. The problem is that these aren’t a definition for love.

Neither is a deeply intimate emotional connection. That should be a part of a romantic relationship – but it doesn’t define it. You may have friends to whom you can tell “anything.” (Based on some of the quite depressing research you may not have a close confidant either, but I hope you do.) That friend is likely not a romantic interest. So while you may love them in the philos and agape senses of the word, you probably don’t love them in the eros sense of the word.

Another popular definition for love is commitment. That is a level of responsibility to another human being (not responsibility for, see Boundaries). However, commitment isn’t all love is. Commitment is the residue of the feelings and emotions. It is the residue of the trust and intimacy that have developed. So while love – in all its forms – has a component of commitment to it, that commitment isn’t the litmus test for whether love exists.

So, why then is there all this talk about love in the context of business? Well, the answer is that it’s evidence for me that we simply don’t have a good understanding of our relationships. There has been more written and sung about love than any other word – and most of us don’t really know what it is.

By Excess and Deficit

One errs by excess and the other by deficit. What one person has in abundance the other cannot muster. Consider the twin ideas of truth and grace which are interwoven through the Christian bible. A person with too much truth and not enough grace will be cold and callous. That person may be right but no one will want to hear what that truth. There’s an old saying that no one cares what you know until they know you care. Conversely, someone who is all grace and no truth will be friendly but won’t be able to have the hard conversations. Finding the balance between truth and grace – and delivering the messages with love – is perhaps one of the hardest things to do in relationships of all kinds.

An overeater is plagued by an excess of food. The anorexic is plagued by a lack of food (fear of becoming overweight.) One errs by excess and the other by deficit. When being an adult in a relationship it’s critical to find balance in our lives – or at least accept that others need balance in our relationships – so that we neither smother nor starve our relationships.

Acronyms

How to Be an Adult in Relationships includes two acronyms that I thought were useful. The first is SEE. It’s when you recognize that you’re reacting inappropriately. It stands for the three most common causes:

Shadow – The part of us that we disown, repress, or deny
Ego – We’re fearful of not being accepted
Early-Life Issues – We’re reacting to a hurt that we experienced as a child that was triggered by the situation

The other acronym, FACE, directly addresses the inflated ego:

Fear – Afraid that we won’t be accepted
Attachment –We won’t get the outcomes we want (Buddhist teachings warn against attachment)
Control – A belief or desire that we can control circumstances or other people
Entitlement – We deserve something (See Anatomy of Peace)

Journaling

Being an adult requires quite a bit of emotional intelligence, awareness of who you are, and ultimately where your boundaries are. As I leave this book review, I want to acknowledge one key feature of this book that is unique. How to Be an Adult in Relationships includes a great number of journaling questions. It is designed for you to be able to read and ponder and learn from the material in a deep way. This is a great way to really grasp the material and apply it to your life.

Book Review-Beyond Boundaries: Learning to Trust Again in Relationships

Robert Bogue May 25, 2013 No Comments

As with my review of Boundaries, I had read Beyond Boundaries: Learning to Trust Again in Relationships some time ago. I had held back posting a book review of it because I didn’t think that I was reading it for professional growth. However I realized that we have relationships in business that are sometimes more complex, confusing, and more difficult than other non-professional relationships. So I decided that you might like to know more about how relationships work and what you can do to improve them all.

Trust

I believe firmly that trust lies at the very heart of all relationships. I remember organizations where the management team trusted one another and things worked relatively well – and conversely, where management teams quietly and secretly waited for a fellow team member to break their word – to violate a trust – so that they could point it out or publicly shame them. To paraphrase Building Trust, trust is the lubrication that organizations need to get things done. I’ve written reviews of three books directly related to trust (Trust & Betrayal in the Workplace , Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships and Life, and Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma), because it is so foundational to every relationship.

There are two additional aspects of trust that Beyond Boundaries exposes. The first is the Hebrew word ‘batach’, which is most commonly translated as trust, but conveys a sense of carelessness. It’s not carelessness as in recklessness, but rather careless as in without concern. It’s this kind of trust that the author suggests primarily to expose an ability to be your authentic self in the relationship – rather than trusting that if you do things exactly right the other person will be tolerant of you. This has the ring of Authentic Trust from Building Trust but is a bit more complete and encompassing than the view expressed there. Its knowing that you can trust the other person as completely as anyone can ever trust another human being.

The second is a breakdown between functional and relational trust. Functional trust, according to Townsend, is an alignment between what someone says and what someone does. Everyone has some level of misalignment between what they say and what they do – however higher levels of functional trust exist when the difference between the two is minimal. Someone who is known to keep their word would be said to be worthy of a high degree of functional trust. Relational trust is an ability to be safe with someone – exposing your vulnerabilities and feelings. In other words, it is awareness that you can be your real, authentic self with someone. Relational trust is about the complexities of trusting in a relationship. Knowing that there will be misunderstandings – but knowing the other party won’t willfully harm you.

Trust is important, but truth – and biases – are important to relationships as well.

Truth and Biases

Truth, as much as we may want it to be a single thing, is influenced by our perspective. One person’s hero may be another person’s villain. We all have biases from our background and from our perspective which influence our version of the truth. One of the most common issues with the “truth” is fundamental attribution error, which was discussed in Switch and in The Advantage. Fundamental attribution error is the tendency to attribute our behavior circumstances, and that of others, to character. We give greater grace to ourselves for making a poor choice because we can see the circumstances a bit more clearly. For others, we generally believe that they have a character flaw that made them behave poorly – even if the circumstances might have been particularly awful.

Kurt Lewin described behavior as a function of both person and environment. That is to say that it is the two of these combined which will determine the action. For instance, if a loaf of fresh bread is in front of you, no one is looking, and you’ve had no way to feed your family – I absolutely expect that you’ll steal the bread (and feel bad about it). If I only told you that someone had stolen a loaf of bread, you might think less of them – until you realize there was no other way to feed their family. Certainly my point isn’t to condone stealing – my point is to expose the fact that none of us are safe from being a product of our environment.

The fundamental attribution error is important in the context of relationships because we can consciously reverse the bias so that we give others “the benefit of the doubt.” In fact, research seems to show that couples in which one person has a slightly more positive view of their partner than the partner does of themselves tend to have better relationships. The better we are able to think positively about the other person in a relationship, the more likely that relationship is to be positive.

No matter whether you reverse the fundamental attribution error or not, there’s some sense of a distorted reality around your “truth.” Of course, there’s our perceptual bias, but there’s more than that. The fundamental attribution error is a close cousin to confirmation bias: the tendency to find evidence to support our positions while ignoring evidence that would contradict our stance. The problem is that if you’re in a bad relationship – at home, with a boss, a subordinate, or a peer – you tend to distort reality if you decide to stay in the relationship. You’ll say that your boss isn’t really that bad or the subordinate doesn’t really make that many mistakes. This distortion of reality is necessary to survive in the relationship, but when the relationship ends, how do you deal with the distortion that you’ve created? The hardest part is realizing the distortion exists, since more than likely you won’t have even seen the distortion happening. You will have created a reality – a “truth” – around how you want that other person to be – whether that is who they are or not.

Boundary Types

One thing that wasn’t but could have easily been covered in Boundaries is the idea of different kinds of boundaries. Townsend asserts in Beyond Boundaries that there are two kinds of boundaries: defining and protective. Defining boundaries are the boundaries that define who you are and are immutable. That is, if the boundary changed it would change who you are. A boundary such as whether you would commit adultery may be a defining boundary – changing it might change your definition of who you are.

Protective boundaries are provisional and will change as the need to protect yourself changes. If you need to protect yourself from verbal abuse, you might set a boundary that you won’t be with your mother-in-law except when your spouse is present. As you work with your mother-in-law to not be so critical, you can remove that boundary. Protective boundaries are like a scab over a wound. They’re there to protect the wound from further damage – and are designed to be temporary.

Victim Again

I promised in my review of Boundaries that I’d be coming back to victimhood again. There are some key perspectives that Beyond Boundaries adds to the working definition of victim. Perhaps most importantly is the perspective that ‘you can’t outsource your health’. This hearkens back to the idea that no matter who created the wound, you’re ultimately responsible for healing it. It means that you have to take an active role in your recovery. You can’t turn it over to a counselor, a therapy group, a spouse, etc.; you must take responsibility for recognizing your hurts and working on them. If you feel like you’re not heard at work, which triggers some deep feeling that you weren’t listened to as a child, it’s your responsibility to communicate clearly your thoughts in ways that are difficult to ignore – without being aggressive. For instance, if you didn’t feel heard in a meeting, you can send a follow up email about what you understood from the meeting and highlighting your idea that you feel didn’t get appropriate attention.

Another poignant concept raised in Beyond Boundaries is that the process of grieving converts a wound into a memory. It removes the poison so the wound can heal. If you’re constantly feeling injured in a particular way, it’s possible that you’ve not completely grieved the situation. It’s an important part of being able to move on to grieve for a lost relationship. The other person in the relationship didn’t die – but the relationship might have. One of the interesting times that grief is appropriate is when someone gets a new job. Even when the job is ostensibly better in every way, the person changing jobs is invariably sad at the loss of friendships from their existing job.

Another perspective that can definitely help reduce the chance of staying trapped in victimhood is to recognize our part in the relationship issues – no matter the size of our role. If one percent of the relationship issues are our fault – then we have something we can work on. (I’ll assure you there are always more than 1% of the relationship issues that are your fault.)

Rescuer Again

I mentioned in the review of Boundaries the tendency for rescuers to get caught up in others’ problems so much that they fail to look at themselves. So in Beyond Boundaries, I was triggered to think of Acts 20:35 – which says that it is better to give than receive. It occurred to me that this is the mantra of the rescuer. It’s better for me to give to others than to receive their care. However Beyond Boundaries hints at the idea that it’s better to give AND receive. In other words, giving is great, but if you never accept the care of others and if you never do self-care, you’ll burn yourself out. Similarly, we need to open ourselves up and become vulnerable to others. The only way to connect with another human is to open yourself up to them. So I’d say that it’s better to give and receive. It’s better to offer to listen to others and to offer them the opportunity to listen to you.

Integrated Images

The final nail in the coffin of victimhood is an integrated image of ourselves and of those people around us. Let’s focus on ourselves for a moment. Everyone has attributes that are great. They’re our strengths and our power. However, just as everyone has great attributes, everyone has poor attributes, parts of themselves that are perceived negatively by others or are self-limiting. There are no exceptions to this, everyone, no matter how great, can improve. One challenge is that the way that we view ourselves most frequently isn’t as one person who is powerful and vulnerable, special and normal. We tend to see one or the other of the two scenarios; rarely do we see ourselves as both at the same time. At the point at which you can see your flaws and your attributes side-by-side and allow them to exist in a single image of yourself, you’ll have conquered victimhood – and made progress on the way to being highly self-actualized and able to face whatever life throws at you.

In terms of your relationship with other people, you’ll tend to see them as either all good (white hats) or all bad (black hats). It’s very difficult for us to see someone as great at work but not a very good community man. It’s hard to believe that a congressman who has done such great things for the community might be committing adultery on his wife – or at least it used to be hard to believe this. We tend to over-generalize information about a person into other areas. In viewing other people, we need to realize that competence or character in one area of their life doesn’t mean that they have competence or character in another area of their life. We can’t project their attributes in one area to another area.

Do vs. Connect

Are we human doings or human beings? While the answer should be human beings, we spend a lot of our time doing things. Part of that is a holdover from our evolution as a society. In early agrarian cultures we had no free time. As a result, we created a tendency to do things all the time. We rarely relaxed or took in what it meant to be a human being – instead of just the sum of the things we were doing. As society has shifted over the last 100 years or so, we’ve developed more leisure time. We’re needing to learn how to become more of the human beings we were created to be – to move past the always busy, always working, always engaged human doings that we had to be for so much of our history. Beyond Boundaries may be just the book to help us with that transition as well as learning to trust again.

Book Review-Boundaries: When to say YES, and How to Say NO to Take Control of Your Life

Robert Bogue May 18, 2013 No Comments

I read the book Boundaries: When to say YES, and How to Say NO to Take Control of Your Life some time ago. However, it fell on the other side of the line between personal and business. While much of the stuff I read, as you might expect, applies to both my personal life as well as my professional life, I generally share my thoughts on the books if I think there’s a reasonable amount of business value. Somehow Boundaries just seemed more like personal maturity than professional maturity. That being said, I’ve been putting a bunch of other pieces together including things I read in Emotional Intelligence and ultimately decided that the growth that comes from Boundaries applies to both my professional and my personal life – and therefore it would be something to share here.

What is a Boundary?

A boundary is a clear dividing line. It separates you from others or what you will do from what you won’t do. It’s not a barrier – it doesn’t prevent problems – it simply allows you to see when there is a problem and allows you the clarity to know what to do about it. Boundaries are essential because they make other decisions about life, relationships, and interactions easier to process. Sometimes defining boundaries helps us to define who we are. It helps us to know what we shouldn’t take responsibility for.

One of the most common boundary issues with humans is codependence. Codependence is where someone doesn’t have boundaries between their own feelings and the feelings of someone else. They subjugate their feelings for the feelings of someone else. There are times where it’s appropriate to support others and to do things for them – but the key is that there are times. If every time you’re with someone it’s all about their needs and desires and feelings and never about yours, then you’re probably not being very honest with them or more importantly yourself. We all have some level of codependence; we’re social creatures after all. The problem comes when you’re always submitting to others.

There is a level beyond codependence that is enmeshment. This is where you literally cannot see where you end and the other person begins. If the person you’re enmeshed with is feeling bad you’re feeling bad. There’s no differentiation between you and them. It is relatively easy to see the problem with enmeshment – just because someone else is feeling bad, it shouldn’t mean that you must feel bad too. Boundaries are there to protect you from becoming so enmeshed in another person that you can’t have your own thoughts and feelings.

The Rescuer

One of the warning signs for codependence is being a rescuer. Rescuers are constantly helping others out, getting them out of jams and binds. Of course, it’s morally good for you to help others so it’s sometimes a difficult line to walk between knowing when to help someone else and when not to. A good boundary here is whether it will harm you or not. It’s good to help others when you aren’t harmed (or are not likely to be harmed) in the process. If you loan a friend $100 and you can afford to do it – no problem. If you loan a friend $100 and you can’t pay your electric bill – big problem. I realize that this example is an over simplification, but the point remains.

I am a rescuer. I love helping my friends. However, I also know, from How Children Succeed, that I can’t always help my friends. Sometimes they’ve got to suffer through the situations that they’ve created so that they can learn. Rescuing someone from the consequences they created is bad, as you’re preventing them from experiencing the important life lessons that they need to learn. Conversely, rescuing them, or helping them, with situations which they didn’t cause can be good for both parties.

The book Thinking, Fast and Slow made the point about differential value of gains and losses. That is that a small amount of additional money doesn’t have the same impact as the previous unit of money – and that we feel losses more deeply than we feel gains. The same is true of supporting others. If you can do something quickly that would be difficult or impossible for the other person to do there is positive energy created in the relationship. If, however, you put more energy in doing something for someone than it is worth to them, you’re creating a deficit. Rescuers sometimes fall into the trap of spending more and more effort to do things for others. It may be the same thing that was done last week but this week it takes more energy. Eventually the rescuer is exhausted and the person that they’re rescuing is not that much better off.

Another challenge with rescuers is that sometimes the rescuer is doing the rescuing to avoid looking at the deficits in their own lives. They look at others and help because they can’t bear to look at their own vulnerability and fragility. When this is happening it’s more than a boundary problem. There’s a problem with the purpose for the rescuing. It’s not about altruism – instead, it’s about the rescuer needing a distraction.

The Peacemaker

Luckily I don’t struggle with every portion of creating good boundaries. Folks who know me won’t accuse me of being a peacemaker – that is, someone who has to have peace (tranquility in the language of Who Am I?) all the time. Boundaries are very difficult for a peacemaker because knowing what your boundaries are will create conflict. Someone will want you to go further than you’re willing. They’ll want you to give up more than you can. The great paradox with the peacemaker is that sometimes small conflicts allow you to avoid larger conflicts.

Consider how this works in terms of a rocket. It gets launched on its way to the moon but it’s a little bit off course, just a fraction of a degree. Correcting the course early on means a very small amount of energy to change the direction. As more and more time progresses the actual position gets further and further away from the real target. Making the course correction will take more and more effort as more time goes by.

Relationships are like this because we sometimes have small misalignments between expectations and goals and instead of working through the discussion – and potentially even conflict – we ignore the problem and allow it to get bigger with the passage of time. Sometimes it’s a minor annoyance like how the toilet paper is hung on the roll (and this is a minor thing, ladies) which becomes a big issue because it gets converted from a small item into a belief about how you feel about the other person or how they feel about you. If you’re like most men I know, the way the toilet paper hangs on the holder means nothing about how someone cares about you. It can, however, grow into an issue if not discussed.

In this case there’s a very minor chance of a conflict and yet many people won’t mention the frustration about the minor item for fear of a big blow-up. The irony of this is that it’s the lack of the small conversations that creates the big blow-ups. Small disagreements and negotiations about expectations up front can mean that the larger blow ups never have to happen. If you’re a peacemaker, then boundaries are going to be hard – but worth it – for the long term peace that you desperately want.

The Lawmaker

The book speaks of ten laws which are useful to consider:

Sowing and Reaping – The other person in a relationship must reap what they sow, I cannot interfere in this process without harming them.
Responsibility – I must be responsible for myself; and responsible to others. I cannot be responsible for others.
Power – I have power over only myself and never others.
Respect – I must respect others’ boundaries and they must respect ours.
Motivation – Why am I doing whatever it is you’re doing – because I want recognition or because I’m trying to do the right thing? Our motivation must be right.
Evaluation – I must evaluate the other person’s feelings, but communicate with them none-the-less.
Proactivity – To grow and change I must proactively work on myself and my relationship with others – not be passive and then aggressive.
Envy – Focusing on others outside of our boundaries isn’t healthy for me.
Activity – I am responsible for actively creating and maintaining my boundaries.
Exposure – To be effective boundaries must be known. They must be exposed to others.

The Victim

One problem that I’m painfully familiar with – something that I want to highlight from the book – is the tendency for some folks to act and feel like victims. Certainly there are people who have been victimized and do deserve our sympathy and support for how they’ve suffered. However they must take their own responsibility for healing from those hurts. That, on the surface, can sound cruel, but it’s certainly not intended that way. It’s about taking responsibility for the recovery they so desperately need. There’s an old joke, “How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb?” The answer is, “One, but the light bulb really has to want to change.” Unless the person who has been victimized decides to not be a victim any longer, a victim they will remain.

From my perspective, victimhood, or being a perpetual victim, is characterized by:

A lack of ownership or responsibility for the wounds or the choices that were made
Being defined by the events or circumstances that caused the wounds
Inability to move through or past the pain

I’ll be talking more about this in a review of Beyond Boundaries: Learning to Trust Again in Relationships – however, for now, know that I believe that victimhood is a critical problem facing relationships both personally and in business.

Stewardship

One problem which is common to those with boundary issues is a lack of self-care. Self-care activities are those things which you do because they revitalize you, they energize you, and they make you feel better about you. Often codependents and rescuers see their desire for self-care as selfish. They shouldn’t need so much time to themselves. They shouldn’t need to care for themselves when others are hurting so much. However, if anyone fails to care for themselves, they’ll ultimately find that they become rundown and are unable to care for others. Without proper self-care, the short-term benefits of giving additional help will come at a massive cost, compromising the ability to continue to give over time.

One area of self-care which is particularly challenging is the need for space. While every human has a built-in need for social connection, we also have a need for space. The space we need allows us to think for ourselves, so that we can ponder our own thoughts without others intruding. Space is as necessary as darkness, so that we can see the light, and rests in music, so we can hear the melody. Space is essential for allowing humans to be human.

Ultimately and paradoxically, the greatest thing that one can do in order to support others is to insist on taking care of themselves. To keep the right mindset about supporting others we have to believe that we are well cared for – of course this is easier if we really are well cared for.

If you struggle with any areas of setting boundaries – this book may help.

Book Review-The E-Myth Revisited

Robert Bogue May 13, 2013 No Comments

There aren’t many books that I read under protest. I don’t mean protest in the sense that someone else is forcing me to read a book, as much as I mean that I’m forcing myself to read it. The E-Myth Revisited is one of those books that I didn’t want to read. I had been exposed to The E-Myth years ago. I knew the fundamental premise behind the book: Make a system for everything. Once you’ve made a system, any lemming can run the system and you can franchise it. Yea, that’s a massive over-simplification but it’s mostly on target. It’s an old book. Published in 1995, it’s definitely long in the tooth. However, as it happens, someone recommended it to me.

Strangely, it was someone who I really didn’t trust, respect, or even like. I believe that she so massively misread and mishandled a situation so badly that I didn’t want to speak with her again. Her parting shot at me – a final attack – included a note that I should read The E-Myth Revisited. I suppose most people would have just written it off however I knew there had to be something there that I had missed in the past. I was right. While the fundamental premise didn’t really fit my situation, it was something that I could learn from – and I think you might be able to learn something too.

Franchise This!

Perhaps my greatest struggle with the book is that it doesn’t really fit my line of work. I deliver professional services and develop intellectual property. In truth, neither of these activities are good candidates for systemization. So the idea that my business could really be systematized and licensed as a franchise was just not compatible with my worldview. It still isn’t.

I don’t believe that you can systematize a professional services company. There are large consulting companies that are built on an army of well-meaning, bright but under-experienced folks executing poorly documented frameworks that are supposed to allow anyone to execute a large project well. In practice, I see numerous failures, cost overruns, and problems that are quietly swept under the rug as the large consulting company marches on to the next deal. (I have to say not all of the larger consulting companies are like this but more than a few are.)

Intellectual property systemization is actually pretty interesting because I’ve spent much of my life in organizations that do intellectual property work. Book publishers are in this line of work and I’ve been close enough to see how trying to systematize book publishing has destroyed quality. Speaking with one of my publishing friends, we were discussing the failure rate of book projects. We were talking about schedule failures (late to market), writing failures (never finished), and sales failures (not enough sales to cover expenses.) The scary thing was we were talking about a net failure rate of 50% or more. Half the books that some publishers were producing would never cover their own production costs.

I mentioned that you shouldn’t expect more than an advance when I talked about the math in Self-Publishing with Lulu back in 2009. (If you’re interested in a more detailed background on publishing and how it works, you can still get an eBook I wrote in 2001 – A Beginner’s Guide to Successful Technical Publishing.) Book publishers make money before your royalty is earned out – but you can pretty quickly see that it takes more than a few thousand books sold for a publisher to really make money.

If professional services and intellectual property aren’t businesses to franchise, then what kinds of businesses are? In short, business-to-consumer companies. If you’re trying to interact with consumers, you’ll find that having a standard plan to deal with the regularly transitioning workforce is a good idea. Having a system allows you to create a copy of your business in another area (that can be relatively close by) which accesses a completely different set of people – because most consumer businesses are inherently driven by location and proximity.

Some business-to-business companies can benefit as well because they’re doing relatively mechanical, algorithmic, repeatable work as well. Even if you don’t franchise your business-to-business company you’ll want to pick up the operational efficiencies that come with having a well-defined and well understood process.

Three Faces

One of Gerber’s fundamental beliefs is that there are three key personalities in each person and that these three are needed for an organization:

The Technician – The technical expert with the skills at the core of the thing that the organization sells.
The Manager – The orchestrator of work. The “Negative Nellie” which views all challenges as problems to be solved.
The Entrepreneur – The visionary with the ability to see the needs of people and design solutions for those needs.

Gerber further believes that most small businesses are created by folks who are good technicians – they’re passionate about what they do and are frustrated with the way that other companies are run. They experience increasing annoyance at the way others are running the business that they are incited to believe that they can do it better. The person who is naturally comfortable being a technician takes on the roles of entrepreneur and manager.

I’ve certainly seen many organizations like this, and to some extent, my organization fits this. I started a consulting company to do it better. To focus on quality and customer satisfaction, to avoid being a body shop and to make a real difference – of course, I may not have achieved my goals.

Aim, Objective, Fire

“If you don’t know where you’re going then any path will take you there.” – Scarecrow, The Wizard of Oz.

In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey said “Begin with the end in mind.” It’s no surprise that figuring out where you are trying to get to is an important part of feeling successful in your business and in your life. Yes, most people don’t have a vision for what they want, much less how to get there. Knowing where you want to go, in Gerber’s language, is your primary aim. It’s the answer to questions like:

What do I value most?
What kind of life do I want?
What do I want my life to look like, to feel like?
Who do I wish to be?

The last question harkens back to Who Am I? , but in general the questions are to help you evaluate your organization and what you need to do – slowly but deliberately – to get where you want to go. If you value your time at home with your family in the evenings, creating a restaurant isn’t likely to be the best fit.

I want to be able to make it easier for folks to learn – to demystify technology and increasingly enable people to bring forth change in organizations. I greatly value being at home so that I can interact with my son, Alex. Thor Projects, my consulting business, isn’t the best solution to being home since many of my clients are remote and want me to travel. As a result, I’ve shaped my rate structure to favor me working remotely for the client (from my home office.) I not only want to be able to work from my home office, but I also want to see and enjoy nature as I’m working. As a result, I’ve put a large number of windows in my office. In fact, I rarely have the lights on in the office during the day – I enjoy the sunlight through all the windows.

Ultimately, I recognize that the structure of a consulting company doesn’t have the flexibility I want, and so I started AvailTek to hold the SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide and other intellectual property. In the end, this will allow me to educate more people and will allow me the flexibility to spend time with Alex. I’ve still not transitioned to full-time work with AvailTek – even though we’ve been selling the Shepherd’s Guide for 5 years now.

The path to the primary aim is the strategic objective. Creating a product company that is capable of sustaining my financial needs is my strategic objective. In my case, getting AvailTek started and creating the content for the SharePoint Shepherd’s brand is all a part of my strategic objective.

Gerber doesn’t spend any time on this topic, but it is a significant part of my experience in the challenges of organizations. That is, converting the strategic objectives into tactical goals and activities. One of the most common occurrences I see in the organizations that I work with is that strategic objectives never get converted into goals and executable tactics. For me, it’s the day-to-day activities driven by the goals that move an organization forward. It’s great to know where you’re going, but eventually you have to figure out how to get there.

Uncommon Standard

There’s a fair amount of appropriate criticism for technical certification programs. At any gathering of technicians, especially in conversation over a couple beers, you are likely to hear their complaints about how their hands-on expertise cannot be captured by a multiple choice test. They are – of course – correct. However, they fail to realize that the goal of a certification exam isn’t to measure the skills of an expert. Instead it’s designed to be a winnowing tool that employers and hiring managers can use to sort out the unqualified from the qualified.

At the heart of any certification exam is a passing score. That is, a standard. It’s a standard that says below this you do not pass and above this you have met the minimum requirements – the standard. In that way, every certification is a standard. Knowing this allows you to focus on the right question, which isn’t whether the certification is good or bad. Rather, the right question is “Was the certification standard set correctly?” That’s the true measure of the value of a certification.

In the context of creating your business, it is the standards that you set which make the business. What is your standard for responsiveness? Cleanliness? Technical skill? When you put all of these standards together you get the organizational standards – and the promise that you make to your clients.

Having a standard is uncommon. Setting high standards is even less common. Being able to articulate what your standards are is less common than it should be.

Start Playing Games with Me

In the context of business, when we say that the management is playing games with us, we almost always think of this in a negative context. We feel manipulated and we don’t like it. However, playing a board game at home with your family doesn’t feel manipulative.

Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi (of Flow fame) interviewed hundreds of creative leaders and summarized a key point from those interviews, thusly, “You could say that I worked every minute of my life, or you could say with equal justice that I never worked a day.” That is to say that those who are in flow – those who are enjoying their work – never feel like it is work.

Gerber shares that people need to want to do work more than they want to do not-work. While a bit oversimplified the core rings true. You want people to be excited to do their work enough that the distractions aren’t consuming. We’ve all seen employees of other organizations checking their cell phone, chatting with other staff members, and generally being distracted from the customers in front of them. If you make the process of being engaged in what you want your employees to do more interesting than the distractions, then they’ll pay better attention to the customers – or so the reasoning goes.

I’m reminded of the suggestions from Drive about how to motivate people. Most workers today are heuristic learners and therefore need to be motivated by mastery, autonomy, and purpose, rather than carrots and sticks. Creating an environment of positive reinforcement for a job well done can be a powerful way to keep employees trying to one-up each other’s level of service to customers – without giving them anything except for good service.

Even in my own work there are times that I just really don’t want to work. It’s amazing to me just how powerful cognitive dissonance can be. That is the desire to do the things that you need to do – and your deeply held desire to do something fun – to reward yourself for a job well done. I find that the better I define small rewards and the clarity around what my end goals are can help me to be more effective at staying on task.

There is No Spoon

Another of Gerber’s assertions is that our work becomes a mirror of how we are inside. That is to say that the more chaotic that we are inside the more chaotic that we make our world outside. While there’s a certain truth to this, I believe that there are times when we will seek the opposite of what we have inside to allow us to focus on changing our world. However, the line from the Matrix, “There is no spoon,” is appropriate here. Much of what we make of our world is how we see it.

I’m reminded of the story from Switch where BP decided they weren’t going to drill any more “dry holes.” In short they decided that the culture was changing from one which accepted “dry holes” (oil wells without oil) to one where “dry holes” weren’t acceptable. They needed to know for sure that there was oil at the bottom when they started drilling – or they needed to not drill.

In the context of your organization, what do you accept as a part of your culture that you shouldn’t? Is it workers who are late to work? Is it a level of distractedness when customers are around? Or maybe it’s just that management isn’t reading books like E-Myth to make the organization better…

Which SharePoint Site Template Do You Believe Will Be Created the Most?

Robert Bogue May 7, 2013 3 Comments

We’re putting the finishing touches on the SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for 2013 and I was trying to figure out the best way to point users to the right site template to use. As a part of that I decided that it would be fun to stack rank order the site templates that will be used the most – so that I know where to position them on the decision tree. Here’s my order from most frequently to least frequently used:

Team Site
Project Site
Publishing Site
Publishing Site with Workflow
Enterprise Wiki
Blog
Business Intelligence Center
Community Site
Records Center
eDiscovery Center
Document Center
Community Portal
Enterprise Search Center
Basic Search Center
My Site Host
Developer Site
Product Catalog
Visio Process Repository

Do you agree with this order? — Or do you have your own?

Book Review-How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character

Robert Bogue May 4, 2013 No Comments

What makes a child successful in life? In my review of Emotional Intelligence I mentioned that tests of emotional intelligence were generally more indicative of long term success than measures of intelligence. However, emotional intelligence – as it was defined in the other book, isn’t all there is to the puzzle. Paul Tough tackles the challenge of the other indicators in his book How Children Succeed. One interesting bit is that Paul is a journalist. That is, his experience is on reporting on other people’s discoveries. That’s both good and bad.

The good is that he’s able to see things objectively. He’s able to draw on multiple sources and correlate differing but related points of view into a single path. The bad is that there’s not the same depth or passion that you’ll find in a book written by a practitioner. That’s not to say that How Children Succeed isn’t well researched. It is. That’s not to say that it’s not well written, because it is. What is does say is that if you’re looking for the richness you would expect to find from someone that has spent their entire life struggling with the question – you’ll need to look elsewhere.

Experience Matters

One measure of how well a child will succeed is to measure the number of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE). That’s really all of the major life stressors that they experience as a child. Major life stressors are things like deaths in the family, moves, divorces, etc., the things that trigger stress in a child’s life. It seems that the problem with these experiences is that they may accidentally cause the stress response – the Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis – to get stuck in the on position. The HPA axis refers to the interplay of hormones in the endocrine system that are characteristic of stress.

With the HPA axis stuck on, children are basically trapped in fear mode all the time. Fear, as we learned in Drive, prevents people from being creative or taking risks – risks that are essential to growth. So the higher the ACE score, the greater is the likelihood that a child will grow up with developmental problems. Effectively, a child’s executive function is compromised. That means that they won’t be as able to regulate their emotions or to delay gratification, and will have sub-normal ability to use working memory. Working memory is the space that you use to work with information. Consider for instance, how many numbers you can remember. It turns out that most adults can hold about seven digits of a number in their head at a time (unless we chunk the data as we learned in Information Architecture – Blueprints for the web). The seven digits that we can hold in our head is working memory. With extended periods of HPA axis activation, this working memory is restricted.

Beyond the developmental problems, the HPA axis wasn’t designed to be left on – or even to be hyposensitized. The human biology evolved the HPA axis to allow for short-term focus. It was never designed to be left on for extended periods of time. It evolved when there were periods where we were in eminent danger from a predator. If we didn’t run right away we’d become lunch for a hungry lion. However, the threats we face today rarely have to deal with life and death situations really. Most of the time, our brains make the situation feel life-and-death, which triggers the HPA axis, although in reality, few of us often fear for our lives.

As a point of fact, humans are the only known animal which can trigger their stress response in a way that’s not precisely coupled with the events in the outside world. We can “stress ourselves out.” In ways that no animal in the rest of the animal kingdom can, we are able to motivate and drive ourselves. This is good when we’re delaying gratification and working on future events, but it’s bad when we forget that stress is designed to be a short term thing.

Ultimately, since you can’t always control the number of ACE events which can trigger a bad stress response, what can you do to make things better? It turns out there’s something you can learn from a rat.

You No Good, Dirty Rat

ACE events may negatively impact a person’s potential for lifelong happiness and success, however, there’s a curious activity in mother rats that seems to counteract the negative effects of stress in rats. The curious activity was special attention that the mother rats showed in caring for their young – specifically licking and grooming. Mother rats could nurture better rats – better at socialization, curiosity, and maze navigation. (Maze navigation is apparently a useful skill for lab rats.) It was discovered, through the magic of gene sequencing, that the high levels of caring (bonding) switched on a part of DNA that allows the hippocampus to process stress hormones better.

Licking a child will pretty much universally get you a “yuck” from the child and any other person in the area. Of course, it’s not really the licking that was causing the better response. It was caring. It just happens that rats show caring through licking and grooming. Parents can help their children better cope, and possibly counteract the long term effect of stress by connecting with them.

Safe to Be Vulnerable

As I mentioned in my review of Emotional Intelligence, one of the great paradoxes of life is that to be vulnerable you have to feel safe. Until you feel safe you won’t be vulnerable. Parents who make their children feel safer create a foundation from which their children can leap. That means that the more you bond with, connect with, and care for your child the more they will be able to, and interested in, exploring. So, socioeconomic factors may lead to levels of success and happiness – but that success and happiness are not solely related to the family’s income. They are really related to how safe a child feels. How many, or few, ACEs they have – but more important than that how they’re nurtured. Nurturing a child can be a challenging task even for a healthy adult.

Nurturing children when your own internal state is locked into a fear mode is an almost impossible task. If you were parented with bad habits it’s hard to break those patterns and provide a secure base for your children. It’s hard for you to portray safety when you internally don’t feel safe because your own HPA axis is locked in the on position.

Creating a place of safety isn’t the only challenge. There’s also setting up an attitude of persistence that needs to be considered as well.

Grit for Polish

When you subtitle a book with a word like grit, there’s got to be something that backs it up. Grit, as defined by Angela Duckworth, is “self-discipline wedded to a dedicated pursuit of a goal.” Emotional Intelligence called this persistence. So what makes grit so important? Well, it keeps children in the game long enough to become good at it. Having read Outliers, I have no doubt that there are times in every great person’s life where they felt like they weren’t going to make it. Where they felt like they were stuck in relative obscurity but they were doing what they loved so they kept learning and trying to get better. That’s a dedication to a purpose that Paul Tough might define as grit.

Many folks will equate grit with gritty. However, I do not. I think about how grit is used to polish mirrors. Grit in successive levels of fineness can put a mirror-finish on a surface. I vividly remember using sandpaper with progressively finer grit to polish axels on my son’s Cub Scout pinewood derby racers. We would do all sorts of things to the axels to reduce the friction. Grit can be used to make something “better” than when it started. That’s what I believe grit does for children (and adults.)

Curiosity Killed the Cat

Plato indicated that the desire for truth (curiosity) is one of the greatest motivators in life. This is certainly true for Plato, but not for everyone. In Who Am I? we learned that curiosity is one of the sixteen key desires. In How Children Succeed Tough speaks only briefly about the value of curiosity. However, the point is made that curious students are better students. Curiosity is the fuel that grit consumes to reach a goal. It is the spark that gets things started.

What Kind of Character

Character is a difficult thing to define. Unfortunately, Tough doesn’t really do much to illuminate this topic. There are scattered references to different bits of self-control and self-management, both of which are covered in more detail in Emotional Intelligence. There are references to virtues – but I found the discussion in Heroic Leadership of much more practical value about instilling virtues. So in this way, I’d say How Children Succeed probably doesn’t meet its subtitle, however, it’s still a good read and gave me plenty to think about.

Public Speaking