Otis Woodard – Page 3

Locating Yourself

Crucial Conversations, Internal State, Psychological Safety and Candor

Yesterday morning, walking up the gravel driveway under the 200-year-old Oregon White Oak, something in me shifted. I woke up feeling pretty low. Sara and I had an argument the night before, and it was one of those rare ones that have a disproportionately strong impact on me. As I was passing under this majestic tree in my early morning walk to my little office up on the hill, I was actively working with my internal state.

Increasingly, I’m realizing the power of internal state and how it really is the crux of personal development. It really defines our life experience, and whether we react unconsciously or respond intelligently to situations we find ourselves in. Two people — in the exact same situation — with different internal states may have two very different experiences. They will react or respond, do more good or more harm, learn or learn nothing, do or do not… in very different ways.

It isn’t the situation that matters most. It is our internal state. And we totally lose sight of this in the very moments where we most need to remember it. This was where I was at with regards to this conflict with Sara. And fortunately, as I passed under the fresh new oak leaves of the summer, I knew it.

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Your 2019 – How to Rock a Mid-Year Reflection

Personal Development, Planning and Productivity

Can you believe it? Half of the year gone… poof! That kind of snuck up on us, didn’t it? One half is now behind us. One half is ahead. How’s it going for you? How is 2019 shaping up?

Do you have a process for taking stock about how your year is going? If you do, this post isn’t for you. But if you don’t have an approach and are interested in spending an hour being reflective about the first half of the year and more intentional for the second half, I’m going to give you a super simple approach. Ten steps. Sixty minutes. Yes!

Why would you want to do this? Well, if you want the second half of 2019 to be even better than the first half, reflection brings clarity. And clarity is power. If you act on it. And this approach includes an action aspect.

Given this is for folks who don’t have an approach, don’t expect this to be the end-all, be-all. I want this to be both do-able and impactful. So let’s get to it…

Increasing Your Capacity for Psychological Safety — Five Practices

Practices, Psychological Safety and Candor

How can you increase your capacity for psychological safety… for connection? By practicing, that’s how! In this article, I’ll outline five practical and powerful practices that will help you increase your capacity. If you stay with them, you will steadily increase the quality and consistency of your connection. More and more, you will embody “clear mind, open heart, strong spine” and some incredible benefits will flow from that.

The Messy Middle

Liminal Space

I’ll be honest: the return from vacation has been hard. It’s Thursday, June 27th. I’m in San Antonio working with my fav client here, but Monday and Tuesday I just couldn’t find my rhythm. Something was amiss.

By Tuesday my mood was low. I felt lost, frustrated, confused. This is rare for me, and it overtook me. Sara and I talked over our vacation about our respective ways forward with our work… what we want to give in the time we have left on this earth. That wasn’t — and still isn’t — clear to me.

As an Enneagram Seven, the Enthusiastic Visionary, I have no shortage of ideas of what that might be. I have a shortage of clarity, the ability to commit to ONE thing and to hold the focus there. This shadow has followed me all my life. This was at the crux of my lostness. But more importantly, there was this.

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Increasing Your Capacity for Psychological Safety — Building the Foundation

Psychological Safety and Candor

In this article, I’d like to share my best thinking on how you might significantly improve the quality and consistency of your connection to your higher self, to others, and to life. I want to share this because increasing your capacity for connection will transform your life, your relationships, your effectiveness, and your sense of meaning and purpose. And, it will increase your happiness and decrease your suffering. Just a bunch of small, little things like that.

In my prior article, I explained why I think connection is the secret to life. I also explained how psychological safety and unconditional love, warmth, compassion, acceptance, and support relate to connection. I will not repeat all of that, for it is all already there, here.

I’m a process and framework kind of guy, so I will give you the journey from here to there as nine steps — four foundational steps and five practices. You don’t necessarily need to follow this order, particularly if you have a basic grasp of the whole of this.

In this article, I’ll cover the four foundational steps. In the next article, the five practices.

Ready to explore this? I know I am.

The Secret to Life is Connection

Psychological Safety and Candor

Sara has been challenging me, encouraging me, to shift my focus from a personal development framework to psychological safety. I’ve been resisting that. I don’t see a good, cohesive framework out there. And I have been using one and evolving it, and it works. Why wouldn’t I want to focus on that?

As soon as people actually start their personal development work, however, it always comes down to the same root thing. People are struggling with having the healthy, happy, highly effective relationships they desire. And that, my friend, hinges on psychological safety.

The degree of psychological safety we are capable of directly impacts our ability to connect with others. I think our ability to connect with others is the secret of life. And I think many people don’t know this. In this post, I will explain why I believe this to be true, and why I’m shifting my primary focus to helping people understand and cultivate psychological safety. To connect. Let’s bring this to life through real-life situations…

Solving Difficult Problems with Compassion

Compassion & Self-Compassion

How might you apply compassion and self-compassion to the practical matters of your life… to make your life better? This is an important question and a very worthwhile one to ask. Why? First, because many people want to know — before they put time, energy, and effort into something — that something good will result. Secondly, and more importantly, practical application is a very important form of practice.

What happens in real life is that we find ourselves in situations where emotions are triggered. If the emotions are both negative and strong, compassion tends to go out the window. That is, if we aren’t watching for it and intentionally working with it.

But what if — in situations where in the past we were anything but compassionate — we could be compassionate and stay that way? As the book, The Anatomy of Peace puts it, what if we could have a “heart at peace” in these situations instead of our internal state being that of a “heart at war”… where we are not seeing people as people?

Five Steps to Remarkable Clarity

Personal Development Compass

Are you on track this year to achieve what you most want? Do you know, or do you have to think about it? Or, are you quietly saying to yourself, “I don’t know what I most want this year”? Or, “I knew, and I lost track of it.”

If you already know whether you are on track and the answer is “Yes, I’m on track.” Fantastic. This article is for the rest of us. Including yours truly.

Why don’t most people achieve what they most want, and instead spend so much time and energy running around in circles and feeling frustrated and unfulfilled?

Simple: they have not done the first step of personal development well. They have not clearly defined five crucial things…

Life Mirrors Mind

Personal Development

A hallmark of our time is so many people are realizing that to change their life experience all that is needed is to change their mind. I’m not talking about positive thinking and affirmations. What I’m saying is we have the power to literally change the nature and quality of our mind and doing that changes our actual reality (not just our perceived reality). The corollary is our life situation mirrors us, and most specifically, our minds.

I’m getting this at a new level, myself, right here and right now. I’d like to share how I’m seeing ever more clearly that two problems I’m facing are problems of my own mind, manifestations of, mirrors of, my mind. Of my own making. And how utterly empowering it is when we can see this, know this, and not just intellectually believe it to be so.

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Start with Self-Observation

Personal Development

“How do I get started with personal development? Do I read a book? Get a coach? Go to a workshop? What?” It’s a common question. And it is an important one because personal development often doesn’t go anywhere.

I have a bias for having a plan. A framework. W. Edmunds Deming said, “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.” I’ve written about the power of a framework here. (Expect to see more on this, soon. Very soon.)

Given you have a workable framework, one of the first practical steps is to learn self-observation. That’s what you and I will talk about here. I also have put together a whopper of a free, downloadable how-to guide for you called How to Do Self-Observation. Let’s do this.