I’d like to share seven ways to expand your ability to become the biggest and best version of yourself. Seven interconnected and interdependent ways to become healthier, happier, and highly effective. When you transform yourself, you transform your life.
The seven ways are:
1. Deepen Connection and Trust
2. Engage in Productive Conflict
3. Strengthen and Hold Your Focus
4. Practice Radical Candor
5. Mind Your Results and Impact
6. Infuse Meaning and Purpose into All You Do
7. Take Time to Reflect
Let’s unpack these a bit and talk about why these seven ways are powerful.
The Source of the Seven Ways
These seven ways are an amalgam of my life experience, what I’ve learned from Sara, and what I’ve learned from others. It all came to a head this week when three things happened.
- First, I created a survey for some teams I’m working with. The purpose of the survey is to give those teams data they can use to decide how they might become a healthier, happier, and more highly effective team. It is a synthesis and derivative of the work of Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team and Google’s Project Aristotle. If you want to snag a PDF of the survey I created, click here.
- Second, Sara sent me something from the Center for Healthy Minds about the four barriers that affect our ability to flourish. It is over to the left.
- Third, Sara and I prepared for an interview on TV, our local access cable channel, and did that interview on Wednesday. Preparing for it really made us think about what our message now is. That was very powerful, and it was a joy to do the interview (although anxiety-provoking to sit and talk in front of TV cameras and monitors, LOL). I will link to it here when it becomes available.
As I woke up this morning, all this started synthesizing for me, and it continues to synthesize as I write. What can I say? I’m a framework guy. So all of the above and more is the Source of the “seven ways” I will now share with you.
I’ll purposefully keep this high-level. In doing so, I hope to impart a feeling for this. And I hope this feeling might resonate in you, stir you a little bit, and maybe point towards and give you a sense for you true north. And, if you like, I can write more about of each of these — and the “how” of them — over time.
What’s super slick about these seven is you can apply them to yourself, your most important relationship with someone other than yourself, your family, your workgroup, your organization, and your community. Let’s dive in.
The Seven Ways
to become healthier, happier, and highly effective.
1. Deepen Connection and Trust
Stephen Porges says that if you want to change the world, start with making people feel safe. Funny how — with the best of intentions — we make ourselves and others feel less safe. The essence of this first way is (a) increase your vulnerability and (b) get better at keeping your heart open in situations and with people where it normally closes.
Bottom line: become an expert at providing a secure base to yourself, and to others. In so doing, engender psychological safety.
2. Engage in Productive Conflict
Thinking you can avoid conflict is delusional. You can kick the can down the road, but at some point that can will kick back. We all know this, yet we indulge in the belief that conflict is undesirable and that is avoidable. Poppycock.
Conflict is a difference in perception… nothing more, and nothing less. And since your perception, just like mine, is distorted, conflict is the way we remove the distortion. Productive conflict is where both parties are fighting for the truth to emerge, not to win their version of the truth.
Bottom line: productive conflict produces better ideas and solutions, leads to better decisions, unleashes creativity, and is the antidote for apathy and entropy. Get good at it. You may never enjoy it, but everyone can get better at it and enjoy the benefits of it.
3. Strengthen and Hold Your Focus
This one is a doozy. Here’s why. Because strengthening and holding your focus isn’t possible if you are not committed to something. Further, you can’t be committed to too many things and hold focus. This is an epic issue in our society.
We are overloaded with possibilities and demands at the same time that our capacity for discrimination seems to be withering. So we become totally stressed out, flogging ourselves around a track when there is no real finish line.
Bottom line: stop being a crazy-maker. Commit to a handful of doable things, and leave some room for margin. Say “no” or “not now” to the rest of the possibilities. Become the embodiment of skill in action, which looks nothing like being a feather in a whirlwind, okay?
4. Practice Radical Candor
We often do not tell one another the full truth. We withhold it. We justify the withholding and tell ourselves we aren’t lying when we do so. And then we hide from the consequences of our less-than-fully-truthful-ness while we suffer all the negative effects. We are masters at self-deception, so we cannot see the wake of destruction of our withholding, hedging, and spinning.
Radical candor is breathtaking honesty — far more than is “allowed” by our social conditioning. Further, it is breathtaking honesty spoken with kindness and compassion.
This often isn’t comfortable for the receiver or for the speaker. It’s hard. It’s edgy. And it is often scary. That’s the tricky part. Breathtaking honesty won’t always be received with trumpets and confetti by the other person’s ego. But, in reflection, they’ll know that you said what you said because you cared about them and that you were pulling for them. Not tearing them down.
Bottom line: start saying what you don’t say, and do it with kindness. Or, if you say everything that is on your mind but are cold or blunt or harsh in the process, learn to do it with kindness. Say things in a way that the other person “feels felt” even when their ego isn’t liking the message.
5. Mind Your Results and Your Impact
Wake up to your results and your impact. Stop grading yourself on a curve when you do look at them. The prior four points work to set this part up. Here’s a smattering of “how”:
- You can’t clearly see your impact or results until you can connect with people and engender trust and safety. Otherwise, you’re flying blind.
- Your impact and results will be distorted if you don’t engage in productive conflict, because without productive conflict the ideas on which you are acting will be distorted. Distorted ideas lead to distorted action, which in turn produces distorted results with undesirable impacts. And you will not want to face these things. You’ll turn away and move on.
- You won’t produce good, sustainable, timely results (where collateral damage is minimized) if you cannot winnow down your commitments and then hold the focus on the vital few. You’ll dissipate your efforts, frustrate and exhaust yourself and others, and waste time and resources. You’ll exhaust life.
- Lastly, what impact are you making when you are not capable of radical candor? What harms have you not been seeing that arise through your withholding of your truth, your perspective? And when you do get around to speaking up, are you so emotionally-hijacked that you are doing great harm to others, and therefore yourself?
Bottom line: to “Mind” means to see your results, the impacts of your results, and the impacts of how you produced those results fully, honestly, and straightforwardly. Are your results good, useful, desirable, and sustainable? Or are the results half-baked and/or unsustainable? Is the inevitable destruction required to produce something new a reasonable price tag? Or do you ignore your ways and means? And what of the impact of these results? Is there a fair and objective accounting of both the good and the harm? There’s always some of both, isn’t there?
6. Infuse Meaning and Purpose into All You Do
I once was very lost in my life and obsessed with finding my life’s purpose. This came right after the great meltdown of my life, which occurred in 2002. I pretty much blew up my life, including my corporate career. All that I once found self-worth in (like things outside of myself) were gone. I was desperate to figure out what work I could do and what life I could lead that would be fulfilling and infused with meaning and purpose.
Because of my obsession with this, my mentor at the time nicknamed me “the porpoise”. I was constantly looking for my purpose. It took many years for me to learn this lesson: it isn’t the work we choose to do or the life we choose to lead that provides meaning and purpose, and therefore, fulfillment.
Instead, we infuse purpose and meaning into doing whatever needs to be attended to right in front of us — whether it is sweeping the front porch, balancing the checkbook, comforting a friend, sitting quietly with a cup of tea, or giving the most important presentation of our life.
The irony is that as we do this, what is right under our nose changes. We start to follow our nose in new directions and to new heights. And, if we aren’t awake, we will mistakenly believe that some mysterious accident happened where the work and the life we always wanted found us. But, following this approach, we actually find one another.
Bottom line: intentionally and purposefully infuse your work with meaning, and therefore purpose. In so doing, you can experience fulfillment in the moment. Here. Now. Take your eye off the horizon. Be here now. Presence bristles and sparkles with meaning and purpose. It really matters not what you are doing.
7. Take Time to Reflect
You probably will not drift your way into excellence. The six preceding ways are powerful and interconnected, yet reading about them will not manifest them. You will need time to step back, take stock, integrate, adjust, plan, and move forward again. If you are too busy to reflect, you are too busy. You know this. And you know at some level that you are harming yourself and others when you do not pause, reflect, adjust, reconsider, and regenerate. So do it, and do it especially when you have neither the time nor inclination to do it. Show the fear-center of your brain who’s boss, would you?
Bottom line: carve out small slices of time to reflect on what is happening and how things are going. Also, reflect on the prior six ways. Ask… What’s happening? What am I doing? How do I feel? How am I wasting time? What needs to be attended to that I’m ignoring? What’s next? What small action can I take right now, or within the next 24 hours, to do something uncomfortable that needs to be attended to, to take some action along the lines of the above six ways?
You don’t need even an hour to do this. You know this, right? Start small. Start, perhaps, with writing one line per day in your journal. Just one line that captures the essence of your day. Or start with using drive time to brunch on Sunday with your significant other to recap the week.
You don’t really need much time at all to start reflecting. Instead, you need intention. That’s all. Start small. Start there.
Fortifying Yourself to Do The Seven
In my next post, I will cover four pairs of empowerments that will help you bring the above seven ways to life. The first two are foundational, and the second two are powerful enhancements. The four pairs are:
- Compassion x Skill with Emotions
- Workable Strategy x Peer Support
- Grit x Growth Mindset
- Self-Deception x The Human Condition
These four pairs provide the capacities, mindset, and structures needed to bring the seven ways to life in your life. And I’m looking forward to sharing them with you.
Why This Matters
What do you want most in life? You are just like everyone else, really. This is the essence of common humanity. We are fundamentally all the same. So what do you want? I can’t tell you. But I can say that common humanity often looks something like this:
- You probably want to be happy, and you probably want others to be happy.
- You probably don’t want to suffer, and you probably don’t want others to suffer.
- You probably want to be healthy, and you probably want others to be as well.
- And you probably want to serve others, and you probably want to support others in their service to others.
- And you probably want to give and receive love, warmth, and acceptance unconditionally.
Unconditionally.
Is this — what you and others long for — possible without the above seven ways?
If not, that is why this matters.
I’ll see you next week, and I’d love to hear any thoughts you have on what I’ve shared here.