I have written before about the health, mind, and business benefits of walking. I even went so far as to build a treadmill desk so I can walk while using my computer. To bolster your motivation toward movement read this overview of clinical and anecdotal evidence assembled by Arianna Huffington. New in 2022, this from Science News: Do we get our most creative ideas when walking?
The moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.
While a consultant at Arthur Andersen & Co in New York City I was assigned to a high-pressure project for a Wall Street firm. We were proud to work at Arthur Andersen because this was way-back-when, before Enron, before helping investment banks was cause for abject ethical concern, and before the building we worked in was destroyed by hijacked airliners. It was the summer of 1985 when I was old enough to think I understood business and too young to notice that I didn’t.
We worked long hours in cramped quarters implementing mainframe software for an innovative financial product. One of the first derivatives, come to think of it. The bank’s internal developers had fallen woefully behind schedule and AA&Co was called in to rescue the project. Every day of delay, we were assured, was millions lost to the bank. Too many delays and the market would be taken by some other bank.
Threescore and eight “Arthur Androids” pulled from “the beach” in every office around the continent instantly gelled as a team and, as in any tribe, we quickly fell into the lazy habit of using buzzwords and (more…)
To live is to suffer.
–The Buddha
But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, there must be a in meaning in suffering. … Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
— Viktor Emil Frankl
Man’s Search for Meaning
One always finds one’s burden again. … The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
–Albert Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus
People who are happy but have little to no sense of meaning in their lives have the same [inflammatory response] as people who are responding to and enduring chronic adversity. …
Meaning was defined as an orientation to something bigger than the self.
Happiness was defined by feeling good. …
“Empty positive emotions are about as good for you for as adversity,” says Dr. Fredrickson. …
From the evidence of this study, it seems that feeling good is not enough. People need meaning to thrive. In the words of Carl Jung, “The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.” Jung’s wisdom certainly seems to apply to our bodies, if not also to our hearts and our minds.
—Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness
by Emily Esfahani Smith
The Atlantic Magazine
Another good reason to avoid jargon, shibboleths, and technical terms with colleagues and prospects. It makes you sound untrustworthy, even criminal. Listeners naturally wonder, “What are you hiding behind those obscure references, technical terms, and acronyms?” For good reason.
The word jargon originally meant unintelligible noises resembling speech, like the twittering of birds. But early on, jargon became the name of the peculiar speech used by criminal groups.
–Professor Heller-Roazen
Learn to Talk in Beggars’ Cant
The New York Times
See also, Misunderstood Jargon, on this blog.
CEOs and their Boards agree. Executives need coaching on delegation, listening, and conflict resolution. Are you ready to get to work on these aspects of your job?
—What CEOs Really Want from Coaching
Gretchen Gavett
Harvard Business Review
Vision Series: Transformational Leadership from GMU-TV on Vimeo.
Jorge Haddock, Dean, School of Management talks about Transformational Leadership. Change focuses on behavior, whereas transformation focuses on “beingness” or culture. Transformational leadership is about shifting the organizational conversations or interpretations to create different results or outcomes. Organizational culture can become transactional, but transformational leadership creates conversations that generate a culture of relationships, moods, and actions consistent with the desired outcomes. The axiom is that our power to transform our commitments and subsequent actions is directly determined by our ability to engage in powerful conversations – to generate transformation we must generate different conversations. These conversations utilize language, which is most commonly descriptive. However, leaders use language in a generative fashion to declare something with no evidence or authority. Using this type of language, transformational leaders create truly new possibilities.
How many times do I need to relearn this fact of life? Last night I tried to correct a troublesome Excel spreadsheet until I gave-up in frustration. This morning, I fixed it in five minutes.
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.–Macbeth (2.2.46-51)
Life is mainly froth and bubble.
Two things stand like stone:
Kindness in another’s trouble.
Courage in your own.
See also on this blog, Be Kind.
I am going to share with you a useful story about a huge breakthrough in sales effectiveness. My friend told me this story at a critical time in my career. First, some background on how I heard it and why its lessons are so powerful.
I returned to executive coaching full time in 1995 and put my coaching materials on the World Wide Web using CompuServe’s pioneering OurWorld service. My email newsletter was soon being read around the world. I soon received an email from an important coach in South Africa, Pat Grove, who became a valued friend and mentor.
Pat told me that he was in San Francisco in the early 1970s helping to invent coaching at the same time as Werner Erhard (EST), John Hanley (Lifespring), Fernando Flores (Action Technologies), and others. Pat developed and delivered his own training programs in South Africa and Israel for forty years, until his death in January of 2012. I never participated in his group training but I did get tremendous value from our emails and Skype conversations. I am sad that he is gone.
Pat mentioned once that being an effective coach is only possible if one is effective in sales. Simply put, if no one accepts your coaching you are not a coach. Pat, like me, was not a “natural salesman.” We also began our careers with traditional business training. He started as a bank accountant and my first paying job was with a “Big 8” accounting firm. Frustrated and bored, we each decided to try sales and we each failed. The story of my first breakthrough in sales effectiveness is told elsewhere on this blog. Here is Pat’s story, that he shared with me by email in 1996. Pat wrote quickly and informally so I present an edited version here. [My comments are in square brackets.]
by Pat Grove
I gave up wanting to prove anything and just got the job done.
I chose to be a service agent…
The most important thing I learned was not to sell benefits but to enroll people into taking action on their dreams.
Selling Encyclopedias was at first for me a way to prove to myself, and others, that I was OK. Firstly, my background and experiences and lying about myself to others and to myself was catching up with me. [Pat used the word “lying” in a particular way here. He refers to the pretensions so common in our culture of pretending to “have it all together,” hoping people will think we are more competent and comfortable than we truly feel. This is all an “act” to prevent people from seeing us as we see ourselves.] So I found a system that had the potential to make a lot of money compared to (more…)
One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.
—Abraham Maslow, psychologist
See also The Way of Transformation on this blog.
We literally see the world the way we want to see it.
But the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that there is a problem beyond that. Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem — namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don’t know it. Left to your own devices, you just don’t know it.
We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know. …
Put simply, people tend to do what they know and fail to do that which they have no conception of. In that way, ignorance profoundly channels the course we take in life. …
People fail to reach their potential as professionals, lovers, parents and people simply because they are not aware of the possible.
–David A. Dunning, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology
Cornell UniversityQuoted in
The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but
You’ll Never Know What It Is
The New York Times
No sooner did I post my article on the pitfalls of misusing jargon that I found myself in a conversation that was confused and distorted by the use of technical terms without a shared context.
A client mentioned his plan to delegate the task of staying in regular, informal contact with customers between transactions. We naturally agreed that these “keep warm” meetings were a valuable and often overlooked source of repeat business. Since the activity is so valuable for the business, I asked how he was going to track the sales representative’s performance on scheduling and conducting these visits. “I’m not worried about that. Her personality assessment is clearly very high ‘I,’ so I know she will happily do the meetings.”
I told him that puzzled me. The most popular assessment tool is (more…)
I like this guy.
We speak the same language.
— from many movies, in many variations
Some people hate to talk to mechanics. Most people don’t know what their doctor told them.
No one likes reading the fine print. Computer departments often find it difficult to get support from the business side. The operations people find it impossible to get the technical people to listen. Jargon used with the wrong audience is a big part of the problem.
People want to be included but using jargon cuts both ways. If everyone in a conversation knows the jargon, everyone feels included. Everyone is “in.” The person who does not know the jargon is “out.”
Consider a sales call on a doctor’s office. The salesperson begins to talk about VoIP, SAAS, and generational back-ups. How would the office manager feel if he were a computer
expert? Respected, included, and comfortable. How would the novice feel? Disrespected, incompetent, and uncomfortable, perhaps? The typical reaction of a person feeling that way is to (more…)
To be totally engaged with all my functions, all my faculties, all my capacities in life.
To me that would be success.
–Philosopher Jacob Needleman in
Money And The Meaning Of Life
Fast Company
See also on this blog, Thoroughly Used Up When I Die
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