Whither wisdom?
Barry Schwartz: The real crisis? We stopped being wise.
From TED
Fear and Transformation
Sometimes I feel that my life is a series of trapeze swings. I’m either hanging on to a trapeze bar swinging along or, for a few moments in my life, I’m hurtling across space in between trapeze bars.
Most of the time, I spend my life hanging on for dear life to my trapeze-bar-of-the-moment. It carries me along a certain steady rate of swing and I have the feeling that I’m in control of my life. I know most of the right questions and even some of the right answers. But once in a while, as I’m merrily (or not so merrily) swinging along, I look ahead of me into the distance, and what do I see? I see another trapeze bar swinging toward me. It’s empty, and I know, in that place in me that knows, that this new trapeze bar has (more…)
Freedom, Responsibility, & Connection
From a Buddhist perspective, the description of reality provided by quantum mechanics offers a degree of freedom to which most people are not accustomed, and that may at first seem strange and even a little frightening. As much as Westerners in particular value the capacity for freedom, the notion that the act of observation of an event can influence the outcome in random, unpredictable ways [i.e., Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle –Editor] can seem like too much responsibility.
It’s much easier to assume the role of the victim and assign the responsibility or blame for our experience to some person or power outside oneself. If we’re to take the discoveries of modern science seriously, however, we have to assume responsibility for (more…)
Be the decisive element
I have come to a frightening conclusion. I am the decisive element in the classroom. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher I possess tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated, and a child humanized or de-humanized.
Twitter Log VI
I use Twitter to share brief daily messages. You can have them delivered to your cell phone by text message (SMS) or view them when you visit your free Twitter web page. Create a Twitter account and “follow” TonyMayo.
Here are my recent tweets (messages):
Find people who support your goals and resolutions. “Company is stronger than willpower.” Yogi Amrit Desai
You may get by, but you can’t get away.
The best fertilizer is (more…)
Creative Conflict
I heard one CEO executive coaching client summarize the tremendous value of his coach’s listening and probing by saying, “This is where I come to get my answers questioned.” Top executives, especially those operating in a strong corporate culture, can find themselves in an echo chamber where everyone seems to be saying the same thing, thereby confusing their mutual agreement with reality. It is the most “obvious” assumptions that most severely constrict our thinking.
Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here,” he started, and everyone nodded their heads in agreement. “Then,” he went on, “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until the next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement, and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”
–Alfred Sloan
GM 1923-1956
This is love
Years ago, when I was new to being coached, I experienced a fundamental attribute of transformational coaching. I was completing a fantastic call with my coach, Mary Arzt. I had done a lot of venting and whining. I had seen some new possibilities. I, ultimately, had gotten clear and excited about the steps I would take into my future. A fantastic coaching call. I thanked my coach for the generosity of her listening and the power of her insight.
At which point, everything had been said and there was nothing left to say. The coach let the silence continue and we sort of basked in that rare space of nothing to do and no place to go: just perfect. At some point, my ego started to second-guess the just completed conversation. My ego realized that I had revealed (more…)
Alone in the Crowd
I just read Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street. The first two-thirds struck me as a humorous account of an eccentric employee, told from the business owner’s point of view. (I hear many such stories in my work as an executive coach to CEOs.) My impression shifted toward the end, as the narrative darkened into a tale of thwarted compassion for a hopeless innocent. It remains in my awareness as a poignant and contemporary warning of the isolation so casually tolerated in our commercial environments. Though Bartleby’s plight was beyond the ability of the well-meaning narrator to avert, better treatments are available today and most of the people in your office are reachable with as cheap an elixir as a smile, a lunch invitation, or a patient ear. Life ends too soon and suddenly to risk our kind communications going the way of the dead letters Bartleby sent to the flames, though they contained: “pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities.”
Read Bartleby, the Scrivener here or download the MP3 here.
Sometimes, the best coaching is “Stop!”
An executive coach once asked me, “Is it ever appropriate to interrupt while your client is speaking?” My response is, “Yes,” for the following reasons:
- There are some clients who just will not stop. If I do not interrupt they will talk to exhaustion. Often, they are talking about or around the issue and filling the bandwidth to subtly avoid dealing with the issue.
- Sometimes I sense that the client is so immersed in the minutia that they have lost their point–and, often, are boring themselves, too.
- The client may be demonstrating exactly the behavior that is keeping them locked in the situation we are working to release, so an interruption pointing to the behavior is the way to free the client. My interruption sometimes takes the form of, “You’re doing it right now.” or “Do you recognize that speaking in this way is exactly what keeps it the way it is?”
Still, I am certain that a big part of my value is intense, patient, appreciative listening. I can’t go too far wrong by listening a little “too long.” For coaches, silence really is golden. As one client told me, “I appreciate the way you let silence do the heavy lifting.”
Crisis of Scarcity?
Are we now “in crisis” and “entering an age of scarcity”? You can see anything you like in a crystal ball. But almost without exception, the relevant data–the long-run economic trends–suggest precisely the opposite. The appropriate measures of scarcity–the costs of natural resources in human labor, and their prices relative to wages and to other goods–all suggest that natural resources have been becoming less scarce over the long run, right up to the present.
The Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and Environment
–Julian Simon
University of Maryland, College Park
Twitter Log V
I use Twitter to share brief daily messages. You can have them delivered to your cell phone by text message (SMS) or view them when you visit your free Twitter web page. Create a Twitter account and “follow” TonyMayo.
Here are my recent tweets (messages):
The intensity of our connections to those we love is a function of our knowledge that everything and everyone is evanescent. —Dr. Gordon Livingston
The best of life must be freely given to be had in abundance: love, money, appreciation, information, time, intimacy, support, gratitude.
To do work you love and (more…)
Effective Communication and Results
What is the most important result of your work with executive coach Tony Mayo?
“Communication effectiveness with direct and indirect reports to produce desired results.”
–Ken Wacker
Iron Mountain
Dogma Danger, II
Wise men make proverbs and fools repeat them.
Click for more Dogma Danger.
Be good to achieve good
Let no man turn aside, ever so slightly, from the broad path of honour, on the plausible pretense that he is justified by the goodness of his end. All good ends can be worked out by good means.
–Charles Dickens
Barnaby Rudge
Reluctance to be wrong stops creativity & growth
A great article in the New York Times, a few highlights:
Paul J. H. Schoemaker, chairman of Decision Strategies International…
“We get fixated on achievement,” he said, but, “everyone is talking about the need to innovate. If you already know the answer, it’s not learning. In most personal and business contexts, if you avoid the error, you avoid the learning process.”
We grow up with a mixed message: making mistakes is a necessary learning tool, but we should avoid them.
Carol S. Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, has studied this and related issues for decades.
“Studies with children and adults show that a large percentage cannot tolerate mistakes or setbacks,” she said.
- We are risk-averse because “our personal and professional pride is tied up in being right. Employees are rewarded for good decisions and penalized for failures, so they spend a great deal of time and energy trying not to make mistakes.”
- We tend to favor data that confirms our beliefs.
- We assume feedback is reliable, although in reality it is often lacking or misleading. We don’t often look outside tested channels.
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